Philosopher Ewa Majewska’s impressive new book aims at nothing less than changing the structures of thinking and feeling that shore up the liberal vision and practice of the public sphere. This structural shift is proposed to resist and ultimately block the rise of contemporary fascism. This seems brave and immense but because Majewska’s methods are not revolutionary but rather rest in the quotidian, it comes to be seen as credible. It is, of course, a necessary goal, so it is reassuring that her arguments provide tools for transformation.Majewska’s argument rests on a challenge to the classic liberal division between public and private, and insists that solidarity should rather be a core model for politics. The critique she employs moves between two key moments in Polish history. The first is the crucial period for Solidarność between August 1980 and December 13, 1981, in which the movement was criminalized and repressed, but when a plebeian form of everyday utopianism kept the movement in motion. There is also a clear distinction drawn between the historical form of Solidarność and its present-day toadying to the current far-right government. The second is the period roughly beginning in the mid-2010s to the present day, in particular the development of the Black Protests against the Polish government’s incursions against reproductive freedom and women’s rights as well as more general resistance to violence against women and sexual harassment echoing #MeToo. Black clothing, worn as a badge of resistance and in reference to widows in mourning, allowed protesters visibility in the street, but could also be worn in the workplace or elsewhere as a sign of solidarity.Majewska highlights in these discussions the transversality of the feminist counterpublics involved in these movements and actions, and in particular that “the debate between reformism and revolution was somehow absent—everybody was protesting in ways they found most convincing and available” (4–5). The critical distance expected in both theory and activism in liberal politics is here dissolved into the immediacy of lived and embodied experience and action. The pull of utopian thinking, perhaps a different sort of distance, is everywhere visible, and Majewska identifies this. The connection between utopianism and activism is assumed, but utopian theorists will be frustrated that she invokes this without extensive elaboration. It is not, however, a weakness of the book or its structure, but rather keen scholars will be able to identify fruitful new territory for research in utopian studies (“transversal utopias,” perhaps, or “weak utopianism”).At the core of the book’s argument is the notion of “weak resistance,” “the unheroic and common forms of protest and persistence that led to a redefinition of the most general notions of political agency in feminist and minoritarian ways” (5). In this she shows how utopias are employed as drivers for the most humble and quotidian modes of resistance that cumulatively have the power to apply enough friction to bring to a halt the most seemingly inevitable political apparatus, as did Solidarność in the 1980s. Majewska’s work on “weak resistance” dates back to about 2015, when she developed the idea through work on the “weak avant-garde,” which she poses as an alternative to political imagery of activism that valorizes heteropatriarchal heroism. Her inspirations include Walter Benjamin’s idea of “weak messianism,” as one might expect. Also there is a debt to Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and Gianni Vattimo’s Weak Thought. There is also a fruitful engagement with James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose queer and feminist borderland politics is situated not just in place but in the body, adding the personal to the public and private in politics—this again is a utopian move, asking us to reconsider, reimagine, and transform every aspect of lived worlds.Linked to the idea of weak resistance, Majewska situates feminism not as an alternative politics, but rather, along with solidarity, at the core of political struggle. This requires a conception of feminism not solely focused upon women, but rather that it should insist that the lot of women cannot be improved without simultaneously improving conditions for everyone—for example, what is wrong for women is also often what is wrong for (and with) men. Feminism is also concerned not merely with the global but with the intimate, and thus is situated not merely in the body politic but in the personal body and private space. Through this Majewska seeks to “reclaim the concept of the public sphere—for long decades, even centuries, hijacked by liberals mainly to defend the exclusivity of politics and separation of the private sphere from it” (8).Weak resistance, feminism, and solidarity all situate the political in the everyday and the private sphere rather than in heroic realms. The political is thus also found beyond the institutions (state and otherwise) which commonly comprise (sometimes in total) the liberal vision of the public. The left—the “we” addressed in the book when it addresses the readership in the first person—Majewska shows, cannot contemplate the political without simultaneously considering both the public and private spheres, without engaging in both theory and practice, without merging activism and academia, without combining narrative and critique. Her work moves into utopian realms here because what this does is demonstrate the necessity for practices of world-making. Its power moves through the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the everyday.Another useful aspect to the idea of counterpublics of the common and weak resistance is that failure doesn’t mark the end of a heroic revolutionary moment. Typically in activist movements failures reinforce a sense of the futility of resisting the status quo. Here, however, failures are seen as inevitable and become incorporated in lived processes of prefiguring alternatives to capitalism. “Equality,” she writes, echoing Jacques Rancière, “needs to be rehearsed, and what comes with such practice is failure, embracing it and learning to fail better” (87). This chimes with her championing of the commons, which she poses as not merely a construct within liberalism (e.g., common law), but rather as an alternative to the public/private dichotomy that is lived and negotiated through a politics that is situated and dialogic. The common allows a different view of property, which balances what is “proper” to the person with what is shared and interactive—air and breathing, landscape and walking, doing art and culture, speaking and language.This view of the common as fundamental to politics bears particular relevance for my own research in landscape studies, a field that has been energized by the understanding that landscapes are not merely inert representations—the scenography of earthly power—but rather that they are constituted in the mutual interaction of people and place, and the negotiations between people and their organic and inorganic environments. In landscape studies the idea of the “right to landscape” extends and expands the Lefebvrean right to the city, and both are based in the idea of cities and landscapes as great collective works over time, the result of myriad small efforts. This has led to the emerging fields of landscape justice, landscape democracy, and landscape citizenships (Majewska contributed a chapter to my recent book edited with Ed Wall and Jane Wolff, Landscape Citizenships). All of this rests upon a similar concept of the political residing in the public, private, personal, and the common as well as in the institutions and abstractions of the state. The political agency of solidarity must become central to the political imaginary in order to make sense of these associations and negotiations. The practices associated with solidarity are not tied to competition and victory, and found in imagery of “heroic fighters over peaceful protesters, men over women and the strong over the weak” (133), but rather dwell in acts of sharing, understanding and translation, and mutual aid.What Ewa Majewska accomplishes in this work is to propose utopian models for theory, practice, and activism that pragmatically set forth a method for the earth to be meekly inherited, through weak resistance, from the fascists who would make it theirs through force and oppression. And this is, indeed, a very powerful set of tools.