Solidarity Is the Only Way to Win the Future
How to build a new movement and beat the billionaires
Earlier this month, I spent the weekend at the California Federation of Teachers convention here in San Diego where I did a workshop on the IWW and the San Diego Free Speech Fight and other radical California union history with labor historian Fred Glass, rallied with local activists, and worked to pass resolutions committing my statewide union to campaigning for new progressive taxes on the rich and corporations to fund a better, survivable future for the young people and communities we serve.
In the face of the fascist assault on everything from the Department of Education to the EPA to the Labor Department, Social Security, Medicare, and more, the convention was chock full of speakers pondering how to best fight back against the billionaire class and their henchmen in the Trump administration. With education facing huge cuts, attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and policies that foster inclusion, the weekend was full of both dread and defiance.
If a common theme emerged from across a wide array of speakers, it was, “how do we pull ourselves out of the current collective malaise and fight back effectively but with no illusions?” Amid all the stark talk acknowledging how dangerous the political landscape is for educators, our unions, our profession, and our most vulnerable students, I kept hearing people say that, despite the larger sense of menace, it simply felt good to be together in a common cause.
And that’s what unions offer at their best: an opportunity to be part of something larger than the isolated individual, to find strength and shared identity in an organization that, warts and all, aspires to unite people despite their differences, in common cause for the greater good. This is a quality that is lacking in many of the transitory protest movements in recent years that have seemed to be game-changing only to recede before our eyes. Why?
Parul Sehgal ponders this recent phenomenon in her New York Times Magazine essay, “The Old Idea That Could Give New Life to Progressive Politics”:
“The 21st century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects,” Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor have noted. The backlashes to a movement for racial justice have been powerful, but organizations on the left also failed to channel the political energy, hope and grief. Progressive groups that coalesced around trauma turned the trauma inward. Activists proclaimed unity and preached collective action, but they found themselves divided along lines of identity or fracturing over conflicts that bewildered outsiders; coalitions that once seemed secure self-destructed on demands for purity.
Here she hits the nail on the head by identifying a very real tendency in progressive circles to replace real organizing with call-out culture that can quickly splinter a coalition or movement, no matter the cause. This kind of movement gatekeeping has put a “Keep Out” sign on far too many social justice causes that stay narrow and lose rather than become more open and tolerant of ambiguity/human contradictions and win. Perhaps the answer lies in a movement that seeks to build bridges rather than walls.
In her review essay of a slew of new books on the idea of solidarity, Sehgal observes of that term that:
“Solidarity,” a word of the old left, is being shaken free of mothballs and tailored to fit the hopes of the moment. Solidarity is the “one idea that can save democracy,” according to the organizers Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, who call for a solidarity on the left — a “transformative solidarity” — that confers dignity to all, as opposed to the “reactionary solidarity” on the right, based on a politics of exclusion.
And this idea, has deep, ancient roots, but in the American context, its explicit formulation was born in the labor movement in the 19th century with the Knights of Labor’s suggestion that “An injury to one is the concern of all,” which was slightly modified in the early twentieth century by the Industrial Workers of the World into “An injury to one is an injury to all.” In other words, anyone’s plight should always be everyone’s concern. This simple motto expresses the central principle of labor that none of us have real freedom, justice, or equity until all of us do. It’s about the greater good. At the heart of the notion of solidarity is, as with teaching, a profound compassion for others.
Sehgal’s essay dives more deeply into this notion suggesting that:
[S]olidarity not as a philosophical proposition but as a distinctive and delicate form of intimacy. Solidarity — a notion so oddly elastic and enticingly vague — is the art and practice of sharing in another’s struggle, of making common cause. If the nostalgic notion of solidarity conjures workers united in purpose, their voices and placards raised in unison, this new thinking examines the inner mechanisms of solidarity, before it blossoms into communal feeling — the meetings, the awkward conversations, the earnestness, the errors.
This is something that I learned in a profound way when I almost died a year and a half ago and saw that the best antidote to my despair came when I spared a moment to talk to, thank, and really see others—my nurses, doctors, medical staff, food service workers, or the janitors who came to clean my room. There is nothing like the shadow death to dissolve the social constructs we erect around us. Simply put, it was healing when I could really see and listen to other people, and they took the time to see and hear me.
We make each other who we are. We can harm or heal one another. Our futures are, as MLK said, inextricably bound. In our journey between the womb and the tomb we get to choose which way to lean—towards greed or generosity, judgement or compassion, a smaller or larger sense of self.
In concrete terms, this means properly diagnosing our collective problem as Bernie Sanders did at a recent rally: “The worst addiction in this country today is the greed of oligarchy . . . They are like heroin addicts — they need more and more and more. And if they have to destroy Social Security and Medicaid to get what they want, that is what they will do.” Surely, we know this is not the right way to lean.
Thus, I think we will win if we place our bets on solidarity and make it the bedrock of our politics and, we hope someday, our democracy. It’s OK to be angry, we just need to direct our anger at the right target and know that beyond that anger, there is a better way, another path that leads not toward endless animus but justice. As Sehgal writes, “Solidarity does not require unblemished souls or flawless political analysis; it must be understood as a form of awareness that is native to us, that sees the health of the individual and the collective as bound and yearns to respond in kind, just as sunflowers in a field angle their heads just so, to best share the light.”
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at the same gathering with Sanders: “I don’t believe in health care, labor and human dignity because I’m a Marxist — I believe it because I was a waitress . . . Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on and because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. And I know that we don’t have to live like this.”
No, we don’t. Solidarity points to a better way, where we acknowledge each other’s struggles, forgive each other’s flaws, find unity in our diversity, and reject the politics of division and exclusion in favor of a greater sense of self.
AOC put it plainly, noting that it’s not that difficult to find the things that unite us: “This movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests . . . It’s about class solidarity. The thousands of people who came out here today to stand here together and say, ‘Our lives deserve dignity and our work deserves respect.’”
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