With a vibrant and dynamic new social movement like OWS and its global offshoots, we are once again seeing a lot of leftists engage once again in ritualized bemoaning of the movement's supposed ideological shortcomings. This sort of talk always brings me back to a sentiment that the late Martin Glaberman, comrade of CLR James, expressed again and again to combat the sort of leftists who try to assume the role of "condescending saviors":
"Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We're not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You've got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class. If white workers realize they can't organize steel unless they organize black workers, that doesn't mean they're not racist. It means that they have to deal with their own reality, and that uansforms them. Who were the workers who made the Russian Revolution? Sexists, nationalists, half of them illiterate. Who were the workers in Polish Solidarity? Anti-Semitic, whatever. That kind of struggle begins to transform people."
http://libcom.org/library/workers-reality-martin-glaberman