RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 367 No Kings Enlarged plus Right to the City, and Winning Time
Episode 367 of RevolutionZ starts out by discussing why I am offering up chapters of the forthcoming The Wind Cries Freedom Oral History as a sequence of episodes. Then it addresses No Kings to ask how can its future help connect mass resistance to everyday organizing that is able to turn fear into agency: and success that is able to win. Then the next chapter of the Wind Cries Freedom sequence discusses housing organizing, right to the city, transportation organizing, and income and time struggle. How did early RPS pursue bike-first streets and free buses, tenant unions that swap apartments, childcare co-ops, and workplace councils that fight for real raises and a 30-hour week at 40 hours pay. Miguel Guevara interviews some familiar and some new organizers who describe how initially small wins can fuel still larger wins; why listening beats lecturing; and how alliances with auto workers, bus drivers, and custodians can transform “jobs versus planet” into “jobs and planet.”
Our journey through right to the city is concrete: car-free days that become policy, city-owned bike shares in neighborhoods long ignored, and motel conversions that turn empty rooms into permanent homes. We go inside campaigns that train prisoners and returning soldiers to build housing they can live in and we unpack just plans to retire dangerous jobs with pay preserved while workers learn skills needed for clean, dignified work. Across each story, the same method emerges—protect people through change, aim reforms at structures beyond symptoms, and connect every win to a horizon big enough to believe in. In each case interviewees report the doubts and obstacles they faced and how they overcame them.
The biggest obstacle the organizers identify isn’t only money or bosses or repression; it’s the doubt that is planted within us that says we can’t act, we can't decide, we can't lead. Through assemblies and shared decisions that address and change current conditions, we learn otherwise. When tenants start to alter their buildings, when riders start to chart their routes, when workers start to win pay, time, and to shape their jobs, hope stops being a slogan and becomes glue that sustains activism.
This episode describes moving from whack-a-mole single issue, single crisis demonstrations to more sustained and linked campaigns that compound power. It addresses motives, feelings, obstacles and means of early RPS development. Can it, or a movement like it become real in coming months and years? That is up to all of us.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our three hundred and sixty seventh episode, and our title this time is No Kings Enlarged Plus WCF Housing Right to the City and Winning Time. The first part, like with other recent episodes, is a brief foray into an issue and possibility for our own times. The second, main part, presents another chapter, the fourteenth, from the Oral History titled The Wind Cries Freedom. In the chapter, four of its interviewees, Bill Hampton, Cynthia Parks, Bridget Knight, and Julius Rocker, discuss transportation, housing, rights to the city, and early minimum wage work time and workplace organizing by their organization slash movement revolutionary participatory society. I have been asked why the hell are you doing this? Why present all these chapters? My answer it is a work in progress. It will appear, I believe, this spring. I think when possible, writers, and particularly writers who are trying to say things that will assist winning a better world, ought to try to elicit critical reaction and advice as they go along. For articles, I tend to do that with a small circle of friends. More as I venture into areas I have less experience with, less when I address issues I have long experience with. The Wind Cries Freedom is a book that ventures into a great many areas I have relatively modest experience with, much less writing about, including the personal dimension of political involvement. To my mind, it therefore makes sense to seek critical reaction and advice, and I haven't heard an argument that suggests that is an incorrect inclination. More, since I favor participation, why should my own efforts to advance participation disallow it regarding my own work? I admit thirty chapters is a big bunch, and as the prospects for my having time to update it in light of reactions recede in coming months, getting closer to actual publication, it may make sense to stop previewing it here, hoping for reactions and advice. Finally, it is fiction, that is, it's a discussion of the future by imagined people who will populate the future. What's that? That is an attempt to convey the kinds of lessons that might contribute to a revolutionary outcome in the United States in a manner that speaks to what they imply for individual activity and to the kinds of content, of substance, of choices that will likely or may likely be involved. It's not a blueprint, it's an attempt to provoke, to cause thought about vision and strategy. In an unusual fashion, I agree. If you read it the way I don't know, I read mysteries or sci-fi novels or adventure novels, it's probably not gonna cut the buddy. It it it it it just won't do the things that those kinds of novels do. It's not meant to. It's meant to do the kind of thing that an oral history does. Whether that's the case or not will depend on how plausible you find the various characters and their discussions and especially their choices and the outcomes of those choices. Okay, enough intro. Before No Kings there was Black Lives Matter, there was Me Too, there was Occupy, there was Free Palestine, there was green climate justice, and more, of course. And they all still exist. But with each new focus that arrives, attention to those before has typically become less energetic and less populated. But that trend is self defeating. Can we do anything about it? No Kings has roused millions to engage with activism often for the first time. It has been a great undertaking. But why is there now less attention to racism, misogyny, inequality, peace for Palestine and the world, and sustainability for everyone everywhere than there was before? Less demonstrating, less speaking, even less writing about each such focus. Viewed one way, I suppose it makes sense. Use the most rousing issue of the moment and emphasize it to amass active dissent in the moment. Such dissent actually addresses all such issues by its implication, but perhaps not by its focus. And what is most what is the most rousing issue now? It is the orange gargoyle who is trying to normalize social greed and violence to the point of attaining king like domination over all sides of at least US life. Probably more too. But to really fight effectively against that, we need to not switch focuses, but to maintain and expand our focuses. We need to address and rouse all the constituencies under attack, to address and combat all the injustices. To instead play whack-a mole one by one is not ideal. To have each critical focus persist and orient itself to support and enhance and turn out its supporters for the others would be much better. I don't know when No Kings is planning to have another national, massive and perhaps even international day of protests. I wish it was to be this month. The sooner and more frequent the better, both to express and inspire growing numbers each new time, and to tell the orange goggle that he has to back off, that we are coming for him, and to tell his billionaire backers you are next. And to also diversify our actions, to keep the mass rallies, to add marches, and we're supported to add compatible civil disobedience. Dissent, resistance, refusal to obey. But how might no kings alter itself to not usurp the energy of parallel priorities, but to instead enhance and also gain from their energy and make their energy mutually supportive? Here's a simple suggestion. How about a minor name change? How about the next time the name is No Kings in an equitable, peaceful, sustainable world? Or something more or less like that. You get the idea. And how about if the signs, speeches, demands, and targets match the new name? We all talk about the problem of siloed activism, single issue politics. How about if we now take a step to transcend it? Okay, to get on to the main component of this episode, to the fourteenth chapter of the Wind Cries Freedom, which chapters do try to do what I mentioned above, Miguel Guevara asked Bill Hampton, Mayor of New York City. Bill, this comes from a second session in his mayor's office. One thing that emerged early in RPS was attention to urban life, with one focus being transportation. How did that occur and what were its early features? This eventually took on many forms, but I think it started simply enough with urban travel. We asked ourselves, did getting around cities really have to mean burning fossil fuels, harming the environment, and hurting our health? Or could we do better? And did we really need to burn through our wallets in the process? Before RPS ever launched, I had the chance to visit parts of Europe where bikes weren't just an afterthought, they were very nearly the norm. The difference was striking. People got more exercise, cities were quieter, the air was cleaner, and the cost much lower. You could even get across town faster because while a bike might not win a drag race against a car in an open field, in city traffic, with gridlock and the hunt for parking, that bike might actually get you to your destination first. So why, we wondered, were bikes practically invisible in so many American cities? The answer was in part the grip of fossil fuel culture. Cars, fuel, auto parts, this whole system was deeply profitable. A bike friendly city, plus reliable free buses made all the sense in the world, but the system wasn't built to make sense. It was built to make money, profits for a few. That's where RPS came in. Bicycle activists and urban planners came together and we supported them in their push for inner city bike lanes plus cleaner mass transit, free buses, and walkable neighborhoods. We weren't trying to tweak the old system. We were trying to replace the smog of the past with something healthier, more sustainable, and more just. Like many RPS initiatives, this campaign was hard to argue against on the merits. Who could seriously say that more bikes plus comfortable, accessible, free buses were a bad idea? The only lasting pushback we got was about the disruption it would cause. People worried that changing the dominant mode of transport would ripple outward to clog roads, hurt businesses, and unsettle routines. But when we asked whether long-term health and sustainability were worth some short term inconvenience, that resistance began to crumble. Of course it took time in organizing, but what remained after lots of organizing at the core was fear. Fear coming from those whose profits or influence were tied to the status quo. That's when RPS made a critical move. We said we won't leave good people behind. We won't let progress mean paying for workers who've done nothing wrong. So we crafted policies to protect the innocent, even as we pushed hard against entrenched power. Rich elites losing some wealth? That was a feature, not a bug, but we made sure the policy shift wouldn't harm everyday people who were just trying to get around and make a living. Bikes, yes, but also free buses, subways, and other context sensitive options. And this became a template. With nearly every RPS campaign, we tried to answer a basic question. Can we pursue urgent change in a way that lifts everyone up? And more often than not, the answer, outside the box society kept us all in, was yes. In the long run, the most transformative part of this campaign wasn't just about bikes or even free mass transit. It was about what was called the right to the city. And that meant much more than clean air or safe bike lines. It meant rights to food, to housing, to education, to migration. It meant public space, democratic participation, and freedom from discrimination. What we saw was that RPS's program wasn't just compatible with this city vision, it was the city vision scaled up. Or to flip it, rights to the city were RPS values applied locally, in full color. Miguel asks, Cynthia, and this is from the session at her home, you got involved with RPS while coming out of prior activist work. Can you tell us what that work was and what drew you into RPS? I was six when my family lost our home. We weren't the only ones. People we knew, families all around us were going through the same thing. At that age you don't have the language for what's happening, but you see it, you feel it, you live it. Families of four, five, six crammed into a couple of damp rooms. Two families squeezed into one small house that wasn't enough for either on its own. And in our case, two years living in a car. I remember the rats, I remember the night so cold I could barely move. I remember the tension, the kind that sits heavy in the chest. I saw things I'll never forget, anger that turned violent, despair that led to drugs and drink. That was life. It was brutal. But as I got older, I met people who were doing something about it. Activists fighting evictions, standing up to predatory developers, trying to keep families in their homes. And when eviction couldn't be stopped, these same activists worked to help those who'd lost everything find somewhere else to live, somewhere halfway decent. The contrast was glaring. On one side were the activists, people working for dignity and justice. On the other side, the landlords, developers, the banks, the police, the ones carrying out the evictions without a flicker of hesitation. It didn't take long for me to know which side I belonged on. Miguel asked, and you're turning toward RPS? Not long after I started organizing with housing activists, my focus stayed the same, but my understanding deepened. I stopped seeing the movers tossing people's furniture into the street as the real villains. Or even the bankers, the developers, the cops, the politicians. Sure, they were part of it. Some showed shame, most didn't. They'd gotten used to the cruelty. But the deeper enemy, the one behind the evictions, behind the fear and hopelessness, was the system itself, the set of rules and pressures that made those actions feel inevitable. That was when I knew I wasn't just angry, I was revolutionary. I didn't just want to patch things up. I wanted something entirely different. And not just for myself, but for everyone. I believed, maybe stubbornly, maybe wisely, that people could do better. So when I crossed paths with folks from RPS, it felt like stepping into a room I didn't know I'd been looking for. I didn't have to shift my focus. I just had to recognize others who were also fighting for change, and let them stand with me as I wanted to stand with them. Pretty quickly I realized I had something valuable to offer. Housing organizing had prepped me in ways many RPS members hadn't yet experienced. The bond between an organizer and someone on the edge of eviction, someone who might become an organizer themselves, that bond was powerful, and it offered a model for how RPS could grow beyond its initial circles. Housing work demanded listening, real listening. It required empathy, creativity, patience, and strength. You had to help people find their voice, trust their power, and keep going under immense pressure. It wasn't just about stopping one eviction, it was about lifting whole communities toward hope and self respect. That kind of organizing, messy, urgent, personal, is exactly what RPS needed. And in turn, what we needed from RPS was the structure, the reach, and the vision of a broader movement that could support our work and amplify it. It was, in every sense, a perfect fit. Miguel asks, What about personal difficulties joining RPS? Oh, there were plenty. The activists I met early on were mostly educated, confident, comfortable in their skin, and in their politics. They carried themselves like they expected others, especially working class folks like me, especially rural folks who looked, talked, or dressed differently to fall in line. They didn't say it outright, it was just there, in the air. It made me feel small, it hurt, and it made me mad. But there were also people who tried to do better, people who didn't just welcome me in, but listened, asked questions, learned from the way I spoke, the way I organized. I remember how some of my friends back home used gun culture, not for violence, but as a bridge to reach folks in rural areas who felt abandoned by the left. That scared the hell out of some city activists, but for others, it opened their eyes to new ways of connecting with people they hadn't understood before. Seeing that, watching people stretch, adapt, learn, which I did too, made me realize I had something vital to contribute, something others couldn't bring unless they'd lived it too. The hardest part for me was finding a way to help others, and even myself, commit to something bigger than whatever fire was right in front of us. Not just the next eviction, the next action, but the long road. That was and still is the real challenge. Believing in something larger than yourself and staying in the fight long enough to help bring it to life. Miguel asks, Bridget, and this is from her session nearer home in Seattle, Washington, you became a grassroots organizer of exceptional effectiveness, so much so that you went on to train other organizers. You began your activism in local communities, resisting evictions while also deepening your understanding of the broader housing crisis, which eventually fed into larger campaigns. You also took on a major role in food organizing and distribution, becoming a steadfast advocate for the most vulnerable. But you came to housing work a bit after your friend Cynthia, isn't that right? And at the start, wasn't your focus somewhat different? Yes. As the threads of local housing campaigns began weaving into something stronger, stitched together through RPS and branching out into many interconnected efforts, I was still a student, reflecting on the conditions of society, not yet ready to challenge them. My curiosity about housing grew, though not yet from a hunger for justice. It was a practical wondering. Could there be a meaningful career here? I began to ask myself, first, what would one do about the daily alienation in large apartment buildings? Each tenant lived behind a closed door. There was no shared cause, no unity. Landlords held sway. Surely there had to be something we could do locally from the ground up. Second, I wondered if a sweeping national effort could reshape housing, making it just and affordable, a reflection of what families deserve, and a model of how homes should be built and lived in. Miguel asks what followed. Some friends and I started to gather and talk. We sought out activists, tenant unions, anyone with experience. In those encounters we met RPS members, many of them, and found ourselves drawn in. The alignment was clear, and so naturally we joined. Miguel asks, so that wasn't some message. Major life decision to angst over? Not in the least. We didn't agonize over it. We saw the comradeship, the shared goals, and we knew RPS was our path forward. Joining was not mainly about grand ideology. It was about people and purpose. RPS offered both. Miguel S, and then? Two main plans took shape from our meetings. Both meant to welcome people from homelessness and powerlessness into homes and empowerment. The housing movement picked up the ideas and they became RPS campaigns. The first was an ambitious expansion of organizing within apartment complexes. The core idea was simple and revolutionary. Tenants discovering themselves as a collective power capable of reshaping their conditions from below. We approached this patiently, step by step. RPS organizers would visit buildings, build relationships, listen. We didn't arrive with blueprints but with ears and hearts. But we also had goals. We sought to make friends, gain trust, and pursue ever larger gains. A few early victories mattered a great deal. In some cases, we helped elderly tenants struggling on upper floors switch places with younger ones from lower floors. Just practical, self organized, modest changes singled that solidarity was possible. They changed not only circumstances, but consciousness. Miguel asks, how did you get folks to do it? Victory doesn't always come from grape leaps. It comes from daring to begin. We started by reaching out to younger tenants, often students, especially where RPS was already had a presence. But even there, the isolation was palpable. People lived beside each other, but not with each other. Still, with humility, conversation and deep listening, we began connecting with families. We didn't lecture, we invited. We celebrated what people could do together, repainting shared spaces, launching food co-ops, organizing childcare, pooling laundry duties. All this served one overarching purpose to free people's time and energy. A single parent working two jobs needs more than slogans. They need time. So organizing had to give back time, not take it. Slowly people saw the value of cooperation. Trust grew, we held parties, we built joy and solidarity. As the trust deepened, doors opened to more painful realities addiction, violence, neglect. Not to shame, but to heal. For many it was the first time they spoke their pain aloud and found helping hands reaching back. This work was neither simple nor fast. Pain and resistance did not suddenly vanish, but something new was forming, a movement, networked across the country, guided by hope, and lifted by RPS. Eventually we began rethinking ownership itself. Most every household owned some tools, appliances, maybe a car, often things used quite rarely, but costing dearly. What if we could share? Community lending grew, not only for books but for bicycles, cars, even toys. What once seemed private became common, and through these acts, new social fabric was woven. These weren't inventions, they were revived truths, and this time the flame of optimism kept them alive. Miguel asks, did you do this typework? Yes, with my own hands I knocked on doors, I held crying children while their parents spoke. I carried groceries, drafted flyers, painted hallways, I argued, encouraged, and listened, shared meals, laughed and wept. What we built wasn't just political, it was human. Every small act carried the weight of a future we could nearly grasp. It wasn't abstract, it was tangible, and it changed me forever. So yes, I was a tenant, and I organized in my complex. That gave me an opening, no doubt, but it wasn't rare. Many RPS members lived in buildings just like mine. Still, I wouldn't say it came naturally. I wasn't the kind of person who lights up a room, who laughs easily with strangers, who rallies a crowd. I was, like many in the modern city, quiet, reserved, sometimes afraid of my own voice. And more than that, and it pains me to say this, I carried the burden almost all women know, fear. Fear of knocking on doors, fear of who might answer, fear especially of entering a home alone, of being met by a man in a space not your own. But I knew the stakes, so I knocked, not with brilliance and thunder, with care, with caution. And we always knocked in pairs, always in pairs for the first knock, often every knock. It was essential. The main focus was here is what the big corporate developers do. They buy up buildings and price people out, but you can stop them by organizing yourself into a tenant association. The glue was people working together. Often some trust took root. The terrain widened with new questions, not only rent and repairs, but safety, drugs abuse. And something once unthinkable slowly emerged, people speaking their wounds aloud, violations no longer hidden, not to punish, but to heal, to prevent, to change, and all of this was built step by aching step on earlier trusts won by solving smaller troubles, paint for the walls, shared child care, rearranged units, food co-ops. Soon we had to face a deeper truth. Each apartment complex is not merely brick and cement. It is a society, a microcosm with its own rhythms, pains, and possibilities. So governance arose, not by decree, but by necessity. Who decides, who resolves, who allocates, rent, repair, resources, we needed some structure. It took time, so many conversations, ups and downs, but then we saw it clearly. These complexes, these neighborhoods were not islands. They were limbs of a larger body. We needed connection, we needed to learn from one another, to avoid reinvention, to share victories, to multiply solidarity. That meant joining RPS was not just wise, it was essential. Miguel asks, didn't you also get involved in broader national campaigns? Yes. We began to dream larger, how to build housing affordable, high quality, just, not just construction, but transformation. Who would build it? Why would they build it? How to finance it? How to distribute it without replicating inequality? We asked, who in society had unmet needs and also idle hands? We saw soldiers, we saw prisoners, people taught to obey and to inflict or to endure, but not to create? What if instead of teaching discipline for destruction, we taught skills for renewal? What if the very people society cast aside could build homes and then live in them? Why couldn't a soldier returning from duty or a prisoner emerging from a cell enter a house they had earlier helped raise? Not another cell, not a bunk and a shelter, a home of their own, a beginning. And why not offer homes too to those fleeing floods and fire, to youth from no with nowhere to go, to families torn from place by greed or storm? This campaign could not emerge from books alone. We had to enter prisons, enter bases, speak with families, with guards, with chaplains, with anyone who touched those lives, and we had to organize in homeless encampments, under bridges, near the prisons, near the barracks. Miguel asks, can you give a feeling for what some of the interactions were like? Yes. A soldier once looked me straight in the eye and said, You want bases and prisons to build houses? Are you crazy? And I said, Yes, that's what I want. And why not? Imagine, not punishment, but participation. Imagine not only cleaning streets but building homes, and not just for others, but for yourselves, for your communities. Miguel asks, going a step back, when did you become radical? What caused it? Me? I was nineteen. A quiet local college. Talks about climate, race, patriarchy, they stirred something, but mostly I sat untouched. It all felt interesting, but distant. Ideas, not events. And the movement, such as I glimpsed it, felt fractured. So much rage, so much blame, so much eating of our own. I didn't want that. I turned to music, to movies, to Instagram. Then one night I sat in a friend's dorm room. She had a poster of Beyonce, and beside her Angela Davis. That alone struck me. She said The Wall Street March was great, but we need more, even here. I scoffed. That'll never happen. She asked, why not? Why endure? Why not dream? I replied, and I remember this clearly, because the world is cruel. I'm not cynical, I'm realistic. You're naive. She was calm. She said, If you were a biologist, would you assume cancer can't be cured before even trying? If you were an engineer, would you say a bridge can't span a river before making a single drawing? Why do you treat oppression as permanent? Why assume failure? Is it fear? Do you fear hope? That hit me with clarity. I didn't answer, but something cracked, and over subsequent weeks it widened. I moved from mocking to mulling, from doubt to hesitation, from hesitation to curiosity. In one semester I crossed from apathy to action. I joined RPS. She had reached me, I don't know how, but she did. One conversation, one spark. There is no formula, no one path to radicalization. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes quick. But when it comes, it remakes you. Miguel asks. There was another campaign, wasn't there? Which came quite a bit later, focused not only on buildings that were already apartments, but on motels and hotels. Yes, we realized the number of empty rooms in hotels and motels was roughly equal to the number of unhoused human beings in this country, eight million at the time. Just to discover that statistic, to see the stark symmetry of rooms and people was like a slap across the conscience. Such facts aren't neutral. Once your ears are tuned, they scream at you. So we said, If there is no will from the top, let there be action from below. We launched a campaign, full housing we called for it, just as others had once called for full employment. The idea was simple. No one should sleep in the streets while beds lie unused behind locked doors. We began with motels. We demanded that twenty percent of their rooms go to permanent residence at deeply subsidized rates. It was a radical premise by establishment standards, but for us it was elementary justice. Luxury for the few comes only after necessity for the many. Later, of course, as RPS deepened, everything about housing changed. Soldiers and prisoners built new homes, whole structures of access and equity were rebuilt. But even the early efforts, gaining small footholds in motels and hotels meant a lot. The system could bend, and in bending begin to crack. Each room one was a seed planted in fertile, rebellious soil. Miguel asks, can you remember some pivotal moment or moments during the emergence of RPS that greatly personally affected you? Many. But one remains etched in my memory like a poem of fire and quiet dignity. During my time as a tenant organizer, I knocked on the door of an elderly couple living on the third floor. I asked them, gently, if they might consider swapping apartments with someone on the first floor, to spare them the painful climb. They invited me in, tea, cookies, the tenderness of strangers, and then the man wept. Two years, he said, two years of pain of avoiding the stairs, of isolation, because his back, his legs, wrecked from years on the assembly line, couldn't take the stairs anymore. His wife, tired lungs on tired legs, she said, had kept going, but only barely. And here was the cruelty, not only the suffering, but that it hadn't even occurred to them that switching apartments might be possible. It was as if the very idea of kindness, of community had been exiled from imagination. They were astonished that no one had offered, and more than that that they themselves had never dared to ask. The visit didn't only yield good friends and a shared afternoon. It illuminated how deeply the system mangles our senses of possibility. We are taught that our pain is private, our discomfort deserved, our loneliness natural. We learn to endure rather than to act, to sigh rather than to speak. But when we put forward the idea to others in the building, younger tenants did volunteer to swap, and on a Sunday afternoon, with neighbors lifting chairs and beds, with laughter and music, some lives changed. No external enemy was overcome, just shared will. These small acts, they are revolutionary because they dissolve resignation, they awaken solidarity. They remind us we do not have to accept the world as it is. We started with student tenants, some already in RPS, and expanded to families. We didn't barge in with manifestos, we asked questions, we listened. One word from us, five from them. This was not charity, it was dialogue. Of course it wasn't easy, far from it. I remember one conversation vividly. I urged a man to join our organizing efforts. He shook his head and said, Why? You don't stand a chance. Injustice always wins. Maybe I can help my kids a little. But the building? The country? And if I try and fail, what then? I've stolen time from my own. His despair hurt, not only for him, but because I wondered, was he right? Did I believe we could win? Back then RPS was young. We were few. The nights were long and riddled with doubt. Too few hands, too many needs, my own hope flickered. Another moment that cut deep, senior year of school. We were living off campus in a low income neighborhood. We made friends with high schoolers, played ball together. They were sharp, funny, full of ache. Drugs surrounded them like smog. One day we asked, What are you taking and why? Glue, they said. Paint thinner sometimes. It kills the pain. We pleaded, that stuff destroys your brain. You won't be able to think, to create. And they answered, You think we don't know that? We do, but what do we need big brains for? To bag groceries? To take orders? We'd rather float away. We aren't losing anything we can use. That reply, so lucid, so tragic, burned in my chest. It reminded me of something. It reminded me of something Sart once said. He took speed to write more, knowing it would shorten his life. When asked why, he said he'd rather trade unproductive years at the end for meaning and the now. These kids had made a parallel choice, but their now held no glory, no creation, just numbness. So I tried something blunt. I said that stuff will make you unable to have sex. That stopped them. Eyes widened. What? Yes, I said, no desire, no joy, no touch gone. And they stopped sniffing. Sometimes revolution speaks through leaflets, sometimes through protest, but sometimes it speaks through raw honest fear of losing even the smallest human pleasure. Life speaks where ideology falls. But you know, the truth is, I made it up. I had no idea what the implications of glue sniffing were for sexual life. It was a bit manipulative, and I felt misgivings about it ever since. Miguel asks an incredible experience. Yes, but it wasn't mine alone. It belonged to all of us. Those who fought, who fell, who listened, who rose. The moments that moved me weren't always loud. They were quiet, trembling truths. They taught me that revolution is not only made of manifestos, it is made of shared cups of tea, of old men's tears, of children sniffing glue to kill time, and of neighbors carrying dressers up a stairwell with laughter and hope. It was more instructive than anything I ever learned in college, but the pivotal claim I'd made, no sex, it was invented, manipulative, and heavy with guilt. There had to be a better way to reach someone's truth. Around that time we began visiting tenants' rights groups. We met many RPS members. I liked them, and I hated what I saw around me, so I joined. There was no grand ceremony, I was unlearned, I was unsure, but joining wasn't a drama of the soul. It felt right, so I did it. My life changed, and in joining I began to see that the accommodations people made to survive, the quiet surrenders, the daily compromises were not only everywhere, they were in everyone I knew. To undo those inner chains became the heart of our struggle. Miguel asked Cynthia, from her session at home, another interesting early project involved transportation, right? Yes. The campaign to prioritize bicycles over cars was rooted in a few simple but powerful ideas, protecting the planet, making our streets safer, and nurturing healthier relationships within our communities. What stood out most though wasn't the argument in favor, it was the resistance, and the journey through that resistance towards something better. At first, the facts were undeniable. Bike transit was cheaper, faster for many commutes, and dramatically better for the environment. The opposition didn't really try to refute that. Instead, they leaned into feelings, the comfort of a car, the sense of security a car offered, the deep reluctance to be shamed. For what had long been considered normal. And we, the bike advocates, made the mistake of charging ahead with logic while paying little mind to those feelings. In return, they painted us as fringe agitators, as troublemakers trying to wreck a system that worked. Things began to shift only when we started to really listen, not just to argue, but to understand. Once we could say, here's another way, something that might help you now, and definitely your kids and grandkids later. It wasn't a demand anymore, it was an invitation. Why not try it? Just a little and see what happens. And that worked. Bike lanes started to appear. In some cities they closed downtown streets to cars one day a week, just to see how it went. People came out and droves, kids played, neighbors talked, the air was cleaner, and from there more streets on more days followed. Bike shops popped up. But bikers also realized we didn't want to recreate the same profit centered system we were trying to move beyond. So we began pushing for city owned bikes that could be shared for free, especially in inner city neighborhoods. We even challenged car manufacturers directly, asking them to shift some of their capacity to building bikes, not just for sale, but for public use. Of course there were conflicts, more than a few shouting matches, even some fights when drivers when bikes collided, sometimes literally. But once bikers stopped seeing the goal as winning and started seeing it as changing minds, the movement grew. Riders who once stayed quiet began organizing. Biking wasn't just an alternative anymore, it was a cause. And when we aligned ourselves with auto workers, making it clear we wanted jobs and justice, not just two wheels instead of four, the tide began to turn. Because not everything is a zero sum game. In the case of private property, yes, if someone owns a company and we say no one should own companies like that anymore, they lose something, wealth, control. And that's a hard truth. But a lot of conflicts don't have to end with winners and losers. Transportation was one of those. If we could build a better system, one that centered bikes and mass free transit, cut pollution and preserve jobs, everyone would win. Except maybe the fossil fuel giants. And that's why the patient, respectful strategy worked. We didn't demand overnight upheaval, we invited useful change. We asked people to help us test a better way. Miguel asks, didn't some on the car side retain their hostility and opposition even as the evidence of benefits mounted? Absolutely. And when we listened closely, it became clear that their resistance wasn't really about the bikes. It wasn't about traffic or even lifestyle. What they feared was the broader shift, what it meant to give up something familiar, something that felt like power or normalcy. They saw bike lands not as a policy change, but as the first step down a road toward remaking society. And in a way, they were right. That pattern repeated itself. Each time we proposed something new, something kinder, more sustainable, more just, the opposition framed it as the start of a dangerous slope. They weren't fighting bike lanes or school luncheons or housing reform, not really. They were fighting the possibility that those changes might lead people to believe in something bigger, that they might start believing in RPS. And once we realized that, we knew what we were really up against. Our task wasn't just to win each campaign. It was to help people stop fearing the idea of deeper transformation. That's why every effort, whether it was for bikes or housing or workplace democracy, also had to include a vision for the whole. The parts couldn't succeed alone. They had to speak to each other, reinforce each other, build trust in the whole picture. The bike campaign was part of that. And yes, once the city centers opened up to bikes and free public transit only, it became impossible to ignore the sea of riders with RPS slogans on their backs. We weren't just building infrastructure. We were riding into a future we believed in and inviting others to join us. Miguel asked, Julius Roctor, from his session at his home in Iowa City, Iowa, you studied linguistics and cognitive science, yet you became a key architect of RPS's workplace vision and activism, eventually served as Secretary of Labor in the RPS shadow government. At first glance, that path from analyzing language and mind to revolutionizing labor seems anything but direct. Do you recall what sparked that shift, what pulled you from linguistic theory into the thick of working class struggle? Sure. Linguistics, you see, belonged to Chomsky. It still does. He was a man with two incredible faces. One face was that of a quiet scientist, honest and sharp, who studied language like a surgeon. Clean, precise, no tricks, no lies, just the truth laid bare in grammar and thought. That side of him shaped my early studies. But one night I sat at a bar, a beer in my hand, a friend across from me asking about my work. She said she read Chomsky too, but not the science, the politics, the books that stripped Empire naked, that dug into power with hard words and clarity. That shook things. I got sick a week later. Not bad sick, just enough to stay in bed for a couple of days. I looked for something to read. I found one of Chomsky's political books. I opened it. That was it. The ground moved. The air changed. I finished that book and read another, then another, then I read Howard Zinn, I read Emma Goldman, everything I believed cracked and shifted. The world was new and hard and wrong, and I couldn't go back. Miguel asks, I have also been asking folks to briefly recount some event or campaign in the period of RPS emerging that was particularly moving and inspiring for them. The first RPS convention mattered to me, so did the second, and the campaign to balance jobs. That was the blood of it all. That shaped my role later in the shadow government. But something else stuck, something quiet. It was before the convention. I had just landed, took a cab from the airport. The driver was a working guy, faced like a stone wall, but sharp and vocal. We talked politics. Trump came up. He hated Trump, said the man was a fraud, said it plain. I asked him if he thought we'd ever get a real president. Not one who fakes it, but one who actually fights for people like him and me. He shook his head. No, he said. Maybe one who means well, sure, but he'll be from the polished world, the world of suits and smooth hands. He'll mean well and still fail, because he won't know what it's like to be hungry and tired and scared. So I asked, What about a real worker? No polish, no prep school, just straight up honest working class candidate. He looked at me, said it wouldn't happen, said workers wouldn't vote for a worker, said we have been taught too long and too hard that we can't lead. That hit me hard, like a punch in the gut. The man was right, and it was killing us. If we couldn't believe in ourselves, we'd never win anything. That ride, ten minutes in the back of a cab, stayed with me. Still does. So I asked him, what if it wasn't a man like Trump? What if it was someone from the people? Someone who worked with his hands, who knew the hard times, who had no polish but had heart and grit. A worker, plain and simple, but decent. What then? He shook his head. Wouldn't matter, he said. A man like that would never make it. The media wouldn't let him rise, and even if he did, no one would vote for him. Not even the workers, especially not the workers. We'd look at someone like us and think he couldn't do it, not smart enough, not ready. And I saw then what we were really up against. It wasn't just the bosses. It wasn't just the money or the power. It was in our heads, a sickness, a doubt that had been pushed in and rotted us from the inside. A man who would fix your engine, lay your bricks, sweep your floor, he couldn't be president. Why not? The cab ride stayed with me. It changed what mattered to me, made it clear what had to be done. Miguel asked. What were the early involvements on that front? The first push was about wages. People needed to more to live. That was a plain fact. It started with fast food workers tired and broke, walking off the job. It spread. Teachers, nurses, public workers. Then came the UAW, the fight for fifteen. It wasn't new, but it got sharp teeth after the RPS convention. RPS joined in. We didn't just want to fight. We wanted to bring something new to the fight, something that didn't fade after a win. Then came the other piece, the hours. People were working longer, harder, less time off, more stress. Productivity doubled since the fifties, but people were still broke, still tired. We saw that and we asked, where did the wealth go? Not to the workers, not to the people sweating in kitchens and cubicles and behind the wheel. It went to the top, to war, to yachts and mansions, and to men who never worked a day in their lives. So we said fight for fifteen, yes, and then for more. But also fight for a thirty hour work week, fight for time, fight for life. Some folks said the rich deserved more because they owned things, or because they had power or fancy degrees. We didn't buy it. We said if you work harder, if you work longer, if your job breaks your back or wears down your soul, you should get more. Not the man counting coins from a yacht. The woman cleaning the floors at midnight, the man loading crates, they earned it. So the fight for a higher wage became more than a fight for money. It became a fight for fairness, a crack in the gilded wall, something to build on. A beginning, not an end, and we knew win or lose, we would not stop there. I particularly remember a fight undertake undertaken at the University of Chicago. It was cold, wind off the lake cut through your coat. But the workers stood out anyway, groundkeepers, janitors, custodians, the invisible people. They made the place run, and everyone knew it, but no one said it. They didn't beg, they didn't say please give us a little more. They said why do we who sweat more and strain more, earn so much less than the people who lecture or write books, or sit behind oak desks in big offices. And they kept going. They didn't stop at asking for a raise. They asked bigger questions. They talked about what work meant, about what was fair. They organized around pride, not pity, around the truth, not some vague sense of charity. Miguel asked, You said there were two RPS early priorities? Yes. This first was wages, second was time. Time's tricky. Bernie had talked about it. Fewer work hours, more life. But when we took it up in RPS, we saw gaps. A shorter work week sounded good. Thirty hours not forty. More time for family, more time for yourself, more time to fight for still more. But there was a catch. If you only worked thirty hours and still got paid by the hour, your check would shrink. And for most people already desperate, that would mean picking up another job or two. So we demanded thirty hours with forty hours pay. It was simple, but still not right because the rich would get it too. A Wall Street shark making save seven figures, he'd get an hourly raise for working less. That didn't sit right. So we revised it. The thirty for forty deal was for those who earned under a hundred thousand dollars a year. If you made more than that, you still got thirty hours, but no bump in your hourly rate. And in either case, if your boss wanted overtime from you, it'd cost triple to make them think twice. But then someone said, wait, if everyone works less, doesn't that mean we make less stuff? Isn't that bad? Less stuff, yes. But bad, maybe, maybe not. It depends what stuff we're talking about. We weren't saying cut back on hospitals or teachers or food, but what if we made fewer weapons, fewer luxury yachts, fewer things designed to break or burn out so you'd buy another? Fewer munitions, less waste, less redundancy. That sounded like a good thing. And if more people worked because fewer hours made room for more jobs, that would be good too. More people working meant more voices, more power, more fairness, less waste, more balance. And that's how it went. We weren't just shaving hours off the clock. We were trying to change what the clock meant and why it mattered. Cuts in output would start with the obvious military weapons, wasteful factories, things made to be thrown out, all of it gone. And yes, if you were going to shift people from making bombs to building schools or solar panels, you had to train them. That wasn't a nasty side effect. It was part of the win. Men and women who once made the tools of destruction could now build something good. That meant schools, that meant dignity. The deeper we went into it, the more the thing grew. It wasn't just about more money or fewer hours, it was about the world we were making. The postgrowth movement had taken root by then, saying maybe the point of life isn't just making more stuff. Maybe it was having cleaner air, better neighborhoods, time with your kids, a place to sit and think. So we kept shaping the campaign, not just for today, but for tomorrow too. Not just for one win, but for wins that could grow. If people had time they could join things, help things, shape the places they lived. That was always the deeper point. Same with the climate fight. We wanted to shut down oil wells and coal plants, but we didn't want to throw the workers under the bus. We wanted them in the lead. If a man had worked thirty years in a mine and didn't want to start from scratch at fifty five, we said fine, retire early. Full pay till the end. Let Exxon pay for it. Let Chevron pay for it. They had the money. RPS wanted not only macroeconomic program, like a higher minimum wage and a shorter work week, but also gains in specific industries and workplaces that would be won by workers located there. Miguel asks, what were the obstacles RPS had to overcome in trying to organize workers around their own workplace conditions and their own lack of local power? The bosses did what bosses do, what being a boss requires. They lied, they threatened, they fired people, they made new rules, they told us to shut up and take what we got. That was expected. What caught us off guard was the doubt in the eyes of the workers themselves. Not just fear, though fear was there, fear of losing a job, fear of being singled out, fear of being crushed. But there was something deeper too. We'd go in talking about workers' councils, about having a say, about shaping the place you work. And some people looked at us like we were trying to trick them, thought it was a setup, that if they said yes, the company would come down twice as hard. Some of them didn't believe they could do it, said they weren't smart enough, said they didn't know the numbers. Some said why would I help make decisions? That just helps the owners. I do my job, I go home. Others said, You want me to make the decisions? That sounds like more trouble. That sounds like more work. It was all real. You had to hear it, you had to sit with it. You had to admit that if a person had spent their life being told they can't do more than take orders, then asking them to lead won't be easy. Not at first. So we started there. We said yes, it's a burden, but it's also a gain. You matter, you know things, you can learn more. You deserve to decide. It was slow, but it caught on. Once people started to believe in themselves, they saw through the lies of the people above them. And once that happened, they didn't go back. Workers had their doubts, and they weren't wrong. They had lived through promises before, and they'd been burned. So first we showed them what decisions they might actually make and how it could matter. Then we went deeper. We asked why things were set up so they didn't feel capable in the first place. Why didn't they know more? Why weren't they more confident? And we told the truth. That was the fight in those early worker assemblies. We were pushing for self management, not just more money or better hours. We were going after dignity, respect, a new kind of control. That meant breaking through the old lies that nothing more was possible, that workers were too dumb to manage. A lot of people had half accepted that garbage. But in the assemblies, we started talking different, about what work could be, about what people deserved, not just in theory, but right there in the job they had. Change came slow, but we listened. We didn't shame, we showed how things could go different. That's why we made progress. It became slowly but steadily a perspective, a new identity, I suppose. Rights, yes, but then positive inspiring values. And that said, this is Mike Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.