{"id":12986,"date":"2024-05-26T00:15:45","date_gmt":"2024-05-26T04:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=12986"},"modified":"2024-05-26T00:15:45","modified_gmt":"2024-05-26T04:15:45","slug":"the-transformative-power-of-solidarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/05\/the-transformative-power-of-solidarity\/","title":{"rendered":"The transformative power of solidarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

N<\/span>eoliberalism has done a number on us. Collective working class cultural values built up over the 19th and 20th centuries eroded badly in our era\u2014and in some ways that\u2019s accelerating. More than that, truly ancient patterns of cooperativeness aren\u2019t immune to the competitive-individualist solvent. Free-market theorist Friedrich Hayek<\/a> considered human solidarity itself a progress-limiting holdover, \u201can instinct which we have inherited from tribal society.” Today tech capitalists take it as their mission to replace all such holdovers with the digital cash nexus, and all too often they succeed.<\/p>\n

Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor\u2019s timely book<\/a> rescues the left\u2019s fundamental concept, solidarity. As they note, \u201cthere is a scarcity of historical and theoretical writing on the subject.” It is necessary as a cure for our metastasizing social pathologies. It is the cultural ethos of a socialist future. And it\u2019s the key notion framing today\u2019s needed strategies of class struggle by and for workers.<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor met as activists in Occupy Wall Street. Hunt, rebellious heir to the ultra-conservative donor J. L. Hunt\u2019s family fortune, organized in support of Occupy and went on to found Way to Win<\/a>, an electoral donor network that organized the youth vote to help flip Georgia and Arizona in 2022. Taylor founded the Debt Collective<\/a>, a debtors\u2019 union that has organized a debt strike and helped press student debt forgiveness onto the national agenda.<\/p>\n

Solidarity is an informative book that begins a much-needed discussion for everyone on the Left. The book traces the word solidarity to ancient Rome (actually Byzantium). There it referred to farmers who obtained loans collectively, holding them \u201cin solidarity\u201d so that if one were unable to pay their share, the others would cover it. Debt proves a surprisingly central idea in the history of solidarity.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century Emile Durkheim<\/a>, founder of sociology, theorized that solidarity flows naturally from the division of labor of modern society. He claimed this division creates materially based feelings of interdependence. Furthermore, despite diverse occupations, \u201cdifference\u2026can be a cause of mutual attraction” (p. 12). This is important to the authors, because \u201cthough Durkheim did not share our focus on the transformative power of solidarity, we believe this insight is key: solidarity does not depend on sameness” (p. 12). Later Durkheim emphasized that the organic growth of the necessary social glue of solidarity he described needs the addition of rituals and beliefs intentionally cultivating it.<\/p>\n

At the same time militant workers\u2019 movements produced a notion of solidarity as a means to build power for the purpose of class struggle. The authors credit this working class solidarity with a \u201ctransformative\u201d power capable of winning social justice. In this sense they side with Marx over Durkheim. But they also dispute Engels\u2019 claim<\/a> that \u201c\u2018the simple feeling of class solidarity, based on an insight into the sameness of class position, is sufficient\u2026to create\u2026one large and cohesive proletariat party” (p. xvi). Thus they aim to take from both Marx and Engels\u2019 class struggle perspective on solidarity, and Durkheim\u2019s emphasis on the need to cultivate it.<\/p>\n

The authors feature the ideas of late 19th century reformists Leon Bourgeois, Leon Duguit, and Pierre Leroux, who developed a philosophy and political practice called solidarism. For them, solidarity was based on mutual indebtedness: present generations stand in debt to their ancestors, members of inevitably interdependent societies stand in debt to each other. The solidarists believed private ownership of the productive forces could be reconciled with social cohesion and justice through \u201censuring social security and public health; providing for full employment for the able-bodied, and for public assistance for those in need;…and progressive taxation”\u00a0 (p. 15). They enacted several programs in France before World War I. After the War Bourgeois went on to bring his theories to the League of Nations and International Labor Organization.<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor suggest a necessary complementarity between the transformative power-building solidarity of the workers\u2019 movement, and the solidarists\u2019 philosophy of interdependence, mutual debt, and reparative justice. But they miss that workers\u2019 struggle has its own philosophical implications. Workers are a collective class, only able to take over the means of production together (you can\u2019t divide up a factory, hospital, etc.). And our class can only maintain our rule cooperatively\u2014economic competition between worker-owned businesses would tend toward the return of classes within and between them. These and other conditions of workers\u2019 solidarity make it about more than just building power\u2014it necessarily involves building a culture of cooperation. Hunt and Taylor are correct, however, to emphasize that such a culture requires conscious cultivation. So some of Durkheim and the solidarists\u2019 ideas, removed from their class-collaborationist standpoint, may indeed be useful to revolutionary workers (along with the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Amilcar Cabral, among others).<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor envision a society of cross-class harmony, and they stress the value \u201cclass traitors\u201d (p. 178)\u2014like Hunt\u2014can bring to movements of workers and the poor. But they sharply differentiate solidarity from charity. \u201cBenevolence, altruism, deference, allyship, and charity\u2026place the onus on individual action\u2026and harness pity or guilt.” (p. xx) Charity enables corporate whitewashing. Controlled by benefactors who place conditions on their aid, charity \u201cis a form of domination” (p. 136). The authors expose, with the benefit of Hunt\u2019s inside view, the way charitable foundations exist more as tax shelters than effective philanthropic vehicles. And their takedowns of the Gates Foundation and Mahatma Gandhi are essential reading.<\/p>\n

Substantial space is also devoted to how to allegedly do \u201cphilanthropy-in-solidarity.” (p. 167) \u201cAt this point in history, philanthropic support can play a role in this urgent project (of changing systems)” (p. 166). and furthermore \u201corganizers cannot do their work without financial support” (p. 167). They admit that even in the best case the philanthropic\/charitable relationship is \u201cfundamentally broken and arbitrary” (p. 166). So they offer strained historical models, like revolutionary abolitionist John Brown\u2019s \u201cSecret Six\u201d wealthy donors. But this wasn\u2019t philanthropy, merely fundraising. The Secret Six placed no conditions on their donations and had no means of monitoring which guns Brown bought with their contributions. They highlight Farhad Ebrahimi\u2019s self-liquidating Chorus Foundation as a positive philanthropy. And they advocate long-term funding, with conditions defined by recipients rather than donors: \u201cthe young person of wealth can put themselves at the service of those who are closer to the ground” (p. 174).\u00a0 Good ideas perhaps, and Hunt and Taylor are careful to keep skepticism in the foreground here.<\/p>\n

Is solidarity the self-change that results from collective struggle or the product of pre-existing social conditions? Hunt and Taylor emphasize the latter. Redistributive social programs like the British National Health Service create \u201cpolicy feedback loops\u201d (p. 218)\u2014beneficiaries have better lives, creating a more solidaristic consciousness, and political constituencies for further redistribution.<\/p>\n

The book mentions an array of progressive programs, many of which can give left activists ideas for demands and campaigns today\u2014public banks, cooperative utilities and dispensaries, social housing, worker and union ownership schemes, maximum wage laws, and climate jobs programs. They encourage unions, cooperatives, and mutual aid projects but argue (with justice) that \u201cany real solution would require the support of the whole society\u2026the state would need to play a central role” (p. 21).<\/p>\n

Their program for the \u201csolidarity state,” as they call it, goes a step further, invoking the Johnson Administration\u2019s War on Poverty slogan \u201c\u2018maximum feasible participation of the poor\u2019.”\u00a0 (p. 196) The Black Panther Party and Welfare Rights Organization, they remind us, have their roots in Federal Community Action Programs from the mid-1960s. These autonomous self-managed government programs hired youth organizers, many of whom were leftists. The Office of Economic Opportunity provided Federal money for tenant organizing, funding rent strikes and demonstrations to bail out arrested activists in New York. In New Mexico indigenous youth took these jobs and organized on a radical basis. As Hunt and Taylor see it, \u201ca solidarity state must create\u2026formations that enable regular people to come together and challenge authority, whether held by corporations or the government.” They call this \u201ccountervailing power” (p. 201).<\/p>\n

This is great, largely forgotten history, for which we can be grateful to the authors. But the outcome of 20th century welfarism, from the relatively expansive Swedish social democracy to the more limited New Deal of the US, suggests limits to this framework. As the authors note, only a \u201cmilitant labor movement\u2026inflicting real costs on bosses and investors through thousands of work stoppages\u201d (p. 66) made the New Deal possible. As they also note, these programs have been largely or wholly rolled back everywhere in the neoliberal era. One can agree that welfarism created a more solidaristic consciousness in its generational beneficiaries. But this never outweighed the overall individualistic social conditioning of societies with private ownership of the means of production. For solidarity to win out in mass psychology, workers and the oppressed must collectively rule our own lives from the top to the bottom of society, with workers\u2019 control of production, housing cooperatives, self-policing communities, democratic economic planning, and more.<\/p>\n

In the long run the ruling class counteroffensive succeeded beyond the imaginings of those who lived through the welfarist golden years. What appeared to be permanent advances toward solidarity ended up not so. As for the \u201ccountervailing power\u201d of the War on Poverty left wing of the welfare state, it was small and quickly dismantled, having provoked a furious response. This is not to argue that any of these reforms were futile. Just that if they remain a destination rather than a stepping stone to overthrowing a system based on private profit and replacing it with one truly built on solidarity and numan need, such advances cannot last.<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor argue that solidarity requires a kind of internationalism. They devote their chapter \u201cSolidarity Beyond Borders\u201d to recovering more history leftists should know. At the same time, they ignore some important historical examples of workers\u2019 self-activity.<\/p>\n

They mention that the Second International promised to mobilize workers against conflict \u201conly to be dissolved by the nationalist fervor of the First World War” (p.\u00a0 231). This left Luxemburg (somewhat misleadingly counterposed to Lenin) defeated in her heroic anti-war stand: \u201cin the midst of World War I, dreams of an international working-class movement seemed decidedly moribund” (p. 232). As a result internationalism had its day only after the war, with the League of Nations and International Labor Organization (influenced by the French solidarists) beginning an ostensibly progressive project ultimately sullied by a failure to break with global \u201cracial hierarchy” (p. 233).<\/p>\n

But Luxemburg (and Lenin) did not fail at all. Their revolutionary socialist internationalism<\/a> grew to influence millions of anti-war strikers as the War dragged on. That War was abruptly ended when mass German naval mutinies and insurrectionary strikes overthrew the Kaiser, created workers\u2019 councils positioned to become the basis of a potential workers\u2019 state, and released Luxemburg herself from prison. In this context, Luxemburg and Lenin\u2019s revolutionary anti-colonial politics led to the formation of Communist Parties allied with them across much of what would later be called the Third World.<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor pick up their story after World War II, when decolonization put Third World solidarity for real self-determination on the table. Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere and Argentine economist Raul Prebisch led a block of 77 \u201cnon-aligned\u201d UN countries pressing for a New International Economic Order based on genuine sovereignty and welfarism. Burkina Faso\u2019s Thomas Sankara \u201cproposed that the indebted countries band together…and refuse to repay\u201d (p. 252). The authors echo Third World Marxists such Walter Rodney in criticizing the limits of left nationalists like Julius Nyerere, who argued in effect \u201csolidarity\u2026is a bond between states; the suffering of people living in those states could be ignored\u201d (p. 246). But, \u201cthese internal contradictions were not the cause\u201d (p. 246) of the neoliberal rollback that followed. Instead, \u201cviolence did the trick\u201d (p. 247) through right wing coups in the Third World, backed by Washington.<\/p>\n

This century Chile and Greece had governments and movements striving, as the authors see it, toward a solidarity state. Chile\u2019s uprising against its neoliberal constitution led to the election of Gabriel Boric and a referendum on a new constitution. The referendum failed because \u201cthe far right used an effective playbook of lies and misinformation\u2026aided by multinational social media companies.” \u201cNo country is an island; we are all subject to these strategies and the only way forward is\u2026to out-organize our adversaries\u201d (p. 265).<\/p>\n

In Greece, Hunt and Taylor point to mutual aid \u201cpracticed as a matter of survival\u2026and modeling the kind of state they hoped SYRIZA would create\u201d (p. 266) as part of the organizing wave that brought SYRIZA to power in 2015, but don\u2019t discuss the multiple general strikes that took place there. They explain SYRIZA\u2019s immediate capitulation to the very EU demands for austerity they existed to oppose, saying \u201cno country\u2014especially a small one like Greece\u2014can resist the forces of global capitalism alone” (p. 266). True, but SYRIZA leadership also made compromises that foreclosed other possible avenues for transformation..<\/p>\n

The authors\u2019 neglect of the Greek general strikes<\/a> fits an overall pattern. They praise unions but don\u2019t explore their contradictions, such as that between rank and file and bureaucracy. The US\u2019 World War II union no-strike pledge is disparaged, without mention of the massive wave of wildcats that defied it. Their account of Poland\u2019s Solidarnosc doesn\u2019t see that that union in 1980-81 built an effective dual power, presenting a genuine workers\u2019 government alternative to the rhetorically existing \u201cworkers\u2019 state.” And they don\u2019t explore the flood of workers\u2019 self-activity, including the Russian Revolution, that actually did end the First World War.<\/p>\n

Hunt and Taylor favor direct action and self-organization. They usefully highlight autonomous movements of poor people. But rank and file self-activity precisely where our class has the most power\u2014in workplace struggles and revolutions anchored by them\u2014gets short shrift. This leaves them with a vision of social change limited to altering the power balance between the classes, not abolishing class, and the hope that poor and working people\u2019s self-organization short of control of the means of production can sustainably hold its own.<\/p>\n

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons; modified by Tempest.<\/small><\/p>\n

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see \u201cAbout Tempest Collective<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":13006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[563,162],"class_list":["post-12986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-socialist-politics","tag-solidarity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/avery_solidarity_review_feature_card_720.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}