It is very common for someone expressing a political view (wherever they are on the spectrum) to put out an opinion that is based on a small number of anecdotes and their gut instincts – which their opponents will call their prejudices. (This first sentence is itself an example of the phenomenon it is describing.)
What is not so common is for someone who has been challenged on the thinness of the support for their view to go away and produce the hard evidence to back up their assertions.
One of the most important books of 2014 for me was U.S. activist Betsy Leondar-Wright’s Missing Class: How Seeing Class Cultures Can Strengthen Social Movement Groups. During the book tour for Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists, her previous book (also excellent), Leondar-Wright was challenged most vigorously about the small section of Class Matters that dealt with activist class-culture differences: ‘What proof did I have that class was related to any particular differences in activists’ ways of operating?’
Typical ways of dealing with these kinds of challenges in political debate include: emphatically re-stating the claim as if that in itself serves as proof of the claim; ridiculing the questioner’s all-too-evident unfitness to discuss serious matters; expressing disbelief that anyone could not see the obvious truth of the claim; or simply ignoring the question of evidence.
Rather than taking any of these time-honored routes, Leondar-Wright decided to investigate. She re-entered higher education at Boston College in Massachusetts, and undertook two years of field research, documenting the meetings and interviewing members of 25 varied activist groups, and producing statistically-significant results under rigorous supervision.
Right now, I’d like to look at just one part of the brilliant study Leondar-Wright has produced, which is to do with class-culture differences in relation to group leadership.
How to get ‘them’ to speak up?
Missing Class is organized around problems in activist groups, with five major chapters devoted to: recruitment and group cohesion; activating the inactive; diversity; people who talk too much; and extreme behavior violations. Leadership is addressed in the section on ‘activating the inactive’.
What Leondar-Wright found was that people with different class profiles (in the parts of the US she studied) had different attitudes towards leadership, and correspondingly different strategies for increasing the involvement of less active members.
The three strategies she identified for ‘activating the inactive’ were: holding back from domination; stylized group processes that required everyone to speak; and ‘trustworthy championing of member interests.’
The first strategy, of more dominant group members speaking less and creating space for quiet members to speak up, was advocated and practiced most often by ‘voluntarily-downwardly-mobile’ (VDM) or lower-professional-middle-class people.
Leondar-Wright created the VDM category to describe people who had chosen, after a middle-class upbringing and a university education, to earn only poverty-level wages, or to be unemployed, and to pursue a DIY (do-it-yourself) subcultural lifestyle. These people were mostly male, mostly young, overwhelmingly white, and all born in the U.S. They were also almost all anarchists (though the anarchists in the study were not all VDM). So the VDM category was not a simple class trajectory ‘but a race/age/class/lifestyle/ideology cluster’.
(The speaking-less strategy, advocates admitted, was not very successful in empowering less vocal people in meetings.)
The second strategy proposed was to use group-process techniques to get quieter members to talk more – the most frequently-suggested process was the go-round (each person in turn gets to speak without interruption). The 12 interviewees who suggested this kind of approach were diverse in age, race and gender. Their biggest commonality was class. Of the 12, 11 were from privileged class backgrounds – four were lifelong professional middle-class (PMC); seven were VDM. Of the seven voluntarily-downwardly-mobile interviewees, four had been raised PMC, and three had grown up upper-middle-class or owning class – ‘very privileged backgrounds’.
(Leondar-Wright spends considerable time exploring how ‘stylized group processes’ can fail to be empowering, and can often be disempowering.)
The final strategy advocated by interviewees in the Missing Class study is summed up as ‘trustworthy championing of member interests with protective leadership’. Leondar-Wright notes that this was a position held mostly by people from working-class backgrounds. Such interviewees praised leaders for using their authority strongly to ensure all members had a chance to speak. There was a strong class difference in people’s willingness to criticize their current political group. The average number of negative comments about activists’ own groups (made during a full-length interview) was more than six for lifelong PMC folk, and just three for lifelong working-class people. Leondar-Wright notes: ‘Closing ranks and loyalty to [current] leaders were clearly working-class habits.’ These activists were, however, quite ready to criticize groups they had been in before, explaining why they left them, thus disproving the lie that working-class people are passive sheep.
Leondar-Wright detected several empowerment methods in this approach, the central one being leaders asking new people to take on small, low-risk tasks, then gradually bigger roles turning into leadership responsibilities. This is a standard community-organizing leadership development model, as she notes.
(Analyzing the participation of 48 lifelong working-class or poor people in their first, second or third activist meetings, Leondar-Wright found two effective techniques: directly asking tailored questions and suggesting tasks; and one-on-one outreach, mentoring and encouragement.)
Cross-class communication
With these three broad strategies for activating inactive members (holding back; special group process techniques; more natural, direct, protective leadership), not only did support for a strategy tend to come from people with a particular class background, opposition tended to come from people with a different class background. Leondar-Wright notes: ‘While activists from class-privileged backgrounds were more likely to be monitoring [speech, in terms of] who was taking up how much airspace, working-class activists were more likely to be monitoring trustworthiness and dedication to the cause, as expressed primarily in actions, not words.’ Taking one meeting she observed as an example, the white facilitator (moderately VDM from an upper-middle-class background) used several stylized group processes, including ‘breaking into pairs and reporting back on what the other person said’. Those who failed to co-operate with – and those who failed to approve of – these techniques were all people who grew up working-class or poor. Leondar-Wright points out: ‘Well-meaning PMC people may try to resolve tensions by doing organized team-building activities that require stylized speech, explicit sharing of personal feelings, or tasks reminiscent of school assignments, not realizing that if the people they’re trying to activate have felt alienated from school teachers or workplace managers, their efforts may make the environment less comfortable, more enmeshed in PMC culture.’
There is a wonderful brief interlude in Missing Class, in which Betsy Leondar-Wright explains some of her own experiences around these issues, and her youthful passionate embrace of, and subsequent critical distancing from, stylized group processes within the Movement for a New Society (MNS) in the 1970s and 1980s. She remarks: ‘In MNS we had a checklist of skills that every activist should acquire. If I were amending that list for today’s college-educated radicals, I would add the skill of participating in a brisk, leader-run, majority-rule, action-oriented labor or community-organizing meeting without whining about the process.’
Anarchist leadership
From quite a different political starting point, the U.S. anarchist author and activist Chris Crass has reached a very similar view in his excellent and wide-ranging book Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy. Crass argues, among other things, that anarchists should abandon a fundamentalist attitude towards particular group processes (such as consensus decision-making), and accept that leaders exist in anarchist as in other political groups. Crass (a classic white, male, U.S.-born VDM anarchist) argues further that it is only when the existence of leaders has been accepted and acknowledged that conscious programs of leadership development can undermine racism, sexism, classism and other forms of oppression to bring activist groups closer to genuine equality. He writes of his time in San Francisco ‘Food Not Bombs’ (FNB):
‘In FNB, the concept of leadership was fiercely debated. For years, many of us said, “There are no leaders”. Often people like myself who were playing obvious leadership roles were the ones most vehement about the group “not having leaders”. Our refusal of leadership was, in many ways, an attempt to share power, but it also made it extremely difficult to talk about the real power dynamics in our work and how they related to institutional forms of privilege and oppression.’
Crass points out that ‘many of the ways prefigurative politics are practiced or discussed today [in US anarchist circles] is based on the lived experience of managerial, middle- and working-class white people in their twenties, who do not have children or care for elders, are able to make sacrifices and live on a low-budget and have devoted a significant amount of their lives to political work’.
Crass warns against ‘prefigurative politics coming to mean a handful of practices and strategies that are always used’, and emphasizes that prefigurative politics can include a wide range of decision-making processes beyond just consensus and that different forms of leadership that includes horizontal and hierarchical structures are necessary depending on the situation’. He ends his book valuing ‘liberatory hierarchies’ which have ‘clear roles and expectations, differentiated decision-making power, supervision and channels for communication and mutual accountability to both goals and values of the organization.’ Liberatory hierarchies, for Crass, ‘are based in the belief that all people have the capacity to lead, that good leaders are also followers, that people playing many different roles are making important contributions, that delegation of specific roles can make space for more people to participate, that opportunities should be available for people throughout the organization to grow politically and personally with the goal of creating more leaders not just for the current organization, but for the larger movement as a whole’.
Chris Crass makes it clear that the evolution of his thinking has come through not only study (the thoughts and experiences of women of color figure repeatedly in the book), but through his experiences working (with a conscious commitment to feminism and anti-racism) with a wide variety of groups including community groups of working-class people of color. The knowledge he gained through study, and the experiences he gained through joint action and prolonged, respectful interaction, wore away at his political prejudices to help him develop a more flexible, values-centered but evidence-based approach to being political engaged. And that’s where we came in.
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