In the past I've read lots of this literature and I can't remember any of it. If you waaaaaaaaant an excellent scholarly account of the core of it look up the essays by Charles Post in HM on aristocracy of labor, and especially look at the closing paragraphs when he says of a future article that it will deal with the episodic nature of working-class movments and analyze the factors that let I development of opportunism sexism racism in interals. It's important stuff, & Charles has also reviewed Lih in Against the Current.
All those endless attempts to show why the Agent ofHistory had notemerged ANYPLACE mostly led off to various types of sectarianism. Fuck them Read Lih.
History (any way you want to define it) is of tremendous importance. I've red a lot of it but nowhere near enough. I have Mike Yates on mysleves but otherthings intervened. Read it and read it while you have eyes & brain to do so.
But writing or reading or thining about history is NOT the same as thinking historically. Thinking historically (what M & E referred to as their historical method) is as B Ollman labels it, doing history backward, and that is essential to understanding the present. See Ollmann's Dialectical Investigations & Dancne of the Dialectic.
If you want to read the best there is in the tradition you reference, read Samir Amin.
Another word or two on theory. I think I made Hewnwood's error in my thinking about teachers. They are, willly nilly, on the frontline of capitalist assault; they are essentiaaally being set up for destruction as an identifiable par ot the total work force. So we see thay should be in the front lines ofresistance to that corporate offensive which began in the 't0s and now has come around to them. But one can't give marching orders to The Workers from outside; it has to come from resistance beginning among them. If, when it does, then every worker flocks to the dfense of their siste/brother workers. But merely seeing that they "should" is pointless.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Carrol Cox Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 6:58 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Explanatory Note
You and I have discussed theory a lot, on and off list. Neither of us have a grip yet on Just what theory is and what is the relation between it and "practice." But whatever that relation is, it is not one in which theory shapes practice. That is an authoritarian Myth. It lies behind the M-L Party. Lih I think, along with developing practice all over the world, buried that myth. So I took your question in a double sense. (1) You wanted to know the relation of a particular discipline, Marxology, to actual practice. (b) You wanted to know the relationship between Marx's Critique & actual practice. Angel's reply was to the 2d: He said that as people turn left, they want to think within some framework, and he quickly summed up that framework, the core of which is that capitalism is a unique social system, NOT a normal development from history. (It destroys the vicious bourgeois myth of progress.) But it does not, it cannot tell us how to practice. Crudely, for this is unfair but it's an important partial truth, Doug is anti-theory. He thinks analysis should determine goals, and it cannot. Theory developed can tell us why FHP wrote an anti-theory paper, not a defense of theory. And now I've moved away from Marxology and Marx's Critique and thinking out loud in the muddle world in which people start to move (see above the 'comfort' of the Critique for them), and in another sense of theory they need and want and are crying out for theory, for the raising of their practice to a level of theory, for theorizing what they are doing so they can do it better. But that theory does not have the 'universalizing' drive of Theory, such as Marx's Critique.
In fact we are moving to a different domain, occupied by Christians, anarchists, Life-Style Marxists, Stalinists, Trotyskists, non-Marxists such as Ian, etc. We have to start putting a we rather than an I before our thinking. We are entering the endlessly muddy world of the anti-capitalist struggle. Thought/Theory (which itself needs theorization) is what we work out together in our practice: it cannot be worked out in isolation as some Theory can. I care about Graeber as one voice of one trend among anarchists: and we have to work together. And in another 'room' as it were I also agree with Doug's nice spearing earlier today of anarchism: its metaphysics of the state. But he was wrong to call it a bias: it's a conviction, a wrong conviction I think but a conviction rather than a bias, which term is just more poisoning of the wells of discourse. We can fight the anarchist theory here or in journals, but we fucking do not insult them: they are comrades. So I guess I would say the answer to your question is the endless wrangling that goes on among comrades.
The only person perhaps who has sort of tried to theorize all this is Ellen Wood, and indifference to her is anti-theory with a bite. Her title tells us:
Democracy Against Capaitalism.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of shag carpet bomb Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 4:21 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Explanatory Note
I must be dumber than a box of rox because I took Angelus's response to be that people are more intested in reading marxist theory because of what's going on around them. i don't see how that answers the question I'd asked.
You know, someone once said that a marxist publication has a theory about where the subject of history emerges - something about how it can't emerge in the u.s. because people in the u.s. are too spoiled by consumer goods, wages, etc. to every care abotu overthrowing capital. Thus, they occupy a subject position that makes them resistant to seeing themselves as harmed by capitalism. People in the third world, even people in non-industrialized countries (IIR this view correctly) may be more apt to see their interests as opposed to capitalism and so more likely to be revolutionary or a fertile ground where they might want to stir up revolution.
you get my point yet?
Doug says theory matters, that it can be used to shape how we act, what goals we pursue, where we protest, who were are interested in as possible allies in the struggle against capitalism, where we attack capitalism, if we can attack it, where to best spent our limited energies. Most people agree with him.
So, in this debate does it matter. Does Graeber's view tend to push us in one direction or not? If it does, is this a "bad" direction and why?
At 03:48 PM 1/17/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>My eyes began worsening again in late November. I have now reached the
place
>where I can no longer read anything. I play it aloud through ZoomText at a
>painfully slow rate. Writing is not so deeply affected, but after a certain
>point I lose track of my text because I cannot scan it quickly. This is all
>complicated now of course because of my physical condition, which is
>improving but still leaves me beat periodically. I have a response, I hope
>nearly coherent, to shag's question on theory and practice which I hope to
>send out today. In the meantime on the specific case of theory/practice,
>Angel's response is pretty good.
>
>I hope some other than a morale-boosting off list poster take up the
>question of Vol. 2.
>
>Carrol
>
>P.S. to Jim F. Will you get me off the A-list & M-Thaxis. I have to
simplify
>my life and my inbox.
>
>
>
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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