Christian Gregory
>But Dennis, Nathan, Marta, Doug, Max, Yoshie, and, okay,
>everybody on the list, have a lot more to say about how to
>make a difference in the world outside the classroom than
>theorists ever did. And even if they are all to one degree or
>another familiar with theory, their effectiveness wasn't because of
>it. Seems like an obvious point, but such things take academics
>30 years to figure out.
> Christian
-I know Doug, Yoshie, and Marta owe a great deal of their insight to Marx -and other theorists, because they have explicitly said so on occassion. -I suspect the same of Dennis, Nathan and Max, but don't want to make -claims on their behalf.-- Carroll
Of course many activists owe a great deal of their insight to a range of theorists, including Marx (and even more so in many ways Gramsci in my political strategic thinking). Even those activists who don't read a lot of theory absorb it in the "common sense" rhetoric and thought among other activists -- my Gramscian theory slipping out there.
The issue is not theory but applying theory. Many academics think they get better insight from an "objective" observer position, but they actually lose out on the insight that comes from continually forcing theory up against reality. In an odd way, it is the least scientific viewpoint possible, since it becomes a world of hypotheses with little engagement with results. Some social scientists try to use "natural experiments"-- retroactively examining correlations between factors -- to explain the world, but at a gut level, I've always learned more through the very commitment to seeking a particular result informed by theory and having to deal with revising my understanding based on the failure or success of such a strategy.
I occasionally express frustration with activists who won't evaluate the failure of strategy in light of alternative theories of how to pursue social change, but I am even more disdainful of academics who have no interest in even seeing how practical results might help them choose between their various theoretical debates. There is some symmetry of the two frustrations-- the theory rigidity being passed down as a "common sense" narrowness of tactics among some groups of activists, but in general I find most activists far more pragmatic in discussing alternative tactics and therefore actually more theoretically engaged in the real sense of truth seeking.
-- Nathan Newman