Too often, we use the word “solidarity” interchangeably with “identification”—a word that indicates how we think or feel about something.
We can identify with the poor of Mexico, but that feeling doesn’t constitute solidarity. We can care deeply about the extermination of salmon, but that caring doesn’t constitute solidarity either. We can recognize that the systems of justice and corrections are weapons used for demographic, social, and political ends, but that recognition still isn’t solidarity.
Our enemy, the rulers of this concentration camp world, don’t care how we feel about the Zapatistas or salmon or prisoners. It doesn’t matter to our rulers how we feel about our rulers or their policies. You can wear any slogan you like on your T-shirt, however militant, just so long as you stay in your place in line and keep marching in lock-step, right into the gas chamber.
They don’t care about what you think or feel. They care about what you do.
They want you to work, shop, pay taxes, and obey the laws they write. Period.
To the enemy, your conduct counts. Your actions. How you think and feel are irrelevant to what you do, and what you do sustains the system of control, keeps it going, perpetuates the grinding machine into tomorrow and the next day and the next. What you do allows the system to project itself farther and farther. When you shop and work and go along with the program, you increase the chances of the next slave following behind you, continuing the same march into the gas chamber of our collective future.
Because our active participation in the system of control keeps the system going, independent of our greatest thoughts and feelings and theories, then, in this context, our solidarity can only be truly expressed by what we do. Can you claim solidarity with the Zapatistas while your purchases at the mall create the demand for more seizure of land and more profit, while you don’t google guerrilla warfare, while you don’t own an assault rifle or intend to learn how to use one? Can you claim solidarity with dying salmon while the 2 million dams in the U.S. remain standing, even though only 75,000 are taller than 6 feet and it only takes 4 pounds of explosives per square foot to bring them down? Can you claim solidarity with 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. gulags while the fences remain standing and prison officials have developed virtually no contingency plan for getting attacked form the outside?
Any realistic view of solidarity cannot ignore that our working, shopping, and compliance with the program benefits our enemy and places a duty on us to engage in action that benefits those with whom we claim to identify, with those we claim have our solidarity. Acting in benefit of the system but feeling empathy for the system’s victims is not solidarity, it’s self-delusion. It’s a desire to escape the reality of our complicity in the system’s crimes by “feeling” connected to the victims. But “feeling” connected doesn’t cut the mustard when as Vaclav Havel described it, our daily conduct “keeps the totalitarian machine rolling.”
True solidarity equates with action. It requires us to act, and act daily, so that the totality of our actions creates a net loss for the system. When we take into account our working and shopping and tax-paying, our resistance actions must add up in such a way that we make the system less manageable, less sustainable, and less operational.
Derrick Jensen has suggested knocking down dams with sledgehammers or loosening lugs on cell phone towers. I would also propose that fake bomb threats from throw-away phones to courthouses and banks and insurance holding companies would make a wondrous mess of things too. There’s always arson. The Smith Act makes it illegal for me to propose political kidnappings, assassinations, or acts of political violence directed at the U.S. government, so I cannot legally express support for such actions. However, if it wasn’t illegal to promote such actions, I would probably be enthusiastic about all of the above. And you should be too.
Frantz Fanon once said that for the colonized, liberation springs forth from the corpse of the colonizer. It still does. So if you’re in solidarity with the colonized, the vast colonized of the world that includes you and me, then you must be contributing to the body-count of the colonizer, both figuratively and literally. That requires action.
Solidarity doesn’t mean militant slogans on our T-shirts. It means living them out.
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This article may or may not have been written by Sean Swain, but because the federal government has stripped Swain of all constitutional protections on the grounds that his writings “promote anarchy and rebellion against authority,” his name cannot be associated with any published work for fear of fascist repression. Sean Swain, who may or may not have written this, is a political prisoner who supports the Occupy Movement, burning down banks and courthouses, and arming the homeless. In a free country, this footnote would not be necessary.