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Exploring class in the UK (D and Dot from The Classwork Project)
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:
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. And we’d like for you to like, weave ourselves delicately through the different threads. And that’s all for me on that, which is probably like, a week too long.
Ali: No, that was great. Thank you for starting us off and giving us that framework, two different areas of like, class analysis in the national/international setting and trying to like, it’s incredibly complex, and trying to like, draw out some of the different strands of that was really helpful for me to hear. And, yeah, really helpful to hear, like, your experiences a little bit and like, frustrations with like, social movements and class. And like, I think that’s a really common thing to hear. And I’m really interested to hear more about, like, what your hopes are of trying to change that and like, how workshops are part of that. So I guess that leads on to like, the second question we have, which is like, what is what is the Classwork project about? And what’s it trying to do at the moment?
Dot: Well, it’s about class, in case you missed that. Particularly, I mean, D’s talked just then quite a bit about like a classt analysis. And so it is about, there is a that aspect of it, thinking about different ways of viewing class. And the way we’re organised around class in our societies, I guess that the work that we do focuses a bit more on an individual level, on encouraging people to examine how their own lives have been shaped by their class position, whether that’s like the education they’ve had, or their work, or their relationships, or the way they’re treated by the state, or what they eat, all of all of the things that make up the experience that we have of the world, and creating spaces for people to talk about those experiences, their class experience in the world, and particularly spaces for poor and working class people to speak about that. And through doing that, I guess a lot of it is about recognition, and being able to share with other people who have similar experiences. I think that there can be quite a lot of blindness that you can be participating in, in like a social movement, or an activist group or whatever, and never really get to know much about someone’s class background. So the workshops, give people an opportunity to kind of recognise each other and in that sense, but alongside the experience that working class and poor people might have of what workshops is also like getting middle class people or people who own stuff to understand what benefits they’ve gained through their class position. And not just like recognising go, Oh, yeah, like, that’s what’s happened to me, but recognise it and then also take some kind of action on that, whether that’s like, giving some money away or doing some, I don’t know, work of some sort, to try and redistribute other forms of capital if it’s not financial ones. And I guess all of this is about not just not just like making, you know, working class people feel better and making middle class people for worse, but about like, making, trying to work towards a place where we can understand each other and therefore mobilise towards social change in a more effective way that people feel more understood. So yeah, I guess we that that’s our that’s our approach. And we, we kind of have different tactics. So those aims and one is the workshop which D can talk better about. I haven’t been so involved in that. And then we have the journal which is, you know, a space that is less embodied for people to write about their experiences and their frustrations and hopes and Yeah, well, that kind of stuff.
Ali: Because I have like a little follow up question around like, in these work, I guess it’s about the workshop. So maybe D wants to speak to it, but either of you can I just like, I guess I’m curious about like, how you visibilise these things that show up like these dynamics, which are always going on. And probably the people who are in more middle class positions are like, probably oblivious to them. And like, how you how you visibilise it, and what you are looking to, for that, for the outcome to be of like visibilising and shifting something like I guess it’s about power is what I’m guessing. But like, Yeah, what do you see as
D: Do you want us to take that Dot?
Dot: Yes, please.
D: Okay. So, yeah, so we’ve done workshops, like Dot said, it’s like, it’s not an attempt just to make folks feel like shit, or guilty or any of that stuff. Although we recognise that, that might be a byproduct, because like, a lot of, you know, people harbour a lot of like, personal stresses and strains around this stuff, lots of denial, lots of I mean, I think to is, to a degree, anyone involved in social movements carries a level of like, responsibility for their own behaviour, and responsibility for their communities, behaviours, insight. And, and we are trained to individualise this deeply, and want to, you know, you know, I’m a lapsed Catholic. So guilt is part of my birthright, and might not be the same with everyone in the social movements. But you know, the rest of many of you’ve got, like the Protestant stuff going on, as well. And obviously, other religions carry their own baggage as well. But if we can’t blame it all on religions, anyway. I guess my point is, like, we’re conscious, like, people may feel a certain way. But that’s not our purpose. The purpose is to bring some of this stuff out into the open a little bit, and have talked a little bit earlier about their kind of different forms of capital. So rather than go in you are middle class, live with it, it’s about people recognising what resources and accesses and I guess, personal traits that they’ve accumulated over time, which enabled them to enter into certain spaces and have their voice heard in social spaces. For those people who are listening, like, I’m a white guy. And both of those factors about me impact my ability to enter into spaces, especially spaces have been for long periods of time dominated by white guys. And even, you know, the fact that they were dominated by white guys 100 years ago, still has an impact now, because that history takes time to shift. And the same goes for the class positions. So I find it I did find it for a long time difficult to enter into those spaces, because of like, coming from, essentially the underclass. And so I had the white white guy on the underclass battling for like, supremacy. But, you know, a white guy from a middle class background, yes, they may have like anxiety, and various other social personal like, stresses and strains that they need to go through. But the space itself is made and has been shaped for people with, I’m going to do like, theoretical quoting, I don’t want to be like, like, what Bordieu calls a “habitus”, like the like, the, the, the million, the description of the setting, the the way people are allowed to speak the, the things that are valued, the individual performance is recognised and given, like, given given us, given acceptance, given recognition. And so, when we do the workshops, like we want people to, like, you know, just take a little bit of like, stock of where they’re coming at it from into these spaces, what are they bringing, like, on all these different social levels and cultural levels and economic levels, and people who come to them who’ve come to the workshops, even those fromm backgrounds similar to mine, or you know, people who are not racialized or gendered in the same way I am, but come from economically similar backgrounds. They’ll still have things on the list where they’ve got social capital, cultural capital, we all do. Like, it’s one of the things you get when you live in one of the historically richest and most powerful countries in the world, we carry some of that with us. But there are those who are going to have so much more.
D: And like, I’m quite keen, I’m quite fond of the saying, like, I want the communist to communist to do communism, like amongst ourselves, like, yes, we are not able to shift the state into, you know, what, wherever your political persuasion is socialist, communist, anarchist utopia just yet, but we can behave that way amongst ourselves. Like, there is no reason for us to be having a social movement where one person has, you know, hundreds of 1000s millions of pounds in the bank, in some cases, and other people in the same social movement, who have nothing, and like nothing saved, no means, no economic resources, are struggling with housing issues. And yet, these two people are supposed to enter into the space on the same page. And when that smells like bullshit to me, but that’s how it’s been, like, you know, that when I was first entering into social movements, none of that conversation was happening. But because primarily, because a lot of the folk in it, not all of them, but a lot of them came from very similar places, you know, many more whites, many were like post just graduated University and was still at university, usually like a red brick University, like, many had been to private school, most had done well at school, like, and then. So that all creates a certain culture that creates a social a certain way of doing things. And that and to have experience that suggests not and again, not always the case, but quite often do you have resources in your, in your family or resources of your own doubt that those resources are being shared that on any level, not being collected by not even before often those ways, into fact, just being made as invisible as possible, speaks to the lack of integrity of those social movements. And so for us, the workshops is about bringing some of that forward. But first, to get to that place where we, you know, are actually doing communism amongst the communists. Like, we have to like go through that really difficult bit of unpacking the truths, like what what is going on what what are the hostilities and tensions and aggravations we hold with one another, what are the ways in which we carry bitterness and resentment around this stuff. And so the workshops are, in part a little bit like, give a bit of him to express some of that. And as I’ve touched upon it, we’re very careful not to like just throw, go, Oh, you’re from working class, you’re from like, borderline like owning class, go and have a chat. Like we spent a lot of time and people talking to others who are in a similar boat. So they can get used to talking about things honestly with people who will have already have recognition for that experience. And, again, over the weekend, you know, we bring people to bring those different, like, we caught we call, we call them capital caucuses, so we have capital light caucus, we only have like, mediocre capital caucus, and then they have like, too much capital caucus. But we stopped bringing them together and start like showing a bit of information and a bit of knowledge. And they’re definitely like, there are definitely sessions over the weekend, when we do the full two day one, where those tensions can become quite unmanageable for people and people become upset and become distressed. And hopefully we hold that. I think for the most part, we’ve held it basically well and support those people feel that no matter what background they come from, cuz you know, we don’t really want like someone from an owning class or middle class to come along and just have an utterly terrible time and leave feeling really guilty. Because all of the guilt will do is ramp up and block their ability to do anything with it. Because they’re like, well, I can’t fucking do anything. Apparently, whatever I do is shit. You know, for me, that’s a problematic response, but it’s also an understandable response. And so the workshops like yeah, try and build some of that as a into it. One of the ways in which we visualise it is we’ve only done that how many times you’ve done this two or three times, okay, yeah, well, we have an exercise where we have like 200 jelly beans. Each Jelly Bean represents like a five grand, we find out what people have in their savings accounts and bank accounts, and visualise that through jelly beans have the four different caucuses. And each time we have one, one jar, one end, which is brimming over with these five grand jelly beans like it’s never been less than a couple of million pounds. And then at the other end, we have a container of the poorest group in the thing where there’s two jelly beans and then we have two in the middle which You know, different levels, but it becomes that’s one of the ways in which it’s become incredibly Stark for people. And it sounds goofy as fuck. Well aware of that. But it’s funny for me, when that’s happened, when we’ve done that in the workshops, it’s been one of the lightbulb moments for folks when they’ve seen Oh, yeah. The, I didn’t realise, you know, I just assumed everyone else had 15/20/30 grand in the bank account, because that’s, you know, how people do.
*Music*
Kat: Thanks, D. And, yeah, it’s really great hearing about the workshops. And I definitely want to try and get to one, one, we’re allowed to meet in person, again, sounds really good. And it also be really good to hear a bit more about Lumpen and what you’re doing with the journal at the moment. And I think, Dot if you wanted to maybe share a bit on that, that would be great to hear.
Dot: Yeah, sure. So we are now putting together the fifth issue. And it’s quarterly, so that that marks are our publishing it for over a year now. And I think it’s, I think it’s changed and it’s, and people have gotten more confident in sending us work and trusting us with their writing. And it’s, we take, it’s just open submission, so anyone can send anything to us. And people self identify as working class or poor. So that’s up to them there, they have their own way of identifying that. And then we go through all the submissions that we’ve got, and choose what we think is good to be published. We don’t ever really turn stuff away, unless it’s got some like, nasty stuff in it, if it’s like racist, or sexist, or whatever. We’re obviously not interested in publishing that. But we will try and work with the people to try and have a conversation about why we don’t want to publish what they’ve written, which I think is important, and that we’re trying to have a really different relationship with the people we work with, compared to what a normal magazine or publishing enterprise would have. And so we try and try and have quite a low, collaborative relationship with the people who write for us. We’re interested in working with people who maybe don’t feel really confident about their writing, or like their grammatical ability or like being readable or being academic. And if people have something that they want to talk about or say, then we’re really interested in helping them to do that, whether that’s like transcribing stuff from people talking or just trying to help people better communicate their ideas. And so yeah, we put and we publish everything from like poetry to fiction, and we get a lot of what’s the word like, basically a posher word for a rant? We get a lot of what is that word? Yeah, we get a lot of polemic, we get quite a lot of polemics from Angry Men, angry working class men, which is kind of accurate mirror to what you would expect you to get from, from putting a call out to working class people to write because those men tend to be more confident in sending work. So that’s something that we’ve been dealing with trying to get a fair representation in the journal, of different points of view from across across people who are working class, and we just started doing books as well. So we’ve we’ve got both D’s books on lumpen publishing. And then we started doing chat books, which are designed to be small kind of introductions to writers that we think are interesting or promising or have good good stuff to say. Mine was the first one. And that will be an ongoing bit of work for us, which I’m really excited about. Um, I guess when we’re talking about like different forms of capital that you’d have one of those forms of social capital. And that’s quite often a form of capital that’s used very effectively in getting, like cultural production stuff done. So like, quite often, to get a book published, you need to know someone somewhere. So it’s kind of about me addressing that. And also, I mean, it’s something I think about a lot I’m not sure that everyone else in the co op does as much but um, tonnes of like working class cultural production, particularly like writing and poetry because I’m, I write poetry, and I’m interested in it. And that it has been a very strong tradition in the past. And it’s been a very strong tradition in like social movements that you’d get a lot of, like, a lot of social movements would have like songs and poems. And there was always a big musical tradition within working class poetry. And I guess you can still see that now in like, road rap, like, with a knife, you know, like Pot of Paper, like these kind of artists, to me are, like working class poets.
Dot: But I feel like within the, within the kind of, like recognised cultural production of poetry, like what Arts Council would call poetry, we don’t have a good representation of working class poets, or writers. So, yeah, that’s another part of recognition of class position. Yeah, I think that’s it for Lumpen.
Ali: Congratulations on being the first books to be published. That’s really great, great. Yeah. So I guess the next bit we wanted to hear about is like, how you organise, and I guess you’ve said that it’s a coop? And I guess Tom’s phrase, how are the communists being communists? I’d like to know how you’re all being communists as well. How does that How do you do How do you do these things together? And with this, like recognition in mind?
Dot: Yeah, I think we can tip when we are obviously when we don’t work in a hierarchy. So we try and be in some way prefigurative about what we’re doing. And we, yeah, we registered as a co-op. We pay, well, we don’t, we’re not all paid to me and myself, and Hannah, are paid, we would like to get to a position where we could pay all of the members. And we’re quite, it’s quite important to us that we pay all our writers for their work. So I think there’s something about the way we value people’s labour and people’s time, which is important. And I think trying to recognise like power dynamics that emerge, because naturally, they do emerge, like 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. So yeah, trying to recognise those things playing out within us and within our relationships with each other, and recognise the sort of like, liberal bullshit that might creep in from time cuz liberalism has a tendency to do that. And also being like understanding and flexible and what we expect of each other, like, with the pandemic, that brought up loads of shit in my family and people in my family died. And yeah, it was a rough time. And so it was good to be part of a co op, where I wasn’t going to get sacked if I didn’t do any work for a couple of months. And I guess that’s also more important when you’re working with a group of people who come from working class backgrounds, because they’re more likely to face, to have trauma in their lives and have particular sort of experiences of the world that might make them harder might make it harder for them to work in a way that’s expected.
D: I’ll add a couple of things or just expand a couple of yeah with the the payment, sort of we have Yeah, we, most of us have experiences of working class labour being undervalued and underappreciated. And that being like, as horrific as it is in everyday life, that being trebled or doubled in social movements, but maybe it’s not as bad. Maybe it just becomes more hypocritical in social movements. Where there’s a Yeah, again, that pretense that we’re all on the same footing. When actually, in actual fact, you know, some of us are doing a variety of forms of care work with people in in communities we come from, which is entirely unrecognised. And some of us are having to hold down like, menial part time jobs, not because it’s a lifestyle choice, but because that’s just what we’ve been trained to do. And we may have like various financial obligations to members of our family or people, other people within our community, but we still have to, like participate in social movements, under the pretence that we’re all on an equal footing. So ensuring that those of us who work on the Classwork project and those who participate through their writing, get a tokenistic at the moment, amounts of like, final financial compensation is pretty important. Things also worth pointing out that the decisions around who gets paid and how much they get paid within the co op is done on like, the position the financial positions people are in at the time, rather than the quantity of work they are doing. And it’s like, yeah, for various reasons. Two of us in the coop didn’t don’t necessarily need a stable income coming from the co op, so we don’t get paid for it. And were those, those situations to change and the cost structure of our payment will change. When also not, we don’t like go, this person has to do X amount of hours this week, they have to clock in and clock out. Otherwise, they’re not getting their wage. And they, you know, we made an agreement, people would get paid a certain amount for the next year for as long as we had the funding, and that would be addressed when we needed to. And from my experience, that’s pretty, that’s quite different from a lot of how a lot of social movement organisations with finances and workers function. Hopefully that’s changing, because I hear I hear from different people it is. Yeah, there was a dynamic saying like, as Dot said which was bang on, like, what, however much we’ve read how much we thought up, however many like, how many workshops we’ve attended about class, we’re still going to reproduce some of this shit. Like, whether it’s along gender, gender, or age, or like length of time within the organisation like these hierarchies can pop up, they can also pop up based upon like, pre existing friendships and relationships, and how information travels within them. So we’ve had to like we had a little getaway, about September, where the first time all four of us were, like, met up together, and we spent the weekend like trying to unpick and unpack some of the ways in which we’d been working, and some of the problems and how we address them going forward. And that’s just a work in progress. And it has, but it has to be like a fundamental work in progress. It has to be like key to what we’re doing. And we will fail. And we will have to address it when we failed. But I think as long as we’re Yeah, sure that was quite well in acknowledging that at the very least,
Ali: thanks for sharing, but that that’s really great to hear about the different ways you work. Like I’m thinking of all that stuff ongoing is really sounds really important and to recognise that it’s like always ongoing. Yeah, that’s feels like it’s given the recognition that needs and equally like, what you brought up Dot around like trauma and like how COVID is like, particularly impacting you, but like, on a class, like is going to impact people from working class backgrounds, as well. I think that’s really like, great, that you’re able to bring that up. And thanks for sharing that. Kat, I’ve asked you for the last question.
Kat: And, yeah, I guess I just want to acknowledge as well that you’ve been shaping this podcast already. So far up to this point, we’ve only had one person on from each group. And so the invitation to have both of you on I think has just made it a much better conversation, hearing multiple voices from the collective or from the co op. has been really great. And thank you for bringing that and I think it will shape how we go forward with interviews. So yeah, just wanting to acknowledge the way you’re sharing power and as well in terms of who gets to speak, and yeah wanting to acknowledge that. And so the last question we’ve got is, I’m sure that a lot of our listeners will have been inspired by a lot of the things that they’ve heard you talking about. And we’re just wondering where we could signpost people to what could they do next? If they want to find out more about Classworks or Lumpen or the workshops that you’ve been talking about?
Dot: Yeah, well, this, this is as easy/ You can, if people some money, give people in your community money, or like, try and find out, if you’re involved in social movements, or whatever, try and be more aware of people’s social backgrounds and what they might need. And I think just like, try, and I think it’s, there’s so many ideas about wealth and inherited wealth, that is so ingrained that I’d encourage people to like challenge and try and shift the way they think about what they have and why they deserve it. And why why we have kind of possessive, like individual ownership and what that means and how, how that can be treated differently. Um, and then you can buy our books and buy our journal. And yeah, just go on your go on our website and have a little shop, I guess. D’ new books is out my books out the new issue of Lumpen and we’ll be out. We’re particularly reliant on subscriptions. So if you are able to do subscriptions, and we have solidarity, subscriptions, that’s really useful. And yeah, if you’re from a poor and working class background, and you and you like writing, or you don’t like writing you never tried to before, but you’ve got shit to say, then get in touch with us. And we’re super flexible about how we work with people. Yeah, D?
D: So yeah, with the workshops, I suppose it’s, well, obviously, we obviously we haven’t done we had a couple lined up just before pandemic and lockdown began. And they got cancelled because of you know, because they did and, and we’ve been very hesitant about moving online with them just because such look quite personal and embodied workshops. That said, we’re starting to develop a methodology and practice around doing work doing some of this work in small groups, and with groups who are like working with each other on long term projects. And so people are interested in that, they should definitely Email us at info @ theclassworkproject.com. But even if you just want to go or we’d like you to do a workshop in our city, once all this ends, the pandemic, not the world, then give us a line in the same place. And we’ll try and work something out. And similarly, we’re keen to work we are keen, more keen, to be honest, at the moment to work with organisations or networks, how are doing ongoing practice with each other. You can also set up a direct pay making a PayPal payment to us, if you don’t, if you already got all our books, and still think we should be supporting funding because we are struggling with finances at present. And if you’re not following us on social media, or on Twitter, or Facebook, you should do because, and spread the word about the stuff we’re doing. And and yeah, I guess the direct participation for the journal like, even if you’ve never, like people who haven’t written before, but I’ve got something they want to get off their chest, like, we’re very up for being like supporting people through that through the show sort of writing experience. So even if you just got kernel of idea, and you want to get support with it, get in contact. And yeah, so we were doing this redistribution project for what was it? Two months at the start of pandemic, which happened ad hoc, or what, and how much detail is going into, it got started because some people got in contact with us saying, we’re in dire straits. We’re in this situation. We need some money. And then at the same time, random people who participated in workshops or knew of the other stuff, we’ve been doing grant contract sign up, or do you know anyone who needs 50 grand? Yeah. Someone just called about that. So we ended up doing a bit of redistribution projects where like, people who had lump sums anywhere ranging from like a couple of 100 to 60 or 70,000, we’re sending it to us and we were distributing it around several 100 different people, mainly from like pre-existing networks. So not not always within social movements. But sometimes quite often, it was just like the communities we previously don’t work in. We’re not sure where we’re going, we’ve ended that. And we’re not sure where we’re going to go with it. But it’s worth noting that there are several of these kind of more localised projects that are coming, stepping up at the moment. I’m sure there is a list somewhere, but you should probably keep an eye out for that kind of thing and try and support them where you can. Because hopefully, when when things like this are like that, like directly in a community directly on the ground, they actually reach the people who need it the most. And they will rely less upon like, not long term relationships, people may have built up in the past that we never wanted to make a centralised thing to do it. We think it was much better in person in the community. So look around for them, maybe ResistRenew, have already got a list of the groups doing that. I don’t know. I haven’t got a list. So yeah, that, that’s about it, both from me.
Ali: Thank you both so much for your time, it was a really interesting conversation, really great to hear about the number of projects you’ve got going on. And I also find it really funny to like, hear, like, I just found a conversation funny and like, as well as being like, deeply, like complex. So like that balance was like really great. And I would, yeah, I can imagine spending a weekend in that kind of environment would have be like, really fun and hard hitting at the same time. So I would look forward to doing something in the future. But yeah, thanks so much. And if you want to write something, get in touch with them. And if you want us give them money, give lots of money to them. That’s my takeaways from the conversation.
D: Cheers, thanks a lot.
Transcript assisted by Otter.ai
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By Resist and RenewEpisode 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:
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. And we’d like for you to like, weave ourselves delicately through the different threads. And that’s all for me on that, which is probably like, a week too long.
Ali: No, that was great. Thank you for starting us off and giving us that framework, two different areas of like, class analysis in the national/international setting and trying to like, it’s incredibly complex, and trying to like, draw out some of the different strands of that was really helpful for me to hear. And, yeah, really helpful to hear, like, your experiences a little bit and like, frustrations with like, social movements and class. And like, I think that’s a really common thing to hear. And I’m really interested to hear more about, like, what your hopes are of trying to change that and like, how workshops are part of that. So I guess that leads on to like, the second question we have, which is like, what is what is the Classwork project about? And what’s it trying to do at the moment?
Dot: Well, it’s about class, in case you missed that. Particularly, I mean, D’s talked just then quite a bit about like a classt analysis. And so it is about, there is a that aspect of it, thinking about different ways of viewing class. And the way we’re organised around class in our societies, I guess that the work that we do focuses a bit more on an individual level, on encouraging people to examine how their own lives have been shaped by their class position, whether that’s like the education they’ve had, or their work, or their relationships, or the way they’re treated by the state, or what they eat, all of all of the things that make up the experience that we have of the world, and creating spaces for people to talk about those experiences, their class experience in the world, and particularly spaces for poor and working class people to speak about that. And through doing that, I guess a lot of it is about recognition, and being able to share with other people who have similar experiences. I think that there can be quite a lot of blindness that you can be participating in, in like a social movement, or an activist group or whatever, and never really get to know much about someone’s class background. So the workshops, give people an opportunity to kind of recognise each other and in that sense, but alongside the experience that working class and poor people might have of what workshops is also like getting middle class people or people who own stuff to understand what benefits they’ve gained through their class position. And not just like recognising go, Oh, yeah, like, that’s what’s happened to me, but recognise it and then also take some kind of action on that, whether that’s like, giving some money away or doing some, I don’t know, work of some sort, to try and redistribute other forms of capital if it’s not financial ones. And I guess all of this is about not just not just like making, you know, working class people feel better and making middle class people for worse, but about like, making, trying to work towards a place where we can understand each other and therefore mobilise towards social change in a more effective way that people feel more understood. So yeah, I guess we that that’s our that’s our approach. And we, we kind of have different tactics. So those aims and one is the workshop which D can talk better about. I haven’t been so involved in that. And then we have the journal which is, you know, a space that is less embodied for people to write about their experiences and their frustrations and hopes and Yeah, well, that kind of stuff.
Ali: Because I have like a little follow up question around like, in these work, I guess it’s about the workshop. So maybe D wants to speak to it, but either of you can I just like, I guess I’m curious about like, how you visibilise these things that show up like these dynamics, which are always going on. And probably the people who are in more middle class positions are like, probably oblivious to them. And like, how you how you visibilise it, and what you are looking to, for that, for the outcome to be of like visibilising and shifting something like I guess it’s about power is what I’m guessing. But like, Yeah, what do you see as
D: Do you want us to take that Dot?
Dot: Yes, please.
D: Okay. So, yeah, so we’ve done workshops, like Dot said, it’s like, it’s not an attempt just to make folks feel like shit, or guilty or any of that stuff. Although we recognise that, that might be a byproduct, because like, a lot of, you know, people harbour a lot of like, personal stresses and strains around this stuff, lots of denial, lots of I mean, I think to is, to a degree, anyone involved in social movements carries a level of like, responsibility for their own behaviour, and responsibility for their communities, behaviours, insight. And, and we are trained to individualise this deeply, and want to, you know, you know, I’m a lapsed Catholic. So guilt is part of my birthright, and might not be the same with everyone in the social movements. But you know, the rest of many of you’ve got, like the Protestant stuff going on, as well. And obviously, other religions carry their own baggage as well. But if we can’t blame it all on religions, anyway. I guess my point is, like, we’re conscious, like, people may feel a certain way. But that’s not our purpose. The purpose is to bring some of this stuff out into the open a little bit, and have talked a little bit earlier about their kind of different forms of capital. So rather than go in you are middle class, live with it, it’s about people recognising what resources and accesses and I guess, personal traits that they’ve accumulated over time, which enabled them to enter into certain spaces and have their voice heard in social spaces. For those people who are listening, like, I’m a white guy. And both of those factors about me impact my ability to enter into spaces, especially spaces have been for long periods of time dominated by white guys. And even, you know, the fact that they were dominated by white guys 100 years ago, still has an impact now, because that history takes time to shift. And the same goes for the class positions. So I find it I did find it for a long time difficult to enter into those spaces, because of like, coming from, essentially the underclass. And so I had the white white guy on the underclass battling for like, supremacy. But, you know, a white guy from a middle class background, yes, they may have like anxiety, and various other social personal like, stresses and strains that they need to go through. But the space itself is made and has been shaped for people with, I’m going to do like, theoretical quoting, I don’t want to be like, like, what Bordieu calls a “habitus”, like the like, the, the, the million, the description of the setting, the the way people are allowed to speak the, the things that are valued, the individual performance is recognised and given, like, given given us, given acceptance, given recognition. And so, when we do the workshops, like we want people to, like, you know, just take a little bit of like, stock of where they’re coming at it from into these spaces, what are they bringing, like, on all these different social levels and cultural levels and economic levels, and people who come to them who’ve come to the workshops, even those fromm backgrounds similar to mine, or you know, people who are not racialized or gendered in the same way I am, but come from economically similar backgrounds. They’ll still have things on the list where they’ve got social capital, cultural capital, we all do. Like, it’s one of the things you get when you live in one of the historically richest and most powerful countries in the world, we carry some of that with us. But there are those who are going to have so much more.
D: And like, I’m quite keen, I’m quite fond of the saying, like, I want the communist to communist to do communism, like amongst ourselves, like, yes, we are not able to shift the state into, you know, what, wherever your political persuasion is socialist, communist, anarchist utopia just yet, but we can behave that way amongst ourselves. Like, there is no reason for us to be having a social movement where one person has, you know, hundreds of 1000s millions of pounds in the bank, in some cases, and other people in the same social movement, who have nothing, and like nothing saved, no means, no economic resources, are struggling with housing issues. And yet, these two people are supposed to enter into the space on the same page. And when that smells like bullshit to me, but that’s how it’s been, like, you know, that when I was first entering into social movements, none of that conversation was happening. But because primarily, because a lot of the folk in it, not all of them, but a lot of them came from very similar places, you know, many more whites, many were like post just graduated University and was still at university, usually like a red brick University, like, many had been to private school, most had done well at school, like, and then. So that all creates a certain culture that creates a social a certain way of doing things. And that and to have experience that suggests not and again, not always the case, but quite often do you have resources in your, in your family or resources of your own doubt that those resources are being shared that on any level, not being collected by not even before often those ways, into fact, just being made as invisible as possible, speaks to the lack of integrity of those social movements. And so for us, the workshops is about bringing some of that forward. But first, to get to that place where we, you know, are actually doing communism amongst the communists. Like, we have to like go through that really difficult bit of unpacking the truths, like what what is going on what what are the hostilities and tensions and aggravations we hold with one another, what are the ways in which we carry bitterness and resentment around this stuff. And so the workshops are, in part a little bit like, give a bit of him to express some of that. And as I’ve touched upon it, we’re very careful not to like just throw, go, Oh, you’re from working class, you’re from like, borderline like owning class, go and have a chat. Like we spent a lot of time and people talking to others who are in a similar boat. So they can get used to talking about things honestly with people who will have already have recognition for that experience. And, again, over the weekend, you know, we bring people to bring those different, like, we caught we call, we call them capital caucuses, so we have capital light caucus, we only have like, mediocre capital caucus, and then they have like, too much capital caucus. But we stopped bringing them together and start like showing a bit of information and a bit of knowledge. And they’re definitely like, there are definitely sessions over the weekend, when we do the full two day one, where those tensions can become quite unmanageable for people and people become upset and become distressed. And hopefully we hold that. I think for the most part, we’ve held it basically well and support those people feel that no matter what background they come from, cuz you know, we don’t really want like someone from an owning class or middle class to come along and just have an utterly terrible time and leave feeling really guilty. Because all of the guilt will do is ramp up and block their ability to do anything with it. Because they’re like, well, I can’t fucking do anything. Apparently, whatever I do is shit. You know, for me, that’s a problematic response, but it’s also an understandable response. And so the workshops like yeah, try and build some of that as a into it. One of the ways in which we visualise it is we’ve only done that how many times you’ve done this two or three times, okay, yeah, well, we have an exercise where we have like 200 jelly beans. Each Jelly Bean represents like a five grand, we find out what people have in their savings accounts and bank accounts, and visualise that through jelly beans have the four different caucuses. And each time we have one, one jar, one end, which is brimming over with these five grand jelly beans like it’s never been less than a couple of million pounds. And then at the other end, we have a container of the poorest group in the thing where there’s two jelly beans and then we have two in the middle which You know, different levels, but it becomes that’s one of the ways in which it’s become incredibly Stark for people. And it sounds goofy as fuck. Well aware of that. But it’s funny for me, when that’s happened, when we’ve done that in the workshops, it’s been one of the lightbulb moments for folks when they’ve seen Oh, yeah. The, I didn’t realise, you know, I just assumed everyone else had 15/20/30 grand in the bank account, because that’s, you know, how people do.
*Music*
Kat: Thanks, D. And, yeah, it’s really great hearing about the workshops. And I definitely want to try and get to one, one, we’re allowed to meet in person, again, sounds really good. And it also be really good to hear a bit more about Lumpen and what you’re doing with the journal at the moment. And I think, Dot if you wanted to maybe share a bit on that, that would be great to hear.
Dot: Yeah, sure. So we are now putting together the fifth issue. And it’s quarterly, so that that marks are our publishing it for over a year now. And I think it’s, I think it’s changed and it’s, and people have gotten more confident in sending us work and trusting us with their writing. And it’s, we take, it’s just open submission, so anyone can send anything to us. And people self identify as working class or poor. So that’s up to them there, they have their own way of identifying that. And then we go through all the submissions that we’ve got, and choose what we think is good to be published. We don’t ever really turn stuff away, unless it’s got some like, nasty stuff in it, if it’s like racist, or sexist, or whatever. We’re obviously not interested in publishing that. But we will try and work with the people to try and have a conversation about why we don’t want to publish what they’ve written, which I think is important, and that we’re trying to have a really different relationship with the people we work with, compared to what a normal magazine or publishing enterprise would have. And so we try and try and have quite a low, collaborative relationship with the people who write for us. We’re interested in working with people who maybe don’t feel really confident about their writing, or like their grammatical ability or like being readable or being academic. And if people have something that they want to talk about or say, then we’re really interested in helping them to do that, whether that’s like transcribing stuff from people talking or just trying to help people better communicate their ideas. And so yeah, we put and we publish everything from like poetry to fiction, and we get a lot of what’s the word like, basically a posher word for a rant? We get a lot of what is that word? Yeah, we get a lot of polemic, we get quite a lot of polemics from Angry Men, angry working class men, which is kind of accurate mirror to what you would expect you to get from, from putting a call out to working class people to write because those men tend to be more confident in sending work. So that’s something that we’ve been dealing with trying to get a fair representation in the journal, of different points of view from across across people who are working class, and we just started doing books as well. So we’ve we’ve got both D’s books on lumpen publishing. And then we started doing chat books, which are designed to be small kind of introductions to writers that we think are interesting or promising or have good good stuff to say. Mine was the first one. And that will be an ongoing bit of work for us, which I’m really excited about. Um, I guess when we’re talking about like different forms of capital that you’d have one of those forms of social capital. And that’s quite often a form of capital that’s used very effectively in getting, like cultural production stuff done. So like, quite often, to get a book published, you need to know someone somewhere. So it’s kind of about me addressing that. And also, I mean, it’s something I think about a lot I’m not sure that everyone else in the co op does as much but um, tonnes of like working class cultural production, particularly like writing and poetry because I’m, I write poetry, and I’m interested in it. And that it has been a very strong tradition in the past. And it’s been a very strong tradition in like social movements that you’d get a lot of, like, a lot of social movements would have like songs and poems. And there was always a big musical tradition within working class poetry. And I guess you can still see that now in like, road rap, like, with a knife, you know, like Pot of Paper, like these kind of artists, to me are, like working class poets.
Dot: But I feel like within the, within the kind of, like recognised cultural production of poetry, like what Arts Council would call poetry, we don’t have a good representation of working class poets, or writers. So, yeah, that’s another part of recognition of class position. Yeah, I think that’s it for Lumpen.
Ali: Congratulations on being the first books to be published. That’s really great, great. Yeah. So I guess the next bit we wanted to hear about is like, how you organise, and I guess you’ve said that it’s a coop? And I guess Tom’s phrase, how are the communists being communists? I’d like to know how you’re all being communists as well. How does that How do you do How do you do these things together? And with this, like recognition in mind?
Dot: Yeah, I think we can tip when we are obviously when we don’t work in a hierarchy. So we try and be in some way prefigurative about what we’re doing. And we, yeah, we registered as a co-op. We pay, well, we don’t, we’re not all paid to me and myself, and Hannah, are paid, we would like to get to a position where we could pay all of the members. And we’re quite, it’s quite important to us that we pay all our writers for their work. So I think there’s something about the way we value people’s labour and people’s time, which is important. And I think trying to recognise like power dynamics that emerge, because naturally, they do emerge, like 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. So yeah, trying to recognise those things playing out within us and within our relationships with each other, and recognise the sort of like, liberal bullshit that might creep in from time cuz liberalism has a tendency to do that. And also being like understanding and flexible and what we expect of each other, like, with the pandemic, that brought up loads of shit in my family and people in my family died. And yeah, it was a rough time. And so it was good to be part of a co op, where I wasn’t going to get sacked if I didn’t do any work for a couple of months. And I guess that’s also more important when you’re working with a group of people who come from working class backgrounds, because they’re more likely to face, to have trauma in their lives and have particular sort of experiences of the world that might make them harder might make it harder for them to work in a way that’s expected.
D: I’ll add a couple of things or just expand a couple of yeah with the the payment, sort of we have Yeah, we, most of us have experiences of working class labour being undervalued and underappreciated. And that being like, as horrific as it is in everyday life, that being trebled or doubled in social movements, but maybe it’s not as bad. Maybe it just becomes more hypocritical in social movements. Where there’s a Yeah, again, that pretense that we’re all on the same footing. When actually, in actual fact, you know, some of us are doing a variety of forms of care work with people in in communities we come from, which is entirely unrecognised. And some of us are having to hold down like, menial part time jobs, not because it’s a lifestyle choice, but because that’s just what we’ve been trained to do. And we may have like various financial obligations to members of our family or people, other people within our community, but we still have to, like participate in social movements, under the pretence that we’re all on an equal footing. So ensuring that those of us who work on the Classwork project and those who participate through their writing, get a tokenistic at the moment, amounts of like, final financial compensation is pretty important. Things also worth pointing out that the decisions around who gets paid and how much they get paid within the co op is done on like, the position the financial positions people are in at the time, rather than the quantity of work they are doing. And it’s like, yeah, for various reasons. Two of us in the coop didn’t don’t necessarily need a stable income coming from the co op, so we don’t get paid for it. And were those, those situations to change and the cost structure of our payment will change. When also not, we don’t like go, this person has to do X amount of hours this week, they have to clock in and clock out. Otherwise, they’re not getting their wage. And they, you know, we made an agreement, people would get paid a certain amount for the next year for as long as we had the funding, and that would be addressed when we needed to. And from my experience, that’s pretty, that’s quite different from a lot of how a lot of social movement organisations with finances and workers function. Hopefully that’s changing, because I hear I hear from different people it is. Yeah, there was a dynamic saying like, as Dot said which was bang on, like, what, however much we’ve read how much we thought up, however many like, how many workshops we’ve attended about class, we’re still going to reproduce some of this shit. Like, whether it’s along gender, gender, or age, or like length of time within the organisation like these hierarchies can pop up, they can also pop up based upon like, pre existing friendships and relationships, and how information travels within them. So we’ve had to like we had a little getaway, about September, where the first time all four of us were, like, met up together, and we spent the weekend like trying to unpick and unpack some of the ways in which we’d been working, and some of the problems and how we address them going forward. And that’s just a work in progress. And it has, but it has to be like a fundamental work in progress. It has to be like key to what we’re doing. And we will fail. And we will have to address it when we failed. But I think as long as we’re Yeah, sure that was quite well in acknowledging that at the very least,
Ali: thanks for sharing, but that that’s really great to hear about the different ways you work. Like I’m thinking of all that stuff ongoing is really sounds really important and to recognise that it’s like always ongoing. Yeah, that’s feels like it’s given the recognition that needs and equally like, what you brought up Dot around like trauma and like how COVID is like, particularly impacting you, but like, on a class, like is going to impact people from working class backgrounds, as well. I think that’s really like, great, that you’re able to bring that up. And thanks for sharing that. Kat, I’ve asked you for the last question.
Kat: And, yeah, I guess I just want to acknowledge as well that you’ve been shaping this podcast already. So far up to this point, we’ve only had one person on from each group. And so the invitation to have both of you on I think has just made it a much better conversation, hearing multiple voices from the collective or from the co op. has been really great. And thank you for bringing that and I think it will shape how we go forward with interviews. So yeah, just wanting to acknowledge the way you’re sharing power and as well in terms of who gets to speak, and yeah wanting to acknowledge that. And so the last question we’ve got is, I’m sure that a lot of our listeners will have been inspired by a lot of the things that they’ve heard you talking about. And we’re just wondering where we could signpost people to what could they do next? If they want to find out more about Classworks or Lumpen or the workshops that you’ve been talking about?
Dot: Yeah, well, this, this is as easy/ You can, if people some money, give people in your community money, or like, try and find out, if you’re involved in social movements, or whatever, try and be more aware of people’s social backgrounds and what they might need. And I think just like, try, and I think it’s, there’s so many ideas about wealth and inherited wealth, that is so ingrained that I’d encourage people to like challenge and try and shift the way they think about what they have and why they deserve it. And why why we have kind of possessive, like individual ownership and what that means and how, how that can be treated differently. Um, and then you can buy our books and buy our journal. And yeah, just go on your go on our website and have a little shop, I guess. D’ new books is out my books out the new issue of Lumpen and we’ll be out. We’re particularly reliant on subscriptions. So if you are able to do subscriptions, and we have solidarity, subscriptions, that’s really useful. And yeah, if you’re from a poor and working class background, and you and you like writing, or you don’t like writing you never tried to before, but you’ve got shit to say, then get in touch with us. And we’re super flexible about how we work with people. Yeah, D?
D: So yeah, with the workshops, I suppose it’s, well, obviously, we obviously we haven’t done we had a couple lined up just before pandemic and lockdown began. And they got cancelled because of you know, because they did and, and we’ve been very hesitant about moving online with them just because such look quite personal and embodied workshops. That said, we’re starting to develop a methodology and practice around doing work doing some of this work in small groups, and with groups who are like working with each other on long term projects. And so people are interested in that, they should definitely Email us at info @ theclassworkproject.com. But even if you just want to go or we’d like you to do a workshop in our city, once all this ends, the pandemic, not the world, then give us a line in the same place. And we’ll try and work something out. And similarly, we’re keen to work we are keen, more keen, to be honest, at the moment to work with organisations or networks, how are doing ongoing practice with each other. You can also set up a direct pay making a PayPal payment to us, if you don’t, if you already got all our books, and still think we should be supporting funding because we are struggling with finances at present. And if you’re not following us on social media, or on Twitter, or Facebook, you should do because, and spread the word about the stuff we’re doing. And and yeah, I guess the direct participation for the journal like, even if you’ve never, like people who haven’t written before, but I’ve got something they want to get off their chest, like, we’re very up for being like supporting people through that through the show sort of writing experience. So even if you just got kernel of idea, and you want to get support with it, get in contact. And yeah, so we were doing this redistribution project for what was it? Two months at the start of pandemic, which happened ad hoc, or what, and how much detail is going into, it got started because some people got in contact with us saying, we’re in dire straits. We’re in this situation. We need some money. And then at the same time, random people who participated in workshops or knew of the other stuff, we’ve been doing grant contract sign up, or do you know anyone who needs 50 grand? Yeah. Someone just called about that. So we ended up doing a bit of redistribution projects where like, people who had lump sums anywhere ranging from like a couple of 100 to 60 or 70,000, we’re sending it to us and we were distributing it around several 100 different people, mainly from like pre-existing networks. So not not always within social movements. But sometimes quite often, it was just like the communities we previously don’t work in. We’re not sure where we’re going, we’ve ended that. And we’re not sure where we’re going to go with it. But it’s worth noting that there are several of these kind of more localised projects that are coming, stepping up at the moment. I’m sure there is a list somewhere, but you should probably keep an eye out for that kind of thing and try and support them where you can. Because hopefully, when when things like this are like that, like directly in a community directly on the ground, they actually reach the people who need it the most. And they will rely less upon like, not long term relationships, people may have built up in the past that we never wanted to make a centralised thing to do it. We think it was much better in person in the community. So look around for them, maybe ResistRenew, have already got a list of the groups doing that. I don’t know. I haven’t got a list. So yeah, that, that’s about it, both from me.
Ali: Thank you both so much for your time, it was a really interesting conversation, really great to hear about the number of projects you’ve got going on. And I also find it really funny to like, hear, like, I just found a conversation funny and like, as well as being like, deeply, like complex. So like that balance was like really great. And I would, yeah, I can imagine spending a weekend in that kind of environment would have be like, really fun and hard hitting at the same time. So I would look forward to doing something in the future. But yeah, thanks so much. And if you want to write something, get in touch with them. And if you want us give them money, give lots of money to them. That’s my takeaways from the conversation.
D: Cheers, thanks a lot.
Transcript assisted by Otter.ai
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