Real Solidarity Requires Membranes

Discussion

Benjamin Life:

"On Membranes, Thresholds, and the Scales of Solidarity:

If care is relational and cannot scale to infinity, then real solidarity requires membranes. It requires relational thresholds, boundaries that define who is inside a given circle of care and who, for now, is not. This sounds harsh until you realize that the alternative is to care for no one in particular, which is the same as caring for no one at all. We are not trying to care for everyone simultaneously. We are trying to care for specific people with whom we have actual bonds of reciprocity, trust, and intimacy.

A boundary of belonging is not a wall built to keep people out. It is the specific, relational act by which someone actually chooses to be in solidarity with someone else. This is the difference that makes everything work. Forced solidarity is not solidarity at all; it is conscription, and it breeds the resentment we feel toward jury duty rather than the devotion we feel toward our own people. Real solidarity has to be entered, consciously, by a self that knows itself well enough to mean it. The membrane is what makes the choice legible, what lets us say, with our whole selves, I am choosing to be inside this circle with you, to bear the real costs of intimacy because of what is ultimately gained from mutual care.

For that choice to stay genuine, the membrane has to hold two properties. It has to be real: an actual threshold, with an inside and an outside, or there is nothing to choose and nothing to consent to. And it has to be fluid and adaptive and self-regulating: porous enough that people can enter and leave, mutually accountable enough that the circle can enforce its own agreements as we do the messy work of caring for each other. A boundary that cannot move becomes a prison; a boundary that will not hold becomes a site of extraction. What we are after is exactly the living membrane we began with, the cell wall, firm enough to maintain integrity, permeable enough to stay alive, crossed only by consent. Here the image we planted at the level of the single self reappears at the level of the community, because it is the same pattern: bounded openness, the throne resting on a web that it neither dissolves into nor seals itself against. This is what keeps belonging from curdling into either tyranny or the tyranny of structurelessness. The boundary is what makes the belonging consensual, and the consent is what keeps the boundary humane.

And here it helps to notice that you already belong to many such circles, each defined by a different kind of shared stake.

I am in economic solidarity with the other members of my cooperative: we share a material fate tied to the same enterprise. I am in social and cultural solidarity with the people I do community organizing with: we share a project and a set of relationships. And I am in ecological solidarity with the people who share my bioregion: because we all have a vested interest in the same healthy water, the same healthy air, the same healthy soil. Notice that these are not abstractions. They are not “the environment” in general. They are this watershed, this foodshed, this soil, this community. The specificity is what grounds the solidarity and makes it material. You are in solidarity with your watershed-mates whether you like them or not, because you will all drink the same water.

When we form networked commons with relational membranes around these different common-pool assets, we are not building some kind of global solidarity. We are building pockets of material solidarity: dense, particular, and real. And then, crucially, from within those membranes we can begin to compose larger structures: nested, federated networks that allow us to be in broader solidarity where it is appropriate, consensual, and bounded.

The trick is to design the scale of each solidarity membrane proportional to the nature of the shared stake. Another bioregional group on the far side of the continent does not share my watershed. We are not in ecological solidarity around the same water. But we do share solidarity around information, around the hard-won knowledge of how to steward a watershed, which we can exchange freely across the distance between us. That is an appropriate, real, and genuinely interdependent form of solidarity, scaled correctly to what we actually have in common. This is the difference between solidarity that is grounded and solidarity that is performative: the grounded kind always knows exactly what it is grounded in.

* Why Solidarity Needs Teeth

For any of this to mean something, the communities involved have to be functionally sovereign. Without enforceability, communities face what has been dubbed by political economists as “the free rider problem.” In any shared space, some people will benefit from the solidarity of the group without ever entering into reciprocity with it. They take from the commons without giving back to it, and because there is no consequence for taking without giving, the people who take the most pay the least. Left unchecked, this dynamic does not just create unfairness. It quietly converts solidarity into extraction.

This is exactly why solidarity needs functional sovereignty. It needs the appropriate stakes, and it needs enforceability, the capacity to say this is the boundary, and these are the consequences of crossing it. Functional sovereignty is what makes solidarity real, because it gives the commons actual consequences and actual norms, enforced through relationships rather than through top-down authority. Without that capacity, solidarity is just a sentiment, and sentiments are inevitably strip-mined.

This is the heart of what Elinor Ostrom spent her career demonstrating. Studying real commons that had endured for centuries, from fisheries to irrigation systems to alpine pastures and forests, she found that they did not survive by being open and unbounded. They survived because the communities governing them had clear boundaries, locally crafted rules, graduated sanctions for those who broke them, and accessible ways to resolve conflict. They survived, in other words, because they were functionally sovereign. The lesson is not that we must choose between freedom and rules. It is that real freedom, the freedom to share a commons without watching it collapse, is constituted by the right rules, made and enforced by the people who live with their consequences.

So the solidarity I am arguing for is rooted in reciprocity, relationships, and accountability, not in some abstract, frictionless solidarity that asks nothing and therefore protects nothing."

- Benjamin Life [1]