Around fifteen years ago, I had a conversation with an activist who had worked alongside Workers’ Liberty in the student movement, and was considering joining our group. He agreed with our ideas, but found the fact we published a regular printed paper unbearably old-fashioned.
“No-one reads newspapers anymore”, he insisted.
What should we use instead, I asked, when we met potentially interested people at work, on demonstrations, or in meetings? What would give them an accessible presentation of our ideas, and a sense of our activity?
His answer was that we should distribute small cards displaying QR codes that would take people to a range of online content, which he suggested should mostly consist of videos.
This conversation returned to mind upon reading James Marriott’s viral Substack article “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”, published in September 2025.
“In the UK”, Marriott reports, “more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports ‘shocking and dispiriting’ falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record.” Marriott argues the central factor in this decline is the form of attention mediation inculcated by smartphone use, combined with the modes of discourse incentivised by social media algorithms: “Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.”
“Post-literacy” does not mean the end of reading. The ability to process symbols representing sounds into words remains. But it does mean a shift in the dominant form of literacy, from sustained engagement with longer texts to scrolling distraction-ridden, fragmented content streams, where often bitesize chunks of text sit alongside short-form video. Even for those who do read the entirety of longer texts from their smartphones or laptops, engagement is shallower. Studies have shown that readers who read from screens retain less than those who read from paper.
Marriott is a journalist for the Times, and therefore perhaps not an immediately obvious reference point for the revolutionary left. I wouldn’t go along with all of the flourishes in his article. However, his basic presentation is compelling. The political implications are severe, but uneven. “Post-literacy” presents a far greater problem for the left than the right.
Marriott’s historical picture — an “age of print”, which inculcated democratic politics, being overthrown by a counter-revolutionary “age of the screen”, which precipitates the “death of democracy” — is dramatically oversimplified. It has surely not escaped his notice that some of the worst affronts to democracy in human history took place in the pre-smartphone era.
There is also an element of technological reductionism in his argument. The harms caused by “the age of the screen” are not the inevitable consequences of an uncontrollable technological force humanity has unthinkingly unleashed. Rather, they are products of the development of forms of technology driven by and in the context of a particular political economy. A central feature here is the deep commodification of human attention.
Marriott’s article recognises “the concentration of wealth, power, and knowledge” at “the top of society”, and even fears a “second feudalism” driven by tech firms that profit from ignorance. But there is little acknowledgement of the political-economic choices that underpin this. Marriott rightly laments the impacts of post-literacy on academic culture, but spends no time considering how the neoliberal commodification of higher education might have created the conditions for those impacts. There is no comment on how weak worker protections and anti-union laws have facilitated the ascendancy of tech firms to their current position of global economic dominance.
Like almost all forms of capitalist development, these technologies also have progressive potentials, which the article overlooks. If I want to find a copy of a particular book, or organise a group to collectively read and discuss a philosophical treatise, a novel, or, indeed, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”, the quickest, easiest, and most effective way of doing so is by using a smartphone.
Overall, though, Marriott’s presentation of the spread of post-literacy is hard to refute. The left must urgently confront its implications for our own movement. Some writing on this topic can feel like middle-class sneering, bemoaning the symptoms of post-literacy as if they are a moral failing on the part of uneducated plebs. Marriott’s article avoids this tone. In any case, it is us “plebs”, those less powerful, who have most to lose from the post-literate society. As Marriott puts it, “The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.”
Karl Marx once described the aim of revolutionary thought as “Ruthless criticism of all that exists.” He did not mean mere negative opposition, but the development of a worldview: a thoroughgoing critique of social conditions, in order to fight to change them. To do this, we need an accurate picture of the world we are critiquing. This requires reading a range of sources, including lengthy analyses which may refer to academic literature.
This kind of engagement requires deep literacy: the ability to concentrate on texts for long enough to follow their arguments and weigh them against others; the ability to follow claims, references, and citations back to their origin. A picture of the world built up mostly from “news” derived from social media, where catchcry emotional agitation and a barrage of ephemeral content predominates, is both less accurate, and significantly more vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues and reactionaries.
Many leftists are instinctively sceptical of centrist critiques of social media, which may share some features in common with Marriott’s, that bemoan its “polarising” effect. The real drivers of “polarisation” are not intemperate tweets, but government policies which exacerbate inequality, and especially a pandering to the far right over immigration. Centrists often promote a generic “meet-in-the-middle” spirit of moderation and compromise as the alternative to polarisation, an approach which invariably helps preserve the status quo. By contrast, radical leftist politics are themselves an effort at social polarisation, on a class basis.
But the left cannot simply repurpose social media’s polarising effects for our own ends. The modes of discourse its platforms encourage and reward are performative and solipsistic. They privilege knee-jerk outrage over detailed critique, often leading to a flattening of all nuance. The “polarisation” we seek is, as the lyrics of ‘The Internationale’ put it, a matter of “reason in revolt” — meaning both a revolt of reason against irrationality, and reason in the revolt, that is, basing our politics on a thought-through critique of the status quo.
A movement that requires only acolytes and foot soldiers can mobilise them through social media’s post-literate modes. Politics that require workers to be what Antonio Gramsci called “permanent persuaders” and “democratic philosophers” need something different. Achieving socialism requires billions of working-class people to take conscious ownership over society’s direction. That in turn requires the ability to think, reason, argue, debate and persuade, and to produce and refine ideas. If only an elite layer within movements possesses these capabilities, then even if some future revolution succeeds in overthrowing capitalism, what will replace it will more likely resemble Stalinism, a grotesque caricature of socialism, than anything genuinely emancipatory.
Revolutionary workers’ movements have always been profoundly literate, and literary. Chartism, the first mass workers’ movement in Britain, was spread in part through a network of newspapers and pamphlet presses. The Chartist press directly concerned itself with questions of literacy and literature, sometimes reprinting verse by Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley, contesting the idea that “high literature” should be the preserve of the wealthy. The Chartist press also published poetry and prose by worker authors.
Eleanor Marx, a leader in trade-union and migrant-worker struggles in the late-1800s, made one of her most significant contributions to class struggle by teaching Will Thorne, a gasworker militant she had met through their fellow membership of the Social Democratic Federation, to read.
In 1908, a group including mineworker and theorist of revolutionary industrial unionism Noah Ablett founded the Plebs’ League, a caucus of students at Ruskin College which pioneered the concept of independent working-class education. Their activity was organised around a publication, Plebs’ Magazine. Antonio Gramsci undertook similar activity in the class-struggle ferment of 1920s Italy, through his Group for Communist Education, and the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order).
The Social Democratic Party in Germany, whose pre-World War One period arguably represents the world-historic high-point of working-class political organisation, stressed reading, written exchange, and study of lengthy, complex texts. Party schools, where leaders like Rosa Luxemburg taught, trained workers, often with only basic levels of formal education, in the forms of literacy necessary to engage with and produce ideas and theory.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the first sustained experiment in working-class rule in history, the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary socialist parties carried on continuous exchanges, polemics, and educational efforts, in newspapers, journals, factory bulletins, books, and other written materials.
In Vietnam, the Trotskyists who were central to labour and anti-colonial insurgencies before their suppression by Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinists organised around magazines and newspapers, including Tranh Dau (Struggle), a daily paper with a reported circulation of 15,000.
More recently, the social and class insurgencies of the late-1960s and early-1970s were characterised by a vibrant print culture, which in Britain included socialist-feminist publications like Red Rag, and rank-and-file newspapers and bulletins in numerous workplaces and industries.
A purely instrumental view of this history might conclude it was all a matter of the available technologies. If Rosa Luxemburg had access to social media, would she have focused on content creation rather than teaching workers to read Capital? We can only make an educated guess. But other recent evidence, drawn from experiences of struggle, certainly seems to reaffirm the claim that revolutionary social transformation requires modes of organising, and therefore of discourse, that are much deeper than those of the post-literate society.
To understand the implications of post-literacy for left-wing political organisation specifically, Marriott’s article is usefully read alongside two other texts, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2010 article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, and Vincent Bevins’ 2023 book If We Burn. (See here and here for reflections on the texts published by Workers’ Liberty).
Gladwell argued that movements based on “weak ties” formed by social media could never carry through comprehensive social change, which requires “deep ties” built through sustained face-to-face interaction in common organisations. Bevins’ book surveys, from the other end of the decade, 10 years of inspiring, but ultimately unsuccessful, radical social upheavals, and reaches broadly similar conclusions.
Both texts indicate the importance of permanent, structured organisations, rather than looser, would-be “horizontal” or structureless movements. Building democratic organisations that foster “deep ties” requires deep literacy: mass participation in debate, producing and critiquing written proposals for policy and strategy, scrutinising the records of proceedings in order to hold elected leaders and officials to account, and being able to understand and interrogate movement history in order to assess contemporary perspectives against those of the past. A left that relies on digital content circulated via social media cannot hope to train activists in these skills.
The tiny, scattered forces of the existing revolutionary left cannot fix at will any of the problems Marriott highlights. What we can do is fight for the wider labour movement to actively pursue struggles for reforms which will help. The proposed ban on social media use by under-16s, prominently supported by National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede but rejected by Parliament, was something of a blunt instrument. But education unions’ wider policy programmes could make a real difference, if enacted: an increase in education funding, the decommodification of higher education, the abolition of tuition fees, better pay and conditions for school workers, smaller class sizes. All of these would create better conditions for teaching the skills of deep literacy to people earlier in life, and embedding those skills through further and higher education.
We can also train activists in the skills of deep literacy through the cultures we build in our own organisations. The left needs an online and social-media presence. But its function should not simply be to feed people content, or provide a generically left-wing take on current affairs. More of the left’s time and resources should be dedicated to in-person discussion and study of written texts, including both the “classics” of our movement and more contemporary writing. Workers’ Liberty tries to prefigure this culture as much as possible, publishing longer analytical and historical pieces in our fortnightly paper Solidarity alongside more agitational pieces, commentary, and reports of struggles. We continue to publish books and pamphlets, a socialist-feminist magazine Women's Fightback, and workplace bulletins. We run book clubs and reading groups, and produce study guides on particular texts and ideas.
The mass institutions of the broader labour movement, though diminished, retain significant social weight. A drive by trade unions to build deep literacy amongst worker activists, through reading groups and schools on trade union history and organising theory, could produce real results. The Morning Star sometimes poses as a broad trade-union paper, but is effectively a Stalinist tabloid. We should aspire to a labour-movement press modelled more on the Chartist press, the first decade of the Daily Herald, and Plebs’ Magazine.
In all of this, efforts to maximise accessibility are essential. Some people may need to engage with texts in different formats, either as an initial step or simply because those are the formats accessible to them for reasons of disability or neurodivergence. The aim is to make as many of the skills of deep literacy as possible accessible to the maximum possible numbers, not to ordain a priest caste drawn from those who, for reasons of social background and educational privilege, come to the table with pre-existing advantages.
Material obstacles to this work must also be taken account of. It is easier for someone in a higher-paying job with shorter hours, or with fewer caring responsibilities, to spend time on these activities. But if Will Thorne was right to dedicate some of the little free time available to him, outside gruelling 12-hour workdays in Beckton Gas Works, to having Eleanor Marx teach him to read, we must seek ways to enable ourselves and others to make similar commitments. Every socialist activist should aspire to be both Thorne and Marx, both student and teacher.
The two most substantial left media institutions in Britain today are Tribune and Novara. Marriott was recently interviewed sympathetically on the latter’s YouTube channel. Whatever their merits or otherwise, they are both almost wholly online efforts. Tribune appears in print quarterly, and there are some online reports of real-world readers’ groups, but mostly from several years ago. Beyond occasional live podcast recordings, Novara’s output has no “real-world” extension. Their content is overwhelmingly consumed individually, on screens, and discussed, if at all, through social-media comment threads.
They are better than nothing. But we need something more.
My interlocutor from 15 years ago was right, of course. Newspaper reading had declined. It has declined further since. So has book reading. But we cannot simply shrug and adapt. Unless we can push back post-literacy, our political project is hindered, perhaps fatally. Socialism, the wresting of control over our destinies from the hands of capital, is, by necessity, a deeply literate project. It cannot be achieved with post-literate means.
Marriott’s article has an apocalyptic tone, foreseeing “the end of civilisation”. He posits no potential agency that might intervene in the conditions he describes in order to change them. His personal remedy has been to get rid of his own smartphone, a lifestyle choice many will find it difficult to make.
We can heed the alarm his article sounds without sharing his conclusions. The task of responding in a way that connects to our own political ends falls, obviously, to us. The first step is to ensure the culture of our movement confronts post-literacy rather than pandering to it or, worse, imagining we can appropriate it. Remaking socialism as a real alternative to capitalism begins with working-class self and mutual education. Today’s revolutionary left, in the spirit of Eleanor Marx, the Plebs’ League, and L’Ordine Nuovo, must strive, again, to establish cultures of deep literacy within the labour movement.
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