Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (review)

I have long considered Fred Rose's Coalitions Across the Class Divide, published in 2000, an unjustly neglected work. Middle-class and working-class individuals and organizations must work together for progressive social change, and the cultural obstacles to doing so need to be understood if successful movements are to be built. Rose's book is a brilliant exposition on this topic, so I have been enthusiastically recommending it to others for years. As Betsy Leondar-Wright shares my enthusiasm for Rose's book, I eagerly dug into her book Class Matters when I was asked to review it for this journal.

Leondar-Wright's Class Matters is a different type of book but very valuable nonetheless. The author interviewed forty activists from an enormous array of different classes, races, genders, and sexual orientations, and drew on her own extensive experience in social change movements, as well as her present position as communications director for the organization United for a Fair Economy. The book thus centers on the lived experiences of people from different classes and cultures trying to work together in social movements.

In her interviews, the author profiles an incredible variety of different movements, and the book contains many short passages written by those interviewed or featured in its pages. This makes for both its strengths and weaknesses, depending on what one is looking for. Let's start with the strengths, which are predominant. Leondar-Wright thoroughly and sensitively brings out many viewpoints growing out of various self-identities. This should be a great help for someone trying to figure out the conflicts, misunderstandings, and stereotypes that almost inevitably arise in cross-class or cross-race or cross-gender or cross-sexual orientation movements. On the whole, the interviewees offer their stories and perspectives with courageous self-revelation and humility. An unusual feature of the book, the author devotes a fair amount of sympathetic attention to the dilemmas of upper class individuals who want to join movements for social change.

The book shows how messy and complicated the interaction of multiple cultures and self-identities within a movement can be in the real world. This is a strong point, because easy answers often end up being simplistic. One of the main lessons of the book is that there is no substitute for constant vigilance and sensitive attention to ongoing interpersonal dynamics in movement organizations.

From a different perspective, the same features that make the book's strengths could be seen as weaknesses. Theoretically it is rather fuzzy in defining differences between its six classes (poverty class, working class, lower middle class, professional middle class, upper middle class, and owning class). I think this muddying is intentional, as the author asks the reader to think through and define class for him- or herself, but it does make for some confusion throughout the book. In a couple of cases the activists explaining their perspective seem to have somewhat contradictory understandings. To take just one example, I doubt that all of them agree completely on what is the proper way for a white working-class man to behave in a movement.

I would recommend Leondar-Wright's book as a useful "how to" manual in working out differences among those doing movement work who hold disparate world views. It also contains further resources, sample workshops, and exercises to bring out class issues and experiences. Many of its short narratives by cross-class "bridge builders" would also be useful in a variety of labor education and popular education contexts.

In short, this is a very fine manual for educators and activists trying to bridge the class (and racial and gender and sexual orientation) divides that plague us all. It should be useful to a great many labor educators, and I recommend it to all with an interest in the topic.