>T: The best position is always the one that is the best informed;
>everything else is mere pragmatism.
just to be clear, i was kind of talking to carrol, so my example was of the way a theory about how radical consciousness may or may not emerge -- on based on the concept of a 'subject of history' that emerges due to its position within class society. and, in turn, how that theory shaped the way some u.s. leftists decided to pursue their struggle. another example might be if you have a theory that you can change consciousness by writing good polemics in popular places, then you will focus on doing that or supporting the writing, publication and dissemination of these materials. another one might be that you believe that, in order for us to bring down capitalist institutions, we need to create new ones within the shell of the old much as the bourgeoisie was creating what would become bourgeois institutions within the shell of feudal society, then you focus on building alternative institutions.
none of this was brought up in order to argue to correctness or lack thereof of these theories of social change.
Not sure why pragmatism is a bad thing.
information isn't theory and being informed doesn't mean you have any clue what theories are shaping your interpretation of information.
I haven't read enough to see any theory in Graeber. He's doing empirical work. He surely has some metatheoretical commitments such as how we know, what it is that we are knowing, etc. But I didn't get a sense he was writing in order to contribute to a body of theory on a topic. I might have missed it in the intro, where such commitments are usually fleshed out.
At any rate, in my current state of partial ignorance about the book, I don't know if he's doing *substantive* theory in the sense that he's focused on how some part of the human world works in order to make generalizable claims about it. That's substantive theory. Haven't read enough of Debt to know if Graeber lays his theory cards out on the table or not, or has just decided to pursue an interesting line of empirical investigation.
This whole elephant in the room that no one brings up much - what they mean by theory -- reminds me of an article FH&P wrote on activistism. The article gestures at theory, but they don't really mean theory as far as I can tell. They appear to mean that they just want people to talk more and that such talk will move people to the correct POV. The example they work around, mainly, is the anti-war movement, believing that the protests against the war were misguided in so far as the signs and slogans seemed to them to be uninformed. They have some line in there about the fact that just being knee jerk opposed to the war was a problem because the issue was so much more complicated than simply a matter of being opposed to the war on conventional grounds. Was it something about how conventional arguments about imperilist grabs for oil didn't explain it (wrong theory??). Dunno. It was never shown how the right theory would have changed political practice and, thus, arighted the incorrect approach to opposing the war. And now, how many years later? It doesn't seem to have mattered anyway does it. At any rate, uninformed in that context means that people are "working from a POV I don't approve of." As they point out in the article people who say they have no time for theory are actually working from a theory and it's one a good leftist is usually opposed to -- too much individualism, etc.
but what their working from a (wrong) theory does to harm social struggle is not clear.
speaking of slogans, I read in the new book out from OWS that a lot of the crazy slogans people saw were the result of the way a certain area of the park came to be a place where transients/visitors showed up for a couple of hours or a day. Apparently, people began showing up to air whatever ideas or grievances they had. You could find them at a certain end of the park because it was on the periphery and didn't require that you actually enter the park to engage with passersby and the media. It became popular for anyone with some cause to show up with their sign but they weren't part of OWS. In fact, some of them were actually hostile to it, but were using it in order to gain attention for some cause or to act out since, as Graeber has discussed in his previous work, the consensus model hasn't formalized the best way to deal with people who have a weak hold on reality.
(Of course, the model of politics we use in the u.s. is to make the psychopaths CEOs)
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)