“Post-literacy”: the beam in our own eyes

I agree entirely with Daniel Randall’s conclusion ("Socialism and the Post-Literate Society", Solidarity 764): “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”.

I want to add some other dimensions. The activist left, I think, is partly a victim of “post-literate” trends in the wider society. But, as the King James Bible has it, “the mote that is in thy brother’s eye” should not divert attention from “the beam that is in thine own eye”. We, the activist left, contain some of the worse examples of “post-literacy”, and we must heal ourselves in order to heal others. I address this article, of course, to those sufficiently into reading to read it, but also with the hope that it will help us all talk with those around us who are only “into” skim-reading.

“Post-literate” is, as Daniel says, a misnomer. I don’t know how to find statistics for this, but I’d guess there is more reading today, in sheer bulk, than before neoliberalism (i.e. before 1979-80), before the mass use of the internet (mid-1990s), or before the smartphone-social-media era (around 2008).

More people do office work and read (reports, manuals, forms, etc.) or even write for work. Both at work and outside, we deal with more emails (widespread since the late 1990s) or other written messages (WhatsApp took off in the mid-2010s) than ever we read letters, “business” or personal.

E-writing has partly replaced handwriting or typewriting or printing, but also, partly, conversation. In that respect we are more “literary”.

More people stay in formal education until early or even mid-20s. By contrast, as late as 1971 in England, 42% of teenagers left school at 15. And secondary modern schools then did not foster deep-reading skills or love of literature.

It is possible today, as it wasn’t in days gone by, to get a degree, even a postgraduate degree, in a “discursive”, “literary” subject, without ever reading an entire book. More on that later. But even at the most credential-factory-ised end of the spectrum, you have to read something.

As Daniel says, the decline is in “deep” reading — focused study of entire books. Skim-reading, quick scans of texts or of excerpts to get the “takeaways”, or reading to get a smattering, has blighted both “deep” reading and serious word-of-mouth debate.

Supplement

The general culture around us is not as overwhelmingly negative as Marriott makes it out to be. Accurate, retentive, skim-reading is not a vice, but an important skill, a necessary supplement to “deep reading”. With “deep” reading, the picture has some counter-currents. The March 2026 National Literacy Trust report is more nuanced than the one (presumably 2025) which Marriott quoted. Book clubs are booming. Universities employ vastly more leftish academics (Marxist, feminist, whatever) than they used to, and those academics write books, often aimed at general readership. More leftists have jobs in NGOs or think-tanks or such which give them freedom to write books. The radical publisher Verso, founded in 1970 and then putting out a handful of books, now publishes a hundred a year. As print technology has advanced, even small left groups can publish books on our own account, as we couldn’t back then.

Some of the new books may be publish-or-perish dross, but many are valuable.

The average household in the UK today is estimated to have more than 100 books. I grew up in the 1950s in an “educated” middle-class household (father a doctor, mother a dentist), but, beyond my dad’s (now-unread) medical textbooks, we had few books before I “got into” reading at age 8 or 9. (How? My parents had one friend who did read widely, a school teacher. And there was the public library. No bookshop in our town of 50,000).

Today my flatmate (not an active leftist) has herself written or contributed to enough books to fill one of our bookcases with her titles. Few books in her bottom-of-the-heap working-class childhood home.

Today we have many more books “to hand”, or available instantly in e-format. There is a culture of reading. The problem is, too often a “smattering”, pick-and-mix culture. Even some “deep reading” falls into that culture.

A few years ago I was startled to find that two keen young Workers’ Liberty members, after a couple of years of activity, and both with higher education on “humanities” courses, had not even read the Communist Manifesto.

Their equivalents at any time since the 1860s and before the 1980s (at latest), plus a lot of young workers then who faced more difficulties in the way of systematic reading, plus probably most people then who were even “around” the left, would surely have read that and even much more.

Why did we study the Communist Manifesto? Or Capital, or Revolution Betrayed? Because we heard people refer to them in intense debates and conversation, and we wanted to know about it. Partly I think the “post-literate” trend is, paradoxically, to do with the culture becoming more “literate”, not less, as electronic skim-reading replaces in-person debate as the basic form of interaction.

Answers

More fundamentally, because we wanted to know about the world and history, how they changed, who could change them. We knew that bodies of theory referring to Marx’s writings offered (uniquely, both then and now) wide-ranging sketch answers to those questions.

It was of a different order from the reading that young left-wing people will “spontaneously” do these days. The “basic reading” to which, say, a young Green leftist today might refer, is, by contrast, more or less journalistic or pop-academic coverage on how the world is bad. It is a series of guides to becoming “woke” or to guiding short-term NGO or electoral politics. And of course, a “smattering” will do. Systematic study isn’t necessary, if the aim is to fill in a picture of how the world is bad.

Some of the titles are very useful, in their limits. They are not an alternative frame.

Marxists denounce capitalism as bad too, of course. But Marx argued that the “bad side” was not just bad. “It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle”.

Exploitation is bad. But in Marx’s theory of wage-labour, exploitation was not just bad. It also amassed the working class into large concentrations, led to struggle over wages and control of work conditions, generated working-class consciousness and organisation, and led to a capitalist socialisation of productive forces on which a socialist socialisation could be built.

The theory was not just about the world being bad, but about who could change it and how. That is why Marx was so furious with people who flattened the theory of exploitation into an “iron law of wages” (wages always forced down to subsistence) or to plausible-but-false mottos like “Labour is the source of all wealth”. They were deleting the subversive side of the theory and reducing it to a moral condemnation. The Stalinists would do the same with the Marxist theories of imperialism developed by Kautsky, Hilferding, Lenin, and others.

A focus on reading Marx, Trotsky, etc. will just make us narrow dogmatists? True, “quotes” from Marx or Trotsky could be used to buttress impoverished dogmatism.

But really studying Marx, Trotsky, etc., and learning from their methods of investigation, cuts against dogmatism, not for it. Dogmatism is more likely to come from a “skim-reading” approach to Marx.

And there can be worse things than dogmatism, like more superficial and eclectic “smattering” cultures. We long deplored the habit on the activist left of using chopped-up quotes from Marx, or Trotsky, or whomever, as debate-stoppers (“I have a better quote than you”). That did at least have the virtue of driving people to investigate the quote, study the context, see what its original meaning was, consider whether it was still valid (or, even, valid at the time, now we can see with hindsight). Now we have an opposite problem.

Scarcely anyone on the left other than AWL ever bothers to try to correlate our current positions with Marxist “classics”, or with our particular strand of “tradition” (i.e. of continuous intellectual development, each step forward based on the past) deriving from the “classics”. The RCP (Socialist Appeal) used to pride itself on the supposed “unbroken thread” of Marxist writing by way of Ted Grant’s output. Now it trashes, without comment, basic Marxist ideas as in Trotsky’s The Third Period of the Comintern’s Errors as if there were no thread at all, as if there were no socialist thought before the scribbler for its paper, The Communist, sat down to write the latest off-the-wall article about revolution tomorrow.

In times of greater left activism, those who studied knew there were different latter-day interpretations and renderings of Marx. We knew new issues had arisen and continued to arise. We knew arguments that Marx had been wrong, or had become outdated. We investigated.

Recently I’ve read more on the history of the “Lambertists”, a strand of French Trotskyism which from the 1970s became notorious for hectoring, formulaic, indeed dogmatic, slogans and methods. Even they were different in the 1950s and ‘60s. One of their major figures, Claude Bernard, was completely unconvinced that the USSR was a “degenerated workers’ state”, and constantly raising questions. Another, Boris Fraenkel, for many years their major recruiter of new members, was a pioneer in translating Marcuse and Reich into French. Michel Lequenne records that so many Trotskyists were interested in surrealism that a sympathiser asked, in all seriousness: “Do you have to be a surrealist to be a Trotskyist?”

Dogmatism

Even the most impoverished “Orthodox Trotskyists” had an intellectual hinterland. It took years of political attrition to narrow that down into dogmatism, a smattering-ised version of Marxist culture.

Dead white men? Well, Gauss and Weierstrass are dead white men, and Noether, a dead white woman. But to have a frame of reference for learning about the many new branches of mathematics, you have to know about complex numbers and calculus and abstract algebra. That those ideas were developed by white Europeans (in fact, Germans) is now a fact. We cannot go back and change it. Smatterings from here and there today cannot substitute for a frame of reference.

We read Weber too; we read Keynes; we read the “post-Marxists” of the day, like the Frankfurt School, or the Dependency Theorists, or the Eurocommunists. But we also studied the Marxist frame. We set our trig points. Modify that frame? Even reject it? Maybe. But first learn it.

The social pressures to get a wide smattering, or to take our cue from social media, weigh here. But they are weighty also because of the weakness of our resistance.

Stronger

Of course, labour movements were stronger before 1979-80, and the false confidence they gained from what seemed to be dynamic if horribly misshapen anti-capitalism worldwide helped make young activists then more intense and more hungry to know. We wanted to know how to make a revolution, rather than just how the world was bad, or what might make a good campaign for an NGO. Understanding The Fall of European Stalinism is essential to getting ourselves out of the rut and seeing that we can do more than accumulate smatterings in order to make us more “woke”.

Now, for example, “abolish the police” can become a widespread slogan among left Democrats in the USA, NGO types in Britain, and even some who reckon themselves Marxists (rs21 in Britain, Tempest in USA), with no effort to study the idea in relation to the Marxist critiques of what Engels ruefully called “German philosophical phrases”. At one Labour Party conference in the Corbyn era, a smug seminar on “abolish the police” took place on the Corbynite fringe (“The World Transformed”) at the same time as Corbynites inside the conference pushed pro-police policies (“against Tory police cuts”) with little left pushback. “Radical thought” on the literary fringe and “radical thought” inside activist politics were disconnected.

In the whole Corbyn era, as we documented in our book Corbynism: what went wrong?, there was little real debate within the left, beyond exchanges of social-media jeers. When James Schneider, the very-recent Lib-Dem who quickly became a keystone in Momentum and later in Corbyn’s Leader’s Office, eventually wrote a book, Our Bloc, he had obviously read some Marx, but relied exclusively on Eurocommunist variants. The culture has become such that he felt no need to take account of Marxist critiques of those.

We have no reason to expect neoliberal or post-neoliberal capitalism to make a better general mass culture for us, except under pressure from inside universities and from the left. It is down to us to start the pushback, and to do that we first have to study.

Incidental

Universities are more and more “credential factories” — pay £9,000-odd a year for three years, and you get a certificate that you can produce assignments to length and on time and display a skim-acquaintance with literature referred to. If you get and retain some of the subject studied, that’s an incidental bonus.

This is not quite as it is often described, education becoming more job-oriented. The UK now has 590,000 university students in “business and management”; but also one million students in social science and humanities subjects, most with little “vocational” focus.

Rather, it is a matter of education becoming more a business of getting skim-reading and report-writing skills, with a smattering of raw material for that (exactly what, matters little). Universities may even positively discourage deep reading (by “filling students up” with skim reading), in the same way that secondary schools in England make students worse at mental arithmetic than when they start, because calculator use “fills them up” instead.

Some years ago, I was struck when attending a lecture at LSE by the famous critical Marxist Moishe Postone that no-one in the audience except me wanted to challenge or debate Postone. Evidently everyone just wanted to come away with a smattering, a possible reference for their next assignment.

In 2014 economics students in Manchester made collective criticism of their courses. But the enterprise faded quickly; and as far as I could see, none of the activist left (not even AWL) was interested. There has been little like that since. Universities can be “turned round” to some degree, even under capitalism, by critical student activity, but it needs initiative from the left.

There are still intense, critical-minded students. But, as far as I can see, “Marxists” on campus tend to divide these days into the “Marxist Ph D thesis” types, disconnected from active politics, devoted to producing a new book to add to the general “capitalism-is-bad” welter, and the activists, disconnected from the deep-reading culture. That is something we, the activist left, have allowed to happen. It is not just something imposed on us by outside society. We can change the culture among ourselves, and thus make ourselves a lever for changing the culture around us rather than a victim of it.

Study, propagandise, organise was the slogan of the pioneer German working-class Marxists. It means not only being more “literate”, in the sense of developing a common theoretical frame based on central texts from the past, but also more “word of mouth”, in the sense of sustained in-person debates and conversations instead of quickfire social-media exchanges.