An Interview With Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor

 

Solidarity is an idea that is often invoked in progressive political and labor organizing contexts. But where does this idea come from? What does it mean, practically speaking, to be “in solidarity” with a cause? And what would it take for us to realize solidarity in our relationships, our communities, our social movements, and our governments?

In their new book, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor argue that solidarity doesn’t just emerge spontaneously. Rather it’s the product of considerable effort, organizing, and a willingness to reimagine just about every facet of a social structure that rewards the few while sowing division among the many. The authors are uniquely positioned to write on the topic. Hunt-Hendrix not only wrote her dissertation on solidarity, she also leveraged her own position—as an heir to the Hunt oil fortune—to found Solidaire, a network of philanthropist organizers focused on resourcing the frontlines of social justice movements. Taylor, a writer and filmmaker, founded the Debt Collective—the first debtor’s union and the organization responsible for pushing debt cancellation to the forefront of contemporary political discourse. Drawing examples from their own experiences as well as solidaristic social movements over the last two centuries, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor weave together the intellectual, economic, and political histories of solidarity, explore the thorny territory of us-versus-them social dynamics, and outline a vision for solidarity as the guiding principle for government, both domestically and internationally.

Hunt-Hendrix, Taylor, and I discussed Solidarity at a public event at Stanford University on April 18, 2024. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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Aaron Horvath: I want to start off by asking both of you about your backgrounds. What were your respective paths to the concept of solidarity, to your collaboration, and ultimately to this book?

Leah Hunt-Hendrix: I was raised in New York City in a pretty wealthy family. My grandfather had started an oil company and my mom had taken what she inherited and started a foundation focused on supporting the women’s movement. So, I was raised in the midst of the women’s movement. But I also went to a private school where kids were on cocaine and in the hospital from anorexia, and where status threat and status anxiety was palpable even as a 13-year-old. And then we moved to rural New Mexico for a couple years where I really witnessed the wealth inequality that characterizes American society. I felt like this is not working for anyone—our economy is just fundamentally flawed. And I didn’t think that philanthropy was solving the problem. It felt like a good contribution, but not enough.

I went to college and studied political theory, and then was doing my PhD when Occupy Wall Street started. I didn’t think of myself as an activist, and it was a very messy, chaotic space. But I was like, there’s something to this. We’ve got to start talking about wealth inequality and what we can do about it, and maybe social movements play an important role in that. Interestingly, the word “solidarity” was always invoked in these organizing spaces. But when I went back to the Princeton library and looked for it, there’s very little on the concept. Maybe it was nerdy that I was looking for a book. But I wanted to know, what is solidarity? How do you practice it? I ended up writing about it in my dissertation which really focused on the history of the concept in late-1800s France.

Our book starts with a quote, where a Frenchman named Leon Bourgeois asks, in effect, ‘What is this concept that has popped into our language? Is it just a new term for fraternité? Or is it actually a new idea?’ I think that’s so cool—that there could be this new idea of how individuals relate to the rest of society. That was basically my path to the idea of solidarity. I met Astra—who is a brilliant writer—during the height of Occupy and we did a few writing projects together, including a special issue of The Nation
magazine on tech and democracy, and an article on solidarity in The New Republic in 2019. Then, in the midst of COVID, we thought that solidarity would have resulted from that kind of collective crisis. But it didn’t. We began to think maybe it was time to write the book and give this concept the theoretical due it deserves.

Astra Taylor: I’m someone who also was just always curious about social movements, and how change is made. I wanted to be an activist, even as a kid. I have a vivid memory of being 19 and the Battle of Seattle [the Seattle WTO protests in 1999] being on the cover of the papers and thinking, ‘Whoa—they’re protesting? What is that
about?’ But it took me a long time to find my way into it because nobody had ever called me into a movement or invited me and organized me.

It wasn’t until Occupy that there was this opportunity for me to meet other people who also wanted to be engaged in some kind of social change. It was in that space the seeds for the Debt Collective were planted, the idea of establishing an experimental union of debtors. It was 2011 and 2012, when I started formally organizing and the Debt Collective became the entity that it is now starting in 2014. Throughout that time, I was also making a film called What is Democracy? and writing a companion book called Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone and thinking a lot about political theory. And these two experiences—digging into democratic political theory, and spending time learning how to organize, how to get people to a meeting, how to strategize, and how to navigate the media and also the arenas of law-making and policy—all this made me see that solidarity was an important concept.

We’ve been thinking that what these days often gets described as a “crisis of democracy” could actually be better understood as a crisis of solidarity.

Looking back on people who write about democracy, I see that they would just sort of sprinkle the word “solidarity” in there—it’s something uplifting, something nice to gesture towards as a way of hinting at a solution. But it wasn’t until Leah called me one day that I began to think about it in a more disciplined way, as a philosophical concept with a compelling intellectual history. She said, “Astra, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you forever. The concept of solidarity is related to debt. And it goes back to ancient Roman law, where the word solidarity—obligato in solidum—meant collective obligations.” So, we started realizing that solidarity has this material dimension. We’re all interdependent; we’re collectively in debt to each other.

Horvath: How do you define solidarity? And given that we’re in an academic context, where we play with related concepts all the time, I’m curious how you distinguish solidarity from other adjacent or synonymous ideas. In the book, you bring up “unity” and “allyship.” But there’s also in the social sciences ideas like, social cohesion, social capital, and the Tocquevillian concept of “self-interest, rightly understood.” So how would you distinguish solidarity?

Hunt-Hendrix: I think of solidarity as closest to something like wholeness. It’s not unity. It’s not sameness. It’s something that holds different pieces together as a collective. The thinkers who began unpacking the idea in the 19th century thought a lot about the human body. We have a foot and a leg and an arm and a stomach. And these are all really different things. But they work together as part of a whole.

But like you said, there’s a lot of different valences to the concept. So, when that ancient Roman legal notion of solidarity debts is adopted into French law, it moves sort of by metaphor into political language. People start thinking about what are the debts that we owe to each other and the debts that we owe to past generations who built the world that we inherited? And what are the debts we owe the future generations? Emile Durkheim wrote the first sustained treatise on solidarity. He saw that the Industrial Revolution was changing everything. There was the rise of democratic revolutions, the collapse of monarchies, and the diminishing role of the church. And he wondered, ‘What can hold us together amidst all these changes?’ and ‘What is the stuff of solidarity?’ He wondered if the division of labor and an economy that was more integrated—as opposed to subsistence farming—would actually make us more interdependent. And maybe that fact of interdependence would make us feel interdependent.

Durkheim thinks of solidarity as social cohesion. He’s part of a group of people called the Solidarists in late-19th century France who hope this might be the concept that helps pave the way towards a pluralistic democracy. But the idea of solidarity also becomes prominent, of course, in the labor movement, which is developing during the same period. In this context, solidarity has more of this valence of power and change and coming together to transform society. We think solidarity contains both meanings: On the one hand, there’s this aspect of social cohesion. On the other hand, there’s a sense of power-building and transformation. While these notions may seem divergent, we think it makes sense that this one word holds these two different meanings. Because society does change. If you’re a collective that contains difference, you are always in the process of transformation.

Taylor: Yes, in addition to the focus on social cohesion, there’s this other really important tradition of conflict and power in class consciousness. We were talking to Eric Klinenberg at the Brooklyn Library recently and he was joking that people usually do not like both Marx and Durkheim, it tends to be one or the other! But we’re trying to think of them together and say there’s something to learn from both here. For us, solidarity is related to a lot of important concepts. It’s related to democracy—it’s a kind of precondition for democracy. So, for example, we’ve been thinking that what these days often gets described as a “crisis of democracy” could actually be better understood as a crisis of solidarity. Solidarity is also related to identity but not collapsible into identity. It’s something that bridges across differences, connecting us across identities and social groups. That’s part of why it’s really important at this moment because we’re all thinking a lot about identity. Solidarity helps us understand that identities can be doorways and not destinations—they need to be expanded and transcended.

Horvath: It sounds like solidarity is generally a good thing and we should have more of it. But how does it come about? It seems like the cards are stacked against it in two senses. You mentioned Marx and my understanding of Marx is that he hoped solidarity would emerge somewhat spontaneously out of class consciousness. And that didn’t exactly happen. At the same time, there are people actively working to suppress solidarity among the masses because it threatens to topple established power structures. Given all that stands in the way, how does solidarity even emerge?

Taylor: Solidarity, actually, is not always a good thing. We distinguish between what we call reactionary solidarity and transformative solidarity. Reactionary solidarity seeks to exclude others and shrink the group. It ultimately promotes the politics of divide and conquer. Then there’s transformative solidarity which seeks to expand the circle of inclusion and transform the individuals who are participating and also have a broader transformative political effect, changing us as people while also changing the overall balance of power.

We begin the book with an account of the Southern Strategy and Kevin Phillips, who famously was an ally of Richard Nixon and said the secret of politics is knowing who hates who and working those resentments and animosities to create what he called “counter solidarity.” It’s really important to acknowledge that there are people actively trying to innovate on his techniques and foster a counter or reactionary solidarity and who very consciously see transformative solidarity as a threat.

Hunt-Hendrix: To the question of where solidarity comes from, we argue that solidarity is constructed. It’s not just a given. We’re born into a world with pre-established identity categories, but these are not inherent. Solidarity, we argue, is something that we have the power to create and need to intentionally think about. Consider the identity of “worker.” “Worker” was not an identity until in the Industrial Revolution when painters and bricklayers and carpenters thought, ‘Maybe we have something in common and we would all benefit from a weekend and an eight-hour workday.’ And so they constructed the concept of a “worker” and built the labor movement.

At the same time, as people are constantly constructing these identities and constructing these coalitions, there are efforts to undermine these efforts. There’s the question of why is our society so divided? Why do we feel so antagonistic? And we think that also is constructed. Look at all the ways solidarity is actively undermined. It’s really important to talk about that and to notice it, because then you can actually resist those efforts. I’ll give a few examples. It’s criminalized for doctors to help women get abortions right now. It’s criminalized to support people who have come here seeking asylum. It’s criminal in Georgia—where there’s been the Cop City protests against the police campus and people have been going to jail for protesting—they’ve criminalized bailing more than three people out in a year, unless you become a bail bondsman. Then there’s the whole rhetoric of anti-woke-ism, or the “great awokening.” These are rhetorical efforts to shame people out of their attempts to become anti-racist and to build an anti-racist society. These are tactics intended to push people back into their silos. So, we think that, in the face of a backlash against the past decade of social movements, solidarity is more important than ever.

Aaron Horvath, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, and Astra Taylor at Stanford on April 18. (Photo by Clarissa Chiu)

Taylor: It’s important to understand this isn’t new. In the colonial era, this country treated labor union organizing as illegal. There’s a great quote from the 1800s: “If the rich meet to reduce wages, that’s a conference; if the poor resist the reduction, that’s a conspiracy.” We have this false narrative of American exceptionalism and individualism that says that we didn’t have the vibrant labor movement that some other countries did. But actually, there were more strikes here per capita than in other comparable liberal democracies. There was, however, much more suppression. And that’s really important to recognize when you’re an organizer—we need to know the history that we’re building on. Because it isn’t just human nature that causes people to be so atomized. It’s that there’s been a really well-funded conservative campaign against solidarity. I think we can take some satisfaction in this: They’re so afraid of solidarity! We must be onto something.

Horvath: I consider myself a fellow traveler, and very much bought into the project of transformative solidarity. But one thing I was thinking about while reading the book was that solidarity is one of those words that generally comes with prepositions. We tend to say things like “in solidarity with.” This leads me to wonder what nouns we fill in there and why. To this end, the book alludes to the importance of visibility. You write that solidarity is “rooted in an appreciation of our underlying interdependence. Today, this interdependence is systematically obscured. We can spend our days without appreciating the supply chains that enable our well-being, or the natural world on which we all depend; markets do not require us to know who produced the food we eat or where our trash goes; consumption happens on the surface while production is hidden from view.” This strikes me as a core point: you can’t really be in solidarity with something that you don’t know about.

Can you explain how the politics of visibility or recognition shape what we can be in solidarity with? And just to add the quintessential Stanford rider to that question: How does social media and the internet—which dramatically shape what we’re aware of and what we care about—affect the possibilities for solidarity?

Hunt-Hendrix: I think this is really what the work of organizing is about: naming something, shedding light on it, and bringing it from its marginality—or invisibility—into the mainstream. This is what Occupy did. Class was not really part of the conversation in the early aughts or for a couple of decades before and what the movement did was to say, “Hey! We are now living in a society with a 1 percent that dominates the 99 percent.” We see that kind of thing with the Disability Rights movement, with Astra’s work with the Debt Collective—basically naming and making debt visible as a public problem and a structural problem, rather than just an individual problem. This is the creative, imaginative, and hard work of organizing.

What’s so worrisome about social media is that we get pushed into our echo chambers, and it becomes hard to see beyond those virtual walls. And, well, Astra wrote a book on the internet, so maybe…

Taylor: I wrote a book criticizing the internet before it was cool! The point of that book was basically that we have to look at the political economy. Who’s making money? Who owns the platforms? What are they actually selling? And those are still relevant questions. Really, though—and Leah kind of named it—we do have to work to make things visible that are either out of sight, purposefully obscured, or simply not discussed because they’re stigmatized. We need to do the work of bringing that stuff to the fore.

At the Debt Collective we’ve done things like hosting debtors’ assemblies where we’re inspired by feminist consciousness-raising groups. We create a space where people can come together to talk about the fact that they’re financially struggling and hear other people’s stories. Or we would often do this thing where we would take those “Hello, my name is…” name tags and write something like, “Hello My Debt is $75,000.” The goal was not just making it visible but also trying to cast away the shame so often attached to debt. And we have to use social media as part of that project. We can’t just abandon that terrain. We have to figure out creative ways to hijack those networked channels and use them for good. When you’re older like me, you need younger comrades who love to TikTok or Twitch stream, or whatever the new thing is, and who are able to use those mediums for authentic, deep political education and community building. Organizers talk endlessly about how to get people to move from online to offline, or how to get people in the door. Social media is a tool to help do that—even if it’s a deeply flawed one that tends to push people into their filter bubbles and undermine our goals in lots of ways. It’s a tension we’re stuck with.

Horvath: Approaching the visibility question from a different angle, my own experience of social media is that of seeing so much information all at once. It’s a torrent of things that I really care about and want to act on. You quote Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he says that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” That’s a really overwhelming thought. Solidarity demands a lot of you—especially when you’re aware of the degree of injustice there is in the world. Given all that, what is there in the concept of solidarity to help differentiate between competing claims for solidarity? What should we prioritize? I know I’d love a moral cheat sheet sometimes to know where to put my energy. Can solidarity answer that question, or do we have to get that answer from somewhere else?

Hunt-Hendrix: The nice thing about recognizing that we are all interdependent is that wherever you enter in—it is all kind of connected. So, I think the issue is just to take the first step, just to get involved and choose something where you can make a positive impact and trust that other people are doing the same wherever they are. Starting locally—I mean it’s kind of a truism—makes sense because it’s important. That’s your context. That’s the area that you’re responsible for. Like I said at the very beginning, I didn’t really like philanthropy. But that was the arena in which I was raised. I thought, well, I guess this is where I need to do my organizing. I probably would have made a very different decision if I had been raised in a different context, and so, it just goes back to organizing where you are.

Taylor: People often ask me what they can do to save democracy or the planet. There’s no one answer. It’s so context dependent. Where are you? Where do you sit? You can’t save democracy alone—join something! Join a community group, join a tenants’ union, go canvas for candidates. The first thing is to start contributing to a collective endeavor. But of course what kind of endeavor matters. But we do have to make choices. Our attention and time aren’t infinite and the crises we face are urgent. Leah and I both believe we need to prioritize things that have an economic dimension and that advance the goal of equalizing the distribution of wealth. I think that’s why Occupy captured our attention and commitment, with its emphasis on class and inequality. Related to this, that’s why we think the revival of organized labor is really critical and why labor is such a big part of the book.

Hunt-Hendrix: Because these are all questions of power—the problem with economic inequality is not just the concentration of wealth, but also the concentration of power and decision making—which affects everything. We want to live in a society where everyone can be free and operate as free agents. But that means that they need to not be dominated by a small class of people who determine or construct the society that we live in. We are veering towards that. We’re living in the world that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have created. And there are pros and cons to that (say, if you love Amazon). But it’s scary. Their choices have huge impacts on us all.

It’s also important, though, to consider the question of tractability, what can be changed, and when there are openings, to join in efforts and movements that might lead to breakthroughs. So, when the racial justice movements of the past decade were gaining momentum, I think it made sense for lots of people to lean into that work. There are times when it makes sense to jump on a bandwagon, even if you were doing something different before because there’s an opening.

Horvath: It seems like creating organizations around the ideal of solidarity can be really tough. You’re widening the circle; you’re bringing in people that have different issues they want to address. There are bound to be internal tensions. From your experiences, how does an organization decide how to allocate its resources toward particular issues? And how do you make sure that no one feels left behind or invalidated if the organization doesn’t start with the things that most directly affect them?

Taylor: I think part of it is you have to be okay with making mistakes. You’re gonna ruffle some feathers and leave some people behind sometimes. Which is to say, I don’t have a perfect recipe. You can do everything and please everyone. We want to be successful, and we need to be strategic, which means paying attention to what is possible in the moment. Right now, while we have a Democratic administration, it makes sense for the Debt Collective to be pushing for executive action. That might not make sense in a year or two, depending on what the circumstances are. At the same time, I also think there’s a role for movements to play in being unrealistic and demanding the impossible. When we started in 2012, we were saying we want all student debt canceled and we want college to be free. Reuters and NPR mocked us and basically said, ‘Can you believe these dummies at Occupy Wall Street want the federal government to cancel student debt!’ They said it would never happen. But here we are and the Biden administration has canceled over $140 billion of federal student loans. So sometimes the strategic thing is to seem unstrategic. Sometimes it’s strategic to demand the utopian sounding thing and demand it now.

Movement strategy is an endlessly fascinating thing to be involved in because you’re like, ‘Oh, is it time for me to be a hard-nosed policy wonk who gets in the weeds? Or is it time for me to be a radical visionary and open imaginative space here?’ We really do need people who are doing all of this and more. There’s almost an ecosystem of solidarity. Because again, it’s wholeness. It goes back to the body Leah mentioned. Someone has to be that spleen, someone has to be the lungs, and someone has to be the legs running the marathon—because we really do need to be in it for the long haul. And we need more people working on all of these different fronts, doing things together that they could never do alone.

This conversation with Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor was held at Stanford on April 18 and hosted by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS). Their new book, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, is available now.

Read more stories by Aaron Horvath.