Leading and Having Influence as a Working-Class Person
“My work has given me a taste of the power and hope of organizing.”
A Southern California Working-Class Liberation Workshop was held in August 2019 in Los Angeles, California, USA. Twenty-three Co-Counselors who were raised working class or poor or were currently working as direct production workers attended. Most were People of the Global Majority, and the majority were women.
I led the workshop (I’m the Regional Reference Person for the San Gabriel Valley/East Los Angeles Region). Dan Nickerson, the International Liberation Reference Person for Working-Class People, assisted me. And Pamela Shepard-García did the organizing. There were many mini-sessions, demonstrations, and small groups.
On Saturday evening, after Havdalah, Dan answered questions, talked about women workers and sexism, and did a panel of direct production workers. That was a highlight of the workshop.
In this article I summarize the talks I gave at the workshop.
Friday Evening—Overview of the Workshop
LEADERSHIP
Welcome to the Southern California Working-Class Liberation Workshop! This is actually the second working-class weekend workshop I’ve led in RC. The first was in 1982—thirty-seven years ago. Another RC leader was supposed to lead it but a few days before said he couldn’t because of urgent union work he had to do. Harvey Jackins suggested that I lead it, and I said yes. I was a young adult and had never led a workshop before. The workshop had its ups and downs, but overall people said we did well, and I agree.
After the workshop, I focused on building my local RC Community and led one-day workshops. The first person to whom I successfully taught RC one-to-one was Horace Williams, an African American raised-poor-and-working-class man who had long been a leader in the wide world and was currently middle class. We decided to build a Community that was mostly People of the Global Majority and to back [support] each other as an Arab-heritage person and an African-heritage person. Horace became Regional Reference Person in 1996, and a few years later I became an Area Reference Person. Then in 2017 I became the Regional Reference Person.
Our Community continues to be about sixty percent People of the Global Majority. It can be done, and yes, we the working class can lead. We don’t need to depend on our good middle- and owning-class allies to lead all our workshops. This weekend a dishwasher is leading this workshop. With preparation and work, all of us are capable of leading in bigger ways than we usually feel like we can.
I would now like us to do a mini-session. Here’s a suggestion: If I had called you a few days ago to say that I couldn’t lead the workshop and asked you to do it, what feelings would have come up for you to discharge?
VALUING OUR EXPERIENCES
We are a group of people raised working class or poor and people currently working as direct production workers. Many of us went to college, where we learned theories and academic values. Although much of that may have been beneficial to us, class oppression often makes us feel that our own experiences and thinking are not of much value.
Harvey Jackins, the founder of RC, was an admirer of the Chinese Revolution and encouraged us during the 1970s to learn about it. One thing I learned is that Mao Tse-tung was from a peasant background and early in his adult life attended a university where intellectuals held many discussions about the way forward for China. Besides studying, Mao spent time in the rural areas speaking with peasants and listening to them. He learned a lot from them about the actual conditions in the country. In political discussions, then and later, he often put forward a perspective that was different from that of others and was met with much resistance. Eventually some of his comrades realized that his ideas were more grounded in reality and effective in the struggle for change. He played a major leadership role, and in 1949 the revolutionary forces won national power.
Our experiences are valuable. We have a good sense of reality that we can recover with discharge and re-evaluation. Our perspective is much needed in the world today and will be of great importance in creating a society without exploitation and oppression. During this workshop I’ll be sharing some of the experiences I’ve had during the forty years I have worked in machine shops and been a nursing assistant and now a food service worker. I encourage you to share your experiences, too. Let’s have another mini-session: What do you value about your experiences, and how do they make you a good leader?
THE CURRENT SITUATION AND NEXT PERIOD OF TIME
We are at a critical point in human history that offers real opportunities for a liberating transformation of society. There are also real dangers to life on Earth if we don’t see to it that big changes happen. Climate scientists say we have eleven years to stop climate change and avoid a tipping point that could make many parts of our planet uninhabitable. Nuclear weapons are an increasing threat, as an irrational arms race continues and even limited treaties are abandoned. Reactionary governments have been gaining power and are shedding even the appearance of “democracy.” The July 2018 Present Time has articles by Tim Jackins and Diane Shisk that challenge us to push our leadership forward during the next eleven years, even more than we have up to now, and enjoy our lives more than ever.
The 2017 World Conference of the RC Communities adopted a new goal on ending classism. It is a useful guide for us. At this workshop we will address each part of it with examples from our own efforts. I like to summarize things to help me hold some of the basic ideas in my mind. I’ve summarized below a few points in the goal:
We commit ourselves to end all exploitation by doing the following:
- Connecting with direct production workers (the large section of the working class that is underrepresented in RC) and poor people and learning from them
- Getting RC into their hands and backing their leadership
- Re-emerging from any distress that causes us to feel that some lives are more important than others, to seek economic advantages over one another, or to be preoccupied with irrationally seeking comfort and security
- Understanding the class society and communicating about it in our own way
(Following a mini-session, we reviewed the official version of the goal.)
Saturday Morning—Connecting with Direct Production Workers
GETTING A BIGGER VIEW OF REALITY
I was fortunate that I learned to enjoy reading at a young age. It was one way that I survived some hard times growing up. When I got into RC, I loved reading RC literature. Harvey’s explanation of the class system and his confidence in the “intelligence, strength, endurance, and goodness of working-class people everywhere” had a big impact on me. Getting an accurate picture of class society and working-class liberation from an RC perspective led me to make key decisions about what I wanted to do with my life.
Some years ago, Dan Nickerson and I put together a list of virtually every article on working-class liberation that Harvey had written up to that point. Dan gave me the titles of some of them and made a few comments about them. I went through Harvey’s books and filled out the list. You were each e-mailed a copy of the list. It is also on the RC website (search for working class, scroll down, and click on “Articles by Harvey Jackins on Working-Class Liberation”). If you only read one article, one of my favorites is “The Working Class, the World, and RC.”
DISCHARGING INTERNALIZED AND ALL OPPRESSION
When I began having sessions in RC, most of them were about the family I grew up with. I discharged a lot of grief about being separated from them as well as many painful memories of their distresses. I had moved to another city to try to escape the distresses, but after finding information about classism and discharging in a working-class support group, I re-evaluated. I realized that I didn’t want to leave my people, I wanted to end the oppression.
For many years I attended workshops on the oppressions I had experienced and on being an ally to other groups. That was crucial work in my fully reclaiming myself, my people, and all people, and it became an ongoing process for building the unity we need for our liberation.
CHOOSING A LIBERATION FOCUS
Almost everyone has many identities. Although it is good to work on as many as we can, we can easily spread ourselves too thin unless we choose one or a few to focus on. In my case, after several years in RC, I decided that working-class liberation would be my primary focus. It seemed to be key in my re-emergence and something I could do that would be most useful to RC and to liberation in the wide world. I also came to realize that in order to be effective, I would need to put an emphasis as well on being of Arab heritage and a man. Much of my chronic distress involved the oppressions of these groups, and moving Arab and men’s liberation forward would strengthen RC as a whole.
Everyone’s circumstances are different, but I hope some of you will consider ending classism as one of the liberation areas you focus on.
SETTING UP OUR LIVES
Once we have chosen a liberation focus, we can set up our lives to have regular contact with the people in our constituency. In my case, this included going home to the working-class neighborhood I grew up in and getting a job in a small machine shop in an industrial area nearby. I got the job by going to the state employment office and finding a company willing to train someone with no experience as a drill press operator. I continued to discharge on internalized working-class oppression and other oppressions that separated me from my coworkers. To have time for my goals, I made a personal decision not to live a traditional family life. Over the years I have made close friends who are like family to me.
Those of you who were raised working class or poor and are currently middle class might make choices that are different from mine. I don’t know what makes sense for you to do, but if I were in circumstances similar to yours, I imagine that I would remember the part of the working-class commitment that says the working class is “the only class with a future.” If that’s true, being middle class could be a temporary stage a person is going through. As a first step, I would consider getting a part-time working-class job. In the future we all may be learning to do all kinds of work rather than being limited to a certain set of occupations defined by class. Meanwhile, I would go to both raised-working-class/poor and middle-class workshops.
MAKING FRIENDS WITH DIRECT PRODUCTION WORKERS
To build the relationships with direct production workers that we need to enrich our lives and transform society, we need to do more than have regular contact with people and discharge our internalized oppression. We need to make friends. Sometimes this means getting good at our jobs and earning respect, taking public transportation and getting acquainted with people we see daily on our way to work at bus stops or in train stations, playing basketball with coworkers, spending time with their families, having conversations about our lives and the news of the world on our lunch breaks, seeking out jobs that bring us into contact with many people as we go about our workday, or offering a hug on holidays or birthdays. One direct production worker I met at a bus stop now shares my apartment with me, and our friendship has extended to family members I see on trips to their country. Such friendships may not happen quickly, but they can be lifelong and bring people into our lives whom we never expected to meet.
Saturday Afternoon—Taking Action with Direct Production Workers
BUILDING ALLIANCES AND TEACHING RC
Over time, I gradually shared my thoughts about the oppressive class system and human liberation with my friends. I found many who agreed with me. I also learned who among my coworkers didn’t agree and why. That made me consider what people were saying and helped me clarify my thinking. I continued listening and looked for opportunities to go a step further than I had before in holding out a perspective of complete liberation for everybody.
I gained a reputation as a good listener. Coworkers would talk openly with me about their lives and struggles and then thank me for listening. When friends asked me what I was reading and where I was going on my days away from work, I would offer naturalized RC at first. Then I found ways to tell them more about our project and my life. Some RC “classes” would be on breaks, and some would happen while our dishwashing crew was working. I’ve shared summaries of some RC literature via e-mail, and this has sometimes led to a person wanting to read one of Harvey’s books. When I told people I was leading this workshop on working-class liberation, they were excited. One said, “We need your voice out in the world!”
TAKING ACTION TOGETHER
During the last few years, the level of trust and understanding at work made me think that people might be willing to take action together as a group. One of the big difficulties in many of our lives has been the large increases in rent in our neighborhoods. I joined a tenants’ union of mostly working-class people and began circulating a petition for stronger rent control laws in California. My coworkers were eager to sign it, and we quickly filled the form with signatures. This year there’s another statewide petition for improving the rent control laws, and we have a team at my workplace that is not only signing it but circulating it to people outside of work. One person took two forms to a basketball game and filled them with signatures.
During recent tense periods in the United States when many immigrants feared deportation, some of my coworkers gave me their e-mail addresses so I could send them information about their rights. I’ve been using the e-mail addresses I collected from these and other coworkers to send information and links to videos about political issues, climate change, and candidates for U.S. president in 2020—which they can read, watch, and share with voters they know. Good conversations have followed and been highlights of my workdays.
During the recent global strikes for the climate, I talked to my coworkers about the events happening in our cities and sent out e-mails with the details. One person, within thirty minutes of our first conversation about it, organized seven friends on her cell phone to attend the rally and march in downtown Los Angeles. We all showed up.
BEING MORE VISIBLE AS A LEADER
In the 1980s Harvey challenged the leaders of the Los Angeles RC Communities to each build an RC Community on their own. Several of us from working-class or raised-poor backgrounds were able to do that. It was a scary but satisfying experience and a contradiction to my internalized oppression patterns of insignificance.
Organizing in the wide world has come more slowly for me, but I have made steady progress. At first I was visible by writing letters to the editors of some local newspapers. In recent years I have become more visible and outspoken as an activist, both in the kitchen where I work and in the rest of the hospital of three thousand employees, including with the managers.
BEGINNING STEPS TOWARD INTERNATIONALISM
Harvey encouraged working-class Co-Counselors to build solidarity with working-class people outside their home countries. Some of my first steps in this direction were with coworkers who were mainly from Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. After establishing friendships with coworkers in the machine shop, I asked some of them if I could speak Spanish with them to help me be able to converse in that language. They agreed, and thanks to them I began having my first sessions in Spanish at workshops with Co-Counselors from Latin America. In 1998 Julian Weissglass (the International Commonality Reference Person for Wide World Change) invited me to attend a workshop he was leading in Mexico, and it turned out to be life changing for me. I made my first contact with a Co-Counselor from El Salvador and eventually developed Co-Counseling relationships with several people in that country. In 2008 I attended a workshop Julian led in El Salvador, and that is where, after five years of telephone sessions, I met María Lorena Cuéllar Barandiarán in person. Our work together has continued since then.
In 2016 Azi Khalili (the International Liberation Reference Person for South, Central, and West Asian-Heritage People) led an Arab conference call and told us that she wanted us to come to Morocco to attend COP22 (the United Nations climate conference) as part of the Sustaining All Life delegation. At the COP I was able to make some Moroccan contacts and start teaching them RC.
Before these things happened, I had only a vague idea of how to connect with working-class and poor people in other countries. But I always kept it in my mind, and as opportunities arose I prioritized them.
Sunday Morning—Working-Class Liberation
LEADING IN A BIGGER WAY
This morning I want to talk about the same things we worked on yesterday but on a larger scale. We need to organize bigger communities and movements in the world to stop environmental destruction, nuclear war, and governments that oppose people’s real interests. All these things are rooted in the class system that dominates the planet in the form of capitalism and its different forms of oppression. We have the theory and the tools to eliminate the distress patterns that underlie these dangers. Harvey challenged us to “build your own world community” and said that each of us could accomplish at least as much as he had. Harvey managed to get RC started in ninety countries. So far I’m working with two. If it goes well, maybe I’ll be invited to another place in the world, and the number will grow. It’s great to be allies and help build solidarity internationally. We each need to think bigger and challenge ourselves to be the leaders that we were born to be.
THINKING STRATEGICALLY
Although we can lead from whatever circumstances we happen to be in, it helps to think strategically. Since the system we are up against is big, we need to be bigger than the system, and we have the worldwide numbers to do so. Where can we reach larger numbers? Unions, schools, and workplaces and industries that have hundreds or thousands of employees are all good places (and not the only ones) to reach people. Where we focus depends on who we are and where we are in the global society. Backing union activists is an excellent role to play. (Two members of the workshop then talked and discharged about their experiences standing up to their employers—one in a large manufacturing company as an individual worker, and the other as a union member in a citywide school system during a teachers’ strike.)
DEVELOPING NEW LEADERS AND LEADING LEADERS
Being a Reference Person for an Area or Region gives us experience developing new leaders. Helping people start new Communities and backing them is a way to lead leaders, who lead leaders, and so on. Developing a circle of allies among direct production workers who lead their families and communities is another way. As individuals we cannot do all of the work, but we can lead and organize in a way that gives us greater and greater influence.
My work both inside and outside of my local RC Community has given me a taste of the power and hope of organizing.
Los Angeles, California, USA
(Present Time 198, January 2020)