Political Solidarity

by Sally J. Scholz

Experiences of solidarity have figured prominently in the politics of the modern era, from the rallying cry of liberation theology for solidarity with the poor and oppressed, through feminist calls for sisterhood, to such political movements as Solidarity in Poland. Yet very little academic writing has focused on solidarity in conceptual rather than empirical terms. Sally Scholz takes on this critical task here. She lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs fundamentally from other social and political concepts like camaraderie, association, or community. Scholz distinguishes a variety of types and levels of solidarity by their social ontologies, moral relations, and corresponding obligations. Political solidarity, in contrast to social solidarity and civic solidarity, aims to bring about social change by uniting individuals in their response to particular situations of injustice, oppression, or tyranny. The book explores the moral relation of political solidarity in detail, with chapters on the nature of the solidary group, obligations within solidarity, the “paradox of the privileged,” the goals of solidarity movements, and the prospects for global solidarity.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Shelly Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this text, Sally Scholz clearly delineates a theory of what she calls *political* solidarity in opposition to social or civic solidarity. Understanding political solidarity as a mediating relation between an individual and the community--it serves as a group that is dedicated to combating oppression or injustice in some particular form. She claims such a group formation is distinct from a politics of identity, as such, members of privileged groups are able to (and perhaps ought to) join the solidary group.

Her depiction of political solidarity seems, to me, too revisionist and far too alienated from political institutional mechanisms to be of terribly much use. This is evident in the fact that many of her examples of solidarity revolve around either "protest" or so-called ethical consumerism. In this sense, while she claims solidary groups can be local, she doesn't focus on the function of local solidary groups except to claim that they need not function by virtue of democratic mechanisms.

Nevertheless, Scholz's perspective is a throughly liberal one: she decries the use of revolutionary violence as the antithesis of the moral relations and duties demanded by solidarity, claims that the solidary group must always be in opposition to a concrete problem that it aims to ameliorate, and functions by virtue of a simple aggregation of the acts of individuals *as* acts of the group. These elements make the theory worse off, in my opinion--as we cannot understand whether and in what conditions the use of violence by a solidary group may be permissible, we cannot theorize a solidary group with diffuse aims but a common political strategy, or understand how it is that the group relation transforms liberal individual subjectivity. Though, I will credit her with denying the humanist claim that we are (or ought to be) in global political solidarity simply by virtue of our shared difference or some essential quality of "being human."

I was most interested in her discussion of global political solidarity, which I ultimately found lacking--as it seems to boil down to either participating in a (far off) cause in whatever way one sees fit toward the aim of ending oppression of a distant other, or various pressures utilized by the states-system with all of its unequal distributions of power.