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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Episode 362 of RevolutionZ continues the oral history recounting by Miguel Guevara and his interviewees. It delves further with the motives, aims, and mechanics of a successful future revolution. This time, it asks, what if the hardest part of building a movement isn’t the opposition outside, but the pressure inside the room—and inside our heads? 

Guevara leads Andre Goldman, Malcolm Mays and Cynthia Parks in a discussion that describes the founding convention of RPS where three thousand people traded posturing for process and built consensus without blunting their ideals. They describe how months of preparation, open amendments, and careful straw polls set a tone that prized clarity over dominance and turned potential stalemates into workable albeit provisional decisions.

From there, the interviewees explore how a “starter program” could be broad without becoming a blur. Wages and work hours. Tax the rich and full employment. Expanded, revised education for all. Immigration and community control of policing. Reproductive and LGBTQ rights. Democratic reforms like ranked choice voting and public financing. Single‑payer healthcare, demilitarization, climate action, and oversight of AI. The initial national platform offered scaffolding that let chapters choose priorities that fit their own local needs—a structure that fed momentum instead of draining it.

Then Cynthia’s story reframes the stakes. Childhood eviction and family violence carved an inner voice in her mind that said you can’t, a crippling voice that many carry with no one else seeing. Rather than pretend that politics is only external, In response to this widespread issue, RPS carved out space to confront internalized doubt and the habits that keep people silent. That attention to the psychological side of participation—paired with humble, flexible strategy—helped the project survive fragile beginnings, temper early rigidity, and welcome new leaders. Guevara's questions also wrestle with the family versus movement dilemma: what does responsible care look like when the future your kids inherit depends on what you build with others today. How much time to allot where? How can we even think about such a vexing choice? 

If you’re organizing, if you're curious about consensus that actually works, or about how to fight the voices within that say your effort, or someone else's effort won’t matter, this episode offers tools our interviewees used in their world and time—procedures that can keep trust intact, culture that can tame ego and liberate potentials, and a program that travels from national goals to neighborhood action. 

Does the episode resonate with you? If so, perhaps share it and the whole Wind Cries Freedom sequence with a friend who is doing or considering doing movement work. Do you instead find the discussion lacking or even wrong? Okay, in either case, perhaps leave a comment to help improve coming episodes. .

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Episode 361 of RevolutionZ continues the sequence of episodes culled from the book in process: The Wind Cries Freedom. The episode's title is "Hope Is Not Naive, Cynicism Is Counterproductive, Fight To Win." It opens with a succinct look at our own time's authoritarianism and the information ecosystem that rewards fear and lies over solidarity and truth. It then takes up the oral history by presenting three future revolutionaries who RevolutionZ regulars have already met--Alexandra Voline, Senator Malcolm King, and Andre Goldman--to talk with them about how their movement facilitated hope, redesigned incentives, and made sustained participation both possible and meaningful.

Alexandra describes the prevalence of cynicism and how she worked to supportively flip the frame from “people are bad” to “what makes good people act badly.” She describes how schools, workplaces, families, media, and policing reward domination while they punish solidarity—and she shows how RPS worked to have cooperation and solidarity overcome competition and anti-sociality.

Senator King traces his path from studying history in college to working on the factory floor, to traversing the Senate. Along the way he explains why to meet people where they are at is not an overused slogan but a method for building real solidarity, even with opponents. He considers his electoral motives and choices and particularly various class interests and pressures that played prominent roles in each.. 

Andre dives into what made RPS different. He describes how it redefined the calculus of success beyond activists noticing only quick wins or losses to also highlight wider and longer term consequences. He shows how RPS struggled to ensure that its every campaign left participants prepared and eager to go further, and how RPS treated attrition due to internal and interpersonal conflicts and flaws as an obstacle to transcend not dodge. 

This episode, like others of the same sequence, presents only one chapter among thirty, and though it is therefore only partial, the interviewees do address their feelings, motives, ideas, and practices. They answer Miguel Guevara's questions to address the shift from activist spectacle to activist strategy. They explain why style matters but cannot replace substance. They show how a politics of everyday life—shared power, accountable process, and sincere care—is able to turn moments of opposition that might otherwise  fade away into sustained movements. 

The thread through it all is not solely slogans, or even only worthy values, nor even just details of episodic activist encounters, but informed descriptions of strategic and visionary activity. For them and for so many others, the interviewees report how RPS offered a way past cynicism and despair able to respect both head and heart. They describe the emergence and use of specific thoughts and practices helped to cultivate informed hope, build resistance, and pursue positive desires that lasted. 

Perhaps you will give these participants a listen. If you do, will this segment of the longer oral history ring plausible for you? Will you find useful insights in its words? That is the episode's hope, and If if it does resonate usefully for you, perhaps you will let others know about the interviewees' stories while you also refine and enrich them with your own insights.

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Episode 360 of RevolutionZ has Larry Cohen, former president of the 600,000 strong Communication Workers of America and current board chair of Our Revolution who has spent five decades organizing workers and pushing democratic reforms inside and outside the Democratic Party to assess No Kings and explore possible future directions for it and of resistance to Trump's fascist agenda. Larry emphasizes the need to organize across differences, to change the rules that block action, and to deliver material wins that build trust. 

He reveals how the No Kings mobilization surged and what it will take to convert mass turnout into durable power. He names the real opponent—the oligarchy that spans billionaires, technocrats, and captured politicians—and shows how Senate procedures, a monarchic judiciary, and dark money in primaries stop popular policies from getting passed. Instead of living forever on defense, he talks offense: defund the oligarchs, fund the people. Cut bloated military spending, expand early childhood education, long-term care, and health coverage. Enforce bargaining rights so Starbucks and Amazon can’t stall contracts for years. Take concrete steps toward Medicare for All by lowering eligibility and slashing administrative waste.

But the discussion also addresses the prospects and methods of immediate organizing and protest. Youth, minority, and labor participation. A weekday No Kings. A trajectory from five-minute stoppages to national strikes. Campus feeder marches into No Kings outpourings. All to evidence and rebuild the muscle of collective action.

Larry explains from his own experiences at every level from precincts and union struggles to revealing conversations with Barack Obama the horrid flaws and important potentials of electoral activism. He describes how to engage without contempt union members who voted for Trump by focusing on efficacy and tangible gains. He discusses the difference between Trump getting many (horrible) things done. Action. And Democrats getting little to nothing done. Abdication. He points to Obama squandering electoral support and a supportive Senate and House with do-nothingism. And he digs into party reform: blocking dark and corporate money from primaries, enforcing endorsements of primary winners, building coalitions with unaffiliated voters where Democrats can’t win and more. Larry urges that the goal ishould be better delivery not better messaging. So this episode is about moving from protest to power. 

What weekday action by No Kings would you like to join next, rally, march, civil disobedience, or what? 

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