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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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