PROLE ACADEMY is a review site, blog, and platform with a dual mission: to read and talk about books that matter, and to raise consciousness of the ideas we’re not supposed to think about too deeply. To that end, we will produce accessible writing that fits your life, and respects your schedule. In return, I’ll ask for your input and participation. By supporting each other, we can seek the knowledge that lets us liberate ourselves and our communities.
Who is Behind This?
My name is Benjamin Walker. I really miss being a student, even though when I had that opportunity to spend much of my time reading everything I could get my hands on, I didn’t do it. There’s some personal failings there, and some personal responsibility involved. I chose to focus on other things, to get distracted. But people don’t exactly choose to suffer mental health struggles, get heartbroken, or rack up surprise bills or family crises. I had some of that, and I know so many other people never got the opportunities I did to avoid the worst of it.
After I graduated, I got a stable day job in an office, and built a family I genuinely want to spend time with. I put a lot of energy out into the world just to work, manage my responsibilities and maintain as much of a social life as I get in mid-pandemic America. At the end of it, there’s not much left for a good book or any big ideas.
Streaming TV kills the time instead, along with video games and social media. Over and over. I got really, really tired of this happening to myself. I started to realize that a lot of people also feel this, cope with it in similar ways, and it closes us off from things that matter, and from each other.
All the while, things fall apart around us in America. Factions form at the dinner table. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and people get rougher. We distrust institutions, experts, politicians, and eventually the process itself by which we get all of these things. So we tune it all out, writing the truth off as lost and the opposition as the enemy, at precisely the most fertile time in world history for us all to connect, collaborate, and liberate one another. How’s that for a glitch in the system?!
Then it occurred to me that this isn’t happening because of a glitch. Rather, the system is working as designed.
What Are Proles, and Why Do They Need an Academy?
Maybe you’ve heard the word prole somewhere else – from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, or from a history class. Maybe from some malcontent you know that spends their summer nights marching in the streets, chanting slogans that leave you with a lot of questions. Such as:
What the hell is, or isn’t socialism? What does it have to do with the boss at my job, my taxes and health insurance, or my packages getting stuck at the post office? And is that all liberalism, or not? And if it is, who cares?
What is Black Lives Matter Really About? Why is Colin Kaepernick kneeling? What does “Defund the Police” or “Abolish Prisons” mean, and if you abolish or defund those, what the hell are you replacing them with?
Is America a really ‘free country’, leading the ‘free world’? What exactly makes a free country anyway? What is the real story? Hell, can there even be one real story?
Proles are the people who don’t get to spend a lot of time answering these questions for themselves unless they really want it, and they know where to look. Proles may be just leaving one thing and are already late for the next. Proles may love to learn, even though some of us liked school and some didn’t. We may feel like we didn’t get the education we needed, either because the curriculum didn’t do us justice or because we were human, and got distracted by something we now kinda wish hadn’t. Proles don’t often have a club to get to after work; they have a job to get to after work, or a family to care for. Or both. Or more.
We have dreams and debt. We have questions and concerns. We believe we can enrich our lives, and that doing so requires us to help one another.
On this site, I try to answer the same questions in-depth for myself, and convey what I find out quickly and simply, for you. This means:
NO LONG-WINDED RANTS.
I will try my best to make everything to-the-point on this site. If a book is a big one, then a book is a big one, but I believe you can tackle something like that in manageable bites. We’re talking about articles you can read at a lunch break, and no book reviews that rival the size of the book itself. I’ve read too many of them, and there’s no need to bring more into this world.
NO BARRIERS TO ENTRY.
You won’t need a postgraduate or a bachelor’s degree in political science or something in order to get something out of Prole Academy. My goal is to meet you where you are. I want to help in a small way to end the stranglehold that academics who charge eight grand a semester think they have on big ideas.
LIMITED REFERENCES TO DEAD EUROPEANS WHOSE BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ.
This one comes with a caveat, because we’re going to read some dead Russians, dead Germans, dead English and Ghanian and Vietnamese folks, and more. But I’ll always try to make the greater context accessible – linking to other sources, tying in synopses of other books if I’m discussing them, and even including a living glossary so you can look up some of the thornier concepts without leaving the site – in some cases, without leaving the page.
Instead, you’ll get short, accessible articles, reviews, a blog that explores our struggle to fit this effort into our lives and apply our new knowledge to the world around us, and hopefully more content in the future. We will tackle the great books, thorny issues, and obscured histories. We’ll try to make these pretty self-contained, but we will also collect them, by subject, in the subject menu on our site. It’s a great way to get a sense of everything we’ve uncovered on a topic, and suggestions for you to begin your own investigation. Finally, you can Contact Us or follow us on social media (links at the top right and bottom left of the homepage) to give us your feedback, ask questions, or suggest new things for us to look into.
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