ACFM - #ACFM Trip 17: Solidarity

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

What do we mean by solidarity? Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert consider the meaning of a much-used word in this unusual Trip, recorded live as part of HKW’s online festival, Acid Communism: Spectres of the Counterculture. With music from Nina Simone, The Youngbloods and The Special AKA, the gang consider the legacy of […]

Hello, and welcome back to ACFM. This is Matt, one of the producers of the show with a quick bit preamble on the episode you're about to hear. This show is a live recording of a live podcast ACFM recorded as part of the Acid Communism Festival held at the Haas de Culture in Dauvelte in Berlin and curated by Pascal Jert and Christian Verschalt. Apologies for any German mispronunciations there.

Keir, Jeremy and Nadia talked about solidarity while taking questions from the audience. So you'll hear Pascal and Christian jump in at various points to communicate those questions and to ask their own. If you'd like to find out more about the Acid Communism Festival and listen to sessions from people such as Owen Hathalie, Helen Hester, Maritio Lazarato, McKenzie Walk, Alex Williams and more, head to hkw.de and search acid communism.

Okay, let's get on with the show. Solidarity to all our ACFM listeners far and wide. So welcome everyone to A.C.FM, the home of the weird left. For the first time ever, we are coming to you live from day two of this spectacularly named acid communism, of the Counterculture Conference live streaming from HKW, the House of World Cultures in Berlin. I am Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by the fantastic Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And the marvellous, Keir Milburn.

Hello once again. And for the first time, all of you. So welcome to this virtual hangout where today, as mentioned, we will be speaking about solidarity. So before we start, a big thanks to Christian. Pascal, Philip, and the whole conference team for inviting us and coordinating this whole event and to our fabulous production team, Matt Huxley and Charles Ravens, for making the show happen every month

and today, for the first time, letting us loose on you a live audience. We, of course, wish we could be together in Berlin for this event in HKW, one of the most fantastic public spaces in the world. Hopefully this event is one of many, can be together manifesting collective joy across borders in the years to come. But for today, stay with us until 7 p.m. British summertime and 8 p.m. Central European time for this discussion

about solidarity, which will be, as mentioned, interdispersed with music questions and answers, which will hopefully provide you with all of the intellectual stimulation, delight and gimmukrikait that you would desire. So, without further ado, let's kick off this episode on Solidarity. So, I think let's start by each giving maybe one sentence, a couple of sentences of a definition of what solidarity means to each of us. So for myself, for me, solidarity is simply the ability of being able to see oneself in other people.

And so the logical conclusion of extending your hand in support to others as you would yourself or your own. It's that fundamental understanding that you can be the other person is you on the end of oppression or you can see yourself in the struggle of someone else. So, Keir, what does solidarity mean to you?

Yeah, well, I can depart from that one to start. Because you're basically describing empathy, really, in that. And I think that, I think that is probably a precondition for solidarity, but then perhaps we'd say solidarity is some sort of move towards at least a potential for action and it probably something like the potential for action because not you you don't just see see see be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes but you also see some sort of shared interest or something like that so that sort of idea that there could be a shared interest here that that then

implies that you might act you might act so solidarity could be a sort of like be a be a verb in some sort of way because you want to enact those those interests something like that yeah and i think um i'd agree with all of that i think um for me the experience of solidarity is the experience of having a consciousness of shared in interests and then you know to be in solidarity as it were to act in solidarity is that his action that proceeds from that there was this great um speech bernie Sanders gave early in 2020 where he said he called upon everyone all his supporters in the room to look at the person next to them and say you know and promise that they would fight for that person as much as they would fight for themselves which is really kind of moving and I think it does

describe a sort of affective and kind of emotional experience of solidarity but in a way technically I think you if you were going to make it a description of a solidaristic relationship you'd have to refine it a bit and say well the first step is actually the recognition that by fighting for the other person you are fighting for yourself, like just as much as if you were fighting alone. And that, for me, that is really sums up the experience and the expression of solidarity. Yeah, so we could sort of contrast it with like charity, which may have some sort of like moral, moral impulse behind it rather than a sort of the perception of a shared interest. That could be some sort of, especially when you think about things such as solidarity networks

and these mutual aid groups that grew up around a pandemic, you know, were they charity? Charity has a power dynamic in it, I think, by default, doesn't it? Yeah, perhaps that's right, yeah. I think that's one of the, apart from the philanthropic kind of ideology. Yeah, so solidarity is much more, in principle, a mutual relationship. Oh, yeah, so basically we get into somewhere like solidarity implies some sort of conception of equality and therefore mutuality based on inequality, which charity perhaps doesn't have something like that. Which is what Jeremy was going to talk about, but wanted to talk about, right? Because that's

one of your steps of like the three forms of solidarity or sources of solidarity. That comes into that, doesn't it? Yeah. So, I mean, I guess like in terms of thinking formally about the concept of solidarity, actually, I wrote a blog post a few years ago that a lot of people, a lot of our friends that were really fond of. And I'm going to turn it into a book at some point. And I turned into a course actually that I taught at Brown University last year and it's and it really

it did you know it came out because it was there was a massive strike in in H.E. in British universities about four years ago or whenever it was now and I was asked to go give a talk by kind of colleagues, comrades a goldsmith and I didn't really know what I was going to talk about and I was on the train I still hadn't really decided what was going to talk

about and I thought well why are you going this is a bit of a hassle and I thought well it's solidarity isn't it so so I wrote down a load of notes. And then every, then, you know, and it was just one of those moments where the talk, you know, went really well. People really liked it. People wanted copies of it. So I wrote it up. And then I had a sort of similar experience of just sort of spontaneous conceptualization. We were talking about this. We had a meeting, the three of us to talk about this episode. And I didn't really have any ideas in my head. Like, well, how do you conceptualize this? Like,

how do you extend beyond these ideas? And yeah, and on the spot, I thought, oh, this is it. This is how I'm going to organise this whole book I want to do. There are three sources of solidarity, shared experience, shared identity, shared interests. Those are the three things. So, I mean, by the end of today, we might have decided that's a load of rubbish, but yeah,

it's a good working concept to start with. So that's my idea really. And I think, so for example, in a lot of political theory, a lot of contemporary political and social theory, I would say there is a sort of psychological assumption. There's a working assumption that the source of shared solidarity is a shared identity,

the sense that you all belong to some imagined community of some kind that has a name and an identity and you recognise each other in it. I think that's really problematic. I mean, that can be really useful. There's some really useful work I've seen, for example, about kind of communal and intracumunal politics in India talking about how some identities can be more inclusive than others

and can facilitate solidarity or limit it. but generally speaking on a philosophical level I think the sense of a shared identity is not something that solidarity is really dependent upon it it might be an effect of experiencing relations of solidarity and then shared experience yeah I think the key I think you know I think sharing experiences of some kind

experiences can be shared by groups and people who don't really feel that they share of social identity shared experience of oppression shared experience of potential impact or actual empowerment, however temporary, et cetera. And then the fundamental thing, I think, is that, yeah, solidarity is always about shared interests of some kind. And I think, I mean, your point about charity, I think is really important here.

Because, I mean, actually, a lot of the time when people talk or write about solidarity, or when you say, right, I'm going to talk about solidarity now, a lot of people will assume that what you're talking about is international solidarity. Like if you say, I'm going to think about the history of solidarity, within the Labour movement, then often people just assume what that means is acts and experiences of international solidarity. And occasionally international solidarity

is framed within a proper conception of really shared interests, but it does often, not always by any means, but it can kind of, that assumption, I think, is often tied to that sort of idea of a charitable or a kind of moralistic or a kind of ethical response to other people's suffering, which is really important and powerful.

But I think often it's not quite the same as like the real, the immediate sense that your struggle is more struggle. Exactly. I think it's so different, so fundamentally different. I can't really articulate where it's from, whether that's an emotional response or whether it exists in ideology. But that idea that if you see someone in need,

extending solidarity and extending charity while the outcome or the action perhaps might look similar. I don't think it's the same thing. It definitely comes from a different place and has different consequences on the long term. I'd say, I think so anyway. I'll go with that for now. I mean, perhaps the next stage to go with that is this. If it's, if solidarity is often thought about in terms of that, you know, the shared experience sort of thing. But we're sort of going a little bit beyond that and talking about shared shared interests so the next move is like you know

is the idea of like some sort of universal solidarity which implies sort of universal shared interest but that's sort of that's leading us towards this idea that like that perhaps the the most attractive form of solidarity

is solidarity across difference if you know I mean one of the things we were talking about when we were when we were preparing this is is that like when you see solidarity is quite a moving thing and we were referring to um to a film called pride which is about this this this example of solidarity during the 1984 1985 minors strike in you in the UK where there was a group formed called lesbian and gay support the miners um and i can't i grew up in in a in a in a welsh valley just

next to the the next valley across from where that film was set um so it might i might not have a universal experience of this but basically i can't watch i can't watch it or watch any clip of it without like tearing up basically um and i so if you sort of ponder on that like what is it why is that so moving to me and i'm just going to universalize my experience there and say moving to everybody you go ahead um and i think it is that because it's like you know that it's solidarity where you perhaps you weren't expecting solidarity to be or solidarity across difference perhaps although that difference starts to break down during the act of solidarity.

It's probably what you see in the film, isn't it? Well, I mean, there are great examples of that across international ones as well. I remember when I was working at War on One, and there was one of the first anti-austerity anti-cuts demonstrations in the UK, and we received a set of pictures and a video from a partner organisation we were working with in Bangladesh who was supporting sweatshop workers, and they went out on strike and on demonstration in support of UK people against austerity. So they made a whole banner and that should be normal. But of course, because it was a poor country doing an action in support of a first world country,

it was a surprise to see and it was very moving in the same way that it's about unexpected pairings, isn't it? And I think that's an interesting thing to interrogate going back to whether we think solidarity can be universal, of not is why is it such a surprise sometimes and why is it so moving when it is a surprise when we see some acts of solidarity which is not the same as you know donations of money going from from those necessarily who are in who have more to those who have less I think

yeah I mean I think in all of those cases I mean the way I think of it is that there's something there's a process of becoming like in technical philosophical terms. There's a sense that the relation, you know, the relationality and the relation between these sets of people who might appear to have fairly different kind of social, cultural identities,

you know, in between them, something else emerges, which is more than the sum of its parts and more than what either of them were to begin with. And that is really, and that is an experience of potential, an experience of sort of,

you know, of a kind of maximisation of everybody's potential and everybody's mutual potential. And it is really, you know, it is really sort of beautiful. I mean, in a way that is, and that is joy, actually, in the sort of technical spinosin sense that we often like to use the term. That is just what joy is the experience of in some ways. And, and yes, I think it is, I think, because I also, I mean, obviously, you know,

we all, we all find that very moving. I think, because we were going to ask the question, weren't we? Like, what, we were going to ask the question at that point, I think, like, well, is solidarity sort of always progressive as we're conceptualising it? Or is there like a conservative sense of solidarity as well? Because arguably the whole conservative tradition has a sense that is also solidaristic in its critique of liberal capitalism and industrialisation and modernity in their effects. It also looks, the conservative tradition looks at what modernity and capitalism and city life does to people.

And it says, yeah, it makes people. alienated. It makes people separated from each other. But it proposes as the source of social solidarity like a respect for hierarchy, a respect for tradition, a respect for established relations of power. And I mean, do we think, I mean, I think we'd want to say, wouldn't we, there's something qualitatively different about solidarity as we're describing it from that sense of, I mean, maybe I would, I would, I would, you know, just to throw it out there, experimentally as a risk. I would say conservatism has a sense of

community, but it's not really solidarity like what it's evoking there. It's in favour of community but the forms of social relations it wants to present as the alternative to capitalist individualistic alienation is not, they're not exactly solidaristic.

I mean, I would agree with that simply because I think the conservative notions of which for the argument's sake we're calling solidarity here are are always about the in-group. So the other group is called in as an in-group always. And so it doesn't cross those kind of like borders of class or race or nation because it's not about shared struggle.

It's about calling in, I think, for tactical purposes. That would be my offering. And it's about being rather than becoming. It's about what you already are. What you already are. what you already are rather than what you all might be. I like that. It's also about cutting off.

So it's cutting, cutting off from becoming, but also cutting off from any, any sort of direction of universality, because it's a bounded solidarity, if it's a solidarity at all. Yeah. Well,

universality is interesting here, isn't it? Because I think from, I mean, at least from this perspective of a philosophy of becoming, universalality is not an achievable goal, but it is a kind of perpetual horizon. to which you can always be open, you can always be moving. But you can only reach that,

you can only travel towards that horizon of universality by passing through every possible difference in some sense, if that makes sense. I mean, yeah, the other way to look at it is that, like, at any sort of moment of becoming, where you have solidarity across this sort of difference,

that is the opening onto the universal, basically. Do you know what I mean? And then that can, you may then find a difference in which you weren't anticipating and you'll have to then, you know, take that path to universality, you know, take that difference

into account in your path to universality, something like that. Are we... We're going to play a song, I think. Before we play a song, perhaps we could get Matt to play the speech from Pride. I think he's got it lined up. So this is a little...

You play a clip from the film that we talked about, which was about this lesbian and gay support the miners. Let's have a little experiment and see if everybody bursts into tears. So this is set in, this is a film set in Britain in 1984. And it's a film about, like Keir said, it's about a real historical event, which was a group of lesbian and gay activists, as they would have called themselves then,

like actively supporting the minor struggle in their fight with Thatcher. I've had a lot of new experiences during the strike, speaking in public standing on a picket line and now I'm in a gay bar well if don't like it you can go home as a matter of fact I do like it it

beer's a bit expensive mine but really there's only one difference between this and a bar in South Wales the women There are a lot more feminine in you What I'd really like to say is thank you If you've supported LGSM

Then thank you Because what you've given us Is more than money It's friendship When you're in a battle Against an enemy so much bigger So much stronger than you but to find out you had a friend

you never knew existed well that's the best feeling in the world so thank you yeah that's going to make me cry just get my laugh well you know you know perfectly well you only have to mention the minor strike

and I'll start quiet for various reasons someone want to talk about the young bloods? All right, well, the next section, we're going to talk about the counterculture in its classical sense, the late 60s and early 70s.

And one of the great historical debates in which we and many others have engaged around the legacy of the counterculture is whether the counterculture was simply an incubator for advanced, postmodern, neoliberal, expressive individualist, you know, neoliberal identity,

or whether it wasn't, whether there was something else going on. in the politics of the counterculture. And to some extent, I think this turns on the question of whether the key actors of the counterculture were aspiring towards some more universalistic conception of solidarity as well as freedom than the one which was made available by sort of post-war Keynesian welfare capitalism or whether they were really just looking to kind of do their own thing all the time. And so we thought we would play a song.

It's a pretty just common, well-known, sort of banal, you know, hippie anthem of the late 60s, the young bloods get together, which I think makes pretty clear which side of the fence this particular group of hippies was on. So let's play that. Love is but a song we sing. Fears the way we'll die. You can make the mountains ring.

make the angels cry Though the bird is on the wing And you may not know why Come on, keep my love, smile on your brother, everybody get together Try to love one another right now Some may come and some may go, some may go, he will surely pass. When the one night left us yet returns for us at least, We are but in moments of light

Fating in the grass Come on people now Smile on your brother and everybody get together Try to love one another right now people now. It's my only brother, everybody get together. Try to love one another right now. So Christian, you have questions or comments for us at all? Or should we move on? No, no, we have. We have one question. I mean, there's one question that I would like to ask first. And then I'm going to take a question from the chat. Oh, Pascal is going to do that.

The question is, I'm going to give you an example. It's not a fictional example. It's not one of those examples that journalists in the UK always make up to, sort of like, it's a real person I've met, and he's a millionaire with a working class background that got rich via financial products, and now sort of like sold office firm, retired,

and he's now, he's usually voting social Democrats or the linker. And I was kind of like meeting him, and he's advocating taxing. millionaires. He says, you know, tax us, let people keep the first million, maybe the second minimum above of that, tucks the hell out of it. And I asked him why he would want to do that. And he said, well, you know, at the moment, I can sort of like, he lives in Cologne, in the Zuchstadt, which is a bit like, it's a fancy part of town, maybe like Stoke Newington, and so on. It was a really nice middle class, sort of like very liberal neighborhood. And he said, I'm going to, at the

moment, I can ride my bike around here. I have the freedom I can go with my kid I can ride my bike I don't have anything to fear I don't fear being mugged I don't fear being murdered for money

and I want to keep it that way so it's sort of like out of self interest that he does it because he wants to preserve his fairly privileged way of life I mean it's not like super rich but he is fairly well off is that an act of solidarity

according to your definition Yeah, it's a good question. Well, I think, yeah, I would say, I don't think it is, I think, well, it isn't, it isn't. I'm going to say, well, let's consider the reasons it is and the reasons it isn't. It isn't to the extent that if it's purely about self-interest, but it's also recognising the interest of others.

No, I think it basically is, you know, but it is an example of a form of solidarity. I mean, it's a highly calculated. form of solidarity. But I think it clearly, he's, you know, I think that is, I mean, to me, to a large extent, that is the basis on which people should think about solidarity, actually.

They should think about it in terms of preserving what's good for them, making things, you know, making things better for them. I don't know. What do you two think? I mean, I don't necessarily think it's solidarity. I think the outcome might have solidaristic expressions, it feels like I mean I don't know if this was also insinuated in the question about whether if we think solidarity is good is this good but the answer the because I think it is good I think that's completely fine and I think that's because I don't have a crass understanding of individual people who are very rich many of whom you know are not horrible people but structurally I would support a high taxation for people who are rich. So as an action, I agree with it, but I think because it's not focused on another subject, going back to my initial definition, who you're seeing yourself in, I think because that's not the intention, then it's not an act of solidarity, even though the outcome might have a solidistic expression.

I don't think it is an act of solidarity, but I would like to offer this friend of yours an avenue to act on solidarity. By the not yet set up ACFM crowd funder. I think that's really good. I think Nadi is completely right. And I have a counter example, which is a better example of solidarity in some ways. Julian Richer, the owner of Britain's most successful

hi-fi retail chain a year or so ago, a millionaire businessman, sells hi-fi, high-fi industry in my experience has got all these like socialists in it I don't know we could talk with another whole other episode and he in he convert he retired and converted the business into a workers co-op he handed he gave the share all the shares and the administration of the whole company like to the to the employees and I would say if if like if

Christians business business man friend was advocating like not just taxing well millionaires, but actually socialising some of their wealth, that would be an expression of solidarity. But this is the whole problem, actually. In some ways, this tells us something about the historic limit point of a kind of Keynesians, sort of tax-based model of social democracy, actually. It can only facilitate solidarity and solidistic relations, part up to a certain point, up to the point where you would actually change the relations of production rather than simply changing, you know, mitigating their outcomes. Well, it also brings up other things that we might discuss a bit later,

which is sort of, you know, the relationship between solidarity and antagonism, perhaps. We had a previous episode where we talked about love and hate in which that came up, and perhaps like a universal solidarity could be, you know, linked to universal conceptions of love, agape or something like that. So it's a similar sort of problem that that brings up, I think. Pascal, is there anything on the chat that might be interested? Yes, I'm just asked Do you have to be putting something on the line

Put yourself at risk somehow In order to be in solidarity with someone Great question I think you have to be aware You are always already on the line To be honest I don't think you have to be making like a great sacrifice But I think you have to be just conscious

That you're already on the line Probably in some sense We're all, yeah, because the terms, it's interesting because the term solidarity, it comes, it, the, the etymology of the word in English and in French, the English borrowed the word from French, it's a financial legal term, meaning shared risks, the idea of shared risks in a, in a venture. And obviously it does have to do with the sharing of risk in a certain sense. Solidarity. And so, I, I, think it is true that it's banal and sort of meaningless to claim or offer solidarity when indeed nothing is at stake for you at all. And then it is just charity. Then it comes back to the idea of charity. But then I think on a certain scale, something is almost always at risk for all of us. You know, in the climate emergency, you know, we are all already on the line, whether we like it or not to some extent. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think in a more specific

sense of like do you have to sacrifice, you know, a specific, a specific material or other sort of advantage that you have? I would say no. So I think it's perfectly possible to be in solidarity with someone and take an active, do an active solidarity without sacrificing something. So it kind of depends. I would expand on that question, which you obviously don't have time for. But I think like, you know, there's a philosophical back. to some of this, both in terms of solidarity, questions of solidarity, but also charity, which, which, like, to what extent does it relate to various different traditions of Christian ethics, you know, around the need to sacrifice to do good, which, you know, is not, is,

I don't, I think is absent from, in a positive way, is absent from a progressive form of what solidarity is. I mean, in a sort of, on a different level, if we, if we were talking about the kinds of solidarity across difference which might become a becoming rather than a being, then that you have got something at risk. You are on the line quite literally because you're going to be changed by this mutual relationship

of solidarity. You're on the line of flight. Somebody turn his mic off. He can't go down the Deleuze hole. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think not, I gave you in fair that it's not, it's not sacrifice. The solidistic relations are not relations of sacrifice.

Even if you're doing something that's hard, it's something that is going to empower you more than it's going to cost you when you're doing it. That's potentially, the potential for that is there. Do we have any more questions, Pascal? Yes, we have a question about the not-belonging outsiders when they come into our bubble and disrupts us. This reminds me of the summer of migration in Germany when the spontaneous help for refugees was was asked and a lot of also very conservative people

their practice was very, they were very into solidarity because they helped but I think that's a big question there's a solidarity on the paper perhaps it's a populist there is a gap between theory

and practice or do you think this kind of help for the others is just a form of charity? I mean, I would respond on that and say, at least in Britain, the statistics quite clearly show that people have most prejudice against, you know, asylum seekers, whether it's black people or migrants or whatever,

where there are the least of them in their local area. So my offering, yeah, so my offering would be that, and this is because I have a positive view, of people if left to their devices outside the machine of neoliberalism is that actually when you see people at need on your

doorstep the vast majority of people will try to help them even if there is this really strong discourse against and it doesn't mean that you can't have really regressive and really right wing and racist actions

but the vast majority of people will help other people and it takes a lot and neoliberalism has been successful at it but not completely at making people so blinkered that you do that anti-soliduristic thing where you say that person is not like me

that will never happen to me and therefore I consider them someone not even a, I consider them a category rather than a human being that could be in that position so that's why I would say on that. this might be a good way to seek seamlessly into the second the topic of the second part of the discussion of our podcast where we were going to talk about about whether the forms of

solidarity and the practices of solidarity perhaps even the thinking of solidarity has changed from the from the sort of 60s countercultural era to now and also to address this problem of you know did the 60s destroy solidarity which is another way of sort of saying did the 60s caused neoliberalism and one one iteration of that oh a couple of iterations of that is um you in the post-war period we had these these very homogenous societies they were you know and and this sort of shared experience created this shared sense of solidarity and that's been disrupted by um these pesky women or these these foreigners coming into the country and and uh and all of this difference coming into this being being introduced into this

this this this this commonality of experience which produced a solidarity i mean so there are like there's very right-wing versions of that obviously but there's also sort of left-wing iterations of that in the in the UK there's a sort of a theme of thought called blue labor um and so the blue is from the conservative party colors uh and so blue labor that this this is the art this is sort of the argument is the argument is that and what we need to have is sort of left-wing social democratic policies, but mixed with perhaps conservative social views, conservative social views,

which can then be the basis upon which the sense of solidarity is reinforced, something like that. Yeah, well, I mean, Delinca had a bit of a dip their toes in that water, at least on the immigration question, didn't they? Didn't work out that well? so yes so i'm not exactly sure where you were going with that keir so how is this really can you guys explain how this relates to the counterculture well the blue labor argument yeah i mean a lot of the blue labor thinkers who i mean blue labor sort of came in during it really came in during

the years of the david cameron premiership and the coalition with the liberal democrats when the conservative Party had really fully embraced sort of Blair-right social liberalism along with their embrace sort of kind of vicious kind of, you know,

neoliberal austerity. And so the idea was, well, actually, if you want to get people to support social democracy, you shouldn't, you should appeal to their social conservatism.

You should say, look, actually, we believe in like traditional family values and traditional family life. What's destroying it? It's the neoliberal kind of undermining of security

in the labour market. It's the neoliberal imposition of mobility on populations that forces migrants to come here looking for work, forces people to leave their hometowns to look for work. And so instead what we should do is we should appeal to people's belief in faith, flag and family, and this

will make them anti-capitalist or make them anti-neoliberal. And so, and those guys are obsessed with the 60s. Those guys think, they think it was free love and people taking drugs and you know

growing their hair to, men growing their hair long in the 60s and 70s that like destroyed traditional working class values, undermined the morale of like traditional working class communities and that's why people started voting for Thatcher

and not renewing their union memberships and not going to church which they all see is basically the same thing. They see like people not going to church anymore. I mean the Blue Labor thinkers are all religious to some extent to a greater lesser extent as well. They all basically think once people stop going to church, they'll also stop joining unions. And so it's a version, and it's a thesis which has been around, at least since

the 70s, you know, there's a sort of, there was a sort of conservative anti-capitalism amongst some American thinkers like Daniel Bell, Christopher Lash, which was already saying, look, like as a conservative, like, advanced consumer capitalism is really destroying everything I hold dear. But, and to them, you know, the hippies were just like the ultimate expression of advanced consumer capitalism. It was just like, don't go out to work, you know, don't have a family, you know, just sit home, listen to records, smoke dope, buy fancy clothes. And of course, yeah, and yeah, there's a, and there's also kind of, there's an austere Marxist version of that critique as well. I mean, it's quite strong, like, especially on like, you know, sections of the American left, you know, that basically thinks, yeah, they look what the hippies left. to the hippies led, the hippies all turned into Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, you know, basically.

And they sort of destroyed, and they sort of destroyed, you know, the working class in the process. So it's not, so it's not just a critique at the point of culture. So just when you were, just and before until you said the last bit, Jeremy, I thought you were saying, OK, well, if the blue labour or, you know, conservative labor movement more broadly is, is critiquing the counterculture as bringing us to this, this point. It didn't seem like it's a critique at the point of, you know, massive economic change of what's happened to the workplace or what's happened to industry, etc. It's because, you know, the hippies have free love or whatever. But that point that you've just made about, well, the hippies are what led to

or the counterculture that point is what led to Silicon Valley. That seems like a stronger position. Yeah, well, you're right, actually. Those are, you're completely right. Those are two different positions. So there's the cultural critique, which comes from the conservatives. who have nothing really, who can't really get their heads around capitalism, even when they write books about it.

And then there's the sort of austere Marxist critique, which focuses more on the kind of historic links between the counterculture and Silicon Valley, which... And it's an anti-libertarian position, right? That's what I'm getting from that. Yeah. As in terms of individual liberty and individual freedoms and all of these things. Yeah, well, there's this critique.

I mean, there's a critique. goes back to the 90s, when people like Richard Barbrook, I can't remember the name of the guy, who was the guy Richard wrote his essay with, Keir? The California ideology? Yeah. I thought it was just Richard. No, it was Richard and someone else, wrote a book called The Californian Ideology. And it wasn't just Barbrook, to be honest.

There was a bunch of really good books from different people came out in the late 90s, basically pointing out a lot of the key people in Silicon Valley and writing for things like Wide magazine. They were deeply invested in certain kinds of hardcore, kind of libertarian right-wing libertarian ideology. Like mostly more coming from the kind of American Ayn Rand tradition than coming directly from kind of European neoliberalism or auto-liberism. And that is all true.

And then more recently, there's the Fred Turner book from cyberculture to counterculture, you know, which basically points out that, you know, again, I mean, it's a matter of historical record. Like loads of people who were hippies became Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and loads of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs became hippies. But, I mean, personally, I would say, you know, that historical account tends to be massively overstated.

And it tends to sometimes ignore the bigger context. It's like, well, it's like everyone in California, everyone in Northern California was a hippie at some point. So it's just, it's more to do with Northern California as a kind of central zone of various kinds of cultural, financial, political, kind of turbulence and innovation than it is to do with any clear identity between like something you can identify as the counterculture and it's a very Anglo-American position and you know good vantage point yeah but of course there were excellent points of solidarity in the 60s sorry you were going to say something here well yeah no I mean so that so that's an argument around you know did did the counterculture just add this was it an individualizing thing did it just set the ground for this sort of like individualizing individualism of neoliberalism etc

and like you can sort of you can address that by by pointing to like you know what you're talking about is the defeat of the counterculture basically in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the symptoms of that defeat is what you're pointing to and then if you actually look back to the to the to the 1960s and 1970s and the sort of practices of solidarity in fact you say no actually that some of the high points of even this universal conception of solidarity you know the 70s was the high point probably of those universal conceptions of solidarity and those solidarity across difference. Do you know what I mean? So what people are reacting to is a defeat. But we should probably give the, we should probably give that the counter argument, not around Silicon Valley and all that,

but like, you know, perhaps not even the blue labour, perhaps the austere Marxist argument, we should give it a good go. We should try and take it on its best sort of, is best iteration or something because if we go back to your three conceptions

of three stages of solidarity which was shared experiences shared identity and then shared interests like if you think about the traditional let's go back to them to mining villages and mining community seen as we did

the pride film you know that that is a those were one of the other high points of the working class movement was, you know, mining culture in South Wales, etc. And from in the pre, you know, from the like 18, 1890s on through the 1930s in particular, as a really high point, you know, the inspiration of for the NHS comes from, you know,

the practices of miners in Tridiga in South Wales, etc. This is the National Health Service in the UK, sorry, just translated. They know. You know, but that builds from this, this complete and utter over. between shared experiences, shared identity, and shared interest, because they were all overlapped to such a degree that it was really obvious, do you know what I mean? And so it stems from the fact that like your shared interests in industry such as mining, which are very dangerous and which you practically rely every day on solidaristic practices

and collectivity from the people who work around you because of the the danger. Basically, that provokes strong practice of solidarity and then minds tend to be in geographically isolated areas and they tend to be based around a shared, you know, one shared workplace or at least peripheral industries related to that workplace. You know, they did, they did produce incredibly strong cultures of solidarity which could, which basically led to political conceptions of universal solidarity and like practices of universal solidarity. So basically those things breaking down from de-industrialisation, etc.

You know, that's not an imaginary thing that those practices of solidarity did break down. Well, the conditions which made them possible broke down, didn't they? The conditions which made those forms of solidarity possible and produced that form of sort of class consciousness which was so exemplified by the Welsh miners broke down. And it is a fantastic example. I mean, the South Wales miners, you know,

that politically, at least people like us, you know, would say that indeed it was because of their militancy and their determination that Britain got a socialist national health service rather than a social insurance model for socialised healthcare, which most European countries got. It's because that was what they wanted. And also, one of my one of my all-time, probably my number one favourite historical factoid about Britain in the 20th century, what part of the country sent the most volunteers to fight in Spain in the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. It was the valleys. It was the South Wales

miners. So that conception of class solidarity, under the influence of the Communist Party and attendant political currents, that really did, it turned into something much more than just defence of their own community. It turned into and it was consciousness expansion. I think we could have said earlier. I think that's a big

part of it, yeah. You know, when one reason why the experience of solidarity and the spectacle of solidarity is so moving, because it is the site of consciousness being expanded. as being in, you know, that is what is being raised. That is what is happening in those moments.

And of course, I mean, what's happening in the late 60s and early 70th. Actually, I mentioned this the Fred Turner book from cyber culture to counterculture. And of course, he makes a clear distinction within the counterculture. He's an American historian. It's a really good book. Clear distinction between, on

the one hand, the new left, which is really the liberation movements, you know, women's liberation, black liberation, the emergent gay liberation movement, but also the kind of left wing of the Labour movement that was pushing for democratisation of unions, of workplaces, indeed of the Democratic Party in the United States, etc.

All of that. That's the new left. And it did overlap with sort of psychedelic culture, hippie culture. And on the other hand, there's what he calls the communal movement, the commune movement, the movement for people to go off and create communes out in the countryside in California, and then up into Oregon, up the Pacific Northwest.

And it's the commune movement, actually, that he sees as the incubator for Silicon Valley sort of platform capitalism. And arguably, what those people were doing is they were looking for community, but they weren't really interested in solidarity. They weren't engaging in practices of solidarity. And you can say in that, and it's not,

and from that perspective, it's not that surprising that by the end of the 70s, most of them had just become sort of proto-neo-liberal kind of individualists. Whereas the new left was very much about I mean, the argument was being made by the new left in America and in Britain, going back to the early 60s, the argument was precisely this. They could already see the general conditions that produce those forms of, those industrial forms of solidarity were breaking down.

I mean, people knew automation was coming. People knew that industries were changing. People knew that, you know, the cities were growing and the small towns were shrinking. And they, and what they proposed as a response to that was an expansion of, you know, relations of solidarity, of relations, and that was, you know, that was the basis for, you know, the idea of the Rainbow Coalition, for example, in the early 70s in the States, the idea of a coalition of different political forces which would share a set of class interests, but would be also conscious of and celebratory of their various cultural differences, which is very different

from the kind of, you know, sort of spectacular homogeneity of a mining community. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There's something there as well about um about uh especially when we were talking about the miners earlier that like um this universal conception of solidarity is quite often like you it's somewhere you are somewhere you arrive at rather than somewhere you start at do you know i mean and we could look at in terms of actually of the of the sort of u.s uh black power movement because you could you could make that argument about martin luther king and malcolm x arriving at a conception from sort of you know yeah arriving at a conception of universal solidarity which sort of plays into so what are the other

the other iterations of of um of this argument around this re-litigation of the 1960s basically is the whole discussion around identity politics versus class first politics is basically the sort of u.s version of this uh there are there are there are sort of versions of it in the UK, but it's in the US where this is sort of most prominent. But once again, you can sort of make this argument that that is, the thing that everyone's really annoyed about is basically the symptoms of the defeat in the 1980s and the emergence of a sort of liberal identity politics, which is basically, which is what you get when the

horizon of like universal change or revolutionary change has gone, you know, the history of all of this is relatively well known. the Combehee River collective with this collective of black lesbian feminists, as was called at the time, or they called themselves at the time, who originated the term identity politics.

And their argument was, that was a problem within a revolutionary socialist politics, basically. And their point was, you know, we want to get to universal solidarity, but our experience isn't being recognised, in the way that universal solidarity is sort of at this moment. And so we're going to start from our experiences

and then we're going to get to universal solidarity. Do you know what I mean? Whereas in the 1980s, once that horizon is gone, well, what's the politics of that form of identity politics? It's basically much more about recognition of gaining recognition from the existing state in order to get some sort of redress because the horizons of political possibility have been limited so much. It's an expression of despair, that's what I would say.

That would be my, that's how far I would go. A symptom of it, yeah, I think you're right, yeah. And you could probably say that that is something that's been reversed. That process has been reversed by the Black Lives Matter movements in the US where this sort of insurgent struggle is something that generates this conception of universal solidarity out of, and so therefore, you know, the problem of identity. gets resituated in this sort of a universal sort of horizon, partly because, yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, of politics has expanded, not just by, not just because of the movement for black lives, but also other things, probably like the Bernie, Bernie, Bernie Sanders campaign and the rise of the Democratic Associates of America and that, but, but just the reemergence of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a sort of course of ways.

Should we play a song? Yeah, let's play. We were going to play Free Nelson Mandela by the Special A.K.A. So this is a song from 1984 by a Scar band called The Specials, but they called themselves a Special AKA for this song. And this is a good one actually because Jerry Dammer's from the Specials. He didn't know about, he didn't know who Nelson Mandela was until he went on an anti-apartheid march.

And I think it was one of them, I didn't really know much about the issue, but like basically the experience of that solidarity on this, on this demonstration spurred him to find out about Nelson Mandela and write this song, Free Nelson Mandela, which is a great song. Nessa Mantela Mantella Free Ness and Mandela

21 years in captivity She's too small to fit his feet His body abuse but his mind is still free Are you so blind that you cannot see I said, Green, Nesson Mandela I'm ready Preeti

Nelson Mandela Preeti Manila Preeti Piedied the cause is at the ANC Only one man in a large job

are you so blind that you cannot see are you so dead that you cannot hear is please And only five years later Nelson Mandela So it's successful I mean it's interesting to play that song that's you know from the early 80s from sort of 84 just around the same time as pride

and in terms of the British experience specifically you know I always say there's a period running from about 1978 which is the sort of high point of sort of punk transitioning into postpunk and it's also in music terms and in political terms it's the year of the Grunwick dispute which is a famous strike when British mainly white male industrial workers

came out to express very extreme forms of solidarity with a group of mainly Bangladeshi women who were striking for better paying conditions in a film processing plant. And Grunwick 78 through to 1984 when gay and lesbian groups were actively supporting the minors as we already heard, it was this sort of high point

of radical political consciousness in Britain I think the same way, say, in the early 70s was a sort of high point, you know, for the Rainbow Coalition and that form of new left politics in the United States. And so that is really, and then, of course, but then that was defeated.

It was defeated, you know, by Thatcher and by, you know, in 1984-1985, you know, represents the great period of defeat, you know, from which, you know, we're still kind of trying to recover to some extent. And that, and it's, I suppose, I mean, our argument would be, well, it's that, actually, is that. That is what produces kind of contemporary or recent forms of postmodern individualism.

You know, it's not really, it's not the kind of the new left or the counterculture of the 60s and 70s that produces that. Do we have any questions or comments from the audience? Yes, but I'm going to ask one question first. because the way that you talked about I don't know who it was it was either Nadia or Jeremy

said that the debate of identity politics versus class politics is indeed people argue about the defeat that kind of like reminds me on something that Helen and Nona talked about yesterday about the communes

when we said when we look at the communes obviously we look at the failures we look at where they failed but it's not it's not necessarily the failures that are the sources of their defeat, of their failure, right? It's not that they failed to kind of like challenge

to gender imbalance, that's the source of that. So the question is, should we look at that? And my question related to that, it got me thinking about, yeah, it's true. But how do we reach people that are fighting the fight of identity politics versus class politics? How would you get them to recognize that they're actually arguing about a defeat?

right and not arguing about they're arguing about a certain historical situation and what they should be doing is examining the kind of like structural forces that led to this historical situation instead of doing this sort of like infighting so yeah that would be my question what kind of how could we form a form of solidarity out of this conflict which is you know I agree with everything you said it's about the defeat and it has structural causes and so on and so forth but it's not me you need to convince right it's people fighting that actual Big question. Go ahead, Kea. Go ahead. I've just been reading a book by a friend of mine, Rodrigo Nunes. It's just published it recently called Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal. And there's a chapter called The Two Left Melancholys or something like that. And his argument in that chapter is, you know, he says, look, there are sort of two lefts which have constructed themselves.

It's kind of intention and perhaps in opposition to each other. One is the left of 1917 and one is the left of 1968. and he says that, you know, actually, if you look back at the 60s and what was going on, especially in the new left, there wasn't a strong opposition between those two. There may be tensions, but there wasn't an opposition that we find being constructed later on. And he says, look, there are two melancholies here, and it's sort of like a Freudian conception of melancholy where you're trapped and you can't move on, basically. You can't move on because, you know, you're, you can't mourn.

And so he said, look, these two. these two sort of left melancholys they formed a sort of some sort of double helix where basically the excuse being the reason we fail is because of them from both sides is the perfect excuse you need not to address your own limitations and failures basically and so his his his you know the way you'd get round that is by saying well look if you look back at the 60s actually

both of those lefts were shared the same field of problems they were trying to address the same field of problems and you know obviously the it's the defeat the defeats of the end of the 1970s into the 1980s that construct this sort of this sort of binary basically in which we seem to be addressing different problems and in fact the problems are being created by the by the other left though those other left and if we could get rid of those other left then we'd all be fine that's not very solidaristic it's not very solidaristic I think I mean another answer to Christian's question, based on my experience, is just to teach people about

this specific history actually and the specific history of the liberation struggles. Because I think, you know, if you know the specific history of the liberation struggles, then it becomes very clear that, I mean, the correct dichotomy with which to understand, you know, identity politics, liberal identity politics versus its others is not the dichotomy between identity politics and class politics, but the dichotomy between an individualist liberalist. and a collectivist politics. Totally. A politics of solidarity.

Completely. The point being those, it's not about Marxism and socialism versus feminism. It's about socialist feminism versus liberal feminism, basically. And I would recommend, like I was talking to the others about this earlier,

I mean, it's a recent best-selling book in this country, at least. It's an Emma DeBiri's book, what white people can do next, which is a kind of intervention in the allyship debate. But I guess we're going to come onto this. But it's a fantastic book.

drawing on all the right sources, which really very basically makes that argument, says, you know, says that the politics, you know, where there is identity politics, we should be doing a politics of solidarity, coalition, and shared interest. And in doing so, we would be drawing on the legacy of the liberation struggles, not on the legacy of what was left over from their defeat. I think tactically, I think our offering should come from, you know, I think to answer the question on like how I'm thinking how do we teach people without also with also understanding like Keir mentioned like where this politics comes from and that it serves a Pacific function and that maybe we want to suggest that part of it has lost its way but you know identity politics came up for for historical reasons and Keir mentioned one of them I think that there needs to be a generous way of bringing to people's attention, the contradictory elements that exist within, a lot of the kind of

really reductive arguments in identity politics, which are of the sort, you know, we're talking about liberal identity politics here, which it destroys empathy, because it is by default the opposite of being able to sort of cross over and see the universality. It's putting people into categories and holding them prisoner within those categories. And like I said, I think that has historical reasons and it comes from despair. But, you know, like the guys mentioned, I think the understanding of like 20th century history, but also, you know, going back to and Emma Daburi talks about this in the book, you know, like 17th century beginning of enslavement of African people.

Like there's why whiteness was created as a category was created to break down solidarity between, you know, Irish workers and enslaved Africans on Barbados. That's one example that she gives. So the creation of this category. So especially when it comes to race, it seems, you know, like I'm not going to be able to articulate myself as well as she does. but it's a really, really good one. It's a good lens to kind of understand why politics of solidarity is very important and see how important something like Black Lives Matter

is, but also understanding the identity tangents that some of that has gone off on and trying to steer that kind of movement in a progressive direction. But I think we're going to come on to all of this in a second again, but maybe we've jumped the gun. Do you have a question from the chant as well? someone asked about

the solidarity and identity politics question that there was one very specific yeah it's about universal universal basic income or universal basic services as

as solidarity or whether they might create resentment is that something we're going to address later is something you could actually answer so will this indeed

I mean the idea obviously it's a disputed issue on the left is all I could say to that but is it a form of solidarity to give people to give money to people that don't need it certainly equality in some sense but is it solidarity I think it can be a deliberate attempt to create solidarity

by kind of creating a degree of mutual interdependence between people I mean you know when it's funny you know when Mark and I, Mark Fisher and I wrote this document, Reclaim Modernity, like a political plan for it years ago now. There was sort of an intervention, a pre-Corpon intervention in Labour Party policy debates. One of the things we were advocating was basic income or citizen income,

but the logic that led us to it was not a kind of ethical logic. It was a sort of cynical logic, because we'd been talking about how famously, you know, Thatcher's most long-term successful policy was the privatisation of social housing in Britain. Mass privatisation of social housing, not allowing municipalities to rebuild the social housing stock. So you turn more and more people into homeowners and property speculators. And it was incredibly successful intervention at the level of social engineering. And it has now successfully produced this whole generation of now retired homeowners who've all started voting conservative because they're no longer dependent on setting their labour in the workplace.

They're just dependent on the price of their assets. And we were saying, What could you do that would do that for the left? What could you do that would actually make everybody dependent on each other and dependent on maintaining a generous welfare state? We said, oh, give everybody kind of universal basic income because that would actually, once everybody gets used to it, you know, you can never take it away again. You just can't politically, you can't.

So I think it can definitely help to engender it. I mean, the question of will it make some people resentful? Well, say, well, any progressive policy will make some people resentful. It's not a reason not to do it. On the question, universal basic income or universal basic services, my answer is simply yes. Both, please. Can we help both?

Is it solidarity? The answer is yes. I'm not sure can states do solidarity? No, they can engender it. They can engender it. Yeah, no, they can engender. I agree with you. I just feel my instinct is solidarity is something between people, not states.

But the state can be mediated between people. Absolutely. fine fine i'll give you that well that leads us to to it to the idea that like yeah different subjectivities i think we're allowed to use that word we'll get will lead you we'll will allow you to find solidities of other people in ease more easily than ever than other forms of subjectivity and so like just really really practically in terms of or jeremy's thing about about you know this this cohort of property pensioners who are who are the new core of the conservative vote in the in the UK probably in the US as well I'm not sure about

Germany you know one of the reasons that high property prices are so important is because you know that is the way you guarantee your care in old age basically so it's just it's just absolutely obvious that if you had some sort of your universal care system which was actually which would offer the care that you wanted then the need for something for this like individualized form of asset based insurance just basically diminishes and you'll be much more open to sort of solidaristic, you know, other, other solidaristic, uh, shapings of your interest, I think. I mean, yeah, it's very Western based that, because in, you know, most

other countries in the world, you, you take your parents into your house and take care of them. Whereas that doesn't really happen in a lot of the West, you know, that, that's it's a complete cultural difference on how you deal with old people. It's a huge subject. Very interesting one and how it links to, to voting and assets. I have a question because what interests me is the relationship between solidarity and unity. Unity of a working class. Solidarity can also be, if you're coming from operasistic thinking or socialism of barbaric and all the critique of apparatchiks in a party.

So unity of the working class, it's very useful as a political strategy, but it also can be very repressive. Perhaps it's a little bit too pessimistic and we don't want to talk about too much about the failures, but perhaps you can elaborate on this a little bit. Well, my response would be that solidarity is categorically not the same thing as unity and does not require unity in that sense,

in the sense of homogeneity or you. or unidirectionality. It requires a certain capacity for mutual coordination and for the plotting of mutually produced vectors of becoming, but that's not the same thing as unity. And that's why I think that that is my straightforward answer, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a postmodernist, but it does seem very 20. It does seem very 20th century calls for unity. I don't think, I don't quite understand, or I've not seen an expression of calls for unity, which

I've really understood the real function of. So maybe, you know, things are, the terrain is different in Germany. And also, I think a radical conception of solidarity is what takes the place. It's, you know, the thing that people are trying, think they want what they call for unity. What they mean

really is solidarity. Tell them, Jeremy. No, no, I mean, I think the kind of like unity, I'm not sure if that is what Pascal was hinting at, is we see it as a sort of like, well, coming back at farce in a sense. And for example, in the writings of Mark Lila, you know, who constantly says, you know, what the left, the social democratic left is lost, is a sort of like idea of an us, and it's been replaced by identity politics and back-class politics.

And he says that us is the kind of like mutual citizenship. So indeed, a certain kind of like, aspect of which brings me to the question what kind of universality is desired right i mean it's it's you know if you were to ask me it's not i wouldn't say citizenship is universality because it's exclusive um obviously and ken does not be a source of of solidarity because it excludes the non-citizen um by definition um you know yeah uh but it's quite interesting he this sort of like the way he phrases the argument there's a similarity. So there's a similarity in

argumentation in what he writes and what these older calls to unity have. But it said, you know, they were at least thinking about the unity of the working class and he's just now thinking of the unity of us, the American citizens. I think it's something you do,

not something you necessarily need to define. That would be my mini intervention. I think I'd go further and I'd say like, you know, there's I think there's like there's an insurgent universality right which and so you know

you could probably do it in fact through sort of like you know constitutions where he'd sort of look at the you know the US constitution or the French constitution and you know with that you know all men are created equal

in the US constitution well they didn't actually mean that did they right they didn't mean the slaves did they but hey there was a revolution which took that seriously in Haiti right and they know But that was like, you know, they, yeah, that insurgent, the results of that insurgent solidarity, if you like, if you put it that way,

it looked very different to like the abstract unity of a, perhaps I'm talking about a top down or abstract unity, which you might think of, I don't know, perhaps in like, you know, the discourse around human rights, which might might well lead to sort of something like Mark Lee. But that brings us back to, you know, my original point that we started at the beginning of this, is that that's a great example here, or, you know, like universal suffrage or, you know, with a vote or whatever, is that if you, if there's whole sections of humanity, i.e. 50% women or, you know, everyone who is non-white after a definition of white that comes in, of which you've gone as far as basing a constitution on the basis of all of these people don't count, then you need some sort of action like, you know, happened in Haiti or, you know, what we were talking about in Barbados and many other examples of history, which put people in a position of realizing that these other people are people.

And it has to be through, you know, struggle. That's how it happens. It's like, oh, shit, you know, we've forgotten about all of the women. And then you just make it happen. And then it becomes normative. It's through struggle, right? It's not through, I don't know. I have to think about the unity one.

Maybe we should do a whole podcast on that. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, I think, I mean, it was thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy and people they were drawing on, like, Levinas. I mean, they were all trying to get at some notion of a horizon of universality that couldn't be thought of in terms of unity, actually. That's partly what they were trying to get at. And, you know, I think it was, and it was partly motivated by thinking about forms of solidarity.

You know, they were thinking about the question of, like, hospitality, like, what do we owe to the stranger? Like, how do we conceptualise friendship in ways that are not limited by kind of, you know, ideas of unity or ethnocentrism or patriarchy? And, you know, the fact that, you know, it's just, I always say this, you know, it's a shame, because they mostly got read and promoted by American liberals. Like that dimension of their thought, it often gets missed, I think, in both the English-speaking world and often, I think in Germany as well, actually, where a lot of the reading of that stuff came back via those kind of Anglo interventions. So that's one source there. But I mean, Nadi is completely right in practice. This stuff is experienced in struggle. Okay.

So I think we've talked a lot about, we've talked already about some of the stuff we wanted to talk about in this section, which is touching on identity politics. and, you know, thanks the guys for bringing in unity throwing that spanner in the works as well to think about. But I think we want to talk now about what inhibits and what provokes solidarity today. So I think that's what we would like to end on. Okay. Well, we've got a later points here to condense, haven't we? But I think, you know, I mean, the basic operational mechanism

of neoliberalism, but also to some extent of liberalism, historically and in fact of all arguably of all ideology in any hierarchical society I think is to inhibit solidarity basically to inhibit relations of solidarity from emerging amongst those who are

outside the social elite and clearly you know I mean you can pretty much you could identify almost you could just analyse the whole of sort of advanced neoliberal culture as a giant machine which is which is designed to

prevent relations of solidarity from emerging by provoking, by, you know, valorizing the privatization of experience, by enforcing the privatization of experience, by enforcing competition on people in the labor market and everywhere else. But to some extent, it has to do that because, you know, this was a point kind of made by Marx.

You know, 150 years ago, it's the point made by people that they agree. The trouble is capitalism is always having to find ways to prevent relations of solidarity from emerging because capitalism was always doing things which have a tendency to provoke it. You know, you take people out of the countryside but you stick them together in cities and factories,

you know, all other things being equal, they're going to develop relations of solidarity in those concepts. So capitalism is always working according to this double movement, I think. It's producing conditions which left to their own devices would give rise to forms of solidarity. And so it has to find ways of making sure that doesn't happen. And that's even true with things like social media. You know, social media weren't carefully designed in ways which are encouraged to make people everybody kind of distracted and crazy and competitive.

Then it would just be a vast networking tool for people to recognise each other's, you know, common interest, I think. The only point that I really wanted to make in this section that we didn't talk about before is just highlighting the interesting situation of being in a pandemic. and what the pandemic has done to solidarity and how that interacts with capitalism, I think is really interesting because as you were talking about before, one of you guys mentioned, you know, the mutual aid groups

and, you know, like we're talking about with the refugee crisis, just people just actually helping each other out. And I think that's really interesting. And particularly interesting to look at this phase this summer that we're going to have and whether things go back to normal or whether some of that quality is retained in society,

assuming that we're on the way out of this pandemic. That's the only point that I'm going to make in this section. Do you think that the experience of the pandemic is going to increase forms and experiences of social solidarity in the medium term? I mean, I think it has, like we've seen that expression, but the question is, because neoliberalism has, is in general so successful at atomizing people very quickly after those experiences is whether the combination of the experiences of solidarity that people have had on the ground

over the last 18 months plus the kind of what I'm calling the summer of love because people are going to get out there and finally go to a party or whatever if the weather holds. Obviously, for us, this is England and anything can happen. and the weather affects politics massively. But whether the combination of that experiences that people have and the optimism of the future of being able to see people again and be in crowds and whether that is going to produce, you know, a certain kind of opening for not going to back to the normal of neoliberalism.

And I don't know. I just think it's interesting. We should say for our, for any German listeners we have, As soon as in the first months of the pandemic in the UK, there was just an absolutely huge explosion of what got termed mutual aid groups. And the term, the phrasing was pretty interesting. And I think it was some of the people who set the first ones were from sort of like an anarchist background. And so it was Kropotkin's book on Mutual Aid.

But it was just really, really, really was remarkable. The scale of it, just the sort of proliferation of these mutualists, aid groups and it was basically people just you know and checking on their neighbors setting WhatsApp groups to make sure that elderly people could get their shopping and these sorts of things and it some of them kept going right the way through the pandemic some of them sort of got brought into sort of you know official council services and these sorts of these sorts of things so there was that initial flush of sort of of real sense of solidarity and which probably has

faded to some degree and then but the other the The wider thing about the pandemic is that the problem is structured in such a way that it points towards, it's basically it points towards being a global problem. So one of the things we see now is like, I think Joe Biden yesterday said they were going to give, I can't remember, 500 million vaccines to the global South. So that's an act of solidarity, which is probably produced, rather than some sort of feeling of empathy, it's produced from the recognition. if you know if you let the pandemic go run rampant in the global south they're going to be these variants one of which is sweeping the UK at the moment and and you know in that sense it's a it's a it's a problem structured very in a similar way to climate change where where you know any sense of solidarity on a purely national level it's not of much use to be honest basically because the problem is global do you know what those what that what effect that has what effect that has on people subject to I think is varies depending on a whole series of things. It does seem to be that there were a whole series of interviews I was reading recently with 60 to 25 year olds around Europe.

And it was very interesting in the sort of the effect it seemed to have was some of them were unsurprising, one of the effects was like really severe mental health problems with a real commonality. But the other one was just, you know, it just seemed to lead all. automatically to like a structural analysis and quite often to an anti-capitalist analysis and it just seems to be that the structure of the of of both the problem and the level the scale of the response that governments have been forced into has you know in terms of like stimulus et cetera it just seems to have had some sort of some sort of impact but also what what it also seems to be it seems to be taken especially by young people as this is what this What we're experiencing now is what the future holds, basically.

This is just a little glimpse of the kinds of problems we're going to be facing on an increasingly rapid level due to the problem of climate change. And so there's this idea of we need systemic change. And like for young people it seems to be, we're going to be the ones who are obligated to do it. So it's like a despair. It's not a hopeful sort of affect. It's more like despair leading, but not despair leading to inaction. and despair leading to a sense of duty or something like that. What effect that will have on solidarity, I don't know.

So we should end on a high note after that point, Kea. That's a hopeful note. We have four minutes left. So shall we play the fantastic song Revolution? There's somebody want to talk about it. Okay. It's Nina Simone from the late 60s. You know, it's kind of always axiomatic for me

that Nina Simone really ought to be remembered. It's like one of the great musical voices of that period. you know she's more you know more than like Mick Jagger and John Lennon this was the song which was her sort of response actually to the Beatles you know revolution song about not wanting a revolution so let's hear it I see about ten soul brothers out there you won

It's called Revolution because I see the face of things that come. Hold the Constitution. Well, my friend, it's going to have to bend. I'm here to talk about destruction of all the evil that will happen. We don't want to be still in. It's just going to be all right. Some folks are going to get the notion, I know.

They say I'm preaching, hey. If I have to swing the ocean, well, I will. Just to continue that, hey, go ahead. It's not as simple as talking jobs. A daily struggle just to stay alive. Oh, alive. We're around there. You know what's going to be in.

It's going to be alive. Stay alive. Hello Buddha Well there you go Inissomone, communist, you know, black liberationist, queer feminist, the voice of the Rainbow Coalition for me and still tears up a dance floor. You know,