The United States is currently experiencing one of its most intense COVID-19 surges since the pandemic began earlier this year. California, for example, recently ordered 5,000 body bags while ordering refrigerated trucks to be on standby. Despite the slow rollout of a vaccine, we are seeing more and more positive cases, more hospitalizations, and unemployment claims that are rising by their largest amount since last spring. And with only $600 being offered through Congress’s stimulus plan, the future is looking pretty bleak.
Amid all of this, there is a broad movement of grassroots organizations throughout the country that are taking their community’s well-being into their own hands. Mutual aid organizations have been working to provide food, supplies and services to the most vulnerable populations throughout the country.
Mutual aid is an idea and practice that emphasizes working with communities in a horizontal and solidaristic way. And although federal, state and local authorities are playing a modest role in assisting certain groups during these tumultuous times, there are many gaps in service that mutual aid groups have been filling. Undocumented folks, houseless folks and others who are disproportionately impacted by this pandemic, including disabled and incarcerated people, are not getting the assistance that they need.
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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