Everything for Everyone

Posted

Everything for Everyone

After reading Half-Earth Socialism, I’ve been searching for similar books which depict a possible utopian post-capitalism future. This one explains the future via a set of interviews set in New York. Since I’ve never visited the city, sometimes it was hard to geographically locate what they were talking about, but it’s not that important to understand what’s being explained.

The book has a lot of interesting ideas, and as a bonus, I even learned about wetware computers 🙃.

Highlights

O’Brien: What does the commune mean to you? Kelley: 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. — p. 35

The Free Assembly of Crotona Park was an early reflection of that intuition that people needed to live and work together in one place to sort things out. — p. 72

I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” — p. 130

Nostalgia is a toxin for that expansive visioning that needs to happen. We need to be done with nostalgia. — p. 216