Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s new book, a galvanising examination of the history of solidarity and how we can use it today to shape a fair and sustainable future, was born out of friendship. But the pair are from distinctly different backgrounds. Taylor is a Canadian-born writer, film-maker, musician and activist (the pair prefer the term organiser, more of which later) who grew up in Athens, Georgia. Hunt-Hendrix is an activist, too, as well as a political theory scholar and granddaughter of a Texas oil billionaire. She grew up on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, spending summers in Dallas.
The two women met at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. They first wrote together in 2015, creating a technology issue for the Nation magazine and, says Hunt-Hendrix, “decided we were great collaborators and that was something we wanted to keep doing”.
They started writing Solidarity during lockdown, but publication was delayed because their original publisher, Verso, was in dispute with its union, so they decided to switch in solidarity with Verso’s workers. As they finally gear up for their book tour, they sit and talk – Taylor, who is visiting family in North Carolina; Hunt-Hendrix at home in New York, a little croaky from the interrupted nights of new motherhood – about what solidarity means to them and why beating polarisation is our only hope.
How did you come to collaborate?
Leah Hunt-Hendrix: I thought Astra was the coolest. The first time we talked one-to-one was when she was organising a telethon for the Rolling Jubilee Fund, which raised money to buy and cancel tens of millions of dollars of debt. I think she may have then invited me to a meeting for Strike Debt, which was an Occupy [Wall Street] spin-off.
Astra Taylor: I respected Leah out of the gate for the way she engaged during Occupy. There were many factions and divisions in that messy but important movement, and I certainly took note of folks I felt were committed and serious about trying to build power over the longer haul. Occupy was a school as well as a protest. I was a kid who was always interested in social justice, and when Occupy erupted I was like: the movement might not be perfect, but it’s calling attention to the crisis of democracy, to inequality.
LHH: Occupy was an amazing experience. Solidarity was a very prominent term there, but when I went back to the Princeton library to see what had been written about it, there was so little, so I ended up writing about it for my PhD dissertation. I went on to build an organisation called Solidaire – a fund to help resource social movements. I was so inspired by Astra’s work, having learned how the concept of solidarity came from a financial term in ancient Rome for mutually held debts. Rather than being a fluffy concept of “let’s all get along”, it was about organising debtors.
AT: When she told me about her dissertation and the etymology of solidarity, I remember having a kind of A-ha! moment. We had collaborated on enough stuff to know that we worked well together and that we would have an intellectual adventure doing [the book] – and we did.
You talk about organising as key to solidarity, but what does organising mean to you?
LHH: Organising is a practice of getting involved with other people, choosing a problem that you want to address, and working together to try to overcome that problem. Whether it’s trying to cancel student debt, or my first experience with organising in college, when I joined a campaign to get a living wage for city employees.
AT: It’s useful to contrast organising with activism. I can be an activist by myself by raising awareness, tweeting a lot.
LHH: Tweeting is not organising.
AT: Organising pushes against the idea that we can do this on our own, and that we win just by protesting. It’s not just about all showing up in the street one time and a big display of shared aspirations. You need to dig in for the long haul and coordinate with other people and build a power block.
People don’t have a lot of opportunities in our lives to organise precisely because there’s been a centuries-long war on solidarity. We have to teach each other, begin where you are with a few friends and take those baby steps. There really is no alternative.
You say friends, but in the book you describe movements such as Occupy as being much broader than that.
AT: I think that that matters so much. We both want to be part of movements that are majoritarian, inclusive in the sense that there’s all kinds of folks from different walks of life coming together. I’d been on the left in New York City for a while but I didn’t know everybody at Occupy. A lot of them were younger than me. I grabbed on to that opportunity, forming the Debt Collective, which is the union of debtors. Just as Leah was thinking hard about solidarity, I was thinking hard about democracy. There were so many claims within the movement that “this is what democracy looks like” – from a chaotically run meeting to, I don’t know, a drum circle.
Astra, do your creative and organising worlds overlap much?
AT: Rarely do they overlap in literal ways. Ages ago I roped my partner [the singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum] into playing music at Occupy, and also at the launch of the Rolling Jubilee, but we haven’t done anything like that since. That said, my more artistic projects – as a film-maker, or playing music with Neutral Milk Hotel [with Mangum] – don’t feel totally separate from my political work. Organising is absolutely a creative act; it’s about seeing the world as malleable and changeable, almost as a kind of material you can mould and remake. Political work can be very serious and hard but it is also an opportunity for collaboration and the unexpected, for experimentation and play. Organising, not unlike art-making, fundamentally involves taking an imaginative leap and also taking risks. Making films and being in a band involve coordinating a bunch of people and doing something together you couldn’t do alone. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a critical mass of the Debt Collective founders were artists.
What’s it like, Leah, being a member of the Hunt family but also being involved in social movements?
LHH: The Hunt family [which owns one of the largest private oil companies in the US] is a fascinating one and my grandfather is a storied man, but my mom Helen left Dallas and raised me in NYC, in the feminist movement, surrounded by grassroots activists. She was focused on organising women of wealth to support women’s rights, so in many ways I followed in her footsteps when I began to organise among wealthy donors too, though I was more focused on economic inequality. I also benefited from the example of my aunt, Swanee Hunt [former US ambassador to Austria], who spent her career helping women play leadership roles in politics, and particularly in conflict zones. I certainly wouldn’t be who I am today without the influence of Helen and Swanee Hunt.
Do you ever feel you have to play down your background, at least at first?
LHH: I don’t always lead with it, but it’s important to be honest so that people don’t feel like I’ve hidden something from them. There can be a tendency for people with wealth who have progressive politics to want to hide their background, or feel shame about it. I think it’s important for each of us to embrace our own stories because in doing so, we can more readily access the diverse resources that our backgrounds give us access to.
And as you say in the book, solidarity is about diverse groups working together.
AT: We’re pushed into identity camps – that’s the political terrain that we’re operating on. There has been a long and very well-funded effort to sabotage solidarity using divide-and-conquer tactics. In the US, the recent indictment of 61 activists at “Cop City” [a £70m police training facility being built on one of the only green spaces in Atlanta] names solidarity as the dangerous ideology motivating these protesters. But solidarity is not equivalent to identity – it transcends your identity, or expands it. We’re saying that we need to push beyond the boundaries of the self. Solidarity is connecting across difference, building new alliances between people and then transforming the status quo.
LHH: We were really interested in the history of the term, especially as it became more prominent in the late 1800s. At a time when we’re so polarised, that feels like an important history to draw on. We didn’t have a weekend, we didn’t have an eight-hour workday: all these basic things that we take for granted now and are being eroded were the result of the labour movement’s vision of a more humane society. They’re the product of organising.
AT: The modern discourse of solidarity emerged from the incredible tumult and economic change of the Industrial Revolution. Religious patterns were changing. There was a sense of the old systems that held things together crumbling, and that’s when this question of solidarity came to the fore, with organised labour saying: “We want to challenge our exploitation. Solidarity can propel political changes.” This is really relevant in this age of hyperpartisanship, where it’s “my party versus your party”. We’re asking again: what can hold us together in this time of incredible tumult? Writing this book, I was struck by how we’re having a lot of the same debates right now.
LHH: We propose a vision of the “solidarity state”, like how the welfare state was what came out of those 18th- and 19th-century conversations – what’s the 21st-century version of this? We’re thinking of it not as just an interpersonal phenomenon, but as something that can be built into the fabric of society.
What if people feel too scared, apathetic or exhausted to get involved?
LHH: That feeling of powerlessness is a huge factor in the crisis that we’re in. When I went to one of Astra’s Debt Collective Rolling Jubilee events, everyone came wearing a name tag with how much debt they were in, and the idea was to say: this is not something that you need to be ashamed of; it’s not a personal moral failing. This is a systemic problem and we can change this if we work together. Organising is the best kind of antidepressant if you’re feeling alone or isolated or powerless. Get involved in an organisation because it can feel so powerful.
AT: When people talk about the problems of social media and misinformation, especially among liberals, there’s a sense that what we need to do is fact check our way out of this. Our argument is that we need to organise people out of this. That’s what labour unions do at their best – they’re not just forums for demanding better treatment but, like Occupy was for us, they’re places of political education. We say: your enemies are not immigrants or trans people or students. Your enemies are the folks who are benefiting from and perpetuating this system.
I’m a big fan of [the organiser and educator] Mariame Kaba and her wonderful phrase, “hope is a discipline”. We’re looking back at this history – from abolitionists to disability justice movements and workers – and seeing that people fought against incredible odds in conditions where they had no reason to be optimistic. Only by working together can we save ourselves and each other.
• Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix is published by Pantheon (£24.25)
