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.

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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.

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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.

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Episode 384 of RevolutionZ has as guest Rachel Donald, a journalist at the site Planet Critical. Rachel suggests that war propaganda thrives on simple stories, and shows how the left sometimes helps that along without meaning to. She then considers a hard question: how might we best oppose the US war on Iran without falling into the trap of treating any US target, no matter how authoritarian, as our ally? Our enemy's enemy is not necessarily our friend. We must oppose intervention and war, of course, but also draw a bright line between a people and the regime that governs them. Donald discusses how, when we collapse that difference it can unintentionally serve the “liberation” narrative that in this case sells intervention, imperialism, and endless war. And also discusses how to deny that an immoral regime is, in fact, immoral, can put off potential resistors.

From there we zoom out to movement strategy. Why does so much anti-war and progressive organizing drift toward moral purity, online pile-ons, and team politics that repel the broader public? We talk about the consequences of war, and all social policy, as a moral and strategic issue keep returning to the question ordinary listeners ask again and again: “I get what you’re against, but what are you for?” If the far right can speak to lived pain like rising costs, insecurity, and lost futures, Donald asks, why can't the left learn how to connect the dots and offer a convincing alternative rooted in real gains.

We also get into journalism itself: the myth of objectivity, the need for transparent values and funding, and why reporting facts without systemic analysis still leaves people confused and vulnerable to manufactured consent. Finally, we discuss independent publishing, Substack’s incentives, and why rebuilding collective media ecosystems may be essential for the next wave of organizing.

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Episode 383 of RevolutionZ starts with No Kings. Nine million people can take to the streets and still walk away wondering if anything changed. How can that be? How is it that turnout can grow in rural towns and new venues while longtime participants slowly fall away? What does it say about cynicism, strategy, and movement-building? The episode suggests a blunt but hopeful lesson: You do not fix a movement by leaving it. You fix it by participating better, retaining people already involved, and building a path from one-day rallies to sustained action, growing civil disobedience, and attaining compelling shared aims.

Next, if we look past the daily churn of Trumpian excess, we find a hard question. What if we spent less time chasing every provocation and more time organizing for what we want? Reaction matters. We need it. But it cannot substitute for proactive political organizing, coalition-building, and long-term resistance that links threats together, from authoritarianism to war, racism, misogyny, deportation, to ecological collapse.

Then this episode returns to our excerpts from the Wind Cries Freedom oral history to offer a set of exchanges on the most difficult internal disagreements RPS faced: to have leadership but not hierarchy, to achieve a strategically sound pace of change, to have autonomy plus solidarity, to navigate the seeming tension between reform and revolution, and to settle the high-stakes debate over violence and nonviolence. Along the way our interviewees from the future explore practical movement tactical proposals like rotation, recall, multi-tactic campaigns, “bloc” structures beyond single-issue coalitions, and “nonreformist reform struggles” that win immediate gains while building capacity for deeper structural change.

As with the rest of The Wind Cries Freedom, there is some analysis and some vision, but the main focus is strategy that ranges from building self-managing movements, through enlarging civil resistance, to seeing how to win real change without losing each other along the way.

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Episode 382 of RevolutionZ continues our sequence of chapters from the soon forthcoming book, The Wind Cries Freedom: An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This chapter's title is "Beyond Capitalism, Classlessness." But, before we get into that, and as with other recent episodes, first we briefly take up two current issues of interest, cancel culture and what to do about AI.

A publisher decides to pulp books it once praised. The publisher moves the word “cancel” from being descriptive to being vicious. What should we make of that? Perhaps best to consider a real case.

A German anarchist-leaning publisher removes from its list four Noam Chomsky titles. We ask the uncomfortable question, how can that be true? Even if Chomsky or any other writer behaved really grossly, as Chomsky didn't but many others have, should anyone, much less an anarchist-leaning press, judge their books by their actual content, or should we all perform some kind of purity test on their writer and dispense with the writer's books?

Put differently, should we publish or for that matter read books for their content or just to celebrate or denigrate their authors? When a crowd, or a part of a crowd, gets angry at an author, is it appropriate to dispense with the author's books to avoid annoying the crowd? Is that anarchist behavior, socialist behavior, or feminist behavior, or is it fascist behavior?

What happens to truth, organizing, and our own moral spine when outrage becomes a reflex, when “guilty until proven innocent” turns into a culture, and books become targets to cancel? The first part of episode 382 argues a position that ought to be self evident. A book is not its author. Pulping books is just a less graphic version of burning books which is true even when leftists light the fire. And finally, cancellation behavior perverts its perpetrators as well as attacks its targets.

After that, we take up some matters of artificial intelligence to apply a practical, political focus. Best case, AI helps cure cancer, reverse global warming, and expand human capability. Worst case, AI intensifies surveillance, makes manipulation mandatory, assaults the planet, un-employs millions, and weaponizes itself to the point of AIs hunting humans for sport. How can we conceive AI policy demands to make now, including enforceable oversight, bans on dangerous uses, limits on energy use, and economic rules that turn productivity gains into shared well being rather than into private profit? How can we usefully think about demands to guide ethical AI, algorithmic accountability, the climate impact of AI, and even AI's collateral soul-stripping impact on its totally well-meaning users in their daily lives?

Finally, this episode moves into another “report from the future.” Interviewees describe building classlessness through RPS organizing. Their accounts get concrete about attaining a new, worthy, viable economy that includes balanced job complexes and self-management that actually shares power, They talk about RPS steadily enlarging its working class membership and leadership, and about the hard cultural work of confronting coordinator-class arrogance without blowing up needed solidarity.

Various interviewees from The Wind Cries Freedom describe their economic organizing experiences to offer insights on all these matters. From future Amazon sit-down strikes to a broad shift among professionals toward choosing “for the people” roles, this episode's chapter argues that the path to economic liberation is built on carefully considered strategic practices.

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Episode 381 of RevolutionZ starts with my email inbox. “Oprah wants your book, No Bosses.” It sounds like a dumb joke until you realize how convincing modern AI scams have become. A flood of smart, personalized emails targets authors with flattering outreach, credible details pulled from your work and your life, plus plausible offers of aid. Then comes relentless follow-up, and only later, once snared--I wasn't, but almost--the ask for money. The point of recounting this isn’t just to urge avoiding author marketing scams. It’s to see what these tricks reveal about a rapidly growing misinformation ecosystem of clickbait, deepfakes, fabricated videos, and synthetic “proofs” that can make truth feel unreachable and even irrelevant.

From there, this episode continues presenting The Wind Cries Freedom oral history with a chapter that describes Revolutionary Participatory Society organizing around race after Black Lives Matter and beyond. This time the interviewees dig into successes and failures of anti racist organizing, describing what it takes to win rather than just be right: speaking clearly, building majorities, reducing needless antagonisms, and holding a vision where community differences remain real but racial hierarchy disappears. The conversation also addresses issues of movement leadership, the hard “who organizes whom” question, and how some “privilege” framing can undermine solidarity even when it starts from a real injustice.

The episode then turns to policing, fear, incarceration, and the conditions that make violence feel inevitable, It reports a striking tactic: athletes using labor power to force all-day police-community safety negotiations city by city. There is more, and then the episode closes with some direct pushback on doomerist defeatism by way of addressing a recent Chris Hedges essay including a reminder that we can’t know outcomes for sure in advance, but we can and must choose how we fight. Finally, and not unrelated, we close with an odd humorous but also quite disturbing Sixties story that highlights one kind of nonsense that too often invades left practice.

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Episode 380 of RevolutionZ, titled WCF End Misogyny and Trump Too, begins with some reactions to our current times. The world is on fire, and we keep producing explanations like they’re water. They aren't.

This episode opens with a hard question: why do we get mountains of analysis about war and authoritarian politics, quite a lot of it redundant, yet so few concrete proposals for what millions of people can do next week different from last week to actually reduce and end the carnage?

If the point of a writer, speaker, or organizer is to strengthen an anti war and anti fascist resistance, then strategy, coordination, escalation, and staying power can’t be an afterthought to yet again explaining the roots of our conditions and pointing out how much they hurt.

In a couple of weeks people are going to demonstrate in the next No Kings event. I hope ten million or more. Isn’t to think about and make proposals regarding what those millions of people might do on that day and still more so how they might proceed when that day runs into the next day, a more important focus than debating causes of the war or reporting its every new communique or casualty? The basics of the war are discussed everywhere. But the future of resistance; not so much. Naming our conditions and their causes matters, but it’s not a plan.

Then we continue to present The Wind Cries Freedom, my forthcoming oral history of a next American revolution, with its Chapter 24. At a conference in Las Vegas, interviewer Miguel Guevara talks with Alexandra Hanslet and Bill Hampton about gender progress, feminist organizing, and why movements fail when they treat gender and sexuality as optional. The interviewees lay out the reality: even “radical” spaces can reproduce interruption, sidelining, harassment, and invisibility unless they change their structures, not just their language and hopes.

Alexandra and Bill describe practical mechanisms RPS adopts: childcare at every event with men sharing equally in the work, leadership, and public speaking roles at least fifty percent women, training and mentoring instead of excuses, and a standard that says if we can’t yet do it in a feminist way, we shouldn’t do it yet. The chapter pushes further into family life and care work, arguing that comparable empowerment and circumstance must also mean comparable participation in caring activities.

Both parts of this episode convey, I hope, that while analysis is important, to cling to analysis mode at the expense of vision and strategy mode defeats self. To passionately debate what's going on and where it came from is essential for arriving at viable and worthy vision and strategy, but to do it to the exclusion of directly addressing vision and strategy mistakes "necessary" for "alone necessary."

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