Organizing the rich is NOT the key project

A PSA (Public Service Announcement)

Beautiful May Day poster by artist Favianna Rodriguez, made for the AFL-CIO.

This is one of a series of posts I’ve been sitting on for at least a year, unsure if I’ve finished them, wondering if they’re ok. I’ve decided to publish these pieces over the course of the coming months no matter my feelings about them, in order to move forward my work and the conversations I hope they inspire.

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Attention, dear readers! Please remember, the rich will not save us! 

If our goal is the transformation of society toward democracy, collective well-being, and a sustainable future — and away from white nationalism, climate chaos, and authoritarianism — organizing the rich is NOT the key project.

The most powerful force for change, and the key sector of society to be organized, remains the working class.¹ 

To attempt to summarize much of the political education I’ve received over the years², there are several reasons this is so:

1. The working class is the majority, in the US and in the world.

2. The working class — particularly working class people of color, working class women³, and workers in the Global South — does the vital labor that keeps human societies going. Remember all that talk of essential workers during the first years of the COVID pandemic — the farmworkers, domestic workers, nurses, truck drivers, nannies, preschool teachers, distribution center employees, and store clerks who kept us fed, housed, and cared for? The collective power of this group to provide the basic needs of the whole is what gives them the ability to change things fast. Another way to say this: if the working class went on strike, after a week or two, I’m eating dandelions in the dark.

3. The working class have the clearest material interest in moving to an equitable society because of the exploitation and oppressions they experience. This exploitation and oppression is not simply about class. It is about the history of slavery and native genocide, and the ongoing racism and oppression of Indigenous Peoples, which are at the root of wealth creation in the US and around the world. It is about patriarchy and sexism, and the way women’s labor has been exploited, unacknowledged, and underpaid. In each instance, the groups targeted by these multiple oppressions have been the lead forces in freeing all humans from their violent effects.

4. Because of their role as the producers of life’s essentials, the multiracial working class has the most intimate knowledge of what’s broken in our current economy and how to fix it. 

5. In comparison, the owning class is systematically separated from learning the core skills needed to provide our basic needs, and contribute to movements for a better world. It’s expected that other people will be paid (often poorly) to take care of everything for us, from parenting our children to fixing our meals. At the same time, we are often encouraged to be in constant competition with those around us, justifying and using any means necessary to maintain our wealth and power. This cut-throat individualism often leads us to be quite discouraged and nihilistic about the possibility of positive social change. We have few chances to experience building collective power based on cooperation, interdependence, and mutual respect. Despite what we’re told, whether we love Oprah or Trump, the owning class will not and cannot save us.

There’s a reason that white supremacy was codified in the Jamestown colony charter, crushing any potential alliance between European indentured servants and enslaved Africans. There’s a reason the right wing is so laser focused on, and pouring billions into, breaking the power of organized labor and recruiting sectors of the working class to their side. A united working class remains the greatest threat to the destructive power and profits of the rich. The owning class literally CREATED RACE, and has spent centuries working to destroy the power of organized labor, all to ensure that the working class didn’t come together to create a more just and equitable society. 

WTF. 

Of course, the working class is no monolith. There are centuries-old histories of right wing populism within the working class. As I’m sure you’ve noticed recently, parts of the working class have been moving toward the right in the US and around the world. Right wing authoritarianism, with its false promise of stability, can start looking pretty good when faced with collapsing social systems, the climate crisis, and a manufactured scarcity of resources.

Organizing the working class behind redistributive policies and a feminist, anti-racist platform is no small task and it is happening. 

It remains the primary struggle in an extractive, capitalist economy that is putting all our lives at risk. 

Why am I telling you this?

I want to do all I can to avoid playing into the idea that organizing the rich is somehow more important than the organizing of any other group. It’s just not true. 

And yet, our tv shows and newspapers, and news feeds tell a different story. The rich are the main attraction and it’s tricky to know how to talk about organizing us without playing into the classist notion that we are the most important people around.

At the same time, so many people, particularly middle and owning class people, are confused about the working class (including me!). We waffle between a fetishization of the working class, as essential workers, as noble martyrs, as blue collar heroes, and a dismissal and (mis)understanding of the working class as more conservative, racist, and sexist than the educated and respectable middle class mainstream. 

So much of philanthropy and social change work is built on the idea that we need to help the working class become middle class or wealthy. Upward mobility and assimilation are put forward as the solution over and over again. 

Or we just need to find the right experts, with the right PhD’s to fix society’s problems and provide us the technocratic solutions we need (Gates Foundation, take a bow). 

So, how do I write about organizing the rich in a way that is clear about the central role of the working class while showing the messy humanness of everyone involved? 

One way is to name the tension inherent in this work (see all of the above). 

Another is to make clear why the heck I’m writing a substack called Organize the Rich in the first place. Here’s what I’ve got:

1. I see my writing and interviews as part of multiracial working class power building. I am engaged in organizing the rich to become full partners in pro-redistribution, progressive movements. There is no effective, progressive organizing of the rich without those efforts being well nested within poor and working class-led movements.  

2. I want liberation for me and my owning class people from the roles we play in this unfair and corrupt economy. Like everyone else, our true self-interest lies with a healthy, interdependent, and sustainable world.

3. We are not the key sector to be organized, and we are A key sector to be organized. 

4. Everyone has a role to play, including the rich, and this is the work I know best.

Wadya think? 

Want to learn more about feminist, multiracial working class movement building? Check out these resources shared with me by friends and colleagues:

• Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections. Edited by Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and Maria Poblet. 

• Sum of Us, the book and podcast by Heather McGee

• Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor by Kim Kelly

• Check out Convergence Magazine, the Forge (a friend especially recommended the writing of Lauren Jacobs) and the labor section of In These Times

• No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the new Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey

• Look into the work and writing of leaders like Saru Jayaraman on worker organizing in the restaurant industry and Ai-Jen Poo on organizing domestic workers and the care economy.

• Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Premilla Nadasen

• The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor by Hamilton Nolan

• Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America by Hahrie Hahn

• There are so many more great resources to share. Add your own suggestions in the comments below.

1. What do I mean by “the working class”? I am talking about the people who produce the goods and services and do the reproductive labor needed to keep society functioning. The working class sell their labor and generally have little control in their workplaces. Though I’m admittedly a little shaky on this part, my understanding is the working class also includes people who are unemployed, imprisoned, homeless, and poor — people with disabilities, poor elders, and those working in the informal economy. They are a vital part of the working class, the “excess” labor needed in a capitalist economy to keep wages down and workers in line. Like many parts of our society, the working class is organized by racism and sexism into an oppressive hierarchy that pushes Black and Brown people, and particularly women of color, into the lowest paying, most physically taxing, least respected jobs.

2. Thanks to SOUL, Grassroots Power Project, National Domestic Workers Alliance, United for a Fair Economy, Working Families Party, teachers and mentors like Pinar Batur-VanderLippe and Jo Saunders, for helping me develop my understanding of class, capitalism and how our economy works. Whatever makes sense in this piece, I credit to them. Whatever doesn’t, you can put on me.

3. Within the working class, women are the most revolutionary force, because of the perspective they have on sexism and what’s needed to end it, the reproductive and domestic work that they do, and their material interest in a redistribution of wealth and power. Women continue to do the most important work for the ongoing health and well-being of our species — and it means they are an incredibly powerful set of humans when it comes to shifting the world toward the collective good.