Before offering my take on the oral history of a Next American Revolution or NAR, a kind of review of it, I guess, I should probably acknowledge that I was one of the book’s interviewees and also from its start an avid member of the focused organization, Revolutionary Participatory Society, or RPS. For me to review this project may for those reasons feel awkward, but that’s par for me. Consider it narcissistic if you like, or perhaps merely forthright since of course I want people to hear about our revolution.

Miguel Guevara, the book’s interviewer, solicited my views, among lots of others, for his oral history, and I happily consented. But I have to admit I wasn’t particularly excited by my contribution and I doubted Miguel would use it. However, a year later, I received the finished book and a heartfelt note of thanks. But since I lived through the times and knew many of the interviewees and the experiences they recounted, I felt no great rush to read it, and with our transitional times being incredibly busy, I set the book aside.

A month passed and I got the flu. Since I hate watching video during the day I by chance powered up the oral history for diversion. I saw after a short immersion that Miguel’s project would be very useful to activists in general, and even better for anyone who doubted prospects for winning a new world or was unsure what a new world could mean, or for how his or her choices might contribute to winning one. In other words, useful for people like myself and the countless others who made RPS happen but who live in a different time and place, and have not yet re-made their own world.

In the evening I read on, and it turned out the book was also useful for an unrelentingly committed veteran of RPS like myself, not for reliving glory days or enjoying a subtle selfie, but because many eyes and many voices give many angles, slants, and takes—and many is more than one.

More, even for someone as involved as myself, while the many interviews were of course compatibly similar, they felt additive rather than redundant. We interviewees told how we got radical, how we later used language to communicate and not alienate, and how we simultaneously sought reforms and revolution while we avoided the ills of violence, excessive electoralism, and suicidal sectarianism. We agreed about where we wanted to arrive, else how would we have gotten there, but we took different paths to our similar ends, and we recounted their different nuances.

For example, considering RPS’s roots, we evaluated the 2016 election and its aftermath. We offered mutually enhancing insights on RPS start-up, early rallies and events, on two conventions, on chapter building, demands, and initial thoughts, vision and program. We recounted successful but also compromised electoral work. We reported the means and results of our consciousness raising work, and described how we contested for race, gender, class, and environmental change and constructed shadow and alternative institutions to plant seeds of sought future program, projects, and habits. 

Throughout my friend Miguel’s oral history, my fellow interviewees and I described our journeys into and through RPS, including misgivings along the way and why we persisted despite them. We shared with Guevara criticism and praise. We recounted warnings and celebrations. We told what we had to overcome and what we had to enact.

As my flu-ridden self read through Next American Revolution, I felt proud that our in-person non fiction-like, story-like descriptions transformed what might have been dry claims into heartfelt evidentiary testimony. But I also appreciated that NAR wasn’t/isn’t a rousing call to do as we did. Miguel wasn’t saying live like these folks. Do what these folks did. No, Miguel and each respondent recognized the dependency on our specific contexts of each event and choice in our timelines—whether sanctuaries, boycotts, marches, strikes, occupations, or elections. So we  interviewees each described our times as we experienced them, south, north, west, east, center and coast—but we recognized and emphasized the contextual dependency of it all. It was some elements of one possible way, not all elements of an only way. Miguel elicited our words and melded them into chapters to address different facets of being a revolutionary and making revolution. He distilled out generally applicable insights and lessons, not a one size fits all exhortation.

Yes, I do believe RPS’s values are basic for modern human liberation. I do believe you can’t ignore equity, downplay justice, bypass self management, sacrifice solidarity, or underestimate diversity, sustainability, or peace and expect to win a worthy world. Likewise, my fellow interviewees’ words also showed the centrality of institutional vision for RPS’s timeline. But even beyond those overarching themes, what I got from hearing RPS history from so many voices and especially from hearing about parts of the journey that were pivotal to other participants yet peripheral or even unknown to me, was that our path from an oppressive past to a revolutionized future wasn’t, in fact, one path. At every turn, different steps were not just possible, they were taken. We didn’t lockstep one path to a singular endpoint. We traversed multiple paths to a diverse new world. Another revolution in a different time and place won’t even mirror much less duplicate our revolution. But Guevara’s premise was that other revolutions might usefully echo or reflect on ours to add and refine various key aspects and insights. Conveying possibility and what some general aspects and insights might be for you to refine, correct, augment, adapt, or even overthrow were his focus even if to pursue those ends he necessarily asked about many specific personal experiences.

Rerun our history’s tape starting in 2017 100 times and I believe the shape of our path would differ each time. A modest change at the outset would often snowball into many differences not far down the road. Perhaps a few reruns would attain success faster than we did in our particular history as recounted in Next American Revolution. Maybe a comparable number of rerun histories would fall to internal flaws or suffer massive war, climate collapse, plague, or other dystopian calamities of the sort so many people so oddly like to write or read about. But beyond those possibilities, I would guess that most reruns would lead to liberation roughly like ours did, even though perhaps requiring longer or less long than we took due to making different choices, encountering different obstacles, or provoking different responses. I think Miguel felt similarly and so felt an oral history of our actual project might prove helpful to people embarking on another revolutionary effort in another time and place. 

Given all that, my main thought on Miguel’s oral history, and my main hope for it is, I think, quite like Miguel’s. I hope I t makes the ringing of revolution plausible and even tangible. I hope it helps generate and inform successful activism in other than our time and place. 

To test its prospects, I tried to read Next American Revolution not as the participant I have been, but as the curious and worried young woman I was over a quarter century ago, and, in that persona, I found it particularly provocative. It didn’t strike me as a how-to-do-it book. It seemed instead a how-to-conceive-it, how-to-refine-it, and how-to-work-on-it-yourself-along-with-others-book.

In that sense, to me the oral history seems relevant not mainly as an oral history that looks back, but more as a facilitator of creative rebellion and revolution exploration that looks forward. As my flu-ridden self read it, it felt like a work in progress and I wondered if others will see it that way. I wondered if others will experience and even extend it not as an engaging novel, and not as an impossible dream, but as a helping hand stretched out across time and space for your consideration. I hope so.

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This article is part of the The Next American Revolution series run on ZNetwork and RevolutionZ, and based Michael Albert’s novel An Oral History of The Next American Revolution.

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