THE LEFT CAN'T READ
bookclub, low literacy rates, and confusing propaganda with political education.
I run a bookclub that reads multi-cultural political theory. It’s cool. It’s fun. We sit around conversing about performance art within the Aids crisis and how the military industrial complex fuels the climate crisis in Guam. We do post-academia study. We flex our mental muscles to keep our critical thinking skills from atrophying under the crushing weight of the attention economy.
The great thing about book club is that it’s not homework. No grades, no pretentious flexing, hopefully, we might be a little guilty of that one. But it’s mostly just curiosity with a spine. It’s us developing the language to name the things we already think and see. We’re developing an ecology of knowledge, we’re growing. Sometimes we go off on tangents about how rappers represent large scale colonial projects. Sometimes we’re tired and barely finish the reading, but we show up anyway, because learning in community feels a hell of a lot better than scrolling alone. There’s coffee. There’s laughter. There’s the kind of honesty that only happens when everyone agrees to stop pretending they know what every word means. We decode together. We trace the roots of the world we live in—empire, extraction, surveillance—and we try to figure out what to do with that knowledge. We don’t have answers. We disagree. We have a good time.
But let’s be clear: This is not the revolution. This is study. Maybe practice. This is prep. This is development of ideology.
Revolution isn’t a really a reading group, but reading sure the hell is revolutionary.
And I don’t just mean it in the warm, fuzzy “books change lives” kind of way, though books do very much change lives. I mean that as a bookseller, as a librarian, as someone who has been organizing around language for over half a decade, I see, firsthand, every single day, how deep the literacy crisis in the United States runs.
I’ve met my fair share of adults that can’t sound out the words in BOB books. I’ve had grown adults whisper to me that they “forgot their glasses” when they’re too embarrassed to admit that they can’t read the fast food job application that they need to fill out. I’ve sat with teenagers in SAT prep that can’t properly read the paragraphs that they are being expected to summarize for a test they have absolutely no shot at passing. I’ve handed chapter books to parents who want their children to read but struggle making it through the words themselves. I see the look in people’s eyes when text is just shapes, and they’re too embarrassed to ever say it out loud. Parents don’t even understand how behind the benchmark their children are, because they themselves have no idea what competent literacy looks like. Seventh graders that can’t read picture books. High schoolers who only read manga because they are functionally illiterate. There’s so much shame in not being able to read. In having to move through a world that everyone else seems to understand but you don’t.
Our public education system is stretched thin, standardized to hell, and built on deeply unequal funding structures. If you don’t have a college-educated parent, or a parent who knows how to meaningfully navigate the system and advocate on your behalf, it is alarmingly easy to go from kindergarten to a high school diploma without ever becoming a competent reader.
We’re not talking about cracks, we’re talking about chasms, sinkholes, fucking earthquakes.
Instead of investing in remediation, community literacy, or culturally responsive education, we criminalize illiteracy. We call people who have been failed by the public education system lazy. We trap them in low-wage work. We build a prison pipeline that profits from their failure. Illiteracy becomes an individual shame, when it should be a collective indictment. We are failing our kids. And though the statement that prison planners use third‑grade reading scores to forecast bed needs in prison is mostly myth, the correlation is real and correct. America is a nation that does very little to teach people to read, and then punishes them for not reading well.
The left knows this. We yap about it all the time. “The education system is broken, it’s failing. We need to pay teachers more. The public school system is inequitable. Poor kids are being left behind”, yada yada yada. We say it so much it’s practically meaningless, because we don’t really do much about it besides crying when our public libraries are defunded...
The left has been building our movements on dense texts and academic language and then wondering why no one shows up. We mock people for not knowing theory instead of asking why we think revolutionary thought requires citations in the first place.
Not everyone CAN read The Communist Manifesto because we live in a society that is largely illiterate. Pretending it’s not is really fucking naive actually.
Illiteracy isn’t rare. It’s structured. It’s produced. It’s something that you actually have to maintain. If someone never learned to read fluently, that’s not a personal failure, that’s a public betrayal. It means the system was successful in doing exactly what it was designed to do: gatekeep knowledge, punish poverty, and hoard power. Acting like theory is just “a Google search away” ignores the very real structural failures that keep people from accessing or decoding language in the first place. If you can’t read a paragraph without guessing every fifth word, no amount of radical reading lists by book riot are magically going to change your material reality.
That being said.
If you are literate, if you are college-educated, if you have the skill, the access, the practice, the privilege, if you have a computer and access to any theory you could possibly want to read via pirating sites and you’re choosing not to read because your attention span is shot or you don’t feel like it or you think you already know the stuff because despite not reading a book in four years you think you’re an intellectual, spare me your tears, stop playing in my face. I do not care that you feel alienated by language you refuse to engage with. I will publicly shame you for being an idiot.
Because there are 15-year-olds working two jobs sophomore year because that’s somehow legal now, who are failing out of high school to help their parents afford rent, and tired-ass organizers teaching civics classes so that people can understand their rights, and prisoners teaching themselves to read in prison law libraries. If you, with all your cushioned middle class advantages, aren’t even trying? I think you’re a fucking dumbass. This is not a call for perfection. You don’t need to be a scholar. But you do need to stop pretending that your disinterest is revolutionary. Or that intelligence is something you have or don’t based on selection for your elementary schools gifted program.
The educated sect of the revolution may very well run it, if they manage to stop cosplaying oppressor and infantilizing the masses. That’s fine. Every movement has its thinkers, its planners, its strategists. Someone has to write the demands. Someone has to print the pamphlets. Someone has to organize the spreadsheets and translate the policies and read the damn footnotes. But that sect CAN NOT shun the masses.
Fascists sure as hell don’t.
Fascists don’t need you to be well-read. They don’t even necessarily want you to be. They don’t need you to understand history or rhetoric or structural analysis. They just need you angry. They need you scared. They need you reachable. And they have that reach. They meet you in church with misquoted bible verses. They’ll hand you simple slogans, gut-level fear, identity confusion, aesthetic incoherence, and the promise of belonging. They’ll organize around your pain without asking you critically think about it. They don’t need educated minds, they need bodies. On the street. At the ballot box. Holding the flag. Driving the car. Swinging the bat. Holding the gun.
Meanwhile many leftists are out here turning political literacy into a fucking entrance exam. We’re essentially asking people to quote marx in order to volunteer at a food pantry. You can’t win a class war with a book club if no one outside the club is invited to the meeting. You can’t organize a revolution that alienates the very people it claims to fight for.
If your theory requires a 12th-grade reading level and a 4-year degree, fascists will beat you to the street every single fucking time.
Moving on.
If you are the college-educated, left-leaning, ideologically “aware” person who spends your free time mindlessly scrolling, reposting the same infographic carousel ten other people already shared, and participating in performance activism for your 1,000 followers without ever picking up a book, without engaging any material beyond headlines?
Welcome to the left’s equivalent of the “uneducated masses.” Except we’re not even doing that correctly, because we can’t be mobilized.
At least the so-called “right wing uneducated masses” are reachable. They’re angry. They’re resourceful. They know how to organize a fundraiser and feed their neighbors. They know when they’re being exploited. They can get on board with a cause when someone meets them where they’re at. And the right is meeting their masses where they’re at. The left’s masses? We’ve got the language, the access, the privilege, and we’re using it to scroll on phones designed by tech moguls who stand ideologically opposite to us.
We are inert, intellectually bloated, and politically dehydrated.
We’re dead batteries.
The left has a lot of people who know surface-level talking points and can sound very correct until meaningfully challenged. We can quote the right thinkers, toss around the right acronyms, perform the right politics for the group chat. What we don’t have is grandmas volunteering as reading counselors. We don’t have the quiet foot soldiers of liberation, people who show up early, stay late, and help a kid sound out words without posting about it afterward.
We’ve got a surplus of semi-informed commentators and a drought of actual organizers. Everyone wants to debate abolition on a panel, but no one wants to go read Junie B. Jones to a room full of second graders who’ve already been written off by the state. Everyone’s got theory in their Twitter bio, but no one’s in the elementary school hallway with the sight word flashcards.
Revolution isn’t a performance. It’s a practice. And some of us are flunking.
Revolutionary work has to be legible to the people it's meant for. Not just symbolically. Literally.
If you're trying to build class consciousness among people who have been systematically denied literacy, then your slogans, your pamphlets, your “educational” events need to reflect that. I can’t hand out a four-paragraph mission statement to someone who’s struggling to read a bus schedule and then get mad when they don’t come to my meeting. That’s not organizing.
Revolutionary work in low-literacy realities looks different. It’s visual. It’s verbal. It’s relational. It’s building trust. It’s person to person. It’s slow and intentional and doesn’t make people feel stupid. It means designing fliers that are actually readable. It means knocking on doors instead of assuming everyone is on Instagram because the people you want to reach are probably more on facebook, but they also have doors. We have to develop symbols, rhythms, and routines that can be picked up through community practice.
It’s time that we understand that oral tradition is a form of literacy. That storytelling is a political technology. That you can teach abolition through a kitchen table conversation oftentimes more effectively than in a 12-week reading group with required texts.
When you say “education is liberation,” you understand that education doesn't always look like a textbook and a test. It can look like watching a film together and discussing it out loud. It can look like someone explaining tenants' rights on the mic at a party. It can look like elders mentoring youth in their communities. That’s revolutionary literacy, too.
So if you’re doing the work, and your work isn’t accessible to people who can’t read fluently, then it’s time to rework your strategy.
Liberation is built on repeated acts of care, not marches and manifestos.
Sometimes it’s making fifteen PB&Js before school starts. Sometimes it’s standing next to someone while they fill out paperwork they don’t understand. Sometimes it’s reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fifth time in a week.
This is the unsexy work. The slow work. The kind of work that never goes viral, that won’t earn you a panel invite or a social media following. But it is the spine of actual movement.
You cannot theorize people into freedom if they’re hungry. You cannot free people by calling them stupid. You cannot organize around liberation without being in active, ongoing relationship with someone besides your own reflection.
Liberation is care repeated. Repeated care. Let’s lock that into our collective psyche. Quietly. Without applause. It’s baked ziti in the freezer for the new mom. It’s a ride to the courthouse. It’s showing up every week to help someone write their resume or respond to a school notice or study for their GED. It’s tutoring. It’s translating. It’s babysitting. It’s trusting people to know what they need, not telling them what you think they need, and sticking around long enough to be part of meeting that need.
That’s the work. That’s radicalism.
That’s what the fascists are afraid of. Fascists are not going to be afraid of the books when they understand that people can not read them. What has the potential to scare them is not the books, but the people willing to show up, again and again, to make sure everyone can read.
The way to an educated, liberated population is not through condescension. It’s not through gatekeeping. It’s not through making people feel like they’re too late, too stupid, too far behind to join the fight. The way to an educated, liberated population is through meeting people where they are, even if where they are is The Hunger Games or The Hate U Give or Different Kinds of Fruit or The Climate Club.
If that’s where the spark starts, then hell yeah.
Because revolutionary literacy isn’t just about decoding words. It’s about making meaning. It’s about seeing your life, your grief, your rage, your people, on a page, and realizing that your struggle does not exist in a vacuum. It’s about building the tools to ask bigger questions, sharper questions. And then finding the courage to ask them out loud.
We cannot shame people into critical thinking. We cannot shame people into solidarity. We cannot shame people into revolution.
The right is full of misinformation. We know this. It's a cesspool of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, dog-whistle slogans, and flat-out lies repackaged as truth. But the left? The left does it too. Just prettier. Just dressed up in infographics pulled from Canva templates.
If you're serious about building a liberatory movement, stop lying to your people. Stop simplifying things beyond the point of usefulness just to get engagement. Stop repeating statistics you haven’t sourced. Stop flattening complexity for the sake of emotional virality. Knock it the fuck off, you are not educating, you are propagandizing. You are propagandizing your own people.
We cannot claim to be liberating minds and also trying our damnedest to manipulate them. We cannot claim to be truth-tellers while passing around talking points that collapse under basic scrutiny. We cannot demand intellectual rigor from our enemies while refusing to practice it ourselves.
“Where’d you get that statistic on abortion?” The left screams.
“I don’t know, where’d you get yours?” The right counters.
Organizing under low-literacy conditions does not mean treating people like they’re stupid. People have been lied to their entire lives. Break the cycle.
Tell the truth even when it’s hard, even when it doesn’t fit neatly into a caption. Give people the tools to draw their own conclusions. Stop with the memorize-able scripts of pre-approved accepted lies. Use real language instead of buzzwords. Stop filling knowledge gaps with guesswork and outrage.
Your job is not to impress people. Your job is to make the truth stick.
The goal of revolutionary education isn’t to "win at discourse”, that’s stupid. The goal is to arm people with clarity. So they can fight smarter. So they can protect themselves. So that they can connect their own dots. So they can call bullshit on their own. So they don’t just believe you. They believe in themselves.
If you’re not doing that? You are a mouthpiece. You are a distraction.
The left has wet dreams of an informed, organized, politically literate base ready to rise up and change the world. We yearn for it. We’re drooling at the thought of it. We romanticize it in every thread, every manifesto, and every Instagram infographic. A mobilizable, educated mass. A people who not only know what the problem is, but know what to do about it. A population that has read the books, watched the documentaries, learned the history, decoded the systems, and is ready to move.
But we are not building that population.
We are not even preparing to.
You don’t get an educated, mobilizable base by hoping one appears. You don’t get it by tweeting about the same five theorists or quoting Baldwin when you haven’t read him. You don’t get it by hoarding knowledge behind social capital or academic elitism. You build it. You build it by teaching.
You build it by showing up in real life. By saying, “Hey, I know that policy is confusing. Let’s break it down.” By asking, “Have you read this?” and not shaming someone when they say no. You build it by translating literally, culturally, socially, and emotionally. You build it by finding where people are starting and walking with them from there.
You don’t build a mobilizable mass by shouting slogans. You build it by cultivating critical thinkers. People who can see through propaganda. People who can organize without being told. People who don’t need permission to act because they understand what’s at stake and how to move.
That is the dream. But that is also the work.
If we want a mass that’s educated and mobilizable, we need to stop treating political literacy like a pass/fail test. Pass the spark. Light people up. Feed it. Protect it. Get people angrier.
Because when the people are ready, they will move. But only if we’ve done the groundwork to make sure they know where they’re going, why it matters, and who they’re doing it for.
You want a radical, politically literate society? Then start with picture books. Start where people are. Sit with them. Read with them. Listen more than you lecture. Teach without superiority. Learn without ego. Hand out books like they’re flashlights and we’re in a blackout, because that’s what a literacy crisis is. And when someone says, “I’ve only ever read YA,” don’t roll your eyes. Don’t you dare roll those eyes. Say, “Hell yeah. Let’s talk about it.” Because what matters isn’t where you start, it’s that you start.
This all begins where someone says: “I didn’t get it.”
And someone else says: “That’s okay. Let’s read it again.”