Praxis without theory is how you get Pol Pot, theory without praxis is how you get a book club.
Chomsky hates everything outside of analytic philosophy and liked Pol Pot, so I think this holds
Nate Robinson is a fucking dumbass who thinks he could throw away 200 years of work and reinvent social revolution from scratch.
western leftists are fucking epic theyre the first to ever discover "real leftism" so move over fucking tankie larpers cause they're gonna do socialism better than anyone in the fucking history of the world
Oh no, I will be dumb and wrong no matter how many people try to stop me.
But not about this because, he is, in fact, good, folks.
I've checked with the boffins and they assure me he is in fact good and right, in addition to being ours, beautiful, and velvet.
For lots of reasons, but specifically in this case because he's not going to toe some line just because everyone thinks he should.
nathan. you write a 20,000 word essay on literally every single topic you decide to write about. i have never derived much value from any of it too
Eh, that might be a useful article to convince some libs that Obama was bad. That's really what NJR is good for at his best- baby's first leftism and pieces that own conservative figures and dismantle common conservative arguments. He is otherwise extremely cringe.
Yeah, as someone who only became disillusioned with Obama less than a year ago, this is a good read that helps me crystallize some of my thoughts about why. It also goes to show what a shame it is that Robinson is limiting himself like this.
I mean even if socialism were a "science", which it very much does not want to be, even a relatively uncontroversial Kuhnian analysis wouldn't point toward the necessity of retaining any sort of Marxist intellectual framework.
Imagine thinking Marx's critique of moralism meant giving up morality.
Can't wait to go 200 years into the past to pursue a failed project dismissed even then as a fantasy
As opposed to dialectical materialism, which is of course, politically ascendant.
Oh yeah clearly, which is why we have despair filled doomer posts here every 15 minutes.
"what" is his fucking "deal". maybe if he spent less time working on his fake accent and more time reading and actually thinking he would be able to understand what "theory" is and how it's "useful"
I want to call this 21st century Proudhonism, but that's too harsh on Proudhonism. However, I will also say that Marx Madness being 31 something episodes deep in DuBois and still missing contexts of the work is also funny. Nor does reading theory mean you understand or gleam something from it, whatever you are "supposed" to gleam. For instance I think people way over hype/get wrong What Is To Be Done because of its fundamental specificity to Lenin's circumstance that you don't get by just reading it. In that sense I guess Robinson has a point but like come on, reading Marx or other historical materialist works gives you a fundamentally different understanding of history and political change. An understanding that could of course be gotten elsewhere, but in its fullest form is written, and a socialist magazine editor should know that. He should know what he is critiquing, and if he is going to put out a book about leaving behind Marx that better mean digging through MEGA project, constructing an overarching argument about what Marxism is and how deviations from Marx/misinterpretations/misapplications are not those things but integral applications of Marx and thus mean abandoning his ideas themselves, and why it's better to go back to some utopian socialism (which is funny as I consider Marx to still have utopian kernels present in his work, and that's fine, but Robinson should know that if he's writing a book lol). However I have the feeling he won't be doing that.
I'm so smart that I can't possibly learn anything from reading. Checkmate ... Uh ... Well read people
