I’ve recently been reading anti-dühring and a bunch of writing from Marx and Engel and I continue to run into this problem where I realize how insane it is for someone to call themself a socialist after listening to a couple lectures and articles and reading the communist manifesto and maybe wage labor and profit and some excerpts. It’s maddening in the sense of, imagine someone being a fan of space or a general thing of physics and only knowing the very basic premises but not the details in of themselves, and if you yourself were a physicist and knew the details and listened to an explanation of physics by someone who knows only the most basic generalizations of the topic. Theory and especially materialist theory and dialectics is basically a socio-economic science, you can’t grasp materialism in just a short video that simplifies things like so many science and physics type videos out there.
On top of that there’s an entire history of socialism from the utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, Weitlung. That history is Socialist history, Communist history, how does one not try and understand their history in order to understand their own beliefs? Libertarian Socialist? What’s that even? It sounds like an Idealist philosophy if anything. All I know is that there are two camps of Socialism, the Idealists and the Materialists, the Idealists being: all the flavors of the anarchos such and such. The Materialists being: Marxist Leninists, MLMs. The idealist socialism and this seems to always be the case is they’re usually people who’ve not read much theory or has read some but not enough to get a good grasp of historical materialism or dialectics and attempt to ascribe their vague abstractions of what is their personal ideas of justice and not a materialist justice based on socio-economic conditions and the solutions to reconcile antagonisms in a society, specifically class antagonism.
What sucks of this knowing too much is that like any person who has a good grasp of a subject one can’t help but want to constantly try and correct someone who is totally wrong. An example of mine is where I met an “anarcho-communist” recently and asked out of curiosity what they read and they told me they didn’t much read because they don’t like reading and instead mostly watch YouTube videos, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t gonna get into an argument with someone who sees themselves as a comrade but I can tell you it was frustrating. It’s like someone saying “I know everything there is to know about feudal society, they had like knights and stuff, I know cuz I took one course on it”.
Its not so much of getting someone to think revolutionary on my end, But more so when I hear someone say a specific thing regarding socialism and knowing that it’s wrong but it would be unreasonable for me to tell someone every time they say something incorrect to go read this or that because I can’t be an encyclopedia all the time by like you said. I have read On Practice and at the end of the day putting your theory to the test is what creates learning. Unfortunately since I’m in the west the only way to engage in practice as far as on the ground work is cadres who do direct action through demonstrations and such.