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

Product Information

He is the author of the short story collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books 2019), and the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020), and is an incoming PhD student at the University of Calgary.

But even the simplest revolution demands the painstaking picking apart and putting back together of the whole warp and weft of human civilization. The novel is situated in an already present ecological and social collapse and the two poles of its tension — insurgency and the commune — cannot exist without each other. Instead, he skates around the contradictions that his work reveals and quickly moves on to the next anecdote. Stories always seem to be set before or after the heroes go to war against the old system – sometimes just before, or just after, but the fight itself is always glossed over.explains the tensions that emerge as the spiritual visions for a new culture come into conflict with the realities of actual business development and real-world collective decision making that are contentious, slow, and messy. After the economic crisis that began in 2008, the cooperative movement is coming back with renewed vigor. The first interview, with Miss Kelley, focuses on the communization of food distribution at the fall of capitalism, which played a vital role in helping to birth the first communes of the city.

The large cast of characters have all lived through and participated in the building of communes between the years 2052 and 2072, and — as is the intent behind an oral history — they speak for themselves and about themselves, prompted by fictional interviewers bearing the real authors’ names (M. It was controversial,” he says of the decision to design and introduce newly created species to increase biodiversity in the territory previously known as Canada. The opening interview of the book is with Miss Kelly, a trans woman who has come up in the ball scene and at the time of the insurrection is doing sex work in the Bronx. In other interviews, the authority of the interviewer breaks as the interviewees criticize the questions, crack jokes, refuse to answer certain questions, and even demand that the interlocutor become the interviewed. Certain technologies, such as nanites to help someone program (or deprogram) gender, tech to allow anyone regardless of sex or gender to “gestate” a baby, and the idea that many of our supercomputers have gained a kind of sentience but only spend their time dreaming, are all great.As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy. O’Brien, as the interviewer, notes how Zhou is drawing a “parallel between integrating different parts of your mind, and the integration of human-use and ecological systems”.

While evocative and inspiring, Everything tells us little we need to know if we truly want to change the system.

The fictional oral history of a commune yet to exist imagines what forms human agency could take to change their world and their circumstances, how it could be contingent and polyphonous, always in process of unfolding and becoming. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. The novel’s insurrections are ambitious, grounded in existing local communities of old and emerging solidarities and their ability to grow into global depth, depicting a great amount of organizational work.

But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative to the robber-baron economy is hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world’s governments. Everything for Everyone chronicles this revolution—from taxi cooperatives keeping Uber at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. Common Notions is a publishing house and programming platform that advances new formulations of liberation and living autonomy.