Class Formation in Portland, Oregon:

Notes Toward An Inquiry

Kevin Van Meter

The present moment is the result of forty-years of class struggle -- in the United States
and across the planet -- with the working-class on the losing end. This has taken many
forms: stagnating wages, precarious employment coupled with unemployment, growing
unwaged work, imposed austerity on social services and education, increasing debt,
massive incarceration and societies of control, violence against women and gender-non-
conforming peoples, drug wars, culture wars, and other wars. Portland is no exception
and to any radical this information is not new. But as anarchists, radical
environmentalists, and revolutionaries we are confronted with questions: How do we
understand the present movement? How do we inquire into these conditions and
realities? How do we organize? Class Formation in Portland, Oregon: Notes Toward an
Inquiry wont attempt to answer these, rather we will begin to develop better questions.
Following a short talk on class formation in the region -- that is, the terrain on which
working-class and poor communities grow and ecologies of resistance sprout -- this
workshop will draw on the participants experiences, prior organizing, and ideas to discuss
a new -- revolutionary, intersectional, queer, and ecologically conscious -- class politics
for the Portland region.

Biography
Kevin Van Meter is a member of the Team Colors collective and recently relocated to
Minneapolis to complete his doctorate in Geography. With Team Colors, Van Meter co-
edited the collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary
Radical Politics in the United States (AK Press, 2010); and with Team Colors, co-
authored Winds from below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution
Possible (Eberhardt Press, 2010). Van Meters collaborative and single-authored work
has appeared in various radical publications.
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