Sure, but still a minority of the global labor force. And the more productive of capital workers are, the further away they tend to become from any needs and desires for social revolution. They can theoretically overcome that tendency, but it is not easy, hence the complete absence of socialism on the political agenda in the North, where wage workers are the most productive. Those Marxists who still think that wage workers in the formal sector, especially in the North, are to be the revolutionary vanguard don't have any idea how to overcome that tendency.
> You seem to be embracing
> the completely marginalized as some sort of revolutionary vanguard,
> but they're too disorganized, too disconnected, and too powerless to
> do the job.
Chavistas, Hizballah, and the CPN(Maoist) are a lot more organized, connected, and powerful in their respective countries than unionized workers of the North or unionized workers of the South are in theirs, for they found and pushed the leaderships who have visions, abilities, and initiatives. You cannot move directly from theory in _Capital_, etc. to any concrete project of revolution-making. Some Marxists have begun to realize that since the Russian Revolution:
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/works/1917/12/rev_against_capital.htm> Antonio Gramsci The Revolution Against 'Capital' Signed ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Milan edition of Avanti!, 24 December 1917.
Republished by Il Grido del Popolo, 5 January 1918, with the following note: "The Turin censorship has once completely blanked out this article in Il Grido. We reproduce it here as it appeared in Avanti! after passing through the sieve of the Milan and Rome censorship."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Bolshevik Revolution . . . is the revolution against Karl Marx's Capital. In Russia, Marx's Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. But events have overcome ideologies. Events have exploded the critical schema determining how the history of Russia would unfold according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx, and their explicit actions and conquests bear witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid as might have been and has been thought.
And yet there is a fatality even in these events, and if the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, they do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are not "Marxists", that is all; they have not used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned. They live Marxist thought - that thought which is eternal, which represents the continuation of German and Italian idealism, and which in the case of Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations. This thought sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization) a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way men's will determines. -- Yoshie