Having spent a lot of time thinking about, and thinking with, the concept of "negative solidarity," it sometimes occurs to me that I should think about its opposite, about solidarity, as the necessary condition for collective action. I have read on the topic from time to time, I read Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix's book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea as soon as it came out. However, I struggle to say anything interesting about it for two reasons. First, as I argued in The Double Shift, capitalism has so undermined our imagination that it is difficult to think of any model of action than a purely individualistic one, everyday people deal with poverty, precarity, and insecurity, by endeavoring to work harder, to hustle, to find a side gig or scam. Working with others collectively is unimaginable, especially when that collectivity is mediated not by the wage form. Second, I am not sure if this default in the imagination can be addressed theoretically, or even through a historical recounting of times in which solidarity seemed easier to imagine, it is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Solidarity increasingly seems like something to do rather than ponder.
I continue to still wrestle with the question, and for that reason, and many others, I read Franck Fischbach's Faire Ensemble: Reconstruction Sociale et Sortie du Capitalisme. Fischbach's book is animated by exactly the same problem sketched above, how is it that at the exact moment in which we need to act together it is that in which we are least capable? The problems confronting us, global warming, the fascist turn of contemporary societies, all demand a collective form Fischbach goes onto point to a fundamental contradiction between social existence and capitalism. As he writes,
"Everything has come to pass as if the tendency of accumulation is detached from from its social base and conditions, going so far as to turn against them: thus, the truly social capacities of individuals are destabilized and compromised, their very ability to act and behave towards one another as social beings, and their power to do things together."
To connect this idea with a few thoughts. First, despite all claims of "competition," capitalism constantly relies on sociality that it can neither recognize nor address. These take all sorts of forms, from the social reproduction that is necessary to reproduce labor power, to the social networks that make it possible for people to live with declining wages and precarity, everything from living with roommates to relying on relatives and friends for childcare. This brings me to a second point, more in line with Fischbach, because this sociality is in some sense outside of how capitalism represents itself, it is subject to constant pressure. It is then possible to think in terms of a "reproductive rift" similar to a metabolic rift, as Annie McClanahan argues, as capital undermines the very social capacities it draws from in order to make worker's more capable and profits higher.
In Fischbach's book this leads to a long investigation into the question what does it mean to "work together," to act in and through collective solidarity and not individual interest. In answering this question, Fischbach offers an impressive consideration of the history of philosophy and sociology on this concept, reading through Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Honneth, Tim Ingold, etc., The different kinds of texts, philosophical, sociological, and anthropological, as well as their different methods, and approaches, ranging from phenomenological to structural, all get at the fundamental ambivalence of the social, as something which can be located at the level of action or perception. Sometimes we are aware of the social nature of our existence, and sometimes it recedes into the back of our mind even as we walk down a crowded street, weaving and dodging people we are only dimly aware of. I am not going to recount all this here, but instead raise a different question, how is work itself as a concept situated at a point of juncture between individuality and collectivity.
Bourgeois thinkers, such as Locke, have tried to make work the foundation of not only property but individuality. As Locke writes, “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his." Our body is our first possession, and the foundation of every other possession. Against this claim we have Marx, or Marx as read by Etienne Balibar, who argues that the Marx's writings on cooperation and the labor relation asserted a fundamentally transindividual nature of production. Even when we work alone, we do so with tools, instruments, and habits that are shaped by our relations with others. While Locke gave us images of the indigenous person with a bow and arrow as a figure of individual appropriation, Marx would assert the social aspect of those tools and skills. As Balibar writes "If we want to understand the conclusions Marx is aiming at, we must give this proposition its maximum strength. Not only does labor become historically “socialized,” a transindividual activity; essentially it always was one, inasmuch as there is no labor without cooperation, even in the most primitive forms."
The proper names, Locke and Marx, with their corresponding baggage, of liberalism versus communism, obscure the fact that labor is at once a singular process, the work of this body, these hands, and a collective endeavor, we not only work with others, but for others, and others work for us. Both of these seem equally unavoidable, work is not only individual, but individuating, I feel my work in my bones; work is not only collective, done with others and through the ways others have influenced us, it is the very reason why we live together, as Plato put it, none of us are self sufficient.
That work is at once individual, or individuating, confronting one with the limits of their body and mind, and collective, connecting one with others, does not prevent, as we have seen different philosophers stressing one aspect over the other. We could also say the one divides into two. In some case the individual aspect is seen as the basis of property and liberty, as in the case of Locke. In other cases individualization is synonymous with isolation. This is the argument that Hannah Arendt makes, she sees work, or more properly, labor, the work done to sustain biological existence as something profoundly alienating, As Arendt writes, "Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary “metabolism with nature” is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness." Similarly, the collective dimension of work can be see as the basis for recognition, the worker as the antechamber of the citizen, or as the foundation of discipline, also the worker as antechamber of the citizen, we can find both of these in Hegel or in readings of Hegel. Which is to say you can read the passages on work in the Philosophy of Right, and how it sands off the edges of particularity, shaping individuals, as providing the basis for recognition, as Axel Honneth does, reviving a kind of left-Hegelianism, or you can see as a kind of proto-Foucauldian point, work as discipline. In other words, the person that state tries to free is the product of a subjection deeper than themselves.
All of this has gotten pretty far from Fischbach's book, at least as a review, but is very much a matter of thinking with it, following through some of its provocations. It is not my plan to offer a complete review here, I want to return to one of the specific discussions and specific chapters which brings to light this tension between work as individual and collective. In the third chapter dedicated to the difficulties of the Frankfurt School, Fischbach discusses Honneth's critique of Althusser.
Before we get to the critique we have to remember that in For Marx Althusser used Marx's formulation of the labor process independent of any social formation, the general schema, of labor as a subject utilizing an instrument to transform an object. For Althusser this general schema becomes a way of thinking practice in general, and philosophical practice in particular, philosophy is the transformation of an object, the existing ideology or status of the theoretical, through concepts to produce knowledge. Of course philosophy is only one such practice, a practice, which as Fischbach reminds us is situated by other practices, political, ideological, legal, etc., all ultimately determined by "social practice." While many misread this claim about theoretical practice, especially as it borrowed Marx's schema, as an attempt to claim that philosophy was practice, and had no need for other practices. What Althusser claimed was closer to a statement of the finitude of philosophical practice, it is not the Queen of the sciences, claiming knowledge of everything, but a specific practice, determined by its object, its concepts, and its place in the social totality.
This is in some sense is the strength of Althusser's formulation it undermines the idea of the philosopher as a kingdom within a kingdom, insisting that even speculation exists only in and through determinate conditions. Macherey did the same thing with literature, insisting that far from being a pure activity of creation, literature works with objects, with ideology as it is sedimented into the existing use of language, However, and this is Honneth's critique, in doing so Althusser abstracted from labor its social dimension. Labor is never just work on things, a transformation of things that also transforms oneself, it is also a social relation. It is simultaneously the forces and relations of production, or, to be more greek about it, praxis and poeisis. There is no making that is not also a doing, or doing that makes something. This is part of its double shift.
This is maybe where finitude returns again in precisely the way that Spinoza understood. Any attempt to think work, to schematize the labor process, is always going to focus on one aspect, its individual or collective nature, its instrumentality, or its necessarily social dimension. These different aspects overwhelm us, and we often find ourselves settling on one particular image, one particular idea, of work.
I have wandered a bit from the question of solidarity. However, I will say that one of the real impediments to solidarity, especially when it comes to struggles around work, is to be stuck in these inadequate ideas of real work, which pit construction against services, blue collars against white. Which might be a way of saying that solidarity requires some common notions in order to be constructed.
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