For the dominant media, the biggest political story of 2019 was undoubtedly the impeachment of President Trump. After all, impeachment is an all-consuming force on Capitol Hill, where the debate over Trumpās dealings with Ukraine devolved into partisan blood sport over the past few months. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn, and it would be a disservice to the millions of people doing remarkable things to simply remember 2019 as the year the Trump Show finally aired its impeachment episode.
Outside the beltway, the world was on fire. Popular uprisings challenged governments across the world, and police responded with deadly force. Youth and Indigenous activists turned to strikes and direct action as scientists warned that the climate crisis is becoming a global emergency. From Hong Kong to Santiago and Port-au-Prince, borders could not contain a new generation of activists loudly confronting neoliberalism and state power. Whether scrawled across a wall or posted on social media, inspiration and solidarity proved contagious in 2019 ā and a threat to the established order.
To celebrate everyone who took action this year, weāve compiled four stories of resistance in 2019 that refuse to be overshadowed by Trump.
The Wind Cries Freedom, the new book from Z co-founder Michael Albert, is a sweeping oral history of a future American revolution.
Through thirty interconnected chapters, it draws out the strategies, failures, turning points, and hard-won wisdom of a movement that called itself the Revolutionary Participatory Society. These are not the polished memoirs of politicians: they are the unfiltered accounts of people who organized in neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, stadiums, courthouses, and places of worship, and kept a shared vision alive through cynicism and exhaustion.
The result is speculative political fiction that reads like history: messy, human, and quietly hopeful in the way that only real experience and long thought can produce.
Get your copy and peruse more features on the book’s website below.
“Read it, argue with it, but don’t look away. The future it recalls is one we must still fight to deserve.”
Yanis Varoufakis
“The most unusual and intriguing combination of prophecy, manifesto, and movement building manual that I have ever encountered.”
Bill Fletcher Junior
“This work fills a huge gap in our social movement literature.”
Cynthia Peters
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CRITICAL ACTION
Critical Action is a longtime friend of Z and a music and storytelling project grounded in liberation, solidarity, and resistance to authoritarian power. Through music, narrative, and multimedia, the project engages the same political realities and movement traditions that guide and motivate Zās work.
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