The Transformation of Theory and Practice

NOTE: This is Part 4 in a series called “Deconstructing Anarchy. The first three parts of this series can be found here, here, and here.

How do we separate “practice” from “theory?”

These questions are dividing lines in the separation of anarchists from Marxists with the overarching goal of moving beyond capitalism and towards socialism. However, beyond this leftist goal, the frameworks appear much differently and get to the heart of how anarchists and Marxists approach the transition to socialism, and the ways in which they remain similar, and, at once, opposed to one another in the struggles against capitalism. Let’s look at these separations broadly, and think about the way to look to a future beyond capitalism, and what steps must be done in order to get there.

Let’s start with the anarchist framework. I discussed this topic briefly in the second part of my series on David Graeber where he identifies himself in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology as a “practice-oriented Marxist.” What does it mean to be a “practice-oriented Marxist?” The term seems vague but broadly defines a participant in organized labor who traces class-based politics into movements that have been traditionally organized around identity. In other words, it is an activist with knowledge of class politics.

Practice-oriented Marxist or not, Graeber has many critiques of Marxists. The first observation that Graeber makes is that Marxists see themselves in the lineage of the writings of one or several “great men,” and define themselves accordingly e.g. Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Marxists-Leninists, etc (4). Anarchist factions, on the contrary, are named after “some kind of practice” or “organizing principle” like Anarcho-Syndicalists, Cooperatists, Insurrectionists, etc (5). This type of self-identification leads to the binary assumption about the role of the individual relative to revolution, and how theory and practice interact.

That leads Graeber to his second observation asserting that anarchists “distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it (5).” They are not, he contends, interested in analyzing political and revolutionary strategy (like the question of the peasants as a revolutionary class) or abstract economic theory (like the Marxian question of commodities and commodity form). Instead, he argues anarchists are interested in practical questions of organizing more democratic social situations, and the ethics of direct political actions like the effectiveness of political assassinations and the ethics of societal hierarchies.

These observations lead to a binary of “theory” and “practice” that will interest us as a questionable and problematic difference. While it is only a fragmentary distinction — and indeed both a theoretical and practical distinction — I want to point out that this is often the way that anarchists argue in response to and against Marxian and Communist questions that regards thinking about and reflecting upon the past revolutions relative to the revolution-to-come. (Already, we observe the problem of thinking as a practice in and of itself!). Graber’s indented distinction between Marxism and Anarchism goes as follows:

1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.

2. Anarchism has been an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. (pg. 6)

Now that I’ve laid out Graeber’s basic introductory argument, I would argue that the difference between theory and practice is a key way that anarchists ontologically define themselves relative to Marxists. To reduce Graeber’s argument even further — anarchists act and Marxists think — anarchists are active and Marxists are passive. To go even further, anarchists are participants in the revolution, they are individuals in daily, banal activists doing what must be done in order to create the conditions of revolution. This is obviously an inaccurate caricature of a Marxist, but one that has permeated through anarchist circles since the 19th century.

In a Marxist framework, the approach to theory and practice goes back to the way that a theory is used in order to transform the world through the organization of labor and political action. This is, to take the phrase taken from the “Theses on Feuerbach” from The German Ideology: “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern,” or translated: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” This statement has been extremely consequential and has caused a lot of controversy within the Marxist philosophers who have alternated between the belief that philosophy should and could only be revolutionary and that philosophy was “dead.”

The goal to change and transform the world is at the center of the political goals for the Marxist project. This is contrary to the anarchist notions of “organizing principles” because the practice of theory is not only the action that can be interpreted as part of a set of principles, but that interpretation itself has the potentiality to change the world, and organize and orientate political agendas and goals. It is also contrary to the anarchist notion of practice starting primarily with individuals. In some ways, it conforms to the “strategy” that Graeber implies with his critique of Marxism, but couched within the strategy is a dialectical synthesis of theory with practice that can transform the world through revolutionary practice.

Here, I’ll define this Marxist framework as those that use the philosophical traditions associated with historical and dialectical materialism. That is to say, the belief in the transformation of the modes of production and the labor of the working class into revolutionary class politics (which is all politics) can transform the world. This is usually associated with Vladamir Lenin who wrote “without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement,” and is followed by the quote: “the role of the vanguard fighter will only be fulfilled by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory” (From “What is to be done,” in Theory and Practice pg. 57). For this discussion, I would like to turn to the two philosophers that came after Lenin: Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, the latter who gave a series of lectures named Theory and Practice in 1976–77 which was only published after 22 years in 2019.

Derrida poses in this lecture series the all-important question that hangs over all of these discussions: What must be done? We can never stray too far from this initial distinction about the difference between theory and practice. The next question is: why Althusser? What new did Althusser have to offer about the nature of theory and practice that was not already held within Marx or Lenin? The answer is that he offered a comprehensive interpretation of the famous “Theses on Feuerbach,” which is to say, he developed a practical way to distinguish between theory in a scientific sense and Theory in a philosophical sense. Similarly, he also distinguished between practice in a commonplace and performative way and practice in a revolutionary way. In other words, he developed the concept of revolutionary practice for the Marxist philosopher and practitioner going forward.

What is revolutionary practice? How does that distinguish itself from the anarchist idea of direct action? For Althusser and Marxists, the distinction harkens back to the Marxian question of praxis. What is praxis? How is it used by Marxists? Upon first glance, it was used in one of Marx’ theses when he was discussing dialectical materialism as a philosophical framework against that of Feuerbach: “The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively.” Althusser applies this concept of praxis to dialectical materialism by saying that all actions transforming the world objectively.

To get a better understanding of what praxis means in a more concrete way, I like to think of the different actions that a modern-day therapist takes in working with their patients. Here we can distinguish between a few concepts that will contextualize action as understood in the original Ancient Greek, from which this all derives. For instance, tékhnē is the practice of learning techniques that can be used in sessions with a patient, like, to give a simple example, “talking about the patients' parents is an effective way to gain insight about their relationships.” Learning that technique before the session would be an instance of tékhnē. However, the action of talking to a patient about their parents in order to help them transform their relationships would be a different type of action. That would be praxis. These distinctions no longer really can be applied to the modern world in a practical sense, as they all fall under the modern concept of labor, but distinguishing them from one another can be helpful in discussing the difference between theory, practice, and the synthesis of theoretical practice which makes up ideology.

Ideology is the key concept for Althusser. Famously, he distinguished between various superstructures that made up and mapped out the influence of institutional bodies in social structures — Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses. He also developed the idea that ideology does not have to be taken seriously for it to function, and that it does not have to be taken seriously for it to be practiced in day-to-day life. And this is the key to the way in which ideology is taken from theory and put into practice. We can see this with the ironic self effacement under capitalist, fascist, and 20th century communist countries — that ideology functions not as a serious set of rules, but as a set of guidelines which can be broken if they have enough social and political status. From For Marx, quoted in Theory and Practice:

Ideology is not always taken seriously as an existing practice: but to recognize this is an indispensable prior condition for any theory of ideology. The existence of a theoretical practice is taken seriously even more rarely: but this prior condition is indispensable to an understanding of what theory itself, and its relation to “social practice” are for Marxism. (pg. 168)

For Althusser, the question of theory and practice is a question of ideology at the level of pragmaticism. Someone doesn’t need to take an ideology seriously in order to practice it. You are still doing it even if you don’t believe in it (in fact, as Zizek has argued, it is precisely when a society doesn’t take ideology seriously that the ideology is most powerful). It is the theoretical pragmatism at the center of logos that requires knowledge to transform the world. That is to say, revolutionary action requires ideological knowledge in order to respond to it with practice. It also requires an understanding of ideology in order to gain the knowledge for what actions must be done. what is truly revolutionary, and action can define itself so that it will transform the world.

The mapping of ideology should be obvious with our discussion of the difference between anarchism and Marxism. Here are two points that this ideological transformation should make clear:

1. The first theory that this dismantles is the idea that there is anything that could resemble “direct action.” Actions are never direct, they are always within a matrix of theory and practice — whether that is the practical application of ideology or the formulation of a theory that has the potential to change the world, revolutionary action cannot be divorced from the bounds of time or the practicing of a certain form of ideology that is indirectly informed by systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge then inform of the tékhnē which can then transform the world through praxis. These systems of knowledge move through time, haunting the world as philosophies that are designed to change the world.
2. The second theory that should be dismantled is the binary that separates theory from practice and practice from theory. Whenever someone is engaging with theory, they are also engaging with a certain practice that is informed by historical traditions and genealogy of what is ‘political’ and philosophical inquiries that cannot accurately and directly distinguished from the ideological production that went into their creation.This Ideology, for Althusser, has a certain level of contingency on superstructures which should not be seen as abstract, but the product of material conditions that will inform the Marxist revolution-to-come.

What must be done about this revolution-to-come? What theory must be written? What practice must be acted upon and repeated? This is where the analysis by Jacques Derrida comes into full force because the actions associated and separated theory from practice are ambiguously defined and he hyphenated the term revolutionary-practice (pg. 11, notes) in order to subtlety work through these ambiguities. For Derrida, the importance of situating activity and action as the predicating activity to revolutionary action is a key part of the necessary action that must be done for the revolution-to-come. It also highlights that practice in-and-of-itself is also a question of access. Access to what? To the revolution-to-come. Practicing revolution cannot be done without access to knowledge of the revolution to come.

From there, Derrida sets about doing a deconstruction of the theory/practice binary. The first step is to note the différance implied by the alterity to the transformation that is implied by practice and the revolutionary-practice that emerges out of praxis (12). Namely, that there is a system of value that goes beyond just the Theses of Feuerbach, and is working within a larger discussion on the question of practice. In recognizing this larger context to situate our study, practice and revolutionary-practice can only be defined within a larger corpus of text, including Graeber, which itself sits in a larger context of the text that seeks to define practice and revolutionary-practice.

Next is the deconstruction of the value of practice, which Derrida finds “enigmatic” (12). Throughout the Marxist scholarship about the Theses which Derrida cites (Gramsci and Althusser), the way that we measure the value of practice and have it reflected in practical real-world action is ambiguous at best. He then goes even further in muddling the issue by asking the flip-side of the question: what is theoretical pragmatism (40)? Is this separate from practice? For Marxists, the obvious answer is no, and pragmatism is often used as a pejorative that quashes revolutionary Marxist strategy, especially within an American context (41).

This is, perhaps, another example of différance, which is to say, the deferral between objective revolutionary-practice and subjective revolutionary-practice, which is contingent, in both instances on the revolutionary double-bind: when is there a state of peace and when is there a state of revolution? Is there a revolution in peace-time? Is peace the preferred state to reactionary and counter-revolutionary violence? For that, Derrida needs to clarify Althusser’s definitions of Practice:

Practice in general: this is “any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product” (For Marx, 166). Let us attend to every word and the relation between each of the concepts that he names: transformation, process of transformation of a given raw material into a determinate product. Althusser underlines transformation and product. Transformation as a production. Practice is a productive transformation or a transformative production starting from a raw material. That transformation is said to be effected by a labor. The labor of transformation is defined as a decisive moment of the process; it is firmly predicated on practice in the strict sense, in the narrow sense according to Althusser. (58)

Here, we approach the all-important question of the speculative nature of revolution. What would a revolution look like? Would it come from a transformative state apparatus, like that of a Leninist vanguard takeover and precipitate the subsequent counter-revolution, or would it take more of the form of assassination, like that of Archduke Ferdinand, which would set off a set of events that would engulf the entire world in the fire? Or would it come in the form of collective protest and autonomous regions like that of Occupy? These questions are not so separate from the questions of tékhnē and praxis, and each employs the questions of putting theory into practice, or, conversely, practice coming from theory.

The transformation by revolutionary-practice has a number of different consequences as a matter of both theory and practice, which are both defined by Ideology. This is contingent upon their perceived changes to the nature of capitalism, as both the machine and engine of capitalism rolls deterritorialize the spaces where capitalism hadn’t previously existed, both in the internal Deleuzean sense, and in an imperialistic Gramscian hegemony that defines practice-oriented capitalism as a Capitalist Realism, which, at every turn, orientates itself away from the collective action, labor, and the uneven relationships between classes. Instead, tékhnē and praxis are used to describe the reterritorialization with an absence of capitalism.

On one hand, revolutionary-practice transforms production and resources and the organization of labor into a revolutionary working class that transcends everyday (dis)organization of labor that serves the interests of capitalist individuation. This can only be achieved (within an Orthodox Marxist or Marxist-Leninist formulation) through the studying of historical materialism and the heightening of the contradictions of capitalism until it becomes untenable as an organizing system of theory and practice. The success of this replacement of one system of organization for another organizing principle has been the reason that Marxist-Leninism is one of the only existing counter-powers on the global stage. Its success at local levels — and less so on global levels — has made it susceptible to the same inequalities and economic pitfalls as its counter-power — that of global capitalism. This can be explained away as a mode of survival, but also retains the heightened contradictions that come with expanding communist sovereignty and hegemony, which must be contended with if there is a global communist revolution.

On the other hand, anarchist “direct action” — which is never ‘direct’ as such— transforms the world by confronting power with violence and the force of people as a counter-power to the power that already exists. For Proudhon, this counter-power would exist as the scientific method and the Science of science to displace the ruling order. For Graeber, this counter-power would be a return to direct democracy and close the loop on direct action — from direct action to direct democracy. This transformation would be the anarchist revolution, a return to direction, an orientation towards post-capitalist democracy, and a re-orientation towards the needs of the individual and each individual’s voice separate from whatever or whoever is directing this direct action/democracy. Therefore, praxis becomes attached to the needs of an individual within an absence of sovereign direction. The problem with this orientation of praxis is the individualistic nature of an image without the collective unifying power of Theory to imagine a better, more democratic world. In other words, “direct action” could describe any action that has a consequential reaction, and therefore rendered useless.

A better, more democratic world. If there is one unifying element to the anarchism-communist divide it’s the need for more democracy. For more force from the people. This has been a consistent thread from Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Althusser, Derrida, and Graeber, who all have different antidotes to the symptoms that arise out of the oppressive nature of capitalist exploitation and authority. However, the knowledge of the need for revolution, the theoretical practice that goes into imagining ways in which revolution comes about, and the revolutionary practice and praxis that would be needed to both bring about revolution and the revolutionary democracy that would proceed from these actions requires a careful deconstruction of both revolution and democracy as it relates to the self and ontology.

“Being-revolutionary,” therefore, is not an agreed-upon status or action between anarchists and Marxists, and reconciling the representation and contradictory nature of these orientations requires theory and Theory. There are too many variables that proceed from an individualist approach to direct action, too many contradictory modes of engagement for what can come to be defined as “being-revolutionary.” In many regards, the bourgeois represents the next being-revolutionary — property ownership with more compassionate and humanistic characteristics, or decentralized ownership while maintaining the exploitative dynamic between owner and worker.

Under capitalism, it has also become fashionable to “become your own boss,” which appears to someone who has worked so much under the thumb of owners, to be a revolutionary practice. But it is only a revolutionary practice for the interest of capitalism. Becoming your own boss has a similar trick that has become synonymous with capitalist propaganda, which is to appear as the owner of your own company or property, to sell labor from the point of ownership to other, more profitable owners. It’s this dynamic that falls prey to the most insidious elements of capitalism, that of ownership as an individual ontology and not as a relationship to the means of production.

Technology, broadly, has also the appearance of “being-revolutionary” under capitalism. And while there are advantages to broader communication for organization and the proliferation of texts inspiring revolutionary-practice, direct action, and praxis orientated towards the end of capitalism, technology in-and-of-itself cannot be revolutionary. The technology produces itself as revolutionary under capitalism, if only because capitalism cannot exist in the state of permanent revolution. Therefore, under capitalism, the production of commodities becomes the mode of production for counter-revolution and the quashing of revolutionary-practice. This is due, in part, because of the way in which the spectacle has evolved as an integral part of technological innovation, which can only promote the Ideological State Apparatuses that exist within the framework of exploitative labor and productive ends.

That leaves us with democracy and the future of democracy within capitalism’s framework to imagine work and the world separate and removed from capitalism. From ‘being-revolutionary’ to our future “democracy-to-come.” In the next section, we’ll look at Derrida’s concept of “democracy-to-come,” which comes with an agreement that anarchists and Marxists can agree with: we are not currently living in a true democracy, despite our self-description as democrats and “free liberal democracy.”

If Marx is correct in his Theses and that the purpose of philosophy is to change the world, then the question remains open: what is “to come?” Where will it come from? Who, or by what force, will inspire a shift away from capitalist modes of production and ownership. These are the questions that should precede before we ask “what must be done?” or “where should we go?” or “who — or what — should we follow?”

This gets us to the future. The future beyond this chapter, the future beyond this essay. Where will the future lead us? What footsteps must we trace to get there? What democracy will lead us to a revolution to overthrow capitalism, how should we deal with the revolutions that come after the revolution, and how can we look forward while looking to the past for the answers to salve the wounds of our exploitation and suffering?

The first place to start is with a philosophy that transforms our actions into practice, to practice being democratic, to practice being organized to know the theories, the critiques, the language of revolution, and to prepare, strategize, act in alienated repose, in response to the contradictory and absurd state of living under capitalism knowing it will crash down at some point in the future, and to be ready.