Solidarity is a notoriously elastic idea. Within social movements it simultaneously connotes a virtue or value that informs action, the relation between actors, the group that is formed to act collectively, and the organizing effort to maintain the momentum of the movement. In addition, though, social-movement solidarity is a mere “tip of the iceberg” of meaningful instances of solidarity practices. The term inspires fear and hope, love and hatred, energy and malaise. Rich and varied philosophical accounts of the concept and various conceptions of solidarity abound.
Solidarity in Conflict identifies its contribution to the philosophical literature as articulating the importance of conflict within a particular conception of solidarity organizing as a practice of world-making or creating sociality for democracy. Radical democracy is both the purpose of solidarity organizing and the norm or ethos of solidarity, according to DuFord. Using labor organizing as a key example, DuFord suggests that being in struggle, or solidarity, is a dialectical process involving two faces or aspects of solidarity organizing. The internal face involves “a process of conflict and negotiation” and the external face presents a “process of unification and opposition to the outside” (63). Ultimately, DuFord hopes to articulate a democratic solidarity with a normative basis that distinguishes between “solidarities that build societies (and with them, democratic forms of life) and those that aim to undermine them” (165).
After a brief sketch of some things DuFord sees in other accounts of solidarity, the book turns to a discussion of nonexclusion and conflict. Substantive conflict (8) or realistic conflict (141) is productive or creative conflict over values or ends like freedoms and power. “Conflict is, in fact, a mechanism for building societies to the extent that members are unwilling to allow others’ individual thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs to have a trumping position” (30). Given the book's rejection of individual approaches, this appears to mean that a group forms in opposition to the trumping thoughts of another person. The internal and external aspects of the group, according to DuFord, “meet Adorno's conflicting demands to function as a process of infinite nonexclusion” (63). Nonexclusion, in other words, is the process that negotiates conflict, expanding the boundaries of solidarity (59). DuFord considers inclusion and integration to be “features of a dominative world” (145). The unity of solidarity is found in a commitment to nonexclusion negotiated through conflict.
DuFord's critical-theory approach leads to a diagnosis of some of the ills afflicting contemporary democracies as “antisocial solidarities.” An antisocial solidarity is a solidarity that seeks to exclude, dominate, or expel others. DuFord's allegiance to “Pensky's reading of Adorno's claim that we ought to have ‘no forced unity’” (146) informs the discussion of expulsion and exclusion. En route to a radical theory of democracy, DuFord pauses to consider that antisocial solidarities may need to be temporarily excluded. Also called “psychic solidarity” and implicitly echoing earlier feminist accounts of patriarchal solidarity, DuFord presents psychic solidarity as “in part about building trust with others who are interested in domination; at the same time, it functions to destroy the bonds of trust between members of the broader public” (89). Groups that assert their own dominance to the exclusion (and potential expulsion) of other groups exhibit psychic solidarity. DuFord uses the contemporary example of men's-rights activists and the Proud Boys in the United States to illustrate the point.
Of course, there are solidarities that seek to build society or embrace nonexclusion rather than develop an exclusive dominance. Indicating that such solidarity is rooted in labor practice, DuFord identifies the goal of the fourth chapter as “to argue that workers’ solidarity is not a ‘special’ sort of solidarity, but rather a way of building sociality back into society in places from which it has been evacuated” (127). DuFord explains that the “boundary struggles” of solidarity make it democratic. Denying that solidarity is a “sort of unity or togetherness,” DuFord points to wildcat strikes as indicative of the democratic process. In other words, the confrontation with various issues workers face causes solidarity to expand its agenda as well as its membership. Identifying an important facet of workers’ associations for democracy offers possible avenues for political theory.
While disagreeing on certain other fundamental issues (e.g., LGBTQ rights and the social role of the family), DuFord might find an interesting ally in philosopher Karol Wojtyla, otherwise known as Pope John Paul II. His encyclical letters Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) similarly place work at the center of solidarity and, of course, he is credited with being a primary inspiration for one of the most important workers’ strikes for democracy in the twentieth century: the Polish Solidarność movement. Although DuFord's book does not engage with either Pope John Paul II's writings or the Solidarność movement, there surely is some resonance in DuFord's effort to value worker solidarity and the sociality it potentially creates.
This “extended rumination” (160), as DuFord calls it, ends with a discussion of utopia. DuFord holds that the “unified element” of solidarity appears most prominently in conflict, negotiated internally while the group stands together externally. Summing up the relation to utopia, DuFord states that “it isn't that we need solidarity to have democracy, but that solidarity is a form of doing democracy” (159).
Openly embracing democracy for the radical Left, DuFord states the position of the book: “A commitment to democracy is itself a partisan position that carries with it the necessity for individuals to cultivate a democratic ethos along with a democratic sociality” (150). Such a position, as DuFord explains, might require regular but temporary exclusion of those people who seek to destroy democratic life, the antisocial solidarists who themselves seek to exclude and dominate. Another way to think about this is that those organizations that DuFord endorses as pursuing nonexclusion through conflict “have already in some sense got the normative facts right” (135).
The value of the book is less as a study of conflicting accounts of solidarity and more as an invitation to think about how leftist organizing against neoliberal heteropatriarchal capitalism may be productive through conflict and how organizers can build networks. Seeing such networking, as well as the continual navigation of conflict within organizations, suggests, according to DuFord, that workers’ associations might be the site for rebuilding the society upon which democracy ought to rest.
In the United States, we have settled for intermittent participation through voting (when the power structures allow us to participate) as our means of enacting democracy. DuFord sees the potential of workers’ associations to reinvigorate debate and rebuild democracy from the ground up. The book might most interest leftist philosophers or intellectuals in the United States engaged in organizing; it is not a text that offers advice or programmatic guidance, but rather a text that offers some thoughts about rethinking the place for—and finding value in—contentious debates in democratic societies.
