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Labor and social movement rhetoric
Creating solidarity through common challenges and experiences
The Shared Struggle is a rhetorical device that builds solidarity between speaker and audience by foregrounding experiences of hardship, oppression, or challenge that both parties have endured in common. Rather than positioning the speaker as an authority above the crowd, it levels the relationship by saying, in effect, 'we have suffered the same thing, and that shared suffering unites us.' The device operates through the logic of communal identity: suffering becomes the crucible in which a collective 'we' is forged. Its roots run through classical deliberative rhetoric, where a speaker would align personal history with the demos, but it finds its most concentrated modern form in labour organising, anti-colonial movements, and civil rights activism, where solidarity is not merely emotional but strategically necessary for collective action.
Human beings are strongly disposed to trust and follow those they perceive as genuinely similar to themselves, and shared pain is one of the most powerful markers of similarity available. The device also exploits the psychological phenomenon of in-group formation: naming a common adversary or common ordeal draws a boundary around 'us,' intensifying cohesion within that boundary. Because the appeal is grounded in real, felt experience rather than abstract argument, it bypasses scepticism and reaches the audience at the level of memory and emotion.
In her speech to striking textile workers in the early twentieth century, the labour organiser Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones repeatedly insisted that she had worked the same brutal hours in the same mills, telling her audiences that she knew their exhaustion in her own bones — a claim that transformed her from outside agitator into fellow sufferer and galvanised strikes across the American South and Midwest.
Pan-African unity movements of the mid-twentieth century drew extensively on the shared experience of colonialism, with leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah arguing that the enforced dispossession, cultural erasure, and economic extraction visited upon African peoples across different nations constituted a single wound that demanded a single, continental response.
A contemporary trade union representative opening a branch meeting might say something like: 'Every person in this room has had to choose between paying the heating bill and buying food this winter — that is not a personal failure, that is a shared condition, and it is the reason we are here together.' The statement converts individual shame into collective grievance and readies the audience for organised action.
Ground the device in the specific, concrete details of the shared experience rather than vague generalities, because precision signals authenticity and prevents the audience from feeling patronised or manipulated. Speak in the first-person plural — 'we', 'our', 'us' — consistently and naturally, so the solidarity feels lived rather than performed. Be careful to acknowledge the full weight of the hardship rather than minimising it, since audiences who have genuinely suffered will detect and resent any softening. Use the shared struggle as a bridge to a forward-looking argument: solidarity is the premise, but it should lead somewhere — a call to action, a proposed remedy, a common demand.
Listen for a speaker who pivots quickly from 'I have suffered' to 'we have suffered,' especially when that pivot precedes a call for collective loyalty or action. Ask yourself whether the speaker's claimed experience is plausible and specific, or whether it sounds rehearsed and general. Notice whether the shared struggle is used to illuminate a genuine common interest or whether it is being deployed to suppress internal disagreement within the group — the latter is a warning sign that solidarity rhetoric is being used to silence rather than to unite.
When a speaker falsely claims to have shared the audience's hardship — whether through outright fabrication or strategic exaggeration — the device becomes a form of manipulation that exploits the very suffering it purports to honour. Even when the claim is sincere, the device can homogenise a group whose experiences are in fact diverse, erasing important differences in how various members have been affected and who among them carries the greater burden. Speakers have an ethical obligation to represent the range of experience within the group honestly, and listeners should remain alert to the way solidarity rhetoric can, if left unexamined, be used to demand conformity and foreclose legitimate internal debate.
Social movements, labor organizing, collective action