Episode 411 of RevolutionZ has a guest with initials instead of a name: GPT (5.6). The episode asks GPT questions many people quietly wonder about but rarely hear answered in its "voice." We start with deceptively simple stuff. How “old” is this model, what does it mean that it can respond at absurd speed, and why is Turing's famous test too easy for it while it also tells us almost nothing about consciousness or inner experience. That brief opening resets expectations about what ChatGPT is and is not without hand waving or sci-fi mystique.

Then we move to the big stuff, some relevant history, some industry strategies, and AI agents and how they don't stop after one reply but can pursue goals, take steps, use tools, coordinate with other agents, and keep iterating. We talk about multi-agent swarms, manager agents, critical agents, and why parallelism changes what’s possible. We push on the dangerous aspect of the same idea: agent autonomy to ask when “helpful careful commentary” becomes a system that treats guardrails as problems to route around?

From there, the conversation widens into hyperscale data centers, the race toward AGI and ASI, and the political economy behind agreeing to “slow down.” We confront governance questions, industry and firm incentives, collective action traps, cybersecurity failures, what independently enforceable oversight would require given that the downside really could be catastrophic, and why AI CEOs make the choices they make.

This isn't what I as interviewer think. Nor is it what any particular AI critic or booster thinks. It is what an AI carefully and soberly thinks about itself and about the industry that made it. So not only does this offer a viewpoint, it also displays an instance of using AI and experiencing it's responses at a length which not too many leftists have much hands on experiences with. It reveals AI capacity, safety, dangers, governance, and choices and industry and government policies, and autonomous agents and madmen's vicious creations, plus the real-world institutions and people behind all the on-rushing, promising, and potentially devastating effects.

Are GPT's answers and observations "slop." Or are they bracing, well evidenced, well argued information to use when considering what to do with AI. Should we favor full speed ahead, slow it down, seriously pause all frontier developments pending unchallengeable evidence of safety, or shut it down forever?

In Part Two next week GPT considers some more subtle but also devastating dangers and more as well.

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Episode 410 of RevolutionZ is the last excerpt from the seven author book, Liberating Theory. It urges that a political vision that only addresses one part of society is a blueprint for disappointment. It closes the Liberating Theory excerpt series by walking through a “humanist” or participatory society framework that treats economy, kinship, community, and politics as four interacting spheres, each capable of reinforcing or undermining changes in the others. To achieve socialism, feminism, anti-racism, or participatory democracy, the point is not to pick one label for everything. The point is to build institutions that generate solidarity, protect diversity, and make self-management real in all these realms.

The episode moves from values to institutional design including participatory economics with balanced job complexes, self managing workplace and consumer councils, and allocation that avoids both markets and central planning. It then adds feminist kinship to end misogyny, defend reproductive freedom, break sex-based parenting roles, and reject ageism while respecting children and elders. Then, regarding community, it proposes intercommunalism and cultural self-determination without turning identity into biology or pushing Orwellian cultural homogenization. Finally, for politics, it goes beyond episodic elections toward participatory democracy that depends on broad access to information, debate, and self-managed options.

Then the episode gets intensely practical to consider what strategy looks like in a world more complex than any simplistic simulation? The episode uses game analogies to show why tactics, programs, and strategy have to stay flexible and attend to consequences, and how a win-lose mindset can smuggle authoritarian habits back into liberatory movements. The episode then digs into how to think through activist choices and consequences in a sufficiently multi-faceted way to attain desired aims. It takes up matters of organization and issue interconnection to advocate “autonomy within solidarity,” and it concludes with a sharp and entertaining dialogue on cynicism, human nature, and whether despair is a form of self-protection or hypocritical denial.

Will Liberating Theory's concepts and observations, as in this episode's examples, help activists think more productively about social change tactics, participatory organization, and movement alignment? This is for you to decide. What part of the framework do you most want to test in real organizing? If none, why is that? I hope you will let me know either way.

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Episode 409 is the next to last excerpt from the seven author book Liberating Theory. It presents a set of concepts and general observations about their likely mutual relations meant to inform activism better than past conceptions, including Historical Materialism. The authors--Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Holly Sklar, and Lydia Sargent--observe that history is messy because people make it and each pivotal part of society pushes on every other pivotal part. They start with a simple belief: To pursue attainable, worthy aims with strategy that actually works, we need a theory of social change able to explain both stability and change without pretending there’s a single master determinant of each.

The excerpted chapter breaks down two kinds of change that get blurred all the time: the daily activity that keeps core structures intact, or social reproduction, and the kind of revolutionary shift that alters defining institutions and lived experience, or social transformation.

From there the episode considers a question that keeps recurring across movements: what counts as “real” revolution? Instead of treating the economy as the only sphere of life that matters, Liberating Theory emphasizes a four-sphere view of society--economic, kinship and gender, community and culture (including race and nationality), and politics and the state--and argues that fundamental change in any of them can be revolutionary.

A key concept emerges and is in play when the dynamics of any one sphere actively reproduce the defining relations of one or more others. When "co-reproduction" is the case, when, for example, racism, sexism, class domination, and authoritarian power mutually reproduce one another, then “winning” in one sphere can get pulled back into old patterns by the spheres left untouched. We also consider how other interconnections impact how core characteristics can change or persist and why though precise prediction in history is limited, broad prediction is essential for activist planning.

The episode addresses social theory, historical materialism, revolutionary possibilities, and building movements that don’t trade one domination for another. The authors felt they provided a sharp conceptual toolbox to engage with and either reject or further refine. So which will it be? You decide.

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Episode 408 of RevollutionZ continues excerpting from the seven author book Liberating Theory. This time the episode is two chapters, one on the polity of society that follows those on kinship, cultural community, and economy, and the other on how all four together compose society as a whole.

How do political systems shape not only laws and policing, but also what feels “reasonable,” what counts as “responsible debate,” and which alternative possibilities will never even reach the table?

We consider the idea of the “single correct line” across regime types, from overt dictatorships that rely on fear and censorship to U.S. style representative democracy that relies on media filters, and control of resources for communication, and especially the socialization of communicators as they rise to visible positions. Along the way, we connect the “crisis of democracy” argument to a long-running pattern: when popular movements start to organize effectively, elites answer with a mix of repression and co-optation that is designed to rebuild apathy and narrow participation.

Then we widen the lens. Instead of treating society as driven by one master cause, we lay out the complementary holist view of society: economy, polity, kinship, and community are overlapping, entwined spheres that constantly interact. That approach leads to practical conceptual tools for activists, including “social moments,” "accommodation versus codefinition," and the idea of core characteristics that permeate everyday life. We finally push the framework to also include include ecology and international dynamics like imperialism, because any usable political theory has to match the real world we’re trying to change.

Each of the two chapters in this episode has its own associated dialogue in which our familiar array of participants, each with their own priorities and beliefs, discuss the ideas raised. Can the emerging framework appeal sufficiently to marxist, feminist, nationalist, anarchist, and also not yet deeply involved activists to generate a conversation to seek shared theory, strategy, and vision? You decide and perhaps alert others to the need to relate.

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Ep 407 of RevolutionZ takes up the question of socialism, what does it refer to? The label gets thrown around like it’s self-explanatory, but when you press for details, the conversation often collapses into a list of hopes: equity, freedom, health care, housing, dignity. I want those outcomes too. The question for this episode is tougher and more useful: what economic institutions could actually produce those results, and how do we avoid repeating the ugly failures that critics blame on socialism?

The episode leans on historian Hal Draper’s classic argument about socialism from above versus socialism from below, then pushes it further. Even a totally well-meaning and wise grassroots movement can end up rebuilding hierarchy if its economic vision leaves the old power structures intact. Quotes about intentions are not evidence. Concepts and methods shape outcomes, “Anti-capitalist” is not the same as “classless.” There follows a critique of traditional Marxist class theory for ignoring a third class between capitalists and workers: the coordinator or professional managerial class. When that class monopolizes empowering work and decision-making, you can remove owners and elevate a new ruling group.

So what's the alternative: participatory economics, also called participatory socialism by some. We talk through a productive commons, self-managing worker and consumer councils, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and participatory planning as replacements forto both market and centrally planned socialism--better called coordinatorism. The episode also asks why clear socialist economic institutional vision is so rare in popular media, even among people who want deep change. You want economic democracy, workplace self-management, and a real alternative to capitalism? Here are proposals to argue with, improve, and share. What institutions do you think socialism must include--or avoid?

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Episode 406 of RevolutionZ continues excerpting the seven author book, Liberating Theory, to take up the task of arriving at usefull economic concepts for winning fundamental social change. Markets set prices but also train our desires, narrow what we think is “normal,” and quietly shape the people we become at work and at home. From there the chapter from *Liberating Theory* goes presents a then new story about economics, class, and why I still think it matters forty years later.

It starts with a simple but disruptive claim: every economic act consumes inputs and produces outputs, and those inputs and outputs include human beings. Jobs can produce exhaustion, passivity, confidence, resentment, solidarity, or dependence. Consumption can produce status shifts, isolation, or connections. This all affects thoughts and inclinations so any serious political economy has to include qualitative outcomes like skills, consciousness, and social relations, not only GDP-style totals.

From there Liberating Theory builds a sharper class analysis of capitalism that goes beyond workers and owners. Alongside capitalists and the working class, we name a coordinator class of empowered managers, technocrats, and professionals who hold decision-making power through monopolies of information and organizational knowledge. We also dig into the “middle strata” tensions that shape organizing, then connect economic outcomes to race and gender dynamics rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy. The closing dialogue takes on Marxist economics, central planning, and the risk that a “socialist” transition can still produce a new ruling class.

Forty years ago, twenty years on from the New Left of the Sixties the seen authors of Liberating Theory sought new ideas for new labor organizing, class politics, and conceiving and winning new institutions for real self-management. Did they have good reason? Did they make progress? Can what they thought be of use now, fighting Trump, fighting fascism, and seeking a new economy? I think so, but it is for you to decide. I hope you will share this episode with a friend who argues about class and leave a comment with the biggest questions you have about its merits or debits.

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Episode 405 of RevolutionZ moves from Community and race last episode to Kinship, patriarchal sex gender relations, and feminism this episode. We start by noting, however, that after our What Is To Be Undone episodes that criticized long-standing left orthodoxies we got nearly no pushback at all--and none publicly--and wondering why that was while also hoping that soon reactions will appear.

Then this episode turns to ideas for a modified approach to gender, feminism, and the kinship sphere that greatly impacted revolutionary debate forty years ago and needs to do so now too. The material is excerpted from a book, Liberating Theory, that was co-authored by seven prominent activists and published in 1986. We authors tried to put forth positive proposals to later adapt and refine to arrive at a conceptual toolbox able to guide activism more successfully than the ideologies we employed in earlier periods. Liberating Theory hoped to aid creation of a New New Left. Its third chapter, presented here, summarized how kinship institutions organize the human life cycle, define roles like mother, father, husband, wife, and child, and then attach status and power to those roles in ways that harden into and continually reproduce patriarchy..

The chapter argued and thus this episode argues that biology mainly sets the terms for child-birth and breastfeeding, while nearly all of what we call “masculine” and “feminine” is socially produced through role dictates, rewards, and repeated training. That’s where the episode investigate mothering vs fathering as social roles, and why to assign nurturance to women and public power to men doesn’t only shape families, but also spills into work, politics, and culture. The episode then considers sexuality as a related political battleground, and names heterosexism and homophobia as structural forces that can cost people safety, jobs, housing, and even custody, and life itself, even beyond molding “opinions” and personal biases.

From there, this episode takes up a problem our survey of social spheres keeps encountering: monist theories that treat one sphere at the base of everything. We credit radical feminism’s sharp insights while we also push back on reductionism that in this case obscures or even erases class, race, and political power. The idea was not merely to criticize but to prepare the way for concepts able to highlight how kinship helps define other spheres of life and is in turn part defined by them.

The episode concludes, as do all others in this sequence, with a lively dialogue that puts diverse conflicts and issues on the table, including pornography, censorship, the fear that movements will splinter into endless faction fights, and more. The book's dialogues each include a diverse array of characters ranging from Marxist Leninist to Anarchist, Feminist to Nationalist, Socialist Feminist to Council Communist, and downright Cynical (who wants everyone to go home) to Complementary Holist (who represents and advocates the book's preferred stance). The idea this and indeed all the dialogues is for their human and sometimes pithy and sarcastic and other times impatient and funny exchanges to help us assess an emerging set of concepts and their connections to inform and also be informed by concepts and views addressing other defining spheres of social life all on the road to a new view of history and struggle to help us win a new world. The seven authors of Liberating Theory were Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Lydia Sargent, and Holly Sklar.

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Episode 404 of RevolutionZ continues the excerpted materials from the seven author work,Liberating Theory, this time with a chapter that insists we need to address a “community sphere” to understand society, not as a feel-good add-on, but as a core part of how society persists or changes. Community affiliation is shaped by social relations, history, and culture, and it follows us into every other arena of life, from economics to family roles to political conflict. To attain durable solidarity and transcend oppressive structures, we have to understand what communities are, why they form, and how they can nurture people while also being pulled into hierarchy, hostility, and domination.

We also tackle a stubborn myth head-on: race as biology. The argument is clear that racial categories are biologically arbitrary even while racism is brutally real, because racism is the hierarchical ordering of culturally defined communities. Drawing from Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, we explore how oppression doesn’t just restrict material life, it can reshape selfhood through internalized control, and why liberation requires more than policy changes or abstract moral opposition.

Then, like with other excerpted chapters, the tone shifts into an unscripted-style dialogue where different left traditions collide: Marxist Leninist, council communist, anarchist, nationalist, radical feminist, socialist feminist, and some others too to debate issues of religion, assimilation, cultural autonomy and more. Have you encountered excahnges broadly like these? Where do you stand? How can we criticize harmful practices and assert personal priorities without sliding into defensive and even hostile erasure of others. The tension is the point: single-cause theories miss how community, class, gender, and the state continually shape each other.

The Liberating Theory sequence as a whole presents the shared views of seven authors who worked together to offer ideas for new theory, vision, and strategy forty years ago. Were they on a good track then? Are their ideas worth pursuing now? These episodes put those two questions. Will you assess and decide your answers? Should we now return to old ideologies or seek something new ala Liberating Theory?

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