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

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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. Published by the small leftist press Common Notions, Everything for Everyone is one of a very small handful of science fiction books I’ve found in English that describes an effective revolution in detail. [ 3] It is a future history of our own world in the mid-twenty-first century told as a series of twelve fictional oral history interviews conducted with a variety of New Yorkers in the late 2060s and 70s. Authors Abdelhadi and O’Brien appear as characters (their much older selves), with chapters alternating between them as interviewers. This serves to make the story feel very much like an outgrowth of our own time. Together, these chapters describe a successful world communist revolution as seen from New York City—still a great metropolis, but no longer the center of the world, and radically altered by sea level rise. iv) …And, lo and behold, I encounter this book which combines speculative/science fiction and ethnography (oral histories)! What a perfect playground to experiment with Graeber’s analyses (wish Graeber had found the time to write a sci-fi)! O’Brien and Abdelhadi tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who has done the labor of community organizing. The realistic depictions of the difficult, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding process of collective decision making add to the relatability of this story. Everything for Everyone guides the reader to imagine a world where today's atrocities and the atrocities of the days to come are in the past -- where people have developed the tools they need to build the world we all deserve.

It’s not exactly that, having read it, I now believe revolution is more likely than apocalypse. [ 1] But science fiction’s job is not to say what future is most probable; it is to make imaginable what is possible, to work out the logical consequences of a given development or set of developments in a coherent, vivid way. The scholar Seo-Young Chu has suggested that science fiction might be at its core a way of representing "cognitively estranging referents"—complicated, unfamiliar things that are hard to get your head around. Often these are new; sometimes they are old but rarely named. Things like cyberspace, AI sentience—but also raw charisma or post-memory grief. Climate change. Maybe even communism. Mohammed Ali, Artist and Curator and founder of Soul City Arts said: “We are aiming to empower children to boldly express themselves and their stories in an increasingly polarised society. Let’s face it, our society isn’t one where ‘everything is for everybody’ and we need to make a head start with young children to confront the inequality we see around us today.” I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits of both the authors through their interviews and in the characters they are interviewing. But if you come to Everything for Everyone for the politics, stay for the writing. Barring Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, I can’t think of another author who uses an academic form to achieve a literary result so successfully. Each of the interviewees and interviewers has an entirely unique and authentic voice. The book is utterly plausible as the archival project it claims to be, while also telling gripping stories and slipping in details to delight sci-fi fans (a space elevator in Quito! Sentient algae-based AI! Augmented reality implants for dance parties!).“ TruthOut The book I'm talking about is pretty cool, with a diverse cast of interesting characters that all either played different roles in the revolution or just grew up during or after it. There are those involved in sex work ("skin care"), therapy, ecological restoration, planning and logistics, dance and events and drugs and space (literal space) — there are also just children and teenagers. The characters' diverse roles — as they existed before and during the revolution, and as they changed during and afterwards — are all depicted so as to give the book more depth, more of a well-rounded consideration of alllllll the different ways that life has changed for these people since the revolution.Tanya had led the logistics and planning for the Free Assembly of Barretto Park, a convening in 2055 that is widely regarded as a turning point in the revolutionary struggle in NYC. 5: Belquees Chowdhury on Lower Manhattan (Abdelhadi) Develop an innovation pipeline. Now that you've established a specific expertise for a specific customer base, make sure you are continuing to evolve and improve your offering. Innovation will keep them interested and buying more, with each new iteration of your offering. If you liked the style/format that World War Z was written in, but you like the idea of a communist utopia more than a zombie-ridden dystopia, this book is for you. As with everything meaningful (socially useful), cooperatives benefit from a political/economic framing to better understand their transformative potential. The lesson we come away with is that the radical/revolutionary potential of co-ops has mostly not been realised.

The problem with this book is that it offers almost no analysis, opting instead for a wide-ranging exposition of different cooperative endeavors, from medieval European monastic communities to agricultural co-ops to anarchist utopias to open-source code to cryptocurrency to proposals for universal basic income. All well and good, this is a basic orientation to co-ops for those new to the topic, but I was frustrated by Schneider's repeated failure to go deep anywhere. Instead he opts for general speculation about what co-ops might do in the future, what would be great about them if they worked. But how to make them work??

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ii) The last fiction to captivate me is Varoufakis’ 2020 Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present; however, this was assisted by the (geo)political economy that was at the center of the book (i.e. structurally, how could capitalist markets for labour/finance/land, global trade imbalances, etc. be abolished). One of the states to collapse is China, which opens up a can of worms on really-existing socialism. I’ll bypass this (still working to synthesize with Graeber’s analysis of “bureaucracy”) by saying that Western imperialist states also collapse, so the siege is over… these other crises include: Everything for Everyoneis a window into a possible future and a powerful antidote to our present moment’s ubiquitous moods of anti-utopianism, despair, nostalgia, and capitalist-realism…this must-read speculative fiction…chronicle[s] the first stages of the abolition of the family; the history of the ecological restoration projects and interplanetary technologies that might render our planet liveable and leisurely; the invention of real democracy; and the armed conflagrations that were necessary along the way. So, if you have ever wondered to yourself, What will the triumph of indigenous land struggles, the overthrow of colonial occupations, and the fall of capitalism look like? Which parts of New York would be at the forefront of a communist revolution, and which would double down into religious, hyper-patriarchal fascism? Whose knowledges of facilitation, healing, conflict resolution and partying will help the population heal from its collective trauma?—then this superb novel is the book for you.”—Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto of Care and Liberation

ii) public sanitation/health policies (relief to social reproduction): Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World The overall unambitious use of language can be frustrating, because it undercuts the immersive feeling of having found a document from another world. Maybe, in a way, this novel wants the principles and emotions the reader takes from it to feel real, but the world to feel more like a sketch than a reality. After all, leftist utopias like The Dispossessed or even other revolution novels like Walkaway (2017) or Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) may feel like real worlds, but they are also separated by an unbridgeable gap from ours—in Doctorow by technological leaps, in Robinson by technological leaps and centuries, and in Le Guin by literal alienness. Everything for Everyone is mostly separated from our world by a few totally plausible geopolitical and bio-environmental events and a couple decades. It’s good, maybe, to remind readers that it isn’t a blueprint or a set of answers, that it can only suggest better questions—a sense of how things change, not of what they must become. [ 10] This is good for keeping our eyes on the prize, but seasoned SF readers may miss the brain-on-fire feeling of lift-off that sometimes comes with reading science fiction. 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. Leftists are often accused of being against everything, but not having a vision of what we're fighting for. Everything for Everyone is a corrective, a sweeping vision of the type of world and society we imagine can and will provide for us all, abundantly. Not all beautiful novels are invested in social restructuring, and not all social restructuring is envisaged in novels, but here we have exactly their meeting point: a beautiful novel bristling with the necessary changes we must make to survive on this planet. The future has sex in it, and community; it has food and labor and joy. It has trauma and memories of the harm, the nightmare, of capitalist precarity. The future is sure to exist; will it have us in it? Everything for Everyone imagines that it will, and, given this remarkable vision, this perpetual possibility, it's now our work to live up to it.”— Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology

This more closely resembles anarchism than what most people, even on the left, understand as communism. But it is very much what Marx had in mind, with the much greater development of capitalism and the working class to make it more plausible than it was in the mid-19th century and the Paris Commune -- communal ownership without a state, without capitalism or wage labor, and so without exploitation. A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative to the robber-baron economy is hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look. 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. 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… Aniyah Reeds describes her evolving relationships with sex work and sex education throughout the revolutionary decades leading up to the New York Commune’s 20th Anniversary. Over the course of two decades in the trade, she becomes the de facto leader of an informal sex worker collective.