Solidarity

The definition treats a word that usually names mutual support as naming a demand, and every part of it is doing work. It is a demand rather than a practice, addressed to reflectors rather than to everyone, and what is demanded is that endoreality be upheld unquestioningly, which makes questioning the offence. The parenthesis identifying reflectors as the Commoners places the demand at state level or above, and the note that it is usually revolutionary accounts for when it is heard most, since a movement needs uniform opinion at exactly the moment it is trying to replace an endo-ideal. Marsh's account of what solidarity is used to prevent is the substance of the objection. Anyone refusing an endo-identity while the circle is being cast wide is vilified as considering themselves exceptional or as lacking solidarity, so the word functions as the enforcement mechanism for endo-identity rather than as a description of cooperation. Her example about the workers' movement shows the incompatibility this produces. The workers' struggle was against corporate endo-idealism while the women's liberation movement struggled against male endo-idealism, and in accordance with the law of the last circle many in the workers' movement wanted to fall back to the caregiver circle, the same circle women wanted liberation from, so solidarity between them was not possible. Her positive term for what solidarity is usually taken to mean is the solidarity network, which requires no shared identity and no agreement.

Solidarity is a foundational term in labour and socialist traditions, in Catholic social teaching and in Durkheim's sociology, where mechanical and organic solidarity describe two bases of cohesion. Richard Rorty treated it as an achievement of imagination rather than a discovery of shared essence. Criticism of solidarity as suppressing internal dissent is well developed within movement scholarship and in intersectional critiques of single-axis organizing, which is Marsh's point arrived at from inside the tradition. Her definition is more absolute, since making the demand for unquestioning agreement definitional leaves no benign sense of the word available and requires a separate term for what remains.