Editing Marxists Behaving Badly (section)

=== Practice and Theory ===
Lenin wrote that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”<ref>[https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm Lenin, What Is To Be Done?(1902), Chapter 1, Section D.]</ref> But what makes theory scientific, and so potentially revolutionary? That the theory is tested by an accurate understanding of the world, which is gained through practice.

Lenin understood that practice is indispensable for Marxist theory: <blockquote>Replying to Dühring, who had attacked Marx’s dialectics, Engels says that Marx never even thought of “proving” anything by means of Hegelian triads, that Marx only  studied  and  investigated  the  real  process,  and  that '''he regarded  the conformity of a theory to reality as its only criterion'''.

From living perception to abstract thought, and from this '''to practice'''–such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.

...man  by  his ''practice'' proves  the  objective  correctness  of  his  ideas,  concepts, knowledge, science.

Life gives rise to the brain. Nature is reflected in the human brain. By checking and applying '''the correctness of these reflections in his practice and technique''', man arrives  at  objective  truth.  Truth  is  a  process.  From  the  subjective  idea,  man advances towards objective truth through “Practice” (and technique).

'''Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge''', for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.

The unity of the theoretical idea (of knowledge) '''and of practice'''–this NB –and this unity precisely in the theory of knowledge, Testing by facts or '''by practice''' respectively, is to be found here in each step of the analysis.<ref>These quotations are from [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D7B379F3DEFC536E7AA5749F2766C564 Howard Selsam and Harry Martel, Reader in Marxist Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963)], pages 108, 341, 346, 349, 352, 353, 364. - [[Grover Furr|GF]]</ref></blockquote>To  the  extent  that  Marxist  theorists  are  divorced  from  practice,  they  are,  in  reality,  not Marxists at all.

Marxists who are ignorant of the history –that is, the practice –of the first socialist state, the USSR, during its most dynamic period, the “Stalin” period from 1929 through 1953, who have based  their  interpretation  of  the  Soviet  Union  on  anticommunist  lies,  cannot  learn  from  the communist movement of the past because they are ignorant of what the practice of that movement really was. They have uncritically ingested a false and slanderous version of that practice from the writings of Leon Trotsky, from Nikita Khrushchev and his hired historical liars, from Gorbachev and ''his'' hired historical liars, and from Western anticommunist writers and academics.

Such self-styled “Marxists” do harm by claiming the status of “Marxist” or “communist” while spreading falsehoods within the [[Left-wing politics|Left]] about Soviet history. In doing so they fatally mislead younger  or  naïve  persons  who,  disgusted  with  [[capitalism]],  want  to  learn  how  to  fight  for [[communism]].

In a review of Phil Slater, [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=A13E0DC53232C0E36B640A5FD51A8638 Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School], [[wikipedia:Terry_Eagleton|Terry Eagleton]] wrote:<blockquote>As  a  Marxist  himself,  Slater  puts  an  accurate  finger  on  the  central,  devastating disability  of  the  whole  [Frankfurt]  School:  its  chronic  inability  to  bring  its theorizing into any productive relationship with political practice.<ref>[[wikipedia:Terry_Eagleton|Eagleton, Terry.]] Review of Phil Slater, [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=A13E0DC53232C0E36B640A5FD51A8638 Origin and significance of the Frankfurt School] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), New Blackfriars. Cited from inside title page of Slater’s book.</ref></blockquote>This  includes  all  Trotskyists,  because  their  understanding  of  history  is  based  on  “belief”  in anticommunist lies about [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]] and the USSR of his day and on their devotion to what amounts to a cult around Leon Trotsky.