RevolutionZ

Episode 395 of RevolutionZ continues our What Is To Be Undone sequence of excerpts to this time discuss ideology in general, not yet specific ones. Ideology decides what we pay attention to and what we miss. It tells us what we should call realistic and what we should instead consider impossible. It guides us concerning what and how to win. And that means that whether consciously or not ideology steers every plan we make. I (Michael Albert) step back from our frequent immediate concrete context to ask an abstract but nonetheless important question: what is ideology, what is it for, and when does it start producing the very failures it claims to prevent? 

To get started, I borrow Thomas Kuhn’s famous idea of paradigms in science and their long stretches of “normal” puzzle-solving inside a shared framework, followed by times of crisis when anomalies pile up and the framework can’t handle them. Then I apply that model to revolutionary politics, where paradigm becomes revolutionary ideology which is theory, strategy, and practice working together to understand society to change it. The shift from natural science to social change matters because the end goal of the latter is not just knowledge but transformation, so the loop between understanding and action has to be always self-correcting instead of sometimes self-protecting. 

The episode discusses how theory is built through abstraction, why narrow theories can look complete due to hiding what they leave out, and how that type blindness can distort left organizing just as easily as it distorts capitalist “common sense.” We also walk through how strategy should be judged, how strategy, tactics, and practice should inform each other, and why movements need built-in ways to learn from reality rather than defend a fixed line. We then close with a sharp set of questions for our current moment and a pointed song lyric that skewers vanguard certainty and sectarian habits. 

If you care about revolutionary strategy, political ideology, and building effective movements, I hope you will listen through to the end and let me know your reaction. Next week we will present Classical Marxism in what I hope is a fair and even an inspiring manner. 
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Episode 394 of RevolutionZ continues the evaluation of the New Left from within begun last episode. This time the focus is the Anti war movement, Weatherman, the Yippees, the Black movement, and the womens movement. The fastest way to break a movement is to let “being technically right” replace getting stronger. Starting with the Vietnam War antiwar movement we ask a painful question: how did a cause with massive public support still end up with thin commitment, divisive splits, and a core that felt unreachable?

We talk about the double-bind that shows up in so many protest movements that make opposition easy enough to attract crowds, but make real participation depend on an expanding list of correct positions. That “credentials” culture can turn organizing into a status system that leaves most people peripheral between demonstrations and sets everyone up for demoralization when the standard becomes “did we win now?” We also dig into why the "raise domestic-costs" strategy made sense, and how drama, manipulation, and weak political education kept it from building durable power.

From there, we move through Weatherman and the lure of extremist identity, to the Yippies’ early creativity and later hardening, the Black Panthers’ extraordinary early contributions and how authoritarianism and macho militarism hurt their further development, and the women’s movement’s historic breakthroughs alongside the reappearance of hierarchy under pressure. The through-line is practical: if we want lasting effective organizations, we need empathy, realistic metrics of progress, a culture of participation, and especially a shared ideology that helps people deal with their baggage and current conditions and that propels learning instead of burning out.
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Episode 393 of RevolutionZ is Part One of a two part critical discussion of the Sixties New Left. It doesn't remember in order to praise what was done. It remembers to find flaws to correct. The content arrives like a time capsule a young me sent from 1974. 
The sixties didn’t just “happen” and then fade into nostalgia. The story of the New Left gets fought over because the stakes are still here: who gets credit, who gets blamed, and what lessons today’s movements are allowed to learn. So this episode takes a hard look at a piece of history that’s often flattened into either a liberal fairytale or a cynical cautionary tale, and argues that both those versions mislead. A useful look, instead, ought to present past history to better create future history.

To do that,  this episode presents and responds to an excerpt from the 1974 book What Is To Be Undone, which was proposed from inside the aftermath of the 1960s New Left. What did the New Left actually accomplish? The excerpt says it helped shatter U.S. political complacency, it spread concepts for understanding imperialism, racism, sexism, hierarchy, alienation, and exploitation, and it demonstrated that even an inexperienced movement can disrupt the establishment. But then the episode addresses a harder question: if so much was achieved, why did so much also fall apart? 

From consciousness raising and participatory decision-making to the student movement’s arc from Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement into escalation and fragmentation, this episode discusses how urgency slid into macho posturing, how sectarian infighting turned politics into spectacle, and how weak strategic thinking produced action without durable organization. Along with so much good came debilitating bad. The core takeaway is simple but demanding: honest self-critique is how a movement builds better theory, better vision, better strategy, and real staying power. 
Okay, but what then? Did and do people now just need to do things that we did then better and longer? Or did we then and do we now need different goals, strategy, methods, and even feelings? And if we do need different practice, does that mean we need to re-elevate classical ideologies as some now claim, or that we need to leave them further behind to find really new ideology? 
That last question guides not only this episode but a new sequence of episodes rooted in reactions to old ways and thoughts, but also driven by the need to do better today and tomorrow.
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Episode 392 of RevolutionZ  uncovers and visits a half-century-old file on my computer to address a surprisingly urgent question: are we building new revolutionary ideas, or just renting space in inherited ones. I recently rediscovered the text of my 1974 book What Is To Be Undone? written when the arguments between Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, and other currents were not academic history but living fuel for organizing. Reading my own early investigations as the Sixties slipped into the Seventies feels like opening a time capsule and realizing the contents still impact what people believe is possible.

On the same day, a friend pointed me toward Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid The Piper Of Western Marxism? and the storms around his claim that contemporary revolutionary theory drifted into a “respectable” left alignment with capitalism and imperialism. I share a long excerpt from Rockhill laying out his case: a purge of dialectical and historical materialism, class analysis pushed aside by culturalism, and a call to rebuild a disciplined, organized left that can actually win. We agree on the need to rejuvenate anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle, but we very seriously diverge on whether the path forward is a return to classical Marxism-Leninism and democratic centralism or a break from their limits. 

From there, I grapple with a personal and political test: was my younger and then on-going self part of the problem Rockhill describes, or was I trying to learn from past failures to strengthen future movements. Along the way I revisit blurbs from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Herb Gintis, reflect on the dangers of sectarian dismissal, and end with Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” as a reminder that clarity sometimes comes from letting go of certainty. 
This episode begins another sequence of episodes whose number of entries depends on what seems the case. Me then and now: a deluded, deceived, sell out CIA symp rejector of Marxism Leninism, or me then and now a sincere whipper snapper  trying to overcome past ideological problems on the way to a better society? 
Is our ideological problem anti anti imperialism, as Rockhill asserts, or is it that  in going forward from the Sixties we actually retained too much from dead men's minds? This episode is a scene setting opening shot on the way to aggressively and hopefully definitively determining which way we need to orient our thinking Back to classical Marxism Leninism, or forward to a participatory self managing future.
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Ep 391 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Vincent Emanuele to talk about the movement against data centers, the logic and methods of organizing, and movement culture. Your town’s next big fight might not be a highway or a stadium. It might be a windowless warehouse full of servers that power AI, cloud computing, and the apps you use every day, while quietly consuming electricity and water on a staggering scale. Combat veteran, writer, and organizer Vincent Emanuele  unpacks what data centers actually do, why communities are packing local meetings to stop them, and what this outpouring reveals about power in the tech economy and modes of resistance. 

We challenge the comforting idea that the fix is simply “using AI responsibly.” Vincent argues that without democratic decision-making, the people calling the shots are still tech oligarchs, investors, and politicians chasing profit and geopolitical advantage. That reality shapes how new technology gets deployed toward militarism, surveillance, and attention-harvesting platforms, not toward the public good. We also dig into the deeper human questions: how does AI and digital life  thin out our skills, our relationships, and even our sense of what it means to be human. 

From there, episode 391 move from critique to strategy. Data center fights often start organically and bring together people who don’t share politics, which makes them a rare chance to practice real organizing instead of only mobilizing the choir. We talk about democratizing knowledge so jargon can’t bully communities, identifying trusted “organic leaders,” learning from sports and military debrief culture, and building non-consumerist spaces where people can meet face-to-face and actually grow power. 
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