Solidarity

Standing with others on the basis of a shared situation or cause, including where one's own interest is already secured.

Theme: Society, politics and power
Tradition: Modern
Term fixed: 1848

In plain terms

Solidarity is not charity and it is not friendship. Charity flows from someone secure to someone who is not. Friendship is between particular people who like each other. Solidarity is standing with people you may never meet because your situations are connected.

The test of whether it is real is simple and severe: does it hold when your own demands have been met? A group that settles as soon as it has what it wanted was pursuing its interests, which is legitimate and is something else.

And it has a boundary problem. Solidarity is usually with a particular group - workers, a nation, a movement - and the same cohesion that binds those inside it defines those outside. The strongest form of the virtue and the ugliest form of exclusion run on identical machinery.

As a philosopher would put it

Durkheim's distinction between mechanical solidarity, resting on likeness in simple societies, and organic solidarity, resting on interdependence through the division of labour, is the sociological foundation of the concept.

Ibn Khaldūn's asabiyyah is the earlier and in some ways sharper analysis: group feeling is what allows a coalition to seize and hold power, it is strongest among those living hard lives together, and it dissipates over generations in comfort - which drives his cyclical account of dynasties.

Contemporary work distinguishes solidarity from beneficence by its basis: it is grounded in a shared position or a shared commitment rather than in the recipient's need, and it involves acting as one of a group rather than for it. Rorty's version dispenses with shared essence and grounds it in an expanding sense of us, extended by imagination and narrative rather than established by argument - which makes solidarity a contingent achievement rather than a recognition of what is already true.

Where you meet it

On 16 August 1980, two days into the occupation of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, the management conceded the strikers' demands: reinstatement of the dismissed crane operator Anna Walentynowicz, a pay rise, and a monument to workers killed in 1970.

The strike committee announced the settlement and workers began to leave. Walentynowicz and Alina Pieniążek went to the gates and argued that dozens of smaller workplaces had struck in support of the shipyard and would be crushed if it settled alone. Enough workers stayed. The strike was reconstituted the same day as a solidarity strike on behalf of the other enterprises, and an inter-factory committee was formed with delegates from hundreds of workplaces.

The Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August established the first independent trade union in the Eastern bloc, and the movement took the name Solidarność. It exists because a group with its own demands already met chose to keep striking for people it had no obligation to.

What is actually disputed

Whether solidarity requires a boundary.

If it is grounded in a shared position, then it holds among those who share it and not beyond, which is what makes it motivating and what makes it exclusive. The cohesion of a nation and the cohesion of a movement work by the same mechanism, and the concept does not by itself tell you which is which.

Universalists reply that solidarity can extend to humanity as such. Critics answer that a solidarity with everyone has no content, since it demands nothing in particular of anyone, and that Rorty's honest version accepts the contingency rather than pretending to a foundation.

A second dispute concerns internal dissent. A group needs cohesion to act, and cohesion suppresses disagreement - so the same virtue that makes collective action possible makes it hard to criticise from inside. Every solidaristic movement has faced this and none has solved it.

Defined against

Oppression Solidarity is what makes collective resistance possible, and the isolation of those subject to systematic disadvantage is what it works against

Philosophers

Karl Marx Class solidarity as arising from a shared position
Hannah Arendt Acting in concert as the source of political power
Achille Mbembe Solidarity across colonial and postcolonial divisions
Judith Butler Alliance across difference rather than on the basis of identity
Simone de Beauvoir Solidarity among the situated rather than the identical

Works

The German Ideology Solidarity grounded in a shared material position
The Muqaddimah Asabiyyah, and the cycle it drives
The Origins of Totalitarianism Where solidarity fails and atomisation follows
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Solidarity as a practice rather than a sentiment
Discourse on Colonialism Solidarity across the colonial divide

Schools

Classical Marxism Where class solidarity is analysed
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where its erosion is a subject
Communitarianism Where it is grounded in shared life
Ubuntu Philosophy Where it follows from relational personhood
Philosophy of Liberation Where it is a methodological commitment

Related concepts

Common good c. 1270 · Emancipation 1843 · Oppression 1990 · Ubuntu 1969 · Care 1982

Solidarité enters political vocabulary through French law and the 1848 generation; Ibn Khaldūn's asabiyyah, group feeling as the engine of political power, is a much earlier analysis of something close to it.