#brain dump sorry lads I'm in my feelings about some stuff that's built up for years

[thedreadvampy]

I had a conversation on Friday night that's really got me mad about some stuff but I have tried to gently bring this kind of thing up directly and it never goes well but I am gonna vent it here for when I start feeling like I'm going insane/being a bitch.

this is anarchist infighting babes xoxoxo

Why are people who grew up rich Like That?

Now I to some degree include myself in the category of People Who Grew Up Rich. I had some shit in my youth but one struggle I never had was being a child in a financially precarious home. I never worried about going hungry. I never was at any risk of homelessness. Have I been homeless, hungry and otherwise precarious since then? Yes, but I have a baseline of knowing what security feels like, and I have a network of people who do have money to fall back on. And I have the confidence and education and class-specific social knowledge that comes with that so even if I'm poor I'm still middle class socially.

Both based on observation and statistics, I think it's pretty clear that economic precarity in childhood is one of the most potent single things that impact your lifelong wellbeing. Being precarious as an adult is traumatic and miserable and awful but it isn't the same as having precarity as your baseline state.

However there's a certain ahhhhhh subset of Anarchists From Upper Middle Class Backgrounds who might recognise that intellectually but who act. As if being from a wealthy background is irrelevant to their current life. And it's not.

Like ok this is where I get bitchy. But moving in anarchist and activity circles see how there's often people who seem to be counting up traumas and operations they face specifically as a reason why you should listen to them? and they often seem to count "childhood trauma" and "childhood trauma and precarity" as the same single point? like "oh you had a bad childhood I had a bad childhood we've both been there."

but no! no we haven't both been there! they're not the same experience! childhood poverty is its own enormous and far-reaching trauma, and it not only doesn't lessen the impact of traumas that can happen to anyone (eg CSA, DV, parental addiction, loss of a loved one), it lessens the space people have to deal with those traumas, both emotionally and practically.

And that's not to say If You're Middle Class You Have No Problems because obviously you do. like. I didn't deal with financial precarity in my childhood and adolescence but I did deal with a lot of instability, violence and abuse throughout. and that's significant and worth giving space to. but like many of my friends were dealing with similar stuff at a similar age AND with the far-reaching trauma of poverty (and other systemic traumas like racism and xenophobia)

and like it's not productive or helpful imo to start the Who Suffered Most competition interpersonally. trauma-as-currency is a plague.

buuuut. with the types of person I'm thinking about THEY'LL be the ones implicitly or explicitly bringing it up, either in a "you have to be nice to me bc I've experienced XYZ" way or, even more obnoxiously, an "I own and know the most about X bc I experienced XYZ". Like this sense of ownership and this idea that your experience of X is everyone's experience of X seems to me to most often come from usually white but always upper middle class activists, who are maybe poor now but were very financially stable growing up.

It gives you. A certain confidence. Growing up rich or well-off. And that can be really useful - definitely sometimes the people most able to just bulldoze through beaurocracy and Get It Done in confronting authority are these folks bc a gift and a curse of being raised in classes higher up the ladder is a lessened fear of authority, an assumption of your own rights and knowledge, and a certain self-assurance. even if you're also a neurotic mess personally, idk how to describe it but I'm positive you've seen it - an upper class upbringing brings with it a type of confidence that's almost entirely separate from who you are as a person, it's like an aura, it's baked into you like your accent. it's a specific texture of entitlement and self-assurance and it can be REALLY USEFUL but it can also be. really really really damaging.

When you grow up rich, however bad shit is at home or in your life, you are taught to understand certain things as your right - you expect to be worth listening to (at least by anyone not more powerful than you), you expect to know what you're talking about, and you expect your life to be valued by others (if not by everyone or by yourself, but by strangers).

You can shake it consciously, and it can be knocked around and come into conflict with other trauma, but it sticks with you when you're born into power - when you're raised rich (or white, or a man, or not overtly disabled). It follows you through poverty and trauma - it's baked in early on. and that's not in and of itself a bad thing, it's just a Thing - class affects your behaviour and self-image, like most systemic social constructs. And again it doesn't mean your struggles are less real - your trauma is still traumatic, your anxiety and self-esteem are still fucked up - but it does affect power dynamics.

People who are raised rich are more sure of ourselves, and almost always more immediately able to assert ourselves, our ideas and our wants than we would be if we had grown up poor. And we kind of need to be aware of that because otherwise what happens a lot of the time is a domination of space, and a dismissal of other people's knowledge and experiences because they're less assertive about them than us.

and I'm so fucking sick of it because what it super often looks like is a combination of people going "I have to get what I want because praxis because radical self-care because I'm saaaaaad. You can't tell me no or tell me off because I'm struggling" and going "We have to do what I want because I'm right. Because I have the most knowledge and experience of this thing and I know you've experienced it too but you're wrong about what you experienced."

like (and here's where I've got SURE gone bitchy) there's this really common Type of anarchist who's super involved and super activisty and also their trauma is always the biggest trauma. their ideas are always the only ideas. anything they did that hurt others was justified by their mental illness or stress or lack of knowledge and anything others did that hurt them was twice as bad because of the fact they're So Marginalised. they need people to go easy out of their comfort zone to help them because things are So Hard but they can't offer help that's inconvenient to them because things are So Hard. They're in charge of every protest and they decide who's allowed to protest because they're allowed to Protect Their Boundaries. When someone crosses their unspoken boundaries it is unforgivable but when they repeatedly willfully ignore other people's boundaries it's because they weren't clearly stated enough.

and the thing I'm saying is. the thing I have noticed about this specific type of Anarchist Guy. is in my experience they're literally always from a wealthy background. they may be utterly fucked for cash and homeless now, and that's a real experience they have every right to be scared and vulnerable about and speak to, but they have always had a childhood and adolescence where money wasn't a concern.

poverty is always a traumatic and marginalising experience. but you don't forget the assurance and entitlement you learn if you're raised rich. becoming poor isn't the same as being raised poor. the default assumptions of what's possible and your own importance are different.

and a) I think we need to be really mindful and self-aware about the types of confidence and self-assurance that we might have got from childhood and adolescent privilege, even if we don't have it now. and also b) I fucking hate when people are That Guy and I have like 6 That Guys in my social circle right now and it drives me insane bc it's utterly impossible to get through to them about it bc ppl end up in such denial of the ways being financially stable as a child produces privilege over those who don't.

like I am thinking of a friend (private school, Oxbridge, academia, family own their home, clearly bad but financially well off childhood) who explicitly and repeatedly believes themselves to have meaningfully the same background (or maybe Worse Trauma) as people who were financially supporting their families from 14, people who spent their childhoods seriously housing insecure and spreading food out across the month, and people who grew up in social housing with a disabled single parent. IT'S NOT THE SAME.

I know it's not the same, and while we're both posh I'm WAY less posh than this friend, but that matters a LOT less than that I'm way MORE posh than any of the other people I mentioned and that does affect things! I don't have the experience of precarity! My mum was a very frugal and money-conscious parent but we had the money, even if we weren't spending it, in a crisis it was there! We were never going to become homeless as a family. We were never going to starve. If things were unsurvivable as they were - ceiling falls in, black mould, boiler broken - we could fix it! Our experiences of childhood instability, mine and this friend's, are of relational emotional and physical lack of safety - people around us cause us harm or can't be trusted or need looking after. But the other friends have that plus the emotional, physical and existential lack of safety that is poverty. That's not the same! It's not at all the same background!

and sometimes it's like. the flipside to class reductionism is class erasure. They think we're from the same background as the people who grew up poor bc we're white, we're queer, we're neurodivergent, we're trauma survivors, we're afab, we're whatever else. but stuff like poverty, lack of educational opportunity, social exclusion on the basis of class - those things just don't register. They're unknown knowns - they're the stuff that we take for granted, we tend to assume everyone who's like us in terms of race, gender and ability was basically financially stable in childhood, finished school and went to university, is treated as we're treated by police and authorities, etc.

Writ large, what this looks like is politicians claiming that £82k a year is basically poverty and genuinely making policy on the belief that when people say they're poor it means "can't afford to do everything I want" not "can't afford to live"

But writ small, what this means is that often the loudest voices leading communities of people who've Been Through It - the people who get their way - are people who think that their experience as raised-rich is exactly the same as the experience of the raised-poor. At worst we get Common People cosplayers who you never find out actually have a trust fund and an allowance but even before that. like.

Anarchist spaces, both organising and social spaces, are full of people who are legit struggling, who say at the good words and think all the good things, but who are fundamentally so entirely blind to the power that a middle class upbringing (particularly but not exclusively a white middle class upbringing) has given them that they just plough right through other people bc they assume they're on an even keel. The assumptions we make about people's confidence and assertion based on what's normal for us often takes a really familiar shape where one person's needs consistently take precedence over anyone else's.

and like. All of us deserve to have our needs met. Your needs aren't less important because you're middle class, or white, or straight, or cis, or male, or whatever else. The problem is when it's always one person's needs and never the people around them.

when somebody who's used to having a safety net falls down, people who are used to having to buckle down and do the impossible bc nobody else will pick them up, will pick them up. when somebody else falls down, people who are used to having a safety net see that picking them up is impossible and don't because they haven't got the experience of Having To Do The Impossible. when somebody who's comfortable asserting their needs assumes that all needs are vocally asserted, people who are used to subsuming their needs, not talking about them and dealing with them solo do not get their needs met. and when this carries on consistently across multiple relationships and multiple years, we got a problem.

And specifically part of the problem I think in anarchist circles is that born-wealthy anarchists are a lot more likely to be heavily socialising with born-poor friends, whereas if you buy into the class system you are likely to mostly hang out with other people who ARE actually from a similar economic background and so ARE likely to assert themselves in the same way you assert yourself.

This is why it's so important to not leave abolitionist relationships with power structures at rejecting or refusing them. As much as we should abolish class, racial, gender etc hierarchies, we have to engage with the world as it is. We can't just divest ourselves of hierarchies by wanting to - we have to actually engage and keep engaging with the ways that hierarchy continues to exist inside us. However poor I am, I still was raised middle class. However antiracist I am, I am still white. However aware of gender I am, I am still cis. That's going to affect the relationships I have with people who have different experiences.

but too many middle class anarchists imk talk a big game about class solidarity but ultimately consider themselves working class by choice. but you can't choose how you're raised. and ignoring the privilege of financial stability in childhood leaves you with enormous blind spots on how you treat others and how you recreate those power dynamics.

doesn't mean middle class people can't or shouldn't be anarchists. lots of us are. but for the love of fuck we need to make sure we're aware of the huge and lasting impact that different childhood economic experiences have on who we are as adults. even if we're down and out now, socially we remain middle class. and that gives us power beyond how we're seen - it's a power in how we act and how comfortable we are asserting ourselves over others.

and I'm so fucking sick of seeing it tbh. and I'm so sick of how shitty it makes a lot of friend group dynamics where a few culturally middle class people dominate every decision and take precedence in every discussion of need.