On Social Movement Media: Learning from Krupskaya & Lenin

Promise Li

WHAT WOULD THE leaders of the Russian Revolution make of social media? And what might their experiences teach us?

In the middle of the 1890s in St. Petersburg — years before the historic victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917 — militant workers and socialists were developing a media ecosystem to quicken a nascent mass movement against tsarism. At first, workers gathered underground to learn about Marxism to seek a framework that could allow them to synthesize and cohere their struggles.

They studied long texts like Capital and digested lectures and pamphlets in study circles. They vetted and invited others by ones and twos from local workers’ night schools or workplaces. As the study circles grew to a critical mass, new mediums of circulating knowledge were needed.

The socialist revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya recalls, around this time, that “the soil had been fully prepared for agitation by leaflets.” But she also states that “this was one of the forms, but not the only form of work among the masses.”(1)

Her comrade and later companion Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov continued to write pamphlets about specific topics that “proceed from the workers’ needs, to lead them step by step to the question of the necessity of political struggle,” including one about factory laws “many intellectuals thought … dull and prolix, but the workers read it avidly, for it was something clear and familiar to them.”(2)

The circulation of leaflets led to even more intense state surveillance, and activists needed to coordinate using “invisible ink, dotted codes, and secret ciphers.” When it became clear that the “leaflets and pamphlets roused the workers,” Krupskaya, Ulyanov, and others obtained an underground printer and began a “popular journal,” Rabocheye Deto (Workers’ Cause).

Rabocheye Deto eventually became an all-Russian national newspaper and party organ, Iskra, when conditions were ripe enough to transform local Marxist groups and study circles into a unified party. These early days of Krupskaya and Ulyanov, who later took on the name Lenin, reveal diverse media forms unevenly unfolding across different stages of building a working-class organization.

Just as no sharp break exists between these stages, these media forms did not evolve cleanly: for one, book-reading coexisted alongside leaflet agitation.

Their experiences provide an essential lesson for critical thinkers and movements today: a rigorous exchange of ideas through discourse is more crucial than ever for clarifying political tasks, just as more accessible entry points for new militants are needed.

Both may overlap or require different forms of media. In any case, there is no single, most effective form of structuring this exchange. Movement conditions are ever-shifting, requiring media fit for various circumstances and tasks.

Sometimes, a pamphlet shakes up a movement and expands possibilities for struggle, like how hectographed print copies of Lenin’s Friends of the People circulated through and energized a generation of Russian Marxists into action in the 1890s. In 1930s Palestine, popular oral poetry effectively gave life to radical ideas by activating peasants’ struggle.(3)

In the 1960s in the United States, radio was the foremost medium that activists used to quicken the civil rights movement among Black communities.(4) The Zapatistas made use of the early rise of the Internet in the 1990s to broadly disseminate their program and messages and encourage international awareness and solidarity.(5)

These spaces for critique did not precede the existence of mass struggle. The desire to think and debate in more sophisticated ways emerged from the concrete needs of those already organizing. Theory is crafted from experiences of struggle. The critical tools that develop, in turn, can empower movements to organize better. In this vein, Marx writes that “the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory, too, will become material force as soon as it seizes the masses.”(6)

Building on Marx, we must understand how our weapons of criticism relate to existing struggles, and theorize and cultivate them to expand the power and scope of these struggles. Far more so than the 1890s, our own period features a flourishing of different media outlets, with new technologies coexisting?? with old ones, just as activists engage in short- and long-form writing.

The point is not whether one form is better than another. We must understand this array of resources in relation to each other and the larger conditions of struggle. Long-form analysis has little value if we cannot broadly expand left-wing ideas and culture to everyday people, let alone rebuild a culture of study and debate among existing organizers. And while social media has undeniably broadened the left’s mass appeal, it runs into limits if new activists are not channeled into organizational work and deeper study.

Simply put, the most useful mediums of exchange, or combinations of which, are the ones that most effectively quicken mass movements toward a struggle against the capitalist system.

From Media to Collective Power

The capitalist class maintains its power not only through coercive means, such as the military and police, but also through powerful ideological fictions, like nationalist indoctrination in schools. Ideology is no less material than coercive power in securing the power of one class over the other.

But the realm of ideology can be a powerful arsenal for workers’ movements to build power. Ideas themselves are products of pre-existing struggles; as Marxist writer Warren Montag puts it, “It is not critique that reveals antagonistic class positions … but rather the specific forms and sites of mass struggle that render class rule as such intelligible and thus available to critique.”(7)

Further, different frames of intelligibility are needed to induce specific tasks that best develop an evolving class struggle. The question of which medium best suits the idiom of politics must always begin with considering what “seizes the masses” and compels them to participate in struggle.

Thus, the correctness of ideas can only be determined by their material impact on struggles. In this sense, the question of how these ideas are presented and accessed is inextricably linked to their efficacy.

The same text may also produce different effects on the movement when re-iterated and reproduced decades later. Something obscure in one period may become decisively useful for politics in another era, whereas a popular text at one point may be exposed as a political dead-end later on.

There is also a sense of “combined unevenness” in social movement media today that we must understand. As explored by another Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, the theory of uneven and combined development describes how transitions between modes of production are often characterized by “an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.”(8)

This framework enables an understanding of capitalism as containing disjointed elements, like the presence of advanced capitalist firms in a largely peasant-based economy. These elements mutually interact and compose a singular totality: the capitalist system. More recently, Warwick Research Collective applied this principle to literary forms:

“the very processes driving the changes in the contemporary world-system have led to a breakdown of traditional boundaries demarcating genres and media, such that world-literary space is now characterized by new forms of convergence, synergy, competition and displacement… in which diverse cultural forms, including new and newly recalibrated media, compete for representational space and power.”(9)

This literary application can help us understand today’s diversity of media platforms. Significant heterogeneity characterizes the composition and demographics of social movements, the development of media industries and tech()nologies, the reading practices and habits of younger generations, and the political consciousness of social movements. Whether each media form is efficacious for emancipatory political practice depends on its relationship to a larger movement of revolutionary politics.

As the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs puts it, “individual acts can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the socio-historic whole. The actuality of the revolution therefore implies study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat.”(10)

In other words, we must understand individual media forms, just as Lukacs calls “individual acts,” in the context of how each functions and mutually interacts to determine and shape the conditions of mass struggle.

From Newspapers to Party Organization

The beginnings of the Russian socialist movement continue to be an instructive example. In the 1890s and 1900s, Russia’s need for new forms of media emerged from the growing militancy of workers’ movements. Along with students, workers were honing their power by challenging the Tsarist autocracy through economic struggles.

For the first time, workers’ revolts forced the Tsarist regime to adopt unprecedented concessions in the 1890s, such as the prohibition on nighttime work for women and children and the reduction of the working day.

Accompanying this growing militancy was the rapid spread of socialist discourse among workers: as Lenin observed in 1900, “study circles of workers and Social-Democratic intellectuals are springing up everywhere, local agitation leaflets are being widely distributed, the demand for Social-Democratic literature is increasing and is far outstripping the supply, and intensified government persecution is powerless to restrain the movement.”(11)

Historian Lars Lih describes how workers and party cadres understood the limitations of their existing organizational and media infrastructure through struggle:

“As the wave of revolutionary activity grew higher, the old party organizational forms were felt to be more and more of a burden. Isolated local committees wanted a way to share experiences, coordinate actions, and speak with a single voice. Party members wanted a unified national leadership consisting of respected figures with solid theoretical principles and great practical experience. Iskra responded to this widespread desire and took on the task of fusing the scattered Social-Democratic forces into a single centralized organization not just in words but in actual fact.”(12)

Workers and other radical activists confronted the limitations of their organizational and media infrastructure in practice, and demanded more to take their political work to another level. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin observed that workers were asking not to be seen as “children to be fed on the thin gruel of ‘economic’ politics alone; we want to know everything that others know, we want to learn the details of all aspects of political life and to take part actively in every single political event.”(13)

Thus, the formation of Iskra as a national outlet did not come from Lenin’s mind ex nihilo but emerged as an organic response to actualizing concrete needs, reflexes, and urges already evolving among workers’ movements.

Iskra also did not displace the need for diverse forms of media to coexist locally. As the vexed road from St. Petersburg Marxist study circles to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) shows, movements have uneven needs, requiring overlapping structures to facilitate their growth. So, we too must acknowledge how different forms of media can adapt to the varying needs of different phases of struggle in our conditions.

What needs did Iskra address? Lenin says that any form of centralization requires a certain basis of unity among socialists that “can not be decreed, it cannot be brought about by a decision, say, of a meeting of representatives; it must be worked for.”

Political ideas and tactical divergences must be clarified and debated, and “conducted in full view of all Russian Social-Democrats and class-conscious workers, are necessary and desirable in order to clarify the depth of existing differences, in order to afford discussion of disputed questions from all angles, in order to combat the extremes into which representatives, not only of various views, but even of various localities, or various “specialities” of the revolutionary movement, inevitably fall.”(14)

So, the immediate task was to organize a national newspaper, not to project a ready-made set of politics. Iskra opened a space to democratically clarify differences in ideas and strategies to strengthen the emergent movement. In this process, disagreements will inevitably arise, as Montag writes, as they “are the necessary effect of their necessarily heterogeneous experience of the often invisible forms of inequality and subjection that both stimulate and constrain revolt. Critique, even when it does not know it, absorbs, distills, and preserves this knowledge … To return it to [the masses] in a coherent form is like handing them a weapon with which to transform the world.”(15)

The question for political movements at each stage is the same: Which weapons best distill the knowledge and experience gained from scattered, spontaneous struggle, and with which can the masses most effectively continue to develop their collective power to transform the world?

These early Marxists did not simply focus on building a single model of organizational or media infrastructure — they adjusted their tasks as the movements around them demanded new tools.

The ever-transforming media ecosystem they built — a matrix composed of a national organ for ideological and tactical debate, theoretical pamphlets, ciphered messages, and a sea of leaflets — shows that an ever-shifting world requires various weapons to comprehend and dismantle.

From Newspapers to Social Media

The lesson for us is not to simply reproduce past media as Lenin imagined them. Some aspects may still be relevant, others need revision, while the rest should be left to history. Today, our world uses vastly different media technologies than in the 1890s and 1900s. Still, one trend is constant: different media forms coexist unevenly to account for a variety of organizing needs.

This unevenness also reflects how working-class political consciousness is developing disproportionately across different regions. Decentralized movements and formal organizations often coexist unevenly.

The radical left’s current media landscape mirrors this sentiment: outlets remain scattered and decentralized as they multiply. The appetite for deeper theoretical engagement varies across movements.

Whatever the limitations of such dominant media platforms among younger political activists, we must recognize that they express concrete needs and ways to struggle in movements. Jasper Bernes cautions against merely reducing failures of mass protests in recent years to simply a problem of ideology or organization without “investigat[ing] the material origins of this ideology” and “locating these tactics in the underlying material conditions which protesters faced.”(16)

The same goes for political media. Reflecting on recent mass protests, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci sees political engagement on social media, from hashtag activism to organizing actions through encrypted apps like Signal, as a “digitally networked public sphere,” partly emerging from distrust of and exclusion from various official or mainstream outlets, especially in repressive conditions.(17)

The COVID-19 pandemic further deepened the use of these technologies among social movements as they facilitate accessibility. Blacked out from mainstream media, Palestinians are exposing the effects of Israel’s genocidal campaign through outlets like X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Twitch and Instagram in real-time for everyday netizens across the world.

Since the mid-2010s, the proliferation of left-wing political education content on YouTube, from video essays to commentary channels, has led some to identify a new genre labeled ‘Breadtube.’(18)

In China, intensifying repression and the clampdown on virtually a whole generation of labor organizers since 2015 have encouraged young activists to rely more on social media platforms like WeChat and Douyin for organizing and agitation.(19) The digital ephemera on these platforms has become the most detailed record of Chinese workers’ lived reality and daily struggles.

Some online platforms better enable the circulation of what Logic(s) (formerly Logic) magazine editors J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Xiaowei Wang call “the conceptual frameworks of impoverished Black people, marginalized folks, and jobless people as opposed to delimiting them as a site of harm for outsiders to examine.”(20) One such initiative may be Scalawag Magazine’s “Week of Writing: Condemned” series that features analytical and other writings by death row prisoners in the U.S. South since last year.(21)

In February, immigrant high school students were able to coordinate across multiple schools in Pasadena, California, solely because of social media. Lead organizers from different schools discovered that they were all planning walkouts around the same week, because they found that each school’s organizing committee was promoting through their own Instagram account.(22) They messaged each other on Instagram and formed a group chat to organize collectively — resulting in a mass walkout gathering hundreds of students from each school on one day.

But are there limitations to social media in building up infrastructures of resistance? On the one hand, Tufekci (among other pundits) brings up many commonly discussed pitfalls of social media organizing, like ”tactical freezes” induced by the hyper-decentralization of social media. On the other hand, Jane Hu argues that in 2020, we have entered a “second act” of social media activism, “in which the tools of the Internet have been increasingly integrated into the hard-won structure of older movements.”(23)

The U.S.-based socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker’s platform may demonstrate Hu’s point. While the popularity of the online multiplayer game Among Us was faddishly brief in 2021, Piker’s Twitch stream playing the game and discussing politics with democratic socialist U.S. Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attracted 500,000 live viewers. Its recording was shared millions of times.(24)

A year later, Piker’s enormous following among Gen-Z netizens proved useful for building organizations when he joined the launch stream of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA)’s “Red Hot Summer” program (which drew more than a 1,000 youth participants) to organize young socialists in their workplaces. A participant observed that “many people in the stream were fans of Piker and were visibly excited when he arrived.”(25)

Zoe, an avid watcher of Piker’s streams and a 20-year-old retail worker, began a union drive in their workplace after participating in YDSA’s programming.(26)

Earlier this year, Piker’s Twitch stream was one of the only outlets that directly featured the voices of incarcerated firefighters during one of their rare breaks, as they labored to extinguish the deadly Los Angeles fires.

In another example, some of the most visible expressions of the American left to young, everyday Americans are the media institutions associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). While PSL is a tight-knit vanguardist formation, it poses an outsized influence on the left, not simply because of its large rallies, but also because of the vitality of its media ecosystem.

PSL has a variety of “front” outlets affiliated with the party. For example, Breakthrough News, led by PSL members, boasts hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and X. Its reporting on any major actions is often the most widely circulated among social media users.

Breakthrough News has increasingly taken on the role Democracy Now has played in the 2000s and 2010s, but for a younger generation. It has documented Palestine protests with professional quality, including drone use to capture the size of massive protests. It has collaborated with the rapper Macklemore to produce a film documentary of the Columbia encampment.

This documentary includes scenes of Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who ICE kidnapped, and Columbia student worker union’s president, Grant Miner, who was expelled for his Palestine solidarity work. This footage was quickly excerpted and circulated on social media upon their repression, providing popular agitational materials for their cases at a decisive moment.

Breakthrough News’ operations are hosted from the People’s Forum, whose leading staff are members of PSL. Based in the middle of Manhattan, the multi-story People’s Forum (also with over a 100,000 followers on Instagram) is arguably the most well-resourced and visible physical hub for left-wing programming in the United States today. This media ecosystem has exposed new activist youth to left-wing discourse, while providing avenues for them to plug into upcoming local or online events.

Of course, PSL’s politics is far from commendable, especially as it uncritically champions authoritarian capitalist regimes abroad that crush workers and mass movements, smearing all their opposition as mere puppets of U.S. interests. But we must acknowledge the singular role its well-resourced media ecosystem has played in amplifying the profile of the left among new generations of youth in the 2020s.

While the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are much larger, PSL’s cohesive and slick social media presence has allowed it to project a more robust public profile. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, for many young Americans, the PSL-backed social media ecosystem is often among their first exposures to the left.

From Social Media to Resistance?

However, it remains to be seen whether this social media-fuelled exposure to social movements could translate into the long-term rebuilding of the global left. In any case, the proliferation of social media also signals a larger question about the younger generations’ capacity to engage with traditional long-form critical thinking and debate.

Some have raised concerns about younger generations’ shorter attention spans because of social media. At the same time, research on Gen Z readers shows interesting trends. They read more widely across genres than other generations. They also prefer print texts over online ones, though most read texts online and receive reading recommendations through social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.(27)

There is no easy separation between “traditional” and online reading in activist social media. Users scroll through numerous webinars, protest and reading guides, tactical debates, and syllabi daily through Instagram infographics, TikTok videos, and X threads.

Reading groups proliferate online, in local circles, and even in protest sites. Last year, makeshift bookshelves with zines and books on theory and tactics can be found across the Gaza Solidarity Encampments. From Gaza to Miami to Hong Kong, repressive states are keen to limit access to books because they fear they can foster political consciousness.

Krupskaya and Lenin, following Marx’s understanding of how theory can become a material force, might argue that all such media are important in their own ways. The real question is which medium, used in what particular way, in what relation to others, and in which phase of a movement, can best “seize the masses” into action.

The multiplicity of media platforms today can be a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, the decentralization of social media activism and knowledge production, the rapid speed of content consumption, and the ease with which we routinely cycle among heterogeneous forms of media — from our phones to movement spaces — allow diverse voices and perspectives to flourish quickly, as they did during the uprisings of the 2010s and into the present moment.

On the other hand, as movements and organizations that are growing in power realize at different historical junctures, deeper levels of critique and engagement with ideas are needed, facilitated by intentional, if not more centralized, coordination.

Despite the blossoming of left-wing media in recent years, there are still relatively few formal spaces for activists to discuss questions of political strategy and build sustainable organizations collectively. The strength of PSL’s media lies in its political education and capacity to broaden left-wing culture for mass youth appeal. However, PSL’s affiliate organizations, including coalitions like ANSWER, can be too bureaucratic and top-down. They provide few opportunities for militants and organizations to participate openly in shaping the direction of their campaigns.

More often than not, there is a gap between the masses of people open to left-wing ideas and venues for rigorous strategic dialogue and thinking.

The continuing importance of print and online publications on the left, like Jacobin or The Nation, does not necessarily translate into deeper engagement with their ideas in broader mass spaces. Such a level of engagement mostly occurs internally in existing national organizations or scattered local formations, most of whom number no more than a hundred or so individuals at best. For better or worse, some of the most vibrant debates about politics across DSA caucuses, various left currents, and organizations are often unfolding informally and haphazardly on social media platforms like X.

And so, the left continues to need more spaces for productive, comradely debate across traditions and currents that make use of emergent technologies. How should we make sense of the state of labor or tenant organizing? Where should they be going next? How should these formations fit into a larger national strategy to defeat the far-right?

What we need to rebuild is a culture on the left, one in which people could move from consuming infographics and webinars and turning out for rallies to trying to grapple with such questions collectively. In other words, we must regularly study the shifting terrain of struggle together. This is needed to develop strategies of resistance and modes of mass politics that can pose a real political challenge to the capitalist system.

We can only figure out what forms of media are most helpful by trying things out as we organize, and analyzing as we go. Just as Iskra would not have made sense when the Russian working class and socialist movement was still inchoate before the 1890s, Iskra is no blueprint for what mass movements need today. Reflecting on how Lenin studied Marx, Krupskaya advocates “taking the works of Marx dealing with a similar situation and carefully analyze them, compare them with the current moment, discovering resemblances and differences.”(28)

Bringing together the right combination of activists to organize a targeted action or study group may be more beneficial at a certain moment than formalizing a party or writing a long-form critique. In another moment, stepping back from the frontlines to write a long-form critique can be more critical for the political moment than trying to make it to every single rally in your city.

In any case, the most reliable metric for which forms of movement media are effective lies in determining which are most useful in pushing the masses toward deeper forms of struggle. As with all things in politics, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that works across time and space.

Notes

1. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 18.
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2. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, 19.
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3. Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-9 Revolt in Palestine (London: Tricontinental Society, 1980; in addition, New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972), 27-32.
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4. Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).
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5. Maria Elena Martinez-Torres, “Civil Society, the Internet, and the Zapatistas,” Peace Review 13, no. 3 (2001): 347-355.
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6. Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1844]), 77.
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7. Warren Montag, “How Does Critique Become Effective?” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (2020): 740.
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8. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008 [1932]), 5.
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9. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 16-7.
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10. Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought, Vienna, 1924, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/ch01.htm.
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11. V. I. Lenin, “Declaration of the Editorial Board of Iskra” in Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 [1900]): 351.
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12. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008 [2005]), 187.
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13. V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1971 [1902]), 73.
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14. Lenin, “Declaration,” 355.
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15. Montag, “Critique,” 743.
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16. Jasper Bernes, “What Was To Be Done? Protest and Revolution in the 2010s,” The Brooklyn Rail (June 2024): https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/field-notes/What-Was-To-Be-Done-Protest-and-Revolution-in-the-2010s.
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17. Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, Yale Univesity Press, 2017).
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18. Wil Williams, “The Video Essays That Spawned An Entire Youtube Genre,” Polygon, June 1, 2021, https://www.polygon.com/22417320/best-video-essays-youtube-history. Accessed May 27, 2024.
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19. Hong Yu Liu, “When nobody listens, go online”: The “807” labor movement against workplace sexism in China’s tech industry,” Gender, Work & Organization 30, no. 1 (2023): 312-28.
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20. Khadijah Abdurahman and Xiaowei Wang, “Logic(s): The Next Chapter,” Logic(s) Magazine, 2022, https://logicmag.io/logics-the-next-chapter/. Accessed May 23, 2024.
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21. “Week of Writing: Condemned,” Scalawag Magazine, https://scalawagmagazine.org/condemned/. Accessed May 23, 2024.
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22. Kai B. “High School Students Walk Out For Immigrants: Report From The Front,” Tempest, March 17, 2025, https://tempestmag.org/2025/03/high-school-students-walk-out-for-immigrants/. Accessed March 25, 2025.
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23. Jane Hu, “The Second Act of Social-Media Activism,” The New Yorker, August 3, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-second-act-of-social-media-activism. Accessed May 23, 2024.
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24. Connor Ammar, “The New Socialism of Gen Z and Beyond,” The Standard, December 27, 2021, https://thestandardspeaks.com/the-new-socialism-of-gen-z-and-beyond/. Accessed May 23, 2024
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25. AP, “My Perspectives on YDSA’s Red Hot Summer: Opening and First Sessions,” Cosmonaut Magazine, July 9, 2022, https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/07/my-perspective-on-ydsas-red-hot-summer-opening-and-first-sessions/. Accessed May 23, 2024.

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26. https://twitter.com/YDSA_/status/ 1673736990720770055.
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27. Melissa Baron, “What are the Actual Reading Trends for Gen Z?” Bookriot, May 3, 2023, https://bookriot.com/gen-z-reading-trends/. Accessed May 23, 2024.
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28. Nadezhda Krupskaya, “How Lenin Studied Marx,” 1933, https://www.marxists.org/archive/krupskaya/works/howleninstudiedmarx.htm.
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This essay is a modified version of a chapter from an edited collection: The Promise of Politics: A Tenth Anniversary Collection of Essays from Truthseeker (政治的承諾：燃燈者十週年文集), edited by Lee, Yu Sum and Athena Tam, Showwe Information, 2024.

May-June 2025, ATC 236