Solidarity was a libertarian socialist organisation and magazine of the same name in the United Kingdom. Solidarity was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical anti-Lenininsm.
Solidarity was founded in 1960 after half-a-dozen members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League walked out in disgust. It was initially known as Socialism Reaffirmed. This group published a journal, Agitator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity, from which the organisation took its new name. Almost from the start it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced.
The group was never large, but its magazine and pamphlets were widely read, and group members played a major part in several crucial industrial disputes and campaigns from the early-1960s peace movement to the Polish Solidarity Campaign of the early 1980s.
Solidarity existed as a nationwide organisation with groups in London and many other cities until 1981, when it imploded after a series of political disputes. Solidarity the magazine continued to be published by the London group until 1992; other former Solidarity members were behind Wildcat in Manchester and Here and Now magazine in Glasgow.
The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis, whose pamphlets (written under the name Maurice Brinton) included The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-21 and The Irrational in Politics. Other key members included Andy Anderson (author of Hungary 1956), Ken Weller (who wrote several pamphlets on industrial struggles and oversaw the group's Motor Bulletins on the car industry), John Quail (author of The Slow-Burning Fuse), John King (The Political Economy of Marx, A History of Marxian Economics) and Liz Willis (Women in the Spanish Revolution).
What made Solidarity different
- During the past century the living standards of working people have improved. But neither these improved living standards, nor the nationalisation of the means of production, nor the coming to power of parties claiming to represent the working class have basically altered the status of the worker as worker, Nor have they given the bulk of mankind much freedom outside of production. East and West, capitalism remains an inhuman type of society where the vast majority are bossed at work and manipulated in consumption and leisure. Propaganda and policemen, prisons and schools, traditional values and traditional morality all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to convince or coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal, degrading and irrational system. The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ‘Free’ world is not free.
- A socialist society can therefore only be built from below. Decisions concerning production and work will be taken by workers' councils composed of elected and revocable delegates. Decisions in other areas will be taken on the basis of the widest possible discussion and consultation among the people as a whole. This democratisation of society down to its very roots is what we mean by ‘workers power'. --from As We See It and As We Don't See It (London: Solidarity, 1967,197?)
Solidarity rejected the economic determinism and elitism of much of the Marxist left and committed itself to a view of socialism based on self-management. Supporting those who were in conflict with bureaucratic capitalist society both in industry and elsewhere, the group wanted to generalise their experiences in order to develop a mass revolutionary consciousness, necessary if society was to be totally transformed. But the group did not see itself as another political leadership. On the contrary, it believed that the workers themselves should decide on the objectives of their struggles and that control and organisation of these struggles should remain firmly in their own hands.
According to this view Solidarity had no confidence in the traditional organizations of the working class, the political parties and trade unions, which had come to terms with the existing patterns of exploitation. It was Solidarity's belief that socialism was not just the common ownership and control of the means of production and distribution. Solidarity stressed that socialism meant also equality, real freedom, reciprocal recognition and a radical transformation in all human relations.
Disagreement with other left-wing forces
Solidarity was highly critical of the rest of the left. It argued that what it called the 'trad left' -- whether social democratic, trade unionist, communist or Trotskyist -- had failed to understand that in modern capitalist societies (in which it included Soviet-type societies) the key class division was between order-givers and order-takers. It opposed the leftist fashion for supporting third world 'national liberation struggles' and was equally critical of the 'lifestyle' left that saw 'liberation' in personal terms.
Account of actual lived experience in Solidarity
Solidarity was initially formed by people leaving Trotskyist traditions, and the traditions of the day dictated that physical violence would be used against "splitters."
- Soldarity was formed by ex-members of the Healyite Socialist Labour League. People leaving the SLL could expect a dose of 'proletarian justice'. Rumour had it that Solidarity members kept a load of incriminating SLL central committee papers which they threatened to publish if needed. Strangely enough nobody in Soly got a pasting from the SLL heavies.
Influenced by changes in French revolutionary pratice, Solidarity published a varied series of works. Controversial views about class structure was always a tension within the group. The mixture of industrial workers and intellectuals proved fruitful in this case.
- Solidarity was heavily influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie amongst other things. Actually, looking back, the influences were probably more eclectic. Solidarity published many pamphlets, they fell into a number of categories which probably reflect the different influences on and within the group. One effort was to republish the works of Castoriadis into English (under the name Paul Cardan). Some of these were fascinating, most were concerned with his attacks on what he saw as Marxism.
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- It was from this trend that Solidarity's ideas of society being divided into order givers and order takers came, rather than a working and a capitalist class. This was not a view held by everyone and anyway many simply seemed to see the ideas of order givers and order takers as being another way of talking about the working and a capitalist class. Others took it far more seriously and I think that these ideas still linger on in the anarchist movement in the politics of Class War and Andy Anderson et al.
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- A second strand was rediscovering important moments of revolutionary working class history. This saw many excellent pamphlets, including Brinton's Bolsheviks and Workers Control. Without Solidarity's efforts we would all be much less knowledgable in Britain.
- A third effort was in publishing industrial accounts which gave voice to what workers were doing during important periods of struggle, particularly in the late sixties. In the late seventies we tried to continue this in the magazine with a couple of special motor supplements. We were able to do this because some of the original members had an industrial background.
Solidarity was always a small organisation, but influential for its size. While it lacked formal membership, it had a tight informal network, effectively binding together activists in local groups.
- At that time [1972] Solidarity had autonomous groups in a number of British cities and was bringing out more than one paper. ... It was a time of mass industrial struggle and each issue carried fascinating commentaries and analysis of what was going on, combined with what workers were saying. I first went to one of their meetings in 1973, I think. It was in London and they were in the process of having a split.
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- At that time [mid 1970s] membership fluctuated around the 80 to 100 mark. There were groups in London, Aberdeen, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford and probably some other places too. We held conferences every quarter and brought out the magazine Solidarity for Social Revolution at the same interval. Whilst we were never a membership organisation as such, people still had to be known by others and be accepted into membership which depended on agreement with As We See It.
Splits and fusions with other organisations
Like most left wing organisations, Solidarity faced regular fusions with other groups, and regular splits by dissatisfied or dissident members. Unlike other groupings, these splits did not break the organisation, and were not a consciously used to eliminate dissidents.
- The group that were to form World Revolution(subsequently part of the ICC ) started off as members of Solidarity. The arguments centred around Castoriadis's views, and as so often happens ideas became polarised. As it turned out Solidarity were probably better off without them.
- As the seventies went on a group of us in the Socialist Party of Great Britain SPGB became more influenced by Solidarity and eventually were kicked out and formed what became Social Revolution . We were never very big, we had 12 - 15 members, but we began to meet Solidarity more and eventually Brinton suggested that we merge the two organisations. Before we did that we had lengthy discussions which led to a rewrite of As We See It and As We Don't See It (the basic statements).
- The Manchester group were co-operating with the local ICC to produce Wildcat as a free sheet. The ICC members left the ICC before Manchester Solidarity split [from] Solidarity.
- A load of us left in the early 80s and from that split Wildcat eventually emerged. Other ex-Solidarity types started Counter Information. That of course is another tale. In my opinion, Solidarity was one of the most important organisations in post war Britain. Apart from the syndicalists, every group in Britain today owes something to their ideas.
- --from Louis Robertson Recollections of my time in Solidarity
Publications
Solidarity's main activity was as a publications group. It produced regular magazines from 1960 to 1992. Agitator (1960-61), which became Solidarity for Workers' Power (1961-1977), was published by the London Solidarity group; there were also various short-lived Solidarity magazines published outside London, including the north-west and Glasgow. Solidarity for Self-Management (1977-78) and Solidarity for Social Revolution (1978-81) were both magazines of the national group. The final manifestation of the magazine, called simply Solidarity (1982-92), was published by the London group.
The group also specialised in pamphlets. Several of them were texts by Cornelius Castoriadis from Socialisme ou Barbarie, using Castoriadis's pen-name, Paul Cardan, among them Modern Capitalism and Revolution, From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy, Redefining Revolution, The Meaning of Socialism and Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society. Other pamphlets include: Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-21, Paris, May 1968 and The Irrational in Politics; Ida Mett's The Kronstadt Commune; Alexandra Kollontai's The Workers' Opposition and Andy Anderson's Hungary 1956. Solidarity's platforms were As We See It and As We Don't See It.