8.2 Historical Worker Solidarity: Social and Political

“Solidarity” contains the Latin stem solidus, which means “strong” or “solid.” At the core of the concept, there is the idea that certain individuals have strong bonds among each other that make them aware of shared interests or shared goals. But the term gets used in widely varying ways: from the historical use of “working class solidarity,” to its use in Catholic social doctrine or liberation theology, to online petitions that claim to be “in solidarity with” a certain cause. There have been many attempts to provide classifications of types or dimensions of solidarity, in both the social sciences and philosophy. I here draw on Sally Scholz’s distinction between social, civic, and political solidarity (but civic solidarity will not play a major role in my argument), which builds on previous conceptualizations and provides a useful framework.

All concepts of solidarity, Scholz argues, assume that solidarity “mediate[s] between the community and the individual,”Footnote ¹⁰ consists of a “form of unity” between people,Footnote ¹¹ and “entails positive moral obligations.”Footnote ¹² Social solidarity can be described as “a measure of interdependence among individuals within a group”; in other words, here it is group membership that matters.Footnote ¹³ Civic solidarity describes membership in a civic organization – typically a state – in which certain institutions ensure that every member has access to the minimum provisions that are needed for civic participation.Footnote ¹⁴ The paradigmatic form of this type of solidarity is the welfare state; solidarity is here implemented in clear institutional structures with ensuing rights and duties for individuals. Political solidarity, lastly, focuses on a “mutually shared vision,” a goal that individuals want to achieve together, typically in opposition to some common enemy or opponent.Footnote ¹⁵ This opens up the possibility of engagement by groups who are not themselves the victims of the injustices or forms of oppression in question, although, for their solidarity to be genuine, they must fulfil certain conditions, for example that they acknowledge the epistemological and moral privilege of the victims of oppression.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, Scholz also points out that there are sometimes uses of the term “solidarity” that are “parasitic” on genuine forms, which lack important elements of the latter and are used as rhetorical devices, in cases in which it would be more appropriate to use other terms, such as “sympathy.”Footnote ¹⁷

As emphasized in Section 8.1, I am mostly interested in forms of solidarity that involve active engagement – “strong” forms of solidarity, in Scholz’s terminology.Footnote ¹⁸ In what follows, I argue that many paradigmatic forms of solidarity, especially in the history of the labor movement, were characterized by a combination of social and political solidarity, and that this fact probably contributed to their success, a claim that I undergird by arguments from psychology and social theory. Of course, this does not mean that solidarity would have been an automatic result of these relatively favorable circumstances. Solidarity still had to be enacted by individuals who took on leadership roles, and whose contributions I certainly do not want to belittle. But if, following E. P. Thompson and others, one understands class as not a “thing” but something that is “happening,” one needs to pay attention to how these processes were situated “within everyday life and social relations.”Footnote ¹⁹

A stylized picture of the historical circumstances in which workers in Europe and North America, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, lived and work, looks roughly like this. Individuals worked together, physically, in direct contact with each other.Footnote ²⁰ In many occupations (e.g. in mining) they had to rely on each other, for their own physical safety and in order to get the job done. In addition, they often also lived together: before the era of mass transportation, individuals had to live in walking distance from their workplaces. Worker settlements would therefore often spring up in the direct neighborhoods of mines or factories, and, while the living conditions were often gruesome, they also brought people closely together and created shared interests (e.g. in relation to local public goods).

Ken Loach’s movie Jimmy’s Hall provides a sense of these historical conditions (of course with some artistic license but based on historical facts). In this movie, communist Jimmy Gralton returns to his native village in Ireland after having spent 10 years in the United States. He brings with him “modern,” democratic ideas that the local authorities (the mayor, the factory owner, the priest) abhor. Jimmy hears from young people in the neighborhood that they need a space for gatherings: for entertainment but also for educational and artistic activities. To respond to this need, he establishes a local center, “Jimmy’s Hall,” that quickly becomes popular and buzzes with activities. But the conservative resistance grows and one night, the hall is burned down; Jimmy Gralton gets deported back to the United States.

Another historical account, from an urban context, can be found in Sara Horwitz’s narrative about her family’s involvement in New York unionism in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²¹ Horwitz portrays the close-knit communities of immigrant garment workers, and describes how early unionists, such as her grandfather, fought for better responses to the workers’ needs, such as access to health care and better housing. The activism often ran in families, and Horowitz – a successful organizer of New York freelancers – credits her own family background for her understanding of strategies of organizing.

Using the lens of Scholz’s framework, we can see how, in these historical cases, social and political solidarity overlapped to a great extent. Workers were members of the same communities, based on shared working experiences, everyday geography, and sometimes shared immigration backgrounds. Often, sheer necessity probably forced individuals to help each other out when it came to everyday needs. In addition, there were clear shared goals, in the sense of political solidarity, and also shared enemies: often local employers but also local authorities, as in the case of Jimmy’s Hall. This situation was a contingent consequence of the state of technology and work organization: the presence of factories in which workers would find employment, but the absence of cheap means of transportation, which meant that they had to live close to their workplaces. And, of course, this kind of closeness can also bring conflicts, for example, over local resources. But, overall, it is likely that it created situations in which individuals had far more to gain than to lose by joining forces.

This overlap of social and political solidarity, under conditions of geographical and social closeness, led to a number of psychological and practical conditions that facilitated active forms of political solidarity. A first factor is trust: high levels of familiarity offer the breeding ground for relationships of trust among individuals, and these in turn make it more likely that they are willing to take risks, or pay a price, for furthering each other’s interests.Footnote ²² A second factor is epistemic salience: if people live and work close to each other, each other’s well-being and interests will be obvious for them, and they get reminded of them every day. Being indifferent to the fate of a co-worker, say in a case of chronic sickness, is psychologically far less likely if this co-worker is someone one runs into on a daily basis. Of course, this may not be sufficient to understand one’s common fate and the common membership in a “class.” And yet, the ground on which the seeds of class consciousness can fall, to put it metaphorically, seems relatively fertile, epistemically speaking.Footnote ²³

An undergirding explanation from social theory is that – putting it into economic jargon – the transaction costs for solidaristic action are low, in at least two senses. First, the transaction costs for gathering information about people’s grievances were low because it was easy to speak to each other, or to directly see which problems someone suffered under. The risk of misinformation and misunderstandings that many contemporary attempts of “global solidarity” run – that those who want to “show solidarity” actually do not quite know what the other side needs and wants – was unlikely to be relevant in such circumstances. Second, the transaction costs for organizing were also low, in the sense that word of mouth could travel quickly and that it was obvious where to meet if one wanted to join forces.Footnote ²⁴ For the latter issue, the concept of “focal point” is a good starting point. Thomas Schelling has introduced this concept for describing points of coordination that different parties would know about, without even having to explicitly communicate about them – such as when a meeting “in New York” would be assumed to be at the central station at 12 o’clock.Footnote ²⁵ Workers living and working together in close-knit communities would very easily find “focal points” for joint action. They would, after all, face up to very similar obstacles, created by the same opponents, often the company they worked for. Of course, workers’ struggles were also embedded in international networks, as the case of Jimmy’s Hall also shows, with the protagonist bringing ideas from the United States to Ireland. Another famous example was Frederick Douglas touring in Ireland and Great Britain in the 1840s to campaign for an end to slavery.Footnote ²⁶ And yet, the overlap of social and political forms of solidarity, and the practical advantages it brought, arguably contributed to the successes that the workers’ movement made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁷

Today, the “working class” is much more scattered, along many dimensions: geographically, in terms of the legal situations that individuals face, and also in terms of lifestyles and mentalities.Footnote ²⁸ At least this follows if one assumes that a precariously employed adjunct professor in the United States, an Indian “clickworker” for Amazon Mechanical Turk,Footnote ²⁹ and a cleaner in Europe are all members of the “working class.” In what follows, I will not discuss the various ideological and political changes that challenge the very meaning of “working class” today. Instead, I will focus on the problem of geographical spread among people who would, in other historical periods, have been direct colleagues. I am interested in the potentials of new technologies and the experiences of their use during the pandemic for connecting such individuals. Before, however, I want to briefly justify why one should think that the idea and practice of “worker solidarity” can still be relevant today.

8.3 Why Worker Solidarity Is Still Needed Today

Among empirical researchers, there are voices of both optimism and pessimism about the potentials for transnational worker solidarity.Footnote ³⁰ Nobody, however, denies the great obstacles it faces. Why then, should one return to that old idea? Even if worker solidarity had been part of the answer to many social questions in the past, why think that it can still be part of the answer today? The converging point of different answers, I take it, is that in a globalized economy, the responses of workers need to be globalized as well.Footnote ³¹ Supply chains span the globe, with raw materials and products going through the hands of workers on different continents. Workers may even have the same employer, with the same logos and brand names travelling with the products. As one unionist put it, concerning relations between workers in the United States and Mexico: “If the companies are international now, we the workers must also be international. We are facing the same one – Driscoll’s.”Footnote ³²

I take it that these global webs of collaboration, created by the supply chains for specific products and services, provide structures around which transnational solidarity could, in principle, crystallize. Of course, there is also talk of “global solidarity” in a much broader and general sense, which is often meant to reach those most in need of support. But without any shared experiences, or reasons for why to be solidaristic with this rather than that group, it can be difficult to build networks that support strong forms of action, that is, actual protests or sympathy strikes, which require the willingness to accept certain risks.Footnote ³³ Without such commonalities, today’s globalized workforce is in the same situation that Simone de Beauvoir had described with regard to women, in contrast to workers: in closer proximity with their oppressors (employers and patriarchic men, respectively) than with each other.Footnote ³⁴ For de Beauvoir, this was one of the reasons for why women by and large did not show a lot of solidarity with each other. Global capitalism, it could be said, provides the perfect “divide and conquer” strategy vis-à-vis workers, by spreading them out into different countries, with different lifestyles and worldviews, making invisible to them what they have in common and who their common opponents are.

And yet, in a kind of paradoxical dialectic, this same global capitalism also brings workers together. Of course, it does not bring all workers together – instead, it creates what Andrew Herod describes as “new geographies” in which, for example, “tech-savvy workers in plants across GM’s corporate structure can easily make direct linkages with one another, sometimes even bypassing their national office altogether.”Footnote ³⁵ The very juxtaposition of “the local” versus “the global” – with the image of the latter being somehow on a “higher” scale than the former – gets upset in the complex networks of twenty-first-century production processes.Footnote ³⁶ The same holds for the pressure points at which influence can be exercised: strikes by a handful of workers as neuralgic points in a corporation’s logistics, for example, can have a massive influence on its global processes, whereas forms of protest in less strategically crucial places may not exert any pressure.

It is the potential of this kind of “solidarity along value chains” that I am interested in. It partly overlaps with union-based forms of transnational solidarity but is not necessarily identical. To provide a point of contrast, consider the case of “Union Solidarity International,” a UK-based organization founded in 2010 to tap the potentials of the internet for union solidarity, as analyzed by Torsten Geelan and Andy Hodder.Footnote ³⁷ It attempted to reach audiences across national borders, but not so much within specific value chains or within the same companies, facing the same problems. Its ultimate aim was to get people to become activists on the ground, in their specific situations.Footnote ³⁸ While interesting in many ways, this approach is different from what I have in mind, which would focus on value chains in which individuals are already connected. Moreover – and this is a point to which I come back in Section 8.4 – this approach was mostly about sharing information, not so much about allowing people to directly interact and build connections.

Why could it be a promising strategy to focus on value chains? My suggestion is that they create spaces of common identity and common concern which, up to a point, can recreate the kind of overlap of social and political solidarity that many historical cases of working-class solidarity instantiated. Émile Durkheim famously argued that, in processes of divided labor, the meaning of an individual’s work can only become visible if one takes into account the broader value chain. As he wrote:

This sense of meaning can, arguably, be strengthened if individuals can connect to others across the value chain (and it might get lost if they cannot). If they can take action together, this can give them a sense of agency that is the very opposite of the feeling of powerlessness vis-à-vis global economic forces that has, according to many commentators, prepared the breeding ground for right-wing populism and xenophobia. While the latter are, of course, also among the obstacles for transnational worker solidarity,Footnote ⁴⁰ their existence provides yet more reasons for returning to the question of transnational worker solidarity, in an attempt to provide alternative narratives and social practices.Footnote ⁴¹

What form can transnational worker solidarity take? The traditional strategy of workers showing solidarity with each other across borders – in addition to many forms of sharing ideas and helping with organizing among union networks – is the “secondary” or “sympathy” strike or boycott. While not very often making big headlines in the media, such forms of worker solidarity have a long history, and have also regularly taken place in recent years (e.g. among dock workers).Footnote ⁴² Many of the more recent examples, however, took place between directly neighboring countries (such as the United States and Mexico). What still seems to be largely missing are actions that would follow, say, the value chain from rare metals extracted in mines in the Global South to electronic devices assembled in South East Asia and marketed and sold in the United States or Europe, or similar value chains in areas such as textiles or food. But this seems very possible, given that materials and products are already traveling between these countries and the meaning of the work of individuals in different countries is interrelated in the way Durkheim described. Workers in the Global North could then also help push for changes within such value chains at the points where this is most urgently needed, for example, insisting on labor standards among suppliers, or putting up pressure against “forum shopping” on the part of companies with regard to labor standards.Footnote ⁴³

Thus, my suggestion is that “solidarity along value chains,” as a specific form of transnational labor solidarity, can play an important role in today’s globalized economic system, as a counterforce to globalized corporations and as providing an alternative to right-wing narratives. It can provide focal points for action, and it can benefit from, and in turn reinforce, workers’ sense of being part of larger value chains that give meaning to their work.

I hasten to add, however, that I do not defend the claim that this would be the only form of global solidarity that is needed; for example, the role of consumers, who might boycott companies for violating labor or environmental standards, remains crucial, not least because of the impact that a withdrawal of purchasing power can have on companies.Footnote ⁴⁴ I also agree with commentators who argue that labor unions must join forces with other transnational progressive movements.Footnote ⁴⁵ But this does not undermine my central point, namely that the fact that work is already organized in transnational ways provides good reasons to ask how worker solidarity could follow these structures, thereby potentially becoming an integral part of the daily experience of work and the self-understanding of employees. In Section 8.4, I discuss what role new technologies could play for this purpose – for workers who work with digital technologies, but also for those who do not but have access to a smartphone in their private lives. I also consider what changes the COVID-19 pandemic experience has brought, and what obstacles this perspective reveals.

8.4 Can Transnational Worker Solidarity Benefit from New Technologies?

The organization of global value chains has massively benefitted, in recent decades, from digital technologies: communication is based on online interactions, and goods are tracked by help of QR codes and other digital tools. And yet, from the perspective of individual workers, and also for consumers, the global economy often appears opaque: one does not understand how one’s own work is connected to those of others, with whom one is, as a matter of fact, “collaborating,” but without knowing it.Footnote ⁴⁶ Knowledge about the human beings who prepare intermediate products, for example, hardly travels with them along the value chain. Those who transport goods, for example, the crews on cargo ships, are equally invisible to those who process, sell, or consume these goods.

Now, it is certainly no new idea to suggest that digital technologies could help connect workers along value chains, and also to final consumers who buy products or services. Information about products could easily be made available for everyone with a smartphone to access, for example, by typing a product number into an online form or scanning a QR code.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, email and chat programs could be used for workers to get in touch with each other – as they often already do when there are, for example, technical problems with a delivery. As mentioned earlier, organizations such as Union Solidarity International also use social media to share information among interested followers across national boundaries. Ethnographic research shows that individuals working for platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk also connect via social media, to share information about their work, to trade tricks about how to get the most out of the platform, or to simply say hi to each other at the beginning of their workdays.Footnote ⁴⁸

What I would like to suggest, however, is that the experiences during the 2020–2022 COVID-19 lockdowns have brought digital collaborations, and people’s proficiency at connecting with each other online, to a new level – one that could potentially be a gamechanger for transnational worker solidarity. The reason is that they allow for connections that are (a) mutual, (b) allow for genuine building of trust, and (c) thereby can increase salience and contribute to active instead of passive forms of knowledge. Before I expand on each of these points, let me acknowledge that, of course, not all workers used digital tools in such ways during the lockdowns; those whose jobs required physical presence continued to leave their homes, often at great risks to their health. But they would also often use such digital communication in their private lives, given that, in many countries, opportunities for private encounters were minimal during the lockdown. Thus, I am interested in the broader shifts of social habits triggered by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which brought the use of digital communication tools – most importantly, videocalls – into the mainstream of social life. Developments that were already happening as technology became cheaper and younger generations grew into digital habits as “digital natives” thus saw a massive push forward.

While a lot of information was, of course, already flowing digitally before the lockdowns, many more people started using digital tools such as videocalls or group chat programs in ways that allowed for much denser forms of communication, and in which a real mutual give and take of information could take place. Participating in such forms of communication is different from being a passive recipient: it allows sharing one’s perspectives no matter where one comes from, and it allows for genuine dialogue, with the opportunity to ask questions, to clarify potential misunderstandings, or to work on joint proposals. Of course, linguistic differences can still be an obstacle, but the fast improvements in automatic translation systems can help here as well (at this point, this holds mostly for written communication, but it is also getting better in oral communication, e.g. with automatic subtitling in different languages). This matters for the possibilities of transnational worker solidarity because it allows individuals from different parts of the globe to understand how the other side thinks and what they truly need or want, and thus create better conditions for consciousness raising and the forging of alliances.

The risk of, for example, solidarity actions from the Global North misfiring or being perceived as insulting or patronizing, for a lack of genuine communication, is much lower if individuals can have a few videocalls beforehand to get to know each other and their perspectives. Moreover, in such forms of communication, individuals can understand whether there are potential or real conflicts between them, or whether they might be “played out” against each other by third parties, typically employers. The transaction costs for sharing such information are much lower than if they had to write letters or travel to each other’s places.

The second point I want to put forward as a hypothesis is that such forms of communication – while certainly not the same as in-person encounters – can, over longer periods of time, help to build genuine trust between different parties. As many commentators on transnational worker solidarity emphasize, solidarity needs to be built from the ground up, without relying exclusively on “technocrats and trade union administrators.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Some programs in the past have relied on actual visits, e.g. a program in the Philippines in which workers and labor leaders were invited for 10 days to experience the realities of Filipino workers.Footnote ⁵⁰ When unionists visit each other in their respective countries, they can get a much better sense of what is at stake in their joint struggles.Footnote ⁵¹ But, of course, the costs – in terms of money, but also time and energy – for such visits are often prohibitively high. It is, however, quite well imaginable to organize transnational online encounters, for example, with a mix of group events and one-on-one encounters, including – if desired – video tours of people’s living quarters, again at relatively low transaction costs.

To be sure, the hypothesis that this can lead to the building of genuine trust ultimately has to be explored empirically. “2D” communication on screens is still not the same as “3D” encounters (and while one saves time and money compared to travel, longer online events are known to be exhausting as well). Digital communication does not, per se, overcome cultural differences, the awareness of, and respect for which, are often crucial.Footnote ⁵² And yet, the idea that a genuine sense of collegiality can develop between individuals who are digitally connected seems much less outlandish after the experiences of the corona lockdowns, where individuals often had no chance but to try, as best they could, to connect through online tools, not only with colleagues they already knew, but also with new ones. This sense of collegiality is, arguably, much closer to the historical situation of actually working (and often living) close to each other than the forms of (typically written) digital communication that predominated before the pandemic. It seems much more plausible to think that individuals would also be willing to take certain risks for each other – because they feel they can trust each other – when they have frequently interacted in videocalls than if they have just exchanged emails.

This leads to my third point. Arguably, the new technological possibilities, and the social practices that are developing around them, are much more suitable for leading people to active engagement because the fate of others is more salient for them. Knowing that there is a concrete individual at the other side, with whom one has interacted and whose family members or pets have walked through calls, makes a difference for one’s psychological situation. Arguably, it leads to a greater sense of responsibility and to a feeling of being accountable to the other person for one’s actions or failures to act. Rationalizing one’s own passivity by claiming that “it doesn’t make a difference anyway” is more difficult if there is another person who will ask one about it, and to whom one would prefer to be able to say, “at least we have tried.” Thus, while certainly not creating the same kind of intense embedded social relations that prevailed in certain historical periods for certain members of the working class, digital communication can potentially lead to a greater sense of connectedness and hence make action more likely, because individuals feel more responsible for each other.

Thus, my argument in a nutshell is this: new digital technologies and the social habits that are developing around them have the potential to give a new impulse to transnational worker solidarity, because they can create levels of connectedness and trust that are closer to those experienced by certain historical worker communities, for whom social and political solidarity – in Scholz’s terms – overlapped. Some individuals may already be in touch on an almost daily basis, so the step from talking about production processes to talking about working conditions seems easy to take. Some companies run “buddy programs” across continents, in which employees encounter each other through video calls; unions can easily do the same. The technical possibilities are constantly growing, as is the ability and willingness of individuals worldwide to use these tools.Footnote ⁵³

Here, however, another obstacle becomes clear: companies’ interests and workers’ interests will only, at best, overlap partially when it comes to the use of digital technology for communication across boundaries. If value chains belong to one company, there may be an interest in communication that is tied to technical or logistical functionalities – but not necessarily in communication that has to do with working conditions, let alone solidaristic action among workers. The situation gets even more complicated if value chains are distributed across different companies. Employees (other than those working directly in the purchasing department) may not even be able to find out which companies the raw materials or intermediate products they work on are coming from. And for reasons of “tax optimization” or the avoidance of economic risks or legal liabilities, even value chains that could theoretically be in the hand of one company are often split in today’s globalized economy, increasing fragmentation.Footnote ⁵⁴

As a result, individuals often cannot make the kinds of connections that digital technology would, in principle, allow – they simply do not know, and have no right to learn, with whom to make them. This could, in principle, be changed: one could introduce a right to get to know one’s “co-workers” (appropriately defined in a concrete context) and for worker representatives from different countries to meet. At the moment, however, not even solidarity actions (e.g. strikes) are legally permitted in many countries.Footnote ⁵⁵ It might be a first step for unions to push for such a right, and maybe also to collect and provide information about international company structures that individual workers could draw on.Footnote ⁵⁶

Such efforts might in fact tie in with efforts on the political level to regulate markets more and to create accountability in value chains. After decades of neoliberal hegemony, the need to rein in global markets has become more and more visible, and several countries, and notably also the European Union, are taking bolder steps to hold large companies accountable for basic labor and environmental standards in their global value chains.Footnote ⁵⁷ But such attempts require enforcement mechanismsFootnote ⁵⁸ – and worker solidarity along supply chains might play an important role in this context. Unions can join forces across borders to push for giving workers and their representatives a voice, to make it more likely that supply chain legislation can make a real difference for the lives of workers and contribute to a path of transformation.

8.5 Conclusion: Technological Possibilities, but No Technological Determinism

In this chapter, I have discussed renewed possibilities for transnational worker solidarity through the lens of different notions of solidarity, and by comparing historical constellations of worker solidarity with today’s globally fragmented value chains. I have argued that, in certain historical constellations, it was the overlap of social and political solidarity that created a fruitful social, psychological, and practical starting point for union activism and other forms of worker solidarity. Today, with value chains spreading around the globe, commentators disagree about the hopes for reviving transnational worker solidarity. I side with the optimists, arguing that new possibilities of digital communication and the normalization of their use during the lockdown periods provide reasons for cautious optimism that similar levels of psychological connectedness and even trust could grow between people connected by digital means.

Let me emphasize once more that I am fully aware that such forms of connectedness would still not hold between all workers worldwide. Many informal workers in the Global South, for example, form no part of transnational value chains, and yet solidarity with them would be urgently needed. Here, digital technology might still offer opportunities, but the ways in which it could be used would need to follow a different logic than that of shared value chains. For example, it could consist in sharing technical solutions that allow workers to safely report labor standard violations via apps on their private phones.

However, we should not expect technological determinism to do the work. Digital technologies can only play the role I have ascribed to them if individual workers have a chance to connect to relevant others – and, often, companies have no interest in letting them know who these others are. Here, action is needed. Governments could, ideally, grant workers the right to get to know their colleagues along international value chains. But pushing for the introduction of such right is, in turn, something that will probably require transnational worker solidarity. As they so often are, these are chicken and egg problems that require strategic organizing, which, again, technology as such cannot deliver. It will remain to be seen how strong the forms of solidarity that are based on digital connections will be when it comes to real political action. There are some interesting signs that there can indeed be more than just warm feelings: a letter written by Amazon mechanical Turk workers to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos,Footnote ⁵⁹ or the launch of an app that allows tourists to book rooms in hotels that treat their maids well, an idea that started out in a WhatsApp group.Footnote ⁶⁰ Maybe – hopefully – more can grow out of such forms of solidarity and organizing, to give new momentum to forms of solidarity that are, today, urgently needed.