The term solidarity has long been evoked to unite workers, whatever their background or nationality. The classic Marxist approach to solidarity was rooted in the shared experiences of exploitation of industrial workers at the point of production. However, historically racialization, gender differentiation, and nationalism have produced divisions among workers seeking to confront oppressive conditions. Today, in a transformed global setting these divisions are often exacerbated but so too are forces that bring together people who are facing new precarities. In the current contexts of related but particularized forms of insecurities experienced by large sections of populations around the globe, including the threats of a global pandemic and intensifying climate change, the question of what divides and what unites those facing precarious lives or futures looms large.

Contemporary discussion of solidarities must address settings of industrial restructuring and automation, the privatization of production, health, social services, and governance, environmental disasters, pandemics, and the reorganization of processes of capital accumulation. Within such globe spanning restructuring of human production and reproduction and concomitant transformations in political subjectivities, precariats are emerging. The question of class is being reimagined. In recent decades, social movements on the right and left have emerged, voicing a growing sense of loss, dispossession, and rage and calling for solidarity.

The COVID-19 pandemic, accompanied as it is by the realization that only by people thinking of more than themselves can the infection rate be slowed, has highlighted the need to understand the well-springs of social solidarity and its potential in building struggles against injustice. Meanwhile the pandemic has produced innumerable cases of people coming together to provide mutual aid. These efforts include people organizing to provide health care workers with scarce protective equipment, committees of volunteers offering support for the elderly and quarantined, as well as support for asylum seekers in Europe and the United States.

Exploring the past history and present possibilities for building solidarities, David Featherstone (2012) has called on us to understand solidarity as rooted in social relationships. In this approach solidarity emerges from people forging forms of togetherness.  In the face of the multiple contemporary crises of institutional legitimacy, Julia Eckert (2019) posits that solidarity is ‘a social force that can invent and bring about new…institutions’. However, Eckert approach does not sufficiently address the social forces that can bring people together in struggle against all forms of oppression. In this article, I argue that we need further discussion of how and when solidarities arise and for what purpose.

Deconstructing Otherness

Social scientists face a number of conceptual barriers in responding to Featherstone’s call to address the social relations out of which solidarities have and can emerge. One of the central problems, as I see it, is the obsession with defining solidarity as overcoming the difference of ‘otherness’.  This emphasis reflects the fact that much of the theorization of the social in western tradition begins with a unique self and its differentiation from the ‘other’. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in 1949, ‘the category of the Other is [thought to be] as primordial as consciousness itself’ (1949). Simmel, for example, (1950: 15) claimed that the primordial human community was formed through a differentiation between self and the ‘other’.

Underneath this theory is a history of late 18^th to 20^th century nation-state building in which notions of homogenous bounded communities were conflated with notions of the individual self.  Self/community were unified in opposition to what lay outside the boundaries —that is ‘the other’.   If this binary division is your starting point for understanding human social experience, then of course the challenge to building social solidarities is to find ways to overcome this barrier of primary difference. In the wake of world wars and the holocaust, 20th century western social theory continued to approach the study of social life by deploying the foundational concepts of alterity, hospitality, and the stranger (Levinas, 1961; Derrida, 2000). Simmel (1971 [1908]: 144) speaks of ‘every human relationship’ as constituted from the ‘union of closeness and remoteness’. Echoing Simmel’s (1971 [1908]: 143) observations about that the stranger ‘is an element of the group itself’, Derrida speaks of the simultaneity of ‘inclusion and exclusion’ (2000: 81). Many authors including Eckert accept this approach to otherness, building on it to emphasize the simultaneity of commonality and difference.

I argue for a different approach, one that discards the category of otherness within the quest to understand social life. I reject the category of otherness because expressions of solidarity phrased in terms of ‘openness to difference’ reinforce a nationalist imaginary of the essential homogeneity of the racially pure nation. As in all forms of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), the fundamental dividing line becomes those inside and outside the national community. All other differences within and across national borders remain unmarked including age, gender, class, rural-urban, and geographic region. Consequently, the complexities of lived multiple samenesses and differences are distorted through the lens of a theorized ‘otherness’.  Discussions of welcome, hospitality, and tolerance to strangers fail to address the multiplicities of shared social positionings and identities that connect people to each other.  Once counted as ‘the stranger’, those otherized find that they are never able to feel completely at home, their daily relationalities and multiplicities remain unrecognized, and the production of difference is reinforced.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, scholars invoked the historic term ‘cosmopolitan’ to speak of openness but simultaneously retained binaries of difference. In anthropology, Ulf Hannerz (1990: 239) defined cosmopolitanism as a ‘willingness to engage with the Other’. Urban geographers note that ‘cosmopolitanism is understood as implying a particular stance toward difference in the world, one that involves an openness to and tolerance of diversity’ (Young, Diep, and Drabble, 2006).

Eckert continues this tradition of referencing ‘the other’. She argues that we must recognize profound difference, not just similarities and takes as her example the differences in norms and experiences that divided refugees and those who reached out to assist them and faced misunderstandings and frustrations within these relationships. She provides examples of native Germans who find that they are profoundly different in their sensibilities and outlook from the refugees they seek to assist.  On this basis, she questions my concept of domains of commonality. But I have never questioned that humans have domains of difference.

No Two People Think Alike; Many People Feel Similarly

Of course, there are significant domains of difference between humans, since each of us are products of multiple social interactions and cultural messages that are never combined identically for anyone, given family structure, changing times and conditions, birth order, our individual temperaments, our multiple social positionings including those structured by racialization and gender, and a host of other variables. Families, spouses, friends, colleagues, co-workers, co-congregationalists, and neighbors find that there can be severe even irreconcilable differences.  No two people think exactly alike.  We are all shaped by our unique positioning within the intersecting networks of multiple sets of social relations.  Yet the differences that we seem to obsess about in an age of reactionary nationalism are those of racialized national religious identities.

A too rarely asked question is why there is an assumption of the possibility of common perspectives and united action when collectivities of people are characterized as a family, a community, an ethnic group, or a nation but when people are defined as having different national, ethnic, or religious origins, we find the possibility of commonality problematic and stress the divisions. The discourse of otherness begins with the assumption of differences that must be overcome and ignores evidence of the aspirations, desires, or political subjectivities those defined as different from each other have in common. Eckert by choosing to speak about the barriers to solidarity and focusing on differences between natives; and ‘migrants’ continues this emotionally freighted choice of making difference the starting point of investigation.

It is for this reason, I suggest a different point of departure. Put aside categorization of self/community and otherness and examine empirically what at different times and places brings specific people together or drives them apart. Let’s begin by asking about experiences, outlooks, and aspirations that lead people to bond. Çağlar and I have emphasized that ‘whatever their differences, people …[are] brought together by common domains of affect, mutual respect and shared aspirations’ (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2016: 18). To set aside theories of ‘otherness’, ‘hospitality to strangers’ and ‘openness to difference’, and instead to theorize the subjectivities that arise from various forms of dispossession and social displacement, it is useful to explore ‘situated mutuality’ (Glick Schiller, 2015: 105) and ‘domains of commonality’ (Glick Schiller, 2016; Glick Schiller et al., 2011). We need these concepts to understand how to build solidarities that can overcome the growing inequities dispossession actuates and build social movements to take on all forms of injustice.

Such an analytical framework enables us to observe everyday sociabilities as well as sources of alienation. Of course, each of us has our own subjectivities and so differ at times from those around us including our nearest and dearest.  Explorations of domains of commonalities must take into account experiences of racialization, gender, age, wealth, education, opportunity, geographic location, and cultural socialization that can produce intersecting rather than binary   lines of differentiation. To speak of situated mutualities allow us to observe how people who share gender, age, national, racial, ethnic or religious identity may –through their life course and its trajectories– form a range of very different comfort zones through their social relations (Glick Schiller, 2014).

Such an analytical framework also enables us to disentangle the emotive state of social and political alienation from the binary of native and stranger. My male students in New England, who claimed to be white Americans with family genealogies that stretched back to the Mayflower –the US foundational ancestral myth– often spoke of not feeling at home and of longing to belong. These subjectivities should be linked to those of people of migrant background who often say that they never fully feel at home in their new land, yet also acknowledge that they never felt at home in their historical ‘homeland’ and longed to leave (Glick Schiller and Fouron, 2001). Studies of the formation of social relations of solidarity should be part of larger studies of alienation and belonging. The search for belonging and solidarity and concomitant alienation stems not only from the existential angst of being and nothingness described by Sartre (1992 [1943]) but also from the anxiety of social displacement being produced by the structural transformations of dispossessive processes of capital accumulation of the 21^st century.

Situated Mutualities: Two Domains of Commonality

Stepping back to theorize the social forces that produce solidarities, I suggest that at least two types of experiences create situated mutualities out of which domains of commonality emerge. And it is from these shared domains that political solidarities are built.  One type of situated mutuality is transhistorical. These experiences, which can lead to domains of commonality, are constituted by life experiences: love and bonding to children, parenting, family, the joy of friendship and everyday sociabilities. The capacity to have these forms of social experience seems to have evolved because, unlike the self of classic Western theory, we as members of a sociable species only develop as individuals within social relations. Hence, the capacity to feel each other’s pain and joys is part of who we all are as human beings, although this capacity can be culturally nurtured, shaped, or minimalized. So, forming domains of commonality within our social relations –out of which solidarities can be built– can be a product of our basic human interdependencies¹).

But there is a second aspect of the emergence of domains of commonality, and this is historically tempered. Domains of commonality also reflect the different ways social relations are structured within different organizations of social life and political economy.  It is this aspect of solidarities that figured large in reference to class solidarities that emerge from one particular domain of working-class experience. Those concerned with class solidarities have noted that workers at the point of production have certain common experiences of exploitation. The surplus value they produced within the labor process is appropriated and deployed to maintain a social and political system that denies workers’ central role in the production of wealth. This appropriation constitutes a denial of worker’s labor, abilities, needs, and humanity. Given this common experience, workers have a real-life basis to unite in social movements to create more just working conditions. In the past, organizers have appealed to these commonalities to build trade unions as well as anti-capitalist revolutions. Workers still experience forms of work place solidarity and labor actions, strikes, and anti-capitalist movements continue to develop around the world: in China and elsewhere in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

But domains of commonality, which can produce solidarities, are also arising in relation to restructured forms of capital accumulation that are situated outside of the workplace. To understand this, we need to talk about processes of accumulation by dispossession, the domains of commonality they produce, and the way these domains form the basis of social movements supporting racist authoritarianism—new forms of fascism—as well as movements for planet saving social and economic justice. To understand this relationship, Çağlar and I built on David Harvey’s theorization of urban regeneration and economic restructuring as forms of accumulation by dispossession, as well as his contemporary assessment of older and ongoing processes of the violent and legal forms of accruing capital through land, resource, and wealth appropriation (Harvey, 2005; 2018; See also Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008; Marx, 1976 [1867]; Schmidt, 2010).

Having conducted research on migrants and city-making in three disempowered cities, Manchester New Hampshire, USA, Halle/Saale, Germany, and Mardin, Turkey between 2000-2018, Çağlar and I initially focused on the process of dispossession and displacement experienced by people who were positioned in these cities as migrants, refugees, immigrants, and minorities.  Our research revealed the ways in which members of these populations had experienced the globe-spanning processes of wars for oil, precious metals, and land, environmental destruction, and the privatization of land and public resources, all of which dispossessed people, displacing them from their homes and forcing them to migrate. We linked these experiences of dispossession and displacement to urban restructuring through public and private debt and real estate speculation within the settings in which our interlocutors sought to build their lives (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2013).

When I presented our research to colleagues in an anthropology seminar at the University of Manchester (UK), they asked ‘but what about, the ‘natives’ in these cities.  Weren’t they experiencing precarity, which is a form of social dispossession and displacement?’. Of course, they were right and pushed further by these queries, Çağlar and I went back to our data and analysis.  We reanalyzed our interviews in Manchester, this time focusing on people who appeared in our research as ‘helpers’²). These were people who had reached out to newly arrived migrants and helped them settle.

These helpers, whom our interlocutors usually identified as ‘friends’, were almost invariably not of the same ‘community’/ ethnicity. ‘No matter where I worked’, said an architect from Colombia who lived for years without papers and worked in an array of minimum wage jobs, ‘I found at least one good friend’.  The friends were either ‘natives’ of the city or were more established migrants of different ‘cultural’ backgrounds. These social relationships had begun in some shared space –not identified as a territorial neighborhood but as an apartment building, workplace, favorite library, or street that the new arrival frequented. Once initiated, these social relations often lasted a number of years.

Most interestingly, our data revealed that these relationships were based on the two kinds social dynamics that I have noted can generate domains of commonality. On the one hand, our interlocutors talked about how the relationship made them feel human, making reference to a transhistoric need for sociability. Their more established friends had reached out to them to establish a social relationship, not on the basis of tolerance for difference, a taste of the exotic, or compassion for the downtrodden but because they sought the mutual pleasures of human companionship in the face an insecure dehumanizing world. At the same time, our data analysis revealed that, like the migrants, the more established friends each had their own history of dispossession and forms of social and sometimes physical displacement. The helpers had often been socially discarded. They faced conditions of unstable low wage employment, racialization, housing loss, forced early retirement, disability, downward social mobility, aging, the inequities of being a woman, or some combination of these processes (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2016).

Rage and Solidarities: Two Different Political Paths

Fearing or facing social and economic precarity does not necessarily produce the solidarity necessary for movements for social justice. As Çağlar and I (2018) have pointed out, social relations that emerge in the face of precarious lives or fear of a precarious future, when coupled with longings for respect and self-esteem, open two very different political paths. One path is towards forms of exclusionary nationalism. Those feeling threatened by dispossession and its multiple forms of political-economic restructuring are fueling the large evangelical movements, usually based in the US but stretching globally, neo-fascist groups in Europe and in the US, and right wing interlinked political parties and movements. While media attention is directed towards loners forming bonds and embracing racist outlooks through social media, most organizations have also built house meetings, conclaves and various forms of networked face-to-face social relations (Wickenden 2019).

The other political path of those whose lives and aspirations are being restructured by dispossessive processes is toward social movements to resist all forms of oppression. While right wing social relations are now increasingly being studied (Westermeyer and Friedman, 2019), we have failed to adequately theorize the social basis of the solidarity that brings people experiencing social displacement and dispossession to move from daily sociabilities based on domains of commonality into joining movements against all form of injustice (Narotzky, 2016; Stennet, 2019; Stivens, 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic offers not only new urgent vistas for social action but also for collaborative theorization of the basis of unity that underlies collective action.

One recent example of research that challenges us to theorize what connects solidarities, emotion, and political action is Maila Stiven’s exploration of the emotive and political dynamics that led women identifying as mothers and grandmothers to become activists.  When she asked a volunteer ‘Why did you join West Welcome Wagon’, an organization formed to support asylum seekers in Melbourne Australia, the woman replied ‘Pure rage …. People pay attention if you’re ragy’ (Stivens, 2018: 88). Stivens found in her research in other such support groups that

while all interviewees made arguments grounded in such an ethics of care, most … nonetheless reported that their main motivation was in fact profound ….outrage and rage at the government’s policies towards people seeking asylum, and at the growing populist and nationalist xenophobia, especially Islamophobia, on display by groups like Reclaim Australia. Such sentiments recurred many times in the interviews as central emotions spurring a passionate affective politics in both an emotional and moral register (Stivens, 2018: 81).

These findings present a clear challenge to those who wish to study and theorize solidarities. As we join and build new solidarities we must analyze the experiences of dispossession, social and physical displacement, and the aspirations for a world of equality that engender rage at systemic injustice. The question we confront as researchers and organizers is how and when does political rage become linked to a sense of commonality with all those who are oppressed?

In conclusion, commonalities and difference, self and other are always present in human relations, not as opposites but as simultaneously constituted experiences out of which forms of social closeness can arise. Those who strive to build movements and political transformations that increase social and economic equality need to cease speaking in terms of binaries that essentialize borders of racialized, ethnic, and gendered difference. Instead it is urgent that we identify, popularize, and direct our critique, rage and social movements against the forces of capital accumulation for which the construction of racialized, gendered, national difference is a daily necessity. Such movements must build on the domains of commonality that emerge from shared human aspirations for a brighter future and the righteous rage of those experiencing or fearing dispossession and its multiple forms of displacement. In this way solidarities can engender the institutional framework that both Eckert and I agree are necessary for a more just world.

Endnotes

1. Transspecies researchers take us further into bonding capacities within and across species but this does not negate that the human experience is rooted in sociability (Braidotti, 2019 [↩]
2. This research included 139 interviews: 86 conducted by student researchers, 46 interviews conducted by Nina Glick Schiller, Peter Buchannan and Thaddeus Guldbrandsen in a study funded by a MacArthur Foundation Human Security grant, and 7 conducted in Manchester by Nina Glick Schiller assisted by migrant and non-migrant interviewers as part of a sample of 76 refugees settled by a refugee resettlement program in New Hampshire. The resettlement study was funded by the Presidents’ Office, University of New Hampshire (Glick Schiller et al., 2009 [↩]

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