Late night on the porch of a small cob bedroom. Four figures backlit against the waning gibbous moon, talking in small voices.

Jax: Look at it this way for a minute. Our society, which is organized by capitalism, is divided in a really profound way between owners and workers. The decisions about what gets done, and how, are deeply structured to benefit the owners at the expense of everyone and everything else.

Velvet: Benefit? Really? This is a challenging framing for me. My birth family -- yes, they're more affluent than most, they live lives distant from realistic fears of hunger or scarcity. But that goes hand in hand with just being distant, disconnected, from their bodies and their souls. I ran away from all that, and they despise me for it, "defiling" the family name as a "whore" -- and even worse, a "poor" one, living hand to mouth. They've cut me out of their lives, their hearts -- certainly their bank accounts! So I grew up a certain way, with certain relationships, and saw the hollowness of it -- and now I've left that all behind. My family's "privilege" is a sham. Yes, the owners may think they're doing everything in their rational self-interest, but they're just exploiting themselves as much as all the rest of us. The "benefits" of their domination are no benefits at all.

Jax: I hear you, Velvet. And I agree that there are ways that class oppression distorts both rulers and workers. But looking at things "materially", in the sense of how the patterns structure life for the workers, it hardly matters whether the owners are misguided in what their true spiritual self-interest is, or not. The mode of production and exchange nonetheless strongly constrain the human and collective potential for autonomy, for wellbeing, for creativity among the vast toiling masses around the globe.

j(A)de: Um, that's pretty abstract. I think what you mean by "mode of production" here is the way that a bunch of cocky frat boys and nerdy workaholics run around telling everyone else what to do. Literally.

Mary: deep breath. OK, I can see that way of talking about it. And it's important for me to take note of my class privilege and minimize oppressive behaviors. But look, there's lots of ways we're oppressed, and this division between owners and workers -- which is way oversimplified -- just doesn't strike me as what I'm called to organize around. I mean, gender oppression is inscribed in our very bodies, the traumas are recycled at the very core of our psychosocial being, and I'm reminded of that every day -- while the putative "privilege" of potentially making lots of money someday is very abstract.

j(A)de: Well, isn't that fucking convenient? Look, you got some grant or something that lets you sit around thinking and "researching" all day, while some of us are wiping vomit and shit from the shaking bodies of crank-addicted teenagers -- and showing up to meetings bloody and exhausted just to watch you and your kin telling us all what to do because you had time to spend the afternoon writing the planning documents, and you show off your vocab and pizzazz to bulldoze through any obstacles in your way. Oh, but you're oppressed too as a woman so you can just choose to ignore the way you're just reproducing the fucking boss mode inside our supposedly revolutionary organizing itself? Damn!

A pause. The wind rustles the leaves.

Mary: Oh, oh, wow -- I really don't think you get it. It's work, j(A)de, hard as hell, to cramp my mind and soul into the boxes of the system in order to try and make ends meet while devoting as much energy as I can to organizing. I mean, do you know what I've given up to do this? My roommate from college, I just saw on LinkedIn, she landed a job with a top management consulting firm. Six figures. Big six figures. Banks of secretaries, brilliant colleagues, challenging intellectual work at the very heart of organizational change in the most ambitious human organizations on the planet. I was recruited for that life, and I chose instead to give myself as fully as I know how to movements for profound change. I do my own laundry, my own shopping, my own fucking toilet cleaning, I work twice as hard for half the money of even my friends in nonprofits, I devote my life to studying the ways this patriarchal empire hurts the most vulnerable and trying to figure out how to help -- and this is how that's received? Look, if I have some health crisis or something I have no safety net to make it all OK. I'll be fucked. (choking up) That's scary, and my mom and dad keep asking me how I'm going to provide for their retirement, and I'm doing the best I can, the best I can to stay in my integrity despite it all!

Velvet: Oh, honey.

Jax: I hear your pain, Mary. pause But surely you can recognize that many working class people aren't going to effusively thank you just for stepping away from some of the fruits of privilege.

j(A)de: It certainly makes it harder to trust that you'll not just back out at some point when the going gets tough and fall back on some cush management job.

An owl hoots, and there's silence.

Then...

Mary: The owl of Minerva ... Is she in the service of Empire, too?

j(A)de: What the fuck are you talking about? I love you too, Mary, but sometimes you're just incomprehensible.

Jax: I think you're asking whether simply connecting with intelligence and education make you part of the ruling class, right Mary?

Mary: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I understand that because I got a scholarship to an elite liberal arts college, and have an advanced degree, I now have a higher earning potential -- although the emphasis is more and more on "potential" rather than "actual". But does that therefore mean that I'm automatically an enemy for those that identify as working class, even though my Mom and Dad still work as underpaid public school teachers in a podunk little town?

Velvet: No, Mary dear, you're nobody's enemy. We love you for your brilliant analytical mind and your fiery passion for organizing, for figuring out how everyone can be part of what we're doing. We need you, and your air and fire.

j(A)de: Hmmmm, "nobody's enemy": maybe that's part of the problem! I know you want to be radical and all, but when the shit hits the fan and the bosses are hanging by their entrails, whose side will you be on? Will you just run away, because some of those people are your old college chums? And you, Velvet? What happens when the "working class" arrives at your family's estate and demands to take it over? What side will you be on, when the pitchforks run with blood?

Jax: (a bit shocked) Geez, isn't that a bit 19th century, j(A)de?

j(A)de: FUCK you all! Don't you get it? (dashes into the dark; after a moment, inexplicable sounds in the middle distance)

A taut, delicate pause.

Mary: Is that really where we're headed?

Jax: It's happened before.

Velvet: And what changed?

Jax: Indeed. We have to do something different. After all, most all kinds of movements of the past -- even workers' movements, maybe especially communist workers' movements of my own tradition -- were directed by intellectuals, many of them once or potential elites. What does it look like to truly undo the patterns of management and control and motivation that capitalism uses?

Mary: (a note of hopelessness) Does this mean there's no use for me, for my kind of strategic thinking, of figuring out who can do what and when?

Velvet: Maybe it means we need to be very careful about how we use you. And me. Maybe it means I need to be very careful about how I use the money that I get from my rich clients, not just assuming that I can dish it out willy-nilly to what I think is important because in a way that's putting me in a position of "borrowed" class privilege.

Mary: But to the degree we have class privilege, aren't we supposed to use it in service of the movement?

Jax: You mean, because you have class privilege as someone who has the skills and relationships to be a manager in capitalism, you should therefore be a manager of the movement?

Mary: Well, you put it that way... deep breath I think I'm getting you, Jax. However we have class privileges, it gets inside our bodies, our attitudes and assumptions, our feelings, our very perceptions of things. So if we're the ones making decisions about how to use the "resources" that class privilege give us, it's likely to be distorted -- even aside from the "fairness" question. And we're likely to continue to do things that reproduce patterns of capitalist power, because those are the things that are most familiar or comfortable for us.

Jax: Yeah.

Velvet: Unless...

Mary: Unless what?

Velvet: Unless we're able to truly step out of the social and psychic patterns that make us part of (or dependant on) the owners and managers. Step out, and become in our very essence aligned with the workers, the oppressed, part of that pattern. And other people really can sense that, and we can draw on the wisdom and perspective of all of us, like j(A)de bless 'em, to use the air and fire, even the money, in ways that are wiser and more effective.

Jax: It means giving up a lot of control over what it might be easy to consider our "own" choices.

Mary: I'm ready to do that.

A gentle wind. Clouds cross the moon. From nowhere, suddenly, a hurtling shape careens into the trio, skittling bodies into the muddy path -- grunts, yelps, wrestling limbs, heavy breaths, and finally a chuckle, a sob, a sigh. Stillness.