Watch the matter people

All right, hello everyone.

Our guest this week is Sarah Shulman, a writer and activist who is authored more than 20 books, including some novels, which we'll talk about a little later if we have time.

She's also written, Conflict is Not Abuse and Let the Record Show, which is a comprehensive oral history about Act Up.

Her latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, continues her project of thinking through activist history in hopes of making us a more potent force

for change in this very bleak present moment. All right, so yeah, let's jump into talking about

the book. It's in some ways a meditation on solidarity through various different moments over the last

several decades.

And I think it's a good time to think about what solidarity means

or what we think about when we talk about solidarity,

because this is, I think, a moment where a lot of people

are beginning to rethink the sort of normal or given ideas of activism,

resistance, and solidarity is another category that's good to think through in some depth.

And the first thing I thought when I started reading the introduction was that maybe I have a different idea of solidarity

or two conflicting ideas of solidarity. The first thing I think about is the song, Solidarity Forever,

which comes from the workers movement. And that kind of implies this equality between all the

workers of the world or the workers at a workplace. But you're, I think, approaching it more from the framework of an activist, which is closer to actually how I've become politicized as more of an activist than from the union movement.

Do you think that those are two different kinds of solidarity, or maybe they're just different standpoints of trying the same thing?

Well, I think the traditional concept is horizontal, right? You have, there's the shop and there's the boss.

And if all the workers unite, then they can get better working conditions. But now, you know, the boss is a globalized conglomerate.

So horizontal solidarity sometimes is not enough. Sometimes it is.

But sometimes you need other people who are outside of your milieu.

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