Corruption as Solidarity : An Inverted Republicanism to Resist Inverted Totalitarianism

According to conventional republican accounts of political vices and virtues, solidarity is a virtue that strengthens the polity and corruption is a vice that undermines political and social bonds. Season 2 of “The Wire� offers the figure of Frank Sabotka as a counter-exemple to this traditional narrative. Sabotka engages in corruption as a means to maintain his labour union in an ultimately futile act of resistance against the encroaching forces of post-industrial capitalism. In my paper I read the figure of Sobotka against more traditional accounts of the relationship between solidarity and corruption as found in such diverse political theorists as Richard Rorty, Niccolo Machiavelli, Quentin Skinner, Hannah Arendt, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. I argue that Sobotka complicates the conventional understanding of the dynamics between corruption and solidarity. Traditional institutions for practicing solidarity such as labour unions, religious organizations, and political parties are all compromised in fundamental ways by late modern capitalism, thereby making political solidarity difficult to maintain. However, corruption, seen by classical republicans as a threat to the social fabric of the state, may under these conditions be re-appropriated as a means for resisting the onslaught of global capital by those whose very way of life is threatened by its expansion. As such, the figure of Sobotka raises the possibility of an inverted republicanism that can resist the inverted totalitarianism Sheldon Wolin identifies as the condition of post-World War II American Democracy and that is depicted in “The Wire.�