DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com wrote:
> This is an incredibly interesting post. My only problem with it is that
> I've had very similar arguments put to me in a different forum, only with
> the word "Marxism" appended to the list "psychology, theology, phrenology
> ...", and "class interests" appended to the list of things which do not
> exist yet which have well-developed theories about them.
I agree. Moreover, I don't believe that the distinction (which I obviously make) can be established in an academic context of verbal disputation. I will not succeed in convincing anyone who is not already commited to making sense of the world in Marxist terms, because the core of my argument is simply that IF historical materialism is true, THEN certain abstractions are empty ones. And what this points to is the profoundly different routes which one follows to marxism or to any other theory of social relations. One has to be a marxist in practice before one even thinks about becoming a marxist in theory. One cannot, I think, be "converted" to marxism by reading or studying marxist texts -- one must *first* find oneself involved in struggle which whatever theories one carries with one (consciously or unconsciously) fail to explain. Then one looks around for some way to explain that practice. I became a marxist before I had read a single work by any marxist. Becoming a marxist was what led to my reading marxists, which I did in order to make some sense of the practice in which I found myself involved. This is why I always come back to the line by Mephistopheles (in Goethe's *Faust*) which Marx quotes in *Capital*: *Im Anfang war die That*. The priority of action to thought, of practice to theory (the defintion of theory, in fact, as the summary and self-critique practice -- and a specific practice, the practice of the international working class under capitalism). She/he who is brought to Marxism by thinking which is not forced by practice (i.e., some sort of collective political struggle) will never be a very happy marxist but will be forever voyaging new seas of thought to reassure him/herself that he/she is not missing out on something. I never read the tale of the Wandering Dutchman, but that seems to be an apt metaphor for those who are marxist by intellectual conviction rather than political necessity.
Carrol