shag carpet bomb wrote at Friday, January 27, 2012 9:21 AM:
you've lost me.
[cbc] That's partly because I deliberately shifted the basis of the discussion, and I'm not an accomplished epistemologist to make myself as clear as necessary. I'll continue to muddle along. A preliminary observation, when real debates about real relations of theory and practice come up they _never_ extend "practice" to refer to ordinary human behavior. To get into that is to muddle the discussion irreparably and wander for ever talking past each other. This discussion makes sense only in the domain of conscious action and serious questions as to the basis of a particular _course_ of conscious action to Theory regarded as existing only in conscious minds. "Theory" becomes meaningless if you see it as something somehow drifting up there invisibly above the heads of people going about their daily business.
[shag] when people talk . . .
[cbc] When people talk they wander on mostly about what they are doing right then, or a million other things, but merely people talking has nothing to do and can only confuse examining the classical debates over the relevance/relation of conscious theory to conscious political practice of _groups_. It simply never comes up in the free-floating way it is being discussed here. The discussion is meaningless unless so anchored, and no one is ever going to understand anyoe.
Shag] when people talk as Tahir did, of practice as something broader, they are ... often talking about the way, say, individualism shapes so much of what we do in the united states. i hope i don't have to get into the nitty gritty but what that means is: . . . .
[cbc] I struggled for a while to make sense of what Tahir had to say and concluded that it had no relevance to discussions of Theory and Practice as they have actually developed among (say) Marxists over the last 150 years. He is wandering into a marsh where nothing can be said with any precision. "Individualism" was never a theory and no one has ever attempted to theorize it; certainly not Mill or Smith. By the time you get to them, it is a deeply held assumption, seldom stated in any explicit way, that the world consists of independent agents, coming from nowhere¸to then make various efforts to enter into relations of one sort or another with each other. Probably the earliest literary reflection of this assumption is to be found in the meeting of the Cherub (Satan in disguise) and Uriel, Angel of the Sun, in Book 3 of PL. It had been growing for about a century. As various historians have pointed out, love as the basis of marriage (or rather marriage based on [romantic] love seems to have been an invention of the great English poets -- Sydney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. It didn't 'catch on' in daily life of many people for another couple of centuries. And no one ever attempted to work out a conscious Theory to explain this messy and complicated historical development in which daily action increasingly reconstituted a world of isolated (autonomous) individuals.
And the crucial point here is that NOTHING in the preceding paragraph has anything whatever to do with the question of Theory and Practice as it has actually come up in political thought and practice for a century or two. The question of Theory and practice must be limited to the world of conscious political practice and attempts to relate that practice (conscious political practice) to conscious Theory.
Suggestion: When you say (or think) Theory, think e=mc*2. If you have wandered into realms or topics where you cannot hold on to that as your model of Theory, then you may or may not be discussing important matters, but you have left behind all the debates of the last century over Theory and Practice.
Engels got a lot of things wrong in Anti-Duhring, but he got some things very right indeed, and I began to get a glimpse of what Marxist thought was the day I realized how clear Engels makes it that the Laws of Science only exist in human brains; there are no laws ought there in the universe, laws are a conscvious effort of conscious human thinkers to make sense of, formulatae what is going on out there. They are ideas, not external realities. The view that Laws have an objective existence outside conscious human thought is very possibly the point of departure for all idealisms.
Now, clinging to e=mc*2 as our touchstone of Theory, we go looking at actual political practice and debates within it for the kind of thing in the messy realm of human activity that are at least analogous to e=mc*2. And they occur. And let me add that what I am writing here is a lot more consistent with most of what you have written over the last couple months than is the post I'm responding to. You let others draw you away from the original focus of your own thought.
To summarize: It is only in the realm of conscious political practice that the question of Theory, its scope and limits, ever arises. "Practie" in this discussion does NOT refer to just any old human activity, it refers to conscious political activity (and in fact to the conscious political practice of groups attempting to generate resistance to capitalism. Beyond that we run into amorass of mere bumbling chatter. I had not realized this myself until I began writing yesterday's posts on this thread.
And one more note: We are not talking about correct vs. incorrect theories, so debate over whether a particular theory instanced is correct ornot is a deflection from the topic at hand.
Shag] . . .yes, at one time, individualism wasn't an ideology. it was a theory, or rather built up from a bunch of theories, all espoused by people who, in hindsight, we see as consciously giving reasons or explanation for political practice. In the case of bourgeois individualism, theories espoused by various thinkers - Smith, Hume, Hobbes, Mill, etc. - which have become "common sense". no one needs to theorize them in a conscious way but you can see the theory in operation in the way people behave or, almost universally, in the way they behave when someone stops acting the way you are "supposed to". You don't have to learn this common sense at a school desk or by reading stuff. you simply live in the world and it's taught to you in simple acts such as the way someone borrows a lawn mower or stands on the elevator or ducks when walking between people having a conversation.
i can't say that this is how Tahir is using it, so don't want to speak fo rhim, but when he wrote what it did, it's what it brought to mind in terms of my own work.
[cbc] This is all interesting and probably mostly correct: your history and your analyses of daily life, etc are usually both. But every time you mention theory here you both forget everything that in previous posts you have said about theory reduce what you are saying here to a meaningless jumble of different things.
Now in general discussions among leftists the way the question of Theory and Practice comes up is in respect to Marx's Critique of Politicval Economy. (Albritton offers a useful perspective on this, and he finds it nnecessary to speak of three levels of theory: Theory (Marx's entire critique of an abstract capitalism), Mid-Level Theory ( the effort to theorize a particular capitalist economy - e.g. liberal capitalism that Marx knew directly or the Neoliberal Period). This gets pretty sloppy because the "interference" of contingency, wird behavior, events in the 'larger' society (capitalism a mode of production, but it exists within a larger society much of the activity of which is irrelevant to tough affected by capitalist relations); and finally, studying the economy we live in is history. I can't do much with this because I'm not a political economist or economist, & I quickly get lost in economic discussions. But the question of Theory and Practice raises its head here in the form of what is the relevance of Marx's Critique to anti-capitalist political practice? And the answer simpoly has to be Not relevant. There is simply no direct line from Marx's Critique to how we should go about forming political organizations to channel our opposition to capitalism. And since there are many more opponents of capitalism than there are Marxists (in the sense of 'believers' in the validity of Marx's Critique) it is obvious that that Critique (a) does not in any strong sense entail revolutionary practice and (b) other understandings of capitalism at odds with Marx's Critique are held by persons whose politics are the same as (for instance) mine. And we are also led to the wilds of Marxology: if we think that critique 'explains' capitalism, then it becomes pretty important to understand that Critique, but two theorists as close to each other as Postone & Albritton have some differences in the way they understand the Critique. Postone (whose politics, incidentally, are pretty wishy-washy) believes that Marx's Critique of Political Economy does not provide us with a Critical Political Economy, while Albritton in his concepts of Mid-Level Theory and History does seem to believe that the Critique can directly guide study and criticism of the contemporary economy, thugh with a lot of leeway for contingency etc.
Can there be a Theory of the Party. Dean (as I understand her) would not only answer Yes but (and I think this simply outlandish) also believe that that theory can guide even dictate the formation of the True Political Party. I woujld argue, on the contrary that there cannot be any Theory that directly or indirectly guides us or dictates to us what an anti-capitalist Political Party should be. We are thrown back into the realm of messy political practice (what, in M-L 'theory' is often referred to as spontaneous activity and viewd with great distrust. This spontaneity is on the other hand worshipped by some (e.g. many bourgeois radicals and many of the Mensheviks. Where does Theory come in here? What conscious formulation of anti-capitalist political thinkers can be even distantly analogous to e=mc*2? I think there are analogies, but they do not exist, cannot exist, before the political practice of thousands or millions has created the material for theorization, emerging party forms, tactics, agitational practices, etc. NOW arises the need for more conscious self-understanding by political activists of what the fuck they are doing. This practice needs to be theorized, and in a really healthy and militant movement there will be many who are discussing and debating their practice, and they will be working on forming a conscious formulation of the principles that have been generated but also obsdcurred in the struggle, and a minimally coherent explanation and laying out of those principles will be analogoues to e=mc*2. It will abstract from the roaring confusion of everyday struggle and experience & raise that practice to the level of theory, though the theory will more resemble Albritoon's mid-level theory or history than it will resemble Marx's Critique. And anyone who studies the Chinese Revolution will or should be able to see that what we have in action in this theorizing process is what the Chinese called Thought: Relevant only to the conditions & practice which evoked its need, but still reperesenting a far more conscious level of practice. Perhapd here you could call Theory the Self-Understanding of a particular anti-capitalist movement at a particular time. And if we read Lih incidentally we find there described what I have suggested we call Kautskyism-Lenin Thought. Kautskyism was afalse theory, but it still provided the rough and ready framework within which Lenin could make sense of the revolutionary activity ("spontaneous struggle") of the Russian Workers, and then demand year after year that the Party recognize its responsibility to help the workers raise to a higher level their consciousness of what they were doing.
Carrol
At 09:08 AM 1/27/2012, Carrol Cox wrote: Let me repeat one point from my previous post.
Theory has no existence outside conscious and self-conscious human minds.
Some of the comments seem to reify it as something out there. But it is not a Platonic Form, existing from all eternity.
So when we talk about the relation of Theory to practice we have to focus on consciously held abstract principles consciously controlling the practice.
Carrol
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)