Raju J Das
Now-a-days, we hear the word ‘critical’ everywhere. It is there even in business schools: there is indeed such a thing as critical business or management studies. Conscious (=conscientious) capitalism, capitalism with a humane face, is presumably born out of such things as critical business studies. If business schools can be critical, can others be far behind? There is critical sociology. There is critical human geography? There is critical anthropology, and so on. Not to be critical almost means stupidity.
What does ‘critical’ really mean? It means being critical of the world, i.e. its social relations and inequalities. It means critical of ideas about the world, the ideas that sustain those inequalities and the ideas that do not conform to (conceptually-laden) empirical evidence. If one says that the place of women is in the kitchen or that people have a natural tendency to be only selfish and to buy and sell for a profit, there is clearly something here to be critical of, because these false ideas have an influence on people’s actual behavior. One must be critical because one cannot assume that what exists = what can exist. Uncritical work, as Alex Callinicos has said, equates what can exist with what does exist, and thus becomes status quo-ist. We must be critical because as Marx says, what appears to be true may not be true, so we need to dig underneath the surface appearances which represent inadequately partial truth and we must be critical of ideas which reflect the surface appearances.
Marx said that one should be ruthlessly critical of everything that exists, of the existing order, ruthless in that one will not be scared of the results of one’s research, nor of the powerful people.
Intellectually speaking, one can become critical of existing ideas about society by asking a series of questions of a piece of work. For example:
- Does a piece of work merely describe an event/process or does it explain it as necessarily caused by specific processes?
- Does a piece of work give more powers to things/processes than they can possibly bear/have?
- Does a piece of work naturalize a phenomenon by treating it as universal when it is in fact historically and geographically specific?
- Does a piece of work stress the cultural/ideational at the expense of the material/economic?
- Does a piece of work distinguish between necessary causes/conditions from contingent causes/conditions for something to happen?
- Does a piece of work treat an event/process as a mass of contingencies or does it treat it as a manifestation/expression/effect of a more general process?
- Does a piece of work conceptualize/treat/ analyze an event/process in terms of its necessary conditions and necessary effects (which may change over time)?
- Does a piece of work stress harmony and stability at the expense of tension and contradiction?
- Does a piece of work ignore connections between things and how their connections form a system which influence the parts or does it stress the difference and disconnection between things at the expense of the connections and similarities?
- Does a piece of work stress the individual thoughts and actions as being more important than structural conditions of individual actions/thoughts?
But what is the practical point of being critical? What happens if a professorial colleague makes criticisms of another colleague? One could say that by making (polite) criticisms of the existing ideas of scholars, we can change their viewpoints. Many people hold the idea that: there are interstices of capitalism which can be used in the interest of ordinary people, and that is a way of fighting against the system and that, more particularly, things such as co-ops, labour unions, NGOs, identity politics, and social-democratic type parties can be used to significantly mitigate or eradicate humanity’s problems. Now: one can critique this idea hoping that the person in question will change her/his existing idea into a more radical idea, and that this will have an impact on radical social change in the world itself.
But this assumption is, more or less, wrong, for the idea underlying the assumption is that radical social change depends on merely change of ideas and that the change of ideas of the professoriate is crucial to radical social change (=transcendence of global capitalism and installment of global economic and political democracy = socialism).
My several years in academia now tell me that it is very difficult to radically change the ideas of colleagues (and most students), although one tries! It is very difficult to make them understand that, for example, the global capitalist class relation is at the root of major social-ecological problems in different localities and in the world at large, and it must therefore be gotten rid of.
A few of these individuals may change their ideas. However, the academic stratum as such will not. As the ideological representative of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces, this stratum cannot relinquish its job of defending and protecting the sanctity of private property and capitalist private property. The places the academia occupies within the bourgeois ideological system define their class-role. This or that capitalist can support the cause of socialism by changing her/his side. Engels did. But the capitalist class as a whole cannot commit mass suicide. This applies to the professoriate as well. Consciously or not, they stick to their roles. Their being critical stops at the door of capitalism. At best, they may be critical of the time- and place-specific excesses of the system, of its anti-democratic nature, but not the system as such. They are critical of e-m-c (everything minus capitalism). Besides, for a large part of the professorate (the movers and shakers of the academic world, who are also often the gatekeepers of knowledge), the ideas are material because they have gripped the minds of the professoriate masses: that is, they have invested in their ideas and have made a career out of their existing ideas (e.g. professor X says that ‘labourers – and not just businesses – have an agency in making changes happen in society’ and has a large following with which come many material-cultural benefits), so why will they so easily change their ideas?
And, even if one is able to change their views, the fate of radical social change does not critically depend on what views are held by professors, although their views are not entirely immaterial. The reason is that: they are not the revolutionary class. Only the working class is that class, given proper ideological and political preparation. This is the class which must sell its ability to work for some compensation and which has very little power to decide the conditions of work and how regularly it will be employed. This class produces the source of profit, rent and interest and this class can stop its production. Genuine Marxists critique the capitalist world and ideas about capitalism which the academia holds, from the standpoint of the material suffering and political power of this class, which is an international class. A more correct understanding of society than it has is in line with its class-instinct, its material life situation, both what it is and what it can be.
The main – rather ultimate – practical reason why Marxists should be critical of existing ideas is to contribute to the raising of consciousness of this class, and not the raising of consciousness of professors. The working class (I am including the semi-proletarians in this category) is constantly being ‘deceived’: its thinking is characterized by partial truths and sometimes complete falsehood. This is a most important reason – apart from blatant coercion – why capitalism still continues. The working class takes capitalism as a natural form in which life has to be lived. This class does suffer from false consciousness, bourgeois consciousness. This is why the working class remains politically weak and the capitalist class, strong.
False consciousness is constantly being produced. It is produced for many reasons. These have got to do with two aspects of one mechanism: ‘control’. It is produced because the objective reality of the capitalist society creates falsehood (as Marx indicates in chapter 1 of Capital vol 1). Let us call it the Capital 1 Model. Because of the absence of direct control by working-subjects, over the way in which useful things are produced, because people are having to exchange the things they need for what they have, because they are having to enter market relations to satisfy their need for food and other things, they therefore think that these things by nature have a price tag, that we must always buy the things that are produced for profit in order to satisfy their need. Every person needs food. That is a universal and natural fact. But that food has to be produced capitalistically, by agribusiness or capitalist farmers, is not natural. People think it is. This idea of naturalizing something that is not natural needs critique.
False consciousness is also produced because of the presence of control of the ruling class over the working subjects’ ideas (as Marx explains in German Ideology). Let us call it the German Ideology Model. The ruling class, directly or indirectly, through the state or through civil society agencies (which are the darling of ex-Marxists dressed up as post-Marxists), controls the ideas of ordinary people and makes them believe that, for example, austerity is good, user-fees increase the quality of service, and so on. That this mechanism of control does not always work is a different matter. It is a different matter that coercion is often used to put people in their place, if after having correctly understood the reality they take action to remedy it. Force was used against even mildly anti-capitalist Wall Street occupiers in New York.
False consciousness is also produced because all kinds of petty bourgeois forces and their academic spokespersons come up with strategies which bind the working class with the bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces (e.g. join bourgeois trade unions; vote for social-democratic and even liberal type parties). The working class thinks that following these forces will bring lasting benefits. Let us call this the Lenin model (which insists on the independent political mobilization of the working class).
Because false consciousness is constantly created, there is a need for critiquing the ways in which this is created, who furthers its creation, and who disseminates it. The professors, even when they espouse some critical thought, are, at best, speaking the language of the petty bourgeoisie and left factions of the bourgeoisie (e.g. the enlightened elite who can think about the long-term and are willing to make short-term or localized and reversible sacrifices). The petty bourgeoisie has some hatred for capitalism because large producers crush them but they do not like the property-less workers either. Ideas do not hang in the air. Ideas are ultimately, if not immediately, ideas of classes and class-fractions. Critique of ideas is ultimately a critique of class and class-fractional interests therefore. Since the academia have a class-role to play – defend capitalist property with or without some reforms—their ideas reflect that function and therefore the interests of the class which they defend.
When one critiques the ideas of the academia, one really critiques the class interests they defend. Since their role is to defend these interests, whether by choice or not (and usually a combination of choice and coercion), any amount of criticism of their ideas is not going to bear much fruit. Therefore, the aim of criticism is not to change these people. The aim should be to clarify to the working class the true nature of the society and of the forces that stop the society from being changed. The point is to remove the layers of misconception from the working class which reflect bourgeois and petty bourgeois (including union bureaucracy) interests, which are ideologically produced by the academia, and which are disseminated through media (new and old), and through family, friends, and sometimes even by professors themselves. Consider the professors selling micro-credit, co-ops, ethical trade, unions, democratic revolution, or even ‘socialism in one country’, as solutions to problems of the humanity; and some of them also win prizes and grant money for knowledge mobilization and community engagements. A genuine critique of the ideas held by the academia will therefore be – can only be – from the standpoint of the interests of the proletarians. Capitalism is critiqued by many people. A proletarian critique is a different critique. It is a ‘critique of everything that exists’ type that Marx had advocated. By critiquing the ideas of the academia, genuine Marxists create conditions for the self-realization of the working class as a class, the realization of its own power and of what needs to be changed and how.
If what is said above is true and to the extent that this is true, this has implications not only for what topic one researches but how one researches it. The implication is quite precisely this: research has to be difficult labor. This is so because research has to be critical. It has to be critical for the reasons discussed at the outset (namely: it must uncover things which are not easily seen or felt; it has to be critical of various forms of exploitation and inequality, which are causes of many events/processes we observe, and so on). And, to critique – the labour of critique – is not easy – this is indicated by the 10 questions earlier provided as a sample of questions one must ask in order to be critical.
There is another reason, which is related to what is just said, why research must be difficult. Consider the following five statements.
- We research existing conditions (generally speaking).
- Existing conditions are present because forces to fight these conditions are absent.
- These forces are absent because it is not easy for these forces (e.g. revolutionary leadership; revolutionary ideas, etc.) to be present.
- So: our research presupposes difficult conditions, the difficulty of conditions. Difficulty can be thought of as an ontological condition: x wants to be but x cannot be, because of barriers to x’s existence. The current conditions exist because the future conditions cannot exist. Researching the presence of the current conditions is indirectly researching the absence of the future conditions (= the opposite of the current conditions), the absence which is caused by difficult factors.
- Therefore: research must be difficult. Dialectics demands this.
The vast majority of the global population, the working men, women and children, live in conditions of barbarism, the barbarism, which is described by the massive un- and under-employment, peasant dispossession, food insecurity, ecological devastation, constant threat of war, aggression and violence, and so on. If transcending the present conditions of barbarism is a difficult affair, if intellectual and political preparation for this transcendence is a difficult affair, then researching the current conditions need to be – must be – a difficult affair. After all ideas more or less reflect the conditions which ideas purport to describe. Research must ask: why are the current conditions present? What forces support these conditions? What forces are undermining – and can completely undermine – the current conditions? Clearly, the cause of the current conditions and of their reproduction has deep roots. Ideas have to help us grasp the matter (=barbarism) by its roots. And when these ideas catch the imagination of the masses, then these ideas act like a piece of iron. Ideas do indeed matter, if we want to replace barbarism with civilization and sanity. But the ideas, not of any group or class, but of the class which potentially has the power to transcend the present barbaric condition.
Raju J Das teaches at York University, Toronto.
Radical Notes 
Thinking/Writing Theoretically about Society
Changing society presupposes studying it. And, studying society (critically) is not an easy task, although some people may believe that this is an ‘amateurish act’. Studying society is difficult for many reasons, some of which I have briefly discussed in a previous article (‘Why must social science be critical and why must doing social science be difficult?’).
Representing ideas about the world
A study of any aspect of society requires a scholar to critically engage with the existing ideas about that aspect of society. This work is often called a ‘literature review’ or goes in the name of ‘writing theory’. Many younger scholars resist doing it; they want to jump to the field and see what is out there. They also get some encouragement from their professors to do this: that is to jump to the field without prior theoretical preparation. They forget that without concepts one will know nothing by just seeing and hearing, and that developing concepts requires hard intellectual labour, including a critical engagement with existing ideas.
When one reviews the existing literature about a topic, one addresses three questions:
These three points are elaborated below.
In terms of 1 (review of the literature in the narrow sense): one needs to think about what the literature says about the following, among other issues:
a) what the object of analysis is, and how it is different from other things (in other words, how does the existing literature conceptualize the object of analysis?)
b) why the object of analysis (e.g. non-farm employment; contract farming; food insecurity, GM crops; child labour; strikes in Gurgaon; corruption; class differentiation; state repression; portrayal of violence in Bollywood movies; poverty; rape in Delhi; SEZ, etc.) exists/happens/changes/develops, and
c) what are its effects (what are the effects of poverty or of non-farm employment or of contract farming on other aspects of society?).
Why is a thorough familiarity with the existing literature necessary? The answer is the social character of knowledge production, the idea that we always build on others’ shoulders. Knowledge production is a social activity. One should know what has been said about a topic so that one does not say exactly what has already been said. One also learns something from what has been said and seeks to go beyond the existing literature. The more we know, the more we do not know. The more we know about the existing literature, the more we find out that there are areas that are still worth exploring (and in new ways).
One could use the three broad categories (a, b, and above) around which to organize the existing views in the literature. Or one can keep these categories in mind and invent other categories around which one may discuss the literature. One may use both these strategies. Often the difficulty is: how will one identify common issues? These are the issues which usually come up again and again, the issues which several scholars emphasize, if differently. In the identification of issues, one’s own tacit/implicit/semi-developed theory (or pre-existing ideas), of course, plays a role.
In doing a thorough literature review on a topic, one should read as much as one can on the topic and on some of the topics that are very closely related to the topic at hand. As just mentioned, one may group the different things one reads about a topic and identify 3-5 issues around which the existing literature can be discussed. Identification/analysis of major issues is one. Their presentation is different. Discussing the literature author-wise is, in most cases, not that interesting. An author-wise discussion often leads to repetition. However, when a given issue is being discussed, one may turn to an author-wise discussion of the separate aspects of the issue. Let us say that one is writing about poverty and that one has identified three broad aspects of this topic (e.g. how poverty is caused by agrarian differentiation; how it is caused by pro-ruling class government policies, and how poverty has an impact on electoral politics). In this case, one may conduct an author-wise discussion while discussing each aspect of poverty as long as authors’ views are different one from another.
The act of thinking and presenting critique:
In terms of the critique part of theoretical thinking and writing: in ‘Why must social science be critical’, I pose a list of questions. That list does not exhaust all the questions one can ask of the existing literature, but using these may be a small starting point.
Critique is an important productive activity in the sphere of intellectual production. This is in two senses: critique itself produces ideas (criticisms), and these ideas create a space for further production of ideas, both conceptual and empirical.
Criticisms are, at least, of five types. Criticisms are philosophical (ontological and epistemological) and methodological (concerning, for example, the method of collection of information). In making philosophical criticisms, one seeks to undermine the philosophical assumptions which underlie the specific substantive assertions being made in the existing literature. Marxist critics wanting to launch philosophical criticisms can accuse a piece of work as being: idealistic/social-constructionist (reducing what exists to what is thought to exist), empiristic/a-theoretical; relativistic (i.e. failing to assign causal primacy to certain processes); a-historical (considering what is historically specific as universal), a spatial (being blind to the fact that attributes of an object may exhibit spatial unevenness); un-dialectical (this can be in many ways including in terms of the laws of dialectics and theory of relations), and so on.
Criticisms are theoretical (theoretical in the substantive-scientific sense). Theoretical criticisms, above all else, raise the issue of causality. A person says that K causes T. A critic says: does K necessarily cause T?; why must K cause T?; what is the logic of the assertion that K causes T? Here refuting the logic one uses one’s power of theory in political economy (e.g. content of Marx’s discussion in Capital), state theory (see Lenin’s State and Revolution), etc.
Criticisms are also empirical. A person says that y happens in place z, but a critic says that y happens in place p, and provides evidence to this effect. Empirical criticisms are usually weaker, epistemologically speaking. One may say that the state acts in the ruling class interests because ruling class people directly control the state, sitting in the parliaments and controlling the commissions of enquiry. In response, a critic may say that in such and such case, the parliament is not dominated by people belonging to the ruling class and yet the state, more or less, serves the interest of the ruling class.
Then criticisms are practical/political. A Marxist can be critical of reformist political implication of a given assertion. Commenting on the mainstream research, Bertell Ollman says: ‘the age-old link between knowledge and action has been severed, so that scholars can deny all responsibility for their wares while taking pride in knowing more and more about less and less’ (in his Dance of the Dialectic). One has to be a little careful in making political criticisms though. On the one hand, given an intellectual assertion (e.g., x causes y), more than one political conclusion (i.e. an assertion about what is to be done) can be made. In other words, our view of what happens and why it happens does not entirely determine our view of what can be done. On the other hand, in practice, I have often seen that reformist political conclusions can be traced to certain kinds of faulty theoretical assertions (e.g., those who rubbish the labour theory of value or think about class as merely income inequality or a matter of attitude tend to be reformists). In practice, also, it is very difficult to separate intellectual criticisms from political criticisms, whether or not the latter are made. Usually, non-Marxists hide their political/normative views and claim that their knowledge-claims are politically neutral when in fact they are not. Marxists are often more candid about their political views. For a Marxist (I am not saying revolutionary Marxist, for the word ‘revolutionary’ is redundant here, and you will just see why): class relations, and most importantly capitalist class relations, are the most fundamental cause of the most fundamental problems of the humanity and therefore the abolition of the class system through independent political mobilization of proletarians and semi-proletarians against the class system and its supporting political-ideological mechanisms (e.g., state) is the most fundamental solution to the problems of the humanity. One sees that one’s theory of class is immediately intellectual and political.
Note that often substantive criticisms – theoretical and empirical criticisms – are the only type of criticisms that are made but these are informed by philosophical and political criticisms. One does not criticize everything one is reading. In developing a critique, one presents a selected number of major criticisms, which may include sub-criticisms (part of a major criticism). Note also that one must try to avoid making the mistakes which one accuses one’s opponents of.
The labour of theorizing?
Often a scholar can stop at the criticisms, and in the light of these criticisms, may carry on her/his own empirical investigation (Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia is almost an example of this). Some make an attempt to offer an alternative theoretical framework, which will inform one’s own empirical study. In the latter case, the framework informing her/his own original research is explicit. In the former case, it is implicit.
One can see that doing conceptual work, including literature review in the narrow sense (in the sense of saying who has said what about a topic) is not easy. Doing conceptual work involves not just reading and thinking but dialectically organizing one’s thinking.
Let us now return to the whole act, the act of theoretical thinking. One way of organizing the theoretical thinking, including the discussion of the existing literature may be as follows:
disagreement)
in the form of an alternative
framework
The above framework suggests that one has at least ‘12 bits of knowledge’, 12 categories of views. This would make one’s conceptual work very thorough, critical and synthetic. An advantage of doing this is that one cannot be accused of painting everything with the same brush because one has split the existing literature into two parts: a thesis and an anti-thesis, which lays the foundation for one’s own critical synthesis (I know this way of saying things is a little clichéd). Following this method, one produces a differentiated view of the existing knowledge, and one tries to create a new way of looking at the things.
Now, what does offering an alternative theoretical framework consist of? It is about theorizing. It is about saying three things:
Here an understanding of the dialectical theory of the multiple relations that exist in the world will be useful (e.g. relations in the world are substantive and formal, relations are necessary and contingent; relations are of similarity vs difference; relations are of contradiction, and so on).
In wanting to offer an alternative way of knowing an object one is offering an alternative way of conceptualizing the object (e.g., what does X mean, socially, subconsciously, emotionally, etc.[3] and how is it different from other objects), and one is offering an alternative way of explaining the object?
How do we explain an object, an event E? One way is to think that: certain structures of relations (S) which give rise to certain mechanisms (M1, M2, etc.), which under certain contingent conditions (C1, C2), will cause an event (E). This is based on critical realist philosophy as popularized by Andrew Collier, Andrew Sayer and others. One’s theory must include all the four elements: structures of relations; mechanisms; contingent conditions, and effects/consequences.
For example, capitalist social relations will cause mechanisms of technological change to exist which in turn will cause low wages, under conditions of strict control over migration and other relevant government policies.
Whether these empirical conditions exist and how effective they are and whether their effectivity varies over space and so on, this is an empirical question which can only be ascertained through a concrete study.
Whether the power of the mechanisms being posited in theory is activated/counteracted is also empirical. We are just saying, given such and such things, x and y will happen. If people are dispossessed of their means of production, they are going to have to work for a wage, other things constant. If a person is working for a wage, one is going to be subjected to domination and exploitation in the work-place. But there is no guarantee that this will happen to a given person or a group of persons: they have to find wage-work in the first place.
One has to think about the entire society of which a given object of analysis (e.g. poverty or non-farm employment or contract farming) is a part. The society is constituted by social relations of class (as well as other relations). These relations give rise to certain other things (mechanisms and processes). One’s object of analysis is connected to, and are rooted in, these.
As mentioned, one begins theorizing by conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing an object in the world, whose image is reflected in our mind, which is interpreted in our mind. An object can exist at different levels, in more or less abstract forms. Consider technology (as used in farming) as an object of analysis. Here are the different levels at which technology can exist (or can be seen as existing):
Productive force of which technology is an example; Technology; capitalist technology; technology used in capitalist agriculture or agrarian capitalism; biological technology in capitalist agriculture; and genetically modified seeds as an example of the latter.
In theorizing, at each level (ideally at each level), technology has to be seen in terms of its necessary and contingent preconditions/causes and necessary and contingent its effects, and in terms of their reciprocal relations (relations between effects and conditions). In theorizing one has to bear in mind the relation between what is technology and other aspects of society.
There are many other aspects of theorizing. It is not possible to write an algorithm for how to theorize. But what is certain is that, theorizing requires familiarity with: philosophy including ontological and epistemological views as well as views about human nature; and general theory of society or social theory (relation between individual and society; view of how a society changes vis changes in contradictory relations between its productive forces and class relations and via struggle; relations between the economic and the non-economic within a system in which the economic has a certain primacy, and so on). One also needs familiarity with more specific theories, theories of the most important ‘parts’/’aspects’ of society (see Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism as well asMarx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy): political economy and class theory, state theory, theory of culture and meaning, and theory of the relation between society and environment/space. One still needs even more specific theory, given stratification of the reality, given that the reality happens and exists at different levels of generality: theory of technology or theory of agrarian change as a part of the theory of political economy, or theory of state bureaucracy as a part of the state theory.
To develop theoretical knowledge, knowledge about necessity in the world, knowledge about how the world really works, one needs to bathe in practice. All Marxists, including Marx (see the Theses on Feuerbach) and Mao (see his On Practice) stress the relation between knowledge and practice. ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question’, says Marx. Mao, whose other views on society and revolution I do not endorse, however, says something that is interesting. This is about the practical character of knowledge. Our social practice, on which our knowledge depends,
‘is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms – class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man’s knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
Scholars must observe the act of production, including production of ideas (how are ideas produced in the universities and how this is influenced by generalized commodity production and need for order). Then there is the issue of political practice. Marx’s and Engels and Lenin’s, Trotsky’s and Luxemburg’s and others’ practical engagement with the world – their involvement in class struggle from the standpoint of proletarians and semi-proletarians – was a source of their theoretical – and not just theoretical – knowledge, which continues to evolve as new developments in the world are constantly reinterpreted and as one’s views at a point in time prove to be less effective than originally thought. It is also the case that over a period of time, one’s actual degree of practical engagement and its form will vary. Sometimes, it may take the form of the creation of ideas to help a developing movement. Just the revolutionary intent, the act of breathing and dreaming revolution, the intent which is rooted in and in turn informs one’s intellectual views of the world, becomes a form of practical activity. This is just as: radical ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses, as Marx asserted. At other times, one’s political practice may be less ‘speculative’.
One also needs to be familiar with empirical trends, with what is going on in the world at different scales, in different areas and in different time-periods, including via government and NGOs reports, social media, online radical and mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc. One needs to find out, for example: is inequality rising or falling; is farming going out of business and to what extent, and how does it vary from place to place, and so on. One’s theoretical ideas must be constantly rubbed against empirical developments which exist independently of one’s contemplation of these developments by a researcher as against ideas produced by other researchers.
Let us turn to Marx’s intellectual practice for a moment. He spent an enormous amount of time reading and writing about Adam Smith, Ricardo, Feuerbach, and so on. See his long footnotes in Capital or discussion in Theories of Surplus Value or his review of Proudhon. He read these scholars, appreciated what was positive and developed his criticisms of these scholars. These criticisms along with his more ‘practical work’ – which included not just his political engagement of different forms but also his deep familiarity with government reports, work of history, etc. – fed into his own alternative way of understanding the society, both at more concrete and more abstract levels.
Like Marx or Lenin, one combines all these different inputs (philosophy, theory at different levels, political practice, and empirical knowledge) in a critical and empirically sensitive way, and one begins the journey of theory-making, without which the project of remaking the world in a revolutionary way is an impossible task.
But ‘Every beginning is difficult’, Marx says. Thinking theoretically and critically is difficult at the beginning, in the middle and in the end! However, Marx hopes that although ‘There is no royal road to science’, it is the case that ‘those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.’
The certainty of the joy of theoretical thinking which produces an ‘artistic whole’ and the inevitability of the ‘fatiguing climb’ are dialectically connected.
Raju J Das teaches at York University, Toronto.
NOTES
[1] Here one says what a group of writers is saying about the different aspects of a given topic represented as Issue 1, 2, 3, etc.
[2] Here one re-conceptualizes an object; one asks: what does the scope of the concept which refers to an object cover? And one changes the boundary/scope of the concept depending on the situation at hand; this is what reconceptualization is.
[3] Note here that the concept, what it refers to, and the word which is used to refer to the concept are different.