Revolution in Our Lifetime

A REVIEW OF EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE

NEW YORK COMMUNE 2052-2072
P H I L K A P L A N ( H T T P S : / / S P E C T R E J O U R N A L . C O M / AU T H O R / P H I L - K A P L A N / )
S e p te m b e r 1 , 2 0 2 2

Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York

Commune 2052-2072
by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

COMMON NOTIONS
2022

Unless you’re rich, it’s fairly hard living your life in today’s world. It’s hard to go out and live your life
knowing that the only way to get food and shelter is through the cruelties of the market, through work,
waged labor, making someone else richer. It’s hard living with violent police and unjust courts and
dehumanizing state institutions at every level. Our so-called democracy seems quite ready to surveil,
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 kidnap, torture, and even kill, while extremely reluctant to educate, feed or house us. It’s hard accepting
rampant consumerism, debt, fees, advertising, and the all-pervasive corporate contamination of all life,
fun, discovery, social discourse, art, music, and culture, seeping into every little nook and cranny of our
daily lives.

But what would happen if we were able to get a clear look at the alternative? Not merely a glimpse like we
get during a brief labor strike, an inspiring moment of resistance during a street riot, a proud political
movement when the poor rise and get a chance to speak for once, but a really !eshed-out, detailed and
personal look into a realistic vision of a future that shows us a truly desirable society?

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E.
O’Brien (Common Notions, 2022), provides us with a wonderfully inspiring depiction of the most
incredible, audacious, and yet plausible future any of us could hope for. This amazing book not only
depicts the mid-Twenty-First century worldwide social revolution that ends capitalism, but goes further
to richly describe life in the new communist society.

In addition to providing an impressive, surprisingly plausible set of narratives depicting a global social
revolution and the establishment of a post-capitalist, post-money, post-state, post-violence, post-
oppression society over most of the Earth (and beyond), this book is also a deep and engrossing
examination of scarcity, war, trauma, racism, settler-colonialism, gender, sexuality, child rearing,
restorative justice, ecological restoration, Indigenous liberation, and more, told via several poignant
personal journeys through the cauldron of global social transformation.

Every socialist needs to read this book. Every abolitionist, every Marxist, every anarchist, every
revolutionary needs to read this book. Every person who has ever wondered how the world will function
after the "nal retirement of the market, the commodity form, money, wages, rent, coercive gender roles,
prisons, police, class, nation states, borders, pro"t, and in general the dominating power of any humans
over any others.

It’s a book that will engage seasoned organizers, well-read academics, and street-level agitators. It also
could serve quite well as a dazzling introduction for newly politicizing folks who would bene"t from a
clear end-goal and would want to know what could be accomplished by the movements for human
liberation.

The book is a work of "ction, of course, although it’s presented as a document of recent future history,
told from the point of view of people in New York City in the form of personal interviews recorded from
2067 to 2072. These years, a century after a major radicalization in the US and much of the world, are
depicted as a relatively quiet and stable time of consolidating, building and healing, when the
insurrections’ participants can re!ect and recall the tumultuous years of struggle, repression, war, famine,
pandemic, resistance and revolution that characterized the global human experience from the 2040s
through the early 2060s.

Everything for Everyone starts out with a brief introductory chapter, laying out the basic ideas and
historical timeline to help orient readers, followed by a dozen chapters, each providing a friendly and
casual interview with one of a variety of participants. Among the perspectives we get to hear are mostly
folks swept up in the urgent struggle for basic survival and how those experiences led them to participate
in radical confrontation with the remnants of the old capitalist order. Among the characters we meet are
PTSD-recovering veterans, trans midwives and sex workers, agroecologists, network coordinators,
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 Indigenous leaders, DJs, hackers, and young people still uncertain about their emerging contributions to
this promising society.

Most of them do not dedicate themselves to a single “job” but rather split their labor between the
immediate needs of the community as well as developing their own potential, now tantalizingly unleashed
by the radical freedom of this new society. Their recollections are peppered with themes of gender, its
transformation and liberation, new options around childbirth and collective parenting, but also abuse,
trauma and collectively-determined restorative justice, brutal confrontations with fascists, the atrophying
state, and religious authoritarians. Dance music, augmented-reality implants, lunar and orbital habitats,
algae-based AI supercomputers, and the fallout from the use of at least one nuclear weapon weave in and
out of the disparate testimonials while recounting the past 20 years of collapse, struggle, and social
rebirth.

THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF THE UTOPIAN

IMAGINATION
Revolutionaries of various traditions have often struggled to provide a clear and inspiring vision of what,
ideally, we would like to see result from a global struggle to end the capitalist social and political order.
The Marxist tradition, in particular, has frequently dismissed attempts at describing a revolutionary post-
capitalist society.

In the mid-Nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels di#erentiated their new conception of
socialist theory and practice mainly through its sharp contrast with the prevailing notions of socialism at
the time, one version of which they referred to as “utopian socialism.” The utopian view of socialism,
unlike their own ideas of “scienti"c socialism” or simply “communism,” as it later came to be widely
known, was described as merely wishful thinking at best and a version of snake-oil at worst.

So from very early in the revolutionary Marxist tradition of communism, we can observe a conscious
hostility against the shortcomings of “utopianism” in its various iterations. One of the consequences of
this early polemical distinction was that the communist movement has shied away from proposing—and
frequently disparaged—elaborate visions of a desirable future society.

Communists have often declared that it should fall to those who themselves win the actual revolution to
transform society, rather than armchair theoreticians speculating during the lulls in struggle, to shape the
post-capitalist social and economic reality. In keeping with this declaration, revolutionary leaders and
theorists have frequently dismissed creative and detailed depictions of a communist world, in the words
of Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, as attempts to imagine “…recipes for the cookshops of the future.”

But perhaps this reluctance to describe a future revolution and its resulting socialist society has, in some
respects, gone a bit too far among today’s expanding ranks of radicals and abolitionists. This reluctance
has left the growing number of radicals who increasingly reject capitalism without a clear political
orientation about what could plausibly replace capitalism as well as a clear path that could lead there.

For that reason alone, this book is a stunningly e#ective antidote to the recalcitrance that revolutionaries
have shown when asked to describe the future we seek to construct. Not only does the book go into juicy
details, such as organizing teenage creches so young people can safely experience living away from adult
supervision, or the struggles of Indigenous peoples for sovereignty over their lives and land. The details
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 themselves and the personal narratives that contain them are impressively believable, inspiring, and,
unlike some more abstract e#orts at examining a post-capitalist social order, grounded in the agency of
the participants and the processes that brought about this new world.

Abdelhadi and O’Brien’s imagined revolutionary timeline includes a cascading set of emergencies and
real-world contingencies which hampered both the power of existing states as well as the emergence of
monolithic, all-encompassing political movements, organizations and ideologies. Without relying on
failing states and by simply responding to immediate human needs, common, propertyless people (not
exactly the traditional working class, since for most people reliable waged labor had become widely
unavailable by the 2040s), who were merely trying to feed and care for one another, came to see how all
their mutual-aid e#orts were very similar and congruent with one another.

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This book is a stunningly effective antidote to the recalcitrance
that revolutionaries have shown when asked to describe the
future we seek to construct.
From this common set of adaptations and responses to famine and overlapping crises emerged the
ideologies that guided and animated the participants. This process, described in the introduction as
‘communization’ and detailed in the personal interviews that comprise the main text of the book,
connects the individual’s stories to the social dynamics they participate in, in a historically plausible
manner. In fact, the book’s detailed depiction of social revolution against collapse and the commune
which sustains revolutionary gains is, in some ways, both the “corrective” provided by a distinctively
Twenty-First century communism, as well as what may prove the most controversial feature of the
narrative, at least for many leftists today.

CENTERING THE COMMUNE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

In Everything for Everyone, the central revolutionary achievement that most prominently captures the
attention of the author-interviewers as well as the participants they question is not any sort of communist
party, revolutionary trade union, people’s army, or coterie of exalted central leadership. It’s not even a
global, class-conscious workers’ movement (although workers’ struggles and international connections
are discussed and certainly active in the forging of the new world). Instead, the central institution of the
new social reality is the commune: a group of people, usually numbering more than a hundred while less
than a thousand, who live, work, eat, care, teach, play, and live together in an urban neighborhood or
other small-scale community.

These numerous communes, spread all across New York City and beyond (including rural farms, isolated
islands, even up in orbit) seem to have their size determined mainly by the question of participatory
democracy: how large can a single decision-making polity be in practice so that every member has a real
voice in all its collective decisions? This practical concern led neighbors, communities and local
subcultures to be woven together in ways to best serve the necessary division-of-labor so that all basic
daily social reproduction could be collectively coordinated and smoothly provided to all, by all.

The “commune” as a revolutionary institution is itself another main character in the narrative, providing
late-Twenty-First-century humans with tangible focus for their lives. The commune serves as a "nal
conclusion for struggle, an identity, a home, a family (of a radically new sort), and a life-purpose.
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 Each commune feeds and houses all its members, o#ers medical and psychological care, and educates,
nurtures, entertains, supports and develops all its members. Each person is expected to provide voluntary
labor for their “three hour” which is the closest post-capitalist analogue to a job or career, often occurring
elsewhere in the city, while the various tasks of local social reproduction are accomplished by each
member also performing the labor of their “two hour.” Every person’s three-hour and two-hour is
generally expected three or four times a week, resulting in a work week of approximately "fteen to twenty
hours of labor. Many commune residents choose to provide further labor, since it is not alienated,
degrading, or particularly onerous. In fact, most of the human labor performed by commune members
appears to be enormously gratifying, creative, and ful"lling to both its participants as well as its
recipients.

Although the numerous iterations of the commune together comprise the central achievement of this new
society, other important institutions also receive extensive discussion. Workers’ councils, usually called
production councils, handle large-scale economic, industrial, extractive, distributional, and consumption
questions, while the elaborate tasks of complex regional coordination of all economic matters are handled
by A.I.-assisted “hubs” for the democratic discussions that are simply too large and geographically far-
!ung to be handled by local assemblies.

These assemblies are almost as important as the communes, and function as a kind of steering wheel so
the residents can collectively direct and manage all the workings of their local commune. As the term
implies, these are simply meetings—in person or online—that feature discussions for the purpose of
collectively deciding how to proceed in any and all social activities that impact others. It’s these
assemblies that are prominent, not the hubs or production councils, as the main decision-making bodies
serving the social coordination needs of the communes and the larger society that they support.

THE QUESTION OF COLLAPSE AND SOCIAL AGENCY

The broad narrative in this book will challenge prevailing Marxist conceptions of how a global social
revolution might be won. The authors accomplish this, surprisingly convincingly, by situating genuine
struggles not within national crises, which have traditionally provided the political setting for
revolutionary challenges to capitalist rule, but within a context of widespread international economic and
ecological collapse.

In the approximately twenty to twenty-"ve revolutionary upheavals throughout recent centuries, when
workers’ movements really threatened to overthrow the rule of capitalism, the overall pattern that
Marxists have pointed out repeats itself, with idiosyncratic variations, again and again: A great national
crisis, whether economic or war-related or some mixture of both, triggers a massive, months-long wave of
struggle that culminates in gigantic mass strikes, street insurrections and the rising power of the
organized and politicized working class and its many allies throughout society. Thanks to the con!uence
of material scarcity, foreign imperial intervention, isolation, and insu$cient political organization, these
working-class led revolutionary e#orts have, so far, nearly always ended in some sort of partial or total
defeat, and the future communist society—free of class distinctions, money, and state coercion—has, for
those reasons, nowhere yet been successfully initiated.

While these revolutions of the recent past sought to resolve primarily national contradictions and
immediate crises, the upheaval’s setting in Everything for Everyone is explicitly global and pointedly
characterized by all-encompassing capitalist economic collapse, ecological devastation, material scarcity,
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 characterized by all-encompassing capitalist economic collapse, ecological devastation, material scarcity,
industrial abandonment, fragmented and ine#ective states the world over, and diminishing spoils with
which the ruling classes can bribe guard labor and other armed protectors of property and class power.

This means that foreign capitalist states can no longer intervene to prop up more fragile client states.
Imperialist powers have their hands full trying to maintain the means of private accumulation within
their own borders. Police become pimps and dealers to survive as resources and arms are directed
elsewhere. Street gangs and criminalized people "nd their activities transformed as market imperatives
retreat from daily life and eventually there’s no longer any functioning market, black or otherwise.
Ultimately, all attention is reduced to the dire question of food and the looming threat of mass starvation.

Famine, deadly pandemics, fascist enclaves, refugee crises, and collapsing imperial wars replete with
rebellious soldiers and veterans, all create cascading failures of the old social order and fuel initial local
e#orts toward communization, which start as nothing more than the e#orts toward securing food for all
and the fair distribution of the means of survival. These embryonic communes of the 2040s can be
viewed as a typical and oft-repeated response to disasters, along the lines described by Rebecca Solnit in
her popular book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
(Penguin 2010). These early adaptations took on numerous creative forms, but often ended abruptly
under the boot heel of state repression. A collectivized city hospital, for example, treating hundreds of city
residents for free, is suddenly reduced to ash and rubble by the US military for the crime of inspiring free,
voluntary care.

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Famine, deadly pandemics, fascist enclaves, refugee crises,
and collapsing imperial wars replete with rebellious soldiers
and veterans, all create cascading failures of the old social
order and fuel initial local efforts toward communization.
A turning point comes in the early 2050s when the fraying US military can no longer maintain its
occupation of New York and the various movements unite to form a coordinated resistance to the
remnants of the NYPD and (except for a reactionary cult on Staten Island) its dwindling fascist
sympathizers. After a citywide victory, the people’s e#orts to provide straightforward collective food,
housing and care blossom into a profoundly satisfying new social paradigm based on the communes and
run by the assemblies.

Without much in the way of organized production or exploited wage labor, workers don’t have any
signi"cant arena in which to play a prominent role in seizing and collectivizing workplaces or the
economy. These forms of struggle get mentioned, but take place elsewhere, o#-screen, so to speak. The
struggles at the point of consumption, not production, takes center stage, and armed resistance comes in
a close second.

The adherents of a classical Marxist approach might understandably balk not just at the extended
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 The adherents of a classical Marxist approach might understandably balk not just at the extended
exercise in imagination, but at this minimizing of industrial action, of struggles between employees and
their bosses, and the limited mentions of organizations, leaders and class consciousness as traditionally
understood. Yet this common !owchart of social revolution was modeled after the great 20th century
upheavals, most centrally Russia in 1917, but also events in Spain in 1936, Hungary 1956, Chile and
Portugal in the early 1970s. These working-class revolutions did not succeed in the formation of a
socialist—let alone communist—society, all having fallen victim to the consequences of international
market pressures and global imperialist interventions in one form or another.

And here we reveal the particular distinction of Everything for Everyone: The traditional
socialist/communist model of revolution no longer appears to apply in a context characterized by
catastrophic global ecological and social collapse, pervasive energy scarcity, the disappearance of wage-
paying jobs, the irrelevance of currency and the international cascading dissolution of all pillars of
capitalist rule, wealth, and social control.

This is why the old “class-conscious proletariat organized as the new state power” model doesn’t really "t
the circumstances of total collapse that characterize the mid-21st century, at least as depicted by
Abdelhadi and O’Brien. The working class can’t "ght for control of workplaces that barely exist, can’t

redirect the uses of industry when industry is no longer a reliable means of private surplus accumulation
or even of producing goods and services, and can’t seize the means of production when bourgeois
investment, needed supply chains and market outlets have shriveled away.

In the book’s introduction, the authors mention this discrepancy and assure readers that workers’ agency
has not been overlooked, even if it’s been demoted to one of many realms of intertwined struggles instead
of the central con!ict. The authors face classical Marxists directly and address this glaring distinction in
how they model social revolution:

As the insurrections continued, they merged with mass workplace occupations and the formation of what
came to be known as the production councils. A key turning point was "rst recognized in Lima in 2043,
as workers occupying a pharmaceutical plant chose to restart production. They sought to directly supply
medicines to the urban occupations. Soon occupiers at hundreds of farms and factories across the Andes
began production to feed, clothe, and equip the protest movements. The phrase communization was used
to understand this mode of struggle. The leap to communist relations was a direct insurrectionary act; it
occurred without a mediating “transition period” (p. 13).

Instead of centering the active takeover of workplaces by workers employed in jobs, the working class is
here presented as crucial, but just one of many necessary agents of social transformation and resistance to
the !ailing, dying tentacles of capitalist rule. Guerrilla warfare plays as much or an even bigger role, yet,
and here there is the greatest risk of potential disagreement. Revolution is most often presented at the
point of consumption: the revolutionary provision of food, water, housing, medical care, education, and
sociality without money, property, markets or state mediation.

It’s not necessarily bad if more conventional models of “workers taking over” are dethroned in favor of the
recent social movements’ emphasis on mutual aid, abolition, gender, social reproduction and retaking and
collectivizing urban public space. It’s well known that science "ction set in the future is, in fact, dealing
with ideas relevant to the time of writing, not the time of the book’s setting, and we see that here. Activists
responding at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic spawned a particular interest in organizing mutual
aid, and the politics of this emerging movement fertilized and conditioned participants’ ideas during the
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 aid, and the politics of this emerging movement fertilized and conditioned participants’ ideas during the
intense street confrontations during the summer of 2020 when millions rose up speci"cally against the
police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and for Black lives more broadly. So right before our eyes
we’ve recently witnessed the potential of mutual aid organizing, as well as the struggle to control the
streets—these are known to the movements and are somewhat familiar dynamics.

But what is not as familiar in recent years are real world examples of workers intervening directly in the
global dance of production and distribution. The classical Marxist conception of revolution doesn’t rely so
much on shootouts with the cops, military or fascists precisely because it’s the power of workers at the
point of production that can truly deny the reactionaries their bullets, vehicles, electronics, and the other
industrial necessities of military control over urban spaces. In Everything for Everyone, the capitalists
and their agents can’t keep up the physical repression needed to wage counterrevolution because of
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ecological and economic collapse, not because the working class has actively and materially interfered
with its provision.

The reigning ideas of the 2020 social upheaval can be seen !owering into a whole new society in
Everything for Everyone, such that the book could be viewed as articulating the global and permanent
realization of the best of the political impulses of that summer upheaval.

Since the next few decades will undoubtedly threaten the usual workings of global capitalism with
escalating ecological, climate and biodiversity crises never previously imaginable, the premise of struggle
as presented in the book feels at least as plausible as the models from which it implicitly departs. It’s a
tremendous virtue of the authors’ utopian imagination that the progression of events remains connected
to tendencies we have glimpsed in the present. For that reason the varying personal narratives appear
realistic and enthralling.

OPEN-MINDED POLITICS, OPEN FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

Our old models have helped us understand, analyze, orient ourselves, even predict some of the ways
capitalism has evolved. But the old ways of looking at politics have not yet led to socialism or to a
communist society, despite so many heroic struggles.

Beyond the historical and contemporary di$culties revolutionaries have faced, this book invites its
readers to behold tantalizing possibilities, thereby invigorating creative revolutionary impulses. Even, or
perhaps, precisely because its narratives depart from some more standard accounts of revolution, those
on the left should read this book so as to encourage the writing of others like it.

In its politics as well as its form as jointly produced and inherently interpersonal, it demands being read,
discussed, and critiqued together. We can ask our questions and raise our issues while we still revel in this
intense and absolutely lovely presentation of humanity’s future on our planet and beyond. Another world
is indeed possible. This short book (239 very fast-turning pages) vividly and believably shows us what it is
we can win.
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