With Friends Like These ...

 “Friendship” by Michal Herer, 2023

This is an anti-capitalist essay that explores alienation and the answer to it.  Herer is doubtful that a social movement full of people who can’t get along or close to neighbors, co-workers, fellow cadre or organizational associates, even spouses and children - is capable of having the necessary social cohesion to build a powerful movement towards socialism.  That is what you might think by reading the book, but he has a broader point about friendship.

Capital has given us the false or inadequate social ‘cohesions’ of family; of nation; of work; of perhaps a neo-liberal NGO or social organization.  He does not mention churches or unions oddly enough.  Herer rejects his list as not leading to ‘common living’ and common struggle. He rightly opposes the faux-leftist hostility to counter-culture communalism and cooperation in the 1960s and 1970s.  These leftists thought this movement led to neo-liberalism but these were actually anti-capitalist trends.  He cites Foucault (you knew this was coming) as becoming concerned with the concept of friendship in several essays.  Herer wants to follow up.

It’s not about the liberal and religious idealism of ‘love’ as a political angle or even the practical, proletarian goal of ‘working together’ that will bind people together in his estimation.  Herer is mostly interested in a philosophic dialog, so goes into a discussion of the differences between love – erotic, neurotic and true love – and friendship, which has some parallels with certain kinds of love.  Herer provides few  facts or examples in his dialog, which is problematic as he looks at the present situation.  He even admits he is working at a too high level of generalization. He quotes Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Freud, Foucault, Fromm, Barthes, Derrida and for Marxists, Wilhelm Reich.  Reich posited that prior to the patriarchal family and the subsequent development of class society, there was a free sexuality practiced in communal, primitive communism.  As Engels put it, prior to “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.” The development of the bourgeois nuclear family under capitalism brought repression and suffocation. Herer is not convinced Reich’s history has enough of a factual background but it does illustrate some well-known limitations of ‘the family.’ 

Friendship shares these characteristics:  It allows distance; it is non-compulsive; it is without thought of gain or sex.  At present it is defined as a personal issue. At least that is a sketch, as even he can’t define it.  Herer however believes ‘friendship’ should be a ‘transcendent’ social and eventually political goal, a sort of soft version of love.  This kind of ‘transcendent’ utopian liberal-anarchism seems to be more fit for relations within socialism or communism than the present.  

Let’s think of a few obvious examples, some of which he deals with. Herer mentions how some men reject the family and women and join the military or fascist groups to find ‘friendship.’ In that vein is “Band of Brothers,” a concept purely male and oriented towards violence.  Or the solidarity of group sports, which is based on winning against others. “Libertié, Egalitié, Franternité!” is a slogan of the French Revolution. Fraternity here is seen as solidarity of some sort, yet aimed at royalty and the rich.  It eventually ended up in the triumph of partial reaction under Napoleon I, a former fraternal brother.  (Fraternity is closely related to friendship according to Herer.) “Brothers and Sisters” is a union greeting and is a bit better, but it is in the context of class struggle against people who are not brothers and sisters.  In fact Herer doesn’t use the words ‘class struggle’ once because this contradiction upsets his transcendent claim.  All he can come up with is the ‘99% versus the 1% once.  In the present social context, ‘friends’ are sometimes understood as those who oppose the same ‘enemies’ – again limiting the concept of transcendent friendships.  A fraternity on a campus is male and attempts to bind frat boys together, perhaps through hazing, joint housing, parties and group dynamics.  Fraternity houses are problematic places as we all know. “Brother versus brother” was one of the concepts of the U.S. Civil War - no more need to be said. Until reversals in the Soviet 1930s, a new version of the family, love, housing, gay rights, abortion, child-care and the like existed. Yet the revolutionary solidarity of the Russian Revolution ended in one faction destroying the other and reversing these policies…something he vaguely refers to.  

The problem with friendship as a ‘transcendent,’ ‘supra-individual,’ ‘egalitarian-libertarian’ or utopian prospect is that it is not dialectical or historically-based.  Herer at one point says friendship is a ‘luxury’ yet actual friends have also been involved in literal survival.  He claims his discourse is not to adopt ‘harmony and unity that would mask conflict” but that is what it seems to do.

This book is not really dealing with present mass struggle against capital, but a more intimate approach to alienation, which might lead to closer relations between smaller groups of people.  Friendship really helps in stressful or military situations, such as strikes, demonstrations, occupations and political combat - as it brings closer cooperation between individuals in difficult circumstances.  But it also helps in normal operating. It allows stronger ties within ‘working’ groups, sinews of muscle so to speak.  Experience has shown that friendship on the Left is limited, not wide-spread, nor could it possibly be widespread – though it certainly beats the idiotic Democratic slogan of abstract ‘love.’  Smaller groups might be more susceptible to friendship, but that is it.  Friendships sometimes underlie political relationships, and not always in a good way.  Witness cronies and boot-lickers getting plum jobs in political contexts. Friendship is really a ‘sliding scale’ of less or more cooperation and unity.  It is not an overall social goal except in a future socialistic way… an intimation of what Herer calls the coming ‘hyper-democracy.’       

Herer is closer to anarchism than anything else, claiming they are “testing solutions for a possible future.” If this kind of thinking is your cup of tea, you might like this book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “Missoula – Rape and Justice in a College Town” (Krakauer).     

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 13, 2023