Good essay. Knowledge that we exist and have a thought out worldview is a step up from erasure. People who are ready for communism and know it exists will go so much further so much faster if they know it exists and have some idea of what it's like. People who are ready for it and have no idea will have a much harder time arriving at the same theory and if they know communism exists but only vaguely as a taboo, they may skip over it, trying to create an alternative instead. I'd venture to say it's a reason why people in the west will tend to get taught about communism vaguely as a taboo ideology, but won't be told to read Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. If you read Marxist theorists and practitioners, it immediately gives the impression of depth of thought and analysis, not the shallow "we just want a utopia but then bad people fucked it up" vague taboo version of it.

I know people's reactions won't all be identical, but I found it humbling the first time I read theory. Like "holy shit people have already put so much depth of thought into struggle." Prior to theory, I tended to be the "free thinker" type, the skeptic, the "I will reason about it and work it out from that". Theory was a wake up call on how shitty my world model was and No Investigation, No Right to Speak made it clearer why; I was trying to replace investigation with "thinking about it harder" and in retrospect it's clear that the culture I was/am immersed in actively encourages that kind of dead-end navel gazing. Someone in the west being a breadtubian dark background pregnant pause scholar talking about philosophy presents zero threat to capital. Someone understanding class struggle and how to navigate it concretely, now that is a threat to power.