But rather than a tidy solution, pain and anger at the destruction is felt more than anything else, and the reader does not get a clear, straightforward narration. There are some half-hearted attempts at “future lingo,” and only some of them work (“sib” as short for sibling works, “fec” replacing shit in common vernacular does not) in a world where everyone otherwise speaks pretty much like it’s 2022. In May of this year, soon after I got my review copy of this book, I was parked with my partner in their old sedan in the parking lot of Nour Cafe. The book sidesteps the second problem by, quite simply, not really being a novel; the individual characters do not, in Cat Valente or David Mitchell fashion, cross paths. The novel is dense, almost too heavy with details where existing infrastructure and social relations are imagined anew under freedom, a positive reworking that transforms the muck of our world into salvage for the revolution.

Based on years of reporting, Schneider chronicles this economic and social revolution — from the taxi cooperatives in Colorado that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay; to the mayoral administration in Jackson, Mississippi, that is giving citizens control over their economy; to the French hacker who is building a cooperative version of bitcoin; to the electricity coop members who are propelling an outdated system into the future. Everything for Everyone offers a much-needed future beyond destruction — a future where the work of kindness and cooperation is rewarded above all else. The platform cooperative enabled them to advocate for a commitment to realizing concrete forms of democratic ownership: An Uber owned by its drivers.The book is utterly plausible as the archival project it claims to be, while also telling gripping stories and slipping in details to delight sci-fi fans (a space elevator in Quito! In an effort to jumpstart the war economy once again, the US has engaged in a disastrous and demoralizing war against Iran which has left its powers seriously depleted. Social reproduction is the phrase that Marxists use to talk about all the (unpaid) things we have to do to make sure that the capitalists have workers to employ. And although it’s focussed on the New York commune, the book doesn’t forget that the rest of the world exists; the entirety of the second chapter is about the liberation of the Levant, while other chapters cover the situation in China.

Even the longest insurrections, of May 1968, dotted many lands with little communities (like the Whole Earth) that slowly transformed into Silicon Valley, where dreams of geo-engineered utopias came to rest. This is not a book of theory, though it touches on theory regularly, but a matter of fact account of a number of real world, present day experiments in cooperatives.People have always fought to forge economies based on cooperation and creativity, rather than domination and exclusion. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).