At 06:02 PM 1/27/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Comments interlinear:
>
>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)
>
>
>
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