Episode 7 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview D and Dot from The Classwork Project.

“Thinking that we can just, because we've read some Marx or wherever, that we can start acting in a non capitalist way all the time is silly”

- Dot

Show notes, links

You can find The Classwork Project online, plus specifically:

the Lumpen journal

their class workshops

Dot's poetry

D's books

Some of the academics and philosophers mentioned were: Stephanie Lawler; Nancy Fraser; Bordieu; Marx.

Transcript

Ali: This is Resist + Renew.

Kat: A UK-based podcast about social movements.

Sami: What we're fighting for, why, and how it all happens.

Ali: The hosts of the show are:

Kat: Me Kat,

Sami: Me, Sami,

Ali: and me, Ali,

Sami: I'm recording this now baby

Ali: Shit it's a podcast.

*Laughter*

Kat: Welcome to the Resist and Renew Podcast. Today we're joined by Dorothy Spencer and D Hunter from the Classwork project. It's really great to have you both.

Kat: Dorothy is an editor of the Lumpen journal and member of the class work project. She was born in London and has a background in community and mental health work. Her first book of poetry was published this year with Lumpen publishing titled “see what life is like”. And D is an ageing chav and anarchist inspired community worker. He is the author of two books “Chav solidarity” and “Tracksuits, traumas and class traitors”, auto ethnographic examination of poverty, trauma, community organising and social movements. He is a member of the Class Work Project workers Co Op. And what is too much football. Great to have you both, very welcome.

D: Thanks for having us.

Kat: So first question is what's the context that you're organising in? And why did you choose to focus on this?

D: So I said I take this one. Not that you gave us questions in advance. So I guess there's two contexts, it's probably worth talking about first. I think the bigger one first, which is, you know, the global class, global and national class systems, which we're all like, anyone who's listening to this exists within which, I guess this is a tricky thing. And once one of the parts where,

like, as a coop we’re still having conversations about, but we also have these conversations with the writers and the, you know, people who write for them, and they participate in that conversation. But I suppose it is like, what's the analysis of class? There's definitely like, some hard and fast dogma going around out there are people saying this is what a class analysis is In fact, I think we got a tweet response, not so long ago, when we were publicising it was do they use class analysis, as if it's a singular thing. But what we have is like different competing analysis, analyses And I guess that's part of the context we're looking at, like, we're thinking about class as purely this like relationship to production. Like you're working class, if you don't own the means of it, you're the owning class, if you do. That's one analysis, that's fine. It's useful in some contexts. And I don't think any of us who are part of Classworks think that's the whole and simple answer to it. There's also like the relational aspects of, you know, how class is lived, how class impacts our interactions with the social world and the cultural world. I think some of us might, I think everyone in the class works, again, pays a little bit more attention to that analysis. But fundamentally, like it, I think, Nancy Fraser talks about, like, the recognition versus the redistribution, and I guess those two analyses kind of fit roughly along that kind of paradigm. And whilst whilst we probably spend more time within Lumpen, particularly, the journal and the workshops, thinking about the recognition, but we also like we do, you know, we've literally got a redistribution project going, we had a redistribution project, we also think a lot about that. But this, whatever this analysis in individual might have, and they are living in a classed society, and class society has like global and national dimensions to it, which, you know, have a level of like, the best way to think about it, have similarities and are interlocked, but also like, exists in a in their own discreet ways, like the UK has a very particular class context because of like, the cultural dimension is historically how it's been shaped. The birth of the middle, so I'm using inverted speech marks because I'm on camera. The people listening to this can't see that. Like the middle class, like the creation of the middle class, slowly over time, and what that might mean, does it actually exist or whether it's just a label? And but for us, the point is, it's it's part of that conversation.

D: In the sort of like 80s, 80s and 90s that was a big push for like, are we living in a classless society. Which I guess for me, I like a writer called Stephanie Lawler, who says that class is really about is like, when we talk about class we were talking about is like inequality, whether it's economic, social, or cultural inequality classes, like the weights, the gamut, we hold that in the mix. We hold that in, that question. So the idea that we live in a classless society, which suggests we live in it in an equal society, which is like, I've not met anyone who thinks we do. But maybe they're out there. And if they do, they're on the same kind of drugs I was on not so long ago.

D: Because we do live in an incredibly unequal society in many ways. And that kind of brings me into like, the second part of this that was like the national and social, but there's, international, but it's also the question of within our social movements, and

participation, and how those social movements have formed. And I feel like we spent, particularly with the workshops, and we spent a lot of time trying to think about how is how does class manifest itself within these social movements?

D: Well, I think a lot of people like to talk about, about cultural behaviours, and, you know,

working class people, like, speak loudly, and shout and a passionate, middle class people are deeply repressed and really organised. And, you know, that they may, that might, that may represent some people, but I don't think any of working class middle class or any class position, doesn't within it hold like set characteristics that personality traits, you know, that’s bullshit, but what they do have is, like, they represent different different levels of power. Within our workshops, we talk we use sort of Bordieu formation of like, social, economic, and cultural capital, and like the different levels of that. And I think that gives us like a better barometer, when we're like, working on like how class is reproduced, and how class manifests itself within our social movements. And I think a lot of the, when we when so so the workshops that we do, started when myself and Shan who's another member, were invited to one up in Scotland, two or three years ago. And, like, we were both people from different parts of the working class and Shan is a blue collar Canadian, I'm, like, trashy English underclass. And we both like entered into social movements and being faced with this like, level of resource, people with these resources and social capital that we haven't come close to, in our life so far, like, quite weird and unusual. And we're both like, had spent a decade within those social movements like responding to that with like, different levels of like, anger and fury and sadness and bitterness and all that. So before, you know, so we tried to like unpack some of that within the workshops and found more and more that there were people from different parts of the working class who were feeling the same, who had been responding the same to this like, incredibly unequal like distribution, just within a segment of the population that is, works towards social injustice, or whatever, however you want to think about it.

D: And the social movements for us had like, become these spaces were very similar class class dynamics played out as they did in like, academic spheres or in engagements with different state apparatus, in which people who had resources, who had capital, were able to make decisions and make choices and have control and power within social movement spaces that those without those resources, and those capitals, were unable to do. So the workshops have tried to unpick up, and but you know, we've only done a handful of them, not many so far. So they've had very little shift in the social movement terrain, so that that situation remains within social movements. And at the same time, like we have, within social movements, like a level of critical reflexivity, about different other social characteristics or social identities. I know there'll be some people listen up who weren't going, but class isn't a social identity. And that's, that can be debated. I'm not sure I'm convinced either way. And I recognise that tension, referring to class as a social identity. But there are other social identities, gender and race being two most familiar with folks. And we also have to think about how gender bias interacts with Class and Class interacts with gender and race.

D: And for us, it's an ongoing conversation. It's like bringing this stuff up and trying to do sensitively and delicately. Because what we have at the moment is incredibly binary and divisive, divisive conversations, which like a completely unhelpful by the, the level of frustration I have with the identity, “identity politics” in scare quotes, versus the “class reductionists”, in scare quotes and like that kind of like hostility towards each of those. Yeah, I don't have much time for that. But we can we can do better. In fact, being in social movements, we should be trying to do better than that stuff. Because it is. It's Yeah, it can be it's incredibly personal. But it's incredibly political.