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.
Introduction: On Insurrection and Historical Memory
Chapter 1. Miss Kelley on the Insurrection of Hunts Point
Chapter 2. Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant
Chapter 3. Tanya John on the Free Assembly of Crotona Park
Chapter 4. Belquees Chowdhury on Student and Worker Occupations
Chapter 5. Quinn Liu on Making Refuge, from Hangzhou to Flushing
Chapter 6. S. Addams on the Church Fathers of Staten Island
Chapter 7. Aniyah Reed on Pacha and the Communization of Space
Chapter 8. Connor Stephens on the Fall of Colorado Springs
Chapter 9. Latif Timbers on Gestation Work
Chapter 10. An Zhou on Ecological Restoration
Chapter 11. Kayla Puan on Growing Up in the North Ironbound Commune
Chapter 12. Alkasi Sanchez on the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly