Avery Kolers
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Solidarity is not joint action

In this chapter, Avery Kolers challenges the argument that solidarity should be understood as a special form of joint action. He uses the example of the famous Trinidadian cricket player Wilton St. Hill. Early in his career, St. Hill faced a choice: he could either play with the lighter-skinned, bourgeois team – Maple – or with the working-class, darker-skinned team – Shannon. Maple actively excluded dark-skinned Blacks. St. Hill decided to throw his lot in with Shannon, despite the greater advantages that a career playing for Maple might offer him. The reason that St. Hill gave was that Maple would ‘not have accepted his brothers’. Kolers argues that St. Hill’s act of identification as such counts as an act of solidarity. He concludes that there can be solidarity without joint action, because St. Hill’s taking sides with the more disadvantaged is a purely individual action and cannot be understood as part of a wider joint action in which Black Trinidadians opposed the racial and colonial caste order.

Andrea Sangiovanni's ambitious and attractive account of the ‘nature, grounds, and value’ of solidarity contributes a great deal to theorizing this elusive concept. My objections to his account come down to the following claim. Sangiovanni has richly and accurately described something people might do in solidarity, and given some reasons they might do it, but he has not isolated the nature of the concept or, consequently, its grounds or value. Solidarity often involves joint action but it is not definitionally a form of joint action; it is better thought of as a kind of team membership through which we are able to engage in a distinctive kind of teamwork. It is most needed not only when traditional bonds weaken but when we lack the capacity to integrate individuals into a corporate agent. Moreover, solidarity often involves identification in important ways, but it is not grounded in identification, and we should be glad it is not. And consequently, solidarity is asymmetric in that the ‘joiners’ do not have the agenda-setting and leadership role that the core members do. And although there are typically pathways through which joiners can become core members, the existence or availability of such pathways is not a necessary condition of solidarity.

Sangiovanni's account fits together as a whole with mutually reinforcing parts. Hence there is a risk that, in making my case, what seem to me to be fundamental challenges will come across as tinkering around the edges. So I begin with an illustration of a real case, then make my argument, and then conclude by laying out what I think an account of solidarity must do, if it is to capture the nature, grounds, and value of the concept.

Maple or Shannon?

In his enigmatic memoir and social history of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, C. L. R. James reflects on the consequences of his choice of which club team to play for. Because colonial Trinidad was riven by class, caste, and racial cleavages, 1 this ‘apparently simple’ decision ‘plunged [him] into a social and moral crisis which had a profound effect on [his] whole future life’ (James 1993, p. 49). The elite Queen's Park club and the White Catholic Shamrock were inaccessible to him due to the facts of his birth; those same facts placed the ‘plebeian’ all-Black Stingo club beneath him. ‘Queen's Park and Shamrock were too high and Stingo was too low. I accepted this as easily in the one case as in the other’ (James 1993, p. 50).

That left him two options: ‘Maple, the club of the brown-skinned middle class’, founded ‘on the principle that they didn't want any dark people in their club’, and Shannon, ‘the club of the black lower-middle class’ (James 1993, p. 50). Hence, although ‘none of these lines was absolute’, James had to choose one or the other of the two social groupings between which there was ‘a continual rivalry, distrust and ill-feeling, which, skilfully played upon by the European peoples, poisons the life of the community’ (James 1993, p. 51). 2 This division was not, however, a rivalry of equals: ‘in a West Indian colony the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself’ (James 1993, p. 52). 3

Though James himself was dark-skinned, his social and familial links with members of the lighter-skinned team gave him options; he opted for Maple.

Faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years. But no one could see that then, least of all me.

(James 1993, p. 53)

Though it seems doubtful that no one could see it at the time, what James failed to appreciate was that his choice was about whom to identify and associate with, whose cause to make his own. He chose to climb. This is a completely understandable choice; few of us do otherwise even in the face of consequences far less momentous than those engendered by colonial social engineering. Even so, it seems – James clearly sees it retrospectively as – a striking failure to do what one ought to do, namely, to choose ‘the popular side’ (by which he means the side of the people).

When James chose to join Maple instead of Shannon or Stingo, he threw in his lot with a higher caste and implicitly – but manifestly – declared that he could not be trusted to side with or still less share the fate of those who were darker skinned. He violated Eugene Debs's admonition that one should not ‘seek to rise from the ranks, but with the ranks’ (Salvatore 1982, p. 292). His error could be criticized on epistemic grounds, since he failed to be aware, at the time, of what was at stake: that ‘the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance’ (James 1993, p. 66). He was arguably also open to ethical criticism insofar as those who were lower down the unjust caste system could object to his failure to stand with them. I want to put aside these evaluative issues and consider the conceptual aspects. For it seems clear that, whatever exactly solidarity is, by choosing Maple, James failed to act in solidarity.

Choosing – or refusing – Maple

Reading Beyond a Boundary, it is intriguing to reflect on what James does and does not make of the choice. He presents the choice in the part of the book that is a memoir of his own cricketing life. The choice confronted him when he left school and had to choose a club team to join. He leaves it there, never really interrogating the ways in which the choice cut him off from ‘the popular side’ and ‘delayed [his] political development’. But the issue returns later, when James is profiling some of the leading players of his era. There one comes across the contrasting case of Wilton St. Hill, who was also offered a place with Maple:

A member of my cricket clique once … said to St. Hill, ‘Maple would be glad to have a man like you.’ The reply was instantaneous. ‘Yes, but they wouldn't want my brothers.’

(James 1993, p. 90)

Unlike St. Hill, James in his youthful ignorance focused on his own preferences and aspirations rather than those of a broader group. He preferred to ‘keep[] company with people lighter in complexion than himself’, even if he didn't think of it politically that way. Instead of choosing ‘the popular side’, he went ‘to the right’. It was a failure of solidarity with the people.

If, like St. Hill, James had refused to play for Maple, he could thereby have identified with a lower caste of Trinidadians. The choice so to identify would have been an act of solidarity. That is, such identification might have been what he did in solidarity; by choosing Shannon or Stingo he could have thereby identified with the dark-skinned working class or lower middle class, making their cause – whatever form it takes, however they pursue it – his own. The choice did not involve discerning his antecedent identification and acting on the basis of it. Rather, in this kind of case, the identification is the solidarity. It might be politically significant to identify that way precisely because the agent in fact, or as a matter of social recognition, does not or need not share that identity. For instance, we might embody a privileged identity but publicly identify with or as a less privileged group. Hence Wilton St. Hill's own skin was light enough for Maple, but since light skin was the criterion, he refused.

To emphasize this point: identification need not be the impetus toward solidarity, it might constitute solidarity. And it's a good thing, too, because antecedent identification is normatively suspect. Accounts of solidarity grounded in antecedent identification standardly face the problem that identification stratifies us vertically and Balkanizes us horizontally. 4 When the status or power of a tenured professor or a surgeon is challenged from below, they find it easiest to kick downward while making common cause with others of their status. When competing social groups confront a shrinking pool of resources, individuals find those who are most saliently like themselves – those for whom the ascent to trustworthiness is least demanding, and who are most likely to share fates whether they want to or not. Such salience, such empirical identification and fate-sharing, is typically heteronomous or ‘given’: we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into groupings along with our coethnics, conationals, professional associations, or those who share our racial and class identities.

One might think this is what we see in St. Hill's case; James indicates that in objecting to Maple, St. Hill was invoking not some wide ‘brotherhood’ of darker-skinned Trinidadians but his own family (James 1993, p. 90). So this might seem to be straightforward identification-based solidarity. But St. Hill did not refuse participation on the national (all-West Indian intercolonial) team just because his brothers were not chosen. He refused to join a color-coded higher-status team because it was color-coded. The (heteronomous) identification gave him a shorthand that would explain his choice to the Maple representative, but the political identification was the act of solidarity.

Though James did not know it at the time, these acts of self-identification were manifest political choices with socially salient consequences. But they were not collective actions. Although solidarity is importantly about us, about how we make it the case that we’re in this together and express that unity to others, such expression is fundamentally the action of individual agents. Solidarity is what we accomplish or manifest by taking action, it is not the action we take.

To say that James failed to be in solidarity may seem harsh; if he didn't know the salience of the choice he was making, how can we blame him? Indeed, given what we know about who he was and what he became, lack of awareness is the only plausible explanation for such a failure. But that's just it; that James could fail to be in solidarity without understanding the situation he is in reflects a crucial feature of the phenomenon, namely, that what solidarity demands of him isn’t up to him. It isn't about him. It isn't about what he intends. The terms of solidarity are set not by the individuals of whom solidarity is demanded, those for whom the question of whether to act in solidarity is at issue, but by the social groups or affected parties whose life chances are most directly at stake – whose adversity needs to be overcome. Often, of course, we play both roles: in later writing for independence from Britain, James was, at one and the same time, acting in solidarity with the independence movement and one of the people who would thereby gain independence as a result of it. Insofar as he participated in the organizing, he was both a subject of solidarity and part of the core or target group. This duality of positions in the context of solidarity often confuses us into thinking that subject is object: that the fundamental agent of solidarity is the we, and that, since identity is a symmetric relationship (x=y iff y=x), then solidarity must be symmetric in the same way (I am with you iff you are with me). But the subject and object positions are analytically distinct. By being in solidarity I may earn the capacity to speak and act as ‘we’. But I am not the arbiter of whether I have earned this capacity. This asymmetry means that attempts at solidarity can fail, for instance if I try to stand with you but you repudiate or shun me.

The choice of which cricket club to join became salient because it mattered to the lower-status people of Trinidad. By being in solidarity with them, St. Hill expressed and manifested his commitment to their cause. He made their cause his. James failed to do the same. His political development was delayed for years because choosing Maple sent him back to square one in being able to earn the right to say ‘we’ and mean we the people of Trinidad.

To summarize these first two sections: solidarity is not grounded in antecedent identification, and it's a good thing, too. In a given case, however, solidarity might consist in the act of identification. This is because the act of identification can be a manifest political choice, an expression of whose lot I'm throwing in with, whose fate I am making my own. Fundamentally, solidarity lies in this act of throwing in my lot with others, and so fundamentally solidarity is an individual act. It is the act through which I can become – and remain, but also become – part of the we. That this is the choice I face is not up to me. The meaning of the choice I make, and the context in which I am required to make it, is not determined by my intentions. By choosing solidarity I do not thereby choose that anyone else is in solidarity with me, and hence, solidarity is not logically symmetric; but by manifesting solidarity I may earn their solidarity in return. This account diverges from Sangiovanni's in each of the respects I have emphasized.

Sangiovanni on solidarity: a definition and a credo

Sangiovanni approaches solidarity as joint intention and mutual commitment, grounded in antecedent identification. By way of definition, he proposes that solidarity is essentially a form of joint action aimed at overcoming a significant adversity that clouds the participants’ shared fate.

Hence for Sangiovanni, 5

a acts in solidarity with b1, b2,… bn iff, on grounds of each agent's identification with one another on some basis or other,

  1. a and each bi intend to do their part in overcoming significant adversity X by pursuing together some more proximate shared goal Y;
  2. a and each bi are individually committed to overcoming X by doing Y, and to not bypassing one another's wills in doing so;
  3. a and each bi are committed to sharing one another's fates in ways relevant to X and Y; and
  4. a and each bi trust one another to follow through on their intention in (i) and to uphold their commitments in (ii) and (iii).

Because of the densely interactive or meshed character of conditions (ii) through (iv), this account of shared agency amounts not just to joint action but to joint intention, mutual trust, and ‘something close to common knowledge’ (p. 63 n. 134). These additional aspects are crucial. Mere joint action includes cases such as that where passengers line up to board a bus, or an electorate chooses a new government. For Sangiovanni, solidarity also entails joint intention, such as cases where two movers haul a couch up a flight of stairs or a duet harmonizes. Joint intention requires a high level of mutual responsiveness and mutual reliance on the other to do their part, a meshing of plans. And solidarity doesn't stop there; the goals and the shared intentions must additionally be the objects of commitments that participants are right to trust; hence if one breaks faith they have not just gone their separate ways but abandoned or betrayed the other.

This strong thesis has important implications on each side. Suppose Sam and Janet are, to take a familiar example, planning to move a couch up a flight of stairs. Abruptly, Janet announces that she doesn't actually feel like helping out, leaving Sam to find a new partner. In the absence of a promise or commitment, and assuming that she does not thereby cause or risk harm to others, Janet would not have wronged anyone by quitting. But solidarity, for Sangiovanni, is not like that precisely because if one agent threw up their hands and said they didn't care about X or Y and would no longer do their part, they would thereby violate their own commitment as well as betray the trust of their comrades, breaking the solidarity relation. This much seems obvious: to wash one's hands of the work is to break solidarity. Crucially, however, the strong thesis also works at the other end. Sam and Janet might haul couches all day without complaint or conflict, responding to one another's cues, safely and reliably furnishing walk-up apartments all over town. But if they did not commit to one another to remain engaged, and hence did not come to trust one another and be trustworthy to remain engaged, then no matter how long they worked together they would not be in solidarity. It would be ‘like Cato's coming into the theatre, only to go out again’ (Locke 1988, II.98). For Sangiovanni, solidarity requires the added glue of commitment, trust, and trustworthiness.

This high degree of mutuality brings with it additional features that Sangiovanni takes to be either essential or noncontingently accidental to solidarity, including a logical symmetry to the solidarity relation – I act in solidarity with you iff you act in solidarity with me – as well as its moral analogue, equality among participants. These features draw a stark contrast between solidarity and charity, which risks demeaning recipients by treating them as mere patients, and servility (where the giver is deferential to the recipient) (p. 57). Neither of these latter relations is either logically or morally symmetric.

All of this mutuality is, though, a lot to ask, and hence, says Sangiovanni, we are likely to be trustworthy in such commitments only when they are spurred by identification: only if I identify with you on some salient basis can I be expected to be committed, trusting, and trustworthy in these ways; only then would I be right to feel betrayed rather than just disappointed or frustrated if you dropped the ball. Identification propels each of us into the we, the plural subject that takes action and advances the cause. If commitment, trust, and trustworthiness are the glue, then identification is the force that brings the glued objects together and holds them until they set.

One analytically attractive feature of Sangiovanni's definition is its multiple realizability, which he underscores by applying the analysis to cases ranging from welfare state solidarism to the transnational BLM to Catholic social teaching. By taking solidarity as a form of joint action and the elements of identification, adversity, action, and shared fate as variables, he provides participants with a portable credo: 6

  1. On the basis of our shared identification as [G], we seek to overcome [A] by doing [Y], and in committing to this course of action we also commit to share our fate of being [F].

Hence those who play their club cricket with Shannon instead of Maple – or Stingo instead of Shannon – might say:

  1. On the basis of our shared colonized and caste-subordinated status, we seek to overcome our debasement at the hands of a colonial elite by making their game ours and beating them at it, and in committing to this course of action we also commit to share our fate by publicly affirming our membership of a lower-status group, and forswearing opportunities to ‘arrive’.

Whereas a member of a union on strike might say:

  1. On the basis of our shared condition of being exploited, we seek to overcome our intolerable working conditions by striking for a better contract, and in committing to do so we also commit to share our fate by enduring together a work-stoppage, temporary hardship, and a risk of longer-term or serious physical and economic harms.

Who are we?

One thing these credos lay bare is that the subject of the sentence elides two senses of ‘we’ – an aggregate sense and a distributive sense. It is we in the aggregate who share a condition and are working to overcome adversity. The analysis of joint action explains how this collective work is realized. But it is not we in the aggregate who commit to share our fates despite having an opportunity to ‘arrive’ or to cross the picket line, and thus avoid the shared fate; it is we in the sense of each of us. G. A. Cohen famously illustrates this distinction with the analogy of ten people locked in a room such that one and only one could escape, but if anyone did, the means of escape would no longer be available to the rest (Cohen 1983, p. 9). In Cohen's case, we in the aggregate are stuck in the room, even though we in the distributive sense – each of us – are free to leave. Solidarity lies in each of us eschewing this option. Hence Sangiovanni has not quite escaped the idea that the agent of solidarity is fundamentally I rather than we.

Put otherwise: if we win our struggle, then we will share our fate in virtue of all being out of Cohen's locked room, all having abolished caste domination, etc. But this – collective success – is not the fate we have to pledge to share. 7 The fates we have to pledge to share are, for as long as the struggle continues, the adversity we're trying to overcome and the burdens of the struggle itself, and, if we lose, the costs of having rebelled. It would make no sense for we in the aggregate to pledge to share fates.

Sangiovanni could reply that, although the ‘we’ is grammatically ambiguous in this way, identification glues us together and makes it possible for each to affirm that the ‘we’ is also ‘I’. By making the cause my own I eliminate the distinction between each and all. After all, x=y iff y=x.

The cases of C. L. R. James and Wilton St. Hill showed that identification is both morally risky and conceptually inapt for serving this purpose. But Sangiovanni might reply that I did not appreciate the pluralistic character of identification. For him, identification is not heteronomously imposed from without, it is autonomous or freely affirmed. We are not doomed to be whomever we get lumped in with by the sum on our paychecks or the check-boxes for ‘race’ on census forms. To the contrary; the movement gives us an opportunity to find our people, and our own place among them.

The key to this reply is that Sangiovanni does not think that every member needs to identify on the same basis; instead, identifications can function as an ‘overlapping consensus’. I identify with some of my comrades as suffering exploitation, with others as sharing a role, with still others by a shared identification with the cause, and so on, but solidarity remains possible as long as all of these modes of identification converge on a single ‘we’, whatever each person's grounds might be with respect to every other participant. For example, consider my union – the United Campus Workers (UCW) of Kentucky. 8 Though it lacks collective bargaining rights and so is more like an affinity organization than a traditional labor union, the UCW stands for and offers to represent anyone who is employed in a postsecondary educational institution or teaching hospital in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. On its face, identification could go either of two ways. It could take a collective object, or a web of individual objects.

Because his account is methodologically individualistic in the sense that there is nothing to the ‘we’ except the shared agency created through joint intention, Sangiovanni must mean that we identify with one another as individuals. Hence, for him, identification-with is a web of individual relations between I and you, I and him, I and her, you and him, you and her, she and him, and so on. Then Sangiovanni could explain my solidarity with the UCW as follows. With fellow faculty members I identify by role; with other employees at my campus I identify on the basis of workplace. Many nonacademic staff and adjunct faculty are deeply exploited, and hence may mutually identify on the basis of that condition, but I am not (or do not identify as) deeply exploited, so this cannot ground my identification with them. Yet I can identify with them, and they with me, on the basis of the cause we share, namely, justice for campus workers, or advancing the enterprise of higher education. Some of my faculty colleagues feel deeply exploited but the nonacademic staff and adjunct faculty do not believe they are; hence these faculty identify with the nonacademic staff on the basis of condition (as exploited) while the latter identify with these faculty members on the basis of a shared cause. Each person needs to have some basis or other for identifying with each of the other members, but not everyone need have the same basis, and each may have multiple bases for identifying with various others, and their bilateral link may be impelled by different identifications for each. This is key: because my identification with you might be different from yours with me, successful identification generates a crisscrossing system of unilateral relations each of which is reciprocated by the same or a different identification but not symmetric.

Unfortunately, this crisscrossing plurality of bases for identification causes problems of its own. In the first place, it implies that a group may be ‘gappy’ if it is made up of some who are not genuinely in solidarity, since one or more others do not identify with them on any basis. This failure of mutuality would taint the collective action that constitutes solidarity because, since you don't buy the basis of my identification, you don't trust my commitment and you don't commit not to bypass my will; that relative mistrust may or may not be a matter of common knowledge. I might mistakenly think I am fully accepted as one of the proletariat because I identify as such, but you look at me as petit bourgeois and suspect that I will be bought off when the going gets tough. Solidarity is then not achieved, or perhaps it characterizes only a subset of the group. 9

Sangiovanni could reply that this poisonous gappiness is an unfortunate fact of life. And this is plausibly true: solidarity is hard to achieve and harder to maintain. But this generates two further problems. First, it throws into question one of the signature aspects of his account, namely, its generality. For can we really then say that solidarism could characterize the welfare state, or that Catholic solidarity is anything more than a pipe dream? The relations between BLM supporters worldwide are also in some question due to anonymity and weak ties. Much apparent solidarity has to be recast as quasi-solidarity or pseudo-solidarity: successful collective actions that were coordinated efforts to overcome adversity but lacked one or more of the requisite mutual trust, mutual commitment, mutual identification, or common knowledge of these. Put otherwise, Sangiovanni's formula may indicate an ideal type, at most, but not a definition.

The second problematic implication is more fundamental. Recall that Sangiovanni treats symmetry as both a logical and a moral feature of the solidarity relation. If movements can be gappy then there will be a core group of genuine solidaries – those who are unquestionably identifiable as the most affected, the ones whose lives are literally on the line; and they will be surrounded or backed by those with weaker or unilateral ties of identification, commitment, and trust. The former group's status relative to the struggle is most central, their say-so is the crucial condition of moving forward with an action, and so on; the relationship between the former and the latter is essentially and importantly asymmetric.

A situation like this became explicit in the US in the summer of 2020, when support actions such as the doctors’ ‘White Coats for Black Lives’, the teachers’ ‘Educators for Black lives’, and so on, were all instances of solidarity efforts that required, and were explicitly called upon to affirm, coordination with and approval by Black leadership. In Louisville, where I live, marching to (what came to be called) Injustice Square – a downtown plaza formally named for a slaveholder who was the third president of the US – was a standard mode of expressing solidarity with BLM, yet the square was movement property, such that if you planned to march there you needed an accountability partner from within the core group. Sangiovanni would have to say that the ‘White Coats’ and the Educators and all the other solidarity marches were not in fact instances of solidarity because there was a very clear system of deference to those most affected. On his view this is a violation of the equality that is essential to solidarity. But that is a category mistake. Solidarity is attractive when it affirms equality, and those who are in solidarity affirm equality by deferring to the judgment of those whose lives are most directly on the line, by affirming their leadership and agency in the struggle. It is the solidaries who refuse to bypass the will of the most-affected, typically not the other way around. This deference is specifically what distinguishes solidarity from free-floating support and sympathy or more standard coalition building.

Sangiovanni rejects deference on grounds that it makes the relationship subservient and anti-egalitarian. This is a false dichotomy. Consider the Educators for Black Lives I mentioned a moment ago. In the summer of 2020, the Educators’ role was deferential with respect to Black leadership in Injustice Square. But a few years earlier, when the right-wing then-governor was making war on public education, roles were reversed; it was the teachers’ struggle that brought ‘Red for Ed’ marches to the State House. Deferring to BLM about ‘Red for Ed’ would have been odd and inappropriate. This says nothing at all about whether each group is the other's moral equal; it says something about which struggle is being joined, and who is on the ‘front lines’ of that struggle. To put it in terms of (my gloss on) Sangiovanni's definition, if adversity X is experienced directly by a, and the bi join in solidarity with a, then while engaged in a’s struggle, the bi ought to defer to a's judgment about whether a given contract offer is fair or acceptable, or whether a particular police reform is to be supported, and about tactics to be adopted in the struggle. If a asks the bi to boycott, then they should boycott; if a asks them to rally, then they should rally; to post on social media, they should do that; and so on. The accountability simply does not run in the other direction in the same way. It's not that a is unaccountable to the bi , but a's accountability is more restricted since what's on the table right now is a's struggle. Now suppose one of the bi , call her Betty, becomes deeply and extensively engaged, going out of her way to participate in organizing and deliberation. Betty may then emerge as a core member in developing plans and so on; she can become an honorary part of a through continuous solidarity, earning the right to speak as part of the ‘we’. Even then, however, insofar as her exit potential is greater, for instance if she is White or not a teacher, Betty must remain cognizant of the primacy of Black leadership or the organized teachers, respectively, in shaping the movement and determining what risks to take and costs to bear. Here, a has priority in determining which adversity to try to overcome, what strategy to adopt in trying to overcome it, and what tactics to choose in implementing that strategy. This does not mean that the bi are subservient but it does mean that they should defer on these questions. When the shoe is on the other foot, then the roles will be reversed.

To be sure, if the bi try to give a their solidarity but a rejects it, then solidarity does not occur despite the bi s’ best intentions. In that sense solidarity needs requital. But it doesn't follow that solidarity is a symmetric relationship because the fact that the bi are in solidarity with a – pushing to overcome a's adversity – does not imply that a is symmetrically in solidarity with them. The bi can be in solidarity with a even if it would be strained, at best, for a to claim to be in solidarity with the bi . For example, BLM went out of their way to acknowledge, embrace, and include participants from a wide variety of organizations and walks of life, giving people opportunities to get involved and thanking them for their solidarity. But does it follow that the members of BLM were in that instance and in the same respects symmetrically in solidarity with the White Coats and the Educators? I suppose Sangiovanni could stand on this point. But I think this mistakes how solidarity works and feels. Solidarity does require uptake and recognition; if BLM had shunned the Educators or responded to them with Strawsonian ‘objective attitudes’, the Educators’ solidarity would have failed. Uptake is a necessary condition. But symmetry is not.

So what is solidarity, then?

As I understand it, the core idea of solidarity is manifest, consequential, autonomous unification. To unpack:

  • Manifest: The unification is realized somehow, not just in the aspirations or sympathies of an agent. I might manifest solidarity by participating in collective action, but I might also manifest it through what I wear or eat, where I go, how I wear my hair, whom I associate with, or which identities I affirm.
  • Consequential: How one's life goes afterward is, in some way, affected by what one chose in this instance: you threw your lot in with someone, and now you share their fate in some way. Failure to be in solidarity, by contrast, can amount to a betrayal in part because one extricates oneself from the previously shared fate, like a ship's captain leaping into the lifeboat and leaving the passengers stranded.
  • Autonomous: Solidarity is unification that could have been otherwise: those who act in solidarity are (empirically) free to do otherwise than join up. This is why solidarity is, as Sangiovanni says, an issue in the ethics of association.
  • Unification: Adhesion or teamwork: many becoming as one, for purposes of identification or action. Team reasoning replaces individualized reasoning; each chooses a course of action by asking, ‘what does the movement need me to do right now?’  10 This may but need not be, and most often is not, full-on joint intention. Formal corporate agents do not require solidarity. 11 It is needed precisely because we are not that integrated.

For C. L. R. James, the question of solidarity was whether to choose ‘the popular side’ or go ‘to the right’: with whom should he throw in his lot? His (retrospectively self-ascribed) error lay in choosing the latter, and thereby manifesting an intention to avoid the fate of the dark-skinned lower middle class in hopes of eventually ‘arriving’ by associating with the lighter-skinned caste. By choosing Shannon or Stingo he would have autonomously manifested his adhesion with the outgroup, in ways that would have had significant consequences for his future. But he would not thereby have been jointly intending to overcome significant adversity on the basis of antecedent identification. 12

1 As well as level-of-play cleavages, which he leaves aside; that he would play for a ‘first class’ club ‘was clear’. See James 1993, p. 49.
2 Quoting James 1933, p. 8.
3 Quoting James 1933, p. 8.
4 This issue is most powerfully confronted in Dean 1996.
5 What follows is my gloss on his formula. I am grateful to Andrea Sangiovanni (in personal communication) for endorsing this restatement.
6 This is my gloss on Sangiovanni (p. 66). I am again grateful to Andrea Sangiovanni for endorsing this restatement, in personal communication.
7 To be more precise, on Sangiovanni's view success can't be the fate we have to pledge to share. On my own view it might be, in the sense that, since I might join up deferentially, I can thereby commit to share the fate of living in a world that goes worse for me, prudentially, than the current one. This is what (antecedently advantaged) class traitors and (White) race traitors presumably do when they join poor people's social movements and movements for racial emancipation and equality.
8 www.ucwkentucky.org (accessed 12 January 2022).
9 Sangiovanni might reply that we can identify on the basis of cause, and these problems fall away. (At p. 91 n. 189 he ascribes such an account to me in order to draw my view under the umbrella of identification.) I think this is a nonstarter. Identification was supposed to be the basis of commitment, trust, and trustworthiness: a relation directly between persons. I see myself in you and you in me. Identification on the basis of cause redirects identification away from the particular others and toward an abstraction or the goal of the action. This makes such identification an altogether different beast. Further, Sangiovanni defines ‘identification with a cause’ in terms of commitment to the cause (pp. 14–15). But identification was required in order to spur commitment. Moreover, two people who are both committed to a cause may be quite bitterly opposed in how to pursue it, and may diverge in their politics even as they recognize one another as worthy adversaries based on their shared passion for, say, health justice or an improved social safety net or whatever.
10 On team reasoning see Gold and Sugden 2007.
11 I have in mind the kind of agent described in List and Pettit 2011.
12 I am grateful to Andrea Sangiovanni for clarification of some aspects of his view, to Adam Kolers for helping me think through the response, and to John Gibson for his comments on a previous draft.

References

Cohen, G. A. (1983), ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 12: 3–33.

Dean, J. (1996), Solidarity of Strangers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Gold, N. and R. Sugden (2007), ‘Collective Intentions and Team Agency’, Journal of Philosophy 104: 109–37.

James, C. L. R. (1933), The Case for West-Indian Self-government.

James, C. L. R. (1993), Beyond a Boundary, 50th Anniversary Edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

List, C. and P. Pettit (2011), Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (New York: Oxford University Press).

Locke, J. (1988), Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Salvatore, N. (1982), Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

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Solidarity – Nature, grounds, and value

Andrea Sangiovanni in dialogue

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