There's a lot of good historical analysis, I think, but their insistence on getting everything straight with Marxist theory is, as usual, wearing and finally depressing. It leads them to the necessity for the unity of purpose of the "fundamental classes" and to, shades of Trotsky, a worldwide proletarian movement. This is supposed, when it gets going, to persuade the "organisational" group to climb on board instead of working with the capitalists. Well I've no doubt it would. But if this is the only hope for the left, it's slim and very long-term. At the moment, it's the capitalists' ownership of the means of speaking to the masses that is an absolute barrier to the kind of purpose, unity, dynamic, that the authors want to see. And I don't see that changing without action on the part of some at least of the "organisational" group.

This group has always bedevilled Marxist analysis. I have heard a good many shouting matches (back in the heady post-'68 days, of course) about whether the intellectuals, the cadres, the managers, the functionaries, were to be considered as proletarians, maybe as kind of "honorary" proletarians, as objective allies of the capitalists, or as by their nature enemies of the working class. Marxist revolutionary theory fitted them in as the "avant-garde", but we saw what became of that. The authors of this article consider them as a separate class which will work with capital or labour without essentially belonging with either. The point being to create conditions in which the balance of power or at least its currently ruling dynamic will pull the "organisers" over to the proletarian side.

So yet more great all-encompassing schemes involving underlying historical purpose/finality (of the bourgeoisie and the proletariet, but the authors don't say those words because they're modern Marxists). Perhaps there will be growing workers' movements in those parts of the world that capital has exported production to, but I don't see any change in the developed world unless part of the "organisational" group changes the conditions of public discourse. But I would say that, wouldn't I?