Living Resistance: The Power of Everyday Solidarity

आवाज़ दो... हम एक हैं। Awaaj do… Hum ek hain! (Raise the voice... We are one!) This slogan echoes across protests in Hindi-speaking regions of India, invoking collective strength and unity. As more voices join, the sound gathers force, and a surge of energy moves through the crowd. Across the world, movements carry similar calls to unite when people organize in resistance. In such movements, solidarity is not only in thoughts; it is felt in the body. For a brief interval, the world feels reorganized around collective presence rather than individual survival. Movements do more than assemble people around a demand. They sensitize perception. One begins to notice dependence, vulnerability, and courage differently; what once appeared private begins to appear shared. Collective presence makes courage possible and reveals how rarely such presence is allowed to endure. The difficulty is not that the spirit of these slogan fades, but that the social arrangements to which life returns are organized through separation: survival privatized within households, labor disciplined by necessity, care absorbed unevenly along lines of gender, caste, and class. The experience of being held within a collective body yield to arrangements that require separation to function. Capitalist systems sustain themselves not only through force, but through the isolation of lives. Risk redistributes itself; fear becomes intimate. Many remain watchful, some continue to speak, and others fall silent within structures that render dissent materially costly. Isolation and fear organize everyday life, while shared forms of sustaining life remain structurally constrained. This piece begins from that strain. It asks what it means to experience unity as real yet live within structures that fragment it; what forms of relation allow solidarity glimpsed in struggle to endure; and how resistance might be understood not only as moments of uprising, but as the ongoing effort to make survival shareable in a world organized to keep lives apart. Living resistance begins in recognizing that survival need not remain privatized and that collective ways of living are essential to sustaining freedom. It revisits socialist and Marxist feminist attempts to imagine collective forms of living and situates everyday solidarities as practices that prefigure alternative ways of sustaining life in the present.