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Call to Worship:
Times are hard and getting harder. Few among us sitting here have been untouched by the economic collapse that has turned our safe, secure world upside down. If we have not lost our jobs, had our wages or hours slashed, lost the value of our homes and investments, we have loved ones who have and we live in gnawing dread that we are next. If soup lines do not stretch around the block and broken men in gray overcoats and battered fedoras do not shuffle forlornly by, it seems only a matter style and time until something very like those old grainy scenes are visited upon us again.
In other times and other circumstances Thomas Paine wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And Shakespeare lamented the “winter of our discontent.” They aptly describe our common condition today.
These times challenge our old assumptions about ourselves, our communities, and our place in the world. We no longer feel we are the captains of our own destiny. The gulf that divides our old identities as beneficent givers of alms to the less fortunate and the alien recipients of that charity has collapsed. Suddenly we are not us and them.
To survive—even to thrive—in such a time calls us to turn, quite unexpectedly, to a new way of being, and a new ethic. It is time for us to consider the unique working class virtue of solidarity.
Sermon—The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity
We have to start somewhere. This is a sermon on working class virtue of solidarity, so maybe the best place to start is by asking what solidarity really means. Like so many other things, it is easier to say what solidarity is not.
Solidarity is not sympathy. Sympathy is a passive emotion. It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress. But empathy is also passive. Solidarity demands action.
Solidarity is not charity. Charity implies a power and privilege differential. The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility. Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.
Solidarity is not altruism. Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like. Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to by right receive support as well as give it.
Solidarity is not family. Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation. Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other. Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.
Solidarity is not utopian. Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect. Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology. Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.
Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy. Warm and fuzzy denies oppression. Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others. And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.
Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.
The roots of solidarity are ancient. Most fundamentally they can be found in the variations of the Golden Rule that, famously, can be found among all of the great religious traditions
Let’s go back to that fellow Jesus, an itinerant preacher in a dusty and insignificant corner of the Roman Empire a long, long time ago. We only know of him maybe third hand. The oral stories of his life and teachings only got written down nearly a century after his death and reported resurrection. Depending on who was telling the tale, the message that he preached was either a narrow call for Jewish renewal and rebellion against Roman authority, or an expansive new message of hope for all humanity. Hundreds of years latter squabbling Bishops would pick just a few among many “gospels” and declare them authoritative. And since that time many interpretations of the words attributed to him in the approved stories have been offered—and often bloodily fought over. So it is hard to declare with certainty what he said or meant.
But if he really did say the things attributed to him in the Beatitudes and elsewhere, then to my ears, he was talking about something very like solidarity. He was arguing for a mutuality of respect and support. Elsewhere the story is told thus:
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’
Christians, who came to believe that Jesus—on whose life, teachings and behaviors they were supposed to model their own—were thus powerfully instructed in the rudimentary basis for solidarity.
But the question is, to whom did this concern apply? Jesus and his disciples considered themselves observant Jews. For them the poor and the sick were their own people, Jews like themselves. The prisoners were likely not just common criminals, but Jewish victims of the occupying Romans. And who was the stranger? The parable of the Good Samaritan taught that even despised aliens were capable of kindness and were thus worthy of respect. Yet the Samaritans were Semitic kinsmen who had lived cheek to jowl with Jews for centuries and whose religion was a variant from the same root stock. Jesus did not preach about the Good Roman, Greek, Egyptian or Babylonian whose people and cultures were seen as historic enemies and oppressors of the Jews.
When Paul and others transformed the Jewish sect that had grown up around the memory of Jesus and took it to the Greeks, Romans and other Gentiles, the pool of those who were included in the community of concern was greatly expanded. But after the defeat of the paleo-universalists of Egypt and the Levant who argued that Jesus’ sacrifice saved all humanity, the Church codified itself as the sole legitimate custodian of the Truth in the West, sharing authority with the waning temporal power of the Roman Empire.
Under this formula it was critical that only those who were “saved” i.e. members of the Church constituted the community to whom succor and support were due.
And now the very Jews from whom Jesus and his disciples sprang, were branded, by virtue of their status as “Christ killers,” the ultimate outsiders unworthy of aid or support and deserving of suppression and persecution.
After the collapse of the Empire when the Church was consolidating itself as the only unifying power in the West, it adopted for itself the duty of providing charity and alms to the poor and sufferings—as long as they were loyal to the church. They ruthlessly suppressed all other agencies of support save the occasional direct gift of a noble to a vassal or serf. Private agencies for mutual aid were crushed, their adherents often fell victim to the Inquisition. Thus the simple teachings of Jesus were subjugated to the political needs of the church.
It took the worst natural catastrophe in Western history to change things. The Black Death swept Europe in successive waves over nearly two hundred years. By some accounts it depopulated the continent by as much as two thirds. And the Church, for all of its power was helpless against it. But the sudden loss of population empowered the survivors in startling ways. Those with skills—masons, weavers, smiths of all sorts, coopers, wainwrights and others—suddenly found themselves unteathered from traditional relationships and free to travel anywhere they found their skills in demand. They set up guilds to protect their craft secrets, but also for mutual aid and to protect them from the demands of the Church and of the crumbling feudal civil authority. Membership in the guilds created new wealth and a new locus of power. And in turn the guilds encouraged the establishment of city and town governments to protect their interests from the land based aristocracy. The growing independence of the city states and the growth of a burger class challenged the Church as the sole dispenser of charity and thus de-legitimized its endless accumulation of wealth, fueled by the corrupt sale indulgences and participation in Feudal land holding. Thus Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
Of course the invention of the movable type printing press in the middle of all of this changed things, too. With a printed Bible available relatively cheaply and an expanded class of literates, the Roman Church lost its authority as the sole interpreter of scripture.
Increasingly reformers including John Calvin in Geneva and John Knox is Scotland maintained that scripture itself, not the Church was the authority. But that meant that each reader must interpret for him or herself the meaning and intent of scripture. That led to no end of doctrinal squabbling—and not a little bloodshed. But it elevated the Individual.
The Enlightenment took the ideas of late Renaissance Humanists like Erasmus, and enthroned reason and the individual side by side as the highest authorities. Our own founders were the direct inheritors of the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish variant. Thus Jefferson’s great declaration speaks of “inalienable rights” and cavalierly calls for the “severance of the bonds” that had tied the colonies from the previously undisputed legitimacy of the English Throne on the basis of those rights.
And philosophers like Adam Smith would find in the rise of Protestantism and in the Age of the Enlightenment a justification for a whole new economic system which would become known as Capitalism and would be described in the Twentieth Century as the product of the “Protestant work ethic.”
On the whole this new individualism and the vigorous emerging capitalism that accompanied it, had little room for the old charity of the Church or any tolerance for emerging alternatives. Indeed the poor were seen as shiftless and sinful, poor because they did not possess the strength of character to succeed. Strict Calvinists sometimes held that wealth was a sign of God’s approbation and that the wealthy might be wealthy because they were among the tiny fraction humanity, the Elect of God, who were destined since the dawn of creation to be saved. Thus the poor were not only immoral, they were damned by birthright.
There were some countervailing tendencies. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan “Commonweal” implied an obligation to each other among its members. The Pilgrims in their “Mayflower Compact” and the Puritans with their church covenants recognized mutuality—but only among the subscribers and members of the group. No responsibility to “strangers” was recognized.
Half of our tradition, the Unitiarians, have their roots among those New England Protestants and, to a lesser degree, among the national Founders, who were often Deists in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the erstwhile Unitarian minister and Transcendental philosopher, took individualism to new heights in his most famous essay, significantly titled “Self Reliance.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique,” he opined. Every man/woman could build his character by dint of appreciation of his or place in the cosmos as received directly in moments of Transcendent experience, and application of steely resolve. But he believed that, while all humans possess the potential for self-realization, in practice only those who belonged to a class allowing for the leisure to ready, study and speculate could effectively could actually achieve true self reliance. Thus the great unwashed legions of the laboring classes and the poor were at best children who should rely on enlightened to look after their interests.
Emerson, like his Unitarian contemporizes, was a social reformer. He shrewdly observed, “Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.” He advocated many reform movements, including abolition and contributed to the private charities that were springing up around America, the “voluntary associations” that Alexis de Tocville in Democracy in America identified as the critical counter weight to heedless individualism in a democracy.
When the early Unitarians responded to the rapid growth of the urban poor in Boston, they created the Beneficial Fraternity, commonly know as Benfrat. This was one of the first forerunners of what became the settlement house movement. It offered direct relief to the poor, but also tutored children and adults alike. It even operated chapels that were widely attended among the poor. But the Unitarians never allowed these chapels to become self governing congregations. Ministers were appointed to them and worshipers given no role in either running the affairs of the chapel or in supporting it. Nor were the ragged worshipers welcomed into the many existing congregations in Boston. It never occurred to the generous hearts of the benefactors that the poor might be capable of managing their own affairs—or their own spiritual development.
On our Universalist side things were somewhat better. After all if a loving God will eventually gather all souls to his bosom, then his grateful children on earth should be willing to do the same. They participated in—and often led—the same social reform movements and some of the same charities as the Unitarians. But they welcomed the poor and the wretched into their congregations as equals, encouraged them to found and maintain their own congregations, Famously although abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates can be found in both camps, the Universalists often even embraced blacks and women as leaders, not just as passive recipients.
Meanwhile working people were developing their own institutions. Most early unions had two sources. The first was basically an extension of the old guild system. It strictly followed craft lines. But when master craftsmen morphed into capitalists employing journeymen and bound apprentices the employees and bondsmen often united against them. This was the model of British craft unionism, and, to a lesser extent, the American craft unions that eventually evolved into the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The word solidarity began to crop up. But it was solidarity within the craft. Workers of one craft felt no compulsion to support workers of another, even when they might be employed on the same job or in the same industry
The other source was the beneficial societies, brotherhoods and lodges that were created often in support of “the widows and orphans of the brothers and the lame and aged in their need.” Some of these societies were ethnic like the Loyal Order of Hibernians among the Irish. Others were organized within an industry or across a community. They often aped the popular Masonic lodges with mysteries, rituals, and secret wisdom of their own. But if workers gathered for mutual support, it was no stretch for them to come together under the auspices—official or unofficial—of these lodges and brotherhoods to confront their employees to address grievances, demand reductions of hours and boosts in pay.
In the dangerous Pennsylvania coal fields, where any dissent was ruthlessly suppressed by employers, Irish miners came together in the Hibernian lodges to create the super secret Molly MaGuires who terrorized their bosses with blasting powder and assault until they were finally penetrated and broken up by an Irish Pinkerton detective.
The first truly national American labor union, the Knights of Labor, was just such a fraternal organization complete with its own mysteries and ritual. But its lodges admitted workers of all industries, skilled and unskilled alike, immigrant and native, and sometimes even including non whites. Its leaders, including Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly, abhorred strikes and sought to prevent them. But the members thought otherwise and freely exercised the option. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, while not called by the Knights was spread and supported by its lodges.
It was in the Knights, and in the anarchism, socialism and other working class movements developing in Europe, that the modern concept of solidarity was honed and developed.
The Russian Anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin laid out the basic principles in his classic book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. For the first time he argued that commonality of interest and mutual support was a positive trait in evolution both among animals and among humans. Mutual aid countervailed against “the law of fang and claw,” and the Spenserian corruption of Darwin’s theory into the ruthless “survival of the fittest” then used to excuse exploitation of the working and poor classes.
Karl Marx applied the same idea and based his hope for liberation of the masses on the basis of solidarity of the working class across all artificial divisions.
Internationals—global associations of working class union and political organizations—began to promote solidarity across borders as a way to end wars. Workers, they argued, should not be “recruited to shoot holes in each other just because they wear different uniforms.
Of course the dream of international solidarity to end war was shattered by the First World War when the labor unions of Europe and the extensive Socialist Parties by in large failed to rise up against the war and sometimes enthusiastically enlisted in patriotic support of their various Fatherlands.
In the aftermath of the dreadful carnage of that war, the dream revived. But now it was identified with the new Bolshevik regime in Russia. Communism became the international bugbear of the ruling elites across the globe. And although the apparent success of the Revolution in Russia appealed to many workers, the eventual realities of Stalinism dimmed their enthusiasm.
Capitalists everywhere furiously attracted every demonstration of working class solidarity as part of the “Red menace.” In this country it let loose the worst repression in our history, the Red Scare of 1918-20, during which thousands were deported, labor unions and socialist organizations suppressed, and hundreds jailed—including the entire leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and the man who had attracted three million votes for President of the United States in 1912, Socialist Eugene V. Debs.
In Europe it was even worse. Fear of Communisms was the door through which the Fascists and Nazis swept to power unleashing their own forms of “White terror.”
Debs may have been the most articulate advocate of solidarity. He said:
“We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; 'Am I my brother's keeper?'…Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.”
Since that time we have gone through much, including the Great Depression, war on an unspeakable global scale, unprecedented prosperity, a civil rights revolution, the women’s movement, more war, and now economic emergency again. All during those years the advancements that have changed world for the good have come through the exercise of solidarity. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, all recognized its power. Their victories would have been impossible without it.
Conversely, the ills we have suffered have occurred when solidarity failed, when we allowed ourselves to be divided against each other by race, religion, language, age, or sex. Certainly the beneficiaries of inequality recognize the value of solidarity—and practice it among themselves.
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked with exasperation, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”
Now, to survive and thrive we must turn away from unmitigated individualism without losing respect for the individual. We must observe true solidarity in our community, nation and the world or we are all doomed to an ugly future.
Maybe Holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel said it best:
“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”
--Patrick Murin
