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On Solidarity

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Europe, the very idea is a series on the philosophical notion of Europe and what reflection upon it can lend to the sphere of concrete politics.

"Quarto Stato" di Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved. On the idea of
solidarity many bien-pensant authors
have written a great deal. Like ‘fraternity’ and unlike liberty and equality,
it is considered soft and fuzzy, a matter of leading articles on national
holidays and solemn anniversaries. As if it were not a concept.

But it is.

In a famous
study, Jeremy Waldron has shown how the universalist notion of human dignity
has its historical origin in the not very universalist – to wit, feudal – idea
of ‘rank’, the dignity attached to status.

The idea of
solidarity has its roots in the history of the workers’ movement, and as this
is usually excluded from conventional tales of human endeavour, it is seldom
understood.

What has
‘solidarity’ meant for the workers’ movement in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries? 

Looked at from
the outside, the workers’ movement was a set of organizations for and of an
exploited, oppressed and politically unrepresented class which was trying to
improve its lot.

It was, in
particular, an attempt to introduce politics into an area from which it was
legally banished. Modern, that is, bourgeois society is based on a series of
separations. One of the most important separations – on which the social
equilibrium, the balance of social forces depends – is the distinction between
public and private. The public – the realm of the common good – is identified
with the affairs of the state, the only realm in modern society where legal
coercion is accepted and where obedience and deference to authority is
obligatory.

In the sphere of
the private, in ‘civil society’, it is contractual, that is, free and voluntary
acts that are the rule (private citizens normally don’t have the right to
coerce fellow citizens into obedience). Such is the case, according to official
doctrine, of labour contracts and, in general, of labour that is seen legally and
jurisprudentially as a private affair between two contracting parties, the
employer and employee, where money will usually change hands, going from
employer to employee, for the performance of voluntarily assumed duties
prescribed by contract, custom, technology and the like.

The law is there
only to ensure that the implied promise of performance is kept and that the
agreed salary is faithfully paid. But the substantive and material content of
the labour contract remains a private affair in which no ‘third party’ is
allowed to interfere, as such an interference would hurt the freedom of
contract, one of the fundamental prerequisites of any civilized, that is,
commercial society.

It is good to
remember that once upon a time strikes were considered illegal precisely because
they constitute a breach of contract. Moreover, they use violence – by closing
down machinery or other technological devices etc. – to force one of the
contracting parties, the employers, under the threat of financial loss, to
change the terms of contract previously accepted. This is, of course, a disloyal
and unfaithful breach of promise, a promise that people are supposed to observe
under penalty of law.

Why did the
striking workers – apart from the wish to improve their economic and social
position, e. g. to increase their wages, shorten their working day and improve
their working conditions, including various social advantages, such as
unemployment benefit, old-age pensions, paid holidays, social housing, free
healthcare and the like – think that they were justified in changing the terms
of a fundamental, perhaps constitutional arrangement essential for the inner
peace and for the existing system of liberties? For it is undeniable that for
secular bourgeois societies the system of separations is necessary for
upholding individual autonomy, by making private life, private affairs and
their framework, civil society, inviolable by political authority, in other
words, by the state.

Why did the
workers’ organizations believe that it was morally permissible to use coercion,
sometimes physical violence to force the employers (or the employers in
general, the ruling class) to give up some of their privileges and advantages
guaranteed by another fundamental right, the right of property? (This is why
socialism was and sometimes still is seen as an enemy of freedom, a tendency to
make politics, that is, the state, absolute and one which is bent on destroying
the autonomy of civil society and of the individual.)

Plainly, albeit
discourteously formulated, they obviously thought that they were in some sense morally superior to their adversaries,
which would justify coercive, sometimes violent, but in any case illegal
tactics which have questioned the constitutional order, even one of its
foundations, the customary distinction between public and private or, if you
prefer, between politics and the economy (and the ‘social’).

Moral superiority

Let us examine this
idea of moral superiority, which is of course alien to Marxism, but which has
influenced the followers of Proudhon, Lassalle and Bakunin, in many respects
more influential than Marx in the practical movements of the nineteenth century,
and an idea revived in the anti-war movement after 1914, in the Russian
revolution in October 1917, in the anti-colonial or ‘national liberation’
movements, and which has indeed coloured the Bolshevik version of Marxism for
nearly a century.

This fight for
seemingly humdrum and mundane goals may appear as a rather poor reason for the
kind of sinful pride affirming moral superiority.

How could be such
a feeling sustained?

Bourgeois society
was regarded by olden-time proletarian revolutionaries as a régime of
selfishness. After all, liberal capitalism, especially its early version, was
constructed as a régime of self-representation.
Built as a clash of wills, a clash of interests, regulated, tempered and
moderated by an overarching constitutional order ensuring that conflicts of
interests would be conducted in a peaceable manner, decided by elections and
court trials, where everybody’s rights will be respected, but otherwise the
(peaceful) battlefield is open for all.

Quite apart from
the traditional advantages of the wealthy, of the well-educated and of the
well-connected, this was held by the proletarians – even if it was not a sham
or a fraud – to be quite contemptible, as it was governed by self-interest and
decided by force, both damned by Christian morality. But what then was the
difference? Were the workers not fighting for their own advantage or interest,
just like the bourgeois?

But the
proletarians – an identification that was tantamount to being called a
socialist, a communist or an anarchist – did not regard the class struggle as a
zero-sum game or merely the aspiration for the lowly material advancement of a
group of people united by their similar economic and social condition. They did
not believe that they represented only themselves and their narrowly defined
interest. Their own authentic aspiration could be told apart from the
aspirations of the rest by the principle of solidarity.

Solidarity

This had many
features.

First, they did
not recognize the uncoerced, voluntary character of the labour contract, the
alternative of which, if you were unwilling to sign, was starvation. Hence,
they did not recognize that labour was in the private realm and that as such it
was not political. (This is the intuitive foundation of every version of anti-capitalism, even today.) So the fight for
higher wages and for a shorter working day and working week had the dignity of politics,
formerly the preserve of the upper classes, barring revolutions.

Second, they did
not recognize the absoluteness or exclusiveness of property rights as, in
accordance with natural right, they regarded wealth as a source of obligation
for the promotion of the common good (or of public interest) and thus
subordinated to the superior claims of the quest for a better human society.
(This is obviously also the claim of the ecological movements.)

Third, in agreement
with the young Marx, they believed that the working class heralded the
dissolution of all classes, that it was the quintessential non-class, defined
as an aspect of the human condition in which the self-interest of some would
mean the end of all sectional interests and so, the emancipation of the human
race. By opposing property and power, they did not want to acquire property and
power for themselves, but to destroy property and power for ever and in all
respects. This was not supposed to be reduced to a political interference in civil
society, on the contrary: it was supposed to mean the obliteration of the
duality civil society/state by putting an end to class/state coercion and to
its law.

Hence, this was not self-representation (this would be a
miscontrual of old social democracy, in a way that has become familiar from current
historiography, which has always been so wary of ideas) but a battle fought on
behalf of humankind as such.

And as this fight
was always understood as unselfish, generous and heroic, as the fight of the
weak against the strong, the virtues that went with it were similarly generous
and heroic: they were essentially virtues of self-sacrifice. During and after strikes and rebellions, workers
were laid off and thrown into jail: this was a badge of honour and a mark of the
highest moral pride, always construed as suffering for a noble goal at the hands
of the flunkeys of the ruling class – gendarmes, gaolers, professional
soldiers, spies, scabs, snitches, prosecutors, judges, priests, bourgeois
politicians, kings and journalists. Voluntary suffering for the noble goal is
naturally also Christian in origin: it is the secular version of the idea of
martyrdom. Also similar to Christian moral theology: this was the proof of the essential justice of the
noble cause.

And the highest
proof was solidarity with other workers, especially that which took the form of
internationalism.

One of the main
instruments of bourgeois society, then as now, is the cross-class solidarity of
the nation – the main moral competitor to the workers’ movement. National
interest was supposed (this is the bourgeois standpoint) to supersede ‘selfish’
and material class interest (the bourgeois interpretation of the proletarian
stance) particularly in the way this supercession was demanded and expected in
wartime. The proletariat had (or should have had) the effrontery to doubt the
legitimacy of this claim, through three natural right-style principles,
typically forgotten:

   • equality between nations,

   • friendship between peoples,

   • world peace.

In this, the
workers’ movement was the true heir of Immanuel Kant, despised as an ‘idealist’
not only by the General Staff, but also by most political theorists, in the
first place by Carl Schmitt, so much admired these days by the baddies. Kant’s
assumption of ‘publicness’ as the sole guarantor of an international law
conducive to perpetual peace is parallel to the demand of ‘publicness’ by
socialists as regards labour and property. Perpetual world peace through
‘hospitality’ (not philanthropy, but right, says Kant) means the extension of
regular democratic politics to a territory from which it was banished earlier.
In exactly the same manner, socialism extends politics to civil society.

The end of peace

In his
influential book about the crisis of the European Union, Jürgen Habermas
acknowledges the changes in the official international doctrine of a universal
rule of law after 1945 – in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the
UN Charter and a number of national and regional constitutions, conspicuous
among them that of the Free State of Saxony, which was accepted and enacted
after 1989 – where it appears that the recognition of universal and equal
dignity plays a role previously unknown. He does not spell this out in
precisely these terms, but it is glaringly obvious that this development took place
thanks to the influence of socialism, as it enjoyed its brief moment of
international legitimacy immediately after the victory over the Third Reich.

One of the
institutions dreamed up to ensure peace at least in Europe – which is of course
unthinkable without the cognate principles of ‘equality between nations’ and ‘friendship
between peoples’ – was the European Union, or ‘Europe’ for short.

There is no need
for extraordinary acuity to discover that the most recent European crisis, not
caused by but only made visible by the Syriza government in Greece, presents us
not with a banal instance of the difference between theory and practice,
principles and interests, but with a deeper and more worrying malfunction: this
appears to be the renunciation of egalitarian principles on the international
level, where once the idea of solidarity was injected into an exceptional
historic moment. Now the ejection of solidarity heralds the end of
international or, in this instance, European peace. Such a peace, already
broken in the former Yugoslavia and now in the former Soviet Union
(Ukraine/Russia) is nearing its conceptual and moral end, also within the
narrower confines of the European Union.

The disappearance
of socialism from the political mix – and with it, of solidarity, acted upon as
a principle, and not merely an empty emotional phrase in May Day speechifying –
demonstrates the close of an epoch. It is the first time in European history
that capitalism is alone, unresisted by socialism or, for that matter, by
Christianity. The international solidarity evinced in anti-imperialism and
anti-colonialism seems also defunct.

There is no
question, that the proud faith in the moral superiority of the solidary proletariat
has become obsolete. Contemporary anti-capitalist protesters – sons and
daughters of the middle class and of the intelligentsia or rootless bohemians
of working-class ‘backgrounds’ kept alive by the bourgeois welfare system – do
not advocate and practice self-representation,
they are rebelling on other people’s behalf. But those people are strangely
silent.

Solidarity is a
social ideal that always tries to become a politics. Its chances are slim.

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