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Over the last decade, social movements have risen up and forged solidarity across lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, faith, nationality, and age. Ordinary people fighting for a rainbow of causes — economic equality, racial and gender justice, trans and abortion rights, safety from gun violence, labor protections, police abolition, environmental sustainability, an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and more — have transformed the public conversation and shifted public policy in progressive directions.
Predictably, these popular challenges to the status quo have inspired fierce resistance from both the rightwing and corporate “centrists,” supercharging attempts to cut these tender shoots of solidarity off at the roots. State authorities have made it illegal to help people get abortions, prosecuted people who assist migrants at the border, and disparage anyone who cares about others as “woke,” a term used to break the solidarity and camaraderie that many people have only just begun to experience. Just look at Georgia’s indictment against 61 activists involved in the Stop Cop City movement, which rails against the movement for promoting “social solidarity” as though that were a dangerous and criminal act.
To stymie discussions of the impact of racism, imperialism, misogyny, and homophobia, conservative politicians and front groups have banned books from schools and libraries, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay. The goal is to pit ordinary people against each other, a strategy known as “divide and conquer.” Defenders of the status quo are determined to push would-be allies apart, weaponizing our fault lines and amplifying any mistakes activists make.
The enemies of progress and inclusion know what solidarity is, and they know why they want to stop it. That makes the task of building solidarity all the more urgent.
We wrote Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea because we believe that solidarity is indeed a threat to business-as-usual, and that’s exactly why we need to build it. In order to do that effectively, we need to first understand what solidarity is and how it works. Our book provides a deep dive into the idea and practice of solidarity over the centuries, offering stories and examples from around the world. We also provide some concrete advice about how to organize so we can win real change. The text below is adapted from the introduction.
Solidarity is an idea and a practice that has indelibly shaped the modern world. Yet it is something we don’t discuss or study nearly enough. Library shelves are lined with books on ideals including freedom, equality, justice, and democracy. Solidarity? Not so much.
Solidarity is the force that achieved universal suffrage, won the eight-hour workday as well as the weekend, made the modern welfare state viable, defeated Jim Crow, enshrined disability rights, and much more. Solidarity has stretched across the globe linking abolitionists in the nineteenth century, national independence movements in the twentieth, and activists agitating for climate justice in the twenty-first; it is the tie that binds women, queer, and trans people, as well as workers, students, and debtors, fighting for their rights today.
Real solidarity (or what we call transformative solidarity) involves expanding one’s sense of self-interest; it creates new communities across social distinctions, class divides, and militarized borders. It names the actions of exploited and marginalized groups as they come together to build power.
This kind of solidarity doesn’t just emerge spontaneously, it has to be consciously organized into being. Consider the idea of the “worker” and the “working class.” At the beginning of the industrial revolution, people saw themselves individually as draftsmen, bakers, tailors, or carpenters who had little in common. Similarly, activists worked for years to forge a disability justice consciousness. It wasn’t initially obvious to people with different impairments and abilities that they should actually come together to demand their rights. Disabled people recognizing themselves as part of a new, bigger Us required a radical act of imagination —and the hard work of dedicated organizers.
Solidarity, however, isn’t only about helping people forge new identities around their shared experiences. It also builds bridges between people who come from different backgrounds and occupy different positions. It often involves people who are not themselves the direct targets of oppression, but who choose to join the struggle for justice nevertheless.
Think of the white abolitionists who risked their lives and reputations to oppose slavery, including the insurgent John Brown and the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who rebelled against their plantation-owning father, or Friedrich Engels, who came from an industrial family, using his wealth to fund his friend Karl Marx’s activities and support working-class agitation. Since the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, citizens of rich countries have been organizing against the pharmaceutical industry to ensure residents of poor countries can access life-saving medicines, while U.S. health-care providers are now busy defying abortion bans and anti-trans laws to provide for those in need of their services. Consider the networks of activists who assist migrants making the hazardous trek across the American desert or the Mediterranean Sea, or who offer support to individuals who are or were incarcerated. Or think of all of the people from all walks of life who have been protesting for a permanent end to the war on Gaza, even though they live thousands of miles away.
It is not just altruism or compassion that inspires people to act in these cases, but the recognition that one’s own liberation is intimately bound with the liberation of others. As Eugene Debs famously put it in 1918, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Writing a century later, Derecka Purnell, a young lawyer and author who was part of the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising, echoed his sentiment, calling on white people to join the movement against police brutality as full participants acting in solidarity: “I wanted them to know that racial violence was bad for them, too. An ally sympathizes. I wanted less sympathy, and more commitment, risk, and sacrifice to eradicate white supremacy.”
Right now, our society is awash in various things that resemble solidarity but fall short of the real thing. Appeals to benevolence, altruism, deference, or “allyship” are widespread, and invite us to be empathetic and kind; but they all place the onus on individual action rather than larger collective engagement, and on activating pity or guilt, rather than a sense of shared responsibility or shared fate
Similarly, under the virtuous-sounding guises of charity and philanthropy, the rich and powerful can bestow kindness from on high, without feeling implicated in the systems that produce poverty, oppression, and environmental degradation in the first place—the very systems that also produce their own wealth and power. Corporations have learned to play this game expertly, as was the case in 2020, when McDonald’s ran an online advertisement claiming to stand with “victims of systemic oppression” while paying poverty wages, and JP Morgan, Bank of America, and other companies pledged tens of billions of dollars to racial equity—only to allocate the funds as loans and investments that allowed them to continue to generate profits along with good press. Whether well-intentioned or cynical, such actions fall far short of producing the transformative social change we need, and often undermine it.
Overcoming looming threats, from structural racism to climate change, will take more than self-congratulatory posturing. A just and thriving society requires that its members take risks and make sacrifices for one another.
Solidarity, then, is not just about asking people to get along. It is not unity for unity’s sake. Instead, it’s about building power to fight for social justice by building a bigger Us, one big enough to stand up to the toxic billionaires and authoritarians who will do anything to maintain control.
The only way we can overcome this racist, reactionary, anti-democratic agenda is by building solidarity from the bottom up. Solidarity involves reaching across our differences, recognizing that we are all connected (even if we are not exactly the same), and bringing as many people as possible into our movements as we can.
As the feminist poet Audre Lorde noted, solidarity matters because we need each other to succeed:
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identi- ties. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness .
Without a doubt, building bridges of solidarity requires patience— it’s much easier to draw lines, pass judgment, point fingers, and place blame. But the reality is, none of us are perfectly pure or enlightened; we are all implicated, to varying degrees, in oppressive systems, and hopefully we evolve as we learn. One way to fight a profit-driven system that treats people as disposable is to instead treat people as redeemable. Solidarity means not writing anyone off completely, not throwing anyone away. It holds out hope that individuals and systems can change.
Our work as organizers and as authors emerges out of a conviction that our current political and economic arrangement is profoundly damaging, both to human beings and to the more-than-human world. Systems of supremacy and domination ultimately imperil even those who, in many crucial respects, benefit from them. Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages, and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. The inequality and pursuit of endless growth that drive climate change endanger the homes, infrastructure, and supply chains on which the wealthy and working class both rely—not to mention the complex ecosystems in which we are all embedded.
Solidarity, in other words, is not selfless. Siding with others is the only way to rescue ourselves from the catastrophes that will otherwise engulf us.
With the planet swiftly tipping toward climate chaos and a right-wing reaction gaining influence globally, those of us who want our species to not only survive but thrive have no choice but to attempt to cultivate solidarity from wherever we happen to sit. Individually, the vast majority of us are locked out of the halls of power and lack wealth and influence.
This means the only viable pathway to change involves organizing from wherever we are. Constructing a bigger Us—one large and powerful enough to overcome the many obstacles in our way—is a hopeful and imaginative act: curious about other people, open to change, and determined to bring new possibilities into being. The costs of greed and division are apparent. Solidarity is the only thing that can save us.
From SOLIDARITY: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor.
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