Carrol Cox:
> True, but the situation is not desperate -- _if_ one subordinates study
> to practice, as suggested in the Theses on Feuerbach, especially Nos. 1,
> 2, & 11. Class, especially, is not usefully considered synchronically:
> the purpose of class analysis is strategic planning, and strategy always
> refers to how things _will_ be at some future point, not how they _are_.
> That is why most of the posts re reparations on this list have been
> simply irrelevant. They all talk about conditions and consciousness at a
> time when there has not yet been major political (mass) activity around
> the demand for reparations -- utterly useless. Only protracted struggle
> around the demand can create the conditions within which consciousness
> concerning it is discussable topic. Understanding _always_ lags behind
> action. "The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which
> is isolated from practice is a purely _scholastic_ question."
But people want to determine what is meant by "reparations". The discussion showed that this was not obvious. It's true one can organize a mass movement around vague ideas, maybe much better than around more concrete ones, but then one can expect an unexpected outcome. In the case of reparations, this is an important issue, because the ideas about its meaning are so radically different from one another.
One of the reasons I suggested following a classical-liberal model of thinking about the question is precisely that it is not in any way isolated from a potential concrete practice, to wit, the payment of particular amounts of money to particular persons for the satisfaction of a particular debt. Lots of little hard grainy particles in the liberal concrete there; one could do something with it.