‘Of labour and struggle, Solidarity will rise!’ Thus opens the ‘Song of Solidarity’ by the Finnish left-wing vocal group Agit-Prop from the 1970s, the great decade of politicization, eventual over-politicization and collapse of one type of far-left student radicalism. I remember well how the marching tune sent shivers down my spine. Listening to it now, it still does. I was never a far-left activist. But, like almost everyone across the political spectrum, I was drawn to this song, like many others of its kind. Whatever may be said of far-left student activism of that era, at least the songs they sang and, outsiders suspected, the parties where those songs were sung, were far better than anyone else had to offer. And, even as one did not admire the Soviet Union or participate in solidarity tourism to Berlin ‘the Capital of the DDR’, one still has nostalgia for that period, not only to its musical culture but also its steadfast faith in the possibility of a better tomorrow, a tomorrow created not out of leisure and entertainment but of ‘labour and struggle’.

One of the most touching recent invocations of that period is Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, where the philosopher travels from Paris to his home town after a long absence in order to deal with the aftermath of his father’s death. Going through old photographs with his mother he gradually becomes acquainted with memories from his father’s life – a father from whom he had been alienated as a teenager and whose attitudes and life as a worker he had detested. The family had once voted communist but had since turned into supporters of the Front National. Their racism and prejudice had now found a new home in the extreme right. With one significant exception, however. When in the 1960s and 1970s there had been a strike, as there often was, or other protest against employers, then distinctions between the ‘French’ on the one side and immigrants, aliens or ‘Arabs’ on the other, disappeared. Its place was taken, however temporarily, by the call for the unity of ‘workers’ against ‘patrons’. Of such solidarity, the young Didier, himself a Trotskyite, had possessed no awareness. The world of labour and struggle that framed his family’s life had seemed only repulsive. Which is why he had used his education, exceptional in his milieu, by moving to Paris so as to ‘save himself’ (his words) from his father’s fate. Returning now, he encountered a past world of solidarity, of which he had never had more than a theoretical concept. Footnote ¹

Hard to say what one should think of that period – the European post-war of labour and struggle, the time of the trente glorieuses, the welfare state and flourishing social democracy. And ‘communism’, of course. Eribon’s parents had been communists, just like the members of Agit Prop and many other seekers of solidarity, a world much misunderstood today. How does that compare with the third decade of the twenty-first century? There is enormous wealth and opportunity, but people like Eribon’s parents, workers in a provincial town, would still lack access to it. And there is also anxiety and cynicism – cynicism about society, its politics, economics, its technology, cynicism about the future, even doubt if there will be one. Progress that was promised for the labour and struggle of the post-war period did not reach that generation’s grandchildren. Instead, there is an endlessly broadening gap between those with incomprehensible amounts of wealth and those who, like Eribon’s parents, survive with the barest minimum. Surveying the processes of privatization, collapsing public health and welfare services, decaying rural communities, immigration crises and environmental collapse makes one almost nostalgic about communism. At least today’s social democracy would seem unrecognizable to post-war labour activists. Instead, the political space is penetrated by anti-democratic and exclusionary movements hostile to the ideals of emancipation that labour and struggle were once expected to make a reality. On the contrary, there is little confidence that the political process or the increase of scientific knowledge, once inseperable from emancipation, could uphold the common good. Might not even mentioning the common good sound like a suspect effort to exercise hegemony?

Nostalgia may be an understandable reaction to a sense of pervasive crisis, such as present media conduits offer as the appropriate characterization of the present. Is the newly found interest in ‘solidarity’ of which this book is an example also an exercise in nostalgia? Perhaps. Eribon’s experience on his return home is likely to be familiar to many people. The post-war efforts to build the welfare state, the reassuring bedrock of the Cold War and the time when labour and struggle left no time to draw sharp dividing lines of ‘identity’ between and inside communities. Class conflict offered everyone a place and meaning. There’s a reason why today’s reactionary propaganda is formulated as ‘taking back control’. ‘Back’ to where, precisely? Nobody can claim a monopoly to the use of a fighting word such as ‘solidarity’. The breadth of its appeal is brought by the lightness of its substance. Perhaps we are drawn to solidarity because it carries the memory of what it was to believe that one was engaged in labour and struggle for a better future in common. Not that many words today speak about a shared future, even less of a future that is better precisely because it is shared, because it embodies a collective project of one or another kind. Might we feel drawn to ‘solidarity’ owing to its performative nature – the way already invoking it is to take a step or two towards the achievement of that sense of ‘belonging’ somewhere of which ‘solidarity’ speaks.

‘Solidarity’ is a messy word – which is not to say that it could not be subjected to the kinds of analytical, sociological, psychological, legal and other analyses of which this volume consists. Such analyses illuminate the many ambiguities in the concept. Illuminate, but never quite capture. Who seeks a definition is bound to be disappointed. Its meaning is its use. Like any fighting word, we feel ‘solidarity’s’ power most when we use it to defend ourselves and our allies against our adversaries – the workers and ‘patrons’ of Eribon’s narrative. To receive a grasp of the word and its power it is therefore useful to describe specific historical situations, moments of struggle, where the word has done, or could do its work. Many essays in this volume follow this path. Such descriptions have both a descriptive and a normative side – they inform us about past struggles and vest them with emotive and moral meaning. We learn both sympathy and outrage through them.

But human emotions and moral languages are fickle. Perhaps solidarity is a little like love in this regard. Or something like the Event in Alain Badiou’s sense, breaking the monotony of daily routine, something based neither on logic nor (neo-liberal) reason but that nevertheless calls for action because the situation to which it refers somehow calls for it. Footnote ² Perhaps it responds to the implicit appeal of the other, within or outside a religious frame. Or maybe it is just a strategic move in a struggle. As Chapter 2 suggests, it might involve taking a risk – though again, not always. As many of us 1970s students remember, it can also focus on people far away. David Featherstone gives the example of Cardiff harbour workers boycotting Italian ships during the Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935. Footnote ³ Both he and I recall the enthusiastic welcome given by many European countries to Chilean refugees after the Pinochet coup of 1973 – quite a striking contrast to how our countries now view the refugees from Africa or the Middle East.

Perhaps indeed there is sometimes an ‘eventness’ in solidarity, but not always. It may also emerge and flourish in a long, intimate relationship, the comradeship of labour and struggle for example. ‘Solidarity of the workers’. As Eribon points out, there is usually also an element of adversity – the employer, the capitalist or perhaps the national enemy that endows the word its emotive and political power. After all, ‘national solidarity’ is never greater than at times of war. Solidarity also often invokes a hierarchical contrast between a dominant party and the underdog, the poor, the homeless, birthplace of the ‘sympathy’ that Adam Smith invoked in his early research on the character of moral sentiment. This may also be the origin of its juridical translation in welfare legislation, the bureaucratic sibling of charity. But, as Samuel Moyn, among others, has pointed out, seeking to care for the poor is surely not enough. Footnote ⁴ Solidarity is not only about the floor but also about the ceiling, the distance that law and social institutions create or maintain between those at the top and those at the bottom. And yet, merely invoking a word is insufficient. It is good to remember that a parallel gap between the rich and poor also existed in fin-de-siècle France at the very moment when the liberal elites of the Third Republic were propounding the ideology of ‘solidarism’. Footnote ⁵ Ruling in the name of solidarity may express sympathy to the less well off – or it may work simply to silence them. As Chapter 4 points out, offering assistance may be an act of charity as well as an insult.

Many of the chapters within this book enquire into the relations of law and solidarity. That theme points historically to the organization of European societies in response to the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century, the decreasing power of religion and tradition and the rise of massive urban poverty and dislocation. The liberal legislators of the period were keen to provide for a society of individual rights, especially property rights, and to make sure that the public sphere does not intervene too much in how they exercise those rights. The experiences of the French Revolution were often sufficient to persuade others not to try to legislate about solidarity, at least not in terms of someone actually enjoying a right to assistance (secours publics) as provided by the furiously socio-revolutionary Constitution of 1793. Footnote ⁶ It was better to separate law from morality and keep the extra-legal notion of charity alive in the sphere of personal virtue where it could be enlisted to alleviate the massive problems of liberal law. As Chapter 3 points out, it is possible to see the operation of this distinction also in the way today’s human rights law distinguishes between political and social rights. Then, as now, the ruling view was that the need of assistance is both utterly indeterminate and endless so it could not be made subject to legal sanction. To think otherwise, it is assumed, would mean laying an unlimited burden on those whose rights were supposed precisely to prevent this. Footnote ⁷ It would be the path of socialism. There is a reason why the concept of ‘solidarity’ has been confined in liberal law to a certain type of contractual liability. Footnote ⁸

Eventually, the classics of sociology found ways to explain why, despite the limited degree to which liberal laws could accommodate duties of solidarity, the problems of modern society still did not lead to collapse. Solidarity could be ‘organic’, founded on the interdependence it created between utterly different lives; Gemeinschaft persisted even at the end of tradition, though with changed forms. Footnote ⁹ Further studies of ideology, hegemony and the dialectic and cynicism of reason produced further explanations for the puzzling fact that, while revolution took place in Russia, a society least likely to having reached the Marxian tipping point, countries with much more advanced capitalist relations of production could go on re-imagining themselves as ‘welfare-states’. Many of the chapters in this book quite properly rehearse aspects of this (European) story.

But many chapters also discuss solidarity as an international matter. This has been a classical aspect of the use of the concept, appearing already in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto in 1848, although today the focus has shifted to the relations between the Global North and South. The word is also invoked extensively in the context of human rights advocacy, especially in efforts to deal with the plight of refugees and migrants. If this is a ‘left’ form of solidarity in today’s international law and politics, its ‘right’ version surely lies in the way it can be used to isolate domestic community from whatever outside source seems to threaten its normality. Is a military alliance a system of solidarity or a system of hegemony? The distance from the call of the workers of the world to unite in the nineteenth century to today’s debates about the provision of F-35 fighter planes to more or less everyone in the US sphere of influence is a graphic demonstration of the flexibility of the concept.

Despite all the conceptual, philosophical, moral and legal difficulties, ‘solidarity’ has much staying power and that is a good thing too. Even as it is more a platform for engagement than an algorithm with fixed results, it does keep alive hugely important themes about how to live together in a world of identity and difference. If today’s greatest problems are those of inequality, both local and global, and the consequent erosion of democracy and the public services, its presence is a constant reminder that if one wants to change that situation, what is needed is labour and struggle.