Solidarity has a long history as one of the most central and elusive concepts in socialist language. This article aims to examine social democratic solidarity as a propagandistic and ideological concept in the 1980s, time of political rupture when solidarity was being reassessed and redefined. The concept is examined in the monthly magazines of the Swedish social democratic youth and women’s branch organisations Tvärdrag, Frihet and Morgonbris. The study shows that the place and function of the concept of solidarity is ambiguous. On the one hand, the concept emerges as ideologically central in that its meaning is subject to struggle. The ambivalent relationship of social democracy to neoliberal influences exemplifies this. Solidarity could be presented as the antithesis of neoliberalism, while in other texts and contexts the concept was almost depoliticised by placing it in the sphere of the private sphere or presented as the responsibility of the individual.