Been seeing more and more evidence that mass literacy is both massively diminished compared to the 20th century and accelerating in its decline across the world, especially in relatively highly educated countries. This problem is obviously much more severe amongst the working class than others, as historically tends to be the case.
If we want the masses to get to grips with a communist understanding of the world, which requires a lot of reading and discussion of text, surely this is an issue we need to grapple with. Current political education initiatives usually bring together smaller, highly-literate (typically university educated) groups of people, which tend to remain insular and rarely seem to engage with the broader working class. I am convinced that a significant barrier to mass political education is that so many “literate” people are unable to read a simple paragraph.
How do we rectify this situation? It seems historically unique because in the past, illiterate people had no illusions about the fact that they couldn’t read and were enthusiastic about learning (at least, in general). Nowadays, I can imagine that most people would not view their literacy as something that needs to be improved, and many will even react with hostility to such a suggestion.
What’s the correct approach? Do we need to emphasise the practical rewards that those who engage with theoretical texts benefit from? Take a direct approach and offer reading comprehension sessions? Interested to hear what others think.
This is why I believe that we need to be on tiktok and youtube way more than we are. They’re the new public square. Get people interested in communism via short form video, leveraging righteous anger and comedy both. Once they’re hooked, then send them blog post links.
If Lenin were alive today I firmly believe that he would be on tiktok constantly - and that he’d be amazing at it.
I don’t mean this to disagree with you, but I’m sure that Lenin would be banned from Tiktok pretty early. Being in social media can probably be somewhat helpful tho.
Lenin also had the spirit of an epic poster. He might get banned from TikTok but he’d still be churning out hot takes on every other social media platform he could get logged in to.
Hmm. I think we do need to level up our media strategy significantly - there are definitely plenty of individual creators on those platforms agitating and propagandising, but as they’re individual and their output isn’t linked to any broader project, there are limitations to the quality of political education and message discipline.
I suspect that getting on these platforms is necessary but isn’t enough; you’re right, social media is the new public square and the new newspaper, but something I think is missing here is that we need to have our own platforms that are democratically controlled and not subject to capitalist censorship. Hexbear (and other parts of Lemmy) might be a good example of this, but we just aren’t big enough to have any impact and we’re not growing presently either.
Where the major innovation of the early 20th century was the party newspaper, the major innovation for us could be party (or at least, working-class) social media. It’s disappointing that Mastodon is pretty inaccessible because Twitter’s downfall was a major moment of opportunity to launch something better, and instead we just got Threads and Bsky.
Social media is not a public square though. It’s literally a series of privately held companies, in privately run servers. Just because it has the appearance of a public square does not make it so. It is these kinds of misconceptions that are really harming us.
This is like saying communists should have published more in the Wall Street Journal. What we need to be attempting to do is create our own parallel infrastructure, of which thing like lemmy is a start, but we need our own social media, and ideally, our own internet infrastructure. It’s not enough to publish the newspaper you want to own the printing press.
Very hard to do when you dont own capital
Yet that’s generally what needs to be done. You couldn’t borrow one of William Randolph Hurst’s printing presses to print your commie newspaper back in 1902. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect a commie chat show to ‘win’ the YouTube algorithm and beat all of the fascist and reactionary chat shows that have dominated political discourses on the platform.
Shame we don’t have some sort of historical guidance of what to do in that sort of situation.
Correct. And yet it is what needs to be done to even get and maintain a real foothold of effective radical leftist politics. It’s all very hard, but becoming a revolutionary is the hardest thing for any individual to ever do.
There is some precedent for this sort of thing. Being some in ham radio, I’ve worked with and learned about a few different emergency communications systems. And some that are unrelated to ham radio. An interesting project is I2P, but it mostly just piggy backs onto the main internet. Mesh networks are closer to your “our own internet” idea, but they would need to he fairly widespread to be effective. There’s Meshtastic which is an existing mesh network using LoRa tech. Each channel has its own encryption key, and for peer to peer, comms are end-to-end encrypted. There are public channels (which just uses a null encryption key like AA== or something) but if you specify a key, only users subscribed to the same channel with the same key can use that channel. You could technically set up a TCP/IP network over Meshtastic, but it’d be ridiculously slow. But an upside is that there’s already a lot of people and infrastructure using Meshtastic, so you already have a difficult part of building a mesh network done. Unfortunately to guarantee full coverage, you’d have to use an internet gateway to link distant users. There are other mesh networks, but most of the ones I know about use ham radio bands which, legally, need to be unencrypted. (at least in the US) And if you were to try to encrypt comes, nosey hams will be able to track you down and report you. And that’s not a vague threat, a lot of hams are just chomping at the bit to track down violators.
I have been thinking about this recently and even considering trying to create educational content.
Just reading about how Wretched of the Earth/Fanon influenced so many people, i was thinking about how the ideas in the books themself just need to be propagated outside of the book (which they are, but it needs to be done more and in digestible ways for the modern day mind) it made me think we could be missing all these potential new movements just because of book reading diminishing