The Wind Cries Freedom is an oral history of a Next American Revolution. Eighteen interviewees report and explain their personal motives, means, methods, debates, feelings, and choices. They offer the lessons of their actions to hopefully help answer the pivotal questions of our time: What new institutions do we want in place of what we now endure? What means of organizing and activism can we use to attain our aims?
The interviewees' answers have both a personal and a programmatic dimension. What did the actors feel and choose? What logic guided their organization's founding, structure, and program? What vision did they seek, and by what strategies, tactics, and personal means?
Their accounts start from the American present day and address all sides of life, including economy, family, religion, legality, polity, sports, education, healthcare, and more. Can freedom win? Their stories say yes. Their pursuit of freedom succeeded in their time and place. Their stories tell how. As our world suffers indignities, immediate violations, and existential dangers, their reports of how they attained a new world speak directly to us.
Review :
"For too long, the left has been caught in a sterile oscillation between utopian blueprints that ignore power's cunning, and pragmatic tinkering that forgets what emancipation means. In this remarkable book, Michael Albert breaks through that deadlock. Drawing on a lifetime of organising and a rare fidelity to both analytical rigour and experimental imagination, he offers not a prophecy but a tool: an oral history from a future that remains possible only if we refuse its foreclosure by today's market fundamentalism. Where neoliberal common sense tells us there is no alternative, Albert dares to narrate one-concretely, conflictually, without erasing the contradictions that any genuine democracy must navigate. As someone who has watched the horrors of actually existing capitalism up close-from the trading floors of Chicago to the debt courts of Athens-I find this book a bracing antidote to cynicism. It reminds us that strategy without vision is merely management, but vision without strategic patience is a narcotic. Read it, argue with it, but do not look away. The future it recalls is one we must still fight to deserve."
- Yanis Varoufakis, Greece
"Michael Albert has created the most unusual and intriguing combination of prophecy, manifesto and movement-building manual that I have ever encountered. Using the scifi genre of 'future as history, ' Albert introduces a journalistic format in order to draw out lessons and potential strategies in the fight for social transformation that should be considered by any serious Left or progressive activist. It is also a book that contains the reasonable and essential optimism that is so valuable for activists in times like these. Bravo, Michael!"
- Bill Fletcher, Jr, U.S.
"Michael Albert has with great determination and creativity put strategy and vision front and center of his lifelong work for radical social change. RPS*/2044 is his most inventive work to date. A journalist interviews key participants in 2044 about the years that led to the Revolution for a Participatory Society. They share the strategies that brought about victories, the breakthroughs in healing the divides that kept people apart, and the discipline and commitment that was necessary to survive tumultuous but exciting times. In current times, we know a lot about what's wrong, and we have access to reasonably effective short-term tactics. But long-term strategy and vision are largely missing from our movements. With RPS/*2044 , we get a taste of what it could look like - a large-scale, radical overturning of current systems, which then puts in place new systems based on solidarity, diversity, and equity. This work fills a huge gap in our social movement literature."
- Cynthia Peters, U.S.
