Intergenerational and cross-class organizing
I’ve been reflecting lately that "intergenerational organizing is a euphemism for cross-class organizing.” This sounds like a riddle, but I just mean that older people and younger people are of different socioeconomic classes. The average person from the "baby boomer" generation has over ten times the wealth of the average millennial, for example. Baby boomers hold 53% of the nation’s wealth, while millennials hold less than 5%. Framing our work as primarily "intergenerational,” as we often do, masks the power dynamics between the two groups.
When we say that elders' contributions to our work often include resources, experience in building and running organizations, and time to volunteer, we are not simply describing the qualities of elders: we are also describing the qualities of wealth. And it's the wrong question to ask what comparable qualities young people bring, because young people are relatively poor, and therefore marginalized, compared to elders. We would not ask other marginalized groups what gifts they bring before we commit to work with them. We work with them because they are marginalized, and therefore they alone have the power to liberate themselves — a basic insight of liberation theology.
So when we try to work with young people, we should keep two things in mind:
They are probably relatively poor, and
They are regular people with a range of interests, abilities, faults and shortcomings. This means that no single young person can speak for the rest. If we want to work well with young people, our best bet will be to find out what a specific person or small group is interested in and devote some of our time, experience and resources to it.
In other words, elders need to relate to young people as leaders they are prepared to follow. But the paradoxical flip-side of this point is that we also need to not pressure young people to lead. At the 2019 regional conference in California, Ched Myers said we should "give young people the keys to the house but keep paying the mortgage." This can be an effective, literal model: older people with wealth can provide property for young people to develop an intentional community. But empowering young people to lead without pressuring them to lead is tough, as our elders know.
For one thing, the class differences between young and old people lead to different, often conflicting politics. Anti-racism is a good example. For poor (young) people, anti-racist politics often lead to calling for the abolition of police and prisons because we see their main function as protecting the property and lifestyle of wealthy people at the expense of poor people, especially poor people of color. In other words, police and prisons represent the intersection of race and class. In my experience, relatively few elders are able or willing to follow this logic, much less support the efforts of young people who want to organize for police and prison abolition. This has led to tensions between elders and young people in our network.
I encourage future conversation on this subject among both elders and young people in our communities. There's a lot more to say about the similarities and differences between generations and classes, and the specific roles people are well-suited to play based on where they fall within these identities. We’re often hesitant to discuss class, but doing so will help us be more honest about our organization and movement.
