Don’t be charitable to the poor...
Arrange it so that they have power
An interview with Michael Zweig by Jane Slaughter

In The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Cornell University Press, 2000), Michael Zweig pulls the covers off "America’s best kept secret." He’s not interested simply in an exposé. Zweig believes that an understanding of class is essential to understanding power in society–and to winning more power for one class by restricting another. That, he says, is " a project of democracy," since the working class, as he defines it, makes up 62 percent of the population. Zweig, who teaches economics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and volunteers with the Southold Fire Department in Long Island, is also the author of Religion and Economic Justice. In that book, he argues that a concern for the poor is most effective when understood not as charity but as "an alliance with the working class."

T.W.: It’s the conventional wisdom in America that we’ve overcome classes, that everyone is middle class. In my seventh-grader’s U.S. History class, they learned that on the frontier there were no classes. Why did you decide to try to convince people that there is a working class and that most Americans are in it?

M.Z.: Over the last 30 years a lot of good attention has been paid to race and gender, but very little to class. And in fact the media puts forth some very misleading ideas about class. For example, every 20 minutes on the news it’s the Dow Jones this and the NASDAQ that. You would get the impression that everybody in the country is involved in the stock market, that we’re all a little bit capitalist. The fact is that less than half the people have anything at all to do with the stock market, even just belonging to a pension fund that’s invested. If you want to have an influence over income and wealth and tax policy and affirmative action and all kinds of very practical day-to-day matters, it’s important to know about class.

T.W.: You often hear even union leaders referring to "middle-class workers." Why has the working class disappeared from public view?

M.Z.: When people talk about "middle-class workers," what they mean is workers who have a house and a decent life, who aren’t living in abject poverty. They think of anybody who has a decent life as a middle-class person, decent in terms of their consumption. But if we look at class just in terms of income or lifestyle, we miss what class is really about, which is power.

Of course, different classes have different incomes and lifestyles, but it’s power that gives you the different incomes and lifestyles. From having different amounts of power you get different amounts of wealth, different status, different access to the media and having your ideas and your needs represented.

Many workers – not all – now live the way middle-class people, managers and small-business owners, lived 50 years ago. That’s because unions and social movements won higher wages, Social Security, unemployment compensation, a Fair Labor Standards Act. All these things have improved the lives of workers, but they’re still workers. They’re still a working class that does not have much power.

T.W.: How do you differentiate classes on the basis of power?

M.Z.: I look at occupation. If someone doesn’t have much control over their work, that’s a working-class person. A cashier in a supermarket is a working-class job. A stockbroker is also a salesperson, but the stockbroker has enough authority and power at work to shape what they do and have some independence. So that person is middle class.

The working class is not just blue-collar industrial workers; the working class is also the people who are writing basic computer code, bank tellers, elevator repair people. If you count the numbers of people who are in each occupation, which the U.S. Department of Labor does, I find that about 62 percent of the labor force are working-class people.

The middle class is the professional people, small business owners, managers, supervisors, and that’s about 36 percent of the labor force. They have middle amounts of authority and control. And then the capitalists are about 2 percent.

The capitalists are the people who have the power to make decisions about production, not just in industry but in finance, real estate, all aspects of the economy. The people who have the ultimate power to run those industries are the capitalist class. It includes owners of small businesses, but on a national level, there are only about 200,000 people who run businesses that have a national scope.

Understanding class as power helps us look very directly at who has power and how they exercise it in the economy, in culture, in politics. There’s a lot of discussion about campaign finance reform, about corporate control of the media and the images that we see, the kinds of things that are represented to us as news or as entertainment: These are all class questions. Because the capitalist class has certain interests and certain ideas about how life should be organized. Ultimately, they use their power not only to run the economy but to maintain their power to keep on doing that.

If you understand class as power, you can understand better who are your friends, who are your enemies, what kind of coalitions can you build, how can you influence events. If you only understand class as income, a lot of that disappears.

For example, the usual way people think about class is that most people are middle-class, it’s a middle-class society with some rich people at the top – David Rockefeller and Bill Gates and Madonna. Then there’s the poor at the bottom, the "underclass." Then if we notice that everyone we know is experiencing degraded working conditions, and that more people in our families are working to make the same income, and that we don’t have time for our children, we’re working longer hours, with less medical coverage – if people want to do something about this, where is the target? Who’s the enemy, who’s responsible? The way politics has played out in this country over the last 20 years is that the problem is poor people. The middle class is suffering because poor people are taking away our tax money and they’re living on welfare and they’re coming into this country and they’re taking away our jobs –

T.W.: And they’re still poor!

M.Z.: But boy, are they making a mess out of our lives. What you get from that view is a lot of sentiment against immigration, against people on welfare, a lot of racism. The poor become the target. That gets you welfare "reform," it gets you criminalization of drug use, the prison-industrial complex–all that follows from "the poor are the enemy."

What’s the alternative? Are "the rich" the enemy? Poor people aren’t poor because there are rich people. Poor people are poor because they are workers who aren’t getting paid decent wages. Or they’re poor because they don’t have jobs. They’re poor because capitalists have decided not to keep their industries in the cities and have moved them away somewhere so that people are left without work and without an infrastructure and tax base. The capitalists are responsible for those decisions because they’re capitalists, not because they’re rich.

So if all you have in your mind as a picture of society is a very broad middle class with a few rich and a few poor, you have no appropriate political target. You get a very confused politics that most working people walk away from. Which is exactly what we see. People don’t vote, they don’t have any confidence in the political process.

Understanding our way through this thicket of politics, culture, and economics, it’s very helpful to understand that most people are working-class people: They work for a living, supervised by, and ultimately controlled by, a capitalist class that has different interests and wants to keep these working people powerless. In fact, the capitalists employ whole arrays of managerial personnel to keep them powerless, as well as intellectuals and professionals. But those middle-class people also have a sense of professional responsibility and want their independence, and they can come to resent the restrictions that are placed on them by the capitalists. So the middle class is not only in the middle in terms of income, the middle class is in the middle of labor and capital, caught between them.

Part of maintaining your power is to hide it, and to get people to think that there isn’t any power involved at all, it’s just the way things are. It’s a struggle even to get a discussion of classes out, because it is such a highly charged and dangerous notion. What did we see when Al Gore went to the Democratic Party Convention and talked about "working families"? George Bush and all these pundits went nuts. "This is class warfare, we can’t allow this." Peggy Noonan, the columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, was on television beside herself: "I thought we gave up this language years ago ..."

Gore stopped talking about working families and went back to talking about middle-class tax cuts. Any discussion of class is very consciously repressed.

T.W.: Don’t a lot of ordinary people seem to have a stake in thinking of themselves as having made it into the middle class?

M.Z.: It all depends on how you ask the question. If you ask most people, "What class are you–upper-class, middle-class, or lower-class?" most people, 85 or 90 percent, will say "middle-class." Because they know they’re not upper-class, and they don’t want to be lower-class, so what else are they going to say? But if you change the question and say, "What class are you–upper-class, middle-class, working-class, or lower-class?" 55-60 percent of American people say "working-class." Despite all the consumerism and upward mobility and "this is America, anybody can be anything."

Even if people are just asked, "Are you middle-class or working-class?" still a majority, 55 or 60 percent, will say "working-class." So people do think of themselves that way. They may not spontaneously say it, because it’s not part of the culture or the language or the media, it’s not what you see on television, it’s not the way anything is discussed on the news. It’s America’s best-kept secret.

People will identify themselves as workers, but they also don’t want to have that carry with it a connotation of doom, of being trapped, of yet one more obstacle. People don’t like to think that their future has been taken away from them. If the point of saying to somebody "you’re a worker," is to put them into a category that says you have no hope, you’re stuck here in the factory, you’re stuck here at this cash register, people will resent that. But if "you’re a worker" means that you have a respected role in society, people don’t want to run away from that.

T.W.: Does the fact that people can work hard and move into better occupations than their parents make the whole idea of class less important?

M.Z.: The fact that people can advance does mean that we don’t have a caste system where we’re born into who we will be forever. People do move across classes (although the biggest indicator of where a person is going to end up in the class structure is where their parents started out). That’s a wonderful and important feature of American capitalist life. But that can’t be true for society as a whole. Everybody can’t leave the working class. There has got to be a working class, and it has to be a majority of the population because that’s how the economy is organized and how wealth is created.

T.W.: Some people say you shouldn’t raise the issue of class because it’s divisive. The idea of class struggle doesn’t bring people together.

M.Z.: If you look over the last 30 years, there’s no question that there’s been very intense class struggle and class warfare in this country. The only thing is that only one class seems to know it. And they don’t want to talk about it.

The capitalist class is waging unrelenting, very deliberate, very well-thought-through warfare on American working people and workers all over the world. It’s a warfare that involves attacks on unions, on individual workers who want to organize unions, on poor workers, on low-wage workers, women workers, on African American and immigrant labor–these are the people who have been targeted to have their living standards reduced, and that’s been a very conscious program to "make America competitive." The idea that America has to be competitive is sold to us as a question of national pride, but what it actually is is a program for the capitalists who run the economy to make money by degrading the lives of working people.

Calling that out and recognizing it isn’t creating class struggle. The class struggle already exists. What it does do is make it a public question. It calls these capitalists to account for what they’re doing, politically, morally, ethically, aesthetically, and in every other way. It’s a way to back them off and say, no, we’re not going to allow you to treat people this way. That then becomes a fight, because the capitalists don’t want to be limited in what they can do. They don’t want to be told that it’s wrong to lay 40,000 workers off and lay a whole city waste. This has to be called out for what it is. The capitalists have too much power that they want to exercise privately and quietly without supervision and without contest. And without people knowing that that’s what’s going on.

T.W.: Does being rich automatically put you in the capitalist class, with those values?

M.Z.: No, a lot of professional people and managerial people make very good money. They may own stocks and may identify themselves in some way with the good life and with the powers in society, the power of capital. But that doesn’t make them capitalists. And it also doesn’t make them necessarily in their thinking and their values aligned with the capitalists. Very often people who are quite well-to-do can have values and ethics that promote a social and cooperative sense of mutual aid as opposed to this barren raw individualism that capitalists promote.

T.W.: Is it possible then to be born in one class but cast your allegiance elsewhere? I’m thinking of Eugene Debs, who said, "While there is a working class, I am of it."

M.Z.: Oh, sure. If you look at the religious community, for example, there are many religious people who are reasonably well-off, they’re not capitalists or workers, who cast their lot with the workers. They may not think of it quite that way, because in the religious communities the way this is often talked about is the "preferential option for the poor." Well, we need to understand, who are these poor?

The poor are not some lump of people at the bottom of society who are just there as the underclass, permanently poor and permanently outside the mainstream of American life. The poor are working people. The poor are people who are unemployed but who are going to go back to work. The poor are women whose marriage ends and they are trying to get a job and get their lives together. After a while they get their lives together and then they’re not poor anymore. And then something else happens and then they’re poor again. Or someone has a job, but then their mother gets sick and they have to stay home and take care of her because they don’t have adequate medical care, and they become poor.

If you understand that poverty is something that happens to the working class, it’s a different type of preferential option. Instead of an option for some marginal poor, this remote "other" that we have to be nice to, it’s an option for the majority of the population, the working class, who are subject to the conditions that create poverty. If you have that option for the working class, that then leads you to an understanding of the need to limit the power of the capitalist class. That has political consequences and ethical and moral consequences.

T.W.: If the poor are in reality part of the working class, cycling in and out of poverty and near-poverty, what does that imply for the traditional Christian concern for the poor?

M.Z.: The idea of doing something charitable for the poor, who will always be with us, is a beautiful thing. But it’s misplaced as a practical program, because the way for the poor to have a better life is for them to have more power. "Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime." That means don’t be charitable toward the poor; arrange it so that they have power.

If you approach working people who are poor with a sense of charity, it’s humiliating to many people. People will take it because they’re hungry, and they’ll even appreciate it in a certain way, but it can be done in a way that’s deeply hurtful and in the long run counterproductive. Or it can be done in a way that says, "Let’s work together to stand up and exercise the humanity we have in a way that makes us fully powerful in our interests and with our own needs, but as a community."

The capitalists claim that their wealth is the result of their individual success and prowess in the market. But their wealth isn’t just their own doing; it’s also the doing of the people who work for them to create the goods and services they sell. Wealth is actually a social creation.

T.W.: So we should see a fair share for working people, including poor people, not just as charity but as...

M.Z.: As a legitimate claim to the contributions that working people make to the wealth of the country.

T.W.: If someone would follow your prescription for philanthropy, they would not just give money to a food bank, they would help to organize people in some way.

M.Z.: In the last 25 years the social safety net has been dramatically shredded at the same time that the living standards of American working people have been greatly reduced. All the social structures of mutual support are being undermined, unions are being undermined, government programs are being undermined, people are having to work much longer hours and have more stressful lives. That means they have less time to volunteer. Their ability to be active in their churches, in the Boy Scouts, in the Volunteer Fire Department, in all the social structures that allow us to help one another, all that is seriously challenged by what is happening in the economy. So we’re being thrown back just on our own resources.

The political forces behind this, which exist in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, are saying to the religious community, "You should do more charity, have another soup kitchen." The churches are being urged to take up the slack of what unions used to be able to win for their members; they didn’t have to go to food banks because they had a wage that could support their families.

So the religious community is now being asked to use all their energy on immediate aid for the people on their doorstep, instead of seeing, wait a second, we need to focus on the social structures that are bringing these people to our doorstep. That is what an understanding of class allows people to do, to see those connections.

We’re being told that our ethical and moral responsibility–if it’s not just to ourselves–is an individual act of charity towards others, volunteering in the soup kitchen. And people are often driven by a sense of moral urgency to do good for the poor. But if we look at the national discussion of morality and ethics in the last 25 years, the way that values enter into the national debate is "family values." All issues of economic justice have been drained away and disappeared from any public review of social policy. All questions of economics are simply technical questions for the market and what we have instead as questions of morality are, "Who are you sleeping with?" Questions of morality become, "Do you smoke marijuana? Are you gay or are you straight? Do you or don’t you have an abortion?"

These are all important questions to struggle with, morality at the personal level. But they aren’t the sum and substance of ethics and morality. That way of approaching things not only misses the economic targets, it misses the moral targets. It misses the ethical reality that we are mutually interdependent and we are mutually determining and we have a responsibility to each other that isn’t just charity. It’s the way society needs to be organized, from the top to the bottom.

And that understanding challenges capitalism. It doesn’t necessarily destroy it, but it certainly puts a limit on it. It says the market is not the be-all and end-all, as a mechanical process of production and exchange for maximum profits, of the human content of our lives. We’re not going to allow our lives to be reduced to that. That’s a moral question, and that’s not who do you sleep with. If we understand that morality extends to economic justice, we can recast what is the practical and moral and religious task of our institutions.

T.W.: Should we turn a cold shoulder to the starving person on the church steps and say sorry, we’re organizing strike support instead?

M.Z.: No, but every strike support should definitely have a soup kitchen. Every union should be working with every church and every synagogue and every mosque to develop social structures for working people, whether they’re on strike or in an organizing campaign or whether they’re unemployed or whether they’ve just been divorced and can’t make it for six months.

We feed you, but we do it in the context of a social movement that’s feeding you, so that it isn’t just the church as an isolated institution taking on the burdens of the poor, it becomes the church working with other institutions to mobilize power, to confront the powerful. That’s a very threatening and difficult thing to do.

T.W.: It’s more than "speaking truth to power."

M.Z.: Oh, it’s doing to power.

T.W.: So you’re saying that if people want to exercise a preferential option for the poor, the best way to do that is to organize power for the working class, which is the majority.

M.Z.: That’s why it’s also a project of democracy. One way class has been obscured in the last 30 years is that workers have been characterized as "special interests." Just like the oil industry or the banking industry. But they’re 62 percent of the population.

Jane Slaughter is a freelance writer who lives in Detroit. For The Working Class Majority visit <www.workingclass.sunysb.edu>.

An "Ethnic Anglican"
considers classism
by Ian T. Douglas

Once, early in our marriage, when my wife and I were vacationing with her parents, my mother-in-law asked me over breakfast: "Ian, why are you an Episcopalian?" Somewhat taken aback by the question, I wondered what was she after? "What do you mean?" I asked. She responded. "You do not seem like other Episcopalians." My interest was piqued. I had a creeping suspicion that my mother-in-law was not making an observation about my religious beliefs but rather about my cultural identity and class background. I asked a second time: "What do you mean?" "Well," she said, "you’re not like the Episcopalians I knew in Philadelphia." My suspicions were beginning to be confirmed. Because I am basically a troublemaker, and because I love my mother-in-law dearly and we enjoy a wonderful relationship, I felt free to push her a little further. "What do you mean?" I questioned a third time. She replied in a matter-of-fact manner: "It seems that, unlike the Episcopalians I knew along the Mainline, you are not of the silver-service, tea-sipping upper class." Taking this as a compliment, I found myself answering her inquiry, quite unreflectively, "I’m in the Episcopal Church because I’m an ethnic Anglican."

What does it mean to be an "ethnic Anglican" and what does such an appellation have to do with class and class analysis?

I grew up in a working-class family in Fitchburg, Mass. In my home town, religious affiliation was intimately connected to the immigrant community with which one primarily identified. Finnish folk went to Messiah Lutheran, Greeks to Holy Trinity Orthodox, Quebecois to St. Francis’, Arcadians to St. Joseph’s, Italians to St. Leo’s, the Irish to St. Bernard’s (these latter four being Roman Catholic churches), and immigrants from England to Christ Episcopal Church.

Just before the Great Depression, my father’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from England and found employment in the paper factories of Fitchburg. At about the same time my mother’s parents traveled south from Quebec to work in the city’s woolen mills. My parents’ question was: Do they raise their two boys as Quebecois Roman Catholics or English Anglicans? They chose the latter and so our family attended Christ Episcopal Church in Fitchburg.

Growing up in Christ Church, it was clear to me at an early age that two classes existed in the parish. There were the mill owners, an old family with deep roots in New England who built, paid for, and ran the church. Then there was the rest of us, the mill workers who filled the pews. In our eyes, the mill owners were the real Episcopalians and we were the immigrant ethnic Anglicans in their church. It was clear that we were second class, economically and religiously.

The ethnic Anglicans at Christ Church, Fitchburg, were well aware of the classism within the parish and in the wider Episcopal Church. As is so often the case, however, those who were privileged by the class structures, the mill owners, had no idea that classism was rife in the parish. That’s how privilege works. Those who enjoy the power do not realize they are carrying an "invisible backpack of privilege." This was as true for the mill owners at Christ Church as it is for others in our communities who continue to be privileged because they are white, or male, or straight.

The Episcopal Church has begun to address the evils of racism, sexism, and heterosexism by unmasking the structures of oppression that privilege some at the expense of others. We have a long way to go, however, in addressing the sin of classism in our midst. We must first recognize and admit that classism is alive and well in our church. We must listen to the experiences of the many "ethnic Anglicans" and other working-class folk among our clergy and in our parishes who have born the brunt of classism in the Episcopal Church. And we must link efforts to overcome classism with the church’s other anti-oppression work. As we continue to struggle together to overcome the sins of racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism in the church and in the world, we will live into the promise of God’s freedom for all made real in Jesus Christ.

Ian T. Douglas is Associate Professor of World Mission and Global Christianity at the Episcopal Divnity School in Cambridge, Mass., and a member of the Epsicopal Church Publishing Company’s board (ECPC publishes The Witness)