PL

As opposed to the “town-and-gown” model, the Chicano Moratorium and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) were the two organizations that did the best job as organizations representing working class people and communities in their anti-war work, framing it around the lived experiences of working class communities. For veterans it was obviously their personal experiences of the war and the treatment they received at the other end of it, the betrayal they felt by the government at all levels. The work that they did was radical and disruptive, but they also did rap sessions and support around post-traumatic stress issues, somewhat similar to what was happening in the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the time. VVAW was learning a lot from the other currents of the time, and similarly the Chicano Moratorium responded directly to the Chicano community’s pride in service that was fairly typical and also the negative experience of young men being pushed into enlisting when they get in trouble with the law. Many times they were offered the choice of serving sixty days in jail or joining the military. So the ways in which there was an economic enlistment process, which we would talk about today as the economic draft, was a focus of their work. The Chicano Moratorium was able to tap into Chicano nationalism and had these slogans like “fight for Aztlan, not Uncle Sam,” that they used to appeal to people in their communities. So those were smart, grounded, modes of anti-war expression.

The expressions of identity politics that we’re so familiar with today were being created at the time. This was the moment in which these identities came out into the public sphere. And because the working class identity in this country had one the one hand come under such erasure in the postwar era because of the long boom, and on the other had been wholly racialized and gendered and build around white, male, goods-producing workers, the class aspect of those identity politics movements largely disappeared — much to their own detriment. And it’s something that all those movements have struggled with since. I actually feel that there’s much less of a break today between identity-oriented parts of the Left and class-oriented parts of the Left than there has ever been in my life. Maybe in 1973, 1974 there were some great leftists working on combining those two things and then they got slammed by the nightmare that became our current reality.

So I see in the movements that are coming up today a lot of lessons learned about the relationship of identity and class politics. I see a deeper appreciation of the ways in which class intersects with race and gender within feminist movements, within anti-police brutality and anti-prison movements. Race and class are deep in those movements and are understood as being connected. And in the women’s movement, such as it is, there’s a lot of attention paid to work-family issues, attention to questions of child care, and the like. I do think that Occupy and the dislocation that so many people have experienced over the past four years has meant that class is I would say a given framework for social movement organizing in a way that it hasn’t been in decades. One of the best things about the slogan of the 99% is that the working class and its interests got named again. Maybe that means that the collective identities that are hammered out in this new movement are always going to be captured inside of a class framework, and it’s one that we need to be defining now and defining through the prism of identity. A lot of the negative associations around what it meant to be “working class” have been erased and hopefully a new way of representing the working class is something we can forge as a result.