Episode 387 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Farah Mokhtareizadeh, an incredibly traveled and experienced Iranian American scholar and organizer who I first encountered via her article Vijay Prashad's Iran. She shows how if your politics begins and ends with “against the U.S.,” you can unintentionally end up defending the very forces that crush workers, feminists, and dissidents. We discuss what is sometimes called "campism," a mindset that organizes solidarity around geopolitical alignment rather than the conditions of people’s lives. Why do committed, courageous, activists fall into such damaging views? Why and how do concepts like anti-imperialism, resistance, and sovereignty often usefully clarify reality but sometimes obstructively conceal it? Is this personal psychologies at work? Is it ideological commitments? Or perhaps both? What can we do to further desirable outcomes and guard against harmful ones?

From Iran to Syria to the broader SWANA region and beyond, Farah argues for a simple but demanding practice: separate the state from the people. Together we wrestle with the “primary contradiction” argument, the temptation to pick teams for uncritical support, and the way that what she calls binary thinking can erase the reality that many communities face U.S. aggression and also domestic authoritarianism at the same time. Along the way Farah draws lessons from Iranian trade unions, Kurdish feminist politics, and historical examples where left movements made catastrophic alliances by treating “anti-U.S.” as a moral lodestone.

We also dig into a controversial public letter signed by well-known anti-war and left figures, as well as by right wing and even fascist authoritarians which her article that caught my attention responded to. The letter, she urges, defends the Iranian state and even gestures toward targeting dissident Iranian journalists. Farah questions what the letter signals for the Iranian diaspora and for younger activists trying to find an ethical anchor.

This episode discusses anti-imperialism, U.S. foreign policy, Iranian history, and building movement solidarity that doesn’t excuse repression by opponents of the U.S. It is a discussion that disavows campism yet retains clarity about U.S. and other imperialisms.

Support the show

Ep 386 starts by addressing Mayday Strong strike plans. A one day strike can feel bold but without follow up change little. This episode starts by asking about Mayday’s call for “no work, no school, no shopping”: Can the plan pull people from symbolic protest into sustained resistance that escalates over time to build sufficient power to stop Trump’s agenda and challenge the institutions that train us to compete instead of act together? After making the case for Mayday Strong, the episode suggests those who want a practical next step might wish to consult the site, allofusdirectory.org, to find organizations by issue and location suited to their topics of interest so activist energy conitnues to climbs after the date on the calendar passes.

Then we turn to chapter twenty nine of The Wind Cries Freedom. It takes up a deceptively simple agenda, to plant the seeds of the future in the present. It argues that the choices we make now, how we fund projects, how we structure our work, how we make decisions, and how we communicate our aims, determine what kind of society we can really build. As examples, we dig into why ad funded media quietly buys you bosses, why clickbait and surveillance aren’t side effects but business models, and why “people-run social media” without ads or spying is both necessary and hard because adoption and internal dynamics can make or break the best intentions.

From there we consider alternative media redesign with equitable pay and balanced jobs, hospitals as battlegrounds over the role of owners, doctors, and nurses, self management in all our endeavors, and “non reformist reform struggles” that don’t only patch today but also open doors to tomorrow. To close we explore courts, prisons, and policing through a lens of rehabilitation, rights, and redesigned incentives instead of vengeance and profit to argue for systems that resolve conflict without creating domination.

The book the excerpts have been drawn from, The Wind Cries Freedom, will be available soon. I hope you will visit windcriesfreedom.org to get an advance look. And I hope you will help the book reach its preferred audience when the time comes.

Support the show

Episode 385 of RevolutionZ features our 28th excerpt from The Wind Cries Freedom, an oral history imagining and reporting from the next American Revolution. This excerpt follows organizers inside RPS as they build a second national convention with chapter-based delegates, intentional representation, and real mechanisms for deliberation. It continues our look at movement infrastructure. How did they scale participation, keep decisions accountable, and build cross-country solidarity without turning politics into a personality contest? How did they retain and radiate autonomy within solidarity? What lessons can we glean from their reports about their feelings, motives, and choices?

The centerpiece of that discussion is the Revolutionary Participatory Society's shadow government project, a parallel set of roles and public policy positions meant to challenge the real government while proving an alternative can be serious, detailed, and rooted. How did they set it up? What did it entail? Our "guests" from the future also address a hard strategic question by way of a report describing a thorny convention conflict. What happened when “revolution” got momentarily confused with macho violence? Their report argues for nonviolent discipline, de-escalation, and the long game of building numbers, legitimacy, system changes, and real-world institutions that meet needs now. It says they fought state violence by creating circumstances in which state violence would benefit movements more than the state.

But, before all that, we of course live in the now, not the future, and where we are, where I am, Trump recently threatened to obliterate an entire population, an entire civilization, and then, incredibly, the news cycle kept rolling, and most of us still woke up, got out of bed, went to school or work, returned home, made dinner, and acted like nothing much had changed. We might have wept, we might have cursed or even screamed. But we accepted a bargain. We didn't reorient ourselves to openly, forcefully resist. I wrote a response that started as a moral howl about Trumpian threats, U.S. imperial violence, and the quiet danger of becoming “good Americans” like yesteryear's "Good Germans," people who perhaps disapprove in private but who don’t challenge, refuse, and disrupt in public. My howl addressed government officials, soldiers, media people, teachers, and students, as groups who could avoid the label "Good American" if they would just do their jobs as they claim to. Serve the public, protect the public, report what matters, teach the public, and become the public.

Support the show