the most basic place¶

I think this is the most basic place to start. Oppressed people are not stupid, cowardly, or inept. They are, by default, disorganized and deprived of education -- deliberately so, as a tool of the oppressor. When they make steps to rectify that, their efforts are repressed. https://t.co/PKaJ2qes2r So they work harder. They organize themselves more vigorously, they educate themselves more pointedly, they divest themselves even more from the ideology of the oppressors.

And time after time, what do they study? What ideology do they adopt as they leave liberalism behind? They study Marx. They study Engels. They study Lenin. They study Mao, and on down the line.

They study revolutions old and recent, successful and failed. They study their own history and their contemporary conditions and they learn from it. They learn from everything they can. Every successful movement has followed a similar path. Revolutionaries move from the particular experiences of their own oppression, toward the general patterns of oppressive systems writ large. This is where studying existing theoretical work comes in. You don't have to reinvent theories around the mechanics of capital, the state, imperialism, etc. out of nothing. These theories already have hundreds of years of work put into them, advanced along the way by firsthand experience. Your job is to add to that collective knowledge. Study, practice, adapt. Learn how to learn from those who learned before you. Teach yourself how to teach others, and continue the cycle. That is what separates impactful movements from fangless ideals.