artifist:

whoa uhh i didn’t say a word about solidarity, i was making fun of old stuff. i 100% believe in solidarity unironically. solidarity has overthrown like four dictators this year so far and i hope syria are getting nervous. and i don’t think that solidarity is lessened just because it comes from outside sources; i remember when during the tahrir square/tuition fees/wisconsin protests you saw posters from each all addressing the others and what i liked best about it was that it opened up a space for egyptians in wisconsin/americans in egypt, etc., to talk about the incidents within a wider context.

like i realise you weren’t being totally serious there but this is one of those things like media analysis where the standard position on it is so bizarre that it annoys me deeply. father culture tells us that solidarity is sentimentalism, has reframed it as ‘kitsch,’ & that it is ultimately worthless. simultaneously it puts a lot of fucking effort into dividing the working classes & inciting hatred for one another. either solidarity is worthless sentimental fluff believed only by champagne socialists, or it is something so dangerous that capitalism must invent the entire concept of race just to stop it happening. i don’t see why we should treat it with less or more importance than father culture places on it; we just sometimes gotta look at what he’s actually saying.

i mean i don’t want to overplay solidarity either. it really is the bare minimum to do this, or retweet #arabspring, or post messages of support to people in libya. but i don’t think there is anything wrong with showing that solidarity exists; that it is ‘us against them’. anecdotally, i saw many people online from ‘the arab spring’ speaking very positively about messages of solidarity which can only have increased the ‘the world is watching’ feeling; conversely, it was also nice at the student protests to meet people who had come from there or who had family and friends there also taking part in these protests, that as maybe frivolous as it is in comparison, they knew it was all aspects of the same fight.

solidarity i guess is like the flour in the world’s most delicious cake. no-one is going to eat the cake and go ‘maannnnnn the flour in this thing is fucking AWESOME,’ but at the same time you ain’t making no cake without flour and people who try to act like flour is something you can only get into ironically need to get educated (in this metaphor the cake stands for communism)

that was probably too much for an off-hand joke but it was gonna come out on this tumblr at something that i am quite sappy and totally believe in solidary and the power of love. suck it.

I’m not going to reply to this, because David and I both know exactly what I meant, and that I meant it as a joke. I fully intend to make a mixtape and send it, because who doesn’t love getting a mixtape from a random stranger? I’m just openly admitting to my own brand of back seat socialism.

Really, the only reason I’m rebloging this is because David is very good at writing things, and for an off the cuff defense of sentimentality within radical circles, this is pretty excellent.