askchapo

For me it's most about my own understanding and agency and building those. If we just follow others framings of a thing we risk falling for things like idealism, utopistic framings etc. Reading theory ourselves (with a broad scope) gives us the actual nuance of what has happened in history, what is happening now and most importantly how we can change things.

Things like dialectic materialism, idealism versus materialism, what the troskyists are about, what anarchist are saying and why and why did the Soviets do what they did and so much more is an evolving understanding. It takes a lifetime, but it does make a commie more and more bulletproof to various brainworms of which there are plenty.

It takes reading theory to come to a place where you can spot the difference between different thinkers or content creators. It takes time to develop this understanding. I don't think the manifesto alone is enough for that. It's also just as important to read the lib thinkers a bit to understand the histories of these things. Reading on feminism, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist works is also just as important.

Understanding the differences of idealism and materialism alone makes everything a lot more clear, but to get there, some learning is needed. We are all (in the West at least) indoctrinated on liberalism so deeply that is is very difficult to see past that. Things that come along with it are white supremacy, pathriarchy and others that are parts of the superstructure and hard to analyze as they are so normalized. To do this analysis an understanding of it is necessary imo.

Edit. I'll add a great reading list that was made by comrade @Cowbee@hexbear.net, in case you would want something curated that isn't too time consuming and covers a lot of the things I tried to mention in my reply.

The reading list is here.