A Solidarity Psychology
A Manuscript Excerpt from Peiwei Li’s and danny weber’s “Engaging with solidarity: Dialectical praxis and love in justice”
Abstract
“This paper reconstructs the concept of solidarity from an interdisciplinary perspective in response to continuing and exacerbating oppressions and climate crises throughout the globe. By tracing the history of the term and examining the relevance of solidarity in the transnational, post-humanist, and digital contexts, the paper grapples to clarify principles for solidarity. We arrive at a set of principles that include dialectical movement, recognition, praxis, and love in justice. In sum, to practice solidarity is to continually unfold through active praxes that cultivate non-alienated forms of relationship to others, selves, and worlds—all while maintaining the principles of love and justice.
Theorizing Solidarity: Principles for Solidarity
Solidarity requires recognition. We also contend that solidarity presupposes recognition, a capacity to recognize the mutual need for solidarity in a given context and across different contexts. It is important to note that what we mean by “recognition” is not just a cognitive understanding or analysis. Our understanding of this term is greatly influenced by its development in the critical theory tradition. The theme of intersubjective recognition first emerged in Hegel’s dialectics in The Phenomenology of Spirit (Carpsecken, 2018; Disley, 2015; Hegel, 1977) (e.g. both the well-known master-slave dialectics, and dialectics of the unhappy consciousness that is less known). Themes of dialectics can also be found in contemporary critical writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois (2008), Frantz Fanon (1986), Paulo Freire (1973), bell hooks (1994), Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser (Fraser & Honneth, 2006), and Robert Brandom (2019), to name a few. A critical take of recognition presupposes that human identity and social life are fundamentally, intersubjectively, and relationally constituted. Recognition is considered an intersubjective process, a form of self recognition in others, as I in We (Honneth, 2014). Genuine recognition can “only be realized through a continual conflict and a constant overcoming of failures.” (Williams, 1992, P. 211). Lived realities of this recognition process took place in the post-humanist section whereby relational beings and mutual accountability were discussed as well as the digital’s multi-point of view discussion of virtual experiences.
Overall, this approach demarcates from perspectives that are rooted in individualistic, atomic, essentializing assumptions that have largely plagued the discourses on concepts such as self, identity, and recognition (Li & Banks, 2020). Meanwhile, this critical approach also demarcates from post-structuralist perspectives that lean on the deconstruction of “self” and “truth”, and equate power and knowledge (Foucault, 2012). In contrast, critical theory never abandons the efforts to theorize self-actualization, identity, and human freedom on the ground of communicative action and normative and moral relevance. Similar to post-structural approaches, critical epistemology centers the understanding of power but does so by explicating dominant power relations in relation to the potentials for human freedom (Habermas, 1971). This stance assumes that solidarity across difference is possible if/when complex power relations are being examined, and mitigated. The tension between recognizing dominant power and the desire to overcome dominance propels a transformative movement when liberatory gains can be actualized through collective actions.
Thus, recognition has to be understood in the context of power. To solidarize, one needs to recognize relevant power relations including one’s own position as entangled in the web of power (Fine, 1994; Li & Ross, 2020), in the shades of dominance, alienation, marginalization, and oppression. Dominant power can manifest on many levels - intrapersonal, interpersonal, inter-group, inter-cultural, transnational, or in more abstract structural and system relations (Carspecken, 1996). Lived power examples populate all three above solidarity arenas, from unequal distributions of power across countries to unequal control of digital systems. Recognizing how we are implicated in the web of power reveals injustice and privileges. This awareness then becomes the impetus for solidarity and active participation to dismantle dominant power in new ways. Meanwhile, solidarity is not just fighting for marginalized others on their behalf, but recognizing that one’s own freedom is deeply intertwined with the freedom of the most marginalized (Freire, 1973). Paulo Freire articulates this dynamic more eloquently:
‘As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression. (Freire, 1973, p.56).’
Thus, when oppressors join forces with the oppressed to fight against oppression, it is never a heroic act but a self-restorative necessity for themselves. For this reason the notion of “ally” has been critiqued for misunderstanding this co-liberating process. The word “accomplice” has been used to more accurately locate solidarity work for the dominant groups (Indigenous Action, 2014). An accomplice not only engages in generative actions such as joining in protests, signing petitions, putting up yard signs, campaigning on social media and etc.. They also engage in subtractive actions, being willing to give up taken-for-granted comfort, convenience, material and monetary resources, and even safety, all of which are direct benefits from oppressive social and political arrangements. Genuine solidarity calls us to risk ourselves in ways that are essential to dismantle the oppressive machinery toward equitable distribution of power, resources, status, and recognition on a large scale. Such subtractive action is alive in the above transnational sections on the Beduoin people’s nomadic movement and recognition of the power to destroy as well as the power to leave lands to heal.”
Acknowledgments: Thank you to Dr. Peiwei Li for practicing solidarity with me in the co-creation of this paper and solidarity psychology as an idea at large.
