When We Win

Revelatory short stories from astute political thinkers that unveil radical visions of futures transformed by collective struggles for liberation

This collection envisions a multitude of futures where today’s freedom struggles have overcome oppression and capitalism and formed new revolutionary societies. Here, fiction authors, revolutionary theorists, and movement intellectuals take readers into liberated worlds, wresting the future from the cruelty of the state, private property, and profit.

Inspired by the liberatory horizons that have emerged in mass movements from recent history, When We Win imagines complex futures of disability justice, sexual and gender freedom, communization, and radical democracy. The stories describe decolonized possibilities, detailing how life after revolution might sound, taste, smell, feel, and look. The future, we insist, is ours to craft.

WIth stories by
Eman Abdelhadi
Ama Josephine Budge
Alireza Doostdar
Anand Gopal
Daniel Sarah Karasik
Sophie Lewis
Mimi Lok
M. E. O’Brien
Vicky Osterwiel
Jordy Rosenberg

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. She cowrote the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. Abdelhadi coedited a “Queer Palestine” issue of Pinko magazine published in 2024, and is coeditor of a special issue of Public Humanities called “Palestine as Paradigm: How Gaza Transformed the World.” She is also coeditor of a forthcoming volume entitled Muslim Engagements with Gender and Sexuality with Brill Press. She writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times magazine, and her essays have appeared in Jacobin, Truthout, Zeteo, and other publications. Abdelhadi is the subject of Coming Around, a feature-length documentary on the intersection between sexuality and religion. A long-time organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation, she is active in Scholars for Justice, Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, and the AAUP at the University of Chicago.

M. E. O’Brien writes on gender freedom and communism. She has two previous books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care and a speculative fiction novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, coauthored with Eman Abdelhadi. She is a member of the editorial collective for Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan and Turkish. She has academic work in Social Movement Studies and Work, Employment and Society, and has also published in Endnotes, Invert, Commune, and elsewhere. Previously, O’Brien coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She teaches queer studies part time at NYU. She is a practicing licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst in formation.

ISBN: 9798888907535

Publication date: June 22, 2027

Preface by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
The Horizon by Daniel Sarah Karasik
People of the Caves by Alireza Doostdar
After the Shadow by Eman Abdelhadi
Sharaner Maash, or a Haunting from the Time Before by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien
The Hormonaut's Retirement Ball by Vicky Osterwiel
New Pleasures, Different Dangers by Sophie Lewis
The Swimming Pool by Anand Gopal
Felix Santoro and the Mars Commune Beyond Colonial Imaginaries by M. E. O’Brien
V for Futuring by Ama Josephine Budge
The Basket and the Bearer by Mimi Lok
The Thousand-Year Thought by Jordy Rosenberg