Functional Illiteracy and Political Education¶
The bourgeois ideal is one in which the masses eagerly take part in their own illiteracy, to their own detriment. As Communists, we must reverse this trend.¶
At the time of me writing this, I have been conducting political education through an organization – the Kansas Socialist Book Club – for a little over two years now. While I am not an educator by profession, I nonetheless have learned much about how to teach others as well as learn from them. And in the process of conducting lessons, one problem which I’ve noticed to be quite severe is that the American people are, by and large, functionally illiterate.
You may be taken aback by hearing such a drastic statement. Perhaps you interpret it in a condescending and insulting fashion. I want to be clear that when I say this, it is not my intentions at all to be rude, snide, condescending or insulting to anyone. Rather, I consider it to be a sober albeit extreme assessment of the seriousness of our situation.
As Marxists we know that the foundation of any revolutionary movement is a careful study of revolutionary theory. Many comrades have correctly identified this, and rightfully hammer the point constantly that we have to Do The Fucking Reading. This is very true! However, I raise the question in response: **how are those of us who organize supposed to lead the masses in study and reading, if they do not possess the comprehension to read the books in the first place?
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Justifications for the Illiteracy¶
Again, I am not a professional and I do not have any rigorous statistics to back up my claim. But as someone who’s been educating people for over two years now, I’ve noticed a few trends. Nobody ever wants to outright come and say they don’t know how to read. That is embarrassing and humiliating to come to terms with.
Rather, this illiteracy manifests itself in a number of ways. People will say things such as “I just find it hard to sit down and focus on a book for more than a few pages.” Admittedly, I do find this one relatable and suffer from it myself from time to time. Yet I’ve noticed many of the same people have no issues of attention span when it comes to reading Instagram or Twitter posts. There seems to be no problem whatsoever when it comes to reading Discord chats or poring over Dungeons and Dragons stories and character sheets.
This is not to disparage anyone from using social media or for having hobbies, to be clear. I myself am more than guilty of having an unhealthy social media habit (looking at you, Twitter). Rather, I point this out because the illiteracy doesn’t stem from a lack of an ability to read at all. In this sense, we are fortunate to have an advantage over previous Communist movements, where illiterate workers and peasants did not even know how to pronounce letters and words.
Important
Rather, the illiteracy which plagues the American public is a functional one. It’s not that people can‘t read, but rather that they are incapable of comprehending anything they read that is above a sixth grade level. Once you go past a thousand words, stars start to spin above people’s heads and their eyes begin glazing over. The masses have trouble abstracting away general principals, from extrapolating trends from specific instances. Their thinking is purely concrete and nominalistic. Theory, by its nature, is an abstraction. So in order to get people to think abstractly, we have to teach them to think beyond concrete examples.
The Manifestations of Illiteracy¶
Another common objection uses a bastardization of identity politics. It usually comes in the form of saying something like “It’s ableist to expect me to read.“ Other times, it comes in the form of “Why do we need to read all these books by old dead white men?” Although these objections are united by their distorted reliance on identity categories, they are fundamentally different objections which I will address separately.
The “Dead White Boys“ Criticism¶
Regarding the Dead White Boys criticism, there is a hint of truth to this. A lot of incorrect theory and horrible ideas come from cishet white men. In fact, a lot of downright harmful and reactionary thought emerges from this demographic! But, it is an identitarian error to assume that we should judge the merits of an author based merely upon the color of their skin, or the identity of their gender, or the gender of those they choose to romance, etc. Although white straight males do write and implement the bulk of reactionary ideas, any demographic can write trash.
For example, should we be uplifting the voice of Clarence Thomas because he happens to be a black male? Should be listening to the voices of women like Amy Coney Barrett or Liz Cheney because they are women who some kind of essentialism insight into the Divine Feminine? Should reactionary transgenders like Brianna Wu and Caitlin Jenner have their opinions given greater weight because they happen to be trans women? The answer, clearly, is no: reactionaries come in every size and shape and identity mixture. In fact, it is a technique of the ruling class to find representatives from oppressed peoples to speak out in favor of reaction. And this thinking that we should listen to someone merely because they inhabit an identity category, is itself a manifestation of illiteracy.
The Ableism Accusation¶
On the accusation of ableism, I want to be clear that this is not always a false concern. For example, a blind person very well cannot read printed text. They need some kind of disability aid such as an audio book or braille. Because the audio book is spoken, rather than written, many people both disabled and not disabled, seem to think that an audio book is “lesser” than reading. But this is false! An audio book recording of a book verbatim is just as good, and in some ways better, than a regular book. They are legitimate disability aids and are entirely valid ways of ingesting knowledge.
Many workers have to spend 50-60+ hour weeks between multiple jobs, on top of struggling with other obligations such as raising children. Listening to an audio book might be a way to accommodate that situation, because they can throw in some headphones while they stock shelves or drive a forklift. And if you are blind, then an audio book is a disability aid in the same fashion as eyeglasses or a cane.
Note
**There is no shame in reading an audio book, and I am sympathetic to the criticism of workers who say that they need audio books to read. Communists have a duty to meet people where they’re at and accommodate their needs. Recording audio books that are free of charge and accessible to all, should be an utmost priority of any book club.
I have personally started recording audio books for the Kansas Socialist Book Club whenever possible. It is my sincere hope that as we develop our cadre and grow, that others can also contribute this form of labor to be more consistent on it.
But this ableism criticism doesn’t always stem from a genuine place. Often times it is quite cynically used as a cover for a different issue. I don’t want to say laziness, as that’s often a reactionary charge. In this house, we seek to indict systems and not individual victims of the system. So rather than condemning the individual as defective or lazy (a left-deviation), I argue instead that many of the accusations of ableism are misguided, though they do hint at aspects of the truth. For example, I’ve been told by some folks who I asked to elaborate upon what exactly they mean by ableism, that what they really mean is that they feel traumatized by the educational system. Others explain that they were shamed as a child for struggling to read, or they were humiliated and bullied by their peers for being passionate about education, or something of this nature. This all gets lumped under the aegis of ableism. So while the moniker of ableism is an incorrect label, it still underlies a fundamental truth. These phenomenon occurring in peoples lived experiences are entirely valid, and should not be dismissed, But they are not ableist. If we fail to diagnose the issue properly, then necessarily any remedy we prescribe to cure the underlying disease will not work.
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Material Causes of Illiteracy¶
Everything about our media landscape is designed to shorten the attention spans of people and render them unable to focus. This is why we see those goofy TikTok videos of Subway Surfers sharing a phone screen with some kind of political speech. There is an economy of attention, and the overall structure of that economy has sent us to the discount bin.
Warning
The malicious engineering of attention spans is a kind of psychological warfare. **The bourgeoisie want to keep their proletariat just barely educated enough to run the machines, but not educated enough to critically think about what those machines are doing. They have constructed an entire media ecosystem to manipulate attention spans to balance this fine line.
Schools as well, are to blame here. The bourgeoisie have a natural problem: they need a proletariat smart enough to run advanced machines and follow instructions, but too dumb to think on their own. Therefore, their propaganda mills called schools adopt a variety of tactics to instill a hatred and fear of learning in young people. For example, they implement standardized testing which, among other things, reduces complicated topics to just one of our possible answers. It encourages reading to maximize ones score, rather than to grapple with the topic at hand. It trains students to read in order to answer the question, and is fundamentally about instructing people what to think rather than teaching them how to think. What we, as Communists, need to do is teach the masses how to think for themselves.
A bedtime story I often tell my children is that the bogey man always looks like a person who wants to take away your ability to read. Anyone who tries to dissuade you from reading, or forbid reading, or control your ability to read, is a bad and evil person you should be cautious of because they want to hurt you. They want to hurt you, because they profit from it.
Important
**All oppression occurs because it benefits one small group at the expense of a larger group.
Who Profits Off Mass Illiteracy?¶
When we look at history, particularly the history of law and order and of crime and punishment, a theme becomes quite clear. In slave societies, the harshest sentences were given out for the crime of reading. Black slaves in antebellum America had their hands chopped off or their eye gouged out for reading the Holy Bible: far from a revolutionary text. For the slaves to attend church with a white preacher, who told the slaves what the gospel said without them being able to confirm it themselves, that’s quite okay. But to have the slaves read the book themselves? Why, that might make them start thinking about stuff and drawing parallels. In the worst case scenario, it might give birth to a guy like Toussaint L’Ouverture who ends up fomenting a slave rebellion – the worst nightmare of any ruling class!
Women were similarly admonished for their escapades with literature. Husbands routinely beat their wives with the full blessing of the law on their side, for the crime of reading. Women who read were also declared to be sorceresses or witches, and they were necessarily reading spells that would give them the ability to fight back. Although the sorcery and witchcraft is a bunch of nonsense, it is nonetheless true that literacy is a danger to our ruling class. The fact it was admonished as malevolent sorcery aimed at killing the husband is a kind of psychological projection by the ruling class onto the women it subordinates. The patriarchs of the nascent bourgeoisie knew how horribly they exploited women, and so therefore, any woman who bothered to read a book must have necessarily been scheming for their downfall. Such is the thought pattern of a guilty person. Therefore, women reading books must be eradicated, lest a pandemic of patricide and husband-murder by conniving and scheming women occur!
But of course, under capitalism literacy can never be fully eliminated, or else there would be no proletariat capable of operating a modern economy. Such is the nature of the contradiction at play here:
Important
***The bourgeoisie, as a precondition of their ability to profit and dominate over the working class, need a working class who can read. They navigate this contradiction by balancing the ability of the masses to read just barely enough so as to discourage and render critical thinking impossible.* This contradiction currently is favored on the side of the bourgeoisie, but inverting it so that its dominant aspect lies with the proletariat is a precondition for liberation.
These two examples highlight an overall theme: mass illiteracy benefits nobody except the ruling class. An ignorant proletariat, unable to read, is a compliant proletariat. Therefore, anyone who encourages, coddles, justifies or promotes illiteracy no matter their intentions or positionality they come from, is working in favor of the ruling class.
What Do We Do About It?¶
By now, it is clear that functional illiteracy is a problem. Furthermore, we know why it is a problem from a materialist perspective. Functional illiteracy is encouraged and promoted by bourgeois society because an educated proletariat is a dangerous proletariat. The workers must not be able to think for themselves.
As communists, it is our job to organize workers. And we must organize the working class that actually exists, not the one we idealize in our head. That means a working class that is functionally illiterate. So what do we do?
For those of us blessed with at least some degree of literacy, as it is with all things we must study the history of how other communist movements tackled this problem. In that regards, we are more fortunate than our predecessors. This is because the vast majority of people are functionally illiterate and not completely illiterate. In other words, the US masses know what the alphabet is. They can string together that alphabet into words, and recognize those words and sometimes their meanings. But what they can‘t do, is abstract away from books and apply the general theories and ideas to specific situations. They have trouble forming metaphors and comparisons. Sometimes, they are traumatized by a variety of sources and reading causes them psychic anguish.
These problems are numerous, but they are not unique in history. Depriving the people of the ability to read and critically think is a time-tested tool of the ruling class as old as reaction itself. Fortunately, some generous comrades who successfully defeated reaction and empowered the masses with the ability to read were kind enough to write down some ideas and recorded their experiments in combating illiteracy. We should identify those works of theory and history that talk about how communists tackled this issue, and adapt their methods to our own situation where it makes sense to do so. Hammer and Hoe would probably be a great place to start. The legacy of the Chinese revolution is a great start.
Second, in all that we do in our work among the people, we must be kind, respectful, and patient. We must not condescend or insult the people we are trying to educate, but rather meet them where their at so we can help them elevate themselves to a higher level. We want to teach them the basics of critical thinking, of logic, of argument and rhetoric, and what not with the intent that we can challenge the masses to go above and beyond short articles and eventually tackle entire books. Perhaps even join us in educating others.
Note
This means we have to meet people where they are at. The statistics reveal that the average American can read at a seventh grade level, which comes from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Therefore, when we have new people show up to study with us, we should assume until they prove otherwise that they are intellectually on par with a seventh grader.
Deviations on Correct Remedy to Combating Illiteracy¶
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The Left Deviation¶
Some comrades, who are rightfully frustrated about the state of education in America, simply say “DO THE FUCKING READING!” and then throw heaping tomes like Capital at the people. Would you go into a classroom of middle-schoolers and expect them to be able to pick up a massive book as complex as capital, and understand the first thing about it? No, clearly that would be absurd. But this is how the left-deviation on the subject of combating functional illiteracy manifests itself.
That’s not to say we should never broach such a book. As political educators it is our sincere goal that the people will, one day, actually be able to pick up a complicated book like capital and have lively debates and discussions over its meaning. This is actually what happened in Revolutionary China during the Cultural Revolution, as described in How Yukong Moved the Mountains. There is a famous scene in which factory workers have a vigorous debate over the nature of contradictions and two splitting into one. Another scene, from Felix Green’s China! shows how even young school children were capable of analyzing the dialectics of soccer balls.
The Right Deviation¶
The right-deviation of the problem, therefore, is the opposite of the left deviation. Whereas the left deviation wants to merely throw a gigantic tome at the people and expect them to read without any willingness whatsoever to put in the work to get them to the level where they can read such a book, the right deviation sees the masses inability to read and therefore deduces that for Communists to push them harder and struggle alongside them to do more reading would be a form of ableism or some such drivel. Whereas the left deviation seeks to make the masses do all the work themselves and abdicate the communists responsibility to the people, the right deviation wants to coddle the masses and expects them to do no work whatsoever. And since there are no expectations of the people, the communists are thereby abdicated of their responsibility to struggle.
Important
The uniting theme that ties together both right and left deviation, therefore, is **a fear on the part of the communists to struggle alongside the people, learn with them, and raise them to a higher standard.
The masses are not inherently dumb or stupid. Stupidity implies an essentialistic and immutable trait. It is a fundamentally liberal way of approaching the subject, not to mention condescending. Rather, what the masses are is uneducated. Fortunately, a lack of education is not an immutable trait; it is a problem which can be fixed with enough effort and hard work.
It is a liberal error to think that it’s ableist to ask someone to ever read such a book, or that it’s somehow oppressive or harmful to encourage people to build up to the level where they can read that book! But to ask the people to read those things right now, given the facts about functional illiteracy and reading levels, is absurd. This can be seen as a kind of left-deviation. It is a left deviation because it sees an enemy where no enemy exists, so to speak. In other words, the left deviation of telling someone to just do the reading and throwing a large tome at them without struggling alongside of them to elevate their comprehension progressively, fundamentally is an individualistic world view that blames laziness or some other form of incorrect thinking as a personal defect of the working class. They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps so to speak.
The right deviation, therefore, is the opposite: the suggestion that it’s ableist or oppressive to challenge people to further their education and push them to do better. This is because it takes on a patronizing and paternalistic attitude to the masses, and also fundamentally assumes that they are too stupid to know. But whereas the left deviation assumes the masses are stupid because of individual defectiveness, the right deviation assumes the masses are stupid and that it is their job to make sure we respect that stupidity because that‘s all the masses are ever going to be capable of.
Note
The golden mean and correct path, therefore, is to have a sober and honest assessment of the workers and masses reading comprehension by careful observation and education. It means that after such an assessment and investigation, we have to tailor a curriculum to meet them at their present level of ability. And once we get to that level, we study and struggle alongside the people to encourage and elevate them to become more effective readers and learners through encouragement, patience, compassion and a positive motivational attitude. This is the correct approach.
We must also be sure that our own conduct, as well as the conduct of others, is in such a way that we are not putting people off or allowing others to put people off through reactionary attitudes. In running a revolutionary communist book club, naturally many people will be scared off because of the anticommunist propaganda. This is to be expected and is more or less unavoidable. But other times, people are scared off for other reasons. Perhaps in your educational space you foster an environment of sex pests, or an environment in which reactionary remarks and chauvinistic comments are allowed to go unchallenged. While we do have to meet people where they’re at and therefore will encounter these situations inevitably, if they become a recurring problem and others see that they are a recurring problem, then that represents a failure of communists. Or in more egregious cases, if such attitudes are not immediately squashed, then that will effectively ruin your ability to organize a book club. Conversely, when you deal with such characters and address either extreme incidents or repeated behaviors, the people will notice this too and become more accepting and feel safer in your space. They will also tell their friends, and this will draw people in. We have to strike a balance between meeting people where they’re at but not permitting disruptions.
See Also¶
left-deviation – The ultra-left error of demanding too much too fast
right-deviation – The opportunist error of demanding nothing at all
The Labor Aristocracy: Is This Theory Bananas? – Material conditions shaping consciousness
essentialism – The idealist error underlying both deviations