Read on Twitter
Let me say a few words about this. The US "left" actually cares perhaps the least about these sorts of things, relative to the rest of the world's "lefts". Communists in, let's say, India care about this sort of stuff way more than "we" do, and they get a ton more done.
The idea that an over-focus on theory, or on the clarification of a political program, is causing US progressive forces to remain weak doesn't pass the first test of causal identification: that there be association to begin with
In general, a careful study of history actually tells against this perspective; it was Eduard Bernstein (no small fry in the world of 20th century socialism) who argued that the "movement" (meaning: day-to-day work) was everything and the "aim" was nothing, and you can see where
this perspective led (obviously, the SPD of today is not worth much, but this perspective had led them down a very bad path even well before the colossal betrayal of 1914--literally 100+ years ago); by contrast, it's safe to say that the leaders of the socialist mvmt in Russia
China, Cuba, etc. took "theory" rather more seriously (that's a huge oversimplification, but it's true that you don't find leaders of the RSDLP, CPC or PCdC saying things like "who gives a toss about theory" like you do in the SPD and across much of the W. European and US left)
It's certainly true that there are a lot of people who care about their online LARPing more than real life (although that's really a tiny group of people in the US); there are also a lot of people like George Meany (again not a minor figure) who basically purposefully destroyed
the largest organ of the US working class from within, for the express purpose of "being practical". So, neither of these things is good. The question, I think, is whether serious debates about "dirtbag leftism" or Lenin are incompatible with "talking to the working class"; my
personal experience as an objectively successful community organizer (past life) and shop steward in my own union (current w/ TAA, AFT Local 3220 baby!) suggests otherwise. Actually, knowing the history of serious, useful debates in communism has without a doubt helped me more
effectively talk to folks in the union (e.g., how can we simultaneously decide to organize on the basis that capitalism places objective limits on workers but also believe that reforms such as wage-increases are possible and desirable under capitalism? that's a really tough Q and
one that I find a substantial number of conscientious people involved in their union feel uncertain about -- fortunately marx and proudhon had a fairly scientific debate about this at great length well over a century ago -- for the results, consult *Value, Price and Profit*).
At heart, this idea is no different than the general principle that 1) knowledge is real (people who study things at great length don't know less than people who don't); 2) knowledge must be popularized and democratized; and, 3) to do 2), at least some people have to study. That
idea has been made out, on the US left, to be evidence of some kind of elitist, antidemocratic mindset, but it's really not; the very process of transmitting knowledge of the skills of, say, algebra, or reading at a high school level, wld be destroyed if 1, 2, or 3 were rejected.
(What would make 1, 2, and 3 elitist would be to add a 4), that workers cannot ourselves be real learners and thus not real teachers, which is ironically almost what the OP is saying, but even such "elitists" as Lenin and Gramsci held 1, 2, and 3 but rejected 4 vigorously).
Anyways, I don't want to dismiss the OP entirely; if someone thinks that they should be a communist by walking up to strangers and ranting about what Conner Kilpadrick said on twitter today, they'd be absolute fools of course (caveat: is anyone actually doing this?), but having a
chat online with other socialists that involves the legitimate use of jargon (as a shorthand for long ideas) is not incompatible with doing stuff IRL *and* it actually matters quite a bit that we *not*, say, be dirtbag leftists (OP criticizes ppl for *constructing* this identity
but one can construct this identity precisely to *criticize* it--to simply not talk about it because it's just internet bullshit or something would actually be to reject a convenient term for referring to a generally race- and gender-dismissive political practice which exists in
meatspace and which a lot of people unfortunately use as their political identity--if it already exists, our only meaningful options in terms of relating to that political identity are to support it, ignore it, or criticize it, and I prefer the latter by a country mile).
Anyways, let me end with another concession to the OP since I was just discussing this with other WWP comrades yesterday: there is a lot of pointless, stupid identity differentiation online which involves the use of 4+ hyphens in defining one's politics (as in, I'm a Bakuninist-
Maoist-DeLeonist-Blumist) which often, as in my joke example, is, beyond being meaningless, internally inconsistent, a form of narcissism of small differences, an instance of a hyper-attachment to the ego which is typical of a certain stage of adolescence. That sucks and it's
worth guarding against this kind of bizarre (but, among communists, a widespread if relatively small) impulse towards taxonomy-ism (not a word but you know what I mean); it means literally nothing to be "a Hoxhaist" in 2018 in the US, and ppl shouldn't talk like this. But the
preponderant danger at present, on the US left, is clearly (and has always been) the opposite: that history is bunk, that "theory", even in its most "practical" form, is meaninglesss, and so on. I guess my claim is, in the end: it would actually do us a lot of good to care more
about the history of socialism and to realize that, though many debates are now obsolete, equally many are not; this can't substitute for practical action, but indeed both are necessary. To bring it back to the question of a US-national peculiarity, truly we are nationally unique
here in believing that every difficult question has an easy answer that no one else but us has thought of yet, that there truly is "one weird trick". It turns out that communism involves both *far more practical* and *far more "theoretical"* effort than we've had on the US left
(on average) in a long time. To quote a very tired line, there truly is no royal road to science or getting shit done. That's my big idea for this evening, informed by ten years of being a communist in this godforsaken country, doing some things right and many other things wrong.
