Everything for everyone, p.3
Everything for Everyone, page 3
The Commune
Finally, the commune. The word commune was used to describe multiple new social institutions across multiple levels of scale. It identified the unit of immediate social reproduction, usually involving around a few hundred people who collaborated in coordinating food, housing, personal care, and healthcare. This narrow meaning of the word to describe a unit of domestic life is the most widely used. But the word commune also has more abstract meanings. The word was used to mark the general animating political vision that had come to dominate the insurrection, one of human flourishing in total opposition to the state and to capital, a vision of abolition. The commune also characterizes new forms of collective action, new subjectivities of interdependence, and the concurrence of dependence and freedom possible within this new social form. The word marked when various fighting organizations became strategies of shared survival, in the mode of communization. The same word was also used to describe the regional and global democratic planning networks that emerged to coordinate production and distribution, one of the uses of the assembly. The phrase commune links together multiple qualities of this new era of revolutionary society.
There is much to say about the new world that has emerged under the banner of the commune. The project of ecological restoration, climate change mitigation, and biome rediversification has become a massive undertaking, which is discussed in our interview with An Zhou. Though controversial, the establishing of the orbital communes, the lunar settlement, and the building of the space elevator in Quito are tremendously exciting. We are just starting to see the depth of transformations in human relationships to gender, our bodies, our sense of community, our relationship to technology and creative production. We feel profoundly blessed to have lived through the rise of the commune, in New York and across the world. We hope this collection of oral histories offers a small contribution to understanding this extraordinary moment in human life.
—M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
May 20, 2072, Ditmas Commune
1 In transcribing these interviews, we were forced to weigh in on the ongoing debates on the capitalization of the word “commune.” Throughout the text, we capitalize communes when used as a proper name referring to specific residential complexes, such as the North Ironbound Commune or the Harlem Commune. We leave it uncapitalized when describing the abstract social institution. Phrases like the “New York Commune,” or the “Andean Commune,” and so forth are particularly ambiguous. There is, of course, currently no specific institutional entity called the New York Commune. The phrase refers, at best, to a coalitional network of thousands of planning forums, cooperative production councils, residential communes, and the shared principles and relationships that link them. In the end, we opted to leave some such uses capitalized, recognizing the New York Commune is at least an entity in the thoughts and actions of the city’s residents.
2 The anachronism of this introduction’s style will be evident to most readers. Even the word “academia” may be foreign, as it refers to a distinct institutional and social life that thankfully no longer exists. Both of us wrote a great deal in the twenties and early thirties, and much less in our current lives. Our style of writing is unfortunately indebted to this earlier period. Present conditions have effectively abolished academia, incorporating knowledge production throughout society. But as a way of thinking, it persists in the minds and words of some members of the older generation. The concluding interview with Alkasi Sanchez articulately touches on some of these issues.
3 Readers probably understand the word employment to mean activity, but at the time, employment referred specifically to paid work. For centuries, economic survival depended on selling your labor to the highest bidder in order to meet your needs. The collapse of this form of employment was a significant part of the fall of capitalism in the thirties. For more information, please see Understanding Wage Dependency (Andean Commune).
1: MISS KELLEY ON THE INSURRECTION OF HUNTS POINT
Recorded on May 4, 2067, in the Bronx.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, my name is M. E. O’Brien, and I will be having a conversation with Miss Kelley. It is May 4, 2067, and this is being recorded at the Cecilia Gentili Social Center in Hunts Point, the Bronx. Hello, Miss Kelley.
Miss Kelley: Hello.
O’Brien: Tell me about this space we are in.
Kelley: This is the main social center in NYC for skinners. From here, I help coordinate our quarterly citywide assemblies, the network of support hubs across the region, and our communications channels. I helped found this place about five years ago. There are four of us regulars who help keep the center going. We have events here every couple of days. Some skill shares, a lot of discussions, the occasional talk or game. We talk mostly about sex, about work in skincraft, thinking about sex as care. A lot of people come in and out, both from around the Bronx and from all over the Mid-Atlantic.
O’Brien: Why is it here, in Hunts Point?
Kelley: There used to be a stroll here, ages ago. I worked it for so long. When I moved here, in ’41 or thereabouts, it was much different than now. Lots of girls working all up and down the Avenue and all the side streets. This was an industrial area. Auto shops, a big produce market, some rail yards, and a lot of abandoned warehouses. I was having a rough time of things. All strung out. Things were getting tense in Chelsea, and I couldn’t hang around there no more. The police was trying to clear us all out, doing sweeps every night. I got arrested a few times, but they told me that if I stuck around they would do somethin’ much worse to me.
O’Brien: What were the police like back then?
Kelley: Well, they was always brutal. Some of my first memories were being a little one and hearing on the news about big uprisings against police murders. But it got worse. The NYPD took over a lot of the drug trade and were starting to try to take control of street sex work. Chelsea had gotten rough. This one cop would harass me for money every night, and made it clear he was running the strip. I will never forget his face. He put these smudges under his eyes, lookin’ like a football player? I don’t know, it was a thing with the cops he was close to. The cops were basically a gang, just one with a lot of guns. I didn’t understand that ’til much later, but the police also changed how they worked with the richies. The police started wanting payment for anything they would protect. Anyone who wanted to do business in the city learned that game. But I think it also showed things were breaking down at every level.
O’Brien: You left Chelsea and moved to Hunts Point?
Kelley: Yeah, I came up here and been here ever since. I grew up not too far from here, in Soundview. I still talk to my granmom. She had a little place in the Bronx River Houses where I could take showers sometimes. I lived with a few other girls in an old print shop on Cassanova, just a few blocks from here. We did it up nice, like with curtains and a couch and all. We paid rent to a cop who came ’round every month … I was not doing so well back then. Strung out all the time on whatever I could get a hold of. I did a lot of coke, but mostly it was tina that had the hold on me.
O’Brien: Tina?
Kelley: Crystal meth. Spent years tweaking. It got me through the nights. Whenever I went off it, I would sleep for days and I couldn’t handle how dead I felt inside. Eventually I stopped altogether, but not until we were in the middle of the insurrection. Where was I?
O’Brien: What life was like in Hunts Point?
Kelley: Even when I was strung out, I still worked hard. Out on the street every night. I wasn’t too safe, or safe enough, but I got lucky and made it through. It’s much safer now, us running the whole show. Girls got the hubs and the comms, and are always in touch with each other, and no one messes around with us no more. But so many girls died, so many didn’t make it through. We did a memorial project here last year, gathered stories from everyone who was working the streets before the commune. Got photos, vids, and holos of who we could, long personal stories from everyone who didn’t make it. Kind of like you are doing now, an oral history project, sittin’ down with everyone we could. It brought up a lot for me, lots of crying, lots of hugging. It’s good for the younger girls to know about because, they don’t know. They need to know why we have to defend the commune, no matter what it takes.
O’Brien: [Pause] This is a memorial for girls who were killed during the insurrection?
Kelley: A few. But mostly it’s remembering those who died before. Young skinners coming up now have a very hard time grasping the intensity of violence that was just a part of everyday life. There was a lot of beauty, and love, and care, and goodness too, don’t get me wrong. But between all the diseases, and overdose, and so much else. It was just a constant part of life.
O’Brien: Are there any particular stories you would like to share? People you want to have us remember here?
Kelley: Yes, I’d like that. Jamie was my house mother. She took me in and really showed me around the scene. She had so much love, took care of so many girls. She would have these huge group meals. She’d take some abandoned warehouse and have us hang fabric and lights and make it beautiful, and then these platters of food. She was from the islands, and would assign us dishes to cook in her kitchen. She taught me how to fry yucca. Everyone could come, but the house would host. Mostly ballroom, and girls who walked the street. These meals were the most loving thing. I think she had a lot of pain growing up and was making up for it. She went into Lincoln Hospital with something wrong in her gallbladder and they killed her. Like she was healthy, and negative, and had stopped using by then. But they botched the surgery and ended up rupturing some of her organs. Lincoln was a chop shop, and so cruel to the girls.
O’Brien: Thank you for telling us about her. You said you moved here in 2041? How old were you?
Kelley: [Raises eyebrow.] A girl don’ discuss her age.
O’Brien: Was it mostly trans women?
Kelley: Sort of. All kinds. A lot of people have notions. Still, after all this time, people come round here asking questions, and they have a lot of ideas about how things worked and who did what, but they don’t really want to listen. They have their own ideas, and their own agenda, and want to shove everything into that.
O’Brien: Are you afraid I am one of these people who just wants to use your story?
Kelley: Of course, you want to use my story honey, that’s why we’ve got stories, to use them. The question is what you want to use the story for. And I don’t really know you.
O’Brien: I understand. Are you up for continuing the interview?
Kelley: [Pause.] I’ll try this dance. You got a jaw a bit like mine. You might be okay.
O’Brien: I … appreciate your trust. What were you like in the forties?
Kelley: I was so beautiful. I had a lot of work done. I was glorious and so beautiful. I used to walk in the balls, and I always won Face. I was a marvel. I thought very highly of myself back then, even when I was strung out on coke or tina. I think in some ways being full of myself kept me alive, kept me going at all. Like I knew I was better than all of them. I never went out in anything but a dress, no matter what. I always looked great, no matter how bad things got. My dresses were just so much color and life. Miss Reginald, she was a house sister and a designer, she would make them for the balls, and I wore them out on the street when I was working. I took up a lot of space no matter who I was with. I was everything. You could see it in my dresses, in how I moved, in how I talked. People tell me I was so full of myself! But everyone loved me for it. Now I got my feet on the ground a bit more, and not so focused in on myself. But also, things are just a lot easier now, so I don’t need the confidence I had back then, no matter what happened. I don’t need to front to keep someone from killing me on the street, or get food on the table, or know if someone may be there to take care of me when I need it. Somewhere along the way I learned a bit about how to listen, and how not to need all that to have something to say.
O’Brien: I’ve heard a lot of people over the years tell me the commune helped them manage their feelings, like made it easier to be able to connect with others.
Kelley: Cert. I was always in fight or flight, for like, years. That is part of why I did so much tina. But my fight mode was all about frontin’, like really making sure I was always beautiful, always confident, so much so I didn’t really see other people as real. First the struggle, and then later the commune, helped me a lot in relaxing that, in being able to actually count on others, to see others, to be able to let other people in.
O’Brien: Tell me about the hunger.
Kelley: Ugh. That’s not really something I like to talk about much. I didn’t know too much about what was going on in the world back then. I was all messed up in the head. There was the war, I know that, it had been going on forever. The men working the Market got older, because all the young ones got sent off to Iran. Then at some point, I don’t know what year it was, everything came tumbling down. Everyone was sick from the cough all that year, and none of the girls could get work because everyone was so scared of the cough. Then everything else started to fall apart. You stopped being able to buy anything. The stores as far as you could walk were empty, the subways and buses shut down. You couldn’t buy fec that year, like the bodegas were all cleared out.
O’Brien: Fec?
Kelley: Like anything? You couldn’t buy anything. Shit. Stuff.
O’Brien: Like feces?
Kelley: Something like that. So, the stores were empty. But the Market was still running! Trucks would roll through all night and day, unloading produce, and then it would get sent down into Manhattan. They had these armed caravans, that were the NYPD, but just hired to guard the trucks. But no food around here, just the shitty brown rice the punks served up under the Bruckner, but you couldn’t live on that crap. It was happening all over, from what I knew. Everyone was getting so mad, and in the summer of ’50, every night people were out fighting with the cops. I had been in a riot in Chelsea way before, when I first got down there. We burned a police van and beat the pulp out of a few cadets. Now it was like that every night. At first, every time they killed someone we would get up in arms, but at some point it all took on a momentum and we felt like we had to win, somehow, and that there was no way back. Some nights I was too strung out, some nights I was busy working, some nights I was too hungry. But often when I was out, I’d come across some kids and the police going at it. Some nights everyone would be out, like granmom went out one night and said she spit on a cop. For a while, the riots were all throughout the city. Eventually the [US] Army put it down. They started these big kitchens where they gave us crap food, protein paste. God, I hated that protein paste. I was doing a lot of tricks with guys that worked the Market, and I had them pay me in pieces of meat or potatoes. Some days I went without, but I often brought a bit of food to granmom, and to Miss Reginald who I was living with. She was too sick to work so I did my best. Thank god I had stopped using by then, because I wouldn’t have made it through the hunger if I also had to hustle drugs. I had been volunteering a bit at this syringe exchange program we set up on the Point, and that helped me get clean. The hunger was so hard. Like it hurt, really hurt. I was dizzy for days, and everyone was getting sick all the time from lack of food. I went through a lot of hard times, but I had never seen anything like the hunger. But we were starting to take care of each other then. All over we started to watch out for each other.
O’Brien: When was the Army takeover in the Bronx?
Kelley: I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly when that was. It was cold as fuck and they served the protein paste cold, I remember that. God, that was fec. You ever have that stuff?
O’Brien: Yeah, I was in the camp at Riis, before I went south.
Kelley: Did you fight in Alabama?
O’Brien: No, but I helped as I could. I was in the Mississippi Delta mostly, after they destroyed Jackson. Before things got exciting up here. You had something to do with that.
Kelley: Cert, I guess I did. You do flatter a girl.
O’Brien: Can you tell us more about drug use and drug addiction, and your process of recovery leading up to this period?
Kelley: That’s a nice question. I could. But I don’t think I will. I’ll tell you about the Market. Let me tell you about the night we took the Market. That I will never forget. It was the most amazing thing any of us ever saw. I told you the Market stayed busy all through the hunger. We’d see these trucks going in and out. When the riots started, the police set up these huge barricades around the Market, like these metal walls five meters high. They all fortified the Bruckner, sealed it off, and used it just for people from Manhattan or the trucks with all the food to go down into the city. For a while, when we were fighting with the Army, the Market became a focus of the riots, because everyone knew there was food inside. All up and down Hunts Point Avenue we’d fight it out. One night we burned a tank! A lot of folks got shot. A lot of girls got shot.
O’Brien: The Martyrs.
Kelley: That’s what people called them later. I don’t know about the term. I get people need heroes. But … I don’t know how to say it. I think I was really drawn to the image of being a hero, like being a martyr, when I first heard people talking that way. I think a bit like being a diva, it was a way of seeing myself as something grand, something amazing, something that was so big that it could shut out the emptiness I felt. And for me, becoming a part of the struggle, later becoming a part of the commune, meant getting over all that. I mean, I still loved being fabulous, don’t get me wrong. But it required actually letting in the pain a bit. Maybe not everyone is like that, but I think that was true for me. So, I could tell you about the girls who were killed—I told you about this memorial thing, so they are really with me. Jakya, Ella, Sydney, Ilaria. I saw Ilaria get shot one night. Like not who did it, just saw her fall in the crowd and when I went over to her, she was passed out and bleeding and didn’t make it … I may not want to be no hero. But I guess I shouldn’t let that get in the way. I should be honoring them. Thinkin’ it through talkin’ with you.…
