M. E. OBrien - An Oral History of the New York Commune: 2052-2072

Praise for Everything for Everyone

"Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. I spent fifteen 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. OBrien 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 Rashmon 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 OBrien seek to illustrate: truth, and the way we might find liberation in it."

Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass

"Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. OBriens tall tales of the future draw on real experiences of the past and present. The books 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 OBrien 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. 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

"Everything for Everyone is a window into a possible future and a powerful antidote to our present moments ubiquitous moods of anti-utopianism, despair, nostalgia, and capitalist-realism. The interviews collected in these pages chronicle the first stages of the abolition of the family; the history of the ecological restoration projects and interplanetary technologies that might render our planet livable and leisurely; the invention of real democracy; and the armed conflagrations that were necessary along the way."

Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto of Care and Liberation

"I had no idea I was a post-revolution speculative fiction fangirl till I started reading Everything for Everyone. 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

"Part speculative social science, part abolitionist manifesto, O'Brien and Abdelhadis genre-bending work of utopian fiction explores the social forms and political possibilities of life after capitalismthe 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 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

"Everything for Everyone is a sweeping vision of the type of world and society we imagine can and will provide for us all, abundantly. Here we have 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

An Oral History of the New York Commune, 20522072

M. E. OBrien and Eman Abdelhadi

Everything for Everyone:

An Oral History of the New York Commune, 20522072

M. E. OBrien and Eman Abdelhadi

2022 M. E. OBrien and Eman Abdelhadi

This edition 2022 Common Notions

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

ISBN: 978-1-94217-358-8 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-94217-358-8

Library of Congress Number: 2022933979

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Cover design by Josh MacPheeLayout design and typesetting by Graciela Chela Vasquez / ChelitasDesign Printed by union labor in Canada on acid-free paper

It means we take care of each other. It means everything for everyone. It means we communized the shit out of this place. It means we took something that was property and made it life.

Miss Kelley of the Hunts Point Commune

In the forties, when Miss Kelley started doing sex work in Hunts Point, she never imagined she would one day act in a pivotal event of the citys history. But on May 6, 2052, she joined with thousands of others to storm the neighborhoods produce market in a riot that would commence a far-reaching transformation of New York. She would go on to coordinate food reappropriation and redistribution for the fledgling commune. By the end of the summer, Miss Kelley and her comrades would be feeding a million-and-a-half New Yorkers across eleven residential communes in the Bronx and Uptown.

The insurrection of Hunts Point, and our interview with Miss Kelley, opens this collection of life histories. Miss Kelleys memories of catapulting burning trash cans and endless meetings began this oral history project, just as those events marked the subsequent twenty years of revolutionary change in New York City. This collection bridges multiple distinct experiences, roles, geographies, and temporalities in this two-decade history. These interviews, we hope, will contribute rich and varied voices of New Yorkers as they experienced the misery and joy of the insurrections, and the growing hope that characterized this recent era. We chose Miss Kelleys words, Everything for everyone, as a title because they embody not only the ethos of the assemblies, communes, and forums that collectively coordinate fulfilling our human needs, but also a heroic promise made that hot May night in the Bronx, and again and again in the years since.