OCCUPY WALL STREET

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by AtLastHome

And you are very misinformed and ignorant of the facts! I have taught social problems and movements for many years. Look up middle-class leisure time variables and social movements in the united states and most certainly the Second Wave of feminism. You are very much out of your league here.

Poor and working poor people are usually struggling to keep food on the table, work more than one job and don't have the all of the "free" time that the middle class has had.

Eh. It depends on the movement. I agree that a great deal of rights movements were given breath by middle class people, but it wasn't the case in every movement of the early modern/modern era. Martina does have a point about certain movements she's mentioned: the birth of the Gay Rights movement, if we trace it from Stone Wall, stemmed from some of the most marginalized people of contemporary society (trans sex workers, drag queens, working or impoverished gay men) becoming fed up with police raids and mistreatment. Of course, the academics that gave a louder voice to the movement (though did not initiate it), were certainly indispensable.

Anti-Apartheid was a mixed bag, and without black South Africans and white South Africans coming together there would not have been as great a success. Same can be said for the Civil Rights movement in the US.

There are quite a few rights movements and revolutions out there that had little to do with white middle class people. At the same time, many rights movements also required the involvement of white middle class academics in particular (the feminist movement as you mentioned. Without middle class white women in particular, there would be no feminist movement, either first or second wave), in order to gain widespread success.

The poor not having leisure time to think of acting on their own oppression is not as true in the 20th century as it was in the 19th and 18th centuries (and before, of course). Especially in groups that were frequently the targets of regular state violence and brutality.

I'm not sure it's a generalisation that can be applied to all movements, is what I'm trying to say.