You mean wage workers in the formal sector, especially in the North, since they probably produce the most capital by conventional accounting or Marxist accounting (for instance, by those Marxists who still try to get to value from price)? If to regard this minority of the global labor force as the central revolutionary subject is a qualification of editing a Marxist webzine, that disqualifies a lot of people from the job, people who come from the Monthly Review tradition, Maoists in general, Castroists, Bolivarian revolutionaries, people who think like Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, autonomist Marxists, Frankfurt theorists, etc. What you suggest seems to me to be a quaint notion of Marxism, a notion that perhaps a majority of Marxists held, maybe up to the point of the Russian Revolution or perhaps till the massive growth of the welfare states in the North and eruptions of anti-colonial struggles in the South.
Do you actually think that wage workers in the formal sector are or will be at the center of revolutionary transformation of a capitalist system anytime soon? If so, how is that supposed to happen? I've yet to hear you say anything remotely like that.
> You express a lot of hostility toward that section of the working
> class that's above miserable subsistence, and seem now to favor
> people whose marginalization from the system is expressed by their
> embrace of desperate religious ideologies. And you see that not as
> the sigh of the oppressed creature, but as promising in itself.
It's not a matter of sympathy but a matter of empirically analyzing who actually made and are making revolutions, without theoretical preconceptions, and who actually joined the forces of reaction sometimes. Intra-class struggles intersect with class struggles. People who are supposed to be on the same side at the most abstract level of theory are not always -- perhaps seldom -- on the same side when it comes to reality. Most soldiers of the US military fighting in war zones are working-class, oppressed in their own ways, to take the most obvious example. It is theoretically possible to align the struggles of wage workers of the formal sector in the North and those of the socially excluded in the informal sector of the South, but it is not easy, so it rarely happens. If you have a practical idea about how to do so, I'm all ears, and perhaps you want to publish that in MR! -- Yoshie