Mark Fisher famously said in his slim, efficient book Capitalist Realism that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (he mentions the sentiment as appearing in the works of both Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson). I have also seen people nowadays invoke the old Soviet concept of ‘hypernormalization,’ popularized by the Adam Curtis documentary of that name and borrowed from Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe the feeling among inhabitants of the late Soviet Union that boiled down to that Simpsons meme of “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas,” but on a societal level, to describe today’s world. It feels like we live not merely in late capitalism but in a capitalism that has completely overstayed its welcome. We in the United States have had the particular fortune of electing the dumbest motherfuckers imaginable to the highest offices in the land, and they are busy dismantling all the good things about the modern capitalist state and with it anything resembling even the twentieth-century consensus, leaving us in a full-on robber baron’s playground. What is painful, then, is how nobody seems to be able to think of a way out of it. Liberals and even leftists are left seemingly unable to imagine doing anything other than holding the line against a lumbering, smoldering beast that, as of writing, is poised to start a trade war because of one man’s narcissism.
It is in times like these it is good to remember that the human brain is capable of imagining alternatives, that we need to be imagining alternatives, because this situation is simply intolerable. There are reasons that higher education has been gutted throughout the Western world and the same applies to anything good in primary and secondary education, including the monomaniacal focus on STEM, which turns people into tools of our rulers, rather than those who can think clearly about who it is that rules us. The science fiction genre is filled with such attempts, such speculations, such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson or Octavia Butler or Cory Doctorow or Terry Bisson or Ursula K. Le Guin. I cannot think of a better time than [gestures vaguely at all this shit going on] to bring to the attention of the readership Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.
Like a good history book, the title tells you exactly what you’re in for. The book is, in fact, a collection of vignettes structured as interviews with participants in the great upheaval that overthrew capitalism in the city of Wall Street and replaced it with a communal way of living. The two narrators are versions of the authors, transposed a few decades into the future and conducting the interviews with the various participants. This form is a clever one, throwing the ‘fake history textbook’ form common in alternate history and in some other SFF subgenres (H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come is an early example) on its head; it allows simultaneously a larger view of events while keeping the human element there, with all its grit and drama and messiness. In a lot of alternate history writing there is a tension between those two elements, but here they are made complimentary.
What is so refreshing about Everything for Everyone is that it is an unabashedly utopian book; I am tempted to describe it as ‘Edward Bellamy but woke (complimentary).’ The format of the series of interviews prevents the utopianism from becoming dull, like so many plodding nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian novels that go on and on and on and on and on about the minutiae of how these worlds may work, with Bellamy’s Looking Backward being the most prominent example. Here, the world is explained naturally, logically, as the people being interviewed are those who had lived to see the changes. Abdelhadi and O’Brien pull another trick in having these interviews recorded with the intention of being saved for posterity, for people who never knew anything else than this utopia, so they can understand what the before time was like. This leads to interesting perspectives, and more than a few bits that are both grimly funny and cutting. The most damning one of these was how one character explains health insurance to children who have only ever known communally provided medicine.
This book is a work of intellect as much as a work of emotion, and much care is taken to show how our rotting capitalist citadel could collapse. It reminds me more than anything else of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which showed a way that capitalism could end in a way that my nebbish, autistic, heretofore vaguely libertarian mind could grok, setting me down the road to becoming a raging leftie during the pandemic. The revolution in this book is less like Robinson’s and more like the anarchism espoused by the likes of David Graeber, who had pointed out that most of the truly revolutionary movements of the past few decades have been of that tendency. It is revolution in the manner of Black Lives Matter, or the protests against the Palestinian Genocide that happened last year. So many people who have participated in those protests feel like the seed of a better world is there, and O’Brien and Abdelhadi take that feeling and rework the world around it.
The book is focused on New York, as the title would suggest, but you see the reverberations elsewhere. There are people, interviewed in New York, who have experience in the Midwest or the Canadian Prairies, a discussion of what would be done with the space resorts of the ultra-rich, and there is a whole chapter about the creation of a free Palestine. It is the last chapter that I found among the most interesting; I was quite impressed by it because it described a resolution to the grueling conflict in that region that did not simply end in one side wiping the other off the map. It was a chapter that left me filled with a melancholy, a mix of hope and despair, as on the one hand it gave us a roadmap, and on the other hand, the contrast to the razing of Gaza that only recently ended (and could easily flare up again at any minute).
It is the segment on Palestine that, perhaps unintentionally, reveals one of the profound strokes of this book. It is a moment that is extremely problematic - and yet looks profound because of how problematic it is. The Palestinian-American narrator uses the word ‘Zio’ to describe the Israeli government and its repression of Palestinians, in a manner that struck me as unaware that it was a term commonly used by neo-Nazis such as David Duke. It was a moment that gave me pause, and called to mind an interview between Kelly Hayes and Shane Burley with the appropriate title of We Don’t Talk Like Nazis, surrounding the Leftist use of the term ‘ZOG’ or ‘Zionist Occupied Government,’ which is indisputably an antisemitic slur used by aforementioned neo-Nazis. But, taken as a whole, that chapter’s anger is focused on the oppressive force of the Israeli state, rather than the Jewish people as a whole, and it mentions a number of Israelis joining in the creation of a free Palestine for all its citizens. You can read this in at least two ways: the character not knowing the source of the term, or the authors themselves not knowing the source of the term. From this, you can see the truth of all revolutions, even the best of them: they are not perfect. They are made by human beings, as flawed and as wretched and with so many blinders, who nevertheless fight for the good of the people, however they define it. It works both in-universe and in our universe; I don’t know if this was at all intended, but there’s something that works very well about it, if as an experience than as a work of fiction. I will caveat all this by saying that I am not Jewish, and would defer to opinions on the use of the word.
As luck would have it, this was the book I was reading in a diner as 2024 passed into 2025, as New Year’s Eve passed into New Year’s Day. It is a book with the calloused, worn, yet hopeful tenor of any number of old Black spirituals; its interviews are songs of despair, of suffering, and of aspiration. It’s a book that stirred something in me, as one year was about to flow seamlessly into another, one administration giving way to one run by madmen, fools, and sadists. This is a book that dares to hope, dares to dream, dares to say that all of this will end, that we, as human beings, can do better, must do better. The lords of silicon and oil are destroying the humanities to prevent a book like Everything for Everyone from being written, so that people cannot imagine their castles built on sand to come tumbling down. It is a book that wields Brecht’s distancing effect like a scythe, cutting down all the tawdry justifications for the cruelty of the world, while still never forgetting that the forging of a new world will be the story of people. I took a look at the world of this book and came away wanting to believe, needing to believe, in the world it promises. I hope the readers of this book, and this review, can do the same.
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Nerd Coefficient: 10/10
Nerd Coefficient: 10/10
Reference: O'Brien, E. M. and Abdelhadi, Eman Everything for Everyone [Common Notions Press, 2022]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
