Political solidarity and violent resistance

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 38-52

  Scholz, Sally J ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51249155926     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00365.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (32)

1. Kurt Bayertz, "Four Uses of Solidarity," In Solidarity, ed. Bayertz (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1999), 3-28.
2. Klaus Peter Rippe, "Dimishing Solidarity," Ethical Theory and Practice 1 (1998): 356. Rippe includes more in his project-related solidarity than I include in political solidarity, but his point is that the solidarity is a unity around a particular project and thus political solidarity might be thought of as one type of project-related solidarity.
3. Bayertz, "Four Uses," 20.
4. Thomas Hill, "Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence," Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (1979): 90.
5. Cf. Rainer Ibana, "The Essential Elements for the Possibility and Necessity of the Principle of Solidarity According to Max Scheler," Philosophy Today 33, no. 1 (1989): 48.
6. Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity, and Belonging (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.
7. Cf. Lawrence Crocker, "Equality, Solidarity, and Rawls' Maximin," Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (1977): 262-66.
8. Helmut Thome, "Solidarity: Theoretical Perspectives for Empirical Research," in Solidarity, ed. Kurt Bayertz (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1999), 126.
9. Collective responsibility usually pertains to assigning responsibility to a collective when something goes wrong. See Virginia Held, "Can a Random Collection of Individuals be Morally Responsible?" Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 14 (1970): 471-81;
10. and Peter French, ed., Individual and Collective Responsibility: Massacre at My Lai (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1972).
11. Sandra Bartky, Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 75.
12. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 42, 65, 89.
13. Ibid., 61. Walzer describes social criticism as taking many forms ranging from the more formal political condemnation to satire; criticism takes the language "of the folk" and "raise it to a new pitch of intensity and argumentative power" (Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics [NewYork: Basic Books, 1988], 9).
14. Walzer offers an amusing description of the leftist critic in Company of Critics, 225-26.
15. Walzer, Company of Critics, 9-10.
16. One of the key tasks of social criticism, according to Walzer, is to name injustice or oppression and to show how oppressive practices continue in accepted cultural traditions and groups. See Michael Walzer, "Pluralism and Social Democracy," Dissent (Winter 1998), 52.
17. Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 6-7.
18. Richard Bernstein makes a similar point in "'Interpretation and Solidarity': An Interview with Richard Bernstein," by Dunja Melcic. Praxis International 9, no. 3 (1989): 203.
19. Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 29.
20. Lugones notes that these strategies change our chosen communities as well as our involuntary communities. See Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 186.
21. Suzanne Toton, Justice Education: From Service to Solidarity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006).
22. Two important examples: Iris Young argues violence is one of the "five faces of oppression" in Justice and the Politics of Difference and Paulo Freire famously makes the case that violence of the oppressor consciousness infects both the oppressed and the oppressor (Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990];
23. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos [New York: Herder and Herder, 1968]).
24. Iris Young raises a similar point, although she does not discuss it, in her article "Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy," Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 674. Young sets the activist up in opposition to the "responsible deliberative democrat," but I would argue that the activist of political solidarity is actually more akin to the deliberative democrat than opposed.
25. Kevin Doran takes it a step further to show that the violence of war is contrary to solidarity per se: "Solidarity is a duty imposed by fidelity to the memory of those who have been and remain the victims of conflict. The establishment of solidarity, however, requires a struggle against the logic of war." Kevin P. Doran, Solidarity: A Synthesis of Personalism and Communalism in the Thought of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 230. Doran argues further that while "Struggles are necessary,⋯ war is an inhuman struggle because it is against the other person. As such it places the civil co-existence at risk. War sows the seeds of division, and this in itself is enough to make it clear that war can never be compatible with true solidarity" (p. 230). For a contrasting view, see Larry May's article in this issue.
26. Cf. Walzer, Obligations, 61.
27. Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 70, see also 68-72. Similar charges were made against Gandhi's satyagraha movement.
28. Tyson, Blood Done, 70.
29. See, for example, Frantz Fanon, Black Faces, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952)
30. and The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963);
31. Freire does speak of liberation struggles, but he divides struggles into two phases: "In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation" (Freire, Pedagogy, 36).
32. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," in Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Indianapolis, IN: Pegasus, 1969), 72-89.