LOL
i love wanky esoteric debates, personally. and, personally, I think there's always a connection to political practice. I was just wondering if anyone else happened to have made such a connection. It often doesn't get discussed.
Doug made a claim in that direction when he accuses Graeber of showing anarchist bias where the enemy becomes the state. I don't know enough about this debate to know if he's correct or not, but I use it as illustration.
I guess it reminds me a bit of the debates over value theory. I never really understood why it mattered and no one, as yet, has ever explained why it might make a difference to how we fight capitalism.
As another debate, there's a seemingly wanky debate over productive/unproductive labor. I've seen it argued that the action is in productive labor, so we shouldn't worry about unionizing sex workers since they engage in reproductive labor. similar debates have taken place here, long ago, over whether we should spend much energy on unionizing police or would we be better served making linkages with members of the military. Those kinds of practical questions can be traced to rather wonky discussion of what Marx meant by reproductive labor or his ideas about how various classes interacted (say in 18th Brumaire) etc.
that's what I'm getting at. I think it's very likely that there is a connection to theory, I just haven't seen anything that helps me understand yet.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)