“Solidarity is not an act of charity, but mutual aid between forces fighting for the same objective.” — Samora Machel, March 25, 1973
One of the greatest weapons workers and oppressed peoples possess against the capitalist class is solidarity.
Workers have common class interests because they face a common class enemy. Solidarity means recognizing those interests and acting on them together.
Workers do not automatically unite. Capitalism divides them by nation, race, sex, gender, sexuality, immigration status, occupation and language, and promotes racism, sexism, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry to hold those divisions in place. Class solidarity has to be built through struggle against them.
Workers build solidarity on the picket line
Working-class solidarity appears whenever workers stand together against the bosses.
A strike depends on workers acting collectively. A worker who crosses the picket line to take the strikers’ work acts against the interests of the workers as a whole.
U.S. workers learned this in practice. In 1934, general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco shut down whole cities. In Flint, Michigan, autoworkers occupied General Motors plants from December 1936 to February 1937 and forced the company to recognize the United Auto Workers.
Trade unions grew from this lesson. An individual worker bargaining alone confronts the employer from a position of weakness. Organized workers can fight for higher wages, shorter hours, safer conditions and job security.
The ruling class works to divide workers
The capitalist class constantly works to weaken this solidarity.
These divisions are not maintained by ideas alone. Capitalism has historically imposed different wages, rights and working conditions on different sections of the class. Oppressed workers have been pushed into lower-paid and more dangerous jobs, excluded from employment and housing, denied political rights and subjected to greater police and government repression.
Employers use immigration status and deportation threats against immigrant workers. Masked ICE agents raid workplaces and homes, and the threat of deportation holds down wages and breaks organizing drives. Women have historically been paid less while carrying a disproportionate burden of unpaid household labor. Racism and national oppression have imposed additional burdens on workers from oppressed nations and peoples.
These inequalities can give some workers advantages denied to others. Racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ ideas then encourage workers to defend those advantages or blame one another for problems created by capitalism.
The capitalist class benefits whenever workers fight each other instead of the bosses.
Solidarity means fighting oppression
Real working-class unity cannot be built by asking oppressed people to ignore the oppression they face.
Workers who do not face a particular form of oppression have a responsibility to oppose it. That means fighting racism and national oppression, defending immigrant workers, supporting women’s and LGBTQ+ liberation, standing with Native Peoples defending their land and treaty rights, and standing with oppressed nations fighting for sovereignty and self-determination.
Fighting oppression is a class necessity. Oppression divides the working class. Fighting it strengthens working-class unity.
Capitalism is an international system
Corporations move production and capital across borders in search of profit, while imperialist powers wage wars and fight for markets and resources.
Workers are taught to identify their interests with the corporations and government of the country where they live. But workers do not share the class interests of their own capitalist ruling class.
International solidarity means rejecting that identification. A worker in the U.S. has no common class interest with a U.S. corporation exploiting workers abroad. Workers fighting that corporation in another country are part of the same worldwide struggle between labor and capital.
U.S. imperialism arms and directs the genocide in Gaza and wages war on Iran. Workers in the U.S. have no stake in those wars, and every strike, walkout and demonstration against them is an act of class solidarity.
“Workers of the world, unite!” — the closing words of the Communist Manifesto — expresses this principle.
An injury to one is an injury to all
Workers face unequal conditions. Some suffer greater exploitation and oppression than others. But when employers can pay one section less, deny it rights or threaten it more easily, the whole capitalist class becomes stronger.
If immigrant workers can be intimidated with deportation, if racism keeps part of the class at lower wages, or if one union can be broken while others stand aside, the bosses are strengthened for the next fight.
When workers defend one another, refuse to cross picket lines and fight every form of oppression used to divide the class, they strengthen the working class as a whole. The labor movement’s oldest slogan states a material fact about the class: an injury to one is an injury to all.
The working class can win only through solidarity
The working class cannot defeat the capitalist class without class solidarity.
That solidarity must extend beyond one workplace, union, nationality or country. It must unite the struggles of workers with the struggles against racism, national oppression, imperialism, women’s oppression and anti-LGBTQ+ oppression.
Socialist revolution can overthrow capitalist class rule, but it will not automatically erase every form of oppression inherited from class society. Those struggles must continue as part of building a socialist society.
The capitalist class depends on divisions among workers. Those divisions are broken in struggle — on picket lines, in the streets against racist police terror, in the defense of immigrant neighborhoods against ICE raids, in the movement against U.S. wars. Every one of those fights builds the class that will bury capitalism.
Additional reading
- Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association — by Karl Marx (1864). The founding statement of organized international workers’ solidarity — the First International.
- The Working Class and the National Question – by V.I. Lenin (1913). Explains why working-class unity requires unity among workers of all nations and opposition to national divisions.
- The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation” by V.I. Lenin (1922), On national oppression, the responsibility of workers in the oppressor nation and the conditions necessary for genuine unity.
- Anti-Alien Prejudice Only Plays the Bosses’ Game — by Sam Marcy (1940). A short article on how employers use anti-immigrant campaigns to split the working class.
- Labor’s Untold Story — by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais (1955). The militant history of the U.S. working class — the strikes, general strikes and picket-line solidarity this page is built on. Published by the UE.
- Solidarity Is Mutual Aid Between Forces Fighting for the Same Objectives — by Samora Machel (1973). Speech to the First National Solidarity Conference for the Freedom and Independence of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, held at Reggio Emilia, Italy, March 25, 1973. Published in “Mozambique: Sowing the Seeds of Revolution.”
- Capitalist Economic Stagnation and the Revolutionary Perspective — by Sam Marcy (1975). Argues that the answer to the crisis of the cities is a general working-class counteroffensive uniting Black, Latine, Native and Asian workers with white workers, men and women, against Washington and Wall Street.
- Busing and Self-Determination — by Sam Marcy (1975). On the duty of Marxists in the oppressor nation to uphold the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, including the right of separation.
- Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miners’ Strike — by Tim Tate with LGSM (2017). The story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, whose support for striking British coal miners in 1984–85 was answered by miners’ support for lesbian and gay rights.
- Return to What is Marxism?