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

Product Information

Everything for Everyone is the book we all need right now. It lets us imagine what can feel unimaginable in this moment—a total reorganization of social relations toward our mutual survival and the dismantling of the ruling death cult. This is a book we will all be obsessing over, arguing with, and talking about in the coming years as we try to conceive how collective action can get us through these harrowing times. I am grateful to Abdelhadi and O'Brien for making something we need so bad so compelling and readable.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid 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. Despite the somber subject matter, Everything for Everyone is an optimistic and refreshing take on where we go from here. It allows the reader to step beyond the reality that things will be getting much worse and skip to the part where things start to get a lot better. Everything for everyone doesn’t gloss over the sacrifice, struggle, and loss it takes to get from where we are to where we need to be.

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)! 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. 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 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. It’s fiction that will set the tone for reality that we will be living and the best stories will model the world.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. 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. 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).

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.Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world. About the Authors A 2069 interview with a young trans artist planning a major ‘sojourn’, a coming of age trip, and her understanding of her family’s role in establishing the residential communes of Newark. Take a stand. This might be the hardest part yet, but it's becoming more and more important to keep loyal customers on your side. Get to know what's important in your customers' lives and take a stand with them. More and more, we are seeing brands take a stand on social, political and economic issues to show their customers that they are living alongside them as they go through their lives.

The new murals tell the stories of the vibrant and diverse communities of Sparkbrook and Balsall Heath featuring their unique narratives and local industrial history and allowing them to claim “a place in the story” (Antony & Cleopatra) of Birmingham’s pioneering Shakespeare heritage. Let me re-trace the steps that led me to consider a speculative fiction as my most-enjoyable read of the year:

New Arrivals

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 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. 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. This is a vibrant photo album, a yearbook for the co-op now. It opens many conversations about power, data and equity, yet offers few prescriptions.