Class and Activists

The more I think about it, the more I realize how we will never build a real, effective movement for change if we do not recognize class differences. I have noticed my own struggles as a working class woman in middle class organizing situations. There are strong cultural differences that get in the way. Here are some that I have noticed…

•Middle class, especially young, activists are proud of their subculture of healthy food, scruffy clothes, and communal living. I understand this, and even participate in some of it, but it is still jarring for me to walk into a young college activist group. I grew up in a working class family, where cleanliness, good hygiene, and home cooked meat and potatoes or great enchiladas were the norm.

•Middle class activists are strongly anti-military. I am both a pacifist (and strongly anti-war) and have family members in the military. For working class and rural people, the military is a source of economic survival and many young people who feel they have no other options join. Middle class activists often don’t seem to understand this reality and can make blanket assumptions and cruel comments about military personal.

•Middle class radicals love the earth. They may even grow an organic garden on a city lot. As a rural farm girl, however, I am amused by the lack of practical understanding that urban, middle class activists have of rural living. For example, urban environmental activists won a great victory in the 90s when they were able to shut down national forests to logging. However, for the people of my hometown, that also meant that the local economy collapsed. Poverty has skyrocketed and fueled a mass exodus from the area. I grew up in the forests and love them deeply, but I also feel deeply for the people who lost their jobs. Isn’t there a way that rural people and environmentalists could have worked together to find a solution that would benefit all?

•There are a lot of stereotypes of rural, working class people. They are rednecks, homophobes, backwards… and the list goes on. Sometimes radical middle class activists use these stereotypes themselves. The reality is that working class culture in general can be rich in hospitality, acceptance, and community.

•The response of people on the left that irritates me the most is the insinuation that working class people are less intelligent, especially if they are more conservative. There is a crass elitism in these assumptions. The accusation that working people are simply stupid, brainwashed, and uneducated is insulting. Some of the most intelligent people I know never went to college.