Ep 362 WCF: Convene and Transcend

RevolutionZ

Content provided by Michael Albert. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Michael Albert or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

8d ago 51:17

MP3•Episode home

Episode 362 of RevolutionZ continues the oral history recounting by Miguel Guevara and his interviewees. It delves further with the motives, aims, and mechanics of a successful future revolution. This time, it asks, what if the hardest part of building a movement isn’t the opposition outside, but the pressure inside the room—and inside our heads?

Guevara leads Andre Goldman, Malcolm Mays and Cynthia Parks in a discussion that describes the founding convention of RPS where three thousand people traded posturing for process and built consensus without blunting their ideals. They describe how months of preparation, open amendments, and careful straw polls set a tone that prized clarity over dominance and turned potential stalemates into workable albeit provisional decisions.
From there, the interviewees explore how a “starter program” could be broad without becoming a blur. Wages and work hours. Tax the rich and full employment. Expanded, revised education for all. Immigration and community control of policing. Reproductive and LGBTQ rights. Democratic reforms like ranked choice voting and public financing. Single‑payer healthcare, demilitarization, climate action, and oversight of AI. The initial national platform offered scaffolding that let chapters choose priorities that fit their own local needs—a structure that fed momentum instead of draining it.
Then Cynthia’s story reframes the stakes. Childhood eviction and family violence carved an inner voice in her mind that said you can’t, a crippling voice that many carry with no one else seeing. Rather than pretend that politics is only external, In response to this widespread issue, RPS carved out space to confront internalized doubt and the habits that keep people silent. That attention to the psychological side of participation—paired with humble, flexible strategy—helped the project survive fragile beginnings, temper early rigidity, and welcome new leaders. Guevara's questions also wrestle with the family versus movement dilemma: what does responsible care look like when the future your kids inherit depends on what you build with others today. How much time to allot where? How can we even think about such a vexing choice?
If you’re organizing, if you're curious about consensus that actually works, or about how to fight the voices within that say your effort, or someone else's effort won’t matter, this episode offers tools our interviewees used in their world and time—procedures that can keep trust intact, culture that can tame ego and liberate potentials, and a program that travels from national goals to neighborhood action.

Does the episode resonate with you? If so, perhaps share it and the whole Wind Cries Freedom sequence with a friend who is doing or considering doing movement work. Do you instead find the discussion lacking or even wrong? Okay, in either case, perhaps leave a comment to help improve coming episodes. .

Support the show

Chapters

1. Setting The Stage And Stakes (00:00:00)

2. Why The Founding Convention Mattered (00:02:36)

3. Building A Flexible, Provisional Framework (00:06:35)

4. Inside The Room: Process And Tone (00:12:31)

5. Narrowing To A Starter Program (00:16:44)

6. Cynthia On Roots And Inner Voices (00:19:05)

7. Fragile Beginnings And Momentum (00:26:48)

8. The Catch‑22 Of Early Organizing (00:33:14)

9. Balancing Family And Movement (00:39:27)

10. From Self‑Doubt To Shared Capacity (00:46:12)

11. Closing Reflections And Hope (00:49:32)

369 episodes

#Activism #Science #Michael Albert #Society #News #Social Sciences #Revolution #Social #Anarchism #Feminism #Albert #Chomsky #Green #Economics #Ecology