Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

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So, there's a book. It's near-future science fiction. In this book, a global (anarcho? communist) revolution has occurred, with the end of restructuring society as it is lived and experienced everywhere around the globe. The story features a (to our best knowledge) realistic idea of this revolution: It's not one large, catastrophic event, with clear belligerents and winners. It's more haphazard, a fracturing. Upheavals in, say, the Andes or Thailand, those occur years before similar events do in New York and Melbourne. But over the course of fifteen, twenty years or so, revolt generalizes, communities start to create their own systems of defense and care as the state spends more and more energy on all these different fights with all these different factions, and, ultimately, the state withers away of attrition, communes flourish, and so does life, in a very different and more free way. But by the 2040s, multiple pandemics have ravaged the climate-scarred and economically depressed world. In an effort to jumpstart the war economy once again, the US has engaged in a disastrous and demoralizing war against Iran which has left its powers seriously depleted. And indeed the revolution does not start in the US—it starts in the Andes, and in Palestine, with one character taking part in the struggle to disband settlements once the Israeli state is no longer propped up. (Abdelhadi has long been involved in the Palestinian liberation movement.) Once the lesser powers that might have propped up the US are no longer able to send aid, the US government is forced to make a choice between where to allocate limited resources, and this means that the NYPD are outnumbered and out-planned at Hunts Point. The center of a dying empire, the US is one of the last strongholds of capital to fall, but it does.

Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. This book will impact the reader emotionally and physically – from shivers down the spine at descriptions of cruelty that are not too far from our current reality to (at least for me) a tingling euphoric sensation of joy at the beautifully painted portrait of a liberated Levant.

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PDF / EPUB File Name: Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.pdf, Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.epub iii) This year, I’ve been systematically (re)reading Graeber (RIP), in particular his under-read magnum opus Direct Action: An Ethnography (written in 2009, before Graeber’s 2011 breakthrough Debt: The First 5,000 Years). One highlight is analysis/demonstration of the uses of speculative/science fiction and ethnography… Latif Timbers speaks about his work as a counselor in his commune’s gestation center in Flatbush, Brooklyn. As the interview goes on, he reveals the traumatic events of his childhood. We learn that co-ops are not all created equal. Many don’t follow all of the seven principles. But what about those who do, with negative consequences? What are the cons of a co-op? That question is not explored.

In this genre-bending work of utopian fiction, O'Brien and Abdelhadi imagine a world that might emerge from the ashes of our own. Part speculative social science, part abolitionist manifesto, it explores the social forms and political possibilities of life after capitalism—the novel ways of organizing life, doing gender, and coping with the psychic costs of transformation that may follow the inevitable crises of capital and climate that lie in our future. Like the best utopian fiction, Everything for Everyone is also a startling work of political theory: it gives us the opportunity, as all utopias do, to learn about our own desires and hopes for a way out of our current conjuncture.”— Katrina Forrester, author of In the Shadow of JusticeIn an era where our future looks incredibly bleak to both the political Right and Left, we need visions of a better future. So many people are defeated and demoralized. It can feel like we’re sliding slowly down the great Decline of Civilization. I cant overstate how important it is to be able to imagine a better world for ourselves, both to start really thinking through what we want from our future, and to energize us. But if the language does not glitter in the dark like c-beams off the shoulder of Orion, it certainly hits heavy and hard: I think I cried maybe five times when I read it, and my partner cried almost every chapter. The chapter about the space elevator in particular is burned into my brain. Nor were there many dry eyes at a reading we went to. It’s not so much the beauty of what could be, but how you start to think about the loss of good people, to death and destruction and grinding-down, that we are living with constantly, right now. Most of the characters in the book lived with that too. They have slain the beast, but they bear the marks of its talons. There is pain in these accounts, but there is hope as well. The youth in 2072 no longer understand how property, commodities, rent, or police function. This reality, born from decades of violent struggle, crystallizes in credible characters. Yet militant research is not finished, as evidenced by the oral history project itself undertaken by the future O’Brien and Abdelhadi in the form of this book. As another historian, working for the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, tells them: “There is a deep link between human subjectivity and the labor process that we’re just beginning to unravel, twenty years after the end of the commodity form.” Through such research and world-building, both material and narrative, new possibilities for collective life present themselves to those of us in 2022, and revolutionary horizons grow. I don’t use the word inspiring very often, but no other term can do Everything For Everyone justice: reading this book was like coming up for air, a fresh and undiluted draught of bright and bittersweet hope brought to parched lips. And it’s not (just) because the future O’Brien and Abdelhadi envision is so utopic; it’s the fact that they take a real, hard look at what it might take to get us there. Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. Co-ops have helped to set the rules, and raise the bar, for the wider society.