Oral History of the New York Commune

M. E. O'Brien writes at the intersection of communist theory, trans liberation, LGBTQ social-movement studies, and feminism. A co-editor of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism, O'Brien's writing has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Work, Employment & Society, Commune, Homintern, Endnotes, and Invert. She worked with the NYC Trans Oral History Project and completed her PhD at NYU where her research considered how capitalism shaped NYC LGBTQ social movements. She currently works as a psychotherapist.Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist based in Chicago, IL. Her research as faculty at the University of Chicago focuses on gender differences in the community trajectories of Muslim Americans. Abdelhadi has also spent many years organizing. She has been involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation, Black Lives Matter, counter-surveillance and abolitionism, marxist feminist mobilization as well as workplace struggles. She is currently co-coordinating the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds community by and for Queer Muslims. Abdelhadi maintains an active creative practice that includes performance art and essay and poetry writing. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin, Muftah, and other publications.

“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""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 final retirement of the market, the commodity form, money, wages, rent, coercive gender roles, prisons, police, class, nation states, borders, profit, 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 benefit from a clear end-goal and would want to know what could be accomplished by the movements for human liberation.”—Spectre Journal“[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“But if you come to Everything for Everyone for the politics, stay for the writing. Barring Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, I can’t think of another author who uses an academic form to achieve a literary result so successfully. Each of the interviewees and interviewers has an entirely unique and authentic voice. The book is utterly plausible as the archival project it claims to be, while also telling gripping stories and slipping in details to delight sci-fi fans (a space elevator in Quito! Sentient algae-based AI! Augmented reality implants for dance parties!).“—TruthOut“Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. I spent 15 years as a community organizer and never dreamed of seeing something that so bravely, brilliantly combines liberational nonfiction and radical documentary with the exuberance of the best speculative storytelling.“ —Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving“Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s tall tales of the future draw on real experiences of the past and present. 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. Voices from as-yet-unlived lives instill faith that our becoming is not yet done. Abdelhadi and O’Brien have created a vivid image of the possibility that we will one day make a home of the world.” —Hannah Black “The special magic of Everything for Everyone is that it combines the genres of the oral history interview with speculative utopian fiction. Oral histories can show how in their everyday lives ordinary people can make the world. Utopian fiction can show the worlds we might want to be making. Every cook, or sex worker, can govern. And this is the life they might build from the ruins of this civilization, such as it is. Such a pleasure to feel one could be making the world over with them.” —McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street “Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien are changing the game of what the novel is and what the novel can be. Much as James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Imani Perry did with the epistolary form in non-fiction, Everything for Everyone uses speculative oral history to expand and explode the limits of what fiction can do. Their imagined oral histories from many parties help us understand the present from many possible points of view in the future looking back, like Rashômon meets House of Leaves. In Everything for Everyone, binaries (of male-versus-female, fiction-versus-non-fiction, past-versus-future) are irrelevant compared to something much more interesting and important that Abdelhadi and O’Brien seek to illustrate: truth, and the way we might find liberation in it.” —Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass“I had no idea I was a post-revolution speculative fiction fangirl till I started reading Everything for Everyone, which kicks off with a food riot at the Hunts Point Market led by a sex worker. I’m really bummed out by the fact that I’ll be 82—hopefully!—when their fictional revolution kicks off and dead by the time the dust settles. Exciting to read something hopeful, intersectional and an antidote to our dystopian doldrums.” —Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation “In this genre-bending work of utopian fiction, O'Brien and Abdelhadi imagine a world that might emerge from the ashes of our own.  Part speculative social science, part abolitionist manifesto, it explores the social forms and political possibilities of life after capitalism—the novel ways of organizing life, doing gender, and coping with the psychic costs of transformation that may follow the inevitable crises of capital and climate that lie in our future. Like the best utopian fiction, Everything for Everyone is also a startling work of political theory: it gives us the opportunity, as all utopias do, to learn about our own desires and hopes for a way out of our current conjuncture.” —Katrina Forrester, author of In the Shadow of Justice “Leftists are often accused of being against everything, but not having a vision of what we're fighting for. Everything for Everyone is a corrective, a sweeping vision of the type of world and society we imagine can and will provide for us all, abundantly. Not all beautiful novels are invested in social restructuring, and not all social restructuring is envisaged in novels, but here we have exactly their meeting point: a beautiful novel bristling with the necessary changes we must make to survive on this planet. The future has sex in it, and community; it has food and labor and joy. It has trauma and memories of the harm, the nightmare, of capitalist precarity. The future is sure to exist; will it have us in it? 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.” —Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology“Everything for Everyone is a window into a possible future and a powerful antidote to our present moment’s ubiquitous moods of anti-utopianism, despair, nostalgia, and capitalist-realism…this must-read speculative fiction…chronicle[s] the first stages of the abolition of the family; the history of the ecological restoration projects and interplanetary technologies that might render our planet liveable and leisurely; the invention of real democracy; and the armed conflagrations that were necessary along the way. So, if you have ever wondered to yourself, What will the triumph of indigenous land struggles, the overthrow of colonial occupations, and the fall of capitalism look like? Which parts of New York would be at the forefront of a communist revolution, and which would double down into religious, hyper-patriarchal fascism? Whose knowledges of facilitation, healing, conflict resolution and partying will help the population heal from its collective trauma?—then this superb novel is the book for you.”—Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto of Care and Liberation