What does solidarity require?

“Solidarity forever” goes the refrain on an old union song. But for many decades solidarity has been out of fashion, cast aside as a relic of the past. Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor want to change that. At a critical moment of transition in human culture, they argue that reclaiming solidarity is the only path to a just and sustainable society. Hunt-­Hendrix and Taylor met during the Occupy Wall Street movement, and since then both have worked in progressive organizing. Taylor is founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union that made plausible the idea of student debt cancellation. Hunt-Hendrix wrote a doctoral dissertation on solidarity at Princeton, parts of which appear in this book.

For Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor, solidarity is an antidote to market-based solutions that have dominated in our neoliberal era, resulting in deepened social inequities, economic insecurity, and ecological instability. Solidarity, by contrast, begins with a “recognition of our inherent interconnectedness” and is “an ethos and spur to action rooted in the acknowledgement that our lives are intertwined.” Solidarity requires intentional cultivation—it will not spring into being on its own accord—and is expressed most clearly in action. It is not simply a thought or a feeling but something that people do. Nor, however, is solidarity necessarily positive. The authors distinguish between “transformative solidarity”—their preferred approach—and “reactionary solidarity” that seeks to consolidate an exclusivist group identity to maintain the status quo.

With this definitional grounding, the book is a dizzying tour across geography and history, much of it neglected or forgotten. For instance, the authors retell the story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a union of sorts composed of welfare recipients who banded together in the 1960s and 1970s to press the government for better treatment. They also recount the story of the Community Action Program of the War on Poverty, where future Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton got their government-funded start in community organizing. These examples and others underpin their argument that instead of a welfare state, activists should aspire to a “solidarity state” that works for participation, repair, and a genuine pluralism.