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benmoy 's review for:
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
by Eman Abdelhadi, M.E. O'Brien
Speculative fiction is not easy to write, I'm sure. Illustrating political ideology via fiction is perhaps even harder. As such, I was prepared to set aside a certain amount of criticism of this work, as I outright hunger for discussions and representation of our imagined futures as communists. It's why I've taken an ever-increasing interest in economics: while even some opponents of socialism/communism will agree with the general thrust of our aims (from, perhaps, a moral standpoint), most still see the various strains of leftism as hopelessly utopian. My reading on economics has confirmed otherwise.
I'll start with the highest praise I can give this book: the final chapter hints at an iterative process of production, distribution, and consumption determinations made through collective discussion and democratic decision making aided by technology, which is what (after reading the Group of International Communists and Robin Hahnel) I think has the best chance of taking us over the finish line while holding to the best of what Marx outlined in his most explicit discussion of a potential world beyond capitalism, Critique of the Gotha Program.
It also, however, accomplishes this via AI run on sentient algae servers in thrall to humanity. Which is sort of the double-edged sword honed throughout this book: every progressive, social-justice-minded suggestion of a way forward as a society bears more than the "birthmarks of capitalism"--it more-often-than-not is influenced by, hints at, or is in part a caricature-level representation of the invented "woke agenda" right wingers are always raving about presented as desirable by the authors, who are admitted academics. These authors clearly have a certain level of guilt about academia, but cannot help reproducing its detached navel-gazing qualities as they invent characters who have experienced multiple intersecting forms of oppression and exploitation.
I was utterly disappointed with this aspect of the book and found a few chapters downright disturbing in their attempts to appeal to radical liberalism and the type of adult-onset oppositional defiance disorder politics found in terminally online "leftist" circles.
The first interview subject is a Black transwoman who did survival street sex work under capitalism that left her abused, addicted, and houseless, and her responses are written in a strange, inconsistent, cringe-worthy AAVE that reminds me of the infamous rewrite of Sojourner Truth's stirring speech. It concerns her reluctance to retire from selling/trading/offering sex because "everyone wants a way to contribute." This turned my stomach: one can only assume the authors do not think the most oppressed and exploited people in the sex trade under capitalism (overwhelmingly Women of Color, many transwomen, disabled women) will have much to offer to the revolution besides their bodies' capacity to bring sexual pleasure to others (traditionally, pre-revolution, men, with no reason to think that will change immediately unless the insurrections somehow erase the history of the patriarchy altogether). I have to wonder if this piece was co-written or reviewed by a Black person, as the explanation from the introduction that other academics typically edit AAVE responses as the reasoning that the vernacular appears here doesn't work for me. What might have been seen as virtuous if this interviewee was not a fictional character written by non-Black authors becomes a headscratcher at best, and a real cause for concern at the worst. It would also be nice if anyone who has done street work weighed in on this (again, I'm unaware), given the authors insistence on speaking on behalf of the most oppressed among a group (the so-intentionally-broad-as-to-flatten-any-distinction term "sex workers"). While other readers seem to like the term "skinner" or "skinwork" for people doing "decommodified sex work," I find it perhaps even more dehumanizing than anything aimed at people in the sex trade under capitalism, personally. Furthermore, if there is no commodity form, and people are "choosing to do sex work" then it's not actually "sex work," is it? Decommodified work is simply human activity. Sex trade expansionist liberals seem to think those of us who want abolition are trying to control who people have sex with, but the fact is that pity sex for people who "can't get a good fuck" is not the same as what is referred to as "sex work" under capitalism, so it's not of real concern to someone like me who simply wants to end the oppression and exploitation that makes up the majority of the trade under capitalism.
That said, introducing physical sex acts into therapeutic spaces is a huge red flag to me, because of the need (even in a world that eschews hierarchy) for someone to be vulnerable to and the inclination to feel beholden to a therapist. As Jo Freeman discusses in the Tyranny of Structurelessness, an attendee/therapist relationship may not have a *formal* power dynamic in this new world, but it certainly has the capacity for one to emerge by virtue of the activity. It is particularly disturbing to me that one of these authors is a therapist and is the one who appears as the interviewer here.
This interviewee ends the chapter saying "Somewhere inside I'm still the girl I was when I first came back from Chelsea. I want everyone to love me, everyone to see how beautiful I am." I found this devastating, but not for the reasons the authors intended. I kept wondering if this brave new world could offer her a therapeutic space to unpack that, preferably one that doesn't contain a "comrade" she's never met who is there to fuck her.
While the first chapter is the hardest to get through, as it codifies the gendered and racialized experience of the sex trade for the most oppressed and exploited under capitalism as a slightly altered component in a world where we also have augmented reality and elevators to space, the subsequent chapters all contain their own cringe-inducing moments of radical liberalism inspired by the authors' academic deconstructions of all things normie. The book is also incredibly inconsistent.
The blood family unit was toxic (but the worst thing colonialism and imperialism did was break up and kill members of blood family units). People just "family" each other now (no explanation of what this verb means).
Certainly is cert. Shit is fec (short for "feces" although our first interviewee is not allowed to be smart enough to know what feces is apparently). But ill is still used as slang. Chaps has been brought from the UK to America. America is still America and New York and other capital cities retain their names, but Palestianians have regained all their names (we do meet one indigenous person in the Americas, who spends most of the interview hallucinating because of Army-installed tech in his head in a strange spiritualism-through-capitalist-oppression moment).
Couples were toxic (characters who helped kickoff networks of communes can't imagine having to split up chores with a live-in partner). No one is straight, but it is still worth mentioning who is gay, bisexual, asexual, etc for some reason. No one is cis, but everyone's transness is dissected as if it's the 2020s. Gender is the only thing that hasn't been abolished in fact: you can get nanobots to remove whatever body parts you don't want anymore, though what dysphoria might look like in a world that has done away with gender *roles* and gender oppression is not at all explored.
Religion was toxic (but could be liberatory if one is the right type of Christian, Muslim, or Bhuddist).
Bipolar doesn't exist anymore as a diagnosis, schizophrenia does. The old methods of addressing mental health were insufficient and regressive, but people read old books on psychoanalysis so they can deem themselves therapists. Everyone is in therapy.
Parents who birthed children taking care of them in the early days was regressive, so now all infants are deposited into a large nursery and anyone can take a shift being responsible for tiny, vulnerable babies.
Anyone can source and acquire a womb - from where? Presumably people born with wombs, but by what process these are removed and implanted is left up in the air in another shudder-to-think moment for anyone who has paid attention to reproductive rights in the present (past).
Privatization of the space race and the millions and billions spent on the infrastructure necessary to colonize the moon was awful. Therefore, denizens of the new word have taken space exploration public with plans to colonize Mars(???)
Human-led destruction of the ecosystem through new technologies we barely studied and understood fully was awful. So the communards are bio-engineering new species and stocking new ecosystems with them(???)
And so on, and so on. It is a world that is burning, where some people cobble together a life and others go to dance parties with designer drugs or build elevators to space with resources. It's a world where some people understand how their neighbors and their neighbors' communication with people elsewhere shape decision making, and some don't. It's a world where sex is owed by certain numbers of "the girls", with people desperate to change themselves using tech and entertainment, with people who live most of their lives on the internet; a world where we use vast armies of sentient non-human life forms to provide for human needs, a world with space exploration and the hope to bring humanity to settle among the stars. In short, it's a world that's a lot like ours, but where everyone eventually works things out, mostly enough to agree to disagree and do their own thing. Post-apocalyptic, post-scarcity, post-capitalist, post-communist, postmodern.
Looking back at the introduction, the stage was set early on: the authors, presumably writing after the interviews were conducted, explain that there was no socialist transition, there was a "nihilistic" undercurrent to the insurrections, and that the "organized left" of the 20s was only marginally involved with the transformation of the world. "Communists" pre-dating the revolution are mentioned here and there, but the idea is that it was people with no interest in politics who led insurrections. That isn't an inherently anti-communist idea, of course! Communist organizing has as its goal the politicization of people through struggle. "From the masses, to the masses," puts the masses first for a reason (it "centers" the masses in academic activist speak). But I did see a 2020s left in this book--the "disorganized left," you might call it. This book is really fan service for a generation of young kids who are disillusioned with capitalism and discovered radicalism via TikToks and memes.
This wouldn't be as much of an issue (I don't mind being an "old" as the book calls us, or even seen as a normie because of my relationship status or my love for my immediate blood relatives or whatever) except that the implication of each book's interview is that lefties of the 2020s shouldn't/can't/need not actually do anything: the introduction and its illustration through these fictional interviews are effectively a no-confidence vote on the capacity of humans to save their communities through organization and solidarity *prior* to the moment after total collapse, when we are forced to try to pick up the pieces. Who among us would survive, and what would be left of us to save? There is no mention of disabled comrades that I recall. Non-confrontational/"neutral" olds who did not take part in the new world immediately are invoked either as heroes with redemption arcs that "came around" or pitiful creatures left to mourn what joy they found in the old world and presumably fade away.
The truth is that I want more books with the stated aims of these authors to exist. I can't fathom ignoring the foundations provided by Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin in discussing things like race, gender, and class in ways that are nuanced, subtle, and blend seamlessly into moving stories of fully-developed people, but it doesn't even seem like there was an attempt here.
This is a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism meme, but without the automation, luxury, or the abolition of gender norms and need to define sexual orientation that made those fun and frivolous. The only thing I see this inspiring is disorganization - why not just wait for collapse like all these people? Surely it will work out.
Well that's it for this review. Be sure to grab your complimentary handjob from "the girls" as you make your way to the dance barge for the sojourn to the reclaimed Blue Origin launchpad. I'm sorry you didn't have time to say goodbye to your 20 parents or 5 friends with benefits. If you were close to any of them or whatever (ew) we can cue up some invented footage of you guys together that we can transmit to your auggie bugs via sentient algae. If you choose to gestate during your trip, we hope it goes well and that you maybe have the infant sent to our commune. Bon voyage!
I'll start with the highest praise I can give this book: the final chapter hints at an iterative process of production, distribution, and consumption determinations made through collective discussion and democratic decision making aided by technology, which is what (after reading the Group of International Communists and Robin Hahnel) I think has the best chance of taking us over the finish line while holding to the best of what Marx outlined in his most explicit discussion of a potential world beyond capitalism, Critique of the Gotha Program.
It also, however, accomplishes this via AI run on sentient algae servers in thrall to humanity. Which is sort of the double-edged sword honed throughout this book: every progressive, social-justice-minded suggestion of a way forward as a society bears more than the "birthmarks of capitalism"--it more-often-than-not is influenced by, hints at, or is in part a caricature-level representation of the invented "woke agenda" right wingers are always raving about presented as desirable by the authors, who are admitted academics. These authors clearly have a certain level of guilt about academia, but cannot help reproducing its detached navel-gazing qualities as they invent characters who have experienced multiple intersecting forms of oppression and exploitation.
I was utterly disappointed with this aspect of the book and found a few chapters downright disturbing in their attempts to appeal to radical liberalism and the type of adult-onset oppositional defiance disorder politics found in terminally online "leftist" circles.
The first interview subject is a Black transwoman who did survival street sex work under capitalism that left her abused, addicted, and houseless, and her responses are written in a strange, inconsistent, cringe-worthy AAVE that reminds me of the infamous rewrite of Sojourner Truth's stirring speech. It concerns her reluctance to retire from selling/trading/offering sex because "everyone wants a way to contribute." This turned my stomach: one can only assume the authors do not think the most oppressed and exploited people in the sex trade under capitalism (overwhelmingly Women of Color, many transwomen, disabled women) will have much to offer to the revolution besides their bodies' capacity to bring sexual pleasure to others (traditionally, pre-revolution, men, with no reason to think that will change immediately unless the insurrections somehow erase the history of the patriarchy altogether). I have to wonder if this piece was co-written or reviewed by a Black person, as the explanation from the introduction that other academics typically edit AAVE responses as the reasoning that the vernacular appears here doesn't work for me. What might have been seen as virtuous if this interviewee was not a fictional character written by non-Black authors becomes a headscratcher at best, and a real cause for concern at the worst. It would also be nice if anyone who has done street work weighed in on this (again, I'm unaware), given the authors insistence on speaking on behalf of the most oppressed among a group (the so-intentionally-broad-as-to-flatten-any-distinction term "sex workers"). While other readers seem to like the term "skinner" or "skinwork" for people doing "decommodified sex work," I find it perhaps even more dehumanizing than anything aimed at people in the sex trade under capitalism, personally. Furthermore, if there is no commodity form, and people are "choosing to do sex work" then it's not actually "sex work," is it? Decommodified work is simply human activity. Sex trade expansionist liberals seem to think those of us who want abolition are trying to control who people have sex with, but the fact is that pity sex for people who "can't get a good fuck" is not the same as what is referred to as "sex work" under capitalism, so it's not of real concern to someone like me who simply wants to end the oppression and exploitation that makes up the majority of the trade under capitalism.
That said, introducing physical sex acts into therapeutic spaces is a huge red flag to me, because of the need (even in a world that eschews hierarchy) for someone to be vulnerable to and the inclination to feel beholden to a therapist. As Jo Freeman discusses in the Tyranny of Structurelessness, an attendee/therapist relationship may not have a *formal* power dynamic in this new world, but it certainly has the capacity for one to emerge by virtue of the activity. It is particularly disturbing to me that one of these authors is a therapist and is the one who appears as the interviewer here.
This interviewee ends the chapter saying "Somewhere inside I'm still the girl I was when I first came back from Chelsea. I want everyone to love me, everyone to see how beautiful I am." I found this devastating, but not for the reasons the authors intended. I kept wondering if this brave new world could offer her a therapeutic space to unpack that, preferably one that doesn't contain a "comrade" she's never met who is there to fuck her.
While the first chapter is the hardest to get through, as it codifies the gendered and racialized experience of the sex trade for the most oppressed and exploited under capitalism as a slightly altered component in a world where we also have augmented reality and elevators to space, the subsequent chapters all contain their own cringe-inducing moments of radical liberalism inspired by the authors' academic deconstructions of all things normie. The book is also incredibly inconsistent.
The blood family unit was toxic (but the worst thing colonialism and imperialism did was break up and kill members of blood family units). People just "family" each other now (no explanation of what this verb means).
Certainly is cert. Shit is fec (short for "feces" although our first interviewee is not allowed to be smart enough to know what feces is apparently). But ill is still used as slang. Chaps has been brought from the UK to America. America is still America and New York and other capital cities retain their names, but Palestianians have regained all their names (we do meet one indigenous person in the Americas, who spends most of the interview hallucinating because of Army-installed tech in his head in a strange spiritualism-through-capitalist-oppression moment).
Couples were toxic (characters who helped kickoff networks of communes can't imagine having to split up chores with a live-in partner). No one is straight, but it is still worth mentioning who is gay, bisexual, asexual, etc for some reason. No one is cis, but everyone's transness is dissected as if it's the 2020s. Gender is the only thing that hasn't been abolished in fact: you can get nanobots to remove whatever body parts you don't want anymore, though what dysphoria might look like in a world that has done away with gender *roles* and gender oppression is not at all explored.
Religion was toxic (but could be liberatory if one is the right type of Christian, Muslim, or Bhuddist).
Bipolar doesn't exist anymore as a diagnosis, schizophrenia does. The old methods of addressing mental health were insufficient and regressive, but people read old books on psychoanalysis so they can deem themselves therapists. Everyone is in therapy.
Parents who birthed children taking care of them in the early days was regressive, so now all infants are deposited into a large nursery and anyone can take a shift being responsible for tiny, vulnerable babies.
Anyone can source and acquire a womb - from where? Presumably people born with wombs, but by what process these are removed and implanted is left up in the air in another shudder-to-think moment for anyone who has paid attention to reproductive rights in the present (past).
Privatization of the space race and the millions and billions spent on the infrastructure necessary to colonize the moon was awful. Therefore, denizens of the new word have taken space exploration public with plans to colonize Mars(???)
Human-led destruction of the ecosystem through new technologies we barely studied and understood fully was awful. So the communards are bio-engineering new species and stocking new ecosystems with them(???)
And so on, and so on. It is a world that is burning, where some people cobble together a life and others go to dance parties with designer drugs or build elevators to space with resources. It's a world where some people understand how their neighbors and their neighbors' communication with people elsewhere shape decision making, and some don't. It's a world where sex is owed by certain numbers of "the girls", with people desperate to change themselves using tech and entertainment, with people who live most of their lives on the internet; a world where we use vast armies of sentient non-human life forms to provide for human needs, a world with space exploration and the hope to bring humanity to settle among the stars. In short, it's a world that's a lot like ours, but where everyone eventually works things out, mostly enough to agree to disagree and do their own thing. Post-apocalyptic, post-scarcity, post-capitalist, post-communist, postmodern.
Looking back at the introduction, the stage was set early on: the authors, presumably writing after the interviews were conducted, explain that there was no socialist transition, there was a "nihilistic" undercurrent to the insurrections, and that the "organized left" of the 20s was only marginally involved with the transformation of the world. "Communists" pre-dating the revolution are mentioned here and there, but the idea is that it was people with no interest in politics who led insurrections. That isn't an inherently anti-communist idea, of course! Communist organizing has as its goal the politicization of people through struggle. "From the masses, to the masses," puts the masses first for a reason (it "centers" the masses in academic activist speak). But I did see a 2020s left in this book--the "disorganized left," you might call it. This book is really fan service for a generation of young kids who are disillusioned with capitalism and discovered radicalism via TikToks and memes.
This wouldn't be as much of an issue (I don't mind being an "old" as the book calls us, or even seen as a normie because of my relationship status or my love for my immediate blood relatives or whatever) except that the implication of each book's interview is that lefties of the 2020s shouldn't/can't/need not actually do anything: the introduction and its illustration through these fictional interviews are effectively a no-confidence vote on the capacity of humans to save their communities through organization and solidarity *prior* to the moment after total collapse, when we are forced to try to pick up the pieces. Who among us would survive, and what would be left of us to save? There is no mention of disabled comrades that I recall. Non-confrontational/"neutral" olds who did not take part in the new world immediately are invoked either as heroes with redemption arcs that "came around" or pitiful creatures left to mourn what joy they found in the old world and presumably fade away.
The truth is that I want more books with the stated aims of these authors to exist. I can't fathom ignoring the foundations provided by Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin in discussing things like race, gender, and class in ways that are nuanced, subtle, and blend seamlessly into moving stories of fully-developed people, but it doesn't even seem like there was an attempt here.
This is a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism meme, but without the automation, luxury, or the abolition of gender norms and need to define sexual orientation that made those fun and frivolous. The only thing I see this inspiring is disorganization - why not just wait for collapse like all these people? Surely it will work out.
Well that's it for this review. Be sure to grab your complimentary handjob from "the girls" as you make your way to the dance barge for the sojourn to the reclaimed Blue Origin launchpad. I'm sorry you didn't have time to say goodbye to your 20 parents or 5 friends with benefits. If you were close to any of them or whatever (ew) we can cue up some invented footage of you guys together that we can transmit to your auggie bugs via sentient algae. If you choose to gestate during your trip, we hope it goes well and that you maybe have the infant sent to our commune. Bon voyage!