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THE JOY OF READING  
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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
February 11, 2025
TriContinental
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_ The artwork in this dossier draws from the Red Books Day 2025
Calendar. Each of the twelve contributions, produced in collaboration
with the International Union of Left Publishers, is inspired by a red
book from a different region of the world. _

, Artwork by Kael Abello (Venezuela/Utopix and Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research).

 

The artwork in this dossier draws from the Red Books Day 2025
Calendar. Each of the twelve contributions, produced in collaboration
with the International Union of Left Publishers, is inspired by a red
book from a different region of the world. Red Books Day celebrates
left books, their authors, and the people’s movements they ushered
in on 21 February 1848, the day Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
published _The Communist Manifesto_. It is a day that celebrates the
joy of reading.

All Russia was learning to read, and _reading_ – politics,
economics, history – because the people wanted to _know_… In
every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had
its newspaper – sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of
pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations and poured
into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst
for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a
frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six
months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature,
saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand
drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history,
diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts – but social
and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and
Gorky…

John Reed, _Ten Days that Shook the World_, 1919.1
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Revolutions of ordinary working people burst through the shackles of
society and created an insistence upon a new world. Every one of them,
whether directly socialist or driven by national liberation, provides
us with evidence of this exuberance to overturn ancient social norms
and build egalitarian forms of being and belonging. Since most
twentieth century revolutions were led by peasants and workers
(Mexico, 1910; China, 1911; Iran, 1905–1911; Russia and Central
Asia, 1917), they often focused on how to transform the rigidities of
landlordism. To overthrow the landlord’s power, it was not enough to
distribute surplus land (land reform); the landlord’s power was
rooted in social hierarchies that sometimes took on a divine
character. The oppression of the peasantry was conducted through the
undecipherable hieroglyphics of land records and accounting books, the
books of moneylenders and priests. Depriving the peasantry of the
ability to read rendered them powerless, a power that, once grasped,
made itself clear in every one of these revolutions in the poorer
parts of the world.

The bourgeois culture that prevailed across these nations in the
nineteenth century adopted reading as a sign of class status. Though
books and newspapers flourished with the advent of commercial
printing, they were mainly for the bourgeoisie and – in some cases
– the petty bourgeoisie. In Mexico, where the presidency of Benito
Juárez (1858–1872) expanded schooling and the publishing industry,
the cost of a newspaper was far greater than the daily earnings of the
average worker or _campesino_ (peasant).2
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 Under the regime of landlords in countries such as Mexico and Russia
and in colonies such as India and on the African continent, very few
opportunities existed for workers and peasants to learn to read. It
was only when trade union and communist movements appeared in these
countries and their organisations published newspapers and pamphlets,
often clandestinely, that working-class and peasant members gained
wider access to texts, which were read to them by literate organisers.
This form of collective learning became an early school for literacy.

This dossier, _The Joy of Reading_, draws from such traditions to
highlight examples of popular literacy from our time, from Mexico to
China to India. The last part of this dossier will highlight Red Books
Day, a programme that began in India and which has since – through
the initiative of the International Union of Left Publishers –
expanded across the world.

Artwork by Valentina Aguirre (Venezuela/Utopix).

 

Mexico Reads

At the time of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, only around 22% of the
country’s population of 15.1 million were literate.3
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 A long period of unrest gripped Mexico for the next decade, until
Álvaro Obregón won the presidency in 1920 and began a process of
reform that comprised mass cultural activity such as opening rural
schools, training teachers, building public libraries and art schools,
and publishing pamphlets and books for early readers. In 1921, José
Vasconcelos was named the first secretary of public education and
given an open charge by Obregón to democratise Mexican culture.4
[[link removed]] To
reach this goal, the state built thousands of rural schools and
teacher training institutes and raised rural teachers’ wages from
one to three pesos a day.5
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run the main training institute, Vasconcelos turned to Communist Party
of Mexico member Elena Torres Cuéllar, who expanded these cultural
missions across the country and trained over four thousand teachers
within a decade. Torres also initiated a free school breakfast
programme in 1921, ensuring that tens of thousands of students were
fed.6
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Under Vasconcelos’ leadership, the Ministry of Public Education
(Secretaría de Educación Pública or SEP) pushed for the development
of quality public libraries in rural areas. To that end, the SEP not
only disbursed funds to build the libraries; it also printed and
distributed sets of books (fifty for rural libraries and a thousand
for urban centres) that would both enhance the cultural life of the
peasantry and provide them with practical and productive knowledge.
These books included everything from Greek classics to books about
Mexican history, household management, and agricultural science.7
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 The SEP also published a teachers’ magazine, _El Maestro_ (The
Teacher), which provided information about teaching styles, new ideas
in education, and book reviews. Alongside this state initiative, in
1934 sociologist and economist Daniel Cosío Villegas set up the
Economic Culture Fund at what was then the National School of
Economics (now the School of Economics of the National Autonomous
University of Mexico), initially to distribute books to economics
students and later becoming a vehicle to distribute a wide range of
books across Latin America.

As the Mexican Revolution became institutionalised and its class
character began to change, the focus on democratising culture eroded.
Literacy rates rose, certainly, but they stagnated at around 70%, and
the state educational and public library systems were unable to
improve the quality of literacy. Both the schools and the libraries
saw their funding drop as the commitment to these institutions
declined in the face of financial pressures that culminated in the
Mexican debt crisis in 1982. As Mexico’s policymakers slipped into
the habits of neoliberalism, other currents within society fought to
prevent the collapse of the focus on literacy. In 1986, the General
Directorate of Libraries began a programme called My Summer Vacation
in the Library (Mis Vacaciones en la Biblioteca) through which a
million children and youth visited public libraries to participate in
a range of social activities.8
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 Mexico’s library system has built on this programme to hold
cultural, music, and storytelling festivals. In 1995, under the
auspices of educational reform following the 1993 curriculum update,
the SEP created the National Programme for Reading (Programa Nacional
para la Lectura), which was renamed Toward a Country of Readers (Hacia
un país de lectores) in 2000. One of the cornerstones of the
programme was the annual selection, production, and distribution of
seventy-five books for school libraries across the country.

In 2008, Mexico’s National Programme for the Promotion of Reading
and the Book (Programa de Fomento para el Libro y la Lectura)
established the Mexico Reads (México Lee) project to use literacy as
a tool to reduce social inequality and increase access to knowledge.
This programme is rooted in a tradition that builds upon Mexico’s
own history of literacy campaigns and that of the Cuban
Revolution’s _Yo__, sí __puedo_ (Yes, I can) adult literacy
curriculum created in 2001 (drawing from Cuba’s 1961 literacy
programme), which has been enormously influential across Latin
America. The following year, in 2009, Director of the Economic Culture
Fund (Fondo de Cultura Económica) Paco Ignacio Taibo II and the
writer Paloma Saiz Tejero set up the Brigade to Read in Freedom
(Brigada para Leer en Libertad) to publish books that the public could
download free of charge or pick up at book fairs and cultural
festivals. At the heart of the brigade is the joy of reading. As
Paloma Saiz Tejero explains:

Reading opens up a series of expectations and knowledge that you
wouldn’t normally have; it makes you much more critical and gives
you weapons to defend yourself every day of your life; it won’t make
you more handsome or richer; those books that tell you that such
things will happen if you read them are pure lies – it’s not like
that, you won’t even become more intelligent – but it does allow
you the clarity to decide what you do and don’t want to do.9
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Artwork by Othman Ghalmi (Morocco/Workers’ Democratic Way).

Reading Helps the Chinese People Stand Upright

Before the Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911, most of the population
– especially women – suffered from illiteracy, with an estimated
literacy rate of 10–15% at the turn of the century.10
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 Literacy would not improve much in the years that followed, largely
because of the disruption that tore through Chinese society until the
1949 Chinese Revolution. It was only in the 1950s that the literacy
rate began to rise dramatically, reaching 57% by 1959.11
[[link removed]] By
2021, the adult literacy rate in China had risen to 97%, one of the
highest in the world. The massive gains that China has made over the
course of the past seven decades have been referred to as ‘perhaps
the single greatest educational effort in human history’.12
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These gains were the result of the initiatives implemented by the
Communist Party of China (CPC) in the immediate aftermath of the 1949
revolution. These initiatives drew upon experiments such as the
Jiangxi Soviet (1931–1934) and the Yan’an Soviet (1936–1948) in
southeastern and north-central China, respectively, which implemented
different forms of literacy campaigns that targeted rural and adult
literacy. Both built upon the Soviet Union’s literacy efforts, such
as the illiteracy eradication campaign _Likbez_, which brought
remarkable gains to all the Soviet republics as they began to
systematise the knowledge of adult literacy programmes.13
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 In 1921, V. I. Lenin announced at a conference on economic policy
that there would be no advancement if illiteracy remained. Without
literacy, Lenin said, ‘there can be no politics; without that there
are rumours, gossip, fairy tales and prejudices, but not
politics’.14
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Though it is impossible to summarise the entire panoply of activities
that shaped New China’s literacy campaign, three of them are
important to emphasise:

* The Chinese word for illiteracy is 文盲, or ‘text blind’,
hinting at the historic centrality of knowing the Chinese characters
in order to be considered literate. Yet the more than 100,000
characters that make up the Chinese language created barriers towards
achieving full literacy in society. In 1955, the revolutionary
government set up the Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written
Language to create a manageable way to advance literacy, such as by
shortening the list of characters to 1,500 for rural residents and
2,000 for rural leaders and urban residents as the minimum requirement
for literacy.15
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1958, primary schools began to use pinyin (the standard romanisation
of Chinese characters) and simplified Chinese characters.
* As in Mexico and Russia, the Chinese Revolution emphasised the
importance of both rural and adult literacy: if parents were not
invested in the importance of reading and writing, their children
would not be instilled with a joy of reading. Lin Handa, who was one
of the most prominent leaders of China’s anti-illiteracy campaign,
said in 1955 that learning characters should not define literacy;
rather, the end goals of the campaign for literacy should be to enable
the peasantry to enrich their lives and increase their productivity.
According to the anti-illiteracy decree issued the following year,
rural adult literacy should be based on the principles of
‘integrating the practical’ (_lianxi shiji_) and ‘learning for
the purpose of applying’ (_xue yi zhi yong_).16
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* Finally, the Chinese Revolution highlighted the role of public
libraries in its literacy programmes. In 1949, there were only
fifty-five public libraries in China. As part of the emphasis on
democratisation, New China built libraries in rural areas for the
peasantry and factory libraries for the workers. By 1956, China had
established 182,960 rural reading rooms that held a range of
materials.17
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Such initiatives enabled Chinese society to overcome illiteracy.
Today, China faces a set of new challenges, such as how to address
young people’s addiction to screens and video games. In 2021,
China’s President Xi Jinping announced that his government would
restrict online video game use among young people to three hours per
week, to be regulated by both the video game industry and parents. In
2022, President Xi inaugurated the First National Conference on
Reading with a speech that highlighted the importance of reading not
only for acquiring knowledge, but also for expanding wisdom and
cultivating virtues:

Since ancient times, the Chinese people have advocated reading and
stressed the acquisition of knowledge through studying the nature of
things and the rectification of the mind through thinking with
sincerity. Reading helps the Chinese people to carry on the
traditional spirit of perseverance and shape their character of
self-confidence and self-reliance.

I call on party members and officials to take the lead in reading and
learning, foster virtues and ideals, and improve abilities. I hope
that all our children will have a habit of reading, enjoy reading, and
grow up in a healthy way. I wish all of our people are engaged in
reading and contribute to an atmosphere where everyone loves reading,
has good books to read, and knows how to gain from reading.18
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That same year, the Shanghai Library (East Branch) was opened to the
public. Just across the road from Century Park in Pudong district, the
library buzzes with activity every day, but particularly on Sunday
evenings. In many of the poorer nations of the Global South, it would
be common to see children playing on the street at this time. In the
Global North, perhaps the children would be indoors, eyes glued to
pixels on a screen. In Shanghai, children collect stacks of books,
sometimes seated on the lap of a father, mother, or grandparent,
excitedly flipping from one page to the next.

A small but prominent section of the library is dedicated to Marxist
literature. The shelves are arranged in chronological order: Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping. The most
memorable section of the library is the children’s section, packed
with rows upon rows of colourful children’s books, with couches,
tables, and booths inviting you to sit and read. This is where people
– adults and children alike – come to exercise their right to read
(outlined by Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights). Reading, in this tradition, is a decidedly social activity
that helps develop empathy and cognitive capacity, especially among
youth, and connects people to their history, culture, language, and
ancestors.

Artwork by Junaina Muhammed (India/Young Socialist Artists).

The Scent of Books in Kerala (India)

Kerala, a state in southwestern India with a population of roughly
33.4 million, is governed by the Left Democratic Front, whose main
party is the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M).19
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 If you drive into any town or city in the state, you will be sure to
see a public library filled with people browsing for books to borrow
or sitting at a table and reading. There are over nine thousand public
libraries in Kerala, which has an enduring tradition of reading due to
the active presence of the communist movement.

In the 1920s, during the movement to defeat British imperialism,
anti-colonial Indian nationalism placed the importance of literacy on
its agenda. One of the instruments for a literacy campaign was the
public library, which had already become an important part of the
development agenda in the states within India ruled by more liberal
princes (such as in Baroda, now known as Vadodara). What is
interesting about the story of the library movement in India is that
many of its pioneers were groups of friends who pooled their books and
newspapers to begin small libraries in their villages and towns. For
example, P. N. Panicker, known as the father of Kerala’s library
movement, recalled how, after he managed to subscribe to a newspaper
– an option that was largely limited to the wealthy – eight or
so people would gather at his home and ask him to read it aloud. ‘I
used to read them biographies of great men on days when we missed the
paper’, he said; ‘a friend of mine subscribed to two other
dailies, and he had a small collection of books. Pooling together
these books and newspapers in a small room, freely rented for the
purpose, we started a small library’.20
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 There are thousands of such stories. Many of these
libraries _later_ became part of the state library system, from
which they benefit greatly through the provision of resources. Such
small libraries continue to anchor the library movement in Kerala,
where the library movement is concentrated and began, and other parts
of India.

Mayyil Panchayat Grama, for instance, with a population of over 29,000
people, is one of the 93 local governments in Kannur, the district
with the largest number of libraries in Kerala. This locality has 34
libraries affiliated with the Kerala State Library Council. That means
that there is nearly one library per square kilometre, each with a
capacity of around 872 people. This is an extraordinary density of
libraries for any part of the world. These libraries are well-funded
by the state, equipped with computers and a unified catalogue, and
staffed with well-trained librarians who are an engaged and available
resource for the whole community.

Every one of these libraries has a backstory, and many of them are
named after social activists such as nationalist or communist leaders.
Here are a few of them in Kannur:

* Velam Public Reading Hall (Velam Potujana Vaayanashaala), in
Mayyil.21
[[link removed]] In
1934, Indian National Congress member Ishwaran Namboothiri arrived in
the Mayyil panchayat (village council) to promote the Hindi language
among the villagers. He built a small shed for his school, which
eventually became a library that houses 18,000 books at present.
* Paral Public Reading Hall (Paral Potujana Vaayanashaala), in
Thalassery. In 1934, a sixteen-year-old girl named Kaumudi donated her
gold jewellery to M. K. Gandhi as her contribution to the freedom
movement against British imperial rule. The money from the gold was
used to fund the creation of the library, which now includes an
archive of the district’s history.
* S. J. M. Reading Hall & National Library (S. J. M. Vaayanashaala &
Desheeya Granthaalayam), in Kandakkai. During the nineteenth-century
social reform movements in Kerala, a man named Sree Jathaveda Guru
went to Kandakkai to teach the villagers there about the need to fight
and transcend caste hierarchies and discrimination. As part of this
work, Guru established a small library which has since grown to hold a
collection of over ten thousand books.
* C. Madhavan Memorial Reading Hall (C. Madhavan Smaaraka
Vaayanashaala), in Pinarayi. The Communist Party of India’s first
conference in Kerala was held secretly in Pinarayi in 1939. Two
decades later, the progressive youth organisation Sree Narayana
Aashrita Yuvajana Sangham created the C. Madhavan Memorial Library,
named after a social activist. Thousands of books are collected and
stored here each year through a local system of donations. That
community spirit has expanded: now, when a new home is built in the
area, a fruit tree is planted nearby in the name of the library.
* Kulappuram Reading Hall & Library (Kulappuram Vaayanashaala &
Granthaalayam), in Ezhome. In the 1950s, weavers from the village of
Ezhome built a reading room called the Young Men’s Club. That
reading room is now a three-floor climate-controlled library with a
space for public events, a large playground, and a vegetable garden.
The library also offers unique social services including book
deliveries and motorcycle driving classes for women which have helped
over a hundred women obtain their driving licence. In 2008, the
library partnered with health workers of the Government Medical
College Kannur in Pariyaram to conduct visits to 700 homes in the
village. Doctors and librarians visited each home in the area to
collect health information and provide information about municipal
services.
* Homeland Upliftment Reading Hall & Public Library (Deshoddhaarana
Vaayanashaala & Public Library), in Chala. Situated along the edge of
a date palm grove, this modest library was established in the 1960s by
peasants who earned a living rolling beedi (hand-rolled cigarettes
popular among workers in the Indian subcontinent), weaving cloth, and
carrying out various forms of daily wage labour. These peasants pooled
their money to build a place for reading and reflection. Today, the
library has around 9,000 books.
* Thaliyan Raman Nambiar Memorial Public Reading Hall (Thaliyan
Raman Nambiar Smaaraka Potujana Vaayanashaala), in Kavumbayi. Leading
activist Thaliyan Raman was arrested during a peasant rebellion in
Kavumbayi in 1946 and killed by police in a massacre at the Salem Jail
four years later. In 1962, local farmers built this library in his
honour.
* Avon Library (Karivellur). What began as the Avon Club was
converted into the Avon Library in 1973, which today holds 17,574
books and has 619 members. This library conducts readings for
children, holds film screenings, and delivers books to the elderly at
their homes. A local history group in the library has been the
incubator for two history theses written by local scholars.

During the pandemic, the infrastructure of the library movement was
key in keeping communities safe and enabling students to continue
their education. One notable example of this is the NetWork project,
which began in Kannur with the aim of promoting social development in
the district’s Adivasi (tribal) regions. The project was led by Dr
V. Sivadasan, a CPI(M) politician and member of India’s Rajya Sabha
(upper house of parliament), and soon became an integral part of the
People’s Mission for Social Development (PMSD), a trust under the
Kannur District Library Council with Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi
Vijayan as its chief patron and Sivadasan as its chairman. The PMSD
pledged to help create a library in every ward (the smallest electoral
division in the Indian administrative system). As part of this
initiative, the PMSD worked with Kannur University and Kerala’s
Library Council to host the first Indian Library Congress in January
2023 in which half a million people participated. To build up to the
congress, the organisers held 1,500 seminars on a variety of topics.
Among them were 3,000 librarians, who were joined by employees in the
local self-government institutions, government officials, cooperative
workers, students, teachers, and others.

The Indian Library Congress has become an annual event hosted in
different states across India to promote the following ideas:

* There must be libraries in as many localities as possible, and
these libraries must be repositories not only of books but also the
most advanced technology possible.
* These libraries must be set up not only in urban areas but also in
rural and remote areas, such as the hilly tracts of Wayanad in
northeastern Kerala.
* These libraries must become an important and active public space
for the community as well as incubators for cultural development and
hubs for the organisation of and/or venues for activities such as
movie screenings, sports, art fairs, festivals, and vocational
training classes. Health centres and science classes must be
established next to these libraries.22
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The library movement is built by everyday working people. Among them
is Rajan V. P. of Payyannur Annur, a beedi worker with a class six
education. When Rajan began working at a beedi factory at a young age,
he was impressed by the practice of workers taking turns reading the
daily newspaper aloud to each other before lunch and a novel after
lunch (a practice that can also be found in Cuban cigar workshops).
Reading inspired Rajan to study further, which enabled him to get a
new job as a clerk in a cooperative bank near his home. By 2008, he
was a manager of the bank. That year, Rajan set up the People’s
Library and Reading Room, which has now blossomed to become a centre
of cultural life in the town.

Another key figure of the library movement is Radha V. P. (age sixty),
a beedi worker with a class seven education who became the head of her
household at a young age. As a young girl, she began to read the
CPI(M)’s weekly magazine, _Deshabhimani_, and write letters to the
editors commenting on its stories and poems. In 2002, Radha became
part of the Jawahar Library’s Women-Elderly Book Distribution
Project (Vanitha-Vayojana Pusthaka Vitharana Paddhathi), also known as
the mobile library, which began the year prior, to take books to the
readers’ homes, particularly women and the elderly. The sight of her
bringing books to every household after work with a library register
in one hand and a bag full of books on her shoulder soon became a
source of joy for locals. In 2018, she finished class ten and passed
the state exam needed to qualify for higher education. Yet, even in
the midst of studies and work, her commitment to the library never
faltered. ‘This is a job that I love’, she said. ‘I never felt
the bag was heavy, as the scent of the books always gave me immense
happiness’.23
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Working people like Rajan and Radha embody the human initiative behind
the flourishing library movement across Kerala.

Artwork by Salvatore Carleo (Italy/Potere Al Popolo!).

Red Books Day, from Japan to the Moon

On 21 February 2019, the Indian Society for Left Publishers, a group
of publishers affiliated with the CPI(M), initiated what would soon
become known as Red Books Day. This event, commemorating the
171st anniversary of _The_ _Communist_ _Manifesto_’s publication
and International Mother Language Day, seeks to rescue collective life
on a secular, cultural, and socialist basis. Red Books Day soon caught
the interest of publishers from around the world and by 2020 was being
celebrated by more than 30,000 people from South Korea to Cuba.24
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 By 2024, Red Books Day boasted over a million participants in events
from Indonesia to Chile (half a million of them in Kerala alone).25
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In 2020, the first year the celebration extended beyond India’s
borders, members of peasant organisations and trade unions placed
circles of plastic chairs on the road in small villages across Tamil
Nadu and discussed _The_ _Communist Manifesto_. Meanwhile, in
settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), members
sat together and took turns reading aloud during the Carnaval
festivities. In the mountains of Nepal, the agricultural workers’
union held discussions about their own red books while landless
peasants in Tanzania talked about the importance of literacy.

Four years later, the ten-day-long Havana Book Fair in Cuba set aside
21 February for a special Red Books Day series of events. In Kerala,
Chemm Parvathy produced a Red Books Day video that showed her dancing
in the markets and workshops of Trivandrum to the French version of
the _Internationale_. The song culminates with Chemm Parvathy at the
beach holding a communist flag, the red sun behind her in the horizon.
Alongside her video came a series of original posters designed by
artists from around the world to commemorate the day and encourage
more and more people to organise readings and performances in their
localities.

In preparation for the first international celebration of Red Books
Day 2020, the Indian Society of Left Publishers convened meetings of
publishers from around the world. These meetings led to the creation
of the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), which now
includes forty-five publishers.26
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 The IULP was formed not only to promote Red Books Day, but more
broadly to provide a platform for left publishers to defend from
attacks by the right wing and to advance rational and socialist ideas.
The IULP has produced several joint books on the same day in various
languages, from Romanian to Indonesian (including on the writings of
Che Guevara and to commemorate the Paris Commune) and has released
statements to defend authors and publishers when they have come under
attack.27
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The library movement has held Red Books Day events at public libraries
across Kerala, where cultural workers sang and acted while hundreds of
thousands of people lifted their spirits with rationality and the
promise of socialism.

Red Books Day is part of a broader cultural struggle to defend the
right to write, publish, and read red books and to fight against
contemporary obscurantist ideas that subvert reason. The hope is that
this day will go beyond the IULP to become a key date on the calendar
of progressive forces. Individuals and organisations far beyond the
circuits of the IULP and leftist currents have taken ownership of Red
Books Day as it becomes a force of its own and a key fixture on the
calendar of progressive forces. By the end of the decade, we hope that
over ten million people will participate in Red Books Day.

In the 1930s, women from the collective farms of Georgievsky in the
North Caucasus wrote a letter to the Soviet government. ‘Of course,
we must study in order to be able to manage large farms properly’,
they wrote. ‘We want to study all winter; to learn how to read and
write; to study the fundamentals of political knowledge and scientific
agriculture. Give us more books and notebooks, because the desire to
study is very great among the women’. One of these women, Fekla
Golovchenko (nearly fifty years old), added, ‘If I’m not properly
educated, I can’t handle my brigade’. Education, the women said,
‘is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity, like water for
a thirsty man’.28
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The words of the Georgievsky women echo those of Paloma Saiz Tejero of
the Brigade to Read in Freedom, who told us:

A people who read are a people who build critical thinking; they are
promoters of utopias. A people who know their history and take
ownership of it will feel proud of their roots. Reading socialises; it
shares experiences and information. Books allow us to understand the
reason that constitutes us and our history; they make our
consciousness grow beyond the space and time that founds our past and
present. Reading generates better citizens. Thanks to books, we learn
to believe in the impossible, to distrust the obvious, to demand our
rights as citizens, and to fulfil our duties. Reading influences the
personal and social development of individuals; without it, no society
can progress.

Artwork by Ingrid Neves (Brazil/Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research).

Notes

1
[[link removed]]John
Reed, _Ten Days That Shook the World _(New Delhi: LeftWord Books,
2017), 53.

2
[[link removed]]Omar
Martínez Legorreta, _Modernisation and Revolution in Mexico: A
Comparative Approach_ (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1989), 71.

3
[[link removed]]James
Presley, ‘Mexican Views on Rural Education 1900–1910’, _The
Americas_ 20, no. 1 (July 1963): 64–71.

4
[[link removed]]Jacqueline
Paola Ayala Zamora, _La obra educativa de José Vasconcelos _[The
Educational Work of José Vasconcelos] (Mexico City: Universidad
Pedagógica Nacional, 2005).

5
[[link removed]]José
Vasconcelos, ‘Education in Mexico: Present Day
Tendencies’, _Bulletin of the Pan American Union_ 56, no. 3
(January–June 1923): 230–245.

6
[[link removed]]Patience
Alexandra Schell, _Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico
City_ (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2003); Lloyd
Hughes, _Las misiones culturales mexicanas y su programa _[Mexican
Cultural Missions and their Programme] (Paris: UNESCO, 1950); Martha
Eva Rocha Islas, _Los rostros de la rebeldía. __Veteranas de la
Revolución Mexicana, 1910-1939 _[The Faces of Rebellion: Women
Veterans of the Mexican Revolution, (1910–1939)] (Mexico City:
Secretaría de Cultura, 2016); Paco Ignacio Taibo, _Bolcheviques__:
historia narrativa de los orígenes del comunismo en México
1919–1925 _[The Bolsheviks: A Narrative History of the Origins of
Communism in Mexico 1919–1925] (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1986).

7
[[link removed]]Louise
Schoenhals, ‘Mexico Experiments in Rural and Primary Education,
1921–1930’, _Hispanic American Historical Review_ 44, no. 1 (1
February 1964): 22–43.

8
[[link removed]]Elsa
Margarita Ramírez Leyva, ‘Mexico Reads: National Program for the
Promotion of Reading and the Book’ (paper presented at the World
Library and Information Congress: 77th IFLA General Conference and
Assembly, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 13–14 August 2011).

9
[[link removed]]Ángel
Vargas, ‘“Leer te hace mucho más crítico y te da armas para
defenderte todos los días”: Paloma Saiz’ [‘Reading Makes You
Much More Critical and Gives You Weapons to Defend Yourself Every
Day’: Paloma Saiz], _La Jornada_, 18 July
2024, [link removed].

10
[[link removed]]‘“The
Single Greatest Educational Effort in Human History”’, _Language
Magazine_ (blog), 8 November
2024, [link removed].

11
[[link removed]]Wang
Yianwei and Li Jiyuan, _Reform in Literacy Education in
China_ (Geneva: UNESCO, International Bureau of Education, 1990).

12
[[link removed]]Glen
Peterson, _The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South
China, 1949–1995_ (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1997), 3.

13
[[link removed]]Though
it is not discussed at length in this dossier, the Soviet Union was
exemplary for its literacy campaigns in the rest of the world. The
statistics of Soviet literacy do not tell the entire story, which is
the story of _how_ the Soviets were able to defeat the scourge of
illiteracy so rapidly. For instance, the Soviets set up reading huts
(_izby-chital’ny_) in rural parts of the former Tsarist Empire and
‘red yurts’ (tents) in the steppes in which they housed medical
units and literacy teams. This story has not been properly told.

14
[[link removed]]V.
I. Lenin, ‘The New Economic Policy’, _Lenin Collected Works_,
vol. 33, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 78.

15
[[link removed]]Heidi
Ross, with contributions from Jingjing Lou, Lijing Yang, Olga
Rybakova, and Phoebe Wakhunga, _China Country Study_, background
paper commissioned for the _Education for All Global Monitoring
Report 2006: Literacy for Life _(2005), UNESCO,
2006/ED/EFA/MRT/PI/85.

16
[[link removed]]Peterson, _The
Power of Words_, 85.

17
[[link removed]]Priscilla
C. Yu, ‘Leaning to One Side: The Impact of the Cold War on Chinese
Library Collections’, _Libraries and Culture_ 36, no. 1 (2001):
256; Zhixian Yi, ‘History of Library Developments in China’ (paper
presented at the ‘Future Libraries: Infinite Possibilities’,
session 164, Library History Special Interest Group, International
Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Conference,
Singapore, 15–23 August
2013), [link removed].

18
[[link removed]]Xi
Jinping, ‘Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Congratulatory Letter to the
First National Conference on Reading’, _China Daily_, 23 April
2022, [link removed].

19
[[link removed]]State
Planning Board, Government of Kerala, ‘Population and the Macro
Economy’, in _Economic Review 2017_ (Thiruvananthapuram:
Government of Kerala, January 2018), accessed 12 January
2025, [link removed].

20
[[link removed]]Lawrence
Liang and Aditya Gupta, _The Public Library Movement in India:
Bedrock of Democracy and Freedom_ (Public Resource, 2024), 54–55.

21
[[link removed]]In
Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, _granthaalayam_ means
library, while _va__a__yanashaala_ means reading hall, a place where
people can sit and read, some of which are small rooms that have just
a few newspapers and magazines but very few or no books. However,
sometimes _vaayanashaala_ is also used to refer to a library. All
institutions listed here have a library and a space for reading, as is
the case with most libraries in Kerala.

The names given here in parentheses are the official names of the
libraries. Some of these names incorporate words in Malayalam and
English. The Malayalam script is phonetic, which implies that words
are pronounced as they are written. But over the course of time,
Malayalam words have frequently been transliterated into English with
spellings that give an inaccurate idea of how the words should be
pronounced. Here we have used spellings that are as close as possible
to the way the Malayalam words are pronounced. In the case of proper
names, the widely used standard spellings have been retained even when
their transliterations do not reflect the actual pronunciation.

22
[[link removed]]P.
Mohandas and Manu M. R., eds., _People Own Spaces: Emergence of
Libraries in Kerala_ (Kannur: Indian Library Congress, 2024).

23
[[link removed]]M.
A. Rajeev Kumar, ‘Bag Full of Joy and Wisdom’, _The New Sunday
Express_, 26 June 2022.

24
[[link removed]]‘Red
Books Day Celebrated on Each Continent’, Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research, 30 April
2020, [link removed].

25
[[link removed]]Nitheesh
Narayanan, Sudhanva Deshpande, and Vijay Prashad, ‘Red Books Day
2024’, _Peoples Democracy, _3 March
2024, [link removed].

26
[[link removed]]International
Union of Left Publishers, ‘Who We Are’, [link removed].

27
[[link removed]]For
a full list, see ‘Books’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research, [link removed].

28
[[link removed]]Georgii
Nikolaevich Serebrennikov, _The Position of Women in the
USSR_ (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 81.

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