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

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Professor Ewan Fernie, ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project Director said: “The collaboration with Mohammed and his team of artists has been a fantastic way to open up Birmingham’s Shakespeare collection with and for its young people. It was of the utmost importance to the founders of the world’s first great Shakespeare library in the city that Shakespeare’s plays include all sorts of people from Kings and Queens to clowns and gravediggers. Mohammed and Soul City Arts have taken that as a spur to imagine a truly inclusive city today and it’s been amazing and instructive to see the children expressing and contributing their own stories, memories and experiences. 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 Justice I was particularly drawn to the Basque and Catalan chapters, which seem quite successful from his sketching. being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book. PDF / EPUB File Name: Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.pdf, Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.epub

I love this essay on the “roles” we play socially by Wallace Shawn—yes, the one who played Grand Nagus Zek, and Vizzini from The Princess Bride (1987). [ return] 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. Everything for everyone weaves together individual stories of suffering, grief, joy, victory, healing, growth, and, ultimately, liberation. The result is a stunning tapestry of intergenerational experiences from people from all walks of life, and centering on how they came to be involved in the fictional future New York Commune. 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 Justice Everything for Everyone] challenges us to not just write fiction about revolution but to make books that practice the kinds of collaboration necessary to make revolution…This book is an uncompromising, anticolonial, profoundly queer and trans, buoying, addictive, and wholly original creation… Everything for Everyone has no patience with docile truisms about how we are supposed to write. Instead, it’s a shot across the bow for contemporary fiction, raising the bar on how to crystallize utopian longings in literary form.“— BOMB MagazineLeftists 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

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?? 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. Please visit the Team section for more information on the project plans and for ways of being involved. Why 'Everything To Everybody'? 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)For other examples of the genre I mean, think Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939) or arguably “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1961); Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (2002); or Ursula Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” (1974). [ return] 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…