[lbo-talk] Shorris on Strauss

[Carrol Cox]

Don't be silly. Policies & their implementations become a given. I need to
add another point to my previous posts, on what makes theory essential. It
was implicit in my recall of my own politics. Those politics, though
established in practice, could not be maintained except through finding
theoretical expression. One endlessly meets up with anti-theory activists,
whose position (theory) is some variation of the claim that those interested
in theory will not engage in practice. I think I've mentioned the following
before. At the final meeting of the Midwest section of LRS, at which we
affirmed the liquidation of LRS, three people vote No: Carrol & Jan Cox &
Carl Davis. They were also the three people present who thought theory was
important. They are also the three people from that meeting who are still
engaged in political practice. (Carl has rather changed his politics, but he
has never ceased being active and he has never ceased theorizing his
practice.) After that meeting in casual chat Mark P, the Midwest Organizer
of LRSS) claimed that those interested in theory would not engage in
practice. Three people said _no_, "You can't say that." Today those three
people are still engaged in political practice; Mark P is down in the
Carolinas writing poetery. I value theory more than to those who try to make
Theory the _cause_ of practice. Cheney's politics help interpret Strauss,
but Strauss offeres little to help us understand Cheney, since those
policies were in their essentials worked out over time and by men and women
who didn't know shit about Strauss. Cheney apparently interpreted his
politics with Straussian theory, but the core politics were independent of
that 'influence.' Other men and women helped develop and maintain the policy
on the basis of quite different theory. I know a number of people whose
politics are the same as mine but who maintain those politics without the
need fro Marx.

A policy can't be created by theory but it can't establish itself without
continuing theorization. But that policy has to come first or the theory is
empty. Most of the men & women I named who were the 'villains' _theorized_
the same essential practice in different ways. Hence focusing on the theory
of any one of them or on any one particular bunch of them makes both the
theory and the policy/practice unintelligible. (Again we are encountering
two key observations of Marx's: (a) Philosophers have interpreted  the world
in various ways; the point (in order to interpret it) is to change it" (b)
"The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape."

Obviously these remarks are pretty skimpy. There are few more complex
questions than the relation of theory and practice. But it is necessary to
be aware of the priority of practice to even make a start on grasping that
relationship.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Dennis Claxton
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2012 1:56 AM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Shorris on Strauss

Carrol wrote:


> the villains were Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush,
> Clinton, & their military and foreign-policy advisors. The last 10 years
> would have been exactly the same had Strauss never been born.

Seems you could as easily say the last 10 years would have been the same 
if Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush,
Clinton, & their military and foreign-policy advisors had never been born.

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