Reach for the Great Majority—the Working Class
I don’t know what it’s like in the Netherlands,* but in U.S. cities, the classes and support groups that our largely middle-class leadership has organized are too difficult for working-class people to come to. Middle-class people have the slack and the resources to get to class Thursday night at 7:30 every week. People who are still working with their hands have too many crises every week to get there every Thursday night.
But if you have a Saturday class once a month, with your best teacher leading it, and a very small fee that people are welcome to skip if they want to, and some milk and apple juice and some jam and bread for lunch if they forgot their lunch, and if you have a simple agenda, working-class people who have heard about or experienced RC will make great efforts to get there once a month.
Now if they come and you say to them, “But you haven’t had a fundamentals class,” or if you offer them only herb teas to drink, they won’t come back. I wouldn’t either. But if we give up our funny little mannerisms from the counter-culture movement and from our middle-class backgrounds, working-class people will surge into RC, will take over RC, and it will be a better RC for all of us when they do.
From A Better World, pages 20 to 21
(Present Time 185, October 2016)
2* Harvey was speaking at a workshop in the Netherlands.