What’s Your Class? A Personal Story

By Galina De Roeck

I cannot boast of having read Marx or Engels, but enough Marxian analysis has ‘trickled down’ to me by now about class relations. It goes like this: in Antiquity society was based on masters and slaves; in the Middle-Ages you had lords and peasants (sometimes attached to the land as serfs); then, starting in England, the Capitalist system developed thanks to industrialization. I have read enough Dickens to get the idea, from his novel Hard Times, about the problems of Capitalist development. As a result, the exploited people turned to rebellion: first against autocracy in the French Revolution of 1789, and then against the new European classes of privilege, the bourgeoisie. And in Russia, which was in a transitional stage between autocracy and bourgeoisie, there was the big Communist Revolution of 1917.

That’s the one I am aware of personally because my parents became exiles in Yugoslavia as a result: they had belonged to the landed gentry and had found themselves on the losing side of the Russian Revolution.   But even so, the concept of class was not part of our vocabulary: we were too busy surviving World War II in Belgrade, Dad made a living driving a truck, and so what if he was fluent in French and kissed a lady’s hand when introduced to her?

However, as we scrambled to find a country that would take us after our stint in German camps, his fluency in French landed us in Morocco in 1949, which was a French ‘protectorate’ at the time. Here the class issue was disguised by the division between the colonizer and the colonized. Although we were poor, being European automatically put us above the ‘locals.’ They were the ones descending into the mine pits and hacking through rocks to build roads through the Atlas Mountains.

But then again, here too the ‘underdogs’ rebelled and started ejecting the Europeans, and this took us all the way to Australia. Now it looked like the French language was useless, and we had to start all over again. I was 20 years old by then, but instead of going to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, I was now a dumb immigrant, and  learned to clean peoples’ homes, work in a fruit factory, and empty bed pans on a hospital night shift.

But I did get a lucky break: the French language came in handy after all because it facilitated my romance with a francophone Belgian boy. He was a corporate brat and took me to the United States in 1962 where his folks had been re-transferred. By then my English was tolerable, Rick landed a good job, and I became immersed in raising a family and working toward a career in teaching: class analysis was not on my agenda.  During these efforts, we even adjusted our religious traditions (my Russian Orthodoxy and Rick’s Catholicism) to the very American denomination of Unitarian Universalism.

There was a good fit between the congregation’s commitments to peace and justice and my childhood memories of running from bombs and starving in camps. This resulted, over the years, in my congregation sponsoring me to several people-to-people trips to forbidden (the Soviet Union) or forgotten (El Salvador) places. After one of those trips south of the border I gave a passionate report to my Unitarian congregation about the problematical conditions I had observed. After the service a friend approached me and said: “Galina, we appreciate your efforts; but don’t you get it? We are too middle-class to budge.”

This gave me pause: the word ‘middle-class’ now required some sort of definition. If my folks had belonged to the elites in old Russia because they were landowners, the class system in the United States was business oriented. But I was not holding majority stocks in oil companies or high-tech investments; I didn’t know how to speculate with currencies; I had no major investments in banks or real estate. Clearly, I did not belong to the American upper class.

On the other hand, I did not work on a factory assembly line, or in the service industry, which I had had to do back in my immigrant days in Australia.

Clearly, my life had become settled in some in-between social stratum presumably defined as the ‘middle-class.’ I had felt at home with my fellow congregants because they were nice people. They believed in helping the poor. They believed in the democratic process. They worried about climate change. They believed in human rights, and became very active in identity issues: racism, feminism, LGBTQ.

I too shared these values, but it looked increasingly as if I was ‘at odds’ with my liberal friends.  Maybe my underdog years had defined me more than I had realized and would not leave me alone to enjoy my hard-earned status in the ‘middle-class’? Maybe that’s why my trips had not been tourist junkets or fancy cruises? And unavoidably, I began to ask all sorts of questions about the way of the world.

Willy-nilly my trips south of the border had to face the effects of the Monroe Doctrine. What was The School of the Americas all about? How come the assassin of Monsignor Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador, had been trained in this ‘School,’ which was now housed in Fort Benning, Georgia?

And then, of course, there were the trips to the Soviet Union. The Russian language had been the mainstay of my family in exile, but my connection to a Russian identity was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I grew up with the horror stories of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinism. On the other hand, I now had a family of my own to worry about. What about the nuclear arms race against the ‘Evil Empire,’ which was heating up in the 80s?

On the very first trip to the Soviet Union with a group of Quakers in 1984, it became clear to me that peace initiatives there were, surprisingly, government sponsored. The argument was simple: the Soviets knew that they could not afford the arms race. Starting with World War I, then the Revolution, then the Civil War, and then the massive onslaught of World War II on their territory, they longed for the benefits of peaceful change.  They were beginning, at long last, to lift their heads and look around. What next?

Their current situation of hard-won social benefits might be defined as ‘middle-class.’ But just as in my individual case, lifestyle securities open different options. For me the question was: should I be counting my blessings and go on with charity work, or should I use my position of safety to struggle for more understanding? As to the Soviet people, their question was: did they still have to be stuck in the lonely struggle for world Socialism when the siren song from the West filled their airwaves, focusing on individual choices and a tempting array of consumer goods? Did the West not have the secret of success?

We in the West definitely thought we did, and prepared to offer guidance. Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s good will in promoting Glasnost and Perestroika culminated in Yeltsin’s economic ‘shock therapy.’ This gave rise to the spectacular fortunes of newly-baked oligarchs while those ‘left behind’ had but one choice – to survive in the chaotic free-for-all of a disintegrating society.  The ‘free enterprise’ of drugs, alcohol, and sex trafficking replaced earnings from reliable wages.

More trips to the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation gave me a chance to observe these changes. But when I shared my misgivings with my liberal friends – whether on the border contest between North and South, or the ideological contest between East and West – I kept losing my audience.

Fair enough, my hectoring was not reflected in the respectable newspapers. But I had gone too far to stop. I now wondered why exotic villains from exotic places - Africa or Asia or the Middle-East - were invading our headlines. And the ‘butcher’ Milosevic hailed from the place where I was born, and this just didn’t ring true to me. And I had reached my adulthood in Morocco, and knew in my bones that Arabs were just people like everywhere else – not born terrorists.

And now there was this beady-eyed little guy parading bare-chested on horseback in Russia. And now out of this place known as the ‘gas station with nukes’ he had the gall to invade Ukraine? My friends, not just ‘liberals’ but ‘left’ ones as well, came out waving the Ukrainian flag. Sorry folks, I am the one whose mother was born in Ukraine, and sorry again, but I do want to really understand what’s what.  

I began to feel surrounded by a high wall of deception.  And now the ‘class issue’ came up front and center. Somebody wanted me to believe all these made-up ‘facts.’ Who were they? One hears about meetings in Switzerland, some place called Davos.  Are they the latest, now globalist, upper class? Apparently, they want to keep me and my nice liberal friends busy with kindly identity politics, while they run the world as they see fit, encircling it with 800+ military bases

And what about ‘justice’? What about all those ‘others’ right here at home – well, we don’t run into them very much if we are middle class. Sure, we elected an African American president – and I had been so thrilled about it. But what did he do for the homeless or the millions stuck in ghettoes and jails? And what about Hillary Clinton: after we had dealt so ‘conclusively’ with the race issue, the woman issue was next. Unfortunately, she related better to the military than to the ‘deplorables.’ But then again, can we even talk of ‘working people’ when the only factories left standing in the country are bomb factories?

So, was my friend right that the middle class was too ‘middle-class’ to budge? But… but… but… Are we not the decent people from decent, hard-working families?  We believe we know ‘right’ from ‘wrong,’ but unless we become somewhat obsessive about it all, are we going to be deceived like the heroic Soviet ‘dissidents’ who didn’t know what hit them? But didn’t they have legitimate gripes about their system? Sure, they did. But don’t we have problems of our own? Don’t we get it that something is very wrong with our precious democracy, our deafening media, our presumed freedom of speech?

Or maybe we don’t really want to know as long as our stores are full of Chinese bargains and our cars can guzzle cheap gas? And don’t bananas come across the border as they always did? And we can afford it all because the dollar is king – even if it’s mostly on credit for now… AND MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, IT’S OUR BASES AROUND THE WORLD THAT ARE KEEPING IT GOING FOR US AFTER ALL?

All this may be too much to face, so why rock the boat? Is that why we make sure to put in some time at the food bank: after all, it does make us feel good. And then, why not indulge in some entertainment: the Reality Show on TV does get our blood boiling, and SO ready to rush out to vote for our ‘team’ at the ballot box. And doesn’t it feel good to hate the ‘other team’? 

And what about all those foreign monsters served up to us as our daily bread? The ‘Axis of Evil’ has been haunting us for some time, and we dealt with some of them, like in Iraq and Libya. But this guy in Syria, Bashar al Assad, has been a hard nut to crack. I understand that Nancy Pelosi has gone to talk to him in person in 2007, but nothing doing. He was stubborn enough to support the Palestinian cause – and even, believe it or not, hooked up with Putin for support.

Well, we have allies of our own: Europe and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – not to mention Israel. It took time, but Bashar al Assad is finally out of the picture – not dead as he obviously deserves, but gone - to Moscow, where else? We now have a dependable leader, a well-trained jihadist, to run the place.

And just like him, there is another leader we can count on: the heroic neo-Nazi resister to the Russian violation of Ukraine, Volodymir Zelensky. I mentioned earlier that my mother was born in Ukraine – but it so happens that my father was born in Russia. And it feels like the killing and dying of Ukrainians and Russians takes place in my own body. And as an American, I feel deeply betrayed in my very soul.

Who’s our next target on the ‘axis of evil’? Or is it the ‘axis of resistance’? What’s the difference?