Welcome, friends!
An introduction to our new friends in common blog.
Hello and welcome to the Friends in Common blog, a companion to the forthcoming book by Laura C. Forster and Joel White, coming out June 20th with Pluto Press. Joel and Laura here, still happily struggling (despite writing 50k words together) with the collective ‘we’ of joint writing. In this blog, we’ll be posting excerpts from the book, interviews, reviews, and musings on friendship, family abolition, social media, pop culture, and genderless 19th Century ghosts (yes really). Sometimes we might even revert to a blog-friendly first-person ‘I’.
We’ve got loads of fun stuff planned, including an extended version of an interview from the book with the brilliant
, coming later this week, followed by a small (hopefully!) interactive series on the ‘friendlord’, coming next week. On that point, please send us your questions, stories or thoughts about friendship, cohabitation and property ownership in contemporary life: have you rented off a friend? Perhaps even one you lived with too? How did it affect your relationship? What did other friends do, and how do we find ways to talk about and challenge each other in these situations? Maybe you are someone who has owned property, and approached the question of people living in your house in particular ways, or been challenged and decided to change how you’ve approached this? More broadly, how do you think the friendlord illuminates wider problems around affordable housing, inheritance, nuclear families, gentrification, and class? Can we organise collectively around these things, with wildly different experiences of them?Just something uncontroversial to start with then! Send us your thoughts, questions and anecdotes to friendsincommonbook@gmail.com - these will be anonymised and worked into 2-3 short blog pieces. For now though, we thought we’d share a truncated version of our introduction, to give you a flavour of the book, along with a pic of us enjoying a spritz in the sun after finishing one of the book chapters. Enjoy!
Friends in Common - A Truncated Introduction:
Friendship is political. Capitalism fundamentally shapes how our friendships are organised, but friendship has also been key to struggles against this system. Understanding the radical possibilities (and potential co-opting) of friendship can help us rethink our ideas of family, work, history, and solidarity - pointing to new forms of political belonging and ways of remaking the world.
Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social change. Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and can be the antidote to capitalist despair.
The book grew out of our individual writing and thinking about friendship (Laura as a historian, Joel as an anthropologist), informed by involvement in anti-racist, anti-capitalist, No Borders, and Queer political movements. But really the book emerged out of our own friendship! Joel and Laura met through a friend in common and decided to do some writing and thinking together, to frame and critically analyse the role friendship has played in political struggle, particularly in recent years and during the nineteenth-century movements Laura writes about. In the process they became close friends!
More broadly, Friends in Common has its roots in conversations with friends: trying to figure out – with friends, in acts of friendship – the links between political struggle and interpersonal belonging, and what historical resonances might help us to do so. We want to think of friendship as struggle, and friendship through struggle: friendship as both a political act in itself – a commitment to forming intimacies despite the individualising and apathy-inducing capitalist machine – and as a key sustaining force within political struggles of various kinds. We want to treat friendship as foundational to revolutionary projects, not peripheral to the real intellectual ‘meat’ of political ideas. We want to think about how friendship constitutes ideas in action, across different historical junctures. We want to understand the life of ideas. And to do this, we need to foreground friendship. In doing so we ended up thinking carefully about friendship’s limits, what it means to build collective struggle against a capitalist system that works to co-opt, contain, and destroy relational bonds that threaten it.
To do so Friends in Common builds a number of related arguments about friendship. Firstly, that the interpersonal is political: the way friendship operates in contemporary life is conditioned by power and hierarchy, but there is radical potential in reconfiguring our bonds of intimacy. Secondly, and relatedly, that capitalism co-opts and conditions friendship in profound ways, but these are never complete, and that looking to the multiple and often radical forms friendship takes at different times – without resorting to prescriptive diktats of our own – can help us challenge the capitalist system. Thirdly, that friendship as a specific mode of radical political belonging ascends at different historical junctures – in our analysis, in the late nineteenth century and post-1970s. Through the book we hope also to show friendship as a kind of bridging concept allowing for a productive traffic between different scales and binaries: personal-political, private-public, local-global.
Through the book, we tackle questions around family abolition, work, mobility, intergenerational connection, state capture and solidarity. We draw on examples from history, pop culture and literature, responding to the current focus on friendship we find in our current moment – a moment defined by the lingering afterlife of a global pandemic and the ongoing ‘polycrises’ of climate catastrophe, far-right resurgence, precarity, economic hardship, rising anti-LGBTQ politics, spiralling conflicts around the world, and Israel’s continuing genocidal decimation of Palestine. Responding to the overwhelming scale of these intersecting crises can feel impossible, but building upon established practices of interpersonal connection and imagining new forms of political belonging are vital in moving beyond isolation and inertia.
Throughout the book, we return to friendship as a range of existing practices, something tangible and already in motion, something that matters to people.
We don’t believe there can be a prescriptive or universal way of thinking about friendship – we don’t suggest that friendship is easy, or that it is always good or generative, or that it can solve all our problems. Rather we simply hope to show that practices of friendship are political, and that these practices have histories. Under different names and guises, forms of political belonging and ways of galvanising community have forever preoccupied those interested in transforming how we live. We can easily get bogged down in these often competing histories, mythologies and definitions (and we have!), but by gathering these ideas together and using friendship as an organising principle, we hope to show how we might more usefully draw on the rich practices of friendship that have happened, are happening and can happen. Formal and informal, long-lasting and fleeting, intimate and anonymous, fraught and infuriating – friendship is central to ways of being in the world, and to remaking it.
Sounds good right?
See you later this week, with Gracie Mae Bradley talking hospitality, guardian angels, and Black feminist coalition building, amongst lots of other things.