Class struggle is a conflict between those who own and control the means of survival and the working class. Everything we do starts here.

Class struggle. At the heart of our politics is a basic antagonism. The ruling classes own and control the means by which people survive: land, housing, wealth, and the systems that decide who gets what. The working class is the multi-racial, pan-gender mass of people who make up the world’s pool of precarious and surplus labour. These interests cannot be reconciled, and no amount of policy tweaking will change that.

More than exploitation. Working-class people are not only exploited at work. We are actively targeted: by policing, welfare bureaucracies, immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system. We also face a cultural contempt that treats our knowledge, values and ways of living as inferior or deviant. Any analysis of class that only looks at wages and ownership misses how class is actually enforced in everyday life.

Class is lived. Class is not simply an income bracket or a box on a form. It is carried in our bodies, habits, accents and histories, and it is active in the present, shaping how we are treated and what we expect from the world. The working class is not uniform. It is divided and stratified, and people can move within it and sometimes out of it.

Class and other oppressions. Race, gender, disability, migration status and sexuality are not extras layered on top of class. They shape who is in the working class, how they experience it, and how they are treated by the state. A class politics that ignores this will only ever speak for part of the working class.

Harm is produced, not random. The harm people live with is produced by capitalism and economic precarity, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism and carceral logics that put punishment before transformation. We see the police and prison system as tools of domination and part of the class structure we organise against, not as neutral guarantors of safety.

The classes in between. Between the working class and the owning class sit managers, professionals, NGO workers, academics and small business owners. They hold relative security and access to resources without owning capital at scale. Their position is contradictory: shaped by closeness to power, yet still dependent on capitalism. Their loyalties are not fixed, and which side they choose matters.

Class in our movements. Social movements are not outside this analysis. Left spaces often reproduce the class dynamics they claim to oppose, through perfectionism, individualism, conflict avoidance, distrust of non-academic knowledge, and putting governance and process before people. Working-class people are expected to translate themselves into these norms to take part, and those who don’t are marginalised or pushed out. We want to name these dynamics wherever they show up, including in the room we are in.