In a world that feels increasingly fraught, violent, laden with intersecting crises, putting time and energy into thinking about something like friendship might feel a bit wasteful, even a little self-indulgent. The first pages of our book of the month – Friends in Common, by Laura C. Foster and Joel White – immediately challenges us to think about friendship as a cornerstone of our movements, which frames the rest of this powerful and engaging book.
Friends in Common opens with an extended quotation from Yvonne, the co-founder of Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE), who shares her experience of detention in the Yarlswood Immigration Centre. Yvonne describes the “domino effect” of the solidarity she experienced from members of Glasgow’s Unity Centre and how it encouraged her to support others in detention, before reminding us that such work has to be rooted in a “love for humanity” that doesn’t reduce people to a “cause”. This tension – between what we want to achieve, and how we want to go about achieving it, means and ends, goals and methods – will be well known to anyone who has been involved in activism and organising. Friends in Common makes an uncompromising case for thinking about and reflecting on friendship as more than an incidental by-product of our campaigning and activism, (“not peripheral to the real intellectual ‘meat’ of political ideas”) but as an essential foundation of building a better world. Many people who have been involved in grassroots activism will instinctively know this, that the relational bonds built through months, years, decades of working together are as important as the goals the group is working towards. However, we can still be guilty of undervaluing the importance of relationships and bonds of trust, and find ourselves taking on some of the individualistic norms we see in wider society.
I want to draw out two key threads in the book that I found particularly helpful: exploring communication in the digital age, and trust.
Communication in the digital age
Social media is a key theme throughout the book, which makes sense! Many people’s lives are now completely interwoven with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and others. Facebook and Instagram have over 3 billion monthly active users, Tiktok 1.5 billion, and X has over 500 million. While these platforms have become an essential tool to mobilising and activism, they are also part of why many people experience life in a very atomised way which leaves relationships feeling very transactional.
Forster and White argue that social media platforms have tried to “co-opt, contain and destroy relational bonds”, and many of us will recognise how social media is fuelling a competitive and accumulative version of friendship defined less by informal interactions and bond-building and more by individuals presenting versions of themselves that they believe will be attractive or interesting to others.
When our friendships are mediated by social media platforms we might end up more “knowing of” people, rather than knowing them in a way that builds the sorts of trust and bonds that are essential to effective organising. As more and more people become reliant on platforms like Facebook and X to earn incomes, advertise their work, and “build a personal brand” Forster and White challenge us to think about the way “ambient friendships” sustained through social media are reducing us to think about friendships in terms of “productivity”. The nature of the space that we interact frames the nature of those relationships; social media platforms might present themselves as neutral, but they are actually cleverly designed structures that have a huge impact on the way we relate to others.
Balancing the power of social media platforms with their many and often insidious problems is a challenge. What should we share, and who should we connect with? What should we keep “offline”?
Trust
The other key theme I wanted to highlight is around “trust”, which I think of as foundational to my own interpersonal relationships, but also to the way our movements function. Trusting that people will follow through on what they’ve said they will do is both foundational to movements and organising, and when there is a breakdown of trust it can be difficult to rebuild. The degree to which we trust the people around is perhaps a luxury we don’t identify unless we don’t have it – many groups and organisations have fallen apart simply because trust among members has become irrevocable.
There has been significant coverage in recent years of the “spy cops” scandal. Over 140 undercover police officers infiltrated more than 1,000 political organisations in what one of the key agents described as a “black operation”, a highly secretive process designed to gather information and disrupt the activities of political groups in the UK. The officers sought to abuse the trust others placed in them in order to embed themselves in the personal lives of people they met through these activities. They regularly built intimate and long-term relationships with activists, and even had children with people they were monitoring. Since 2010 several of the police officers involved have been identified, and an inquiry into the issue began in 2020.
Friends in Common places the spy cops scandal in a historical context, highlighting the many and varied ways that authorities have sought to disrupt protest or revolutionary activity by embedding spies, informers and even agent provocateurs among those seeking to challenge powerholders and instigate social change. Forster and White explain that “infiltrating and fabricating friendship has long been a strategy of the state…the explicit strategies of these agents include deliberate and sustained attempts to create intimacies, and to penetrate intimate and informal spaces, be they bedrooms, bathrooms or barrooms.” and that as well as gathering information and reporting on plans and activities, the role of such infiltration (drawing on an example of FBI agents infiltration of the Black Panther Party and the anti-Vietnam war movement) as creating “suspicion, isolation and loneliness” within organisations and movements. We could think of these activities as a conscious attempt to weaponise trust, a way of using the very human bonds that are built through activism to undermine attempts to organise, challenge, and resist.
While the impact of such behaviour by security forces is shocking and upsetting (and, for those who experience the deceit and deception directly, it can be deeply traumatic), Forster and White also argue that the amount of energy and resources put into these activities “signal the revolutionary importance of friendship”, that because friendship is “policed as a threat” we should recognise its central importance to our ability to build lasting social change.
The question we are perhaps left with is: in a climate where even people we think we know and trust deeply – perhaps even love – could be weaponising such human tendencies against us, how do we continue to trust others? Forster and White have an almost counterintuitive answer – to “dig deeper into bonds of real friendship”, pointing to the story of Lisa. Lisa received an email from her former partner “Mark Stone”, asking for forgiveness. Considering the deceit and betrayal Lisa experienced we might expect her to never trust again, but instead she explains “I’m being shown such a huge amount of fiercely true love from so many incredible people that I can’t let down. I choose them.”
In an age where more of our activism takes place online, where we have the potential to be connected to people from anywhere, and where state surveillance and limits on the right to protest and organise are increasing, Friends in Common is both inspiring and refreshing, and gently provocative and challenging, a thought-provoking reflection on the nature of the bonds of friendship that are the scaffolding of our work to build a different world.
Friends in Common was published in June 2025 by Pluto Press. We hold a copy in the Commonweal Collection, and you can check its status here