“At this point, unity is essential for our survival”
On International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day or May Day in many countries, here’s a short excerpt from chapter nine of my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games:
There was always an alternative to capitolism’s Hobbesian order based on fear and obedience. It’s solidarity, and contrary to Capitol propaganda, it’s entirely natural to us.
As Astra Taylor and Lean Hunt-Hendrix note (“One for All”, New Republic, 26 August 2019), as a social theory, this idea first emerged in the legal texts of the Roman Empire, although of course as a social practice it goes back long before that; it’s how we’ve survived as a species. In the Roman era, when people held a debt in common they were said to hold it in solidum. Being in communal debt was the basis of solidarity, a very different kind of debt to capitalist hierarchical debt. If one individual faltered, its members would either bail each other out or default together.
In its original formulation, solidarity was a common identity underpinned by collective indebtedness and obligation, shared responsibility and risk, interdependence and mutual aid. Terms like “bonds,” “trust” and “mutual funds” are now used by bankers to describe financial mechanisms. But real solidarity, in contrast to modern contracts, has to be cultivated. It’s the practice of creating social ties, of inventing collective identity.
“In the early nineteenth century, solidarity became central to the growing labor movement. Craftsmen and laborers from a range of industries, who once saw themselves as unconnected, began to share a larger common character as workers. As industrialization spread, this new working class strengthened their common bonds through acts of resistance and strikes. Solidarity was also central to the creation of welfare systems and social safety nets.
These understandings of social belonging have been eroded under the corrosive pressures of contemporary life. Modernity made the individual sacred, but also separated, isolated, as we saw in the statistics on mental health. Capitol propaganda and division has also de-socialized us, through economic stratification, privileges for some, and shaming the poor.
Today, “solidarity” is most associated with inter-group expressions of comradeship, for example international campaigns in support of groups resisting oppression. Such campaigns say we do not agree, we do not condone. (As noted in the prologue, solidarity is also crucial to direct action movements, as in the Hong Kong protests.) Perhaps, in place of nationalistic supposedly unifying myths, we might be able to tell alternative stories, including for democratic self-governance at a global level. To Hauke Brunkhorst (Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community), this might be being modeled in recent global protest movements, the beginning perhaps of a transnational civic solidarity.
The enormous challenges we face, from capitalist authoritarianism to climate change, require that social movements forge a radical solidarity. Building of bonds and diverse coalitions is essential to the struggle for a just world. The Capitol will of course push back, buying off some of us, but mostly trying to turn us on each other, to keep their games going. But there is no survival, let alone freedom, without each other.
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is out now in paperback and e-book from Zero Books and can be ordered from the following places: