AA: Okay, let's jump into the first question. Please introduce yourself in any way you would like—your name, pronouns, location, occupation, and any other identities important to you.

MO: I write books as M.E. O’Brien, which is close to my name. I have a book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and The Communizing of Care, a non-fiction book of communist theory that is related to the topic. And I co-authored a science fiction novel with my best friend Eman Abdulhadi, called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052 to 2072.

I work as a psychoanalyst and a psychotherapist. I've been doing that for about six years or so. This is my office. I work in private practice and in analytic training, and I teach at NYU occasionally on queer Marxism. In terms of identity markers, probably the most relevant one is that I'm trans, I'm a trans woman, and there's lots of other things about my life that might or might not be relevant depending on how the interview goes. I use she and her pronouns. I live in Brooklyn, and we're in Midtown Manhattan right now.

AA: Thank you. 

MH: Sweet. Our next question is about your experience with family growing up, because we're interested in those formative experiences for people and their relationship to how they view their care structures now. Feel free to skip if you don't want to answer. I'm curious about your home life during childhood, if you grew up in what you would call a nuclear structure, and what that was like for you. 

MO: When doing book tours about family abolition, I've always been quite resistant to speaking too much about my own family structure. In terms of the contemporary family life I'm in, one of the ways that I articulate that is that my family seems very non-traditional and radical and idyllic, where several trans people are involved in raising a child together. I'm not dating any of the other parents, and there are three households. But it's this way due to a series of divorces and negotiation about questions of custody and role in our child's life. This speaks to me that there's so much idealism and romanticism around family, and of course we have a great desire to put together sane, loving, supportive, caring non-traditional radical familial structures, and once in a while stumble into it, but that often those really deliberate efforts, although they're much better than not trying, run into all sorts of material problems. The actual structure of people's family lives is so structurally constrained and faces the chaos of racial capitalism, market dependency, and the unfolding chaos of our lives in this world, so often our family structures don't reflect our values, they reflect what's happened to us on some level. 

And I think for many people when I was speaking about family abolition, they really wanted to relate to it as a volunteerist guide for how to live counter-cultural, alternative lives. And I happen to have had a counter-cultural, alternative life, so I have great respect for that. I think it's enormously important for people's survival—certainly for many queer and trans people, for many people of color, many migrants. But the conditions under which we create those are not of our choosing, and those structural conditions play such an enormous role that part of my argument is that the nuclear family is an effective survival strategy for reproducing ourselves under racial capitalism, so people wanting to escape from that family structure run into all sorts of difficulties so long as we live in this world as we do. We have to create structural alternatives. 

AA: Yeah. I think everyone has a unique story and that's what we're valuing here. “The personal is political” is kind of what's moving us here, so please share as much as you want to.

MO: So part of my story is encountering something of radical social movements that provided a kind of escape—an escape from loneliness and isolation and the isolation of my nuclear family. And I think that that's part of the personal, right? That we step into these public worlds of struggle and we encounter new relationships there and new ways of being together that were made possible, not just new and different people. Like, oh, I encountered queers, that was great, but also new ways of being that are made possible through the very existence of the struggle itself. And so people discover parts of their psychic lives and their emotional lives and their relational lives when they get involved in the very intense relationships of camaraderie and love that sustain and enable social movements. 

And so there's some way that the family frame, I mean psychoanalytically, is enormously important because so much is structured around our first two years of life, and then so much is structured around our immediate experience of puberty, that the family plays a giant role in constituting a kind of unconscious fantasy. But what it means to love and be loved and be present with others is so tied up with how we circulate in the world, and encountering movements becomes a sort of restructuring of the personal. And that's part of what interests me, that I sort of discovered how to be a person when I entered into struggle with people. 

MH: Yeah, we’re interested in those early experiences of expansive community care, and you spoke to that. It sounds like you experienced community care in the context of social movements and felt or saw how different it could be outside of the nuclear family structure.

MO: I was probably 17 when I was involved in a direct action forest defense campaign called Warner Creek. It existed outside of Eugene in the Cascade Mountains, in, whenever it was, ‘95. And there was a blockade on a road up in the mountains and past the town of Oak Ridge. I would drive around with someone else, I didn't drive, and we would collect donated food at different restaurants around. And then we would drop by this guy, Tim Reame, who was on hunger strike in front of the federal building, and we'd give him some juice because that's all he drank. And then we'd drive up into the mountains with all the food, and a few times we'd drop off the food and then I would stay. I'd stay two or three nights over the weekend. 

There was a protest camp there, and when other people were there, mostly we would work very hard on building the camp—building blockades and other things—and we would lead people on educational nature hikes that were centered around how forests recovered from fires, because this was an area that an arsonist had torched, and they legally were able to log it because it had been burned. So we would talk to people about how the forest regrows and the ways it regrows after a fire. And we would argue about politics. And at that point there was an initial development
of what became anarcho-primitivism and sort of a particular current of eco-anarchism that took shape in Eugene in the late 90s. There was a whole group of people interested in eradicating civilization, and I was kind of on the social anarchist side, because I was very involved in immigrant solidarity work at the time through another group, so I would argue with them about politics. 

So that's one memory of thinking about a sort of practice of collective care. Another is that I was invited to a retreat space by some older Radical Faeries—I was a gay man at the time, but very anxious about my body and sexuality, which, given I later became a trans woman and a lesbian, sort of makes sense. And the Radical Faeries are this sort of hippie, pagan influence, gay male countercultural community around the United States, and in Tennessee and Oregon especially. And I went to their community and we went on hikes together and everyone was really nice to me. I was like 16 and people were really gentle and kind to me. 

And I talked to these older men, and what they talked about was the complete decimation of their entire generation due to AIDS—that many of them had lost more than half their friends over the course of a decade, and how the continuity of what gay politics meant had been completely violently ruptured. And on some level, the rest of their lives they were in a kind of process of collective grieving. 

What it meant for them to be gay men in their thirties and forties and fifties in the early nineties—which was just like three years after the introduction of protease inhibitors and SS and the medication regimes that really kept people alive, that happened in like ‘92 and ‘93—was to be in a life of grief. And some of them had been in ACT-UP and other things, but Oregon was not a huge hotbed of militant AIDS work. But they had all been involved in social services and mutual aid, in these care networks that emerged around advocating for health care—certainly, they were all involved politically—but a huge part of that collective care was caring for someone who was dying and then died. So the collective care was so tied up with the experience of grief. And it was a little bit shocking to me. I had read a little bit about it, but I was 16 or something and it really impacted me. And later, when I was 19, I went to Guatemala and visited these Indigenous communities where half the town had been massacred during the counterinsurgency war in Guatemala and a similar sort of question of what it means to survive is to grieve the fact that everyone you know is dead. And I thought about those two experiences alongside each other.

AA: That's a lot to carry.

MH: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Those are very illustrative of that moment. Moving forward in time a bit, when did you encounter the idea of family abolition and how did you feel when you discovered it?

MO: So I started writing about family abolition in 2012, 2013. I sort of arrived at it theoretically. At that point, no one had written about family abolition much at all since the early 70s, and it was not a part of the Left in any meaningful sense. There was a 2015 essay by two very close comrades of mine, Jules Gleason and Danyal Doyle Griffiths, that sort of inaugurated this current moment of thinking about family abolition. But I was starting to think about it before then. I was in gay communist, queer communist, trans communist circles with both of them. I talked about the essay in Family Abolition and cited them and engaged them. 

But I was starting to think about it, and I had edited a reader on revolutionary feminism for the Communist Research Cluster. I was the lead editor, and there were study groups in like 36 cities and five countries, and we spent a lot of time on it, and it was revolutionary thinking about gender from the 1870s to the 1980s. And it was, in each era, the furthest edges of people in communist and mass, working class struggle being like what would gender freedom mean? How does gender work? What would it mean to be free? So, you know, feminists, anarchists, communists, Black nationalists, Black revolutionaries, and Marxist feminist debates and lots of other things. 

It's easy to read all that material and see it as a sort of continuous thread of people being like ‘we are oppressed, we want to be free, capitalism is part of the problem,’ but I became interested in the fact that the way people understood that changed a lot from one decade to the next. Even people in the same political tradition—they use the same terms, but if you read it very closely, in completely opposite ways, and I found that interesting in part because part of my political project is that defamiliarization of historical legacy. Like, we inherit a particular version of what Leninism is or what gay liberation is or what Black feminism is, and actually if you go back and read the texts really closely, they say something different. And that difference sometimes is actually really helpful to illuminate what was different about the past and illuminate what we don't understand about the present. 

So I became interested in how the ideas have shifted, and I tried to use a theoretical framework to trace what had changed, and I kind of stumbled accidentally on the family as a central focal point over and over and over again of what they were trying to overcome, what they were trying to destroy, and what they were trying to transform. And what they meant by family kept changing. And then I used some communist theory about the history of capitalism in order to develop an argument about the historical emergence, unfolding, and decline of a particular history of the family in a way that allowed me to periodize this revolutionary thinking about gender and make sense of it as a history of capitalism. 

People's ideas about what gender freedom meant kept changing because the structural dynamics of how capitalism shaped the terms of people's intimate lives kept changing. And it kept changing in an unfolding way that had a structure and a history to it that was not just random or chaotic. So the family was the fulcrum through which racial capitalism and people's intimate private sexual lives were changed, either through being excluded from that family or being structured within that family. And as racial capitalism developed, due to some very large scale forces, the terms of who could form families, how those families worked, what they looked like changed. And with it, what it meant to be queer changed, what it meant to be sexually free changed, what it meant to be a woman changed, and so the family became a way of organizing the whole history. 

So I wrote that up as a historical piece, and that became the historical section of my book, but initially it was an essay in this obscure communist theory journal called Endnotes. And then that posed the whole question of what does it mean to go beyond [the family]? If over and over and over again, people are like, the family is what we need to go beyond, where are they right and where would I disagree? And initially when I started working on Family Abolition, I actually had no theory of what family abolition was for the present much at all, and I had to write like half the book before I figured that out. So what would it be to go beyond the family now in an era where very few people can form idealized stable families at all, many people don't really want to, and many people don't think of their intimate lives as being that tightly organized around the family. And for people for whom the family is important, often it's important as a very desperate survival strategy against some really horrible violence. And so trying to construct a theory of what it would mean to go beyond the family now, in our current conjunction of racial capitalism, and then what happens in the present that points us in that direction. 

So I kind of stumbled onto it as a part of reconstructing the history of gender and communism and capitalism. And then right about the same time that I did, about five or six other people, all of whom are friends and comrades of mine, started becoming very interested in family abolition as a political question. A few of them I met later, but those of us in queer communist circles, we crossed paths with each other and we all started working on family abolition within a year or two of each other, often separately, and then crossed paths with each other very quickly afterwards. And then we wanted to make it something that many people on the Left were talking about and we succeeded, but when we started no one was. No one at all. 

MH: I think it's amazing how that happens, where several people have the same idea around the same time—an idea just wants a home and it'll find whoever's going to take it. 

MO: For exactly the reasons I was talking about, the structural conjuncture of the macro-dynamics of racial capitalism and the dynamics of the class struggle enable new ways of thinking to emerge at historical moments. 

AA: Has your thinking about family abolition evolved since the book was published? What do you think of the utility of family abolition as a term—any apparent advantages or drawbacks?

MO: Hm. Well, the drawbacks are quite obvious, which is that it's extremely alienating to large numbers of people, including in some cases people that I have great sympathy for and great solidarity with and great care for. And I believe somewhat strongly that there's a variety of different roles for Left theory to play, and one of those roles is to think about questions of revolutionary transition and to think about the sort of deeper structure of society in a way that doesn't need to be popular. That we might develop ideas that speak to a moment that has not yet fully arrived. To speak to a moment that is inchoate, still emergent, in the present. And so I feel fine writing a book that lots of people are like, what the fuck is that? Including people I like, and I don't get all worked up about it. They don't need to like it. That's fine. The number of people for whom the term is not that threatening is much higher than I expected. I actually thought it would be much less popular than it was. But I meet people all the time on the Left who are like, "Wow, you know, that's interesting. I want to learn more about that." That's great. 

There are a lot of people on the Left who are waging campaigns, as we should, for tenant rights and housing policy and what I call progressive anti-family reforms in the book: changes in legal codes and structure in the family, and obviously anti-fascism. And all of these things appealing—not necessarily to the majority, it depends on the political dynamics of the situation—but to a large portion of a particular constituency, is really strategic, and so using terms that don't immediately set up barriers makes sense to do. So that's also a huge disadvantage. 

I think the advantage for me is that it connects the entire realm of questions of gender and sexuality and private intimacy and care and the trajectory of child rearing and aging, to questions of revolution. There's already some currents like social reproduction theory or whatnot that think about it in terms of the dynamics of racial capitalism, but they don't imply a horizon beyond themselves. There's no escape built into the theory. They sort of gesture at what they know of Marxism to be like, well, obviously what we need is socialism or something. But what that would actually mean care-wise is not invited as a question in that work. 

Posing it as family abolition places it as a question of the revolutionary horizon, and the revolutionary horizon that is in relation to our present and struggles of the present and in relation to revolutionary attempts historically. So it rapidly draws our attention to revolutionary moments around the world, and how did people care for each other in those moments? Which ultimately is the framework that I kind of stumbled on in the book that was not obvious to me going into it, that the key moments are not the deliberate alternative families that people try to form in the present. Deliberate alternative families are extremely admirable! But instead I was focused on how people actually care for each other during protracted, direct confrontations with capital and the state, what I call insurgent social reproduction. During these moments that survival through racial capitalism is breaking down and, due to a limited political rupture, they're able to form an alternative strategy of care with each other. 

AA: How have the principles of family abolition affected your personal care structure and what does that look like for you? 

MO: Not much! I have a radical, really interesting, great family in some ways and that is me trying to find my way to surviving in a very difficult world and trying to figure out how to maintain working relationships with a variety of people and to maintain a role in my kid’s life. And so I think family abolition helps me loosen assumptions about how that should look, how that does look. But as a trans, queer communist, I don't think even without this research I would have had very rigid assumptions about how it looks. I’ve spent a lot of time in group houses and deliberate communities of a variety of sort, and I know a lot of people in poly families and whatnot, so the idea that it's possible to do things in a wide variety of different ways, I think was kind of clear to me. 

The intervention of family abolition is understanding why the family so often takes the form that it does, and why we run into so many difficulties trying to do it differently. And so in some ways I would say my family abolition research draws attention and helps me make sense of the fact that my radical, non-traditional, unusual family has so many of the problems families often have—that these problems are actually very difficult to escape, and and having some peace with that rather than feeling betrayed and really let down by it. Being like well, I'm trying to figure out how to survive, we're all trying to figure out how to survive, and very slowly, and sometimes very quickly, we're trying to build escape routes and we're trying to build the conditions for doing something else with each other. 

So, you know, certainly I think when it comes to family formation or care formation, trying to free ourselves of normative assumptions—cis-normative, heteronormative assumptions—about how things should be structured, and trying to do our best to build the care networks that can help us take care of our children and take care of us when we're old, not presuming that that should take a traditional form and recognizing that when it does take a traditional form, often that's an almost impossible situation for that much burden to fall on one or two people. And then when we're trying to build it, having some grace with ourselves, with how really hard it is. People put together a lot of ideas about how things should work, and then they come up against difficulties and those difficulties are not just about us alone, they're things about how the world is organized. And so rather than it being a sort of catastrophic betrayal of great conflict and disappointment, it can be a difficult situation that we're doing our best to try to figure out how to work through together. 

And then the family abolition framework really draws my attention, in my case, specifically to care practices that happened during moments of struggle. Actually all these things we do to feed and house and care and protect each other when we're in struggle together are all actually the real movement of overcoming the family. And noticing those as they play out in struggles that I'm around. 

AA: I appreciate that.

MH: Yeah, I think that is hugely important. The recognition that even if we're caring for each other in alternative ways that we're still reproducing capitalism, you know? We're surviving, as you say, rather than dramatically altering the system just by not having a nuclear family. And that really struck me from the book, about insurgent social reproduction, that we have to think about what we are reproducing, not just how we are reproducing it. That if reproducing insurgency is not part of the equation then we're not actually doing something radical. And that's a lot of pressure on our care structures, to wonder ‘how is this care helping me be a better radical?’

MO: Or not! Or that the care structures that we have in a non-revolutionary moment, we don't need to demand that they are revolutionary. It's actually really difficult for them to be revolutionary—they can be what they are and we can do our best to work with that. To engage in revolutionary activity in a non-revolutionary moment is actually very hard to do. And figuring out what the practice we can do in the present that opens us on to revolutionary moments is also very hard. That's a question of movement strategy. I think there's some really fundamental things about how racial capitalism is organized that have kind of broken all our assumptions about how that works. And we don't really have a clear idea about how it works. 

There was one other thing. Oh, I remember Sophie Lewis and I were talking about how people respond to our books and I said something, or we said something together, I don't remember exactly, like ‘people want family abolition to be about how to form a better polycule, but what it's actually about is communism.’

AA: [laughs]

MH: Yeah.

MO: Yeah.

MH: I'm still interested in this thread about our care structures being radical and supporting radical action, because that's sort of an assumption of this project. That the work we do, maybe our community care work, or our political work, is reflected in some way in our intimate care structures. And that our intimate care structures can be a practice space for managing conflict, interpersonal dynamics, and stuff in social movement work. And that our intimate structures can also be healing spaces that then help us work better with others and in groups. So I'm curious to hear more about if you feel like in any way your like radical intimate care structures have informed the way that you approach activist work, political work, public-facing work?

MO: Yeah, I think this is a really challenging question, and I doubt that there is a clear, easy to find relationship. Part of what I tried to do in my book and my research is to draw attention to some of the difficulties in easily positing such a relationship. The reproduction of the private household is as important to family politics as the reproduction of a particular kind of sexual and gender configuration within that household. Even a very non-traditional family has to figure out how to pay rent, how to get health care, how to get education, get the clothes cleaned, interface with the neighbors, not run afoul with zoning law, protect themselves from child protective services. It has to navigate this world that places tremendous constraints on us, and that in those conditions it puts on pressure so that, for example, one major feature of family dynamics is that those people with access to outside resources often have outsized power within the home and use that power to personally dominate other people and to get out of doing unwaged labor. So traditionally, that's men with jobs. And patriarchy is a powerful force, so even when women have more resources, men still don't do that much housework, but by and large, access to outside resources plays this huge role in how much power you have within your family.

In the most radical alternative anarchist commune, that still happens! Like who has a rich family that bailed them out? Like all these hippies in the 60s, they all had an incredible sort of anarcho-communist intuitive set of values about the lives that they wanted to lead with each other. And some of them, the ones who were poor, ended up OD’ing and going to prison, and some of them, the ones that had money, ended up opening all these hippie-themed businesses around Eugene where they sold tofu and juice and sprouts. 

And I, at 17 years old, worked at a sprout factory under a racist, sexist, asshole hippie who ran this business to sell sprouts to the hippie food stalls at the Oregon Country Fair and the Eugene Saturday Market! That class violence had reasserted itself over the course of a generation, and no amount of utopian values to do something else provided any escape from that, because surviving in the world is hard and you have resources becoming a small business owner. And your commune mates who don't have those resources get shut out. And so there's some way that these structural dynamics, I think particularly for young people, particularly people early in the formation of an alternative radical community, that these structural constraints really get downplayed because they impose themselves over the course of the life cycle.

Many, many, many progressives don't start thinking about what aging is going to look like until they're in their 40s. And sure, a commune could be an incredible strategy for aging, but also many people settle into careers and start saving money for retirement if they are middle class. And if they're not middle class, they hope their kids can take care of them in a much more conventional arrangement, and that's the structural force. 

So in terms of my life, certainly I have benefited from my immediate family members, my co-parent, who I’m no longer partnered with, and my child, to support me in engaging in political activity. Certainly a benefit from that. And our attempts at treating each other well and with dignity and to navigate conflicts certainly are part of a much broader picture of me trying to figure out how to become a decent person in the world. That makes me, at times, a better activist, or at least a less problematic one. And there are times that each of the members of our household have—and we say our household, everyone lives in different places and whatnot, but we function partially as a unit of reproduction—everyone has participated very actively in different moments of historical insurgency or historical protest. That's taken different forms for different people depending on how old they are, their political histories and what not. 

But I think of the politics that's most exciting to me as one of rupture. These moments that huge numbers of people enter into struggle together in ways that a few months prior would have struck everyone as impossible and totally implausible. And these moments of rupture draw people in and offer really different experiences. 

Okay this is going to be grim, but the basic mechanism as I observe it, is that radicals in their 20s try very hard to form radical communities, and those communities mostly fall apart over the course of 15 to 20 years. And they mostly fall part, often due to the pressures of racial capitalism, that then unfold as internal conflict within the community. But they might keep ties with each other, and then depending on the political dynamics, at some point, someone enters into a moment of great political rupture. If they're lucky, maybe that happens in their late teens, or their early 20s or maybe later. 

So there was one moment in the late '90s around Amadou Diallo’s killing in New York City where a whole generation of radical militants formed radical organizing based non-profits in New York. Or another moment around anti-globalization protests in the late '90s. And a generation came out of the Zapatistas, and many people went down to Mexico, or the George Floyd uprising in 2020. That someone encounters something really extraordinary in these moments of rupture that is profoundly inspiring and profoundly moving and gives a glimpse of the revolutionary horizon, and then they spend the rest of their lives in non-revolutionary circumstances and trying to figure out how to preserve and reproduce some of the values that they encountered there through how they organize their intimate lives. 

And they organize much better households and families as a result of that experience, but it doesn't quite work. It doesn't quite add up. They can’t quite rediscover the experience of what it was actually like to be feeding people in a mass-movement space and being in the streets together and protecting each other and fighting alongside each other. The sense of how it transforms us, what those experiences open up, and when the rebellion dies down, we try to reproduce it within our care structures, and it's very, very hard to sustain. But we're much better for it, and much better for the attempt at doing it. 

So, people trying to do this, I think, is great. Really important. Everyone should try with the very best we can, and there's also something to be learned about how often we fail. And something to learn that is not just about how to do it better, but about something that needs to change.

AA: Do you have that something? Do you know what that is?

MO: Oh, I mean it's the class structure. Yeah, and the really concrete ways that that plays
out. It's the fact that our lives are organized around private property, and we only survive by owning property or selling our labor. And we are all embedded in a system where the profit motive structures the conditions of who lives and who doesn’t. 

AA: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

MH: Rather indulgently, I'm wondering if you have any thought about how we create and sustain that revolutionary energy. I think it's so bleak to imagine that someone has an experience like that early in their life, and then as you said, will try to reproduce it and fail. And I know that that kind of revolutionary action takes so many people and that doesn't happen all the time, and we can't sustain that all the time and we shouldn't. But what are your thoughts on how we move closer towards that? And how, if not by our little experiments in our intimate care structures?

MO: So, in the very obscure French communist tradition that I drew from in writing Family Abolition, called Communization, there is a critique of a tendency on the Left called "programmatism." It's a very silly word for the idea that the Left should come up with an agenda for a program to be accomplished. And that part of our task is selling this program to people, offering it to them, and convincing them that it's the right one, and then implementing it in the world. Either through a series of reforms or through a particular kind of revolution or a particular kind of alternative experimentation. And clearly, programs are very, very important, and we should all do our best to try to figure out what can be done better. And if someone is like ‘Michelle, I'm trying to have a child, do you have advice for me about co-parenting?’ I have so much advice about co-parenting. And of course I could give it to them. Half of it won't be relevant—they will encounter conjunctures that are slightly different and outside of our control and they’re allowed to do something different, but I have so much advice. I was a professional organizer for years. I was in revolutionary organizations for over a decade—abolitionist and communist and anarchist [organizations]. I studied revolutionary history for a long time. I directed policy campaigns for years. I hired organizers and trained them. So I have a lot to say about how we build strategy and how we win, and I can answer all that. Or I can try to answer it and give some advice. 

There's some level at which the entire research project of Family Abolition is partially made possible by suspending those questions. By allowing for the possibility that there might be something useful for the Left to think about that is not what other people should be doing. And in my case, that question is in the revolutionary overcoming of racial capitalism, how are our intimate personal domestic lives transformed? And in attempting to overcome that, what are the ways of loving and being with each other that begin to be implied, and then, how do we understand the persistence and permutations of the family as a force of violence and exclusion over the history of racial capitalism? 

And so those are the three questions: the revolution, the struggle, and racial capitalism and what does it mean to care for each other across all three, in all three contexts? And they're often in relation to each other. And that's a question that I was able to make a lot of progress on by setting aside having any advice for anyone about what kind of family structures they should form, what kind of movements they should form, and how strategy works. And one of the things that the Communization tradition offered me, that I did a lot of thinking about, is how on all three fronts there's been an erosion of a coherent organizing principle to link these things together. 

So in the 1960s, there were large numbers of people that formed collective care projects in order to literally sustain them in revolutionary organizations until the revolution arrived. There were people in group houses so that they could organize full-time with the Black Panthers or communist organizations or as street militants, and they were preparing for the revolution that they thought was a mere few years away. And the care networks they formed were literally strategies so that they could spend 80 hours a week organizing instead of working a job. And they were rushing towards a revolutionary future. And that doesn't work anymore. I mean, I kind of thought that briefly as an anarchist in the '90s, but that doesn't quite add up in the same way anymore. 

I mean, the George Floyd uprising, like a lot of uprisings, emerged with a force and dynamism that completely outstripped the plans of anyone involved at all. Like, lots of people have been doing abolitionist organizing for years—I had been in Critical Resistance for a time—but the force and scale of the uprising was completely beyond what anyone had strategized around at all, and then it died down. And it won some things, and now we're in the middle of a counter-revolution. But the force of the masses, of Black working-class people, drew an entire country, and a world, into struggle. 

I think since the defeat of the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s and the restructuring of global capitalism in the crisis of 1974 and 1975, something broke, and the clear links that used to be establishable between the work we do now, the revolutionary horizon, and the lives that we want to lead, all became very fraught. They all became really difficult to parse out and there are structural reasons that that's the case that have to do with the changing class relation. 

But this is all why my book is not about this question, but I am willing to answer the question. So strategy wise, I think we need to form robust communities where we love and protect each other, where we try to form collective practices of reproduction, like eating together, like caring for each other while we're sick, like helping each other raise children, helping each other when we're aging, and we need those to be robust and thoroughgoing and involve networks of semi-communal housing and to include both a tolerance for a wide variety of personalities and mental health difficulties and violence that people deal with in their minds and an accountability. In Pinko, we did a book about accountability for the real ways that we harm each other and are unprincipled to each other and inflict assault and violence on each other. And there has to be a dialectical tension between these things. 

And in building these communities, they need to have many, many interfaces to radical struggle that expands the power of working class people around the core questions of survival through demanding the resources that we need to survive. So fighting for affordable housing, fighting for health care, pushing back on the violence of racial capitalism, the violence of the police, the family policing system, ICE, Nazis, and doing this in a way that both wins what can be won reform wise, builds autonomous institutions, and deepens a capacity for solidarity with each other that both is able to recruit and welcome in and involve a multi-racial working class in its many, many manifestations, and transforms, giving the opportunity for people more and more to be acting as agents in the world. To feel a sense that they are part of history and collective responsibility and able to act as thinking people to effect change, to be a part of change, and that this needs to include, to some extent, both reform and autonomy and insurrection. But each of these things not just sort of dogmatically on its own terms, but in a way that is attentive to the emergent subjectivity of what it means to be in solidaristic love and care with other people, and to see the world not just as something that happens to you, but something that you can positively envision changing and act on that change. And this is what large numbers of people are trying to do on some level, and it all has its place on some level. 

And it's not what my book is about. And I think there are interesting reasons that that is so hard right now. When we did this book in Pinko, After Accountability, we went and interviewed many of the most radical, interesting, brilliant people we knew involved in questions of transformative justice and abolition and about accountability. And one of the things we found is with a couple of exceptions, most accountability processes fail. Most of the time there's sexual assault, for example, people try to address it, and the community implodes and collapses. It doesn't work. I mean it’s worth trying. Once in a while it works, but we saw so many people, people who have been leading processes for 20 years who are like, ‘I've never seen it work once,’ you know? But you can read our book and through it derive some best practices. 

Then I wrote a conclusion, and it was co-written, but I was the lead author on the conclusion, where I argue that the idea of community under racial capitalism is enormously fleeting because our actual relationships of dependency are on our landlords, our employers, and all the strangers that make the things we need to survive that we exchange money for. And we want to be dependent on our friends and our comrades and our lovers and our neighbors, but mostly we aren't. And if we are dependent on them, it doesn't quite add up much of the time because another class owns the means of reproduction! And so long as the means of production are privately organized and life is structured around a commodity relation, all the communities we form are kind of tacked on top. They're like sand castles, and the tide comes in. 

AA: Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

MO: Yeah. And, of course, everyone wants to do accountability well and there's no possibility of having anything decent without figuring out how to do it well. It's just really hard.

AA: Yeah, it takes a lot.

MH: I really appreciate your very realistic, grounded, broad view of the pressures that we're facing and that it’s worth doing what we can to be good to each other, and also that is not going to solve all of our problems, because we're not each other's problems, the systems are. 

MO: That's very well said.

MH: Yeah, I think that viewpoint is incredibly useful at the outset of this project, so thank you for your perspective and for defining what your work is and what it isn’t.

MO: I spent the late 90s and 2000s in radical communities, while working as an organizer, and I used to be very oriented to how to do things right and how to do things wrong. And I ran into a lot of difficulties. I ran into the very subtle ways that we can be cruel to each other by thinking that we know how to do things right, for example, and that's a really hard problem to overcome because it's not at all obvious how you get past that. 

One thing that I'll say that I think is implied in the way you asked the question and the things that you've said, is that I'm much more interested in radical communities that are organized in a way that prioritize their members to be able to participate in external social struggles against external forces. So like a group house that enables half the people in it to be organizing in abolitionist mutual aid projects is much more admirable to me than a group house that tries to grow its own food, sustain itself in isolation, embody the radical world that we want to live in, although that has its place. I do not think when we form a radical community, that it then inspires other people, that it expands outward in an accumulated way forming the new world. A radical community is radical insofar as it enables the people within it to participate in the broader struggle of the multiracial working class for our collective emancipation.

And so [I’m interested in] the kinds of care projects that don't just take care of the people within them but enable those people to be militants. And in every struggle historically, there are many, many, many projects like that, and they're worth studying and thinking about and sustaining. And there are many, many people who every day go out and fight ICE in the streets and every day go out and visit prisoners and every day go out and feed people at protests. Radical community that figures out how to sustain that and enable that is always, always a crucial task, and often not the first thing that people are thinking about when they say, ‘I want to form a group house together.’ 

So that's a bridge between thinking about insurgent social reproduction and thinking about the sort of deliberate life choices we can make now to try to connect these things. Which is not really what the hippies who moved to Eugene were trying to do, for example.

MH: Yeah, I agree. I'm interested in those kinds of projects that enable participation in social movements too.

MO: I lived in an anarchist group house in West Philadelphia while I was first working as a bike messenger, transitioning, and then working in AIDS services with very poor trans people around Philadelphia living with AIDS. And the group house that I lived in had been previously formed by a group of militant revolutionary pacifist Quakers in the early 80s—a group called Movement for a New Society, that anarchists have written some books about, so people have heard of them, but back then very few people had—who built these houses, these land trust houses, when land was cheap, so that they could sustain a strata of militants who were getting arrested doing anti-nuclear protests every week for years and years and years. 

And they had a whole model for how this would overthrow the state and capitalism. A model that I think is wrong, but an interesting model. And so they formed group houses for that purpose and then institutionalized them into a land trust and then a generation later, this was in the early ‘80s and I moved into this house in 2001, there were no Quakers left. There were some old Quakers still organizing in the periphery of the scene and doing nonviolent work, but it was mostly anarchists. And we were participating in another generation of struggle. There were lots of people in ACT UP Philly. There were lots of people in what later became a whole strata of abolitionist queer projects. And I left that scene because I had a lot of conflict with a couple of my housemates and one of them was terrorizing me, but it was a really admirable project and it had this multi-generational history to it. 

MH: Very cool, thank you.

AA: I have a lot to think about on my train ride home… about what it takes to sustain the revolutionary momentum we get during uprisings and the external part was important too—that we need to reproduce outwards. So I'm at a point of reflection for now. I don't think I have another question except what are you working on next and how can folks support it?

MO: So Eman Abdelhadi, my best friend and comrade and co-author of Everything for Everyone, and I have launched a couple of new projects and one of them is currently welcoming fiction contributions set in the world of Everything for Everyone. So if anyone has read our novel, many people have, and many people are inspired by it, we are inviting people to write stories set in the world of Everything for Everyone. It's called Project 2052 and it's with Common Notions, our publisher, and we're currently asking for monetary contributions in order to pay authors and short story pitches of one to three paragraphs of a story or a poem or a visual piece, a drawing, a photograph. We're paying, unfortunately, because we had some fundraising trouble, very small honorariums of $150, and we’re currently soliciting contributions. 
Our experience with Everything for Everyone was that in every city we went to, we encountered people for whom it was their favorite book. And we are not the most amazing authors in the world, neither of us had written much fiction, but it spoke to something in people participating in mass struggles today and feeling their desire in the present pointing to a revolutionary horizon. That another world is possible, that we feel it in the work that we do right now. 

Everything for Everyone is sort of an invitation, even as a book before this project, for everyone to articulate something about the world that we're fighting for right now, that we desire, that is evoked in our lives and the work that we're doing. And Project 2052 is a chance to provide some structure and support for people to engage in that as a fun activity, as an envisioning exercise, as a movement practice, and to tap into the many people who've done stories in their movement spaces and classrooms and activist workshops inspired by our book. So I wanna ask everyone to donate money to Project 2052, if you have money, and to write story pitches and send them in.

MH: Awesome. I'm so excited to see how the project turns out. I love the book, and to see people's imaginings of what else could be in that world is really exciting. 

AA: Thank you so much. 

MO: Stay in struggle. Good luck. When I inscribe books, the things that I most often write are ‘for the revolutionary horizon in us all’ or ‘stay in struggle with joy.’

MH: Mmm. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today.

MO: Oh, of course. Of course.