RevolutionZ

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 what...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 about AI. A...