RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 361 Hope Is Not Naive, Cynicism Is Counterproductive, Fight To Win
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.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. Unless this is your first time with Revolution Z, you are likely aware that I am interspersing in our flow of episodes a sequence based on a book I have prepared, but which does not yet have a publisher. The book, entitled The Wind Cries Freedom, is an oral history of a future American Revolution. The book is therefore a novel told by imagined future participants, which means it seeks to read like nonfiction, like personal reports of real events, ideas, motives, and feelings. As its purpose, the Wind Cries Freedom hopes to inspire belief in the possibility of worthy, viable, fundamental change, revolution, and to convey thoughts and lessons that may prove helpful for attaining such change in our time and place, though the thoughts and lessons are communicated in the oral history by others from another time and place. It seems like that might be of interest, though perhaps my guess that it would be is incorrect. Seeking to find out which of those is the case and to get feedback, in this episode chapter, Miguel, the interviewer throughout talks with Alexandra and then Senator and later President King and with Andre, all of whom you have heard from in prior episodes about how to address hesitance to act due to thinking humans are bad to the bone, as well as to discuss essential changes that were key to attaining RPS's, their revolutionary participatory organizations, lasting commitment to ongoing social struggle. But first, I would like to interject a word or two about our ongoing actual circumstances in our time, in our place. There can no longer be the slightest doubt if Trump's mind boggling words and deeds from tariffing the economy to smashing the White House for a ballroom to celebrate himself, and from taking over the judiciary to assault his idea of enemies within, to spreading murder most foul and indiscriminate on the high seas, not to mention enabling the orchestrated horror of the Mideast massacres now called a ceasefire, presumably as in Palestinians who were never able to fire much ceasing to fire, and Israelis with unlimited US supplied and sanctioned firepower resuming or actually never stopping firing, haven't haven't been sufficiently convincing. In a recent interview, Trump's comrade in Nazification, Steve Bannon, revealed that in his words, Trump is going to be president in twenty twenty eight, and people just ought to get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is, but there is a plan. So becoming dictator is not just an evident destination, it is a clearly stated intention police state uberalis. But resistance climbs, and less loudly, so does dissolution of Trump's support. The two are entangled, but let's address the latter here for a minute because it is less widely noted, particularly among those who are actively resisting. Partly it is some Trumpian political allies raising doubts. Partly it is slowly emerging military doubt. But the thing that has caught my eyes is evangelical pastors counseling a subset of churchgoers to leave MAGA, literally to leave MAGA. And these current or soon to be ex MAGA members are not going to suddenly lose their legitimate anger at surrounding conditions. Rather they are going to realize MAGA isn't for them, which means they are going to either despair or they're going to look for a different vehicle to express their anger and to try and rectify their painful situations. This is Sanders and AOC in Red States, particularly AOC, I think, because best I can tell, she understands and more importantly shares that grassroots anger. Listen to her speech at the recent Mamdani rally in New York City, and let me know if you agree. Forget that she is in a war making elite serving party. Listen to the words, hear the tone. Is it far fetched that she will get heard by ex MAGA women and even ex MAGA men? And speaking of Mamdani, about a week from when I first record this, and just two days from when it is first posted online, the next mayor of New York City will be chosen. I believe Mamdani will win. If you are mainly electorally oriented, his winning, a product of the efforts of fifty thousand volunteers, will for you perhaps lay claim to being the day when the die was cast. If you were mainly activist oriented, perhaps you would instead say that october eighteenth was that day. Whether one of those or another day, hopefully not far off, the day will come when the race between fascism trying to entrench itself and a growing resistance seeking to stop fascism will enter a new period when Trump moves from being steadily ascendant to beginning his steady descent. When we move from forces, ideas, and feelings of fascism ascending to forces, ideas and feelings of fascism having crested and falling. Of course that won't be the end of even that limited fight. Resistance will need to keep fighting, even to keep growing, so as to not falter and let Trump rise anew. But with that as our plan, the coming inflection point, the coming turning point, can become not just a sign of Trump's end, but a sign of new positive motion, not just overcoming fascism, but toward becoming a worthy, viable, fundamentally altered, sustainable society. This is what has to happen. And I admit to offer you chapters from the Wind Cries Freedom as if that inflection point has not only come, but as if the positive struggle for much more and much better has itself grown ascendant and unstoppable, as in the book, feels a bit strange. But I can't help but think for a great many people to fight Trump and Co, much less to fight way beyond that for much more gain, depends on belief that for us to win is possible, and for us to arrive at compelling, supportive beliefs and tactics, strategy and vision able to propel that end is essential. And so, even as I keep hammering away at today's situation in these podcast episodes, I also feel compelled to at the same time address tomorrow's prospects. And to do that, to offer this episode's chapter from the Wind Cries Freedom, this episode's oral testimony from a possible future, to start off, Miguel asks, Alexandra, as you became steadily more active, did you encounter resistance based on cynicism? If so, how did you reply to it? And what impact did encountering this have on you and on RPS? Cynicism? Oh yeah, all the time. And not just from others, from myself too. After Trump's second win, there were days where I felt like despair was the only rational response. And then we started building again, and as we built, as we started dreaming aloud, cynicism came rushing in like a tide, telling us we were naive, that people are selfish, evil, that history will just repeat itself. My way of dealing with that wasn't to argue. It was to invite people in with a question. I'd say is there anyone in your life you genuinely admire? Someone kind, someone decent. And people always had an answer, a grandparent, a teacher, a friend, whoever. Then I'd say okay, so put that person on the side of humanity. Now, how many people do you want to put on the side of cruelty? Go ahead and list them all. But when you're done, ask yourself this why should the worst of us define the limits of what the best of us can build? We've been trained to believe hope is childish, but hope, radical, rigorous, informed hope, is one of the most grown up things you can choose. RPS was, in many ways, the organized form of that choice, not naive, not blind, not magical, but deliberate, audacious, informed, necessary. Now consider, I would next say to them, that if evil was inevitably wired into human nature, like having kidneys, eyes or a heart, everyone would be on the evil side of the ledger. That isn't the case, and so we already know that evil is not inevitable. On the other hand, we know even as evil is possible because antisocial folks certainly exist. We also know evil can lie, manipulate, and fear monger its way into major office. So we know human nature allows people to become evil and to or to worship evil, to even become slaves to evil. To deny all of that would be ridiculous. It happens, therefore it is possible. But it is only possible, not inevitable. Human nature allows people to justify evil and even to admire, prop up and do evil. But none of that is inevitable. Otherwise you, your grandmother, or whoever you indicated was good would be evil, would celebrate evil, and would even worship evil. That's how I would put it. I hope without moral condescension, but with moral clarity. I'd ask people to take a step back from the noise and ask if being cruel, greedy, violent, if being indifferent to others is truly human nature, wouldn't everyone always be that way? Wouldn't you be that way? Wouldn't your mom, your best friend, your kids be that way? And if not, if even one person you know carries kindness, shows empathy, or chooses decency, then we already know better is possible. We prove that every day. Evil isn't born into our bones. It's battered into our systems. But we do have to ask, I would continue, if antisociality isn't wired in, why are so many people so seriously greedy and violent or at least callous towards others? Not just in their worst Trumpian moments, but even a good part of the time. And that's the heart of it. The question isn't why are people bad? The question is what's making people bad? Because let's be real, it's not an accident that in our society selfishness is celebrated and solidarity is punished. Look at what we reward. Owners who hoard billions while they deny their workers health care, politicians who scapegoat immigrants while they cut taxes for oil barons, cops who brutalize with impunity. These are not outliers. They are products of systems that prize domination over dignity, systems that promote greed as virtue. So I would say to people, look at the structure, look at the incentives, look at how cruelty is rewarded and kindness is stigmatized. Look at how people are trained from school to work to media. No wonder we compete, fear and step over each other. We do it to survive. And then ask yourself, what would happen if we flipped the script? If cooperation was rewarded, if people were safe enough to care. If compassion and decency still show up under brutal conditions, and they do, then maybe those qualities run deeper than cruelty. Maybe they're closer to the root. Sometimes such an exchange would end right there. For example, I remember any many times I would give a talk, field a question, offer that viewpoint, and then move on. But other times discussions would go a lot longer. Maybe it was me and one other person, or maybe it was talking with a group in an open ended discussion in a dorm, bar or workplace. Or perhaps it was meeting with a group and going on as long as possible. And honestly, it was those longer, often late night conversations, especially with folks who didn't already agree that really shaped me. That's where the real work happened, not just telling people what's wrong, but walking with them as they unlearned the myths they had carried their whole lives. Because here's the thing, when people resist what you're saying, it's not always because they disagree logically. It's often because they feel like their worldview is under threat, like they'll lose footing, like everything they've believed, suffered through or justified is being pulled from under them. That's scary. And so I learned you have to walk people across that bridge, not shove them, not shame them, just walk them. Miguel asks, what did the longer discussions get into? The longer discussions would consider how our antisocial roles mute our social inclinations, and how they impose antisocial inclinations instead. And this would be a very pertinent matter bearing on people's deepest beliefs. The reasoning was pretty trivial, yet the discussions were hard. At first people would not hear the case. They would find my claims delusional. They didn't have logical difficulty with them. They had difficulty accepting that they had for so long taken false things for granted. And I learned to sit with that discomfort. I'd say it's okay to feel disoriented, you're not alone. We've all been fed a steady stream of lies about what's possible, about who we are, but you're here now, and that means something. Miguel asks, did you have other ways to address the cynicism? Yes, a few. Sometimes I'd borrow from others who help me push through my own doubt. I remember hearing Noam Chomsky speak once, and he gave this incredible example. He said, Imagine you're looking out your window on a hot summer day. You see a little kid with an ice cream cone. Then a big adult walks up, slaps the kid into the gutter, takes the cone, and keeps walking. Do you say, Ah yes, there goes an ideal expression of human nature? Of course not. You say, what the hell is wrong with that guy? You know that's not normal. You can feel it. And that's the point. You don't need a PhD in philosophy to know what's right. You don't need a spreadsheet to know compassion makes sense. We instinctively recognize cruelty as deviant. So maybe the problem isn't our nature, it's what society forces us to normalize. Chomsky had another go-to line. He would say if we do nothing, the outcome is grim. If we act, it might be better, so we should act. And sure, that's logically airtight. But when I tried that approach, it didn't land. Why? Because people are exhausted. They're drowning in debt, stuck in dead end jobs, afraid for their kids, afraid of cops, afraid of climate collapse. And then you show up and you say, Hey, join this fight, it might work. That's not enough. That's not inspiring. It's terrifying. People need more than rational calculus. They need hope. They need connection. They need to believe they matter. And that their participation isn't just a drop in the ocean, but part of a wave. They need to feel seen and heard. So instead of saying, quote, we should act because maybe we'll survive, I'd say, quote, let's act because we deserve joy, we deserve justice, and we can build it together. I think RPS grew because we didn't just appeal to people's logic. We appealed to their hearts too. We made space for grief. We honored courage, and we refused to let cynicism have the last word. I first reached these perceptions with my own parents and a few close friends. I was already on my activist path. They were politically engaged, progressive, even quite liberal, but not committed to winning for fundamental change. They believed in better, they just didn't believe better was possible, and that was a common thread I kept encountering. It wasn't that people didn't care, it was that they didn't believe. So sure, the approaches I described earlier, the thought experiments, the moral reasoning, the appeals to our shared humanity, they had some effect. A few people shifted, some grew curious. But deeper, longer term change in people's choices, getting off the sidelines, staying off the sidelines, seemed to require hope. And not abstract magical hope. People needed to feel a reasoned sense of efficacy, a belief that they could matter, that change was not only necessary, but possible, and that their contribution could help make it real. So yes, I totally agree with others in RPS who have said that one of the deepest root causes of inaction isn't selfishness or laziness or apathy, it's hopelessness. Big moments, massive protests, unexpected uprisings can shake people out of that. They can feel like cracks in the wall of cynicism, like quote, maybe something's happening, maybe this time we can win. And that kind of jolt can be transformative. I saw it in the George Floyd uprisings, in the women's march, in the dreamers taking over offices, in the walkouts after school shootings, and Gaza solidarity and encampments in resisting Trump too. But then what happens? The moment passes, demands aren't immediately won, the system doesn't cave, and people think, Oh, I guess we were wrong to believe, I guess power always wins. And debilitating doubt takes hold again. Not in everyone, but enough to slow the momentum. You can't create a spontaneous mass event on your own in a living room or at a coffee shop. So in one on one conversations you have to use smaller tools, stories, metaphors, examples. You try to create little glimmers of what a movement can offer. But even that spark, and even the big jolts, none of it lasts without something to sustain belief. So what did that mean? For me, for RPS, it meant we had to radically shift what we emphasized. Miguel asks, what more did you need to provide? Beyond correcting ignorance and cutting through denial, we had to go deeper. We had to meet people where they were, not just intellectually, but also emotionally. We had to confront fear, exhaustion, and disbelief. We had to grapple with a society that had taught people that nothing better is possible, and worse, that they aren't worthy of it even if it were possible. Think about it, people didn't just think that we couldn't win. They thought that even if we did win, it would just fall apart again, that any victory would rot from the inside, that any new world would just become another version of the old world. To break that cycle, we had to do something we weren't used to doing. We had to talk less about what we were fighting against and more about what we were fighting for, why it was worthy, why it was viable. We had to show, not vaguely, but concretely what justice looks like, what equity feels like, what liberation tastes like. We had to make the future vivid, real, touchable. That was hard. It was a huge shift in how we communicated. I had to completely reframe my own approach. I had spent years pointing out everything that was wrong with the system, how war kills, how poverty stars, how racism dehumanizes, how patriarchy rapes, and how profit subverts every social value. And that was important, but it wasn't enough. It aroused, but it didn't sustain. I had to say something more. We all did. So I started to focus on what justice would mean, not in slogans, in life. I talked about new institutions, new ways of working, new ways of living. I talked about care, joy, and the dignity of real democratic power. I talked about the mechanics of how to get there, step by step, using organizing, coalition building, strategy, and vision, and I talked about what new relations we could construct to make such outcomes real. More, I knew if I didn't believe what I was saying, if I didn't feel it in my bones, no one else would either. Cynicism smells fear. Hope is contagious, but only if it's true. That's what RPS gave me in those early days. Not just analysis, not just community, but a framework for how to move from what is to what could be. A structure that said we can do this, here's how, and here's why you matter. Miguel asks, Senator King, you studied history in the classroom, but you learned a different kind of truth on the factory floor and beneath the kitchen line. From those early jobs to the halls of the Senate, your journey carried you through RPS organizing, activism, and ultimately national office, where you became the first high ranking elected official to openly carry the RPS banner. I'll be honest, it feels a bit surreal to be sitting here interviewing a US senator, but I'm grateful for the chance. Let me ask you, can you recall what it was that first pushed you to become radical? What cracked things open for you? Please call me Malcolm, and yes, I think I can. I was always drawn to history, and I think part of that was because I felt a deep connection to the stories of people fighting back, fighting for justice. Understanding how institutions shaped injustice gave me a framework, but that understanding for a while was academic. It wasn't yet grounded in life. After college, I couldn't get work in history, so I took a job on an assembly line and another as a short order cook, both familiar paths in my family. I'd love to say I did it out of solidarity, but truthfully, I just didn't know what else to do. I took the jobs that I could get. That turned out to be a gift, not one I fully appreciated at the time, but a gift nonetheless. Because once I was working those jobs, I wasn't reading about working class life, I was living working class life, and that immersion transformed me. I came to understand exploitation not as a theory, but as a lived experience, and that's what radicalized me. Miguel asks, Can you tell us which events, campaigns, or early moments in RPS history were most moving for you personally? Well, no surprises there. Becoming a US Senator from Massachusetts post Trump changed my daily life in a big way. But I want to highlight two moments that hit me at a personal level. The first was when Bernie Sanders passed away. Now I know he wasn't ever formally part of RPS, and his public politics didn't always reach the full RPS vision. But for me, his campaigns, his voice, his commitment to working people, they were formative. Bernie had an ability to cut through the noise. He never made himself the story. He always reminded us. It's not about me, it's about us, he would say, and he meant it. When he died, it hit me hard. That old slogan, don't mourn, organize, it's good advice, but it's not always easy to follow. I mourned, quietly, deeply, and in that morning something clarified in me. I thought more concretely about what mattered, and honestly, I thought more about death, and what we leave behind. The pundits call it legacy. Burney's was stellar. The second moment came during the campaign for military and prison conversion. I gave a talk at a military base in Kansas. Afterward I sat with a group of soldiers. We talked about their lives, their families, what the conversion campaign could mean for them. What I found wasn't cartooned villains. I found citizens patriotic in their own way and deeply concerned about their futures, about justice, about truth. Many still had a lot of misconceptions, sure, but they were open. They were wrestling with real contradictions. That conversation taught me something vital. You can't organize people by imagining what they ought to believe. You have to start with what they do believe. You have to listen. You have to engage where they're at, not where you wish they were at. And when you do that, when you genuinely try to understand instead of assume, you build something stronger than agreement. You build solidarity. Miguel asks, What do you think fed into the early boycotts and so many other such projects and campaigns emerging when they did? Well it didn't come out of nowhere. The march on Wall Street was a major spark. So was the earlier horrific assault by Israel with US support on Palestine's that shocked many people into action. And of course, we experienced rising fascism, Trump seeking to erase every democratic value. But you can trace it further back. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Bernie's campaigns, the massive women's marches at the start of Trump's first term. Each of these moments shook the status quo, each of them raised expectation, and each left lessons behind. The resistance didn't die with Trump's first term ending. It evolved. Labor organizing picked up steam. The movement for climate justice surged forward. I felt all of that shape who I was becoming. As Malcolm X said, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And I realized that even if you don't win right away, each effort can lay groundwork for what comes next. You build momentum, you lose some fights, you get knocked down, but the trick is learning from the losses so that over time your wins build on each other. RPS didn't come out of thin air. A thousand earlier struggles helped shape it. Each left behind a peace, an experience, a new skill, a taste of solidarity. But that didn't mean every participant held tight to what they'd learned. People get tired, they burn out, they fall silent, and yeah, sometimes they regress. Life's tough. But many other people did carry those gains forward. They showed up for the next campaign. That's how movements grow. Not in a straight line, but with a rickety forward motion. Going forward is what matters. We saw it during the arms boycotts. Some campuses were on fire, twenty, thirty percent of the community were actively involved, eighty percent were in agreement. But when campaigns ended, win or lose, people too often drifted back to their past. They returned to routine, they stopped pushing, and to watch that it felt like a fog of passivity settling in. RPS noticed, we studied it, we came to a tough but vital conclusion. The biggest threat to change wasn't always police repression. It wasn't always legal barriers or bribes. Sometimes it was just attrition. People give up, people check out. So we made a commitment. Every campaign had to leave something behind, not just policy wins, but a stronger, deeper, more enduring base of organizers, allies, and lasting organization. We said it then, and I say it now. A moment. Movement has to be busy being born or it will be busy dying. There's no standing still, and it's always the right time to do the right thing. Miguel asks Andre, you were intimately involved in all this. Was your experience similar to Malcolm's? I saw periodic declines and I too was saddened by them. I could even have been totally sidetracked, and there were low moments when I almost was. But I guess I ultimately saw the optimistic side more intensely. I saw that some people in each campaign kept on keeping on. I also saw that even the folks who went back to their prior ways had a residue of their boycott experiencing living on in their minds, and I knew it could resurface not long later if those who did keep active did good work. Miguel asks, so what was your impression of the significant number who did not return to prior business as usual? We were changed and we retained the changes. The changes meant we no longer fit our prior patterns. A few of us became social misfits. We were shattered and for a time unable to function well due to our outrage at all the injustices around us. Our bitter angry feelings interfered with us engaging thoughtfully. But others of us became designers of new slots for ourselves. We decided society had to fundamentally change and resolve and we resolved to help make it happen. We became part of a flow that led toward RPS, along with those already on the same path who had learned from earlier campaigns against Trump's vile panel policies and whatnot else even earlier. Other gains occurred at that time that also led toward RPS. Perhaps most important, at least as I saw it, activists began to realize that the right criterion for judging events, whether meetings, campaigns, boycotts, strikes, occupations, or whatever else, wasn't only or even primarily did our effort immediately win what we directly demanded. It wasn't only or even primarily did we achieve the disruption we desired or even the change we directly sought. The additional criteria was did our effort increase consciousness, desire, organization, and commitment in ourselves and in the larger circles of people our activities communicated with. This new criterion for judging our efforts helped birth RPS. It was a big step toward movement first thinking, replacing me and mind first thinking. We move from thinking only our feelings and our small group matter to thinking that mass action and outward effects also matter. Consequences matter. Miguel asks, what made you feel that that change had occurred? A lot of things, not least my experiencing it myself. But here was one particularly stark indicator. Consider a major demonstration called Shut Down Some Elite Meeting. The anti globalization demonstrations way earlier in Seattle were, at least from my studies, a good example. In earlier cases like that one, in the initial organizing, the focus of activist commentary was typically on substantive issues. What was the meeting that the activists aimed to disrupt all about? Why was it a highness gathering? Why did demonstrations oppose it? What did demonstrations want beyond merely shutting it down? After the new criteria gained sway, this type of focus persisted for such endeavors right through when they occurred and into the aftermath. But before the new criteria gained sway, pretty early on, and steadily more so as the events neared, organizers and left media would shift overwhelmingly from focusing on the issues of the movement, on the aims of the meeting, and on our large scale future aims to technical details of blocking the meeting, and especially how to deal with police. The tone became stop the meeting, we win. Fail to stop the meeting, police win. This was remarkable, because of course elites won as soon as that became the substance of the discussion. With that as the focus, real radical insights faded from view. Organizers and activists could be easily crushed. Coerce us into tactical retreat, and you win, we lose. In those days, hell, we would moan about their violence and even exaggerate it and its effects instead of emphasizing our resistance. We would do the work of their PR department for them. And truth be told, this recurred with Trump too. With the new criteria after Trump, our priority became to reveal how today's choices impact the future, not only whether today's action accomplishes some specific short term tactical aim. When RPS members later organized to stop some meeting or to win some campaign, our demands and action certainly mattered to us for the immediate benefit they could deliver to worthy constituencies, but also for how they provided a basis for winning more games in the future. And state violence, we had to parlay it into more resistance, not moan about it. These insights caused me and many other activists to deeply realize that being a revolutionary wasn't mainly about supporting particular ideas or even having a transformative vision. It wasn't mainly courage or even organizational ties. That all mattered greatly, of course, but even beyond all that, being a revolutionary was about having a new attitude. Life had to reorient from being firstly about one's day to day concerns, one's job, or even an immediate short term progressive agenda, to being about winning a change society. I am a revolutionary came to mean that the organizing principle guiding my life is to win a new society. Miguel asks Andre, what did activism most need to accomplish, something it hadn't quite managed in earlier decades if it was going to give rise to and sustain a project like RPS? What had to change for it to not only ignite but endure and grow? Information and analysis mattered greatly, of course, but I tend to think they were secondary. I remember hearing a talk about activism decades back that focused on a case study. The speaker said, I guess in about two thousand eight, that Paris and France as a whole entered a kind of revolutionary moment forty years earlier in May of nineteen sixty eight. In April of that year, Paris was like other places at the time. It had considerable activism, but along with the activism a vast sea of passivity. Then some modest events happened, initially about male and female hours of access and entry on college campuses. And then bam, virtually overnight, the country was in turmoil, and for weeks after that, France was indeed a revolutionary cauldron of tremendous energy and creativity. Everyone seemed hugely energized to denounce the horrors of modern life and to fight for comprehensive freedom. Everything about society got questioned, barricades proliferated, minds were blown, yet not long later, quiet resurfaced, passivity became rebellion and then devolved back into passivity. What happened? How could we explain such turning on and turning off of gigantic social upheaval? The speaker said that one broad possibility that some people suggested was that ideas about how society works were suddenly successfully widely conveyed, and the newly imbibed wisdom fueled the uprisings. And then, after a time, the new insights somehow melted away. The upheaval thus subsided back into life as usual. The speaker then amusingly wondered how a whole society could suddenly become enlightened and in turn active, and then undergo such apocalyptic erasure. Mass lobotomy? Everyone bought off? Ridiculous. He then suggested another possibility that dramatically affected my thinking. Before may nineteen sixty eight, there was, he proposed, hopelessness in the minds and hearts of France's population. Then during May there was hope. Later hope disintegrated. The relatively brief presence of widespread hope freed minds and hearts. Widespread hope aroused and fueled turmoil, but once it dissipated, hope's absence terminated the turmoil. I thought the idea that informed hope was key was astute. Just as to think newly suddenly learned ideas were key was ridiculous. That is why when I am asked about ideas that I thought were important for RPS to emerge, the one I emphasize is that RPS offered compelling, desirable vision for the future, sufficient to sustain informed hope. At any rate, that was central for me. Miguel asks, but that was then. What about now? It's a fair question, Miguel. One way to approach it is comparatively. Consider the fifty two years from nineteen sixty eight to twenty twenty, and then the twenty five years from twenty twenty to twenty forty five, now when you're interviewing me. What explains the difference? The earlier period witnessed widespread insight and considerable unrest, but little consolidated. Miguel S, why have we done better? Some will argue it was due to increased suffering. Others will cite theoretical advances or catalytic events. These factors certainly played a role, but I don't believe they were decisive. Miguel S, so what was primary for RPS as compared to organizations and campaigns in the sixty in the sixties and from then until RPS? Let me suggest a few different but interconnected possibilities. One key difference was, as we've already said, hope. The widespread belief that there is no alternative began to erode. In its place emerge a counter belief. There really is an alternative. When people can't imagine a different future, the existing order becomes not only dominant, but normalized, inevitable. Once a credible alternative is imagined, however, the present becomes contestable. A second difference, intimately connected, was a shift in interpersonal and organizational culture. In the earlier period, activists often defaulted to denigration, harsh criticism, rejection, mutual invalidation, even of ourselves. We effectively rejected the old, but we were fragmented and ineffectual in proposing and sustaining the new. By contrast, RPS sought to cultivate a different ethos, one based on mutual respect, constructive engagement, and an affirmation of diverse contributions. Miguel reacts it was a shift from fragmented critique to collective construction? Exactly. United We Stand, Divided We Fall is more than a slogan. It expresses an underlying truth about power. An individual can act, a small group can exert some influence, but coordinated collective engagement across networks is what yields enduring results. That, however, requires not only organizational structure, but also a shared culture that prioritizes solidarity over status seeking. We went from too many progressives separately arguing and even fighting with each other over arcane differences in the present, to steadily more progressives collectively seeking a better future, while treating our differences as components to test, modify, and merge. A third shift involved how we communicate. All communication has two facets style and substance. Style involves tone, emotional register, persuasive appeal. Substance concerns the logic of arguments, coherence of ideas, and grounding in evidence. In the decades leading up to twenty twenty five, style too often eclipsed substance. Political discourse leaned toward affective performance, how things sounded, what they evoked emotionally, rather than what they meant or how well supported they were. The clearest example was Trump, whose disregard for facts, logic, and coherence was near absolute. His appeal rested on fear mongering, catchphrases, and a blunt charisma built on manipulation. But Trump didn't appear in a vacuum. He was an extreme symptom of a deeper decay. Social media, Twitter, Facebook, and their successors reshaped how people processed information. Complex analysis was compressed into slogans. Serious reflection gave way to brevity, speed, and spectacle. The structure of communication was less deliberative than dopamine driven. Clickbait headlines severed any connection between title and content. Truth became optional. Truth became a naive impediment, not a principle. Visual narcissism, selfies, and image curation dominated attention. The entire information ecology became saturated with distraction. In that environment, it's hardly surprising that someone like Trump could rise. He was the logical product of a media system detached from substance. Yet in response to that degeneration, many began to reclaim the importance of substance, without discarding the necessity of accessible and effective communication. It wasn't a rejection of clarity or emotional appeal. It was a refusal to sacrifice meaning for manipulation. RPS sought to merge grounded vision and empirically informed argument with language that could reach people across experiences and backgrounds. That combination mattered. Still another difference, perhaps the most subtle, had to do with the politics of everyday life. In earlier periods activism was frequently partitioned off from the rest of one's existence. One did politics when time permitted, after work, between family obligations. Activism was episodic, not existential. It was a role, not a foundation. For many people, the idea of making their life about building a new society felt unrealistic, self indulgent, or even intensely stupid. RPS rejected that compartmentalization. It maintained that the values we aspired to realize in a transformed society needed to inform how we organized in the present, how we treated one another, how we structured daily interactions, even before any broader institutional transformation had been achieved. This wasn't about moral purity or personal virtue. It was a recognition of historical continuity. If the foundational logic of a new society wasn't cultivated within the process of change itself, there was little reason to expect it to emerge spontaneously afterward. To change society we had to begin by changing ourselves and by helping one another to do so. I think these choices distinguished the emergence of RPS from many earlier efforts. We had hope grounded in a coherent and plausible vision. We rejected cynicism and sectarianism, which had previously fragmented so many efforts. We revived solidarity as a live principle. We emphasized substance and communication and all daily practices. Taken together these steps helped constitute the preconditions for something durable that didn't dissipate with the first major setback. In the years that followed, I believe we made real progress in dis in redressing the imbalance between style and substance, and that our rebalance was instrumental in laying the intellectual and cultural groundwork for our peers. I assume you'll return later to institutional developments, new forms of media, for instance, that aim to retain the positive potential of digital communication while mitigating its corrosive effects. But what seems clear is that we began to understand something basic. While style can attract attention and slogans can resonate, none of that substitutes for a substantive framework. In fact, we saw that manipulation, however effective in the short term, was antithetical to our aims. It also became evident that mutual aid oriented insights into the nature of society, along with deepened commitment to shared vision and an increasingly urgent desire for strategic organization played a significant role in enabling RPS to take shape. We were emotional, but our emotions were informed by our reasoning. Such priorities had existed before, of course, but not with the same clarity or centrality, at least not in the United States. And there's a further factor, one I still don't fully grasp. In the nineteen sixties, many people radicalized. That process was one thing, but the persistence of involvement, the capacity to remain engaged over decades was another thing altogether. Far fewer people sustained their commitment than had it in the first place. By contrast, in the most recent quarter century, it wasn't just about people becoming radical, many more stayed involved. Why? It may be that the newer period paid more attention to what might be called the psychological dimension of organizing, confronting and working through people's doubts, insecurities, lack of confidence, emotional fatigue. Was that simply a function of different conditions? Possibly, but I doubt that's the full story. More likely it had to do with a change in collective priorities and norms, an increased willingness, even an insistence on seriously but not mechanically or intrusively attending to those dimensions at the outset and throughout. And that may have made a decisive difference. At any rate, the implication seems straightforward. Movements that systematically but not intrusively work to address feelings of inadequacy, low confidence, and underdeveloped empathy are more likely to retain participants and to function more effectively. So ends this chapter of The Wind Cries Freedom, and thus this episode's presentation of that material. I hope it was useful. I hope that you will I hope that you will think about it, and perhaps even drop me a line saying what you think of the substance of this episode, but also the whole idea of this oral history. And in that light, and with that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.