Lessons in Solidarity

On George Scialabba

I’ve written a review of George Scialabba’s new book, and his lessons on solidarity more generally, for Dissent Magazine. Here’s the opening:

Reviewing a biography of Christopher Lasch in 2011, essayist George Scialabba noted that the “liberal complacency” long critiqued by his hero had become displaced by “liberal demoralization.” Anxieties over government paralysis, economic crisis, and climate change were eroding the myths of unfettered individualism and unlimited growth that had so troubled Lasch—and Scialabba—since the 1970s.

How times have changed. Today liberalism seems to be not merely demoralized but dissolving, along with the vocations that propelled its postwar hegemony. The cult of expertise, the power of the professional-managerial class, the momentum of globalization—all these are being fundamentally called into question.

All this spells grim good times for Scialabba and those of us who cherish his work. A wounded healer and self-described “ethical socialist,” Scialabba has devoted his skill as a writer and thinker since the 1980s toward sustaining the humanist virtues that, many of us hoped, would furnish the moral infrastructure for any future progressive revival. His magisterial review essays (including some that appeared in Dissent) have challenged both technocratic neoliberals and over-materialist Marxists with their concern for virtue, mutualism, and rootedness as the necessary grounds for political renewal. Today, the world appears to be ready for these messages. The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia assembles some of Scialabba’s finest political essays and reviews over his five-decade career, and offers nothing less than a blueprint for a moral ecology suitable for a post-capitalist age.

But while many of Scialabba’s ideas now appear prophetic, there was much he did not foresee. The election of Zohran Mamdani and the Minneapolis uprisings against President Donald Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement affirm Scialabba’s insistence that our politics must be built from mutualism and moral imagination. But the social bases of these movements—which include college-educated women, immigrant workers, and metropolitan professionals—cut against his assumption that solidarity can only emerge from already-cohesive communities. For all its indispensability, The Sealed Envelope occasionally struggles to account for the novel forms of collective action being carried out today. This tension, however, is not a signal to abandon Scialabba’s ethos, but to test how it can be applied in a world that has finally caught up to him.

Read the rest here (if you need a copy of the article, let me know).