>Doug might be impressed by Adorno's skepticism of the demand that theory
>must have direct political implications, but to compare the juvenille
>demand to elicit immediately the political consequence of a theory to
>the Gestapo's demand for papers is itself a juvenille debating tactic.
I am impressed by that, if only because I'm so bad at answering the What is To Be Done question myself, as I'm impressed by a lot in Adorno. But his line on the antiwar movement was a load of shit. The "Chinese" torture tactics - weird of him to use that modifier, really, were they all that different from, say, German methods? - are pretty irrelevant when you have the greatest imperial power in the history of the world dumping millions of tons of bombs all over Indochina and killing 2-3 million people. There's not much complexity to the What Is To Be Done question on that kind of issue - you do everything you can to stop the slaughter.
But as for the broader WITBD issue, well, it's not really a debater's tactic. The "what would you do, wise guy?" question is used all the time to silence critics; that's the juvenile debating tactic here, not Adorno's response. Do you know WITBD, Rakesh? If you do, please tell us, because I don't see a very long list of answers floating around right now.
Doug