I am not trying to tell you that your opinions are "invalid" or "worthless." You raise a good problem well known by actual, practicing Marxists about Western "Marxists" that seek to endlessly critique society without changing it. However, it would be a mistake to not learn from Socialists in the past and present who have a wealth of experience and lifetimes of analysis to draw from. Rather, my goal isn't telling you that you don't know enough to be involved, but that I think you are making a critical error in attacking Socialists based on what I believe are misconceptions and misunderstandings, and this hurts leftist movement.

I think if you made an effort to understand what these billions of Socialists believe in and are committed to, you would better understand if their ideas and systems are valid or not. I think without reading theory that you are only going to have an incomplete and partial view, and this, while not delegitimizing your opinions and views, certainly harms the integrity. Celebrating an "end to theory" was something the Socialist Revolutionaries adhered to pre-revolution in Russia, and this was proven a mistake, while the Bolsheviks' strict adherence to theory and mass worker organization proved correct.

ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand,

It kinda irks me seeing comrades engage with people assuming they're arguing in good faith and immediately it turns out it's just unabashed western chauvinism. The fact that you refer to Debord is just the icing on the cake.

I've read Debord, guy had a good fifteen page essay hidden inside The Society of the Spectacle and then over a hundred pages of masturbatory inscrutability of the kind Zizek perfected and good old french chauvinism. I put more stock in the works credited by people who actually achieved revolution and then a better quality of life for their nations through them. A social science requires falsifiability.

On the other hand, there is Lenin boiling down in a hundred pages a very thorough understanding of Marxist thought and the critical steps the revolution must take to defend itself as well as the reasons for it. No fluff, no academicist posturing, just keeping in the Marxist tradition of making the subject only as complex as it needs to be. Then he went and fucking proved it with his practice.

Capital isn't an entry level text, it is a thorough study of the mechanisms of capital, the value form, the objects of financial speculation and their interaction with the real material economy. Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, even Socialism: Utopic and Scientific by Engels are thorough, clear, and concise. And they work.

when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee

Samwise Gamgee isn't a good person, he's a fictitious character in a fantasy novel.

You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.

You need to have something before it can be taken away from you.

Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own.

Then you know the illusion of choice isn't the same thing as a people's right to self-governance. And further, that a movement of people in opposition to a media established regime is not stealing their neighbors' liberty by asserting some of its own.

Not even if all the TVs and radios and newspapers say so.