RevolutionZ

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Ep 372 Three Strategic Issues: What to Say or Write?, What to Do?, and Who to Do it With? Plus Taylor, Steph, and Caitlin… Jan 17, 2026

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Episode 372 of RevolutionZ urges that every activist choice we make—what to say, what to do, and who to do it with and for—can be usefully guided by one clear calculation: will this or that option grow the movement’s numbers, deepen members' commitment and means, and increase pressure on those in power? How might that logic of choice affect how we write, organize, and work with others among other daily choices we face?
To start, the episode considers our choice of words to speak or write. When an episode or an article describes pain that the system around us imposes, and even how the system works, and we do it over and over, how much does that help with growth, commitment, methods, and pressure? Given our need to grow in numbers, and enrich in methods, doesn't the proposed measuring stick say we should speak where the reachable are, keep our language as simple as accuracy allows, and always include and even emphasize vision and strategy? Do we do that? If not, why not? Can new ideas, concrete proposals, and credible plans invite hesitant people off the sidelines more than for us to say or write, yet again, that how bad things are? Strategy-focused words become a tool for converting attention into action. Do pain focussed words that tell people what they already know do likewise?
Then we consider choosing tactics by considering the now surfacing debate over how to fight against ICE. The pull toward confrontation is real. We feel it. But if we use our one yardstick, our simple proposed logic to weigh violence against mass nonviolent disruption, what we feel isn't our guide. Instead it is to consider consequences of competing choices for growth, power, and impact. If we do that, what emerges?

The episode suggests that nonviolent tactics done at scale impose costs on elites while attracting allies and improving commitment. Our goal isn’t to feel fierce or righteous. Our goal becomes to win over and commit more people, more often, for longer.
Who to relate to, who to support, gets similar treatment. The simple logic suggests that purity shrinks, coalescing grows. Shying away from what doesn't agree perfectly with oneself fragments. Listening and even learning from what doesn't agree with self, can grow. To support campaigns that win tangible gains and build capacity, even if they don’t include every preferred demand, isn't that what we ought to do, but is it what we do do?

Do we frame differences as due to character flaws to dismiss or as disputes over expected outcomes to test and explore? Which can create enlarged unity? Do we seek out and onboard unions, students, faith communities, and neighborhood groups who can bring fresh energy and legitimacy though we don't all see all things the same way? Do we join with and support even what we hope will include more of our favored priorities in time?
Finally, as a kind of afterword, the episode considers catalysts that can accelerate initial momentum: visible local wins like Mamdani's, regular actions that build efficacy like the efforts in Minneapolis, and also less often sought, bold engagement from cultural figures and labor leaders able to reach large audiences. We invite Taylor Swift, Stephen Curry, and Caitlin Clark as examples. Also school teachers and university faculty. Come fully on board. Why? Because when artists and athletes, labor leaders and educators with access to large audiences speak out clearly, very loudly, and consistently militantly, when they donate time and resources and seriously show up, their doing so can communicate widely and make participation feel hopeful to audiences that are otherwise not yet hearing the call. Pair that with steady organizing and you get a movement that compounds power.
Does the simple but powerful norm for choices offered this episode make sense to you?

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Ep 371 Greg Wilpert Discusses Trump’s Attack On Venezuela Jan 11, 2026

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Episode 371 of Revolution Z has as guest Greg Wilpert, founder of Venezuela Analysis, who discusses the role of oil, power, Trump, Maduro, and which way Venezuela. Wilpert tracks the quiet recalibration of demands coming from Washington—curbs on drugs that aren't real, and on migration caused by sanctions. Vague “terror” charges that are projections at best, and a push for oil access that has actually been offered earlier albeit with fewer controls—alongside a court case that tests the boundary between domestic law and international immunity. If the aim of kidnapping Maduro is optics that establish that Trump can use the American military whenever and wherever and however he unilaterally chooses, what does a “victory” look like, and who will pay the price?
What are the mechanics and effects of sanctions? How have they hollowed out revenues, warped trade, and driven migration that is in turn used to justify more pressure. Wilpert explains why Venezuela’s heavy crude isn’t the easy prize it’s portrayed to be. High costs, slow ramp-up, and market dynamics will blunt returns not least but not only as climate impact mounts. The gap between oil rhetoric and oil reality and between governing rhetoric and governing reality matter because the truth about each clarifies whether policy is about energy security or political theater. Meanwhile, protests and public perception will begin to swirl around the Maduro trial, the one contested issue that neither side can easily negotiate and still claim to have won. And ultimately, the deeper issue is precedent—what changes when a superpower uses massive militarism to kidnap and then prosecute a foreign leader despite international norms much less on nonsense charges?
Midway, Greg previews his forthcoming book on developing consciousness for a post-capitalist commons. Structures like cooperatives, communes, and creative commons only thrive when everyday practices dismantle informal hierarchies and embed equal voice. He maps the mindsets that either reproduce domination or make shared power real, connecting movement culture to durable democracy.

We close by zooming out to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” which, supposing it lasts, would generate a move toward spheres of influence and away from enforceable international law, raising the risk of multiple escalations and even nuclear miscalculation. If that’s the road ahead, Wilpert urges that we need a clearer vision for global rules, accountability, and economic relations that don’t weaponize dependence.

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Ep 370 Comments "Chomsky Reassessed" plus WCF 16: More RPS Ideas, Values, and Motives Jan 04, 2026

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Episode 370 of RevolutionZ mainly continues our sequence of excerpts from the forthcoming The Wind Cries Freedom's Oral History of the Next American Revolution. However, before doing so, it takes up various reactions I encountered to an article I wrote titled "Chomsky Reassessed." The followup discussion here raises some more general concerns and further ideas bearing on issues of "cancellation."

Internal movement differences, arguments, and even accusations can force a movement to constructively self examine and grow, or can fracture it. What damage is done when outrage outruns evidence, when cancel culture and circular firing squads turn activism into spectacle and drive away the very allies we need? What dynamics play out? When do they arise? How do they gain life and spread? How do they involve us and what might we do to address them?

After that rather substantial introductory section, this episode continues into a new oral history excerpt about how to build movement power and cohesion in which Bertrand Jagger and Lydia Lawrence further chart their respective journeys from atomized into systemic thinking. They describe their attraction to self-management as proportionate say, to equity as pay for effort and sacrifice, and to an economy redesigned to eliminate not only rule by owners but rule by the often-ignored coordinator class.
Bert takes us inside the illusion of choice that we often feel, where markets script our consumption and work options and productivity gains vanish into someone else’s ledger. He traces the subtle hierarchies that reappear in movement meetings, media, and campaigns when movement roles unintentionally subvert movement aspirations. He explains why balanced jobs, transparent information, and participatory planning weren’t rhetorical add-ons to RPS but at the core of its approaches. Lydia widens the frame to kinship and culture. She shows how hierarchies in patriarchal families, schooling, and media bleed into the workplace—and vice versa--how class hierarchies in turn contour kinship and culture. She shows why to change one domain of activity without changing the others reroutes power rather than dissolves it.
Along the way, we revisit a cautionary note from Bob Dylan—what happens when movements punish nuance and reward heat—and we ask how to create spaces where disagreement refines strategy instead of ending careers and silencing conversation.

So this episode is mostly about how two people were attracted to and navigated movement design, class analysis that extends beyond owners and workers, and turning diverse values into effective daily practice all in the new movement they became part of, the movement for a revolutionary participatory society.

Can their remembrances provide insights in our time and our place about attaining a clear, rigorous path forward? Listen, and perhaps share with a friend who’s organizing something big or small. Then I hope you will leave a comment saying what strikes you as useful and revealing, and what doesn't.

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Ep 369 WCF 16: Lydia Lawrence On Race, Class, Gender, Roles and Institutions Dec 28, 2025

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Episode 369 of RevolutionZ has Miguel Guevara questioning Lydia Lawrence about her journey from the Sixties to RPS. After anger and solidarity fuel a movement’s start what decides whether it survives? Lydia Lawrence—feminist, organizer, media worker, and the first shadow government president of RPS—tells of her journey from sixties militancy, through doldrums, to sustained revolutionary engagement. Her recounting begins with a poem-like charge sheet against injustice, but quickly pivots to the practices that kept early RPS victories from unspooling. Treat oppression as a web, not a queue; change roles, not just leaders; speak plainly, share skills, and build structures that match our values.
Miguel elicits from Lydia a revelatory mid-west factory story. Workers seized their plant. Councils rose and wages leveled. Spirit soared. Yet before too long passed, hierarchy crept back. Spirits crashed. The culprit wasn’t human nature. It was an unbroken corporate division of labor. A small group accumulated knowledge, access and confidence from newly doing empowering tasks while most returned to repetitive, debilitating tasks. Voice, influence and then even income stratified as much much of the old order reassembled itself. Out with the old boss, the owner. In with a new boss who Lydia calls Coordinators. Lydia lays out how class, race, gender, and polity entangle across home, school, workplace, media, and law—and why single-issue wins erode when unaltered institutions push back. She describes the cultural suicide of “ghosting” in movements and the coordinator class habit of hiding power behind jargon. Solidarity requires attention, not performance.
The discussion moves from Sander's valuable sparks and Trump’s odious fear to the necessity of building bridges without diluting justice for women, Black and Brown communities, LGBTQ+ people, and working-class men alike. Since oppression is an entangled network, strategy must be systemic. Lydia discusses her conversion to emphasizing balanced roles, open information, participatory decision-making, and a language everyone can own.

Do Lydia's reports of her path to joining sustained, effective revolutionary activism resonate with you? Are the lessons she reveals relevant to our times and circumstances? Concluding this episode's presentation of the sixteenth chapter from The Wind Cries Freedom, is a closing meditation on fiction as oral history—stories that test ideas and invite you to refine them. Is it worth sharing with a friend?

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Ep 368 Bhaskar Sunkara on Socialism and Us Dec 21, 2025

Show notes

Episode 368 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin and more recently The Nation and author of The Socialist Manifesto. Our topic isn’t a kinder capitalism; it’s a post capitalist vision and practice where private ownership is overcome and control of production resides with the people who do the work.
Together we discuss seeking a higher minimum wages and seeking higher wages more generally, full employment, greater workers say in the workplace and community, municipal support for co-ops and more. We urge that what we seek, how we seek it, and even what issues we raise while engaged in the pursuits, should deliver concrete gains in the present and also rewire expectations about who should decide and who should benefit in the future.

Sunkara discusses electoral campaigns and candidates, but more so the system in which elections occur. He challenges the limits of welfarism and highlights the power question: who owns, who governs, who invests. Together we also broach the hard problem of the division of labor and derivative class divisions. Sunkara says that specialization won’t disappear. We can't and won't all do everything. But what we do and how we do it must be democratized so that expertise serves everyone instead of hardening into a class that serves mainly itself over workers. We also explore differences and agreements about when to challenge what issues and about what structures are needed to attain our goals versus what structures will continually obstruct our goals. How can and should the choices of a socialist in a workplace or on a campus, for example, and really anywhere, differ from the choices of a progressive working in the same settings? Issues. Demands. Formulations.
Regarding the electoral arena we consider why some workers back Trump and why even center-left parties feel distant. We agree the answer isn’t to scold; it’s to organize. It is to show up where people live, to honor local experiences and concerns, and to build organizations that feel like home not like elite seminars. Sunkara explores how an independent profile—more Sanders than party brand—and now more Mamdani than party brand—can help rebuild trust and make clear class politics evident again.
Are we ready to move beyond slogans and toward a post-capitalism that’s practical, democratic, and winnable? Are we ready to further define our vision's features to the extent we now can, and to refine and improve them as we proceed? Sunkara proposes a path forward to consider.

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Ep 367 No Kings Enlarged plus Right to the City, and Winning Time Dec 14, 2025

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Episode 367 of RevolutionZ starts out by discussing why I am offering up chapters of the forthcoming The Wind Cries Freedom Oral History as a sequence of episodes. Then it addresses No Kings to ask how can its future help connect mass resistance to everyday organizing that is able to turn fear into agency: and success that is able to win. Then the next chapter of the Wind Cries Freedom sequence discusses housing organizing, right to the city, transportation organizing, and income and time struggle. How did early RPS pursue bike-first streets and free buses, tenant unions that swap apartments, childcare co-ops, and workplace councils that fight for real raises and a 30-hour week at 40 hours pay. Miguel Guevara interviews some familiar and some new organizers who describe how initially small wins can fuel still larger wins; why listening beats lecturing; and how alliances with auto workers, bus drivers, and custodians can transform “jobs versus planet” into “jobs and planet.”
Our journey through right to the city is concrete: car-free days that become policy, city-owned bike shares in neighborhoods long ignored, and motel conversions that turn empty rooms into permanent homes. We go inside campaigns that train prisoners and returning soldiers to build housing they can live in and we unpack just plans to retire dangerous jobs with pay preserved while workers learn skills needed for clean, dignified work. Across each story, the same method emerges—protect people through change, aim reforms at structures beyond symptoms, and connect every win to a horizon big enough to believe in. In each case interviewees report the doubts and obstacles they faced and how they overcame them.
The biggest obstacle the organizers identify isn’t only money or bosses or repression; it’s the doubt that is planted within us that says we can’t act, we can't decide, we can't lead. Through assemblies and shared decisions that address and change current conditions, we learn otherwise. When tenants start to alter their buildings, when riders start to chart their routes, when workers start to win pay, time, and to shape their jobs, hope stops being a slogan and becomes glue that sustains activism.

This episode describes moving from whack-a-mole single issue, single crisis demonstrations to more sustained and linked campaigns that compound power. It addresses motives, feelings, obstacles and means of early RPS development. Can it, or a movement like it become real in coming months and years? That is up to all of us.

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Ep 366 Trumpisms, Socialisms, and WCF Health Gets Personal Dec 07, 2025

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Episode 366 of RevolutionZ starts by considering a phrase frequently borrowed, nowadays, the phrase "like never before," and then moves on to a word nowadays being used more frequently and positively than in quite some time, the word "socialism." Regarding the former, why are we mimicking the verbal priorities of the Orange Monster? Can we avoid that? Regarding the latter, are people using the word "socialism" to talk about outcomes or to talk about institutions? Can we do the latter? After exploring those questions a bit, we move on to the main focus of this episode, another chapter, chapter thirteen, of the forthcoming book The Wind Cries Freedom.

This time Miguel Guevara elicits from the doctor, Barbara Bethune, and the nurse, Emiliano Farmer, both of whom we met last episode, more about their experiences and the lessons they take from their health work and organizing. They consider the hospital as a living case study. They describe the pipeline of suffering—pollution, price-gouged meds, avoidable illness and more—and also the subtler currents of class status that dictate tone, attention, influence, time and income. They examine the role of the “coordinator class” of hospital managers, doctors, lawyers, and other coordinator class members who don’t own capital but oversee labor and monopolize empowering circumstances. For many working-class people, these are the faces of power they see every day. That’s why polished condescension can push workers toward leaders who “feel real,” even when those leaders actually harm workers, Trump being a prime example. The interviewees explain how the left stumbles when its language and posture mirror coordinator class norms and when it sidesteps a hard truth: removing owners without changing the structure of empowering tasks just juggles bosses.
A candid conversation with a doctor and nurse becomes a turning point. The doctor admits to class bias toward those below, then embraces balanced job complexes so no group monopolizes empowering tasks, self-management so decision-making matches those affected, and remuneration for effort and sacrifice to attain equity. The nurse arrives at the same aims but after admitting class hatred for those above. Alongside all this, a personal story from the doctor about her "aphantasia"—living without a mind’s eye—shows how unseen differences among people distort what we treat as normal. Her honesty presents a lesson in humility: people edit their self-understanding to belong, and professionals do the same to protect hierarchy. Real organizing requires honesty about the impulses and structures that make empathy sustainable.
The interviewees connect these and related ideas to action: confronting big pharma, building rural and school-based care, reforming medical education, and ending toxic internship culture. The National Nurses March in their time stands out as a catalyst, proving to many that mass participation can thaw numbness and turn moral clarity into practical wins. If participatory society means anything, it must show up at the bedside and in the break room as shared power, dignified work, and decisions made by those who live their consequences. There is actually much more as well...

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EP 365 Duvernay and WCF: Health and Class Dec 01, 2025

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Episode 365 of RevolutionZ presents an essay by film director Ava Duvernay about the difficulty of writing in unimaginably chaotic times. Her's is a sentiment I share but that she expresses more eloquently. Simply put, it’s hard to write to a conclusion when the world won’t stop shouting new horrors. Then Miguel Guevara interviews Barbara Bethune and Emiliano Farmer, taken from chapter twelve of The Wind Cries Freedom. A doctor and nurse, Barbara and Emiliano describe their experiences in health work revealing aims, motives, biases, and beliefs. They report and analyze the class forces that shape who gets heard, who gets paid, who gets healed and who doesn't as well as the emergence of struggle about the issues including explaining the contrasting the circumstances and mindsets of doctors and nurses as a particular instance of the contrasting circumstances and mindsets of coordinators and workers more generally.
Barbara Bethune is a doctor who loved the promise of medicine but who began early on to question the rituals that came with it. She describes how she came to realize the differences between training for obedience and training for excellence. She tested her impressions by comparing her experience of medical internship to her observation of military boot camp as surprisingly similar methods of imposing systemic deference. Beyond profit-seeking, Barbara reveals how doctors' and administrators' coordinator class culture manages care but resists democratizing its means and methods. She finds the roots in the hospital's division of labor and her takeaway is clear. Class divided health care burns out workers, inflates costs, and leaves prevention on the cutting-room floor. It heals as a means, yes, but the ends are profits and power.
Emiliano Farmer, a militant activist nurse who helped build Healthcare Workers United, speaks from the front lines of the pandemic and beyond, where applause never becomes protection or real power for workers. Emiliano challenges face to face the reflexive elitism that keeps nurses and techs out of key decisions, and he lays out reforms that move from grievance to governance, balanced pay scales, and participatory decision-making. He and Barbara explore their own negative and positive experiences, and actions, their politicization, their actions and commitments, and the conflicts that occurred within RPS over practical steps like single-payer momentum, Big Pharma accountability, antibiotic stewardship, food and housing as health policy, and especially job redefinition—all of which campaigns help make care safer, affordable, and patient-first. Guevara elicits from them personal experiences, views, and feelings to convey lessons about class division, rule, defense and resistance in health care and in broader social struggles.

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Ep 364 Epstein and WCF: Post Convention Vision Nov 23, 2025

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Episode 364 of RevolutionZ begins with a brief discussion of the Epstein phenomenon. How do elites manufacture loyalty and impose silence? How did Epstein (and Trump too) get constituencies that not only ought to have known better, but literally ought to have abhorred them, to instead become sycophants or at least friends?

After that interlude, the episode continues the oral history presentation of the Wind Cries Freedom episodes This time, Miguel Guevara elicits from his interviewees reports regarding Revolutionary Participatory Society's initial post convention vision for a society where people actually manage the decisions that shape their lives. The connection with Epstein and Trump? As power recruits through fear, favors, routine, and spectacle, we must answer with vision and program that makes popular agency normal, protects dissent, and make hierarchy impossible to resurrect.
Guevara's interviewees describe arriving at a clear foundation for democratic life. Politics moves beyond occasional voting to year-round self-management. Decision-making power tracks impact. Society reveres dissent. Economy rejects owner and coordinator dominance. It favors workers self management, balanced jobs, and income based on effort, duration, and onerousness of socially valued labor. Participatory planning replaces markets and command with cooperative negotiation conducted via workers and consumers councils. Compatible commitments contour everyday life. Caregiving is shared. Consent-centered sex education bolsters sexually and emotionally diverse relationships. Partnerships endure without perks. Cultural self-governing communities have the space and means to thrive so long as universal rights hold. Across borders, internationalism eliminates empire. Across time, addressing full ecological and social costs ensures that future generations inherit options, not debts.
The RPS conception was that commitments should and could keep hope honest. Guevara's interviewees detail their support for recallable leadership, transparent roles, internal diversity, and childcare and mutual aid practices that make participation possible. Empowering tasks are distributed so influence cannot accumulate. RPS initial strategy, the interviewees report, favored nonviolence and context-aware electoral choices. RPS vision and program operated as a scaffold are participants to elaborate in contextually contingent situations.. RPS members' shared aim they explain, was to win reforms that leave people and organizations more connected, more confident, and more capable of winning still more gains.

Throughout, the interviewees reveal how status seeking, impatience, defeatism, and inflexible personal habits corroded movements and describe how humility, listening, and rigor strengthened movements.
In sum, this episode offers describes some ways a particular future movement turned values into institutions and made collective self management a daily practice. The interviewees don't provide a blueprint. Indeed, they reject the virtue and even the possibility of blueprints. They instead offer their own experiences in hopes they can be adapted, refined, augmented, and when need be ignored in a different time and different context which needs to arrive at its own vision and strategy.

If the recounting resonates for you, subscribe and share with a friend or ten. What guardrails against persistent hierarchy do you favor? What visions do you advocate? What motives and means fuel your life choices? Don't we all need to each be able to respond to such questions? Don't we need to be able to use our answers to such questions to go forward against Trumpism Epsteinism and every other ism that subjugates any living soul? If we do, maybe the interviewees from The Wind Cries Freedom convey lessons we can usefully adapt.

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Ep 363 WCF: Chapters Are Essential Nov 16, 2025

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Episode 363 of RevolutionZ as its main focus continues with another excerpt from the Oral History titled The Wind Cries Freedom. The episode opens, however, with a comment on our place and our times following on Mamdani's remarkable victory and Steve Bannon's call for Republicans to take over all institutions or face jail in about a year. In the struggle for institutions, for us to act as though Trump and Co. are now wielding a mighty force that is targeted at each and every one of us, ready and able to trounce us each now, in our workplaces, schools, and homes— for us to believe that exaggeration, and in response to be so security conscious that we curtail ourselves to avoid attracting their assault, that approach will do their work for them. That response from us will give them what they are racing to gain but which they do not now have. Our resignation. We have to fight back, not hunker down.

The episode then takes a second side route to present the lyrics of four specially chosen songs. Time to get up stand up, imagine, escape the badlands, and bring our ship in. Finally, hopefully roused a bit, we return to the oral history. This time the interviewer, Miguel Guevara questions two interviewees who we have already met, Mayor Bill Hampton and academic activist Andre Goldman about RPS first forming chapters and thereby getting real.

We see, in the oral history's time, how real chapters of their Revolutionary Participatory Society organization formed, grew, and spread to multiply power without losing heart. We see RPS's scaffolding for durable organizing that started around kitchen tables and scaled to a national federation—including the role of its weekly meetings, balanced roles, internal culture, local campaigns, and outreach as strategy.
Bill Hampton walks us through the early steps after their founding convention: setting a growth trigger for action, launching local campaigns at twenty members, and using those campaigns to reach forty to fifty members and then divide and double the chapter count. He explains how strategic recruitment, chapters sharing their innovations peer to peer, intramural sports, open classes, and street theater plus initial activist campaigns all emphasized growth and roads to member leadership. He shows us what “invite, don’t preach” looks like when stakes are high. He gets concrete on accountability, patience, a culture that welcomes rather than filters, and a movement that emphasizes flexible growth not static self defense.
Andre Goldman next adds the educator’s lens, including how he in his chapter and others throughout the organization worked to pair internal education with external actions through organizing schools that trained people to listen across difference, to frame demands without needless polarization, and to teach others to do the same. He tackles hard truths about gender, race, and class after Trumpism and why being morally right doesn’t guarantee strategic effectiveness. Miguel questions how RPS split chapters without drama, added supports like childcare and modest dues, and dealt with interpersonal conflicts by designing structures that contained heat without dimming the mission.

In short, with eyes on early chapter building, this episode continues the agenda of The Wind Cries Freedom, to convey what it might look like to not only block and terminate Trumpism but to continue on beyond that to achieve a fundamentally better world. And that is why RevolutionZ is devoting so many episodes to conveying the current draft of Miguel's oral history to you. To contribute to confidence, strategy, and vision in a congenial and personal way. And, hopefully, to get some feedback to help with additional improvements to the book.

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