interesting that the left twitter debate abt 'is reading theory inaccessible?' pops up around Paulo Friere's 99th birthday (today). I think [re-]reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed would make this whole convo much more meaningful

imo the purpose of political theory isnt to tell you that oppression and exploitation are bad. if this was why we read, clearly reading would be unnecessary to change our situation. i think we read to make our actions as strategic as possible. what process brings about change?

if freedom was as simple as understanding that you don't like your conditions, we would've been free. why haven't we won yet? globally, there are hundreds of millions of people who rebel all the time. if unplanned, spontaneous rebellion was all it took, we would've been free

dialectical materialism is an enlightening and complicated theory. i cant imagine arriving at it by yourself. this doesnt mean that it's unnecessary, useless, or inherently inaccessible. it means that the masses r deliberately not taught to analyze their world in a liberatory way

i also wish we didn't have to always debate abt if big words = inaccessibility. sometimes big words & complicated vocab are the most accurate & concise way to describe a situation. if we could never use the word 'proletarianization', for example, marxist texts would be way longer

i think the problem isn't the words or the language themselves (if we're trying to build something that isn't currently here, why would we be limited to the language of the world that surrounds us?), but the ways in which we are discouraged from engaging critically w our world

imo there's a separation between the people who are angry abt their situation and have nothing to loose, and the people who are taught liberatory methods of analysis, usually in the academy (which is inaccessible lol). when you bridge that gap, you get a huey p newton

connecting our struggle to past and current struggles can only happen through political education and organizing. it does us a disservice both when we pretend like poor people are incapable of doing this, and when we pretend like that knowledge is readily available to anyone rn

Lenin writes abt this in 'What is to be Done?' and I think also in 'Better Fewer, but Better' (?)