#3 The Politics of Friendship
Or “friendship is the soil out of which a new politics will grow” - Ivan Illich
When it comes to hope, I owe everything to my friends. Imagine trying to hold a vision of a world free from exploitation, cruelty and domination by yourself. It would be intolerable. There’s a reason the genre of young-outcast-who-only-really-becomes-themselves-when-they-make-friends is so popular (see Harry Potter or, more interestingly, A Wizard of Earthsea): the relief of not being alone makes life possible.
When I think of the social sensibility that both guided young Greg away from lazy conformity to a pretty shite dominant culture and held me through the various phases of denial, defensiveness, mourning, rage etc. that confronting that culture entails, it can only be called friendship.
Activists of all kinds, and especially anarchists and feminists, know that friendship is something potent and subversive:
"Empire’s grip on relationships is being broken by new and resurgent forms of intimacy through which people come to depend on each other, defend each other, and become dangerous together. Friendship as freedom, in this story, names interdependent relationships as a source of collective power, a dangerous closeness that Empire works to eradicate..."
says one (poetic) example.1
“Structural proximity to a movement, rather than any individual disposition, produces activism. Although individuals differ in their dispositions, the opportunities afforded by structural location relative to a movement determine whether they are in a position to act on these dispositions. Empirical support for these positions is unimpeachable…”
says another (less poetic) example.2
This isn’t universally accepted by the radical left. Some see friendship as an unreliable foundation for social movement building. When your capacities to change the world - your political capabilities - are dependent on friendship, the loss or end of one can be catastrophic.
You can think of the way Lila in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a fierce and rebellious young woman, becomes consumed by her home town’s stuffy macho culture only after her friendship with Elena breaks down. Or of Anna the communist protagonist in Dorris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook whose core relationships fragment and deteriorate as the revelation of Stalin’s crimes splinters the communist movement. Or you can think of this newsletter’s quest for political hope, which is absent in no small part from the ending of one of my life’s central friendships.
Jodi Dean, a communist theorist in the States, is convinced that this proves that friendship is an unwise foundation for a revolutionary movement. Friends fall out all the time, and our movement needs to be stronger than that.
The other argument is that friendships are also often cliquey and exclusive, and our movement needs to bring in as many people as possible. Francesca Polleta, another social theorist from the States, wrote a study on the inner workings of a series of 20th-century social movements that squares with Dean’s assessment. All of the movements she studied reached the same crisis moment, and most of them struggled to cross it: when a core tight-knit group of founders failed to involve newcomers, trust in the organisation declined, resentment grew and groups split.
I think these are fair warnings. And I think that it’s understandable that radical groups get cliquey. If you finally find belonging in a world where you haven’t before, the thought of losing the crew that gives you it can be frightening. But I don’t buy their conclusion that friendship ought to be replaced by something less intimate (like comradeship as Dean suggests).
If we buy Sophie K Rosa’s point that “the unwieldiness of friendship – understood as polyvalent intimacy that defies hierarchy, formalisation and state sanction – could be its power”, then why give up that power?
Why not instead aspire for better versions of friendship? For friendships which are attentive, which are open and which take their endings seriously. Anna in the Notebook needed more friendship around her, not less. As did Lila. And in these months, while rekindling my own belief in a swift, nonviolent, revolutionary transition of power and transformation of culture, my friends (yes you!) are who I need.
Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery (read this book!!)
Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam, “Collective Identity and Activism,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory quoted by Jonathan Matthew Smucker in Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals