Ep 386 WCF Planting Seeds of the Future Plus A Mayday Message

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Mayday Strike And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's called Revolution Z. This is our 386th consecutive episode. It continues our focus on chapters from the Oral History The Wind Cries Freedom, presenting this time chapter twenty nine. But also, before that, it includes a comment addressing a current immediate agenda item. I do that each time I do an excerpt. The strike scheduled for Mayday. The call is for no work, no school, and no shopping. The idea is, I believe, to extend the no king's type gatherings another step toward striking, which is to say, toward more active resistance. Will Mayday's actions be large enough, spirited enough, militant enough? Not to win, we won't fully win yet, but to take a part of the No King's participants, and maybe some new participants as well, into another level of activism. Will it be large, spirited, and militant enough to motivate everyone who becomes involved and more people too, to strike again before too long passes, and to then move on to a two day event, and then three day and beyond. That is a trajectory that can fully win. It can stop Trump and it can lay the basis for doing still more in order to undermine and in time replace the institutions that made Trump possible. The institutions that make most of the population less than we can be, that give us quiescent, obedient eyes that can only conceive of individually competing with others, not collectively working together to change society's roles, aims, and outcomes. So the question becomes who will participate? And will those who do participate who aren't already involved in a sustained way and not merely on specific days move to wanting to become involved in a sustained way? If so, please check out all of usdirectory.org. All of us directory is one word dot org. That's the URL. That site lets visitors search for organizations to connect with based on the organization's topics of focus and on your personal interests and locale. So for example, maybe you want to work with the immigration focused organizations about ice, and maybe you have personal uh tastes about what you would do that involve uh calling, uh working on uh on literature or whatever, and you live in some particular place, I don't know, Cincinnati. You use the site to find something that suits you where you are and needs your assistance. And so we now turn to the future, to our excerpt from the Wind Cries Freedom, in which Bertrand Jagger, Leslie Jordan, Emiliano Farmer, Barbara Bethune, and Robin Zimmerman report on the internet, media, hospitals, and justice campaigns as planting seeds for the RPS future. Miguel Guevara, our interviewer, kicks us off by asking, Bert, what was the origin of the phrase planting the seeds of the future in the present? And what does it mean? I believe it began as an anarchist whisper, words carried by those who refused to wait. But no matter its origin, it lived in RPS like a heartbeat. What it means is simple and immediate. What you plant is what you harvest. You don't grow roses from nettles. You don't reap justice from the seeds of greed. Miguel asks, so if your project needs funds, why not sell drugs? Why not sell porn? Why not sell whatever sells? It may not be planting the seeds, but in dry conditions, could it be watering them? What you sell is not just a product, it's soul. When you plant poison, even if it grows profit, it poisons the gardener too. Take media. You need money. So you sell ads. But ads don't just bring in cash. They bring in masters. To sell ads, you must sell your audience. You must shape your message to please those who sell dreams in plastic packages. And soon your mission is no longer yours. That's how the future gets lost, one compromise at a time. That's why planting the seeds of the future in the present matters, because the future we want is not built by any means necessary. It's built by means that already carry its essence. So we must ask, does this tactic, this structure, this decision reflect the world we seek? Or does it quietly sow weeds? Strategy without vision is a ship with no compass. It may move, but toward what? Miguel asks Emiliano, what was the RPS attitude toward the internet and social media? How did planting seeds of the future play out in that realm? When RPS was forming, the internet was this weird double edged thing, a kind of messy experiment with wild results. On the upside, it gave folks a way to share ideas without needing a printing press or a TV station. You could send out a message, get a movement going, stir up some thought fast, and without much of a budget. That was exciting. It made mobilizing easier, spreading the word easier, making the aims accessible easier. But then boom. It also came with a massive payload of garbage. I mean real garbage, fake news, nonsense, shallow clickbait, AI spewed drivel. The noise floor shot through the roof. Finding real content started to feel like digging for gold in a landfill. And on top of that, you had this economic pressure for brevity, not because short was better, but because short left more room for ads. That's what really mattered. Getting eyes on the ma on the ads. People got used to small bites, tiny doses, and it spiraled. Shorter, dumber, louder. Clickbait didn't just creep in, it kicked the door down. Now toss in corporate surveillance. Every move online is tracked, logged, and sold. You aren't just browsing anymore, you were leaking personal data like a sieve. Companies harvested that stuff and sold it to advertisers or handed it over to governments. Privacy went down the drain. People thought YouTube and browsing were democratizing, but more often than not, it was ads, ads and more ads, flash flashy manipulation. And the big fish, Google, Facebook, a few others, swallowed the ocean. It became a big funnel down into a handful of sites. Facebook even wanted to be the internet, be the web, the whole thing. Then came the smartphone, plus social media, comboed punch. On one hand, it gave everyone a voice. On the other hand, it amped up cruelty, bullying, and narcissism. You had to wade through all that to get to the good stuff when you could find it at all. It was a strange mix of illumination and garbage. So sure, people disagreed on the balance sheet. But some folks, even before RPS, asked the obvious. Can we ditch the bad while keeping the good? Can we build something that respects people, encourages depth, and nurtures solidarity? RPS tried. We made websites, podcasts, and discussion boards. We said let's keep it civil, no clickbait, no ads. But I'll be honest, many of us worried that even with the best intentions we might be reinforcing the very habits we hoped to fight. Sites started chasing traffic by dumbing things down, not making important things accessible, rather ignoring important things. More clicks, shorter reads, jumpier pages. But was that really a win? So we said screw it, let's do it ourselves. Build a people social media, one without ads, spying or manipulation, one where arguments mattered more than outrage, where meaning got priority over brevity. We wanted communication, not consumption. Keep it accessible, but maintain importance. The RPS Tech folks went back to square one. They dreamed up a mashup platform. Our own versions of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube all rolled into one. But no corporate owner, no surveillance, no tricks. The kicker. Any revenue beyond basic costs would go to progressive causes. The site itself would help fund activism. We called it participatory links. It started in the US, but quickly opened to groups and movements around the globe. Everything was transparent. Jobs were balanced, costs were low. And again, no spying, just participation. But ah, there was a catch. You know the old chicken and egg problem? That was us. People didn't want to join unless it already had lots of people. But it couldn't have lots of people unless people joined. We were stuck. Until some brave early adopters jumped in, not because it was already perfect or even really reliable, but because they believed it could be. And it was a funny thing. It wasn't the tech that made the difference. It was desire, a kind of hunger for something that wasn't shallow, mean, or sold out. Some users could see the value before it fully existed, and their leap of faith made the value real. Miguel asks, Come on, there must have been other difficulties in actually creating the system. Well, I wasn't in the code trenches, but I had friends who were, and yeah, they argued a lot over fonts, layouts, features, bugs, aesthetics. It was endless. And I told them, don't let chasing the perfect get in the way of building the good. But you know how it goes. Everyone thinks their version of good is best. Truth is, when people are knee deep in creation, little differences feel like life or death. They can't zoom out and see them most of the disagreement is small potatoes. I bet the whole project took twice as long because of internal squabbles over details. But they did finish it, and once it was running, most of those earlier arguments vanished into thin air, except for a few that still had legs. See, when you try to build something real, social media, RPS, a new society, you don't get to escape the messiness of people. Ego, opinion, misunderstanding, it all comes with the package, but you can keep it from running the show. We did that mostly by prioritizing humility, openness, and the willingness to live with difference. Not bad, huh? Miguel asks, Leslie, what about media more generally? Two major currents defined the early media work within RPS, and they're still shaping what we do today. First, we overhauled the existing ecosystem of alternative media. Second, we built new, more ambitious projects from the ground up. For the legacy left projects, we added RPS values and structure, principally equitable pay and balanced job complexes. But let's be honest, that process wasn't seamless. For one, many of the projects had been created and sustained by individuals who'd poured their lives into them, founders, veterans, people who had sacrificed sleep, savings, and sometimes their personal lives. Now imagine coming to them after all that and saying you need to relinquish control. You need to share the decisions, you need to give up your higher income and take on a fair share of the rote less visible labor. Of course it was fraud. These weren't villains we were confronting. They were often admired and respected and justifiably so. They carried with them institutional memory, vital skills, and deep relationships. But when we said to them to live our values this change must come, many balked. Some genuinely feared that such redistribution would cripple their project, and sometimes they weren't entirely wrong. The shift could, in the short term, introduce chaos. But here's the truth. Their intentions, selfish or noble, weren't the central issue. What mattered was that if we wanted to speak with moral clarity about class structures, if we wanted to model the world we were advocating, and if we wanted to foster participation that nourished everyone involved, the change wasn't optional. It was essential. Some of the push for transformation had already gained ground on questions of race and gender. Those conversations had been ongoing for years, and by the time RPS came into the picture, resistance on those fronts had already begun to soften. But the conversation around class, that was a different beast. It struck at the heart of how things ran. And it wasn't just senior leadership that felt the pressure. Regular staff had to step up too, take on new responsibilities, learn new skills, help shape direction rather than just implement plans others devised. That shift could be empowering, but it was also demanding. Miguel asked, Did you go through all that personally? Yes, very directly, and I didn't handle it well at first. In my own workpace, I was part of a small group making most of the big decisions. When these new demands came forward, I snapped. I said to the people pushing them, What the hell are you talking about? I've given my life to this place. Some of you have been here for months, maybe a year or two. That's a blink. And now you want to displace me? You think that's fair? That's smart? You honestly believe pushing me aside, my skills, my experience, my contacts, will make us stronger? At the time, I believed that was unassailable logic, morally right, strategically sound. But I came to realize I was wrong, deeply wrong, and getting there wasn't fast or easy. It was messy, emotional, but the change, like all truly transformational change, had to happen. Miguel asks, how did you get one over? Eventually, something clicked. I realized that before we made the change, before we even began talking about it, our daily reporting, our editorials, our commentary, had completely sidestepped a foundational truth. We weren't saying anything, anything at all about the structural dynamics between the working class and the coordinator class. We barely touched workplace self-management. We rarely, if ever, discussed how labor was divided or how market logic was shaping outcomes. These weren't marginal gaps, they were core omissions. And when I really sat with that, I understood why. When an institution mirrors a dominant feature of the society it inhabits, like a corporate division of labor that consolidates authority at the top and disempowers the rest, it tends to treat that feature as a given, not a problem. It's a kind of internal censorship, subtle but pervasive. We didn't talk about it not because it wasn't important, but because it was too important, too close to home. So even if I had continued to believe that changing our structure wouldn't turn us into a better model, even if I had doubted that the new approach would improve the lives of our staff or plant seeds for a more just future, even if I had clung to every one of those doubts, the shift still would have been necessary for the sake of our journalism. Because ironically, the very quality I had claimed to protect by resisting change was exactly what we were undermining by maintaining the status quo. And yes, there was some truth in my early concerns. There are times when change comes too fast or without care, and yes, that can do real damage. But in most cases, especially ours, the more pressing problem wasn't overly zealous reformers. It was the entrenched defensiveness of those who protected old hierarchies, however progressive our intentions. In time I came to see that structural transformation wasn't a threat to our work. It was the only path to deepen it, to democratize it, and to align it with the world we claimed to be building. And the more successful examples we could point to, the easier that understanding became. Miguel asks, was the situation similar for new media efforts? For newer initiatives, Miguel, the dynamic was similar, but the terrain was a little more forgiving. You didn't have gatekeepers with decades of accumulated power and routine. You didn't have to challenge legacy hierarchies. You had a blank slate. You could write the rules. But that didn't mean it was smooth sailing. In any startup, some people bring more to the table, more experience, more connections, more confidence. And unless you build explicit method mechanisms to counterbalance that, old hierarchies have a way of sneaking back in. That's why, even with shared values and strong intentions, if projects failed to balance jobs, the old dynamics inevitably reemerge. It wasn't personal failure, it was structural inertia. We learned over and over that good politics wasn't enough. You had to back it up with good design. Otherwise institutions replicate the very inequalities they claim to oppose. Miguel asks, did you ever personally feel strange devoting so much of your on air time to promoting RPS views? Did you ever feel like an agent of RPS in media rather than a media person doing her job? That's a fair question, and maybe I'm not the most objective judge of myself. But honestly, no, I didn't often feel that way. I thought about it, sure, but ultimately I think the reason I didn't feel like I was crossing some line is because of the pace and scale of RPS's growth. See, my job, my self-definition, has always been to offer news and analysis that sports meaningful social transformation. I've been part of RPS from the beginning. And because RPS grew so quickly, covering it wasn't some outlier editorial decision. It wasn't me bending my work around my beliefs. RPS was the story. It was changing people's lives, shaping public debate, and building momentum. Even if I hadn't been a member, I'd still have had a professional obligation to cover it. The fact that I believed in it only deepened the alignment between what I personally wanted to highlight and what my work organically required me to report on. There wasn't a contradiction. But okay, what if things had played out differently? What if RPS hadn't taken off the way it did? What if it was still just a scrappy little effort moving slowly, not yet on the national radar? Then yes, I imagine my commitment to it would have led me to give it more airtime than its raw influence would have otherwise justified. And would that have made me feel like less of a journalist and more of an RPS operative? I think I still would have done it. I believe that. But how would I have felt about it? That's a harder call, and it raises a deeper question. When a media figure, whether on the right or the left, uses their platform to amplify a political project they believe in, does that make them quote just an ideologue? Or does it mean they're a full human being who sees the stakes and chooses to act? Or maybe they're both. To me, everyone who works in media, and really everyone who communicates publicly, is bringing their beliefs into the process. That's not a flaw. It's the reality. It doesn't mean they're lying or Or manipulating. It means your values shape what you choose to cover, how you frame it, and what kinds of questions you prioritize. And that's not only inevitable, it's right. We have to be honest. We have to strive for accuracy. But honest isn't some neutral abstraction. When we say something is honest and accurate, we're already interpreting the world through our lenses. Unless we're truly just mouthpieces, and some people are, that's how meaning works. Our politics influences our communication. It always has. So yes, if RPS had remained small and off the radar, I would still have used my platform to spotlight it, but I would have done so transparently, making it clear that I wasn't doing so based solely on its existing viability, but because I believed its values and ideas made it worth amplifying, because I thought it deserved to be heard. And in that case, as in this one, I wouldn't be just a journalist or just an advocate. I'd be both. And that's exactly what I think more people in media need to own. We're not outside the stories we tell, we're in them. Miguel asks, Barbara, what about in hospitals? What seeds did you plant there? There were two gardens of direct struggle in health, clinics and hospitals. The clinics were sometimes already standing and sometimes still sketches in the minds of those bold enough to build. Just like with media, if you birthed it new, you could raise it in the values of RPS from the start. The real task was finding the ones willing to walk that road who wanted to work in a place that honored justice. The reward was a workplace of grace where relationships bloomed between caregivers and patients like Jasmine and June. Every new clinic became a lamp shining into the dark, urging others to follow. But light came at a cost. For some the pay was less, for others the pressure was great. We were breaking norms the world had chained in place for decades, centuries even, and society called us mad. Now with already standing clinics, there was a division. Some employees leaned toward transformation, but those in power, doctors and administrators often clung to what they had. And when the new clinics proved that patients could thrive under justice, the old arguments crumbled. No longer could defenders of inequality pretend they were saving patients. Now they had to admit that what they were protecting, what they were really protecting was their own privilege. In hospitals, the struggle deepened. These were not merely buildings, they were institutions etched into the bones of the system. Some hearts yearned for change, others clung to the past. Nurses, how I love them, sought more say, more skills, more power to care. They were ready to be full, vibrant souls that collective self management required. And yes, not every nurse was ready. Some trembled at the thought of more weight on their shoulders, but many already carried more than their fair share and did so with grace. Doctors, more often than not, stood in the way. So did boards and owners. Maintenance workers too had to choose between fear and faith. Over time most chose the latter, but the journey was not easy. We fought hard for small steps, open budgets, new pay scales, review boards made up of peers, assemblies with real say, on the job training, new job definitions. All of it took sweat and sacrifice. We held teach ins and welcomed advisors from clinics reborn in justice. We reached out to patients, to neighbors, we walked out, we sat in. Long before RPS there was a slogan revolution within the revolution. I didn't know what it meant back then, but now I do. Each institution touched by RPS became a theater of change, a soul awakening. The hospital? Just one more heart learning to beat again. Miguel asks, Emiliano, what were the biggest health industry problems to overcome? If you looked at the private hospitals back then, you'd find the first tough nut to crack was the owners. They were the brick wall. No surprise, they wanted their profits. You mess with that, they come out swinging. Push for higher wages, open the books, shift spending toward patient care, boom, they resist. That battle line was clear. That was the whole group of employees facing off against the owners. But then came the second wall, and this one was trickier. A subset of hospitals, own professionals, administrators, lawyers, accountants, and a solid block of doctors, especially the well established, well paid ones. These weren't the folks with title deeds and stock portfolios. Instead, they had fancy degrees, they had credentials, they had arguments, and I'll tell you something, their arguments weren't total nonsense. See owners, they just had the claim it's ours, we own it. Which if you stop to think about it, doesn't get you very far once people start asking why ownership means they get to dominate other people's health. That facade cracks fast and then crumbles. But the coordinators, they said, look, we know things. We're trained. We you can't run a hospital without us. And to be honest, that wasn't wrong in the short run. You can't just snap your fingers and have a hundred new surgeons fall from the sky. You can't cut their workload in half overnight without consequences. The patients don't disappear just because you want equity. We had to admit that, and so we made a two part argument in response. First, give us some time and we can train new people. Grow the base of skilled labor, no magic tricks, just education and structure. Second, a lot of what hospitals were doing wasn't actually about health. It was about padding the bottom line. Surgeries no one needed, tests ordered just to fill quotas. If we stopped doing those, we wouldn't need so much surgery in the first place. So that's the difference. With owners, you could go full throttle. We want it all now. With coordinators, especially doctors, you need a trajectory, step by step, training, policy change, reallocating labor. It was slower, but it was responsible. We weren't trying to break the system, we were trying to build it right. We knew it would take time, but we also saw the momentum. And after twenty years, let me tell you, now it doesn't take a wild imagination to see the finish line. What does take imagination is pretending you're gonna roll back to old to the old ways. That's pure fantasy. Remember the slogan not going back? Yeah, this was that on steroids. Miguel asks, what were some turning point victories along the way? It depended really. Different hospitals, different struggles. But where I was most involved, I think the real hinge moment came when we started to redistribute tests. Now at first this wasn't seismic. We weren't revolutionizing overnight, but we were asking, what can nurses do that doctors have been hoarding? What stuff doesn't actually help patients and could be tossed? And this is key. What can doctors do that's less gramorous but necessary? The last part's important because it wasn't just about freeing up nurses. It was about bringing doctors into the trenches, at least a little. Not punishment, just balance. Same for all employees. And the real shift wasn't in the task. It was in the conversation. The moment we said out loud, let's evaluate the division of labor here, that was it. From that point on it was just a matter of time. Sure there was yelling, doctors saying demeaning stuff, classes stuff, ugly moments, but I sat there thinking, we've done it. The dam has cracked. The question was now legitimate. After that, arguing against balanced job complexes and self management, it started to sound silly. People still tried, sure, but the logical ground was slipping away beneath them. At best they could argue for delay to train, to adjust, but not for never. Miguel asked, You really thought you couldn't lose? Okay, that's fair. Back then maybe I had to believe that. It kept the fire burning. But now, now I know better. Nothing's guaranteed. You can still lose. Even with many wins in hand, daily routines have inertia. Hospitals reinforced old hierarchies. The gravity pulls you back unless you're actively pushing forward. If you're not building new, you are preserving old. So yeah, it wasn't just the policy shift that mattered. It was that we knew what it meant. We didn't just win a skirmish, we changed the trajectory, and we were determined, hell bent really, to see it through. We had a term for it, a non reformist reform. It meant the reform mattered not only for what it fixed today, but for where it pointed us toward tomorrow. It was a wedge, prying open the door to a new kind of workplace. No more owners, no more classes, and the beauty was we knew it. Miguel asked, Barbara, what about social policies, insurance, the pharmaceutical policies? That struggle was different. There the people, the mothers and fathers, the children, the elders, the weary and the worn, they were not onlookers. They were in the center of the frame. It began with a long overdue blessing, single payer health care for all. No more wondering who could afford to heal and who could not. The next wave came for insurance, and again the people stood tall. But the hardest battle, the one that shook the ground, was against the pharmaceutical giants. These were not companies, they were kingdoms. They profited from pain. They sold addiction wrapped in sterile paper. They wrote death into their ledgers and called it growth. The fight was not just for better pills, it was for the soul of medicine. And to complicate it, much of what they produced was life saving essential. You might say, if care is free, why worry about the prices of the medicine? But the truth is, though the pocket though the patient's pocket no longer emptied, the nation's purse did. Every dollar that fattened pharmaceutical executives was a dollar stolen from schools, from bridges, from food. And still, we couldn't just shut off the tap. No, we couldn't tell the sick to suffer. So we could send a message. That would be betrayal in the name of justice. So what could we do? We began with the simple truth and made it a rallying cry. Medicine for health not profit. We stood before the government and said place limits, impose price controls, and if they do not obey, take their factories and make them serve the people. That last part, the threat of nationalization, had haunted the dreams of the elite since talk of single payer first stirred. And now it walked be it walked beside us in the daylight. Still, how to make the government move? How to lift its hand from its lap and into the fight? We organized not just actions but stories. We named names, we showed faces, we uncovered hypocrisy like pulling back the sheet from a cold body. We demanded that the state, as the only buyer of medicine, use its power not to bargain meekly, but to demand, and if they refused, we would not disappear, we would grow. We told them, ignore us and you will lose your seats. Ignore us and we will no longer speak only of health. We will speak of everything housing, education, labor, and so we did. When the victories came, and come they did, they opened not a conclusion but a door, our march continued through it, bold, brilliant, and unafraid. Miguel asks, Robin, what emerged in the legal system from the plant the seeds mentality and agenda there? It was very similar to other realms, though with its own slant, of course. The main focus had to be revising our approach to prosecution. But as with other situations, this could be achieved by changing the court system or by creating alternatives parallel to the current courts. For the former, part of it was changing laws and punishments. Another part was renovating the approach to prosecution and adjudication. In this area of RPS activity, however, things are still pretty germinal. After winning changes in penalties, particularly for victimless and nonviolent crimes, and thereby hugely altering the life of the court and dramatically reducing the incredible price to individuals and to society of incarcerations, things were significantly improved. But then came the need for a deeper renovation of the whole process. We needed to bring it in line with civilized values, including stronger guarantees for the accused, made real by collectivizing criminal law procedure and having society pay the now far more sensible bills on all sides. The main change in mentality was to shift away from a tone of revenge against violators and from narrow material and organizational self-advancement on the part of practitioners to rehabilitation and sentencing and incarceration, along with equitable remuneration of particular practitioners so they could reclaim sensible motivations. Some of this was underway before the organization. Miguel asks, What about prisons and jails? The cruelty of them was an open secret. The U.S. had more people behind bars than in classrooms of higher learning, a stain that no patriotic anthem could wash away. Half, maybe two thirds of those locked up in America wouldn't have even been imprisoned in Europe, even if guilty. Poverty, racism, and alienation crushed people's hopes and filled their lives with fear, then punished them for acts born of that desperation. The society preached wealth as salvation, but locked every door that might lead there, and when people kicked the doors down, it called them criminals. Inside the prisons it was not rehabilitation, it was punishment, it was vengeance, it was the warehouse management of human beings. These were institutions of suffering, not of learning, not of healing. They bred survival through domination, they created hardened souls, and when people left those walls, they were handed nothing but another push toward the edge. If they turned again to theft or violence, the system feigned surprise, but it had drawn the map. Prisons functioned like an assembly line for human disposal. Inmates treated like shadow, were coerced into labor for next to nothing, their every moment monitored, their dignity stripped. Courts became the gatekeepers of this machinery, streamlining suffering to keep cells filled, budgets growing, and entire industries fed. And not only the courts, but also the culture was at fault. Sometimes voters pushed such policies on courts. But something changed. The resistance spread, not only from the prisoners, not only from their families, but from a surprising place. Some prison guards, long viewed as agents of the state's cruelty, began to show solidarity. It started small, guards voicing support for prisoner protests against overcrowding or forced labor. But it grew. Many guards, brutalized in different ways by their own roles and conditions, began to see through the fog. Some clung to the authoritarian identity they had been trained into. Others stepped out of it, reclaiming their humanity. They had seen the system from the inside. They knew its truth. Their empathy became dangerous to the status quo. This wasn't isolated, it was part of a broader wave. As demonstrations grew under Trump's second term, even some police officers and ICE agents, once seen solely as enforcers, began questioning their roles. They began to see protesters not as enemies of order, but as legitimate citizens and even voices of truth. Even back during Trump's second term, that cracks were forming and the ranks of repression were one of the was one of the clearest signs that a deeper transformation was on its way. Miguel asks, would there be crime in the society you seek? Would there be police in courts? In the past, some of the left argued that the answer had to be no, no crime, no police, no courts. It was a kind of purity, almost religious in its insistence. For them, to admit otherwise meant giving ground to the idea that oppression was inevitable, that a just society was impossible. But this view was always somewhat misguided. You don't have to believe in perfect people to believe in a better society. You just have to believe that people, given just institutions, can be better. Human beings aren't machines, they're not saints, they can act in ways that are selfish, even violent. That will not disappear entirely. It never has. The difference lies in how society responds. If a society incentivizes selfishness and rewards cruelty, then those traits become strategies. But if a society fosters equity and solidarity, makes greed and domination fruitless, those impulses fade. Crime, true crime, becomes rare. But I don't think it vanishes. Jealousy still exists, so does desperation, so do mental illnesses and moments of rage. No vision worth believing in needs to pretend otherwise. What we do know is that crime won't be people stealing bread to feed their children, or billionaires exploiting workers, because there will be no billionaires and there will be no hunger. We also know that the need for violence based law and order responses will wither. Not because the danger entirely vanishes, but because society will learn to deal with danger differently, compassionately, intelligently. And yes, that means we'll still need people trained to help resolve conflict, uncover truth, and deescalate harm. Not every citizen will know how or want to do that. Just as not everyone wants to be a pilot or a surgeon, but the job of a justice seeker will be transformed. Before RPS, one argument went like this police can abuse power, so abolish the police. But that logic collapses. Surgeons can cut patients, pilots can crash passengers. The question isn't whether abuse is technically possible, it always is. The question is whether a system gives people the power and the incentive to abuse. If so, it must change. We needed to eliminate functions that weren't essential. We needed to erase the structures that taught and rewarded authoritarianism. The well-motivated impulse to say abolish rather than redefine hid the harder work. A truly just society doesn't pretend away the need for conflict resolution. It builds institutions that serve that need, but without creating domination.