It view of the facts that
i) multipolarism is returning conflicting antagonism between competing state-capitalisms,
ii) the developing bourgeois subordination of or merger with the state,
iii) the coming war between socialist China and US imperialism,
iv) the need to be able to quickly rouse up subjective conditions of revolution when the world crisis comes,
v) the deeply rooted Christian consciousness among the western working classes,
I propose we rewrite socialist theory in simple parables. The simplicity of Jesus' parables is what made them spread quickly because it doesn't take a lot to understand them. Socialist theory is dense but even at Congresses of bolsheviks you find the delegates using parables to explaing ideas. Take for example
https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/ch21.htmPlekhanov:
>Imagine a policeman, the embodiment of the police state, and along with him, imagine a bourgeois who is struggling with this policeman, striving to win some rights for himself, but not for the working class, and, finally, imagine a proletarian who is watching the fight between the bourgeois and the policeman and wondering: ‘What should I do?’ The reply of the Utopian Socialists was: ‘Do not get mixed up in this fight, it is a family quarrel between your enemies, and whichever of them wins, you will gain nothing, or you may even lose a great deal.’ We, from the standpoint of modern scientific socialism, say to the proletariat: the outcome of this struggle is not a matter of indifference to you—every blow that the policeman gets from the bourgeois is a step forward along the path of progress and is therefore to your advantage. But, in his fight with the policeman, the bourgeois is thinking not of you but of himself, and moreover, cannot cope with the policeman, so you must yourself enter the fray, armed to the teeth, as the French say, so as not only to knock down the policeman but also to be in a position to rebuff the bourgeois when he wants to deprive you of the fruits of victory. That’s all.or Stalin's parable about the shoemaker that has been circling around for some time here but I can't find it now.
>Here is a simple illustration. Let us take a shoemaker who owned a tiny workshop, but who, unable to withstand the competition of the big manufacturers, closed his workshop and took a job, say, at Adelkhanov’s shoe factory in Tiflis. He went to work at Adelkhanov’s factory not with the view to becoming a permanent wage-worker, but with the object of saving up some money, of accumulating a little capital to enable him to reopen his workshop. As you see, the position of this shoemaker is already proletarian, but his consciousness is still non-proletarian, it is thoroughly petty-bourgeois. In other words, this shoemaker has already lost his petty-bourgeois position, it has gone, but his petty-bourgeois consciousness has not yet gone, it has lagged behind his actual position.
>Clearly, here too, in social life, first the external conditions change, first the conditions of men change and then their consciousness changes accordingly.
>But let us return to our shoemaker. As we already know, he intends to save up some money and then reopen his workshop. This proletarianized shoemaker goes on working, but finds that it is a very difficult matter to save money, because what he earns barely suffices to maintain an existence. Moreover, he realizes that the opening of a private workshop is after all not so alluring: the rent he will have to pay for the premises, the caprices of customers, shortage of money, the competition of the big manufacturers and similar worries — such are the many troubles that torment the private workshop owner. On the other hand, the proletarian is relatively freer from such cares; he is not troubled by customers, or by having to pay rent for premises. He goes to the factory every morning, calmly goes home in the evening, and as calmly pockets his pay on Saturdays. Here, for the first time, the wings of our shoemaker’s petty-bourgeois dreams are clipped; here for the first time proletarian strivings awaken in his soul.
>Time passes and our shoemaker sees that he has not enough money to satisfy his most essential needs, that what he needs very badly is a rise in wages. At the same time, he hears his fellow-workers talking about unions and strikes. Here our shoemaker realizes that in order to improve his conditions he must fight the masters and not open a workshop of his own. He joins the union, enters the strike movement, and soon becomes imbued with socialist ideas…Do you know of any other examples? Post them!!