The question of solidarity — what it is, and what its conditions of possibility might be — has never been more urgent, as systems of care and mutual support crack and crumble under the strain of a pandemic that has capped off four decades of neoliberal violence. “Solidarity,” although rarely precisely defined, has often been understood as the radical or progressive value par excellence, a guarantee against the twin risks of oppressive hierarchy and anomic social dissolution, the thing that must be preserved in the face of modernity’s tendency to dissolve all kinds of bonds. The ethical basis of humanism in its simplest form might be understood as an ideal of universal human solidarity, while even the most rigorously antihumanist strands of Marxism have appealed to some notion of universal human emancipation to be achieved through the practice of working-class solidarity. Now the age of ecological collapse presents us with the question of what it would mean to conceptualize solidarity in even wider terms that those assumed by liberal humanism, universalist religious traditions, or the most capacious forms of Marxism: if our interests are directly shared with an entire ecosystem, can awareness of that fact only find political expression in a more-than-human concept of solidarity, or would such a notion merely be emptied of all meaningful content? Is the concept of the human still a necessary normative anchoring point for an otherwise amorphous notion of infinitely expansive relationality and solidarity, or the last stumbling block on the way to understanding solidarity in terms that are truly adequate to our times?
Jeremy Gilbert is professor of cultural and political theory in the Department of Music, Writing, and Performance in the School of Arts and Creative Industries, University of East London. His most recent publications include Twenty-First-Century Socialism (Polity, 2020), a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Experimental Politics (MIT Press, 2017), and the book Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto Press, 2013). His next book, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World, co-authored with Alex Williams, will be published in 2022. He writes regularly for the British press and for think tanks such as IPPR and Compass and maintains a lifelong commitment to public education outside the academy, currently hosting Culture, Power, Politics, a regular series of free open seminars and lectures.