videos
Breadtube if it didn't suck.
Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.
There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It's open submission unless there's something important to commandeer it with at the time.
A weekly watch party happens every Saturday (Sunday down under), with video nominations Saturday-Monday, voting Monday-Thursday. See the pin for whatever stage it's currently in.
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Illiterate Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Cuban, Lao (etc.) peasants who were born into a level of poverty which Americans not only will never experience but will never even witness were able to learn theory while being murdered by the west and by domestic bourgeois. There is nothing that can excuse someone, especially a leftist, from trying to understand their conditions. If American "leftists" refuse to learn theory, it's because they know that it won't confirm their biases.
If you won't read it, then consume it in a different format (as this video says). However, you'll have to accept that when someone who knows better than you because they did read theory corrects you, you should listen to them. Funny enough, the people (not this video, in general) who complain about being told to "read theory" usually aren't willing to listen to the explanations of people who have (don't make me link the article again).
I think the classic "literacy was the most basic tool of communist propaganda" tweet unintentionally really hit something deep in the Amerikkkan psyche. The amount of pride people have in their functional illiteracy is because they don't want to know the truth, because they know what it means for them (consult once again the linked article in the first paragraph). Giving them the truth in a different format misses the point that they don't want it, and that's what they mean when they say "stop telling me to read theory".
I get that it's not the intention, but this post reads like praising one set of peoples as innately good and scolding another as innately bad.
I think this might indicate that they were shown or convinced in some way that reading was important for their survival. I think that's a little stronger of an understood incentive than anything we have in America.
My intuition is that giving the impression that "you should defer to someone who has read more theory than you/read X amount of theory" is a belief people who read theory have is extremely counterproductive towards building this understood incentive. I think it's an idea worth letting go of.
The point isn't that you should blindly defer to people, the point is that when people try to teach you something, you should listen to them. This isn't to say that someone saying "well I read, so i'm smarter and XYZ" is correct, it's to say that someone saying "actually, this point you made is an incorrect understanding of Lenin - when he wrote XYZ it was in the context of ABC, meaning DEF" might be worth listening to and learning from. If someone comes in with citations and disagrees with you, you have to either prove them wrong by checking the text yourself, or accept that they might be right. There's no arguing with research using vibes, which is extremely common in general (not just leftist spaces).
A related thing: I personally often do learn things from secondary sources (summaries of theory, discussions, etc.), as do many other people, which is fine. However, I accept that I probably don't understand those concepts as well as people who have studied them more closely, and when someone corrects me on them I look up the corrections in more detail in order to fill those gaps in my knowledge/understanding.
Yes, of course. The point is that "I don't like reading" isn't much a barrier considering people who couldn't read managed to learn the theory.
Reading/not reading theory doesn't make someone inherently good or bad, but I would argue that refusing to read is a harmful choice.
My point is that not being convinced that it is necessary for survival is vastly more of a hindrance than anything else we're discussing. People only have so many free hours to allocate outside of what's necessary to survive, they are not going to put a lot into something unless they've been convinced it will pay dividends. There is nothing wrong with lamenting that people don't invest time into it, but doing that with open condescension rather than with empathy for the value of their time is also a harmful choice.
I'm talking about leftists here, not random people. I wouldn't expect any random American to even know what theory is, much less read it. However, leftists refusing to read are a completely different case. They know better.
I'm saying this on a forum for leftists, to other leftists. Leftists usually get told to read theory because they're wrong about something, and the theory can correct that. I wouldn't say this to random people at a community event, obviously.
there are a significant number of people, not all western, who at least claim to have read theory but use "bourgeois" and "proletarian" entirely incorrectly
if this hypothetical person who has not read any theory at all is "corrected" by one of these people how are they to know that what they are being told is incorrect?
A good tipoff is when the alleged theory-enjoyer starts out with, "so first of all, wiping your ass is bourgeois, so write that one down..."
...but yeah, there's some really fucking bad signal-to-noise ratio out there once you factor in social media (e.g., Twitch streamers, a good chunk of BreadTube, etc.) and people who consume it as gospel.
Virtually all of so-called BreadTube is trash and the remainder that isn't doesn't really deal all that much with political theory in any unified manner (e.g. Shaun).
It's an expected result of using a capitalist media platform to criticize capitalism and capitalist media
Which is another reason that people need to READ for themselves, lol.
Also lol @ OOP with the "I studied law and I don't read, and telling AmeriKKKan$ to read is undeconstructed ivory tower elitism ackshually" schtick. If my unmedicated ADHD multiple-time-college-dropout ass can handle Graeber and Cockshott, I don't have all that much sympathy. Obviously no one (well, maybe one or two posters here) means "go out and read all three volumes of Capital in the original German in one sitting," but good fucking God, outside of a very small handful of internet personalities (Luna Oi! comes to mind), there aren't that many trustworthy content creators/presenters/whatever you want to call them.
I often wonder why people feel comfortable saying such things out loud, lol. Bordering on "literacy is bourgeois" here.
UwU?
OwO *notices How the World Works*
Thank you!
I'm gonna co...ntinue reading
Yeah, this is why people should read theory.
Eye-opening read, thanks! I'm way too ignorant to comment on the main thrust, so -
I found it useful (if a big bummer, far from my first) to learn about Orwell. I only read him as a kid, could never have noticed all that, and honestly would have likely just reread uncritically, given the impact those books made on me as a youth. Cryptofascist pig, and that's just for starters, neat!
And then the stuff summed up by this pair of lines, woof. Finally helped me understand something I've noticed forever, seen discussed plenty too, but could never quite put my finger on, causally (and I certainly attributed the phenomena and my confusion to some vague, hand-wavy "brainwashing", as per the essay). Probably needs the preceding material to be impactful/explanatory:
Can't wait to hammer friends and family with that shit at Thanksgiving! (tongue-in-cheek, I promise, I didn't entirely miss the point lol)
I just thought it was superfluous with the other responses you received.
Still interested in your thoughts.