A dumbed-down populace.
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Let us admit that basic geography and history have become specialist subjects, whilst literacy beyond the basic is at an all-time low.
So we must hope of many workers of today that they will come to socialist awareness without these things. Not impossible, as i know many comrades say. However, forget about any knowledge of the materialist conception of history (or even of basic chronology, let alone social history), and forget about any knowledge of places too. (Global distribution of goods in socialism will have to depend on computer programs made in advance, maybe).
Call me a snob, but it is still a fact that people travel around the world and back without knowing where the places are they’ve been to. And they also rely on the state for its paltry education and few now read books.
So only anger and need can lead them to make world revolution. Knowledge of why they are where they are (historical materialism, which term would flummox most) and how they got here won’t do.
And yet it’s true. Just watch any number of quiz shows. Or broach the subject of history, or geography.
People are surprised when i argue with their conviction that early humans hunted 🦕 dinosaurs.So your approach to social research is to watch funny videos on YouTube? And then you think it’s the other people that are dumb?
No. But you won’t believe my own experience of other people.
And on quiz shows people win money if they answer correctly, so if they knew when the American Civil War ended, they wouldn’t say 1951, would they?
The point is it doesn’t matter as long as we really dumb down ourselves when explaining our case. Start talking about history or materialism, and there’s no hope.
Defunct capitalism is making more and more people, in the digitalised world, stupid.
That’s not to say they don’t have skills needed for their wage-labour. That’s it: history and the Humanities are held in disdain because business is all that’s valued, and sciences and skills that channel workers into a specific avenue, their wage-slavery.I don’t see any blossoming of culture any more until capitalism is overthrown, but that’s also a Catch 22 situation, as human intellect stagnates along with the system.
Only socialism, by freeing us from the wages system, can introduce leisure for the mass of people (see Lafargue and Morris) and raise intellect, bringing back what was once called “Renaissance Man” – a condition that cannot flourish under present conditions (see Wilde).
The problem remains – the climbing free in the first place and attaining the willpower for revolution whilst under present, capitalist, stifling conditions.
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