Bibliography
Former members of Solidarity are contributing accounts of their experiences with the group to John Quail, who is writing a history. Louis Robertson (the pen-name of a Solidarity member of the late 1970s from the midlands, who joined the group with a handful of other fellow former dissident members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain) has published an account on the web of his time in Solidarity. He says:
Solidarity was heavily influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie among other things. Actually, looking back, the influences were probably more eclectic.... Solidarity published many pamphlets, they fell into a number of categories which probably reflect the different influences on and within the group.
One effort was to republish the works of Castoriadis into English.... It was from this trend that Solidarity's ideas of society being divided into order givers and order takers came, rather than a working and a capitalist class. This was not a view held by everyone and anyway many simply seemed to see the ideas of order givers and order takers as being another way of talking about the working and a capitalist class. Others took it far more seriously and I think that these ideas still linger on in the anarchist movement in the politics of Class War and Andy Anderson et al.:...
A second strand was rediscovering important moments of revolutionary working-class history. This saw many excellent pamphlets, including Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control. Without Solidarity's efforts we would all be much less knowledgeable in Britain.
A third effort was in publishing industrial accounts which gave voice to what workers were doing during important periods of struggle, particularly in the late sixties. In the late seventies we tried to continue this in the magazine with a couple of special motor supplements. We were able to do this because some of the original members had an industrial background.
Robertson also describes the group as he first encountered it in the early 1970s:
At that time (1972) Solidarity had autonomous groups in a number of British cities and was bringing out more than one paper.... It was a time of mass industrial struggle and each issue carried fascinating commentaries and analysis of what was going on, combined with what workers were saying.
He continues on the mid-1970s:
Membership fluctuated around the 80 to 100 mark. There were groups in London, Aberdeen, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford and probably some other places too. We held conferences every quarter and brought out the magazine Solidarity for Social Revolution at the same interval. Whilst we were never a membership organisation as such, people still had to be known by others and be accepted into membership which depended on agreement with As We See It.
Robertson goes on to describe how Solidarity played midwife to various minor left-wing groups, among them the left-communist World Revolution and the quasi-Bordigist Communist Workers' Organisation. He concludes:
In my opinion, Solidarity was one of the most important organisations in post-war Britain. Apart from the syndicalists, every group in Britain today owes something to their ideas."
Read more about this topic: Solidarity (UK)