Michael Moore's comments make sense to me.. His works are tremendous tools for steering people to towards mass movements. It is not his fault that there aren't many mass movements to steer them to.
I do disagree with him on one point:
"If you don't own the business, you're part of the working class as far as I'm concerned."
If this were true, organizing would be a lot easier. But I think we can argue that there are not two classes to deal with but three. There is a large minority -- somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the population -- who without owning businesses make decisions, plan, and coordinate on behalf of the owners of business. Coordinators earn far more than they would if hourly earnings were pretty well equal. Their jobs not only provide them with power, but with practice in the exercise of power, and usually more pleasant than those of ordinary working people.
I think one could argue that this is a true class -- one with interests in common with the working class, but also one having interests that are objectively different. I think what it amounts to is that the ideal society (from the point of view if this class) is one where capitalist are eliminated but all the power is in the hands or co-ordinators and planners.
Note that this is not identical to intellectuals. Intellectuals (even within academia, let alone outside it) often have neither a reasonable income, nor a particularly rewarding nor powerful work life. And many co-ordinators especially those in management are far from being an intellectual of any type. None the less there is a tremendous overlap between intellectuals and co-ordinators. A good part of academia is devoted to developing ideology and and practical techniques for controlling workers. A great deal of both education and media *ARE* means of control. A good part of top management are intellectuals of a sort.
This leads to the problems Michael Moore points to. On the whole members of the coordinator class are the vast majority of those with both the spare time and objective class interests to devote a great deal of spare time to opposing capitalism. Also members of these classes have more experience with the coordinating tasks necessary to run such organizations. (I know people on this list can give plenty of individual counter-examples. But can you really deny that this is true on average?)
As a result liberal and left organizations tend to be run by in ways that both coincide and conflict with those of workers.
A good programmatic example would be debates among different kinds of greens. Any "greening" which takes place unmitigated by income redistribution within a capitalist society tends to have both have benefits and costs for working people. It has benefits in that if pollution is cut, they live longer. Their health is better. But environmental mitigation also tends to have costs -- which are mostly borne by working people on the principle that shit flows downhill. The environment can be improved through increased regulation or better enforcement of existing regulation -- which increases costs. It can be improved through green taxes or a permitting process -- which also increases cost. While a portion of these costs will come out of profits (otherwise there would be no opposition to them by capitalists) as much as possible will be passed on to those at lowest end of the spectrum -- through layoffs and price increases.
Note that to a coordinator -- who is not a capitalist on the one hand but who is at the end of the income spectrum least likely to be hit by layoffs, and least likely to be hurt by price increases this is pretty much an unmitigated good -- while to a worker it may be a mixed curse or at best a very mixed blessing.
Is there a way to get around this? Yes, always implement enviromental reform in a way that also includes income redistribution. If you want to regulate industry more highly why not penalize companies in a large percent of their stock, to be given to the workers or communities ? If you can push it through, you could even have a corporate death penalty, where a business convicted of a particularly egregious environmental, or worker or consumer safety violation would have 100% of its stock distributed among the a nation. If your preference is for green taxes, then distribute the proceeds among ordinary people. If you want to use permits, give the permits to ordinary workers, and let the big companies buy their permits from them.
I think that this enviromental example applies to other causes as well. I think that anytime you think programmatically about any "identity" cause you can probably find a way to strengthen your policy proposal by including some element which will appeal to the objective interests of the entire bottom 80% of the population.
If there are ways to make programs (or wish lists as somebody put it) more worker friendly, it is even more important that organizational style and structure and atmosphere not be coordinator oriented. Michael Moore has given a great many tips on the matter of style in Downsize This. In terms of structure, I don't know how you make an organization less hiearchal -- while keeping it workable -- but I know you have to do it. How many "pwogwessive" organizations are organized like a damn corporation these days -- complete with a self-perpetuating board of directors? Atmosphere, which goes beyond style, is a matter of being genuinely welcoming to ordinairy people, of not having contempt or hatred for them -- for example not having the mentality which refers collectively to all white male workers as "scabs" by virtue of being pink penis people.