Of course, social action being the goal of thought is not in itself defensible by appeal to social action! Marx said some snappy stuff, but wasn’t always a good philosopher.
This course I’m in is giving me new respect for Marx as a philosopher, especially considering that almost all of his philosophical writings were done when he was 25, and that they weren’t even intended to be published. Considering his time and relationship with Hegelianism, which is itself a very complicated and nuanced philosophical system which I barely grasp beyond a few key concepts, I have yet to have a big ah ha! moment where I see a huge flaw in his philosophical work, at least in respect to Hegel (or in this case, Feuerbach) specifically. Feuerbach resolutely refused to do anything other than do philosophy as he thought that history had not run its course to lead to a real democratic revolution (especially after the failure of the 1848 revolution), while Marx was beginning to see a life revolving around praxis as the only way forward. This debate between them is based on a bunch of specificities that the Young Hegelians raised earlier that I really don’t understand the basis for, so I can’t speak to, well, specifics of it.
But I’m with ya on the conclusions that could be drawn from this quote, that “theory for itself has become a useless endeavour”. I’m with Zizek on this, that we need theory more than ever now, with a foot firmly planted in the real, getting our hands dirty. There’s nothing more annoying than that one Marxist who parades capital around saying that we have the ultimate theory and method right here with us, and all that is left is praxis. Boring, if not mostly because that position is so anti-Marxist (al la “ruthless criticism of all that exists”), and also really Hegelian in the sense that Hegel’s system was considered the ultimate philosophy, the end point.
