>What I am deeply suspicious of is the reverse of the activist fetish, namely
>those who sit in airchairs and accuse activists of "selling out" when such
>intellectuals' work by its nature is free of the compromises necessary to
>most day-to-day activist work.
Two responses to this. First, one of the dangers of activist work is that people don't think critically enough about the cumulative effects of all those day-to-day compromises, or even about what the long-term goals of their activism are (or how they might fit in the bigger picture, either). Years ago, I was on a panel with an activist lawyer who was going on about how city development policy should favor small business. I made my usual objection that small business pays less, is more dangerous, etc. etc., and his reponse was to accuse me of getting lost in the "paralysis of analysis." And second, I don't have any stats on this, but it seems to me that you hear more critiques of these sorts of sellouts coming from other activists - Earth First!ers, black bloc-ers - than from intellectuals.
Doug