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

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A transnational activist and freedom fighter, Kawkab Hassan recounts her life of struggle across the globe. She grew up amidst the Palestinian community of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and migrated to her grandparents’ native Palestine in the mid-20s to join the Gaza Rebellion. Designated a terrorist and stripped of her American citizenship, she was unable to return to the United States for decades and instead dedicated her life to resistance movements in the Arab world. Everything for Everyone] challenges us to not just write fiction about revolution but to make books that practice the kinds of collaboration necessary to make revolution…This book is an uncompromising, anticolonial, profoundly queer and trans, buoying, addictive, and wholly original creation…Everything for Everyone has no patience with docile truisms about how we are supposed to write. Instead, it’s a shot across the bow for contemporary fiction, raising the bar on how to crystallize utopian longings in literary form.“—BOMB Magazine An “academic” introduction reflecting on the value of oral history to make sense of the transformative experience of participation in revolutionary social change. It will outline the events of the 2040s that led to the revolutionary outbreak in the New York City region, including the defeat of the United States in a protracted war in Iran, the secessionist outbreaks across multiple rural regions of the US, the broader context of global rebellion and the formation of the Communes of the Andes, of Guangdong, of the Maghreb, of the Levant and of the Mississippi River Delta. Everything for everyone weaves together individual stories of suffering, grief, joy, victory, healing, growth, and, ultimately, liberation. The result is a stunning tapestry of intergenerational experiences from people from all walks of life, and centering on how they came to be involved in the fictional future New York Commune.

We learn that co-ops are not all created equal. Many don’t follow all of the seven principles. But what about those who do, with negative consequences? What are the cons of a co-op? That question is not explored. PDF / EPUB File Name: Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.pdf, Everything_for_Everyone_-_M_E_OBrien.epub

New Arrivals

A really fascinating glimpse into a future New York City after a revolution has transformed the US and much of the world into an antifascist, communist utopia…necessary and empowering, providing a hypothetical foundation for an ideal future.“— Buzzfeed, "34 New Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down"

Reading Everything for Everyone is a profoundly moving, maybe even worldview-changing, experience, but it is not particularly like reading a novel. Contemporary utopian and revolutionary novels share the problem that if they are too rosy in their depictions, no one will believe them; revolutionary fiction has the additional problem that it has to depict a vast historical change accomplished by millions of people using a form developed for telling the story of an individual character’s personal decision-making and growth. [ 7] Like much other quasi-utopian SF ( The Dispossessed [1974] , Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [2003] , the Terra Ignota sequence [2016-2021]), Everything for Everyone solves the first problem with aplomb. The scars of the world that has passed, and those caused by its passing, remain to be seen everywhere; the saving grace of the new society is that there is world enough and time to heal them. And by the end of the novel, there are hints of new developments, maybe even new problems, on the horizon. The book sidesteps the second problem by, quite simply, not really being a novel; the individual characters do not, in Cat Valente or David Mitchell fashion, cross paths. [ 8] Rather than being carried along by the familiar rhythms of the hero’s journey or narrative arc, the book functions more like a very long Borges story—a work of fictional scholarship, though one that mostly avoids academic jargon, being in the form of oral history and set decades after the end of academia as a distinct sector. [ 9]iii) This year, I’ve been systematically (re)reading Graeber (RIP), in particular his under-read magnum opus Direct Action: An Ethnography (written in 2009, before Graeber’s 2011 breakthrough Debt: The First 5,000 Years). One highlight is analysis/demonstration of the uses of speculative/science fiction and ethnography… Lower Manhattan remained relatively immune to the broader insurrection engulfing NYC until an occupation of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in early 2056, where Belquees was a student. She describes growing up in an immigrant Bengali family in Queens, becoming a taxi driver and student. At BMCC, she became active in CUNY Against the War, the leading group in the 2056 occupation. 6: Quinn Liu on Internment, Guangxi and Flushing (Abdelhadi) This book will impact the reader emotionally and physically – from shivers down the spine at descriptions of cruelty that are not too far from our current reality to (at least for me) a tingling euphoric sensation of joy at the beautifully painted portrait of a liberated Levant.