Worker Solidarity Quotes

IWW organizer Joseph Ettor said: If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. . . .

Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy. Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine a world where men who are unemployed for any reason could learn the way to self-actualization.

Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.5 It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women.

The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in the pockets than all the property of capitalists. . .

How can there be solidarity of workers with fools like you?

Leon also explained how the Nazi Party, having witnessed the successful workers’ revolution in Russia, and seeing communism gaining political power in Germany, set out to deliberately weaken the importance of class in the minds of German workers. This was done by replacing class solidarity with racial solidarity, supplanting the common interests shared by all workers with the pleasures and rewards that flowed from belonging to the Aryan race, a bond that claimed to unite the poorest Christian workers with the wealthiest industrialists.

The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.

Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

This moment is rife with opportunity, rife with the sacred responsibility unions have to be at the forefront of the movement for justice that is already underway, to ensure that workers are at the center of defining and creating their own liberation.

Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy

Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains. But, said the more perceptive nineteenth-century critics, if this is how people live their lives at work, then how on earth can they think differently when they come home at night? How might it be possible to build a sense of moral community or of social solidarity, of collective and meaningful ways of belonging and living that are untainted by the brutality, ignorance and stupidity that envelops labourers at work? How, above all, are workers supposed to develop any sense of their mastery over their own fates and fortunes when they depend so deeply upon a multitude of distant, unknown and in many respects unknowable people who put breakfast on their table every day?

Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums. The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading. For those who are prepared to do this, these essays might provide some encouragement, and food for thought.

But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.

Every defeat of the capitalist class is a defeat for fascism. Every time the workers obtain a reduction in their hours of work and a rise in salaries, every time they affirm workers’ solidarity by defending a victimised fellow worker, every time they abolish degrading methods of production, every time they achieve a victory over their boss, they win a victory against fascism and pave the way to socialism. THE LEFT & WORLD WAR II: Selections from the Anarchist Journal 'War Commentary' 1939-1943

The fall of the protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and the former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and unemployment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they existed in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have supported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second World War.

is true that because of much greater employment the total income from wages and salaries grew from twenty-five billion marks to forty-two billions, an increase of 66 per cent. But income from capital and business rose much more steeply—by 146 per cent. All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the worker. But a sober study of the official statistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies.

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism.

Well what can you expect?' I retorted. 'Those people are, as you say, simple and uneducated. Wasn't it Marx who said that peasants are like sacks of potatoes? Is it surprising that their lives are filled with gods and goddesses and demons?' She glanced at me again. 'You really do not care for ordinary people, do you?' The imputation of elitism made me bridle. 'Why you're quite wrong!' I said. 'I consider myself a person of the left. As a student I was a Maoist fellow traveller. I've always stood in solidarity with peasants and workers.' 'Oh yes, certo!' she said, suppressing a giggle. 'I knew many Maoists and fellow travellers in Italy. They had every regard for the bellies and bodies of poor people - but not, I think, for what is in their heads.

Modern armies no longer line up in neat rows and charge each other from opposite sides of a battlefield. Strangely, however, they still train that way, for example, during marching drills. This practice is useful, it turns out, not to prep for actual battle conditions, but to build trust and solidarity among soldiers in a unit. Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes. In the early decades of the 20th century, IBM used corporate songs to instill a sense of unity among their workers.49 Some companies in Japan still use these practices today.

They eyed with mounting alarm the red flags and banners and portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Largo Caballero on huge placards, and listened to the chanting of the demonstrators, demanding the formation of a proletarian government and a people’s army. But it was not just these obvious political symbols that frightened them. The workers in the street had a new confidence or, in their view, insolence. Beggars had started to ask for alms, not for the love of God, but in the name of revolutionary solidarity. Girls walked freely and started to ridicule convention. On 4 May José Antonio delivered a diatribe from prison against the Popular Front. He claimed that it was directed by Moscow, fomented prostitution and undermined the family. ‘Have you not heard the cry of Spanish girls today: “Children, yes! Husbands, no!”?

Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.

As existentialists as Jean-Paul Sarte learned, radical individualism can be a dead end for social justice. It is not easy to establish a coherent ideology of social justice based solely on the radical freedom of the individual. Unlike Sarte, who eventually escaped into Marxism, postmodernist philosophers reject communism. But they do find refuge in the New Left, in which Marx's old economic class warfare has been replaced with identity-cultural warfare. This transformation gives them a way out of the individualist-relativist trap in which they found themselves. Instead of the proletariat, it is now cultural identity groups that are being oppressed. It is not workers but races, women, and ethnic and sexual minorities who are the new revolutionaries. Unlike classic Marxists, for whom class consciousness is a social phenomenon economically determined, identity theorists define it as a psychological phenomenon manifested in the culture. Identity solidarity is the equivalent of class consciousness, only it has no objective foundation, economic or otherwise, other than the perception of mutual grievance based on identity.

God in the Spirit revealed in Jesus Christ, calls us by grace to be renewed in the image of our Creator, that we may be one in divine love for the world. Today is the day God cares for the integrity of creation, wills the healing and wholeness of all life, weeps at the plunder of earth’s goodness. And so shall we. Today is the day God embraces all hues of humanity, delights in diversity and difference, favors solidarity transforming strangers into friends. And so shall we. Today is the day God cries with the masses of starving people, despises growing disparity between rich and poor, demands justice for workers in the marketplace. And so shall we. Today is the day God deplores violence in our homes and streets, rebukes the world’s warring madness, humbles the powerful and lifts up the lowly. And so shall we. Today is the day God calls for nations and peoples to live in peace, celebrates where justice and mercy embrace, exults when the wolf grazes with the lamb. And so shall we. Today is the day God brings good news to the poor, proclaims release to the captives, gives sight to the blind, and sets the oppressed free. And so shall we.

Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.

In the years preceding World War I, tenants in Budapest used boycotts as a weapon against individual landlords. “Residents who were not able to pay the increased rent and who were therefore evicted, called upon those seeking dwellings to boycott the houses concerned. These calls were publicized in newspapers and posters, and met with much success. As a result of this, and the solidarity of the tenants still living there, many landlords were forced to conclude collective contracts which severely restricted their rights.

Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.

The System The denunciation of a dictatorship’s crimes doesn’t end with a list of the tortured, murdered, and disappeared. The machine gives you lessons in egoism and lies. Solidarity is a crime. To save yourself, the machine teaches, you have to be a hypocrite and a louse. The person who kisses you tonight will sell you tomorrow. Every favor breeds an act of revenge. If you say what you think, they smash you, and nobody deserves the risk. Doesn’t the unemployed worker secretly wish the factory will fire the other guy in order to take his place? Isn’t your neighbor your competition and enemy? Not long ago, in Montevideo, a little boy asked his mother to take him back to the hospital, because he wanted to be unborn. Without a drop of blood, without even a tear, the daily massacre of the best in every person is carried out. Victory for the machine: people are afraid of talking and looking at one another. May nobody meet anybody else. When someone looks at you and keeps looking, you think, “He’s going to screw me.” The manager tells the employee, who was once his friend, “I had to denounce you. They asked for the lists. Some name had to be given. If you can, forgive me.” Out of every thirty Uruguayans, one has the job of watching, hunting down, and punishing others. There is no work outside the garrisons and the police stations, and in any case to keep your job you need a certificate of democratic faith given by the police. Students are required to denounce their fellow students, children are urged to denounce their teachers. In Argentina, television asks, “Do you know what your child is doing right now?” Why isn’t the murder of souls through poisoning written up on the crime page?

experiencing dramatic and sudden change. We entered the town square where one hundred thousand Polish workers had gathered. They were waving American flags and shouting, “Bush, Bush, Bush… Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.” I turned to my colleague Robert Blackwill of the National Security Council staff and said, “This is not exactly what Karl Marx meant when he said, ‘Workers of the world unite.’” But, indeed, they had “nothing to lose but their chains.” Two months later, the Polish Communist Party gave way to a Solidarity-led government.

Jews and Marxists were forbidden in any case to practise journalism in Nazi Germany. In October 1933, Hitler enacted an editors’ law modelled on the regimentation of journalists in fascist Italy. From mid-1935 the Catholic-owned press was also purged of all divisive religious trends. Sinning newspapers were sniffed out and closed down. As Goebbels publicly emphasized: ‘I reject the standpoint that there is in Germany a Catholic and a Protestant press; or a workers’ press; or a farmers’ press; or a city press or a proletariat press. There exists only a German press.’ To Goebbels's new monolithic organization Hitler assigned three tasks: to illuminate to the world the urgency of the problems he was about to tackle; to warn that he would not be trifled with; and to show the world the solidarity of the German people.

The spectacle of that gathering [a NSW Teachers' Federation protest in the late 1980s], the might of its unified purpose, the feeling of solidarity and strength, resonated with me in a way that has shaped my beliefs and my actions ever since. Union power is this simple act of solidarity - of people realising what we have in common, and deciding both to stick together and to act.

But the cat was out of the bag; in response to draconian tactics, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, farmers began to organize across caste lines, with Jat and Thakur landowners joining forces with cattle-rearing Gujars and the poor, uncompensated Jatav and Dalit workers who farm their lands.

Until the middle third of the nineteenth century, compagnonnages were illegal secret associations, countercorporations, as it were, that provided workers with weapons to resist their masters’ tyranny and paternalism and that schooled them in a highly ritualized ethic and mystique of solidarity, virtue, and good conduct (as the fraternities defined it), the independence and dignity of the worker, and pride in the trade.

For All in the Family and the many shows it spawned, the generation gap merged with class distinctions as the new generation seemed less held back by class than by culture. Mature white working-class men in popular culture, therefore, would be hard-pressed to have values in any enviable sense. This came to the fore in August 1974, when actor Carroll O’Connor refused to show up on the set while replacement workers did the jobs of striking electrical equipment operators at CBS. His nearly month-long show of solidarity single-handedly halted production of All in the Family, earning him the wrath of the producers, television critics, and fans alike. Meantime, his otherwise politically progressive co-stars saw little wrong with going to work in the midst of a strike and treated O’Connor as a bit of an oddity. “I don’t think he has any support anywhere,” remarked Jean Stapleton who played Edith; “It was very noble-sounding, but not, uh, wise.

The aim of the policy of forced mobility was not only to push individuals to leave the company, but also to disrupt existing forms of collective relationship. The message was that each worker was alone in the face of management and had to bear personal responsibility for the economic successes or failures of the company. The old culture of solidarity and collective representation had to be done away with. Suicides often have a social dimension seeking to achieve strategic ends beyond a person’s death. Letters left by individuals may denounce workplace conditions, point the finger at bosses, or appeal for broad social change. In some cases a detailed portfolio of documents has been left to allow others to mount a legal suit against the company. These are objectives more readily associated with social protest.

solidarity is now broken, and every worker is alone, facing the blackmail of merit, the humiliation of failure, the threat of being made redundant. What follows is a sense of guilt, anxiety and reciprocal resentment for the perceived mutual inability to help each other, to build solidarity. This is how the heavy architecture of shared depression is built.

The post-bourgeois capitalist class does not feel responsible for the community and the territory because financial capitalism is totally deterritorialized and has no interest in the future well-being of the community. On the other hand, the post-Fordist worker no longer shares the same interest as his/her colleagues, but, on the contrary, is forced to compete every day against other workers for a job and a salary in the deregulated labour arena. Within the framework of this new precarious organization of labour, building solidarity becomes a difficult task.

Only non-involvement and the ability to remain extraneous, to refuse any identification with one’s job and with one’s working condition, only a radical rejection of the ethics of responsibility, might offer workers the possibility of navigating a way out from this productivity blackmail. Unfortunately, the ethics of responsibility, the phoney discourse on participation and collaboration, are prevailing in today’s political and cultural life. We invest our psychic energies and our expectations into work because our intellectual and affective life is poor, because we are depressed, anxious and insecure. So we are trapped. The industrial worker who was obliged to repeat the same gesture a thousand times every day had no reason to identify with her work – so she invested her psychological energies into solidarity with colleagues, and her mind was free to hate the assembly line, and to entertain thoughts that had nothing to do with her daily slavery. Conversely, cognitive workers have been lured into the trap of creativity: their expectations are submitted to the productivity blackmail because they are obliged to identify their soul (the linguistic and emotional core of their activity) with their work. Social conflicts and dissatisfaction are perceived as psychological failures whose effect is the destruction of self-esteem.

Internationalism is not abstract moral solidarity, mere political will. It is the effect of the condition of work without quality, the condition of abstract work. As a consequence of this condition of radical alienation, industrial workers have been able to create the cultural conditions of equality. Industrial workers know that they are equals in their loss of humanity, of life, of time, of difference. It is through this alienation that difference can be reconstructed as consciousness, not as memory, as a political process of solidarity, not as belonging to an imagined origin. Since the working class was defeated by precariousness and the globalization of the labour market, the Volk has returned, stupid and bloody as it is, bringing with it the curse of origins, the obsession with belonging. In his book La Défaite de la pensée, Alain Finkielkraut rightly laments the fading of universal reason as the foundation of law and social structure, and the the re-emergence of identitarian culture and belonging. When relativism becomes culturalism, when belonging is mistaken as the foundation of law (‘memory is right’), when workers’ internationalism is defeated, modern universalism dies, and Humanism dies with it. Only the global, idiotic proliferation of particularities remains: crime and suicide.

A vivid feeling of solidarity, whether racial, national or religious, is undoubtedly an effective means of preventing labor unrest. Even when the type of solidarity is such that it cannot comprise the employer, it nevertheless tends to promote labor contentment and efficiency. Experience shows that production is at its best when the workers feel and act as members of a team. Any policy that disturbs and tears apart the team is bound to cause severe trouble. “Incentive wage plans that offer bonuses to individual workers do more harm than good…. Group incentive plans in which the bonus is based on the work of the whole team, including the foreman … are much more likely to promote greater productivity and greater satisfaction on the part of the workers.”21

In the domain of cinema, the latest example of such “classism” is Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020) which portrays the daily lives of our “nomadic proletarians,” workers without a permanent home who live in trailers and wander around from one temporary job to another. They are shown as decent people, full of spontaneous goodness and solidarity with each other, inhabiting their own world of small customs and rituals, enjoying their modest happiness (even the occasional work in an Amazon packaging center goes quite well . . . ). That’s how our hegemonic ideology likes to see workers—no wonder the movie was the big winner of the last Oscars. Although the lives depicted are rather miserable, we are bribed into enjoying the movie with the charming details of the workers’ specific way of life, the underlying message being: enjoy being a nomadic proletarian!

This departs from expertise-based social services that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed therapist, lawyer, or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done.

The attitude of the permanent staff toward those precariously employed ranges from negativity to empathy and solidarity. While many seek a better position for agency workers and their integration into the firm’s social community, I came across cases—for instance, in an energy technology company, where the most unpleasant tasks (with negative health effects) were deliberately given exclusively to agency workers. Many permanent staff see agency workers as a buffer that protects their own employment in case of a crisis or threat of dismissal.

This fight for decent pay has, like many labor struggles before it, exposed the fact that workers of color suffer the most acute economic injustices, but most of the people harmed in a wage structure built on racism are white. And like every truly successful labor movement, it has found its reach and its strength because of cross-racial solidarity.

Connecticut’s Solidarity Dividend was almost immediate. In the first legislative cycles after public financing, the more diverse (by measures of race, gender, and class) legislature passed a raft of popular public-interest bills, including a guarantee of paid sick days for workers, a minimum wage increase, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, in-state tuition for undocumented students, and a change to an obscure law championed by beverage distributor lobbyists that resulted in $24 million returning to the state—money that could contribute to funding the public financing law. Despite regular efforts to curtail it, Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program has endured for over a decade, highly popular with both Connecticut residents and candidates, 73 percent of whom opted into the system in 2014.

Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

The Bush plan is economic treason against the American worker. That "civil rights leaders" are silent about the dispossession of the black working class, that unions are not marching to denounce this sellout of blue-collar and white-collar America, only tells us that the amorality of the transnational corporation has infected both. Solidarity be damned, it is all about money now.

In 1910, on the grounds of health and safety, Contestabile supported a law that would have required every cook in Massachusetts to obtain a license.61 By erecting barriers to entry, the cooks revealed that the policing of boundaries to their occupation, rather than broader worker solidarity, was their preferred organizing strategy.

Oh, everybody knows that although they may be hard workers, they are not easy to deal with, and they’ve skimmed the district for all the cream they can get. But after all, though they may rob us, at least they respect us. That makes for a kind of social solidarity between us and them—deplore it or not, it exists, and everything that exists should be used for some good purpose.

When they work well, unions are the voices of all of the workers in negotiations with management and can leverage worker solidarity to not only prevent management from treating workers poorly, but to force management to create a safer, equitable, and more joyous workplace.

Strong unions require solidarity and solidarity in turn demands that workers must forego some degree of individual freedom in order to take advantage of the greater freedom they can win when they act as one.

It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.

Sure, some rich people work hard – but so do koilawalas, construction workers, and domestic helpers. Other bases of privilege have little to do with personal merit: our aptitudes, health, inheritance, social connections, and other assets derive from contingencies (such as the accident of birth) over which we have no control. Even our education reflects inherited circumstances, and our parents’ and teachers’ efforts, far more than our own. All this is without going into the fact that wealth and power often build on corruption, exploitation, and crime

In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.

We need to stop thinking we can "rescue" the world from problems we helped create. Haiti has no money because the United States, France, and other colonial powers stole it. When we buy a twenty-dollar shirt that a Haitian was paid pennies to make, we are continuing to steal from them. When a U.S. aid worker in Haiti is paid a salary equivalent to that of fifty Haitians, we are continuing to steal from them. This is not aid. Aid is reparations. Relief is overthrowing a system of colonial domination, and eliminating debt. Support is standing in solidarity with Haitians ... [who] are organizing and fighting and leading their own struggles for an end to colonialism.

These studies indicate that the biggest problem the black community may face today is not “shamelessness” but rather the severe isolation, distrust, and alienation created by mass incarceration. During Jim Crow, blacks were severely stigmatized and segregated on the basis of race, but in their own communities they could find support, solidarity, acceptance—love. Today, when those labeled criminals return to their communities, they are often met with scorn and contempt, not just by employers, welfare workers, and housing officials, but also by their own neighbors, teachers, and even members of their own families.

Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.

In New Orleans in 1907 a general strike on the levees, involving ten thousand workers (longshoremen, teamsters, freight handlers), black and white, lasted twenty days. The head of the Negro longshoremen, E. S. Swan, said: The whites and Negroes were never before so strongly cemented in a common bond and in my 39 years of experience of the levee, I never saw such solidarity. In all the previous strikes the Negro was used against the white man but that condition is now past and both races are standing together for their common interests….

Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism. There was no room in this vision of obligatory national unity for either free-thinking persons or for independent, autonomous subcommunities. Churches, Freemasonry, class-based unions or syndicates, political parties— all were suspect as subtracting something from the national will.121 Here were grounds for infinite conflict with conservatives as well as the Left. In pursuit of their mission to unify the community within an all-consuming public sphere, fascist regimes dissolved unions and socialist parties. This radical amputation of what had been normal worker representation, encased as it was in a project of national fulfillment and managed economy, alienated public opinion less than pure military or police repression, as in traditional dictatorships. And indeed the fascists had some success in reconciling some workers to a world without unions or socialist parties, those for whom proletarian solidarity against capitalist bosses was willingly replaced by national identity against other peoples. Brooding about cultural degeneracy was so important a fascist issue that some authors have put it at the center. Every fascist regime sought to control the national culture from the top, to purify it of foreign influences, and make it help carry the message of national unity and revival. Decoding the cultural messages of fascist ceremonies, films, performances, and visual arts has today become the most active field of research on fascism. The “reading” of fascist stagecraft, however ingenious, should not mislead us into thinking that fascist regimes succeeded in establishing monolithic cultural homogeneity. Cultural life in fascist regimes remained a complex patchwork of official activities, spontaneous activities that the regimes tolerated, and even some illicit ones. Ninety percent of the films produced under the Nazi regime were light entertainment without overt propaganda content (not that it was innocent, of course). A few protected Jewish artists hung on remarkably late in Nazi Germany, and the openly homosexual actor and director Gustav Gründgens remained active to the end.

The victories these unions won reshaped work for us all. The forty-hour workweek, overtime pay, employer health insurance and retirement benefits, worker compensation—all these components of a “good job” came from collective bargaining and union advocacy with governments in the late 1930s and ’40s. And the power to win these benefits came from solidarity—Black, white, and brown, men and women, immigrant and native-born.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists….

Production organized by workers builds new relations among producers—relations of cooperation and solidarity; it furthermore allows workers to end “the crippling of body and mind” and the loss of “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx) that comes from the separation of head and hand characteristic of capitalist production. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. Further, as long as this production is carried out for their private gain rather than that of society, they look upon others (and, indeed, each other) as means to their own ends and thus remain alienated, fragmented, and crippled. Social production, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers.

IWW General Headquarters was collecting information regarding past free speech fights in response to a request from the U.S. Committee on Industrial Relations. Believing the “publicity to be worth the work it will entail,” Vincent St. John made an appeal in Solidarity one week before the September convention. Anyone who had first-hand experience was asked to submit personal narratives, pamphlets, bulletins, reports, and detailed histories regarding the various free speech fights. …. The committee determined that non-English-speaking workers had prevented development of better employer-employee relationships, especially with the “unreasonable prejudice of almost every class of Americans toward immigrants.” With rumblings of a European war, the committee recommended immediate legislation for restricting immigration except for those who were “likely to make the most desirable citizens.

Exactly how long it would take for solidarity to replace exclusivity and lead to genuine gains in the labor movement for the skilled and unskilled workers alike, Gideon didn’t know. He was afraid it would be a long time.

That's a dramatic example of the efficiency with which business controls US ideology, of how effective its propaganda and indoctrination have been in depriving people of any awareness of their own rights and history. You have to wait for poor Latino and Chinese workers to celebrate an international holiday of solidarity with American workers.

This means that there has always been ripe potential for solidarity between people of color and those more marginalized whites, and that such a solidarity could undo white supremacy. And whiteness knows this. This is why our governments expend so much money to detain asylum seekers in detention and lock their children in cages. It is why white workers are encouraged to blame immigrants for both stealing jobs and simultaneously lounging around on welfare. It is why immigrant, black, and Indigenous populations are blamed for the bulk of everything from social security fraud to sexual crime. Not only does invoking and stoking racial differences prevent solidarity from taking effect, it backfires and keeps class divisions as well as racism alive.