If you'd like to hear Pete Seeger sing "Solidarity Forever," just click the link to the title of the song. Here's where to click for the full lyrics, plus a little bit of history.
I am writing about "solidarity," today, not because I have been thinking about this famous union song (one of my favorites, by the way), but because I recently read an article by Roger Berkowitz, titled "Our Concern With Ourselves," which then led me to read another essay by Berkowitz, "Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?"
Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of The Hannah Arendt Center For Politics And Humanities at Bard College. Here's a picture of Hannah Arendt:
As you can see, Arendt was a smoker. If you click this link, you should be able to visit a collection of pictures of Arendt, in various situations, and at different stages of her life. Cigarettes clearly played a big part, all the way through. I have forgiven her for that - given that I think that she is one of the deepest thinkers I know of about "politics," and about American politics in particular. Let me state, though, just to be clear, that I definitely do not approve of that smoking habit!
Well, back to the Berkowitz articles. Below, I have copied some of the statements in "Our Concern With Ourselves" that I found particularly worth pondering (emphasis added):
In his reflection on Hannah Arendt’s insight — “In politics, we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves” — Micah White raises a serious question about the boundary between morality and politics. As Arendt writes, “In all moral questions, we are concerned with ourselves. We ask ourselves whether we are guilty of something, whether we can live with ourselves after having done this or that.” We can hear in such a moral question Henry David Thoreau’s insistence on moral purity: If my government uses its taxes to support slavery or a war I disagree with, my obligation is not to end slavery or stop the war, but simply to refuse to pay my taxes and wash my hands of my involvement.
Such moral questions, Arendt continues, “are entirely legitimate and very important questions but they are not fundamentally political. In politics, we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves. What I object to in the New Left, as I sometimes objected to in the Old Left, is this concern with themselves.”
White cites these lines of Arendt to indict “an activist culture that thinks winning is living a progressive lifestyle: recycling, eating organic, voting.” For White, “This turn toward a concern for oneself is symptomatic of the shift away from revolution.” Too many progressives want to keep their hands clean and eschew violence as a moral imperative. In doing so, White sees that they refuse the fundamental maxim of politics, which is to take and wield power.
The idea that any genuine "politics" is focused on what we do together (not individually) is always a point worth making. Here are a couple of further observations from that Berkowitz essay, making the point that a concern with "ourselves" is not what politic is really all about (emphasis added):
In Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” she refuses Thoreau’s moral understanding of civil disobedience and argues that it should be understood politically, as an organized movement of a substantial minority of citizens who are willing to break the laws in order to demonstrate their illegality. Because civil disobedience is, for her, a political and not a moral act, it reaffirms its commitment to civility and legality. It is not about keeping our souls pure but about a political fight about our common world.Arendt also opposes the world to our concern for ourselves in her essay “What is Freedom?” Freedom, she writes, is the ability to act in public, to start something new. It is the human faculty to interrupt the status quo, the automatism inherent in all politics when “political life has become petrified and political action impotent.” To act freely is to interrupt political processes and will always appear to be dangerous, even violent. That is why freedom depends on courage, and it is why courage is the first virtue of politics. To act courageously is to risk one’s life in order to change the world.
Anyone who is tagging along with my various blog postings will recognize the influence that Arendt has had on my own thinking. The idea that freedom is "the ability...to start something new" is exactly why I so often say that we can "do anything," and why Arendt's book, On Revolution, about the American Revolution, is really, I think, my favorite book of all time.
And what about solidarity? Here's from Arendt's paper on that topic (emphasis added):
Solidarity, for Arendt, is the political form of her love for the world. It is what allows a plurality of people — people who have wronged one another, failed one another, and disagreed with one another about almost everything — to live together in a common world at all.
Arendt develops her thinking about solidarity alongside her idea of reconciliation. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. It is not a moral act, but a political judgment. To reconcile is to accept the wrong and the wrongdoer in the world and to make a judgment that in spite of their wrong, the world is better with them in it. Reconciliation does not excuse the wrong, but says yes to the world inclusive of the wrong and also the wrongdoer. It says, in spite of the wrong, we can all share the world together....
If reconciliation is what allows us to live with imperfect friends, solidarity is what allows a plural polity to live together at all. It is the political work of repairing the fabric of the polis where wrongs and divisions have torn it. Arendt’s most arresting illustration of this is her argument about Adolf Eichmann. We hang Eichmann, she insists, not because of who he is but because doing so is an act of solidarity with the world we still wish to share. Even our gravest judgments are, at their best, acts of binding rather than of expulsion.
From this understanding follows what I have come to think of as solidarity’s double courage. To say no to a world broken beyond repair is an act of solidarity with a future world. But to say yes — the joyful affirmation of life within brokenness — is also a political act, and an act of solidarity with the world we already share. Refusal and affirmation are not opposites but two sides of the same courage: the courage to share the world with others as it truly is. From that double courage solidarity arises. Born of joy, solidarity holds together refusal and affirmation to open the possibility of a truly human world, a world we share founded upon friendship and respect.
Think about what we read, each day, in the news. It is, almost always, profoundly disappointing and dispiriting. We must, in fact, have the courage to accept both the reality of everything we know to be wrong, and dangerous, coupled with the courage to envision and work for the possibilities that are also "true." If we can do that, if we can muster our willingness to act - always with others - we can, in fact, change the world. That is, in fact the task before us, and not our own status and circumstances. Working together to change the world: that must be our main preoccupation. How can we, with others, change the world? That is what "politics" is all about.
Here's that link again, to let you listen to the song: "Solidarity Forever." It is our coming together in common purpose, uniting in that - it is our "union" in that task, our working together to change the world that "makes us strong."
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