Solidarity is the practice of standing with others who face domination — not because you feel sorry for them, not because helping them benefits you, but because you recognize that their struggle and yours are connected. It is the basic social relationship of anarchist politics: the commitment to act together against shared conditions of hierarchy, even when the specific hierarchy does not affect you directly.
Solidarity is not charity. Charity flows downward — from those who have to those who lack. The giver retains their position above the recipient. Solidarity is horizontal — it operates between equals who recognize a shared condition. When workers in one industry strike and workers in another industry refuse to cross their picket line, that is solidarity: different people in different situations recognizing that the authority of any employer over any worker is the same structure, and that weakening it anywhere weakens it everywhere.
This recognition — that forms of domination are connected — is why solidarity is central to anarchism rather than to liberal politics. Liberalism treats each injustice as a separate problem with a separate solution: labor rights, racial justice, gender equality, environmental protection — each gets its own reform movement, its own legislation, its own bureaucracy. Anarchism holds that these are all expressions of the same structure of domination and that resistance to any one of them requires solidarity with resistance to all of them. This is not just a moral claim but a strategic one: a movement that opposes economic exploitation but accepts racial hierarchy, or that opposes state power but accepts patriarchy, reproduces the structures it claims to fight.
Solidarity requires risk. It means acting in support of people whose situation is not yours, at potential cost to yourself. It means refusing to cooperate with authority even when cooperation would benefit you individually. It means treating an injury to one as an injury to all — not as a slogan but as an organizing principle. This is why solidarity is incompatible with obedience: the obedient person does what authority demands regardless of how it affects others; the person practicing solidarity does what the shared struggle requires regardless of what authority demands.
Related terms
- Mutual aid — the material practice solidarity produces
- Freedom — the condition solidarity works toward
- Domination — the shared condition solidarity responds to
- Class — one axis along which solidarity operates
- The general strike — solidarity as collective action
- Direct action — solidarity expressed without institutional mediation
- Obedience — the compliance solidarity refuses