Laura and Joel have been invited to The NewBridge Project as part of its Reading Room Programme to share and discuss their newly published book Friends in Common.
Friends in Common (Pluto Press, 2025) shows that friendship as a political practice and a historical precedent is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and can be the antidote to capitalist despair. Forster and White argue that 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 authors think of friendship as foundational to revolutionary projects. Through this, they 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.
Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship and radical struggle, and friendship as radical struggle. The book uses friendship to think politically about our interpersonal connections and forms of belonging, overlaying examples from past, present, and imagined futures.
The discussion will talk through some of the key ideas in the book, drawing on attendees’ own experiences and friendships. Together, the group will then collectively construct an ‘anti-family tree’, tracing lineages of friends and friends of friends that have shaped their political subjectivities.
In doing so the event asks:
- How might we understand history as a form of intergenerational friendship?
- Can we think about friendships themselves as archives?
- How can we highlight the informal, intimate, and irreplaceable affects of friendship?
The event will finish with food, and a paid bar will be available throughout the evening.
Laura C Forster is a writer and historian based in Edinburgh. She is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. Joel White is a writer and researcher based in Glasgow. He co-runs the record label GLARC.
