The future of solidarity
The future of solidarity
By Peter Boyle
Federal and state governments are doing their best to abolish solidarity. It's against their law for workers for one capitalist to show their solidarity with workers of other capitalists by taking industrial action.
There are new "hot lines" to dob in single parents and the unemployed for breaching increasingly onerous social security regulations. There are public campaigns to dob in your neighbour for smoking marijuana.
Murdoch and Packer's media run a permanent campaign to make us afraid of and suspicious of each other. We are encouraged to eye strangers with suspicion, especially if they are black or Asian. If you believed their propaganda, you'd think Australia was being torn apart and ripped off by rampaging Aboriginal youth and armed Asian gangsters. Meanwhile, the systematic corporate rip-off of the great majority continues unabated.
The aim of the socialist movement is the replacement of capitalism with a classless society based on social solidarity and production for social need rather than private profit. Such a society is not only possible but necessary if we are going end global injustice and avert imminent ecological disaster.
But how could workers, individually so alienated from each other, divided by racism, sexism and national chauvinism, run society on the basis of solidarity? Wouldn't competition and greed get the better of us and destroy any attempt to build a socialist society?
The argument is that capitalism works best because it fits human nature. But capitalism has existed for only a few hundred years. It didn't "fit" human nature but changed it dramatically: avarice was a sin according to Christianity, Islam and most other religions. You can still see human nature being changed in Third World countries where belated industrial development is occurring.
But if human nature is shaped by capitalism, it also reflects its contradictions. As much as capitalism conditions us to accept dog-eat-dog values, to idealise the lust for individual profit, it also socialises us to work together — in order to create the wealth which capitalists appropriate as profit.
So our natures are twisted in two directions. We have to compete with each other for the right to work, but we also have to cooperate to get our jobs done and to survive. What can tip the balance in favour of solidarity is our experience of collective struggle against the capitalists. People who haven't experienced collective working-class action find it hard to imagine just what a powerful force for solidarity is released.
Raghu Krishnan, a journalist, captured this phenomenon in his graphic description of the special mood in France during the December 1995 public transport strike*:
"Paris was full of bikes, hitch-hikers, rollerbladers, people walking, people carpooling ... The city was taken by a new wave of new-found camaraderie and joviality. A pleasantly surprised janitor of African origin who had to hitch-hike from a distant Paris suburb to work in the city centre was quoted as saying, 'People are friendly in the streets; they respond kindly when I tell them the route I have to take. Since the beginning of the strike, I have not come across a single racist.'"
This is the same France where La Pen's racist National Front has been making gains.
Living in "normal" times is alienating and dispiriting. But times of struggle — and solidarity — keep recurring, because capitalists are driven to try to increase their exploitation of the majority. Solidarity will win out eventually, because struggles will continue until it does.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
*Raghu Krishnan's article can be read in Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, No. 7, available from Resistance Bookshops.