7.2 A Solidarity Moment in the Steam Economy: Workers in German Coal and Steel Industries

A reading trail connects AI and digitalization with the ‘social question’ of nineteenth-century industrialism. Once AI and digitalization have awakened your interest in cybernetics, you search for its sources, moving backward from the standard accounts of 1940s wartime applications to calculate the trajectory of anti-aircraft fires to late nineteenth century advances in mathematical modelling of complex processes,Footnote ³ ever-important to insurers of complex industrial risks, which, in turn, raises the question why insurance had attained such a prominent role, moving you to consider whether the nineteenth century cluster of industrialism, revolutionary threat, changes in liability law and the advent of welfare law is a kind of playbook we need to study carefully in order to understand the contours of what is happening in the relation of AI and digitalization to law.

Let me briefly introduce how this cluster came about. In nineteenth-century Germany, industrialism swept workers into novel forms of communal living and conditions of labour that were part of the industrial revolution and, due to their novelty and scale, largely beyond regulation. Workers reacted to these changes by associating in a way usually labelled as workers’ solidarity. These associations brought about a strong sense of intra-group obligation that we could describe as a private proto-law. The legality of their actions was challenged from the start, with employers denouncing the novel phenomenon of strikes as illegal and systematically shunning deliberations with worker committees.Footnote ⁴ Once owners and the government realized that worker associations, the unions germinating from them, and socialism were not going to go away, they reacted by combining repression with welfare-related entitlement. Socialism was formally outlawed, and an appeasing legislative package was adopted, prescribing strict liability for certain categories of industrial accidents, obligatory accident, health and pension insurances and providing welfare benefits for workers and their families, albeit on a rather limited scale. During the time of the normatively under-regulated emergence of industrialism, the proto-law of solidaristic workers’ associations had provoked the creation of new state law in response – a state law drawing inspiration from solidaristic demands as much as confronting them. Let us look at the individual elements of this jurisgenetic structure. They are industrialized communal living, under-regulation, solidaristic proto-law and, finally, repressive-appeasing state law.

First, there is the element of industrialized communal living. Generally, nineteenth century coal and steel industries in Germany concentrated workers in industrial barracks-like housing around factories and mines with miserable working conditions. The uniformity of housing and work, with workers of the same profession and the same workplace living together in the same space was a precondition of worker self-organization and German socialism.Footnote ⁵ Fascinatingly, this housing was part of industrial technology, meaning that, with industrial housing, technology and its owners created the very conditions that just might have led to a revolutionary change of ownership of the means of production in nineteenth-century Germany. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the coal and steel industry established new operations in rural areas unfit to absorb the great number of workers needed. In this phase of expansion, the uniformity of housing and work was an important factor in attracting and retaining workers, with a person’s labour contract often being linked to the rental contract for a flat in a housing project owned by the employer, giving employers ‘the means to control the life and political behaviour of workers beyond the workplace’.Footnote ⁶ Such workers lived and worked in a normatively very dense environment in which the employers’ politics manifested itself around the clock.

The absence of pertinent regulation by law or contract is the second element in the structure I propose. Employers enjoyed the benefits of a regulatory landscape where old rules had been scrapped without new ones having emerged yet. There was a decade-long inter-regnum of under-regulation. The 1865 Prussian Mining Act did away with numerous legal rules and claims, and abolished the principle that all mining is under the ultimate direction of the state (the Direktionsprinzip).Footnote ⁷ Just at the time when novel technology that had led to a sizeable expansion of coal production in the United Kingdom and elsewhere was imported into the Ruhr area, the state withdrew as a regulator. What is more, the law was slow and late in addressing workplace health and safety issues.Footnote ⁸ The minimalist public law approach taken after 1870, as detailed at the end of the current section, reflected this tardiness of regulation. Neither was there any leeway for individual workers to negotiate workplace safety aspects into their individual employment contracts, or, for that matter, any other condition of employment. On the contrary: industrial labour lived off the standardization of its processes.

Third, technology and social reorganization of industrial labour led to the self-organization of those subjected to technology in their labour. What is of interest to us here, is that common actions based on solidarity first emerged in the context of these forms of self-organization, that is, before – or outside the context of – the institutional forms of social democracy. At times, such actions could take contractual expressions. I use the term ‘proto-law’ for these relations resulting from workers entering into association and putting themselves at risk of dismissal or repression in order to bring about a better regulation of working conditions. All this would be at local level and within a short timeframe, by contrast to the medium- to long-term timeframe of social democracy and its national aspiration.

How are we to imagine this proto-law that emerged from the self-organization of workers threatened with immiseration by work accidents or dismissal? Locally, union-like associations emerged and sought to cartelize the negotiating power of single workers faced with owner demands on extended working hours or on the imposition of dismal and dangerous working conditions. Such associations followed the delineation of professions or task specializations in the industry in question.Footnote ⁹ To avoid being prohibited under the 1878 Socialist Law (Sozialistengesetz), these associations made a point of not self-identifying as unions.Footnote ¹⁰ The proto-law made by worker associates could take the form of private oral contracts to associate. One case in 1907 illustrates the response of Ruhr coal workers to the introduction of a markedly authoritarian management system (the Stinnes system, named after German industrialist Hugo Stinnes, 1870–1924). Faced with the incipient repression of their local and limited attempt at organizing, a group of pit foremen drew up a written agreement, adding a financial penalty to be paid by those breaking the ranks of the newly formed local organization: ‘I oblige myself to remain faithful to the organization. Should I leave it, I will pay 10 Mark as penitence [Reuegeld].’Footnote ¹¹ The dimension of trust among fellow workmen is moulded into a legal commitment, and a minimalist institution – ‘the organization’ – is created along the way. On the other side of the equation, the affected industry owner pressed workers to sign contracts committing them not to associate and to agree to their own dismissal, should they break that contract.Footnote ¹² All in all, what flourished during these times dominated by state laissez-faire and laissez-souffrir was a private law of sorts, formally frail and politically portentous.Footnote ¹³

As the example of self-organizing pit foremen suggests, particular professional categories among the newly mobilized, urbanized and co-housed workers were the source of resistance to industrial transformation. Just as technology could call forth forms of housing facilitating the control of workers, the same technology boosted collectivism within professions and ultimately produced the bearers of a solidaristic resistance in Germany. This is not without historical irony: exert a certain form of pressure on workers, and the structures generated by technology and capitalism start to turn against owners and directors.

When the German government devised counter-laws during the 1870s and 1880s, they were carefully tailored to thwart as much as to appease resistance from these groups, bringing us to the fourth and last element of my structure (repressive-appeasing law). We should imagine this as a massive public law intervention into the laissez-faire of German industrial markets, in part tangibly onerous for industry owners. The adoption of the Socialist Law in 1878 is the best-known attempt at large-scale repression of workers’ self-organization.Footnote ¹⁴ Remaining in force until 1890, it prohibited socialist, social democratic and communist associations, gatherings and publications. The Socialist Law gave a powerful tool to law enforcement authorities and courts to disrupt self-organization at local, regional and national level. Before it came into force, workers’ protests were simply dispelled by police or military. Now, the law had entered the fray, legalizing the use of law enforcement resources even in situations where self-organization had not grown into full-blown protests yet.

As a primary measure of appeasement, the introduction of strict liability for certain industries by the Bismarck governmentFootnote ¹⁵ softened the effects of workplace accidents to a degree and greatly stimulated the emergence of appropriate private insurance solutions for industry owners. The significance of this legislation must not be underestimated: The question of workplace accidents figured very prominently in German debates at the time, as industrialized labour had exposed workers to novel, aggravated dangers. In particular, young mining workers’ conditions of work entailed extreme morbidity and mortality rates.Footnote ¹⁶ Liability for such accidents was hard to attribute to owners under traditional forms of culpa models. The introduction of strict liability was carefully tailored to fit specific industries,Footnote ¹⁷ namely those in which self-organizing workers figure prominently. By way of example, the building industry objectively exposed its workers to considerable dangers at work, yet it was not included in strict liability legislation. By way of example, building workers were not housed communally as miners or steel workers, and would need to muster much greater resources to compensate for that lack of proximity. With the establishment of strict liability, the lawmaker acted strategically, seeking to drain out self-organization where it cropped up.

To the introduction of strict liability for certain industries, the gradual introduction of welfare-style worker insurance was added, with social insurance introduced in 1883 and health insurance introduced in 1884. However, welfare provision through these laws was kept at a minimum level and financed to an important part by workers’ contributions. The outspoken objective of these legal changes was to avert revolution, and they came in tandem with a robustly enforced legal repression of social democracy.

An analytically significant moment occurred when appeasement policies targeted the housing conditions of workers, addressing head-on the crammed communal living conditions that made workers organize themselves. Industry owners had taken initiatives at building worker settlement already back in the mid-nineteenth century, many of which stacked workers in high-occupancy buildings close to the industry. But, in the last decades of that century, a turn in workers housing took place. From then onwards, many leading industries opted for spreading out workers in settlements whose quasi-rural apparition was supposed to evoke a sense of Heimat, or homeland, among its inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁸ Houses are machines for living in, as Le Corbusier later famously wrote; in this case, they were designed as machines for living one’s love to the homeland – instead of living solidarity with worker-neighbours.

In the course of this shift, workers’ housing initiatives by Friedrich Krupp’s armament works turned away from the pre-1870s densely occupied multi-level tenements towards the cottage community of Altenhof (1892–1907) and the Margarethenhöhe (1909–1918) garden settlements. Also, as part of its wider labour policies, the German government promoted the development of new working-class housing in the periphery of large cities such as Berlin or Hamburg. Drawing on debates in German social-democratic publications of the late nineteenth century, Philipp Reick suggested that ‘organized labor opposed decentralization not only based on economic and socio-cultural reasons. Rather, workers opposed decentralization also because at least until the end of the century, central neighborhoods provided the movement with crucial spaces for collective action and political participation’.Footnote ¹⁹ This turn from a type of industry-appended housing that fostered the emergence of class solidarity to one that was meant to promote workers’ belonging to the nation corroborates that state and industry owners understood very well which preconditions were required for solidarity and resistance.

The process of repression and appeasement by the German government and affected industrial owners did not do away with the original tensions that germinated in local labour conflicts of the nineteenth century. Rather, these tensions survived into the new century, with revolutionary escalation remaining limited to the Weimar period of the 1920s. It was National Socialism that largely neutralized the political solidarity of workers during the Third Reich when, notwithstanding harsh working conditions and deteriorating labour conditions, only a limited number of strikes occurred.Footnote ²⁰ Ultimately, deindustrialization and the slow demise of coal power eliminated the political agency of mining and steel workers in contemporary Germany.Footnote ²¹

So, in all, what did steam power do to law in the case of the German industrial revolution? It brought about a structure where technological reorganization of production tips over into workers’ self-organization in solidarity, which engenders legal counter-organization by response. The communal life of workers in a joint physical place turns out to be the tipping factor. The agglomeration of housing and work brought opportunities for close horizontal encounters among German workers in the same industry operation and the same professional sub-groups. This suggests that geographical proximity alone is not enough. A necessary requirement for jurisgenetic solidarity is the availability of a common physical space, providing a parliament of sorts, where compromises can be trashed out and positional unity manufactured. All this is done with the purpose of bringing about normative stability: a lex inter partes brought about by private contracts.

7.3 A Solidarity Moment in Plantation Slavery: Maroon Communities in Suriname

In his Diarium Surinamicum, the botanist Daniel Rolander, a student of Carl von Linné, documented his 1755 research journey to the Dutch colony of Suriname.Footnote ²² Minute descriptions of plants and animals dominate, but often Rolander comments on the life of slaves, and on the cruelty colonists inflicted on them. Several entries relate to fugitive plantation slaves who settled in remote upriver locations, from which they raided Whites travelling outside their settlements and White settler plantations.Footnote ²³ In certain of those passages, Rolander uses the term ‘black rebels’ and recorded that Dutch-language settlers referred to them as ‘weck-loopers’ – literally those who run away. The groups of fugitives from slavery is today referred to as Maroons, and Maroon societies formed in different locations across the Caribbean. They represented a formidable challenge to White settler colonialism, whose occasional attempts to exterminate the Maroons by military means remained unsuccessful, and ultimately gave way to the conclusion of peace treaties between settlers and groups of Maroons.

In his entry of 13 January 1756, Rolander reasons at length on the conflict between Whites and slavery fugitives. On that day, at crossroads in Paramaribo, the colony’s capital, a herald publicly proclaimed a decision of the senate:

In the same entry, Rolander concludes that ‘[t]he blacks are too many for being subjugated by the white inhabitants or by a thousand soldiers sent from Holland’.Footnote ²⁵ He adds that ‘the black slaves would not have conceived their implacable hatred of the whites, or rebelled or even thought of undertaking such daring deeds, if they had been treated with less harshness – to say nothing of cruelty’.Footnote ²⁶ Rolander then suggests that ‘mildness and chastisement’ would have been a more effective system, as slaves treated in that manner testified to him elsewhere that they were content, and that they would not have been better off in Africa.Footnote ²⁷

Suriname’s European colonization had been a plurinational effort from the outset. As Karwan Fatah-Black’s work details, it remained a heterogeneous affair throughout the early modern period. The first expeditions to the Guiana coast in the early seventeenth century were, he argues, ‘based on shared business interests rather than being strictly French, Dutch, Irish or English undertakings’.Footnote ²⁸ It makes sense to read Surinamese plantation slavery as cropping up from industrialization and globalization rather than being an outflow of nation-statism. It illustrates the reach of private ownership in the colonial context that plantation owners in Dutch Suriname organized their own armed protection and covered the expenses for the military protection of their premises organized by the Dutch governor.Footnote ²⁹ These entrepreneurs of an industry based on human labour met a permissive regulatory environment that often limited itself to lending sovereign legitimacy to colonial appropriation. In the context of British colonialism, Philip Stern has shown the Company to be no mere merchant, but a form of early modern, colonial state and sovereign, laying the foundations for the British Empire in India.Footnote ³⁰

Today, there are six established Maroon groups in Suriname, and one of the two largest are the Samaraka Maroons.Footnote ³¹ As societies driven by oral tradition, the Maroon did not produce documents reflecting the proto-law on which these six communities rest, but their sociogenesis can be tracked through the proxy of language. A comprehensive overview of creolists’ efforts to determine when Samarakan creole formed is in Jacques Arends’ 2017 monograph, arguing that an earlier belief of a relatively short formative period from 1690 to 1712 lacked empirical foundation.Footnote ³² Overall, as André Pakosie writes,

German industrial workers traded the existential risk of inhuman work conditions for another one: that of being sacked wholesale for associating with each other and losing the sole source of individual or family subsistence. By escaping, fugitives from plantation slavery in Suriname also traded the considerable risks of being a slaveFootnote ³⁴ against another type of existential risk: being exposed to a hostile nature without secure provision of food and shelter, and being targeted for punishment or subjected to attempts at military annihilation by settler armies.Footnote ³⁵ That apart, the very project of transitioning from a haphazardly configured group of escaped slaves into a functioning society of escapees could fail miserably. What if the act of escaping produced a dangerous life in solitude and intergroup strife rather than a relatively secure one within the mutuality of an emerging society? German industrial workers were recruited from different classes and areas, but in all cases a basic socialization had been achieved to a large degree at a point prior to recruitment. For plantation escapees, basic socialization was a labour yet to be done, illustrated by the emergence of a group-specific Maroon creole, integrating elements from African and colonial languages.Footnote ³⁶ Abduction into slavery took place from different West African communities. Therefore, escapees could not necessarily fall back on earlier group identities. They had to build communities anew, forming what has been termed a socioterritorial movement.Footnote ³⁷ The point of solidarity was exactly that: becoming Loweman, becoming Maroon.

There is another commonality, one that initially seems paradoxical. Without the German mining and steel industry, there was no worker solidarity. And, without the industry of plantations, no communities of solidarity among its slaves and escapees. What interests me is that nodal point where techno-social reorganization (in plantation slavery and the Second Industrial Revolution in Germany) tipped over into self-organization and solidarity (for Maroons and for German industrial workers, respectively). The slaves, as much as German industrial workers, were put out of the reach of existing regulation by the massive techno-social changes wrought by industrialization and globalization. Ironically, by forcing both groups into communal living arrangements, industrialists and plantation owners provided an indispensable condition for sparking political resistance. This holds, all differences notwithstanding.Footnote ³⁸ The factor behind violent repression turned out to be the factor behind emancipatory solidarity.

Solidarity among German industrial workers expressed itself and was conditioned by what we might call associative agreements. These ranged from promises in informal settings to formal associations with statutes and financial contributions. I have labelled them as proto-law, filling an emergent space of solidarity with norms and rudimentary institutions. In the case of the Maroons, we lack sufficient sources to explore analogous proto-law within Maroon groups and, beyond the formation of Maroon creole, its linguistic carrier. We only know that inter-escapee solidarity was sufficient for a form of sociogenesis into several Maroon groups taking place, providing them with institutional structures and leadership hierarchies. These allowed the Maroon groups of Suriname to become parties to bilateral peace treaties with the Dutch colonial administration. Such treaties were concluded with three established Maroon groups: the Ndjuka (1760), the Saamaraka (1762) and the Matawai (1767).Footnote ³⁹ They enabled the Maroon parties to adapt their life to peaceful conditions and to move to, or extend their power into, more prosperous areas. This came at a price, though. Of particular interest to me are clauses to the effect that the Maroon parties were to deliver all later runaway slaves to the slave masters.Footnote ⁴⁰ This reformist move would, in effect, exclude future generations of fugitives, thwart an expansion of Maroon sociogenesis and make the Maroon project sterile in the transformation of industrializing and globalizing politics. The Maroon agreed not to enter into negotiations with other groups, such as Amerindians, without permission of the colonial power, effectively depriving them of their capability to run their own foreign policy, as Pakosi notes.Footnote ⁴¹ The colonial power had effectively succeeded in making a repressive and appeasing state law that would curb the revolutionary potential of active solidarity – as German welfare laws did in conjunction with the prohibition of socialist association.

In all, the peace treaties were inducing no less than a form of counter-solidarity. This counter-solidarity was sufficiently effective to stop alliances between the established Maroon groups and the Boni Maroon, a relatively new group likely to have emerged during the first half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴² As Dutch public records from the relevant period suggest, the Ndjuka Maroons assisted the Dutch in tracking down and fighting the Boni Maroon group.Footnote ⁴³ The alliance projected in the treaties functioned in practice. It effectively introduced a rift between Maroon groups, with the binding power of a common past as forcibly displaced African fugitives proving insufficient to engender solidarity across these groups.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Maroons leveraged solidarity to establish a functioning social, political and legal community, with the element of communal life and work being decisive. Today, the six established Maroon groups ‘remain distinct tribal entities whose autonomous political status finds support in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century peace treaties and in historical relations between the coastal government centre in Paramaribo and the leaders of the different tribes’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This autonomy brings Aonghas St-Hilaire to draw the conclusion that, at least prior to the 1940s, the Surinamese Maroon formed a ‘world system’ of their own, as a minuscule alternative to the only other world system on offer: capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁶ While there might be a seductive appeal in this special status, its price tag is isolation and the inability to extend the reach of the Maroon political project.

While German workers remained within a system of labour exploitation and exercised solidarity on its inside, the Maroon left the plantations and placed their exercise of solidarity on the outside of the system of exploitation that had brought them together. While the German workers’ remaining on the inside eventually resulted in Social Democracy and a long history of repetitive solidarity practices that grew together with the industries providing its base, the Maroon’s outsider status disallowed solidarity to grow in tandem with the technology that brought it about and relinquished the Maroon to the status of external collaborators to colonial exploiters. I conclude that the sharing of a physical place by exploited labourers is a critical factor for the forming of a community in solidarity, yet that place needs to be on the inside of a politics of exploitation, if solidarity is to endure.

7.4 A Solidarity Moment in Data Societies?

The case of the Maroon suggests that the juris-generative pattern behind the term ‘solidarity’ is not particular to production in certain European industrial centres and to the interaction between European industry workers, industrialists and states. The point of comparing the metropolitan case of Germany industry worker solidarity with the colonial case of Maroon solidarity was to test whether the four identified elements (industrialized communal living, public under-regulation of labour in revolutionized production in conjunction with resistant proto-law and repressive-appeasing state law) helps us to think about solidarity under conditions of AI and digitalization.

It can be argued without too much difficulty that we are indeed in a state of public under-regulation today, obtaining from an appropriation of social resources by digital entrepreneurs. Structurally, this situation is comparable to the one permitting British and Dutch slave traders and plantation owners to exploit a normative environment infamously framed as terra nullius.Footnote ⁴⁷ To be sure, ascribing the quality of terra nullius to plantation colonies did not imply that the public lawmaker of the British empire should engage in the regulation of newly appropriated territories. Rather, private interests setting up and operating plantations were laying down their own norms as they went along. The massive collection of data by private companies assisted by the United StatesFootnote ⁴⁸ and China today resonates to quite a degree with the acquisition of colonial resources by private companies in the heyday of plantation colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁹ So does the fact that ‘frontier AI’ is largely subject to self-regulation by the industry itself.Footnote ⁵⁰ When EU regulators stray too far into the terra nullius appropriated by digital entrepreneurs, technological monarchs threaten to sanction the EU by withdrawing technology from its jurisdiction.Footnote ⁵¹

However, it appears that under-regulation is the only straightforward commonality that links plantation slavery and the industrial revolution with AI and digitalization. At face value, it is hard to identify forms of communal living in AI and digitalization coeval with the upheaval and reorganization of human life and work that is characteristic for plantation slavery and the industrial revolution. Both pushed or forced human labourers into an amalgam of communal living and working conditions, which turned out to be a critical enabler of solidarity.Footnote ⁵²

In the European power struggles since the advent of industrialization, the question of which level of integration between life and work is required for political self-organization is, I would argue, central. To corroborate that, let us revert to German workers’ solidarity and consider the point at which conflicts on industrial work and industrial politics came to a head. During the 1918–1920 German revolutions, worker and soldier councils grabbed power locally and regionally – in all instances, power was lost as fast as it had been won. Worker and soldier councils offered themself as a logical culmination of the solidarity structures brought forth by working and living communally. Harry Graf Kessler, a German intellectual, reports a private discussion in the immediate aftermath of the short-lived Munich council revolution of April 1919 in his diary:

Janus-like, the machinic character of industrialism toggles between enabling, and subsequently destroying, worker solidarity, with the degree of communality it permits in both living and working being a decisive factor. Here, the technological, the social and the political play out as facets of one and the same phenomenon. Exactly how technology and accumulation articulate the communality of life and work determines the extent of solidarity. This is an important lesson to be learned from European industrialism, even though Cassirer and other pessimists of the 1920s were proven wrong: workers were still capable to stage extensive strikes in Western Europe during the Cold War, which suggests that the machine did not fully render humans into isolated atoms.

Compared to the machines of the 1920s, the machine of AI and digitalization is capable of dismantling communal work and life to a different order of magnitude. Digitalization is capable of disintegrating the experience of human communality even where humans share a joint physical space. AI delivers a specific contribution to that process, breaking down, as it does, human life and work into fragmented behaviours, subjected to tracking, probabilistic prediction and partial automation. ‘Big data does subjects differently’, as Marie Petersmann and Dimitrii Van Den Meersche point out, making them fluid and relational.Footnote ⁵⁴ This fluidity may work against solidarity. Evidence from Kazakh digital platform couriers and Filipino online entrepreneurs corroborate that the degree of communality in their work and life is insufficient to engender resistance arising from the solidarity of protolegal contracting.Footnote ⁵⁵ By contrast, where digital workers share the same workplace, unionization is attempted, as 2023 reporting on Meta content moderators in Nairobi shows: Filtering some of the internet’s most horrific content with an average handling time of 55 seconds per task, moderators developed signs of trauma, founded a union and took their employer to court for subjection to digital sweatshop conditions.Footnote ⁵⁶ The 2016 strike of London Deliveroo riders, known as the ‘first strike of the platform economy’, also suggests the centrality of a common physical workplace for the emergence of solidarity, even if it is as extensive as a large city.Footnote ⁵⁷

The question driving this chapter is whether solidarity is possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI. The early evidence we have on solidarity in data societies confirms the centrality of communal life and work in a shared physical space. Much will depend on which data societies develop, but it is safe to say that digital technologies provide ample opportunity for a counter solidarity politics of divide et impera.

7.5 Coda: Who Is the Agent of Solidarity?

Reviewing mainly French solidarism literature as it presented itself at the outset of the twentieth century, Célestin Bouglé identified original sin as the common base of conceptualizations of solidarity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Within Christianity, the fall is an experience common to all mankind by virtue of being the progeny of Adam and Eve. It gives solidarity its conceptual contours through a negative referent: the absence of community with god enacted in the eviction from paradise. This is a version of solidarity that maximizes inclusion: solidarity is but the experience of absent community with the divine, communalized across mankind as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁹In this reading, every human is an agent of solidarity.

The universal aspiration of cybernetics and digital technologies maximizes inclusion in a similar way. Cybernetics imply that capitalism expands through an unprecedented level of abstraction (as argued by Timothy Erik StrömFootnote ⁶⁰). And, as almost everyone utilizes a digital platform and generates data, everyone seems to be a data worker, or, in Varoufakis’ more polemical terminology, a ‘cloud serf’: ‘The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners’.Footnote ⁶¹ For us all as cloud serfs, Varoufakis considers modes of resistance that are characterized by low risk-taking on the individual level, such as consumer boycotts of a particular platform provider, such as Amazon. He sets this off from the high-risk strategies of earlier industry workers engaging in strikes that put their livelihood on the line.Footnote ⁶² This seems to underplay the difficulties of effectively organizing such actions on a politically significant scale and over a politically significant period of time.

Other contemporary writers are no less affected by the lure of extending the group of solidarity agents conceptually. In their 2018 study on digital solidarity, Horan Lee and Ronald Staples first make existing solidarity conceptions more capacious to then capture solidarity phenomena in digital work life with it.Footnote ⁶³ While this keeps solidarity in the game at the verbal level, it ends up in mere stipulation, with a perennial promise of political potential – but actual political impotence. If everybody is potentially an agent of solidarity, the difficulty moves instead to the question of what exactly it is that we need to do ‘in solidarity’ to change an exploitative techno-economic system.

I have gone in a reductive direction and sought out a minimalist conception of solidarity as a trigger point for resistance. The factor of communal life and work proved to be pivotal in the tracking of protolegal solidarity.Footnote ⁶⁴ The advantage of a minimalist solidarity concept is that it keeps close to historical transformations of plantation and industry capitalism. Thereby, it remains sensitive to the question whether capitalism is approaching the end of its road in cybernetic technology, or whether we are just in for another round of abstraction, and another round for solidarity. Epochal framing is but an aspect of methodological framing. If we assume that capitalism prevails beyond the changes wrought by cybernetics (and, as it were, the heritage of industrial emissions), then it is only solidarity in this known form that has come to the end of the road. However, it might also be the epoch of capitalism itself that has come to the end of the road, once the reformative safety valve of solidarity is no longer accessible.