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 asking how can its future help connect mass resistance to everyday organizing able to turn turns fear into agency: and success, 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 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 obstaces 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.

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