Nathan Newman wrote:
>The classic Marx statement on it all was "The point is not to understand he
>world but to change it."
-Yes, but Marx spent *lots* of time trying to understand the world. -Not to mention writing theory. He was not one to subordinate his -interests to the immediate needs of activists.
No- but he did spend a lot of time with activists understanding what they were looking for and addressing a lot of the strategies then under discussion, attacking some, promoting others. His work is permeated by engagement with the debates of his day with concrete responses.
I am not drawing an opposition between theory and action-- they are intimately tied together. My biggest problem with most left theorists is that they are so abstracted from action in their writing-- positing the theory without the concrete possibilities.
-- Nathan Newman