To be concete, how do you imagine you could engage in the movements you list here if you "don't do community activism or street heat, I don't do foundation advertising or NGO fundraising. I'm not a marketeer or a salesperson or a lawyer... I'm not even allowed to be a professional culture-worker or theorist"??
But now you're asking a different question, a very broad one -- how can we make the left stronger in the US? (which seems to me different from Kelley's more specific question). That's a very interesting question, no doubt, but no answers are going to appear anytime soon that are going solve your problem of feeling isolated.
I'm being critical here but i identify with how you feel. I just think that if you could concretely visualize how you'd like to "plug-in" you'll be able to find opportunities to do that.
On a side note, I think Foucault's notion of the "specific intellectual" (in Truth and Power) is a good way of looking at this quandry.
--adam
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 19:23:05 -0700 (PDT), Dennis Redmond
<dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> > i'd very much like to know when and where are these spaces, this
> > "political commons" where "long-term conversations can happen
> > between identity-movements, artists, interested laypeople, union
> > activists, NGOs and political parties"?
>
> E.g. the world social forums, the various EU Green and Left parties, the
> Workers Party in Brazil, the Chavez movement in Venezuela, the trade
> unions in South Korea - lots of very interesting things happening. In a
> way, my question is really the same as Kelley's question - how can the US
> Left sustain collective institutions, as opposed to one-shot campaigns
> built on star personalities?
>
>
>
> -- DRR
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