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

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These are the book’s best moments, where you can feel the effect that this new world has had on its communities’ mental and physical health. Even in this non-capitalist reality—without wage slavery, overproduction, imperial genocide—the climate is fucked, natural disasters are rife, and organizational disagreements (about food consumption, say) and harm such as child abuse require conflict resolution. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi present in Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 isn’t one free from the blood, trauma, and harsh realities of life. A more flexible alternative to left melancholy, though not quite a how-to, Everything for Everyone maps out the affinities that draw individual voices into a we, without leveling them out into a single, representative speaker. In a carceral world, such style is a demand — one’s “fight mode was all about frontin’” — but in struggling with one another on the streets, even confusion can be an intimate political statement.

This kind of internationalism inflects all the interviews; the further you get into the book the more already referenced struggles reappear as people learn from one another’s tragedies and successes. Indeed, nostalgia is a posture the book pointedly refuses, for the ways that it makes rigid a single version of revolutionary change. I took to heart the injunction of the nineteenth century utopian feminist Charles Fourier, quoted herein: ‘Your behavior should be governed from now on by the ease and proximity of this immense revolution. She co-edits two magazines: Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics.The book’s multiple narratives, equal parts hope and pain, merge into a prayer for collective survival and for the eventual flourishing of our powers of love and invention. 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.

They worked at a for-profit social services provider, and their new boss had essentially forbidden them from helping the people they were, in theory, originally hired to help. Cooperatives are undoubtedly important as models for a democratic economy, but changing the system is a different proposition from that of proposing more cooperatives, and the “next big idea” thrust of Schneider’s book risks overselling the power of the latter. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Whetstone Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Decolonial Hacker, Strange Horizons, and others.His writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Artforum, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Historical Materialism, Hyperallergic, Momus, ROAR Magazine, and e-flux journal, where he is associate editor. It was as though all the hard things my friends and family were going through became my problems too.