Any conversation about a book whose title is a single word has to start with a basic definition of that word. Let’s start there. What is solidarity?

Well, part of the point of writing the book was to avoid giving a one-sentence definition. The history and the context of the development of the idea is so interesting and so much a part of what’s important to understand about it. If we had to give a quick definition, solidarity is about the interconnectedness between us and connection across difference. Solidarity is not unity or sameness or oneness. It’s about connection across difference.

One of the fascinating things about this word is that you can trace it back all the way to Ancient Rome where it was a concept of debt. There were obligatio in solidum, debts in solidarity, solidarity debts that were held in common where a group of people would be kind of on the hook for a debt together. Imagine if a few folks go in together on a house but then one person can’t pay their share. The others would step up and cover the rest. It was then brought from Ancient Rome into modern French law through the Napoleonic codes in the 1800s. Then almost by metaphor, it moves from law into popular discourse.

People start talking about the debts that we owe together, the debts that we have to each other. There’s even a political tendency called the Solidarists that develops. They help create the modern welfare state, social security programs. They advocate for public education and health care. They argue that we have debts to everyone who came before us and we have debts to future generations. That’s what I think is the real definition of solidarity. It’s this kind of connection across time, connection across space.

It’s almost the opposite of individualism in the sense that it’s the belief that no individual exists alone or on our own. That we inherit our language, we inherit ideas, we inherit institutions, we inherit art. Everything that we have around us is inherited from other people. We owe those people something and we owe people who don’t even exist yet the responsibility of carrying all of that forward.

I am one of the cofounders of the Debt Collective, which is the world’s first debtors union. In a way, it was this insight that Leah shared with me about the sort of etymological roots and history of the concept of solidarity that got me hooked on the project. Leah called me up one day and said, “Astra, the concept of solidarity actually means debts we hold in common. This kind of interdependence.” At that moment, I was like, “Wow, I can see a book.”

It’s a foundational part of the argument we lay out. We are interdependent. Solidarity is a word for the bonds between us.

The other thing that I was positioned to see in that conversation with Leah is that in a lot of our political philosophy, we leave out that relational element, the ways that we’re connected. We talk a lot about freedom. We talk a lot about equality. We talk about justice as sort of pillars of democracy. But solidarity, at least in the United States, gets short shrift. Which means we are trying to think about small-d democracy without a relational concept, without something that talks about those bonds, without something that describes our interconnections. There are various things we want to do with this book. But I think one thing we’re trying to do is say, solidarity is actually kind of a precursor to democracy. Solidarity deserves to be in the pantheon of these democratic political ideals.

I’ve always been struck by the absurdity of claims of individualism, because long before we get to any kind of moral or social political question, the idea of individualism itself is so absurd. Every one of us is not only dependent on others, but we quite literally are others. We are made of others. Our bodies are made up of the matter of previous generations. We were brought into the world, not of our own volition, but through our parents drawn from our parents’ little literal bodies.

You can go on and on. We continue to exist because our bodies are nourished by food that’s grown by others. We need cars built by others or public transit operated by others to move around from place to place. We need clothes made by others to wear.

We need electricity made possible by miners and creators of solar panels and builders of dams in order to do almost any of our daily tasks. The idea of an individualistic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality is delusional because it implies that we’re able to live in the world without others. But we can’t. It seems to me that this concept of solidarity operates, first and foremost, in recognition of that fact, that if we are fundamentally dependent on each other, then we should act like it.

You sound like Martin Luther King Jr, who writes this amazing statement:

Whether we realize that or not each of us is eternally in the red, we’re everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. We do not finish breakfast without being dependent on more than half the world. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge that’s provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that’s created for us by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. And at the table, we drink coffee that’s provided for us by a South American or tea by a Chinese or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world.

That’s also a big part of what the first theorists of solidarity in the 1800s began to notice. It was a time when the Industrial Revolution was happening. There was a lot of change, a lot of questioning of social norms and institutions.

It was also the time of the rise of the individual as the big idea of the era. The solidarists and thinkers like Émile  Durkheim were pushing back and saying, “But we are scientifically interconnected.” They talked about the human body as a good example of this. That the legs and arms and heart and lungs are all completely different. But they work together as a whole. There was also a French statesman named Léon Bourgeois, who was a minister in the government. He ended up being one of the first presidents of the League of Nations and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote a tract on solidarity.

He said the French Revolution was based on the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But solidarity seems to be replacing fraternity as the idea that we need to begin to build our societies on. Because it combines this scientific fact of our interdependence with also the moral requirement to attend to that interdependence.

What Durkheim and Bourgeois and others started to notice is that even though we are technically fundamentally interdependent, we don’t necessarily feel it. We don’t necessarily act like it. We actually have to construct it. We have to get really intentional about it. We have to build practices and stories that organize us to attend to our interdependence. That’s another reason we wanted to kind of write this book and start a conversation about this. It has to be present in our minds. It has to be something that we focus on intentionally.

We provide an intellectual history of solidarity in the opening of the book. This history that Leah’s beginning to lay out was something I didn’t know about. The work of these thinkers is not something that is widely discussed, especially in the United States. We talk about how the Solidarists and this figure Léon Bourgeois shape the French welfare state, but that they reached the peak of their influence before World War I and then were forgotten in the aftermath of that tragedy. We think it’s an important intellectual tradition, but it’s only one strand of solidarity. When we look back at that history, the 1800s, early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution, the story we tell is sort of these two parallel tracks where solidarity is being theorized in practice.

One is this movement that is centered explicitly around the idea of solidarity, is really excited about it. There’s a text we quote where someone says something to the effect of, we need to be as mad for solidarity as the Christians are for Christ. Solidarity became a buzzword. It was this new idea that had urgency, because people were living through tumult. They were living through the beginning of the main period of the Industrial Revolution. People are migrating, society is shifting. There are these democratic upheavals and people are wondering, what’s going to hold society together? How are we going to hang together as these older institutions and ways of life crumble? Solidarity is a concept that they settle on and theorize as a way humans who are different can hang together.

That’s really Durkheim’s contribution. He theorizes solidarity as a kind of social bond, as a force of social cohesion. The other track is the labor movement, and that’s the tradition that we still associate solidarity with most strongly. That tradition is a bit more interested in conflict, in class conflict. Less, how do we hold society together, even in a just way, and more how do we actually change society to make it just? This is an acknowledgement that there needs to be contention and power struggle.

What Leah and I ultimately settle on is that we need both traditions, that we actually need to hang together and we need to change, that we need cohesion and conflict. These thinkers in France at the time offer some valuable insights. Léon Bourgeois is bourgeois. He’s an upper-class statesman talking to his peers saying, “We need to organize society and the state around this principle because laissez-faire economic principles are catastrophic. We should create a welfare state.” He makes some serious inroads in this way. He also, along with his collaborators, creates this set of interesting concepts, the concept of social debt. They emphasize, as many thinkers do in that period, duties as opposed to just rights. The fact that we have obligations.

They consider themselves socialists. They are socialists; they talk about social property, the fact that property gets its value from social relations and it’s not just something that can be conceived of in a purely private, individualistic way. They give a tool kit of concepts that we think are worth thinking about and recovering and using alongside the more militant tradition of solidarity.

Near the end of the book, you have an extensive discussion about the religious aspects of this concept of solidarity, a discussion of the sacred quoting Durkheim, the sociologist — you say that he came to “understand solidarity not simply as the product of material conditions, but also as reliant on a shared sense of the sacred solidarity that has an almost spiritual aspect.” Can you talk about this kind of sacralization of solidarity?

It was inspired also in part by our experience in our own organizing, but also by Durkheim. If you look at his corpus, he starts with the division of labor, thinking that, okay, in the modern era we’re falling apart, but the division of labor is going to hold us together, because we need each other economically. Then he realizes suicide rates are increasing and writes a book on suicide, saying, “People are really struggling, feeling this sense of anomie, isolation, social loss. Toward the end of his work, he writes The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where he dives into the concept of the sacred and makes a new argument that what actually holds this together is not the economy or the division of labor, but shared concepts of the sacred.

It’s making meaning together, deciding what is really valuable, what’s really important, and the construction of practices, rituals, and beliefs around that. He doesn’t mean it in any supernatural sense. He says anything can be sacred, a rock or a tree or a river, but the issue is the role it plays in society.

We end the book with a chapter on the sacred because we wanted to address multiple levels at which we think solidarity operates. A lot of the book spends time on the historical, macro-political levels. Then we also spend time on the sort of organizational level, how we organize ourselves in struggle and campaigns and organizations to change our society and surroundings.

The sacred is where we think about the role of individuals and our relationships to each other, how we treat each other, the role of different virtues, like courage and humility and curiosity. Because we don’t think all of social change is reducible to being nice to each other, but there is a role for it. There is a role for kindness in our social movements, in our organizations, in day-to-day lives. It’s about treating each other as sacred in our daily actions; we can’t just have a radical politics and significant social change if we’re not actually living that out with how we treat each other on a daily basis.

As we embarked on this chapter, there was a bit of hesitation. Were we going to commit to using the word sacred? Were we going to really end the book on a slightly touchy-feely note? In the end, it turned out to be actually one of my favorite chapters to write. It actually is in a way the heart of the book because we think solidarity operates on these different levels. Part of the insight about solidarity being constructed as opposed to spontaneous is that we have to work to build it. We think it’s really important to build organizations that are based in solidarity and that fight for a more solidaristic world.

Labor unions are of course the most important formation on that front. We think that you can instantiate more solidaristic policies at the level of the state. We talk about what we call a “solidarity state” as a kind of step beyond the welfare state. Ultimately, as we said at the beginning, solidarity is relational. It is the stuff between us and how we treat each other that really matters because solidarity does have to be built day by day, person by person, relationship by relationship. As we were working this out, we went back to Durkheim and felt like, “Oh, he’s onto something.” Part of the definition of the sacred that we settled on is that it’s really about what you pay attention to.

What are you kind of honoring in your everyday life? And capitalism captures our attention, whether we want to or not. We are forced to pay attention to the market.

We are forced to engage as consumers. If we’re lucky enough to have 401(k), we have to attend to it. If we want to have a chance of not being destitute in old age, the market captures our time and our attention and therefore our piety. Even if we don’t want to, we’re forced to worship at the altar of money. We think that part of revaluing things is reclaiming the attention that we can and saying, no, as people who believe in solidarity, as socialists, we think life is sacred; money is not sacred. And that we have to reflect that in, again, in our relationships and in our movements. We talk about what this means.

This is also at the heart of being a good organizer. It’s reaching out to people, trying to understand where they’re coming from and holding out hope that they can be brought into a broader coalition. That means that we don’t replicate capitalist dynamics. We don’t treat people as disposable. We don’t treat people as instruments or as objects but as real human beings and potential comrades. As leftists, we sometimes say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter what we do on personal levels or the choices we made, we need to change structures.” But we actually get to the point where we have the power to change structures by changing how we engage personally.

I was glad that you ended the book in this way because it spoke very much to the religious background that I come from. I think about a thinker like the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, who used to basically argue that the question is not is there a God or is there not a God? We all have a God in our lives, something we make into a God. The question is whether that God is, as he put it, pointing toward what’s “ultimate” or if it is something that is pointing toward something that is not ultimate. This is a sort of violation of the First Commandment: that thou shalt have no other gods before me. Under capitalism, the market is God.

We’re sort of forced to orient our entire lives around serving this thing, the market, which is a kind of false idol worship in Christian framing. Solidarity does point to what is actually ultimate, which is our interconnection with each other. We make that the center of what we are doing with our lives together. To me, that doesn’t sound like false idol worship.

That sounds like putting at the center of our lives that which should be at the center of our lives, which is our interconnection with each other and our responsibilities to each other.

Amen.

Your argument in the book is essentially that solidarity should be the fulcrum around which the world should turn and that the success or failure of a social policy or policy outcome is the extent to which it’s rooted in solidarity and can generate a sense of solidarity among its beneficiaries. How do we get to that place where we make solidarity the essential value for us all? What are the means by which we instill the solidarity essential to our lives? Do we need to first embrace solidarity as a value, then act accordingly? Or is it more important to figure out how to create policies and institutions and practices that encourage and build and strengthen that sense of solidarity?

I think the first step is, again, putting solidarity back in that pantheon of political ideals, not just consigning it to the realm of rhetoric. This is not just a buzzword. It’s not just a word on a placard. It’s not something to sign your email with. It’s actually a core principle in practice. And so I think that’s step one.

Signing your emails “In solidarity” isn’t bad. You can do that, too.

I mean, do it.

I think I’ve gotten emails from you signed “In solidarity.”

I think it’s starting to give solidarity its due. We see solidarity very much as a means and an end. It is both the way we create power, and it also names a political horizon that we want to work toward.

I think it’s important for us as leftists to say not just that we want to create an egalitarian society at the end, but a solidaristic one, one where people are really conscious of their interdependence. We should be thinking of a kind of solidarity statecraft. How do we imbue our social policies with solidarity, so that it. . . maybe doesn’t trickle down, but trickles sideways? In that sense, solidarity statecraft is a kind of soulcraft.

And it’s okay to be thinking about policies in terms of how they shape people’s sensibilities and how they shape their sense of possibility. There’s a well-known quote from Margaret Thatcher, the former neoliberal prime minister of the United Kingdom. She said, “Economics is the method. The point is to change the soul.” She understood that by creating a more cutthroat, competitive society, one with a diminished social safety net, she would change people and how they interacted, how they saw themselves and how they saw their neighbors and how they saw people beyond the country’s borders. I think we see a similar kind of ethos in Project 2025.

It is about gutting welfare policy and getting rid of wokeness and diversity, equity, and inclusion and all this, but it is very bold about saying we’re seizing what will be left of the state to impose a culture of blessedness, to impose a character on the American people. We can’t be neutral in the face of that.

We are interested in what sociologists call policy feedback loops. How do policies actually create a sense of interconnection, a sense of interdependence, a sense of solidarity? We also understand that you don’t get even the most modest sort of reforms without a fight, without a contest. In that sense, we have to build solidarity at the ground level in our workplaces, in our schools, in the streets, to fight for a change in the structure of the state. I think it’s interesting for us to ponder, well, what would it mean to define social policies, not just so they promote economic redistribution and provide a floor beneath which nobody can fall? Yes, we want housing. Yes, we want transportation. Yes, we want education. Yes, we want health care.

But actually, how would you structure those so people feel really brought into them, understand themselves as agents and see how we are enmeshed in all of these social debts that we discussed earlier, that we really are dependent on other people for our survival and well-being?

Most people on the Left would associate solidarity with being a fundamentally positive thing, but solidarity is just a kind of social cohesion or interconnection with each other. At a time of social fragmentation, obviously, that is a very good thing and a very needed thing. But you can have solidarity among misogynist men and their hatred of women or solidarity among white workers in the World War II–era Detroit auto plants who waged hate strikes to keep workers of color out. Can you talk about the negative forms of solidarity and your alternative vision that is wrapped up in this concept of transformative solidarity?

Yes, it is really important to note that solidarity in a sense is a neutral term and can be positive or negative. You gave some great examples. Donald Trump’s campaign was very much based on what we call “reactionary solidarity.” So, solidarity that pulls the group inward, it’s exclusive, it has rigid borders, it otherizes in a way that the “us” is protected and the “them” is to be annihilated. It condones violence.

The ruling class has really strong class solidarity. White supremacy is a form of reactionary solidarity. We counterpose that to what we call “transformative solidarity,” which also has an us and a them, because any kind of group has an identity and has borders. But for us, transformative solidarity has porous borders. People can move in and out. If Occupy Wall Street had the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, it was as inclusive as possible. But it did identify that there are people who are driving us apart, whose interests are opposed to the majority and who are benefiting from exploitation, oppression.

That needs to be identified and named. We can’t pretend that we’re just all in it together and we all have the same interests all the time, because we don’t. There is conflict in society. But the “them” is not a group of people that should be annihilated, it should be transformed.

In the case of the 1 percent, we’re saying they should be dispossessed. When we talk about abolishing billionaires, we’re not literally talking about rounding up billionaires and executing them. We’re talking about changing the structure of the economy so that people are not in a position to systematically exploit.

We don’t think that the current state of economic inequality benefits anyone at any end of the spectrum. Elon Musk seems like the least happy man in the world. At that top echelon, you’re fighting to keep people out and stay at the top. That’s a miserable existence as well. Transformative solidarity aspires to outcomes that benefit everyone, but it recognizes that there is conflict along the way.

You talk quite a bit in the book about the need for struggle in order to achieve policies and societies that are rooted in solidarity. That’s common sense to a lot of people who are already on the Left. But I think that the struggle piece can be a somewhat difficult sell for many people beyond the already existing left who buy into the principles of solidarity as part of a broader belief in progressive principles, maybe religious principles like the ones that we were just talking about. They believe in loving their neighbor and not hoarding resources and acting out of a sense of love toward their fellow human beings. But then that makes the idea of struggling against others, of treating other people as enemies to be defeated, is anathema to them. How do we overcome this tension in the ideals of solidarity and a reticence to engage in struggle and to achieve it?

Leah invoked the word “polarization.” It’s less in the discourse now. After Trump was elected in 2016, there was a lot of conversation around how we’d become too polarized and need to have more civility and turn the temperature down.

We’re of the view that, no, polarization is really important. But the question is, around what axis? Picking an enemy is dangerous business, because when you define your enemy, you’re defining yourself. Those of us who are engaged in struggle and want there to be polarization need to take that responsibility to heart. We are having an argument in this book with the folks who believe that reducing polarization could somehow create a situation where we don’t need conflict anymore.

Or that you would reduce polarization through dialogue and discussions, just sitting down with people at a dinner table. Polarization is structural. It’s created structurally and needs to be addressed on a structural level.

The problem isn’t that we’re naming it. It is structured into a capitalist economy. That’s the way that this society is built.

We’re not going to be able to fix it through dialogue, persuasion, or arguments alone. In the book, we have a chapter that is about organizing called “Power in Numbers” and spent some time there trying to address the audience you’re imagining. We say, look, folks have attempted to pursue social change through means of getting access to deciders, through lobbying, through making the best arguments and publishing the most compelling white papers. But ultimately, if you look back at the historical record, almost everything we now celebrate in terms of the victories of the civil rights movement, the disability justice movement, women’s suffrage, it all required disruption, serious conflict, bold direct actions that are often whitewashed from the stories we then go on and tell ourselves.

I’ve always found Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” a key document in the American pantheon that speaks to this question, because it comes from this figure who has become sanitized in the American imagination — the aspects of waging struggle, naming enemies, and defeating them is not central to how we talk about King today. But if you read that letter, King is speaking to exactly this kind of person, these white moderate clergy members in the South who are saying that they’re sympathetic to his aims but don’t agree with the methods of creating conflict in the streets in order to achieve them. He speaks to them in a very loving tone, a very patient tone, but is totally firm in saying that the only way that we’re going to be able to achieve the kind of society rooted in love and rooted in solidarity that we want is through struggle.

Yeah. The people who are in the struggle, who are in the civil rights movement, or in the fight today, are not the ones actually creating the conflict by naming it. It’s not that you and your right-wing uncle are just not getting along. Fox News is creating a conflict. Media is driving people apart. This focus on immigrants as if that was the main problem, that’s undermining American society — that’s a narrative that’s creating conflict.

This is part of Ian Haney López’s argument in Dog Whistle Politics, where he writes about how we get driven apart by the ruling class. Part of what’s creating the underlying conflict is that we don’t have a strong enough safety net for everyone, which we could have if we taxed the wealthy. But the wealthy are invested in retaining what they have. And so they fund media that distracts through dog whistles on other parts of the population that can be marginalized and targeted.

Trump and [J. D.] Vance talk about Haitian migrants — that is classic dog whistle politics. Overcoming that involves a struggle and response. The labor movement is one of the places where that struggle happens. This is why unions are so important. They provide a context where people can really engage in struggle together.

To answer your question how do you get people who might be sympathetic to see that a more ambitious, combative struggle is required — sometimes I think you have to let people learn the hard way. In organizing, sometimes you have to say, okay, let’s do it. Let’s go and persuade. Let’s go meet with our Congress people. Let’s go meet our representatives, tell them how we were wronged. They just need to be informed.

Part of organizing is doing stuff like that over and over again so that people can try things out and see their limits or litigation. Often if people are harmed by predatory corporations, their instinct is, I’m going to sue. Well, okay, try that route and see where it gets you. Sometimes people do have to learn through experience just how difficult it is to win change through the proper channels. That can be very radicalizing. Sometimes I think we have to have the patience to let people go through that in hopefully an organized context. Ideally we speed the process along, but there’s no better teacher than just having the powerful be unmoved by your pain and your suffering.

You mentioned in the book the rhetorical shift in American life in talking about the “taxpayer” in public rhetoric about social policy. Why is discussion of the taxpayer part of the reactionary turn away from solidarity and what’s the possible alternative?

We discussed the taxpayer in a chapter called “Divide and Conquer” that lays out some of the ways that solidarity is actively undermined. It’s important to name that. We’re not trying to organize for transformative solidarity on a neutral playing field. There has been a conscious, well-funded, and deadly war on transformative solidarity going back centuries. If you go back to the colonial era in this country, unions are illegal. They’re criminalized from the start. This idea of people combining or conspiring against the bosses is outlawed from the get-go and isn’t legalized until 1935 with the Wagner Act. We’re really trying to build solidarity on hostile terrain. Solidarity is sabotaged in different ways.

Through regulation and law, we see the criminalization of solidarity across the country right now with attacks on protesters. Across the country, we’re seeing the intensification of domestic terrorism statutes. We’re seeing things like blocking a sidewalk or traffic now being elevated to felonies. We’re seeing attacks on bail funds, as is the case in Atlanta after Cop City protests. We’re seeing attacks on abortion providers and even people who help someone seeking reproductive health care.

Solidarity is obviously very, very threatening to the elite or they wouldn’t have to go to these incredible lengths to sabotage it. Some of the ways are also more subtle. It’s just a culture of consumerism, a culture of competitive individualism. We see it also through these myths or narratives.

One of those is the taxpayer, this idea that we’re not actually citizens — we’re people who should think of ourselves as taxpayers who are at risk of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. That frame of the taxpayer was very prominent in [Ronald] Reagan–era politics when there was a conscious attempt to roll back the welfare state, both direct subsidies to families but also vicious attacks on higher education. The idea was that those students and those single mothers are siphoning resources from the good upstanding taxpayer, who’s always a white, able-bodied, working man.

We see it today. In the work for student debt cancellation, in my dealings with random commenters on articles to people in Congress, to New York Times editors, they’re always asking “Is the idea of canceling student debt fair to taxpayers? It gives us a ludicrous way of thinking about ourselves and thinking about the state and what we’re entitled to, but it’s so powerful. It’s so antithetical to solidarity. I would love to see that word sort of banished from public discourse.

It also creates a political subject solely on the basis of whether or not you are paying taxes. You are entitled to rights based on whether or not you pay taxes.

It’s also hilarious because rich people in corporations famously do not pay their fair share of taxes. The kinds of taxes poor people pay are regressive. Sales taxes are a great example. So even by its own bizarro logic, it doesn’t work. It’s all about undermining a sense of interdependence and entitlement, right? That’s where it’s anti-soliduristic. It’s about, “I’m the taxpayer, I’m paying this much, I’m an island,” instead of, “I’m actually paying a social debt. And I might benefit in direct ways or in ways that are harder to calculate.”

And you’re not a member of a collective — if you’re a member of a community, you have responsibilities to people who live around you. If you’re a union member, you have responsibilities to your coworkers. If you’re a taxpayer, you’re just responsible for defending your interests as a taxpayer, you’re trying to fight off anybody who would make any kind of demands on you and your taxpaying.

Switching gears here: Do you ever worry that the individualistic, non-solidaristic approaches to consumption, to social life, to politics, to all the ways that individualism rules our lives in the twenty-first century is too powerful for us to overcome? That solidarity, even if it’s innately appealing to many people, can’t overcome that kind of individualism?

I’m actually curious what you think about. I’m curious what your answer is. I feel like you live your whole life conveying a hope that we can change.

We can point to many millions of people who choose solidarity over individualism all the time. That’s the stuff of social movements. I also take great hope personally in the fact that despite all of the capitalistic propaganda that we imbibe in this country, on most big questions people are still fundamentally solidaristic. People still want Medicare for all, they still want to tax the rich. They want a society that looks different from the one that we live in despite being told that this is the best possible world that we could live in over and over again. I take hope in that. But it’s hard to imagine scaling back from all the individualistic forms of consumption once we’ve had a taste.

Yes, I agree, and I don’t really imagine scaling back. I imagine more like collapse, like this is unsustainable. I think the rise of authoritarianism, the Trump era, has signified that neoliberalism is reaching a point facing its own contradictions. Economic inequality is at an all-time high. A lot of people have felt like things are spinning out of control, and that’s correlated to consumption and the immediacy of information, the overflow of and flooding of information and materialism, and it just doesn’t feel sustainable. Society goes through changes that are not always linear, and we’re in a pivotal moment in history where we are trying to figure out the next economic system.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the revival of the labor movement. In the mid-twentieth century, we had 30 percent union density. Now we’re down to 10 percent. But it’s not out of the question that we could get back to 30 percent or even more. A lot would have to happen to make that possible. If workers at Amazon and AI companies were unionized and had more of a say, the mechanics of production and consumption would look different. I feel like we’re on the cusp of change and there is a real question of do we go forward into more isolation and nihilism — and that this is a choice we have every day: nihilism or solidarity.

One way of dealing with what you’ve laid out is to emphasize the possibility of public luxury instead of private consumption. We can think about it in terms of investing in things like libraries and expanding their purpose, so it’s not just books but tools and technologies and classes and all sorts of stuff that can enrich us individually and collectively. Or the classic example is a pool. If there are wonderful public pools and social spaces that have places to swim and saunas and opportunities to exercise and be in public with others, that doesn’t just provide a material benefit, it actually provides an emotional social benefit.

We think that those are sites of solidarity. Heather McGhee in The Sum of Us writes really beautifully about this and about how public pools used to be a thing. Under white supremacy, they dried up, and now if you want to have this sort of American dream, you have to have your own chlorinated water that you don’t share with anybody else. But those pools were and could have been sites of connecting with folks across age, across race, and been points of solidarity.

Take Iceland for example where they have this naturally heated, geothermal pools. Every neighborhood has a kind of public space where people hang out together and that, according to experts, is a key to Icelandic solidarity. This is public luxury. People are hanging out, talking to their friends, soaking in the water. It sounds really nice to me.

We also don’t know how much of our consumption is a symptom of deeper malaise. There are regulatory things we could do. We could outlaw obsolescence and say you can’t make things to break. That’s illegal now. Therefore, we don’t have to buy new shit all the time. But I do think that public wealth could be persuasive to a lot of folks. I don’t mean persuasive in the sense of an argument on the page, but just something irresistible that draws folks. Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist, talks about “palaces for the people,” this idea that our public goods should be kind of sacred, that we should make things that uphold a sense of civic pride. Being together really matters. If we made spaces like that, I think people would change how they live in profound ways.

It actually is more fun to go to the pool where there’s a bunch of people there, some of whom you know, some of whom you don’t know, you meet new people, you have experiences there, versus just swimming laps by yourself in your backyard. That is a way to show people that this is a better way to live our lives.

Yeah, a beautiful public park is different than a lawn. It creates different energy, different relationships, and so we really see those as sites of solidarity-building and as core components of a hypothetical solidarity state.

Leah, you mentioned the labor movement just now. When I first heard that you all were writing this book I immediately thought of the labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan’s memoir Which Side Are You On?, where he writes about his work with unions as having

the appeal of stepping into some black hole in American culture with all the American values except one: individualism. And here in this black hole, paunchy middle-aged men slugging down cans of beer come to hold hands, touch each other, and sing “Solidarity Forever.” It is the damnedest un-American thing you will ever see. Labor thinks of itself as American as apple pie but it is not. Go to any union hall, any union rally, and listen to the speeches. It took me years to hear it but there is a silence, a deafening Niagara-type silence on the subject of individualism. [. . .] Individualism is for scabs.

The labor movement has been the central keeper of this concept of solidarity around the United States and the world, the force that has been the sine qua non for the construction of a society that is built around more solidarity. I take a lot of hope in the fact that there is a demonstrable desire for the labor movement. Labor unions are polling better, more positively than they have in decades in this country.

There is a real hunger among millions and millions of American workers for unions. They recognize that their individual ability to survive out in the job market is not enough for them to lead a decent and dignified life, and that they need that kind of collective coming together, the collective vehicle of trade unions in order to achieve that better life. Despite the over a century of war on organized labor in this country and the way that the deck is stacked against unions in this country, that desire for unions persists.

I feel hopeful about it too. In the past year seeing the [United Auto Workers] become much more militant, organizing new factories in the South and thinking about auto supply lines and electric vehicle factories, seeing the Teamsters link up with the Amazon Labor Union, we’re seeing a lot more militancy,  a lot of workers organizing independent unions like Trader Joe’s United and Starbucks Workers United. We’re seeing so much activity from below. There’s enormous demand and I think it’s truly incumbent on unions to step up and start spending more on organizing new workers.

Chris Bohner writes in Jacobin about union finances and the unions actually have more money than ever: assets in the bank, stocks in Wall Street. But they’re spending about a billion dollars less than they used to on organizing new workers. The money is there. The demand is there. It’s really a decision about whether we start organizing at a whole new level.

That Thomas Geoghegan quote is so funny because the people do imagine kind of like middle-age white guys sitting around drinking beer, but the labor movement is the most diverse cross section of society. It is such a reflection of America. It’s a site where people can really build multiracial solidarity. There’s a real opportunity to rebuild in this sector. It has so much power, and that’s why the Right made such a concerted effort to dismantle it over the past fifty years through right-to-work laws.

Parts of the South used to have even greater union density than the north before right-to-work laws were passed across that region. There’s a real opportunity to rebuild and I think that anyone interested in the idea of solidarity should think about how to be a part of that rebuilding, because it’s like the church of solidarity. It’s where we can really work together, struggle together, build those relationships, and have a real impact on transforming what America looks like.

You mentioned multiple times throughout the book that the right-wing
“war on wokeness” is an attempt to stamp out nascent stirrings of solidarity. I think this is true insofar as wokeness, whatever that means, is rooted in people’s desires to act out of a sense of solidarity for other people who have faced oppression.

But it also seems clear to me that one of the main problems with some of the dominant ways of thinking and communicating on the Left these days is that they are often fundamentally anti-solidaristic, that certain ways of talking about identity and oppression are not about building solidarity with others and seeing yourself as engaged in a shared struggle with other people but rather insisting on the uniqueness of one type of struggle, one type of oppression or “intersecting” types of oppression, as uniquely valid over others. How do you continue to talk about these kinds of issues in ways that deal with oppression while also ensuring that you are constructing constructing solidarity?

Solidarity as we understand it really is about relationships across difference. Solidarity is not unity. Solidarity is not sameness. It’s got this aspect of difference. Transformative solidarity as we understand it is about connecting people across difference. That’s one thing that distinguishes it from reactionary solidarity, which is essentializing: white supremacy, misogyny, immigrants versus native people, “real Americans.” This aspect of difference is important and is also reflected in the historical record.

Different identity categories we now take for granted were built over time. The category of blackness, is something that emerged out of specific historical conditions and has evolved. Who counts as white has shifted and changed the category of worker. The category of worker didn’t just come into being. It wasn’t just invented one day, and it certainly isn’t something that we found outside of social conditions. It’s something that workers themselves forged. Different people in different trades started to see what they had in common and think of themselves not just as craftsmen or drafters or painters or welders but in this category of worker. For us, solidarity has to touch on identity, but it can’t be reducible to identity. We have to always remember that identities are something that we are making and remaking, instead of essentializing them.

We talk a lot in the book about a transformative, solid heuristic way of engaging identity and identity politics versus more reactionary ways of doing that. For us, we really believe that you have to think of race and class together, that you can’t wish away questions of identity just to focus on economics. We’re not going to get very far with people if we say, “Leave your identity at the door and just think about yourself in terms of purely material relations.” Because we all bring our identities and our experiences to the table, but then how can we use those identities as portals to understand each other and people who are in different situations instead of becoming stuck in them.

I do really think that people on the Left should not add any fuel to the right-wing war on wokeness. I don’t think it serves our purpose at all. Yes, there are bad neoliberal forms of identity politics. I hate them on a visceral level. That’s identity politics at its worst. But when people are having moral intuitions and trying and waking up to injustice, it’s our job to provide a different kind of frame. The neoliberal version of identity politics is often what people first encounter, because that’s the dominant culture that we live in.

But I think we shouldn’t respond by shaming people. We should say, here are other other paradigms and frameworks. Here’s why we have to build solidarity across difference. Here’s why we shouldn’t get caught up in “oppression olympics.” Ultimately we’re working toward a future where there might be different ways of conceptualizing ourselves and our identities, and we should embrace that kind of creativity.

You’ve mentioned some very interesting research on political communication by the scholar Ian Haney López that makes the case for talking about racism not as a kind of battle between different racial groups but as a tool wielded by the ruling class to divide the working class. Haney López calls this “the plutocrats’ scythe,” and it seems like this approach to talking about racism and other issues like immigration status have been taken up by some major movement leaders in recent years.

I’m thinking in particular about United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who constantly talks about bosses’ attempts to divide workers on questions of sexuality or race or immigration status. Can you lay out the plutocrats’ scythe argument and how you think it should be employed by movements? And what it has to do with solidarity?

Ian Haney López writes in Dog Whistle Politics about the history of the way in which the ruling class uses racism as a tool of division in order to distract from conversations about the economy, about taxation. There would be the diversion to “but welfare queens,” “but the thugs on the streets,” “but crime.” We see this in the playbook of Donald Trump, of Elon Musk.

An organization that I cofounded and work with, Way to Win, has been creating political ads that actually quickly encapsulate what’s happening. On the other side, Republicans are trying to fearmonger and distract by talking about immigrants or crime rates, but we need to hang in there together. The only way we win is by coming together across difference, finding our common bonds and fighting for justice and equality for all. It’s something that Democrats sometimes step toward. But very often they actually fall back into “but we’re tough on the border,” “but we’ll be tough on crime,” and that’s really falling into the trap that López lays out. It’s a really good analysis of the Right’s playbook and the best way to respond.

These frames that he’s tested appeal to people who might otherwise bristle at messaging that’s simply “racism is bad” or “racists are bad.” Or maybe a message that seems overly woke. But when you add the element of “why” in, it speaks to a far more diverse set of people. Saying “rich people are using racism to divide you so they can harvest obscene wealth and power” — that’s why it’s a scythe. They’re using racism as a tool for this grotesque harvest.

When you say that directly, it really speaks to people. The point about Democrats though is they have not fully imbibed this. Members of the Squad have. People in the progressive wing of the party have. But obviously Kamala Harris played up being tough on crime and tough on border security. That is not a solidarity platform. It is a platform that is countering Trump’s reactionary solidarity by looking for a constituency to throw under the bus.

This is maybe most apparent in public discussion on immigration. Right now, both major parties are seemingly seeking to outdo each other in their hatred toward immigrants and their tough-on-the-border policies. There does seem to be some appetite for this among the American public at this moment. But the need for a sense of solidarity to guide our immigration policy in particular seems more important now than ever, especially in the coming years. We know that numbers of refugees and migrants that are coming to this country is actually a drop in the bucket in comparison to what is about to come, with the effects of climate change worsening in the very near future.

I agree. The thing is this turn against immigrants also wasn’t spontaneous. It’s because a kind of reactionary solidarity has been really invested in by the Right. There has been an incredible anti-immigrant agenda precisely because of the benefits they reap from scapegoating vulnerable people. If you can say, “No, the problem isn’t that your boss is underpaying you, the problem is that an immigrant is coming in driving down wages or taking your job,” this takes the heat off the boss. It’s extremely useful, and Democrats have really failed to build up a plank that can counter that. As Dan Denvir, the host of The Dig, shows in his great book on the topic, this is in keeping with the Democratic establishment’s approach to immigration going back decades.

I agree with you that this is a critical issue, but I do think it’s important that we denaturalize the hostility that we’re seeing and understand the way that these fears are being whipped up. We need to lament that the Democrats are not countering reactionary solidarity with any kind of more progressive, robust solidaristic politics. The Democratic establishment is stuck in a coalition-building approach. Throw a bone to this group, a bone to that group, throw immigrants under the bus, and hope to just hold together enough to win an election. Instead of offering a deeper, transformative vision that can actually galvanize folks and get them excited about the future.

The last thing is, why are people migrating? It’s not that America is so great. That is important. People are not coming here necessarily because they want to. It’s because they have to, because of a lack of work, a lack of opportunity, a lack of safety, some kind of climate crisis, war and upheaval, and that points to the need for a deeper level of internationalism.

We have a chapter on internationalism. You can look at examples of trying to build solidarity states in one nation, but it doesn’t actually work because we are such an international society. It’s really important to situate this conversation about immigration in the context of foreign policy and what we want the global order to look like.

Part of what we argue in that chapter is that there have been two dominant theories of the global order: one is the kind of corporate globalization that allows money to move quickly across borders but not people, and the other is nationalism, which is more protectionist and isolationist. But those are not the only two options. In fact, those are actually two sides of the same coin. The corporate globalization stimulates nationalism because it leads to so much inequality.

There’s a third tradition of thinking about a global order, starting within the First International, thinking about how workers can unite across borders, going into the international labor organization and then into the postcolonial movements. Many of the leaders of postcolonial nations after World War II started using developmentalist policies and thinking together about a third bloc during the Cold War. The Non-Aligned Movement had a different vision. They created the New International Economic Order as a proposal that they brought to the UN and had a different vision for what an international community could look like.

The conversation about immigration is situated in the fact that America was very involved in squashing that vision and then involved in right-wing coups of many of those leaders, especially throughout Central America and South America. All of which led to destabilizing those economies and creating more of a flow of migration. We really can’t have a conversation about immigration without the historical and global context. It’s important in the same way that Ian Haney López recommends: tell a bigger story. Tell the story about what’s happening with the plutocrats’ scythe. We need to tell that bigger story around immigration.

You have a chapter in the book on philanthropy, which makes sense both because philanthropy is unfortunately central to questions about building progressive movements today, but also because, Leah, philanthropy is central to what you do, as someone who comes from significant wealth. Your chapter on philanthropy is often quite scathing, aware of the problems with even the best-intentioned charitable giving. You’ve clearly done a lot of wrestling both intellectually and personally with this concept.

How do you approach this question of philanthropic giving without undermining projects or movements and what are the institutional mechanisms that can keep funding like the kind that you engage in rooted in a place of solidarity rather than the whims and self-interest of donors.

We call philanthropy a semblance of solidarity. It seems altruistic but often is a source of power and control. Then we come to the question of progressive organizing, nonprofit social movements actually do need resources. How do we square that circle? I have spent most of my adult life trying to solve that problem and created a network of progressive philanthropists called Solidaire, which does a lot of rapid response funding and partnerships with movements.

There’s been a new kind of orientation of philanthropy called “trust-based philanthropy,” which is trying to educate foundations to demand less of grantees, less grant reporting, less metrics, and more trust. That’s part of the answer, but I honestly don’t think that philanthropy poses any real solution. The whole nonprofit structure needs to be upended. That all of this was created really to protect wealth, to protect charitable trusts and foundations, is really just ways of hoarding wealth and accumulating more wealth while giving away 5 percent a year.

I’m interested in the labor movement in part because we need organizations that are funded by their own members, that are accountable to the people who provide the funding. Unions are funded by the workers. I think that there are many more experiments to try around creating different funding streams. But I do think that getting as far away from philanthropy as possible is important. But it’s hard. It’s a contradiction. We’re stuck with this flawed structure where if you want to do good, progressive work, you’re dependent on donors who may not agree with your real vision, and you have to morph it and characterize it in terms that they would prefer.

In the conclusion you all write,

Any attempt to forge bonds of transformative solidarity implies a belief in something we cannot see and cannot prove until after the fact. That despite all the past and present conflict, we have the ability to change the world for the better when we acknowledge our interdependency, expanding solidarity beyond the confines of similarity, be those confines of kinship, race, or nationality, requires the conviction that we can remake our world and ourselves.

Later, you write, “Choosing transformative solidarity then is not an entirely rational choice. There is no guarantee that organizing work will be successful. In fact, the odds are that any given movement won’t succeed.”

This gets us back into the religious territory that we were discussing earlier, the leap of faith of solidarity. Solidarity may not be fully rational, but there is a case here that choosing solidarity is in people’s best interests, even if they don’t always win. To close, make that case. Why choose solidarity?

Solidarity is a leap of faith because it’s not guaranteed. You do have to get comfortable with failure and setbacks. But when you take the longer view, I actually think it’s a sure bet.

There was a period where I was pushing for the book’s full title to be Solidarity: The Only Thing That Can Save Us. If you look back at history, you see is that solidarity has basically propelled everything good on a social level. All social progress that we now celebrate or take for granted happened because folks built bonds of solidarity and fought to transform their social conditions.

In that sense, I think it’s not a leap of faith. It’s actually a very rational enterprise. When you think bigger, and at this moment when we are facing so many crises from rising threat of authoritarianism to increasing financialization of our lives to climate change, I think the call of solidarity just needs to get louder and louder. I’m bullish on solidarity in that sense and I think it is something that we need to talk about more, but that we need to do a lot more of.

The book is in many ways an intellectual history of a tradition of people who’ve chosen solidarity over time since the Industrial Revolution, like Rosa Luxembourg, Martin Luther King Jr, postcolonial leaders, and labor leaders in our time. I can’t think of a tradition I’d rather be a part of. It’s a tradition that reaches for the stars and has big vision and big hopes and then does the work. I think that’s just the best way to live our lives and it’s the most fun.