Episode 380 of RevolutionZ, titled WCF End Misogyny and Trump Too, begins with some reactions to our current times. The world is on fire, and we keep producing explanations like they’re water. They aren't. 

This episode opens with a hard question: why do we get mountains of analysis about war and authoritarian politics, quite a lot of it redundant, yet so few concrete proposals for what millions of people can do next week different from last week to actually reduce and end the carnage? 

If the point of a writer, speaker, or organizer is to strengthen an anti war and anti fascist resistance, then strategy, coordination, escalation, and staying power can’t be an afterthought to yet again explaining the roots of our conditions and pointing out how much they hurt. 

In a couple of weeks people are going to demonstrate in the next No Kings event. I hope ten million or more. Isn’t to think about and make proposals regarding what those millions of people might do on that day and still more so how they might proceed when that day runs into the next day, a more important focus than debating causes of the war or reporting its every new communique or casualty? The basics of the war are discussed everywhere. But the future of resistance; not so much. Naming our conditions and their causes matters, but it’s not a plan.

Then we continue to present The Wind Cries Freedom, my forthcoming oral history of a next American revolution, with its Chapter 24. At a conference in Las Vegas, interviewer Miguel Guevara talks with Alexandra Hanslet and Bill Hampton about gender progress, feminist organizing, and why movements fail when they treat gender and sexuality as optional. The interviewees lay out the reality: even “radical” spaces can reproduce interruption, sidelining, harassment, and invisibility unless they change their structures, not just their language and hopes. 

Alexandra and Bill describe practical mechanisms RPS adopts: childcare at every event with men sharing equally in the work, leadership, and public speaking roles at least fifty percent women, training and mentoring instead of excuses, and a standard that says if we can’t yet do it in a feminist way, we shouldn’t do it yet. The chapter pushes further into family life and care work, arguing that comparable empowerment and circumstance must also mean comparable participation in caring activities. 

Both parts of this episode convey, I hope, that while analysis is important, to cling to analysis mode at the expense of vision and strategy mode defeats self. To passionately debate what's going on and where it came from is essential for arriving at viable and worthy vision and strategy, but to do it to the exclusion of directly addressing vision and strategy mistakes "necessary" for "alone necessary." 

Support the show