All around the world voters feeling a sense of precarity have chosen to elect leaders such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. People’s faith in the future and sense of security are so under threat that in many places around the world, there are epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. California, one of the richest places on the planet with a two-thirds Democratic majority, has not figured out how to build a livable state. The global rise of right-wing nationalism is the symptom of a disease, rather than its cause.
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us. At this crucial moment we need to choose between a world based on reactionary nationalist sentiments and political power plays by the fossil fuel industry and other reactionary forms of capital, or we can figure out how to fairly share the resources we have and learn to live together in healthy relationships with nature. It is time to build a world based on relations of solidarity.
The Deep Roots of the Current Crisis
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function.
Since its beginning capitalism has been challenged by those it has harmed: from slave revolts and anticolonial rebellions all around the world, to the Levelers and Diggers in capitalism’s original home of England, who opposed the privatization of land. And from capitalism’s beginning there have also been those who fought to get a greater share of the spoils of the system for working people. Unions have fought for better working conditions and wages from employers. Reformers have fought for the state to operate in ways that shifted the balance of power toward the interests of people and the environment.
In many European nations, accords between capital and labor were reached early in the 20th century as the result of strong labor movements. Those accords led to social democratic forms of capitalism, where living standards were kept high, and social safety nets were created, as states managed to regulate businesses while also allowing them to flourish and remain politically powerful. As inequality has increased and governments have been decreasingly able to deliver satisfying lives under these accords, many European nations have seen support for mainstream parties decline and support for right-wing nationalist parties rise.
If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
In the U.S., after the immiseration and social turmoil of the Great Depression, a similar accord was reached between capital and labor, where businesses were regulated by the state, living standards were somewhat protected, and wages rose. This accord lasted until it was challenged by former President Ronald Reagan, whose began his administration in 1980 by firing striking air traffic controllers. Since that time, the U.S. has seen a steady erosion of protections for workers, regulations to protect the environment, and living standards. The Depression-era accord was broken, and the U.S. has seen a steady decline in living standards ever since.
One could imagine a situation in which a new accord was established, and a detente could be reached again between the working class and capital. As the world falls further into chaos and people’s lives become more precarious, the old accords that were established between capital and labor are no longer holding. While it is possible that rational capitalists who want a stabilized system will come to the rescue and create a new accord, that outcome is highly unlikely, for several reasons.
One reason it is unlikely is the climate crisis. Clean energy is being installed at a rapid rate, and it is transforming lives in much of the Global South. Speeding the transition in ways necessary for our survival will require more regulations on polluting industries, and more government investments in infrastructure. And yet, the fossil fuel oligarchs continue to fight those changes tooth and nail, as seen in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The fossil fuel oligarchy holds dominant power is the U.S., Russia, the Gulf States, and many powerful transnational institutions. It is not going to peacefully wander into the sunset as the transition away from fossil fuels undermines its power and profits. The fact that the survival interests of a livable planet are in direct conflict with the interests of that politically powerful sector make it difficult for other sectors of capital to come to a new accord to stabilize the system.
Another factor making a new accord unlikely is the political power of the technology oligarchs whose social media products are responsible for much of the current chaos in the world’s information ecosystems. Those oligarchs and their firms are fighting globally to maintain their ability to operate as monopolies, and are preventing more benign forms of social media from developing. They continue to refuse to limit the spread of forms of misinformation that led to massacres in many places including Myanmar. They allow Russian bots and other malign entities to spread disinformation in ways that help us get outcomes like the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Those tech oligarchs are increasingly flexing their political power. A new accord between capital and human society would require strong action to reign in those destructive forces.
A third factor making a new accord difficult is that in earlier periods, businesses functioned largely by making things that met people’s needs. Consumers got the products they desired, and in many parts of the world, living standards rose. In the past decades, capitalism has entered a vampiric phase, where finance capital extracts profits while doing less to create things that meet people’s needs and desires. This has led to the rich getting richer without creating rising living standards as a by-product, as in happened in earlier phases of capitalism.
As inequality increases all around the world, a variety of social ills follow in its wake, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. These range from obvious ones such as increased crime rates, to less obvious ones such as teen pregnancy, and a tendency for social cohesion to fall apart. Lack of social cohesion can then lead voters to put authoritarian leaders into power who promise to give them a sense of stability as their worlds fall apart.
Solidarity
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
The term solidarity is a call to unite across differences to advocate for a common set of interests. It often means standing up for the needs of others, not in the form of charity, but in the form of building social relations that work for others, or stopping destructive forces such as wars, or social practices that lead to poverty, in the name of building a world based on healthy forms of interdependency.
The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world.
In every part of the world there are examples of people managing resources in ways that build solidarity. They are creating community gardens, community land trusts, time banks, and credit unions. They are finding ways to support and promote sharing, gift giving, and caring for one another. They are building networks of socially oriented enterprises. They are developing models to spread. They are working to transform the context in which these enterprises take place to foster their growth and increase their impacts.
Moving to a world based on principles of solidarity involves building that new world from within the belly of the old. We need to challenge the dominant structures that uphold the old order, while simultaneously building and living in viable alternatives, and rethinking how we understand the nature of our shared social world. We need to fight, build, and rethink.
The accords established to stabilize many countries early in the 20th century were the results of tremendous work by people organizing in trade unions and broad-based social movements. Unfortunately, the current crisis comes at a time when trade unions are not as strong as they have been in some periods in the past. And yet union power is developing as are a wide range of oppositional social movements. The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world. As we do all we can to stop the current onslaught against a livable world, we should also keep in mind our broader vision of a world that works for all of us, including the natural systems on which our lives depend.
