Do you want to feel superior or do you want to increase access to your ideas? Most people won’t read a dense tome or even a particularly difficult book of something they’re mildly interested in. It goes even more for something other people tell them to read in ways very reminiscent of people saying to read the bible.
Meet people where they are, and as you convince them that there’s some merit to your ideas you can challenge them with challenging ideas. Some of those people will move on to difficult books, others however won’t because they prefer other types of challenges. In order to get what we want we need a lot more people on our side and that means addressing how bad we are at spreading our ideas to the general masses.
If communism means reading books that are long, difficult, and boring to ordinary people, most people don’t want it. They don’t read their bibles when they’re Christian and they won’t read their Marx if they’re communists.
They want knowledge presented efficiently, yes, and presenting knowledge efficiently means speaking to people in language that doesn’t get in the way of the ideas to those who are new to them. Academic language is a skill. That skill shouldn’t be presented as a barrier to learning about how the working class deserves more. Hell you can recommend people read theory that does speak to them in more common language. The Black Panthers were really good at speaking to people where they were. David Graeber also was excellent at it.
But why do people read any given text? Because they’ve been given a reason to want to. A podcaster got me started on my recent Graeber binge, and I excited by and enjoying the books convinced some friends to add one to their lists, as well as me talking about what I liked about and found fascinating in these books here on lemmy. Now I’m in the middle of some fiction unrelated to all of it because those friends recommended it to me.
“Go read theory” is brushing people off and cannot be expected to produce the result of them actually reading anything. “Hey, I’m not really doing my position justice in this discussion, if you’d like a much better argument read X by Y, it’s where I got a lot of these ideas, I found it really illuminating” is a much more effective means of getting someone to read.
There are plenty of challenging books to read. I don’t know many people who read books because they know they’ll be challenging, especially as throughout this discussion challenging has both meant “ideas that challenge one’s views and reshape them” and “ideas presented in a way that is challenging”.
The former is generally positive. Many people can enjoy such things whether it’s in a book (ideal as it can go into a level of depth other media struggle with, but also is the least easy to get people on board with because of the time investment), a discussion with someone they’re comfortable listening to, a zine, a podcast, or whatever else. Hell LeGuinn was great at using fiction for it.
The latter meaning of challenging however has upsides and downsides. It may add precision and complexity at the cost of legibility. When legibility is lost many walk away. It takes more effort to get to the dang ideas in the first place. This is especially the case with academic language, which many aren’t familiar and comfortable with.
Presenting old ideas in a newer and easier to access way is good. It’s a role that on the left spent far too long as the domain of zines and not much else.
When people feel they’re supposed to read a book because it’s important they put it off indefinitely. Reading it can feel like homework. If you want people to understand theory you need to help get everything but the ideas out of the way of the ideas and get them interested in knowing more. When they want more then you can spring a book with a painfully 19th century academic title on them, then they may actually read it.