Way upthread, Doug remarked: Man, people do love to hate on Jodi.
I comment:
I think Dean has pretty good politics and I commend her for getting her hands dirty with the OWS Demands Group and all that.
To the extent I have been critical of Dean, it was not long before OWS popped off, when she was making the interview rounds for her upcoming "communist" book. By virtue of her book's subject matter, she presents herself as an expert on Leninist party organization, centralism versus horizontalism, socialism versus anarchism, etc. When I hear her speak, I don't get the impression she's an expert at all, especially regarding the history of debates between these movements and tendencies and whatnot, in relation to their failures and successes. To the degree that she does offer good insights, sometimes I think that her propensity to slip into pomo-ish jargon occludes those insights. And sometimes I think the jargon disguises (barely) the absence of insights. (And I'm not opposed to jargon per se, nor high theory, BTW.)
But... I haven't much read her stuff. My impressions are formed by hearing her talk. Maybe her written work would blow me away. I probably have been unnecessarily singular in my criticism.