RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 364 Epstein and WCF: Post Convention Vision
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.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This week we have another in our The Wind Cries Freedom series of episodes derived from an oral history of the next American Revolution. The lessons from the interviewer's parallel world and advanced time are conveyed to us via the oral history as recounted in these podcast episodes. This particular episode is titled Post Convention Vision. It is from chapter eleven in the book, which has a whopping thirty chapters. As editing is still occurring, no doubt there will be some modest alterations before any final text appears. But before we get into this episode's excerpt, I want to say a few words about the unfolding mayhem that's associated with the Epstein files. First, that Trump's relations to Epstein get so much attention doesn't mean the subject is a manufactured diversion of no consequence. Yes, the story is hoarding huge attention, but no, that doesn't make it unimportant. Second, human trafficking and misogyny of any shape, size, or form are horrendous violations of human well being and are thus profoundly important. When you have elite figures and institutions of uncountable wealth and power mixing their material greed with their psychological depravity, it matters, it can instruct, and it can have effects. Of course, climate echocide, wealth suicide, war homicide, and on and on should not disappear from our view, quite the opposite. But given its own importance, what kind of attention should Epstein, his files, and his underlying issues and connections get? On the one hand, the roots of male violence and female and child subjugation, and in particular, the structural, psychosocial, and fiscal cultural causes and dimensions of each should be effectively addressed. Sadly, as we all know, that is not what mainstream media highlights. For mainstream media, larger lessons are systematically ignored and even overtly obscured. But I would like to suggest that there is another angle barely addressed at all that is of at least some interest. It seems, or perhaps I should say my guess is, that Epstein was an intelligent, fiscally sound, personally congenial, and publicly seriously circumspect circumspect version of Trump. By that I mean that in place of ignorance Epstein trafficked in knowledge. In place of wildly destroying his own wealth, Epstein quietly augmented it. In place of using fear and hate to amass allies, Epstein brandished favors and friendship. And in place of flagrantly flaunting his evil ways, Epstein miraculously largely avoided the limelight. So what was similar? Epstein, like his buddy Trump, was disgustingly socially destructive and at least in some degree deranged. The two also had wealth and misogyny in common. As Trump's role in Epstein's human trafficking child exploiting becomes steadily more evident, it will hopefully further fracture his support. Some who had become otherwise too enthralled to see Trump's true colors may finally do so. In some incredibly ironic way, Epstein's one collateral service to the world may become his contributing a bit to weakening and finally minimizing Trump. One monster's ghost helps us take down another monster's living self. But for me, what is out of the box most interesting is that each of these monsters seemingly attracted and even tightly ensnared a subset of people who certainly ought to have instead shunned, hated, and opposed them. Of course, they also each attracted another subset of people, who, given their own psychic inclinations and material and political interests, understandably aligned with and supported them. I suspect in both cases the out of place subset is far, far larger than the subset that fits comfortably with Trump and Epstein. The smaller, supportive, temperamentally and materially allied groups are of course for Epstein those who are perversely interested in procuring traffic to underage humans, or who at least don't care that it occurs. And for Trump, those who are greedily interested in preserving and enlarging their own already gluttonous power and wealth at the expense of anyone they can get away with oppressing. Since we already know these ugly dynamics rather well, I wonder more about the other subset, the one that doesn't oppose or that even supports these monsters despite having quite contrary personal inclinations and material interests. For Trump, this is mainly those of his MAGA supporters who are in oppressed racial or cultural communities, who are women, and finally who are white working class men. Trump hates and routinely and even explicitly attacks all these MAGA supporters. For most of them, their allegiance to Trump is not just contrary to these people's humanity, but also contrary to their immediate interests. Save, I guess, when Trump literally bribes them or has them so afraid that they ignore their own immediate interest out of what is either the thoughtless, terrified reflex or, if it is self aware, because they think to support Trump is essential for their self preservation. I suspect there are important things to learn about how people arrive at and especially later defend their commitments from carefully considering and learning to speak with this group of Trump supporters. For Epstein, who is the immediate focus of this sidebar discussion, his non pedophile, non trafficking, and non misogynistic friends likely got entranced by his intelligence, friendliness, connections, and favors. Still, for those benefits to override their interests, inclinations, and in some cases even warnings that they probably got to steer clear of Epstein may not be all that different from how some of some of Trump's unexpected allies got sucked in. Or I would at least suggest that there may be something to think about in this juxtaposition. Okay. To return to the main focus of this episode, this time Miguel Guevara elicits from separate interviews of Cynthia Parks, Andre Goldman, and Bill Hampton observations about the vision that came from RPS's first convention, and also about how RPS differed from prior dissident and even revolutionary organizational efforts. Is that topic of potential interest and use for you? I hope it is. I added that question. So to begin, Miguel asks, Cynthia, and this is from a session at her home outside Indianapolis, you attended the first convention. Can you summarize the initial vision the convention adopted? Yes, our proposal for politics came out of a yearning, maybe even a hunger, for something more democratic than what we had earlier known. We envisioned a kind of government that didn't just ask for participation every four years, but made room for everyone to take part in shaping their own lives. A government whose choices were transparent, and whose decisions reflected not just power but responsibility. Our guiding principle was simple. People should have a say in decisions in proportion to how much those decisions affect them. We imagined that kind of democracy being practiced from the ground up through neighborhood assemblies, councils, or communes. Sometimes direct votes would be best, other times delegation would work best. We weren't rigid about the forms. Majority rule might fit one case, consensus or supermajorities might suit another. What mattered most was that it all worked to support genuine self management. We insisted on the full range of civil liberties, freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and political organizing. But we wanted to go further than what had traditionally been demanded. We argued that dissent should not just be tolerated but protected. Diversity should be encouraged, not simply endured. People and groups should be free to pursue their own lives and dreams so long as they didn't prevent others from doing the same. And when conflict did arise, as it inevitably would, we believed in resolving it with fairness and care, not vengeance. The goal should always be justice and healing. If you read what we wrote back then, you'll see we weren't only laying out a vision for some future society. We were also planting seeds for our own present. We said this was about the kind of world we hoped to build, yes, but also about the way we wanted to organize ourselves right then. The values were clear enough, and the ideas weren't all that complicated, a handful of shared principles and some honest thinking about how to build institutions around them. That was our foundation. And we didn't come to it from nowhere. We learned from past movements in the US and abroad. We tried to carry forward what had worked and to leave behind what hadn't. We argued that government should be an ally to every member of the community, that it should solve problems rather than create them, that it should not reproduce hierarchies or allow some citizens to stand above others. We offered values and aims, but we didn't lay out a full blueprint. We gave a rough scaffold, not a detailed script. The political atmosphere at the time was shifting. The Sanders campaign had opened the door to talking about political revolution, not just different outcomes, but different ways of doing politics. Ironically, Trump's rise made the stakes painfully clear. He too promised transformation, but of the worst kind. His movement remade government in cruel and corrupt ways. What RPS tried to do was to expand positive vision, to give needed political redesign the depth and breadth it deserved, touching all areas of life. That meant we didn't stop with politics. We made proposals for a future economy too, one in which resources, workplaces, and the very infrastructure of production were not owned by a few, but shared by all. No one would gain income just by owning something. No one's influence in decision making would be skewed by wealth. We believed workers should earn more if they worked longer or under harder conditions as long as they did work that society needed. But no one should be paid more because they had property, bargaining power, or because their labor generated more market value. And people unable to work, they should still receive an average income. That wasn't charity, it was justice. Decision making in workplaces should follow the same basic rule as in politics. The amount of say people have should match the stakes that they endure. Sometimes decisions would be made by majority rule, sometimes consensus, sometimes another method that fit the context. But each worker would be in a position to participate, to really participate. That meant restructuring work itself. No more corporate hierarchies where a small class gets the empowering, decision heavy tasks, and everyone else is left with road obedience. We call the alternative balanced job complexes. It sounds simple, and in many ways it was, but it took time for that idea to catch on. Our belief was that work should build a person's ability to participate, not wear it down. Every day on the job should leave you more capable of contributing to decisions, not less. For how goods and services should be allocated, we proposed a method we called participatory planning. It was a system of decentralized cooperative negotiation between workers and consumers councils. No market competition, no top down bureaucracy. We knew it would take time, likely a long time to build this in practice, but naming it was a start. Miguel says you are remembering almost verbatim, yet this was about fifteen years ago. How do you explain that? But more, surely not some of this was contentious, even in the group working on the proposal. How did you resolve your differences before sending it out? I'd love to say it's because I have an exceptional memory, but that wouldn't be honest. I had a feeling this would come up in the interview, and I didn't want to misstate anything, so I went back and reread the original materials. But more than that, this isn't the kind of thing you remember the way you remember a date or a name. It's a different kind of memory, the kind rooted in understanding. This is like the difference between memorizing a math proof and being able to derive it yourself. Our proposals flowed from our values. We knew what we believed, we understood the flaws of existing institutions, so when we envisioned alternatives, the logic followed. We didn't have to memorize, we could arrive there again and again. But yes, you're right, some parts were hard to agree on. Most of what we proposed had been explored in some form by earlier thinkers and organizers. Those efforts had made only limited progress, but they gave us a foundation. We hoped the convention would do the same with our work, take what we'd offered and improve it. The hardest parts to settle on were where we shifted from broad moral commitments to specific institutional designs, balanced job complexes, for instance. There was a lot of back and forth about that. Same with allocation. Once we agreed to move beyond markets and central planning, the question became what to put in their place. Some people wanted to stick to values and avoid proposing mechanisms. Others felt we needed to go further. In the end, we leaned toward detail only when we felt the issues were truly foundational. Division of labor and allocation systems, those struck us as central. And if I'm being honest, part of our push for clarity came also from fear. Fear that if we didn't name real alternatives, the old systems would sneak in through the back door. Fear that we'd be vague where specificity was most needed. Fear that without strong enough roots, the whole thing might not survive the storm. Miguel asks, fear? Can you explain that a bit more? When we talked through the early framework for RPS, most of us believed that for nearly every part of the vision there weren't major rifts among leftists who might attend the first convention. We trusted that open, respectful dialogue could carry us toward shared understanding. And we believed we didn't need every detail nailed down beforehand. We could start with broad goals and refine things together as we grew. But two areas stood out division of labor and markets, those we felt couldn't be left so open ended. It wasn't just that they were fundamental, many issues were, but that these in particular had been neglected or misunderstood by much of the activist community. People came into the room with assumptions, habits, and whether they knew it or not, class interests that shaped how they saw work and exchange. Even among committed organizers we saw blind spots. These weren't just intellectual gaps. There were real class dynamics at play, and if we didn't name them clearly and early, they could shape our efforts in the wrong direction. Later, we developed a kind of guiding rule. If a certain institution or design seemed essential, so much so that leaving it out would cause the whole vision to collapse, then we had to be clear and detailed about it. But if a proposal was only one of several possible paths to a short goal, then we could afford to be flexible and leave room for different approaches to evolve. In other words, there was a core scaffold, basic principles and necessary features, and then there were many possible additions that would take shape hanging off the scaffold determined through experience. The truth was, if we opened the doors to the convention without being upfront about some of those class rooted dynamics, many participants might have come in unprepared or even unwilling to confront the role of what we called the coordinator class, people who, often unknowingly, held disproportionate power and wealth over working class folks. These dynamics weren't as openly understood as those of race or gender, where feminist and anti racist work had made deeper contributions to our thinking. We expected some differences in those areas too, of course, but we also trusted that people grounded in anti racist and feminist movements would find enough common cause to move forward. Class, though, especially the more subtle dynamics of class hierarchy within movements, was a place where we couldn't afford ambiguity. People could be highly attuned to the owner worker division, but largely blind to the coordinator worker division. So we took care to lay out institutional alternatives to guard against coordinator class dominance, especially in how labor was divided and how resources were allocated. Miguel asks, can you get the rest of the initial convention proposal on record here? What about the rest of the visionary aspect? We offered a vision for gender and kinship that aimed to support all kinds of families without placing some on a pedestal and marginalizing others. Whatever shape a family took, the idea was to nurture well being, especially for children, and to honor society's shared responsibility for all children. We affirmed that every family, regardless of its structure, deserved the right to love and raise children in an environment of dignity and rootedness. We also proposed doing away with uniquely arbitrary age based rules for participation in society. Instead, while age, whether young or old, might need to play a role, readiness would, when possible, be assessed based on ability, not on a birthday. Marriage and other long term partnerships would be honored as cultural and personal commitments, but not as routes to extra benefits or status. Care work, so often overlooked or undervalued, would be recognized as vital. We called for new ways to share caregiving's burdens and rewards. We also wanted our kinship vision to support a wide range of sexual identities, pleasures, and intimate relationships, always with the understanding that these must be grounded in consent, autonomy, and mutual respect. And of course that meant comprehensive, inclusive sex education and the firm legal rejection of any nonconceptual acts. As with our political and economic ideas, what we offered here wasn't a finished blueprint, it was a framework. We proposed values and principles, not a rule book. The idea was to give people enough structure to begin with, and then to let the finer details grow through dialogue and lived experience. One part that may have felt new to some was our suggestion to revisit and reshape old expectations around mothering and fathering, and instead to think about parenting as a shared, evolving role. But even that wasn't an invention. Much of this had existed scattered through movements and communities. What felt different was that we brought it all together into a cohesive picture. We asked people to engage with the whole, not just the part they already understood or agreed with. And to recognize that no single arrangement was going to be right for everyone. In the same spirit, we envisioned new cultural and community relations, where people would be free to hold multiple social and cultural identities. A society should provide space and resources for people to express who they are and what they value fully and positively. We emphasize that the commitments most important to a person should shift over time based on their own experience and circumstances. We also said that while cultural communities should be protected and supported, there are some rights that must be universal. Everyone deserves self management, equity, solidarity, and liberty, regardless of culture or background. And while the way those values are realized might vary, their existence isn't negotiable. We proposed that people should have the right to join and leave cultural communities freely. Any community that allowed that kind of openness could be self governed by its members so long as its practices didn't violate the core values shared across society. When it came to international relations, we extended the same basic commitments beyond national borders. We called for internationalism instead of empire, an end to colonialism and its modern equivalents. We imagined a world where wealth disparities between nations would shrink, not grow, and where each society's unique cultural practices would be protected from outside interference. We wanted cooperation among nations to be shaped by solidarity, not by corporate interests. And finally, we put forward a vision for new ecological relations. These would require that we honestly assess the environmental and social costs of our choices across generations. That way, future societies could make informed, democratic decisions about how much to produce, how much to consume, how long to work, how to steward land and resources, how to deal with pollution and climate change. We wanted to foster a sense of ecological responsibility, not just survival, but meaningful connection to the planet. That also meant leaving open questions about animal rights, vegetarianism, and the ethical choices that go beyond sustainability. These weren't decisions to be handed down, but to be made by future generations, freely, together, in keeping with both ecological understanding, human dignity, and the dignity of other species as well. Miguel S, it was so much, it was so dense, even here, now, long since familiar with it, and with the many extensions that took it considerably further, even now, just summarizing it it still weighs heavy. Was that a problem? Of course it was, and I guess it would be for people reading this. You have to think further. Even without impenetrable jargon and numerous references to distant past precursors, which RPS always avoided, it was a lot to receive, and I imagine it may be a challenge for many who will read this interview. People often value brevity, and rightly so, but conciseness isn't the only virtue in communication. Sometimes conveying what matters most takes more words, not to dazzle, but to clarify. Sometimes it's the only way to keep meaning intact or to ward off easy misunderstandings. You could take a different approach. You could stitch together highlights and low lights, the stirring moments, the crushing ones, and paint a portrait from memories, just enough to stir emotion, maybe to inspire. I suppose there's a place for that. But would it be more useful? Easier to read? Yes, sure. More vivid, maybe. But more valuable? I'm not convinced. Sometimes a lighter, quicker read asks less of the reader, but also gives them less. I wonder, will the people who read these interviews pass them on? Would more do so if the material were slimmer, more emotional, more easily digestible? If that meant more readers but less depth, would it be worth the trade off? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that we tried to say something that mattered and not just for our time. We laid down a foundation that would allow future generations to make their own decisions in their own way. That was the point, not to hand down dogma, but to build a framework for choice. And if you look at what RPS has become roughly twenty years after that first convention, you can see we didn't just speak ideals into the air. The broad values and intentions we started with have held steady, even as we've added more structure, more insight, more practical experience along the way. It hasn't been easy. Learning has come in fits and starts, in struggles and setbacks, but we've made real progress. Miguel asks, can you summarize what the main complexities of unsmooth sailing were? It wasn't mostly about finding good ideas. We had no shortage of those. What was difficult was holding firm to your own views while making space for others to do the same. It was resisting the temptation to let your belief in a harder insight turn into dismissal of those who hadn't arrived there yet. It was remembering that the people we were disagreeing with now might have been where we were a month ago, or where we ourselves had once stood years earlier. It was resisting the all too human urge to think that because we had a vision of where we wanted to go, we were entitled to ignore the imperfect steps it would take to get there. Wanting everything at once or nothing at all was a surefire way to end up with nothing at all. We came from a world that taught us some terrible habits, habits of judgment, of superiority, of defensiveness. I always found it ironic how we could all agree that society was built on destructive institutions and distorted relationships, and then act as if we ourselves were somehow untouched by all that, as if our own thinking, our own instincts weren't also shaped by what we've been through. Racism does damage, that's clear enough. Radicals talk a lot about how it poisons the views of the privileged, and it does. But we talk less about how it also affects the oppressed. Same with sexism, same with classism. They distort everyone's thinking, not just those who benefit from them. And that includes us, especially when we think we've already risen above it all. I'm not talking about guilt or self flagellation. I'm talking about the simple, grown up work of recognizing that we always have more to learn, that we need to hold our convictions with care, strong but not brittle, that we need to walk a line between certainty and humility. That's what made the journey of RPS so uneven, and in its way so real. I remember being taken to task, gently, yes, but clearly. Someone close to me pointed out how quick I could be to judge, not out of malice, but from forgetting how long it had taken me to learn what I now thought others should already know. I had to work through my own reluctance to revisit beliefs I'd come to rely on. And I remember being on the other side too, helping someone else through the same discomfort. None of it was easy. I can still recall lying awake at night, not every night, but often enough, asking myself, was I fair today? Was I being rigid? Or were the others holding back, afraid of letting go of identities they'd carried too long? Both could be true, and sometimes both were. The personal side of this history, the ways we related to each other is just as important, maybe more than the intellectual side. Of course, the ideas, the goals, the strategies mattered, but so did the tone of our voices, the way we held disagreement, the willingness to listen. Think of someone who's poured years of their life into a cause, gained knowledge, earned respect, and maybe even holds a formal leadership role. Then newer members challenge the direction. Does that person resist change out of ego or out of honest belief that the challenge might do harm? And what about those doing the challenging? Are they pushing for justice or are they chasing influence for its own sake? Maybe both, and how do we tell? These questions don't come with easy answers, but they shape the They shape how power moves in a movement. They shape whether trust deepens or breaks apart, and they shape whether the next step we take together builds something lasting or sends us back to where we began. Miguel asks, Andre, from a session in his New York office, what about proposals for the organization itself? As much as personal choices were central to outcomes, we also recognize that the context in which people operated and the institutional structures they inhabited profoundly shaped what those choices could be. A new project, however inspired, wouldn't amount to much unless it was anchored in a well developed institutional foundation. Yes, individuals had to aspire to and enact exemplary commitments, but such efforts would falter if carried out in settings that actively undercut them. We therefore proposed that RPS's structure and policy should remain flexible, open to periodic revision, but should always strive to embody internal classlessness and collective self management. A key danger was clear from the outset. Those of us with more experience, more confidence, or a head start and initiative could easily come to dominate. We insisted that no such minority, no matter how well intentioned, be permitted to consolidate formal or informal authority. That meant not relegating newer or less confident participants to passive roles or rote tasks. The organization had to uphold a consistent norm. Each member should have decision making influence in proportion to the extent they are affected. We advocated explicit protections for dissent, encouraging the formation of internal currents with full rights to resources, to articulate alternative perspectives, and to participate in robust democratic debate. Debate and dissent weren't threats to unity, they were vital to development. The organization had to welcome diversity, including by allowing differing views to be tested in practice alongside dominant approaches. Chapters, whether national, regional, local, or campus based, had to respond to their own specific circumstances, but that flexibility had to coexist with shared principles. No chapter should impose on another, and all should respect the broader aims of the organization. We proposed extensive mechanisms to support member participation, not just nominal, but meaningful. That included deliberative processes leading to informed decision making, along with clear procedures to ensure that those decisions were carried out respectfully and accountably. Transparency was essential. Leadership roles had to be open to scrutiny, recallable and regularly updated. Any deviation from openness, whether for security reasons or otherwise, had to bear a heavy burden of justification. Members needed the power to recall representatives they believed failed to reflect their interests, and internal disputes needed resolution processes that were constructive rather than punitive. Miguel asks, this is getting quite long. Yes, I feel that too. But would it be preferable to omit essential elements? Building a serious organization, one intended to help transform society, requires more than slogans or lofty aspirations. We aren't just trying to post clever messages online. We were trying to construct viable conditions for lasting change. That required specificity. These weren't incidental ideas. They were, in our view, preconditions for success. So we also argued that tasks carrying empowering and disempowering implications should be distributed in ways that prevented concentrations of influence. No member should acquire decision making leverage simply by monopolizing information or daily operations. All participants should take part in guiding policy and in shouldering collective responsibility. The structural commitment had a practical effect. It generated initiative and creativity throughout the organization. And while we prioritize protecting minority dissent and alternative experiments, we also recognize the need for coherence in public action. So, wherever possible, whenever possible, the organization should speak with a unified voice. We proposed that RPS incorporate members directly in developing, debating, and deciding proposals. A lack of participation wasn't to be ignored. It was a problem to be actively addressed. That meant we had to design internal structures to facilitate involvement. We advocated, for example, providing childcare at meetings and events when possible. We called for outreach to aid those with heavy kinship obligations or with multiple jobs that left little time for political engagement. The goal was inclusivity not just in principle, but in practice. And the organization should monitor and constructively address manifestations of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia and transphobia within its own ranks. This included ensuring that roles in projects were accessible to people with different life conditions and commitments. But these responsibilities had to be carried out not by rote rules, not through top down imposition, and certainly not with arrogance, but with caution, care, and deep attention to content. The fact is, when RPS first began to take shape, no one harbored illusions of immediate moral or political perfection. We were fully aware that we were all deeply shaped, damaged even by centuries of systemic injustice. These weren't patterns we could throw off in a few days of excitement. So we committed ourselves to a different principle progress over perfection. We needed a clear destination and a deep desire to reach it, but also the patience to accept that meaningful change unfolds over time. We had to always be moving forward, always becoming, always in process, not lapsing into dogma or stagnation. You can see, even with a large number of proposals and their simultaneous presentation, that we weren't descending into technocratic minutiae or, on the other side, obscurantist jargon. Our aim was clarity. We knew that the convention would need to produce interim guidelines. We anticipated that arriving at these guidelines and even rules might be our most contentious and comp and complex task, but we tried not to overload that moment. The point was to undertake what was necessary, no more, no less. Throughout the structural proposals, the emphasis was consistent, participatory self management, vigilance against the reproduction of hierarchy, and commitment to substantive democratic process. We weren't simply trying to build a useful activist entity. We were consciously trying to avoid what had undermined so many past efforts sectarianism, authoritarianism, and the calcification of leadership. Our goal was a political formation constantly willing to critique, reform, and even replace itself if required, never to crown itself with permanent authority. As the convention proceeded, more detail was added. In the months and years that followed, especially through the flourishing of chapters, still more refinements emerged. Miguel asks, that was vision and the organizational agenda, and even as the total was so much, I can also see how the things proposed were geared to guide an interim period without overstepping to determine too much at the outset. But what about more specific program? The proposals advanced prior to the founding convention supplemented the vision and structural components with a broad programmatic orientation. The idea was that the organization's ongoing activity should not only pursue immediate reforms, but should embody and prefigure the future society we hope to create. This included how members behaved and how new institutions were conceived and built. The program, we proposed, should constantly expand the organization's reach among those constituencies most affected by oppression, across class, race, gender, and cultural lines. It should build unity with a broader public than those already involved. It should empower younger members, support diverse movements, and foster sustained mobilization. It should seek to win immediate improvements in people's lives, but also, and equally importantly, structure those gains in such a way that they would generate momentum for further advances. The methods and language used in campaigns should leave participants more confident, more connected, and more capable of seeking still more transformative change. Strategies had to be context specific, of course, but the guiding principle had to be broadly shared. Here again, you can see the logic that was foundational to RPS avoid sectarianism, maintain flexibility, embrace reform without slipping into reformism. These were not platitudes, they were lessons drawn from decades of frustration and failure. Miguel asks, was there anything more concrete? We propose that the organization support immediate struggles identified by members, including, but not limited to global warming, arms policy, war and peace, economic output, agriculture, education, health care, income, labor time, gender roles, racial justice, media law, and legislative reform. Miguel asks, but that was guidelines, not specifics. Indeed, and that was by design. We had two reasons. First, the proposals were meant to endure. Specific campaigns are temporary and contextual. What matters today may not matter tomorrow. Second, we wanted specificity to emerge through participatory deliberation, not top down edict. We also argued that programs should support members' material and emotional needs, legal assistance, financial resources, employment support, and so on to enable sustained radical engagement. Political participation is demanding. We wanted it to be enriching, not debilitating. Being part of a movement to transform the world would certainly require sacrifice and come with risks, but it should also include joy, love, laughter, and fulfillment. We weren't fighting for a grim utopia, we were fighting for a society where people could flourish. Miguel asks, it still seems awfully broad. Indeed, it was, and we were fully aware that someone might agree with everything in principle, and yet when it came to actual engagement, do little to nothing. Others might look for clearly delineated specifics to commit to, and in their absence, feel adrift and walk away. But that was never our aim. The guidelines we proposed were meant to serve as a framework, an architecture of orientation, for chapters to engage, discuss, and ultimately shape their own concrete programs through deliberation and collective will. We added that the program should generate, analyze, disseminate, and advocate accurate news, insight, vision, and strategy, both internally and outwardly. To do so it needed to develop and maintain independent media infrastructure, as well as to create and sustain avenues for direct face to face communication. The means of engagement were to include education, marches, boycotts, strikes, and direct action. Traditional forms of protest and organization that had proven their worth, but with two critical caveats. Electoral politics should be approached with care and evaluated case by case, and there should be an extremely high threshold for even defensive violence. A consistent nonviolent stance was not only strategic, it was principled. Again, this was a kind of meta program, a scaffolding to be applied flexibly. It aimed to outline the general character of what campaigns and actions should attempt to accomplish across contexts, without overreaching into prescriptive demands that could become obsolete or divisive. We avoided setting forth a fixed list of demands or universally mandated actions, not because such lists couldn't be valuable, but because they could all too easily tether the organization to transient issues. We were trying to build something durable. Miguel asks, among those who prepared the proposals, did you have differences? Of course we did. Even after weeks of collaboration, we didn't all land on the same hopes for the convention. Some thought the gathering should simply refine and then ratify the proposals. Others, myself included, felt that wasn't enough. I believed we needed to do more, to immediately apply the proposals in the context of the moment to define some specific campaigns people could take home with them. My expectation, and I think it turned out to be broadly correct, was that the specifics would emerge organically from the accumulated priorities of ongoing movements. Black Lives Matter had articulated demands. The Me Too movement had unearthed widespread realities and proposals, anti Trump coalitions, anti genocide actions, campaigns for housing, justice, wage equity, the shortening of the work week. All these provided material to be synthesized. Our guidelines offered a lens through which to bring those threads together, add new dimensions, and more fully align them with the values and norms we were adopting in RPS. Miguel asks, Bill, from a session at Grace Mansion, I want to try to get at what was different, at what was perhaps the key to early RPS success by hearing about how you saw RPS as being different, how you saw it as overcoming past inadequacies that hadn't earlier been overcome. You know, I remember pretty early on Cynthia and I were at a university to give a talk about just that together. Maybe Cynthia and I can recreate it for you. Miguel says, Great, by all means. We did it as a kind of dialogue, I guess it was, where I opened it up by turning to Cynthia and asking, Why have we had so much trouble winning a new society? To win is desired, to win is needed, yet so often we fight and lose. And then Cynthia, I still remembered, you answered, I think it's because society debilitates us until we lack sufficient confidence to fight well. I think it's because oppression distorts us until we lose our ability to cooperate and be strategic. Can't you feel society's roles bend us until we pick up habits that destroy our unity and clarity? I replied, So we fail because we do bad things? Cynthia continued, yes, we sometimes get overly aggressive. Other times we remain too passive. Sometimes we attack opponents to prove our worth or to defend our circumstances more than to win a new system. Often we find it easier to talk to people who like us and to avoid people who dislike us. Always we complain. We magnify our differences to boost our own formulations. Rarely do we sufficiently welcome new participants to hear what they bring. Bill, why do you think we subvert ourselves? I answered. I think fear of losing crushes us until we doubt we can win at all. So we lose motivation to try. Confidence dissipates. When we become defeatist, we prioritize pleasing friends or advancing our own narrow aims, or keeping our small team intact to enjoy its camaraderie, but not grow. We focus only short term, not long term. We lack hope, and we ridicule vision. We silo ourselves, we succumb to liberalism or we rail pointlessly at it. We even disdain reform. We denigrate those who are not yet radical. We celebrate professional and not working class life. We denigrate religion, sports, country music, and fast food. I remember at that point Cynthia spoke to the students in the audience. I have a good memory for some things. Cynthia responded, some of you may resist what we are saying. Resist admitting we have so many faults. Some of you may even castigate us for reporting them. You may think we are overly critical. But the truth is if everything was already wonderful, how could we do any better? Be thankful we can find faults in our past to report, because that gives you things you can correct in your futures. Miguel says, I'll plead guilty myself. I remember feeling anger toward friends who pointed out our movement's shortcomings, thinking they were attacking us rather than trying to strengthen us. But over time I came to see that naming flaws was how we could move forward. After that, I made it my mission to find what needed fixing, and to say it out loud. It wasn't always welcome, but Bill, tell me, how did the presentation unfold? I replied to Cynthia that RPS realized we had to give collective attention to previously untreated personal baggage. We allotted time for everyone to tell their stories. We listened, we cried and commiserated. We admitted and addressed problems. Confronting our problems, we felt less alienated and more present. We felt compassion for each other and realized our fears weren't ours alone. Miguel asks, Cynthia, can you explain why you went towards activism, but so many others didn't until much later when it was more common to do so? Honestly, no. I don't think I can say why. Was it chance? Some twist of timing or a small moment that nudged me off one path and onto another? I've thought about it, and I still don't know. Maybe some people just have to go first, even when they're mostly alone in doing so. But as for why one person steps forward early and not another, I imagine there are a thousand different answers. Miguel asks, no commonality? There are too many variables dependent on just one thing. We come into this world with different beginnings, different homes, different teachers, different heartaches and joys. Some people are moved by grief, others by love. But in ordinary times, most of us share a basic assumption that the structure of society will hold. You have your pleasures and your pains, I have mine, but we each assume the foundation won't shake. And then something does shake it. Something cracks open that certainty. And in that moment, not all at once, but in time, a few people begin to imagine things could change, that the way things are isn't the way they have to stay. And then a few more feel it, and eventually enough people feel it that they start to change the shape of the world. We go into that shift with all our differences intact, and we come out of it with those differences still alive, but joined now by something shared. Before the change, what we had in common was the belief that this was it, that the world as it stands was fixed in place. Afterward what we shared was the belief that the world can be remade. That's the turning point, and it doesn't matter so much whether the catalyst was pain or hope, fear or longing. What matters is that something shifts. We stop accepting what was handed to us. We start reaching for something better. It's tempting to dwell on the drama of personal journeys. They are, after all, the shape our lives take. That's where we learn and grow, where we fall apart and find our way again. And yes, they matter. Telling those stories can light a spark in others. But when you pull the lens back, when you look at what truly changes the world, it isn't the specific dramas of our individual lives that does the heavy lifting. It's the vision we build together. It's the shared desire to move beyond what we've known. It's our commitment to stand side by side, not just to imagine something better, but to fight for it. Some of us came to this from sorrow, some from joy, but the real star of the story isn't our private struggles. It's the force that draws us together, that shared fire, that collective hope. So yes, in your history relay some stories. By all means, they're worth hearing. But don't lose sight of what matters most. The real heart of it all is the change we believe in, the world we can see, just over the horizon, if we walk toward it together. That's what deserves our attention. That's what we ought to report, area by area. And that's how the chapter ended. I wonder how it sounds to you. I wonder how it would read to people as a text. And that said, this is Michael Albert, signing off for Revolution Z, until next time.