What is Solidarity?

January 30th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 4:37 pm

One of the familiar problems in responding to problems which encompass potentially enormous collective impacts, such as global warming and resource depletion, is to whom a call for action can be addressed. Must we be addressed as individual workers and consumers, bound together only by the economic transactions through which we contribute to GDP? Or is there something else, another kind of non-market solidarity, that holds us together, and which forms the basis of collective forms of action?

In a market-led culture, governments are increasingly chary of even attempting to speak of collective action. What’s so ridiculous about libertarian assaults on the culture of collectivism with which individual liberties are apparently being constantly threatened is that liberal-democratic governments increasingly see their legitimacy as being tied solely to how far they can restrict their role to facilitating market exchanges, even when it comes to the provision of crucial public infrastructure, health care and so on. The idea that a major collectivist political project could now be undertaken in a nation like the UK is, at least at the level of official political culture, entirely unimaginable.

Of course, taking this role of ‘facilitator of markets’ robs governments of many of the capabilities which would be necessary to genuinely tackle a collective problem. It also arguably forms a real threat to individual liberties, to which libertarians must be blind, given how it tends to reduce the meaning of freedom to the capacity to engage in market exchanges from some position of comparative advantage. Liberal democratic politics fails to be genuinely political insofar as it shies away from trying to actually positively articulate what the general interest is, instead clearing a negative space where only the voice of the market can be heard. It fails to try and interpret what the basis of social action is, trying instead to close the gap between individual self-interest (unregulated consumption) and the public good (sustainability, or its current fetishised form, the ‘reduced carbon footprint’) by means of public information bulletins that take the form of moralistic exhortations to buy energy-efficient lightbulbs, not leave TVs on standby, etc. Where the only form of social solidarity is seen as the bonds created by the market (temporary, instrumental, fungible and replaceable relationships), then the only recourse of government is to an authoritarian moral discourse. Libertarians fear this voice of ‘the collective’ without good reason – the only valid response is laughter, given the impotence of its appeal to individualism when compared against the all-powerful individualism of the credit economy.

One common way of responding to this problem in social theory is informed by what we might refer to as a postmodernist recognition of particularity. As James Mensch does here, we could acknowledge that we are always already involved in multiple forms of solidarity, because our identities are constructed from different cultural materials that we are bequeathed by our forebears. But these multiple forms are not just ‘communalities’, that is, affective forms of identification that draw us together in ethnic, religious and other ‘tribal’ groupings. They also include mor universal orientations, which identify us, together with those from other communal groupings we share territory with, as ‘citizens’ of a more encompassing unity. Mensch identifies particular, communalist groupings as anchoring us in relation to a sense of the past, and universalist identities as pointing us to the future, understood as a progressive, open dimension of potential, which promises liberation from particularity and its shackled perspectives. In either form, solidarity is identity, and the present is therefore a place where we negotiate between the claims of these different multiple identities. For Mensch, ‘being concrete’ is the way to proceed: the existence of multiple identities is itself a deeper form of solidarity (’we are all multiple’) that might somehow prevent us from killing each other, should our grand political projects fail. Ultimately, there is no way of getting beyond the differend between these various identities: they all subsist on the same level.

This position is postmodern because for all its language of concreteness, negotiation and flux, it is defined by stasis.

Only by being concrete can we be attentive to multiple solidarities we are actually engaged in. Our different situations of race, language, religion, and cultural preference involve us in differing networks of solidarity. These, unless artificially suppressed, provide a natural system of checks and balances within the solidarity that is based on the past.

Once you have acknowledged particularity or diversity, and postulated that their forms provide the ‘checks and balances’ to the possibility of exclusionary violence rooted in past divisions, there is nowhere to go. Mainly because trying to go anywhere else would be too risky: reasoning about the general interest that unites all the particular interests risks doing violence to some of the particulars. Political action is ultimately only about self-interest and, for Mensch, we need to recognise this (how actions which focus on the long-term futures of climate change and resource depletion are solely about self interest Mensch does not explain).

The problem is that refusing to go this extra step towards the idea of a general interest automatically does violence to the particulars: by freezing them as abstract particularities, it denies them a genuinely transformative future, and at worst condemns them to a fetishised, undead existence as cultural commodities – ethnic, linguistic, religious brands that can feed the cultural industries’ engines of creative destruction. Only by attempting to articulate what actually unites particular forms of identity in a political project can they have a future. That is why attempting to understand how the particular can become the universal is vital: we need to return to an understanding of this connection between abstract particular and abstract universal forms of identity, mediated by something like Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, to free the multiple from the frozen constellations into which postmodern reason would trap it.

Nationalism, as a form of solidarity, is therefore not always regressive. Richard Phillips writes in this month’s issue of Planet magazine (draft version of article online here) that the resurgence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism can represent not the desire to tear loose from the UK a residuum of ethnic and lingustic identity, but a path towards a new internationalism. Here, solidarity is born out of a negative experience, not the imagined positive fullness of affective, communal identification. Solidarity is once again an attempt to challenge the social totality, to build a genuinely international community, based on the unhealed divisions within the nation-state, based on the legacy of colonialism, based on challenging the continued triumph of those who have written history. In the form of the abstract particular (linguistic identity, the legalistic promotion of Welsh etc.), this new nationalism risks becoming another tool by which political elites retain their hold on power, and close off the future. But national self-determination also generates a new enthusiasm for returning to the basic political question: how do we want to live? To recreate solidarity in the form of common causes requires just this kind of courage.