World Book Day: Consciousness, Struggle and Intellectual Recovery of Youth

by: Tahir Nazir

Every year, World Book Day is celebrated all over the world on April 23, but the real spirit of this day is not just love for books, but also a message to transform knowledge into consciousness and consciousness into struggle. In today’s era, this question has become more important than ever: why are young people moving away from books, and what are the socio-economic effects of this distance?

From a communist perspective, knowledge is not just a collection of information but a means of creating class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had made it clear that in the capitalist system, the ruling class controls not only the economy but also ideas and narratives. Today’s social media is a modern form of this continuum, where young people are kept busy but not awakened.

Mobile phones and social media have imprisoned young people in a circle where temporary entertainment, artificial trends and frivolous content prevail. On the contrary, books give the youth the awareness of history, economics and politics that gives them the courage to understand their exploitation and stand against it. When the youth is away from books, they are actually away from their class identity and the direction of struggle.

Writings like The Communist Manifesto are not just books but revolutionary documents, which make the working class realize that their deprivation is not an accident but the result of an organized system. Similarly, Das Kapital exposes the depth of capitalist exploitation. But when the youth remains unfamiliar with these books, they remain part of the same system that it is their historical responsibility to change.

Today, the need is to attract the youth back to books, but not just to curricular literature, but to revolutionary and critical literature. If educational institutions, student organizations and social circles really want change, they must promote reading as a political and social process.

World Book Day reminds us that true freedom is not only political but also intellectual. And this intellectual freedom is possible only when the youth understands the system around them through books, questions it, and plays their role in the struggle to change it. Because history is a witness that when consciousness awakens, revolution is born.

٭٭٭