Abstract
Where is everybody? Why won’t more people get involved with this issue? Why can’t we find some common ground? Why can’t we end meetings on time? Why do the same people talk all the time?
For anyone who has been involved in any kind of social movement organization, these questions will sound all too familiar. They point to just some of the many challenges that social movements regularly face. While there are many reasons for these challenges, some general to movement-building, some particular to each group, Betsy Leondar-Wright argues that there is a key component missing from our understanding of social movement dynamics: differences in class cultures.
In Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures, Leondar-Wright argues that these differences in class cultures shape how movement activists and leaders structure meetings, how they make decisions, how they talk, how they use body language, how they interact with the public or other groups, and more. According to Leondar-Wright, “lack of class awareness prevents activists from noticing how class dynamics play out and so keeps them from effectively bridging class differences” (p. 2).
Leondar-Wright deploys a Bourdieusian understanding of class, where individuals are positioned in a social space structured by the volume, composition, and trajectory of different types of capital (economic, cultural, social, etc.). This leads to a seven-fold class typology, ranging from “chronic poverty” to “upper middle class” (an eighth “owner class” is omitted), with further distinctions based on individuals’ “class trajectories,” meaning how their class position has changed over the course of their lives (pp.30–39).
She applies her framework to an in-depth study of 362 individuals associated with 25 left-of-center social movement organizations. Over two years, her research team interviewed individuals and sat in on group meetings, then coded the resulting transcripts to find patterns of difference in vocabulary, language use, tone of voice, and interpersonal interaction. As would be expected, there were significant differences depending on the race and gender of interviewees, as well as the movement traditions in which they were based. But Leondar-Wright’s research shows that there were also significant differences depending on individuals’ class. For example, poor and working-class people used more specific, direct vocabulary, while those who were “professional middle class” (PMC) favored more abstract, impersonal words (pp. 152–157). And in cases where certain classes dominated in a group setting, she found that the group exhibited certain “class cultures,” independent of race, gender, or movement tradition. For example, working-class groups were more likely to offer food and other forms of material “mutual aid” to encourage meeting attendance than PMC-dominated groups, which relied more on individual ideological commitment (pp. 101–105).
Much of Missing Class is devoted to documenting how such class differences show up in small but surprising ways in all kinds of social movement settings. While these might appear to be mere differences in personal style and group tradition, Leondar-Wright argues that if unacknowledged, these differences in class culture create obstacles to movement building. Activists from different class sub-groups end up “operating from two [or more] different playbooks, and thus accomplishing less” (p. 2). By developing more “class awareness” and “class multiculturalism,” Leondar-Wright suggests that progressive social movements would be better able to work together and build powerful cross-class coalitions.
As someone who has sat through plenty of social movement meetings myself, many of the scenarios that Leondar-Wright describes ring true. Her accounts of the unintended consequences of process-heavy meetings were particularly apt (pp. 135–140). While hand signs, rotating facilitators, and other techniques are intended to flatten hierarchies and encourage broad participation, she shows how elaborate meeting processes actually stifle group interaction, encourage individual “performances,” and end up excluding those who are not well versed in how to navigate the process rules. Likewise, I myself have played the role of college-educated union organizer addressing a room of “lifelong working-class” activists, trying and not always succeeding to find a common language.
Clearly Leondar-Wright is on to something. Different groups of activists speak, act, and interact differently. These differences are not solely attributable to race, gender, or movement tradition, and they clearly result in miscommunications that can hobble social movement organizations. Understanding where these differences come from, and finding ways to address these differences systematically, could probably improve social movements’ organizational functioning. What is less clear from her analysis is whether the class schema she proposes is the best way to understand these differences, or the best way to strengthen social movements. Additionally, Leondar-Wright’s ahistorical analytical framework skews her analysis of social movement group dynamics, viewing dynamics that are particular to a specific generation of social movements as dynamics afflicting U.S. social movements more generally.
One of Leondar-Wright’s main goals in writing Missing Class was to provide scholars and activists with a “shared vocabulary” to talk about class differences (p. 29). While she implies that the U.S. lacks such a shared vocabulary, this is incorrect. As she notes, there is a default class vocabulary in the United States, one based in the idea of the country as a “middle-class society.” It posits a class schema involving small groups comprising “the poor” and “the rich,” with a large, internally differentiated “middle class” between them. The dividing lines between and within these groups are murky, based on individual attributes such as income, occupation, education level, and consumption patterns. Critics charge that this default class vocabulary makes it hard to see class differences as forces shaping social power relations or life trajectories. Instead, it draws attention to individual differences based on consumption and lifestyle choices (Vanneman and Cannon 1987; Zweig 2001).
Presumably Leondar-Wright wanted to improve on this default class vocabulary. But even though she systematizes her class schema using typologies and Bourdieusian theory, what is surprising is the degree to which it ends up mirroring the default U.S. class schema. We still have relatively small “poor/working class” and “owning/upper class” groups, separated by a large, internally differentiated “middle” class. Although she provides some guidelines, the dividing lines between classes remain unclear. It is not at all apparent that her approach creates a better vocabulary for U.S. scholars and activists to recognize and discuss class differences.
However, the problem is deeper than a quibble over the labels that Leondar-Wright applies to different groups. Her conception of class risks undermining her stated goal of strengthening social movements. By organizing her class schema around individual attributes instead of social relations, she shifts the analytical focus from power to privilege. Understanding class differences no longer involves developing a better analysis of how class relations shape social power dynamics, which in turn might allow social movement groups to develop a more strategic approach to organizing. Instead, it involves recognizing that certain individual attributes confer greater or lesser degrees of “privilege,” which can exclude or marginalize certain groups.
But the reason that those with less “class privilege” are excluded or marginalized is not because society doesn’t value their class cultures enough. It is because they lack power. Changing the social value attached to less “privileged” class cultures is not simply a matter of those currently endowed with more “class privilege” learning to appreciate the positive attributes of less “privileged” class cultures. It involves building working-class power. If Leondar-Wright is serious about the need for “a mass movement . . . with working-class cultural strength in its bones” (p. 5), then that must be the priority.
Seeing class is key to this endeavor. But it requires seeing class differently from how Leondar-Wright sees it: not as a set of individual attributes, but as a social relation derived from struggles over power and authority in the workplace. This approach displaces the idea of the United States as a “middle-class society” in favor of seeing a working-class majority (Wright 1997; Zweig 2001). Leondar-Wright is sympathetic to this alternate conception of class, but argues that it obscures vast intraclass differences in life experiences (p. 4). The implicit assumption is that the only way to understand the “micro” dimension of class is to view these differences as differences between classes, as if it is somehow impossible for classes to have a unifying identity while also being culturally heterogeneous.
But class identities are always internally heterogeneous and politically constructed. Just as it is possible to understand “Latin@” as a constructed racial category, while also understanding that this group is internally divided by region, national origin, education, religion, immigration status, and more, the same can be said for “the working class.” Without denying Leondar-Wright’s claim that education levels and occupations create social and cultural differences (p. 32), it does not follow that they are class differences, or that they preclude a common class identity. The extent to which they unite or divide individuals is not simply a function of how “aware” people are of them. Rather, it is a product of struggle and strategy.
To understand how class identities unite while remaining culturally diverse, we need only look back in history. For, despite Leondar-Wright’s contention that there have been few cross-class, multi-racial movements in the United States (p. 3), in fact there have been more than a few. Groups like the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the IWW, the Socialist and Communist Parties, the CIO, and othersmobilized people from a wide range of educational and occupational backgrounds—what Leondar-Wright would call class backgrounds. The reason she cannot see them as cross-class movements is because they do not fit her class schema. Instead of seeing themselves as cross-class movements, they saw themselves as class movements. They sought to unite disparate groups of people around a common class identity and against a common class opponent. Their goal was not to “raise awareness” about the value of their class culture, but rather to build class power. That their unifying vision often fell short—particularly around issues of race—and that they often failed to achieve their goals does not negate the fact that they managed to mobilize people from a wide array of backgrounds on a scale unimaginable to many of the groups profiled in Missing Class.
Leondar-Wright notes that the groups she included in her sample “varied in almost every way I had hoped” and that she is “confident that the class commonalities I found in the sample don’t actually reflect another variable” (pp. 237–8). They do, however, reflect a certain time. And many of the differences she identifies as “class” differences might better be understood as products of that time. For example, although she recognizes that she conducted her field study in a period of “movement abeyance,” she fails to recognize the degree to which the broader period of the past several decades has been one where Left social movements are not only weak, but largely divorced from a working-class base. It is also a period where activism has become professionalized. Where past generations got their political training on the picket line and union hall, most of the activists in Missing Class got theirs on a college campus or in a community development office. Many of their organizations struggle with competing priorities as they become ever more dependent on placating foundations and wealthy donors. Leondar-Wright is aware of these characteristics of the movements she studies, but treats them as general features of social movement organizations, not products of their historical period.
The result is a book that sets out important goals, but fails to achieve them. Yes, today’s social movements need strengthening, and, yes, activists and scholars alike need a better vocabulary to talk about class. Unfortunately, the framework that Missing Class provides misses the mark.