open Democracy News Analysis - Beyond abstract solidarity, James R Mensch - Comments

alfredo.bremont on "Beyond abstract solidarity"

alfredo.bremont — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:15:57 +0000

As civilisation is approaching another turn on its own foundation, humans on one end and culture on the other seem to have created a paradox and this liberal technological society that we happen to exist in today is set for a drastic change. Moreover the capitalist system must evolve into a more human, sane and cohesive one. Technology has the knack of dividing the language we happen to use and its interpretation and the danger of such a language is that it is becoming an Orwellian form of communication. Therefore when peace is war, to understand what solidarity is among individuals can become quite complicated, misunderstanding of the terms could quite easy become abstract and it is the political leaders such as Hitler in our past, but also most of the actual that have used this language manipulation. Our society is at the present time confuse, from the economical point of view to the moral values most folks do not really know were they stand what is out there neither they have the capability to approximately discern what is on their own minds. This Orwellian language comes as a handy tool to most politicians and media barons, they used this manipulative methods and the result is the confusion that we experience now. The sad part of the story is that these politicians do not understand neither care for their fellow men they are somehow marinate on their own egos and their own vision of themselves. The result will probably be a disintegration of western culture, and a global civil war that will follow. Never the less this will prevent the nasty ice age that in some respects could be even more damaging than what we can imagine. It is all on the table and it is easy to perceive but as I mentioned before, the nuclear atomic submarine is still under construction at the same time that the anti radiation bunker that will save you from disappearance, both items are made simultaneously and this fact is the proof of this paradoxical civilisation and its Orwellian language. Selling weapons to Saudi Arabia or nuclear plants to morocco on one hand and promoting peace on the other is incompatible with reality. A global disarmament looks a bit more human more civilise than just another thermonuclear device.

hermogen on "Beyond abstract solidarity"

hermogen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:31:41 +0000

For taking a critical stance towards abstractions I find it surprising that the article is written so abstractly. I find it perfect accord with the idealism of the young Hegelians - the author seems to imply that solidarity is to be achieved by a shift in thinking, as if different foundations of solidarity can be freely chosen. Marx and Engels commented critically on this kind of idealistic reasoning in the preface of The German ideology, comparing idealists to the man who thought that people are drowning merely because they believed in gravity and dedicated his life to fighting this wretched idea. It should be noted here that universal solidarity was the ideal Marx dedicated his life to, but he understood very well that this ideal can not be achieved merely by a shift in ideas, less even by acclamation of "natural system of checks and balances within the solidarity that is based on the past," - of the status quo in other words.

The more unsettling aspect of the article is the hostility towards "abstractions". In History and class consciousness, Lukacs argued that commodity fetishism (manifested as fragmentation of human forces - what is called structural differentiation) is causing the bourgeoisie to progressively lose intellectual grasp of social totality as they are progressively acquiring control of the details of their existence. This resonates with the critique of positivist thinking that Horkheimer and Adorno developed in Dialectics of enlightenment - in their view reason that set domination over nature (and other people, they add) as its goal has degenerated into its opposite: by moving away from all "abstractions" it was left only with the status quo, with nature, and subordination under nature (the objectified productive forces) was the final result. There simply can not be critical thinking without abstraction, without it there is only acclamation of the existing, of that which ever was and forever shall be.

The author is quite correct in critiquing what he calls "abstractions", but their fault is a different sort of abstraction. It is the same kind of abstraction that the author himself succumbs to: if the ideas he criticizes are abstractly transcendentalist, his are abstractly particularist. They are abstractions in the sense of those Marx criticizes in the Theses on Feuerbach as mere scholastic reasoning - reasoning that isolates subjectivity from praxis.

Two world wars should be testament enough that the prevailing modes of solidarity - the market, which provides a minimal solidarity based on shared interest in the continuance of the reproduction of material life and the nation state - are not working satisfactorily. As tribalistic, familistic, ethnic and class solidarities are being steadily eroded by them, the problem we are facing on our path towards universal solidarity is positivist thinking: states that seek legitimacy primarily in GDP growth, a scientific subsystem that is slowly but surely losing its power of abstraction and in that becoming a mere instrument of the economy. Emerging particularistic solidarities (nationalisms, tribalisms, etc.) are not what they seem at first glance. As a positivist world erodes them at one end, it opens up a window in which they can flourish, on the other. They are allowed to flourished because a positivist world is indifferent to them. It is indifferent proportionally to the inability of abstract thinking. It is therefore not particularistic solidarities we should be concerned about, neither is their mutual balancing - either a "natural" one as the author suggests or a more conscious one - a possible solution. The solution lies in a view on social totality, on capitalism and positivist reason (two sides of the same coin, one being a social form of domination, the other the subjective one), which the Frankfurt school attempted.

Beyond abstract solidarity, James R Mensch

James R Mensch — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:10:34 +0000

In our increasingly interdependent world, human solidarity has become a topic of general (and heated) discussion. It has been urged as an antidote to the competitive pressures of globalisation and to the threats of climate change. Others argue that the sense of belonging together, of sharing a common fate that it brings is essential for civil society. Without this, we will seek to avoid the burdens our governments impose on us, for example, taxes and the draft. This sense of belonging facilitates our talking to each other and forming a democratically based consensus on such matters. A common history, language, religion, or ethnic identity can ground this sense of belonging. So can a feeling of shared danger.

The difficulty is that this sense of belonging can be exclusionary. Those belonging to the "wrong" race, professing the "wrong" religion, or speaking the "wrong" language - for example, Flemish in Wallonia - will not belong. Neither will the immigrant, who does not share the nation's history.

James R Mensch is professor of philosophy at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

He is the author of Knowing and Being: A Postmodern Reversal (Penn State University Press, 1996). A collection of his writings, available online is here
Also by James Mensch in openDemocracy:
Violence and embodiment(12 Dec 2007)

This difficulty points to the basic contradiction that Hannah Arendt saw in the modern nation-state. "Nation" refers back to natus, that is, to "birth" and a collective racial identity. It, thus, includes a reference to nationalism and, hence, to tribalism with its exclusion of the other. "State," however, calls to mind the French état, with its sense of citizenship as defined by universal rights and obligations that hold regardless of the citizens' race, religion, or family history. How can these two combine? If solidarity is only a function of race or religion, then the very sense of belonging that a state needs to function seems to undermine its universal, legal character.

That sense of belonging also undermines the solidarity that is supposed to bind nations together. Such solidarity must, by definition, exceed the limitations of race, language, and religion. When we ask individual nation states to promote it, are we not requiring them to ignore an essential factor in their own social cohesion? As the referendums on the European constitution in France and the Netherlands showed, the result can be a denial of (international) solidarity for the sake of (national) solidarity.

Aside from this, there is the fact that solidarity depends on our identifying with one another. It therefore overlooks what sets us apart. Some, like Montesquieu, argue that a perfect solidarity would lead to a perfect universalism, one where I would not prefer to aid a friend over a stranger. It would lead to a world where the very notion of friendship would cease. Such solidarity, they contend, is that of the internationalism that abstracts from all the particularities of our private histories - language, race, religion, culture - in short, all those ways by which we recognise and seek out what is properly "our own".

No one wants to live in a world without friendship. Equally, however, we all want the modern state with its guarantees of legal and political equality. Given the fact of global climate change, a certain measure of international solidarity is also essential. Is the demand for it really in conflict with the solidarity that binds only by excluding, the solidarity based on race or religion?

Or might it be that the whole discussion of solidarity is too caught up by these abstractions?

One sign that this is the case is its abstract treatment of our temporality. Those who fear solidarity's exclusionary tendencies generally focus on the solidarities based on our past, that is, on our inherited situations of race, language, culture, and religion. Those who proclaim its benefits see solidarity in terms of our working with others to achieve common solutions to common problems such as global warming. Here the focus is on what we want to achieve politically, that is, on the future that we seek to collectively realise. Identity in this instance is not a matter of what the past gives us, but is rather provided by our working with others for a common goal.

This identity is political rather than natural. It is something we have to create. It requires, for example, the creation of a public space where the processes of debate and decision can take place. Such solidarity is not limited to the international level. Being a member of a state with its universal rights and political obligations, that is, being a citizen as opposed to a member of a racial or linguistic group is sufficient for this type of identity.

No one, of course, lives completely in the past or the future. Thus, our identities (and corresponding senses of solidarity) are never so neatly defined. Our collective actions are informed by the past. Without it, we have no experiential or moral basis for acting. But they are also determined by the future, that is, by the goals that we want to achieve. To reduce such actions to our inherited situations is to define ourselves in terms of race, religion and so on. It is to replace citizenship with tribalism. To reduce them to what we want to achieve, without any thought of the past that makes us a definite people, leaves us with an empty universalism - a world without friendship.

Concretely, of course, we are always negotiating between the two. For the nation state to function we don't just need the solidarities given by our collective past, we also need those given by our collective goals and the institutions for realising these. The solidarities created by heathcare and other social systems can often overwhelm all others. In my native Canada, this has reached a point that people have to be reminded that there was a Canada before there was a national healthcare system.

In times of economic crisis or military defeat such institutions can, of course, fail. The result is not just a crisis in their achieving the aims they were instituted for. It is also a crisis in the solidarity they create. Given that nations must have some form of solidarity to function, the temptation is always there to resort to the exclusionary forms of solidarity to make up the deficit. The breakup of Iraq into religious factions is only one example of this phenomenon. In every country, there are always extremists waiting to promote their racial and religious causes as focuses of identity. The question is whether they will receive a hearing. One thinks here of Hitler and his response to the crisis of the Weimar Republic. Hitler's substitution of the solidarities of race for those created by institutions and active citizenship is only an extreme form of an all too common phenomenon.

Also in openDemocracy:

Mark Vernon, The Politics of Friendship (5 December 2007)

Saskia Sassen, Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit; (18 July 2007)

The practical question is: how do we avoid this? How do we integrate the solidarity provided by our past without falling into such extremes? Once again, we have to beware of being caught up in abstractions. Only by being concrete can we be attentive to multiple solidarities we are actually engaged in. Our different situations of race, language, religion, and cultural preference involve us in differing networks of solidarity. These, unless artificially suppressed, provide a natural system of checks and balances within the solidarity that is based on the past (see, for example, Saskia Sassen's article The world's third spaces, 8 January 2008).

Such solidarity is itself balanced by that which looks to the future. Its basis are those goods that demand collective action if they are to be available at all. Some require this immediately. Television frequencies, for example, must be collectively regulated and assigned before we can use them. Some, like tuna fish, require a longer term vision. We have to realise that if their catch were not limited, the tuna stocks would vanish in a very few years. There are also goods that require an indefinite collective commitment. In the case of global warming, the requisite solidarity extends across the generations.

This solidarity has little to do with altruism. It is a matter of self-interest. The collective institutions that incorporate it, whether nationally or internationally, are based on the recognition of the special nature of these types of goods. Such recognition does, however, require that our self-interest be enlightened. More specifically, it requires a political class that recognises the nature of the goods involved and the collective agreements required to attain them. Ideally, it should be responsible for informing our public debate on such matters.

A further type of goods may be mentioned here - those that are increased by being shared. In teaching somebody something, we increase the knowledge of what we impart. The same holds when we give directions or advise others. In such cases, we do not stand on an equal footing with regard to some good. Solidarity, in this case, moves beyond self-interest to embrace empathy. Feeling the ignorance of the other, the teacher is motivated by a desire to alleviate it by sharing her knowledge. So does the person who gives directions. A related form of solidarity occurs when workers refuse to extend their hours in order to open up opportunities for the unemployed. Perhaps such solidarity should be called responsibility. It is, after all, a responding to the needs of others as revealed by our empathy.

The examples I have mentioned are hardly exhaustive. But they do point out the multiple aspects of our solidarity. It is, in fact, as multiple as our human reality is. Appeals to it will only succeed when we are attentive to this reality and, hence, to the scope and demands of the particular solidarity we are calling for.

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