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Recognizing class differences is a first step to turning them into assets for political movements instead of obstacles, according to author George Lakey, executive director of Training for Change.
At a workshop last weekend hosted by the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center (visit ijpc-cincinnati.org), Lakey focused on the "hidden dynamics of class" that impact social change movements.
"My number one goal is to assist them in being more effective in developing united efforts for change," Lakey says. "The difference between classes are generally overlooked and yet they still have an impact. The impact is to reduce the sense of unity that people have. The less unity there is in a group or coalition, the less effective it's going to be."
Strength can come from the diverse viewpoints held by people of different classes, Lakey says.
"A friend of mine has done study of the social movements in the 20th century in the U.S. to compare them in terms of their success, whether it was getting the eight-hour day or ending child labor," he says. "What she found was that the movements that had people of various classes were more likely to achieve their goal."
A better mix
Qualifying his definitions as "generalizations," Lakey describes class in broad terms.
The "owning" class has the job of owning things and the lower class produces things, while the middle class oversees the efforts of the lower class. Within each of those groups are sub-sets such as lower-class individuals who are underemployed or occasionally unemployed.
With each level comes a different set of experiences that supports various aspects of a social movement.
"If everybody brings all of their background to the table, it makes a more dynamic organization and a more dynamic campaign because each class brings attributes or traits that have to do with the way they've been brought up that actually enrich, make stronger a coalition that includes them," Lakey says. "Middle class people tend to be more idealistic than working class people, idealist in the sense of 'We can do this — let's imagine how we can,' which is a great thing. Working class people tend to be more practical, like, 'OK, how is this going to get done?'
"Owning-class people often bring to the table a very big picture of what's going on. Owning-class people are often folks who see it from a big systems point of view, and that's a big plus as well."
That mix can keep movements from being unrealistic and thus ineffective.
"A mixture of idealism and cynicism is stronger because it's more likely that a movement will be realistic," Lakey says.
People from different backgrounds often find themselves in the same room, brought together by an issue or problem to be resolved. Once common ground is recognized and a sense of "We're in this together" is achieved, the next step is to build trust within that group so that everyone feels comfortable sharing their perspectives and stories.
"Once we explore the differences and see, for example, some of the tendencies of the owning class, people in the room who are not from the owning class are often surprised: 'I totally get that,' rather than, 'Oh, that's really exotic and I wouldn't know how to think that way.' We live in a culture where we're exposed enough to films and novels, to points of view that come from other classes, so that we're able to put ourselves in other people's places pretty quickly, which is a great strength."
Dumping violence
Part of that discovery process is figuring out the class to which each person belongs in order to have a context for these different experiences.
"A lot of people are not sure what their class is," Lakey explains. "For one thing, a fair number of people have moved within their class position in the course of their lives. Another thing is that very often their parents are from different classes. They have a working class dad and a middle class mom."
Reviewing such factors as income, job, savings, education and lifestyle help clarify where each person fits.
"We usually travel within a bubble of our own class (and) therefore reach out to the people we know, or know of, to get things done," Lakey says. "I'm hoping this workshop will give people the sense of possibility that, 'Hey, the next project I create, I'm going to do it across class lines.' "
That kind of effort takes creativity, so Lakey would like to see violent options removed from the slate of possibilities when any change group is forming.
"Violence tends to make people stupid," he says. "It reduces people's imagination, their sense of possibilities. I think it's that their fear gets in the way, because violence is scary.
"Let's not even go to violent options, but instead let's explore and become strategic about a nonviolent struggle. That opens up people's intelligence. It's quite inspiring to see how intelligent people get when they lay down the sword, lay down the missiles and just start getting creative about non-violent solutions."
Staying focused on common ground and utilizing positive, non-violent change can be difficult, but there are people who have lived the violence enough to have learned it's counterproductive, according to Lakey.
"In every war situation that I know of, there's some people who get their faces rubbed in violence so much, instead of staying on revenge they get sickened by it and they say, 'There's got to be a better way,' " he says. "For example, on this Iraq War, there is a tremendous amount of veterans who have been over there fighting who come back and say, 'We know it in a way that we never knew we would realize war. We've seen it and we're sick of it, and we are absolutely clear the U.S. needs to stop making things worse by staying in Iraq.' That kind of leadership is very valuable."
That leadership can help people find "a new sense of possibility of winning their social change objective through coalition building across class lines," Lakey says.
For more information about building non-violent social
change, visit trainingforchange.org.
