Yes Jahreal
I just replying real briefly for now, and not trying to fully address all the points you raised. In brief: as far as the non-reading non-"intellectual" massives... if they don't read or can't read, they still listen to music and have conversations. Music can be a powerful organizing tool. How much people never heard about what is Rasta until they heard Bob, or Spear, or Culture. How much people never knew what apartheid was until they hear Peter tellin them to fight against it. I know people for whom listening to artists like PE, dead prez, etc. was the first step in turning them into hardcore activists. Who did the Nigerian government fear more than Fela Kuti? Music can definitely be a powerful medium for the message we trying to transmit - at least, for initially turning people on to the message.
From working with various community organizations, I learned that the only way to really get people down with the program is to directly engage them in face-to-face conversation. Knocking on doors and gettin em slammed in your face if need be. People also want to be talked with, not at. Few people like to be preached at, especially by people who they don't know from adam and eve. When we talkin to people, we shouldn't only be trying to get them "down with the program" as we may define "the program", we must also find out what "the program" might mean to *them.*
Once the imagination of the massives is sparked by seeing a movement at work, a movement that really offers them something, and in which they are expected to be participants and decision-makers, more and more people will gravitate towards it. Movements become succesful when they crystallize and put into an organized form, what people are already thinking. Just seeing that it was POSSIBLE to stand up to armed racist police and survive - as the Black Panther Party showed with the community police patrols that were their first public activity - sparked the imagination of people who already KNEW they'd had ENOUGH. Marcus Garvey words and works sparked the imagination of millions of people cos he spoke the right words to them at the right time, and set a concrete example of how it was POSSIBLE to build an alternative economy and social structure for Black people, as the white economy and social structure virtually completely excluded us. The US government bombed MOVE because they showed that it was POSSIBLE to exist "outide the system", i.e., surviving co-operatively and refusing to deal with the taxes, job market, etc. in babylon, and that was POSSIBLE to stand up to the system and actually win, once you present a strong united front. (Cos before they got bombed, MOVE succeeded in having some of their political prisoners freed, by protest and agitation rather than "legal" channels, and embarrased the Philly administration by surviving a year-long siege when Mayor Rizzo attempted to starve them out of their house with a 24-hour police blockade).
Nowadays we have maybe a more uphill battle than people had in dem days, cos mainstream media saturation and "dumbing down" has made the average person perhaps less receptive to our kind of ideas. But, I still think we can do it though. Yeah there's a lot of wilfully ignorant zombies out there, but there's also a lot of people who are hungry for knowledge and purpose. That's why various dead-end cults like the Israeli Church of Practical Universal Knowledge or the Nuwaubians have had no trouble recruiting members. If they can do it with a bunch of gobbledygook, why can't we do it with the truth?
Well I gotta go, more later...