A must-read! Even though what the hell is a must-read, this concept, darn, abolish it.If you're into Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower or any of the Le Guin Sagas, but can already recount their plots backwards in your sleep because they are so much discussed in that lil degrowth bubble of ours: here is some fresh and deslish tempeh-steak of speculative fiction for you.
Eman Abdeladi and M E O'Brian stage themselves as two academics from the close future (in which the insitution of academia has fallen, but anyways, thats a sideplot) doing an oral history project about all of our wettest dreams: the revolution, big time. Prisons, Money, States, Family - abolished! Palestine - liberated! Everything - communized. Only Australia is still an enclave of capitalism in which oddities like private property and profit accumulation survived. In the rest of the world decentralized, participatory decision-making bodies govern communities, people live in constellations of the wildest sorts according to their needs and wishes, everyone who can does 3x3 hours of work in ever changing contexts and settings and 2x2 hours of community work, transformative justice circles do conflict resolution procedures, co-parenting between groups of varying numbers of people, trauma therapy is daily bread and humans steward land in harmounious ways.
Exciting is, we also get to know how we eventually got there. Through twelve interviews with former military operatives, skin workers (what we now call sex workers), rave organizers, forest conservationists, kids who grew up in the commune, and facilitators of assemblies, the authors offer a prismic view of the tumultuous times between today's hegemony of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy and the juicy piece of world thereafter.
But, fair warning to all those hardcore transformation-strategy-masturbators out there: you won't find your satisfying answers about how global revolution finally really worked. The book doesn't really dig into how existing institutions-governments, corporations, militaries-which weakens its exploration of the mechanics of revolution. There's a lot left to the imagination when it comes to resistance: what obstacles were overcome, and how? And while it touches on the challenges of organizing the new society, it doesn't dive deeply into the nitty-gritty. How is power distributed? How are decisions made? How is conflict mediated?
There's so much room here to explore, and the book skips over these details, leaving some of the world-building feeling less credible than it could be. The arguably most repelling feature is the space elevator and communisation of space to make space accessible to all. Better than Musk's ideas for space, ye sure, but, why the hell do we need space tourism at all? Imo the book here seems to be 'absolute decoupling is gonna work-level optimistic about thängs.
All in all, I was fully sucked in by this book and excited for the upcoming AltShift because... who wants to read a chapter with me in the wooods?
Arratz