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This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

My whole life, I’ve regarded friendship as a happy by-product of activism — a reward for all the sacrifice, but little more. That view got a jolt when my friend Frida Berrigan, reviewing my new book about the post-9/11 antiwar movement, wrote: “Varon conveys that the real strength of the peace movement . . . is friendship.” Hmm. 

I met two of my best friends through the anti-Guántanamo group Witness Against Torture. Countless friendships formed in the groups I studied. Friendship, Frida claims, defied the “War on Terror,” based in fear, suspicion and racism.

The second jolt came when reading Benjamin Shepard’s terrific “On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting.” For Shepard, a dear friend of friends, friendship is essential — both the means and the end of change-making. I met my wife, Alice Meaker Varon, and another one of my closest friends through the 2004 sensation Billionaires for Bush.

Touché.

Ben Shepard takes friendship seriously, while making the case that we, as activists, should do so too. The book is hardly a systematic treatment of friendship. Instead, it is a shape-shifting account of Shepard’s own journey through the great progressive causes of the last four decades, from HIV/AIDS activism, to global justice, to opposition to war and now fascism. Studded throughout is wisdom about friendship, from Aristotle to Adrienne Rich, along with Shepard’s tender remembrances of love, loss and fellowship at the barricades. 

There is a long philosophical tradition that sees friendship, especially with virtuous friends, as itself an act of virtue. From experience, we all know that friendship — in its connection and contention, happiness and hard times — is a crucible for the formation of both our character and capacity in the world.

Shepard’s conceit is to see that capacity as a potent, if underappreciated, political force. 

Some of the book’s most arresting lines are those Shepard worked to learn, like the greeting of an HIV/AIDS activist to her staff: “Thank you for coming to work today!” That work, based in the respect of friendship, saved lives.

Ever humble, Shepard reveals himself as something of a national treasure. He seems to know everybody, in New York City at least. There must be three of him, my wife and I joke, because he’s at every protest. He always has a giant smile and kind words to match. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel good about yourself and whatever your small effort is that day. Bless such people. 

Shepard never goes so far as to say that friendship, in itself, is resistance. (J.D. Vance, no doubt, has friends; Hitler surely did too.) But he makes the political case, quoting philosopher Bennet Helm, that friendship is a “joint exercise of autonomy in defining the kind of life worth living.” Friendship, put otherwise, can be figurative. The goal of so much activism is to give the public and policy spheres a hint of the decency, empathy and compassion we privately seek. 

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These recent years have been so awful, in part because too many Americans have embraced a cruelty and toughness in public life that violates what they expect from themselves and others in the realm of friendship. Friendship, Shepard implicitly argues, is a standpoint from which to reject right-wing ideology, on personal as much as political grounds.

Shepard hardly glazes up activists’ commitment to friendship. Much of the book is about the soul-destroying ploys of too many on the left to tear their comrades down. The most intense parts of the book concern what may be termed the left’s own “cancel culture” (though Shepard avoids the term). It is one thing, he argues, to disagree with the position of an ally on some specific issue. It is another thing to accuse that comrade of being a bad person, through and through. I winced, and nearly cried, when reading of an ACT UP activist, at the height of the AIDS crises, being nearly ex-communicated for taking a “safe sex” line, to the ire of ACT UP’s “pro-sex” radicals. Shepard offers plenty of dispiriting examples, surely triggering grief in the reader from their own experience. Hillary vs. Bernie vs. Trump broke close bonds. No doubt, Oct. 7 and Gaza did too. 

Shepard is a fierce fighter for all that is good and just. He has lived a “big life,” in no small part by allying with big personalities, like the legendary HIV/AIDS activist Elizabeth Owens, whose life as a Black queer woman from the Bronx is so different from Shepard’s own. But, intramurally speaking, Shepard is a lover, not a fighter. His insistent message is that people broadly on the same side share vastly more than whatever may separate them. The best play is almost always coalition, alliance. Divisiveness divides, and saps our power. Almost never do we look in retrospect at such schisms over ideology — or worse personality — and judge them worth the strife.

I have learned this all over again in a recent, terrible struggle against wicked austerity at my university, the New School, in which faculty and staff jobs are on the line.

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The stress is enormous, as the stakes are high. There are power plays, stretching years back, in our spirited resistance. But there are, more importantly, fundamental issues of worker justice on the line, demanding solidarity and true efforts to listen, understand and even change one’s position.

Shepard endorses solidarity, while reminding us of the simple act of human kindness — based on shared aspirations and responses to shared hardships — that make solidarity real.

Through it all, Ben smiles. He takes the prefigurative seriously, along with the succor (and sexy connection of queer struggles of the 1990s) of the group experience.

Maybe I smile too little because I don’t value enough the friendships we create. Maybe you do too.

Thank you Ben, my friend, for pointing us to a better way.

This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

Whatever happened to the “polycrisis”? A couple of years ago it was the buzzword of the world, describing a concatenation of interacting crises that aggravated each other and made solutions appear impossible. In the year since the inauguration of Donald Trump his words and actions have so dominated world events that discussion of the polycrisis has atrophied. But the polycrisis is alive and well and massively aggravated by Trump’s aggressive and erratic behavior. This commentary and the following two trace the development of the polycrisis in the Trump era, examine the intensification of its dynamics, look at its possible outcomes, and give a preliminary perspective on how it might eventually be quelled.  

Donald Trump speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

For the two decades from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 to the Great Recession in 2008, the world order was largely shaped by economic globalization and US global domination. Since then the world order has been riven by interacting crises that came to be dubbed “the polycrisis.” “Polycrisis” characterizes the way crises in many different spheres – ranging from geopolitics and economics to climate and inequality – are aggravating each other and even converging.

The key concept for the polycrisis is interaction. It cannot be understood by simple cause-and-effect models within a single sector or even within the world order as a whole. The interaction of forces, acts, and events determines its patterns and its course. This interaction is illustrated by two crises that might appear quite separate, war and climate. Many of the world’s current armed conflicts are caused or aggravated by climate change; for example, desertification caused by rising temperatures precipitated Sudan’s civil war. Conversely, military buildups and wars are significant causes of global warming; the total military carbon footprint is more than five percent of global emissions. And of course, each of these interacts with the breakdown of international cooperation on climate and security; the rise of para-fascist parties and movements; and many other aspects of the polycrisis. 

The next commentary in this series will examine the dynamics of the polycrisis in the Trump era. There are contradictory tendencies both within and among the polycrisis dynamics. For example, there is a fracturing of globalization but at the same time continued growth in world trade and the concentration of global economic power. Such contradictions make it of limited value to extrapolate these polycrisis dynamics into longer-term trends, other than the probability of increasing chaos and conflict.

Why analyze the polycrisis? Certainly not in order to make credible predictions about the future. Unpredictability is an essential element of the polycrisis. But nonetheless there are two good reasons to try to understand it. First, to avoid faulty assumptions that lead to strategic errors. For example, it was widely believed that Trump’s tariffs would severely damage Chinese exports, but, due to the realities of a global economy, Chinese exports actually increased substantially in the year after Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. Second, to have a better idea of what needs to be overcome and how to replace it. It’s easy to identify one aspect of the polycrisis as “the” problem and focus on it without noting its context. But any effort to move beyond the polycrisis will require a holistic approach to both the problems and the solutions.

Flag raising at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, 04/04/2023. Photo credit: UK Government, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Looking at the polycrisis today, the polycrisis of a year ago appears the embodiment of rationality and order. Leaders still pursued rational, comprehensible aims, even if what they actually produced was usually unintended consequences. Institutions, however much they twisted into modified shapes, still maintained a family resemblance to their former selves. Today, who could claim to really know the aims of Trump or Putin, or to see today’s NATO as a logical outgrowth of NATO past?

There are many questions about the polycrisis we would like to know the answers to. How much of our world order is shaped by national objectives, how much by simply trying to grab resources and territory? Or, at another level, will the “West” as a socio-political entity survive the Trump assault on Europe? Or, what will become of the triangular relationship among Russia, China, and the US: tripartite division of the world into spheres of influence; continued de facto alliance of Russia and China against the US; three-way cold war; or limited or all-out war among two or three?  Unfortunately, these are just the kind of questions that the unpredictable and chaotic character of the polycrisis makes it impossible to answer. 

Starting in June, 2024, I wrote a series of ten Strike! Commentaries laying out some basic dynamics of the polycrisis. They included burgeoning warfare; accelerating conventional and nuclear arms races; breakdown of international cooperation around climate, public health, and conflict resolution; a “war crime wave”; conflict between a rising China and a resisting US; unstable tripartite rivalry between the US, Russia, and China; rising economic nationalism; struggle to control global economic networks; decay of democratic institutions; rise of fascist-style movements and governments; accelerating global warming as climate protection gave way to national economic rivalry; unpredictability; and proliferating folly.   

The election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2024 was both a product of the polycrisis and its great accelerator. As I wrote in a Commentary on “Trump, Trumpism, and the Polycrisis” immediately after the election, “Trump’s style of provocation, deliberate unpredictability, and unrestrained folly will lead to intensified conflict, strange shifts in alliances, deliberately aggravated chaos, and wars.” Uncertainty is further aggravated because we do not know how long Donald Trump himself will remain in power and who and what will succeed his rule.

While Trump’s actions have indeed exacerbated the polycrisis, that doesn’t mean that his intentions are shaping the present, let alone the future, world order. The actions and reactions of other players, and their interactions, are also shaping the developing polycrisis. In fact, the polycrisis remains a dynamic, interactive, uncontrolled, and unpredictable reality in which the acts of actors – above all of Trump – have consequences different from and in many instances contradictory to their intentions. Consider, for example, Trump’s ignominious retreat from his demand to annex Greenland in the face of Europe’s threat to retaliate with its economic “big bazooka.” To paraphrase the Bible’s “Book of Proverbs,” Trump may propose, but the polycrisis disposes.

The polycrisis has consequences. Each year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a “Doomsday Clock” to “convey threats to humanity and the planet.” The clock has become a “universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.” Noting the threats from war, nuclear arms race, climate change, and a variety of new technologies, in January 2026 the Bulletin set the clock to 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been. That represents the catastrophe so many of us sense we are living in. It is not just the product of one or another actor, but the momentum of the polycrisis as a whole toward global destruction. 

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The post Up For Grabs: Polycrisis 2.0 first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

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