How can a small group make a difference with genocide-level violence happening half a world away? When some of us faced that question in 1971, we learned something about leveraging our power. We also learned something new about how people from different classes can form an alliance.

President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger denied that the U.S. was sending weapons to Yaya Khan, the Pakistani dictator who was waging massive war against the Bengalis who wanted to secede. Our Philadelphia Movement for a New Society (MNS) collective soon learned the truth: a Pakistani freighter was at that moment on its way to Baltimore to pick up a shipload of weapons.

MNS members went to Baltimore to see what could be done. They first visited the ships’ pilots association, asking that the pilots refuse to bring the Al Ahmadiinto the Baltimore harbor. The answer was no.

The next step was to go to the bars where longshoremen (dockers) congregated, and sound them out. They had a power we didn’t. Maybe they would refuse to load the weapons.

East Coast longshoremen have traditionally had somewhat right-wing politics. The workers we talked with thought U.S. policy was wrong on this one. Still, the workers’ families counted on the daily wages, and the men said they would need to load the ship when it arrived.

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The hardest job I ever had in a half century of social change work was coordinating a multi-class coalition. It didn’t simplify things that it was also cross-racial. Nor that it was composed of people who had substantially different politics.

I led the Pennsylvania Jobs With Peace Campaign for seven years, in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s White House was trying its best to undo the progress made in the 1960s and ’70s. Our chapter was part of a national campaign pressing to take money out of the military and use it for human needs. Our local chapter also pushed for decentralized people’s planning for economic conversion of military industries.

An advantage I had was that our campaign included a collective of the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a radical network that was already figuring out how social class influences the way activists do and don’t work together for change.

Sociologist Betsy Leondar-Wright has listed major social movements in the U.S. and identified their class composition. (See her website, ClassMatters.org, and her book Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists.) She asked how successful they were in achieving their goals. Betsy found that the movements most likely to succeed were those that crossed class lines. The ones who achieved less were single-class, like blue collar trade union campaigns, or middle ...