“I Think We Better Do the Job”
Comments by Harvey Jackins to a working-class caucus in Europe in 1990
It’s very plain from my experience leading this project that if a working-class person takes leadership, everybody else will follow. When I get together with sixty owning-class people, they argue a little bit, but then they say to me, “Tell us what to do.”
So you be a clear model. If you will move and do the things that you know how to do, people will follow. The middle class is trying to get their heads clear to do the right thing, but they’ve been made to be much more confused than you have. Owning-class people are good people underneath their patterns, but their patterns keep them tormenting and hating themselves. They don’t know how to move, they don’t know where to go, because it feels to them like death if they don’t do what their parents told them.
We are not that confused. We are timid and we’re easily distracted. “Come have a beer and forget it, Joe.” We have patterns that tell us we are stupid, and we tend to believe we are powerless. However, we live under this oppression, and we see what a screwed-up mess it is. The middle- and owning-class people still think it is the only way to live, and that’s what makes us so important. It isn’t that we are holier than anybody else or more virtuous than anybody else. We just know the score [understand what is happening]. We’re in better touch with reality. Generally life has taught us that if a job needs to be done, the only damn thing to do is to do it. So we’re no better than anybody else, but also we’re at least as good as everybody else, and if we want the human race to survive, I think we better do the job.
I promise you, and I think I have demonstrated this, that the middle- and owning-class people will get behind us and follow us if we’ll just move.
From page 97 of “You Must Lead Leaders,” in An Unbounded Future
(Present Time 201, October 2020)