On 2012-01-11, at 9:07 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> (MG)...it was Doug who was invited to speak at OWS, along with a slew of other left-wing academics and intellectuals of the kind derided by Riley.
>
> he wasn't invited. I told him he ought to go, ravi jumped on the bandwagon, and so did others. doug hadn't done it on his own because he didn't know who to contact. i told him to talk to taryn. as joe said, OWS at NYC was giving anyone who wanted one a hearing.
Sorry, forgot. But this doesn't contradict that politically sophisticated left-wing public intellectuals like Doug make valuable contributions to mass movements without necessarily being involved in day-to-day organizing. Riley asserts otherwise, echoing Carrol, Michael Smith yourself, and perhaps others on this list. The value of such outside opinions naturally increases to the extent they're informed by past experience in these movements as well as continued close study of them and regular contact with their organizers. And I would say it's not really possible to weigh the finer points of tactics and strategy without being very active in a union or other mass organization and having an insiders appreciation of the environment in which they operate.
But Riley is contemptuous of all left-wing academics and intellectuals not embedded in these struggles, and only values opinions which come from "activists", seemingly oblivious to the fact that the activist opinion itself is not uniform but divided between liberals, social democrats, Marxists, and anarchists who have strongly conflicting analyses and prescriptions of what needs to be done.