Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

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Kawkab Hassan is a Palestinian born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn who cannot find a job and instead finds meaning in travelling to the Levant to participate in the Last Intifada.

The interviewees discuss the effects of climate catastrophe and mass species extinction, the liberation of Palestine, the communization of space, as well as personal stories of revolt, class war, trauma, healing, and politicization.That muscle of Marcuse’s making, so lovingly carved by Fredric Jameson and the descendants of the Frankfurt School into ideal societies and their necessarily impossible referents, is now sold within mass-market tomes, with “hope” and “solutionism” as prepackaged political categories.

The fact that a revolution, like an army, marches on its stomach; the fact that the people who matter are the ones who know how to get people talking to one another, the ones who know how to take care of people and how to cook for a crowd; the fact that the joy of figuring things out together might be partial compensation for the lack of stability—and the more sobering fact there are moments and places in world history where a revolution is possible, and ones when it is not. Lizzie Borden’s documentary-styled film Born in Flames (1983) provided one answer to Ukeles’s question: after the United States’ transition to state socialism, violence against women, unremunerated labor, and homophobia remain rife, even amongst “comrades. The platform cooperative enabled them to advocate for a commitment to realizing concrete forms of democratic ownership: An Uber owned by its drivers. Convincingly, they present us with an ethnography, not of an ideal society, but of a revolutionary one in flux.Humanizing The Economy has a richer description of coops and the their post www history and I would recommend Humanizing The Economy first and Everything for Everyone if you have a fascination with the digital side of cooperatives (open source software, blockchain, digital management tools). It is a book for everyone and a book for our times: read it, share it, but don’t just talk about it. But as Nathan Schneider shows through years of in-depth reporting, there is an alternative to the robber-baron economy hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look. 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.