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

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I don’t use the word inspiring very often, but no other term can do Everything For Everyone justice: reading this book was like coming up for air, a fresh and undiluted draught of bright and bittersweet hope brought to parched lips. In fact, the book at one point has members of the Latin Kings joining and becoming indispensable in the revolutionary assembly. With digital power reconcentrating and networks recentralizing under corporate control, Schneider and Scholz imagined the platform cooperative as a way to address the “nagging questions of ownership and governance” left out of the vague promises of digital disruption.

The authors give a lot of attention to communal responses to trauma and conflict, countering liberal reformist positions that preclude the potential for autonomy by ensuring its impossibility: “If we abolish the police, who will protect me? In its antiwork future, wage labor is abolished and new forms of working together to abolish capital and maintain communities emerge simultaneously.And by the end of the novel, there are hints of new developments, maybe even new problems, on the horizon.

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.His writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Artforum, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Historical Materialism, Hyperallergic, Momus, ROAR Magazine, and e-flux journal, where he is associate editor. 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. 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. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Whetstone Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Decolonial Hacker, Strange Horizons, and others. As another historian, working for the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, tells them: “There is a deep link between human subjectivity and the labor process that we’re just beginning to unravel, twenty years after the end of the commodity form.

Everything for Everyone proves how our vested interests are best served by addressing our common ones. Learning how to live a life where you are not constantly trying to please everyone else is a process. Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. It is a future history of our own world in the mid-twenty-first century told as a series of twelve fictional oral history interviews conducted with a variety of New Yorkers in the late 2060s and 70s. By elevating cooperatives into one of the “candidate regimes” for building a new social model, Everything blurs the line between economic instrument and systemic vision.

Nathan Schneider’s Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy is a whirlwind tour of the cooperative movement flourishing in our digitally connected global society. Additionally, Kelley discusses the safe and healthy path forward for sex work (or skin work as the folks of 2067 might say), taken in a world without money. The fact of their sentience can now be assumed through the nature of their communication with each other about the “modeling of virtual worlds.