I'm usually suspicious of generalizations, and there's not enough evidence to persuade me that leadership on the Left was historically more middle class and is becoming more plebeian.
In the US, the Sorges or DeLeons always relied on working class figures in secondary and tertiary roles, and I think this mirrored the movement internationally as well. Then, you'd occasionally have figures like Debs or Haywood. Earlier, successful workers movements found themselves herded into multi-class formations with a middle class figure at the head of them. And after the 1940s, class becomes the invisible and unspoken reality across the political spectrum, including (oddly enough) on the Marxist Left. But my impression is the leadership of the movement in the 1960s or 1970s was not more plebeian than it had been in the 1930s or earlier. Quite the opposite in my own obviously limited experience among the mostly campus-based Trotskyists. Of course, I may well have misunderstood the drift of this.... ML
