"The layer of the most active hundred members or so is largely lefty, but not entirely. It includes catholics and mormons who are militant about class stuff, conservative about social issues; anti-immigrant latina nurses; socialist shop stewards who are regarded as quacks by their co-workers; some ex-steelworker radicals; republican filipina RNs who are involved to improve the care they can give their patients; janitors who are openly hostile to the higher-paid nurses; county employees who are angry the union focuses on organizing in health care and burly guys who do road maintenance in 120 degree Nevada summers. And all the wonderful contradictions of a group of normal people struggling to unite to struggle...The gap between "a couple bucks an hour and healthcare" and workers' revolution is large, and seemingly larger now than ever before....Alas, it's a rough historical period." =============================== Alas, it is is a rough historical period, Jim, and your capsule description of a sprinkling of earnest radicals participating in the bread-and-butter struggles of vaguely class-conscious working people of solid character is not very different from the one I would have given when I was an SEIU organizer in Toronto three decades ago. I was a shop steward in a Steelworkers local before that, and while I wasn't regarded as a "quack" by my co-workers as you describe, it's true that whatever stars I earned were as a good trade unionist, very much despite rather than because of my socialist politics, in which some individuals showed a (passing) interest but most were indifferent. I led less than I hoped, but learned more than I expected about the nature of working class consciousness and the conditions on which it is dependent.
There's a part of the left which crucially tends to neglect the connection between the two, and whose idealist "illusions" about current possibilities frequently lead to political sectarianism, followed by "disillusionment" and the abandonment of politics altogether. Your somewhat excited post berating "intellectuals who only talk to other intellectuals" for not taking advantage of the opportunities for political organizing within the working class suggested that you were also setting aside the relationship between "being and consciousness" in your hunger for change, which was what prompted my reply.
The intelligensia can't be expected to act politically outside the context of a living mass movement, and shouldn't be held to a higher standard than the rest of the population, even though it often has an exaggerated sense of its own distinction. If it's any consolation, and as you know, intellectuals have always been at the forefront of mass movements when these have erupted, and the intelligensia as a whole has mostly embraced them after they triumphed. The Cuban Revolution, for example, lifted of the spirits of the mass of the country's artists and intellectuals who the day before were affecting the despair of those who viewed life as a "theatre of the absurd." The history of other social upheavals show a similar pattern, and I don't think it would be any different in the next one.
My impression, incidentally, is that is the lassitude you bemoan is not true of most left-wing intellectuals; it's evident from this list that many have had, and continue to have, an ongoing interest and involvement with social movements and, where they are in an organized workplace, are active in government, teachers', and other white-collar unions. Not that I would distinguish the latter in any case from the self-employed writers, researchers, and professionals who are among the most perceptive social critics on the list.