The hardest job I ever had in a half century of social change work was coordinating a multi-class coalition. It didn’t simplify things that it was also cross-racial. Nor that it was composed of people who had substantially different politics.
I led the Pennsylvania Jobs With Peace Campaign for seven years, in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s White House was trying its best to undo the progress made in the 1960s and ’70s. Our chapter was part of a national campaign pressing to take money out of the military and use it for human needs. Our local chapter also pushed for decentralized people’s planning for economic conversion of military industries.
An advantage I had was that our campaign included a collective of the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a radical network that was already figuring out how social class influences the way activists do and don’t work together for change.
Sociologist Betsy Leondar-Wright has listed major social movements in the U.S. and identified their class composition. (See her website, ClassMatters.org, and her book Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists.) She asked how successful they were in achieving their goals. Betsy found that the movements most likely to succeed were those that crossed class lines. The ones who achieved less were single-class, like blue collar trade union campaigns, or middle class environmentalist groups.
I don’t know of a comparable international study, but there are plenty of successful campaigns in the Global Nonviolent Action Database that are notable for their cross-class action. Take the Chilean overthrow of dictator Pinochet’s regime in 1988; students and other middle class elements joined the workers for five years to win against a police state. A cross-class coalition of Danes slowed down the Nazi war machine during German occupation between 1940 and 1945; they so dramatically frustrated German intentions that the generals had to tow half-built ships to Germany to finish them! The Danes worked so effectively that nearly all the Danish Jews were saved from the concentration camps. Students, professors and other middle class elements joined South Korean workers in opening space for democracy in 1986 and 1987. More recently, Tunisian students and lawyers joined workers in kicking off the Arab Awakening by overthrowing their dictator at the end of 2010 and into 2011.
A non-doctrinal way of working
In the late 1970s, the small MNS task group that launched us into class work was not impressed by a Marxist tradition of trying to empower people by starting with theory and ideology. Instead, the task group called us all together for an evening and formed small groups to share some of the features of our lives when we were children: Did we go to camp in the summer? Sleep-away camp? Did our families take vacations? Abroad? Were our parents sometimes unemployed? On welfare? Did we own or rent? What were our tables like at dinnertime? Crystal goblets or jelly glasses?
As the evening progressed we sorted ourselves out. The facilitators had us use colors rather than names to designate classes, reducing the emotional charge and keeping us focused on experience rather than on academic debating points. By the end of the evening the scales had fallen from many eyes, while others were newly confused.
“My parents didn’t tell me we were poor.”
“My mother and father came from really different backgrounds, and I don’t know what I am.”
“My parents said we were middle class but now I realize we were owning class — what was that about?”
Spinning off from that evening workshop were affinity groups, peopled by members who wanted to explore more. I’ll never forget the first meeting of the working class caucus, facilitated by Kenn Arning in his communal house. I was stunned by how many of us were present. It was Kenn who named it. “The reputation of MNS in the larger movement, is that we’re a bunch of middle class activists,” he said, “and I thought so, too. But what about this?” He gestured to the room of people.
It took a lot of chewing to get our mouths around all this: our own not-knowing, the sense some of us had that we were different from the middle and owning class comrades we lived with but without a method for figuring it out, the strangeness of our coming together in a room by ourselves, and also the comfort of it.
At the monthly meetings of Philly’s MNS, the class affinity groups began to report on what they were doing, sandwiched in between items like direct action campaigns, neighborhood organizing and the food co-op. The middle class group see-sawed between confusion (“How shall we define class, anyway?”) to moments of tremendous clarity (“We’re the ones who’ve been brought up to manage things and teach people stuff!”). The owning class reported that it was struggling with guilt over the amount of privilege its members had grown up with — realizing that guilt doesn’t actually help anyone but still having to admit they felt it.
And we working class people reported that we felt freer with each other than we did in the larger group, and realized that we must be putting some of our energy into fitting into the organizational culture instead of being our spontaneous selves.
The more that people listened to others in their affinity group, the more they realized that there is a kind of “culture of classes” — norms and values that go along with the spots their families occupied in the economic ladder. They realized that as children they were given messages about what’s right and wrong and that these messages were laden with class expectations. “Too loud!” is what middle class (and especially owning class) parents said about working class people. “Stuck-up and impractical,” working class parents said about the other classes.
And so, even with these MNS comrades who risked jail and more with each other in direct action, there were subtle ways that we judged and separated ourselves from each other based on class. Who knew? We radicals, who wanted to believe that ideas are everything, got a crash course in the cultural programming that lies in the unconscious.
I was grateful a few years later when I worked with the Jobs With Peace coalition. I knew to expect the subtle anxieties that came up, the need a homeless person had for extra support when sitting across the table from the millionaire, and vice versa.
I became practiced at listening to a union organizer complain to me after a meeting about the “spacey” woman who didn’t like the fact that her comment was ignored when, later, a man said the same thing and it was acted on. “What’s her problem?” he said with irritation. “She got what she wanted!”
I knew by then that working class people are usually brought up caring most about task, not process, because in their work life it’s the product and the result that counts.
And of course my shoulders were cried upon by middle class women who felt dismissed when they wanted to add to the agenda a concern about nutrition with a vegetarian option for the upcoming fundraising dinner and saw some working class guys rolling their eyes. (This was the ’80s.) Middle class people rarely know what a sacrifice evening meetings can be to people who started their hard working day at 7 a.m. The last thing tired people want is “unnecessary” agenda items.
The frequent collision of class cultures, with zero awareness by strong egos acting out class scripts, was sometimes funny to me and sometimes exasperating. The plus side was that when we took the time to fight with each other, and took the time to learn what was really at stake for the other, we were actually in the process of liberating ourselves from the rigidities of class upbringing.
One example was the struggle over how organizational representatives would make decisions together. Labor union people were most comfortable with the Robert’s Rules of Order. Most of us activists preferred consensus. At first, the debate was ideological: What is most “democratic?” On that level, we stalemated. Then the labor reps explained that accountability is usually built into union organizations such that they need to return and explain decisions made. The unions didn’t mind if their point of view lost sometimes, but it was important in such cases that the reps were recorded as opposed.
Those who preferred consensus explained that for them it was often more important to delay a decision to maximize the chance that a creative way forward would be found that was inclusive.
Each side began to hear the other, and through the dialogue we came to an agreement that we would ordinarily struggle to reach consensus, and when we didn’t get there and it was a matter of urgency, we could vote and an 80 percent majority would carry the day.
The debate was actually a bonding experience for our coalition. The union people found that “know-it-all” middle class people can actually listen, and the activists found that “rigid hierarchical” working class people sometimes work with a different set of responsibilities. I was ecstatic; we were learning about class, from the inside-out. Maybe we can learn to go beyond class, after all.
I enjoyed this article. Does anyone have a good survey/question sheet that can help individuals in a group sort out class distinctions? It sounds like MNS had one.
It is very interesting how process vs results clashes occur in workplaces and in families that are composed of different classes. In the case of families, class divisions can happen both between partners and between generations. What are useful, nonviolent, ways of talking about money in a family that is divided by class experiences?
Ben,
Glad you asked. This is the first of a number of columns I’m writing on class, and I’m pretty sure the series will be helpful to you.
Right now I’ll share an exercise some trainers use to assist people to sort out where they are on a spectrum of class privilege. You’ll see that it touches a lot of bases: income, education, wealth, etc. I don’t recommend the exercise but at least it gives you a list. Note that it doesn’t define the classes, it puts people on a spectrum of degree of privilege and lack of it.
There are multiple definitions of class and I think that’s fine, because a lot depends on why we want to know — what our application is. Two columns from now you’ll see an impressionistic cultural definition of classes that goes more fully into behavior differences and conflicts that easily arise from them. (Next week there’s a bit on conflicting perspectives.) Then three columns from now I define class according to the function each class plays in the larger economy, and how that influences childrearing. That analysis works OK for a variety of nations, but I include some specifics for the U.S.
Then four columns from now I go into more depth on how the way we’re socialized trains us for the various functions we’re expected to perform. The “process/task” difference comes up again there.
Betsy Leondar-Wright’s book “Class Matters” has a lot of wisdom that you can apply to conflicts about money, and her website is a fine resource as well. Her book also includes a definition of class that’s consistent with the one I’ll be using in this series of columns. Following my name will come the list I promised you:
George
TAKE ONE STEP FORWARD:
If there were 50 or more books in your house when you were growing up.
If there was a computer in your house.
If both your parents graduated from high school.
If your parents had a savings account.
If you saw adults reading in your home on a regular basis.
If your family took vacations regularly other than to visit relatives.
If your parents have a second home or summer home.
If your family’s recreation costs money, like skiing, sailing, horseback riding, etc.
If you had a car in high school.
If you attended private school.
If you have a relative or friend who holds a posdition of power in the community or company.
If you have a trust fund or own stocks and bonds in your name.
If you attended camp in the summer.
If your parents owned their own home.
If you had your own savings account as a child.
If you have ever dined in a restaurant without being concerned about menu prices.
If your family ever owned real silverware or china.
If you have ever traveled abroad for educational or recreational reasons.
If you own a piece of outdoor equipment that has a retail value of over $500.
TAKE ONE STEP BACK:
If you had to have a job in high school to help support the family.
If you are from a single parent female-headed household and money was a problem.
If a family member ever had to sell or pawn something to pay for necessities.If a parent was often unemployed (not by choice).
If your parent(s) lived from paycheck to paycheck.
If family decisions were made solely on the basis of money or lack thereof.
If you qualified for free or reduced lunch.
If you attended college completely dependent on financial aid.
If a parent was partially or fully illiterate.
If any family member was or is on welfare.
If you grew up living in rented apartments.
If you have worked at a fast food restaurant.
If you or a family member shopped with food stamps or received subsididized food.
If abandoned houses are within a half mile of where you lived when you grew up.
If you have or had a work study job in college.
If a family member belonged to a union.
If your parents ever delayed paying monthly bills due to lack of funds.
If you received a scholarship to attend summer camp or an outdoor program.
Thanks for sharing this, George. This is powerful!
Maybe we could find ways to get more concrete examples and exercises like this into future columns.
Yes! I would also like to see broader discussions around exercises–how do various exercises work together? What are the overarching goals to keep in mind during training? What are the criteria for a good exercise? How do we fit training to contexts?
I’ve really enjoyed everything that touches on those questions so far (the spectrum of allies article was wonderful–I turned around and used that exercise in a training within two weeks, and everyone loved it).
I’m open to that. In the meantime, the website of Training for Change is a terrific source for exercises including actual step-by-step description of some tools. The only activities that are placed on that website are those that have gone through the test of being used in a variety of cultures, by the way. Not also the articles and reflections on the website that focus on training experiences, including (shockingly!) an article by Daniel Hunter on when to say “no” to an invitation to do diversity training!
How exciting that people are thinking about activities, exercises and tools for generating useful discussion about class! As the current Director and one of the trainers at Training for Change, I also want to encourage people to check out some of the tools on the website. Myself and the other trainers in TFC are usually available to give support to other trainers/facilitators/educators who are looking for tools or suggestions for workshops they’re planning. So if you have questions about an activity you see on our website or are looking for other ideas, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at info@trainingforchange.org
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