Opening Ourselves to the Realities of Class

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/opening-ourselves-realities-class-1346771037

***SNIP

What do you “bring to the table?”

The dockworkers came to realize that they are a part of history, a realization about themselves that comes rarely to working class people. To understand how this can be so, we need to take a closer look at how class society organizes the assumptions we make about ourselves and each other.

Activist-sociologist Betsy Leondar-Wright — project director of Class Action — led a class workshop for activists that I observed in Boston. She formed small groups based on the class of the participants when they were children. She asked, “What do you bring to the table in social movements that was encouraged by your class background?”

The groups dug into their awareness and came up with strengths, which they reported to the others. What was striking was that there was little overlap; each class affinity group identified different strengths within itself, much as traditional gender distinctions assigned different qualities to women and to men.

The middle class workshop participants reported that as children they got the message that they could make a difference to the larger scheme of things. The participants brought up working class and poor were not given that message, but they did learn the value of fighting, something most middle class people are taught is a negative value.

[leveymg]

1. "Capitalism" is a term that is nearly obscene and unspeakable.

Better use the euphemism, Free Market, if you want "serious people" to listen. Similarly, "Class" is a five-letter word in America, because of the myth of a classless society. Everyone, be happy!

[burnsei sensei]

3. It doesn't help that capitalists shot capitalism in the foot in the course

of the last forty years.
Capitalism has lost its authority.
The moneyed elite really doesn't know what they're doing.
The person who makes vast amounts of money isn't a genius.
And business is not democratic.

[burnsei sensei]

2. I started learning social science in the 1st grade.

I learned about producers and consumers.
About basic human needs, clothing, housing and food.
And our teacher also disclosed the reality of class when she taught about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Washington was rich, Lincoln was poor.
I asked my father "are we rich or poor?"
"Oh," dad said, "we're poor, we've always been poor."
The consciousness of class conflict only came to me later.
There is nothing wrong with the existence of classes.
There is EVERYTHING wrong with how they relate to one another.