Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 2, 2007, at 8:58 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> > You complain that activists do not take
> > interest in theory
>
> Yup. If they did, the above points would be obvious to them.
Political activists _AND_ many self-identified political theorists tend to use the term theory to apply to any sort of abstract thinking, which is simply absured and empties the concept of any useful meaning. And this leads to a false (and dogmatic) conception of the relation of theory to practice -- i.e. the assumption that theory can directly shape practice. I think the "two points" referred to are probably correct, but they can't be derived theoretically: in fact, from within a serious theoretical perspective they are surely false. They are merely empirical observations, almost certainly correct, but they have no theoretical purchase whatsoever.
Carrol