This week we are reading a very special, wonderful book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi from Common Notions.
Told as a series of interviews by two ageing ex-academics (because academia has been, thankfully, finally, abolished), Everything for Everyone depicts a future in which the central organizing force of human society is the Commune. Emerging unevenly, violently, and somewhat spontaneously around the world at various times and in various forms, the Commune is the form society takes when needs are met and the ubiquitous crises of everyday life under capitalism are addressed head-on. Ordinary people tell their own stories of bringing about and sustaining this post-capital, post-commodity, post-gender, post-state future.
Matt and Hilary discuss how this book makes a problem of narrative itself, as well as many of the beautiful features of the world depicted. Care and community are the focus of everyday life, but the book also acknowledges that "care" and "community" are not, and have never been, static concepts. Rather, they are always changing, and the project of human living-together is precisely the work required to meet those ever-changing needs. We see characters bringing about the new ways of life by doing them, by living them. At the same time, the future depicted is not without pain, trauma, or struggle. Rather, trauma--in all its forms--take center stage as the thing to be addressed, worked on, overcome, and healed in a social organization worthy of the name. The Commune here is not a form yet to come, but rather something that's constantly being built.
We talk about crisis, the myth of property, technology, nostalgia, commitment to a social whole, gestation, and writing a future for ourselves, that includes ourselves. We also find potential parallels to KSR, William Morris, Octavia Butler, and Marge Piercy.
Buy this book! And get an extra copy for a friend, family member, or enemy, and make them read it and talk to you about it!
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Music by Spirit of Space