>Criticism is only available for insiders? Outsiders can therefore only carp?
>You can't possibly mean this so why write it?
>
>Does one have to be a US citizen to criticise the US? Venezuelans can only
>carp about US policies?
>
>Can any communist criticise the FSU or do you have been a citizen of the
>USSR to do so?
>
>Who determines inside and outside? Are former union members allowed to
>critize or is it just carping once
>they are no longer active members?
>
>
>John Thornton
-
What Carrol's getting at is the difference between external and internal critique.
It's not about insider as in formally belonging, but about insider as someone who identifies with whatever is under criticism. So it's not critique v. non-critique, but internal v. external.
My critiques of radical feminism on the blog lately are external (not sympathetic) critiques of some instantiations of radical feminism. Where I'm sympathetic and internal in my critique is where I want to advance feminist thought and practice -- but apart from the stand of radical thought in feminist theory (Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's critiques of the Subaltern Studies group were internal in the sense that she wanted to advance the group. It was sympathetic critique in so far as she attempted to put the object of criticism in the best light possible, rather than arguing with a strawman.
I don't really think anyone in this discussion is opposed to unions, however.
I do think, though, that we're not really arguing about unions anymore. :)
In that sense, the criticism is more like trafficking, where the goal isn't to improve unions, but simply to use the union issue as a conduit between interlocutors in their attacks' on one another's position more generally.
That's stolen from feminist analysis of the way men traffick in women -- both for real and symbolically -- but it's not about women, it's about men.
:)