I was recently working with a client who raised a concern over competition between them and a peer in their workplace. As the job market becomes increasingly uncertain, with the number of layoffs increasing every week, this is becoming more common.
It is common for organizations to espouse values around teamwork. But at the same time, most organizations encourage a degree of competition. Performance review rating systems, individual achievement awards, a limited pool for raises and bonuses, and limited promotion opportunities are all ways that individuals compete. This may not be explicit (you won’t necessarily know what raise someone else got, although if someone else gets the promotion, you will know). Still, the implication is that things in an organization are scarce, and employees must compete for them.
The other side of this value is that the implication that “we are all in it together” denies that the implications differ for different people. The top executives often have golden parachutes in their contracts, which means they will be taken care of even if things go badly. The rewards for success are also unevenly distributed.
Negative solidarity is more than just not supporting your peers; it is far worse. Jason Read picks up this theme in his book The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work:
Negative solidarity is not just an inversion of solidarity, a focus on the individual rather than the collective, but one in which any collectivity, any connection between one individual’s struggles and another’s, is actively refused. Negative solidarity is a transformation of one’s own particular destitution into a virtue—a virtue that is founded upon an attachment to the trials and tribulations of work. It is the belief that because one has suffered through work, or believes that they have suffered, then others should too.1
We often see this when people work more hours, feeling that others should also have to work long hours. We also see it when people miss out on a promotion and, as a result, undermine the promotion of peers. I have seen it in managers who suffer because of their boss, and so they pass that suffering on to their teams.
Negative solidarity is what remains of class conflict after class conflict has been attenuated. Negative solidarity is a particular sense of indignation, aimed not at capitalists for living of off the exploitation of labor, but at those who either are seen not to work or whose labor fails to live up to the norms and demands of “truly productive work.” 2
One thing that happens is that solidarity is misplaced. This is quite common in layoffs. When we see layoffs, we often see some solidarity; people come together to support those who were let go, but we also see solidarity with the company, whether in the form of people thanking the company that let them go or for those who remain pledging their support to the same company that sacrificed their peers. It is seeing the injustice of the situation, but rather than wanting to change it, it ensures it is shared.
Negative solidarity is defined as “an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension funds, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too.” 3
Meritocracy
I would argue there is a relationship between negative solidarity and meritocracy. There is a belief that those who have power earned it. (You may notice the most common people making these claims are wealthy white men, but that is probably a coincidence). The (often unspoken) belief of meritocracy is that those in higher positions are superior. And if those in lower positions were truly equal, they would rise to the occasion. Ursula K Le Guin talks about the concept of superiority in her writing on Utopia:
If it were true that superior people refuse to be treated as inferiors, it would follow that those low in the social order are truly inferior, since, if they were superior, they’d protest; since they accept an inferior position, they are inferior. This is the comfortably tautological argument of the slave-owner, the social reactionary, the racist, and the misogynist. 4
We are often in our positions because of contingent circumstances that have intervened. This doesn’t discount the value of hard work or skills but instead places them in context. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith writes in his book Triggers, “Fate is the hand of cards we’ve been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.” 5
This exemplifies the ideas often given by meritocrats: “Sure, you have been dealt a lousy hand, but what you do with it is what matters.” But this (to extend the poker metaphor) fails to consider the stacked deck, the lack of a seat at the table, and the fact that regardless of dealt cards, those with the most chips will be able to position themselves for success.
Yes, we are responsible for how we respond to our circumstances, but not everyone has the same options for responses, and path dependency matters; there are limits to mobility.
Of course, those in positions of power think that they have power because they deserve it; they don’t often recognize that they only have power so long as those they have control over believe it. Slavoj Žižek remarks on this, extending the thoughts of Karl Marx:
we, the subjects, think that we treat the king as a king because he is in himself a king, but in reality a king is a king because we treat him like one. And this fact that the charismatic power of a king is an effect of the symbolic ritual performed by his subjects must remain hidden: as subjects, we are necessarily victims of the illusion that the king is already in himself a king. That is why the classical Master must legitimize his rule with a reference to some non-social, external authority (God, nature, some mythical past event …) – as soon as the performative mechanism which gives him his charismatic authority is demasked, the Master loses his power. 6
In current discourse, that external authority is meritocracy.
When we believe we have earned what we get, that includes the good and the bad that happen to us. And often, our view of the bad as a right of passage causes us to believe that others should suffer through that same process.
As an affective-imaginary complex, negative solidarity is self-perpetuating. It is sustained by two dynamics. First, there is a tendency to resist the cognitive and affective dissonance of “seeing the better and doing the worse,” to resolve this contradiction by dismissing the possibility of the better. This affirmation of the worse as the only possible option is, in some sense, an affective transvaluation—an attempt to turn powerlessness into pride, suffering into merit. As work is stripped of its capacity to deliver pride and satisfaction of the job itself, or the capability to deliver the promised goods and life of consumer society, the only thing that remains is work itself as an ethical value. Having a job, working hard, becomes the point of pride and identification. This point of pride is often maintained against others who are seen as nonworkers, even if they are imagined. The desire to maintain joy, a sense of one’s capability and agency, even as a fiction, is a particular strategy for thinking and acting. Second, once this imaginary is accepted, it becomes self-reinforcing as a limitation of imagination and action. We only do what we are capable of imagining. Practices and actions shape the imagination, and the imagination in turn shapes what actions are deemed desirable or even possible. Together, these two aspects constitute a kind of symbolic violence done to the imagination. 7
One of the key points here is that we often see work on its own having an ethical dimension. Hard work is seen as a good thing. When we lose the ability to see our work as truly meaningful, we cling to working hard. There is a certain way that this turns into productivity porn, and people complain/brag about how busy they are.
And if hard work and the suffering that goes with it is ethical, anything else is unethical. Thus, our suffering at work is seen positively, and we expect everyone else to suffer equally.
What does this mean for middle managers?
As a middle manager, you will likely see this dynamic and can often (unintentionally) propagate it. Negative solidarity can be even more damaging when coming from a manager. If you feel your team needs to suffer in all the ways you do, they certainly will.
As a manager, you can show solidarity with your team. And for all the talk of negative solidarity, it will help to have a picture of what Solidarity looks like. Mary Douglas paints such a picture in the introduction to her book How Institutions Think:
Solidarity involves individuals being ready to suffer on behalf of the larger group and their expecting other individual members to do as much for them. It is difficult to talk about these questions coolly. They touch on intimate feelings of loyalty and sacredness. Anyone who has accepted trust and demanded sacrifice or willingly given either knows the power of the social bond. Whether there is a commitment to authority or a hatred of tyranny or something between the extremes, the social bond itself is taken to be something above question. Attempts to bring it out into the light of day and to investigate it are resisted. Yet it needs to be examined. Everyone is affected directly by the quality of trust around him or her.” 8
An environment of actual psychological safety is part of what is needed for solidarity. There needs to be trust in those around you, but even more is required. As Mary Douglas continues, really driving the point home: “solidarity is only gesturing when it involves no sacrifice.” 9
“What are you willing to sacrifice?” is the ultimate question of solidarity.
What would you give up to support your peers? What would you sacrifice for those who report to you?
- Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ursula K Le Guin, “A War Without End” ↩
- Triggers. M Goldsmith ↩
- Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology ↩
- Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work ↩
- Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think ↩
- Ibid ↩