Solidarity

Can we come together to save ourselves?

I wrote some of the essay from earlier this week about a year ago as part of a bigger project. I had concluded that the way out of our overshoot problem was people banding together to demand better. It will take a significant proportion of humanity to come together and demand a better tomorrow before we can get on a degrowth path. That logically leads to the concept of solidarity. An understanding that we are all in this together and will fail apart or succeed together seemed obvious. In my research, I came across a 2019 essay by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor from the New Republic titled, One for All, about how solidarity was needed to get us out of the environmental mess we had made for ourselves.

Soon after I did my research and that original writing, I heard that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor were working on a book: Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. I couldn’t wait to read it.

Their book recently made it to the top of my reading list. I’m pleased to find that it was something worth sharing.

I highly recommend the book. It is a great work of scholarship and opens up a new way of thinking about our relations to each other; the debts and obligations we owe each other that we don’t think about or would rather not think about.

I’m not going to summarize too much of the book here, because I don’t want to steal the thunder of the authors, who have done extensive research. I want to share where the idea of solidarity came from, what role it played throughout the ages, where we are now, and where we can go if we are clever enough to create a “solidarity state”. I’ll only highlight a few points that I hope get people thinking and make them hungry to learn more.

Solidarity as debt covenant.

The idea of solidarity came from the Romans, who originated the idea of debts held in common. This was an early form of insurance in a way. Farmers would hold debt together for example and could help each other. When one farmer's crops failed, another could support him who had a bumper crop year.

However, we have largely failed as a society to recognize and value the social debts we owe to each other, or society at large. This is especially challenging in the United States, where the needs of society are often seen as subordinate to the needs of the individual.

Communities and nations have experienced widespread solidarity in the past, but it tends to be in response to an extreme event such as a natural disaster or a war. This solidarity is often ephemeral, lasting, days, months, at most years, until the danger passes, and we all go back to thinking of our own problems, and not bothering to think about how interdependent we are as a society.

Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor offer up the idea of a solidarity state as a way to achieve more permanent solidarity. Such a solidarity state would be a nation that recognizes our interdependence, and is held together by shared sacrifices, shared risk, and shared reward.

Solidarity is possible. It is also needed.

Our interdependence is a fact of life that we have largely lost in our modern society. As I’ve said before (and many people have said), we depend on a million people in our day-to-day lives, but we never see them, never think of them, to the point that they aren’t considered by us at all. From the farmer halfway around the world who grows the coffee beans to the corporation halfway around the world that makes the toothpaste we use before we go to bed, there are a million people who make our lives possible, to whom we owe thanks, if not a debt, that we never think about.

But when you stop and think about it and think about it beyond just who provided for you this day, the list of those to whom you are indebted gets massive. When you look back and think about those who came before you, without which you would not exist, it is, or at least it should be a humbling realization.

The authors ask, what obligations do we owe each other? It is much more than we realize. They cite Martin Luther King’s sermon “The Man Who Was a Fool,” in which he said:

“Whether we realize it or not, each of us is eternally “in the red.” We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. We do not finish breakfast without being dependent on more than half of the world.”

King goes on to detail how the daily routines commonly begin with an unknown dependence on the people who made our soap, our towels, our food, our coffee, and the chairs and tables that we sit at.

We don’t think of them, or that we owe them any kind of obligation. But we do.

In a solidarity-focused state or world, we would work to ensure that those people who make our lives possible are treated well. Some of those people are in the past and have given us immaterial things like the freedoms we have and the comfort that we enjoy. We can pay the debt owed to these ancestors by improving the future for our descendants, as was done for us.

But we are deep in the red in most areas when it comes to what we owe future generations. If we pool those debts, and our energy, we can pay those future debts, by addressing the environmental and societal problems that will plague future generations.

Degrowth isn’t in the book. But degrowthers should be taking notes.

The authors don’t mention degrowth, but much of what they talk about are the same types of cultural changes and policy prescriptions you have seen me talk about in this space and you would find in many discussions of a post-growth society.

Many degrowth writers and thinkers have done a great job of explaining what a degrowth world could look like, and what policies are needed to get there. What is often missing is the “how” to get there.

That is always the hardest part to communicate when explaining how to get somewhere new if no map to that place exists, and if tumultuous change stands between you and getting there. There is no blueprint for how to get to a degrowth path.

To get there, we need to acknowledge our interdependence and recognize the power we have if we are united in our demands for a better way forward.

I do believe, solidarity is the answer.