Solidarity is the iron law of social transformation:

In US political tradition that imperative is expressed by the slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

In the Quran it is expressed as “To kill one human is as if one has killed the entire humanity.”

Going back to our most ancient ancestors the conviction that cooperation & harmony are essential for human civilization must have found many expressions.

Evolutionary psychologists, best known as evo psychos, are trying to recycle the misanthropic ideas of social Darwinism based on projections of their own malignancy & speculations that humanity evolved from killer apes & are genetically programmed to competition, social hatreds, war.

The politics of anarchism are not compelling, but the anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote a marvelous book in 1890-96 titled “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” to rebut social Darwinism. The now deceased Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist & historian of science, has written volumes making chopped liver out of social Darwinism & exposing it for what it is: hating on the human race & justification for the excesses of capitalism.

Solidarity isn’t just a sentimental, childish pipe dream. It is what has made human survival, culture, civilization possible. Now as capitalism spirals into its barbaric phase, solidarity is the only force that can reverse that & make the human race whole again. At the risk of sounding maudlin, we were made to love one another & it is what all children deserve as their birthright.

(Thank you to Hassan Iqbal for the quotation from the Quran)