[lbo-talk] not theory

[Chris Sturr]

I could definitely be wrong, but wasn't "philosophy of praxis" just
Gramsci's term for Marxism (I always assumed it to be a euphemism so he
could get his writings past the prison censors, but I could have made that
up), and by "praxis" didn't he mean some combination of theory and practice
(practice informed by theory, or vice versa, or both?), so that it doesn't
make sense to ask what the relationship between theory and praxis is?  (Or
you can ask, but the answer is that theory is a *component* of praxis?)  (I
understand that I'm not really answering your questions, Shag!)


> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:05:34 -0500
> From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] not theory
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.2.20120126065712.0710b2f0 at mail.cleandraws.com>
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>
> I am curious though. I was a student of what is called the "philosophy of
> praxis" - a tradition of scholarship that was absorbed with the questions:
> what is theory? what is praxis? what is the relationship between the two?
> why does it matter?
>
> so, outside of that rarified circle of scholarship, i'm curious how these
> ideas are conceived otherwise.
>
> there's a lot of complaining that the theorists don't *do* anything, or
> that what they write about is too arcane for people to understand or for it
> to be useful to anything. max likes to bitch ever so often about this, as
> others have here on the list.
>
> on the other side, there's a lot of complaining that there's to much
> thoughtless action. In the FHP article, for instance, the complaint is that
> demos against the war used slogans such as "no blood for oil" which, to the
> authors, represented an action (protest) directed by bad theory.  FH&P felt
> that the assessments people made about why there was a war were wrong and
> that, had they had better assessments about what caused the war, they would
> come up with better slogans and, perhaps?, a different political practice.
>
> As FH&P point out, of course, it's not that there is no theory going on. It
> is rather that there is bad leftist theory going on. Etc. So, even here,
> the complaint about lack of theory isn't really about the lack of theory,
> but about the lack of the correct theory.
>
> At any rate, just curious what people think it is.
>
>
> --
-- 
Chris Sturr
Co-editor, *Dollars & Sense*
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Boston, Mass. 02108
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