It’s a thought I keep returning to. I can also mention https://deafbible.com/ — a site that has videos of Bible readings in a bunch of different sign languages, including some pretty obscure ones not even spoken in Christian-majority countries.
I guess it makes sense strategically for Marxist texts to not focus on perfect accessibility, since you’re working with limited resources and the aim is more to develop enough of an educated vanguard to actually fight the revolution, than to spread the word to Absolutely Everybody like missionaries want to; but it still feels a bit unfair, doesn’t it? Like if you can have false consciousness preached at you in your own language, why not class consciousness, y’know?
I guess this isn’t really a topic with much potential to ignite discussion, but eh.
The Bible isn’t very accessible in reality. It has a lot of stories but they don’t make a ton of sense out of context and the context is missing by default unless you get a heavily annotated version. So you can read the Bible and become familiar with the characters and general themes (often internalizing a number of false narratives about the contents) but still not really get it - in part because it’s a collection from very different authors over vast swatha of time, carefully curated and pared down to suit various agendas.
This is a big part of why Christianity isn’t actually that focused on Biblical scholarship. More about churches and patriarchy, having “special” dudes tell you what it means and why you have to listen to them or you are a bad person who should be shunned or worse. The focus is on social control, historically to support the ruling class, and the stories provide a canon story embedding for the nerds that ask why.
Marxism is also not very accessible but this isn’t just due to Marx writing like a big nerd in the 19th century and there being a few rare terms in it. It’s because the topic itself also requires a large amount of contextualization and explanations to understand. Its fundamental premise is that the society you are embedded in is operating on a hidden agenda in plain sight and that you must learn how to recognize the propaganda and work against the oppressive forces that it serves, oh and it’s entirely about economic relations whose common narratives are a pack of lies that nevertheless look true with a lazy analysis and virtually every “legitimate” expert will support that pack of lies. And to begin our analysis of the secret plain sight agenda that dictates our lives we have to start by abstracting our day to day economic lives, establishing terms, questioning popular narratives and dabbling in some exploration for epistemology and social change.
Marxism could be translated into every language and given out for free in every form and it would still have big challenges in understanding it for most people. This is a big part of why our responsibility is to teach it. We make it accessible through directly speaking to one another and organizing sessions and relating it to our shared struggles. It becomes accessible through concerted effort rather than being stories with ubiquitous (yet still misunderstood) cultural reference.
Very well said, thank you.
Christians have more resources and funding than most communists organizations, theres an actual interest by the big churches in converting Native Americans, Asians and Africans, which is why languages like Guaraní were preserved and promoted by the Jesuits in places like Paraguay (at sometimes having more speakers than Spanish).
And besides all of that, actual marxist text tends to get ignored in favor of local leftist writers and ideologies like José Carlos Mariátegui, Peronism, Trabalhism, in places like the Global South. Though most of these are heavily inspired by Marx’s works, they tend to have some criticism and favor local culture and views over what they see as a Europeanism.
Interesting, thank you.
Start leaving Mao’s Little Red Book in the bedside drawer of hotel rooms.
Will do!
Yeah Christianity had a head start on Marxism by thousands of years so it makes sense. Add in the cold war too and I can imagine why Marx wasn’t aimed at more niches in the west like the bible was.
Yeah, a head start of thousands of years, albeit with the caveat that attitudes towards Bible translations have varied a lot throughout history. More importantly, I think, is just the Bible having the backing of the powers that be. If you’re given effectively limitless resources to spread your message, you will make it as accessible as possible, right? For the amount of suppression that Marxism has faced by contrast, it’s impressive how many times things like the Communist Manifesto have been translated — the most translated text of the modern era, supposedly.
the most translated text of the modern era, supposedly.
For real? That’s cool.
I think that it is both resources and size of the movements and focus. The USSR and CPC didn’t seem to really prioritize converting everyone to that extent and there is no other Marxist movement with the resources to do much of this. Many Marxist organizations will prioritize other actions and struggles rather than pure accessibility and evangelism. Where both there are large Christian organizations and donations from rich Christians to fund this work.
I did end up being dragged to a Protestant church for Easter Sunday, and I did meet a guy doing this type of work. He is a linguist and is supported for 6-9 months a year to go to a Western African nation and work on developing written scripts for several of the indigenous languages that don’t have one, as the first step to translating the Bible to that language. So that they don’t have to learn English or French to read the Bible. And that is just one missionary organization working in a small nation that already has a not insignificant Christian population due to colonialism.
Gotta preserve these endangered languages by uploading numerous mistranslations of the Bible to YouTube. To preserve these cultures, you see.
I doubt these audiobooks are mistranslated in any meaningful way: these are actual native speakers making these audiobooks — I say “small and endangered languages”, but I should be clear to say that these are languages with tens of thousands or even 100K+ L1 speakers — and they’re apparently working off of old Bible translations from before the languages in question were endangered.
I’m assuming you’re thinking of the absolute scourge of AI slop Indigenous language dictionaries and learning materials that are genuinely hampering efforts to revitalize these languages, but Today’s Native isn’t that, it is as far as I can tell just straight up Indigenous Christian boomers making content for other Indigenous Christian boomers.
Interesting, good to know. I just assumed it was either AI slop or was people that barely/don’t know the language, since that’s been a problem in other cases
Translation is a use-case for AI that I think is inarguably good. The quality of translation now in almost all languages is getting very useable and while it makes errors in some weird ways they are usually still quite understandable in the context they occur in.
The number of things I have been able to access because translation is good now is much higher than it ever was before. Things that are far too niche for a human to bother doing. I will take MTL wherever human translation isn’t already occurring voluntarily.
Going to replace the Gideons Bible in ever hotel room I stay in with Parenti.
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One serves capital, the other serves labor.
Yeah it always sucks to learn how Christianity has such a fucking head start because it was started by white Catholics with a myopic cultural worldview that they infected on the rest of the world.
Imo goes back to the idea of no gods and no masters. Jesus was a guy who would have been a Marxist
