The Inevitable Stain of Class
Despite the best efforts of social movements in the UK to create an echo chamber in which we rejoice in our own wisdom, we are fundamentally shaped on an individual and collective level by the material, cultural and social systems we were raised in and continue to exist in. The class system is just one of these. It impacts the ways we talk, walk, think and act; it shapes the conversations we have, and the ones we are allowed to have. Our chances and opportunities, the power we can wield in a crowded room and the likelihood of an early death are all impacted by the class contexts in which we were born, raised, and now live our lives. If we accept this, we must conclude that class will also shape the form and content of our resistance. The tactics and strategies we favour, the people we meet or already know, and who we find enough commonality with to enter into struggle together.
Since the 1960s, social movements have been shaped by those who have the most time, energy, financial resources and confidence. These people were born into what can be broadly labelled the middle-classes. The individuals in these movements are driven by their ethical dispositions and the knowledge that they don’t possess the same power as the owning class but have been goaded into a relationship of hostile dependency with them.
The Management of Dissent
With these middle-classes having such influence on social movements, what space is there for those of us raised and living in the working-class? Or from its lower echelons, subject to the myriad violences of poverty? Can the middle-classes work with working-class individuals and communities without management or administration? Without judgement, measurement, or punishment?
We ask these questions because that is the job the owning class has given the middle-classes in all other social fields. We ask because we have spent large portions of our lives in social movements and this is what we see happen to the small number of working-class people who manage to enter these spaces. All the while, our supposed betters lead another futile charge and pat themselves on the back.
Why look at class in our social movements? Because whatever introspection has gone on thus far clearly hasn’t changed anything, and our society is racing into the abyss.
Why look at class in our social movements? Because we think the working-class should be behind the wheel. After all, if the middle-classes are conditioned for management, what are the working-class conditioned for if not survival, struggle, resistance?
A Methodology of Unpacking and Redistributing
So we begin. We begin with getting people together, because we still believe in people and we still believe that minds can be changed. We begin with structured conversations in workshops and trainings. We begin with educational processes that allow all of us to unpack the lies about class that capitalism has told us. Workshops in person over a weekend, educational sessions held online, reading groups, and our most basic weapon – one-to-one conversations. We recognise the different ways of learning, thinking, and working between the classes and we respond to them. We play to our strengths. We accept that sometimes separation is useful and necessary in resourcing us to continue the cross-class work long term.
We get together with our working-class siblings to interrogate the ways in which we have internalised the class hierarchy, and we push our middle-class would-be comrades through the same process. We come together across class in our local wealth redistribution groups and struggle with the basic task of communising the wealth at the table. We lean on our new education, continuing those conversations, holding people to account. We challenge all of us to dig a little deeper, to go a little further, and then we do it again.
The Numbers and the Nerve
In 2023, the initial weekend workshops which pushed our network into action took place across the UK. Late in 2024, those who had begun local redistribution projects off the back of these workshops converged for three days to test how far we’d come. What next? We pilot a series of online sessions for 50 participants from the working-, petit-bourgeois, and middle-classes. 5 of us set up A Revolting Class (ARC) in order to pick up the pace. We make plans to train 10 more working-class facilitators who can conduct the weekend workshop by the end of the year. People stick with this work for a host of reasons, but we imagine most of all they stick with it because it resonates with their experience. It rings true against the barren falsehoods that capitalism has offered, and the lukewarm bullshit served up by social movements.
Whoever you are reading this – you have been shaped by capitalism. Whatever class you were born into, wherever you find yourself now. You want dates and numbers, you want something to measure. It’s the itch in the ass crack you just can’t reach. Allow me:
- Local redistribution groups: 4 (Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Brighton)
- Total members: 50
- Total redistributed: £529,000
- ARC-facilitated weekend workshops completed so far: 8
- ARC weekend workshops upcoming 2025-26: 12
- Online sessions completed so far: 33
- Online sessions upcoming 2025-2026: 132
Make of that whatever the fuck you like. The conclusion we’ve drawn is that we’re just getting started. We want to add a few more bodies to our organisation – those with the blood, spit and drive for the cause. People who want to unpack the damage that capitalism has done to their minds, and resource the communities of resistance they are connected to. We want to ask ourselves deeper questions about what it means to work in solidarity cross-class against the ruling class. And we want to find ways to resource the working-class resistance already happening because we know with the full beat of our hearts that the philanthropy sector is utterly unsuited for this task, and it cannot be reformed. Just like one of our Grandfathers used to say – “Why ask for the devil to hand you a sack of potatoes when you can rob all his little helpers at gunpoint?”
