Friends In Common: Forster & White on Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities

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.

'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

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 our speakers: 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.

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.