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

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Also, ask them to share their experiences within their networks. Your goal should be to form a strong base of advocates who have fallen in love with your brand and can't live without your business services. 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

Please visit the Team section for more information on the project plans and for ways of being involved. Why 'Everything To Everybody'? A sex work activist describing the events of 2052, when mass hunger riots in the South Bronx led to the direct seizure of the Hunts Point Produce Market, and the establishment of the regional food distribution networks that fed the coming decade of urban civil war. The stories of what becomes a Global Insurrection are not naive dreams -- the fighting is fierce, and certainly not completely non-violent. The ensuing process is one of *communization,* leading directly to egalitarian. popular control without going through any intermediate stages of state socialism. Key terms are defined in the introduction: "[t]he global, communist phase of insurrection is characterized by four closely related qualities: communization, abolition, the assembly, and the commune" (12).

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i) For context, fiction is buried in my list of reading priorities, relegated to when my brain is in a stupor. I’ve just found little success in fiction for the questions that haunt me. M. E. O'Brien writes at the intersection of communist theory, trans liberation, LGBTQ social-movement studies, and feminism. A co-editor of Pinko,a magazine of gay communism, O'Brien's writing has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Work, Employment & Society, Commune, Homintern, Endnotes, and Invert.She worked with the NYC Trans Oral History Project andcompleted her PhD at NYU where her research considered how capitalism shaped NYC LGBTQ social movements. She currently works as a psychotherapist. I was particularly drawn to the Basque and Catalan chapters, which seem quite successful from his sketching. One of the founders of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Memorial Library was the radical preacher and lecturer, George Dawson (1821-1876). Dawson formulated the ‘everything to everybody’ ethos, which fuelled a significant movement for public welfare and cultural participation in nineteenth-century Birmingham, and which historians of the Victorian city from Asa Briggs to Tristram Hunt have acclaimed as a major stimulus to the development of modern civic culture.

Reading Everything for Everyone is a profoundly moving, maybe even worldview-changing, experience, but it is not particularly like reading a novel. Contemporary utopian and revolutionary novels share the problem that if they are too rosy in their depictions, no one will believe them; revolutionary fiction has the additional problem that it has to depict a vast historical change accomplished by millions of people using a form developed for telling the story of an individual character’s personal decision-making and growth. [ 7] Like much other quasi-utopian SF ( The Dispossessed [1974] , Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [2003] , the Terra Ignota sequence [2016-2021]), Everything for Everyone solves the first problem with aplomb. The scars of the world that has passed, and those caused by its passing, remain to be seen everywhere; the saving grace of the new society is that there is world enough and time to heal them. And by the end of the novel, there are hints of new developments, maybe even new problems, on the horizon. The book sidesteps the second problem by, quite simply, not really being a novel; the individual characters do not, in Cat Valente or David Mitchell fashion, cross paths. [ 8] Rather than being carried along by the familiar rhythms of the hero’s journey or narrative arc, the book functions more like a very long Borges story—a work of fictional scholarship, though one that mostly avoids academic jargon, being in the form of oral history and set decades after the end of academia as a distinct sector. [ 9] The thing is: This is not that book. This is those characters telling you about the events of that book. This is a fictional oral history. It is interviews. It's different; perhaps in some ways this is a better product, as it was meant to be, but I do wish I could read the other book, which exists between the lines here. 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. This kind of books is extremely important and everyone should be encouraged to read and open up to these topics. Imagine the future that we might be living is something that fiction should be all about. The world in the next 50 years, especially at the crossroads we are should be the favorite topic people are talking about. 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 VirologyBristol Transformed is a grassroots, volunteer-run annual festival of socialist politics, arts, and culture. Bringing together activists, trade unionists, and leading figures on the left, we’re creating the space to discuss the most important issues facing us, equipping us with the skills and knowledge to transform Bristol and the world. 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 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.

A love letter to abolitionist possibilities.” —Lara Sheehi, coauthor of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine 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. Vivid examples include the Enclosures/Industrial Revolution’s commodification (and degradation) of humans/nature to create the labour/land markets in brutal workhouses and “dark Satanic Mills”, culminating in a social crisis in Europe only relieved by: It’s a detailed roadmap of what the path to one version of a better future might look like, and it’s the first one I’ve ever had.

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 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:

Dryly journalistic and disjointed, with a dearth of practical information. There are some interesting tidbits, but it’s a jumble of quotes and references, interviews, anecdotes and observations, academic analysis, and research notes, in desperate need of organization and editing. The choppy delivery makes it really hard to follow the thesis in many points. 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.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.pdf, Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.epub 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 Magazine I find this political economy builds a strong foundation to appreciating the underlying contradictions of capitalism, whereas most historical accounts only reveal the brief surfacing of crises (consider: Thinking in Systems: A Primer).