The top leaderships of populist Islamsits and secular leftists in the Middle East probably come from roughly the same class backgrounds and educational levels; and so are probably mid-ranking populist Islamist and secular leftist cadres, below the levels of the former. The question is which type of intelligentsia gets more mass following from the class(es) below them.
In the USA, secular and religious leftist intellectuals on the Left probably also come from roughly the same class and educational levels.
The difference is that many of the latter have their own standing institutions through which they can do politics whereas few of the former, excepting union organizers* and rank-and-file union activists**, do.
* If you don't disagree with your boss. ** You have more freedom than staffers, but you have fewer resources than them.
> > To repeat, the dialectic of capital-wage labor is indeed what makes
> > capitalism what it is, and it is therefore the primary contradiction
> > at the level of theory, but that theory does not imply that people can
> > or must organize themselves in practice along the line of the primary
> > contradiction which is an abstraction.
>
> Really? I hadn't heard that before either. Or this:
>
> > In short, the tools are not meant for purifying
> > cross-class movements into a movement of, by, and for "the
> > proletariat" in the abstract.
>
> While organized labor in the US is dominated by some fairly
> conventional political thinking, esp at the top, there are plenty of
> seriously radical people scattered throughout unions who know this
> very well, and try to do what they can. Unions in the US would be in
> even worse shape than they are if it weren't for reds and pinks, from
> the CP's influence in the 1930s through all the Berkeley Trots who
> created TDU and Labor Notes, to the SEIU of today. But you know all
> this, right?
Even just looking at organized labor, which means looking at intra-class stratification rather than inter-class relations, the rule still applies, perhaps increasingly so in the USA. Which sectors of workers are more unionized? Teachers, industrial workers, transportation workers, retail workers, agricultural laborers?
Another question: which do trade union members attend more often -- their own locals' meetings or their places of worship? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>