Episode 365 of RevolutionZ presents an essay by film director Ava Duvernay about the difficulty of writing in unimaginably chaotic times. Her's is a sentiment I share but that she expresses more eloquently. Simply put, it’s hard to write to a conclusion when the world won’t stop shouting new horrors. Then Miguel Guevara interviews Barbara Bethune and Emiliano Farmer, taken from chapter twelve of The Wind Cries Freedom. A doctor and nurse, Barbara and Emiliano describe their experiences in health work revealing aims, motives, biases, and beliefs. They report and analyze the class forces that shape who gets heard, who gets paid, who gets healed and who doesn't as well as the emergence of struggle about the issues including explaining the contrasting the circumstances and mindsets of doctors and nurses as a particular instance of the contrasting circumstances and mindsets of coordinators and workers more generally.

Barbara Bethune is a doctor who loved the promise of medicine but who began early on to question the rituals that came with it. She describes how she came to realize the differences between training for obedience and training for excellence. She tested her impressions by comparing her experience of medical internship to her observation of military boot camp as surprisingly similar methods of imposing systemic deference. Beyond profit-seeking, Barbara reveals how doctors' and administrators' coordinator class culture manages care but resists democratizing its means and methods. She finds the roots in the hospital's division of labor and her takeaway is clear. Class divided health care burns out workers, inflates costs, and leaves prevention on the cutting-room floor. It heals as a means, yes, but the ends are profits and power.

Emiliano Farmer, a militant activist nurse who helped build Healthcare Workers United, speaks from the front lines of the pandemic and beyond, where applause never becomes protection or real power for workers. Emiliano challenges face to face the reflexive elitism that keeps nurses and techs out of key decisions, and he lays out reforms that move from grievance to governance, balanced pay scales, and participatory decision-making. He and Barbara explore their own negative and positive experiences, and actions, their politicization, their actions and commitments, and the conflicts that occurred within RPS over practical steps like single-payer momentum, Big Pharma accountability, antibiotic stewardship, food and housing as health policy, and especially job redefinition—all of which campaigns help make care safer, affordable, and patient-first. Guevara elicits from them personal experiences, views, and feelings to convey lessons about class division, rule, defense and resistance in health care and in broader social struggles.

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Episode 364 of RevolutionZ begins with a brief discussion of the Epstein phenomenon. How do elites manufacture loyalty and impose silence? How did Epstein (and Trump too) get constituencies that not only ought to have known better, but literally ought to have abhorred them, to instead become sycophants or at least friends?

After that interlude, the episode continues the oral history presentation of the Wind Cries Freedom episodes This time, Miguel Guevara elicits from his interviewees reports regarding Revolutionary Participatory Society's initial post convention vision for a society where people actually manage the decisions that shape their lives. The connection with Epstein and Trump? As power recruits through fear, favors, routine, and spectacle, we must answer with vision and program that makes popular agency normal, protects dissent, and make hierarchy impossible to resurrect.

Guevara's interviewees describe arriving at a clear foundation for democratic life. Politics moves beyond occasional voting to year-round self-management. Decision-making power tracks impact. Society reveres dissent. Economy rejects owner and coordinator dominance. It favors workers self management, balanced jobs, and income based on effort, duration, and onerousness of socially valued labor. Participatory planning replaces markets and command with cooperative negotiation conducted via workers and consumers councils. Compatible commitments contour everyday life. Caregiving is shared. Consent-centered sex education bolsters sexually and emotionally diverse relationships. Partnerships endure without perks. Cultural self-governing communities have the space and means to thrive so long as universal rights hold. Across borders, internationalism eliminates empire. Across time, addressing full ecological and social costs ensures that future generations inherit options, not debts.

The RPS conception was that commitments should and could keep hope honest. Guevara's interviewees detail their support for recallable leadership, transparent roles, internal diversity, and childcare and mutual aid practices that make participation possible. Empowering tasks are distributed so influence cannot accumulate. RPS initial strategy, the interviewees report, favored nonviolence and context-aware electoral choices. RPS vision and program operated as a scaffold are participants to elaborate in contextually contingent situations.. RPS members' shared aim they explain, was to win reforms that leave people and organizations more connected, more confident, and more capable of winning still more gains.

Throughout, the interviewees reveal how status seeking, impatience, defeatism, and inflexible personal habits corroded movements and describe how humility, listening, and rigor strengthened movements.

In sum, this episode offers describes some ways a particular future movement turned values into institutions and made collective self management a daily practice. The interviewees don't provide a blueprint. Indeed, they reject the virtue and even the possibility of blueprints. They instead offer their own experiences in hopes they can be adapted, refined, augmented, and when need be ignored in a different time and different context which needs to arrive at its own vision and strategy.

If the recounting resonates for you, subscribe and share with a friend or ten. What guardrails against persistent hierarchy do you favor? What visions do you advocate? What motives and means fuel your life choices? Don't we all need to each be able to respond to such questions? Don't we need to be able to use our answers to such questions to go forward against Trumpism Epsteinism and every other ism that subjugates any living soul? If we do, maybe the interviewees from The Wind Cries Freedom convey lessons we can usefully adapt.

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Episode 363 of RevolutionZ as its main focus continues with another excerpt from the Oral History titled The Wind Cries Freedom. The episode opens, however, with a comment on our place and our times following on Mamdani's remarkable victory and Steve Bannon's call for Republicans to take over all institutions or face jail in about a year. In the struggle for institutions, for us to act as though Trump and Co. are now wielding a mighty force that is targeted at each and every one of us, ready and able to trounce us each now, in our workplaces, schools, and homes— for us to believe that exaggeration, and in response to be so security conscious that we curtail ourselves to avoid attracting their assault, that approach will do their work for them. That response from us will give them what they are racing to gain but which they do not now have. Our resignation. We have to fight back, not hunker down.

The episode then takes a second side route to present the lyrics of four specially chosen songs. Time to get up stand up, imagine, escape the badlands, and bring our ship in. Finally, hopefully roused a bit, we return to the oral history. This time the interviewer, Miguel Guevara questions two interviewees who we have already met, Mayor Bill Hampton and academic activist Andre Goldman about RPS first forming chapters and thereby getting real.

We see, in the oral history's time, how real chapters of their Revolutionary Participatory Society organization formed, grew, and spread to multiply power without losing heart. We see RPS's scaffolding for durable organizing that started around kitchen tables and scaled to a national federation—including the role of its weekly meetings, balanced roles, internal culture, local campaigns, and outreach as strategy.

Bill Hampton walks us through the early steps after their founding convention: setting a growth trigger for action, launching local campaigns at twenty members, and using those campaigns to reach forty to fifty members and then divide and double the chapter count. He explains how strategic recruitment, chapters sharing their innovations peer to peer, intramural sports, open classes, and street theater plus initial activist campaigns all emphasized growth and roads to member leadership. He shows us what “invite, don’t preach” looks like when stakes are high. He gets concrete on accountability, patience, a culture that welcomes rather than filters, and a movement that emphasizes flexible growth not static self defense.

Andre Goldman next adds the educator’s lens, including how he in his chapter and others throughout the organization worked to pair internal education with external actions through organizing schools that trained people to listen across difference, to frame demands without needless polarization, and to teach others to do the same. He tackles hard truths about gender, race, and class after Trumpism and why being morally right doesn’t guarantee strategic effectiveness. Miguel questions how RPS split chapters without drama, added supports like childcare and modest dues, and dealt with interpersonal conflicts by designing structures that contained heat without dimming the mission.

In short, with eyes on early chapter building, this episode continues the agenda of The Wind Cries Freedom, to convey what it might look like to not only block and terminate Trumpism but to continue on beyond that to achieve a fundamentally better world. And that is why RevolutionZ is devoting so many episodes to conveying the current draft of Miguel's oral history to you. To contribute to confidence, strategy, and vision in a congenial and personal way. And, hopefully, to get some feedback to help with additional improvements to the book.

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