Hello and welcome to Friends in Common.

It’s wild that we’ve had our book out in the world now for 6 months! Thanks to everyone who has been sending in their thoughts, questions and reflections, its been amazing to see people engage with it. You can currently buy paper copies via Pluto for the outrageous price of £4 (or £2.50 for the eBook), as part of their Xmas sale - and obviously we think its a perfect gift for all those friends (and enemies) you’ve yet to buy a present for.

Its been a while since our last post, but we’re not going to spend too long apologising or pontificating about the lack of activity. Suffice to say, a mixture of post-Book inertia, fatigue, work and life has been getting in the way. This, mixed with an underlying sense of ambivalence about Substack as a platform, sparked by calls to boycott through the year, but also by a general sense of wanting to not plunge back into another cycle of ‘useful platform enshittifies over time, revealing its core functions as profit-making (and Nazi hosting?) husk’ that any elder-millenial readers will be all too familiar with by now.

On this, Joel has been recently trying to extract himself from various social media platforms, whilst remembering the creativity and fun that can be found through html self-coding and old utopian notions of the internet. You can see the silly little personal website he’s started on this tip here, and read more about the crew in Glasgow that is inspiring this here. Hopefully we’ll get a Friends in Common neocities up and running at some point, and try this blog off-platform. For now though, no judgement for anyone who uses these sites (except Twitter maybe, judgement there surely?), embedded as they are in the freelance economy, not to mention many of our most intimate relationships.

Joel’s also been busy working on an amazing archival and film project looking at the history of Bradford Resource Centre, and the wider Network of Trade Union and Resource Centres around Britain. You can read a little Zine he wrote about this here, and explore the Friends of Bradford Resource Centre website here (film to uploaded in the future!). For those who are interested, our pal Rosie Hampton has a brilliant recent piece in the New Internationalist about a similar network of left-wing spaces and social centres, and will be talking about this in Glasgow on Wednesday 10th December. Joel was also involved in writing this report on the policing of Palestine Solidarity Protests in Scotland, with SCALP and Netpol, available here.

Laura has also had a hectic old time, with a new piece in the History Workshop Journal on history as a form of intergenerational friendship, available here. She’s also organising a conference with Marc Jaffré on Sociability & Political life, asking: can there be politics without sociability? How have friendship, intimacy, socialising & informal attachments been central to political projects & movements?
More info here, abstracts need sending by the (very romantic) date of Feb 14th.

We’ve also spoken on various podcasts and panels since the end of the summer, thanks to everyone who organised, facilitated and participated in those! You can listen back to us discuss the book with Chris Brown for Radicals In Conversation here, and with Marybeth Hamilton for the History Workshop Podcast here. Joel also spoke on a panel at the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair about ‘Solidarities from the Ground Up’, which you can watch back here.

We’ve got some nice things planned already for the new year, including some potential book talks in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Leeds & Brighton - more info to come. If you’d like to book us for a talk or workshop just get in touch!

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Its been a hectic few weeks since our last post. On June 20th we officially released Friends in Common in a sweltering room in Glasgow, followed by a night of friendship themed kareoke (including a faultless Spice Girls ‘Wannabe’ Rap, Placebo, Randy Newman, Carole King, Sondheim and us both doing the Friends theme song). We then piled into Joel’s Berlingo for a small tour around the country, taking in Newcastle, Todmorden, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol and London.

We had some amazing and expansive conversations throughout, and want to extend a huge thanks to everyone who helped host, promote and attend the various dates. The whole idea of the tour was to try and recreate some of the ideas about making connections and sharing political analysis through touring that we explore in the book, and it was incredibly heartening to experience this together and see people engaging with Friends in Common as both text and practice!

We have collated a few pictures below, along with some lists of books we were recommended, and that we found ourselves referencing a lot from our own bibliography. Various people mentioned how they’d struggled to find books about friendship (beyond the often shallow and individualised set of self-help writing on the topic), so hopefully this can help a bit.

Joel also did a special edition of the folk and trad radio show his does with his friend Lilí Ní Dhomhnaill, HOW SERENE, focused on songs about friendship - you can listen back to that here.

Finally, before the lists - we’ve got a few more upcoming things to shout out too. Joel is at the Woodcraft Folk’s Camp 100 today and tomorrow (spanning the world with friendship indeed!) for anyone who is there, with a workshop on Queer Family Trees at the MEST-UP tent today at 16:30, and a book reading at the Central Cafe tomorrow 11:00.

We are then both back in Newcastle on Thursday at the The NewBridge Project for a free (but ticketed) workshop, chat and delicious dinner as part of their Reading Room Programme, 6-8pm, tickets here.

We are then both in Edinburgh on August 13th at the fabulous Lighthouse Books for a lunchtime (1pm) Book Fringe event, tickets for that here.

OK, we’ll back soon with more posts and interviews. For now though, here’s some pictures of us looking sweaty and excitable at various locations around Britain, and some book recommendations:

Some books we kept recommending:

• Dean Spade – Love In a Fucked Up World

• Anahhit Behrouz - BFFs

• M.E. O’Brien - Family Abolition Capitalism and the Communizing of Care

• Anonymous - ‘Friendship as a Form of Life’ Zine

• Nick Montgomery and clara bergman - Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

• Hannah Proctor - Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

• Vincent Bevins - If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

• Saidiya Hartman - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

• Pinko Collective - After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept

• Jodi Dean - Comrade

• Jenni Keasden & Natalia Szarek - Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home

• David Scott - Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity

• Alan Bray - The Friend

• Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - Rehearsals for Living

Some books we were recommended (but haven’t had a chance to read yet!):

• Victoria Law and China Martens - Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities

• Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman - Big friendship: how we keep each other close

• Sheila Rowbotham - Friends of Alice Wheeldon: the Anti-War Activist Accused of Plotting to Kill Lloyd George

• Benjamin Heim Shepard - On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies and Conflicts

• Isabelle Graw – On the benefits of friendship

• Christophe Camus – ‘An essay on radical friendship’

First, a quick note to say that the book is out very soon! 20th June! To celebrate, (and as an excuse to hang out with as many friends and friends of friends as possible) we’ve organised a little tour around some of the UK’s finest independent bookshops and venues. You can find all the details and booking info here: https://linktr.ee/friendsincommon We hope you can join us! For now though, Pluto have offered all our subscribers 30% off any pre-order via their site with the code: 'FRIENDS30'. And do subscribe and share this substack if you’re keen!

We started this substack partly to introduce our book, and to document the meandering thoughts that helped to bring it into being, but also to provide a space to explore the many conversations, half-thoughts, sentimental outpourings, and revolutionary plotting we’ve shared with friends and friends of friends along the way. And so, for today’s post, Laura talks to Evelina Gambino. Evelina is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her and Laura met at a party, through a friend in common. One wine-soaked evening in 2022 (or maybe 2023?) the two enthusiastically discovered a shared interest in the possibilities of friendship, both as a radical practice, and also as a way of thinking about feminism, queerness, solidarity, defeat, and revolution. For over a decade Evelina’s research has mapped the situated impacts of transnational infrastructural networks. In dialogue with feminist critiques of capitalism, her analysis highlights the different kinds of work that allow projects of accumulation and extraction to make sense. Evelina’s work has been published within and beyond academia. Since 2017 she has collaborated with artist and director Tekla Aslanishvili on several multimedia projects, including the experimental documentary “A State in A State” (2022). She is co-editor of the volume “Gendering Logistics: Feminist Approaches to the Analysis of Supply Chain Capitalism” and is currently completing a monograph that proposes a feminist, materialist approach to the study of infrastructural failure.

Evelina’s work on infrastructures has helped her to understand friendship as precisely that, a vital part of structuring day-to-day life and an important means through which to create the connections and disconnections necessary to build new worlds. The following conversation was prompted by the publication of The Mountain Speaks to the Sea, that celebrates the work of Evelina’s close friend and long term collaborator Tekla Aslanishvili, and contains an essay by Evelina titled, ‘Infrastructures of friendship.’

LF: Your essay in The Mountain Speaks to the Sea is titled – ‘infrastructures of friendship’, can you say a bit more about what you mean by that? How does infrastructure relate to friendship?

EG: I love this as a starting question: straight to the core, and also allows me to show from the outset how much of a geek I am. So in the essay, and in real life, there are two ways in which I think friendship and infrastructure relate to one another. The first one is quite simple: the friendship that I describe in the essay, between me and the artist and film director Tekla Aslanishvili, was born out of and grew around our common interest in infrastructures. Tekla and I met in 2017 in Anaklia, a small village at the border between Georgia and the defacto state of Abkhazia that at the time was at the centre of grandiose plans to transform it into an infrastructural hub for the New Silk Road. We had travelled there separately to document this process and when we met we realised that, unlike many of the people that were crowding the village at the time, what brought us there was an interest in the way infrastructures – objects like ports, railways, pipelines – were able to catalyse promises of development much greater than their technical components and also a sense that these promises, more often than not, failed, and ended up entrenching the very forms of dispossession that they were claiming to erase. So, this realisation of a common feeling for infrastructure was what sparked our intellectual exchange and, following, our friendship. But there is another side to how I have come to understand infrastructure and friendship to be related, and this is what Ruth Gilmore has called infrastructures of feeling. To clarify what I mean, it's helpful to go back to the etymology of the word infrastructure: it’s a composite term that comes from the suffix infra meaning underneath and the term structure, so at its most basic it denotes a structure or a network that underwrites a system, allowing it to work. In this sense friendship, whether we intend it as physical and affective proximity or a kinship of political feeling, like Gilmore suggests, is definitely the chief infrastructure sustaining my life, without it, I simply wouldn’t be able to exist. Friendships that transcend different realms, like the one between me and Tekla, or I suspect the one between you two authors of the book, can be good to think with because they reveal this infrastructural character by linking together different realms of our lives: work, politics, intimacy etc…in sometimes surprising ways.

LF: Absolutely, and this makes me think of what you say later in the essay – that ‘Infrastructures are made of and make relations.’ Your film A State in a State, follows the Baku – Tbilisi – Kars railway’s transit route which is part of the New Silk Road, running from Baku in Azerbaijan via the Georgian capital Tbilisi to Kars in Türkiye, touching the fragile political boundaries that have emerged in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In your essay you describe how B-T-K railway workers describe the railroad as ‘a state within a state’, because ‘it had its own connectivity, including specific phone codes and lines that facilitated connections between rail workers in all corners of the Union, even in times when connectivity was otherwise not possible.’ Here I think we see both how the state often seeks to police and suppress forms of connection and sociality, but also the endlessly resourceful ways that people continue to pursue connectivity, and how friendship can be a means of resisting systems that seek to alienate or isolate us. You show how infrastructure can be a powerful tool for creating solidarities across borders and for coordinating unexpected forms of connection – do you think the railway workers you worked with felt that the state in a state (the state of solidarity?) was capable of winning out against the state seeking to expand or decay infrastructures for very different purposes?

EG: Yes, in the film Tekla and I made together, A State in a State we interviewed several people who used to work on the railways during the Soviet Union. The film takes its name from the fact that these workers used to define the railroad as a state within a state, pointing to how any large infrastructural network – whether a railway or the metro – is in some ways a world of its own, with its own rules, technical knowledge, culture etc… One of the things we became very interested in during the making of our film is how, for the workers we spoke to, belonging to this parallel state also gave rise to specific forms of solidarity, which in many occasions went against the original purpose of the railway. In other words the fact that all these workers were connected together through the railways and knew their operations intimately, gave them forms of power, to control, or in some cases to sabotage, the workings of the systems they operated. So to go back to your question of the relation between friendship and infrastructure, in the case of these workers, the infrastructure is literally the terrain on which these political friendships can blossom. But at the same time, these strong bonds of friendship and solidarity born from the railway are an infrastructure in themselves. The workers know this, and in our film we show the acts of solidarity, small and big, that are made possible by this infrastructures of friendship.

Still from A State in a State (2022)

LF: I really liked your discussion of film as a means to capture connectivity, and also the process of filmmaking as a relational and reflexive practice in itself, and one that contains within in some of the logic of friendship. You say: ‘Film allows the filmmaker to follow serendipitous connections, while simultaneously making visible the labour necessary to capture and link these disparate moments. A labour akin to what Edward Said has called “being of the connection”. Filming, much like ethnographic fieldwork, entails negotiations with a range of participants, yet it also implies a different urgency, a heightened attention to atmospheric elements, and coordination with the non-human actors that populate each scene.’ This made me think of both the possibilities and power of friendship (the serious radical politics made possible through forms of friendship), and also the more quotidian lived-ness of the practice of friendship (‘the improvisational and serendipitous quality’ of friendship!). Do you think film is uniquely able to both work through and document these processes of friendship and connection?

EG: Well, yes and no. Collaborating on the film with Tekla made me aware of new/different aspects of the stories we were trying to tell, filming is a durational activity, deeply boring at times, sometimes meditative. It is also essentially social. Especially the kind of experimental documentary film-making that we did, in which you are not shielded by the fences and schedules that surround fictional films or more high budget productions and instead you stand amidst lively environments, bending with their movements. This for me was an entirely new experience and one that made me rethink some of the methodological assumption of the kind of ethnographic fieldwork I was trained to do. For anthropologists, fieldwork is often understood as solitary rite of passage that one has to endure to become a true researcher, but as Said points in that essay you mention, this understanding of the field is part of a broader structure of meaning that, historically, has entrenched a profound separation between the knowledge produced by ethnographers and their human and non-human subjects. Making films is not the only way to come to terms and overcome such separation, and indeed many documentary films not only reproduce it, but add new layers to the exploitative hierarchy between those who narrate and those who are narrated. Tekla and I spent a lot of time reflecting on how to represent the places we were filming in a way that made sense both to us and to those who live and work there. Like many before us, we came to the conclusion that showing the seams, frictions and bumps in the road that marked our journey, in other words presenting our film as a process of understanding a set of diverse and complicated stories, rather than a finished product, was a way to be accountable to our different audiences, including those directly involved in the stories we are representing. As you say a mix of serious commitment, arduous work and playfulness is integral to many different activities and is generally at the heart of what makes them meaningful. The making of A State in A State came for me as a culmination of the process of reflection that had started during my PhD and provided me with a new vocabulary, not just written, but embodied and felt, to speak of, but also speak with the stories of the infrastructures we had been following.

Stills from A State in a State (2022)

LF: There is a lovely bit where you talk about love as a form of freedom, and collaboration, therefore, as a political imperative for any movement interested in freedom: ‘There is another word that shares the same root as friend, and that is the word ‘free’. That loving and caring for others makes you free is perhaps the reason why feminists — and many others engaged in making the world a little less oppressive — have often emphasized collaboration as the basis of their political practice. At its most basic, collaboration can be a means of achieving the kind of reflexivity necessary to recognize the limits of the knowledge that we produce.’ Can you say a little bit more about your collaboration with Tekla, and how working together perhaps made you think anew about forms of friendship, struggle, and solidarity?

EG: So my friendship and collaboration with Tekla started during my PhD fieldwork, a time in equal measure exciting and terrible. Shortly after I embarked to study the infrastructural transformation of Anaklia, I realised that I had no idea what I was doing. My first week in Anaklia was awful, I was lonely, my Georgian was atrocious and seemingly the entire male population of the village – that at the time counted also tens of construction workers – appeared to think I was there to entertain them. I remember crying on a Zoom call with my supervisor as I was telling him how I had to escape from a group of men who followed me onto the beach where I had retreated to write my diary. Those early weeks were hard. I felt trapped, not specifically in Anaklia, but in the body of a female ethnographer, bound by outdated disciplinary expectations and a lingering sense of not being up to the task I had set for myself. My friendship with Tekla, and the other friendships I have established during that time, developed amidst those challenges, and became a conduit for other modes of being in the spaces of my research, other ways of understanding what I ought to do there.

After my initial solo visits, Tekla and I started coordinating our trips so that I would not be doing fieldwork alone. She welcomed me as part of her film crew and this in turns gave us time to share more of our ideas, until the boundaries between our different points of view became blurry. Tekla’s film Scenes from Trial and Error and my doctoral thesis are the result of this constant dialogue. But describing it like this risks reducing friendship to something functional. A research methodology? Or a band-aid to apply over the wounds inflicted on us by the increasingly uncaring institutions in which we work. Like many of the essential things in life friendship is both functional and not functional at all, and the years that followed those strange early days of fieldwork have, luckily, being filled by the latter.

In one of his very early books, the late David Graber sets out to outline an anthropological theory of value. He begins by pointing to the three main ways to think about value: in a sociological sense value is understood as conceptions of what is good and desirable in life, in an economic sense value stands for the degree to which objects are desired and, finally, and in a linguistic sense, value, following Ferdinand De Saussure, might be most simply glossed as ‘meaningful difference’. I have always been fascinated by this figure of “a meaningful difference”, I know that in linguistics it probably means something really dry, but thank god I am not a linguist and so, like David Graeber, I can riff on the possibilities foregrounded by this formulation: to me, meaningful difference stands for the idea of an alterity that binds us to another being. As a bond established with someone other from us, then, friendship seems to encapsulate how meaningful difference can be essential to definitions of value.

Throughout the projects we did together Tekla and I have come to measure how different our perspectives are: while we are motivated by a similar commitment to social justice and to oppose the predatory forms of capital accumulation and extraction we found over and over across the infrastructures we have studied, our insights are shaped by different backgrounds and stories. During our research trips, I, a foreigner, often elicit a curiosity from our interlocutors, that Tekla, who is native to Georgia, has had to smooth over and take care of. Small frictions, misunderstandings and larger imbalances shape each of our actions and working together has meant labouring through them, sometimes in painful ways. I am not saying anything original in affirming that these mundane efforts are the most basic unit of political organising and I imagine your book delves into the intricacies of these affective and political geometries. Across the infrastructures we have researched, we have seen how moments of collective struggle emerge as a result of and have to contend with this meaningful difference that binds those living and working along the points connected together by an infrastructural project, present or planned. This is, at least partially, what we sought to capture in A State in A State by tracing the bonds of solidarity between workers along the relics of the Soviet railway system.

Evelina and Tekla in the Soviet Sanatorium of Tskaltubo

LF: I love the idea of meaningful difference. Joel and I called our book Friends in Common partly because that’s how we met – through a friend in common – but also because we argue that building new kinds of revolutionary relationality requires something far harder than bland universalising and proclamations of ‘common ground’. It requires modes of communication and spaces of interaction that encourage the kinds of difference you talk about, allowing ‘friends in common’ to emerge in the process. For us the phrase also speaks to friendship beyond proximate interpersonal intimacy and signals ‘dense bonds’ as modes of belonging that can encompass anonymous, fleeting affinity, as well as deeply enmeshed personhood. It seems to me that your work on infrastructures - both literal infrastructures of connection (trains, and planes, and telephone cables), and figurative ones (forms of hospitality, friends of friends) – might help us to think about the connections (again both physical and figurative) between different scales of solidarity and sociality, and the radical potential of interacting across these scales. Friendship, too, like infrastructure, can be fast or slow, meandering or direct, moments of boredom, stillness, disappointment, and excitement. I suppose, then, I want to ask how working on infrastructures, and working with people who work on infrastructure, has shaped some of your own interpersonal politics – do you think studying these systems of connection and disconnection has made you more alive to your own?

EG: Definitely! If you look back at the recent history of debates about infrastructure, you find a spike of interest in the term around the same time in which the internet was becoming a thing. That is to say that the sprawling and largely invisible network that allowed strangers to talk to each other across thousands of miles spurred people to ask questions not just about the technological components that allowed these networks to function, but also about the relations that travelled on them. Over the years this debate grew in countless directions but it ultimately strengthened a sense that, as Brian Larkin says, infrastructures are things but also the relationships between things. Of course how and why different infrastructures bind things, people and other animals to one another is a contested and political question. For me, the question was always about the common. When I started to work in Georgia, in the long wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, it became apparent that folded into visions about infrastructure there were much more complex, and corporeal, visions about what enables and sustains life. Infrastructural provision during the Soviet Union was at once pastoral and violent – publicly owned and run systems provided Soviet citizens with what the state deemed to be all their basic necessities – food, electricity, water, heat – but simultaneously curtailed many other things that are equally, if not more essential to life: such as the ability to exist freely. In many ways the system that was slowly and painfully installed after the collapse, placed freedom as the sole indicator of life’s worth, leaving those who could grab it with disproportionate amounts of power. A new vision of infrastructure took shape in this dramatic shift that portrayed large technical systems as vehicles for the accumulation of wealth that would, eventually, enrich everyone. By the time I started my research in Georgia, in the mid-2010s, it was amply clear that not only the wealth hadn’t trickled down, but instead it had created powerful channels for dispossessing local environments and their inhabitants. In the first instance, then, paying attention to infrastructure made me deeply aware of the multifaceted forms of harm that shape our present. But the same attention, to the constructed-ness and interconnected-ness of the worlds we inhabit, allowed me to see that the networks I was observing were inhabited by a connectivity of a different kind, what AbdouMaliq Simone has called “a choreography of experimentation” made of movements, moments, accidents that pierced holes in the extractive projects served by infrastructure and made space for forms of living in common. As we witness how systems are made to work in service of literal genocidal destruction – like for instance the BTC pipeline, one of the largest and most cherished post-Soviet infrastructural ventures crossing Georgia that its currently supplying up to 20% of crude oil to Israel – it feels hard to be optimistic about the fate of these nodes of struggle and resistance. But perhaps infrastructures’ lesson about the foundational quality of relations, can be translated into a renewed imperative to sustain our commitment to solidarity.

Still from A State in a State (2022)

LF: That’s a perfect place to end I think - in hopeful commitment to the foundational quality of relations, and to the continued practice of friendship of solidarity! Thanks so much Evelina!

A few small bits of housekeeping before we get on with the main post this week, written by Joel in response to a dreamy trip to Bradford and a ghoulish set of pronouncements from the government about immigration controls.

We’ve been a bit slow in getting the piece we mentioned in our first post (about ‘friendlords’) together, but it is coming! Thanks to people who have sent testimonies or reflections, if you still want to do that there’s time - just sling us an email or voice note to: friendsincommonbook@gmail.com

We are going to be announcing the launch of the book very soon, with a little tour around the UK to celebrate. For now though, Pluto have offered all our subscribers 30% any pre-order via their site with the code: 'FRIENDS30'.

And do subscribe and share this substack if you’re keen!

Ok, here’s On Strangers:

Cities are places where strangers meet - Richard Sennet

I met a lot of strangers this weekend, back in Bradford, the city where I grew up. There were the revellers at 'Bassline Symphony', an event part of the 2025 City of Culture program that fused the hard, wobbling sound of bassline music with a full classical orchestra, all in the ornate setting of Bradford St George's Hall. Last time I'd been to the venue was for a victory lap gig by kings of the new wave of bassline: Bad Boy Chiller Crew, who I interviewed back in 2020. The crowd was similarly eclectic both times: grandparents with kids on their shoulders, middle aged ravers two-stepping at the back, gaggles of young kids mouthing the words to different raps. After such heady heights with BBCC, I wasn't sure what to expect from Bassline Symphony: a jarring gentrification of a music made for (good) car stereos? Some gimmicky strings strapped on top of a tune made on Fruity Loops in 2003? Some fun, nostalgic sing-alongs and an overpriced theatre bar?

To repeat an old Niche bassline tune back to my cynical self: 'Shut Up'. I couldn't have been more wrong. Bassline Symphony was one of the most incredible bits of musical curation I've seen in years. An initial hour of hi-intensity DJing and MCing, followed by three euphoric, beautifully and playfully arranged sets by legends of a scene that has so often been dismissed and ridiculed: TS7, DJ Q, Jamie Duggan. In Q’s words: “We really got Bassline with an Orchestra before GTA6!! Last night was amazing! I’m still gassed.”

Everything was held together by producer Tanya Vital, who came on mic throughout the night to describe the process of putting together the event - “people told me it was impossible! We've been working on this for four years!” - and pull together various strands: pointing out the overlooked contributions of women to the genre, decrying cuts to the arts and how working class kids get locked out, briefly eulogising members of the scene that had passed away. Part wedding, part funeral, part school reunion, part living archive. A parade of quite familiar strangers took to the stage throughout: singers and rappers I'd grown up listening to, hearing on £1 CDs from the corner-shop, seeing on posters for nights I was too young to go to – but had never seen live. Some, like Rapper T Dot, apparently had to be coaxed out of retirement, others had probably not performed outside the vocal-booth in years. Earlier on that night, some of us sat in the sun and watched kids play in the fountains of the Bradford City Park, some guys behind us live-streamed an afrobeats DJ set, some girls practiced a dance routine, and (in classic Bradford fashion) a couple of lads turned up on horse-and-carts to have beers outside Wetherspoons.

The next day, a group of us went to help with sorting and archiving at the Bradford Resource Centre (BRC). Housed in an old Quaker meeting house in Bradford's Little Germany area, BRC was a hub of radical politics that provided meeting space, a library and offices for a range of anti-racist, LGBTQ+, feminist, disability rights, and trade union groups, operating from 1979 up into the 2010s, as funding dried up and groups left the space. Since 2024 a group called Friends of Bradford Resource Centre have been trying to preserve the amazing archive left within the space, and get the building back into community use. As part of this, I've been working on a film and exhibition about BRC and the wider history of radical politics in Bradford with the artist Adam Lewis Jacob and youth film collective Toothless Films. Laura and I write in the book about how informal archives and what we call 'history from within' can offer 'the hand of friendship' across time, showing possibilities, strategies and personal stories that resonate in profound ways. Sorting and archiving at BRC has been an often beguiling experience of this sense of historical resonance. At various points in the cramped basement of the building we've stumbled across: a 1911 handwritten ledger from the Bradford Trades Council (including notes from the 1926 general strike!), a box of Polaroid photos from the 'Valid' & 'Mustn't Grumble' disabled theatre group, hand collaged- posters for the Bradford Women Against Pit Closures group, a 'Bradford Dykes' calendar from the late 1970s, lunch boxes, novelty mugs, a bag of old clocks (!). Sometimes, people related to the groups we encounter are there in the room with us, sorting things through too – and we laugh and remark about an irate letter from a councillor, or the doodles on the minutes of a boring meeting.

Other times, we come across people that are not so much friends, but strangers – characters and stories that are harder to place or catalogue, and often even more interesting for this reason. In the chaos and sheer quantity of the material there, it's quite nice to just sit with the opacity of these characters, rather than try to reveal or illuminate them. No doubt one day, in an archive somewhere, they will speak in a different way to a different person - but not right now. (Having said this, if you work for an archive or know people who do, we’re still looking for help submitting some of the collection - get in touch!)

This weekend we also found a bunch of sworn enemies: a file of 00s BNP leaflets buried in the files of an anti-fascist group that operated out of BRC. The iconography and language was so familiar, union jacks and bad Microsoft word art mixed into racist anti-migrant polemics that were scary in their vitriol but also somehow desperate: to be taken seriously, to will a political community into existence, to not get run out of town this time. What shocked me was just how familiar this content was in another way, foreshadowing the rhetoric of Reform & the Conservative Party obviously, but also of our current Labour Government. I'd understood this in an abstract way, charted on a history that stretched from Blair and Straw’s attacks on people in the asylum system, to Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance, into the latest ascendancies of the European Far Right and the brutal defeat of Corbynism, but it was another thing to hold this history in my hands, to see how mainstream it had become.

This feeling was ignited on Monday when Keir Starmer made what will surely now be known as his 'Island of Strangers' speech, announcing the new government White Paper on Immigration. The excellent Free Movement blog has a detailed summary of the paper’s contents, which essentially outline an intention to cut numbers of ‘legal migration’ through various measures including more demanding language requirements, changes to student visa rules, longer time periods before people can apply for settlement, and bans on people coming to the UK as care workers. Suffice to say it's a punitive, cowardly set of proposals aimed at somehow forcing Reform into retreat through mimicry and number-fudging. It shows how deeply the (actually quite recent) dominant framing of ‘legal’ vs ‘illegal’ migration has embedded itself into governance, with the White Paper on so-called ‘illegal’ migration (refugee law has always accounted for people crossing borders and making claims upon arrival) scheduled for “later this summer”.

However, it was Starmer’s speech about the White Paper, and particularly this phrase ‘island of strangers’, which has been a media focus since. To quote that section in full:

Let me put it this way: Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

Within the characteristically dull supply-teacher-telling-you-off language of it all, the ‘island of strangers’ phrase cuts through. This is in part, as many pointed out, due to the direct resonance the phrase has with one from Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech:

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

Starmer, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, were quick to rebuff the comparison, or that there was anything deliberate about the semantic overlap. It seems pretty unbelievable that nobody in Starmer’s team would have noticed the similarities of this high-profile outlining of Labour Government intentions on immigration policy and one of the most famous political speeches of the last 50 years of British history on that very topic, but maybe Starmer really is that useless. He clearly has been bristling in the last few days over how focused people are on that phrase within the speech, something he shares with Powell, who preferred people to speak of his ‘Birmingham Speech’, rather than allusions he made to violent civil war and Roman rivers foaming with blood. The comparisons don’t end there: Starmer speaks of prior Tory ‘betrayal’, while Powell ends his speech stating that government inaction would be a ‘great betrayal’; both treat immigration as a threat to national identity, a source of conflict and social decay, both are animated by a sense of white victimhood and a nostalgic myth of historic homogeneity. Yesterday, Nigel Farage, who 11 years ago said he backed the ‘basic principle’ of Powell’s speech, praised Starmer in the Commons: “We at Reform, [...] very much enjoyed your speech on Monday, you seem to be learning a very great deal from us. Could I encourage you to go further, as a matter of national security?”

Of course we shouldn't be surprised, when the lines of racist nationalism, often amalgamated with a protectionist idea of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, go so deep within the Labour Party (Powell quotes approvingly in his speech from then Labour MP John Stonehouse’s complaints about the Sikh community “maintain[ing] customs inappropriate in Britain,” by wearing turbans). But this does seem like a shift in tone, and from a government that currently faces no serious immediate threats from either opposing parties or their own backbench. More gallingly, many in the wider left have echoed Starmer’s framing in the last few months and in response to his speech, with everyone from Perry Anderson to Michael Walker on Novara Media using similar language to assert that ‘the numbers’ need to come down, and that people haven’t been ‘consulted’. As China Miéville writes in an LRB letter responding to Anderson’s piece:

Anderson says that voters have usually not been consulted about ‘either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad’. But then, after decades of neoliberalism, what are voters usually consulted about? And on what policies do their opinions have an effect? There is no democratic mandate for almost anything: pouring shit into rivers; declining real wages; the financialisation of public goods; skyrocketing inequality; the destruction of the universities; the underfunding of hospitals; and so endlessly on. To demand that the left should concern itself with the lack of democratic accountability tout court would be welcome, if hardly innovative. But instead, it is only immigration that Anderson cites on this point.

Miéville goes on to articulate a succinct set of ‘socialist demands’ around immigration: “full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.” Why have so many others on the left abdicated from articulating such a position? In trying to smash that Overton window, have they fallen through the other side?

Of course, plenty of people did call out Starmer’s rhetoric, often turning to the liberal language of welcoming, economic contribution and human rights. MP Nadia Whittome and journalists like Helena Horton and Neil Mackay instead drew on the idea of ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours’ to reject the framing of ‘strangers’. This helped illuminate, for me, what felt different about the tone of Starmer’s speech. In the phrase ‘an island of strangers’ Starmer captures (and misdiagnoses) real feelings of alienation and isolation felt by many. He argues that ‘strangers’ emerge from a lack of adherence to a ‘social contract’, in a thinly veiled defence of assimilationism. It is a phrase that implies, alongside demands that people ‘commit to integration, to learning our language’ - societal breakdown and a fear of replacement, in the far-right mould that Powell has done so much to shape. It is language that works to deny the possibility of a friendship or neighbourliness that is not refracted through the nation, whilst implying a deeper, whiter and homogenised relationality to the historic communities of the British Isles, one we know to be false.

Talk of friends, neighbours and ‘strangers’ also resonates with a very different episode that happened this week, four years ago: the Battle of Kenmure Street. As I argued in the LRB Blog a year after that day, it was a blurring of these concepts - friend--neighbour and the ‘unconditional support’ offered to strangers - that helped animate the politics of that day:

Decades of anti-racist and tenant organising across Glasgow provided not only material context but also key points of political principle. The idea of ‘unconditional support’ is central. Places like the Unity Centre share information, skills and resources without asking people to divulge their immigration status, to avoid the Home Office dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants. In Kenmure Street we knew very little about the men in the van. Occasionally people in the crowd would ask for more information: ‘How do we know they’ve not done something wrong?’ To which the general response would be: ‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done or who they are, nobody should be treated like this.’

What should be a fairly simple political principle is difficult to uphold in a system that encourages – and, through ‘hostile environment’ legislation, attempts to legally mandate – people to enact their own ‘good citizenship’ through the policing and naming of the ‘bad’. Yet at Kenmure better instincts prevailed. ‘These are our neighbours,’ we chanted, ‘let them go!’ Other terms of political kinship were also used – ‘friends’, ‘brothers’, ‘sisters’, the occasional ‘comrade’ – but it was the idea of the neighbour that seemed to anchor the protest, with its sense of commonality that still allows a certain anonymity. ‘I am lucky that my fate brought me to Glasgow,’ one of the men, Lakhvir Singh, said afterwards, ‘where the people come out to support one of their own.’

In rejecting Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ then, perhaps we should be careful not to reject the idea of strangers entirely. As the sociologist Richad Sennett argues, learning how to live with strangers is a key part of contemporary urban life, one we should meet by encouraging forms of cooperation that do not erase difference: “treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance”. Starmer’s phrase tells a story of an immemorial national fraternity in which ‘migration’ is just small sanitised chapter (1945-2025?) and demonstrating ‘integration’ means subjecting oneself to obscene levels of surveillance and scrutiny. The phrase works to exclude and demonise, but also, like all far-right politics, speaks to a certain fascinated need to probe, catalogue and contain. We should reject all aspects of Starmer’s ‘stranger’ then, but consider using Sennett’s formulation to turn the former against itself: to organise and struggle with people as strangers, without demanding a transparency or knowability to their stories and histories.

From the dancefloor, to the public square, to the archive; we can find ways to think with friends and strangers, sometimes together. As we try to build our anti-raids and anti-racist groups to be able to meet not just individual moments of immigration enforcement like Kenmure Street, but the whole racist system, we should hold these forms of political community in mind. We can reject Starmer’s attempt to construct an acceptable version of Enoch Powell, along with his dismissal of the comparison. We can advance unconditional practices of connection and support that acknowledge what has always been true: people will move, our real enemies are the ones who try to violently police and curtail this. We can find friends, and strangers, in this struggle, in our radical history, in the city that some joyless Tory MP said is ‘already an island of strangers’, sitting out in the sunshine.

Hello and welcome to Friends in Common.

Firstly - love, strength, and endless solidarity to our trans friends and comrades after a horrible week. The Supreme Court decision comes on the back of years of aggressive transphobic organising in Britain, and is a savage blow to the community - but one that we can and will organise to resist and defeat. What The Trans has a list of protests happening over the weekend on their bluesky, and Netpol just put out some useful information about safely attending trans solidarity protests: we hope to see you there.

Also, following the news this week, Pluto has put Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s brilliant book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds online for free as an ebook. You can get it here.

Secondly, we want to say a huge thanks to everyone who has helped us through the initial bump of building an ‘online presence’ (ew) by sharing this blog and our other bits of social media. We feel particularly weird about this as the book contains quite a lot of critical analysis about how corrosive online life can be to friendship and organising, but hopefully we can move to some much nicer IRL chats about all this once we get word out about our book tour in late June (announcing soon!). For now though, we are really grateful for people subscribing and sharing and all that stuff.

Anyway, we wanted to share an extended version of an interview we did for the book with our friend . Gracie is an amazing campaigner and writer who co-wrote the book Against Borders: The Case for Abolition with Luke De Noronha (who we also interview in the book!), and was a founding member of the Against Borders for Children (ABC) campaign. We interview her as an accompaniment to Chapter 3, which focuses on the politics of movement and making connections through ‘friends-of-friends’, drawing on histories on 19^th Century socialist / anarchist lecture tours and 2000s Zine and Punk touring.

The interview was initially prompted by a post Gracie did on her blog In Relative Opacity, entitled ‘On hospitality’, which touched on many of these themes of ‘friendship on the move’. Here, she describes travelling to record an episode of the Border Abolitionist ‘de Verbranders’ podcast in Amsterdam and to the Feminist Autonomous Research Centre’s No Borders Summer School in Athens through the early part of Summer 2023. As Gracie puts it:

[This was] the first extended time since [Lockdown] that I’ve spent wandering around intermittently with other people, rather than on my own or with my partner. So I’m remembering how it feels to catch an evening on the wing of a gentle invitation; to follow a kind stranger’s recommendations through a city’s hot night.

She goes on to describe the Summer School:

There were whole rooms and faces from New Delhi, Lisbon, Palermo and beyond at the opening assembly. Afterwards, I spoke for a brief while about mine and Luke’s book, but more importantly, we spoke with one another about what the border is doing to people where each of us lives, how burned out and tired many people resisting the violence are; how degrading the conditions in the camps are; and the inadequacy of some of our movement spaces at meaningfully dealing with harm. Only that day we had learned that hundreds of people had died in a shipwreck at Pylos, many of them shut in the hold of a rusting trawler. There is no solace for deaths that should not have occurred, so that isn’t the word that I want: I am thinking of what it was to feel our anger and sorrow together, to be able to hold one another’s hands and regulate our breaths in the same room and air, rather than alone and behind a screen.

We discuss such experiences of collective grieving below, along with how Gracie conceptualises these forms of relationality in motion:

It isn’t only in my recent travels that I have been thinking about hospitality shows itself. I now live much further away from some of my old friends, and our time together, shorter though it is, has a different timbre and intensity, because it stretches over days. Between the voicenotes and text dumps we’re back in the teenage intimacy of long weekends in one another’s homes, camped out on sofas, long breakfasts, jumping in one another’s beds in the mornings. We’re together enough time to wind each other up, to fall into long hours of silence and reading, and at the same time grown up enough that we (I) fuss parentally about whether guests slept well; whether everyone has had enough to eat, and if they’ve brought the right shoes to go hiking. And so the day I arrived home from Greece, a friend who I met in Paris over a decade ago arrived in Glasgow, and his husband the next day, and we decamped first to the unseasonably hot shores of KK Bay, and then to a tiny cabin by Loch Voil, sleeping in bunkbeds, swimming in the peaty yellow water every morning, and watching two red squirrels chase each other up the birches.

All of which is to say that when we were all separated from one another I missed this, and I am grateful to be reminded of what can happen when we let our guard down, when we decide to pitch up somewhere, and meet open arms. And I am grateful that my own life is such that my door is a place at which friends can pitch up hot and tired and know welcome. You know, insert something profound and not too subtle here on all of this being the antithesis of bordering; on the importance of giving centre stage to what and whom we love.

***

We started our conversation by talking about these travels and connections Gracie had been making in Amsterdam, Athens, and beyond, asking how she conceptualises such kinds of ‘friendship on the move’.

Gracie: I suppose the thing for me is that one of the many realities of life under racial capitalism is that unless you're independently wealthy, you're working, and you're spending a lot of your waking time doing paid work. And while this can’t be collapsed into the kinds of work that many people do that is actively degrading or dangerous, and those contexts in which labour rights are routinely denied, many of us are still operating in institutional contexts that are not super welcoming, or might be hostile to us, or just, not in alignment with our values. And so we spend a lot of our waking time in these potentially quite unfriendly environments, so spaces where we get to spend time with fellow travellers, I think, are really important. They’re important reminders of what we can be to each other. [In Athens, at the Feminist No Borders Summer School] I kind of just pitched up, with relatively short notice. But I was in the company of fellow travellers. And I guess when I say fellow travellers, I don’t mean that we agree with each other on absolutely everything. We have an investment in a shared project, that is border abolition, abolition feminism, and I think investment in shared projects, it lets me let my guard down. It lets me trust people. And it means that when we agree, but crucially when we disagree, our starting point is very different to where we start when we disagree with people with whom we have no common cause.

Joel: Yes. I really like the idea of the fellow traveller. And it makes me think about the ‘friend of a friend’ as well, how much that animates this stuff, just the knowledge that someone else is a kind of node in the network. I’m also interested in the role the podcast played in this, and how that relates to Zines and Pamphlets in the past. How much have these trips and material formats influenced you and your political ideas?

Gracie: In terms of zines in particular, I have to say I loved Give Up Activism. I think I picked it up at London Anarchist Bookfair one year. It’s a really powerful prompt to avoid organising in cliques. But more generally, I think that the influence of these trips and encounters on my political work has been really significant in terms of just like, helping me to keep the faith. To actually just keep believing that this world that we talk about, and that we talk about making together is possible, because we prefigure it. It’s a reminder that what we write about and what we write towards, these aren’t kind of ideals that are off in the distance. These are things that can happen for us, that we can make together, even in the world that we live in now. Its restorative. In terms of the podcast, I ended up doing that because Luke [De Noronha] had said to me, ‘these people are great, you should go’ and when I went, the hosts put so much care and attention into welcoming me and making me feel safe and comfortable. And in that sense, it's less about the form of the podcast for me. That’s a pretext to do certain things. Other people might really differ in their view on that, but I'm less bothered about the form and more about how it allows us to get together.

Joel: Absolutely. You talked about Luke there a bit, and we’ve spoken before about the intensities of friendship when writing and thinking together. I’m also interested in how you’ve approached friendship and political organising more generally. How much of a role do you think friendship should play in political organising, where’s the line for you?

Gracie: I find this question interesting and challenging, because as I said earlier, there's an inherent trust to friendship. So, it can be easy to do political work with your friends because there's a shared basis of trust. If you’ve helped to put someone's kids to bed or you've been in their home, there's a trust that's there. That means that you can do risky stuff together. But you can also do vulnerable stuff together, and world making is a vulnerable thing, to open yourself up and say, ‘I would really like the world to be this way’, that’s vulnerable. I think sometimes political work requires friendship. And sometimes it inculcates friendship. But in terms of the limit, there are a lot of black feminist thinkers and organisers who've written about the importance of coalition organising, in order to get to where we want to politically, and they've also written about the fact that a coalition isn't home.

And it's not as simple as that kind of trite 'will you ever kiss a Tory?' thing. It’s more that you've got to be able to organise with people with whom you disagree, people who hold beliefs that we find challenging, and also just people who we find annoying, who rub us up the wrong way. I obviously don’t mean organising with people who want me or my family dead – or anyone else for that matter – but there are still a lot of people who we disagree with who might find it useful to work with at times. And it's not just about doing political work with people that we're not friends with, it's also about doing political work for or in solidarity with people that we're not actually that keen on. I don't have to be someone's friend to believe that they're worthy of all the things that a person needs to live a flourishing life. And I think that that is a really, really important line to draw. I don't have to like someone to think that they're worthy of dignity and freedom and all the rest of it. I have certainly seen a fair amount political organising feeling like a scene or an in group. And seen it be hard for people to get involved. An over reliance on informal friendship networks and relations of trust can mean that you don’t develop the structures that allow you to welcome and bring people in who just are completely random and don't know anyone at all. So I think it's quite double edged. But there's also a frivolity to friendship - I mean, not that all political organising has to be really serious - but just I guess there's something to do with obligation in political organising. And there's a lot that we do with our friends that has nothing to do with obligation at all. And it's really important that we have that too.

Joel: Yes, I agree. It makes me think about the question you touched on in the blog too, on grieving and friendship, and what it means to grieve for someone you didn’t know. Could you speak a bit about how you understand the relationship between friendship and grief, or of being with friends during grief, but also grieving for people as a kind of friend?

Gracie: Yes, I mean, when I think about the importance of physically being together in times of grief, I want to start with a big caveat. Because I obviously don't want to ignore or minimise the fact that for some people sharing physical space and touch isn't enjoyable. For some people, it might actually be unsafe. So when I talk about the importance of being physically together, we also have to think about how we minimise barriers to people being together, whether that's like ensuring the physical accessibility of spaces, or putting COVID mitigation measures in place. I think that's important. But what this question brought up for me was that when I think about friends who've been with me in grief, I don't remember very much at all of what we said to each other. But I have really vivid memories of holding people or people holding me.

I have a really vivid memory of my partner saying to me after a family member had a serious medical diagnosis “Well, I've got no idea what to say, but I'm not gonna go anywhere”. And he just sat with me for hours. So there is something really important about all of the ways that we communicate with one another non verbally. In those times, its actually really hard to find the words. And I think that with the way information and news move these days, we deal with a lot of things for which words actually just don't come very easily. And so it becomes all the more important to be able to open your arms to somebody or to hold their hand or to make them a cup of tea, or to put the fan on because you know that it's too hot.

And I guess when we think about the grief that we feel for people that we don't know, it's really hard. I find it so hard to put into words, how it feels to learn about hundreds of people dying an awful death in the sea. Its hard to find words for that. And even to ring up a friend and say, ‘this terrible thing has happened’, or to try and write something about it, it's just really, really difficult. So I think to be able to be in a room with someone and to just say, ‘we know that this has happened, and we can just take some breaths together’. That's important. But crucially, what happened next at the Feminist No Borders Summer School when we learnt of those deaths is that people began to deliberate together about what they wanted to do next. And I don't want to say much about that in detail, but the point is that there was time to be together and to process a little bit, but there was also time to deliberate together about what we wanted to do. And I think that those spaces are so important, and maybe to counter a little bit what I said about being physically present, during the pandemic, when the police were massively aggressive to all of us at Clapham Common [at a vigil for Sarah Everard]. It was being able to jump onto a Zoom call with a bunch of people, friends, from Sisters Uncut, and other groups to be like, 'what the hell just happened’? ' and 'What are we going to do about this?' That was really, really important. So yeah, maybe we don't always have to be physically together. But we do need to be together.

Joel: Yeah, absolutely. Beautiful. This question of space feels important too. I’m interested if you’ve had particular experiences in spaces that felt conducive to the kind of fleeting but dense friendships we speak about in this chapter?

Gracie: Yeah. I mean, so there are two answers that I want to give to this - three - thinking about conferences and residentials and overnights. This question made me think of a conference I attended in 2021 called Sensing the Planet, which was organised, in part by the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Paul Gilroy and others. The thing that made it a bit different to other academic conferences that I've been at, is it there were a lot of artists there as well, there are a lot of writers, poets, and so on. And we’re staying in this beautiful estate in Devon, and the season is changing to Autumn, all these old sweet chestnut trees that are turning, orange and brown. I'd been doing this kind of extractive high powered Westminster campaigning work for some time and arrived in this place and was able to be in a completely different mode. I’d wake up early and walk around and then go to breakfast, and you kind of just sat with whoever was around. And there was this one artist who I sat with that I’d barely spoken to so far, but that morning we just sat and spoke about our dreams for an hour. It was really special, we don’t get to do that very often. I can't remember this person's name, but there's something about the openness that residential space can inculcate, because they take us out of our every day. And I know that kind of 360 immersion really does not work for some people, but for some of us it does and, that's a place that we get to.

But then thinking about those fleeting and momentary friendships. I think important context for my response to this is that I grew up in Leicester, and Leicester had a really good scene as teenagers. There would be a crowd of us who vaguely knew each other and were committed to certain kinds of alternative music and we’d just go out and see where the night took us. So free-wheeling around with people I only vaguely know, that's pretty normal to me. And in a way, a lot of these slightly random trips, overnights, residentials, call me back to quite a teenage mode of being, I guess. And I suppose we're encouraged to disparage that a bit. But those are ways of being that I really enjoy, and that I don't necessarily want to let go of.

And the final side of this question that I really wanted to talk about, is that I have a lot of really lovely exchanges with older people. It happens a lot in Glasgow, but it also happens a lot in Europe too. For instance, one time me and my partner were walking on the coast in Crete, from Agia Roumeli to Agios Pavlos. It was hot and we were low on water. And from a distance we'd seen this old man in the distance hopping around naked on the rocks by the coast. And eventually we got closer and he kind of just reappeared. And he had his swimming trunks on by this point. And he could just see that we were way too hot, and it was too much. And he had a banana. And he just broke it in half. And he gave a piece to each of us. And we established that he and I both spoke French because he was Belgian and he just started telling me about his life. He was telling me about how he goes out on his boat in the summers, and he hops around the rocks. And I just remember him saying something like ‘je suis dans la liberté totale’: ‘I’m in complete freedom'. And me and my partner, to this day, maintain that he was an angel. Because it really was just absolute salvation.

Joel: That's so nice! Hopefully we can all be angels one day too. Maybe to finish though we can bring it back to the relationships that were important to you when you first started being involved in political organising. Is there anyone who comes to mind?

Gracie: Yeah, for me, the Against Borders for Children [ABC] campaign was just incredible. Some of the people involved in that campaign were already friends when it when it happened, and that's part of why it formed that way, but I didn’t know most of them, and we’re all still friends now. And I think that there were really experienced organisers who brought us together, and who kind of insisted on - I don't mean they forced us to be friends - but they insisted on it not all being business. They focused on really getting to know each other and finding out about one another's families, getting to meet each other's kids, making meals together. I suppose they just modelled how you can take care of each other in doing political work. And some of them had had decades of experience, but it wasn't that they had always done things this way. It was more that, as a product of so much of their experiences and organising, they got to a point where they felt it was important to organise in this way, so they were still learning and experimenting also. But they were really intentional about that.

So the ABC campaign is one set of friendships that comes to mind and then friendships with people that I've probably already mentioned a bit, one of whom has been active in Sisters Uncut for a really long time, the other who’s a very formidable Palestinian anti-racist activist. These have been two of my best friends that I've made in my 20s. I'm an only child, and I know that people's friends are important to them regardless of how many siblings they've got, but these two really are like my sisters. I just think that there's an ease that comes with political work between friends. A lot of it isn’t big and showy, it’s Signal messages in the middle of the night. There's this shared point of departure that you have that just makes an enormous amount possible.

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.