Revolutionary Solidarity Beyond State Divisions

Introduction

Revolutionary solidarity is easy to chant and difficult to live.

Every movement declares unity. Yet scratch beneath the slogans and you find familiar fractures: class resentment simmering under progressive rhetoric, racial hierarchy reproduced in leadership roles, religious mistrust disguised as secular superiority. The state does not merely divide us through police and prisons. It trains us to divide ourselves through education, media, theology and habit. We internalize the architecture of rule.

If the goal is to abolish systems of domination rather than rotate managers at the top, then solidarity cannot be sentimental. It must be structural. It must rewire how power circulates inside our organizing spaces before we attempt to seize or dismantle power outside them.

History offers warnings. The global anti Iraq War marches in 2003 mobilized millions across 600 cities, yet the invasion proceeded. The Women’s March in 2017 drew historic crowds, yet internal fractures around race and leadership weakened its staying power. Size alone does not guarantee transformation. Without internal coherence and shared risk, mass mobilization evaporates.

The thesis is simple but demanding: revolutionary solidarity emerges when movements design intentional practices that surface hidden assumptions, redistribute real authority, and bind participants through shared risk. Vulnerability must translate into sovereignty shifts, or it is just catharsis.

The State Inside Us: Why Divisions Persist

Before we can dismantle the state, we must recognize how it lives within us.

The state is not only a bureaucracy. It is a pattern of separation. It classifies, ranks and disciplines. Religion, when coopted by power, sanctifies hierarchy. Education sorts children into winners and losers, normal and deviant. Capitalism trains us to compete for survival. Over time, these logics crystallize into reflexes.

You carry them into your meetings.

Internalized Hierarchy as Strategic Weakness

Many movements default to voluntarism. If enough people show up and escalate tactics, change will come. This lens privileges mobilization over introspection. Yet if your coalition replicates class elitism or racial gatekeeping, your numbers conceal fragility.

Consider Occupy Wall Street. Its encampments spread to 82 countries and reframed inequality through the language of the 99 percent. Yet internal tensions around race, gender and strategy limited its durability once police evictions began. The encampment was a powerful ritual, but the deeper architecture of solidarity remained underdeveloped.

When hierarchy is unexamined, it reappears in subtle ways: who drafts press releases, who controls the bank account, who speaks to media, who absorbs the most legal risk. The rhetoric may be horizontal. The flow of power rarely is.

Division as Counterinsurgency

States rely on more than batons. They rely on narrative segmentation. Workers are told their enemy is the immigrant. Religious communities are warned against secular radicals. Secular activists dismiss faith as backward. Each division fragments potential solidarity.

If your organizing space reproduces these silos, you are performing unpaid counterinsurgency on behalf of power.

The solution is not forced homogeneity. Solidarity is not sameness. It is coordinated difference. It requires practices that expose how hierarchy operates and then deliberately reroute authority.

This leads to a harder question: how do we design reflection that destabilizes internalized domination without collapsing into endless therapy?

From Vulnerability to Shared Risk

Vulnerability has become fashionable. Circles, check ins, storytelling sessions. These can be powerful. They can also become rituals of confession that leave structures untouched.

Revolutionary vulnerability must carry consequence.

Assumption Autopsies

Begin with an Assumption Autopsy. At the start of each cycle, invite participants to name a belief about class, race or religion that shaped them. Not to wallow in guilt, but to expose the mental scripts running in the background.

This practice accomplishes two things. First, it normalizes self interrogation. Second, it destabilizes moral superiority. Everyone carries residue from the system.

But the autopsy cannot end in applause. Each confession must trigger a structural shift. If someone recognizes that they habitually dominate discussions, they step back from facilitation for the next action cycle. If someone admits discomfort working across religious difference, they pair with a comrade from that community in a high stakes project.

Vulnerability becomes a hinge that swings power.

Dangerous Proximity

Solidarity deepens through shared risk, not shared sentiment.

The civil rights movement in the United States fused Black church networks, student organizers and labor activists through coordinated direct action. Sit ins, freedom rides and voter registration drives exposed participants to violence together. Risk equalized status. Courage redistributed dignity.

You can design analogous experiences. A rent defense sleep in that brings homeowners and tenants into the same physical space. A workplace mapping session where wage disparities are exposed publicly. A coordinated refusal of an unjust fee that binds students and staff.

When people confront authority side by side, identities shift. The category of comrade begins to outweigh inherited labels.

Rituals of Decompression

Shared risk generates tension. Without decompression, conflict festers and hierarchy reasserts itself.

Embed collective rituals after major actions: communal meals, music, silent walks, spiritual reflection if appropriate. These are not luxuries. They are psychological armor. Movements that ignore the emotional metabolism of struggle burn out or implode.

Vulnerability, risk and decompression form a cycle. Reflection leads to action. Action generates stress. Ritual converts stress into cohesion. Then the cycle repeats at a higher level of trust.

Yet trust alone does not dismantle hierarchy. You need visible metrics.

Designing Power Shifts, Not Just Conversations

If solidarity is real, it will show up in the ledger.

The Shadow Budget Exercise

Every organization has a budget, even if informal. Money, time, media attention and decision making authority are currencies.

Host quarterly Shadow Budget workshops. On one wall, map the current distribution of resources. Who controls funds? Who approves expenditures? Who drafts strategy? On another wall, sketch the distribution that would reflect genuine equality.

The gap between these maps is your hierarchy.

Commit to erasing at least one gap per quarter. Perhaps treasury rotates every six months. Perhaps media spokespeople are drawn by lot from a trained pool. Perhaps a percentage of funds is allocated by caucuses representing historically marginalized members.

Do not debate indefinitely. Amend your bylaws or norms immediately. Solidarity that cannot rewrite rules is decorative.

Rotating Authority as Discipline

Charisma ossifies. Expertise hardens into gatekeeping. To prevent this, build rotation into your structure.

Facilitation, note taking, public speaking and negotiation roles should circulate on a predictable schedule. Publish that schedule. Transparency disrupts informal hierarchies.

Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa demonstrated how student activists could force institutional change by maintaining pressure while continually renewing leadership energy. When roles circulate, burnout decreases and new voices shape strategy.

Rotation is not chaos. It requires training. Invest in skill sharing so authority transfer does not weaken effectiveness.

Blind Caucuses and Public Commitments

At least once a year, convene identity based caucuses in private sessions. Encourage candid discussion of lingering hierarchies. Then reconvene in plenary where each caucus presents concrete demands for structural change.

Set deadlines for implementation. Thirty days. Sixty days. Public accountability prevents promises from dissolving into goodwill.

This process reframes vulnerability as negotiation. It acknowledges difference without allowing it to calcify into factionalism.

Still, how do you know whether these practices are transforming your internal dynamics or merely producing temporary openness?

Measuring Sovereignty, Not Sentiment

Movements often measure success by turnout or social media reach. Internal transformation demands different metrics.

Count sovereignty gained.

Three Core Indicators

1. Decision Origin Rate: What percentage of strategic proposals originate from members who previously held marginal positions in the group? Track this quarterly.

2. Resource Allocation Control: What proportion of funds and logistical authority is directed by those same members? Follow the money.

3. Retention After Conflict: Do participants from historically sidelined groups remain active after major disagreements? Exit rates reveal hidden hostility.

If these indicators trend upward over time, hierarchy is melting. If they stagnate, your reflection practices are cosmetic.

The Speaking Time Dashboard

During meetings, track speaking time by social position. This is not to shame individuals but to surface patterns. Display aggregate data publicly. Patterns once invisible become discussable.

Similarly, document who drafts public statements and who represents the group externally. Representation is power. If the same demographic repeatedly becomes the face of the movement, examine why.

When Data Contradicts the Vibe

Movements are prone to mythmaking. We tell ourselves we are inclusive because we aspire to be.

If your metrics contradict your narrative, pause external campaigns for a defined period and address the imbalance. This is painful. It may feel like losing momentum. Yet pursuing external victories with a fractured internal culture produces hollow wins.

The Quebec Casseroles protests in 2012 succeeded partly because participation diffused across neighborhoods. Households banged pots from windows. Leadership was less centralized, which made repression difficult and participation accessible. Structural diffusion can be an ally of solidarity.

Measurement does not replace trust. It sharpens it.

Integrating the Four Lenses of Change

Most movements operate primarily through voluntarism. Mobilize enough bodies and escalate tactics. When numbers decline, despair sets in.

Broaden your lens.

Structural Awareness

Monitor the material conditions shaping your struggle. Economic crises, debt spikes, environmental disasters create openings. The Arab Spring followed food price surges and long simmering grievances. Timing matters.

Solidarity deepens when participants understand the structural forces at play. Education about these forces should not be abstract lectures but collaborative analysis sessions mapping how global systems touch local lives.

Subjective Shifts

Inner transformation is not indulgent. Consciousness shapes possibility. Art, music, ritual and spiritual practice can recalibrate collective imagination.

The ACT UP slogan Silence equals Death functioned as both accusation and awakening. It transformed shame into militancy. Such symbols rewire emotion at scale.

Integrate creative practices that seed new feelings about cross class and cross religious collaboration. Joint cultural festivals, shared fasts, collective art builds. Emotion is a political resource.

Theurgic and Symbolic Dimensions

For many communities, spiritual language remains powerful. Rather than dismiss it, explore how ritual can sanctify equality. Mass prayers for justice, ceremonial occupations of contested land, interfaith vigils. When aligned with structural strategy, such acts deepen commitment.

A campaign that fuses material leverage, emotional resonance and symbolic depth becomes harder to fracture along identity lines.

Solidarity is chemistry. You mix will, timing, narrative and structure until a reaction ignites.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To transform internal hierarchies into engines of solidarity, embed the following practices:

• Monthly Assumption Autopsy
  Dedicate the first meeting of each month to surfacing internalized beliefs. Pair each confession with a concrete authority shift for the next action cycle.

• Quarterly Shadow Budget Workshop
  Map current and ideal resource distribution. Amend at least one structural rule every quarter to close the gap.

• Rotating Role Calendar
  Publish a transparent schedule for facilitation, treasury, media and negotiation roles. Train members to ensure competence rotates with authority.

• Shared Risk Campaigns
  Design at least one action per quarter that binds diverse participants through meaningful risk, such as coordinated refusal, public testimony or physical presence.

• Sovereignty Dashboard
  Track decision origin rates, resource control and retention after conflict. Review data publicly and commit to corrective measures when trends stall.

These steps require discipline. They may slow rapid mobilization. But they cultivate resilience. They convert solidarity from emotion into structure.

Conclusion

Revolutionary solidarity is not declared. It is engineered.

The state divides through classification and control. Capitalism isolates through competition. Religion and education, when captured by power, legitimize hierarchy. If your organizing space passively absorbs these logics, your movement will fracture under pressure.

The alternative is demanding but liberating. Surface assumptions regularly. Tie vulnerability to authority shifts. Embed shared risk into campaigns. Measure sovereignty, not sentiment. Rotate power before it calcifies. Fuse structural analysis with emotional and symbolic depth.

Movements that win rarely look like they should. They experiment. They correct course. They refuse to let internal hierarchy sabotage external ambition.

Solidarity is the art of turning difference into coordinated force. It is the slow construction of a culture where freedom is practiced, not postponed.

The question is not whether you can imagine such a space. The question is whether you are willing to surrender enough power to make it real.

What authority will you relinquish this season so that solidarity can become more than a word?