Bringing Working-Class People into RC
Tim Jackins answering a question at the Pennsylvania
and New Jersey, USA, Teachers’ and Leaders’ Workshop
Question: Dan Nickerson [the International Liberation Reference Person for Working-Class People] has been spearheading an initiative to bring more working-class people into RC, and I’ve been thinking that the RC Community is a very middle-class environment. I’m curious if there have been initiatives, particularly in the United States, to make it more workable for working people to come in.
Tim Jackins: Yes, there are lots of efforts. I think what will work is for working-class people to reach other working-class people—not bring them into the Community but teach them RC themselves. I think we have to prepare people to be part of our Community so they are not so vulnerable to being restimulated by us when they get here.
We all need to push against whatever stops us from having relationships with working-class people. Whether we are working-class or middle-class or owning-class, we have distresses that interfere with having those relationships. We have to challenge that—go stumble and do it awkwardly but start learning how to make contact.
As we work to make large changes in society, we will need a solid group of working-class people who understand the world from a working-class perspective, who have seen what really makes the world work. And they will need the tools we’ve developed in RC, so they can’t be derailed by restimulation and can’t be set apart.
Working-class RCers who have working-class people they would like to bring into the Community need to teach those people RC. Their friends need to have done enough RC that when they come into the Community they understand it and don’t just react to it.
We are always going to restimulate each other. There is no way out of that. We agree to try not to restimulate each other, which makes a big difference but doesn’t cure it. We still restimulate each other. We just usually know better than to let it ferment and continue going back and forth.
Working-class Co-Counselors need to find a few people and teach them Co-Counseling one-on-one or one-on-two or two-on-two. They need to help them understand RC from a working-class perspective, from the beginning, and understand it well enough that they can participate in the Community. The Community’s resource, which is often based in other classes, is valuable. But if people come in and don’t understand restimulation and then it hits them, their reaction might be, “There is something nice here and I would like to stay, but I can’t stand it [tolerate it].”
We can teach people ourselves instead of hoping, praying, or trying to find some way to manipulate the Community into quickly being something different. It has taken a long time to build the Community, and it won’t change right away.
We need to experiment. It’s fine if a working-class fundamentals group doesn’t meet with the rest of the Community for a year or two—whatever time it takes for people to understand RC enough that it’s not hard on them to step in; not harder than they can bear. I think the answer is in that direction. Try it out and let me know.