Substack 3
Laura Wiederspahn
10/14/22
ORST 198M
Substack 3
One of the ideas that Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor mentions as a barrier to allyship surrounds the societal assumption that the working class is primarily White and male. This creates a barrier to allyship and solidarity across the community due to the fact that the majority of the American working class is female, Black, White, Latino/a, and immigrant. By not acknowledging the demographics of the working class, allyship is not possible. Allyship depends on the recognition of the issues that the working class confronts such as immigrant issues, gender issues, and antiracism. Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor describes solidarity as “crucial to worker’s ability to resist the constant degradation to their living standards”. Yamahtta Taylor describes how allyship and solidarity are key to radical change and improving life for working class citizens. She talks about how being unaware of working class issues will prevent the improvement and betterment of lives within this class. Overall, it is clear that Yamahtta Taylor is arguing that the working class should be cognizant of issues across different demographics in order to overcome political challenges such as the “systematic, bipartisan effort to dismantle the already anemic welfare state”.
When Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor discusses what the “material foundations for solidarity” are, I think she is referring to the understanding the working class should have for eachother. I think the idea Yamahtta Taylor is trying to express is that without understanding, connection, and acknowledgement of various working class issues, there can be no resolution to problems this class faces. Her writing implies that a material foundation for solidarity involves people of different backgrounds forming relationships and understanding mutual and individual issues such as immigrant, gender, and race issues. Transnational organizing can only be possible if there is recognition of the challenges all groups face within the working class. Organizing without knowledge of all challenges the working class face would make it difficult to articulate and address the best plan for allyship and solidarity.
The challenges Yamahtta Taylor presents come from a lack of solidarity in the working class, and this relates to issues mentioned by Guy Standing. Guy Standing talks about the working class precariat as an existence of being employed in career-less jobs, and a community that faces labor insecurity, insecure social income, and living without a secure identity or “sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle”. The issues that Guy Standing presents about the precariat have the potential to be mitigated with Yamahtta Taylor’s belief that a material foundation of solidarity and allyship can create working class radical change. These two organizers discuss overlapping themes in how the globalization and commercialization of capitalism can disrupt the solidarity within working class groups. To achieve solidarity, Yamahtta Taylor realizes that it involves “standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression”. I think this quote is important for movement building, as well as creating systems where people work together and not against each other in order to improve the standard of life for working class people.