20 Minutes with Joerg Rieger: Deep Solidarity

Deep solidarity is not a warm sentiment or a “let’s all get along” slogan. It’s the kind of collective connection that makes the powerful nervous because it turns everyday shared pressure into organized power.

We sit down with Professor Joerg Rieger to unpack what he means by deep solidarity and why it emerged for him out of Occupy Wall Street and the claim “we are the 99%.” Along the way, we draw a bright line between solidarity that liberates and solidarity that traps. We talk about conservative identity solidarity like nationalism and white supremacy, not just as prejudice but as a political technology that can “unite and conquer” by recruiting working people into projects that ultimately sacrifice them.

We also dig into the limits of liberal moral solidarity. When solidarity is framed as charity or guilt, it often runs on outrage and burns out fast. Deep solidarity goes deeper than moral appeals by asking what is already tying our lives together under capitalism, extraction, and exploitation. We explore why worker organizing and the solidarity of the masses is what elites fear most, and why the best solidarity never erases difference.

Finally, we take on the worry that the “99%” flattens race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other lived realities. We argue that deep solidarity only works when it treats difference as strength, learns from where suffering is greatest, and builds collective liberation without the Olympics of oppression. If you care about social justice, labor unions, community organizing, and real change, this conversation gives you language and clarity for what comes next.

Subscribe, share this with a friend, leave a review, and tell us: what would deep solidarity change in your workplace or community?

This episode of Religion and Justice was produced by Peterson Toscano Studios. Learn more about their other podcasts and projects. Visit petersontoscano.com.

About Religion and Justice
Religion and Justice is a podcast from the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering how these forces shape the work of justice and solidarity. Each episode offers space for investigation, education, and organizing through conversations with scholars, organizers, and practitioners.

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Transcript

Why Deep Solidarity Threatens Power

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Deep solidarity is not a dream or a nice utopian concept. It is something that makes the powerful tremble, and they'll try to find every way to defeat it.

Defining Deep Solidarity Through Occupy

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello again, everyone. We're here with Professor Jorg Rieger, and we're going to be going over another concept that you will hear a lot in the Wendell and Cook program. It's deep solidarity. Jork, do you think you could give us just a uh quick definition of what you mean by deep solidarity, and then we'll go into sort of like these other solidarities that might be problematic.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

It's a term that came to me out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. You might remember it, right? Uh, when people said, we are the 99%. And that was a moment in a recent American history, I think, when a lot of people rediscovered solidarity. So it's not me saying, you must be in solidarity, but it was people realizing we have something in common. Uh, we are the 99%. And so I dug a little around that point. And deep solidarity then is this beautiful concept where people realize they're connected without having to give up their up their differences, without having to all look alike, and being able to make a real difference. I think that's what we want to talk about. How does solidarity help us to make a real difference?

Conservative Solidarity And Unite To Conquer

SPEAKER_01 1:18

I think we hear often about different types of solidarities. You talk about a sort of conservative type of solidarity. Could you kind of define that for us a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

So if you think about what we're talking about these days, you know, nationalism, racism, sexism, and so on, I think of these as solidarities. They might not always be called solidarities, but they're definitely designed to bring people together. So nationalism, you know, brings people off a certain nation together in order to be in solidarity. That's part of the German history with which I grew up. You know, you have German nationalism, fascism between 1933 and 1945, uh, that basically suggested to people, you know, here we are, white Aryan race people uh who have all this in common. Now, that's a form of solidarity that was extremely powerful. You know, it sent people out into war, sacrificing their lives, you know, sacrificing their families and everything. You could make the same case for white supremacy, right? White supremacy is to bring white people together believing that they're supreme over everybody else. Now, that's sort of this identity solidarity that we see everywhere. I mean, religion could be part of that, right? You pull people together by certain religious traits, and you say, well, we're now in solidarity. That requires to become more alike, to march in lockstep once in a while, right? Military, but also, you know, processions and all that stuff, marches. Marching in lockstep, I think, uh is another way of making people think we're alike. Of course, I talk about this as false solidarities because these solidarities at the end of the day are really not where it's at. Look at nationalism. One of my grandfathers was a soldier in Hitler's army uh marching against Russia. The solidarity that he might have felt uh with the German people was really just uh to pull him in to a scheme that in the end uh you know would spit him out as cannon fodder, would ruin his life in so many ways uh as it did, uh, you could see that later on, in order uh to use him uh for another project. So German nationalism wasn't about all Germans, it was about the ruling class, it was about the big corporations, the big politicians making their own deals and using everybody else for their own purpose. The same is true for white supremacy. You know, white supremacy is supposed to make people think we're all supreme, but white supremacy really only benefits, and for the most part, always benefits those at the top, the white ruling class, that makes the white underlings, the white working people believe they have more in common with the white ruling class than with their fellow workers, their fellow underlings, which is of course misleading, because in the end who wins is the ruling class and everybody else gets sacrificed. So what you see there, even in white supremacy, is white people perhaps sacrificing everything because they think they're supreme, and in the end uh they're spit out, you know, they're expendable. They're not the kinds of people that uh those on the top care about. So a lot of this is it's just fooling people for the sake of something else. So the conservative solidarity that I'm talking about here is really problematic because in the end it doesn't even help the people that that think they're benefiting from it.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Yeah, you talk about divide and conquer, almost in terms of conservative solidarity, you talk about unite and conquer. Could you just say a little quick part about that in terms of this conservative solidarity as unite and conquer?

Liberal Moral Solidarity And Burnout

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, use the example of white supremacy again. So white supremacy unites white people in order to conquer. I think everybody can see that, right? The interesting question is who gets conquered? What we can see, what is again obvious, you unite white people in order to conquer all non-white people. That's number one. Number two is the one that's usually not seen. You unite all white people in order to conquer most white people too. This is how elections are won these days. This was the southern strategy after the end of slavery. You bring white people together, making them think because you're white, they have more in common with you if you're the ruler, than with non-white people. Thereby you fool them and you conquer most white people for your own purposes too. That that is part of the pernicious history, and this is not just something that happened yesterday. Uh, this is something that's been happening for a very long time, and a lot of the modern world was built on this unite and conquer. In other words, uh, when we then talk about solidarity, my point is not we need solidarity because we're all so individualistic. That's what a lot of people think. Well, we need to bring together people because they're all over the place. Solidarity, deep solidarity, is designed to address these false solidarities that unite people in order to conquer everybody.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

So now let's flip the coin a little bit towards the problematic sort of liberal solidarity that you talk about also, that is put in terms of moral appeals.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

So if you think about what we're up against, right? Uh there's this conservative solidarity that's really false solidarity fooling people. But the question then is what do we do, right? Uh I mean you could think about maybe a liberal false solidarity uh where people are marching in lockstep again, right? Political correctness to some degree might be that too. You know, you have to talk exactly like me. You have to do exactly as I'm doing, you have to do as I'm saying. That's one thing. But what I usually see in in liberal circles is solidarity is seen as a moral obligation, a moral imperative, right? And again, you know, liberals might feel, you know, we have to bring people together for a cause. And so somebody says, you know, we have to help poor people, we are rich people, we have to middle class, we're middle class people, we have to help poor people. And so we go in and by golly, we're gonna help poor people. No, of course we we've seen that there have been solidarity movements in the US, you know. In the 80s, there was a solidarity with Central America movement that that operated like that a bit, you know. I'm glad there's solidarity, don't get me wrong, but the problem with these moralizing solidarities is they're really just based on moral appeals. They're not based on anything deeper, so they're not very deep. In other words, when I say deep solidarity, I'm looking for something deeper, number one. And number two, I'm also criticizing the solidarities where you know people become morally offended, outraged, and then they say, well, we have to do something. The problem with this moral solidarity is it usually burns you out. Uh after a while, you know, you're you're done with that. Uh, and then this is what we saw. And then people uh were sick and tired of Central America after a while in the US. Passion fatigue was a term that was used in those days. You have all this stuff, but it doesn't do anything. Now, when you look at this sort of liberal solidarity from the other side, uh, people in other parts of the world have often commented on this. There was an Australian Aboriginal woman, Lilla Watson, uh, who reportedly said to a young activist coming to help her, she said, if you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. If you've come here because our liberation is bound up together, then let's do it. Let's work together. So that's a big one, right? Solidarity that goes deeper than just moral appeals you have to help the poor or the aboriginals. A South African theologian by the Basil Moore, probably around the same time, put it even stronger. He said, If you have come here to help me, I cannot trust you. Why could he not trust them? Well, because if all you have is your moral appeal, you can always walk away. This is in fact what happened. This is not just that they saw some people walking away, but they saw these uh moralizing efforts to produce solidarity as always failing. People were always walking away, some sooner, you know, some later. That solidarity um built on morality, I think, is you know better than not doing anything, but it leads to burnout, it leads to a failure of progressive efforts. And that's tragic because then at the end things might be worse than they were before. My point here is that we have to be really cautious.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

So now that we have these sort of surface-level solidarities, the conservative, the liberal, how does deep solidarity address the concerns that you have about solidarity in general as it's as it's typically spoken of?

Deep Solidarity As Real Connection

Postmodernism And What Depth Means

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Deep solidarity here is not so much an idealistic idea or a moral principle. It is just looking at reality. It's asking the question, how are we already connected? This is how I read uh the second part of Jesus' commandment to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. I don't read it as you must love your neighbor. That's sort of the liberal solidarity thing again. I read it as saying something like, your neighbor is part of who you are. Now, there were some Jewish philosophers, Martin Buber was one, uh later Emmanuel Levinas, who realized that connectedness, but they often did it without a power analysis. They often sort of looked at this more in terms of philosophical relationship, in terms of, you know, ethical frameworks. I want to look at this in terms of a power analysis and say, what is it that accounts for the fact that your neighbor is a part of yourself? And for that, you might have to go back to the capitalist scene again, right? Because people say that in the capital scene, everybody's so individualistic, are missing the fact that in the capital scene everybody's connected. Everybody's building on everybody else, and oftentimes that means people are building their lives on the back of other people. So that's the connection here that I'm looking at. I often quote the Apostle Paul when he talks about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, who says, if one member suffers, all suffer together with it. The labor unions uh have slightly different expression. They say an injury to one is an injury to all. The deep solidarity I want to talk about is first of all, not to say we're all the same or we're all humans, but to say what is it that ultimately affects us all? What is it, you know, that puts us under pressure, as it were? What is it that we're experiencing? And that's of course the pressures that we just talked about in terms of capitaline, exploitation, extraction, and so on. In a way, it's not a very romantic concept. People always expect something romantic when they hear deep solidarity. It's just an account of saying, what kills you is what kills me, and it ultimately kills us all. Now, you build on this, of course, this is not the end of the conversation, but this is the foundation. Realizing that we may have more in common than meets the eye. But once you've said that, the point in is also realizing how we're different. So it's not necessary to say, I know exactly what you're going through, or I can feel your pain directly. The suspicion here is that your pain and my pain are somewhat related. That is also not to say that they're all the same in terms of value. You know, sometimes uh, you know, we've been playing this Olympics of oppression for a long time, where I'm more oppressed than you, you know, I'm more s suffering more, you know, than you, and you can never imagine. I'm not saying I can imagine. I'm saying that the people who are under pressure in the system need to realize uh that they're under pressure together, and this welds them together so that they can build something together.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

You talked about almost a criticism that you often receive, which is depth is sort of like maybe a romantic notion. But I'm also wondering for the postmodernist out there, when they hear deep or depth, I almost feel palpable alarm bells going off in their heads. I'm thinking of Bauldrillard, where he says in late modern culture, surfaces, signs, and simulations, they don't hide a deeper reality. They are the reality. Or where sometimes we can, when we talk about depth, we appeal to sort of like a true identity or an essence that's riding beneath the surface. Oftentimes that does away with difference. So can you maybe respond to the postmodernist for a moment and talk about how your depth and the deep in deep solidarity is not maybe what is setting off their alarm bells?

SPEAKER_02 14:12

That's a really good question. I came to the US in the 80s, early 90s. I was a grad student at Duke when this sort of thinking was all over, right? I spent a lot of time in the literature department that was full of postmodernists. And the postmodernists have a point. I mean, there's sort of a false notion of depth, uh, that's an illusion of a foundation that doesn't really exist. What the postmodernists, you know, via structuralism and poststructuralism often said is that everything is relational. But that's what I mean by depth. I don't mean there is some rock at the bottom uh that exists there in and of itself. I'm saying uh that these relationships create something that's more than just fleeting. I mean it may not be forever, but it is something that can build something at a certain moment when we need it most. So where postmodernism, I think, was right to critique certain foundationalisms and the idea that we can build on some foundation uh that's simply out there. What they forgot to ask is the question, what really matters? If you think about the capital scene again, what really matters there, of course, is also relationships, but some relationships matter more than others. I can also argue this in terms of finance capitalism. There's a lot of people following the postmodernists that are saying all that matters now is financial relationships. Finance capitalism is independent of any foundation, right? It's just money begetting money, something like that. But the truth is uh people are still working. And the postmodernists, you know, if they're CEOs, uh, there's quite a few postmodernists who went uh into the business world. They're still surprisingly interested in exploiting workers. They're not going and saying, well, what you do is nice, you know, keep doing what you're doing. No, they're also fighting unionization, they're also fighting working people building power. And so that's what I'm saying. There is something there uh that goes beyond uh the nice play of difference and all the other stuff that the postmodernists love to talk about. There's something bigger, something deeper, perhaps, that we have to reckon with. I'll give you one more example that probably uh you know pushes us to the next level of this conversation. What is it that the capitalist scene is most afraid of? People say, well, people speaking truth to power, protesters. Not really. You can ignore them. Uh we've we've seen that too often now. Or somebody who tries to become more diverse and inclusive. Not really. I mean, you can include a lot in the capital scene uh till the cows come home, really. No, what the capitalist scene is most afraid of is the solidarity of the masses. Workers organizing, graduate students organizing, that's when they get really nervous. And we've seen this uh in our own places uh just recently. This is a real thing. Deep solidarity is not a dream or a nice utopian concept. It is something that makes the powerful tremble, and they'll try to find every way to defeat it.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

When it came to the we are the 99%, there was a criticism that it sort of flattens difference, and there's a sort of class reductionism, I think that was used. Can you alleviate the fears again of people that might be terrified that this is sort of like economic reductionism or financial reductionism or capital reductionism or something?

Difference As Strength And Shared Struggle

SPEAKER_02 17:45

Yes, this is really important. So thanks for raising that question here. It has to be recognized that the capital scene is not designed to benefit the 99%. Uh, a lot of people don't see it, and if you don't see it, you're missing something crucial. If you're in the academy and you think the capital scene was built for you, think again, you see the capital scene coming for you these days. I don't need to give any specific examples, I think people know what I'm saying. Let's take that very seriously. Within the 99%, there are all kinds of other things going on. So this is why class is important, but so is race, so is gender, so is sexuality, so is ethnicity, so is ability, so is age. All these things also play a role, and so within the 99%, of course, let's use the race example here. Race gets used to play working people off against each other, or to unite white workers with the white bosses. This is the uniting conquer we just talked about. Within the 99%, all these other differences matter. It's not a matter of either or. It's actually a matter once you see the 99%, now you can see how racism functions to keep the 99% and not the 1%. How sexism functions. I mean, what is the big problem with sexism? Stereotypes, all kinds of things. It's a big problem. But why are we not talking about the fact more that women are making 77 cents off a dollar of what a white man does, black women 57 cents uh in Latinos 56 cents of a dollar of what a white man does. Also there's something within the 99% that has to be taken seriously. In deep solidarity, we take that into account. So it's not just we need to be mindful of it, it is part of the principle. Because the argument is you really have to look at where the pressure is the greatest. Paul, if one member suffers, all suffer together with it. Where is the suffering the greatest? And usually it is with non-white people these days, uh, let's think especially about immigrants, women, non-straight people. All these things are crucial. And why is it so important? Well, because this is where you see the face of the dominant system the clearest. So for me as a privileged white male, to see what's happening with some of my immigrant neighbors or women or or trans people, some of them my students, is really crucial because it helps me see what's going on. And there's not a contest me saying I'm suffering too. No, it's simply seeing what's going on and then joining together. So here's the funny thing and and the exciting thing too at the same time. Once you realize the importance of difference within deep solidarity, it's then not a matter of tolerance. It's not to say, oh well, we have to be more tolerant of difference. No, it is a way of putting it to work. Those who experience the greatest pain in their own bodies, in some ways are part of the leadership. They can help everybody else see what's going on. And once we pay attention, we become part of it. And then I can bring some of my privilege to the table. And when I do that, of course, it gets deconstructed. I mean, it's not like I bring my privilege and it stays that way. But this is the best way to deal with it. Don't divest yourself of what little privilege you have as a 99%er. Use it in the struggle, and this is where diversity then becomes a beautiful thing. You know, you're helping somebody else, you're helping yourself, and you're collaborating in a way that you become aware of who you are, somebody else becomes aware of who they are, and you bring your common resources together. It's a great image for interreligious dialogue too. You bring the various religions together, not to say we're all alike or to celebrate diversity. No, you bring them together to make a difference, to fight the suffering, uh, to overcome suffering, and then you can appreciate and see what everybody brings to it. As a Christian, you can now see what is it that moves a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu, a Jewish person, and you learn from that. Maybe you learn something for yourself, you might learn what. You bring. But that's the whole point of deep solidarity. It's unity and difference. Indifference then is not an excuse. Difference is what makes us stronger. That goes back to the postmodernists. You know, the postmodernists would always say difference relates. I now say, well, that's great, uh, but difference actually makes us stronger. So now you move from postmodernism and post-structuralism maybe to post-colonialism and decolonialism.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Thank you so much, Jorg, for speaking to us today about deep solidarity. Thanks for being with us. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they, as well as you and I, cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year, until they win it.