Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I had practical purposes (analyzing X to do Y, for instance to decide whether or not to work harder organizing small shop-keepers in Japan) in mind, rather than arbitrarily chosen analytical purposes (analyzing X to do nothing in particular, at least in immediate terms). Perhaps, for some sort of political organizing, it may occur to some to wish to know what factors matter most when determining "whether a person is a 'capitalist,'" but I don't know what sort. For what practical purpose would you want to know that (not a rhetorical question)? Yoshie
You make yourself very clear. I don't know if anyone else finds this line of questioning as exasperating as I do. My usual impulse is to ridicule it, which I will try to avoid this time around (as deserving as it might be). I think this question can be parodied as something like this: do you need to know what a potato really, really is in order to decide whether to boil it or bake it? No you don't, but you may be a person who has a deep interest in nutrition, which broadly influences the way in which you think about cooking, and, ultimately perhaps, how you actually cook. I seem to recall Lenin saying that without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement. The old dead white guy was right. Now how can the question of class, and class composition, be of anything but central importance to a marxist, whose action is supposedly for the working class against capitalism? It comes back to the level of abstraction thing again doesn't it. Knowing exactly who the capital! is! ts are might not help you decide within the next five minutes as to whether to go down to the demonstration or to turn on the TV instead, but it does influence your broad world outlook. That's what theory is supposed to do. It's a question of your broad cognitive organisation. It's not a little piece of information that helps you to decide what to do next. BTW I do think that there is an element of rhetoric in the above question, in that the answer is already given earlier. Those people who pose theoretical questions are those people who do "nothing in particular", who don't do GOOD WORKS (oh hell, here I go again). We all, without exception, act in the world, and in that sense there is no such thing as "doing nothing in particular", and the way we act in the world is partly a function of how we think about the world. There may be another implication here and that is that discussion lists should not be about theoretical questions, but only for making very specific kinds of a! rr! angements. Well that is not so very different from the earlier poi The question of how very ordinary people live their lives, how their values and beliefs are formed and find expression in their daily activities, etc., etc. This is all of far greater political significance than the grand political gesture of the terminally committed. Oh how does one even begin to explain....? Tahir