RevolutionZ

Episode 387 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Farah Mokhtareizadeh, an incredibly traveled and experienced Iranian American scholar and organizer who I first encountered via her article Vijay Prashad's Iran. She shows how if your politics begins and ends with “against the U.S.,” you can unintentionally end up defending the very forces that crush workers, feminists, and dissidents. We discuss wh...

Ep 386 starts by addressing Mayday Strong strike plans. A one day strike can feel bold but without follow up change little. This episode starts by asking about Mayday’s call for “no work, no school, no shopping”: Can the plan pull people from symbolic protest into sustained resistance that escalates over time to  build sufficient power to stop Trump’s agenda and challenge the institutions that tra...

Episode 385 of RevolutionZ features our 28th excerpt from The Wind Cries Freedom, an oral history imagining and reporting from the next American Revolution. This excerpt follows organizers inside RPS as they build a second national convention with chapter-based delegates, intentional representation, and real mechanisms for deliberation. It continues our look at movement infrastructure. How did the...

Episode 384 of RevolutionZ has as guest Rachel Donald, a journalist at the site Planet Critical. Rachel suggests that war propaganda thrives on simple stories, and shows how the left sometimes helps that along without meaning to. She then considers a hard question: how might we best oppose the US war on Iran without falling into the trap of treating any US target, no matter how authoritarian, as o...

Episode 383 of RevolutionZ starts with No Kings. Nine million people can take to the streets and still walk away wondering if anything changed. How can that be? How is it that turnout can grow in rural towns and new venues while longtime participants slowly fall away? What does it say about cynicism, strategy, and movement-building? The episode suggests a blunt but hopeful lesson: You do not fix a...

Episode 382 of RevolutionZ continues our sequence of chapters from the soon forthcoming book, The Wind Cries Freedom: An Oral History of the Next American Revolution . This chapter's title is "Beyond Capitalism, Classlessness." But, before we get into that, and  as with other recent episodes, first we briefly take up two current issues of interest, cancel culture and what to do abou...

Episode 381 of RevolutionZ starts with my email inbox. “Oprah wants your book, No Bosses.” It sounds like a dumb joke until you realize how convincing modern AI scams have become. A flood of smart, personalized emails targets authors with flattering outreach, credible details pulled from your work and your life, plus plausible offers of aid. Then comes relentless follow-up, and only later, once sn...

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 milli...

Episode 379 of RevolutionZ starts with some discussion of the savaging of the Iranian people before returning to our sequence of chapter excerpts from the forthcoming book, The Wind Cries Freedom t o discuss experiences of education and economy in the participatory revolutionary struggles of the next American revolution.  Trump represses and depots; bellows and bombs. Are we doomed to chase every...

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 institution...

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 c...

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‑...

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...

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 are...

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 r...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 m...

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 d...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...