Building solidarity.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Union solidarity is the first step towards rebuilding a strong Labor Party - Class Notes - Column

Solidarity is a key notion on the left. It pops up a lot in leaflets and speeches, in calls to mobilize for demonstrations, attend forums, or participate in boycotts. We call on ourselves to express solidarity with striking workers, with victims of child labor and sweated labor, with Sandinistas, Zapatistas, French transit workers, East Timorese, or the African National Congress.

For all its moral urgency, this notion of solidarity is a member of the same conceptual family as noblesse oblige. It exhorts us to go do something that shows our support for some them, and typically a them someplace else.

I don't mean to dump on this kind of support work; it's important and should be done. It can realize victories that advance progressive interests everywhere, and it can be an indispensable tool for political education. It is also, though, a kind of passive or secondhand politics. It encourages people to respond to injustices committed by the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations against others, not themselves.

I got to see this aspect of the left's rhetoric of solidarity at the Labor Party Founding Convention, where it stood in stark contrast to a different notion of solidarity historically associated with the labor movement. Labor solidarity rests on a more pragmatic foundation. Building solidarity in this context is about constructing and maintaining a we to fight in concert for common objectives.

The slogan AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL isn't just an ethical statement about how we should understand our relations to others. It's a prescription for action: We must treat an injury to any one of us--even those we don't like--as harmful to all if we intend to maintain the unity we need to reach our common goals.

This is the symbolic power of the "Solidarity Forever" lyric, "the union makes us strong."

Workers in a particular shop are in the same basic position and share the same basic interests relative to their employer. Recognizing these common interests is the essence of union, the foundation from which the bargaining unit, the trade-union local, the international, the federation of internationals, and the party arise.

Because its glue is concrete objectives, union solidarity necessarily requires negotiation, compromise, and toleration of difference. It's no accident that trade unions are the most racially integrated voluntary associations in American life. People don't always overcome their prejudices, but they have to learn to...