I’ve been thinking, this week, about the politics of communication and about an older radical that I used to do activist stuff with.
The starting point for this reflection is an article that I read. The topic of the article doesn’t matter, but it was smart and I mostly agreed with it. But I was really conscious as I was reading it that even though it was weighing in on something that is super important and timely, it was written in specialized left language that most people who are talking about that topic right now wouldn’t connect with.
I should be clear right off the bat that even though I felt very conscious of this fact, I don’t necessarily think it was a problem. I think making our writing and our media clear and accessible is often a good thing, but I’m not one of these people who treats it as a universal good. Sometimes it’s important, but not always.
Certainly, I think writing and media that are obscure or complex for no reason, or thoughtlessly, or to deliberately exclude, or out of snobbery, or for career advantage in the context of oppressive institutions are genuine problems. And, yes, inaccessible writing that plays a role in reproducing oppression and marginalization is definitely something we should oppose.
But not all writing does the same thing, and we shouldn’t expect it to. Some writing is meant to reach lots of people, and some is meant to have a very narrow audience. Some has a lay focus, some is specialized and technical. Some is an effort to connect with people very different from the author, some is about engaging in debate or building consensus with people who already share a lot of understandings. All of that plays a role in whether you or I or some person on the street can pick it up and make sense of it…and sometimes, it’s perfectly fine if one or some or all of us can’t.
Perhaps most important is the reality that writing that politically engages in substantive, radical ways with the world can’t always avoid being complex and challenging. The world is complex, and through our media and education systems, we’re systematically deprived of the conceptual tools we need to name how the world works, what’s wrong with it, and how we want to change it. So efforts to build those tools, to name those things, to capture those ideas are sometimes going to come across as difficult and inaccessible and weird. And while I believe that the impulse towards simplicity and clarity above all else is well-intentioned, it also sometimes feels like it erases the long history of people with little formal education who have successfully taken up challenging theoretical ideas in sophisticated ways as part of struggles for justice and liberation.
So that’s the general context of my reaction to this article. But it also made me think about the person I mentioned above. He is someone I worked with in anti-war groups in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time he was an industrial worker, and had been since the 1970s. He had also been on the radical left for even longer than that. As such, he is one of those people who is perfectly comfortable with those dense, difficult, theoretical debates that happen within the marxist left — definitely more so than me. So his politics, on one level, are in this sort of dense theoretical register, full of terminology and ideas that lots of people might find difficult and off-putting. But what I really admired about him — even though we had quite different politics in lots of ways — was that when you heard him give a speech about whatever issue, it was super clear that the relentless political practice he had of arguing for his radical politics on the shop floor with a bunch of people who didn’t already speak the language of that dense theoretical register had forced him to get good at staying anchored in his chosen theory but communicating clearly beyond it.
So that’s what I was thinking of as I read this article. I don’t think it was a problem that it was written in theoretical left language for other people who already speak that language. We need articles like that. Not everything needs to be simple and clear, and not everything can be simple and clear. But given that it was about a topic that lots of people beyond the left are currently talking about, it made me conscious that it’s that bridging discipline that is too often missing in both left media and left political practice — the relentless, ongoing work of getting good at staying grounded in the complex, challenging theory of our politics, while communicating effectively with people who don’t share that shorthand.