Philosophy
Solidarity is not just about speaking up. It is about knowing when support becomes appropriation, and whether the vulnerable are being heard or merely represented by someone more powerful.
Solidarity without Innocence
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks, in her famous and persistently misread essay, whether the subaltern can speak. The question is not whether marginalised people have voices; of course, they do. The question is whether, under conditions of structural inequality, those voices are heard as speaking. Whether they enter the frame as speech, as argument, as knowledge, or whether they are filtered, translated, managed, and ultimately replaced by the voices of those who claim to speak for them. This is the problem that solidarity must face. The instinct to stand with exposed populations is a good one. But solidarity that does not reckon with its own position, who is doing the standing, from where, at what cost to themselves can slip, without noticing, into something else: the speaking-over that masquerades as speaking-for, the appropriation of someone else’s vulnerability to confirm one’s own politics, the solidarity that centres the solidarian rather than the struggle. Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism is often cited and often misunderstood. She proposed it as a provisional, self-aware political tool: the idea that groups whose identities have been fragmented by structures of power might temporarily act as if those identities were unified and coherent, in order to make effective political claims, yet remaining internally aware that the unity is a strategy, not a fact. The keyword is strategic. And the key audience for the critique is not the communities using the strategy; it is those who project essentialism onto them, who require them to speak with one voice, to be a certain kind of victim, legible and grateful.
So what does this mean for solidarity in practice? It means that to act in solidarity with Gaza, with Manipur, with Dalit communities, with any population whose vulnerability has been manufactured and managed is not simply to declare support. It is to ask, seriously and repeatedly: what is being asked of us? Not what do we want to offer, but what does the struggle require? It is to resist the temptation to make someone else’s precarity into our political education, our moral biography, our opportunity for growth. Butler, in her more recent work, has written about the importance of ‘coalition’, a different word from solidarity, though related. Coalition is the recognition that precarity, wherever it is manufactured, is manufactured by the same kind of logic. To stand with one exposed population is not to rank suffering or to claim equivalence of experience; it is to recognise the structural kinship between different instances of the same mechanism. The person working against violence in Manipur and the person working against the denial of grievability in Gaza are not working on unrelated projects. They are naming different expressions of the same political logic: that some lives are made to bear the weight of the system’s requirements for an exposed category. This is what solidarity can be, at its best: not the sheltered reaching down to the exposed, but people on different points of the same continuum of precarity recognising their relationship to each other and recognising, too, that the structure which exposes some fully exposes all partially, and that none of us is as sheltered as we think.
Ambedkar’s vision of a just society was not a society in which Dalits were included in the existing hierarchy; it was a society in which the hierarchy no longer existed. That vision requires a form of solidarity that is willing to give something up: the comfort of one’s own position in the graded order. Real solidarity that is not innocent, not self-serving, not premised on the maintenance of existing structures with slightly improved access. It asks those who are less exposed to examine what they gain from the exposure of others, and to be willing to answer honestly.