The US military is always asking for recruits. If you don't read, you won't know that "helping them" means killing civilians.

I'm in this meme and I like it.

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I've been hearing so much about.

I'm helping!

We need good analysis to guide good praxis, but you can literally learn a lot of more advanced stuff from just listening to comrades, even if reading with comrades is even better.

Knowledge is important, but values and character are more so, IMO. Many complex ideas are founded on the belief of/are distilled from basic humanity.

Anarchists wrote books too ya know, you can't just escape reading by changing your allegiance.

The only real problem with the people who don't want to read theory is they just love talking over the people who did. The Dunning Kruger effect exists in revolutionary spaces.

Remember kids, you can't be a good communist if you don't have any skills. We already have people well practised at arguing on the internet.

“Wait a second…is that from the ‘83 tour?!”

I can just beat someone with praxis. Take that, theorists!

Reading theory ≠ being highly competent, though. Dunning Kruger states that people with low competence (in specific areas) overestimate themselves, and highly competent people underestimate themselves.

Reading doesnt necessarily make you better at things (though obviously it can help). A community organizer that's been feeding the hungry for 40 years but has never read a political book will be more competent than someone who's read hundreds of books but never gone out and done stuff.

This is me. Not into all the political theory, just want my fellow human beings to be treated with dignity and for everyone to have a comfortable existence.

I mean I'm an anarchist and I got to my position by reading 🤷

To be fair, big shoots has a very broad definition of friend, which is what they replaced "someone" with

I like the anarchist tendency to encourage thinking for yourself because I think outsourcing political opinions and generally the narrative that politics is too complicated for the layman to fully grasp goes a long way in enabling a world where everything is treated as sophistry leaving gaps for people to blindly follow ideologues. Something similar happened with science and now we have folks ‘debating’ things that are clear as day if you just look.

Encouraging each person to think for themselves isn’t to say everyone should live in a private conspiracy. I think everyone should take a course in propositional logic or higher because it truly helps your brain sort through information more clearly and quicker, and makes you much sharper at catching sophistry.

In ourselves we should try to note when we hit that point in an argument when we are arguing just to win. At that point we should (potentially apologize) and bow out. Arguing just to win is unhelpful.

Theory is much more helpful once you have your feet under you. You are committed to dignity for all. That is a strong position to assess the world from. The categories are quite clear. Once you are here reading theory, especially examples of successful revolutionary projects, helps you understand the types of tools and approaches you might use (or avoid) to bring about change. It also saves lives to avoid strategies that commonly fail.

Stop avoiding your homework OP, read the damn theory!

Surprise twist: I am aware anarchists like reading; I like reading; and I'm not actually an anarchist!

It's just a fun meme making fun of upright overly intellectual Marxist-Leninists (that part is sincere).

Anarchists usually don't need the kind of deprogramming of capitalist, monarchist, colonial, or imperial systems that socialist and Marxist theories typically focus on.

I know, I like the meme, and we can have fun here :)

Are there no anarchist books? I'm pretty sure there are and anarchy doesn't mean willful ignorance.

would you also try to cure cancer while ignoring all the research published on it?

More hands make less work. Pitter patter.

There's plenty, and they can help, but you ain't gotta read em. They're guides and ideas. Nobody ever told me I needed to read Proudhon to think the state's bad, and usually older texts become more of historical interest than theory interests. When I wanted to understand anarchism I was told to go out and engage in praxis.

It's technically a work of fiction but The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin can maybe be considered an anarchist book. It does a deep delve into an anarchist society and how it could theoretically be organized. In my opinion it could also be interpreted as a critique, but I think it's stronger for it.

Yhea, it's easy! If a patient asks you for help: you help them

Is that why every anarchist I know tells me I'm insane and justifying the "evil Iranian regime" after I said the US/Israel shouldn't be bombing Iran?

Fully agree that that's the way to learn. Do praxis, theory will develop.

However, I recommend the bread book to anyone I think might enjoy reading something like it. It changed my life fundamentally to see some one lay out the math of how a society could function like that. As suggested above,nthe dispossessed is also an amazing work of theory disguised as a very fun sci fi read. I routinely quote "where do you go when you die in hell" ever since reading it

Bruh what

Yeah no I’m gonna step in and fully agree with you on the statement of “psychopaths shouldn’t be allowed to enact destruction on civilians.”

IDF, USA (and all its three letter agencies), whatever authoritarian fuckbags murdered Iranian protestors, etc.

It’s all bad. If these genocidal people who choose to reject their humanity have an axe to grind, they should be forced to do so amongst themselves.

Hiding behind bombs and armies is bullshit. Make the “leaders” go face to face, with little more than a rusty machete and keep the rest of the world’s people out of it.

Agreed, I just think we need to nurture how people relate to/ground their opinions before theory can take root properly. Currently both science and politics are treated like sophistry—it’s all a matter of argument

What I think is especially unhelpful is people who have not read enough theory to understand what they are talking about (let alone considered it in the context it was written), but they are passionate about an issue so they try to debate people using the logic of that theory and they end up just making the theory seem like nonsense because they didn’t understand it. Only in the context of debate does it make sense to argue for a theory you don’t really grasp. Debate is about winning an argument but not about what is ‘true’ or ‘right’. I would rather that person just stick to their guns on the basics of whatever the argument is over (ie. genocide is bad no exceptions). This way they stand firmly on their own feet but can also have confidence in their reasons even without a nuanced historical perspective of how things got to where they are.

Anyway I love reading and discussing theory and philosophy (including your guides) and find it extremely rich and rewarding. It should be used as fodder to help you think rather than a guidebook to inform what you should think.

This is again part of the problem. You can understand the fundamentals of ML in like an hour or less. A quick start guide being like 12 hours long is insane.

When all the information you have about Iran comes straight from western sources that have lied about Palestinians for years you should take all claims about Iran (and Hamas) with a pile of salt. Otherwise you're a useful idiot both sidings issues that have to do with imperialism first and foremost.

Counterpoint, you can understand the core points of socialism very quickly. One need not read 50 books before joining the conversation.

However else you explain any other concept, these are very simple ideas.

I mean yes but also don't be anti-intellectual if people have time they are plenty of books we should recommend.

You can definitely explain most of those in a way a 5 year old could understand in under 20 minutes.

Not dialectical materialism though. I've read about it and had it explained to me more time than I can count, and my brain refuses to hold on to what it means.

Explaining it to them without the fluff?

The all theory and no action crowd are definitely more annoying and proficient at taking over spaces and killing the vibe, in my experience (e.g. socialist alternative here in Aus)

Yeah, but so does just doing it. And talking to people about how to do it. The point isn't that people shouldn't read, it's that the should do (and shouldn't be prevented from doing because they can't or won't read).

I have multiple Iranian friends. No one in Iran other than religious fundamentalists liked Khamenei, or his government. But they also (justifiably) don't trust the west. They feel trapped. Khamenei being removed is a problem not because he's gone, but because he leaves a vacuum that might get filled with something worse.