This is absolutely basic, and it is testimony to the grip a vulgar empiricism and various forms of unconscious pragmatism have over all who grow up in bourgeois society that the point has had to be made over and over again by every revolutionary leader from Marx to the present. (Mao said it most dramatically, but there has never been a revolutionary of any commitment whatever who has not said it in some way or other.) When the day comes when someone says this and gets a reaction of "huh, of course, why do you bother to say it?" -- at that day the classless and stateless society of the future will have arrived.
Now, one of the elements which has cast glue over this discussion is the urge for newfangleness illustrated by the term "activism" itself. Whether we are radical reformers or revolutionaries, we are our history, and thoughtless proliferation of new terminology tends to violate our history. And there is a very old terminology indeed for this discussion, "Practice" and "Theory." The *marxist* assumption is that theory is a moment in practice, but an absolutely essential moment, for it is through theory that we become conscious of what it is we do. Legitimate and crucial debates have been had and will be had among comrades on just how this complex of relations operates at a given time, but the debate and mutual understanding (which is of course fundamental to political solidarity) is aborted by bringing the slang term "activists," into this discussion, for that term is merely a casual reference, a sometimes useful shorthand, suitable for conversation, but it can only utterly obscure the issues which this thread is raising (or, rather, re-raising for the n-zillionth time).
Carrol
All activists do, whether or not they
> think much of the role of theory. Further, paid activists who head
> 'non-profit' organizations, it seems to me, tend to develop an ideology
> that justifies their social positions, which ought to be subject to
> critique.
>
> Activists who hope to create a world in which they won't have to be
> 'activists' have no reason to think that such critique diminishes our work.
>
> Yoshie
>
>
>