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  Praise for Everything for Everyone

  "Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. I spent fifteen years as a community organizer and never dreamed of seeing something that so bravely, brilliantly combines liberational nonfiction and radical documentary with the exuberance of the best speculative storytelling."

  —Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving

  "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

  "Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s tall tales of the future draw on real experiences of the past and present. The book’s multiple narratives, equal parts hope and pain, merge into a prayer for collective survival and for the eventual flourishing of our powers of love and invention. Voices from as-yet-unlived lives instill faith that our becoming is not yet done. Abdelhadi and O’Brien have created a vivid image of the possibility that we will one day make a home of the world."

  —Hannah Black

  "The special magic of Everything for Everyone is that it combines the genres of the oral history interview with speculative utopian fiction. Every cook, or sex worker, can govern. And this is the life they might build from the ruins of this civilization, such as it is. Such a pleasure to feel one could be making the world over with them."

  —McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street

  "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. 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."

  —Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto of Care and Liberation

  "I had no idea I was a post-revolution speculative fiction fangirl till I started reading Everything for Everyone.… Exciting to read something hopeful, intersectional and an antidote to our dystopian doldrums."

  —Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation

  "Part speculative social science, part abolitionist manifesto, O'Brien and Abdelhadi’s genre-bending work of utopian fiction 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 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 sweeping vision of the type of world and society we imagine can and will provide for us all, abundantly.… Here we have a beautiful novel bristling with the necessary changes we must make to survive on this planet. The future has sex in it, and community; it has food and labor and joy. It has trauma and memories of the harm, the nightmare, of capitalist precarity. The future is sure to exist; will it have us in it? 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."

  —Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology

  EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE

  An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

  M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

  Everything for Everyone:

  An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

  M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

  © 2022 M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

  This edition © 2022 Common Notions

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

  ISBN: 978-1-94217-358-8 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-94217-358-8

  Library of Congress Number: 2022933979

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  Cover design by Josh MacPhee

  Layout design and typesetting by Graciela “Chela” Vasquez / ChelitasDesign Printed by union labor in Canada on acid-free paper

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction:

  On Insurrection and Historical Memory

  Chapter 1

  Miss Kelley on the Insurrection of Hunts Point

  Chapter 2

  Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant

  Chapter 3

  Tanya John on the Free Assembly of Crotona Park

  Chapter 4

  Belquees Chowdhury on Student and Worker Occupations

  Chapter 5

  Quinn Liu on Making Refuge, from Hangzhou to Flushing

  Chapter 6

  S. Addams on the Church Fathers of Staten Island

  Chapter 7

  Aniyah Reed on Pacha and the Communization of Space

  Chapter 8

  Connor Stephens on the Fall of Colorado Springs

  Chapter 9

  Latif Timbers on Gestation Work

  Chapter 10

  An Zhou on Ecological Restoration

  Chapter 11

  Kayla Puan on Growing Up in the North Ironbound Commune

  Chapter 12

  Alkasi Sanchez on the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION: ON INSURRECTION AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

  It means we take care of each other. It means everything for everyone. It means we communized the shit out of this place. It means we took something that was property and made it life.

  —Miss Kelley of the Hunts Point Commune

  In the forties, when Miss Kelley started doing sex work in Hunts Point, she never imagined she would one day act in a pivotal event of the city’s history. But on May 6, 2052, she joined with thousands of others to storm the neighborhood’s produce market in a riot that would commence a far-reaching transformation of New York. She would go on to coordinate food reappropriation and redistribution for the fledgling commune. By the end of the summer, Miss Kelley and her comrades would be feeding a million-and-a-half New Yorkers across eleven residential communes in the Bronx and Uptown.

  The insurrection of Hunts Point, and our interview with Miss Kelley,
opens this collection of life histories. Miss Kelley’s memories of catapulting burning trash cans and endless meetings began this oral history project, just as those events marked the subsequent twenty years of revolutionary change in New York City. This collection bridges multiple distinct experiences, roles, geographies, and temporalities in this two-decade history. These interviews, we hope, will contribute rich and varied voices of New Yorkers as they experienced the misery and joy of the insurrections, and the growing hope that characterized this recent era. We chose Miss Kelley’s words, “Everything for everyone,” as a title because they embody not only the ethos of the assemblies, communes, and forums that collectively coordinate fulfilling our human needs, but also a heroic promise made that hot May night in the Bronx, and again and again in the years since.

  The transformations of the last three decades are difficult to grasp. Many debate to what extent we should understand these events as a single, unified event—“the revolution,” “the insurrection”—or as a heterogeneous set of overlapping processes. Few even agree on a start date. Some mark the definitive rupture with the Andes in 2043, others mark the Global Assembly of 2061. Where any given account draws the line says a great deal about how the authors understand the nature of this period. Is it a toppling of an old order? The founding of a new society? A proliferation of autonomous projects of human flourishing, self-determination, and freedom?

  These questions, in various permutations, have long been debated on the streets, in the crowded meetings of free assemblies and virtual planning forums. One could, and many do, define this era through the concrete abstractions that came to an end with these tumultuous events: money, the economy, the family as the basic unit of domestic reproduction, nation-states, borders, prisons, and militaries. Outside of the unfortunate events of the ongoing struggle in Australia, the forces of capital and order have been routed. Others characterize the period through what we have created since the fall of the old order: the world commune, the free assemblies, the planning forums, the local residential communes as a primary reproductive unit, or the production councils. The changes are so vast, so manifold, they elude easy summary.

  About the New York Commune Oral History Project

  Our present work will contribute, in a small way, to the ongoing collective efforts to grapple with these questions. The collection offers a selection of the interviews gathered through the New York Commune Oral History Project. The Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly commissioned and facilitated this project as part of a larger retrospective commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune.

  Our focus is not in offering a definitive account of the recent period. Our scope is geographically and temporally specific. All our narrators share strong ties with New York City and its immediate surroundings, including Newark and the coastal seaboard of what was once New Jersey. The first interview, with Miss Kelley, was conducted in 2067 as part of the fifteenth anniversary commemoration of the Insurrection of Hunts Point. Subsequently, the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly commissioned us to conduct a series of oral histories along similar lines over the next five years, in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the New York Commune.1 We concluded our final interview with historian Alkasi Sanchez in 2072. The interviews themselves focus on the events in between the Insurrection of Hunts Point in 2052 and the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly in 2072, because it was in this period that the New York Commune emerged. We are excited and honored to be included in the wave of excellent research, memoirs, collections, public events, and celebrations that are marking this anniversary.

  New York has always been a global city. Though labor markets and rural dispossession no longer drive global migration, the city continues to welcome climate refugees and those drawn by its rich, dense, heterogeneous communities. The worldwide reach of New Yorkers’ life experiences means the accounts here include attention to global events. Connor Stephens discusses his time with the North American Liberation Front (NALF) in the battles of the Rocky Mountains. An Zhou discusses ecological restoration efforts in the Coast Mountains and Great Plains, and Quinn Liu the emergence of communes in what was once China, while Kawkab Hassan recounts the liberation of Palestine and the Levant.

  We selected narrators who were involved in key moments in the insurrection. Belquees Chowdhury participated in the reclamation of healthcare systems, the demilitarization of lower Manhattan, and the creation of refuge centers in her commune. Aniyah Reed, in turn, was a key player in reclaiming state exploration infrastructure. We have also both been students of gender, sexuality, and the family throughout our lives, and our interest in social reproduction influenced our choice of narrators and our threads of inquiry as well. We were particularly interested in Latif Timbers’ work as a gestation consultant, for example. We wanted each interview to reflect the arc of a narrator’s life. We did not approach any interview with a specific set of questions, and we tended to follow each person’s story as it unfolded before us. Before starting each recording, we let narrators know that they could stop at any point and could refuse any questions they did not want to answer.

  We have lightly edited all interviews, including breaking up extended run-on sentences. We tried to balance maintaining some sense of the tone of the narrators’ spoken words with our intention to offer a readable text. Occasionally, we add context in brackets; for example, to indicate a narrator is laughing or crying. We decided to only conduct interviews in English because it is the language in which we are most fluent. We hope this effort will inspire many similar works in other languages. We noticed, in editing the transcripts, that some narrators (particularly those from generations close to our own), may have toned down their vernacular forms of speaking—such as AAE—during our interviews. We tried to render those vernaculars faithfully in the transcripts when they appeared in the recordings.

  This written version is accompanied by a multimedia presentation, available as holos for those with aug implants or on screens. We also decided to undertake the unusual choice of a small print run of this text on bound paper sheets. Such nostalgic extravagance was hard to justify, and for the printed version we have restricted ourselves to including only twelve interviews. We thank our print publishers, a small Brooklyn-based collective called Common Notions, that has kept alive this anachronistic but aesthetically elegant method through the difficult years of the civil war. Today, they teach paper-based printing and publishing as an art to young people in the Park Slope Commune.

  About the Interviewers

  As the interviewers and coauthors, we met in graduate school in New York in the tens and have been friends and comrades since. Decades have passed and with them many versions of our lives.

  Abdelhadi had a career as a professor, writing various books on the crisis of the self under capitalism. She maintained a life outside academia as a community-builder, artist, and storyteller. O’Brien, drawing on some prior engagement as an oral historian, became a psychoanalyst in the twenties. She wrote over a dozen nonacademic books, including a series that was influential to the transformation of kinship and caretaking relationships within the commune, once known by the phrase “family abolition.” Both of us stayed active politically, as we were able, across a range of struggles.

  Neither of us were central to the events described. O’Brien, for her part, spent much of the early portion of this period in a military detention camp at Riis Beach. While there, she conducted psychotherapy and taught political theory to her fellow detainees. Abdelhadi spent most of the forties in liberated Palestine, engaging with Arab scholars who were creating new centers for communized knowledge production. In the early fifties, she returned to the Midwest in time to help rioters storm the campus of her former employer.

  After the liberation of the Riis Beach Detention Facility in 2053, O’Brien spent two years supporting the struggle in the Mississippi Delta. Then she returned to Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she joined the Ditmas Commune, serving stints coordinating its robust mental health prog
ram, later its creative activities program, and finally one term on its leadership council. Her current life is devoted largely to meditation and preparation for death. She hopes the present text will be her final public work.

  Abdelhadi also lives in the Ditmas Commune. She finally returned to New York in the mid-fifties after its liberation and is once again O’Brien’s neighbor in Flatbush. These days, Abdelhadi’s appetite for research has waned, and she spends her time reading fiction, writing poetry, and occasionally performing stand-up comedy.

  Oral History, Trauma, and Collective Agency

  Our choice of oral history was deliberate. Oral histories are an opportunity to explore the subject in history; the peculiar and contradictory nature of individual human experience as it occurs during moments of shared collective action. Oral histories are inherently contradictory, unresolved, open, and expansive. Each person brings their own psyche and their own pattern of remembering and forgetting. We came to this project particularly interested in the contradictions of memory.

  In part, our interest in memory reflects our own intellectual development. In our varied roles in life, both of us have become historians, committed listeners, and keepers of a belief in the power of people’s stories. Both of us have engaged in oral history and interviewing repeatedly and have in turn been changed by listening as an art and as a practice. In our prior lives we were both academics, and we have both been shaped, in part, by the theoretical debates that dominated progressive academia in the tens and twenties.2 The theoretical writing of that period attempted—and, we would argue, failed—to reconcile the fragmented and chaotic experiences of the subject with the structural determinations of social forces. What was missing was the collective human agency that would only become possible through global insurrection.

  With the insurrection, human agency entered history in a radically new way. The commune provided what had previously been missing: a collective actor that could rival the large-scale social forces of impersonal market domination. With it came the material basis for a conceptual reconciliation of the long-standing philosophical debates between agency and structure. Individual experience and shared collective action work in dynamic interrelationship to each other, just as they do within the life of the commune. Like the present work, many new histories reflect this methodological breakthrough: simultaneously fragmented and unified, heterogenous and integrated, open and coherent.