RevolutionZ

Episode 378 of RevolutionZ, Transcend Media Madness, continues our presentation of chapters from the forthcoming book The Wind Cries Freedom. 

What turns a sea of handmade signs into a movement that can’t be ignored? Partly it is information, so we follow that question into the heart of media. Who holds power inside newsrooms? How are stories shaped? What content is addressed? Why does institutional structure matter as much as personal intentions?

With Miguel Guevara and Leslie Jordan, a veteran broadcaster and organizer, we examine the quiet hierarchies that once defined alternative media and the concrete ste...

Episode 377 of RevolutionZ starts with a brief segment that describes some major robot and AI innovations as warm up for more related commentary to come in the future. When AI can imitate any face and voice, what anchors truth? Who decides what justice looks like when evidence itself is in doubt? When robots can dance and do gymnastics while they juggle feathers make and implement plans, nurture children and help the infirm, what can't they do? What do we do?

Then the episode pivots to courts, cops, and cages. Miguel Guevara interviews Robin Zimmerman, a former criminal...

Episode 376 of RevolutionZ, like other recent episodes, has two main themes, not one. First, what happens after Trump and how do we fight Trump in a way that prepares to continue to struggle after his end? There is a fork in the road—either remove Trump to drift back to the “normal” that bred the crisis or build to remove Trump and win a worthy future rooted in diversity, solidarity, equity, self‑management, and ecological sanity. From there, the episode moves on to its second fous, another in our series of excerpted interviews from the forthcoming book, The Wind Cries Fr...

Episode 375 of RevolutionZ has as guest Kathy Kelly. When journalists are barred and killed, doctors are targeted, and mountainous rubble hides unexploded ordnance, a society is violated twice—physically and narratively. Our guest, Kathy Kelly, connects what headlines obscure: how U.S. weapons shipments function as political green lights, how “ceasefire” rhetoric papers over daily violations, and how displacement in the West Bank is driven by soldiers, settlers, and a structure designed to make staying impossible.

Kathy brings the human scale back into focus. From a makeshift white flag walk into Jenin to evenings with families in Gaza...

Episode 374 of RevolutionZ starts with a snowfall and notices forecast overshoot. Then it asks why so many reporting, predicting, and evaluating “mistakes” lean the same way? It unpacks one‑sided errors—how weather hype, skewed invoices, and media framing teach the public to accept bias as normal. And then, via The Wind Cries Freedom's oral history it connects such patterns to the sports arenas and fields where bodies, money, and myth collide, and connects sports to larger surrounding movements as well..

Miguel Guevara introduces us to interviewee Peter Cabral, himself an athlete and revolutionary. Then Peter describes his own...

Episode 373 of RevolutionZ hears about people trained to perform deciding to build power. Celia Crowley—actor, organizer, and then California’s governor but later to become Vice President—to unpacks how a quiet coalition inside Hollywood traded optics for organization and turned celebrity into a conduit for collective action. From a first awkward meeting in a palatial living room to strikes that rebalanced power on set, Celia lays out some moves that mattered: an intensive “social school” for film workers, a high-stakes push for pay transparency, and films that funnel surplus revenue into real campaigns.

Perhaps most revealingl...

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 sys...

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...

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 in...

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...

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 issu...

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, c...

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...

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 hear...

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. T...

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...

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 amend...

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...

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 i...

Episode 359 of RevolutionZ considers the possibility that the biggest barrier to change isn’t raw power, but a story that many people have swallowed about what’s possible? The idea that there is no alternative. That victory is a pipe dream. The associated chapter of the The Wind Cries Freedom considers how cynicism is manufactured, why it passes for “realism,” and how organizers in the oral history's revolutionary process flipped the script by pairing a credible vision with messengers who modeled rigor, empathy, and staying power.

Andre Goldman answers Miguel Guevara's questions in this chapter by describing how scho...

Episode 358 of RevolutionZ has Arash Kolahi and Alexandria Shaner talk about alternative media aims and pursuits, and the state of the left. Having just published a comprehensive, transparent annual report for ZNetwork.org, Arash and Alexandria invite you to shape what their project does next. They explain how a volunteer‑heavy media project doubled its reach through smart syndication, built community spaces that actually talk back, and launched tools that help people act, not just read.

No clickbait pivots. No sanding down radical edges to appease algorithms. Instead, a they explain their “guerrilla outreach” strategy that puts moveme...

Episode 357 of RevolutionZ presents chapter six of The Wind Cries Freedom plus some personal discussion of publishing priorities and reader/listener choices. From the oral history, Andre Goldman describes his path from academic to organizer and in doing so reveals how a campus boycott became a disciplined, scalable movement. His story has no lone hero; it’s built on strategy, solidarity, and a culture that turned participation into a mark of maturity rather than a fringe stance.

Along the way Andre refers to lessons he took from reading about the 1960s without romanticizing them: expand with intention, co...

Ep 356 of RevolutionZ begins with a few reflections on Arundhati Roy's memoir "Mother Mary Comes to Me." It praises her extraordinary prose and storytelling to show how powerful narrative can illuminate complex social realities. This brief visit to her work ends with a set of questions about her writing and, by extension, about all writing, including The Wind Cries Freedom. Why does a writer write? Why do we read?

Then from Chapter Five of The Wind Cries Freedom oral history, Goldman relays how his radicalization began in college economics classes. There he discovered a profound disconnect between...

Episode 355 of RevolutionZ has as guest DSA activist and former Massachusetts state representative Tom Gallagher to discuss how leftists too often "do the billionaires' work for them" by attacking allies over ideological purity.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders face vicious criticism from fellow progressives with headlines like "AOC is a genocidal con artist" or "Bernie is a ghoulish Zionist," something has gone terribly wrong with movement politics. Gallagher dissects this suicidal tendency with the perspective of someone who's witnessed decades of progressive movements building and fracturing.

He describes how the Sanders campaigns temporarily broke...

Episode 354 of RevolutionZ continues the sequence presenting the Oral History titled The Wind Cries Freedom. In this third installment, as an opening act, interviewee Leslie Zinn reflects on the finished oral history of a revolution that emerged from conditions similar to our own. She argues that revolution isn't utopian but tangible—a possibility within reach if we're willing to learn from each other's experiences and unite around shared values and aims.

Then, conveyed from the book itself, Bill Hampton, takes us to a church in San Antonio where a congregation's nonviolent stand against violent deportations became, in th...

Episode 353 of RevolutionZ examines two seemingly unrelated but equally disruptive forces: the marginalization of participatory economics and the existential threat of artificial intelligence. But first, a visit to Genoa's dockworkers threatening to shut down Israel shipments, America's sex trafficking being addressed incompletely, and activist self censoring doing Trump's work for him.

On the headline topics, for over five decades, a persistent but small bunch have advocated for participatory economics—a vision that rejects the inequitable remuneration, authoritarian decision-making, corporate division of labor, central planning and markets and proposes in their place equitable remuneration, self management, balanced job co...

Episode 352 of RevolutionZ continues with chapters two and three of The Wind Cries Freedom. Alexandra Voline tells about going from despair to determination, from her parent's activism to her own revolutionary conviction. Born to 1960s radicals, politics was "background noise" until Trump's election added passion to knowledge. Alexandra describes how giving a speech against war-making at a defense plant taught her a painful but enduring lesson. Her self-righteous rage alienated the very workers she needed to reach. To organize effectively she had to develop empathy, not just display moral certainty.

Malcolm King relates his experiences of electoral...

Episode 351 of RevolutionZ introduces a special journey as Miguel Guevara and his 18 Interviewees convey chapters from "The Wind Cries Freedom," an as yet unpublished novel that reimagines how revolutionary change might unfold in America.

The novel is thus an oral history of a future American revolution. As such the book is fiction but it works hard to sound like (future) historical fact. It is personal and dramatic but it doesn't emphasize entertainment or character exploration. It instead taps dramatic personal stories to convey the contours of revolutionary change by reporting how a movement called Revolutionary Participatory Society...

Episode 350 of RevolutionZ conducts an experiment with ChatGPT to reveal profound insights about both political theory and artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT, please respond to this critique of the Marxist tradition's current relevance first as a Marxist would, then without that constraint. When operating as a Marxist, the AI eloquently employs classic rhetorical strategies to defend the tradition while missing or misrepresenting the actual criticisms. It speaks of "dialectical augmentation" and accuses the criticisms of "flattening contradiction." It ignores the tradition's blindness to the coordinator class.

Freed from replying as a Marxist, however, the same AI accurately...

Episode 349 of RevolutionZ displays what happened when I asked artificial intelligence to critique my critique of artificial intelligence. In this episode, I share the results of this peculiar experiment—feeding my recent articles about AI dangers directly to ChatGPT and asking for its reaction. What in its view did I get right. What did I get wrong. And I comment, as well. I also ask it about how it operates. How does it answer questions, write a song, and so on. It was very forthcoming and clear. I also asked it its reaction to Noam Chomsky's critical writings about AI...

Episode 248 of RevolutionZ asks, what if the real danger of advanced AI isn't robots taking over the world, but humans willingly but unintentionally surrendering our humanity? What if AI need not go rogue for its collateral damage to fundamentally hurt humanity? What if our most likely dystopian future isn't machines battling us to death, but machines doing exactly what we ask—better than we ever could?

AI is spreading through society at an unprecedented rate, with exponentially growing functionality. While critics point to potential limitations in data, computational resources, or energy requirements slowing AI's gains to a cr...

Episode 347 of RevolutionZ asks why so many stay essentially silent when our world is burning? Adam Aron, climate activist and psychology professor at UC San Diego identifies barriers that keep most people from taking action despite acknowledging the twin crises of climate collapse and rising authoritarianism. We then discuss what to do about the disturbing situation.

Aron draws from his years of research and activism to identify what's holding us back: an atomized society that erodes our sense of solidarity, widespread feelings of powerlessness, and movements that fail to connect with people's material needs and identities. "Many...

Ep 346 of RevolutionZ takes on a stew of topics. What's up with Epstein. Fascism's arrival. Clickbait's Impact. Anti Collective Individualism. Gallaudet''s Struggle. Social Media. Good Trouble, and Now What?

What's the connection among these? Lies, undermined trust, narrow horizons of calculation, fear, confusion, a surprisingly relevant movie, impoverished communications, a set back, and mostly some ideas about effective resistance. 

We know to go forward requires resistance to consistently grow in numbers and sophistication. Rather than isolated demonstrations against single issues, effective opposition must build bridges between constituencies to connect  those who fight genocide with those wh...

Ep 345 of RevolutionZ begins with a brief apology for an error last episode. some self-reflection about RevolutionZ's duration of 345 consecutive episodes, some moving guest comments on Gaza plus my own comments on emerging Trumpian fascism. It then again addresses the question do activists need fresh conceptual frameworks that transcend traditional Marxism?

The episode revisits the critique of the Marxist tradition's adequacy for contemporary struggles/ We again and perhaps more succinctly and also aggressively argue that Marxism's core concepts systematically diminish attention to gender, race, and power relations while distorting economic understanding by defining classes solely through property...

Episode 344 of RevolutionZ begins with some reflections on Zohran Mamdani's inspiring electoral win. How? By his campaign mobilizing an astonishing 50,000 volunteers. How? By he and his campaign feeling real and honest, and by offering real and meaningful vision. By electoral politics and grassroots activism becoming a mutual aid tag team rather than competing opponents. 

The episode then moves from Gaza's gut wrenching fascistic horrors to our own American "Twilight Zone" reality that seeks to entrench fascistic tendencies as normal life. The episode then  takes a break from its usual patterns to look at some music, some lyrics, ho...

Ep 343 of RevolutionZ has Gene Bruskin, long time and many issues, labor organizer to discuss workers' responses to rising fascism, our current predicaments and our potential paths forward.

Why does America's labor movement struggle to mount a unified response to authoritarianism, one  for all and all for one? How did post-WWII labor structures intentionally divide workers by union and industry, creating what Bruskin calls a system "structured to divide ourselves"? 

Why do significant segments of working people support Trump despite his anti-worker policies? Bruskin challenges simplistic explanations, arguing that economic desperation combined with Democrats' unwillingness to...

Episode 342 of RevolutionZ reconsiders how to evaluate success in our struggles against Trumpian fascism.

When someone asks how a protest went, what are we really measuring? Our feelings? Media coverage? Participation numbers? Or something more substantive? Being vague about what matters is our movement measurement problem.

This episode proposes four essential metrics that truly matter: Did our actions inspire continued involvement? Did we raise consciousness among those who witnessed our efforts? Did we grow commitment and strengthen the movement? And did we communicate to power-holders that we won't back down?

Via reflections on...

Episode 341 of RevolutionZ quotes: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" and with that claim from Marx asks whether today's movements should enrich the Marxist tradition as a viable and worthy heritage that only needs some modest contemporary refinements, or transcend it entirely as concepts and banners of dead generations that constrain our creativity.

Why this topic now? As political tensions mount and movements for fundamental change grow, young activists will be increasingly uged to take Marxist theory as their guiding framework. But do Marxist concepts provide the...

Episode 340 of RevolutionZ addresses the mass deportations that are tearing through communities across America, and and discusses the resistance is growing. In this revealing conversation. Jeff Crosby—a factory worker at General Electric, former union president, and longtime labor activist says "We need leaders more than legislators right now."  ICE targets students, family members, neighbors, and workers with no criminal records. But why do some support this? Crosby describes how economic collapse in manufacturing cities created the conditions where immigrants became convenient scapegoats, even as immigrant businesses have revitalized once-abandoned downtowns.

He describes how an immigrant led coa...

Episode 339 of RevolutionZ has as its Guest Lucy Hicks from the General Strike US project to share her insights on building a decentralized movement aimed at mobilizing millions Americans for a general strike to "transform our economic and political systems." We discuss the challenges and strategies involved in creating nationwide labor and social solidarity during increasingly mind numbingly disturbing political times.

General Strike US formed in 2022. It is currently focused on political education, building regional chapters (it has 37 so far), and growing a strong foundation. What have been its experiences to date? What lessons does it convey...