Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities

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Friendship is potent and full of possibilities for social change Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. 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. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape. The dissonance created by comparing societal expectations around friendship and a lonely reality, especially in the wake of an isolating global pandemic, is deeply alienating. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and is the antidote to capitalist despair. About the Authors Laura C. Forster is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. Her research is concerned with intimacy, radical ideas, and political activism in the long nineteenth century. Laura has written for Tribune, ROAR, DOPE and Novara Media. She lives in Newcastle and is part of Food & Solidarity. Joel White is a writer and researcher based in Glasgow. He is involved with groups in the city that organise around mutual aid, migrant solidarity, prison abolition and anti-racism. His writing has appeared in Guardian, Wire, Tribune and the LRB blog. He co-runs the record label GLARC. What People Are Saying "I've been waiting for this book for years – a beautifully written, compelling study of the significance of the dense bonds of friendship in fostering and preserving progressive politics. Never more needed than now, Friends in Common is essential reading for everyone who wants to keep hope alive, a joyful, empowering read." Lynne Segal, author of Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care Friends in Common - itself the product of a friendship between its two authors - is a moving exploration of the importance and the difficulty of forging and sustaining intimate relationships within and against the capitalist hell world. Assembling an array of historical case studies, interviews, personal anecdotes and pop cultural references, Laura Forster and Joel White show that the interpersonal is political and celebrate the foundational role friendship can play in struggles for a world held in common." Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat "This brilliant and accessible book reveals the revolutionary potential of friendship, and how it can help to remake capitalist relations. The authors unmoor friendship from its structural constraints under capitalism, which produce isolation and alienation. Instead, they compellingly show how friendship is a method for creating political transformation at an everyday level. This book teaches us how friendship is at the core of collective ways of being together – from solidarity to comradeship -- and enables these and other future modes of political belonging. An essential read for our times!" Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center "A beautiful and inspiring study of friendship; Friends in Common is wide-ranging, original, and deeply insightful. We are in desperate need of such resources of hope." Diarmaid Kelliher, author of Making Cultures of Solidarity "By turns searching and playful, intimate in its project and ambitious in its scope, Friends in Common reframes both friendship and solidarity. A book, and, in its generosity and generativity, a gift." Helen Charman, author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood Table of Contents Show more