Praxis
“Praxis” is a somewhat pretentious term that Marxists use to refer to the fusion of theory and action. Action with no theory turns you into a reactive spontaneist who will never achieve lasting goals; theory without action turns you into the dreaded academic intellectual who only interprets the world. So you need both, but, importantly, these two categories are not distinct, nor are they static. They are intimately related, tied up and mutually interpenetrated, and they develop relationally, changing over time. Action alters theory which alters action and so on. Marxists use another somewhat pretentious term for this kind of relationship: dialectics.
In reality, no one engages in action without some kind of theory, at least an implicit one. One’s ideas, however impartial or uncertain, about how the world works, and what one’s place in it is, will guide their action, even without deliberate conscious reflection. This seems rather intuitive to most people. Human beings aren’t amoebae responding and recoiling to various stimuli. There’s always some kind of thought process grounded in an understanding or worldview. People think, and so people’s lives are full of examples of theory guiding action.
The reverse idea — that all action produces theory, is less well understood. But it’s just as true and just as apparent. I think about the nuanced, beautiful way someone like William Morris describes the development of one’s craft, about the way practical activity over time gives one a deep sense, both conscious and intuitive, of what one can do with wood or stone. What you do in the world — what you are able to do, what you are rewarded for doing, and what you are banned and punished for doing — produces an organized set of thoughts about your place in the world, and how the world works in general.
Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m talking about theory and action in terms of everyday life, not politics. Where’s the shop floor here? Where’s the smashing of the state? But my choice is deliberate, because I think we often start with political goals so large and abstract — full communism! — that it’s not simply hard for those uninitiated into our arcane ways to subscribe to, it’s practically impossible for them to understand. And if you can’t get anyone outside of grad students and radical activists to understand you, you aren’t going to get very far.
This isn’t an essay about proselytizing or organizing. It’s an essay about what people do and think, and how these are related. Althusser has a formulation about ideology on this that’s often quoted, but I’m not sure how well it’s understood. He emphasizes that ideology — one’s worldview, one’s way of piecing together reality into a coherent whole — is a matter of practice, not simply ideas. He was addressing, in a submerged way, how intellectuals of the time understood the problem of the 20th Century, which can be most succinctly summarized as, why didn’t communism win? Why didn’t the workers take over and abolish capitalism? Why did they seem to support it in many instances?
A lot of people pointed to class consciousness, an idea with roots in Marx. So workers existed as a powerful class, but they didn’t actually realize it. They were a class-in-itself but not a class-for-itself that could mobilize and change society. So the solution to this problem is to get the workers to see reality, to see that capitalism was exploiting them, that this was the root of so many of their problems, and that they were the ones who could change the course of history. Their heads were full of bad ideas, like that their problems were caused by other workers, like immigrants. You could cure this ideology by replacing the bad ideas with good ones: it wasn’t immigrant workers — in fact they were in the same boat as you. You should unite and fight the bosses!
Althusser had a different understanding of ideology, one that was rooted in thinking about the dialectic of theory and action that colors everyday life. He understood that beliefs don’t sit in people’s heads like a box of cereal on the shelf, so that all you do is take away the bad sugary cereal and replace it with something nourishing and whole grain. Beliefs don’t sit still. They move and they have to be replaced moment to moment, through what people do, and how people actually live their lives. There’s a practical side to ideology, and even if you try to replace bad ideas with good ones, you will run up against limits if people don’t change what they do and how they live their lives.
To make this less abstract, one example Althusser gave was the school. Sure, the school could be a source of bad ideas: for example, that the nation’s relationship to its colonies was largely benevolent. But there was more. Even the basic organization of the school, with a single teacher in front and all the students sitting in an undifferentiated mass, meant that students were, from their physical organization, conditioned to obey authoritative figures, to receive their messages as, if not the truth, then the good way of thinking about things. If you just focused on the ideas, you missed the way ideas adhered to minds via practice, via human action.
You can see how people like Foucault, who was a student of Althusser, ran with this with ideas of panopticons and how people were in many ways completely conditioned by the way their bodies were controlled. I think this bends the stick a bit too far. You start losing the dialectic, and instead you replace the notion of ideology as bad ideas with one that says ideology isn’t that important, it’s all about how bodies and entire disciplines of knowledge are constructed and controlled. It’s not that people think vaccines cause autism and that’s incorrect, it’s that there is a medical apparatus that reproduces certain ideas of causation, morbidity, disease that causes these odd outbursts. There are fruits to pick from this perspective, but it leaves a lot out.
So back to the dialectic. Let’s think about something like race, which is an extremely prevalent ideology, and one of the sources of division among workers, preventing that whole class-struggle-to-communism thing. The Field sisters, who wrote a very good book about the origins of racial ideology called Racecraft are basically Althusserians when it comes to ideology:
“Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.”
They understand racial ideology and racism as reproduced through institutions that helped people make sense of something as fucked up as slavery. It was a host of practices, rituals, codes that helped people navigate slave society as something that made sense. Even then it didn’t work for a lot of people, particularly the slaves. Althusser always pointed out that behind those ideological institutions were repressive ones, ready to beat your head in if you got out of line.
For reasons I don’t understand, the Fields seem poor at understanding the material side of racial ideology today. They simply act like it’s a set of bad ideas that people should stop believing in, and they put a lot of blame on activists who fight racism for perpetuating it. The element of practice, its roots in how people live and make sense of egregiously unequal situations, of how people are cajoled into reproducing an exploitative society, is gone. It’s just bad ideas — race is a real thing — that need to be replaced by good ones — race is a fiction that divides people unnecessarily and we should organize ourselves according to class.
I don’t want to get into a full critique of the Fields here, though perhaps I will another time. I agree with the argument they make about how racism and racial ideology is not simply a set of bad ideas, but a set of practices that reaffirm racial divisions, and that many of these are organized through social institutions.
What everyone is talking about since the election is the “white working class” and the significance of their support for Trump, which is presumed to be decisive in this election. This is particularly galling if you are a Marxist, because the working class is supposed to be your constituency, not the constituency of the fascist. So people have to once again answer the question: why are these workers not doing what they are supposed to? And here where racism works as an explanation. It’s a good explanation, but not all explanations adequately deal with the relationship between thought and action.
Nathan Robinson writes, “You need to understand racists not so you can sympathize with them, but so you can figure out what shapes people’s beliefs, and help them reach different beliefs. People on the left must reach out to people on the right. They must make their case. They must go into red states. They must take counter-arguments seriously and respond to them.” I think these intentions are good, and maybe even doing some of this is worthwhile. But you’ll notice that they rely on the same class consciousness model, where bad actions are a product of bad ideas, so you attack the ideas. This simply won’t be enough, because bad ideas are produced through bad actions.
This also means that the idea that beneath their racism, white working people are already social democrats deep down — or, yet worse, are actually right now social democrats with just an unfortunate bit of racism thrown in — is wrong. There is a quite popular belief that once you make people well off enough, their racism will subside. “Economic anxiety” is the disease, and racism is simply a symptom. This convenient diagnosis ignores a great many things, chiefly the existence of wealthy racists, the prevalence of racism throughout the boom times in the US, and the way that welfare state provisions exist comfortably alongside racism — this is actually the form racist populism takes in Europe.
This was the crux of Althusser’s critique of Marxist humanists like Sartre. The Marxist humanists believed that there was a kind of essential core of socialism inside people that, by overcoming certain barriers such as false consciousness, would be realized. But socialism won’t come because of the inexorable turn of history, with a bit of pushing from radicals. It is not something that lies dormant, waiting to be realized. It isn’t the light at the end of a tunnel that we are moving toward, however haphazardly. Socialism has to be constructed. Just as human subjectivity is produced through practice, so too would socialism have to be a conscious project that couldn’t rely on assumed “interests” already existing in people that would manifest themselves once some bad ideas like “racism” or “identity politics” got out of the way. But let’s think a bit more about Donald Trump.
Trump ran a racist campaign but it’s important to specify the kind of racism he traffics in. There are plenty of racists in this country that we could describe as “race-first.” They prioritize white supremacy over all other needs, lending a kind of irrational or even pathological cast to their racism. It’s the sadistic kind, the kind that revels in the excess of the suffering of others, beyond what benefits its perpetrators beyond short-term satisfaction. This has been a part of American history from the beginning of colonization. It is the racism of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, the racism of war footing.
This racism, while a significant and troubling element of the US political landscape is not the entirety of US racism, and it is not Trump’s racism. Make no mistake: Trump is absolutely racist. But his racism is viewed by many, perhaps wrongly, as a pragmatic racism. The racism that is not excessive, that doesn’t threaten to consume everything in its hatred, but the racism that is practical and, above all, profitable. The racism of redlining and housing discrimination, of opportunistic political talking points. It’s not that he doesn’t mean it, not exactly. It’s that his racism is up for negotiation. He can drop it at a moment’s notice if he needs to, he can work with “the blacks.” Even his terrible positions on Muslim immigrants seemed flexible at times. I think this might explain why Trump got more votes from black and Latino voters than many expected, and why people like the workers at this factory, who abhor his rhetoric, still maintain a bit of hope about his presidency.
(Part of Trump’s appeal was also clearly misogyny, and this seems far less pragmatic than his racism. If Trump has a sadistic side, and I believe he does, then it manifests itself via gender.)
Racism, sadistic or pragmatic is, like all other ideologies, reproduced through practice. The practices of suspicion, of racist jokes or comments made in all-white spaces, the practices of white invisibility that are suddenly shaken by the presence of non-whiteness. The practices of bullying, the practices of listening to anti-immigrant speakers and speaking those words oneself, without challenge. But without practice, racism, like any other belief system, withers. There is no ontological racist, though there may be incurable ones. Racism is reproduced through social practice: racist actions make racists. This means you can’t simply disabuse people of their racist beliefs. You have to alter their social practices.
This is why the question of organization is so key. The major political parties in the US do a bad job of organizing, in that they do not affect the practices people in their everyday life. Only the extremely enthusiastic end up joining the party and attending meetings. For most everyone else, the parties are simply choices on ballots and often-vague sets of positions blared through the media. This is why most people don’t vote — they tend not to say “the system is not legitimate and we reject it,” they say “it doesn’t affect me.” Which isn’t true, of course — policies will affect them, but is true in the sense that there is no palpable existence of political parties in people’s lives. Even now plenty of “normal” people I know are moving on from the election. It’s over, time to get back to the important things.
What kinds of organizations can induce an anti-racist practice into people’s everyday lives? One obvious answer would be unions, except that historically US unions haven’t been especially great at this. One place where leftist beliefs are currently weak, but historically have not always been, is in rural areas. If antiracism and pro-social democracy arguments are coming from urban centers, they won’t penetrate. People like Arlie Hochschild and Kathy Cramer, who do ethnographic work on “Trump Country” emphasize the ethnographic virtues of listening and empathizing; these are components of larger social practices of “the act of being with other people.” These practices will be necessary in forming an account of the composition of these communities and working to challenge the reactionary values that have found an easy home there. The John Brown Gun Club is one interesting response to this problem: they intervened in the practices of rural areas by tabling at gun shows. This is anti-racist politics beyond arguments.
It isn’t everything. Defensive organizations will also be necessary. Violence is a social practice, and the more successful the racist violence, the more it will occur. The police, who overwhelmingly supported Trump, will not be helpful. Robust anti-fascist organizations have an important role in breaking up white supremacist practice, and are important grounds for creating solidarity. When you have a strong critical mass of people, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to convince others of the validity of your positions. People, especially Americans, like to bet on winners. I am not content to stand by and tell people to wait for the economic conditions to improve and cure racism. I don’t think that’s how it works, and even if I did, there’s no guarantee things will get better any time soon.
What are these practices? I fear we understand very little of what people think, and even less about what they do in such places. We have a lot of work to do, and it won’t be as simple as making the right argument.
