Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "A Touch of Class" in Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 123-126). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, June 1989
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
My mama told me there were certain words you didn’t use because they weren’t nice.
My daddy went even further — you couldn’t even say “Shut up!” around him. That was garbage-can language.
Not until the ’60s did Americans get to say the forbidden “F” and “S” words. Speech was so exuberantly free in that liberationist epoch that we could even talk in public about oppression, exploitation, imperialism, and — take a deep breath — capitalism.
Everybody today prattles about the unmentionables of yesterday: abortion, prostitution, masturbation, oral, anal, name it. The AIDS epidemic has at least vanquished Puritanism in everyday conversation; safe sex is definitely in.
But I’ll tell you what’s still out, what is still not nice, annoying, gauche. I’ll tell you which two words rarely fail to elicit groans, snores, befuddlement, glazed expressions, or ruffled feathers from most people: “Working Class.”
Trade union bureaucrats, and workers climbing the career ladder to Business Agenthood, are loath to use the phrase.
Gorbachev never refers to it. He’s too absorbed in peaceful co-investment with ruling classes.
Upwardly mobile professional ladies and gentlemen of all colors and sexual preferences tend to squirm and glare when they hear the offending term. The greed generation considers it a 19th Century vestigial hangover, an appendix slated for surgery because nowadays, of course, everybody is middle-class.
Cultural nationalists airily dismiss the concept: it’s irrelevant and immaterial to their agenda, which relies solely on group worship of traditional folkways and/or skin color. True delights like soul food or blintzes or guacamole or sashimi become the political cement of a small sector of some ethnic groups, and class be damned.
Some leaders of Native American nations get really nasty about proletarian power. Russell Means, formerly of the American Indian Movement and presently of the Libertarian Party, views class and socialism as artificial constructs devised by Karl Marx and interesting only to “white Europeans.”
The Greens (whole earth anarchists) say that class exists all right, but it’s obsolete; capitalism and socialism are really the same thing because both deal with who shall own and control production. They claim we shouldn’t produce at all because production is hazardous to health and environment.
Some lesbians and gay men can be absurd, too — white gays who genuflect on the establishment altar and hate Reds of whatever sexual persuasion, and separatist lesbians who scorn all males except their bosses.
And then we come to feminists. What do they think about radical politics and labor solidarity and workingclass-principled personal behavior? Well, here it seems some fresh breezes are blowing. For instance, feminists around the country have started inviting yours truly to explore this formerly no-no topic.
I recently spoke on socialist feminism to a conference on Women and Power at the University of Washington in Seattle. My remarks on the connections of race, sex and class elicited interest, some agreement, and some vehement opposition.
On March 31, in Oakland, California, I was the keynote speaker before 1000 women at the 20th National Conference on Women and the Law. My talk was “A Call to Activism: Reviving the Tradition of the Rebel Lawyer.” I was honored to be introduced by Merle Woo, a sister in class struggle. Freeway Hall Case attorney Valerie Carlson and Bay Area socialist feminists Nancy Kato and Roanne Hindin also espoused a radical class viewpoint in their workshop speeches. Again, a mixed reaction, but at least our presence was noted!
On April 6, I addressed a national conference at the University of Iowa attended by 2000. The subject was “Parallels and Intersections: Racism and Other Forms of Oppression.” My lecture was on “Oppressions: The Capitalist Connection and the Socialist Solution.” Nancy Kato also hit on the issue with a fine talk on the revolutionary feminist approach to race and class.
April 18 found me at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where the Women’s Resource Center invited me to talk on “Using the Power of Class to Combat Racism and Sexism.” I think they liked me in Lincoln.
Yes, indeed, the single-issueism of post-Vietnam War days is happily dead. Feminists today are considering alliances — radical multi-racial coalitions of lesbians and straights to confront injustice. The attention paid to female workers and trade unionists is still not enough, but openness to a dynamic feminism wedded to a class-based internationalism is surging.
Most thrilling to me was the swift emergence of a Socialist Caucus in Iowa, composed of women and men, people of color and uncolor, gays and not-gays, from various countries.
We said the bad words out loud, over and over: working class, working class, working class, WORKING CLASS! We demanded that respect be paid to this decisive class that alone creates unity out of diversity and separates the fighters from those who do the bosses’ dirty work.
As Linda Ellerbee, the columnist and television anchor, said to a USA Today interviewer, “Just because it’s a rat race doesn’t mean it’s OK to be a rat”
This here mama done told you.