Building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul.
July 24, 2024
Source: Hammer & Hope
Black Lives Matter protesters outside Trump International Hotel and Tower in Midtown Manhattan during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd, New York, June 5, 2020. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII.
How do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.
In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.
Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.
But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have proposed similar bills in Congress.
This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.
Whenever ordinary people begin to come together across their myriad differences to challenge oppression, wherever fragile shoots of trust begin to grow, the powerful seek to mow them down and plant a more mean-spirited and lethal crop in their place. Last fall, influential Democratic Party adviser Ruy Teixeira published a piece connecting the progressive response to Gaza to the George Floyd uprisings. In it, he encouraged his fellow Democrats to “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” Over the past 10 months, many elected officials have done just that, further emboldening a fascist right that has beaten nonviolent protesters while funneling mountains of cash into MAGA candidates’ coffers and pretending to denounce a make-believe scourge of antisemitism on the left. A disturbing number of Democrats have provided cover for their opportunistic Republican colleagues, including New York Representative Mondaire Jones, who sided with AIPAC to oust his cease-fire-supporting colleague Jamaal Bowman. For members of both parties, Palestine is not a real place full of real people but a wedge issue to exploit in order to marginalize the left — to sabotage inclusive, transformative solidarity while fostering its reactionary counterpart.
Across the world, far-right governments, which have been gaining ground by forging reactionary solidarity among their base, have faced encouraging electoral setbacks in the face of solidifying opposition in France, India, and the United Kingdom, while the threat of renewed austerity in Kenya has brought together coordinated mass protests of such intensity that President William Ruto dismissed almost his entire cabinet. It remains to be seen how a new Democratic ticket will respond to this fraught moment and whether organizers can continue to build on the momentum that forced Biden to step down to help ensure his successors stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians.
A majority of Americans believe a cease-fire is urgently needed. But we need more than positive survey results — we need to do the hard work of cultivating solidarity and building collective power. The question is what kind of solidarity we, the people, will choose to grow: A flourishing, inclusive, and transformative solidarity that fights to universalize access to affordable housing, transportation, dignified working conditions, and peace? Or a poisonous, exclusionary, and reactionary variant that aims to incarcerate, deport, and deprive people of rights, protections, and even life itself?
The distinction between transformative and reactionary solidarity reminds us that solidarity is not always a good thing, as Hammer & Hope editorial board member Astra Taylor and the activist Leah Hunt-Hendrix argue in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Picture the odious insularity of white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists or of otherwise hypercompetitive billionaires who lock arms to defend their class interests, the provincialism of police unions, or the resentful bonds men’s-rights influencers forge with their followers. These people are united, but toward what end?
This form of reactionary politics exceeds U.S. borders. Narendra Modi’s Hindutva dogma promotes Hindu Brahminical domination through violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and Dalits throughout India; Viktor Orbán’s fascist traditionalism encourages religious and racial intolerance in Hungary; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism colonizes and kills Palestinians while also smearing anti-Zionist Jews in Israel; Javier Milei’s anti-migrants and anti-Indigenous austerity plan led to the closing of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi) in Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro’s racist legacy includes the subordination of minority groups to the Christian majority and the rise of a militarized Christian state in Brazil. These leaders have one another’s backs, as documented ties between Netanyahu and Orbán reveal, as well as the growing popularity of the Israeli government among European far-right parties. Reactionary solidarity locks its adherents in a toxic embrace that essentializes its enemies — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians last fall.
This chauvinism serves a purpose. To paraphrase legal scholar Ian Haney López and author Heather McGhee, reactionary solidarity functions as a “plutocrat’s scythe”: a way economic and political elites weaponize a wide range of resentments and fears to harvest obscene wealth and power. And harvest they have. Fascist formations and parties around the world continue to make inroads, gaining converts and seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has climbed to a record high. Some of the most notorious members of this class are now proud promoters of a racist, conspiratorial right wing. Trump endorsers Elon Musk and Bill Ackman are bound by reactionary solidarity, having conscripted themselves and their vast fortunes into the “war on woke” — a battle absurdly out of proportion to any racial justice reforms or concessions. It’s a reminder of just how threatening some found 2020 and the specter of multiracial solidarity.
But the problem isn’t just the right. Embedded in every conservative backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to improve people’s lives. Liberals’ unwillingness to blame the capitalist system for hurling us toward mass immiseration and planetary destruction leaves people grasping for explanations, and the far right is happy to fill the gap. Millions can barely make ends meet, yet corporate Democrats claimed for months that the issue was bad vibes and the public’s ignorance about how inflation works, opening space for fascist faux populists to position themselves as champions of the working class.
This reminds us that the term “backlash” has always been a misnomer. It misleadingly implies that conservative counter-reactions to social movements are natural and inevitable as opposed to ongoing and engineered. But division is not our default state; authoritarians spend money, time, energy, coordination, power, and opportunism to foment it. The right’s forging of reactionary solidarity is a long-running and expertly executed project — one that takes advantage of not only liberal failures but also the shortcomings of the left.
“Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing,” writes the renowned and much missed labor strategist Jane McAlevey in No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Whether reactionary or transformative, building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul. The kind of solidarity we need has to be consciously cultivated, meeting by meeting, day after day. Many of the pieces in this issue document efforts to do precisely that, whether in Sudan or Haiti or during past iterations of struggles that we continue to fight.
As leftists, we know we’d all be more secure if we funded social services instead of jails; more stable if our neighbors could stay safely housed and well fed; better paid if immigrants weren’t exploited for poverty wages; healthier if we protected the air and water in poor communities and distant countries. If being right were enough, the left would have won long ago. The same goes for having public opinion on our side. Survey after survey shows Americans want many progressive things, from environmental protections and universal health care to free college and union representation to a cease-fire in Gaza. But polling results aren’t power.
Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.
We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, historian Robin D. G. Kelley, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.
Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”
As philosopher and poet Audre Lorde recognized, we need to find ways to find common cause in our complexity and heterogeneity:
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.
Black Lives Matter protesters outside Trump International Hotel and Tower in Midtown Manhattan during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd, New York, June 5, 2020. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII.
How do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.
In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.
Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.
But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have proposed similar bills in Congress.
This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.
Whenever ordinary people begin to come together across their myriad differences to challenge oppression, wherever fragile shoots of trust begin to grow, the powerful seek to mow them down and plant a more mean-spirited and lethal crop in their place. Last fall, influential Democratic Party adviser Ruy Teixeira published a piece connecting the progressive response to Gaza to the George Floyd uprisings. In it, he encouraged his fellow Democrats to “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” Over the past 10 months, many elected officials have done just that, further emboldening a fascist right that has beaten nonviolent protesters while funneling mountains of cash into MAGA candidates’ coffers and pretending to denounce a make-believe scourge of antisemitism on the left. A disturbing number of Democrats have provided cover for their opportunistic Republican colleagues, including New York Representative Mondaire Jones, who sided with AIPAC to oust his cease-fire-supporting colleague Jamaal Bowman. For members of both parties, Palestine is not a real place full of real people but a wedge issue to exploit in order to marginalize the left — to sabotage inclusive, transformative solidarity while fostering its reactionary counterpart.
Across the world, far-right governments, which have been gaining ground by forging reactionary solidarity among their base, have faced encouraging electoral setbacks in the face of solidifying opposition in France, India, and the United Kingdom, while the threat of renewed austerity in Kenya has brought together coordinated mass protests of such intensity that President William Ruto dismissed almost his entire cabinet. It remains to be seen how a new Democratic ticket will respond to this fraught moment and whether organizers can continue to build on the momentum that forced Biden to step down to help ensure his successors stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians.
A majority of Americans believe a cease-fire is urgently needed. But we need more than positive survey results — we need to do the hard work of cultivating solidarity and building collective power. The question is what kind of solidarity we, the people, will choose to grow: A flourishing, inclusive, and transformative solidarity that fights to universalize access to affordable housing, transportation, dignified working conditions, and peace? Or a poisonous, exclusionary, and reactionary variant that aims to incarcerate, deport, and deprive people of rights, protections, and even life itself?
The distinction between transformative and reactionary solidarity reminds us that solidarity is not always a good thing, as Hammer & Hope editorial board member Astra Taylor and the activist Leah Hunt-Hendrix argue in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Picture the odious insularity of white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists or of otherwise hypercompetitive billionaires who lock arms to defend their class interests, the provincialism of police unions, or the resentful bonds men’s-rights influencers forge with their followers. These people are united, but toward what end?
This form of reactionary politics exceeds U.S. borders. Narendra Modi’s Hindutva dogma promotes Hindu Brahminical domination through violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and Dalits throughout India; Viktor Orbán’s fascist traditionalism encourages religious and racial intolerance in Hungary; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism colonizes and kills Palestinians while also smearing anti-Zionist Jews in Israel; Javier Milei’s anti-migrants and anti-Indigenous austerity plan led to the closing of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi) in Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro’s racist legacy includes the subordination of minority groups to the Christian majority and the rise of a militarized Christian state in Brazil. These leaders have one another’s backs, as documented ties between Netanyahu and Orbán reveal, as well as the growing popularity of the Israeli government among European far-right parties. Reactionary solidarity locks its adherents in a toxic embrace that essentializes its enemies — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians last fall.
This chauvinism serves a purpose. To paraphrase legal scholar Ian Haney López and author Heather McGhee, reactionary solidarity functions as a “plutocrat’s scythe”: a way economic and political elites weaponize a wide range of resentments and fears to harvest obscene wealth and power. And harvest they have. Fascist formations and parties around the world continue to make inroads, gaining converts and seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has climbed to a record high. Some of the most notorious members of this class are now proud promoters of a racist, conspiratorial right wing. Trump endorsers Elon Musk and Bill Ackman are bound by reactionary solidarity, having conscripted themselves and their vast fortunes into the “war on woke” — a battle absurdly out of proportion to any racial justice reforms or concessions. It’s a reminder of just how threatening some found 2020 and the specter of multiracial solidarity.
But the problem isn’t just the right. Embedded in every conservative backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to improve people’s lives. Liberals’ unwillingness to blame the capitalist system for hurling us toward mass immiseration and planetary destruction leaves people grasping for explanations, and the far right is happy to fill the gap. Millions can barely make ends meet, yet corporate Democrats claimed for months that the issue was bad vibes and the public’s ignorance about how inflation works, opening space for fascist faux populists to position themselves as champions of the working class.
This reminds us that the term “backlash” has always been a misnomer. It misleadingly implies that conservative counter-reactions to social movements are natural and inevitable as opposed to ongoing and engineered. But division is not our default state; authoritarians spend money, time, energy, coordination, power, and opportunism to foment it. The right’s forging of reactionary solidarity is a long-running and expertly executed project — one that takes advantage of not only liberal failures but also the shortcomings of the left.
“Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing,” writes the renowned and much missed labor strategist Jane McAlevey in No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Whether reactionary or transformative, building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul. The kind of solidarity we need has to be consciously cultivated, meeting by meeting, day after day. Many of the pieces in this issue document efforts to do precisely that, whether in Sudan or Haiti or during past iterations of struggles that we continue to fight.
As leftists, we know we’d all be more secure if we funded social services instead of jails; more stable if our neighbors could stay safely housed and well fed; better paid if immigrants weren’t exploited for poverty wages; healthier if we protected the air and water in poor communities and distant countries. If being right were enough, the left would have won long ago. The same goes for having public opinion on our side. Survey after survey shows Americans want many progressive things, from environmental protections and universal health care to free college and union representation to a cease-fire in Gaza. But polling results aren’t power.
Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.
We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, historian Robin D. G. Kelley, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.
Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”
As philosopher and poet Audre Lorde recognized, we need to find ways to find common cause in our complexity and heterogeneity:
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.
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