Episode 375 of RevolutionZ has as guest Kathy Kelly. When journalists are barred, and killed doctors are targeted, and mountainous rubble hides unexploded ordnance, a society is violated twice—physically and narratively. Our guest,Kathy Kelly, connect swhat headlines obscure: how U.S. weapons shipments function as political green lights, how “ceasefire” rhetoric papers over daily violations, and how displacement in the West Bank is driven by soldiers, settlers, and a structure designed to make staying impossible.

Kathy brings the human scale back into focus. From a makeshift white flag walk into Jenin to evenings with families in Gaza, she shares the intimate choices people make under siege—protecting elders, scavenging firewood, teaching children to read the sky for drones. These stories resist the flattening of body counts, revealing what war does to witnesses and perpetrators alike. Kathy explores how international law erodes when powerful states flout norms, why nuclear ambitions can spread under the guise of “civilian” programs, and how those choices ricochet into U.S. life through policing exchanges, PTSD, and the quiet normalization of force.

Kathy also talks strategy. She tells how student encampments and divestment campaigns pried open university endowments and hedge fund ties. How cultural voices amplify names and memories that institutions try to erase. How growing activism keeps movements alive and oriented. Kathy reflects on practical commitments—from tax resistance to hospitality—that shift resources away from violence and toward care and building a revolution of values sturdy enough to change institutions: living more simply, sharing more fairly, ending the reflex to eliminate those who resist subordination to “national interests,” and actively organizing sustainable resistance. Her message: read and remember, organize locally, join boycott and divestment efforts, and align daily choices with the future you want.

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Episode 374 of RevolutionZ starts with a snowfall and notices forecast overshoot. Then it asks why so many reporting, predicting, and evaluating “mistakes” lean the same way? It unpacks one‑sided errors—how weather hype, skewed invoices, and media framing teach the public to accept bias as normal. And then, via The Wind Cries Freedom's oral history it connects such patterns to the sports arenas and fields where bodies, money, and myth collide, and connects sports to larger surrounding movements as well..

Miguel Guevara introduces us to interviewee Peter Cabral, himself an athlete and revolutionary. Then Peter describes his own transition into activism and the shift from star‑driven gestures to athlete‑led organizing. He describes the pressures that keep players quiet—family expectations, early pedestal treatment, and career‑long dependence on gatekeepers—and how physical harm, perverse pay, community harm, and desires for actual dignity and rational life forced athletes to break with business as usual. From Colin Kaepernik’s kneel to coordinated boycotts and especially campus organizing, Peter takes us to the moment when Revolutionary Participatory Society's solidarity turned into structure and its isolated individual courage became collective strategic activism.

The conversation digs into college athletes organizing and how their methods not only learned from but also taught the pros. It explores seeking and then winning Olympic reforms: moving events across multiple cities, reusing facilities, redirecting revenue to athletes and neighborhoods, and refusing to play when hosting means displacement. It describes practical programs Peter was part of to protect communities, honor but not unduly enrich competitors, and to move the drama and excellence of sports back to the field from stock markets and media madness. Peter also wrestles with pay schedules: should luck-born athletic gifts command outsized wealth? He argues in the RPS mode instead for pay to be anchored in duration, intensity, and onerousness—and for celebrating excellence but without creating hierarchies. He describes how such desires for sensible equity and real respect emerged and began to dominate athletes' aims in place of owning mansions on a hill.

Threaded throughout Miguel's questions and Peter's replies is a call for media literacy and especially institutional redesign across all domains. When incentives reward spectacle and bargaining power with owners on top, “errors” keep tilting one way. Peter's response: When we organized from pressrooms to locker rooms we helped advance athlete activism, Olympic accountability, equitable pay, and the fight against creeping authoritarianism, WE became part of something much larger. Peter describes the kind of personal feelings and collective actions and programs that, in his time and in his experience, fueled concrete wins that pointed toward an unfolding next American Revolution. Finally, Miguel elicits from Peter how he expects sports to change in a fully developed participatory society, both for the athletes and for fans.

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Episode 373 of RevolutionZ hears about people trained to perform deciding to build power. Celia Crowley—actor, organizer, and then California’s governor but later to become Vice President—to unpacks how a quiet coalition inside Hollywood traded optics for organization and turned celebrity into a conduit for collective action. From a first awkward meeting in a palatial living room to strikes that rebalanced power on set, Celia lays out some moves that mattered: an intensive “social school” for film workers, a high-stakes push for pay transparency, and films that funnel surplus revenue into real campaigns.

Perhaps most revealingly, Celia dismantles the myth of artistic exceptionalism with great clarity. Creativity doesn’t need hierarchy to thrive. It can do still better with equity, shared decision-making, and room for many voices. She discusses how democratic planning can fund cultural work without dictating its content, how balanced jobs expanded total creativity, and how evidence from RPS-style productions challenged the old game of genius-for-power. She also gets personal about beauty as currency, the risks behind the red carpet, and the hard line to draw between admiration and structural privilege.

Along the way, she answers questions about a pivotal Oscar night, a landmark industry strike, and the steady rise of worker councils across sets and studios. The episode provides a template with lessons for journalism, sports, and any field where a few have long held center stage. Celia provides reason to rethink who decides what gets made, who gets paid, and how audiences become stakeholders. Her experience offers strategy, examples, and proof points to use whatever your work and passion may highlight.

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Episode 372 of RevolutionZ urges that every activist choice we make—what to say, what to do, and who to do it with and for—can be usefully guided by one clear calculation: will this or that option grow the movement’s numbers, deepen members' commitment and means, and increase pressure on those in power? How might that logic of choice affect how we write, organize, and work with others among other daily choices we face?

To start, the episode considers our choice of words to speak or write. When an episode or an article describes pain that the system around us imposes, and even how the system works, and we do it over and over, how much does that help with growth, commitment, methods, and pressure? Given our need to grow in numbers, and enrich in methods, doesn't the proposed measuring stick say we should speak where the reachable are, keep our language as simple as accuracy allows, and always include and even emphasize vision and strategy? Do we do that? If not, why not? Can new ideas, concrete proposals, and credible plans invite hesitant people off the sidelines more than for us to say or write, yet again, that how bad things are? Strategy-focused words become a tool for converting attention into action. Do pain focussed words that tell people what they already know do likewise?

Then we consider choosing tactics by considering the now surfacing debate over how to fight against ICE. The pull toward confrontation is real. We feel it. But if we use our one yardstick, our simple proposed logic to weigh violence against mass nonviolent disruption, what we feel isn't our guide. Instead it is to consider consequences of competing choices for growth, power, and impact. If we do that, what emerges?

The episode suggests that nonviolent tactics done at scale impose costs on elites while attracting allies and improving commitment. Our goal isn’t to feel fierce or righteous. Our goal becomes to win over and commit more people, more often, for longer.

Who to relate to, who to support, gets similar treatment. The simple logic suggests that purity shrinks, coalescing grows. Shying away from what doesn't agree perfectly with oneself fragments. Listening and even learning from what doesn't agree with self, can grow. To support campaigns that win tangible gains and build capacity, even if they don’t include every preferred demand, isn't that what we ought to do, but is it what we do do?

Do we frame differences as due to character flaws to dismiss or as disputes over expected outcomes to test and explore? Which can create enlarged unity? Do we seek out and onboard unions, students, faith communities, and neighborhood groups who can bring fresh energy and legitimacy though we don't all see all things the same way? Do we join with and support even what we hope will include more of our favored priorities in time?

Finally, as a kind of afterword, the episode considers catalysts that can accelerate initial momentum: visible local wins like Mamdani's, regular actions that build efficacy like the efforts in Minneapolis, and also less often sought, bold engagement from cultural figures and labor leaders able to reach large audiences. We invite Taylor Swift, Stephen Curry, and Caitlin Clark as examples. Also school teachers and university faculty. Come fully on board. Why? Because when artists and athletes, labor leaders and educators with access to large audiences speak out clearly, very loudly, and consistently militantly, when they donate time and resources and seriously show up, their doing so can communicate widely and make participation feel hopeful to audiences that are otherwise not yet hearing the call. Pair that with steady organizing and you get a movement that compounds power.

Does the simple but powerful norm for choices offered this episode make sense to you?

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Episode 371 of Revolution Z has as guest Greg Wilpert, founder of Venezuela Analysis, who discusses the role of oil, power, Trump, Maduro, and which way Venezuela. Wilpert tracks the quiet recalibration of demands coming from Washington—curbs on drugs that aren't real, and on migration caused by sanctions. Vague “terror” charges that are projections at best, and a push for oil access that has actually been offered earlier albeit with fewer controls—alongside a court case that tests the boundary between domestic law and international immunity. If the aim of kidnapping Maduro is optics that establish that Trump can use the American military whenever and wherever and however he unilaterally chooses, what does a “victory” look like, and who will pay the price?

What are the mechanics and effects of sanctions? How have they hollowed out revenues, warped trade, and driven migration that is in turn used to justify more pressure. Wilpert explains why Venezuela’s heavy crude isn’t the easy prize it’s portrayed to be. High costs, slow ramp-up, and market dynamics will blunt returns not least but not only as climate impact mounts. The gap between oil rhetoric and oil reality and between governing rhetoric and governing reality matter because the truth about each clarifies whether policy is about energy security or political theater. Meanwhile, protests and public perception will begin to swirl around the Maduro trial, the one contested issue that neither side can easily negotiate and still claim to have won. And ultimately, the deeper issue is precedent—what changes when a superpower uses massive militarism to kidnap and then prosecute a foreign leader despite international norms much less on nonsense charges?

Midway, Greg previews his forthcoming book on developing consciousness for a post-capitalist commons. Structures like cooperatives, communes, and creative commons only thrive when everyday practices dismantle informal hierarchies and embed equal voice. He maps the mindsets that either reproduce domination or make shared power real, connecting movement culture to durable democracy.

We close by zooming out to the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” which, supposing it lasts, would generate a move toward spheres of influence and away from enforceable international law, raising the risk of multiple escalations and even nuclear miscalculation. If that’s the road ahead, Wilpert urges that we need a clearer vision for global rules, accountability, and economic relations that don’t weaponize dependence.

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Episode 370 of RevolutionZ mainly continues our sequence of excerpts from the forthcoming The Wind Cries Freedom's Oral History of the Next American Revolution. However, before doing so, it takes up various reactions I encountered to an article I wrote titled "Chomsky Reassessed." The followup discussion here raises some more general concerns and further ideas bearing on issues of "cancellation."

Internal movement differences, arguments, and even accusations can force a movement to constructively self examine and grow, or can fracture it. What damage is done when outrage outruns evidence, when cancel culture and circular firing squads turn activism into spectacle and drive away the very allies we need? What dynamics play out? When do they arise? How do they gain life and spread? How do they involve us and what might we do to address them?

After that rather substantial introductory section, this episode continues into a new oral history excerpt about how to build movement power and cohesion in which Bertrand Jagger and Lydia Lawrence further chart their respective journeys from atomized into systemic thinking. They describe their attraction to self-management as proportionate say, to equity as pay for effort and sacrifice, and to an economy redesigned to eliminate not only rule by owners but rule by the often-ignored coordinator class.

Bert takes us inside the illusion of choice that we often feel, where markets script our consumption and work options and productivity gains vanish into someone else’s ledger. He traces the subtle hierarchies that reappear in movement meetings, media, and campaigns when movement roles unintentionally subvert movement aspirations. He explains why balanced jobs, transparent information, and participatory planning weren’t rhetorical add-ons to RPS but at the core of its approaches. Lydia widens the frame to kinship and culture. She shows how hierarchies in patriarchal families, schooling, and media bleed into the workplace—and vice versa--how class hierarchies in turn contour kinship and culture. She shows why to change one domain of activity without changing the others reroutes power rather than dissolves it.

Along the way, we revisit a cautionary note from Bob Dylan—what happens when movements punish nuance and reward heat—and we ask how to create spaces where disagreement refines strategy instead of ending careers and silencing conversation.

So this episode is mostly about how two people were attracted to and navigated movement design, class analysis that extends beyond owners and workers, and turning diverse values into effective daily practice all in the new movement they became part of, the movement for a revolutionary participatory society.

Can their remembrances provide insights in our time and our place about attaining a clear, rigorous path forward? Listen, and perhaps share with a friend who’s organizing something big or small. Then I hope you will leave a comment saying what strikes you as useful and revealing, and what doesn't.

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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?

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Episode 368 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin and more recently The Nation and author of The Socialist Manifesto. Our topic isn’t a kinder capitalism; it’s a post capitalist vision and practice where private ownership is overcome and control of production resides with the people who do the work.

Together we discuss seeking a higher minimum wages and seeking higher wages more generally, full employment, greater workers say in the workplace and community, municipal support for co-ops and more. We urge that what we seek, how we seek it, and even what issues we raise while engaged in the pursuits, should deliver concrete gains in the present and also rewire expectations about who should decide and who should benefit in the future.

Sunkara discusses electoral campaigns and candidates, but more so the system in which elections occur. He challenges the limits of welfarism and highlights the power question: who owns, who governs, who invests. Together we also broach the hard problem of the division of labor and derivative class divisions. Sunkara says that specialization won’t disappear. We can't and won't all do everything. But what we do and how we do it must be democratized so that expertise serves everyone instead of hardening into a class that serves mainly itself over workers. We also explore differences and agreements about when to challenge what issues and about what structures are needed to attain our goals versus what structures will continually obstruct our goals. How can and should the choices of a socialist in a workplace or on a campus, for example, and really anywhere, differ from the choices of a progressive working in the same settings? Issues. Demands. Formulations.

Regarding the electoral arena we consider why some workers back Trump and why even center-left parties feel distant. We agree the answer isn’t to scold; it’s to organize. It is to show up where people live, to honor local experiences and concerns, and to build organizations that feel like home not like elite seminars. Sunkara explores how an independent profile—more Sanders than party brand—and now more Mamdani than party brand—can help rebuild trust and make clear class politics evident again.

Are we ready to move beyond slogans and toward a post-capitalism that’s practical, democratic, and winnable? Are we ready to further define our vision's features to the extent we now can, and to refine and improve them as we proceed? Sunkara proposes a path forward to consider.

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