People under Age Thirty-Five, and Classism
I am interested in the thinking of people under age thirty-five about classism. I attend both middle-class and working-class workshops—and I don’t see a lot of us!
I think our age group can have a useful perspective on the class system and make interesting decisions about it, including to resist it. We are such a vital group. We have revolutionary potential!
The economic system is not the same today as it was for our parents. Many of us were sold a middle-class dream that doesn’t exist anymore and that was never good for humanity.
Older adults are often restimulated when they see in us what they confronted when they were our age, including having to compromise with the class system. This separates them from us. We need them to stand by our side while we look at what is ahead for us.
I’m curious about the following:
- How have you experienced the class system? How connected or isolated have you been?
- How are you oppressed in the class system? How are you fighting back?
- How have racism and other oppressions affected your relationship to the class system?
- How are you resisting assimilation into the class system?
- How are the experiences of young people, young adults, and those of us in our early thirties different from each other? (I am thirty-four.)
- What is your relationship to the working class?
- What role do you play in the class system today? Did you intend to play that role? Did threats or bribes influence your decision? Did discharge play a role in what you decided?
MY CLASS STORY
I learned RC when I was twenty-two years old. When I was twenty-seven, I read an article by Seán Ruth, the International Liberation Reference Person for Middle-Class People, in which he described the different roles that we in the middle class are expected to play. [See <www.rc.org/publication/present_time/pt176/pt176_052_sr>.] What he wrote included this: The class system offers no good roles for young adults. A challenge is for you to find alternative liberating leadership roles that go against middle-class conditioning and for all of us to support you in leading all middle-class people.
I cried and cried when I read it. I felt like someone could see the impossible situation I felt that I was in. (Reading it also brought an awareness of my undischarged oppressor distress.) I decided to build a life as a unionized direct production worker.
In building that life, I’ve had to discharge on the following:
- What it’s like to have money (I take home more money than I ever did as a middle-class worker)
- The role my work plays in U.S. domination
- How terrible the class system is
- Internalized classism
- My middle-class upbringing
- My connections to the global working class
- And much more
I hope you will answer my questions and share your story!
USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of young adults
(Present Time 208, July 2022)