Everything for Everyone - by Nathan Schneider (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback.

A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. 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.

Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on.

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. As these pioneers show, co-ops are helping us rediscover our capacity for creative, powerful, and fair democracy.

Review Quotes

"Everything for Everyone proves how our vested interests are best served by addressing our common ones. In Schneider's compelling take on the origins and future of cooperativism, working together isn't just something we do in hard times, but the key to a future characterized by abundance and distributed prosperity. We owe ourselves, and one another, this practical wisdom."--Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

"Everything for Everyone lives up to its title. This is no paean to the neoliberal 'gig economy' but rather an historical and contemporary tour of the radical potential of cooperative economics to disrupt capitalism as we know it. It is a book for everyone and a book for our times: read it, share it, but don't just talk about it. Commons for all!"--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black RadicalImagination

"[An] invaluable study."--New York Journal ofBooks

"A gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make--spiritual, technological, communal."--Krista Tippett, host of NPR's On Being

"If Walter Kaufmann and Annie Dillard had a love child, it would be Nathan Schneider. Part philosophy junkie, part spiritual seeker, all journalist."--Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

"Nathan Schneider is one of our era's foremost chroniclers of social movements. Always engaging and analytically insightful, there's simply no one I'd trust more to guide me through the latest iteration of the longstanding, international, and utterly urgent struggle to build a more cooperative world and reclaim our common wealth."--AstraTaylor, author of The People's Platform

"People have always fought to forge economies based on cooperation and creativity, rather than domination and exclusion. But that work has never looked so urgent as it does today. Charting a wealth of renewable ideas, tools, and commitments that are poised to reinvent democracy, Schneider tackles an immense subject with precision and grace."--Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and ThisChanges Everything

"The time has never been better for cooperative enterprise to change how we do business. This is a guide to how a new generation is starting to make that promise into a reality."--Jeremy Rifkin

About the Author

Nathan Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has written for publications including Harper's, the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times, and the Catholic Worker. Everything for Everyone is his third book. Schneider lives in Boulder, CO.