Solidarity Forever: Building Movements Amid Today’s Crises
Deconstructed
Deconstructed Podcast
Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix on their new book, “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

“None of us benefit from a burning planet,” says activist and documentarian Astra Taylor on this week’s Deconstructed. Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix join Ryan Grim to discuss their new book, “Solidarity: The Past, Present, And Future of a World-Changing Idea.” Delving into the philosophical depths of solidarity, they trace its origins back to ancient Rome and explore its relevance in today’s interconnected world.

Focusing on transformative solidarity, they highlight its potential to bridge diverse experiences and causes, offering a unified approach to address the multifaceted crises we face. Taylor, a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, and Hunt-Hendrix, co-founder of progressive philanthropy networks Solidaire and Way to Win, draw on their experience to underscore the necessity of transformative solidarity in movement building.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Hi, I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

When we think about the concept of solidarity, it’s hard not to get Pete Seeger immediately stuck in our heads—

Pete Seeger, Jane Sapp, and Si Kahn.: [sung] “Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong.”

Though curiously, in the West, it’s an idea that has stayed strictly siloed to the labor movement. But why? And does it have to be that way? After all, it’s an expression of a truly human universal impulse.

A new book called “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing” idea tries to unpack why we have generally ignored the notion of solidarity, and how our world can be made a better place by embracing and enacting solidarity. It’s co-written by Leah Hunt-Hendrix — who cofounded Solidaire, and also Way to Win, which are both networks of donors trying to rethink philanthropy — and author and documentarian Astra Taylor, who cofounded The Debt Collective, the first union of debtors.

Astra and Leah, welcome to Deconstructed.

Astra Taylor: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having us.

RG: And Leah, thank you kindly.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix: So happy to be here.

RG: So, let’s talk about solidarity.

You mention in the book that it has a really interesting root, coming from a debt that is collectively owed just by virtue of being born. Talk a little bit about where this concept of solidarity, this idea of solidarity, came from in the ancient world.

AT: It’s something that Leah found out while researching her dissertation on the history of solidarity, which is sort of the original genesis of this project, but it is how I got wrangled into cowriting this book with Leah; who is a friend of mine, of course, but also a longtime movement collaborator.

I think sometime in 2019 we were scheming, as we do, about how to build power and make change. And she said, Astra, there’s something I really have to tell you, I just think you’ll find it interesting. And that’s that the root of the word solidarity comes from ancient Roman law and the concept of debts held in common, collectively-held debts. So, imagine a group of farmers all on the hook together who have to bail each other out in a time of crisis.

And this spoke to me, and Leah knew that it would, because I’m one of the cofounders of The Debt Collective, which is the world’s first union for debtors. We’ve been fighting for student loan debt relief, and medical debt relief, and more. And I just found that incredibly fascinating for many reasons.

One, because what it does is it adds this material economic dimension to the concept of solidarity. Solidarity is not just a fuzzy feeling, or an affect, or, like, I gotcha, or I empathize with you. It has this material element. And so, there’s a complex history of how that ancient roman concept gets transmitted into political theory and into labor. Of course, it’s a word we associate with the labor movement, and we tell that history.

But that phone call is how I got hooked on the topic with Leah, and what set us on this adventure together.

RG: And so, Leah, you’d been studying this concept for a very long time.

LH: Too long.

RG: Yeah, too long. And discovered that there really isn’t much out there. Like, if you’re talking about concepts like liberty or justice or equality, you’re going to find shelf after shelf after shelf of books and libraries dedicated to this concept. But when it comes to solidarity, there really isn’t much, yet it’s equally as profound an idea.

What is the history of the thought around solidarity? And why is it so frail?

LH: Well, it doesn’t actually become a real political term until the 1800s.

So, it was striking finding this obscure article that traced it back to ancient Roman law. And what happens is, it gets transferred into French law in the early 1800s through the Napoleonic codes. And then it seems from the literature that it gets moved out of its financial sense into kind of a political sense, sort of by metaphor. People start thinking about, what are the debts that we owe each other? What are the debts that we have in common? And what debts do we have to past generations and to future generations?

And there’s a group of thinkers in the late 1800s that go by the name The Solidarists, and they are like, wow, this idea might be the solution to all of our problems. It unites the individual and the collective, because individuals can only thrive in a thriving collective, and it essentially unites the past and the future, thinking about what we inherit from the past and what we owe to the future.

There’s a lot of beautiful writing and thought about how the concept might be the term that could really create a foundation for a democratic society, particularly in the wake of the revolutions that were happening in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The fall of many monarchies, the decline of the church, and people were kind of looking for, like, how are we going to hang together?

And in fraternity, during the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity was kind of the rallying cry. But then, in the mid-1800s, the women’s movement is on the rise. And fraternity has this masculine connotation, and it also has a kind of familial connotation, that you’re brothers, and the nation is now— It’s not just a band of brothers, these are becoming pluralistic societies. So, these thinkers in late 19th century France are saying, maybe solidarity can be the guide as kind of the new framework.

At the same time, the labor movement is also on the rise, and as workers were organizing, building solidarity communities, solidarity structures to support each other through mutual aid and begin to organize together, that became an important term of the labor movement. But, as you noted, it wasn’t really strongly theorized. Emile Durkheim is the first real theorist of the concept in 1891, in “The Division of Labor and Society.” And it has a lot of traction through that decade, but then you really see it kind of drop off by the beginning of World War I. Even folks involved in social movements at the time were saying, this war was going to roll back the solidarity that was being built through the labor movement.

That is what it did. It kind of pushed people into their national silos, and sort of put a halt to some of this thinking. And so, you see it taper off, and a more liberal kind of individualistic orientation sort of wins out in the academy, and political philosophy goes in a direction that’s more procedural. John Rawls becomes a key figure, and a kind of relational concept like solidarity begins to lose traction.

RG: Yeah. And I wonder, Astra, as somebody who’s an organizer, and active, and in the world, I wonder if the fact that solidarity is not really a thing, it’s more an action. You’re doing it. Like, if you think about liberty, equality, justice, and then fraternity or solidarity — which sometimes got swapped in, but not completely appropriately — but you could say, liberty, equality, solidarity, liberty and equality are things that you’re striving for, but solidarity is kind of an action.

Like, you guys write in the book that if you’re not enacting it, it doesn’t exist.

AT: Yeah. It’s just empty.

RG: Do you think that has something to do with why the academy is just less interested in it? You can’t study it in the same sense, because it’s always and forever kind of evolving based on people’s willingness to enact it.

AT: Yeah, I think that’s right. One thing we’ve taken to saying in our book talks is that a lot of the people thinking about solidarity and trying to do it were too busy. Too busy building movements, too busy trying to make change in the world.

And I do think you put your finger on something we talked about a bit in the introduction, which is a kind of academic aversion to a concept that isn’t just procedural, that isn’t just abstract, but is always kind of messy, and invested, and engaged, right? It’s also relational, but I think that’s really important to democracy.

I wrote a book on democracy before this book, and I spend a whole lot of time thinking about liberty and equality in it, right? Because those are the concepts I inherited. And it strikes me now as a very North American perspective to have, that I kind of had these blinders on, that I left out solidarity, which is a relational concept. It’s something that has to be forged between people.

So, our theorization of the concept: solidarity reaches across difference. At its most basic, [it is] a measure of group cohesion, it’s what keeps us together. That makes it very interesting philosophically, but it also is literally what you’re doing as an organizer, day to day, when you’re calling people into a movement, trying to build bonds, trying to make people feel connected, trying to make different causes feel connected to each other in a coalition.

Like, that is the day-to-day work of organizing, and so, it is really important that we think about it, and get it right, because it is what’s going to save us in this moment of so many intersecting crises.

RG: And I think it’s interesting in the way that it kind of comes in the wake of the industrial revolution, as you said, in the 1890s. It feels like, back in a time period when there was just obvious solidarity everywhere, maybe you didn’t need to even theorize it. It was only when it was being stripped apart by the atomization of these transformations in the workplace that Durkheim is writing about that it becomes important to then start thinking and bringing back this concept of solidarity.

And Leah, maybe this one’s for you: I was kind of expecting as I was reading the book that there’d be some Confucianism, or some exploration of that element of solidarity. You have a line on Page 276, where you say, “On a fundamental level, solidarity comes down to relationships.” I mean, this could be either of you, but you’ve basically defined Confucianism, in a way.

Confucianism says— I think there’s one line that says, “if there are not two people, there isn’t one person.” Like, a person is defined by the roles that they play and by the relationships that they have, and defined in such a way that they’re literally different people. Like, you are a different person in your relationship to your mother, than you are to your daughter, to your friends, to an activist group that you’re part of, to your colleagues at work. If you’re a CEO, you’re a different person to your workers than you are to your friends and your family. But you’re literally a different person. How effectively and ethically you enact the different roles that you play in society is what Confucianism is kind of all about.

I’m curious if you came across any of that in your study of solidarity, because it feels like the West, in its thinking through concepts of solidarity, is kind of pawing at something that Confucius was on to a long, long time ago.

LH: I don’t know a lot about Confucius, but I do agree that there is sort of a spiritual element to the concept. And you’re right, Durkheim was writing about the rise in suicide rates at this time in Europe in the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of what he called anomie, this sense of social dislocation, and losing your sense of your role in a community, in society.

So, the question was, what holds us together? And, interestingly, in his early work [he] thought, well, maybe this new division of labor in society which is making us actually technically more interdependent, maybe it will make us feel more interdependent, because I’m producing a piece of something here, and another piece is getting manufactured over there. And, like Martin Luther King’s quote that, by the end of breakfast, you’ve already benefited from more than half the world. Because your tea has come from China, and your towel has come from Turkey.

But Durkheim realized that wasn’t happening. People were not feeling more interconnected. So, by the end of his life, he realizes solidarity is really created by having a shared sense of what’s sacred. And he’s looking at books on religious communities, and realizes that it’s not always a religious concept, or the sacred is not always something supernatural. But having a sense of what matters to a community, what is valuable, what is worth sacrificing for, what is worth protecting, that these are things that actually create our sense of who we are and who we belong to.

And I think that’s something that’s really important for us to consider as we build social movements, and construct organizations and social institutions. How do we tap into that deep sense of meaning and purpose, and not just rely on the facts and figures and rational arguments, but tap into people’s desire for something deeper? And I think that that’s how we will build stronger senses of solidarity.

RG: Astra, do you have any thoughts on the role of Eastern ways of viewing what we’ve identified as a Western problem?

AT: Your comments really intrigue me. I’m sad to say that I don’t know more either.

What I hear in your summary is a different way of engaging with the idea of identity. When you say we’re pawing around it, right? Because we say very clearly that solidarity is not reducible to identity. And we have multiple selves depending on our relationships; that’s not an essentialist view.

And I think it’s really important that we, as organizers and as theorists on the left, start figuring out other ways to talk about identity that aren’t reactive and essentializing, and make space for that multiplicity. We might very well be invoking a more Eastern perspective without being fully conscious of it. Because what we try to do is present a vision of defining the self and the groups that’s porous, immutable, that changes over time, you know? And that has the idea of transformation at the core.

So, we distinguish in the book between what we call reactionary solidarity — which is the solidarity of like to like, the solidarity of ethnonationalism, and white supremacy, and patriarchy — versus transformative solidarity, which is always seeking again to bridge across divides and differences. It has boundaries and names enemies, but in a way that’s porous, that doesn’t seek to annihilate other groups or exploit them, but rather to expand the circle of inclusion and create a more just society.

So, yeah. I’m very intrigued by what you’re saying, and it makes me want to learn more. And the book does have, I think, a very Western perspective, because we’re kind of arguing with the Western political tradition, right? Leah mentioned this, the way that political philosophy was sort of shaped in the 20th century, became more individualistic, became focused on the idea of basic liberal rights instead of a more expansive view. So, it’s partly the tradition that we’re arguing with.

LH: We don’t talk a lot about Eastern philosophy, but we do talk about some indigenous orientations, which really do have a very relational orientation.

You know, Standing Rock was a part of a lot of our formation, maybe, if you were around during the social movements of the 2010s. And that movement was really about the water, the water is life, the water is sacred, land is sacred, and that it’s our relative, that the river is a relative and we’re in relationship with it. And I think that there’s so much to draw on from that orientation, and we would all really be better off if that was the general orientation towards the natural world, and that we had towards each other.

RG: Picking up on the point that you made about pursuing a world in which identities are mutable, relationships are porous. You guys have a pretty long section on the relationship between solidarity and identity politics — and I’m just thinking out loud here — but your point is an interesting one, in the way that identity politics and intersectionalism, as you guys elaborate on it, thinks about identity versus how I was just describing Confucianism, thinking about identity.

In a Confucian perspective, it is the action, it is the role that you play in the world that creates your identity. Whereas from the intersectional perspective, it is the way that the world acts on you that kind of creates your identities, the oppressions under which you’re operating; or the privileges. So, it’s kind of a reversal of the perspective of what creates an identity.

And so, I’m curious from both your perspectives how you grappled with this both tension and relationship between the growth of identity politics on the left and solidarity. Because you describe the way that intersectionalism was designed in order to pursue solidarity, but oftentimes is used as a weapon to make solidarity impossible.

LH: One thing that that brings up for me is that the concept of solidarity, I think you’re right. That there’s something about [how] it’s taking back the role of being the active agent in society, and that that action is part of what defines your identity, rather than how the world is defining you. And so many of the political concepts that we have —like benevolence, and charity, and philanthropy, and even allyship a bit, pity — are unidirectional and act on the other, rather than acting with, where the other is also an active agent. I think [with] solidarity it’s like you’re all active agents, you’re all protagonists acting together, rather than one being acted upon.

And I think that’s an important intervention into some of the conversations around philanthropy, and effective altruism, and things where the agency of others is sort of denied, even amidst the good intentions of the project. But I’ll turn it over to Astra to talk a little bit more about intersectionalism.

AT: Yeah. I sort of bristle at the idea that — not that anyone has said it here, but it’s an idea that’s commonplace — that it’s identity politics or economics, right? I think the world is raced and gendered and classed and, as Stuart Hall said, “race is the modality through which class is lived.” And that capitalism divides people up in order to justify the exploitation of certain groups and the privileging of others.

And so, we just have to be able to navigate that.

RG: Yeah. Last week we had Anat Shenker-Osorio on the show making that a legible point for people.

AT: Yes. And, at the same time, it is true that identity can be invoked in a way that justifies the status quo. We say very clearly in the book: we don’t want a rainbow oligarchy, right? We don’t want massive economic inequality with a bit more diversity.

It’s just to say the basic thing, which is: we have to think about identity and economics together. And when you’re organizing, you have to connect with people’s actual lived experiences, and the fact is that people experience being discriminated against, people experience misogyny, people experience ableism, as well as exploitation on the job, and poverty, and debt, and all of that. So, we’ve got to meet people where they are.

But the categories through which we experience our lives are not set in stone; they are created. There are a few key points to the book, and one is that solidarity is not found, it’s made. We have to generate it, we have to cultivate it. And that’s why it’s so important to tell these deeper histories, the history, for example, of the labor movement, which we return to again and again.

The category of worker didn’t just come from on high, it didn’t even just magically appear with the industrial revolution. Workers forged it by coming together across their differences. They initially saw themselves as members of guilds, as cobblers, and smiths, and farmers, and very distinct groups. And it was only over time and through effort that people began to develop the category of worker-at-large.

I’ve seen this in my own work at The Debt Collective, where we started working with people who had gone to different predatory for-profit colleges who didn’t see themselves as having anything in common. Ten years later, we now talk about student debtors as though it’s a group that is legible. But that’s only because we work to shift the narrative, we work to build relationships.

And so, I think identity is incredibly important, but it should be a doorway, not a destination. It’s something that should help. We can move through it to see connections with other people, and we can invent new categories, new ways of understanding ourselves.

And so, I think it really does have both those dimensions of, it’s something— There’s an element of agency, right? We can be part of this process of inventing new ways of understanding ourselves and each other, but we’re also responding to stuff that’s being put on us from the outside. Whether that’s stigma, stereotypes, wage discrimination, a passport that denies us the kind of mobility that other people take for granted, and the like.

So, both are true, and we have to navigate these seeming paradoxes if we want to change things.

RG: As I’ve been thinking through the concept of enacting solidarity, one sort of metaphor that’s occurred to me is, the people who have a principled belief in free speech. It is very easy to defend speech that you agree with; that’s not really a principled defense of free speech.

It’s when, say, like the ACLU defending who— Where was it? The Skokie or whatever Nazis who were marching in the seventies or something. When an organization or a person is defending something that they abhor on a principled level, that’s when it’s difficult, and that’s when enacting it comes with real principle.

And when it comes to solidarity, you really only need it when you’re under assault. Like, it’s easy to have solidarity when times are good, when things are flowing. The solidarity of a rock concert doesn’t take a whole lot of work on behalf of the people that are there to all collectively have an awesome time together. It’s when one small group of you are getting attacked that, then, the inaction of solidarity actually matters.

And, oftentimes, some of the people getting attacked are the worst. Like, they suck, and they did something wrong to be getting attacked. Yet the principle of solidarity maintains that there ought to be some defense if you’re all in the pursuit of the same goal.

Now, you killed somebody. That kind of solidarity is not the right thing. That would be like the Fraternal Order of Police type of solidarity. And, actually, some of the teachers union solidarity back in the ’90s that got the teachers unions into real political trouble, and which they’ve since backpedaled from. Where they were unwilling to give an inch on even the worst teachers who were, like, showing up drunk and beating kids

AT: The solidarity of the Catholic church

RG: The solidarity of the Catholic church, to pick a an easier one to knock around. That what’s also so interesting about this concept of solidarity, is that it is obviously not necessarily always a good thing. Yet, also, when it’s hard, sometimes that’s when it’s the most necessary.

How do you guys think through differing kinds of solidarity? And when it’s moving in the right direction, and when it can move toward a reactionary, fascistic, MAGA-type of solidarity?

LH: I think this is why theorization, and distinctions, and the work of political philosophy are so important, so that it helps us parse through when something is moving in the right direction or the wrong direction.

There have been some other shorter articles and books trying to make distinctions about solidarity, political or civic solidarity, social solidarity. So, like Astra said, our main distinction is between transformative and reactionary solidarity, and we see these as really structurally different. We think transformative solidarity is the goal. Solidarity writ large is kind of neutral. Social cohesion is a good thing, but not if it’s at the expense of a large section of the population.

We’re kind of fighting for transformative solidarity, we’re open about that, and we see that as different from reactionary, in that it seeks to broaden the circle of inclusion, whereas reactionary solidarity is shrinking that circle for the sake of its own kind of status.

Like Astra said earlier, the borders or boundaries of the community are more porous, whereas with reactionary solidarity they’re much more rigid, and seek to annihilate the other, that which is outside the community. And we think it’s very possible to use this in any given kind of social movement situation to clarify what side to be on. Which is the side that is seeking to narrow the social benefits, which is the position that would expand those benefits and have more lasting consequences.

Maybe to go right to the controversial topic of Gaza and Israel, part of why I think it’s so important to take a position of solidarity with those who are advocating for a ceasefire and for peace is because that really is so important on an international level. That is the only position that upholds international law, that upholds international institutions. The horrors of what’s happening on the ground speak for themselves but, even when you step back, the two orientations that are at stake are very different structurally.

So, I think the idea of transformative solidarity helps us see why peace is a key priority for the perspective of transformative solidarity. I think that helps us navigate how to relate to social movements.

RG: Astra, you’ve spent 20-plus years in these social movements. How do you approach this question of when to enact solidarity in the face of adversity, and when internal turmoil is needed, because a group is going through some type of real debate about its future? How do you sort through those questions which are becoming increasingly dominant?

AT: Yeah. Well, I think you can have solidarity and turmoil at the same time, right? I mean, solidarity to me, organizing entails turmoil in tough debates, and we’re seeing that right now, as Leah just said, in the movements for a free Palestine. And this is a moment where my advice to folks who don’t agree with every tactic or every disruption of demonstrators need to accept that, and not undermine the bigger cause, which is standing against the devastation of Gaza and its people. So, we have to be able to have some internal tensions and debates without solidarity totally breaking down.

And your question about free speech is an interesting one. I’m just reading a book right now about the billionaire backers of a lot of the campus wars. And I think part of a full analysis needs to be, like, OK, we’re standing up for free speech, but what speech is being paid for? What speech is being promoted opportunistically in certain environments, right?

So, is a controversial speaker coming to a college campus, because they’ve got tons and tons of funding from a right-wing thinktank? They weren’t actually invited. In the case of one lecturer, [they] cost the University of Berkeley $800,000 in extra security.

I think a real analysis has to take into account all of these sort of material economic dimensions, and be like, OK, what is the goal of what’s being promoted here? Is it really demonstrating about free speech, or is it actually a bunch of right-wing billionaires trying to inflame tensions, and to divide and conquer people on the ground? By making some students look unreasonable in the eyes of the liberal press.

It’s complicated, there’s not a hard and fast rule. But I do think that disagreement is just going to be part of any organizing effort, any effort to build solidarity, you know? And, in the book, we try to give some advice for navigating that stuff, and try to say that we need to recognize again that people are changing. People are not set in stone, people have the capacity to change, and that we need to treat each other with a bit of forbearance and humility, if we want to actually build a movement that’s big enough to win the structural changes that we need.

RG: And Leah, I wanted to ask you about your chapter on philanthropy, too. For people who don’t know, you’ve spent most of your career kind of in the world of philanthropy. A charity that you’re affiliated with has actually supported The Intercept in the past, along with a whole host of other organizations.

So, I’m curious how you think of the concept of solidarity and how it relates to philanthropy, and how your own view of philanthropy has kind of changed throughout your time in it.

LH: So, just for transparency, I was born into a family with a family foundation. My grandfather had started an oil company and my mom used resources from that to fund the women’s movement, and helped start organizations like the Ms. Foundation and the New York Women’s Foundation.

When I was younger, I was really critical of it, and saw it as a kind of ladies who lunch, and a little patronizing, and just nice around the edges. To me, it was just always a problem that so few people had so much money and so many people had so little, and that like fundamental disparity was an important societal problem to address.

And so, I was interested in what can really change our economic system? What’s beyond neoliberalism? How do we actually redistribute wealth and power? And, as I got involved in social movements — starting with, really, the global justice movement, and then Occupy Wall Street — what I realized is that social movements need financial resources.

There’s an interesting book about the history of the labor movement that came out in 2023 by a French author, I think it’s called “Struggle and Mutual Aid.” And he writes a lot about the resourcing of the labor movement, and how the unions would kind of resource each other in France and England. And even then it was very hard and controversial, [in terms of] who got what money.

So, resourcing movements is hard, but is there a way to do philanthropy in solidarity and have it not just be palliating and pacifying, but actually transformative? And I think there is, and I think it’s really important for people in philanthropy to be extremely self-critical, and to read and learn about all the ways in which philanthropy can be destructive.

Megan Francis Ming is a really important thinker on this topic who writes about movement capture, looking at the history of the NAACP, and the effects of the Garland Fund on that organization.

RG: Yeah, you go into that in the book. I didn’t know that story, but that’s a really interesting story. That, yeah, the NAACP wanted to work on antilynching work, and to help organize Black workers. But instead, their rich donors said, no, why don’t you hire a bunch of lawyers and sue your way to integrating schools— Which, obviously, Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark decision. But if you don’t build the structures around it, that can be erased. And now, here we are, back to basically segregated schools again. And you look back, and you’re like, oh, maybe the actual activists and people involved with the NAACP did have the idea that, by building economic power and by protecting their communities, that they then could build the political power on top of that.

Anyway, that was a really interesting example.

LH: Yeah, a really important example. And the Garland Fund was a progressive foundation. It was a foundation that we wanted to support racial justice.

RG: Right. And segregation is bad. You can see how the grant proposals breezed right through. Yeah.

LH: But who gets to decide what the strategy is and what the goals are of an organization or of a movement? And philanthropists can easily use their financial power to kind of meddle with those goals or strategies. And so, I think it’s really important to have a clear view on if you’re doing that or if that’s happening. And the structure of philanthropy itself is the consequence of policy decisions made over the last century that created the 501(c)3 and tax breaks for the wealthy. So, that very structure needs to be challenged.

So, that’s something you can do. If you’re in philanthropy, you can lobby or participate in trying to change those laws. You can think about the concentration of corporate power, and how to break up that accumulation of wealth at the top through antimonopoly law. And then, of course, supporting social movements, supporting the labor movement. There are lots of ways to get involved supporting The Debt Collective as an effort of organizing debtors to be a movement that can challenge the financial industries and think about the role of debt in society.

So, there’s a lot that can be done. I just think it’s really important to have a really critical eye on philanthropy, but it’s not that helpful to just completely write it off because, at the moment, it exists and nonprofits need it. And so, ideally, I think philanthropy and solidarity should fight to put itself out of business — philanthropy as an institution — but how do we be constructive in this moment? That’s the effort that we make in that chapter.

RG: Yeah. And I feel like there is philanthropy that can be challenging to power centers, and I think Astra’s organization is a good example of that. Obviously, selfishly, I would say that ours is as well. But I think one way that you can tell that that’s true is, there really are not rich donors beating down the doors to fund our work.

AT: Tell me about it.

RG: Exactly. One way you can tell what I think Leah’s giving is in that direction is, there aren’t a whole lot of people following you down that path. It’s not as if there’s hundreds of millions of dollars following you saying, let’s go after The Debt Collective, for instance.

LH: Well, I have worked to build several networks of philanthropists. One is called Solidaire, another is called Way to Win. There is also Resource Generation and Movement Voter Project. And there is a growing ecosystem. Mike Gast is actually someone who is working on naming and clarifying this movement within wealthy communities that [are] trying to be in the service of progressive social movements. So, I think that there’s something there.

I love to go back and read these debates in the First International and earlier on in socialist movements. Where they were like, is there a role for the bourgeoisie in the workers movements? And mostly people were, like, no. But it was a real debate. Rosa Luxemburg was involved in this debate.

RG: Certainly Frederick Engels and Karl Marx are the one that people talk about all the time. Yeah.

LH: Yeah. There often are class traitors involved in almost every successful social movement. So, I definitely don’t want to be heard as saying, like, open the doors to these wealthy bourgeois comrades, because I think there should be some skepticism. But can we build an ecosystem of people who want to participate? I think it’s work worth doing.

RG: And what do you think, Astra?

AT: We have to. I mean, movements take resources, and the right-wing knows this. I mean, there are just mind-boggling mountains of money being moved in the most mercenary directions, right? The thing they’re saying on the right now is, we want The Federalist Society for every institution in America, right?

So, we can’t expect ordinary people who are overworked at their multiple jobs to be able to withstand this assault without resources. And I think the perspective that we’re trying to emphasize in this book in solidarity, though, is that these class traitors, what they recognize is that, actually, this is in their self-interest too, you know?

Ultimately, none of us benefit from a burning planet, you know? We are all interconnected. It sounds touchy-feely, but it’s really the truth of living in a world where you know that your privilege doesn’t depend on other people’s desperation. That’s the case we’re making and we really believe it.

We need more people to pony up for things that really challenge the status quo. It’s urgent.

RG: Well, it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking book, and I really recommend it to people. It’s called “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

Leah and Astra, thank you so much for joining me.

AT: Thanks for having us.

LH: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

RG: That was Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor. Check out their new book, it’s called, “Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

And that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of the Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed the episode. And our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you soon.
Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix on their new book, “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”
“None of us benefit from a burning planet,” says activist and documentarian Astra Taylor on this week’s Deconstructed. Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix join Ryan Grim to discuss their new book, “Solidarity: The Past, Present, And Future of a World-Changing Idea.” Delving into the philosophical depths of solidarity, they trace its origins back to ancient Rome and explore its relevance in today’s interconnected world. Focusing on transformative solidarity, they highlight its potential to bridge diverse experiences and causes, offering a unified approach to address the multifaceted crises we face. Taylor, a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, and Hunt-Hendrix, co-founder of progressive philanthropy networks Solidaire and Way to Win, draw on their experience to underscore the necessity of transformative solidarity in movement building. [Deconstructed theme music.] Ryan Grim: Hi, I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed. When we think about the concept of solidarity, it’s hard not to get Pete Seeger immediately stuck in our heads— Pete Seeger, Jane Sapp, and Si Kahn.: [sung] “Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong.” Though curiously, in the West, it’s an idea that has stayed strictly siloed to the labor movement. But why? And does it have to be that way? After all, it’s an expression of a truly human universal impulse. A new book called “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing” idea tries to unpack why we have generally ignored the notion of solidarity, and how our world can be made a better place by embracing and enacting solidarity. It’s co-written by Leah Hunt-Hendrix — who cofounded Solidaire, and also Way to Win, which are both networks of donors trying to rethink philanthropy — and author and documentarian Astra Taylor, who cofounded The Debt Collective, the first union of debtors. Astra and Leah, welcome to Deconstructed. Astra Taylor: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having us. RG: And Leah, thank you kindly. Leah Hunt-Hendrix: So happy to be here. RG: So, let’s talk about solidarity. You mention in the book that it has a really interesting root, coming from a debt that is collectively owed just by virtue of being born. Talk a little bit about where this concept of solidarity, this idea of solidarity, came from in the ancient world. AT: It’s something that Leah found out while researching her dissertation on the history of solidarity, which is sort of the original genesis of this project, but it is how I got wrangled into cowriting this book with Leah; who is a friend of mine, of course, but also a longtime movement collaborator. I think sometime in 2019 we were scheming, as we do, about how to build power and make change. And she said, Astra, there’s something I really have to tell you, I just think you’ll find it interesting. And that’s that the root of the word solidarity comes from ancient Roman law and the concept of debts held in common, collectively-held debts. So, imagine a group of farmers all on the hook together who have to bail each other out in a time of crisis. And this spoke to me, and Leah knew that it would, because I’m one of the cofounders of The Debt Collective, which is the world’s first union for debtors. We’ve been fighting for student loan debt relief, and medical debt relief, and more. And I just found that incredibly fascinating for many reasons. One, because what it does is it adds this material economic dimension to the concept of solidarity. Solidarity is not just a fuzzy feeling, or an affect, or, like, I gotcha, or I empathize with you. It has this material element. And so, there’s a complex history of how that ancient roman concept gets transmitted into political theory and into labor. Of course, it’s a word we associate with the labor movement, and we tell that history. But that phone call is how I got hooked on the topic with Leah, and what set us on this adventure together. RG: And so, Leah, you’d been studying this concept for a very long time. LH: Too long. RG: Yeah, too long. And discovered that there really isn’t much out there. Like, if you’re talking about concepts like liberty or justice or equality, you’re going to find shelf after shelf after shelf of books and libraries dedicated to this concept. But when it comes to solidarity, there really isn’t much, yet it’s equally as profound an idea. What is the history of the thought around solidarity? And why is it so frail? LH: Well, it doesn’t actually become a real political term until the 1800s. So, it was striking finding this obscure article that traced it back to ancient Roman law. And what happens is, it gets transferred into French law in the early 1800s through the Napoleonic codes. And then it seems from the literature that it gets moved out of its financial sense into kind of a political sense, sort of by metaphor. People start thinking about, what are the debts that we owe each other? What are the debts that we have in common? And what debts do we have to past generations and to future generations? And there’s a group of thinkers in the late 1800s that go by the name The Solidarists, and they are like, wow, this idea might be the solution to all of our problems. It unites the individual and the collective, because individuals can only thrive in a thriving collective, and it essentially unites the past and the future, thinking about what we inherit from the past and what we owe to the future. There’s a lot of beautiful writing and thought about how the concept might be the term that could really create a foundation for a democratic society, particularly in the wake of the revolutions that were happening in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The fall of many monarchies, the decline of the church, and people were kind of looking for, like, how are we going to hang together? And in fraternity, during the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity was kind of the rallying cry. But then, in the mid-1800s, the women’s movement is on the rise. And fraternity has this masculine connotation, and it also has a kind of familial connotation, that you’re brothers, and the nation is now— It’s not just a band of brothers, these are becoming pluralistic societies. So, these thinkers in late 19th century France are saying, maybe solidarity can be the guide as kind of the new framework. At the same time, the labor movement is also on the rise, and as workers were organizing, building solidarity communities, solidarity structures to support each other through mutual aid and begin to organize together, that became an important term of the labor movement. But, as you noted, it wasn’t really strongly theorized. Emile Durkheim is the first real theorist of the concept in 1891, in “The Division of Labor and Society.” And it has a lot of traction through that decade, but then you really see it kind of drop off by the beginning of World War I. Even folks involved in social movements at the time were saying, this war was going to roll back the solidarity that was being built through the labor movement. That is what it did. It kind of pushed people into their national silos, and sort of put a halt to some of this thinking. And so, you see it taper off, and a more liberal kind of individualistic orientation sort of wins out in the academy, and political philosophy goes in a direction that’s more procedural. John Rawls becomes a key figure, and a kind of relational concept like solidarity begins to lose traction. RG: Yeah. And I wonder, Astra, as somebody who’s an organizer, and active, and in the world, I wonder if the fact that solidarity is not really a thing, it’s more an action. You’re doing it. Like, if you think about liberty, equality, justice, and then fraternity or solidarity — which sometimes got swapped in, but not completely appropriately — but you could say, liberty, equality, solidarity, liberty and equality are things that you’re striving for, but solidarity is kind of an action. Like, you guys write in the book that if you’re not enacting it, it doesn’t exist. AT: Yeah. It’s just empty. RG: Do you think that has something to do with why the academy is just less interested in it? You can’t study it in the same sense, because it’s always and forever kind of evolving based on people’s willingness to enact it. AT: Yeah, I think that’s right. One thing we’ve taken to saying in our book talks is that a lot of the people thinking about solidarity and trying to do it were too busy. Too busy building movements, too busy trying to make change in the world. And I do think you put your finger on something we talked about a bit in the introduction, which is a kind of academic aversion to a concept that isn’t just procedural, that isn’t just abstract, but is always kind of messy, and invested, and engaged, right? It’s also relational, but I think that’s really important to democracy. I wrote a book on democracy before this book, and I spend a whole lot of time thinking about liberty and equality in it, right? Because those are the concepts I inherited. And it strikes me now as a very North American perspective to have, that I kind of had these blinders on, that I left out solidarity, which is a relational concept. It’s something that has to be forged between people. So, our theorization of the concept: solidarity reaches across difference. At its most basic, [it is] a measure of group cohesion, it’s what keeps us together. That makes it very interesting philosophically, but it also is literally what you’re doing as an organizer, day to day, when you’re calling people into a movement, trying to build bonds, trying to make people feel connected, trying to make different causes feel connected to each other in a coalition. Like, that is the day-to-day work of organizing, and so, it is really important that we think about it, and get it right, because it is what’s going to save us in this moment of so many intersecting crises. RG: And I think it’s interesting in the way that it kind of comes in the wake of the industrial revolution, as you said, in the 1890s. It feels like, back in a time period when there was just obvious solidarity everywhere, maybe you didn’t need to even theorize it. It was only when it was being stripped apart by the atomization of these transformations in the workplace that Durkheim is writing about that it becomes important to then start thinking and bringing back this concept of solidarity. And Leah, maybe this one’s for you: I was kind of expecting as I was reading the book that there’d be some Confucianism, or some exploration of that element of solidarity. You have a line on Page 276, where you say, “On a fundamental level, solidarity comes down to relationships.” I mean, this could be either of you, but you’ve basically defined Confucianism, in a way. Confucianism says— I think there’s one line that says, “if there are not two people, there isn’t one person.” Like, a person is defined by the roles that they play and by the relationships that they have, and defined in such a way that they’re literally different people. Like, you are a different person in your relationship to your mother, than you are to your daughter, to your friends, to an activist group that you’re part of, to your colleagues at work. If you’re a CEO, you’re a different person to your workers than you are to your friends and your family. But you’re literally a different person. How effectively and ethically you enact the different roles that you play in society is what Confucianism is kind of all about. I’m curious if you came across any of that in your study of solidarity, because it feels like the West, in its thinking through concepts of solidarity, is kind of pawing at something that Confucius was on to a long, long time ago. LH: I don’t know a lot about Confucius, but I do agree that there is sort of a spiritual element to the concept. And you’re right, Durkheim was writing about the rise in suicide rates at this time in Europe in the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of what he called anomie, this sense of social dislocation, and losing your sense of your role in a community, in society. So, the question was, what holds us together? And, interestingly, in his early work [he] thought, well, maybe this new division of labor in society which is making us actually technically more interdependent, maybe it will make us feel more interdependent, because I’m producing a piece of something here, and another piece is getting manufactured over there. And, like Martin Luther King’s quote that, by the end of breakfast, you’ve already benefited from more than half the world. Because your tea has come from China, and your towel has come from Turkey. But Durkheim realized that wasn’t happening. People were not feeling more interconnected. So, by the end of his life, he realizes solidarity is really created by having a shared sense of what’s sacred. And he’s looking at books on religious communities, and realizes that it’s not always a religious concept, or the sacred is not always something supernatural. But having a sense of what matters to a community, what is valuable, what is worth sacrificing for, what is worth protecting, that these are things that actually create our sense of who we are and who we belong to. And I think that’s something that’s really important for us to consider as we build social movements, and construct organizations and social institutions. How do we tap into that deep sense of meaning and purpose, and not just rely on the facts and figures and rational arguments, but tap into people’s desire for something deeper? And I think that that’s how we will build stronger senses of solidarity. RG: Astra, do you have any thoughts on the role of Eastern ways of viewing what we’ve identified as a Western problem? AT: Your comments really intrigue me. I’m sad to say that I don’t know more either. What I hear in your summary is a different way of engaging with the idea of identity. When you say we’re pawing around it, right? Because we say very clearly that solidarity is not reducible to identity. And we have multiple selves depending on our relationships; that’s not an essentialist view. And I think it’s really important that we, as organizers and as theorists on the left, start figuring out other ways to talk about identity that aren’t reactive and essentializing, and make space for that multiplicity. We might very well be invoking a more Eastern perspective without being fully conscious of it. Because what we try to do is present a vision of defining the self and the groups that’s porous, immutable, that changes over time, you know? And that has the idea of transformation at the core. So, we distinguish in the book between what we call reactionary solidarity — which is the solidarity of like to like, the solidarity of ethnonationalism, and white supremacy, and patriarchy — versus transformative solidarity, which is always seeking again to bridge across divides and differences. It has boundaries and names enemies, but in a way that’s porous, that doesn’t seek to annihilate other groups or exploit them, but rather to expand the circle of inclusion and create a more just society. So, yeah. I’m very intrigued by what you’re saying, and it makes me want to learn more. And the book does have, I think, a very Western perspective, because we’re kind of arguing with the Western political tradition, right? Leah mentioned this, the way that political philosophy was sort of shaped in the 20th century, became more individualistic, became focused on the idea of basic liberal rights instead of a more expansive view. So, it’s partly the tradition that we’re arguing with. LH: We don’t talk a lot about Eastern philosophy, but we do talk about some indigenous orientations, which really do have a very relational orientation. You know, Standing Rock was a part of a lot of our formation, maybe, if you were around during the social movements of the 2010s. And that movement was really about the water, the water is life, the water is sacred, land is sacred, and that it’s our relative, that the river is a relative and we’re in relationship with it. And I think that there’s so much to draw on from that orientation, and we would all really be better off if that was the general orientation towards the natural world, and that we had towards each other. RG: Picking up on the point that you made about pursuing a world in which identities are mutable, relationships are porous. You guys have a pretty long section on the relationship between solidarity and identity politics — and I’m just thinking out loud here — but your point is an interesting one, in the way that identity politics and intersectionalism, as you guys elaborate on it, thinks about identity versus how I was just describing Confucianism, thinking about identity. In a Confucian perspective, it is the action, it is the role that you play in the world that creates your identity. Whereas from the intersectional perspective, it is the way that the world acts on you that kind of creates your identities, the oppressions under which you’re operating; or the privileges. So, it’s kind of a reversal of the perspective of what creates an identity. And so, I’m curious from both your perspectives how you grappled with this both tension and relationship between the growth of identity politics on the left and solidarity. Because you describe the way that intersectionalism was designed in order to pursue solidarity, but oftentimes is used as a weapon to make solidarity impossible. LH: One thing that that brings up for me is that the concept of solidarity, I think you’re right. That there’s something about [how] it’s taking back the role of being the active agent in society, and that that action is part of what defines your identity, rather than how the world is defining you. And so many of the political concepts that we have —like benevolence, and charity, and philanthropy, and even allyship a bit, pity — are unidirectional and act on the other, rather than acting with, where the other is also an active agent. I think [with] solidarity it’s like you’re all active agents, you’re all protagonists acting together, rather than one being acted upon. And I think that’s an important intervention into some of the conversations around philanthropy, and effective altruism, and things where the agency of others is sort of denied, even amidst the good intentions of the project. But I’ll turn it over to Astra to talk a little bit more about intersectionalism. AT: Yeah. I sort of bristle at the idea that — not that anyone has said it here, but it’s an idea that’s commonplace — that it’s identity politics or economics, right? I think the world is raced and gendered and classed and, as Stuart Hall said, “race is the modality through which class is lived.” And that capitalism divides people up in order to justify the exploitation of certain groups and the privileging of others. And so, we just have to be able to navigate that. RG: Yeah. Last week we had Anat Shenker-Osorio on the show making that a legible point for people. AT: Yes. And, at the same time, it is true that identity can be invoked in a way that justifies the status quo. We say very clearly in the book: we don’t want a rainbow oligarchy, right? We don’t want massive economic inequality with a bit more diversity. It’s just to say the basic thing, which is: we have to think about identity and economics together. And when you’re organizing, you have to connect with people’s actual lived experiences, and the fact is that people experience being discriminated against, people experience misogyny, people experience ableism, as well as exploitation on the job, and poverty, and debt, and all of that. So, we’ve got to meet people where they are. But the categories through which we experience our lives are not set in stone; they are created. There are a few key points to the book, and one is that solidarity is not found, it’s made. We have to generate it, we have to cultivate it. And that’s why it’s so important to tell these deeper histories, the history, for example, of the labor movement, which we return to again and again. The category of worker didn’t just come from on high, it didn’t even just magically appear with the industrial revolution. Workers forged it by coming together across their differences. They initially saw themselves as members of guilds, as cobblers, and smiths, and farmers, and very distinct groups. And it was only over time and through effort that people began to develop the category of worker-at-large. I’ve seen this in my own work at The Debt Collective, where we started working with people who had gone to different predatory for-profit colleges who didn’t see themselves as having anything in common. Ten years later, we now talk about student debtors as though it’s a group that is legible. But that’s only because we work to shift the narrative, we work to build relationships. And so, I think identity is incredibly important, but it should be a doorway, not a destination. It’s something that should help. We can move through it to see connections with other people, and we can invent new categories, new ways of understanding ourselves. And so, I think it really does have both those dimensions of, it’s something— There’s an element of agency, right? We can be part of this process of inventing new ways of understanding ourselves and each other, but we’re also responding to stuff that’s being put on us from the outside. Whether that’s stigma, stereotypes, wage discrimination, a passport that denies us the kind of mobility that other people take for granted, and the like. So, both are true, and we have to navigate these seeming paradoxes if we want to change things. RG: As I’ve been thinking through the concept of enacting solidarity, one sort of metaphor that’s occurred to me is, the people who have a principled belief in free speech. It is very easy to defend speech that you agree with; that’s not really a principled defense of free speech. It’s when, say, like the ACLU defending who— Where was it? The Skokie or whatever Nazis who were marching in the seventies or something. When an organization or a person is defending something that they abhor on a principled level, that’s when it’s difficult, and that’s when enacting it comes with real principle. And when it comes to solidarity, you really only need it when you’re under assault. Like, it’s easy to have solidarity when times are good, when things are flowing. The solidarity of a rock concert doesn’t take a whole lot of work on behalf of the people that are there to all collectively have an awesome time together. It’s when one small group of you are getting attacked that, then, the inaction of solidarity actually matters. And, oftentimes, some of the people getting attacked are the worst. Like, they suck, and they did something wrong to be getting attacked. Yet the principle of solidarity maintains that there ought to be some defense if you’re all in the pursuit of the same goal. Now, you killed somebody. That kind of solidarity is not the right thing. That would be like the Fraternal Order of Police type of solidarity. And, actually, some of the teachers union solidarity back in the ’90s that got the teachers unions into real political trouble, and which they’ve since backpedaled from. Where they were unwilling to give an inch on even the worst teachers who were, like, showing up drunk and beating kids AT: The solidarity of the Catholic church RG: The solidarity of the Catholic church, to pick a an easier one to knock around. That what’s also so interesting about this concept of solidarity, is that it is obviously not necessarily always a good thing. Yet, also, when it’s hard, sometimes that’s when it’s the most necessary. How do you guys think through differing kinds of solidarity? And when it’s moving in the right direction, and when it can move toward a reactionary, fascistic, MAGA-type of solidarity? LH: I think this is why theorization, and distinctions, and the work of political philosophy are so important, so that it helps us parse through when something is moving in the right direction or the wrong direction. There have been some other shorter articles and books trying to make distinctions about solidarity, political or civic solidarity, social solidarity. So, like Astra said, our main distinction is between transformative and reactionary solidarity, and we see these as really structurally different. We think transformative solidarity is the goal. Solidarity writ large is kind of neutral. Social cohesion is a good thing, but not if it’s at the expense of a large section of the population. We’re kind of fighting for transformative solidarity, we’re open about that, and we see that as different from reactionary, in that it seeks to broaden the circle of inclusion, whereas reactionary solidarity is shrinking that circle for the sake of its own kind of status. Like Astra said earlier, the borders or boundaries of the community are more porous, whereas with reactionary solidarity they’re much more rigid, and seek to annihilate the other, that which is outside the community. And we think it’s very possible to use this in any given kind of social movement situation to clarify what side to be on. Which is the side that is seeking to narrow the social benefits, which is the position that would expand those benefits and have more lasting consequences. Maybe to go right to the controversial topic of Gaza and Israel, part of why I think it’s so important to take a position of solidarity with those who are advocating for a ceasefire and for peace is because that really is so important on an international level. That is the only position that upholds international law, that upholds international institutions. The horrors of what’s happening on the ground speak for themselves but, even when you step back, the two orientations that are at stake are very different structurally. So, I think the idea of transformative solidarity helps us see why peace is a key priority for the perspective of transformative solidarity. I think that helps us navigate how to relate to social movements. RG: Astra, you’ve spent 20-plus years in these social movements. How do you approach this question of when to enact solidarity in the face of adversity, and when internal turmoil is needed, because a group is going through some type of real debate about its future? How do you sort through those questions which are becoming increasingly dominant? AT: Yeah. Well, I think you can have solidarity and turmoil at the same time, right? I mean, solidarity to me, organizing entails turmoil in tough debates, and we’re seeing that right now, as Leah just said, in the movements for a free Palestine. And this is a moment where my advice to folks who don’t agree with every tactic or every disruption of demonstrators need to accept that, and not undermine the bigger cause, which is standing against the devastation of Gaza and its people. So, we have to be able to have some internal tensions and debates without solidarity totally breaking down. And your question about free speech is an interesting one. I’m just reading a book right now about the billionaire backers of a lot of the campus wars. And I think part of a full analysis needs to be, like, OK, we’re standing up for free speech, but what speech is being paid for? What speech is being promoted opportunistically in certain environments, right? So, is a controversial speaker coming to a college campus, because they’ve got tons and tons of funding from a right-wing thinktank? They weren’t actually invited. In the case of one lecturer, [they] cost the University of Berkeley $800,000 in extra security. I think a real analysis has to take into account all of these sort of material economic dimensions, and be like, OK, what is the goal of what’s being promoted here? Is it really demonstrating about free speech, or is it actually a bunch of right-wing billionaires trying to inflame tensions, and to divide and conquer people on the ground? By making some students look unreasonable in the eyes of the liberal press. It’s complicated, there’s not a hard and fast rule. But I do think that disagreement is just going to be part of any organizing effort, any effort to build solidarity, you know? And, in the book, we try to give some advice for navigating that stuff, and try to say that we need to recognize again that people are changing. People are not set in stone, people have the capacity to change, and that we need to treat each other with a bit of forbearance and humility, if we want to actually build a movement that’s big enough to win the structural changes that we need. RG: And Leah, I wanted to ask you about your chapter on philanthropy, too. For people who don’t know, you’ve spent most of your career kind of in the world of philanthropy. A charity that you’re affiliated with has actually supported The Intercept in the past, along with a whole host of other organizations. So, I’m curious how you think of the concept of solidarity and how it relates to philanthropy, and how your own view of philanthropy has kind of changed throughout your time in it. LH: So, just for transparency, I was born into a family with a family foundation. My grandfather had started an oil company and my mom used resources from that to fund the women’s movement, and helped start organizations like the Ms. Foundation and the New York Women’s Foundation. When I was younger, I was really critical of it, and saw it as a kind of ladies who lunch, and a little patronizing, and just nice around the edges. To me, it was just always a problem that so few people had so much money and so many people had so little, and that like fundamental disparity was an important societal problem to address. And so, I was interested in what can really change our economic system? What’s beyond neoliberalism? How do we actually redistribute wealth and power? And, as I got involved in social movements — starting with, really, the global justice movement, and then Occupy Wall Street — what I realized is that social movements need financial resources. There’s an interesting book about the history of the labor movement that came out in 2023 by a French author, I think it’s called “Struggle and Mutual Aid.” And he writes a lot about the resourcing of the labor movement, and how the unions would kind of resource each other in France and England. And even then it was very hard and controversial, [in terms of] who got what money. So, resourcing movements is hard, but is there a way to do philanthropy in solidarity and have it not just be palliating and pacifying, but actually transformative? And I think there is, and I think it’s really important for people in philanthropy to be extremely self-critical, and to read and learn about all the ways in which philanthropy can be destructive. Megan Francis Ming is a really important thinker on this topic who writes about movement capture, looking at the history of the NAACP, and the effects of the Garland Fund on that organization. RG: Yeah, you go into that in the book. I didn’t know that story, but that’s a really interesting story. That, yeah, the NAACP wanted to work on antilynching work, and to help organize Black workers. But instead, their rich donors said, no, why don’t you hire a bunch of lawyers and sue your way to integrating schools— Which, obviously, Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark decision. But if you don’t build the structures around it, that can be erased. And now, here we are, back to basically segregated schools again. And you look back, and you’re like, oh, maybe the actual activists and people involved with the NAACP did have the idea that, by building economic power and by protecting their communities, that they then could build the political power on top of that. Anyway, that was a really interesting example. LH: Yeah, a really important example. And the Garland Fund was a progressive foundation. It was a foundation that we wanted to support racial justice. RG: Right. And segregation is bad. You can see how the grant proposals breezed right through. Yeah. LH: But who gets to decide what the strategy is and what the goals are of an organization or of a movement? And philanthropists can easily use their financial power to kind of meddle with those goals or strategies. And so, I think it’s really important to have a clear view on if you’re doing that or if that’s happening. And the structure of philanthropy itself is the consequence of policy decisions made over the last century that created the 501(c)3 and tax breaks for the wealthy. So, that very structure needs to be challenged. So, that’s something you can do. If you’re in philanthropy, you can lobby or participate in trying to change those laws. You can think about the concentration of corporate power, and how to break up that accumulation of wealth at the top through antimonopoly law. And then, of course, supporting social movements, supporting the labor movement. There are lots of ways to get involved supporting The Debt Collective as an effort of organizing debtors to be a movement that can challenge the financial industries and think about the role of debt in society. So, there’s a lot that can be done. I just think it’s really important to have a really critical eye on philanthropy, but it’s not that helpful to just completely write it off because, at the moment, it exists and nonprofits need it. And so, ideally, I think philanthropy and solidarity should fight to put itself out of business — philanthropy as an institution — but how do we be constructive in this moment? That’s the effort that we make in that chapter. RG: Yeah. And I feel like there is philanthropy that can be challenging to power centers, and I think Astra’s organization is a good example of that. Obviously, selfishly, I would say that ours is as well. But I think one way that you can tell that that’s true is, there really are not rich donors beating down the doors to fund our work. AT: Tell me about it. RG: Exactly. One way you can tell what I think Leah’s giving is in that direction is, there aren’t a whole lot of people following you down that path. It’s not as if there’s hundreds of millions of dollars following you saying, let’s go after The Debt Collective, for instance. LH: Well, I have worked to build several networks of philanthropists. One is called Solidaire, another is called Way to Win. There is also Resource Generation and Movement Voter Project. And there is a growing ecosystem. Mike Gast is actually someone who is working on naming and clarifying this movement within wealthy communities that [are] trying to be in the service of progressive social movements. So, I think that there’s something there. I love to go back and read these debates in the First International and earlier on in socialist movements. Where they were like, is there a role for the bourgeoisie in the workers movements? And mostly people were, like, no. But it was a real debate. Rosa Luxemburg was involved in this debate. RG: Certainly Frederick Engels and Karl Marx are the one that people talk about all the time. Yeah. LH: Yeah. There often are class traitors involved in almost every successful social movement. So, I definitely don’t want to be heard as saying, like, open the doors to these wealthy bourgeois comrades, because I think there should be some skepticism. But can we build an ecosystem of people who want to participate? I think it’s work worth doing. RG: And what do you think, Astra? AT: We have to. I mean, movements take resources, and the right-wing knows this. I mean, there are just mind-boggling mountains of money being moved in the most mercenary directions, right? The thing they’re saying on the right now is, we want The Federalist Society for every institution in America, right? So, we can’t expect ordinary people who are overworked at their multiple jobs to be able to withstand this assault without resources. And I think the perspective that we’re trying to emphasize in this book in solidarity, though, is that these class traitors, what they recognize is that, actually, this is in their self-interest too, you know? Ultimately, none of us benefit from a burning planet, you know? We are all interconnected. It sounds touchy-feely, but it’s really the truth of living in a world where you know that your privilege doesn’t depend on other people’s desperation. That’s the case we’re making and we really believe it. We need more people to pony up for things that really challenge the status quo. It’s urgent. RG: Well, it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking book, and I really recommend it to people. It’s called “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.” Leah and Astra, thank you so much for joining me. AT: Thanks for having us. LH: Thank you. It’s great to be here. RG: That was Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor. Check out their new book, it’s called, “Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea.” And that’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of the Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed the episode. And our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. 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