Speculative fiction is a diverse genre capable of telling stories that may tickle the imagination and spark hope for a better tomorrow, or simply reify the most insipid aspects of modern society and push reactionary stupidity. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi is certainly the first kind. The book is structured as a series of interviews conducted by future fictional versions of O’Brien and Abdelhadi. The interviewees are individuals who participated in the revolution that, in this book, has established a communist society in the second half of the 21st century. Twelve fictional characters give their first hand accounts of the communization process and/or life in a new post-capitalist society.
This book operates on two levels. It is obviously a work of fiction with characters and worldbuilding (but less of an actual plot, due to the interview structure). It is also a work of communist sociopolitical theory where the speculative angle allows for the exploration of various topics from a different dimension than might be achieved through a standard non-fictional work of writing. While I have plenty of opinions on how this book holds up on both of those levels, this review will focus only on the sociopolitical theory aspect as to keep on topic with the theme of this site.
Immanence
The main strength of Everything for Everyone is the way in which the process of social transformation is presented as immanent to the satisfaction of needs for the various characters. The characters speak of revolutionary transformation on their own terms (albeit with the occasional piece of awkwardly-placed jargon). Concepts are demonstrated through the particularities of individual stories as opposed to the usage of carefully qualified universal statements as is the case for non-fiction writing. The first interviewee recounts the seizure of Hunts Point Market as a matter of survival against starvation and police brutality. Another recounts the communization of the hospital they worked at as a means of fending off a pandemic in the face of a breakdown of state and corporate capacity. A third details their post-revolutionary role in childcare after the collapse of the far-right cult they grew up in. The characters mostly serve as vehicles for the authors to speculate on ways that people might take collective action in the face of a faltering capitalism and deteriorating state, and how this collective action becomes politicized beyond the immediacies of survival and turns into not just organs of revolution but eventually pieces of communist society itself.
The fact that the focus is on the immanence of collective action and subsequent politicization for all manner of people simply trying to make ends meet is important. Many (non-fictional) histories of past communist movements focus heavily on the thoughts and actions of elite political actors. Communist party leaders and military strategists play an outsized role, according to many historical accounts, in shaping the course of revolution. Detailed play-by-plays of debates and factional politics often give the impression that communism is a battle of ideas to be waged in the realm of rhetoric, and that the material process of revolution is something that can be decided on the terrain of political debate. The reality that many communists do not want to admit is that uprisings, insurrections, and revolutions are generally a messy and largely uncontrolled affair that tend to create their own organizational forms rather than adopt the forms and methods prescribed by self-appointed experts. The fact that the characters in Everything for Everyone who play roles of leadership in the establishment of the global commune are generally politicized in the process of revolution (or in its build-up) is an important insight.
Simultaneously, the authors do not seem to subscribe to a faith in sheer spontaneity that afflicts some strains of radical thought. These revolutionary organs, while largely developed through the process of revolution itself, require intentional structure and (increasingly expanding) cooperation to establish and maintain. While I must applaud this, I cannot help but feel as if this revolution is surprisingly free of political conflict. What conflict exists between revolutionaries is usually mentioned in passing with little more than a handwave. There is little to no mention of forces that may attempt to coopt revolution. There are no aspiring bureaucrats attempting to direct insurrectionary fervor towards toothless reform. No ostensibly-friendly armed groups aiming to seize the state (rather than crush it) pose any serious threat to the communization process. The numerous cults and millenarian sects that arise in the face of societal collapse do not seem to derail communist social organizing at all. The political right exists largely as far right paramilitaries or localized despots that are clear enemies of revolutionaries; the notion that the far right may appear more ambiguous and compete with the far left for influence among nascent social organs (as is the case in reality) is nowhere to be found. The second interviewee, for instance, details the communization of the Palestine region and the destruction of the state of Israel. Apparently there is never any sort of threat from islamist groups, either those playing an overt militarily counterrevolutionary role or those who aspire to ride the revolution into state power themselves. I get that this book is supposed to largely be a feel-good read, but there is a limit to how far I can suspend disbelief. Political terrain always has been fraught with precarious alliances, shifting positions, and ambiguous actors. I appreciate the implicit rejection of nationalism (including “nationalism of the oppressed”) as a vehicle for communism, but it seems strange to omit any account of the various competing nationalist impulses that tend to rear their heads in times of social unrest and clothe themselves in the trappings of revolution.
Points of View
Unfortunately most of what I enjoyed about this book has already been accounted for. Everything for Everyone suffers from a perspective problem. O’Brien has a PhD from the New York University department of sociology and currently works as a therapist. Abdelhadi is research faculty at the University of Chicago and is an activist for a number of causes. Both authors focus extensively on the topic of gender in their writing. Unsurprisingly, Everything for Everyone has a very large focus on trauma, gender, sexuality, and the structure of the family. This is an important set of topics, however it seems to come at the expense of giving some other very critical topics their due level of attention.
The giant gaping hole in this book is the productive system that keeps the depicted society running, or rather the seeming lack thereof. Occasionally there is passing mention of the fact that some sort of goods are produced, but very little about how or by whom production is undertaken. Whenever the authors do mention a productive process it usually reads like an afterthought; just a couple sentences thrown in to round out a paragraph. Hunts Point Market, the flashpoint of the communization process in New York, receives food from farms. Sometimes inhabitants of the urban communes leave the city to perform farm labor. Virtually nothing else is said about these farms.
There is an entire interview on the “communization of [outer] space” that barely discusses anything related to matters of production, and when it does it comes off as very out of touch. The character being interviewed, Aniyah Reed, details the takeover of operations at ExT, a private space company supporting extraterrestrial communities of the ultra-wealthy. This company, once a large transnational firm, centralized its entire operation to an HQ on Long Island and a manufacturing site in Pennsylvania before the onset of the revolution. This manufacturing was all done “by bot or by 3D printer,” which was mostly “operated remotely from Long Island.” When the HQ was seized, the revolutionaries “sent messages to the workers there [in Pennsylvania] that it was time to go” before dispatching some people over to mop up. The HQ itself was seized by a coalition of revolutionary militias after several years of infiltration and planning by scientists and engineers passionate about space exploration.
This entire interview is a perfect example of how the modern North American left has completely lost touch with the productive sphere. Industrial production is always something that happens somewhere else. The processes themselves are occluded, the only real interaction the average humanities academic may experience with them is purchasing a produced commodity off a store shelf or seeing a rocket launch on YouTube. The living labor of these processes, flesh and blood proletarians with lives and thoughts and feelings and agency, are similarly out of sight and out of mind. ExT manufacturing is implied to be largely automated with “bots” and additive manufacturing methods, but automated processes typically still require lots of labor, both specialized technical as well as rationalized and “low-skill.” Here lies a huge plot hole and, more importantly, a big hole in how production and revolution are formulated in this book. Automation, especially in the form of robots and (apparently) very sophisticated 3D printers, requires lots of constant capital. The fixed capital (machinery, buildings, etc) may have been procured before manufacturing was consolidated in this offhandedly-mentioned Pennsylvania plant, but where does the circulating capital in the form of raw material, fuel/energy, and off-the-shelf goods come from? Manufacturing space vehicles, space stations, and luxury amenities requires a robust supply chain of inputs from all over, not to mention a lot of labor power. The only way around this, of course, is if the 3D printers are so advanced that just a couple raw material inputs are needed and complicated assemblies can be manufactured in one go. Such an arrangement could work with a smaller group of highly technical workers, but would still be dependent on some sort of supply chain. If this is the case one must ask: why are such marvelous 3D printers capable of printing all sorts of goods with uncomplicated material and labor inputs never mentioned anywhere else? Surely these would have been immensely useful to the rest of the revolutionary interviewees!
The workers at this manufacturing facility are not given any agency in the story, all the action happens at the takeover of HQ in New York. What is important to Reed is not the industrial process, but just its end result: the flashy commodity of space travel. The motivation for Reed and her organization of radical scientists and engineers, and apparently several militias, seems to simply be that space is cool, and it sucks that rich people get to enjoy it while the rest of us do not. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with this sentiment, but the fact that the entire focus is on a literal headquarters and the actual manufacturing is some afterthought appendage that simply does whatever the headquarters wants is so absurdly on the nose of how out of touch academic communists are with the productive realm. The manufacturing workers are apparently not worth organizing at all, just the intellectuals who push buttons at HQ. If that facility is really that magically self-sufficient, then why was the focus on seizing it for space operations and not, I don’t know, literally anything else? Is this technology present in other industries that are fundamental to an industrial society? I hate to say it, but a space program with asteroid mining should not be a high priority for a nascent communist society. The authors missed a big opportunity. They could have leaned into the science fiction aspect and discussed the ways such powerful additive manufacturing methods could grant power to revolutionary organs. Or instead they could have placed the emphasis on the workers that keep the Pennsylvania site running and the role labor up and down the supply chain played in the revolution. Or both! Instead we get an elitist power fantasy where the spectacle of public-facing technological marvels can be free of any of the human considerations that make them possible. As someone who is actually a communist engineer who has built an organization of radical scientists and engineers, I feel somewhat embarrassed to be portrayed this way.
Later, in the final interview, one final gesture towards the productive aspect of society can be found. Alkasi Sanchez, a historian and archivist for the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, details the structure of organizational bodies that coordinate all manner of social affairs. Of the Mid-Atlantic Hub, Sanchez states: “[it] is one of sixteen production coordination hubs around the world, where we do a major portion of the data processing for tabulating production needs, and coordinate communication between production councils.” There are over two million production councils that coordinate through this hub. These councils comprise manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructure, communications, and other socially necessary operations. This depiction breathes some imaginative life into the Marxist notion of “freely associated producers.” A variety of decision making processes are utilized based on the needs of the productive associations happening. Sanchez briefly discusses the ways the Hub operates is undergoing changes and expresses concerns that it may hamper the relationship it has with the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, which largely coordinates more social-reproductive functions.
The couple paragraphs where this is explored are easily my favorite portion of the book. It is an acknowledgement that human productive activity is vastly complex and would continue to be so under a communist future. I am very sympathetic to the notion that production would become a species-level rational process as it is depicted here. The authors get bonus points for portraying productive activity and decision-making as a constantly evolving process subject to historical contingencies. Communism is not utopian and certainly not static, and I deeply appreciate that this point is made in this fashion. Unfortunately right as this gets interesting the interview takes a sharp turn away from this speculation and turns to other topics, several of which have already been thoroughly explored in earlier interviews. I must admit I felt a little led on. While I would have preferred more discussion of production, the rest of Sanchez’s interview veered into fun science fiction speculation that felt well-suited for closing out the book.
Should You Read This Book?
Probably not. Let me be clear, there are things this book does well. Besides everything already discussed, there were moments that stirred my emotions in ways I was not expecting. A reclusive older aunt who came out of her shell as part of working with revolutionary youth. A Chinese-American individual recounting a childhood spent in an internment camp and the subsequent escape only to end up enslaved in a factory and never seeing their parents again. The giddy excitement of a coming-of-age teenager ready to embark on an adventure in a world where the horrors of capitalism have been largely vanquished. The coming to terms with transgender or non-binary identity in the spaces opened up by the dissolution of capitalist gender norms.
But these little moments generally do not make up for what I feel is inadequate explanatory power, even when paired with the aspects of this book I found compelling. As I read through the book, I kept asking myself who this book is written for. Much of the abstract theoretics are only fully accessible to someone already familiar with many of the “communization theory” concepts either directly or indirectly alluded to throughout. I think most people would not be able to pick up on some of these implicit arguments. At the same time I do not think this book was written for theoretically-inclined ultra-left communists though, as far too much is missing for it to feel satisfactorily rigorous. The extremely simplistic accounts of revolutionary politics and transformation of production fail to address a number of central concerns for this political perspective. Nor does this book seem to be targeting those relatively unconvinced of the merits of communism as a political outlook, the reader’s inclinations are assumed to be far too leftward for this to be the case.
To be honest, it feels as if the authors wrote it mostly for themselves. Their areas of academic and personal focus are well-represented in this book, but very little else is. Even when they venture outside of the main topics of family, gender, and trauma, the excursions are minimalistic and flat with no competing perspectives across different interviewees. One could argue that they are simply staying in the lane of what they know as to not speak on subjects on which they are not experts, however this would be an irresponsible cop out. The introduction states “we selected narrators who were involved in key moments in the insurrection,” but it is clear that a number of very important perspectives are missing in a way that would be obvious to many people outside the academia-culture-media sphere. The authors should have done what academics are trained to do: research unfamiliar subjects and engage with primary sources to gain a sufficient understanding to be at least able to navigate said subjects.
To reject “the working class” as a hegemonic identity from which revolutionary agency can be derived, as many communization theorists do, means that the actual productive material power of the working class must become politically communist through a different avenue of proletarian self-understanding. Instead Everything for Everyone rejects both the identity of the working class as well as its actual productive basis from which communism is both possible and must necessarily be built from. This is a very unfortunate error on the part of the authors, one that I cannot help but feel stems from a retreat of Marxism from the shop floor into the ivory tower of academia.
Speculative fiction is a difficult genre to write well. Writing this genre with an overt political angle simply doubles the amount of potential criticism. The amount of communist speculative fiction providing visions of a compelling new world is limited, and I applaud the authors for their contribution to the genre, especially given the things this book does correctly. Unfortunately I simply found Everything for Everyone to be significantly lacking in too many critical areas. I wanted to like this book, and I wish my review could be more positive. If anybody reads this book and comes out of it more hopeful for the future or convinced of the viability of a communist society, then I would count that as an unqualified victory for the authors for which they deserve full credit. Alternatively, those whose interests line up with the authors’ areas of focus may get more out of this than I did. Their speculation on gender, sexuality, family, and trauma was certainly interesting even if I found some of it disagreeable.
If O’Brien and Abdelhadi were to write another book of communist speculative fiction, I would applaud the initiative and sincerely hope it builds off the strengths of Everything for Everyone while avoiding its unfortunate weaknesses.
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