Hourly paid workers in the United States have never joined radical parties in large numbers. In fact, the modest successes of socialist, Communist, and anarchist groups in recruitment of industrial workers from the 1880s through the 1930s were mainly among European immigrants who were already politicized at the time of their arrival in the "new world." But, in the more than half century since the end of the second worldwide war, the number of joiners and "close sympathizers"combined among workers with roots in only one class has steadily dwindled to imperceptibility.

The working class is stated to be the central force in the politics of almost the entire American left, making this isolation tragic at many levels, including the personal. It is a contributor to the constant crisis atmosphere in the life of every organization on the American left—which extends to every independent radical.

A number of public explanations for this estrangement from workers are offered by the various radical intellectual groups. They complain about "unfriendly conditions in the objective situation," and note "a deep residue of the fear left by the McCarthy Period." They console themselves that "these things take time."

Some explanations involve forms of self-blame. "There is a breakdown of self-discipline and activism because of consumerism," they say, or "the revisionism of the growing minority in our group preoccupies our membership and obstructs our work." But something else is in play. In most radical sects, the people who set up the meetings will always remain in full control. They will always have read a thousand times more on their chosen subjects than the industrial recruits, even if those recruits began reading voraciously from the night of induction.

With few exceptions, radical political sects are elitist, that is, vanguard-ist. Their methodology is symptomatic of this fact. They believe that they have something to bring to workers, but not the other way around. From time to time there are meetings which might be addressed by a worker-leader, but they are not set up so that the vast knowledge available from "regular" workers without higher formal education, or their equivalent, can be gained by the radicals.

There is a possibility that organized political efforts that made life-on-the-job a primary object of discussion would attract and retain the active participation of working people. This would require the creation of a worker-intellectual alliance as a top priority. The intellectuals could report the existence and anatomy of Taylorism and then have the workers in the group each tell the others the degree to which the ideas of Scientific Management were utilized by their employer.

For the intellectuals, one of the many rewards from this more democratic approach would be that they would learn of forms of resistance which are not visible to those without direct access to factories or large offces, hospitals, or fields of mechanized farming. These discussions could pose the key questions: Is there evidence that while there is no open resistance, there is a subculture indicating rejection or silent ridicule of what is? How widespread is it? Does it ever get open expression? In what form? Has it ever developed into an action? In what form?

A formulation inspired by absorbing the ideas of socialist scholar George Rawick offers a relevant rule: none can offer aid in the form of new ideas until they have fully heard and understood the ideas, mistaken or otherwise, upon which their potential new allies are operating. For it is those beliefs which are determining the present forms of resistance.