On solidarity: a review of a dinner party

The conversations that night left me thinking a lot about solidarity in Singapore, specifically in Singapore’s civil society. Solidarity is hard here. We are told, often and in multiple ways, that the individual, the discrete, is more important than the whole, than the inter and the intra. Meritocracy, a pillar of the Singapore identity, teaches us that only the smartest and hardest working can succeed. As Mysara Aljaru and I have previously argued in Brown is Redacted, the anthology we co-edited alongside Myle Yan Tay, there are “certain narratives, structures and policies that are actively reproduced to maintain a specific idea of a ‘multiracial society’: a society where tolerance and conscientious management are prioritised over inclusion, and where decision-making is based on majoritarianism, instead of true equity.” Some social issues are framed as more “bread-and-butter” than others, hierarchising injustices and pitting them against each other. We constantly drink the Kool-Aid of individualism: so long as we all keep to ourselves, we can all lead generally satisfactory lives. As a result, solidarity, a concept premised upon mutuality, is not intuitive to the general Singaporean, activists included. This limits our ability to push for systemic change. And it also limits our ability to forge community.

To me, solidarity is fundamentally about acknowledging our shared commonalities and struggles and, crucially, using them to propel us to political and social transformation. I don’t think solidarity is something that can be artificially manufactured or imposed by force—as a dear comrade, Kokila Annamalai, has written before: “Solidarity is not owed or demanded, it is evoked or inspired.” It is an experience that must be generated, activated through a building of bonds and a knowledge that “we are in this together.”

What then, does civil society think about solidarity? Where does solidarity lie, and what role do we have in trying to get people to discover it? Do we want solidarity? Do we want large-scale change? A retelling and review of that dinner party is a meditation on some of these questions.

The lawyer introduced the first prompt. Directed at Connie and Margie—veterans of the scene who had previously witnessed a significant leadership transition in our government—the lawyer asked: what was it like when Goh Chok Tong took over? What did it feel like?

It wasn’t an innocuous question to encourage Connie and Margie to reminisce. Instead, it was an acknowledgment that Singapore is at an inflection point, that civil society could be at an inflection point now. Against the backdrop of POFMAs galore, an increasingly emboldened populace attempting to mobilise support for Palestine and the rising cost of living, a new leader, Lawrence Wong, has come into power. More specifically, a leader who is not a seatwarmer the way Goh Chok Tong was perceived by many to be. A leader who has to contend with party members from an old guard that appear to be luxuriating in its overreaches of power. A leader who has become a leader, seemingly because other likely candidates just fell away with time. The question the lawyer finally landed on was: based on the experiences and hindsight of Connie and Margie, how are we going to seize this moment?

I picked up on the use of the first-person plural pronoun “we”. Was this it? I thought. Was this the start of a discussion to build intentional structures of solidarity within civil society?

I have found it challenging to figure out how to ignite that spark in people, that spark that would get them to think about building a broad base for change, building people power. Though we live in a country with limited democratic opportunities and a socioeconomic system that is increasingly indebted to businesses and wealthy elites, agitation and a desire for something different seems to remain elusive and scarce. Through the state’s creation and provision of a certain kind of “middle-class disposition,” in the form of public housing, ostentatious shopping malls and a social script that enables personal consumption, solidarity has proven difficult to forge. There is a general sense that standards of living have improved or will improve over time—even though that may not be the reality for a lot of people. Understandably, this narrative also shapes a lot of activists and activism.

I asked the group: who actually is the “we”? My sense is that we all have different definitions and there isn’t a shared understanding. Is the “we” a collection of discrete organisations and individuals, banded together only by association—an association that the state makes on our behalf? Or is the “we” something else? I am interested in a different kind of “we”. I want it to be more.

To be something greater than the sum of its parts. To be something that we collectively define and decide for ourselves. To address the lawyer’s initial provocation, we first needed to figure out who we were to each other.

To a very large extent, state control in Singapore is highly sophisticated and invisible. The IPC status is one such example of the state’s choice of disciplining technologies. It confers recognition on an organisation—presenting it with the illusion of influence and impact—while simultaneously engendering fear that said recognition can be taken away, causing organisations to self-regulate, to stick to their “own issue.”

Laws like the Public Order Act are written so broadly that it is difficult to define what constitutes an illegal assembly or procession. Anecdotally, many of us have heard stories of others being blacklisted from public sector jobs or not having their work visas renewed, with no clear reason why. As a result, people err on the side of being overly cautious, intensifying the culture of paranoia, self-censorship and myopia. Any capitalist society requires labour to be disciplined. As a country highly dependent on the capital from multinational corporations and wealthy foreign investors, the state ensures that the labour market is micro-managed in order to sell a politically stable business environment. As such, any highly cognisant and calibrated capitalist government knows that there must not be even a whiff of solidarity. Structures like the IPC status and broadly worded laws then help to keep even the most vocal of dissenters siloed and atomised.

Margie suggested an alternative to a collective: do we need to come together? We all have our own specialties. One of the academics agreed, saying that they feel they would not fit in if there was indeed some kind of broader “we”.

Not only are there specific governmental and political levers that help to perpetuate individualisation, there are also discourses that shape our collective consciousness. They help ensure that we imbibe individualism—the material and rhetorical organisation of Singaporean life all play a part in affecting our ability to understand and practise solidarity. We are told that we can achieve contentment through our 11:11 purchases; that we are not a welfare state and our CPF follows a “get what you saved for” principle, forcing us to work doggedly; we are told that we make change in the right way, unlike some other groups, which is why we get invited to exclusive closed-door dialogues. It is easy to see why sticking to our own lanes is compelling. Apart from the fear of repercussions, individualism is also a form of agency that we can assert: let me work on this one thing, this one issue, this one narrative. It is simpler. Accomplishments might be more frequent, change might be more tangible.

Academic Alexis Shotwell argues that this mode of change-making is shaped by a politics of purity, a desire to work towards and achieve some kind of ethical, political, moral purity. Single-issue politics is a form of classification. And Shotwell says that the urge to classify and delineate is deeply tied to the urge to contain something from externalities, to push other things aside—issues, identities, inequalities. Shotwell believes that this is a “forever-failing” endeavour because single-issue politics demands that we try to control a complex situation that is really out of our control. In other words, purity does not exist. We are all entangled, interdependent, contaminated. Better labour rights and stronger bargaining powers mean that women and gender minorities can battle workplace discrimination and harassment with more teeth; petrochemical workers can demand that they are taken care of adequately when they have to transition out of a polluting industry; delivery riders can lobby for minimum income and better protection.

Imagined purity prevents us from starting from a place of interconnection. It is demobilising and decollectivising and it will keep preventing us from building solidarity.

Unfortunately, the modus operandi of “pragmatic resistance” in Singapore can be seen as a form of purity politics. Legal scholar Lynette Chua has defined pragmatic resistance as a form of change-making that attempts to “maintain cultural legitimacy” by refraining from “directly confront[ing] the state.” Historically, this has meant that effective change-making is defined by what the state approves. In such circumstances, pragmatic resistance usually manifests as single-issue and representational politics, where a single policy tweak becomes the identity of a whole movement, or where publicly supporting other activists becomes too risky for fear of losing the state’s goodwill. It breeds individualisation, not agitation, not community. The desire for us as individuals, as individual groups, to enter into the (cultural, political, economic) marketplace means that laws and restrictions are not seen as borders that need to be erased, but as gates to an exclusive mansion that lull people into dreaming of entry. This perpetuates an us and a them; our issue and their issue; groups we can work with and groups we cannot.

Individual purity might seem satisfying from time to time, in small pockets, but it will ultimately fail us and will always disappoint us as our successes will fall short of being transformative, revolutionary. We cannot and must not accept that we are too diverse to come together to tackle our shared problems. It is a myth lodged deep in our imaginary that we must resist.

To the academic’s point, starting from a place of interconnectedness does not mean that we’re starting from a place of homogeneity. We are not indistinguishable and should not be aspiring towards it. If anything, solidarity hinges on differences. It is about recognising that despite our differences, we can still come together to take collective action. Solidarity is not the attempt to squeeze us all into a container. It is the relation that is built with others. It asks, what are we to each other?

And I don’t mean it’s all about vibes. It should be a coming together with a purpose. The abolitionist chimed in: this is why first principles are important, and why we must build them in civil society. I resonated with their suggestion. This could be the basis of fostering solidarity. First principles can help us figure out what we can all agree on at a minimum. Discussing first principles can also be energising and empowering because it enables people from different backgrounds to come together to work towards a common goal. Shotwell argues for a specific type of solidarity: aspirational solidarity. It is “a ‘solidarity based on collective conceptions of worlds that do not yet exist’—as a norm that might guide action toward humans but also toward worlds in which all sorts of beings flourish”. And this, to me, was what the abolitionist was saying. What principles can we agree on that will make all our lives better?

But really. It’s not about vibes. In the process of figuring out what is the minimum we can agree on, disagreements and debates are inevitable. It will then be about negotiating what is the most strategic, what is good enough, laying out practical and concrete options for what we are willing to do to show up for each other. Messiness, clunkiness and tough conversations are to be expected. About a week before finishing up this essay, I volunteered to help out at The People’s Manifesto Town Hall held on 3 August at The Projector at Golden Mile Tower. A handful of civil society groups, including SG Climate Rally, the organisation of which I am a part, came together to draft a list of policy demands that we believe, at the minimum, leads to all our lives improving. The working title of “The People’s Manifesto” was “The Minimum Programme”, a title reflective of the ideology of solidarity that inspired the document. The town hall was a mixed bag. It was long. It was a little draggy at times. People were forming their thoughts as they were speaking, which meant that some of the attendees went on a bit of a ramble. Others had criticisms, questions, disagreements. But there were also cheers of support. People applauded in unison as others spoke passionately. They laughed and connected with strangers. All these things felt like a positive sign of small “d” democracy. I was heartened that a room of over 200 people were energised enough to try and use a muscle they’re not used to working; they were contributing to a conversation about our shared humanity and interconnectedness.

A note to activists: we must remember that we are in the business of changing the world, not just interpreting it, as Marx’s adage tells us. And change can only come from, well, trying to change it. Disagreements can have the power to halt attempts; they can keep us forever stuck in the interpreting end of the spectrum. Notwithstanding the importance of interpretation, solidarity asks that we find ways through the disagreements to get to the attempts.

The point isn’t necessarily to be right—a tough standard to hold on to given that we are trying to prefigure and create things that may not exist yet. The point is to create possibilities, spectacular and non-spectacular alike, with the hope that something will eventually be right. In an attempt to take a step back and analyse things schematically, the ex-politician spitballed the idea of looking at Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s, when the People’s Action Party (PAP) first came into power. There were three main actors: the British state, opposition parties and society. The PAP was the most successful opposition party at that time because they used society to defeat the state. Historically, what seemed to have worked was the coming together of actors—a collective “we” needed to be constructed. In their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, authors Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor remind us that social change is not a “game of persuasion”. Instead, it is a “power struggle”. I think we often forget this. It is worth stating the obvious: power is not easy to dislodge and it will not be transferred quietly. In response to this historical example, I said that the case for solidarity is strong because that seems to be the only thing to have worked in the past.

It would not work now. There isn’t a moment, there isn’t a zeitgeist, said the lawyer. I have a hard time being convinced that we will know when a moment is the moment. A “moment” feels like it is a self-contained, uncontaminated phenomenon that speaks to a politics of purity. It is narratively neat, a literary device that conveniently ties all loose ends together. This is not to say that moments can’t happen. They do and they can push us in specific life-changing directions. But moments—circumstance—are determined by factors like timing and luck. Often, these factors are the same. A politics of solidarity—a politics of coming together to figure out and fight for what we want collectively—feels
a lot more concrete and certain. We cannot wait for a moment because our world is not built on such easy-to-follow scripts. And even if a moment is indeed coming, solidarity then says: what can we do in the meantime to make sure we’re ready for its arrival?

I whispered, I fear that we will miss the moment because we will be too scared. Because we will feel like we are not ready, like it isn’t the right time to stand with each other.

It is true that no generation is special. But it is also true that many people at that party wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for people like Connie and Margie and, similarly, they would not be who they are if it weren’t for others before them. We are products of our histories and it is important that we hold on to that. People fought—demonstrated bravery—to create this present. Our present was part of the future they sought to create. We must remind ourselves that we are creators of futures.

And creating something can’t exclusively come from “moments”. A moment may be perfect but perfection and reliability rarely come as a pair.

The wonderful thing about solidarity is that it doesn’t need perfection, or a remarkable generation. If anything, it is built on imperfection, people putting aside their differences to focus, again and again, on their commonalities, their common struggles. Solidarity doesn’t need to start from the spectacular.

Intentionally trying to build a collective “we” will probably need to start from conversations like the ones I had during this dinner. It will start from facilitated dialogues where we figure out what our risk levels are, what we can agree on and how we’d like to disagree with each other. The truth is that solidarity contains an element of risk. It always will, especially if we try to build intentional solidarity within civil society here in Singapore. Showing up for others means putting yourself, your organisation on the line. But as Kirsten Han wrote in her contribution to the anthology that produced this dinner party: “‘Being brave’ is a choice that must be made, over and over again. You have to decide not to back down.” I think the choice becomes easier to make when you don’t have to make it alone. As creators of futures, we have some level of choice in producing something better. Even if our problems may differ in scale, there are many similarities, including the people and institutions we are up against. We can choose to acknowledge that and do something with that acknowledgement.

The question beckons us to remember, to come up with a response that would also give us insight into how we remember. And, as the AWARE Saga has shown us, how we remember the past matters for how we want it to affect our present, and our futures. People remember the Saga as the moment justice won; the moment when a feminist organisation was not cowed into acquiescing to conservatives. It propelled and fortified AWARE, making it the force it is today. This should show us that the present was not inevitable and that the future can likewise be different.

Where were you? is a question about the past that’s not really about the past. It is about the future. It calls on us to ask ourselves how we would like this present to be remembered, how we would like it to be constructed for the future. It calls on us to recognise that our future can be constructed by us.

If we take the lawyer’s initial question seriously, this inflection point, this opportunity to craft different futures, then we should keep asking ourselves, where were we?

In the future, I want to say that I was discussing the coming together, the beginnings of a collective “we”, the project of building solidarity at a dinner party, over damn good mutton samosas and chicken dum biryani.

Kristian-Marc James Paul (he/him/his) is an activist and writer. He is one of the co-editors of Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore (2022), an anthology on minority race narratives. He has also written for CNA and Mekong Review. He was a contributing author to We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore (2024). Kristian is a Learning & Development professional and facilitates intergroup dialogues, partnering with organisations to run community discussions on masculinity and male allyship.

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