On 2011-08-13, at 9:09 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Aug 13, 2011, at 6:01 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> I would think that you more than anyone would want to pay special attention to these rules of conduct, since you must surely see this list as another venue for organizing, as someone who professes to be not interested in only interpreting the world in various ways but in changing it.
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> Not everyone's an organizer. It's important work, but some people aren't good at it. There's a role for thinking, analysis, and criticism, too.
Yes, but this still leaves us with the observation, integral to Marxism, that theory divorced from practice is next to useless. IMO, this is certainly true in relation to issues of a mainly tactical nature which divide organizations engaged in trade union and political struggles. Those outside these struggles don't have any direct means of assessing the balance of forces, on which tactical decisions of great importance are based, and I've learned over time and my own experience to weigh judgements from the sidelines very cautiously as a result.
But I don't know how much farther you can stretch the principle, since it is simply not possible to acquire first-hand knowledge of the very great majority of the issues, many of them international ones, which concern us and draw our comments. We have to rely instead on the depth of our reading and our political intuition dervived from prior study and experience. So I would say that while theory doesn't have to be contemporaneous with practice, whether it needs to have been informed by it at some point for the unity of theory and practice to be meaningful is an intriguing question. I think it's noteworthy that all of the great Marxist thinkers had in common some direct acquaintance with mass working class organizations, often in a leadership position. I can't offhand think of any who didn't.
But the problem, which I've alluded to previously, is that there are no longer any militant or socialist working class organizations and struggles to provide laboratories for social theorists. This may explain why we're experiencing, IMO, a poverty of (idealist) philosophy on the left relative to the production of previous generations from those, mainly academics, who identify with the Marxist tradition. Others, of course, will not share this opinion.