Somewhere, in the complex and often confused history of anarchist and communitarian movements of the US, Michael Albert resides, now almost 80, a veteran of endless campaigns but still eager to make his familiar points. Communitarianism of some kind can work, can create a substitute for the miserable economic arrangements of the present, and engage ordinary people in the process of changing themselves as they endeavor to change the world.

This sentiment has a more than honorable history even in the US, historically known for its weak and fragile Left institutions. Its origins should properly be placed well before the rise of the Marxist-related movements, mostly German immigrants, during the 1860s-70s. Indeed, the communitarian experiments of the 1820s-40s engaged some of the great figures of the age, from Shakers to Bohemians, and even produced a remarkable literature, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s rather satirical Blithedale Romance.

The ideas of dress reform (mainly for women), healthy foods, and even freer sexual relations flowed into Abolitionist and Women’s Rights movements. The Civil War swallowed a large chunk of utopianism, but enough survived to prompt a rebirth in successive generations. Edward Bellamy’s best-selling novel, Looking Backward , published in 1887, seemed, by example, to make small-scale cooperative living imaginable, even if colonies nearly always failed in their first (under-capitalization and too few agricultural skills counted heavily). Hope is ever-born or perhaps never really goes away. Skinny-dipping and open curricula for children’s education, known in the 1910s, also found their way into the hippie mini-societies of the 1960s-70s.

It would be hard to say how deeply anarchist and communitarian ideas penetrated the “Counter Culture”—a phrase so dated and imprecise that we now set it off— but the sentiment was sincere and deep. “Share the Land” by the Canadian group Guess Who still resonates on YouTube with a confidence of “Brothers and Sisters Who Care” sharing valuables in common. It just didn’t work out in life.

To his credit, Michael Albert never gave up. Student activist, antiwar protester, launched South End Press in Boston of the 1970s, and the avowedly anarchist/libertarian Z Magazine in 1989. Thereafter, Albert and various collaborators, notably Robin Hahnel, worked out theories of alternatives to the market economy along lines that Prince Peter Kropotkin surely would have approved. At what might be called a literary highpoint,  he published Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003), a book translated into a couple dozen languages. Albert took his message to the world. The specifics of the furious debates over whether his proposal would work in practical economic terms, are now long past and largely forgotten—but the debate inevitably goes on. Beneath the specifics could be found a deeper plan, a vision based more on ethics than practical details.

And here we are twenty-some years later. And, no doubt, with the enriching personal experience of establishing, through an extended Z Media Institute, a world of training for the next generations of media and grassroots activists, now emphatically including podcasters, including Michael and the Z folks.

The conceit of this fat volume is that the Revolution has been successful, as related by an aged activist and SDS veteran to an oral historian. Like the most rigorous of oral histories, it encompasses a life story or rather a number of life stories. These mostly lack—according to me, an experienced oral historian and director of a couple of oral history programs—the deep family and community background that is most useful. But it emphatically includes details of the process of participation and learning, from a couple dozen imagined participants of widely different backgrounds, through lives of many struggles.

A little backstory from my end is useful. Oral history, the practical use of oral history, fell upon me in the 1970s as I realized that the vital living memories of the 1920s-40s Left—what they believed and what they did, far from the centers of Leftwing national leadership—were slipping away fast. The field had emerged around this time, more activist than academic, with some thousands of activists. Amongst these, the Oral History of the American Left archive (NYU), my veritable brain-child. And later more oral history on Rhode Island working people; still later teaching oral history for a decade at Brown.

I mention these personal details because, in my own experience as a field worker, administrator and teacher, oral history is valuable especially as a probing of personal life, that is to say personal life from childhood (usually also family and setting). That is: how the child grows into man or woman, developing beliefs and behaviors that often last a lifetime.

Not that there is one standard by which all oral histories can or should be judged.  Michael  Albert’s gambit is to construct oral histories out of his imagination, at dates largely in the future. His oral history interviewees, some of them participants in SDS a lifetime ago, seem less than likely to have  childhoods or family memories useful to them. Mostly younger folks, their experiences began, logically, with 2015-16, the Bernie Campaign, or a little earlier, in Occupy.

None of them appeared to have experienced the hyper-intense working-class movement parallel to Occupy, that is the Wisconsin Uprising (2011-13). That the experience tested the capacity of perhaps a half-million participants, notably women unionists in teaching and care professions, would have been useful, even in drastic failure, thanks in no part to the unwillingness of leading Democrats or labor officials outside the state to lend a hand.

But perhaps I have exaggerated the difficulties of oral history because the speakers in The Wind Cries Freedom experience so much in their own lives from about 2010 onward. Some are inevitably more compelling than others. The personal conversion to RPS or Revolutionary Participatory Society has more than a little in common with other “conversion” experiences, but in a good way. As one participant makes clear—but is present in the thoughts of others—“We don’t just need smart policy proposals—we had those. What we needed was to share those proposals with each other across our movements.” (p.51)

The central and driving idea is that excitement and engagement in different struggles—say, for affordable housing in US cities and against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza—should or could prompt something more coherent. That coherence, in turn, could lead to a conversation and a movement around a different kind of society. The devilish details would follow

I wish to be persuaded by this line of argument because, after all, “participatory” brings back theorganic 1960s notion of “participtory democracy.” The famous two-word phrase got lost amidst the violence (99% by the government) and confusion (that we all shared).

The reader of this book can decide best, looking through it, what appeals, what makes sense, and how it may be used.

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