Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi
RIYL: Utopic science fiction, world-building, socialism
Leftists of all stripes are often asked, both in good and bad faith: “What would your socialist world look like?” A common answer is to not presume to know what form the future might take, shaped as it will be by people in different times and circumstances than ourselves, no matter how near or far this presumed future is away. I get how this is probably a safe and rational answer to give, but also…I can’t help but fault its lack of imagination. As both a leftist and a lover of speculative fiction, I can’t help but want to read about and imagine and create possible futures. If the world ever does throw off the shackles of capitalism for something better, it probably won’t look exactly like anyone’s vision - it will be as messy and changing and compromised and confusing and haphazard and unpredictable as anything humanity has ever done. But it’s still worth coming up with some possibilities, dreaming up some futures, both as a political act and as, simply, a fun act of imagination and creation.
One of the best examples of this is the recently-published Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (henceforth here referred to as Everything for Everyone). The book is framed as an in-universe, academic-style piece of nonfiction, centered around twelve interviews with regular people involved in the revolution and its aftermath, chronicling the early days of their still-new world. The real authors represent themselves, only cast forward into this particular future - old souls with many memories of the way things used to be, excited and bewildered by the new.
I don’t want to “spoil” too much of Everything for Everyone’s imagined future, since gleaning new bits of information about it with each interview is part of what makes it so engaging to read. But a few broad strokes should be fine. This is, explicitly, a narrative about the end of the global reign of capitalism, and the subsequent socialist revolution and reinvention of the world - aside from a few mentioned holdouts. I’ve read some - but still far too few - science fiction works that dare to actually imagine their future utopia, but none seem as plausible as this one. Our current tumultuous time of increasing far-right agitation and collapsing democracies, coupled with the devastation of climate change and the ever-growing inequality between the few benefits of capital and the many left behind, continues until many states have trouble sustaining themselves. With so many and so much falling between the cracks, people begin working together to provide for their own communities, and taking up arms against increasingly authoritarian governments and increasingly privatized police forces. The upcoming struggle of a few horrible decades is not glossed over - Everything for Everyone’s vision of our future is one with much death, suffering, and struggle, but at the book’s present, we’re left with an unfathomably better world. It’s a world still changing, still radical with possibilities and hope, still scarred by traumas both generational and personal, but unquestionably a new era, better than the last.
Everything for Everyone is published by a small radical left press, and it’s not going to win any converts from the center or the right. But I do think that the book serves as one interesting and fun vision of what a post-capitalist, socialist world could look like. It’s not a workers’ state in the style of traditional Marxism or in the authoritarian states that claim Marxism, but closer to a left-libertarian or anarcho-communist vision of society, one deeply created and shaped by the disenfranchised and marginalized. People throughout the world have organized themselves in localities to provide for each other. No one goes hungry or unhoused. Its vision of a future is not one that eschews social justice and identity issues in the name of a sole focus on class, but one that believes the two struggles are inexorably linked. Those interviewed in the series are refugees and sex workers, trans people and racial minorities, old hardened revolutionaries and young naive teens.
The book doesn’t take its framework as a series of interviews for granted, and its interviewees are not just NPCs spouting off lore. They get mistrustful or confused, shut down when questioned too sharply, or find themselves sprawling off-topic before being reined back in. Their unique perspectives and personalities help keep the book from feeling too much like simple world-building. Many of these characters were profoundly shaped and traumatized by the conflicts necessary to bring about this better future, and O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s imagined future has both the inclination and the capacity to care for trauma in all its forms.
Everything for Everyone certainly isn’t the only piece of fiction to disguise itself in the trappings of nonfiction, but it still feels unique. I found it a quick and engaging read, though I can see others straining against the lack of traditional narrative. In fact, a theoretical novel about the lives of any of these twelve interviewees would be a great read, but here we’re given only fascinating windows into these stories, only skimming the surface. Often I found myself wishing the interviews would go on for longer, or dig deeper into an interesting bit of world-building.
If there are weak points in the book’s vision, to me, it’s a dearth of examination of the revolution’s enemies. Its visions of collapsing states and overwhelmed police forces seem reasonably plausible to me, but we don’t find out much about how the revolution dealt with the conservative, fascist, and/or anti-communist factions among the regular people. Everything for Everyone seems to posit that without the oppressive states and the structure of capitalism, regular people would be incentivized more to care for each other, with the forces of reaction and regression ultimately defeated by both strength of arms and in terms of numbers of supporters. It’s a sentiment that I try to believe in, but that I still find myself struggling with. I don’t believe humans are inherently evil or selfish, at least, not only. Humans are great and terrible, good and evil, selfish and caring - it’s the societies we’re placed in that shape which of these contradicting “human natures” will win out in the end. I have to hope that the belief that Everything for Everyone posits is true, because we need to believe in the possibility of victory if we’re going to win.
I’m sure the authors would have good answers to this question of reactionaries, but at the end of the day, any such revolution will have to involve a great political awakening and mindset shift across wide swaths of the population. Perhaps being able to articulate our vision - empowered by stories like Everything for Everyone - will help, in some small way, to achieve it.
Rating: **** 1/2