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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). 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 fiction that will set the tone for reality that we will be living and the best stories will model the world.
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 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. M. E. O'Brien writes on gender freedom and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines: Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. She is currently in training to be a psychoanalyst, and works as a therapist. I said, "Well, one reason I think you’re worth so much is that I think you’d be a great apocalypse buddy. Or a great comrade in a revolution." 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
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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. 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.
Unfortunately, this was not at all like Pale Fire which I guess is a bit unfair because its one of the greatest works in the English language. This just did not resonate with me at all. I appreciated the authors’ attempts to weave together many layers of feminist, queer and leftist theory together to imagine an alternative future that both seems recognizable to our current conception of progressive thought but stretch it into something completely novel and almost alien. The world they imagined felt incredibly rich and interesting. I would love to read other novels set in this alternative future. 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.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. I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people. Furthermore, there were several inconsistencies here. The characters who were written as the interviewers, frequently asked questions that would not have made any sense in context. They asked questions as if they were in our present, not their present. Questions revealing something that would be clearly obvious to someone in their time, and would be unnecessary. This is in addition to inconsistencies with how the climate crisis has unfolded. They made several mentions to cities that were flooded and abandoned (such as parts of Florida and what they termed “what was formerly called New Jersey”). Yet many parts of New York, which is also functionally at sea level, were fine and habitable? It doesn’t make any sense.
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). 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] 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.
Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.--Crises: national states become increasing vulnerable to social protest. States are unable to maintain social reproduction/outsource its contradictions under the mounting burden of the parasitic/volatile finance (speculative gambling/debts for rent-seeking) and accelerating ecological collapse, bringing down the “middle class” (who have been an essential buffer for “Capitalist Realism”). When things we take for granted collapse (ex. car transportation), seemingly insurmountable social norms follow (ex. car culture); paraphrasing Assange, humans are extremely adaptive to both change (heroic efforts to survive) and status quo (tragic efforts to tolerate oppression). A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint. Each one of these 12 short-story oral histories deserves a full-length book, which I would read (12-for-12 is a stunning success rate for me!). Overall reflections:
It's the story of a successful (almost) worldwide revolution, and, more challenging, a successful utopia. After capitalism has trashed the planet, a series of global uprisings restructure the economy, the city, the family, the relationship between humans and the environment, and even space. The clever structure of the book—a series of interviews with people who experienced different parts of the revolution or who play interesting roles in the Commune—allows for a massive scope that nevertheless feels grounded in real people and real communities.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 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 No fiction I’ve ever read has really broken down and examined what The Revolution looks like. Stories always seem to be set before or after the heroes go to war against the old system – sometimes just before, or just after, but the fight itself is always glossed over. And I do understand that! It’s much easier to imagine a better world than it is figuring out how to actually build one – but that’s exactly what makes Everything For Everyone so important. 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
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