I teach a religious school class of a few 13-14 year olds every couple of weekends and this is what I’ve been trying to think about — if you can explain Marxism to teenage kids then you can explain it to anyone; that’s my test to see if I know what I’m talking about

Unfortunately I only came up with the idea a month or two ago and now the class is basically over, but for next year I’m going to attempt to make a Basics of Marxism lesson plan and see how it goes

The class is current news/social responsibility focused so for most of the year I tried to use current events to explain wealth inequality, corporate influence in politics, American imperialism, etc. but I felt like I would be doing a disservice by not giving them the whole picture

I think explaining dialectical materialism is a good way to start — the kids seemed to understand it alright, and even though not all that complicated it’s the basis for everything else in Marxism (that’s all I’ve gotten through to this point)

Then maybe explaining class dynamics and how they have generally evolved throughout history next

It’s just so hard to explain the why of Marxism, as in “why should anyone care about this,” to someone who doesn’t already kind of see the big picture already — so it’s also feels necessary to explain the entire ML narrative of modern human history just to give a decent context for all these ideas

But anyway, if I ever get to developing that lesson plan it probably will look similar to a “Beginner’s Guide” and I’ll post it — first I need to read about 10 more books though