The problem with Solidarity

The greatest achievement of the West is the formal appreciation of the value of human life.

Humans are valuable.

They do not need a market price to find value. While you could buy and sell humans--as happened in the slave trade--the West now recognises this does not give humans their worth. As a result humans cannot be bought or sold, their worth is intrinsic.

This idea is not new. In Christianity God loves all who truly repent. While this does put a condition on God's Love it places our value beyond the limits of mere mortal characteristics like wealth, skill, usefulness or race.

The irony of course is that within the Jewish religion race is still a defining feature of worth, but that has been discussed already in this blog, and underlines why Judaism is an extremist belief system at odds with Western values.

Despite this formal declaration of intrinsic human value the West has been slow to embody these values. It still adopts a Capitalist economic system that affords wealth to a minority and relative poverty to the majority, and it still engages in weapons production and war which sets one group of humans against another. Both these belief systems are extremist and against Western values.

These inequalities and injustices in the West led by the end of the 18th Century to the rise of Socialism which sort for a fairer world and the promotion of the value of human beings above all else.

The core of the Marxist flavour of this was the Class Struggle where humans were seen as divided across a class divide between the Capitalists who owned and the Workers who did not own.

The perception of this divide led to Solidarity between the people who felt this divide an injustice to them.

However isn't it immediately obvious that such Solidarity contradicts the fundamental belief in human worth.

If we wish to respect human worth we should remove boundaries and division. Celebrating a division like the Worker Class, even if only while we remove it, is a contradiction.

This problem is seen most obviously now in all the Rights Movements. You have Blacks unified through their blackness asking for equality for Blacks. That is a straight contradiction. You can't ask for equality from a platform of division. It is doomed to failure.

The most ridiculous version of this is Israel. A country supposedly built to protect people from division and prejudice whose very foundations are built upon a division of people into Jews and Gentiles. It is doomed to fail.

It is commonly noted that drives to protect a particular group in fact increase prejudice against that group. This is obvious. The cause of prejudice is division, so increasing that division by defining groups to protect only amplifies the problem.

Solidarity, Rights, Identity Politics, Anti-politics (like Anti-Racism, Anti-Sexism, etc) all contradict the fundamental culture of the West which is value for the human being them self.

A human should be valued regardless their race, colour, sex, gender, class etc and so solidarity between sub-divisions of people is actually against the principle of human value.

You cannot value someone more, or less, because they share, or do not share, your race, colour, sex, gender, class etc.

So while the rise of Socialism in the 19th Century was built upon the growing awareness that humans are to be valued in and of themselves, it was immediately derailed by Solidarity between groups against other groups.

The way forward is to pick up the, now dropped, baton of Equality and strive for a world where people value each other because they are people and ignore everything else. All those floundering in the mire of politics need be helped out toward the light.

There are 2 things to add to this.

(1) Division is the main tool of the powerful to control the mass. "Divide-and-Conquer" the British called it. Religion and race are the classic divisions used by politicians around the world to gain control of people. Get people in-fighting and they won't fight you. So its essential for the Elite to cause in-fighting between people in order to keep control. The internet has invented "Cultural Marxism" to suggest that Marxism is being used to control people by getting them to fight over silly identity issues. Indeed Marxism says that History is propelled forward by conflict over social contradictions (dialectics), but it is technically wrong to suggest that Dialectics is being exploited by the powerful: Dialectics is bigger than that: the powerful and the powerless are both instruments of Dialectics! I mean what is the meaning of "powerful" if there are not "powerless" and vice-versa. So how impossible then for the powerful to exploit dialectics! Rather we see simply that divisions have always been promoted by the powerful because conflict enhances their control. So to establish peace and equality between people does ultimately mean abandoning politics.

(2) The account given here comes under the banner of Humanity. The idea that humans are a species joined collectively by sharing a common ancestry and identity. This idea goes back to creation myths like Adam and Eve (where it is never clear whether they were the first Jews are the first Humans - an ambiguity convenient to Christians). Sharing the same parents ultimately means we are all brothers and sisters. This is 1000s of years before Darwin and his ideas were not radical, only the mechanism he proposed was new. But some people Jews in particular would reject this idea of a shared humanity between people. For Jews people are not the same, and this idea is shared with Racists the world over which think that say Black and White people are different. In the UK Army I was once showed a video of burns victims and a squaddie pointed out that one of them had been black until his skin came off: "we really are all the same underneath" he said with some revelation. But the idea that humans are not all the same underneath persists at all levels all the way up to whole States like Israel. So the battle ground that holds the world back from the vision above lies in these kinds of arguments that still very much exist. Worth noting that a key feature of Buddhism is the recognition that all beings Suffer. This is the solidarity that joins all feeling creatures. But it is not a solidarity that divides people, but a solidarity that comes from having awareness in the first place. This reveals another problem with what is said above. The Unity of Humans above is actually rather limited. Really the equality and respect for beings need not stop at Humans and ultimately extends to all creatures.