seriously. it’s not that big a deal. if people in gaza are still standing up to their oppressors every day then you likely have zero excuse for not doing more IRL shit (political reading and writing at home are good, but don’t mean anything if you’re not applying that theory as practice and then assessing the results and adjusting your practice accordingly).
I mean wasn’t Russian literacy super fucking low pre-Lenin? Many of the greatest revolutions ever done were done by illiterate people. Reading theory is good, but some people here treat it as far too important.
Those trying to build up the socialist movement early on were all heavy readers though. They need to be. Most of us live in a country where the movement is in the infantile stages
If a revolution does ever come to America, 99% of participants will have never read a single communist book, yea
Back then, it would’ve been, like, the one guy at the factory who knows how to read, reading things to fellow workers, right? So reading theory would’ve been to a large degree a social activity back then, whereas now it’s often a pretty lonely activity. Even if you aren’t just reading alone, but are doing a book club or something… a book club isn’t quite the same when it’s 12 people from around the world on Discord, compared to when it’s 12 people in the room with you. And even if you’re going through the effort of making the information you learn more accessible to others, making an audiobook for the consumption of countless anonymous people online isn’t quite the same as reading something to someone in person; nor is translating a work and publishing it online quite the same as actually going through the effort of making a translation in paper and giving it to someone.
Basically what I’m getting at is that “theory” can and should be praxis in itself, and this is achieved by changing the ways we interact with and think of “theory”. That is, sharing information can itself be a productive, creative, and social activity grounded in our immediate surroundings, that builds the networks and skills to make us good revolutionaries, rather than just giving us explanations of why the world’s kinda messed up so that we can debate with internet strangers to prove who’s more well-read.
Just because people were illiterate or had low literacy levels doesn’t mean they didn’t engage in theory though. This is also why vanguardism was so important to historical revolutions.
But you only need one comrade who can read for a classroom sized group of people (or larger) to be able to learn and discuss theory.
Part of what Mao did so successfully was to convey complex ideas in theory in very simple to understand language. In fact, he was so effective in doing this that most of his writings manage to cross a vast linguistic gap in a very nimble way.
Theory isn’t the be-all and end-all, of course. But a party or the masses without theory is like a ship without a rudder.