Ep 402 Liberating Theory, Getting Started

Episode 402 of RevolutionZ moves from part one of a sequence about ideology to part two of it, from critique of an old ideology to transcend to offering a  a new one to consider and extend.  Too often activists agree on outrage but fracture over the explanation,  strategy, root cause, and solution. The last few episodes have argued that Marxism Leninism not only doesn't preclude such divisions, but  to elicit them. So this time we begin a new sequence of episodes to propose an alternative for your consideration. The new series works off of Liberating Theory, a collectively written book that Michael Albert co-authored with Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Lydia Sargent, and Holly Sklar, built around what we took to be a pressing need for a shared conceptual toolbox that would help movements understand society well enough to collectively change it. Albert and Hahnel generated a first draft but then all seven corrected, appended, and refined our way through subsequent drafts. At the very outset, we each individually offered a brief statement of our advocacy of the finished book, our hopes and motives for it, including of the tension we all felt between winning immediate relief from oppression and building a future worth fighting for. From there the book digs right into method: for example, why activist theory has to be accurate but also usable in trying circumstances, why it has to confront race, gender, class, and authority without turning any one of them into the only story, and how without effective concepts movements can unintentionally reproduce the very biases and even hierarchies they oppose. That takes us into a critique of using a toolbox that elevates one or another sphere of social life as the primary key to social change, the limits of eclectic pluralism that mechanically combines two or more spheres without addressing how their intersections can alter even the defining attributes of each, and the authors attempt to build a more integrated framework that the book calls "complementary holism." We also introduce the book’s fictional and informal dialogues that we designed to provoke debate even as they offer some humor. A Marxist Leninist, a radical feminist, a nationalist, an anarchist, an advocate of Liberating Theory and others argue over what belongs at the center of analysis, who gets erased in coalitions, and the “stew” problem of mixing perspectives without one flavor swallowing the rest. The authors were all deeply involved in movement life, organizing, writing, etc. They felt a pressing need for shared vision and strategy and to achieve it they felt movements needed to share an underlying conceptual framework as well. They came together to all work on the resulting framework that they called Liberating Theory. I, Michael, am taking a liberty in presenting it to you as an episode a full forty years after we collectively settled on and signed our names to its words.What Liberating Theory tells us about the mid eighties and more important about whether its insights live up to present needs and potentials is for you to determine. Support the show