Excerpts from the RC Journal COMING HOME.
From the Draft Liberation Policy for Owning-class people.
We are isolated to an extreme degree from other humans. Isolation is a problem for all people in this society, but it is systematically enforced upon the owning class. This is a grievous hurt, and denies us much of the wonder and joy of being alive and intelligent. We are forced to treat other humans inhumanely - by proxy, if not directly.
We are forced to live lives of pretense: to minimize or even deny the struggles, fear, and pain that are the common experience of all humans within the oppressive society. We are left confused and unsure of our own reality, forced to conduct our lives within an all-pervasive pseudo reality - the "correct" way to be in the world, to think, to act, to interact, and to conduct relationships.
The Fundamental Contradiction of the Owning-Class/Working Class Society
The fundamental reason why the system is collapsing is not because the working class is getting resentful; it's because this is built into the system. This system, by its own inherent rules that cannot be changed without the system itself being destroyed, is dependent on profit. The value that is produced by the working class is taken by the owning class and a portion of it returned to the working class as wages. What is not returned as wages and fringe benefits is taken and shared by the factory owner, the banker, the landlord, the defense department, and so on. That's what the system is about, to take this extra value away from the person who produces it - that's the point of the whole thing. Profit takes precedence over everything.
The system goes through cyclical crises, each one more devastating than the last, which lead to an enormous number of bankruptcies. ...
(Harvey Jackins addressing the owning-class workshop, Southampton, England, January, 1988).
Resigning from the Owning Class.
We must face the fact that class oppression is not a side effect of this society; the whole purpose of this society is the economic exploitation of the majority for the benefit of a small minority. This is not a little foible that creeps into this society that we can correct or liberalize or put a band aid on. It's what the society is all about. People had to be deeply embedded in patterns to think this system was to their advantage, and the rest of the people had to be convinced that the organization that flowed from an oppressive society would be advantageous, in order to buy into it. No one would stay a slave unless they had submissive patterns installed on them.
You are the pseudo-beneficiaries of the of the economic exploitation of the working classes (part of which are called middle class) and the invention of all the other oppressions to divide the working classes against each other in order to short-circuit the rebellions and revolts. ...
(Harvey Jackins addressing the owning-class leaders' workshop, Fellowship Farm, Pennsylvania USA, July, 1988)