What we’ve done so far

A Revolting Class (ARC) didn’t begin as a formal organisation with a strategy document and a roadmap. It emerged out of shared frustration, long experience and necessity.

Many of us have spent years organising in social justice movements that speak the language of equality while operating through deeply unequal internal economies. We’ve watched working-class organisers carry movements on their backs, through unpaid labour, emotional work, credibility and risk, only to burn out, be sidelined, or quietly disappear when their lives became too unstable to sustain the pace.

ARC came together to name that pattern for what it is: structural, not personal. And to begin experimenting with ways of doing things differently.

Building a working-class-led core

ARC was formed at the end of 2024 by a small group of organisers, most of whom are working-class and have lived experience of poverty, housing insecurity, addiction, criminalisation, care systems and informal economies. Collectively, we bring decades of organising experience across housing struggles, prison abolition, mutual aid, renters’ unions, wealth redistribution and political education.

From the beginning, ARC has been intentional about leadership. This is not a space where working-class experience is consulted, extracted or showcased while decisions are made elsewhere. Working-class organisers are central to analysis, strategy and direction, not symbolically, but materially.

That core is no longer just the people who founded ARC. We have grown it deliberately. In 2026, the first cohort of our Organisers Development Programme joined us. Every member has a mentor. Every member is supported to develop their skills, deepen their analysis and grow their confidence, at a pace they can sustain. Our members organise around housing, homelessness, migrant justice, wealth redistribution and more, and they bring that experience back into ARC, shaping what we do and how we do it.

The results are already visible. Members who joined this year are delivering our workshops, leading facilitation and shaping our education. The work no longer rests on the few people who started it, and that is exactly the point. We are building a working-class core that is collective, growing and built to last.

Supporting working-class-led redistribution in practice

One of ARC’s first areas of work has been supporting local, working-class-led wealth redistribution groups. These groups bring together people with very different levels of access to money and security, and organise the collective redistribution of resources to working-class individuals and organising efforts.

ARC has helped connect groups that were already doing this work in isolation, enabling shared learning, political clarity and mutual support. Rather than centralising money or control, ARC has focused on strengthening the conditions that allow redistribution to be collective, accountable and led by working-class members.

Through this work, resources have been redistributed directly to people dealing with housing insecurity, criminalisation, health crises and organising burnout. Not as charity, but as part of an explicit political strategy to challenge how movement economies function.

Political education rooted in lived experience

Alongside redistribution, ARC has developed and delivered political education spaces grounded in working-class experience rather than abstract theory.

These have included classes, reading groups and facilitated discussions focused on class, wealth, power and movement economies. Rather than offering prescriptive models or polished frameworks, ARC’s education spaces are designed to sharpen analysis, surface disagreement, and connect ideas directly to organising practice.

A consistent theme across this work has been challenging the idea that awareness alone creates change. ARC’s education asks difficult questions: Who controls resources? Who absorbs risk? Who can afford to lead? What happens when we don’t address those questions structurally?

Convening and listening

ARC has also prioritised listening and collective reflection. In 2024, we hosted a multi-day gathering that brought together working-class organisers and redistribution practitioners from across the UK. The aim wasn’t consensus or alignment, but shared analysis: understanding what people are experiencing, where existing models fall short, and what support actually looks like in practice.

Following this, ARC carried out interviews and group discussions with working-class organisers to document patterns that are often treated as individual problems, such as burnout, exclusion and instability, and to situate them within broader economic and organisational structures.

This process has shaped ARC’s direction. Rather than rushing to scale or formalise, we’ve focused on learning from what already exists and being honest about what isn’t working.

Establishing clear boundaries

From early on, ARC has been explicit about political boundaries. We do not work with police, prisons, the military, political parties or fascist organisations. We engage cautiously with institutions and philanthropy, prioritising material benefit to working-class organising over reputation, growth or visibility.

These boundaries are not about purity. They are about survivability: protecting the integrity of the work and the people most affected by its outcomes.

Growing the work: 2025 to 2026

2025 was ARC’s first full year of operation. Since then, we have moved from testing ideas to putting them into practice: running political education on our own terms, and building the structures to make the work last.

Online education

Our online programme takes our education to people across the country. Class and Wealth 101 is a short, accessible introduction and is often people’s first contact with ARC.

We also run longer series for different class positions, because people in different positions carry different needs and responsibilities. Our eight-session middle-class and petit-bourgeois series confront class, ideology and class treachery head on, asking people with relative security to break from their class interests and commit their resources, loyalty and labour to working-class struggle.

Our ten-session series for working-class organisers has now run twice, sharpened each time. In September 2026, we launch a two-year theory and practice series, taking this work to working-class organisers well beyond our own membership.

Learning together

We practise what we teach. Through our internal education programme, Class, Knowledge, and Community, members study together across twenty-six sessions, covering class theory, class alongside race, gender and empire, working-class knowledge, and community struggle. We build our analysis collectively. It does not belong to a few voices at the top.

Exploring Class workshops

At the end of 2025, we began running our two-day Exploring Class workshops. Built on ARC’s class framework and rooted in participants’ own experience, they give groups the space to confront class position, class dynamics and class consciousness directly.

We have since delivered workshops in Glasgow with ARIKA, Sheffield and Leeds. In August 2026, at the invitation of Leeds Redistro, we ran a workshop for around 26 people with a team of seven, most of them new members, one leading facilitation for the first time.

Building the organisation

Working-class leadership does not survive on goodwill. It needs money, time and structure, and we have built all three deliberately.

We pay stipends to our members. This is not a perk. It is a political decision. Too many working-class organisers have been pushed out of movements because they could not afford to stay, while those with savings, family support or salaried jobs carried on. Stipends mean taking part in ARC does not depend on already having security.

We have built a clear membership structure and a members’ handbook that sets out our politics and how we work. We have grown carefully, bringing in new members only when we have the capacity to support them properly, and we are now opening our doors to a new intake.

None of this is administrative detail. It is how we turn our politics into an organisation that working-class people can actually stay in.

What this phase has taught us

So far, ARC has not “solved” class inequality in movements. What we have done is create space for honesty, experimentation and material intervention where those things are often missing.

We’ve learned that working-class leadership cannot be sustained without resources. That redistribution creates friction, and that this friction is often a sign that something real is shifting. That education matters most when it changes how decisions are made, not just how people talk.

Most importantly, we’ve learned that doing this work slowly, collectively and with care is not a weakness. It’s a political choice.

What we’ve done so far has laid the groundwork. The next phase is about building on it with confidence: launching our two-year series, welcoming new members, and growing the working-class organising power that lasting change depends on.