Introduction

A few weeks after COVID-19 began its deadly embrace in Italy, prompting a lockdown that severely disrupted social life and the economy, a couple of community activists lowered ‘solidarity baskets’ in the city center of Naples, with the note, ‘Those who can, put something in, those who can't, help yourself’ (Poggioli 2020). In the face of isolating and uncertain circumstances, as well as various kinds of hardships wrought by the pandemic, there have been many such examples of people and communities devising creative ways of coming together to offer mutual aid and assistance to those in need. ¹ At the same time, globally, the lack of solidarity on ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines is blatant. Although effective global vaccination would help to halt virus transmission and mutations, by the end of 2021, only ‘2.6 per cent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, compared to 66.6 per cent of people in high-income countries’ (United Nations 2021, p. 4). At the time of writing, six months later, it is not much better: 2.8 billion people in the world still have not received even one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, making them more vulnerable to severe illness and death, and disproportionately increasing hardships in low-income countries, including major economic setbacks and political disruptions (United Nations 2022). ²

These examples of successes and failures of solidarity in the struggle to alleviate the toll of the pandemic generate perplexing and urgent questions about the value of solidarity as a social practice. On the one hand, solidarity seems like a reliable and virtuous social practice that affirms the bonds of social identification and attachment in contexts of adversity, generating collective action that extends the boundaries of social obligation, and may even prompt their transformation towards greater equity and inclusion. The solidarity baskets in Naples affirm to poorer residents that they do not suffer alone, that the fate of the disadvantaged is of common concern to the whole, that everyone is in it together. On the other hand, solidarity seems most rare and fickle where it is most needed, that is, in contexts of adversity marked by deep structural injustice, where the bonds of communal attachments or identification are rigidly segregated, demotivating action that could aid in dismantling the barriers posed by structural domination or oppression. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ on the part of wealthy nations since the start of the pandemic has pointedly exposed the limits of solidarity, and the role of exclusionary identification in stymying wider cooperation, despite the fact that global vaccination would produce a win-win outcome of minimizing virus mutations (Bollyky and Brown 2020).

Andrea Sangiovanni's essay provides us with a clear and compelling analytic account of the concept of solidarity, focusing on its two core elements of identification and joint action. His account is useful for identifying practices of solidarity empirically, and distinguishing them from acts of charity/altruism, love, and justice. His essay also provides a lucid account of the potential normative role of solidarity in contemporary moral, social, and political life, highlighting its instrumental and non-instrumental value to agents’ flourishing in associational life. In this short commentary, I build on Sangiovanni's account to address some issues that arise when considering the value of solidarity in contexts of structural injustice. Although he does not address this question directly, Sangiovanni's analysis of the concept of solidarity can help to explain why, despite its potential to be instrumental for achieving greater justice, solidarity as a social practice often fails to materialize effectively to dismantle deep and pervasive structural injustice. The reasons, I posit, have to do with how structural injustices affect agents’ intersubjectivity and the contours of their schemas for identification, with implications for their opportunities and capacities for joint action. If solidarity as a social practice is predicated on social structural processes that mediate identification and joint action, we can locate the reasons for morally objectionable failures of identification and joint action in unjust social structures.

Focusing on the social structures that mediate, enable, and constrain identification and joint action allows us also to make sense of the structural reasons why individuals may be inhibited from forming the epistemic, affective, and normative attitudes that would ground their joint action with others resisting injustice, oppression, or domination. In this light, I think we can understand better how calls for solidarity by various social movements are related to calls to dismantle structural injustice. While Sangiovanni aptly distinguishes the demands of solidarity and justice (with the latter understood as institutional morality or enforceable duties), I consider how the demands of solidarity can themselves be constitutive of social structural justice, and how showing a lack of solidarity can itself be morally objectionable or blameworthy. This is because lack of solidarity with the oppressed may be based on a moral failure to acknowledge the oppressed as agents who have interests in and entitlements to equal freedom, dignity, and/or respect. In such cases, even if members of a privileged group share in solidaristic associational life towards a good end, the non-instrumental value of such solidarity is necessarily limited, and even questionable. Although I am sympathetic to Sangiovanni's account of the instrumental and non-instrumental value of solidarity (for an assumed good end), assessing solidarity's value in contexts of structural injustice is more complicated than his analysis suggests. Ultimately, one may be more ambivalent about the instrumental or non-instrumental value of solidarity as a social practice in contexts of deep and pervasive structural injustice.

Structural injustice and the instrumental value of solidarity

According to Sangiovanni, solidarity is a part of ‘associational ethics – the ethics of life in associations and within social relationships that extend beyond relations among intimates’ (p. 117). While fellow-feeling may motivate solidarity, the nature of solidarity consists of ‘joint action characterized by a typical profile of commitments, intentions, and attitudes, and triggered by, inter alia, an identification with others on the basis of a shared cause, role, way of life, condition, or set of experiences’ (p. 5). Distinct from altruism/charity, love, and justice, solidarity is

As Sangiovanni notes, his concept of solidarity is a unified account that is meant to be useful for distinguishing practices of solidarity from other phenomena such as love, charity, or justice, as well as for developing normative and empirical conceptions of solidarity. With his account, we can better describe and explain solidarity as a social practice in the empirical world, and also better evaluate or make sense of its normative function and value in moral, social, and political life.

When considering the value of solidarity as a social practice, however, a puzzle arises. As Sangiovanni observes, although solidarity as he has conceptualized it may not always have normative value, especially when it is practiced to promote wicked ends, contemporary social movements typically call for solidarity on the expectation that it can be ‘a crucial motivating factor in realizing principles of justice’ (p. 115). The puzzle is why solidarity does not work, or become operational, as an instrumentally effective practice in all contexts or against all forms of structural injustice. What are the conditions in which solidarity gains emancipatory or egalitarian potential to reform or revolutionize social relations towards greater social justice? Sangiovanni's clarification of the main components of solidarity – identification and joint action – is helpful not only for identifying solidaristic practices empirically, but also for understanding why solidarity may or may not be forthcoming in response to various social and political crises. Understanding the reasons for failures of solidarity, however, raises questions about the instrumental value of solidarity in contexts of structural injustice.

To get at these questions about the relationship between solidarity and structural injustice, we can revisit the historical practices of solidarity that Sangiovanni describes in section 2. To construct his account, Sangiovanni engages with solidarity as a historical social practice, ‘a lived system of norms, rules, and expectation that gives rise to new self-understandings, new concepts, and new possibilities for collective action and social relation within complex, modern societies’ (p. 33). Historically, ‘solidarity names an egalitarian, mutualistic, and cooperative practice among strangers, whose aim is to overcome significant forms of adversity in an era when traditional social ties […] have weakened’ (p. 34). The ‘language of solidarity emerges as a response to growing anxiety regarding the expansion of commercial society, large-scale industry, and perceived collapse of traditional communities’ (p. 35). It called on citizens to identify ‘with one another on the basis of their role in sustaining and reproducing the division of labor’ (p. 38). Solidarity, historically, was about joining together with others, based on a shared, common, or joint affinity or identity, to solve collective social, economic, and/or political problems in mutually supportive or reciprocal ways.

Sangiovanni rightly argues that the value of solidarity is ‘deeply bound up with the history of egalitarianism as a collective struggle’ (p. 62). The historical and contemporary cases he discusses – solidarism, socialism, nationalism, Christianity, and social movements such as feminism and civil rights – can all be described as engendering ‘collective agency and transformative mobilization’ (p. 65) among strangers. These ‘core’ cases, for Sangiovanni, are paradigmatic examples of the social unity that solidarity as a social practice engenders:

While Sangiovanni implicitly evaluates his ‘core’ cases of solidarity as normatively valuable, and shows convincingly that the history of solidarity as a social practice is bound up with the history of egalitarian struggle, one interesting part of the history of egalitarianism that is not really mentioned in his account is their limited or selective nature. Although he is right that normatively, solidarity is valuable when the social unity it expresses is based on a common recognition that the flourishing of all is necessary for the flourishing of each, this normative aspiration was not instantiated by any of Sangiovanni's core historical cases. Including the inegalitarian history of egalitarianism, I think, is instructive for illuminating the barriers posed by structural injustice to solidaristic practices. Doing so also exposes the limits of the transformative potential of solidarity as a social practice, especially in the face of deep structural injustice.

Perhaps most obviously, nationalism as a shared identification in an imagined community is a morally complicated expression of solidarity in the modern world. While Ernst Renan described the nation as ‘a great solidarity’ (une grande solidarité), he and other nineteenth-century nationalists were also known to have fused national identification with racial hierarchy: ‘nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race … a race of tillers of the soil, the Negroes [sic]; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race’. ³ Even the history of liberal nationalism cannot be told without the context of global White supremacy (Mills 2019, p. 103).

Consider also the French Revolution, a paradigmatic case of egalitarian struggle that called for a new egalitarian basis of fraternity and solidarity in the face of the collapse of the ancien régime. Yet the African-American scholar Anna Julia Cooper noted in her historical study that the French revolutionists had not considered extending their liberatory struggle to enslaved Blacks in France's most lucrative colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Cooper shows that Blacks in Haiti had engaged in several slave revolts, in 1679, 1691, 1703, and 1758, that preceded the French and American revolutions. Yet politicians in France and White colonists in Saint-Domingue consistently overlooked and underestimated the capacities of the Blacks and the gens de couleur, and could not believe that the enslaved Blacks would revolt, even when it was happening everywhere. ⁴ Why did the French revolutionists not engage solidaristically with the enslaved to deepen the revolution?

One reason seems to be that they did not see Blacks as equals or even as agents, who are capable of sharing in a republican political project, a convenient belief that made the French republic consistent with slavery and empire. ⁵ If solidarity as a social practice holds the potential to transform social relations in a more inclusive, egalitarian direction, the case of the French revolutionists on slavery shows that deep structural injustices of racial hierarchy and anti-Black racism can pose a barrier to developing any identification based on shared experiences, conditions, and fates, cutting off the prospects of solidarity across the racial divide. Recovering this history of egalitarian struggle may generate more ambivalence, not only about the value of solidarity but, more significantly, about its potential to support radical structural transformations. For how can solidarity as a form of joint action grounded in identification be transformative of unjust social relations, when those relations and their attendant schemas of identification are embedded in unjust structures that deny the very agency of the oppressed? If solidarity is a special form of joint action grounded in identification, then to be operationalized, it already presupposes some level of equality between those who identify, or some level of recognition of others as the kinds of agents with whom one can engage in joint actions.

Sangiovanni's account helps us to focus on identification as a fundamental component of solidaristic practices and, for my purposes, raises the question of why building identification among agents in different social positions is so difficult in contexts of deep structural injustice. If solidarity is grounded in identification, but identification itself is produced and grounded in social structures, then the challenging question is how solidarity can motivate individuals to dismantle the structural injustices that mediate and condition their identification or their boundaries. It may be that for solidarity to serve any emancipatory role, it must not only broaden notions of self (beyond narrow self-interest), but must involve disorienting and even destroying the social identities that entrench certain structures of injustice and their attendant barriers to shared identification. For example, BLM is a slogan that aims not for inclusivity of Black people in the social order but, more provocatively, to reveal and counter the racial logic of White supremacy underlying the current social order (in which Black lives are dispensable). Sangiovanni argues that solidarity ‘gives rise to new self-understandings, new concepts, and new possibilities for collective action and social relation within complex, modern societies’ (p. 33), but it seems that before solidarity can forge new identities, it needs some old identities to be destroyed. Solidarity against racism and for a racially just society and world, for example, would require repudiating the ideology of White supremacy, just as solidarity with the poor requires endorsing a shared understanding of poverty as a political problem of oppressive or unjust social structures, and of the poor as agents rather than passive recipients of aid (Deveaux 2021, p. 201).

Such transformations of intersubjectivity are harder to accomplish than one might think. As Sangiovanni observes, identifying with others is a transformative endeavour: ‘When I identify with another, my imagining and sympathizing with their life is not just a way of learning about them but a way of modifying or transforming myself in the process’ (p. 12). To identify with Indigenous peoples and their struggles, however, may require imagining myself as a settler in a settler-colonial society, and giving up my self-image as an immigrant who successfully integrated into a liberal egalitarian and multicultural society, which can be a deeply unsettling and painful transformation. To identify with the poor and their struggles may require imagining myself as a beneficiary of global and domestic social structures that produce their subordination, and giving up my self-image as a hard-working person whose gains are largely attributable to my own ambitions and efforts.

Sangiovanni is right to argue that identification does not require sharing interests or values (p. 102), but as Iris Marion Young noted, ‘for every structural injustice there is an alignment of powerful entities whose interests are served by those structures’ (Young 2011, p. 148). A significant method of entrenching structural hierarchies of domination is to socialize agents into being attached to ideologies and narratives that produce epistemic distortions and biases which combine to rationalize the denial, dismissal, or inhibition of the agency of those who are marginalized, dominated, or oppressed by the social structure. One salient effect of structural injustice is thus to stymy agents’ capacities to foster identification as a basis for joint action against structural injustice.

Indeed, the kind of identification required to foster solidarity may even be hard to establish among those who are victims of structural injustice. Although Sangiovanni is right that victims of oppression can identify with their oppression, such identification can be crippling or burdensome rather than empowering. As Judith Shklar noted, ‘Most people hate to think of themselves as victims; after all, nothing could be more degrading. Most of us would rather reorder reality than admit that we are the helpless objects of injustice’ (Shklar 1990, p. 38). For this reason, building solidarity as a sustainable social practice among the oppressed is a real political achievement, and requires critical political conscious-raising as a precondition (Deveaux 2021, pp. 113–26).

To take seriously the social structural processes that shape individual and group identification generates a conundrum for those who seek to build solidarity in contexts of structural injustice. To produce solidarity, understood as joint action grounded in identification, agents need to identify with each other; but structural injustice precisely produces social positions that obstruct identification with the causes or conditions of those vulnerable to or suffering from structural injustice. In this sense, structural injustice produces forms of identification-based joint action that tend toward the reproduction of domination and oppression. Understanding how solidaristic practices are embedded in and fortify structural injustice generates a more sober view of the instrumental potential of solidarity in struggles against deep and pervasive structural injustice.

Structural injustice and the non-instrumental value of solidarity

While Sangiovanni understands solidarity to refer to ‘a social, interpersonal relation, constituted […], by a characteristic set of other-regarding attitudes, behaviours, norms and dispositions’ (p. 9), he notes that solidarity is not the same as justice, whether justice is understood as the ‘domain of institutional morality […] or of enforceable duties’ (p. 112). Indeed, he offers several ways in which solidarity may go beyond justice, as well as assist or motivate justice; in addition, he also offers some ways in which the normative demands of solidarity may be more narrow than justice, and even go against justice. As a part of associational ethics, solidarity may or may not be instrumental for justice, in the same way that the associational ethics of friendship may or may not be consistent with the demands of justice.

Sangiovanni asserts that part of the reason why solidarity cannot be an enforceable duty is that the ‘nature of our identifications is intimate and personal’ (p. 117); for this reason, ‘there is very little non-prudential normative pressure that we can put on another to identify’ (p. 116). He argues that ‘the normative, epistemic, and affective degree of commitment required by solidarity far outstrips what is required – by way of our attitudes rather than our actions – to meet the demands of justice’ (p. 117). While true, I think Sangiovanni misses an opportunity to confront the problem of lack of solidarity as a problem of justice, and not only of associational ethics.

Understanding the lack of solidarity as a failing of justice helps to make sense of many contemporary calls for solidarity by progressive social movements. Some calls for solidarity consider it a vital instrument for achieving greater justice or overcoming injustice. For example, Carol Gould has argued that calls for solidarity in bioethics and healthcare literatures have not sufficiently taken into account the impact of structural injustices: ‘Systemic forms of injustice militate against adequate healthcare for all, and suggest the need for solidaristic action to struggle against and to remedy existing entrenched inequalities’ (Gould 2018, p. 542). In addition to this instrumental view of solidarity, some calls to take ‘political responsibility for solidarity’ with the oppressed imply that solidarity is itself constitutive of justice (Young 2011; Deveaux 2021, pp. 129–202). They are appeals to identify with others, often those who are oppressed, dominated, marginalized, or exploited, as a matter of justice, and to commit to joint actions to support their claims or causes, in ways that recognize them as agents with whom one can engage in jointly reciprocal action (Gould 2020; Deveaux 2021). The conception of justice in social movement discourses refers not mainly to institutional morality or enforceable duties, but to a broader conception of justice that goes beyond formal rules and institutions, and engages with ‘all social processes that support or undermine oppression, including culture’ (Young 1990, p. 149).

As Iris Marion Young argued, structural injustices such as racism and sexism are not only instantiated in formal or discursive discriminatory practices. Rather, they structure and mediate the way that individuals’ intimate and personal identifications are constituted, thus ‘unconscious reactions are more widespread than discursive prejudice. Judgements of beauty or ugliness, attraction or aversion, cleverness or stupidity, competence or ineptness, and so on are made unconsciously in interactive contexts and in generalized media culture, often mark, stereotype, devalue, degrade some groups’ (Young 1990, p. 151). While attitudinal changes cannot be compelled through enforceable duties, I think Young's account of structural oppression can help supplement Sangiovanni's argument by pointing out that lack of solidarity is a moral failing in contexts where it is a symptom of the effects of structurally unjust schemas of identification. Young's call for political responsibility for structural justice includes changing ‘cultural habits’. Taking such responsibility requires individuals to become aware of and change their ‘actions, habits, feelings, attitudes, images, associations’; thus, to call on individuals to contribute to dismantling structural injustice ‘is to ask the person from now on to submit such unconscious behaviour to reflection, to work to change habits and attitudes’ (Young 1990, p. 151).

Structural injustice also complicates the assessment of solidarity's non-instrumental value. Sangiovanni argues that solidarity ‘instantiates a form of non-instrumentally valuable cooperation in which we each participate in the complementary excellences of all, and take pleasure in the collective realization of ends that none of us could achieve alone’ (p. 123). In the right conditions, ‘solidarity is non-instrumentally good, but it is non-instrumentally good for us, by which I mean that, in the right conditions, solidarity makes our life better’ (p. 105). At the same time, when discussing this non-instrumental value, he notes that ‘the non-instrumental value of the trusting, cooperative you-and-me reciprocal activity constitutive of solidarity is … conditional on the value of the ends it promotes. If the ends are wicked – as we are assuming the ends of the Mafiosi are – then the solidarity enacted to realize them becomes disvaluable as well. This goes for all forms of solidarity bent to wicked ends: racist groups, terrorist cells, xenophobic nationalists, and so on’ (p. 111). Furthermore, ‘If solidarity's ends are good, the non-instrumental value is all the greater; if they are bad, then its non-instrumental value is all the worse’ (p. 112). The non-instrumental value of solidarity, then, is normatively parasitic on the value of the ends it promotes.

Sangiovanni implies that if the ends of associations are morally permissible or good, then solidarity has non-instrumental value. The impact of structural injustice, however, may complicate this assessment. Can the ends of associations be considered good without an examination of the larger structural contexts in which they are embedded? What are the conditions in which solidaristic associational life is non-instrumentally good for us? Is solidarity (for an assumed good end) non-instrumentally good for those who participate in it, even in contexts of structural injustice?

Consider the Catholic Church and its members in Canada. After a week-long ‘penitential pilgrimage’ of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples in Canada in July 2022, Pope Francis called the Indian Residential School system and forced assimilation policies ‘genocide’, ⁶ and apologized for the Church's participation in running the schools in Canada. In the 2006 court-mandated settlement, the Church promised to contribute to healing and reconciliation efforts through a fundraising campaign for $25 million. ⁷ The campaign raised only $3.7 million. Over the same period of the fundraising campaign, the Church paid $128 million to renovate St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica in Toronto, ‘30 times what was raised for residential school survivors’ healing programs’. ⁸ Catholics express a robust solidarity within their own community in ways that are admirable and fulfill the criteria of other-regarding joint action, but as a group, their lack of solidarity with Indigenous peoples reveals something less praiseworthy about the mutuality of Catholic associational life. In settler-colonial contexts of longstanding anti-Indigenous structural injustice, what can the lack of solidarity shown by Catholics to the plight of Indigenous peoples in Canada reveal other than a fundamental lack of acknowledgment of Indigenous people as the kind of agents who are entitled to equal worth, dignity, and respect?

Although the Catholic Church and Catholics arguably can be said to be promoting good ends, it would be difficult to argue that the solidarity of Catholics is morally commendable or non-instrumentally valuable, except from the internal perspective of those who benefit from the association. From an external point of view, the benefits of such solidarity may even be viewed as morally blameworthy. When assessing the non-instrumental value of solidarity, then, in addition to the condition identified by Sangiovanni – that associations do not promote bad or wicked ends – we should also add the condition that the solidaristic practice is at least not perpetuating structural injustice.

Perhaps Sangiovanni would respond that Catholics have moral reasons, even duties, to support collective actions of repair, whether or not they identify with Indigenous peoples and their struggles. If the Catholic Church were ordered by the courts to pay compensation or reparations, for example, such action could be required by justice and the duty to pay would be enforceable, but would not constitute solidarity. I agree with this assessment that solidarity is not an enforceable duty, but my point is that we cannot straightforwardly evaluate Catholic solidarity in these circumstances as non-instrumentally valuable. Even though such solidarity is not promoting a wicked end, its selective basis perpetuates the structural indignity ⁹ of Indigenous peoples, which thus nullifies its value. It is due to Sangiovanni's lucid account of the egalitarian ethos of solidarity as a social practice that we can see more clearly how deep a moral failure the lack of Catholic solidarity with Indigenous peoples is.

Conclusion

Wherever groups face adversity, especially in conditions of injustice, oppression, or domination, we hear calls for solidarity. I have argued that such calls for solidarity can be understood as components of a wider conception of social structural justice. Clarifying the relationship between solidarity and structural injustice helps us to understand why solidarity in practice may buttress social justice claims in some contexts, while stymying such efforts in others. Structural injustice is a major reason why individuals are inhibited from forming the epistemic, affective and normative attitudes that would ground their joint action with others resisting injustice, oppression, or domination. In addition, by focusing on the structural conditions in which solidarity is practiced, we can better assess the value of solidarity as a social practice, which is based not only on the worthiness of an association's ends, but also on its contribution to the perpetuation or dismantling of structural injustice.

The paradox of solidarity is that for it to be a virtuous social practice, it would presuppose largely just social relations, but if social relations were just, then solidarity in social relations would not be fundamentally transformative but merely expressive of the moral reciprocity instantiated in a just society. In contexts of structural injustice, however, associational life will be distorted or corrupted in ways that also undermine the value of solidarity as a social practice. Thus, while valuable to some, solidarity will precisely fail where structural injustice is deep and pervasive enough to sever the bonds of identification that are needed to ground solidarity as an emancipatory social practice.

In assessing the instrumental value of solidarity for dismantling deep and pervasive structural injustice, I have raised the concern that empirically, solidarity as a social practice is likely to disappoint, given that the grounds of solidaristic collective action in identification are likely structured to reproduce structural injustice, rather than its dismantling. Sangiovanni's account of the concept of solidarity helps to pinpoint what political efforts need to focus on in order to construct effective solidaristic movements against structural oppression or domination. In assessing the non-instrumental value of solidarity, I have raised the challenge that contexts of structural injustice may undermine the non-instrumental value of solidarity as a social practice, even when the group's ends are not wicked. Structural justice thus is a condition for both the instrumental and non-instrumental value of solidarity, understood as a special form of joint action grounded in identification. In this way, the value of solidarity as a social practice is ultimately parasitic on visions of and struggles for structural justice.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Maria Laura Chobadindegui and Brian Isaac for their research assistance.