This is a fine article that Doug, Liza and Christian have written and I agree with it. However, IN ADDITION to anti-intellectualism and american pragmatism, wouldn't it be fair to count the FAILURE of many 19th and 20th century theories (or at least the incarnations of those theories) among the reasons that the American movment is so anti-theoretical?
I mean, who among those of us who went through the New Communist Movement does not still feel the sting? In the end, that movement ended up bickering over who was the most ideologically pure, even though it had minimal impact on American society in the 70s when it was at its height. Finally, a whole generations of seasoned activists who had embraced theory got burnt out and withdrew. Those that remained, like the American RCP, just persisted in their claims of ideological purity. The trotskyist movement went its course also and what you end up with there is the WWP which seems to have made a fetish out of the type of activism that the "activitism" piece describes.
Now I just wonder if this might not also be a reason for this problem of snubbing theory.
-Thomas
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