Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 w/ M. E. O’BRIEN & EMAN

·44 min·2 clips

The book imagines care as the currency of the future, while the speakers name police violence and COVID-19 trauma.

Emi O'Brien opens the conversation by placing Everything for Everyone inside the New York Commune imagined across the 20 years named in the title. O'Brien and Abdelhadi describe a world shaped by genocide, ecocide, disease, fascism, and viral capitalism. Rather than turning that landscape into a simple dystopia, they shape the book as a mosaic of oral histories, with each of them taking on the role of interviewer. The form gives the project a collaborative, documentary feel and makes the political world feel lived in rather than merely outlined. It also lets the book move beyond New York as a setting and into a wider historical and global horizon. They talk about how the structure creates room for generations, trauma, and the long afterlife of struggle. The conversation comes back again and again to social reproduction, care, and the work that makes collective life possible. O'Brien reflects on what the book emphasizes and what it leaves less fully developed. She notes that some elements, including ecological defense and ecological restoration, could have gone further. That choice is framed as a deliberate limit rather than a flaw. Abdelhadi and O'Brien both present the book as an invitation rather than a closed system. They want readers to imagine their own chapters and their own interview subjects after the revolution. The discussion points to how the book has already been used in teaching and as a writing prompt. They also describe plans for a website where people can submit stories set in the world of the book. The conversation turns to the state and to the relationship between the state and the market. O'Brien argues that political change can arrive faster than people expect when crises build on one another. That idea gives the book its urgency. It is not a fantasy of easy victory. It is an argument that the left, though marginal and under pressure, still lives inside conditions where abrupt transformation is possible. The closing note is one of disciplined hope, shaped less by optimism than by a refusal to treat collapse as destiny.

As heard by us

A serious, searching conversation about survival, care, and political imagination.

M. E. O'Brien and Iman Abdelhadi use the New York Commune to think through what it takes to live under fascism, ecocide, disease, and viral capitalism.

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Why you'd press play

You want a political future imagined as lived history, not apocalypse wallpaper.

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