by Martin Boksenbaum
Working class. Ahhh. To someone steeped in the leftist lingo freely expressed in the New York City of the 1960s, with its peace, civil rights, labor, and leftist activism, it’s refreshing to hear such culturally repressed language out in the open once again.
A photo of an energetic, determined Occupy Wall Street march is posted on “The End of Capitalism” website, accompanying an article by David Graeber entitled “Occupy Wall St. Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”. The photo’s caption reads: “Youth of the multiracial working class – always at the front of things. Police arrested over 80 people during this 9/24 march, and pepper sprayed more.” In the article itself, Graeber says: “We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated—faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.”
Working class. Ahhh. To someone steeped in the leftist lingo freely expressed in the New York City of the 1960s, with its peace, civil rights, labor, and leftist activism, it’s refreshing to hear such culturally repressed language out in the open once again.
Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com editor, writes, in introducing Graeber’s article, “Our theory is that capitalism has entered a crisis from which it will never recover. The youth can feel it, we know we have no future within the existing system. The only question is, what alternative models can we move to, when everything feels so bleak?”
Is there hope in all the bubbling and ferment now going? What hope is there now that the Occupy Movement has raised the specter of the 99% to haunt the 1%?
Most of us in the 99% are wage earners (working class). That’s my background. As a teacher, I was a member of the working class (and a union member). Much has been made, by leftists such as Frederick Engels in the late 1800s, of our role as members of the working class in transitioning us all to a more sustainable way of life that “meets the needs of the community and of each individual.” Engels expected much to come from our efforts: “While the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this [societal transformation].”
Yet, other movements stress other economic classes as pivotal in societal transformation.
Both the Transition Movement as well as BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies; here it’s the Sustainable Business Network of the Lehigh Valley) stress the change-creating importance of small shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, the second major class of the 99%. The May 15-18, 2012 BALLE Conference in Michigan invites you to “Come join us to learn how different communities are moving their investments from Wall Street to Main Street and creating ownership opportunities in essential economic sectors. Our conference session, It Takes a Village: Community Supported Enterprise, is an in-depth look at the hows and whys of using local financial resources to create a thriving economy.”
And in The Transition Companion, Rob Hopkins talks about creating a new, economically viable local infrastructure. “The idea of this ingredient is, first, that Transition Initiative might better meet their aims by stimulating and supporting social enterprises and entrepreneurs locally and, second, that in the pursuit of initiatives becoming financially viable, social enterprise has a key role to play.”
The third, and smallest, economic class in the 99%, is made up of small farmers. Joel Salatin, sustainable farming guru, asserts that we need the brightest and the best to go into farming because sustainable food production, basic to sustainable communities, requires intelligence, knowledge, and creativity, as well as all that hard work.
Indeed, the sustainable agriculture movement talks about the change-creating importance of small farmers. Brian Snyder, of PASA (Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture), has called on folks to “join me in helping to make 2012 the ‘Year of the Farmer’ in terms of the influence that all of us can, and must have with respect to the future of our farms, our families and the world around us!” The theme of PASA’s Feb 2012 conference was: “Breaking Ground for a New Agriculture: Cultivating Versatility and Resilience.” Resilience! A key term of the Transition Movement.
What’s the hope in all this? While wage workers, small and medium business owners, and small farmers have different concerns because of differences in how they make their livings, hope may lie in their recognition that we are all part of the 99%, facing common crises whose solution depends upon our recognition that we need to deal with these crises together.
Martin is a member of the Alliance Steering Committee.
(Published in the 2012 edition of Sustainable Lehigh Valley)
(Essays express the ideas of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alliance.)