PROLE ACADEMY exists because I got tired of hearing that voice in my head telling myself that I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t need it.
It’s the same voice that found me in college, and told me to smoke weed and party when I could have been reading; to play video games until damn near sunrise when I could have been writing; to fight with people on social media, spouting ideas I half-remember by skimming an article, rather than building up a store of knowledge that I’ve truly reckoned with absorbed.
I was a part-time activist and writer for a short spell. I saw people ruined by that life – surveilled, beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested for believing in something radical. And I got spooked.
So I got a safe job, a reliable job, in a quiet corner of the country where I couldn’t rattle anybody and no one hurt me. I listened to the voice that insists it’s better (to paraphrase Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters) to have a lead role in a cage than a walk-on part in the war.
I’m willing to bet you’ve heard it, too.
And here’s the thing: that voice is wrong.
If you’re a PROLE, you’re a worker – you do labor to make a living, whether it’s with your hands, your skill, or your mind at the center of it. If you’re a PROLE in the United States, where I live, there’s a million reasons not to read up on the difficult and dangerous ideas that affect our lives. However much education you got or didn’t get, you’re grown now, and that time now feels like it’s passed.
Time – that’s it, isn’t it? You feel like there’s no time to do it, even if you want to. You’re too busy trying to fulfill your basic needs, pay rent and make dinner and find the money to buy shoes for your son who, you swear, just got a new pair like last week and has already outgrown them. And every year, all those things get just a little harder.
All I have to offer is my spare time, but a PROLE can produce some great things with spare parts.
So here I’m going to read the difficult, dangerous, radical books. I’m going to brief you on them – digest and discuss their major ideas, and put them in conversation with other big thinkers and brave muckrakers whose books are out there gathering dust on a shelf near you. I’ll situate these books in the context of our complicated and volatile world, and do it all in an approachable way that values your time and doesn’t shut you out of the ivory tower – because, much like you, I can’t afford it either.
For now, Prole Academy is a blog about dangerous and difficult books. In time, with hope and effort, it will be more than that, and more than just me.
Thanks for showing up, proles.
I like the sound of that!