if I believe the current capitalist system is failing us, and that some form socialism is the way to emancipate us, and yet all I do is post all day instead of doing praxis, does it mean anything at all?
if I believe the current capitalist system is failing us, and that some form socialism is the way to emancipate us, and yet all I do is post all day instead of doing praxis, does it mean anything at all?
Two people set out to build a small airplane by themselves.
One immediately went to the backyard and start building shit, despite having no fundamental understanding of physics other than knowing that the goal is to be able to fly.
The other instead went to get an engineering degree, and along the way discuss their ideas with others in the field, improving the good designs, eliminating the bad ones, and using the knowledge they learned to apply to this project.
Who do you think will succeed first?
Sometimes you don’t need to win the game by 100 points, you just need to win. Most of us already have enough knowledge to get started.
I will remind you that many communes and socialist uprisings had been attempted, even before Marx’s times, and I urge you to seek out why so many had failed, and only those who followed the path of scientific socialism has ever achieved some form of lasting success.
The emphasis here is to approach this in a scientific manner, to understand the dynamics and inner workings of capitalism, how it had changed since the past century, and only then, can we really have a realistic chance of defeating capitalism and surviving the ensuing counter-revolutions.
I’m not telling you not to read theory. I think it’s important. But you can’t expect everyone to be a scholar of theory. In any examples of successful and enduring revolutions you can cite, you will absolutely find that the masses of people involved did not hold advanced degrees (or equivalent knowledge) of socialist theory. Material conditions precipitate the revolution. You are quite right about defeating the counterrevolution-- that requires strong leadership grounded in solid theory, to maintain the material conditions necessary to satisfy the people, of whom relatively few will ever be scholars.
The engineer still needs to actually build the plane.
Back to the OP, an engineer that never builds planes is ideology without action.