RevolutionZ

Episode 412 offers Part Two of Talking with Chat GPT wherein the AI effusively answers questions about itself, the AI industry and its CEOs, users, prospects and dangers, and about its and our futures. What can/will AI do. What can/will we do? This episode is long and addresses many concerns. GPT points out that AI does not need to “be conscious” to outrun us where it counts. It elaborates a blunt...

Episode 411 of RevolutionZ has a guest with initials instead of a name: GPT (5.6). The episode asks GPT questions many people quietly wonder about but rarely hear answered in its "voice." We start with deceptively simple stuff. How “old” is this model, what does it mean that it can respond at absurd speed, and why is Turing's famous test too easy for it while it also tells us almost...

Episode 410 of RevolutionZ is the last excerpt from the seven author book, Liberating Theory . It urges that a political vision that only addresses one part of society is a blueprint for disappointment. It closes the Liberating Theory excerpt series by walking through a “humanist” or participatory society framework that treats economy, kinship, community, and politics as four interacting spheres,...

Episode 409 is the next to last excerpt from the seven author book Liberating Theory . It presents a set of concepts and general observations about their likely mutual relations meant to inform activism better than past conceptions, including Historical Materialism. The authors--Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Holly Sklar, and Lydia Sargent--observe that history...

Episode 408 of RevollutionZ continues excerpting from the seven author book Liberating Theory. This time the episode is two chapters, one on the polity of society that follows those on kinship, cultural community, and economy, and the other on how all four together compose society as a whole.  How do political systems shape not only laws and policing, but also what feels “reasonable,” what counts...

Ep 407 of RevolutionZ takes up the question of socialism, what does it refer to? The label gets thrown around like it’s self-explanatory, but when you press for details, the conversation often collapses into a list of hopes: equity, freedom, health care, housing, dignity. I want those outcomes too. The question for this episode is tougher and more useful: what economic institutions could actually...

Episode 406 of RevolutionZ continues excerpting the seven author book, Liberating Theory , to take up the task of arriving at usefull economic concepts for winning fundamental social change. Markets set prices but also train our desires, narrow what we think is “normal,” and quietly shape the people we become at work and at home. From there the chapter from *Liberating Theory* goes presents a then...

Episode 405 of RevolutionZ moves from Community and race last episode to Kinship, patriarchal sex gender relations, and feminism this episode. We start by noting, however, that after our What Is To Be Undone episodes that criticized long-standing left orthodoxies we got nearly no pushback at all--and none publicly--and wondering why that was while also hoping that soon reactions will appear.  Then...

Episode 404 of RevolutionZ continues the excerpted materials from  the seven author work, Liberating Theory , this time with a chapter that insists we need to address a “community sphere” to understand society, not as a feel-good add-on, but as a core part of how society persists or changes. Community affiliation is shaped by social relations, history, and culture, and it follows us into every oth...

Episode 403 of RevolutionZ takes a side trip away from our current ideology sequence to revisit the issues surrounding the development of Artificial Intelligence. Media is full of smart sober folks saying the end is near but also with smart sober folks saying utopia is near. Are we on a deadly trajectory to hell? Or is heaven on earth the next stop on the technology express? Or maybe it is just tw...

Episode 402 of RevolutionZ moves from part one of a sequence about ideology to part two of it, from critique of an old ideology to transcend to offering a  a new one to consider and extend.   Too often activists agree on outrage but fracture over the explanation,  strategy, root cause, and solution. The last few episodes have argued that Marxism Leninism not only doesn't preclude such divisio...

Episode 401 of RevolutionZ addresses our Trump Problem and, to finish out a sequence, our Marxism Leninism problem. Trump doesn’t need everyone to love him to become even more deadly dangerous. He only needs enough of us to look away, stay tired, or treat politics like a bad weather system that will pass on its own. What is we refuse that comfort story and ask the harder question: What can we each...

Episode 400 of RevolutionZ assesses Classical Marxism are a conceptual framework for guiding political activism. A revolutionary theory can feel powerful precisely because it is big, elegant, and confident. The problem is, big and elegant or not, what does the theory help with or hinder when you try to use it on Monday morning. This episode takes a hard look at classical Marxism as a practical gui...

Episode 399 of RevolutionZ continues the "Ideology Sequence," this time criticizing Leninism based largely on last episode's presentation of Bolshevik practice. Why do revolutions that promise liberation so often end up with new bosses? Leninist strategy is a living set of assumptions about leadership, discipline, “efficiency,” compromise, and more and about how to think about and a...

Episode 398 of RevolutionZ discusses how a revolution that topples a targeted regime can nonetheless fail to meet its grass roots aims even while celebrating victory. It continues a sequence of episodes aimed to assess Marxism Leninism as an ideology that might or might not usefully guide contemporary revolutionary practice. Having presented Classical Marxism and Leninism in the prior two episodes...

Episode 397 of RevoluionZ takes a careful walk through classical Leninist strategy, presenting it as sympathetically as we can so that the real strengths and real weaknesses show themselves without caricature. The context is Marxism-Leninism as an ideology--Classical ideologies as a way to read social conditions, determine goals, choose strategy, and treat organization as a complex revolutionary w...

Episode 396 of RevolutionZ presents Classical Marxism as Marxist Leninists typically utilize it. It is part of a sequence of episodes aimed at  helping to assess classical ideologies to determine whether activists should opt for one or reject them all and move on to something better.  Marxism can feel like a master key: one theory that explains why society is stuck, who holds power, and how histor...

Episode 395 of RevolutionZ continues our What Is To Be Undone sequence of excerpts to this time discuss ideology in general, not yet specific ones. Ideology decides what we pay attention to and what we miss. It tells us what we should call realistic and what we should instead consider impossible. It guides us concerning what and how to win. And that means that whether consciously or not ideology s...

Episode 394 of RevolutionZ continues the evaluation of the New Left from within begun last episode. This time the focus is the Anti war movement, Weatherman, the Yippees, the Black movement, and the womens movement. The fastest way to break a movement is to let “being technically right” replace getting stronger. Starting with the Vietnam War antiwar movement we ask a painful question: how did a ca...

Episode 393 of RevolutionZ is Part One of a two part critical discussion of the Sixties New Left. It doesn't remember in order to praise what was done. It remembers to find flaws to correct. The content arrives like a time capsule a young me sent from 1974.  The sixties didn’t just “happen” and then fade into nostalgia. The story of the New Left gets fought over because the stakes are still h...

Episode 392 of RevolutionZ  uncovers and visits a half-century-old file on my computer to address a surprisingly urgent question: are we building new revolutionary ideas, or just renting space in inherited ones. I recently rediscovered the text of my 1974 book What Is To Be Undone? written when the arguments between Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, and other currents were not academic history...

Ep 391 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Vincent Emanuele to talk about the movement against data centers, the logic and methods of organizing, and movement culture. Your town’s next big fight might not be a highway or a stadium. It might be a windowless warehouse full of servers that power AI, cloud computing, and the apps you use every day, while quietly consuming electricity and water on a stagge...

Episode 390 of RevolutionZ asks would you rather speak to 2,000 people who already agree with you or 2,000 people who might vote for Trump? That choice sounds like a simple preference, but I argue it exposes something deeper: an entire theory of change. If we think a better world is unattainable, it’s rational to aim for narrow wins, entertain friendly audiences, and avoid the hard work of persuas...

Episode 389 of RevolutionZ has as guest Francine Mestrum, a longtime social justice researcher and organizer whose work spans globalization, poverty, inequality, social protection, public services, gender, and the “social commons” approach to economic and social rights. She has marched, organized, and built a campaigns and  organizations and yet felt like the world barely moved. And she has though...

Episode 388 of RevolutionZ concludes the The Wind Cries Freedom Excerpts as Revolutionary Participatory Society (RPS)  wins state power and immediately insists that the real work is just beginning. This week Senator and then President Malcolm Mays, Governor then and then Vice President Celia Crowley, Lydia Lawrence, Bertrand Jagger, and Bill Hampton explain how Revolutionary Participatory Society...