What is Solidarity (2)?

February 25th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 2:37 pm

As well as being a follow-up to this post, the following is a response to the latest evocations of the tedious and stupid myth [restricted access, university logon probably required] that the only thing separating ‘the greens’ from the Nazis is that the latter were nicely turned out.

I offer this quotation from Kurt Eisner, who was a central figure in the November Revolution of 1918 which produced the Weimar Republic (taken from Andreas Wildt’s 1998 essay Solidarität – Begriffsgeschichte und Definition):

Nein, nichts mehr von Liebe, Mitleid und Barmherzigkeit. Das kalte, stahlharte Wort Solidarität ist in dem Ofen des wissenschaftlichen Denkens geglüht. Sie wendet sich nicht an schwimmende, gleitende, rosig leuchtende, untergehende Empfindungen, sie schult die Köpfe, hämmert die Charaktere und gibt der ganzen Gesellschaft die granitene Grundlage einer Umgestaltung und Erneuerung aller menschlichen Beziehungen in ihrer ganzen Breite.

[attempt at trans.: No, no more of love, compassion and mercy. The cold, steely word Solidarity has hardened in the furnace of scientific thinking. It does not refer to rosy, glimmering feelings that float, slide and fall away. It schools the head, hammers the character and gives to a whole society the granite-like basis for a transformation and renewal of all human relations in their whole breadth].

The important thing to remember about solidarity is that it is more than simple community and also more than the kind of universal formal reciprocity between individuals of which the liberal democratic principle of equality before the law is a manifestation. As Rahel Jaeggi has written, it is neither given nor invented, is neither a particularistic expression of affective, cultural, linguistic ties nor an all-embracing replacement for these ties. To get beyond the dualism of the particular and universal here means including time in any analysis of the meaning of solidarity: for Eisner, the emergence of solidarity is a work-in-progress, a process of transformation that turns feeling into character, and into institutions. In this, Eisner recalls Hegel’s labour of the negative: without work and reason there can be no solidarity. But without feeling, sympathy, sensitivity to vulnerability there is no reason to work.

When Hegel defined recognition or Anerkennung as the essential problem that social institutions try to solve, he implicitly made historical process the key to understanding how forms of identity are precipitated by social conflicts, and how these conflicts are preserved in the forms of identity that result. For instance, the emergence of bourgeois civil society is inseparable from the equal and universal rule of law, but it is also inseparable from the generation of new forms of interdependency that are not equal and universal. From this interdependency comes the idea of ‘enlarged reciprocity’, such as is embodied in the idea of redistribution of wealth through taxation, among other ideas.

Whereas reciprocity as such simply implies repayment of like for like (as under the special conditions which create the possibility of economic exchanges between contracting parties), ‘enlarged reciprocity’ derives from a distribution of non-reciprocal relationships through which the social whole is maintained. These would include the contribution of social value from non-economic relationships, such as the care of parents for children, which ground the possibility of social reproduction. The social value contributed by these non-reciprocal relationships is primarily towards the maintenance of particular forms of life which are seen as socially meaningful, rewarding, and constitutively valuable by individuals and groups. By maintaining these forms of life over time and thus contributing, not to utility (which is necessarily a subjectivist measure of good) but to well-being (eudaimonia), the broader forms of identification that bourgeois society values are made possible. That is why ‘enlarged reciprocity’ is the form of recognition that characterises social orders in so far as they incorporate a social-democratic element (the USA of the time of the Great Society along with Western Europe from the late 19th century on). It involves the redistribution of goods to support and enhance the non-reciprocal relationships that bourgeois civil society requires in order to sustain itself. This is why bourgeois society is, much more than it is a realm of pure self-interest, a realm of what Jaeggi calls ‘non-instrumental cooperation’, taking an interest in the interest of the other. Here, sympathy for the vulnerability of others reappears in concern for their lives that touches on the aspects of their identities that extend beyond the universal level of legal equality that grounds their economic existence as producers, consumers, and workers. It is embodied in welfare states, but also in social phenomena as diverse as cooperatives, allotments, and mutual aid societies.

Enlarged reciprocity, however, contains within it a virulent critique of bourgeois society at the same time as being rooted in it. It embodies forms of solidarity which emerge over time as the asymmetries involved in the extra-economic production of social value become clear. From the workers’ movement (conflict over the appropriation of surplus value), to the women’s movement (conflict over the cultural and political policing of responsibility for care), to the various sexual liberation movements, these asymmetries, framed in terms of different demands for justice, become articulated. Anti-colonial struggles and anti-globalisation movements articulate the asymmetries of the international order in a similar way. But in all these cases, the demand is not for the pure reciprocity embodied in the idea of legal equality, but for recognition of the role of historical-emergent vulnerabilities in producing and maintaining the social order, and for appropriate forms of recompense (where recompense means revolution, not reparations).

What the idea of sustainability seeks to articulate is a further dimension of solidarity, a new dimension of ‘enlarged reciprocity’. Among the non-symmetrical relationships that generate social value (including instrumental but also constitutive values) must be counted the contribution of extra-social ecologies (soil, air, water etc.) to human life, which the commercial-capitalist form of economics that accompanies the growth of bourgeois society, together with its industrial and post-industrial descendents, views as unpriced and therefore as not part of the costs of production. In addition, the wellbeing of future generations enters here as a source of constitutive value, given that what posterity contributes to our lives is a large portion of their meaningfulness. To widen solidarity to the ecologies that support the social totality, and the futures into which this totality unfolds, places us at the limit of the forms of identification that bourgeois society requires of us. What many of those who recognise these further dimensions of non-reciprocity are agitating for, in their demands for a re-thinking of the institutions that we have inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries, is a revision of the forms of solidarity that condition our lives, which would require both the training of new forms of feeling and the transformation of reason.