death of the theory bro

on resisting anti-intellectualism and raising mass consciousness

Group study of Mao’s Little Red Book at a Black Panther rally in Oakland, California (1968). Source: Stanford Libraries, Bob Fitch Photography Archive

There’s a particular kind of person who, if you’ve been active in leftist circles for long enough, you’ve almost certainly encountered at least once—usually young, white, and male, and always incredibly and insufferably smug about the fact that they ‘read theory.’ This is the kind of person who seems more committed to proving their own intelligence than they are to actually building power for the international working class, who is constantly trying to bash you over the head with references to obscure theoretical works and chiding you for your insufficient knowledge of and fidelity to the gospel of Marx/Engels/Mao/Lenin/insert-preferred-leftist-thinker-here. For people like this, leftist politics seem to be more of a virtue-signaling aesthetic than a genuine ideological commitment—a way to prove their own intellectual bona fides, rather than to win liberation for working and oppressed people. There’s a name for this archetype; perhaps you’ve heard of it. I’m referring, of course, to the ‘theory bro.’

Everybody, understandably, hates a theory bro. But in many cases, particularly in the most online circles of the online left, the (thoroughly justified) backlash to this most obnoxious of leftist archetypes has resulted in the inadvertent embrace of an anti-intellectual ethos which not only serves to alienate us from our own revolutionary history, but which also risks adding fuel to the fire of a growing reactionary current in our society. To successfully resist this current, it’s imperative that we on the left renew our commitment to the development of a robust and disciplined revolutionary consciousness on a mass scale—a project which, whether we like it or not, can only be achieved through disciplined political education and serious engagement with the most important fundamentals of revolutionary theory.

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But what do we mean when we talk about ‘theory?’ I think it’s useful to draw a distinction between revolutionary theory—the body of theoretical literature that has emerged out of real-world revolutionary movements and struggles for liberation—and the more abstract (and often obscurantist) forms of left-wing and Marxian-influenced academic theory that began to proliferate in the latter half of the 20th cenury, exemplified by the works of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others of the post-structuralist ilk. While there are certainly valuable insights to be gained from the latter, for the purposes of this essay, I’ll be focusing primarily on the former.

There are, I think, two key defining characteristics of revolutionary theory. The first is that anybody can produce it; the only qualifications needed are (1) to have been an active participant in struggle, and (2) to have developed one’s own revolutionary consciousness through committed study and political education. The second characteristic is that such theory concerns itself first and foremost with analyzing the concrete and material conditions of society, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing real-world revolutions—not just with an eye to understanding society, but with an eye to transforming it.

It’s this second characteristic that is lost in the breathless, quasi-religious reverence with which a maddeningly vocal minority on the left—particularly the online left—speak about works of theory and the thinkers who write them. Rather than seeing such works for what they are—products of particular contexts and conditions, intended to aid in the development of real-world revolutionary struggles—the archetypal ‘theory bro’ treats them as a sort of secular gospel, capable of somehow being extracted from their historical context and applied uncritically to any and all situations. Beyond being deeply obnoxious, however, this tendency also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what theory is, and what it is meant to do.

Case in point: last summer, as part of my own (ongoing) journey of political self-education, I took it upon myself to read Vladimir Lenin’s classic 1901 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?—a text I’d been meaning to read for quite some time, but had never actually gotten around to. As I began reading, I found myself struck by the text’s simultaneous universality and specificity. What I mean by this is that even as each chapter practically overflowed with insights that were incredibly applicable to the present moment, the text as a whole was remarkably particular to the circumstances of its creation, replete with references to individuals and organizations and events that meant little to someone like me, reading the book more than a century after it was first published. For every sentence that I underlined with a note about its astonishing relevancy to contemporary politics, there was another that sent me scrambling to Wikipedia in a desperate attempt to figure out what the hell Lenin was actually talking about.

This experience is, I think, revealing of a crucial but often-overlooked nuance that is, unfortunately, frequently lost in the study and discussion of revolutionary theory—the extent to which works such as this one, which are all too often held up as timeless classics and invoked in dogmatic, doctrinaire terms, are in fact historically contingent and indelibly shaped by the context out of which they emerged. The fact is that Lenin did not write What Is to Be Done? as a work of abstract philosophy, nor as a how-to manual to be uncritically copied by future revolutionaries. He wrote it as a work of concrete political analysis, intended to summarize and respond to the specific conditions of turn-of-the-century Russian social-democracy. Even a work like The State and Revolution, which is much broader in its scope and less particular in its immediate subject matter than What Is to Be Done?, is still grounded in the author’s analysis of the prevailing political context around him. As such, any reading of these texts—or, for that matter, any other work of revolutionary theory, by Lenin or anyone else—which treats them as decontextualized and dehistoricized sources of eternal wisdom is doomed to failure from the outset.

In fact, when it comes to revolutionary theory, the argument could well be made that ‘theory,’ as such, doesn’t actually exist—at least, not in the sense that the term tends to evoke, of a work that was composed with the intention of postulating some timeless, universal truth. Rather, what we are really referring to when we talk about ‘theory’ are works of particularly prescient and insightful analysis, tailored to the particular conditions in which they were written, to which the status of ‘theory’ is applied in hindsight as their most salient contributions prove to have staying power beyond their immediate historical and political context. As Mao Zedong famously put it in his 1937 essay “On Practice:”

If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself . . . If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.

This is an important distinction to draw, because accepting it compels us to read works of so-called ‘theory’ with a certain humility, approaching them as primary sources first and foremost—products of a particular time and place, constrained by the context in which they were written, and capable simply of offering guidance for how we in the present day might view the world. Engaging with such works in the spirit of nuanced historical analysis, taking the lessons that we can apply to our current conditions and leaving the rest behind, allows us to escape the dogmatic trap of treating a given work as gospel, simply because it was penned by one of our side’s preferred Great Men of History. Training ourselves to engage with theory in this way is certainly a daunting task—but it is also a necessary one.

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It’s not entirely unsurprising that, perhaps in reaction to the rigid dogmatism and sheer insufferability of the ‘theory bro’ archetype, many on the American left seem to have turned away from engaging with revolutionary theory altogether. On social media and in organizing spaces alike, I’ve observed a particular ideological current crop up time and time again, which seems to be predicated on the assumption that the very act of invoking theory—let alone actually studying it—is inherently ‘elitist’ and ‘inaccessible’ to the masses of ordinary working people. Marginalized and oppressed people, this current holds, already have all the grounding they need for radical politics by virtue of their own ‘lived experience’—a term that has become increasingly fashionable in social-justice circles over the last decade or so. To suggest that the perspective offered by this experience might be enhanced by reading or otherwise engaging with revolutionary theory is, according to this line of thinking in its most essential form, not just an act of condescension, but an affront to the very sanctity of ‘lived experience’ itself.

The result of all this is both clear and alarming. Rather than embracing a coherent Marxist analysis of the world, grounded in a dialectical and historical materialist understanding of politics and class struggle, many self-proclaimed leftists have instead adopted a politics rooted exclusively in moral outrage and righteous indignation at the myriad injustices of capitalist society. But while moral outrage and righteous indignation are certainly a necessary part of any left-wing politics worth its salt, they are not in and of themselves sufficient to win the world we want to build. In the absence of a genuine revolutionary consciousness to ground them, moral values alone can only ever be the basis of an idealist politics whose amorphous qualities and romantic tendencies leave us all the more susceptible to co-option—and, even more dangerously, to inaction.

It’s important to underscore that such a revolutionary consciousness isn’t something that one is born with, nor is it something that can be developed through ‘lived experience’ alone. And it certainly isn’t something that descends miraculously from the heavens to be imparted on the most principled and politically-pure among us. On the contrary, truly revolutionary consciousness can be developed only through disciplined political education and study—an ongoing, perpetually-unfinished process that strives to integrate both theory and practice in equal and co-constitutive measure. The real power of such political education—including the study of revolutionary theory and history—is not simply that it makes it us smarter or better-informed. Rather, it’s that political education allows us to refine our deeply-held values and principles into a nuanced and coherent political analysis of the world around us—the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” that Vladimir Lenin famously called the “living soul” of Marxism.

There is, after all, a reason why so many revolutionary movements and liberation struggles throughout history have placed such a strong emphasis on political education as an integral component of revolutionary struggle. From China to Cuba to Vietnam and beyond, communist parties and guerrilla movements around the world have long required their cadres to engage in serious and disciplined study of history and revolutionary theory, rooted in the understanding that the revolutionary consciousness engendered by this political education is a necessary prerequisite for the success of any liberation struggle. This reasoning was summed up neatly by the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in a speech that he delivered at the 1957 opening of the First Theoretical Course of the Nguyen Ai Quoc School, where he declared:

Unity of theory and practice is a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism. Practice without the guidance of theory is blind practice. Theory without integration with practice is mere theory . . . You are all high-ranking cadres of the Party. Your theoretical study does not aim at turning you into mere theoreticians but at enabling you to work well. It means that you must study the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, its stand, viewpoint, and method, and put them into practice in order satisfactorily to solve practical problems in our revolutionary work.

It goes without saying that the American left could stand to learn a thing or two from these insights. As it turns out, however, we don’t have to look as far afield as Vietnam for examples to learn from. Here in the United States, perhaps one of the best-known examples of a revolutionary organization integrating political education into its practice and struggle is the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. As educators Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian point out in an article for the Zinn Education Project, the Panthers themselves formed out of a study group at Merritt College in Oakland, and new recruits to the Party were required to read no fewer than 10 books on topics relating to socialism and Black liberation. The Rules of the Black Panther Party, which all Party members were expected to abide by and to know by heart, declared not only that “Everyone in a leadership position must read no less than two hours per day to keep abreast of the changing political situation,” but also that “Political Education Classes are mandatory for general membership.”

In her 1974 autobiography, the legendary Black feminist and revolutionary Angela Davis offers an illuminating account of her experience with these political education sessions during her (relatively brief) involvement with the Black Panther Party. “If I still retained any of the elitism which almost inevitably insinuates itself into the minds of college students,” she declares, “I lost it all in the course of the Panther political education sessions.” Describing the experience of reading Lenin’s State and Revolution in a class alongside “sisters and brothers . . . whose public school education had not even allowed them to learn how to read,” Davis writes:

When they explained, for the benefit of the other members of the class, what they had gotten out of their reading, it was clear that they knew it all — they had understood Lenin on a far more elemental level than any professor of social science.

It’s worth pointing out that while Davis describes here how the most marginalized and least educated of her comrades were able to grasp Lenin’s core arguments “on a far more elemental level than any professor,” she does not go so far as to claim that it was therefore a waste of time for them to read State and Revolution. In this sense, Davis’ account offers a powerful and radical alternative to the oft-invoked argument that ‘lived experience’ of oppression and systemic injustice is in and of itself a sufficient substitute for engagement with revolutionary theory. On the contrary, what the anecdote that Davis offers in this passage actually tells us is that ‘lived experience’ doesn’t supplant political education—it enhances it. Just as political education serves to build upon the basic foundations of abstract moral values, sharpening and refining them into a more nuanced and conceptually rigorous revolutionary analysis, it does the same for the powerful but indeterminate sense of grievance and injustice that ‘lived experience’ tends to engender. In this sense, the power of political education lies in its ability to form a sort of ‘missing link’ between feeling and consciousness, between outrage and empowerment—and ultimately, between cynical passivity and revolutionary action.

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Beyond the power it holds at the level of individual ideological development, political education can also offer the left a crucial way out of the bind created by broader societal developments as well. In recent years, many have observed a rapidly rising current of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and have rightly identified the dire threat that this current poses to the project of building a genuinely democratic society. After all, as any student of history knows, anti-intellectualism has historically been central to fascism and other far-right projects—from Nazi book-burnings to McCarthyite witch-hunts against thinkers, writers, and academics who were suspected of being ‘Communists.’

As such, it’s hardly surprising that the primary center of gravity of our contemporary anti-intellectual moment is situated squarely on the American right, thoroughly enmeshed in the culture wars and moral panics that motivate it. It’s impossible, after all, to ignore the fact that far-right crusades against ‘wokeness,’ ‘Critical Race Theory,’ ‘DEI,’ and ‘gender ideology’ almost always take the form of assaults on the very institutions that are meant to function as our society’s most crucial sites of education and knowledge production—book bans in libraries, policing and censorship of schoolteachers’ lesson plans, suppression of student dissent, public crucifixions of academics and university administrators. And all of this, of course, is taking place amid a shifting social landscape in which education itself is steadily becoming ever more neoliberalized—with the predictable result that students are treated as depersonalized vessels of human capital, the classroom is transformed into an increasingly efficient site for the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and intellectual life is rendered more and more precarious with each passing day.

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But while the scope and magnitude of the problem have certainly increased dramatically in recent years, the problem itself runs far deeper. As the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed in his Pulitzer-winning 1963 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life, skepticism of and hostility to ‘intellectuals’ has been a feature of American politics since time immemorial. “Those who have suddenly become aware of it,” he writes in the book’s introduction,

often assume that anti-intellectualism is a new force . . . But to students of Americana the anti-intellectual note so commonly struck during the 1950’s sounded not new at all, but rather familiar. Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background.

At the heart of American anti-intellectualism (and of anti-intellectualism more broadly) is the perception that the intellectual class is composed largely of pompous, out-of-touch elites. This perception is not entirely unfair. Many of the journalists and academics and media pundits who dominate this country’s contemporary intellectual life seem to harbor a perception of themselves as uniquely enlightened in relation to the masses of ‘ordinary’ people, who are all too easily pathologized and dismissed as uneducated and narrow-minded. As Adam Waters and E.J. Dionne Jr. point out in a 2019 essay for Dissent, even Hofstadter himself replicates a great deal of this same bourgeois condescension in his argument—and it is precisely this condescension that has, for so long, thrown fuel on the fire of our culture’s anti-intellectual backlash. “Impatience with intellectuals,” Waters and Dionne argue,

needs to be distinguished from outright opposition to the intellectual project . . . Attacks on free expression are fundamentally different from a healthy skepticism of intellectuals (on all sides of politics) who distance themselves from the struggles of their societies and from the insights of popular culture and popular religion. Intellectuals as a class are no more immune from criticism in a free society than any other class.

To put it in Marxist terms, bourgeois intellectualism and reactionary anti-intellectualism exist in a dialectical relationship with one another—the more desperately the intellectual class clings onto the remaining vestiges of its elite status in a world that is growing increasingly hostile to it, the greater and more vigorous the backlash against it will be. But given the intimate relationship between growing anti-intellectual sentiment and the steady creep of fascism, the left must resist at all costs the urge to respond to this dismal state of affairs by retreating into a narrow anti-intellectualism of our own. Instead, we must recognize the opportunity that this moment of crisis presents us and seize upon it to offer our own revolutionary analysis that can fill the intellectual void left by both bourgeois intellectualism and reactionary anti-intellectualism.

But what, exactly, does this mean? Simply put, it means bringing Marxism out of the classroom and into the streets. It means focusing our intellectual energies on mass political education and consciousness-raising, rather than on abstract, detached philosophizing. The revolution certainly has room enough for writers and thinkers and academics, even with all our petty conceits and idiosyncrasies. We would do well, however, to follow an example that leans less in the direction of Adorno¹ and more in the direction of Walter Rodney—the Guyanese revolutionary and ‘guerrilla intellectual’ whose critical pedagogical method of ‘grounding’ saw him bring his teaching to the masses directly in their homes and communities, approaching them not as the bearer of externally-imposed enlightenment but rather as an equal intellectual partner, ready to think and study and struggle together. As Rodney writes of the masses in the titular essay of his 1969 book, The Groundings With My Brothers: “You do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they add something to what you are saying.”

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What, then, does political education actually entail? It’s an infamous cliché that leftists love a book club; we all know the stereotype of the self-proclaimed ‘Marxist’ organization whose idea of ‘organizing’ is just an endless succession of reading groups and study circles. And while close reading and careful study are certainly important parts of any project of revolutionary political education, it’s not enough to tell people to “just read theory.” Many people, especially working people, simply will not be willing or able to wrestle their way through 50 or 100 or 200 pages of dense, jargon-heavy writing. Rather, if we are serious about raising mass consciousness through political education, it’s incumbent on those of us who do have the time and energy for in-depth, firsthand engagement with theory to do so, drawing out the most salient concepts and arguments and then making those lessons widely available to the masses—always taking care to ground these theoretical insights in concrete analysis by applying them to the real-world problems facing the working class today.

This is hardly a new insight. In What Is to Be Done?, for example, Lenin argues that the “ideal” to which socialist revolutionaries must aspire should not be that of the “trade union secretary,” but rather:

the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression . . . who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat . . . We must ‘go among all classes of the population’ as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators, and as organisers.

Serving as the “tribune of the people” in this manner means meeting the people where they are at, using any and all means at our disposal to raise mass consciousness and disseminate the fundamentals of revolutionary theory as widely as possible. It means being innovative in our tactics and methods for such dissemination, embracing the accessibility and educational potential of forms of media beyond just longform academic writing—zines, podcasts, teach-ins, film screenings, even TikToks and Instagram infographics. And it means disabusing ourselves of the bourgeois, elitist notion that certain forms of disseminating revolutionary knowledge are somehow beneath us solely because they lack the intellectual imprimatur of elite institutions.

Above all else, it also means taking seriously the idea that one can be a Marxist without ever having read Marx, and a Leninist without ever having read Lenin. One key marker of the theory bro’s influence on the left’s intellectual culture is the fetishization of texts themselves, rather than the ideas contained within them—but it is precisely this fetishization that lends itself to precisely the sort of dogmatism that we want to combat. Ultimately, what really matters is not so much whether one has read the original works of the revolutionary canon, as whether one understands the theses, concepts, and ideas that make up the intellectual core of those works.

As schoolchildren, we were all taught Newton’s laws of motion and Darwin’s theory of evolution. I’d wager a guess, however, that none of us ever had to read the Principia or On the Origin of Species as they were originally written—it was sufficient for our teachers, having a satisfactory grasp of Newton’s and Darwin’s core arguments themselves, to distill, synthesize, and present those key concepts in a way that would be more easily understandable for us as students. The same holds true for revolutionary political education—when it comes to instilling in the masses the basic principles of a Marxist political and economic analysis, the form in which those basic principles are delivered is ultimately less important than whether they are delivered in an accessible and effective manner.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than the countless Marxist revolutionaries who took part in anticolonial movements and national liberation struggles across the Third World throughout the 20th century. As researchers at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research point out in their 2021 dossier Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation:

Many of those who became Marxists in the colonial world had never read Marx. They had read about Marx in various cheap pamphlets and had encountered Lenin in this form as well . . . They came to Marxism from the factory floor and the agriculturalist’s field, from the prisons of the colonial rulers and the nationalist organisations to which they flocked. They drew from what they learned and developed their theories both about imperialism and capitalism from that reading and from their experience. They read what they could find and drew from it what would help them to develop a theory and praxis adequate to their social reality.

These are, of course, the same revolutionaries who successfully led the struggles that liberated millions of people around the world from the shackles of colonial domination, allowing newly independent countries across the Third World to embark on ambitious projects of postcolonial nation-building and socialist construction. And while we should be careful not to romanticize such projects, many of which failed for various reasons to live up to their lofty goals, it’s still worth comparing the track records of these Third-World Marxists against the track records of self-righteous theory bros in the imperial core. Such a comparison should, I think, tell us everything we need to know.

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In our current moment of deepening crisis and heightening contradictions, the project of raising mass political consciousness is, simply put, among the most important tasks facing the American left today. But ‘consciousness-raising’ is more than mere rhetoric, and it requires more than just instilling a sense of righteous outrage and opposition to injustice in the hearts of the masses—these are important prerequisites for political consciousness, but they are not substitutes for consciousness in and of itself. Rather, truly revolutionary consciousness requires principles to be sharpened and substantiated by a coherent political analysis which can only be achieved through a project of mass political education—a project which can and must take many forms, but whose crucial importance can neither be overstated nor negotiated.

Building such a project means rejecting both the drive towards holier-than-thou dogmatism and the tendency to respond to such dogmatism by disavowing revolutionary study altogether. It means responding to the rising tide of reactionary anti-intellectualism not with a repackaged anti-intellectualism of our own, but instead with new and radical forms of revolutionary political education that meet the masses where they’re at and approach them as active participants in the development of their own consciousness. And above all else, it means integrating revolutionary theory seamlessly with revolutionary practice, recognizing that one cannot exist without the other. Doing away with the theory bro, in other words, does not mean doing away with theory itself. On the contrary, the death of the theory bro is precisely the requisite condition which must be met in order for theory—and the revolutionary subject that theory is intended to empower—to truly come alive.

1. Despite being a key figure in the Marxist Frankfurt School and a major intellectual influence on the New Left of the 1960s, the philosopher and critical theorist Theodor Adorno was sharply criticized for his detachment from and even hostility to the real-world student movements and political struggles of his day.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: