If you put your ear to the American right-wing bubble these days, you might hear panic about a cabal of communists in America who are dead set on abolishing private property, outlawing money, dismantling national borders, disempowering everyone and moving us all into communes, disassembling the nuclear family, making gender such a fuddle that boys will be getting pregnant and your sex organs will be transformable on a whim, abolishing the police, and tearing down the prisons.
The authors of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 want to set the record straight: All those things are true, however it’s nothing to be afraid of—it will be wonderful!
They make their argument in a cleverly-executed utopian fantasy that takes the form of transcripts from an oral history project conducted by historians of a future communist-organized New York City-area, twenty years after its establishment amid a set of global revolutions that uprooted and mostly abolished capitalism. With the exception of a brief introductory chapter, the book is told by means of the verbatim reminiscences of a variety of people living in 2067–72 New York who lived through this revolutionary period and participated in it to one extent or another, with occasional editorial asides from their interviewers. The conceit works well, and the tone of these interviews is believable.
It is tempting to review this fictional book as though it were a novel — something like Erewhon, Atlas Shrugged, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or The Dispossessed that uses a story about an imagined future society to explore political philosophy. But Everything for Everyone doesn’t really have a plot; it has “characters” of a sort, but they don’t develop so much as they reminisce. There are occasions when an interviewee chokes up over some traumatic memory, but that’s pretty much all there is as far as dramatic tension. So I think it’s probably a mistake to review it as a novel, or to try to read it as one. It seems designed more as a fantasy (not in the sense of the swords-and-sorcerers genre but more as in a sexual fantasy or daydream: revolution-porn maybe). The book helps us to envision a delightful communist future from the perspective of the post-revolution happily-ever-after. Hindsight, they say, is 20/20, and this book takes a communist utopia as a given and imagines backwards from there to our current world in the hopes of making such a path easier to see.
Reconstructing the book’s timeline by piecing together clues from the various reminiscences, it goes something like this: In the 2030s the U.S. dollar collapses, global economic depression and political instability follow. Wealthy elites retreat to well-guarded enclaves, or off-planet into orbital or Lunar oases. Tension with China leads to a racial roundup reminiscent of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Ⅱ. By the 2040s there are mass protests / riots / armed movements on every continent. There is worldwide famine and widespread looting. Early protocommunes and commune networks start to develop in the Andes, Xinjiang, and Palestine. A "final intifada" liberates Palestine and Israel collapses as a political entity as “hundreds of thousands [of Jews] went back to Europe and America.” The U.S. invades Iran, institutes a draft, the war goes very badly, and military morale sinks to Vietnam-era levels with fragging common; eventually the U.S. uses nukes. There is massive white-flight from California as wildfires and coastal flooding take their toll on the state's livability; San Francisco more or less empties out. Between 2047 and 2051 an epidemic about 100× as deadly as Covid-19 sweeps the globe. The fall of China and India marks the end of nation-states in Asia. Communist appropriation and redistribution begins sporadically in the United States, as its military, still in disarray, struggles to seal the border with New Afrikaa (an insurrectionary collection of former States of the U.S. south) to prevent an influx of radical ideas and climate refugees from flooded cities along the Gulf Coast, eventually using nuclear weapons there too. In 2050 a right-wing group disrupts state elections in Wyoming and takes over the government there; Native Americans take advantage of the chaos to expand their sovereign territory in the area. There are food riots and attacks on police stations in New York City. The U.S. Army occupies NYC and begins putting political prisoners in camps; the occupation lasts about two years. The Army, in desperation, cuts off the internet and destroys communications satellites to try to disrupt insurrectionary communication. In 2052, the last bastion of NYC’s elite, a well-guarded food market in lower Manhattan, succumbs to the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, a Pentecostal sect obsessed with enforcing traditional gender ideas has turned Staten Island into a fortress, but it is undermined from within by a revolt of women fed up with child sex abuse at the hands of the Church Fathers. One Police Plaza in New York is attacked, and the Manhattan Detention Complex is stormed and its prisoners released. The U.S. government declines a request to prop up the NYPD, which collapses. Communist rebels continue to rack up victories, liberate the borders, etc. Battles between the rebels and an unstable alliance of fascist and government forces continue in the U.S. until around 2065; most of what used to be the United States is then organized by the victors as networks of communes, or as ethnonationalist Native American nations. Somewhere along the way, America finally adopts the metric system. By 2069, an American might very well respond to a question about whether they’re a communist with “But isn’t everyone a communist? What does it mean to be a communist today?”
The authors say that this successful revolution effectively abolished several things they curiously call “concrete abstractions” — “money, the economy, the family as the basic unit of domestic reproduction, nation-states, borders, prisons, and militaries.” It seemed strange to me that they would assert that “the economy” came to an end with the revolution; that strikes me as a weird use of the term… like saying “when I came indoors, the weather came to an end” or “when the YMCA left town, that put an end to the fitness.” But in some ways the book does seem compatible with an interpretation that an economy of production and distribution and such had been at least partially replaced by magic of some sort. This magic is not always specified. Occasionally there are explicit mention of things like sentient AIs in “algae-based” server farms at sea, or “a biosynthetic server farm through an underground rhizomatic fungal system on the roots of trees …[which] helped expand communications and computational capabilities for the whole continent,” or sci-fi perennials like asteroid mining and space elevators. But largely it is unexplained how it has come to pass that only a few years after the end of a massive (even nuclear!) civil war, capping a couple of decades of famine, ecological collapse, and devastating epidemic, “it’s really different now, because we all have what we need.” “Now” (circa 2069) nobody has to take “paid work… selling your labor to the highest bidder in order to meet your needs” or “keep track of how much money you [have] in the bank,” but everyone’s needs are met by their commune: healthcare, clothing, food (just “wander down to your commune’s pantry and grab a snack”). A mostly-unspoken background assumption throughout the work is that they are now living in a time of tremendous plenty and surplus; there is almost no scarcity of anything worth having, and what scarcity there is doesn’t lead to conflict. Perhaps this can be partially explained as a temporary effect caused by massive depopulation from the war, famine, and epidemic disease of recent decades. People do work a few hours a week here and there, but not on things they have to do to make a living, but on jobs that inspire them, like photography, history, “skinwork” (e.g. sexwork, massage), or “gestation care coordination.” At age 17, some people engage in three months of difficult community service they call the “sojourn.” Some people are happy to do the drudge work to keep the communes running, much of which seems to involve assemblies and other sorts of meetings. In the communist future, people still complain about meetings, but they seem to have a lot more enthusiasm for them, so maybe they aren’t as bad — it’s not uncommon for everyone in a commune to drop what they’re doing and meet through the night to discuss, for example, some particular child’s welfare.
Political power is a touchy subject in this utopian communist future. It seems to have become adopted as a sort of truism that everyone now is “without property or power” (the way modern Americans might recite something like “liberty and justice for all”). But there is an abundance of “councils” and “assemblies” and such who seem to be the ones making decisions about what gets produced and to whom it gets distributed and who can exercise which prerogatives (like the “council of grandmothers” — that is, “elder feminized people” — in one commune who, for example, decided who “had to be disarmed”). At the time of writing (2072) there is ongoing debate about what sorts of decisions ought to be made by which sorts of councils at what scales (e.g. local, regional, global), and to what extent these processes should be codified to be more transparent or left uncodified so as to be more flexible and responsive to immediate democratic control.
The nuclear family seemed to be more or less abolished, at least in the region the book covers, in favor of more traditional communal child-rearing practices. There seemed to have developed a craze for “gestation” (a form of pregnancy practicable by both males and females — “most people just use sperm and egg banks” to conceive), and a corresponding disinterest in proprietorially raising the child one has gestated, though there are other adults around who “opt in” to being parents as needed. Genderfluidity is the new normal, “about two out of five young people these days don’t identify as cis,” and advances in genetic engineering allow people to transition their bodies from one sex to another without surgical intervention.
I found the book’s presentation conceit cleverly executed, but its utopia unconvincing. It struck me as a sort of just-so story that leaned too heavily on what strikes me as the very implausible belief that of course a post-apocalyptic communist order will be a paradise of plenty once we get over the hump of getting from here to there.
