Solidarity Must Be Defended

Pour les révolutionnaires des deux derniers siècles, l’accumulation du capital devait unifier la classe ouvrière sous la bannière du sujet révolutionnaire. Le mouvement ainsi né était appelé à renverser la société de classes et les clivages divisant les prolétaires. Mais le mouvement de la valeur a finalement triomphé, pour donner naissance à la société de la séparation. L’atomisation a pris le pas sur les puissances du rassemblement. La civilisation du capital traverse aujourd’hui une crise sans fin, mais les forces capables de la défaire brillent par leur absence.

Ces textes tirés de la revue Endnotes, réunis pour la première fois en français, dessinent la carte d’un présent ponctué de paysages désindustrialisés, de centres logistiques et de bidonvilles où s’entassent les populations rejetées aux marges de l’accumulation – autant de coordonnées nécessaires pour continuer à penser le dépassement du capitalisme : une fois encore, reprendre le chantier de l’hypothèse communiste.

Endnotes est une revue théorique communiste produite par un groupe de discussion du même nom basé en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis.

Traduction: Pablo Arnaud
Préface: Aaron Benanav Et John Clegg

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

In a world propelled by swift technological progress and perpetual obsolescence, women frequently find themselves adapting and altering their daily experiences in order to remain functional. In the 21st century, as technology purports to comprehensively assess and address women’s conditions and physical discomfort, Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed delves deeply into the realm of female health technologies, revealing a space where science, holistic methods, and mythology converge. This book challenges the idea of combining ancient wisdom with modern innovation and takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey to explore the intricacies of female’s health.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future. 

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. 

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. 

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC’s AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today’s world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. 

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.