Laura C. Forster and Joel White on Friends in Common

As the title of their book alludes to, Laura C. Forster and Joel White met through a friend in common. When, after years of writing and organising separately, Joel reached out to Laura about something she’d written which touched on ideas he’d been exploring in his own work, this dialogue would become Friends in Common. 

Through lengthy co-writing sessions and hundreds of voice notes, the two friends' voices came together seamlessly into the book’s six chapters, punctuated by interviews with fellow writers and organisers, Gargi Bhattacharya, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha. The result is a thoughtful, collaborative mediation on the often-thorny ways that friendship intersects with the political, and how interpersonal relationships are the foundation to lasting movements.

For Forster and White, friendship’s political power is made evident by the way in which capitalism attempts to co-opt it, as in the instrumentalisation of real relationships formed at work for profit explored in chapter two, Work Friends. “Anti-work politics, at its core, asks how we can build more time for ourselves to do the things that we need and want to do,” explains Forster. “In acknowledging that the work-leisure boundary is fundamentally blurred, we have to think through those contradictions.”

This blurring of the work-leisure boundary leaks into day-to-day relationships, and by extension our political organising, arising as competitiveness, comparison, and an attachment to productivity as a determination of worth and value. To White, developing an anti-work ethos in our friendship means “think[ing] about how the organisation of time can be rearranged and reorganised to not just serve capital, from the workplace to the neighburhood.”

This means rejecting both the manosphere-era logics of ‘high-value’ friends and the valorisation of struggle over rest in political organising. “Am I only someone's friend when I'm in the struggle?” asks Forster, noting how activists can neglect “taking time to engage in shared forms of care. There’s an opportunity there for a prefigurative way of organising which resists instrumentalisation,” she adds.

The book’s third chapter, Friends of Friends, draws on Forster’s background as a historian to explore how interpersonal relationships can act as vectors for the transmission of political ideas. Early models of movement building – the travelling activists who gave lectures across 19th-century Europe and the vibrant zine cultures of the DIY punk scene in 90s-00s UK – relied on networks of friendship to function while also creating space for politically generative connections. 

Nowadays, technology and digital platforms echo these processes on what feels like a faster, larger scale, through city-wide organising group chats, political streamers or viral social justice infographics. Yet, Forster reminds us, although these historical movements used the cutting edge technologies of the time, they also offered an interpersonal aspect not quite replicated online. Where the internet has revolutionised our ability “to share strategy, to bring movements into conversation [with one another],” she says, something is lost in this move away from the physical, material and face-to-face; what White calls the “granular day-to-day connection you need for most successful movements.”

Besides the obvious security risks of online organising, the authors agreed that the parasociality of digital movements can threaten their sustainability. It’s not that parasocial relationships are problematic – “I’ve met a lot of men with a parasocial relationship to Karl Marx,” White jokes – but they lack the opportunities for growth found in offline friendship. “[Friendship] is always relational, and it’s always made in the doing. For it to be a meaningful, political kind of interpersonal connection, there has to be that push and pull,” Forster says.

Our relationships, and our organising groups have been forced online in part by a systematic attack on accessible public space. In chapter four, Old Friends, the writers reflect on how 19th-century cafe culture in Paris helped lay the stage for the 1871 Commune. These thriving spaces of intergenerational and cross-cultural exchange seldom exist these days, lost to centuries of enclosure and privatisation enacted by the state and institutions. In adapting to the rapid shrinking of third spaces, Forster believes that “there’s no getting around it, we just need to have [physical spaces] and we have to fight for them. We have to prioritise this absence of interpersonal connection, and recognise how politically vital it is across our movements.”

For White, “DIY venues, protest kitchens, community archives, queer saunas or public squares – they don't just contain community but they question the terms of access to it.” Fighting to re-establish common space is also an opportunity to ensure they are built for everyone. This means learning from the pandemic, White explains, and “putting in the work to break down barriers to attending meetings, rather than moving to Zoom because it’s easier than finding an accessible space, or a space at all.”

Many ideas at the core of Friends in Common were borne out of a physical space, namely Glasgow’s Unity Centre, a volunteer-run drop-in space for people in the asylum and immigration system, active for its 17-year lifespan until the end of 2023. A key hub of anti-racist and migrant justice organising in Scotland, White recalls being told at Unity’s volunteer training session to call everyone ‘friend’ – not client, not service user, not asylum seeker or refugee.

“That time at Unity, the relationship being explained in that way, it really was like a light bulb,” he explains. “It seems common sense on some level, or unsaid – that when we do affinity politics, when we work non-hierarchically, it’s all about friendship.”

The struggle for migrant justice is in many ways defined by the interpersonal – relationships are delegitimised and disregarded during deportations and citizenship claims, state hostility enforces isolation upon migrants and refugees, while border movements, community centres and mutual aid organisations work to re-establish belonging. 

“[Migrant organising] is about meeting people where they're at, in very different situations,” says Forster, reflecting on how power differentials and varying access to resources can shape relationships in these spaces. “But humanity, and a shared humanity, is the activism itself in a lot of ways – it’s about creating a reliable source of material support while also agitating for systemic change.”

The penultimate chapter, Bad Friends, turns to the SpyCops scandal, an ongoing national inquiry into undercover policing in Britain in the late 20th century, where activist groups across environmental and social movements were infiltrated by policemen posing as friends, comrades and lovers. The case, with its seemingly endless catalogue of violations and betrayals, is an example of the risks of building community in defiance of the state. In the wake of Spycops, movements have been left cagey, suspicious and closed off – but, argue the authors, this isn’t the answer.

“Friendship's really hard, precisely because people have been burned a lot,” says Forster, “but if we’re not [vulnerable], we're dead, you know. We’re better off trying to do it, trying to figure out why it feels hard and how we could make it feel better or different, and seeing what might be made possible in doing so.”

Connected through the Police Spies Out of Lives campaign, victims of undercover policing were able to undo years of secrecy and shame by turning their shared experience into a way to hold power to account. “Through finding others who had been through the same thing, they rebuilt their ability to trust,” says White. “We could do the same – it’s not only possible, it’s vital if we’re to face up to the state.”

“If people take anything away from the book, it's that friendship, which is seen as this apolitical space of sentiment and shared values and activity, is actually deeply political,” says Forster. Building on second-wave feminist theories of social reproduction, Friends in Common's central thesis is that ‘the interpersonal is political’. “[Friendship] is shaped by the world we're in, and it has impact on that world, too,” explains Forster. “It reproduces that world in certain ways, but it can also be used to try and challenge injustices in the world.”

Rather than a private, individual experience, Forster and White imagine friendship as the backbone of political struggle. Outside of the flashpoints of elections, campaigns or protests, friendship offers a praxis to challenge the isolation and alienation of capitalist social relations, undermining divisive rhetoric by allowing itself to be nourished by individual differences. As Yvonne, a friend from White’s time at the Unity Center, describes in the book’s opening chapter; ‘Friendship means strength in the struggle [...] vicarious strength.’

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Friends in Common is out now with Pluto Press
Laura Forster and Joel White will be appearing at Book Fringe at Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh on 13 Aug at 1pm