Everything for Everyone - (Nonaligned) 2nd Edition by M E O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An unforgettable oral history of the future, where ordinary people recount the revolution that transformed New York--and the world.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism--New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Blending speculative fiction, political imagination, and documentary storytelling, Everything for Everyone has become a landmark work of revolutionary futurism. This expanded second edition includes new interviews from the future, a reading group guide, and an appendix introducing Project 2052: Revolutionary Dispatches, an evolving collaborative world inspired by the book.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"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

"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

About the Author

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. She is the coauthor, with Eman Abdelhadi, of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 and coeditor of Project 2052: Revolutionary Dispatches from the World of Everything for Everyone.

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. She is the coauthor, with M.E. O'Brien, of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 and coeditor of Project 2052: Revolutionary Dispatches from the World of Everything for Everyone.