Solidarity and Difference

When addressing the topic of solidarity, it is important to clarify from the outset how not to approach this topic. Solidarity does not have to mean uniformity, sameness, or marching in lockstep, as it frequently does on the Right. Disagreements are not necessarily detrimental to solidarity, and neither do all disagreements amount to the proverbial firing squads. In other words, solidarity does not have to mean abandoning a profound appreciation for diversity, difference, and multiple identities, which distinguishes the solidarity of the progressive left from the solidarity of the Right.

Two common responses to the “circular firing squads of the Left” can be ruled out from the beginning. First is the centrist response. Centrists often seek to solve the problem by finding the lowest common denominator or by assuming that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In this case, whatever is not considered to be in the middle can be quickly dismissed.

In many cases, especially in mainline churches and their theologies, centrists are especially concerned about anything that is perceived to be left of center, while they are more likely to give a pass to everything else. Of course, as the political spectrum keeps moving further to the right, not only in the United States but around the world, the middle keeps moving further to the right as well.

The second response that can be ruled out is dreams of a unilateral position on the Left that are built on assimilation and the acceptance of seemingly universal categories and points of view. This happens, for instance, when a singular category of domination is essentialized and made to trump all other categories.

One example of this problem is historian Touré Reed’s observation that postwar liberal positions, including Democratic presidential administrations from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama (as well as Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency), have been race reductionist rather than class reductionist because they eliminated economic empowerment of minorities from other forms of fighting structural racism.

Reductionism will not bring unity to progressives on the Left, and it will do little for theology in the Capitalocene, which is why it is important for ecology to be put into conversation with a more sustained analysis of class and with close attention to the challenges of racism and sexism.

Solidarity and the Christian Left in the United States

In the history of the United States, progress (including theological progress) never materialized without solidarity — a concept that goes deeper than contemporary notions of allyship because it emphasizes connectedness and mutuality. The various liberation movements in US history —  abolitionism, suffragism, civil rights, ecojustice, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, labor, and various indigenous socialist efforts — cannot be conceived without some solidarity bringing together diverse constituents.

Each of these movements reshaped US history in significant and often lasting ways, even though the origins are not always remembered, and the results are frequently taken for granted. The labor movement may serve as an example: under its leadership, the eight-hour workday was won after decades of struggle, child labor was ended, protection for women at work was introduced, and pension plans and even health care plans were developed. What may come as a surprise is that, unlike today, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many faith communities and even some mainline churches were supportive of labor struggles, the Left was not yet as ostracized as it is in religious and labor circles today, and many efforts were interracial.

Solidarity in these movements was never about uniformity but allowed for different expressions, including religious diversity. Unlike in Germany, for instance, where religion was so closely linked to the dominant status quo that working people often had little choice but to emancipate themselves from it, in the United States, religion was more diverse and allowed for a greater variety of expressions — reflected in a broader variety of theologies as well.

If in Europe, the critique of religion often meant the rejection of religion altogether, in the United States, the critique of religion could also have meant the rejection of dominant religion and the embrace of alternative religious expressions even within Christianity itself. Examples from Christianity include various Anabaptist developments that grew out of the left wing of the German Reformation that came into their own on the American continent, like Mennonites, “Free Methodists” in the United States, early Pentecostal developments, minority religious traditions such as the black churches, Christian socialist traditions, and a range of radical and liberation theologies.

The Primacy of Labor

Examples of alternative religious expressions also include labor and community organizers on the Left constructively engaging Christian traditions in ways that are mostly forgotten today. Religion and labor, in particular, were at the heart of powerful transformations, including the Knights of Labor, black and white social gospel preachers, and the 1908 Social Creed of the Methodist Episcopal Church, adopted also by the Federal Council of Churches, which made radical demands for “equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life,” labor rights for women, and “the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.” Such radical demands, especially in regard to labor relations, have been dropped in the more recent version of the United Methodist Social Creed.

In many of these developments, solidarity emerged not primarily on the basis of progressive ideas but because people realized their shared interests, came together, and organized. As utopian socialists in the nineteenth century established communities all over the United States based on progressive visions, these communities rarely lasted for long, while organized working people began to make history and changed the course of the country in many cases.

These organizing efforts attracted the interest and support of people who are rarely named in the same breath, like Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Neither Marx nor Lincoln had much interest in utopian socialism, but both understood, in their own ways, the primacy of labor over capital and the value of organized working people for all kinds of progressive causes. This is an insight worth reclaiming after the COVID-19 pandemic has made us aware that society cannot function for long without what is now rightfully called “essential workers,” which is not necessarily the case for many of the arbiters of ideas and capital.

Despite their differences and the obvious limitations of their times and places, Marx and Lincoln were quite clear about the benefits of labor unions, envisioning solidarity in practical terms, focusing not only on class but also on race. Both Marx and Lincoln celebrated and welcomed the fact that the emerging working class in the United States was multiracial. In an 1864 letter to Lincoln, Marx famously noted that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The historical record shows that Lincoln responded positively to Marx’s letter.

In his seminal work Das Kapital, Marx notes the broader context before repeating and expanding on that famous sentence: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” This is not to insinuate that Marx was able to resolve the problem, but he clearly identified one of the major challenges that are still with us.

Race and Class

There is a longer history of concern for the relation of race and class on the Left, including the Christian left, which is mostly forgotten today. While the abolition of slavery and emancipation were matters of life and death for those enslaved, these developments also signaled a broader emancipation of working people everywhere, both national and international. As Frederick Douglass noted, “The slave is robbed by his master, of all his earnings above what is required for his physical necessities, and the white man is robbed by the slave system, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.”

Southern white workers not only did, in fact, earn less than Northern white workers but also made less than Northern black workers. All this led to efforts for intersectional organizing across the South, identifying and building solidarity at the level of the working majority — a majority that has always been diverse in terms of race and gender, then and now. Some were inspired by the theology of the social gospel and its specific embodiment in the South.

Enslavement of African Americans in the United States did a tremendous amount of damage and negatively affected most of the population, keeping down not only the enslaved themselves but the majority of working people, as well as shaping theology to the core. It has been argued that the consequences of slavery are still visible even today.

According to a recent article by Matthew Desmond, capitalism in the United States continues to be so harsh in its treatment of working people because it developed in the context of slavery. Slavery produced a hierarchy of labor with clear demarcations of who was at the top and who was at the bottom — with those in the middle put into the service of those on the top without gaining similar benefits and often worse off than the middle class in the North.

Moreover, the meticulous methods of control over slave labor in the South prefigured the subsequent use of similar methods to control industrial labor in the North. In addition, the exploitation of slave labor for the production of cotton was mirrored in the exploitation of land for the same purpose. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism continues to combine the exploitation of work and extraction of natural resources along the lines of class and race, which is why intersectional responses are needed for transformation.

Faith, Solidarity, and Power

The history of the Christian left has often been genuinely intersectional. In many instances, the concerns of gender, race, and class came together organically, though, of course, never completely without tension. To be sure, the history of the Christian left in the United States is not predominantly the history of white American males, as is often suspected. Many of its agents include women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants from around the world, and other minorities.

Female African American civil rights leaders deserve a special place in this history because they brought together the concerns of race, gender, class, and religion in their own ways. Their names include Nannie Helen Burroughs, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and later womanist theologians like Delores Williams and Katie Geneva Cannon.

Hamer’s legacy is especially instructive, as she came to understand the need for building collective power beyond political victories. Cofounder of the influential Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, some political setbacks led Hamer to focus increasingly on the building of networks of economic independence as the foundation of democracy. The cooperative efforts of Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi in the 1970s, parts of which were run by women, still offer inspiration and serve as reminders that political democracy cannot be conceived without economic democracy — and the same might be said for religious democracy.

In a 1964 speech, Hamer explains how faith in God makes a difference: “All we have to do is trust God and launch out into the deep. You can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” In other words, even faith in God — and related images of God — makes sense only in the context of cooperative work and solidarity. The legacy of the Christian left, as well as the forms of solidarity that were part of it, cannot be understood without the fundamental contributions of African American traditions.

For the most part, solidarity was always more than just an idea in the history of the Christian left: it was embodied by all those who stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight for transformation. Without this solidarity, many of the battles would not have been won. As Touré Reed notes:

Righteousness was not the basis for the movements that opened opportunities to black Americans. Emancipation and even Reconstruction were produced by a convergence of interests among disparate constituencies — African-Americans, abolitionists, business, small freeholders and northern laborers — united under the banner of free labor.

In Douglass’s famous words, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Such demands need to take the form of a serious push, bringing together political, economic, and religious democracy, based on the agency of the working majority and nonhuman nature. Those who think that a few courageous voices speaking truth to power are enough may find that at the end of the day, they may well have the truth, but those in power still have the power.

Solidarity in the Capitalocene

So how can the Left pull together and make a difference, and what might be the lessons for the study of theology in the Capitalocene? Worrying about the political and religious right unified by racism, sexism, and (Christian) nationalism has helped create some cohesion. But this is not enough, not even when things take a turn for the worse, as happened during the years of the first Donald Trump presidency.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor takes us back to the relations of labor and class when she talks about a “potential for solidarity” that has to do with the fact that “when one group of workers suffer oppression, it negatively affects all workers.” There is, according to Taylor, a “material foundation for solidarity and unity within the working class.” Adolph Reed talks about a politics that “presumes a concrete, material basis of solidarity — not gestures, guilt- tripping and idealist abstractions.”  In other words, solidarity emerges in relation to the common pressures experienced by the working majority — without this material foundation, it may not be an option.

This is something I have emphasized in my own work as well, coining the notion of deep solidarity in the context of  the Occupy Wall Street movement and some of its religious expressions. Here, a rudimentary understanding of class emerged again in the United States after a long silence. This brings us back to intersectional class analysis, which is based not on moral imperatives to well-meaning people (often demonizing the wealthy) but on a clear-sighted analysis of power in relation to privilege.

That there are material foundations for solidarity means that it is not primarily an ideological sleight of hand, as it often is for conservatives who promote a false sense of solidarity via racism, sexism, nationalism, and even religion; neither is solidarity a moral imperative for privileged people of good faith, as is often the case with liberals and some progressives. Unfortunately, these two options are all that most people, and most faith communities, imagine to be possible.

The true potential for solidarity, by contrast, is rooted in the realities of exploitation and oppression that affect the many, not just a few. This was one of the lasting insights of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s recognition of the difference between the symbolic 99 percent majority and the 1 percent minority. For this solidarity to materialize, a basic awareness of class is required. For those studying theology, this throws new light on the role of religion and related images of the divine.

Directing our attention to class in this context does not mean ignoring racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual or even religious difference — just the opposite. There is a common misunderstanding of which Barbara Fields reminds us:

When someone in   the press says working class or working-class voters, they invariably mean white people. They forget that most Afro-Americans in this country are working people. Most Latinx people, however you define that ambiguous term, are working people. Southeast Asian migrants, most of them are working people, and indeed the same is true of a good many East Asian migrants.

The working majority is more diverse than any other social formation the world has ever seen, disproportionately BIPOC and female. This strengthens rather than weakens solidarity and the study of theology in the Capitalocene, which can now raise new questions about religion, interreligious engagement, and the divine’s involvement in the world as well.