theres a big difference between "read every marxist work" and "read enough to understand why your views are right." i cant even begin to imagine how you'd determine who has read every marxist work. do i need to read everything marx ever wrote? Even this letter he wrote to his father?
Do I gotta read Lenin? Trotsky? Stalin? Mao? Kim Il-sung?
Bukharin? Luxemburg? Kautsky? Padmore?
Like, that's a lot of reading shit written by people who have been dead for over 100 years to be considered a real leftist. I'm not saying these works aren't still valuable and that you shouldn't still read them, but I think the bar for "having some idea what you're talking about" is a little bit lower than having read every Marxist work.
The issue is that it's a fundamental contradiction, not that socialists also don't read. Reading Marx (or anything else) is not necessarily a requirement for being a socialist, but if your position is that you believe in evidence-based policy, the bare minimum requirement is that you have evidence.
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theres a big difference between "read every marxist work" and "read enough to understand why your views are right." i cant even begin to imagine how you'd determine who has read every marxist work. do i need to read everything marx ever wrote? Even this letter he wrote to his father?
Do I gotta read Lenin? Trotsky? Stalin? Mao? Kim Il-sung?
Bukharin? Luxemburg? Kautsky? Padmore?
Like, that's a lot of reading shit written by people who have been dead for over 100 years to be considered a real leftist. I'm not saying these works aren't still valuable and that you shouldn't still read them, but I think the bar for "having some idea what you're talking about" is a little bit lower than having read every Marxist work.
Oh you like communism? Name every factory strike leader
The issue is that it's a fundamental contradiction, not that socialists also don't read. Reading Marx (or anything else) is not necessarily a requirement for being a socialist, but if your position is that you believe in evidence-based policy, the bare minimum requirement is that you have evidence.