“All systems are necessarily abstractions, and all generalization violates the living reality of the individual”-Bakunin
“When People are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘The People’s Stick’.”
My history is strongly rooted in the working class. I think I get my radical tendencies from my father who was a union guy. I remember him proudly and romantically telling me about how he took nails to the picket line to flatten the tires of scabs who would cross it. I come from what I call a “Pac Bell” family. Both of my parents and my grandfather worked there. It is where my parents met and my grandfather worked there for 40 years or something crazy like that. My grandmother was a waitress, but didn’t work much past the age of 30.
My father made a pretty good living and also made good use of debt, eating out often and indulging in stereo systems and other things. His spendy nature in combination with a decision to retire early from the phone company and changing costs of living in California meant that my family was downwardly mobile. He never graduated from high school and wasn’t in very good physical condition so he was basically unemployed by the time I was 12.
When I was in 3rd grade, I got put in this special program for advanced kids and was tracked through that and into honors classes until I became the first in my family to go to college. Although I had always known that I was of a different class than others in my schools before college, it had only really manifested in appreciation for families that kicked down to me, jealousy of those that didn’t, and a pretty serious resentment of my parents for not providing any money for college, unlike most of the people I was in school with.
Both my brother and I got our first jobs at age 15. This offered me the freedom from school and family that I needed. I was able to buy a car, learn things that I really enjoyed more than school, like cooking and working with people. From the age of 15-19, I continued working in food and other service jobs with some people my age and some people who had been working at these places for 20 years or so. At these jobs, the roles were reversed from my classes. I was intending to go to college and most of the people that I was working with never thought about it or had the opportunity.
After I went to college, I worked with a number of worker collectives. In 1999, I was making more money than ever (still averaging less than $10/hr), and I was still feeling stressed about money and really trapped by the idea of working for that wage for 10 years before I would be able to pay off my student loans. I also saw the dot-com economy taking off like crazy and knew that I had to get in on it soon if I wanted to take advantage of it.
While all of these things reinforced my working-class identity, they also obscured the specific role of class in my life. My friend Aragorn encouraged me to think about why I was working. Because I like doing my job? To make money? To have good relationships with people as part of my work? To change the world through my work?
My answer to those questions was all of the above. I mostly did work that I enjoyed the actual act of. Some of my jobs were cooking, baking, attendant work, and working at Pedal Express. These things were a tolerable way to spend time. Of course I was working to make money, because I needed it to survive. The lack of money in my life was causing more stress than anything else, though. I started looking at workplace relationships that I was depending on for my emotional support and critical feedback. With some significant exceptions at all of my workplaces, I didn’t relate to people that I worked with outside of the context of work. At Pedal Express in particular, I started feeling like the lefty-capitalist alternatives that I had been working in are more a part of the problem than the solution. While in some ways it empowered my relationships with individuals, in others it obscured hierarchy and enforced middle class values. While it made people feel good for living in a liberal city, it enabled them to be passive consumers with no real change in their habits. While I had a hip and fun job, I was in financial crisis. It simply wasn’t a living wage.
So I decided to confront the class issues that came up for me and find a white collar job, which I had feared for a few reasons. I had no idea what job I could get hired for and definitely felt I wasn’t “polished” enough. Although I am pretty polished for a politico, I found out that was kind of true. What I didn’t expect was for potential employers to appreciate my DIY-style experience, recognizing that it could benefit their small business. I feared betraying my history. Coming from a blue collar, union family, I haven’t related to other kinds of workers. I also had fear of getting sucked into the lifestyle that a good paying job could offer. I solved this by setting student-loan financial goals and sticking to them (and not changing my friends or lifestyle much. I probably also had concerns about being perceived as a sell-out by other radicals. Getting over this just took confidence in my decision and my relationships. I have gotten support and understanding from radicals, conservatives make jokes about selling out.
Parallel to this has been changing ideas about the importance of class and a change in interest from Marxism to Anarchism. While I was working at Uprisings Bakery and really romanticizing it (which I still do), my friend Leor suggested that maybe factory work, even if it was worker-run factory work might not really be even a small step towards utopia. At the time, it didn’t take much time to agree. Now, on the other hand, while the thought of many factories is not very appealing, I think that I would really enjoy spending a lot of my time baking bread with women that I find inspiring. I do think that there is a role for “work”, even what is currently considered “labor” in my life, but it is no longer the primary way in which I give and receive support, get satisfaction, or develop relationships. I guess that my work ethic has changed from something that is part of my identity to something that I have to do to in our society, a society that I don’t appreciate much.
