PKMKII [none/use name]

Pee Wee Herman

Whenever this gets brought up, I think of the Bill Haywood quote, “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I’ve got the marks of capital all over my body.” Yeah, if you start in with bolts of linen to coats and exchange value versus use value, someone whose reading comprehension is at an 8th grade level is just gonna tune out. Praxis needs to be presented in a way that’s applicable to people’s everyday lives. Which honestly, isn’t hard because socialist political economy is fundamentally about how everyday people get a raw deal. You show them they’re getting a raw deal, then show they can get something better, simple as that.

Like, if you wanted to impress upon someone the benefits of a car, you wouldn’t start by discussing the physics equations used in determining the force generated by internal combustion or drawing a diagram to explain a differential. You would start with, it’ll get you from here to there fast and comfortably. Likewise, it’s better to start with “Doesn’t it suck that your boss pushes you around? Well that wouldn’t be an issue if you and your coworkers picked the boss instead of some corporate suits that never see your office” than starting with a discussion of Hegelian materialism versus idealism.

From what I gather, the issue is not so much illiteracy in the absolute, can’t read anything kind of illiteracy. It’s more so the kind of comprehension literacy where people can read things but they lack the skills to get the deeper meanings and understand the unified arguments and implications in longer written pieces.

Part of this might be the emphasis on shorter and shorter media content. However, I think the educational shift to more standardized tests and hyper focusing on STEM is a large part of the problem. Reading and reading comprehension is less emphasized, it gets more segmented to smaller pieces as to fit the test format more neatly, there’s less exploratory reading to naturally grow that skill set.