What do radical futures look like? How can we employ science fiction to help movements progress? M.E. O’Brien’s recent projects have sought to answer these questions. O’Brien is a writer and speaker on gender freedom and capitalism, from a Marxist lens. In this interview, we discuss her book, co-authored with Eman Abdelhadi (a Palestinian-Egyptian American public intellectual and community organizer), Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 - 2072, and discuss their follow up work through the launch of Project 2052–an ingenious reversal of the infamous Project 2025.
The book is written as history, but set in the future, charting a path towards revolutionary futures in which that is already the case. I’d never before read a book that took this approach to the speculative, that blends genres in such a way that propels you, not just into the future, but into a better future. Everything For Everyone left me with a sense that a better world is not only possible, but achievable, which, given the state of global politics and the rising of fascism across the world, is no easy feat. The book does not just provide a narrative for hope, but shows tangible ways that this could happen—a much needed antidote to despair.
After reading Everything For Everyone, I felt compelled to reach out to M. E. O’Brien to learn more about what inspired her to bring this book into the world. I had never done this before, but I was so struck by the book that I felt I had to. O’Brien and I then met up later that month on a park bench overlooking the water one sunny afternoon. There is so much that can be learned from the way in which O’Brien thinks and writes about radical futures, and I was grateful to have had this opportunity to speak with her. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the impetus behind yourself and Eman Abdelhadi co-writing Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072?
Common Notions
M.E. O’Brien: Eman and I came to write this book out of our shared commitment to revolutionary politics and radical social movements. We thought that it could be fun, worthwhile, and moving for people to flesh out one vague, possible revolutionary future that arises from communist and abolitionist movements and mass struggles that have inspired us.
Q: What do you say to those who say that’s impossible?
O’Brien: It’s hard to say what’s possible and what isn’t, but we live in a very implausible time and unpredictable society, careening from one crisis to another. It seems extremely clear that there is no possible future in which the current social arrangements survive.
The world is unravelling, and new worlds will come of it, in which it might be much worse or much better. Many people can feel that the relative stability for the Global North post-World War II era is coming to an end, and that new futures will share much more with the chaos of people struggling for survival and freedom against the great brutality that we see around the world.
The liberal world of nice citizenship rights and voting rights and stable families and stable jobs that has never been available to most, will be available to almost no one. We are at the end of an era and the future will be fundamentally much more chaotic and those who are more in a position to succeed are the fascists, because they have the closest ties to military, resources, and so on–so the future is radically uncertain. In this context, there will be many opportunities for a common revolutionary break–when enough people say ‘Let’s do something different and let’s win something different,’ when you are up against stable police departments, et cetera—there will be moments of social chaos, ecological chaos, and more—which will show that something really different is possible. I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about collective social movements to find why uprisings spark off, and what I found is really that you can’t predict it, which is probably good. Otherwise, they would find a way to stop it.
In the book, there is a central question about whether it’s possible to get out of capitalism or make real substantive progress [in that direction]. My confidence in this is from my involvement in political mass movements and how to change political consciousness, in survival and camaraderie.
Survival can open up a whole different way for people to love and care and protect each other.
In joining social movements, people struggle in ways not primarily driven by greed and selfishness. I have experienced this over and over again. It happens in natural disasters or in mutual aid networks. People already imagine the unraveling of the social order, and we see this in the proliferation of apocalyptic science fiction.
We hope such an unraveling could be a chance for mass social movements to build a new more caring and loving society, emerging out of revolutionary struggle. That it could change the material conditions of people’s survival, and it opens new ways of caring for each other.
We tried to write it up in a way that wasn’t a completely abstract utopia, and linked it through vague plausible historical events for how we might get from the present to a revolutionary future beyond the state, mass incarceration, capitalism, et cetera. Very few people thought our present was possible! So who knows what is possible.
Writing it helps those who have participated in struggle the last few decades see the future beckoning. Those in the uprisings of 2020 and deep in the Palestine solidarity movement, anti-racist movement, open up a sense that another world could be possible in a way that welcomes and enables people to articulate and imagine how we are in the present. It helps people imagine that our desires are possible.
Q: Why did you choose the format of science fiction to discuss revolutionary futures?
O’Brien: My co-author Eman and I met in a sociology program. I was really into science fiction, and Eman soon developed a love of the genre. Science fiction explores the effects of different social relations. Altered social relations can take the forms of new technology, or a non-human entity of other sorts, or much else; these open and transform the parameters and structures available in society. Science fiction is how to think through social theory, social change, political movements, power and authority, the possibility of different kinds of worlds that can really resonate with Marxism and social theory. I do also write social theory, but fiction can be fun to read, and be a source of joy. Science fiction is an opportunity to think through questions of social change on the one hand, and on the other, the space of pleasure and entertainment and fun to be able to do something creative.
Eman and I came up with the idea to do a sci-fi novel together, so we wrote Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072. It was published in 2022, and has been passionately received.
Q: What did you think about the reception to the book? What do you think it says about the political moment?
O’Brien: The book really spoke to people and resonated with a depth of passion and enthusiasm that completely overshot anything that I imagined. It sold a lot more copies, provoked ardent enthusiasm, and inspired more study groups than I could have ever imagined. This reception speaks to the need people feel to have the chance to articulate something about our shared desires in popular movements.
We protest in the streets, and partake in political uprisings, and confront the horrible things that have been going down the last several years. These actions are articulating something about desire, but we don’t get many chances to name and flesh out those desires. Everything For Everyone was a way we could articulate the world that we heard evoked and imagined from those around us, from comrades. Eman and I tried to write up something of a world that we were a part of collectively fighting for—abolitionist horizons, communist horizons, questions of what trans liberation could really mean, and much else.
It turns out that writing down our own politics and what we learned from listening to the movements around us, to say a bit about what we’re fighting for, really spoke to people and reflected a deep and widespread yearning for articulating and thinking out and imagining these different types of futures.
Q: What keeps you joyful and hopeful in this work?
O’Brien: To imagine possibility is really quite joyful, despite all the trauma and horror of what unfolds over the course of the 2040s [in the book]—the unraveling of racial capitalism is extremely traumatic, but people get out of it.
As [organizer and educator] Mariame Kaba puts it, “Hope is a discipline.” In Black feminist politics there is a long tradition of people being really interested in cultivating hope and optimism in revolutionary futures which is not naïve. I read Kathleen Cleaver when I was really young, where she talked about participation in revolutionary movements as being joyous, and hope as part of revolutionary futures.
There is always so much reason to despair and feel quite lost, but a practice that we can cultivate within each other is that we can open up spaces of non-naïve hope. We are capable of so much, and humanity has such creative solidarity, ingenuity, and love, that these things can be a basis of another kind of world, and we see this in every mass movement. In anti-ICE struggles for instance, you see the level of love and solidarity between people is not based on homogeneity and sameness and long established best friends, but people standing with their neighbors and their coworkers and people they know at their bodegas, migrants and non-migrants alike. We can love and support each other, to cultivate and develop a world worth living in. That’s the kind of hope that is reflected in Project 2052.