The following article is excerpted from a book in progress titled An Oral History of The Next American Revolution. It includes a Foreword, an Introduction, and a short First Chapter of the book. Z will publish one excerpt a week for fourteen weeks as a series. Visit the Z Community Forum to discuss the weekly installments – our discussions will impact each new installment and inform a weekly RevolutionZ episode.

                                                                                 

Foreward

– by Michael Albert, 2024

In his own United States, in his own 2044, Miguel Guevara began questioning a group of prominent revolutionaries about their Revolution for a Participatory Society (RPS). From the resulting interviews, Miguel stitched together an oral history that is here titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution.  

Miguel lives on an “alt earth” whose initial divergence from our earth shuffled people, morphed names, tweaked events, and shifted time 28 years. Alt earth’s 2016 closely resembled our 2016, but when we endured 2016, alt earth enjoyed 2044. Our future won’t mimic their past, but could their past inform our future? Guevara thought it could.

An eye blink ago, now in our own 2004, 52 activists and 2,000 additional advocates signed a statement titled, “We Stand for Peace and Justice.”

“We stand for peace and justice. We see an organized anti worker, anti minority, anti immigrant, anti woman, anti LGBTQ, anti ecological, pro imperial, incarceration minded, surveillance employing, authoritarian reaction proliferating around the world. It calls itself right wing populist but is arguably more accurately termed neofascist. It preys on fear as well as warranted anger. It manipulates and misleads with false promises and spews outright lies. It tries to create an international alliance. Courageous responses are emerging and will proliferate around issue after issue, and in country after country. These responses will challenge the unworthy emotions, the vicious lies, and the vile policies. They will reject right wing rollback and repression. But to ward off an international, multi issue, reactionary assault shouldn’t we be internationalist and multi issue? Shouldn’t we reject reaction but also seek positive, forward looking, inspiring progress? To those ends:

“We stand for the growing activism on behalf of progressive change around the world, and their positive campaigns for a better world, and we stand against the rising reactionary usurpers of power around the world and their lies, manipulations, and policies.

“We stand for peace, human rights, and international law against the conditions, mentalities, institutions, weapons and dissemination of weapons that breed and nurture war and injustice.

“We stand for healthcare, education, housing, and jobs against war and military spending. We stand for internationalism, indigenous, and native rights, and a democratic foreign policy against empire, dictatorship, and political and religious fundamentalism.

“We stand for justice against economic, political, and cultural institutions that promote huge economic and power inequalities, corporate domination, privatization, wage slavery, racism, gender and sexual hierarchy, and the devolution of human kindness and wisdom under assault by celebrated authority and enforced passivity.

“We stand for democracy and autonomy against authoritarianism and subjugation. We stand for prisoner rights against prison profiteering. We stand for participation against surveillance. We stand for freedom and equity against repression and control.

“We stand for national sovereignty against occupation and apartheid. We oppose overtly brutal regimes everywhere. We oppose less overtly brutal but still horribly constricting electoral subversion, government and corporate surveillance, and mass media manipulation.

“We stand for equity against exploitation by corporations of their workers and consumers and by empires of subordinated countries. We stand for solidarity of and with the poor and the excluded everywhere.

“We stand for diversity against homogeneity and for dignity against racism. We stand for multi-cultural, internationalist, community rights, against cultural, economic, and social repression of immigrants and other subordinated communities in our own countries and around the world.

“We stand for gender equality against misogyny and machismo. We stand for sexual freedom against sexual repression, homogenization, homophobia, and transphobia.

“We stand for ecological wisdom against the destruction of forests, soil, water, environmental resources, and the biodiversity on which all life depends. We stand for ecological sanity against ecological suicide.

“We stand for a world whose political, economic, and social institutions foster solidarity, promote equity, maximize participation, celebrate diversity, and encourage full democracy.

“We will not be a least common denominator single issue or single focus coalition. We will be a massive movement of movements with a huge range of concerns, ideas, and aims, united by what we stand for and against.

“We will enjoy and be strengthened by shared respect and mutual aid while we together reject sectarian hostilities and posturing.

“We stand for and pledge to work for peace and justice.”

That “We Stand* statement from 2004 got about 120,000 signatures overall but it didn’t yield a broad, continuing project. However, later, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaign, MeToo and the Women’s March, on-going anti-war resistance, persistent immigration organizing, vigorous anti-Trump resistance, wide and persistent global anti fossil sustainability activism, and the resistance to the Israel/U.S. war on Palestine together evidenced the likelihood of more struggle to come. Where might it go? 

Don’t ask how—I have no idea the mechanics of the conveyance—but I have received and now have the responsibility to channel Miguel Guevara’s oral history which echoes, substantially enlarges, and most importantly successfully acts on the much earlier We Stand sentiments. Can lessons relayed to us from Miguel’s revolutionary alternative future inspire advance in our current world? Time waits for no one, and time will answer.

Introduction

– Miguel Ernesto Guevara, 2049

A quarter century ago, in 2024, another in a long sequence of intermittent massive upsurges took hold and grew. For me, Miguel, in my world, it was uniquely historic because as Summer came the radicalization didn’t devolve but only paused and after a time came back. For you in 2024, being inside it, watching it, cheering it, worrying it, you may wonder, unlike so many other rebellions, how might this one persist? Indeed, how might this one go from time-bound to timeless? How might it go from narrowly focused to broadly comprehensive? How might it go from rebellion against injustice that afflicts some, to revolution for justice that liberates all? Good questions. I know some folks who found some answers.     

Starting in the 1960s, in their teens, my parents sought a fundamentally better world. They were courageous activists who named me to honor their hero, Che, and probably to prod me, as well. 

They stuck true to their desires, but a lifetime later that felt to them, so they told me, like barely along moment, they witnessed Trump’s first triumph. As I watched them watch Trump, I felt that they felt something must have been seriously wrong about their prior activist path. Their Glory Days, truth be told, had not led to the glorious results they sought. They died wondering how today’s generations would do better. What would their children’s success look like? What would a better world include? 

Next American Revolution is an oral history of a victorious period running from my 2026, to my 2049. I questioned interviewees about their project to build a Revolutionary Participatory Society. I then relayed their story in a book which you now have. How did that happen—damned if I know. 

In any case, might their history’s lessons broadly foretell at least some elements of your future? Might their commitments inform your commitments? To those ends, in our interview sessions I tried to elicit generally applicable lessons. You judge if I succeeded. 

Che, for whom I was named, sought to become a doctor until his oppressive times waylaid him to become an inquisitive and socially learned guerrilla fighter who led courageous Cuban troops to overcome economic and social injustice. 

Despite my having Che’s name, I dreamed only that I would write novels, but it was not to be. Despite desire and considerable hard work, I found that I lacked sufficient imagination to write engaging fiction. I was into words, but words were not into me. So I shed a tear, had a drink, and figured okay, no problem, I’ll write fact. I’ll be a journalist. 

I got a beat and a boss and from 2034 to 2040 I wrote topical essays for a Latin American news project. I pegged each story to news cycle excitement. I offered facts. I avoided lessons. I offered names, dates, and happenstances. I avoided whys, where froms, and where tos. I wrote about 1500 words three hundred times. 

In sum, I followed the rules of my job, and I got blindingly bored. I wasn’t on a chain gang, but nor was I blissfully free. And like my namesake, injustice waylaid me too.

I quit my job and blundered about for a time, but in early 2041 I read an oral history of the 1960s. It wasn’t a brilliant book not least because the interviewer’s questions were only mildly inspiring. Because of the questions, the interviewees’ answers focussed more on themselves than on Sixties movements, motives, and methods. That was a big misstep, at least to my eyes. 

But even so, the interviewees did describe, reveal, engage, and teach the limited substance they prioritized. Their chattiness and persistence moved me. I didn’t particularly like the book, but I did like the medium. And indeed, my having discovered oral history gradually overcame my boredom and in 2043 I began asking participants of the then on-going U.S. Revolution for a Participatory Society (abbreviated RPS) to recount their stories for the oral history you are poised to read. 

I asked them, what did you do? Why did you do it? What were the problems? What were the successes? What lessons did you learn? I didn’t so much seek information about individual’s life lines, as I sought information about their collective undertaking. 

The interviewees were my vehicle. Their thoughts, goals, and methods were my focus. I was interested in lesson lines, not lifelines. But time exists and I had a problem. When would the oral history start? When would it end? 

In a process as complex and multi-faceted as a social revolution, there really is no start date, no end date. But I had to start sometime and end at another time. It wasn’t entirely a free choice. My interviewees lived and experienced what they lived and experienced, and that was not everything from time endlessly past to time endlessly future. So asking them how they got started pretty much defined our start time. That problem was solved by them. However to end the history was another matter. I was interviewing while it was still happening. It could go on and on. I needed a way to not quite but almost arbitrarily end it. When to choose?

Revolutions can be seen as having phases. First, reaching out and accruing support. Second, contesting with powers that be. Third, constructing what will be new. The three phases come sort of in that order except it isn’t all one and then all another and finally all the third. 

Rather in revolutions all three happen from start to end but the weight of each in the whole changes. First consciousness raising, then contestation, then construction is preponderant, but all always happen. There is even a name for the third phase, Transition. 

Transition arrives broadly when construction of society’s new institutions becomes central. While still winning additional people over with consciousness raising and, while still fighting residual elements that want the past to return, on reaching Transition the emphasis becomes constructing the future. When does that happen? 

Roughly when the Revolution has attained so much social power that it is really driving events and the past is reduced to fighting it from outside. In other words, when the revolution is no longer subordinate to a state and its forces of repression and when the state, now really the polity, has become a part of the revolution. When the state has become a changing part and a modest part, but no longer an enemy. 

And when is that, in our oral history? It is when the Revolutionary Participatory Society has risen to creator in most of society, and in particular in governance. A brief opening chapter tells about that milestone place, that pause before Transition which itself occurs after our oral history.

So, will you now read what emerged? Will you hear my interviewee’s words and relate them to your own circumstances? I found the interviewees to be a grand group. They were like you but already had future stories with happy endings albeit arriving there after often tumultuous starts. 

My interviewees identified precursors, assessed early activities, and described aims. They discussed Revolutionary Participatory Society’s birth, emergence, and maturation. They recounted its ups and downs, and envisioned its trajectory to the point of transition. And yes, that means that you already know, right here at the outset that when this book ends, they are headed for really, truly, fully winning. How’s that for a drama killer? No cliffhanger. But that’s okay. Drama isn’t my aim. 

The interviewees who speak here evaluate RPS’s early efforts in health, housing, urban relations, economics, entertainment, sports, religion, law, and media. They describe how RPS’s policies emerged. They report why disagreements arose. They recount how they together resolved differences. 

The interviewees describe RPS’s gender, race, class, international, and ecological policies. They assess RPS’s approach to solidarity, leadership, and correcting its own inadequacies. They show by example how revolutionaries jettisoned their own personal baggage and built their own collective solidarity. 

The interviewees talk about RPS’s shadow government and its shadow society programs. They describe RPS’s social vision and its strategic principles. They address ecology, health, legality, education, media, economy, city life, family life, and elections. They describe their new society being conceived and struggling to win life. They share its lessons. Their stories often get personal and sometimes even dramatic. But this is not a revolutionary manual or a social studies text book, nor is it a typical novel with one or two central characters who undergo personal travail to finally emerge either victorious or annihilated. This is an oral history. It describes the interviewees’ future time in hopes that their vivid experiences will help you navigate your present times. 

This oral history is not a travelogue. It is not a trip up technology lane. It doesn’t predict and excavate details of how to deal with AI or with energy and resource use, much less does it describe fashions and fads. It does not highlight contingent highly malleable choices, much less review future music or describe future inventions. It isn’t about future specifics. It is about plausible revolutionary thoughts, feelings, processes, and outcomes.  It is about future possibilities. It is about winning a better future.

I questioned the interviewees sometimes one at a time and other times two, and even three at a time. I chose questions. I mixed and matched answers into topical chapters that offer lessons, but not a precise timeline. People’s answers reflect their own views and priorities. What they talk about skips forward and backward in time. The interviewees mainly mean to relay the essential visionary and strategic insights that their experiences rested on and taught them. The interviewees hope readers will refine, enlarge, augment, and then use the emergent lessons. The interviewees are therefore the authors—but so are you. This is their story but it is far from a complete history. I channelled the interviewees’ words to you. The meaning is for you to discern as you see fit. 

But wait. Have you already noticed there is a weird complication. You are about to read these interviews decades before they occurred and even before when the events they recount occurred. You have my gratitude for your patience with the dissonance of that. I know it may make their words feel a little strange. Tenses may get confused. Your time. Their time. Whose time? But, please, don’t let details like that sidetrack you. Ignore that what follows isn’t in your history books. The thing to consider is the plausibility, dignity, and effectivity of their struggles. This is not an oral history of detailed events, technology, conflicts, or even people. Such content appears only enough to convey the possible soul and content of a possible Next American Revolution. This is an oral history of that. 

Chapter 1 — Looking Ahead

In which President Malcolm King and Vice President Celia Curie very briefly discuss their recent election experiences.

Wait—again. Who the hell begins an oral history presenting content from very near its last recording session? Me. I do. Miguel Guevara. I warned you in my Introduction that the timeline might get a bit confusing. I even apologized for it. 

I conducted one interview after another over quite a few years, so I started the first interview well before I finished the last. More, the interviews do not span the whole revolution, but only a part, albeit pretty much. To be really clear that the point of it all isn’t to wonder if they will win or not, here in chapter one I offer some excerpts from one of the last interview sessions that certainly suggests that total victory is coming. It was recorded mostly in the Oval Office in 2049 where the new Revolutionary Participatory Society President and Vice President offered some remarks on their new situations just after being inaugurated and at a kind of take-off point for all that would then follow: The continuing acts of RPS. The collective construction of the sought society. 

Mr. President…

Are you kidding me [the new Vice President Celia Curie interrupts]. Jeez Miguel, Call him Malcolm. I do. We all do.

But Madame Vice President…

Miguel, seriously? I am not a statue. I am not a label. I am Celia.

Well, okay… Celia, Malcolm, what a pleasure to celebrate your victory. How do you feel?

Eager. Cautious. But, Miguel, ideas won not us…

But you and Celia traversed the country. You campaigned. You won…Right Celia?

No. Not right. Yes, Malcolm and I walked, rode, and flew a lot. We talked a lot. We got hoarse, talking. Sure. But millions of volunteers won. Miguel, do you remember at the convention, after choosing candidates, when we were celebrating and Malcolm spoke, and I think I can repeat it but, Malcolm they were your lines, so you repeat it…   

Okay, well, I think it went like this: “Thirty five years ago. Someone running and winning for President with my views was an impossible dream. Then Bernie Sanders brought hope. Black Lives matter exploded. Activism flourished. MeToo, too. Horrible Covid. Incredible Palestine support, and on to RPS. And here we are.”

Celia, what are your first reactions to the Oval Office?

Look at these portraits. My first reaction is the same as anyone with eyes. We need to redecorate.

And what about immediate program?

It will of course be what our supporters desire. Hold a constitutional convention and build local assemblies to revamp government. Enlarge the Supreme Court to reflect society. Build housing, schools, and clinics. Drastically down-size the military. Pardon many many prisoners. Renovate judicial procedures. Further innovate energy and all production to attain ecological balance. Further restrict AI. Support unending workplace take-overs. And then more. 

Test and refine participatory planning. Empower and federate neighborhood assemblies. Demolish income and wealth inequity. Tax and repossess. Advance real self management. Follow the will of the people. Follow the will of the people. RPS has waged a quarter century journey of ceaseless struggle. RPS has reached a new stage. It is now time to build new institutions. It is now time to build our new society. We certainly won’t let up now.

Malcolm, do you agree? Do you feel pressure for RPS to do all that? Do you feel fear?

I feel excited tension. We need to construct even as we win over some who have yet to agree with liberation and overcome residual resistance. Imagine the impact this movement, this revolution, can have. And yes, I feel some fear. Ignorant government choices, like ignorant choices in other on-going construction, could slow change and yes, I do fear that. But good government choices could speed up change. So we will seek that. This is just one more notable flex point in our journey. We will flex forward, of course.

In tune with the health workers’ advisory to “do no harm,” and the ecologist’s “precautionary principle,” we have to do good and also avoid damage. 

Is their sufficient unity of will and vision to accomplish that?

We are about to see. At RPS’s beginning, do you remember how friends, workmates, and relatives often feuded. RPS members were few and we often clashed with non RPS neighbors and workmates, and even with each other. “I want…no, I want…” We all endured such conflicts even in our own families. To advance, we had to arouse hope and raise consciousness. We had to overcome many differences, not with each seeking to be right and prove others wrong, but with everyone seeking to move forward effectively. And we had to do it while high water was rising and hard rain was falling everywhere. 

That was a daunting but not impossible task and we did it with our labor strikes and sit ins. We did it at immigrant detention centers, in courts, jails, and at military bases. We did it in workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and homes. As RPS membership grew and our vision developed and spread, we initiated our own new community centers and day care programs. We created new schools, and changed laws. RPS planted seeds of a better future with our new projects. But we also fought inside existing institutions and we won initially modest but steadily escalating victories there. We of course also endured many losses and suffered many setbacks. There was repression and conflict, but mostly RPS marched forward. Celia and I and all of us learned from grassroots efforts every day. The movement was the star. The movement was the school. The population was the teacher. Celia and I were just precocious students. 

Do you remember just after election day? I was in New York City hearing Alexandra Voline introduce the city’s Mayor, RPS member Bill Hampton. He wore an RPS hat and looked elated. A massive crowd looked upon a New Year’s Eve-like stage. A banner waved: Another World Is Ours.

Yes, I remember, but Celia and I were already in Washington, not New York, though we saw videos and they were wonderful…

Alexandra was the mc and she said, “Here we are. Inauguration Day. Another milestone on the way toward fulfilling our aims in every workplace, school, neighborhood, city, and state. I give you, your Mayor, Bill Hampton…”

[Celia takes up the account.] Yes, and Bill reached out and swept his arms and eyes across the massive, buoyant New Year’s Eve-like crowd, and I remember Bill said, “politics used to be competitive and elitist. It was money grubbing, hypocritical bureaucracy in service of wealth and power. As Mayor, in prior years I struggled to reduce its insanities, often to little avail. Politics used to be disconnected professionals dictating from above. Now you all demand and enact. Now politics is you!”

When I saw the video, as Governor of California I knew exactly what Bill was talking about. Even at that point he had me leaking happy tears, and then he got to everyone. He described to a million in the street, maybe more—and to so many more by video—how as a child, as he put it, “I suffered nightmares of big planes silently, ominously, almost gently, dropping massive parachutes, and beneath each chute, swaying to a devil’s dirge, huge cylindrical, nuclear coffins drifted down.” The crowd went utterly silent and Bill smiled. “But I woke up,” he said. “We all woke up. We got into each other’s nightmares of war and climate collapse and fascist violence and we turned them into colorful, inspiring dreams of freedom. Visions replaced fears. And now we celebrate a new milestone. Tomorrow we will carry on. All of you are now architects of our collective future.”

Malcolm, what were you thinking just after the election?

I had my own childhood nightmares. I used to see cattle cars full of human corpses. Thousands of them, stretching across the country, east to west and back, and back again, seven times. Society’s killing train. And so when I watched people cheering Bill, in the street, I thought those people are not corpses. They are not mourning. They are celebrating. They are ready to build a new far far more worthy world. 

I said at the time, when Inauguration Day was still coming, that “Rebels and rakes, outcasts, the gentle, the kind, poets and painters, bricklayers and truck drivers, doctors and dreamers, saints and sinners, those incarcerated in jails and those incarcerated in boring subordination, those in struggle and those still getting in, we all need a moment’s rest, a moment to celebrate as we set out to win still greater victories to come.” 

I remember that Celia said “history has shackled society’s citizens so long that many millions now want to dance in the streets.” And that she wanted to as well—and me, I did too, and I am no dancer.

And so for inauguration, to accommodate so many celebrants we held events in all our big cities and in hundreds of counties. We danced to decades of struggle. We danced to battling on. All of us. And we must now undertake transition. East to West and North to South. A new society, part of a new world.

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Author’s Note: I hope readers will continue with this serialization’s weekly excerpts. The next excerpt is chapter two and is titled First Breaths. Its interviewees will talk about first gatherings and rallies, early struggles, overcoming resistance, and establishing early momentum. In the meantime, I hope you will find some time to use Z’s Community Forum to provide reactions, criticisms, advice, and whatever else you would like to share to help improve the project. I also hope you will listen to the next RevolutionZ podcast episode which will explain further and offer diverse interjections of additional thoughts, reasons, and hopes for what you have just read.

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