• Ericthescruffy [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    8 months ago

    Put it that way you’re not wrong but:

    I maintain that if a socialist movement actually requires a majority of its membership to have actually read every volume of capital cover to cover and be able to write a college level paper on the subject: we all might as well just take the black pill right here and now because comrade that just simply ain’t gonna happen.

    Reading theory should always be encouraged but like it or not: any organized mass movement is going to depend on people who are operating purely on the cliff notes.

    • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      8 months ago

      Precisely why everyone should be encouraged to read theory, even if not everyone actually ends up doing it. The more people who have actually read theory, the more people can get away with having read the summary

      As an English teacher, trust me when I say that no one is less under the illusion that everyone will do the assigned reading than me

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      8 months ago

      I maintain that if a socialist movement actually requires a majority of its membership to have actually read every volume of capital cover to cover and be able to write a college level paper on the subject: we all might as well just take the black pill right here and now because comrade that just simply ain’t gonna happen.

      No one is demanding that from anybody. They’re just demanding that people stop jerking off and throwing away their life and money to e-celebs who talk to a camera for a living and maybe read a book. Any book.

      any organized mass movement is going to depend on people who are operating purely on the cliff notes.

      Ok? Then tell the ecelebs to actually make good cliff notes

    • DayOfDoom [any, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      8 months ago

      First-worlders need to read theory to combat the first-world desire to just tune out from the struggles of the bottom rungs of imperial core society and more specifically those struggling outside the imperial core. Vibes-based imperial “leftism” is going to make you more wrong than right at some point, maybe no right now when all the left gets to to do is chat about ideology and news events. You could see how astray people got as soon as Bernie pseudo-ran or BLM and people had to actually start looking at society through a marxist lens and not a passive consumer but kept doing shit like telling Canadians to phonebank for Bernie Sanders and whites to not talk over corporate-backed POC shitlibs.

      The comrades outside the imperial core have their lives directly linked to improving global working politics, though they too still need to engage with communist theory and thought/consciousness, just not as much and for different reasons than us.

      • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        In the global south, you got unions, parties, organizations, clubs, and media run by leftists.

        In the west you just got the media, and half of the problem is that everyone calls themselves a leftist including liberals who hate themselves, and the other half of the problem is that the media is dog shit culture crap 90% of the time.

        The local libs in DSA and other socialist orgs make political and community gains in their areas, but you rarely hear a peep about it from these big radlib channels.