An Oral History of the New York Commune: 2052-2072

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.