Carrol: It isn't so much "experience" as failure to show any _knowledge_ of the history of efforts (successful and unsuccessful) to build the kind of party (or any kind of party) that she wants.
John: Right, I sensed that that was imminent in what you wrote. And that's what I meant, in part, too. Extensive "real-world" experience at building a putatively revolutionary party, broad and deep historical knowledge about such attempts (and also of the hoary debates endlessly conducted with anarchists and other "horizontal" tendencies, in the wake of movement successes and failures), or some combination of the two would seem to be required for her to write/speak with the degree of authority she claims for herself. (I mean, she's not explicitly claiming authority AFAICT, but her public profile implies that she has it.)
I was NOT denigrating book learnin'. I was (or I'm now) saying that to the extent that I'm familiar with her theoretical analyses, substantive claims, and rhetorical style -- which is more, but not much more, than a little -- I'm not convinced she really knows her stuff terribly well. Her insights strike me as no more learned or acute than those of a run-of-the-mill intelligent leftist blog commenter or mail list participant, one without any particular expertise. Maybe her sometimes obtuse phrasing leads me to underestimate the quality of her work. It's not EXACTLY terms/concepts from po-mo "critical theory" grafted onto a rather bare-bones Marxism (or Leninism), but there is a strong element of that if you ask me.
I am a little reluctant to be so harsh, b/c I do think there is a fair amount of validity to some of what she says, unlike Eric and Shag.