CHAPTER NINE

IN SOLIDARITY: A FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIALIST HUMANISM

Solidarity in the heart of a people is impossible without solidarity among all peoples —Fidel Castro

To bring about a ‘better society’ and progress at the level of social welfare, the French revolutionaries called for freedom, equality and solidarity. Th e American revolutionaries similarly called for a system that would secure the right of each member of society the freedom to pursue the inalienable human right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness. To bring about progress so conceived the revolutionaries entrenched in the Constitution of the new State the formal equality of each individual in the face of the law and the eyes of God, and the democratic right of each individual to enjoy a number of fundamental human rights, including the freedom of expression and political organ- ization, and to be protected in these rights. What the Constitution did not guarantee, however, was that these rights would be given and secured by the State under conditions of social solidarity, i.e. in condi- tions that are ‘equal for all’. And this for good reason. Th e State was founded on the principle of private property in the means of social production, thus guaranteeing the legal right of the owners of property to freely dispose of it in their own economic interest. For this rea- son, the democratic states and capitalist economies—capitalist democracies—so constituted gave institutional form to the principle of freedom, or prioritized economic and political freedom over social equality and solidarity in the scale of values. In any case, the resulting system and subsequent regimes were democratic in form and class- based and divided, resulting in conditions of substantive social ine- quality in access to the means of social production and the distribution of the social product. Under these conditions social solidarity is simply not possible.1

1 Th is fundamental point of principle was not understood by Michel Camdessus, Executive–Director at the the time of the IMF, when, on an offi cial visit to Mexico 238 chapter nine

In societies that are divided by relations of class—and capitalist societies are necessarily class divided—the poor oft en live on islands that are separated from the non-poor by oceans of wealth and privi- lege. Under these conditions social solidarity cannot exist except in the dreams and minds of reformist social liberals such as Michel Camdessus, concerned with the destabilizing eff ects of class division but unwilling to propose the abolition of class. At most, what is pro- posed is the attenuation of the inevitable inequalities in social condi- tions, providing avenues of social mobility, and overcoming the class divide by convincing the poor that the existing system of institutions and policies also benefi ts them, providing opportunities and pathways out of their poverty.

Democracy as Social Solidarity

In the modern world of capitalist development and liberal democracy, and especially in the United States, social solidarity, in the words of Joseph Swartz (2009), is the ‘forgotten sibling’ among the family of dem ocratic values—‘liberty, equality and fraternity’—that suff used the democratic social revolutions from the French Revolution onwards. While schoolchildren in the US are taught that the American Revo- lution fought for the rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (or ‘property’ according to John Locke) the less liberal individualist and more democratic collectivist (proto-socialist?) French Revolution spoke of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Th e concept of ‘fraternity’ or ‘solidarity’ (in gender neutral terms) implies that in the course of con- structing the enterprise of creating a better form of society and a more human form of development, people develop a capacity for empathy and trust in their fellow beings—social solidarity, we would say today, or, as Che Guevara would have it, a ‘love of humanity’. In capitalist or other forms of class-based and divided societies gov- erned by hierarchical norms of class and status, social obligations and duties are set by customary practice and cultural tradition. In contrast, in community-based societies, or those oriented towards communalism

under Ernesto Zedillo’s Presidency he announced that the Fund’s policy regime was not based on neoliberalism (belief in the free market), but rather on three pillars: the invisible hand of the market; the visible hand of the state; and ‘social solidarity between the rich and the poor’.