RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 369 WCF 16: Lydia Lawrence On Race, Class, Gender, Roles and Institutions
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 structures that match our values.
Miguel elicits from Lydia a revelatory mid-west factory story. Workers seized their plant. Councils rose and wages leveled. Spirit soared. Yet before too long passed, hierarchy crept back. Spirits crashed. The culprit wasn’t human nature. It was an unbroken corporate division of labor. A small group accumulated knowledge, access and confidence from newly doing empowering tasks while most returned to repetitive, debilitating tasks. Voice, influence and then even income stratified as much much of the old order reassembled itself. Out with the old boss, the owner. In with a new boss who Lydia calls Coordinators. Lydia lays out how class, race, gender, and polity entangle across home, school, workplace, media, and law—and why single-issue wins erode when unaltered institutions push back. She describes the cultural suicide of “ghosting” in movements and the coordinator class habit of hiding power behind jargon. Solidarity requires attention, not performance.
The discussion moves from Sander's valuable sparks and Trump’s odious fear to the necessity of building bridges without diluting justice for women, Black and Brown communities, LGBTQ+ people, and working-class men alike. Since oppression is an entangled network, strategy must be systemic. Lydia discusses her conversion to emphasizing balanced roles, open information, participatory decision-making, and a language everyone can own.
Do Lydia's reports of her path to joining sustained, effective revolutionary activism resonate with you? Are the lessons she reveals relevant to our times and circumstances? Concluding this episode's presentation of the sixteenth chapter from The Wind Cries Freedom, is a closing meditation on fiction as oral history—stories that test ideas and invite you to refine them. Is it worth sharing with a friend?
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. Trump is exoriated and continues to trample rights, dignity, and even sanity beneath his inanity. Last episode I had as a guest Bashkar Sankara, and we talked about socialism, what it means, and how it's how views about it might affect our organizing. This episode, like fourteen others of late, I offer a chapter from a book I am completing called The Wind Cries Freedom. Each chapter addresses different aspects of the same overarching focus, undertaking its many aspects and how many different people feel doing so, their motives and methods. This time we meet a new interviewee, Lydia Lawrence, who is interviewed by Miguel Guevara in her home in St. Louis, Missouri. She discusses the RPS ideas and values that captured her allegiance. But heads up, she briefly talks about writing a novel in her world and time, and her reactions to her friend's lack of response when asked for help. So, to start the 15th chapter, Miguel Guevara asks, Lydia Lawrence, you became political during the great upheavals of the 1960s and have spent a lifetime as a feminist, organizer, media worker, and revolutionary. You were RPS's first shadow government president, and you have remained one of its most consistent and clarifying voices. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but for me and for many others, your longevity and impact have been a deep source of inspiration. Given all that, can we begin with how you first became radical and how that early experience shaped your continuing journey? You're very kind, thank you. I appreciate it, and hopefully I can hang around a bit longer. But I admit, when you are younger, you have no real consciousness of time expiring, but when you get to a certain age, you wake each day and perhaps think, well, how about this? I am still here. I was in college in the late nineteen sixties and got caught up in the culture and politics of the times. I became anti-imperialist due to the butchery my country imposed on Indochina. I became feminist due to the sexism within the then left itself. The assumption that women were ornaments to be paraded and servants to do tasks that men wished to avoid. I became revolutionary when my mind and heart linked to a commitment to win better. But in truth, why me? I had friends experiencing the same things as I was, but who took different paths. Hell, I knew twins, same parents, same family, same home, same schools, and so on, and very different later commitments. So it seems to me that there are factors we never even see, never acknowledge, multiple factors, nothing alone definitive. I think that is why some people say it is what it is, or K Serra Sera, or even let it be. I don't buy any of that, but I do get the sentiment. On average, in the large, we can talk compellingly about factors. I am not sure about talking compellingly person by person. Miguel Guevara asks, but you were in position to inherit wealth and power. Why didn't you grab what you could? I am not a self analyst, but I would say it was partly moral outrage and partly a sense of solidarity with others. I felt more kinship with the Vietnamese and with Mississippi African Americans than with the New York jet set I was born to join. The sixties birthed a set of communal rather than loner attitudes and desires. The wealth and power we were supposed to sell out for began to repulse me, and activism began to attract me. Imagine you offer a vegetarian a year's supply of steak to ignore the hunger that others suffer. Not very attractive. The bribe would be no bribe at all. The truth is I did grab what I wanted. I wanted change. The payout I was offered to sell out was not attractive. To refuse wasn't particularly hard. If it was attractive, what would I have done? It's an unanswerable question, I think, if we are honest about it. Miguel Guevara asks, You were very militant, angry and out front. Is that right? Do you remember your feelings from those days? I wrote a long poem or a poem like comment as a dedication for a book that I published in the early seventies. I still remember reading it aloud for some friends to judge before I decided to include it in the book. I think it represented my feelings and those of many others as well. I can recite it if you want. Miguel responds, yes, please. For workers on the line, bored, tired, and robbed of their creative days, for women, raped, pinched, door opened, decultured, feminized, beaten, maimed, married, asylumed, for blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, nameless, robbed of dignity, lynched, harassed, low paid, running, jailed. For the drunks and addicts, the worn out and the never lively, for the old and ill who should be long lived and wise, for the young, schooled and unschooled, end running boredom, sniffing glue, stealing sex and losing love, trying to escape out or trying to find a way in. For those on welfare or off, looking in or looking out, employed or unemployed, alone or in pairs, hiding their sex or flaunting it, angry, sad, mad. For those who feel less than they could feel, for those who are less than they could be, exploited, starved, cheated, tortured, ambushed, kidnapped, death squatted. For all the world citizens suffering brutality and indignity, electric shocks and murdered relatives, starvation and working for pennies, the military boot and the cultural stamp, for the Empire's citizens and the Empire's enemies. Miguel reacts. Sounds a little like Dylan. The young Bobby Dillon, as Phil Oakes jokingly said, I hope it does, a little, yes, but I was no poet, and I knew it, but I tried, but it isn't done. For the strikers, saboteurs, feminists, anarchists, and nationalists, occupiers and death defiers, for the new leftists, panthers, women's liberationists, farm workers, Puerto Rican nationalists, for those of AIM and their relatives who resisted and died in the past and who nonetheless live on. For the ones who dodged the draft, for those who went and disrupted, and for those who went and died or lived, for the French in the streets in May and the Italians in autumn, for the Mexicans in summer, and the Czech and Chinese. For everyone who has fought, fights, or will fight for a better world than they were, are or are going to be bequeathed. Miguel asks, what about enemies? And against doctors who deal in dollars not dignity, against owners, administrators, bosses, rapists, dealers of bad hands, intellectuals who keep knowledge as if it were their private property, who enshrine their own ignorance under false halos, who can justify barbarism or technically dissect it as their interests require, but who never shed a tear. There was more, but I think that indicates what I and so many others were feeling back in the sixties and through the seventies too. It was RPS sentiments being born. But then in the eighties and the nineties, and twenty plus years into this century too, relatively few people felt or even understood such feelings. So I buried my anger and militancy. For me, the arrival of RPS ended a long emotional coma. I became myself again. Do you remember when the Swedish ecological activist, the then sixteen year old Greta Thunberg, told off the US Congress? I think in some ways that spurred lots of emotional awakening in me and many others. Wake up, grandma, get back in the fight. Miguel asks, I have also been asking folks to recount a personally moving or inspiring event from the past twenty years. Would you do that for us too, please? At Trump's second inauguration, and thereafter, the spectacle wasn't just in the gold trim and the clenched fists. It was in the sheer volume of resistance that materialized in the streets. Women, men, teenagers in pink hats, grandmothers like me in orthopedic shoes, marching, shouting, refusing to consent, not just in DC, though it was enormous there, but in cities scattered across the US and beyond. For me, someone who'd been teetering on the edge of a very rational despair, it was a life preserver hurled into a sea of institutional collapse. It said you're not alone, and you're not done yet. From there the floodgates opened, marches, occupations, spontaneous uprisings, hope zigzagging through the muck, setbacks be damned. But one moment carved itself deeper than most. It came during the campaigns for community control of the police. I had conversations with people known as exonerees, folks who had spent years, even decades locked away for crimes they didn't commit. It's one thing to know intellectually that the system fails. It's another thing to sit across from someone whose youth was devoured by that failure, who walked out of prison to find no family left, no home to return to, no job prospects, just the wreckage of a life stolen. And still they smiled, they cracked jokes, they talked about building something better. It was a kind of resilience that should be studied, bottled, revered, and at the same time it was a grotesque indictment of the machinery that ground them down in the first place. When you widen the lens to account for the plea deals, those forced trade-offs between guaranteed injustice and the threat of something worse, and all the people jailed for crimes that shouldn't even be crimes, what you see isn't just a broken system. You see a system designed to humiliate, to warehouse, to discard. If you think the ruling class is venal, take a look at the institutional foundations it enforces. It's rotting from the bottom up, and the stench reaches everywhere. Then, in a completely different register, more intimate, but no less political, I tried something I hadn't done before. I wrote a novel, not as an escape, but as another way to make an argument, to push an idea, to show a different world. I'd written plenty of nonfiction, I could cite studies, summarize data, expose contradictions. But fiction, that was new, though of course it was still political, seeking to inform, arouse, and cite. So I did what you're supposed to do. I sent the draft around to friends, comrades, and family. People I thought might be curious, might care to help. Few even acknowledged that they got it. Barely any read it. None asked a single question. For most, the communications vanished without a trace, not a word, not even a polite misdirection about being too busy. I wasn't asking for an academic review. I wasn't asking for a blurb. I was asking for engagement with ideas that I thought, rightly or wrongly, mattered. With a story about struggle and survival and the ways people navigate a rigg world. At first, sure, I was hurt, who wouldn't be. But what gnawed at me wasn't just personal, it was cultural. These were people who'd lived the language of solidarity, who had shouted down police lines and written manifestos and organized mutual aid. And yet when it came to showing up for something small, quiet, and thoughtful, they didn't. I couldn't help wondering if the roles were reversed, would I have read their draft? Or at the very least, would I have responded with something, anything, to show I still believed in the exchange of ideas? I feared that that had become a quaint notion. Eventually it dawned on me. This wasn't about my novel. It was about a shift, a hollowing out of the kind of political culture we used to imagine we were building. People had gotten good at saying the right things, at performing empathy, at checking in, a quick take care, a shared post, a heart emoji, all easy, all automatic. But when something took time, when it wasn't optimized for Instagram or couldn't be replied to with a meme, it dropped off the radar. What we started calling ghosting was actually more profound than it sounded. It was a quiet detachment and unaccountability masquerading as normalcy, and it bled into everything, even left spaces, especially left spaces. People still showed up to protest, sure, but the deeper forms of solidarity, intellectual generosity, emotional risk taking, sustained attention, those had withered. You could talk all day about abolishing the police, but ask someone to read two hundred or even twenty pages of your thoughts on society. For many, forget it. In the then context, for someone to deliver was exemplary. This was well before Trump's full unraveling of civility, but it laid the groundwork. If we can't engage with each other deeply and directly, we opened the door to every kind of political con. Superficiality became not just the norm, but the expectation. Real care, real disagreement, real effort? That was deemed too much. So yes, the silence around the book hit me hard. It made me rethink which kinds of communication could still reach people, and which couldn't. It made me reevaluate what counted as engagement, and it made me less certain than ever that we still knew how to listen to one another. Miguel asks, When RPS was emerging and the times changing, I guess you already had a lifetime's worth of activism as your personal history. Did the emergence take you by surprise? Did you feel vindicated? Honestly, I think I felt more like what the hell took us so long? We'd seen it coming, we'd mapped the terrain, we had the moral clarity, the organizing experience, the collective anger, and yet somehow we kept falling short. Time and again our efforts flared and fizzled before they could coalesce into something that could actually last, let alone carry us all the way to a new kind of society. So yeah, I was thrilled when RPS started to take shape, of course I was, but I also felt this gnawing sense of regret. Because quite a few of us had figured out the broad strokes decades earlier, and still we didn't manage to build the damn scaffolding. And that failure didn't just sit on a shelf collecting dust. It cost lives. It meant people lived and died under conditions we might have helped change earlier. Miguel asked, You felt responsible? Yes, I did, because I was responsible. Not in some abstract sense, but as someone who was there, who could have, should have done better. With others, of course. But that doesn't dilute the weight of it. We weren't clueless. We knew things, important things, and we didn't share them well enough. Didn't communicate them in ways that could stick, inspire, multiply. If we had, maybe something like RPS could have been seeded much earlier. To me, that's not some mysterious insight. It's painfully obvious. Every day the old system persisted, every day the new one wasn't born was another day of immense, preventable but persistent human suffering and death. Miguel asks, even before the first RPS convention, what ideas did you think distinguished RPS from many predecessor projects that hadn't taken off? What ideas attracted you back at the beginning? And what do you think served as a foundation for what has emerged since? Thinking back, the first thing that grabbed me, intellectually at least, was the way RPS dismantled some of the blinders I'd been wearing. I was a militant feminist. No apology, I still am. But the thing is, back then, before RPS, I was wearing a kind of ideological tunnel vision. Everything I looked at, workplaces, families, institutions, was filtered through a gender lens, which, to be clear, is a damn important lens. But it wasn't the only one. I'd walk into a factory or a school or a courtroom and see everything as a gender dynamic. Who had authority? Who got paid what? Who did the emotional labor? So often male versus female, with the same patterns playing out over and over. And sure, those patterns were real. They mattered. But what I wasn't seeing, what I was relatively blind to, were all the other structural forces shaping those same spaces. Class, race, cultural identity, and crucially, the way all those forces interacted, how one pressure point could ripple into another, distorting or reinforcing everything around it. What's strange is I had once seen the world that way, back in the early 70s, when everything felt like it was on the table. But somewhere along the line my focus narrowed. I became a specialist in gender, to the near exclusion of other forms of power. It was like adjusting a microscope so tightly on one cell that you forgot there's a whole organism out there. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much my personal experience as a woman shaped that narrowing. It wasn't theoretical for me. I knew what patriarchy felt like, smelled like, how it lingered in rooms and workplaces and policy memos. So of course I zeroed in on it, but in doing so, I was missing the full picture. RPS, for all its earnest insistence on holistic thinking, initially rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like ideological hectoring, a checklist you had to complete to prove you were intersectional enough. It annoyed me, even though deep down I remembered being that same earnest young Lydia who wanted to connect all the dots. But eventually the logic began to wear down my resistance, not because it was loud, but because it was right. Miguel asks, But why were you initially standoffish? Why didn't the insight grab you right off without resistance on your part? At the beginning, I think a part of me was just plain scared that if we started putting other social dynamics on the same level as gender, then gender and by extension kinship would get nudged to the margins. I'd spent years watching feminist concerns get sidelined by male dominated movements, always with some supposedly more quote universal issue taking priority. So of course I worried. If I and others like me didn't hold the line on elevating kinship, who would? The fear wasn't paranoid. It was based on experience. But still, it kept me from really hearing what RPS was saying. I wasn't ready to engage with their message, let alone agree with it. And honestly, part of the problem was how I'd learned to do politics. Feminism for me, and for a lot of us, had become a kind of damage control. We were constantly scanning the horizon for threats, sexism in the workplace, in the family, in the streets, and trying to block them, expose them, call them out. But we weren't dreaming up new structures. We weren't laying out blueprints for the kind of gender relations we actually wanted. It was all defense, no offense. And we weren't alone in that. Anti-racists did it. So did anarchists, anti-capitalists too. We were all so keyed into identifying and rejecting the harm we saw that we really imagined what real healing or liberation might look like. And that mindset came with baggage. In our zeal to call out sexism, I could easily look past the significance of a strike. A comrade might minimize the violence of misogyny because they were laser focused on class. We'd all gotten a little myopic, hyper attuned to our wound, but half blind to others. But eventually the RPS framework broke through. I had this moment, finally, where I realized, wait a minute, the very thing I'm afraid of happening to kinship is exactly what I'm doing with kinship to everything else. By keeping gender at the center, I was actively pushing everything else, class, race, politics, off to the side. I wasn't preserving space for kinship. I was crowding out the rest. That wasn't solidarity. That was just a new version of the old hierarchy. Once that clicked, I didn't have to concede that something else was more important than feminism. I just had to admit that the other pillars, economy, polity, race, culture, were equally central, that they didn't threaten feminism. They contextualize it. Just like gender could shape the character of a workplace or a nation, economic and political structures could push back and shape the character of family life and gender relations. Influence didn't just go one way. What struck me most once I allowed myself to see those intersections was how obvious they suddenly became. It was like putting on a pair of glasses after years of blurred vision. Suddenly I could see class dynamics baked into family hierarchies, gender coding built into job descriptions, racial division woven into public health policy. And it wasn't just overlap, it was interplay. RPS made it clear each realm of life could reinforce or undermine the others. It wasn't about competing grievances, it was about seeing the system as a web. Pull on one strand and the others move. RPS helped me realize that we didn't need a pecking order of oppressions. What we needed was a politics that could hold complexity without collapsing into chaos or infighting. And that required sharper tools. Concepts that could cut through our biases and help us think beyond the boundaries of our own personal experiences. It wasn't about scoring theoretical points in a seminar. It was about crafting strategies that worked in the grit and pressure of real struggle. That connection between analysis and action, between thought and risk, that's what RPS offered. And that's what drew me in. Miguel asks, can you give me an example or two of how that insight deepened your understanding compared to how you saw things earlier on? Did it shift how you thought about what it actually means to win change? The RPS view forced a kind of reckoning in me. It made plain that you can't uproot sexism by planting your flag solely in the living room or the nursery. Yes, the home is a core site, where gender roles are drilled into us, where hierarchy can hide behind intimacy. But if you think that's the whole battlefield, you're missing most of the war. What RPS argued, what it made impossible to ignore, was that these roles, these prescriptions for how to be a man or a woman, don't stay politely tucked inside the home. They travel. They become the lens through which we see the rest of the world, and through which it sees us. The workplace, the school, the church pew, the baseball field, even the shopping mall. They all either reinforce or challenge what was learned at home. If they reinforce it, you've got a well-oiled system. If they challenge it, you got friction, and friction demands resolution. But it doesn't stop there. These outside institutions don't just reflect the logic of the family. Over time, they internalize it. They start running on the same circuitry. The office manager becomes the household patriarch. The classroom mirrors the obedient child parent relationship. And once that happens, you've got sexism reproducing itself in stereo from every angle, in every setting. So even if you make real headway in one area, say inside the household, those gains can be eroded, chipped away by the steady drip of reinforcement from everywhere else. You're trying to bail out the boat, but the leak is coming from all sides. And of course this wasn't just about gender. It was race, it was class. You could see how those hierarchies were equally embedded in every structure we live with. We carry class into the family dinner, race into the school curriculum, gender into the voting booth. These things are stitched into the entire fabric, not just into a single thread. Miguel asks, okay, but what did it matter? Was it just academic? It mattered because if you thought you could transform society by fixing just one part of it, you were setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. You might win reforms, real ones, significant ones, but without addressing the deeper, interconnected web, those reforms wouldn't hold. They'd erode. The system would find ways to heal itself, to return to form. Your win could dissolve right out from under you. But once the veil was lifted, once you saw how all these spheres reinforced each other, you also saw the necessity, no, the urgency of building connections across struggles. You saw why we had to link arms, why single issue activism was never going to be enough. Before RPS, I didn't always see that. Afterward, I couldn't not see it. Miguel asked Lydia, can you give a less abstract example? Perhaps one from back near the start of RPS that caused a different view than had been prevalent, including different actions. The Sanders campaign lit a spark. Then Trump came in like a Molotov cocktail. You've probably read the histories. Those campaigns didn't just shake things up. They cracked the political floorboards. But it wasn't all clarity and unity. No, there was a whole storm of confusion and controversy about what it all meant, especially when it came to white men. Because the fact was, painful, glaring, more than half white working men supported Trump. The question was why? He was a guy who embodied nearly every toxic trait in the American playbook, rich, belligerent, a braggart, openly racist, grotesquely sexist, and even at the outset already veering toward outright fascism. You'd think working class folks would have run the other way. But a lot of them didn't. A lot of them backed him. Some of the very people we'd hoped would rally behind Sanders or later Harris, hitch their wagons to Trump's circus. And the truth was if we were ever going to build something resembling a just and decent society, we couldn't afford to just write them off. I won't rehash the entire postmortem, but let me point to a line of thinking that RPS helped sharpen, an approach that was nowhere near the mainstream at the time, but later became essential. Look, women and black Americans had been fighting like hell for decades to get a shred of justice, and more often than not, they were doing it explicitly as women, as black people, it was identity plus urgency, and understandably so. But from the sidelines, or what had started to feel like the sidelines, white men were watching this unfold. They were watching while their own jobs disappeared, their communities were hollowed out, and their political representation was vaporized, often courtesy of the very Democratic Party that used to court them. So what did they conclude? If the dominant social struggle was a zero sum brawl between races and genders, and that's how it often sounded, then maybe they were just losing, losing their spot, losing their dignity, and then like some grotesque guardian angel, Trump arrived, loud, crude, unapologetic, someone finally saying, Yeah, you are getting screwed, and I'll punch back for you. For a lot of them, a lot of workers, it wasn't about policy, it was about recognition. Now RPS didn't excuse this. We didn't throw up our hands and say, Oh well, racism and sexism are just inevitable. But we also didn't pin the blame solely on white men. Instead we asked, what were the conditions that made Trump's pitch so appealing? Yes, ignorance and bigotry played a role, but so did something more insidious, our failure to engage class in a way that resonated. It became even more evident when serious numbers of women and blacks and Latinx people joined the white men in trumpeting Trump. We noticed how the Democratic Party had drifted, choosing professionals over workers, and treating identity like a checkbox rather than a reality. That mattered. But the RPS approach wasn't about pointing fingers outward. It was about holding a mirror up to ourselves. And what did we see? That we were, frankly, too often terrible at talking to the working class. Even if we ourselves were working class, we spoke in abstractions, we failed to listen, we didn't honor the grit and struggle that shaped people's everyday lives. And when it came to the divide between professionals and workers, what we began to call the coordinator class and workers, we barely acknowledged it, let alone confronted it. We had to do much better. The second major shift was about how we addressed race and gender. Yes, we had to fight racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia with urgency and without apology. But if we did it in ways that alienated people who were also hurting, also getting crushed by the system, we were shooting ourselves in the foot. We had to fight for justice, not in ways that built walls, but in ways that built bridges. Supporting working people, including white male working people, wasn't a throwaway PR move. It was foundational. It was about decency. It was about strategy. It was about winning. Miguel asks, and this was all hard for you to accept? I mean now, just what, I guess twenty, twenty five years later? It is all second nature. It is hard to see why it would have been so difficult. When these ideas started to surface, and maybe more accurately to resurface, we all had to wrestle with our own sacred cows. Some folks had always centered their politics on class and the economy. Others, like me, had long prioritized kinship, gender, sexuality. Others still had poured their energy into race and culture, or into the machinery of politics or the existential stakes of war and the environment. At the extreme end, you had people who explicitly ranked their chosen terrain as the most important, everything else subsidiary. But more often, people didn't say that out loud, they just behaved that way. When things got rough, when analysis or action got complex, they default to the lens they knew best. I was in that group. So when someone said bluntly that one of the reasons white men flocked to Trump was that we on the left had utterly failed to talk sufficiently about class, and especially about the dynamic between working people and the so-called coordinator class, it hit a nerve. It felt to those who had been fighting capitalism tooth and nail like a slap in the face. And when others pointed out that there were flaws in how some of us, black folks, feminists, had pursued anti racist or anti sexist politics, that hit another nerve. It felt to me and others like we were being blamed for the very injustices we were trying to fight. These weren't minor critiques, they were gut punches. So yes, it was messy, really messy. But the more I sat with it, the more I began to see, and I wasn't alone. Two major problems with overprioritizing one area of social life over all others. And let me be clear, I don't mean we each have to do everything. Of course we don't. We can't. We all have different experiences, talents, passions, we specialize. That's natural. That's fine. The first problem, though, was that when we elevated one area, gender, class, race, authority, you name it, we risked narrowing our entire worldview. We became less able to connect with dynamics outside our chosen tent, and sometimes even less capable even less capable of fully grasping the complexity within it. Prioritizing gender above all, for example, didn't mean we cared too much about gender. It meant we didn't care enough about how gender intersected with economy, polity, and culture. We saw the world through one filter, say a feminist lens, when what we needed was a whole toolkit of lenses. We needed a panoramic view, not a keyhole. The second problem was maybe even more destructive. Our silos bred competition, not solidarity. Every camp started to act like it held the golden ticket. Every focus, race, class, gender, authority, ecology, war, was defended like a fortress. We weren't saying let's work together but on equal terms. We were saying often implicitly, my issue first, the rest can wait. It reminded me of a scene out of some tragic comedy. Picture a giant, awkwardly shaped boulder, something heavy, unwieldy, and symbolic of social transformation. Around it stood teams of people, each one tugging at a different side. Each team knew their part best. Each knew how to get a grip on it, how to move their side. And they pulled. God, did we pull? But nobody was talking to each other. Nobody was coordinating. So the whole thing just rocked a little, shifted a little there, but it didn't go anywhere. RPS said enough of this. It insisted that every side matters, that we're not going to get anywhere unless we move together, deliberately, in sync. If we keep moving in isolation, or worse, in opposition, nothing meaningful will shift. Instead of mutual aid, we get turf wars. Instead of building something together, we trip over each other. So yes, this wasn't easy for me to internalize. But what eventually pulled me in and kept me anchored to RPS was its insistence on acknowledging all the major engines of inequality and domination. It didn't flatten the world into one story. It added dimensions. I knew these ideas had been around in the sixties and seventies. Hell, I'd flirted with them back then. But it was through RPS that they really came alive for me, that I saw them not just as theory, but as guidelines. Miguel asks, was this basically a debate between advocates of what was called identity politics and class politics? Yes and no. That debate had been going in circles for decades, and it flared up again after Trump's first win like a recurring infection. But RPS didn't later just jump into the ring and pick a corner. It tried to redraw the ring entirely to expand the frame so that folks in either camp could engage without sharpening knives. Here's how it shook out. On one side you had the class first camp, rooted in classic anti-capitalist thought. These were people who believed fervently that class was the engine of history, the core of social change. For them, every policy, every movement, every theory had to ultimately answer to class analysis. Other oppressions? Sure, worth noting, but only insofar as they played into or reflected economic effects. The tools of class analysis were the go-to gear. The rest was optional. On the other side were people who'd come up through feminist or anti-racist organizing, often in direct reaction to the class only orthodoxy. Initially, they turned the tables by lifting gender or race into the lead role. And as time passed, this grew into a broader alignment, what its critics started calling identity politics, but what its supporters called instead intersectionality. To the class camp, identity meant everything except class. They bristled at the way it pulled forces away from ownership and exploitation. Ironically, though, identity politics was trying to expand the lens, to add nuance, context, the stuff of real life. Meanwhile, the identity folks had their own gripes. They saw class discourse as too abstract, too institutional. It talked about labor and capital, but not about the psychic toll of being a woman in a man's world or black in a white space. It rarely touched the skin, the heart, the daily bruises of power. So you had this tug of war, flexible, yes, and shifting over time, but still draining energy from the fight we all needed to be in together. There were the objective clubs. About which oppression was more fundamental, more constraining, more causative. Both sides used basically the same logic to justify opposite conclusions. Class shaped everything. No, race shaped everything. No, gender did. You could twist yourself into knots and still end up right where you started. And then there were operational concerns, tactical fears. The class focused folks worried that too much attention to race, gender, or sexuality would crowd out class. The identity camp feared that elevating class would dilute or derail their struggles. And both sides were right. It was possible for one focus or a combination to overshadow the others. But the only way forward wasn't to play whack-a-mole with priorities, it was to stop thinking in terms of zero sum attention. We had to build an approach that made space for all the pieces. That's what RPS did, or tried to do. Didn't pretend to be inventing fire. These were old ideas, many of them. But they'd been shelved or sidelined too often. RPS said, look, the class people are right that institutions matter. The identity folks are right that what's in our head and hearts and habits also matters. Race, gender, sex, class, all are critical. They don't cancel each other out. They entangle, they reinforce, they complicate. Each can bend and be bent by the features of the rest. So let's try stop treating this like a contest. Let's come at social life holistically, with institutions and consciousness front and center. Let's drop the impulse to rank oppressions and instead learn to recognize how each one shapes and is shaped by the others. Let's build movements that can walk and chew gum and throw bricks, metaphorically, of course, at the same time. Miguel asks, You said two RPS innovations played a major role in attracting you. What was the second? If its multiplicity of focus was the first, what was the second? It was something so basic that I almost feel ridiculous saying it out loud. But for all its simplicity, it had a huge impact on how I thought. And it wasn't a new idea either, just one that, despite being around forever, hadn't really sunk into how people acted, at least not in my experience until RPS made it unavoidable. The idea came from the class camp that I just talked about, but RPS refined it. It said institutions shape outcomes mainly through the roles they assign. If you want to function in an institution, whether it's a workplace, a school, a family, or a church, you have to fill one of its defined roles. Not just in name, but in behavior. You don't just have a role, you become it. You want to be part of the economy, you've got to be a worker, consumer, manager, owner. You want to belong to a religion, you've got to engage with its rituals, its hierarchy. Family? Pick your role. Parent, child, spouse, sibling, and every role comes with a behavioral script. Deviate from it too much and you're punished, socially, economically, sometimes even legally. So people adapt, they internalize, they conform. All that goes for everything from the janitor to the CEO, the priest to the stripper. If you're going to survive or thrive inside an institution, you learn the ropes, follow the cues, fit the mold, you play the game, you know when to smile and when to shut up, and before you know it, the act becomes who you are. Once I really got that, once I saw how roles mold people, it was like putting on x-ray goggles. I saw it in jobs, families, media, in activism too. This wasn't just a sociological insight. It had real world consequences. Three big ones in fact. First, if we wanted to understand an institution, we've got to look at the roles it enforces. What do people have to do to succeed in it? Who do they have to become? That tells us what the institution actually values and reproduces. Second, if we want to change an institution, we can't just swap the people in power. We have to redesign the roles. We have to ask what kind of behavior does this structure reward? What kinds of roles would support the values we actually believe in? Third, and this one's crucial for activists, we have to interrogate our own rules inside our movements. Are we building cultures and habits that reflect our vision of justice? Or are we unconsciously replicating the very hierarchies we claim to oppose? These were the kinds of questions RPS forced me and others to ask. And once you start down that path, you can't go back. It's not sexy theory, it's not abstract, pompous look at me, highfalutin jargon. It's very basic, daily life stuff, but it cuts deep and it made RPS something worth committing to. Miguel asks, can you give an example of the kind of experience that led you to elevate that simple insight about roles and institutions into a central guiding principle in how you think and act? Early in my time with RPS, I made a visit to an occupied workplace in the Midwest. Workers there had taken control of their factory, much like workers in Argentina had done decades earlier, sometimes mying in, but most often when owners basically quit on their project due to it failing. And at first it had felt like a revolution, real, tangible, full of promise. But now, during my visit, not too long after, the mood had curdled. What I walked into wasn't a celebration, it was disillusionment. All the old crap is coming back, one worker said, with a look that belonged more to a funeral home than a factory floor. They were stunned, hollowed out by the slow return of hierarchy and drudgery. What was supposed to be liberation had started to look like deja vu, and worse, they were beginning to think the old guard, the bosses they'd overthrown, had been right. We took over and set up a workers' council to have decision making by everyone involved. We equalized wages, we practiced mutual support. It was exciting and felt wonderful. That was how one of them had earlier written about those first heady weeks. But by the time I arrived, just six months later, the meetings were mostly empty. Wages had started to drift apart again, and the work, engaging work was reverting to being a debilitating, alienating chore. Then came the punch to the gut. Back then I laughed at him, one worker told me, referring to a former manager who'd mocked the takeover, but now, just a year later, I fear he was right. The manager had warned us flat out, you're naive. The inequalities and hierarchies you rebel against are part and parcel of being human. That is who we are. It is who you are. There is no alternative. And now the workers were looking around and seeing his grim prophecy creep back into view. Their pain was palpable, and I felt it too. But I also knew something they hadn't yet considered. In all their radical upheaval, they had left a key piece of the old machinery intact. They had kept the same division of labor. I asked them, straight up, when you took over your workplace, did you leave most people doing overwhelmingly rote, repetitive, and disempowering tasks while some others took over the more empowering tasks and manager that manager and accountants and so on had been doing before? Of course, they said we had to get production levels back up. That answer was their albatross. These workers weren't elites. They weren't strivers looking to claw their way up the professional ladder. They were working class through and through, raised in working class homes, educated or not in working class schools, and when they took over their workplace, they brought their values with them respect, solidarity, a strong sense of fairness, but they also brought their baggage, not on purpose, just by default, and it turned out upbringing mattered, but persistent situation matters more. Most took up the same jobs they'd had before, but a few stepped into new roles, administration, accounting, desk jobs. They thought the familiar, differentiated pattern was just about getting things done. They didn't see that roles weren't just tasks, they were social positions, with all the invisible wiring of power and status baked in. So here's what happened. The few who moved into empowering roles started gaining confidence, knowledge, and influence. They didn't mean to become rulers, but the machinery of the roles made it happen. The rest, the ones still on the line, doing the numbing, body grinding work, started to shrink inside. Their voices faded, their expectations lowered. Inequality, that old devil, wasn't dead. It had just slipped on a different suit. This wasn't about human nature. It was about institutional inertia, about how even good intentions got steamrolled if you didn't rewire the basic structures. What those workers experienced was not proof that revolution is doomed, it was proof that leaving certain roles untouched is a recipe for restoring exactly what you tried to escape. And here's the kicker. It was also basic, not obscure, not abstract, not the stuff of purely academic debate. The lesson was practically carved into the factory floor. Roles matter. Institutions mold people. Change the structure or it changes you. What was perhaps most absurd was that there were many who didn't like that explanation. They considered it too simple. Miguel asks, they didn't like that the analysis was simple? That sounds absurd. Can you explain your saying that? It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But that's the thing about leftist academics, and that's who I'm talking about. Many of them have trained themselves painstakingly over years not to trust anything that doesn't come dressed in polysyllables and parentheticals. There's a premium on sounding smart, and that usually means sounding complicated. Now I'm not against what they call theory. I've spent my life pushing ideas, but what I saw over and over was this reflexive disdain for clarity, as if making an idea accessible somehow drained it of rigor. Some of these folks, certainly not all, had become a kind of intellectual aristocracy. Their jargon wasn't just habit, it was a defense mechanism, a reflex. If the insights could be understood by anyone, then anyone could have the insights, and that was dangerous to a class of people whose status depended on exclusive access to knowledge. This wasn't just a personal quirk. It was structural. It was a coordinator class dynamic. If you're rewarded for knowing things other people don't know, your first instinct isn't to share. It's to obscure, and almost no one challenged that dynamic. Miguel asks, What do you mean almost no one? I mean exactly that. Very few people admitted this dynamic out loud. But if you go back to when the idea of the coordinator class started surfacing, in part through an essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who used the term professional managerial class, you'll see the backlash. It was a whole book of responses, between labor and capital it was called. It came out, many of the replies were knee-jerk dismissals. In that volume, coordinator class shows up in at least one reply, I think for the first time. But what really struck me was the tone. Critics didn't engage the substance so much as swipe at the style. They called the Aaron Reichs anti-intellectual. They framed the critique as some populist jab at smart people, which of course was nonsense. What the Aaron Reichs and those supporting them were doing was calling out a power dynamic, a class dynamic. And if that dynamic was rooted in control over knowledge and communication, over empowering circumstances, as RPS amended, then yeah, plain talk was a threat. But that only made it more urgent. The simplicity of these ideas didn't make them shallow, it made them useful, it made them dangerous to the status quo. And it made them necessary to people trying to build something different. If you don't understand how roles shape people, how they shape behavior, how institutions reproduce inequality even when run by well-meaning people, you'll get blindsided. You'll think good intentions are enough. You'll think your politics are in your heart, when they're really in your habits, your structures, your defaults. Miguel asks, so academics didn't like spreading skills? When was that? The book was published in the late nineteen seventies, in nineteen seventy eight, I believe. And yes, the critics of that book weren't exactly subtle in their distaste for what Barbara and John Ehrenreich had done. The Ehrenreich's had challenged the sanctity of what they called the professional managerial class, the very class many of their critics belonged to, by accusing them of monopolizing empowering work, and worse yet, doing so under the cover of a kind of self-serving intellectual mysticism. They poked at the smug bubble of verbal gibber jabber, and naturally the bubble burst back. But the thing is, the Iron Reichs weren't doing abstract theory for theory's sake. The ideas they laid out, accessible, unpretentious, often sharp, were grounded in lived experience, and they were immediately practical. They helped you do something. You could carry them into a meeting, into a picket line, into a rethinking of how your workplace or your family functioned. There were tools, not just texts. It was a long battle, and its roots stretched back farther than many wanted to admit, all the way to anarchists like Pakunin, who were raising these same alarms in the nineteenth century. And still, the lesson had to fight to be heard, because here's the uncomfortable truth. If you don't pay close attention to the institutions you're building, if you don't interrogate every role you're reproducing, then all your best intentions can be derailed by what looks like an innocuous, even a necessary choice. Retaining the old division of labor was exactly that, a seemingly obvious, seemingly harmless step that quietly reinstalled the same damn hierarchy. That's what stayed with me. That's what shaped my thinking permanently. It wasn't enough to decry bad outcomes. We had to dig deep into the machinery that churned those outcomes out again and again. We had to get to the root, and then we had to rip the root out. And then what? Replace what is rejected. But replace it with what? And that was the end of that session, and of that chapter. And so of this part of this episode discussing and presenting that chapter. But I want to say I've been asked why I'm conveying this novel, this fiction, and these episodes. I describe it as an oral history, a novel that wants to read like nonfiction. I could also say it was nonfiction trying to communicate like fiction. If you know everything Lydia conveyed with her words and stories, great. Maybe this take on it, her way of expressing it, will help you express it and apply it in your own circumstances. If you don't know all she offered, or don't agree with parts or even all of it, also great. Maybe assessing it, refining it, or replacing it will help in your circumstances. Does it matter how much is fact from various situations and lives relayed as fiction, or how much is imagined fiction trying to shed light on possible fact? You decide. Let me know. And meanwhile, this is Michael Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.