It is not in itself inefficient, since every successful revolution comes in part from a broad alliance of classes. However, it must always be done in conjuction with the sort of productive labor you mentioned – the people who have the power actually to shut down the economy. Moreover, these same productive laborers must be recognized as the most advanced sector of the proletariat, and their demands should in general come first. The problem with most western communists is not they organize service workers and student unions, but that they focus almost solely on that. Thus they tend to lack a real proletarian ideology, since productive labor is where the proletarian essence is most clearly found.

We should remember that one of Lenin’s key contributions – expanded on and brought to its logical conclusion by Mao, and (I would argue) Kim Il-Sung – is that because imperialism is now the primary contradiction, other classes besides the “classic” proletarian have revolutionary potential. These classes, however, need to be led by a party with proletarian ideology, and which is thus grounded in the industrial proletariat. For that reason I would argue, though I am not a third-worldist, that until real collapse in the first world happens, an important step in communist organizing is getting first-world workers to see that many of their interests actually align with workers in socialist countries – hence the importance right now of anti-war agitation.