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.Support the show

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• Ep 360 Larry Cohen on No Kings and Beyond: Tactics, Strategy, and Goals

  Episode 360 of RevolutionZ has Larry Cohen, former president of the 600,000 strong Communication Workers of America and current board chair of Our Revolution who has spent five decades organizing workers and pushing democratic reforms inside and outside the Democratic Party to assess No Kings and explore possible future directions for it and of resistance to Trump's fascist agenda. Larry emphasizes the need to organize across differences, to change the rules that block action, and to deliver material wins that build trust. He reveals how the No Kings mobilization surged and what it will take to convert mass turnout into durable power. He names the real opponent—the oligarchy that spans billionaires, technocrats, and captured politicians—and shows how Senate procedures, a monarchic judiciary, and dark money in primaries stop popular policies from getting passed. Instead of living forever on defense, he talks offense: defund the oligarchs, fund the people. Cut bloated military spending, expand early childhood education, long-term care, and health coverage. Enforce bargaining rights so Starbucks and Amazon can’t stall contracts for years. Take concrete steps toward Medicare for All by lowering eligibility and slashing administrative waste.But the discussion also addresses the prospects and methods of immediate organizing and protest. Youth, minority, and labor participation. A weekday No Kings. A trajectory from five-minute stoppages to national strikes. Campus feeder marches into No Kings outpourings. All to evidence and rebuild the muscle of collective action.Larry explains from his own experiences at every level from precincts and union struggles to revealing conversations with Barack Obama the horrid flaws and important potentials of electoral activism. He describes how to engage without contempt union members who voted for Trump by focusing on efficacy and tangible gains. He discusses the difference between Trump getting many (horrible) things done. Action. And Democrats getting little to nothing done. Abdication. He points to Obama squandering electoral support and a supportive Senate and House with do-nothingism. And he digs into party reform: blocking dark and corporate money from primaries, enforcing endorsements of primary winners, building coalitions with unaffiliated voters where Democrats can’t win and more. Larry urges that the goal ishould be better delivery not better messaging. So this episode is about moving from protest to power. What weekday action by No Kings would you like to join next, rally, march, civil disobedience, or what? Support the show

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• Ep 359 Cynicism Or Informed Hope

  Episode 359 of RevolutionZ considers the possibility that the biggest barrier to change isn’t raw power, but a story that many people have swallowed about what’s possible? The idea that there is no alternative. That victory is a pipe dream. The associated chapter of the The Wind Cries Freedom considers how cynicism is manufactured, why it passes for “realism,” and how organizers in the oral history's revolutionary process flipped the script by pairing a credible vision with messengers who modeled rigor, empathy, and staying power.Andre Goldman answers Miguel Guevara's questions in this chapter by describing how schools, media, and workplace hierarchies train us to expect little and accept less. From there, Goldman considers the limits of purely defensive mobilizations. To push back against a figurehead can matter, but it could also  leave intact the belief that the underlying order is inevitable. Goldman tells how a pivotal turning point arrived for the movement for a revolutionary participatory society when evidencing the logic of hope became a central priority and activists learned to couple a vision of a principled and feasible future with an associated strategy and priorities until dissent began to signal seriousness rather than naivety and wisdom rather than delusion.Miguel asks Andre about RPS's militarism boycott as a kind of case study. Andre tells how campus divestment was forced by student activism and felt like a major win until research quietly migrated into private spin-offs. Andre then tells how the RPS approach: transformed to address not just colleges but also corporations and how it learned to protect jobs while reassigning funds from weapons to green transit, schools, clinics, and renewable energy. He describes how the movement discovered and becoming adept at explaining why elites often prefer military budgets over social investment—not for defense or even for offense, but mostly because public goods empower workers and reduce elite leverage, whereas military production does the opposite. At the same time, in context of the on-going campus organizing about guns and militarism Goldman describes arguing with students about open carry and coming to realize how the open carry debate was more a clash of premises than of values. When a student or townsperson assumes permanent danger, everyone having guns on display can look “rational” as a deterrent against mass shooters who will then know they will get quickly picked off. One side believes a far far less violent society is possible so no open carry, indeed, no to guns more widely. The other side believes that violence is inevitable so that having a gun is one's only defense. The lesson that premises divide dissenters and defenders of oppressive ways changes the argument from moral differences and judgments to differences over the facts of the matter.  This then tended to get generalized to fossil fuels, borders, and foreign policy. RPS learned to address values, of course, but also the upstream fictitious beliefs that make harmful conclusions feel inevitable to system defenders.Miguel next draws out Andre about the human side of durable movements, about the need to build confidence, to design for joy and care, and to create visible wins that prove agency. If you’ve ever felt that critique is endless but change feels out of reach, Andre Goldman's stories in this chapter of the real history show a path for turning analysis into action, and for turning despair into informed hope..Support the show

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• Ep 358 - Arash Kolahi and Alexandria Shaner from ZNet Keep Hope Real

  Episode 358 of RevolutionZ has Arash Kolahi and Alexandria Shaner talk about alternative media aims and pursuits, and the state of the left. Having just published a comprehensive, transparent annual report for ZNetwork.org, Arash and Alexandria invite you to shape what their project does next. They explain how a volunteer‑heavy media project doubled its reach through smart syndication, built community spaces that actually talk back, and launched tools that help people act, not just read.No clickbait pivots. No sanding down radical edges to appease algorithms. Instead, a they explain their “guerrilla outreach” strategy that puts movement analysis, strategy, and vision in front of new audiences on platforms like MSN and Flipboard while keeping the full, uncensored archive at znetwork.org for everyone's easy access. Our conversation breaks down the nuts and bolts—how to jump into Discord, what the annual report reveals about budgets and priorities, and what concrete projects your support accelerates including a powerful new site search for 70,000+ articles, short-form explainers that invite deeper dives, an interactive map of Gaza solidarity encampments, and the All of Us Directory that is built to connect potential volunteers to any of hundreds of groups and projects that welcome help, earchable by skills and location.We also discuss the emotional stakes in our chaotic times for media and everyone. Fear isn’t just background noise—it’s the government's business model. That’s why Arash and Alexandria advocate for “critical hope,” a practice rooted in analysis and collective action, and  for “social self‑defense,” a movement strategy to resist authoritarianism while building the world we want. If you’ve felt stuck between outrage and burnout, this conversation offers a framework and real next steps one can take. Read the report, join the conversation, and tell Z what tools would help you organize where you are.If Arash and Alexandria communicate to you, resonate for you, please share their episode with a friend, subscribe on ZNetwork for updates, consider donating via their site at ZNetwork.org to help aid them, or via Patreon for RevolutionZ as our new donations will go to them too. Your feedback shapes what we build next.Support the show

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• Ep 357 Cynicism Meets Activism Strategy Wins

  Episode 357 of RevolutionZ presents chapter six of The Wind Cries Freedom plus some personal discussion of publishing priorities and reader/listener choices. From the oral history, Andre Goldman describes his path from academic to organizer and in doing so reveals how a campus boycott became a disciplined, scalable movement. His story has no lone hero; it’s built on strategy, solidarity, and a culture that turned participation into a mark of maturity rather than a fringe stance.Along the way Andre refers to lessons he took from reading about the 1960s without romanticizing them: expand with intention, consolidate gains, and keep your organizing transparent if you want participatory democracy to be more than a slogan. Miguel draws out his take on how students in their time exposed militarized research, how campus workers reshaped demands toward shared governance, and how inter-campus coordination converted isolated protests into a coherent force. When administrators leaned on repression, “safety” threats, and prestige, the movement focused on raising the real costs of such behavior—documenting abuses, repeatedly returning stronger, and persistently building sympathy beyond the campus.The biggest obstacle, Andre reports, was not tactical but psychological. Potential allies often agreed on facts and ethics but clung to the belief that victory was impossible or irrelevant. So, to dissent was pointless. Andre uses his experiences to describe the origins of that learned powerlessness and to show how movements undid it by linking small wins to a bigger strategy,, asking questions that stir conscience, and modeling a vision others want to join. Does Andre's discussion of a future struggle as part of this oral history provide provocative, useful insights for campus organizing, anti-militarism, democratic governance, and beating cynicism in our time? Does it reveal what concrete steps, courage, and discipline can accomplish together? If so, I think Miguel and Andre would say okay, in that case refine the insights, adapt them to your many varied situations, beat Trump and militarism. If not, I think Miguel and Andre would say, okay, generate your own more useful insights. If Andre's stories and the lessons he took resonate for you, or even more important, if you think it would resonate for others, perhaps share the episode with a friend who thinks “nothing ever changes,” and perhaps even attach a comment with a lesson you feel you can take into your next action, or a proposed lesson which you instead think is confused or mistaken and needs to be improved or replaced. In other words listen, but then engage.Support the show

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