> Who says you have to construct from first principles? By all means use
facts.
Gar, I hope this sentence is an accident, which you don't actually believe yourself, because if you do mean it I'm not sure whether it's possible to hold a conversation with you. To say this is tantamount to saying that facts explain themselves. Not only do they not explain themselves, they do not even exist "in themselves," and while "Just the facts, Maam" may be both good TV and good "common sense," please note (for example) that asserting the fact that "A murdered B" presupposes an elaborate social theory which is the result of millenia of action and thought. We can still have very real debates about whether the "fact" (returned to below) that "A killed B" necessarily has any connection with the "fact" that "A murdered B."
And neither is the proposition, "A killed B," in any simple sense a "fact," for "to kill" is a *relationship*, not an "observable event," and it is in fact fundamental to modern thought, both idealist *and* historical materialist, that relations cannot be observed but must be thought (see the *Grundrisse*, but one need not be a Marxist to recognize the truth of this). So the assertion of "A killed B" implies a set of principles in terms of which the relationship "killed" can be *thought*. No principles, no facts.
You ARE whether you know it or not acting from principles. The only question is how conscious you are of the principles you are operating from. Unless you acknowledge to yourself what those principles are, and make those principles clear to others in your posts, we do not share any foundation which makes us mutually intelligible.
Now under *all* historical conditions and contexts, the principles which one adheres to blindly, without critique, are the principles of "common sense," i.e., the principles which make intelligible the class relations of that given social order, and in terms of which one *cannot*, however much one wishes to, do other than reaffirm in various forms the principles of the ruling class(es) of that social order.
So Gar, what *are* the principles in terms of which you arrive at your views of the relationship (actually an internal relationship) of practice and thought. It seems to me that you make thought the ultimate reality, and practice a merely subordinate actuality which flows from thought. Thought "invents" activism, and then more thought says that "activism" is the way to reconcile the endless confusions which thought, separated from practice, generates for itself.
Carrol Cox