By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.
Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.
On the one hand, this is fictive academic non-fiction, with the conceit of oral histories to make it direct and also obviate even a latent plot or characterization. On the other hand, it is communal utopia spun from our current set of dystopias, centering imagined voices young and old across a range of questions of care and process and identity and standing up together as our world came apart and we needed each other.
you can have a little bit of prefigurative politics (as a treat)
4 stars
This was super fun. I thought the oral history format was a really clever format choice, like looking into a giant construction site through little windows cut in the scaffolding and only kind of being able to grasp the depth of the pit. I kept thinking about KSR's New York 2140 and how it couldve been the same world almost, but with more grittiness and trauma and explanations about how we get from here to fully automated gay luxury space communism. I'm pretty sure I have big political differences with the authors, but I seriously enjoyed it nonetheless. I'd really appreciate seeing more of this kind of fantastic dreaming from those who want a drastically different world.
Favourite book of the year for the disillusioned revolutionary Inside of me.
5 stars
This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.
being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.
I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.
I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.
I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits …
This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.
being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.
I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.
I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.
I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits of both the authors through their interviews and in the characters they are interviewing.
It's really a great book, at moments touching me and making me want to cry or laugh and taking me away to a vision of the world where the commodity form, capitalism and the state have been abolished almost the world over (sorry Australia, all the reactionaries, capitalism and fascists bunkered down there).
