Those of us who were raised working class 
and/or poor and have been upwardly mobile can use the “privileges” we now have to get RC into the hands of direct production workers and to follow their leadership in making the world right. We can use RC to fully reclaim our working-class selves. We can discharge the hurts that led us away from home as well as the hurts and confusion, from being in the middle and owning classes, that stand between us and our people. We can “go home.”

Dan Nickerson (the International Liberation Reference Person for Working-Class People) is asking us to use the term “direct production workers” for the group of people we have called “currently working class.” These people were usually raised working class or poor and are currently engaged in the direct production of goods and services.

Dan is asking us to look at our place in the class system from the perspective of the work we do and our role in society, rather than from the viewpoint of an “identity” (“What class am I?”). From Dan’s perspective, the role of direct production workers is to create the wealth that the rest of us live on.

I find it helpful to try out Dan’s perspective, if for no other reason than it forces me to think afresh. I was upwardly mobile. I no longer do direct production work by virtue of my current place and roles in society.

I carry the strengths of my working-class background and the scars of the oppression.

I went to college to get badly needed information for my family and community. Of all the things I learned in college, RC is the most important. (One should not have to leave their family and undergo heavy middle-class training in order to have access to RC!)


I got confused and did not return home as I had planned. Thanks to Harvey’s [Harvey Jackins’s] work on classism, I did eventually go home and determinedly shared what I had learned. After a few years I left home again, thinking I would be gone only a short time in order to do some important work—but I got mired in the middle class again.


Now, decades later, I am discharging on returning home and bringing with me all that I have gained from RC. What does it mean to “go home” now? I think for me it means going back after the people I left in my hometown. It is with these people that I can most directly face the internalized oppression as I received it, and where the greatest discharge and re-evaluation will happen, at least initially. But I think “going home” also means prioritizing my relationships with direct production workers, especially with the women.

I have been going back to my hometown to renew and deepen relationships. I’m finding I have many opportunities to listen, support people’s thinking, and follow their leadership in making things right—and in the process, get a bit of RC into their hands.

In my current class position I have many privileges that most direct production workers do not have. I am astounded when I look this fact squarely in the face. A few of the privileges are as follows:


• Time to do my work and also get lots of sessions to keep thinking freshly and grow in my leadership
• A warm, calm, orderly space of my own to work in
• Excellent health care and access to exercise options so that at seventy I am healthy and energetic enough to do my work
• A safe neighborhood where I do not need to keep an eye on my safety and that of my family and friends or handle threats to our safety
• Work I choose to do for the love of the work, not for livelihood, work that is not hard on my body
• A middle-class daughter who can afford to stay home with her children, so I am not needed for daycare

The list goes on and on and on. Those of us in the middle and owning classes generally take these privileges for granted (or we think we have “earned” them).


I have the opportunity to use these privileges to move things forward for direct production 
workers—and for all of us—and to write about it. Now that is a real privilege!


What are you up to [doing] in this regard?