/lit/ - Literature

>>22053915
Socialism doesn't need defending. The labour movement isn't a debate club.

>Whoever imagines that socialism can be achieved by one person convincing another, and that one a third, is at best an infant, or else a political hypocrite
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/may/06.htm

>>21868785
The workers made up a large portion of the bolshevik party base and portions of leadership, even just looking at Russia for example with Matvei Fisher, Kanatchikov, Shlyapnikov, Yezhov, Tomsky, etc. They just aren't focused as much on by popular history and modern communists. What you say about the helm of communist movement is generally true, with a large portion of leadership being generally petit bourgeois and intelligensia, with some nobility and fully upper class members. Workers were often more radical than the intelligensia, who would start to turn away from violent revolutionary activity especially around 1905 and as strikes started, or post February revolution, which was led in mass part by spontaneous action by working class people especially women, when some of the more middle and upper class Bolshevik members were more hesitant than the likes of Shlyapnikov and his fellow worker faction in 1918 (outside of Lenin and a few others from the upper class). By the time the October revolution rolls around, most intelligensia went for Mensheviks, SRs, or the Menshevik-Internationalists.

It's just generally true though that the poorest of workers, those who have no reserves and no property and perfectly fit proletarian, and the similar poorest of peasantry and agricultural proletarian, on average have way less time to devote to party work and thus not make leadership, and indeed when the working class is not internally associated and sufficiently organized and led by itself it gets easily turned astray or used or manipulated.