Ep 346 of RevolutionZ takes on a stew of topics. What's up with Epstein. Fascism's arrival. Clickbait's Impact. Anti Collective Individualism. Gallaudet''s Struggle. Social Media. Good Trouble, and Now What?

What's the connection among these? Lies, undermined trust, narrow horizons of calculation, fear, confusion, a surprisingly relevant movie, impoverished communications, a set back, and mostly some ideas about effective resistance.

We know to go forward requires resistance to consistently grow in numbers and sophistication. Rather than isolated demonstrations against single issues, effective opposition must build bridges between constituencies to connect those who fight genocide with those who defend healthcare, to connect immigrants rights activists who resist deportations with teachers who resist censorship. Elites must perceive not only widespread opposition but escalating costs to them.

How can movement building effectively counter fascism's advance? From workplace resistance to campus organizing, from artistic engagement to direct confrontation with power centers, this episode discusses ideas for creating the pressure needed to force elites to reconsider destructive paths. The episode's warning is clear: we must act bigger and better now, while resistance remains possible before fascism completes its institutional capture. Are we ready to move beyond scrolling toward persistent fighting?

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Ep 345 of RevolutionZ begins with a brief apology for an error last episode. some self-reflection about RevolutionZ's duration of 345 consecutive episodes, some moving guest comments on Gaza plus my own comments on emerging Trumpian fascism. It then again addresses the question do activists need fresh conceptual frameworks that transcend traditional Marxism?

The episode revisits the critique of the Marxist tradition's adequacy for contemporary struggles/ We again and perhaps more succinctly and also aggressively argue that Marxism's core concepts systematically diminish attention to gender, race, and power relations while distorting economic understanding by defining classes solely through property relations.

The episode describes how these limitations have manifested in real-world movements to lead not to classlessness but to "coordinator class rule," dictatorships, and persistent though sometimes somewhat altered racism and sexism. The episode rejects Marxism's labor theory of value, denies the practical utility of dialectics, and considers why the tradition seems particularly vulnerable to sectarianism.

After then sharing a couple of personal anecdotes, the episode extends invitations to prominent Marxist intellectuals—from Kali Akuno, Tariq Ali, Ben Burgis, Vivek Chibber and Angela Davis, to Terry Eagleton, Max Elbaum, Bill Flether, Nancy Fraser and John Bellamy Foster, to David Harvey, Doug Henwood and Boris Kagarlitsky, to Robin Kelly, Vijay Prashad, Kshama Sawant and Rick Wolff—to address these concerns in the spirit of constructive dialogue. Hopefully one or more will respond. After all, why not?

This episode isn't bent on dismissing Marxism's contributions much less any Marxist activists, but on asking essential questions to propel a needed conversation: Does this intellectual tradition, as practiced by real-world actors who have been bent by existing oppressive structures, provide the comprehensive understanding needed for today's multi-faceted struggles? When should we enrich existing frameworks, and when must we entirely transcend them? Do you want to be called Marxist? If so, why? What conceptual tools will best serve our efforts to create a world beyond capitalism, sexism, racism, authoritarianism, and ecological collapse? Marxism's conceptual tools, or what?

Whether you're deeply versed in Marxist theory or approaching these matters for the first time, this episode urges that we together critically examine the intellectual foundations of our activism. What frameworks best position us to understand—and change—our rapidly transforming world?

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Episode 344 of RevolutionZ begins with some reflections on Zohran Mamdani's inspiring electoral win. How? By his campaign mobilizing an astonishing 50,000 volunteers. How? By he and his campaign feeling real and honest, and by offering real and meaningful vision. By electoral politics and grassroots activism becoming a mutual aid tag team rather than competing opponents.

The episode then moves from Gaza's gut wrenching fascistic horrors to our own American "Twilight Zone" reality that seeks to entrench fascistic tendencies as normal life. The episode then takes a break from its usual patterns to look at some music, some lyrics, hoping to find some clarity, courage, and, well, dignity. Hoping to find some potential sources for an emerging new youth culture which is something that we all, young and older alike, profoundly need to create, experience, and embrace.

Bruce Springsteen's "Youngstown" documents capitalism's broken promises. His "The Ghost of Tom Joad" reminds our moral obligations. But mainly the episode hopes to introduce and propel some emerging voices of today, not only old ones from yesterday. We hear Jesse Wells' and Carsey Blanton's unflinching and yet also moving and eloquent lyrics that directly confront power. "Rich people been fucking us all." Back not too long, we re-surface Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" and Bob Dylan's "Gates of Eden" and "Dignity." The point of it all is to celebrate how artists have long conveyed a vocabulary of resistance that we desperately need today.

I hope the songs whose lyrics I offer reveal that cultural resistance isn't separate from political action—it's an essential aid. It helps us imagine and create more just futures. Even more, it can help establish a mood, a disposition, aspirations, and confidence in the face of deadly hate. In the coming months of defense and then in coming years of positive gain, we will need to disobey authoritarianism, eliminate ecological nightmare, and reduce staggering inequality. We will need to entrench in their place self managed participation, productive and ecological sanity, and real solidarity and equity. I hope the lyrics in this episode and others that you go on to find, to sing, and to hear, music and all, can help provide the rebellious soundtrack for our necessary actions. When I was a child we had that. The culture around us propelled us. We didn't win all we needed to, but some. Now new generations have to prevent the elimination of all that and, more, have to expand the victory vastly further. I hope artists and their audiences do their part to help propel all that. It ought to come naturally.

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Ep 343 of RevolutionZ has Gene Bruskin, long time and many issues, labor organizer to discuss workers' responses to rising fascism, our current predicaments and our potential paths forward.

Why does America's labor movement struggle to mount a unified response to authoritarianism, one for all and all for one? How did post-WWII labor structures intentionally divide workers by union and industry, creating what Bruskin calls a system "structured to divide ourselves"?

Why do significant segments of working people support Trump despite his anti-worker policies? Bruskin challenges simplistic explanations, arguing that economic desperation combined with Democrats' unwillingness to confront billionaires and inequality created an opening for "phony populism." When Trump says "I feel your pain" while Democrats offer only rhetoric, many desperate workers took a chance on the disruptor.

We also discuss Bruskin's post-retirement work creating political musicals about working-class history and struggle. His productions about Reconstruction and the abolitionist, John Brown, act on his belief that cultural resistance is essential for movement-building. Bruskin says, "We couldn't have won the civil rights movement if people couldn't be singing 'We Shall Not Be Moved' while they were being hauled to jail."

Bruskin leaves us with a powerful metaphor from a banquet waiter who, when pressured to give a senator special treatment and dismissively asked if he didn't know who the Senator was, responds: "Do you know who I am? I'm the guy who gives out the bread and butter." This encapsulated Bruskin's point: working people must recognize their collective power. As he put it: "Do you need the boss, or does the boss need you?"

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Episode 342 of RevolutionZ reconsiders how to evaluate success in our struggles against Trumpian fascism.

When someone asks how a protest went, what are we really measuring? Our feelings? Media coverage? Participation numbers? Or something more substantive? Being vague about what matters is our movement measurement problem.

This episode proposes four essential metrics that truly matter: Did our actions inspire continued involvement? Did we raise consciousness among those who witnessed our efforts? Did we grow commitment and strengthen the movement? And did we communicate to power-holders that we won't back down?

Via reflections on experiences during Vietnam War protests, the episode illustrates how unrealistic expectations can demoralize rather than empower. He offers practical suggestions for the upcoming July 17th demonstrations—from coordinated clothing colors to unified messaging—as possible ways to enhance movement solidarity and impact.

The episode goes beyond tactics to strategy including assessing the counterproductive dismissal of Trump supporters as simply "stupid," the strategic limitations of violence, and the false dichotomy between electoral work and direct action. The message is that diverse approaches can coexist within a unified framework if we judge each by its contribution to movement growth and effectiveness.

The episode moves beyond subjective feelings toward strategic thinking to advance progressive goals. The struggle against fascism, all kinds of inequity and injustice, and ecological collapse demands nothing less than our clearest thinking about what works, what doesn't, and how we measure the difference.

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Episode 341 of RevolutionZ quotes: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" and with that claim from Marx asks whether today's movements should enrich the Marxist tradition as a viable and worthy heritage that only needs some modest contemporary refinements, or transcend it entirely as concepts and banners of dead generations that constrain our creativity.

Why this topic now? As political tensions mount and movements for fundamental change grow, young activists will be increasingly uged to take Marxist theory as their guiding framework. But do Marxist concepts provide the conceptual tools and organizational commitments we need to navigate current crises and in time create the revolutionized society most progressive movements desire?

This episode highlights "economism" -- which privileging economic analysis while inadequately addressing gender, race, ecology, and political dimensions of social life -- and also Marxist class analysis which fails to recognize how managers, professionals, and other empowered employees monopolize empowering tasks and decision-making positions to form a distinct class between capital and labor which can also rise to ruling status and has done just that in all past Marxist revolutions. Do conceptual blindspots explain why Marxist revolutions consistently elevate a new ruling elite over workers rather than creating genuine classlessness, or is the cause perverse leadership or external opposition. The episode also takes on what is called dialectics, historical materialism, the labor theory of value, and Marxism's views of and more often absence of vision for a better society.

The episode asks, does immersing in and advocating the whole Marxist tradition support or subvert our collective endeavors? If it does the latter, as the episode argues, then what must we enrich or transcend to do better? If it does the former, contrary to my observations, okay, immerse, learn the lingo, and carry on, but correct me too, please.

The episode is provocative and controversial, perhaps even a bit funny here and there. It invites listeners to critically examine inherited theory and consider what conceptual tools we truly need to build a more just and participatory world. It proposes some answers and it also urges those who disagree to make known their views. Some will say the episode's claims are ahistorical, over dramatic, exaggerated, or even delusional or worst of all a reactionary attempt to disarm movements. Fine, if any of that is the case, it should be pretty easy to demonstrate. I hope those who think so will attempt to do so.

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Episode 340 of RevolutionZ addresses the mass deportations that are tearing through communities across America, and and discusses the resistance is growing. In this revealing conversation. Jeff Crosby—a factory worker at General Electric, former union president, and longtime labor activist says "We need leaders more than legislators right now." ICE targets students, family members, neighbors, and workers with no criminal records. But why do some support this? Crosby describes how economic collapse in manufacturing cities created the conditions where immigrants became convenient scapegoats, even as immigrant businesses have revitalized once-abandoned downtowns.

He describes how an immigrant led coalition in Massachusetts has trained over 1,000 "verifiers" who document ICE activities, often causing agents to leave rather than be filmed while making deportations visible and helping prevent them through non-violent direct action. But Crosby warns this is just the beginning of what could become a much larger confrontation, comparing potential sanctuary actions to those used during the Vietnam War.

Crosby challenges progressives to develop a vision that speaks to economic realities while refusing to compromise on racial justice, immigration rights, and other core values. "It's a race now," he explains. "Will the resistance get big enough or will Trump get entrenched?"

Crosby offers both a warning about where we might be headed and a roadmap for how ordinary people can effectively resist.

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Episode 339 of RevolutionZ has as its Guest Lucy Hicks from the General Strike US project to share her insights on building a decentralized movement aimed at mobilizing millions Americans for a general strike to "transform our economic and political systems." We discuss the challenges and strategies involved in creating nationwide labor and social solidarity during increasingly mind numbingly disturbing political times.

General Strike US formed in 2022. It is currently focused on political education, building regional chapters (it has 37 so far), and growing a strong foundation. What have been its experiences to date? What lessons does it convey? Where is it headed?

In addition to conversing about this project, episode 339 addresses the experiences and current mindsets and inclinations of Generation Z's members including Lucy herself. Where are they at? How have the pandemic imposed school at home and isolation, restrictive and declining life options, and antagonistic social media involvements impacted their lives? What obstacles from loneliness and isolation to fear and alienation, among others, limited or advanced radical or reactionary inclinations and collective organizing?

How do Lucy and others approach the problem of moving from the currently largely narrowly individualist orientation of their peers to a collective response to their plight? As of now, over 340,000 Americans have signed their "strike commitment cards" pledging to participate when the time comes. Will that climb to millions and If so, by what path will it happen? How will young people who are angry and even outraged, scared and even desperate come together to propel a resistance that can defeat Trumpism and then continue on to win a fundamentally better society?

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