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Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer based in the United States. She is best known for her documentaries, including What is Democracy?, Examined Life, and The People's Platform. Taylor is a contributing writer for The Nation, and her book, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, was published in 2014. In addition to advocating progressive causes, Taylor participates in various political and social movements and has been a prominent voice in the fight for workers' rights and promoting democratic values.

In this candid conversation with philosopher Srećko Horvat, Taylor discusses how solidarity has evolved, arguing that it is a relationship founded on collective indebtedness, shared responsibility, shared risk, mutual aid and interdependence. She also points out that it is essential for the left today to build power in a way that acknowledges differences and turns them into a strength. 

Srećko: You have written a lot about solidarity. How has that concept evolved? How do people get it wrong today? What should we understand when we say in the Progressive International, "make solidarity more than a slogan"?

Astra: For the last couple of years, in addition to my organizing work with the Debt Collective, I have been writing a book about solidarity with my brilliant organizer friend Leah Hunt-Hendrix, who wrote a dissertation on the topic. 

There are many books on freedom, equality, justice, and democracy (including one by me). Why does solidarity get silent treatment? I suspect that this dearth of discussion stems, in part, from the fact that solidarity is not just an idea; it’s an ethos. As your question gets at, solidarity must be more than a slogan—by definition. Solidarity is a practice as much as a principle, and as such, it doesn’t lend itself to pure theoretical abstraction. It’s inherently invested, particular, and can be messy. All traits that maybe make it less enticing to purely philosophers or academics. To write about solidarity with any credibility, I think you need to have experience organizing and participating in social movements —a PhD alone won’t cut it.

Of course, solidarity is a beloved word on the left, which makes the fact it is under-theorized all the more striking. Consider Marx, who very much engaged ideas to change the world. But Marx never took the time to analyse solidarity in-depth, perhaps because he assumed it would appear spontaneously as a consequence of deeper economic forces and capitalism’s tendency to, he claimed, produce its own gravediggers.  And Marx didn’t fully appreciate the ability of capitalists to use strategies of divide and conquer to sabotage solidarity and, as is often the case, to criminalize it.

Unfortunately, solidarity rarely emerges spontaneously—and when it does, it is too often fleeting. Solidarity has to be cultivated. This is something anyone with a background in organizing knows all too well. Solidarity takes work. You have to overcome social divisions to create connections. So that’s the answer. You make solidarity more than a slogan by doing the work of organizing, and organizing is hard. 

Instead of the kind of solidarity that comes from deep organizing, our culture is awash in semblances of solidarity that, even when well-intentioned or laudable, fall short of the real thing. Allyship, altruism, charity, empathy, unity—all of these are insufficient. None can substitute for solidarity. What differentiates solidarity from these terms is the fact it has a material dimension. It’s not just a mood or feeling or an affect. It is not a disingenuous statement of support, like Amazon.com’s homepage prominently featuring the claim they “stand in solidarity” with BLM (Black Lives Matter) in 2020.

This material dimension is part of the term’s etymology. Before solidarity emerged as a modern political concept during the Industrial Revolution, it was in the legal books of the Roman Empire. It is a concept with ancient roots. When people held a debt in common, they were said to hold it in solidum. In other words, the state of being on the hook as a group was the basis of solidarity. If one individual faltered, the group had to step up—meaning that its members would be either bailing one another out or defaulting together. 

Thus, solidarity had an economic component that raised the stakes from its genesis. In this original formulation, solidarity is a relationship underpinned by collective indebtedness and obligation, shared responsibility and shared risk, mutual aid and interdependence. 

The last thing I’ll say is that part of what draws me to solidarity is that the word simultaneously describes the ways in which we are bound together (sociologists speak of group solidarity or social solidarity) and how we can act, in concert, to change our circumstances (what Leah and I call “transformative solidarity”). Solidarity doesn’t entail sameness—rather, it reaches across differences and does so without erasing them. You can be in solidarity with people who are not like you. It is about social connection and strategic alliances. That seems essential for the left today—building power in a way that acknowledges variation and, ideally, turns it into a strength.

Srećko: We are entering a new global debt crisis. Why is it so hard to build a global debt movement? Is it as simple as a "collective action problem", or is there something more fundamental we are missing?

Astra: Personally, much of my politicization—not only in regard to my work on debt but much more broadly—stemmed from my exposure to the debt jubilee movements of the later 1990s and early 2000s. The campaigns for sovereign debt cancellation during that period profoundly shaped the lens through which I understand finance, accumulation, democracy, public provision, structural racism, and internationalism to this day. Those movements were, without a doubt, a direct inspiration for my work with the Debt Collective. 

The global debt crisis is not just “out there.” The scale of global capitalism means that debt affects individuals, households, municipalities, states, and countries. Our wager at the Debt Collective is that we can follow the chains of debt, lending and borrowing to help us to see how debt binds us to people we do not know, from those who live on the other side of our town to those who live on the other side of the world. Just like the insistence by the US ruling class that the national debt means we can’t afford universal health care or safe schools and functional public transit, international oligarchs maintain that sovereign debts must be paid on the backs of workers, students, and pensioners. 

Before we can mobilize people for collective action, we need to help people see their financial connections—connections that are purposefully obscured and hidden. And at the Debt Collective, we believe these connections can help us figure out appropriate strategies. People who can appear very distant and different, in fact, often share common creditors—and given the concentration of the financial sector, these same creditors often exert power over us in terms of our personal debts and the sovereign debts that countries owe. That said, I’m not surprised this work is hard because, again, organizing is always hard. But I think helping people see that the global debt crisis is reflected in and connected to their personal indebtedness could be very helpful.

Srećko: A unique problem in the United States is its student debt; over 43 million people have student loans to pay off. As a co-founder of the Debt Collective, which is tirelessly working on this issue and fighting for student debt cancellation, what needs to happen for this to become a reality?  

Astra: After nearly a decade of intensive organizing, the Debt Collective and its growing coalition of allies successfully pushed the president of the United States to cancel a significant amount of student loans—ten to twenty thousand dollars— for tens of millions of people. Over twenty million people could potentially have their student debt wiped out. 

Right now, the relief is tied up in legal challenges. The problem stems from the fact that, instead of simply wiping the debt away immediately, which was absolutely an option, the Democrats took the neoliberal path of making borrowers apply for it. That slowed things down and bought Republicans and their billionaire backers time to sue in multiple districts, line up their cases with sympathetic judges, and stall the program. Now the issue has escalated to the Supreme Court, the most conservative court of all, and we expect the worst. Fortunately, the White House has alternative legal authorities they can use to follow through on the promise to deliver cancellation. We’ll be protesting in Washington DC on February 28, the day the Supreme Court hears arguments, and we will be demanding just that.

When we raised the demand for debt cancellation a decade ago at Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the media scoffed, politicians scoffed, and regular people scoffed. It seemed pie in the sky. But we kept at it and developed a range of tactics to put the issue on the political agenda—including debt strikes, which hadn’t ever been done before. We mixed the aggressive debt strike tactics with public education, creative legal interventions, and policy work. For years, we have argued that the president of the United States has the executive authority to cancel student debt without going through Congress. The Biden administration essentially lied and denied this was the case until we finally wore them down. 

I don’t have the space to lay out the ten-year organizing strategy that got us to this victory, but I will say that I think we can accomplish even more moving forward. The key is continuing to build debtor power. People now know that debts can be canceled, not only for big banks or the wealthy. Working people can get relief, too. This is transformative. Of course, there are lots of problems with the student debt cancellation plan Biden announced—he should have canceled all student debt, not just some of it. But Joe Biden has been a long-time ally of the banking industry and did not want to cancel a penny of student debt. He was forced to by relentless grassroots pressure. That’s the real takeaway—organizing works.

Srećko: You’ve mentioned OWS. What should these new protest movements learn—or avoid—from OWS? 

Astra: To reiterate my comment above: solidarity can occasionally emerge spontaneously, but when it does, it is often fleeting. We need to build institutions that can sustain, deepen, expand, and even institutionalize solidarity—and to do that, we need to connect it to a materialist strategy. 

Protest and rebellion have their place, but we must also build and govern. OWS was an amazing spark, but the challenge was sustaining and challenging the energy it unleashed. OWS had a real phobia or skepticism about the prospect of building institutions and wielding power, which was the dominant view of the left at the time. Fortunately, that attitude has dissipated. Today, people on the left are unabashed about wanting to build working class counter-power and transform the state. They are looking for opportunities to actively challenge entrenched interests, whether by engaging in electoral politics, joining a labor union, or participating in campaigns of economic disobedience against lenders and landlords. 

That said, even if I never fully bought OWS’s guiding political attitudes and assumptions, I am enormously grateful to the movement. OWS wasn’t perfect, for myriad reasons—but it was hugely transformative. At the time, some leftists, especially Marxists, quibbled with the phrase “99%,” and I completely got the conceptual problems. But in practice, the phrase was brilliant. It was so capacious that many people who had never protested felt like they could participate, and they did. And the OWS encampments—their temporality and physicality, the fact that people hung around in one place for months on end—had incredible power. They were more like schools than protests. Instead of marching and shouting, we sat and talked. And that enabled people to find each other and connect, including many of us who would eventually go on to found the Debt Collective. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, OWS was pivotal, helping precipitate the progressive and socialist resurgence that has changed US politics for the better, even if we have an incredibly long way to go and very little time to get there. And so my takeaway is this: We must try our best to build functional organizations that can seriously challenge the status quo over the long haul, but we should never underestimate or write off the unpredictable magic of a short-lived, surprising, messy mass uprising.  

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