With the administration announcing attacks against every marginalized group and saying they will criminalize protesting and journalism, let’s talk about solidarity.

Solidarity is unity of action by individuals or groups with common interests. Solidarity is expressing and providing support for groups with similar or overlapping struggles.

Right-wingers are good at presenting a unified front. Christians and nazis and technocrats and transphobes will all jump in bed with each other (politically, at least) as long as they achieve their personal goals. Meanwhile, leftists are fighting with people they largely agree with.

Whatever your goal is - minimizing harm, fighting oppression, pushing back authoritarianism, taking power back from the rich, preserving democracy (as you have known it), or a revolution - we won’t get it divided and squabbling amongst ourselves.

Solidarity does not mean total agreement. It means we support each other in a particular struggle.

Solidarity means working to protect communities that may not yet fully support each other. You are not selling out trans rights by standing up for another marginalized group whose position on trans rights is evolving. You are helping two communities and hopefully providing a bridge between.

Solidarity means posting in support of a group that has been your ally, even if you don’t care about an issue.

Solidarity means not picking a fight with allies when you disagree with them on an issue or organizing tactic.

Solidarity means community work to directly support the people you talk about helping.

Solidarity was popularized in early union struggles when unrelated unions would indicate support, threaten action, or strike in support of other unions. We need that sort of strength in the upcoming years.

Just to be clear, I am not saying we should work with, say, abusers or transphobes. I am saying that progressives, socialists, and anarchists should get back to working together more of the time, and more importantly, expressing support and avoiding unnecessary conflict the rest of the time.

We need to be aware that our adversaries try to divide us, and they are clever about it. Lookup the history of COINTELPRO and the carnage that it did to the civil rights movement. In this era, the manipulation can include targeted social media posts to create intergroup tensions and having informants create conflicts between groups.

I’ve spent a couple years arguing against the increasing infighting and infiltration of activist spaces by reactionaries, and I’ve been saying, “the time will come that you need to work across the bridges you are burning”. That time is here. It’s go time.

We either come out of this era with an effective movement for the working class and oppressed people, or we come out of it with the far-right gaining more dominance domestically and internationally. The Democrats won’t save us with their centrist sycophant-for-the-rich policies and gutless responses to right-wing aggression; the only way they may be of use is if we force them to be more aggressive and committed to fight oppression.

Mass organizing can save us and build a better future. Mass organizing requires hard work and what? Solidarity.

PS - it’s a good time to review the St. Paul Principles and why they are important.