Apr 14, 2008
Working-class unions and middle-class environmentalists are very different organizations.

The middle class is prone to seeing the working class as rigid, self-interested, narrow, uninformed, parochial, and conflict oriented. The working class tends to perceive the middle class as moralistic, intellectual, more talk than action, lacking commonsense, and naïve about power.

Each side has a different standard for evaluating information. The working class trusts experience, and the middle class believes in research and systematic study. The result is a wide gulf in understandings of nature, sustainability, economics, and human conduct.

They seek change differently. The working class seeks to build power to confront external threats, while the middle class hopes to change people’s motivations, ideas, and morality.

The middle class tends to have greater faith in the ability of bureaucratic institutions to accomplish its goals. The working class, by contrast, is often the weakest party in conflicts and tends to pay the costs of many political and economic decisions. Its strategies reflect both this vulnerability and the interpretation of politics as a conflict about interests.

Fred Rose according to Aaron Schutz

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