Solidarity vs. Sorting

I am not new to class politics. I have been around for a long time now, participating, observing, and critiquing. In my time, I have watched the same sequence repeat itself under different banners, in different cities, across different crises.

A public event is announced, and people show up! Photos and videos circulate. Oh, the momentum! We have “done something meaningful!” But when the event ends, nothing materially changes. The institutions being “protested” continue operating as before (or convert their paid staff into volunteers to “evade paying taxes to the fascists,” either very naive or the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen).

A Parade Is Not A General Strike

My last piece pointed this out and got a massive, positive response. It is easily the most-circulated article I’ve ever written, anywhere (not just on Substack), and less than 1% of the engagement has been negative, which, if you know me, is a welcome surprise. I say this because I do not want the reader to think the outside world disagrees; it does not.

But when you are critical of spectacle that many take as serious political action, there is an obvious group of people who won't like it (PSL members and the like). I had two guys come in with this kind of defensive response, and it’s extremely familiar to me. It embodies an attitude that discourages questions and dissent, which often follows when the assembled forces are built through transactional engagement that sorts for like-minded political actors rather than building community and solidarity.

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Circular Logic

This was only one step, you see! The real work is happening behind the scenes, awareness matters, organizing takes time, and visibility is a means to build power!

This is “the right response.” Linguistically, this is technically what the class-conscious political actor wants to hear; these are actions we know have “worked” in the past. People did those things, then people marched in the streets, and things changed!

None of these things is automatically wrong, either. Even visibility (though much criticized in my work) can be a means to build power. The issue is that power isn’t the result; visibility is. And many people mistake “a means to build power” for “power,” and thus “a means” for “an end.”

In that mindset, these activities become about sorting through potential participants for future actions. Even when people are helped, the orientation toward assembling a crowd is felt, and it changes the relationship. That shift often goes unnoticed by the people doing the work, but it prevents the trust and interdependence that solidarity actually requires from ever forming.

This problem prefigures the belief that protests are how power is exercised. When organizing work is oriented toward assembling a crowd, the public event is expected to convert that crowd into leverage. Under that logic, a protest is only meaningful if it produces or exercises power. Something should be different afterward, even if the change is incremental.

But when criticism of a protest's lack of transformative results is instinctively met with “that wasn’t the point! The real work is happening behind the scenes,” the contradiction reveals itself. This defense is, in effect, an admission that the protest was just a symbol, a signal, a moment of expression. The power is said to exist somewhere else, out of sight, doing work that can’t be evaluated in relation to the event at all.

Yet the protest is still defended as necessary, meaningful, and effective, because without that belief, there would be no reason to keep doing it!

This is circular logic. Protests are held because they’re assumed to build or exercise power. When they do neither, the defense that “oh, we’re doing the necessary boring stuff” gets leveraged. If that is the case, though, why are you engaging in “General Strikes” in which literally no leverage of any kind is exercised, no conditional cost is imposed on commerce, and no negotiation is pursued?

This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the distinction necessary to understand the criticism.

I am not disputing that people are sincere (I made sure to mention that I believe most involved are well-intentioned and sincere), nor am I claiming they are not engaging in action. I am disputing what these activities do. And part of this is why they are being done.

One of the two naysayers of my piece (among hundreds of positive responders; again, I don’t want to imply people are “didn’t get it”) responded to a question I asked about befriending neighbors regardless of their political beliefs: “You think all those people on TV are socialists? Of course not, they are just neighbors, but organized by socialists.”

That sentence is offered as a rebuttal, but it actually clarifies my issue. “Socialists organizing people” is not community integration; it’s mobilization, a relationship where one group activates another for an event, a moment, or a task, and then the relationship dissolves when the task is complete. It may be reactivated later by an email or text blast, but that’s that.

That model is familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a campaign, a nonprofit drive, or a marketing push. It is not mutual, it is not durable, and it does not create obligations that persist beyond the action itself.

If those “neighbors” disappeared tomorrow, nothing in the organizers’ lives would materially change. They may not even notice if no spectacle is produced from the disappearance. If the organizers disappear, the neighbors ultimately don’t know where the protest is. No interdependency has been created! If anything, coercive dependency is sometimes created with the understanding that aid is contingent on some form of participation.

Insistence that “we ARE doing mutual aid, outreach, education, and networking! A LOT!” (I am not exaggerating the capitalization) just misses the point. I am not claiming that these actions are meaningless, nor that they automatically collapse into marketing and demographic sorting. Mutual aid, in particular, can create real interdependence, trust, and obligation that persist beyond a single political moment.

The problem is that, though it may not be intentional (or even noticeable to participants), aid is often distributed in ways that remain conditional and episodic. Whether participants realize it or not, they are oriented toward identifying, recruiting, and activating like-minded political actors rather than community integration.

What distinguishes solidarity-building from sorting is not the label attached to the action, but whether it produces relationships that survive disagreement, inconvenience, and time. Help must be given without any expectation. It is counterintuitive, but we must scratch people’s backs without expecting (or hoping!) that they scratch ours in return. It just has to be because they have an itch on their back.

It can be difficult to exercise this, as our society is set up to be transactional, and to some extent, people will always do things that serve their own interests. But even if that is what has brought you to the aid, the aid has to be purely for the sake of it.

The version of “aid, outreach, education, and networking” that political organizers, parties, and even many sincere people eager to “do something” pursue is a pipeline for mobilization, and mobilization is not sustainable without deep community integration. You recruit people, burn through their energy over a year or five, and they walk away. In this way, “aid, outreach, education, and networking” is marketing and demographic sorting, not community building.

That distinction used to be understood intuitively. It is not understood now. And that loss of understanding is what turns practices that once built power into practices that now reproduce spectacle.

This is why I have done so much work on fandom; it is ultimately the endgame here. These various ideological and experiential commodities have street teams forming around them. It sounds harsh, but I am not saying it to insult; I’m saying it because I do not want this to be the mode.

What makes this so frustrating is that this model is the one every org, group, or party follows. Liberal NGOs and socialist parties use different rhetoric but operate identically in practice. Visibility is pressure/power/leverage, and growth of the group is treated as results.

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Conclusion

People can be sincere, intelligent, and well-read and still be engaged in activity that does not do what they think it does.

In fact, sincerity often makes the confusion harder to dislodge, because criticism is experienced not as analysis but as an attack on identity. That is why the response is emotional, why the caps lock gets pounded down, and why the conversation ends abruptly once outcomes and time horizons are introduced.

The people who respond negatively are doing the same thing they are doing everywhere else: sorting. Agreement is mistaken for community, so skepticism is seen as cynicism.

Solidarity is not produced by agreement or shared language. It exists when people are bound together, when absence has consequences, and relationships persist through disagreement and time. That kind of binding is slow, unglamorous, and often invisible, but it is real.

Sorting produces mobilization. Solidarity produces integration.

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