Solidarity as Both Means and End

Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor discuss the state of solidarity on a new Team Human

Astra Taylor has been my go-to activist and intellectual since long before Occupy Wall Street and the Rolling Debt Jubiliee she helped create. She’s always been great at articulating what we intuitively feel as activists working toward mutual aid, and backed these intuitions with both historical sweep and tactical grounding. I’d never met her writing partner, Occupy veteran and Hunt heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix, founder of Solidaire - a network of progressives committed to funding movements focusing on racial and economic justice. So, one part prosperity to two parts precarity, we came together to talk about how we can leverage solidarity in spite of the many Liefforts to keep us all apart. 

Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s new book, Solidarity, is now available wherever books are sold.

Rushkoff:
Have authorities understood that solidarity is their enemy? Do you see signs of intentional undermining of our possibilities of forging solidarity with each other?

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:
Yeah, absolutely. We have an example in the book about the ancient Roman plebs who went out to the mountain and organize the first strike. This does go back many centuries. There’s power in numbers, power in collective action, and that is threatening. It is because it can transform the status quo. It's a power that we need to acknowledge and grab onto and participate in. But we do constantly face divide-and-conquer tactics. The fact that solidarity strikes are illegal…

Rushkoff:
Are they illegal in America?

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:
Yeah.

Rushkoff:
I didn’t know that. I thought I was always allowed to strike.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:
Secondary strikes. Solidarity strikes are not legal.

Rushkoff:
That means if there were bakers on strike somewhere because there were machines that were cutting off their fingers and they go on strike, then me, I, as a teacher can say we are in solidarity with the bakers who are having their fingers cut off. We can't go on strike with them.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:
Yeah, there's no legal protection for that. We're seeing solidarity strikes right now in Sweden where Swedish mechanics are on strike against Tesla. The Finnish and Norwegian dock workers have decided to stop unloading Teslas. Postal workers have stopped delivering Tesla license plates, but that would not be allowed in the United States. The United States has very strict laws around union organizing, and solidarity strikes are not legal.

Rushkoff:
We could never have a general strike in America, I guess…

Astra Taylor:
Oh, we could, but it wouldn't be approved by U.S. labor law. U.S. labor law provides bare minimum protections for organizing, but is also very anti-labor and does inhibit solidarity in lots of ways. I mean, to your point about there being a conspiracy against solidarity, I think there absolutely is. That's not conspiratorial in the negative sense to acknowledge it. Even the name of your podcast, Team Human implies a “team anti-human,” right? What team anti-human is doing in our view is trying to divide and conquer. That's the phrase Leah used. Trying to separate us, pit us against each other in order for a minority of people to accumulate unjust and obscene power and profits.

You've written many books. There's always the period where you're brainstorming subtitles. One idea we played with was something that would have the phrase, the most dangerous idea in it. Right? Solidarity: An account of a dangerous idea. This idea that people will come together, recognize their common interests, see their faces intertwined and f-shit up, right? They will fight together to change the status quo.

It’s threatening to a lot of elites. We detail some of the ways that solidarity is being suppressed or sabotaged or outright criminalized in this country. Labor laws are part of that story, but not all of it. We share that account just because we think it's so important to actually recognize that we're actually not fighting on fair terrain, right? That this is actually terrain that's very hostile to solidarity. We actually begin the book with an account of an attack on solidarity, as opposed to a sort of warm and fuzzy story of solidarity, right?

Astra Taylor:
The Southern strategy, which it is. White people against people of color in the South. We begin in the Nixon administration, though it goes much further back to Reconstruction and before. Other more recent examples are the criminalization of people who try to help migrants. There's also an example in Georgia right now, there's been a lot of protests around Cop City, the building of this police campus and a lot of people have gone to jail protesting this. If you try to bail more than three people out that that's no longer allowed. That just a straight up attack on solidarity, right?

Rushkoff:
I feel like one of the things you're trying to do is suggest that solidarity is not a noun, but a verb. It's not a perfect state. Solidarity is this ongoing process, but solidarity is the struggle, right?

The thing I've been talking and writing about lately is trying to move away from a certain kind of movement politics that puts an eye on the prize, a goal on the top of the hill, and an ends-justifies-the-means journey to a thing. I'm trying to think of it way more in terms of, instead of “movement” politics, moment politics. To ask the questions, what are you doing right now? How are you leaning towards something and what is the process you’re using?

In a sense, solidarity as a means to an end is in some ways booby prize. It's like solidarity itself is what we're working on, right?

Astra Taylor:
We’re clear in the introduction of the book that solidarity is a means and an end. Solidarity is the means by which we build the power to achieve our purpose, which is a more solidaristic society, right?

That itself is something that's not going to be set in stone. We’re very clear that solidarity has to be made and remade, generated and regenerated. There are ways we could set up our society that would be more conducive to solidarity, less inclined to sabotage it, to divide and conquer us.

But, absolutely, this is something that is always in flux. It is not just achieved and then we can rest on our laurels. But I think the means and the instinct is important. I mean, Leah and I are both organizers, right? We write, but we also really try to do. We're trying to build solidarity every day.

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