First, an announcement, then some book thoughts from Marin, one of KRJC’s Research Fellows!
We have some very special news! We’re hosting Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center’s first ever book club!! We’re collaborating with our friends at SPARK Reproductive Justice Now! to bring you a six week study series where we’ll be discussing the book Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. We’ll meet every Tuesday at 4 pm PT/7 pm EST on Zoom starting on 8/25 to chat about that week’s chapters, discuss hand picked supplemental texts, and hear from a few special guest speakers, including authors, artists, and organizers working on some of the central issues in the book. Register for book club and request a book here.
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Everything for Everyone is a speculative novel set after a social and economic revolution has transformed the so-called United States into a network of locally-based, self-governed communes. In this world, everyone’s basic needs are met, no one works for pay, and people navigate conflict and repair without carceral systems. The book is told through imagined oral history interviews of people who were part of the revolution, with O’Brien and Abdelhadi posing as the interviewers.
The format of the book definitely speaks to Abdehaldi and O’Brien’s backgrounds—they are academics, not fiction writers. However, the groundedness of the interview format really works for me as someone who is often suspicious of speculative fiction and fantasy. Because the book is told through conversations, rather than dense, lyrical descriptions or high-drama action sequences, it lends the world they’ve created a sense of realism. When I read speculative fiction, I want my sense of what’s possible for our world to be expanded—I don’t want to just escape into another reality. For that reason, Everything for Everyone really hit home. There are certainly aspects of this story that are far from our current reality: technology that enables anyone to be pregnant, an elevator that goes into space, and, um, the destruction of capitalism, but the world created in the novel is close enough to our own that those developments feel plausible, and that is its magic for me.
The beauty of a novel told as a historical record is that it doesn’t just make a world without capitalism and the state feel possible—it makes it feel inevitable. The events of history often feel inevitable in hindsight, as if they were destined to happen. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us not to fall into this trap, recalling that before the Civil War, for example, the end of slavery would have been unthinkable for most people. Emancipation was not inevitable—it was born from people’s steadfast belief in a reality without slavery, and today we are indebted to those people. Kelley’s point is that what feels inevitable to us now was once someone else’s act of radical imagination.
The power of Everything for Everyone is that it gives us a radically imagined future, however fictional, to stand in that makes the end of our oppressive systems feel pre-destined. The characters in these stories remark at the backwardness of so many of the facets of our current-day society—private insurance, marriage and the nuclear family, working for pay to survive. Hearing the characters’ shock and disgust when they learn of these institutions is deeply nourishing to me. It reminds me that we must make the inhumane, unjust practices of this moment unthinkable to ourselves and to future generations. To do that, we must be able to imagine something else.
These stories are not blueprints for the world to come—they’re fuel for our imaginations. The world of Everything for Everyone is not a utopia. It’s messy, a work in process, and involves hundreds of hours of meetings. There is a lot of suffering and destruction in these pages as well that comes before the birth of the new world, some of which was difficult to read.
But that again is the power of fiction, that it can help us feel rather than just think. We feel stories in our bodies—they move us toward grief, tenderness, anger, and hope. Fiction can give us the felt sense of another reality in a way that theory cannot. Most importantly, perhaps, stories can create room in our bodies for what freedom feels like, and we have to know that feeling to be able to chase it, to build it for ourselves and others.
Everything for Everyone gifted me with a taste of that freedom. I finished the book with an expanded capacity to imagine a world without systems of domination and feel into what that would be like in my body. The book isn’t perfect—it leaves a LOT left unexplored, especially around the identities of marginalized people and how the harms faced by those people would be addressed and healed in new systems. But the book is a place to start to imagine a more free, more loving world, and I can’t wait to see what else we come up with together.
Come to book club to join us in building our imaginations and to hear the rest of the team’s thoughts!
I asked the team a few questions about the book to get started, and here is what they said:
What was your biggest takeaway from the book?
What from this book do you hope will happen in the next 50 years? What do you hope won't happen?
What do you hope to get out of book club?
Khye:
My biggest takeaway is that I’m not dreaming big enough! And that our imaginations are often limited by the world we’ve grown up in. It’s really true that we can’t be what we can’t see, and this book has given me ideas for the world I would love to build for the next generations and how that world can come to pass if we expand our minds and methods.
I hope we center the needs of youth separate from their caregivers/families of origin. I love the idea of young people having a say in who they live with, who they spend time with, and the families they build. I hope we decenter space exploration in the next 50 years! And I hope cults aren’t still harming people in the future.
I hope we can gather together and share our opinions and desires for the world we want to build. I hope this club can be a space for us to practice the world we’re creating and refine all of our ideas and politics in real time.
Jasmine:
I am reminded that there are alternative ways of existing in this world. Some of what feels like our wildest aspirations are quite possible. Knowing that someone can imagine it and write about it makes it feel all the more real - and closer!
I hope to see more opportunities to let youth govern themselves. I hope we don’t experience (more) times where folks are purposefully disconnected to the internet / outside sources + people that are living life differently and showing folks they can too.
I hope book club brings a lot of questions, discussion, friendship building, and the desire to host another series!
Alanah:
Maybe also that I am not dreaming big enough? I opened the Communization of Space interview expecting something about opening up our homes, not about entering space lol. Honestly, the book stressed me a bit with how unfamiliar everything is–but I think that is the point. The ugliest named things were the memories of our current reality, a pivotal reminder that this can become what’s unfamiliar to me.
By 2076, I hope that the gestation room–with the garden and library exists. I’m sure it will. And no more guns, no need for all that.
With book club, I’m ready to read alongside people and be exposed to varied reactions to where the interviews take us! I hope to end it feeling that I know something more certain about the future we are approaching.
Thanks for reading and we hope to see you on August 25th!!! Register here.
With revolutionary love,
Marin Hart and the rest of the KRJC Team
