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4/8/13 Thoughts on Solidarity AREA Chicago

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4/8/13 Thoughts on Solidarity AREA Chicago
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Thoughts on Solidarity
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Words by Mary Patten
Depending on who youre talking to, forms and expressions of solidarity include the general strike, the
hunger strike, the die-in, and the march; the human billboard, the mask, the wheat-pasted poster and the
stencil; the refusal to testify before a grand jury; flowers at the site of disasters, the giving of blood, the
writing of checks. The word has seeped into our political vocabulary in the wake of the unspeakable: the
tsunami of 2004, hurricane Katrina, and the attacks on the World Trade Center. Sometimes solidarity is
embodied in a mass; sometimes in an individual figure (Rachel Corrie, the man some people have called
Wang Weilin who stood in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 [1], the political
suicides of Lee Kyung-hae and Jan Palach [2].) Acts of solidarity are not immune from a larger political and
signifying context. They are not inherently noble or good. Solidarity can manifest as a substitution, a desire
to becomesomething- else [3]. Solidarity can be lonely, anonymous, unrecognized, as in Chris Markers
story about the funeral of the old rank-and-file communist worker in Grin without a Cat.
A search for solidarity on Wikipedia.org yields first a disquisition on Solidarnosc, the anticommunist labor
movement that emerged in Poland in the late stages of the Cold War. This is supplemented by more
workings of Solidarity as a proper name. One has to visit the wiki dictionary for the received wisdom of
the meaning of solidarity, lower-case
1. A willingness to give psychological and material support when another person is in a difficult position or
needs affection And only after that, a line that indicates something about the words politico-historical roots
2. A band of unity between individuals united around a common goal or against a common enemy. The
unifying principle that defines the labor movement.
The political valences of solidarity have multiplied and proliferated since the word first entered the
modernist vocabulary in the 19th century, as a development from the French concept of fraternite.
Solidarnosc sundered the concept from its previously leftist, anarchosyndicalist context, when labor and
left were inextricably linked.
Today, many lament this break [4], and the corruptions of a word whose utopian connotations have been
usurped or reduced: solidarity no longer carries moral freight, but has been reduced to simple group
cohesion and feelings of belonging [5].
The idea of an embrace so big it could encompass, if not all, the vast majority of humanity solidarity
forever, the Internationale has been overtaken by everything from corporate solidarity, the Aryan
brotherhood, and advertisings manipulations of our longings to feel connected. Oliver Stones World
Trade Center is one of the latest iterations of the maudlin refrain, we are all human beings emerging from
US popular culture which, upon closer examination, betrays a whole series of exclusions, beginning with
immigrants, foreign nationals, Afghanis and Iraqis, and animals other than human.
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What is at stake in re-claiming solidarity from these dilutions and deviations?
The familiar examples still serve to excite, and inspire many of us: the Russian anarchists of Land and
Liberty disappearing into the countryside, to become one with the peasants; Black and white students of
sncc traveling to the South to register Black voters in the sixties. There is usually a breach of identity, of
space a leap to an identification, even if only a temporary or provisional one.
The presumption of the we, or the I-forall, continues to animate, from Attica is all of us, to We are all
people with aids; to the thirteen- year-old boy who said to a reporter or rescue worker in southern Lebanon,
I am Hezbollah! the multiple, identical signs, each proclaiming I am a man in the crowds of Black men
marching in the mid-1960s.
We are also familiar with the reverse-the negative, flip-side of solidarity: Pastor Martin Niemollers often
repeated quote, first (they came) for the Communists I didnt speak up because I wasnt a Communist
and Angela Davis re-working: they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the afternoon
[6].
Invocations of solidarity have shifted because the meaning of work has shifted, irrevocably with the
globalization of cheap labor, the struggle between increasingly borderless economies and the violent re-
inscriptions of those borders, the proliferation of information and service economies, and new formations of
reserve armies of labor, particularly in prisons. Ideas about class struggle have been challenged and
forever altered by movements against colonialism, struggles for womens and queer liberation, communities
struggling for economic and environmental justice. The failure of democracy in socialist movements and the
absorption of numerous avant-gardes by resilient capital have produced wide skepticism about centralism
and vanguardism in movements of the left.
The post-modern break has produced theoretical works that grapple with these shifts. In The Inoperative
Community, Jean Luc Nancy argues for a concept of singularities where each (person, being) is infinitely
different from every other one, yet endlessly interconnected, interdependent, inter-penetrable. Badiou and
Agamben argue against a universalist humanist ethics that always re-inscribes the divide between self and
other, where there is always an abject in need of rescue, always a bottomless need for generosity from
those who alone become more elevated by the gesture of helping and saving.
Many of the post-cold war, globally conscious movements for justice, land, sovereignty, and rights invoke
the idea of new solidarities new because these are recent alliances between groups previously demarcated
by their difference from one another [7]; multiple because these bonds are not just between many subjects
and identities, but the overlapping points, connections, and spaces between them: concentrations of
affinities, networks of mutual aid, in a struggle against a complex web of relations, not just one common
enemy.
The point is not to collapse into, to become the other (small farmers in India, unemployed workers in
Argentina, PWAs in South Africa, indigenous peoples in Bolivia, anarchists in the metropoles) but to speak
and work across differences, in respect of these infinite singularities not to try to revive obsolete relations of
labor, or familiar, fixed identities, but to coalesce our desires, to identify with and embody one another in
performative political actions that engender new connections, while re-articulating and repositioning old
ones [7].
Postscript: another story
A few years ago, at New York Citys Gay Pride Parade, a small radical queer contingent burst into a
chant of End the occupation! Anal penetration! Was this simply shorthand for: Our liberation as queers is
impossible to imagine without the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? or: Our solidarity
with you (Palestinians) is linked to, or contingent upon, your recognition of US? or, just a campy reach for
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a rhyme? The raucous incoherence of the two lines which dont even share a grammatical construction,
whose biggest commonality is their rhyming throws into relief two incommensurables against one another: a
description of a sex act next to a political demand. Heres an acknowledgement of the gap between two (or
more) different communities/populations, sets of urgencies, and political styles; a desire for the them to
coexist, to rub up against each other, to inform one another, but remain distinct.
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