Communist study, and our method of scholarship, must be bound up in active revolutionary practice. “If we have a correct theory,” Mao wrote, “but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.”
This means two things: 1. that our theoretical knowledge must accurately reflect the world as-it-is in practice. An abstract knowledge divorced from reality is fruitless. And 2. that to develop our theoretical understanding of a field of inquiry, we must practice it rigorously.
Scholarship—and study—is a form of labor. As a form of labor, the course of study goes: study, assistantship/apprenticeship, full practice. There is a reason that the academy has retained this feudal labor formula: there is something important in practicing what has been learned.
All of this is to say that we, as communists, must not cheapen the rigor of study; we must exemplify it and we must raise ourselves up as exemplars of knowledge-in-practice.
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