The 2025 national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America wrapped up this weekend, right here in Chicago – home of some of the most vibrant and dynamic working-class communities in the history of this country. As often happens, our speakers, delegates, caucus members, and organizers correctly spoke of the importance of building a mass movement of the multi-racial working class in order to fight capitalism and win socialism.
But there is a curious tendency, even in the most enlightened and class-conscious spaces on the left, to discuss the working class in a strange, detached way, as if they are an object and not a subject, a signifier and not the signified. It can have a disorienting effect, especially on newly organized members and people who are not used to the rarefied language often employed in activist circles, to hear workers, the poor, and the marginalized referred to as if they are specimens to be coaxed, cajoled, and studied before being released into the wild.
This is understandable! Just as DSA struggles with its racial composition, it struggles with its class character, with many of its members drawn from the white middle and upper-middle class. It’s not a cause to feel guilt; people have no say in how, where, and when they are born, and anyone can be part of the struggle. It is a fact that, especially in America – the most capitalist country in the history of the world, one whose citizens are inundated in anti-communist propaganda from the cradle to the grave – many people only develop class consciousness, leftists political tendencies, and an understanding of material analysis by attending elite colleges and spending time around socially aware academics.
But if we are going to reach the working class, let alone organize the working class into the only weapon that can end the dominance of capitalist imperialist hegemony, we must understand how to talk about the working class. While it was being in solidarity with educated children of the bourgeoisie that gave me the language to understand Marxism and develop a theory of change, it was being around other working-class people that gave me the life lessons to translate those theoretical frameworks into action that can bring more and more workers into the fold. Here are four commandments for talking, thinking about, and organizing the working class.
I. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE WORKING CLASS IS.
Defining the working class can be deceptively difficult, especially in the U.S., where the bosses have developed all kinds of tricks and rhetorical feints to discourage class consciousness and solidarity and discourage the working class from identifying them as the true enemy. But here, as in most things, we look to the source: Karl Marx. We must conquer our shyness around words like “comrade” and “proletariat” and turn our attention to the most basic definition of the working class that Marx gave us: those great masses of people who have nothing to sell but their labor, and who must do so in order to live. That is why the working class is larger than we allow ourselves to imagine, as it comprises every person on Earth who does not directly control capital. It does not matter how much you are paid for your labor; it does not matter what that labor consists of you selling. If you must sell it, whether it is muscle or brains, to live, you are the working class.
II. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE WORKING CLASS ISN’T.
One particular trap people fall into is to mistake cultural signifiers of class for the true class marker of what you must do to earn a living. Again, this is an easy pitfall, because the bosses are forever muddying the waters through propaganda, and in America – a country that claims to have no classes – we often talk ourselves into the delusion that class consists of certain cultural markers. Even people on the left do this out of the same confused impulses that makes reactionaries do it: teachers aren’t working class, but plumbers are. Truck drivers are working class, but baristas aren’t. Blue collar workers are working class, but white collar workers aren’t. Real working-class people drive like this, fake working-class people drive like this. Don’t fall for it, comrades! This is the same old ruling-class trick to keep us fighting among ourselves instead of the people keeping us all down. Your fellow workers are your allies, no matter how they talk, what they do for work, or what their taste in music is.
III. THE WORKING CLASS ARE EVERYWHERE.
To hear some people talk, the working class is like a rare species of bird or a mythical creature like gnomes cavorting among the toadstools. The truth is, you do not have to go anywhere to find working-class people. They are everywhere you look! They are your friends and they are your neighbors. They are the people who drive your cabs and serve you food. They are the security guards at the office building where you work. Unless you are part of the bourgeoisie (and it’s fine if you are; class traitors are part of a great leftist tradition going all the way back to original communist gangster Friedrich Engels), they are your co-workers! Talking to them is as simple as having a conversation with them about how their day is going, when their shift ends, or how long it is before they get to go home. Most working-class people are more than happy to talk to anyone (besides the boss) about how alienated they are under capitalism. From there, a conversation about workplace organizing is an easy next step.
IV. THE WORKING CLASS SHOULD LEAD.
Perhaps the most dangerous mistake many leftists make is to assume the working class are helpless, hopeless, and politically idle, and are waiting in a kind of ideological limbo from those of us who come from on high to liberate them. But disorganization is not helplessness! The truth is that the working class has been organizing for its own interests long before we ever came along. When we say we believe in workers controlling the means of production, that means the workers are the ones we trust to organize for themselves. All workers know their workplaces, their social conditions, and the nature of their exploitation. They may not have the language to describe it or the know-how to resist it, but we don’t need to explain their own lives to them. As one of the speakers at our convention this year, a grocery worker encountering DSA for the first time, put it: “We do not need saviors. We just need people with knowledge and organization to stand with us.”
V. DON’T GET HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY.
Okay, technically, that’s one of the Ten Crack Commandments, but related to the above, it’s desirable to introduce Marxist language to the working class, because it’s for them to use in pursuit of their own liberation. But it’s easy to overwhelm people with jargon, or use particular academic argot that can be confusing to newcomers to theory. By the same token, it’s important to remember that it is class that binds us, and while moving in unfamiliar circles allows for lots of opportunities to introduce related forms of liberatory solidarity, we shouldn’t disqualify people from membership in the working class because they aren’t as politically developed as we are or as socially integrated as we are. Once we unite them in struggle, we will have plenty of time to help them move beyond whatever prejudices they retain from growing up in a reactionary environment encouraged by the bosses. You were a worker first, and so are they. Having comrades who trust you is better than being assured of your own righteousness.
If we could distill all of this into a single Golden Rule, it would be “Don’t other the working class.” The working class is you, it’s us, it’s practically everyone. As our chapter strives to teach in our political education platform, we do not value the working class as the means to revolution because it is uniquely moral, especially politically developed, or the most oppressed; we value the working class because it is us, in our vast numbers, a huge army of labor equipped and suited to fight the bosses and overthrow the rule of capital for the benefit of all. For workers to be a class of themselves and for themselves, they must be seen as ourselves, our allies, and our comrades – not an exotic animal at the zoo. Reject the egoistic notion that you are different, better, or even inferior to other workers and embrace the totality of solidarity, and you will begin to see that the path to building a mass movement of the multi-racial working class is not as rocky a road as it may seem.
