Episode 409 is the next to last excerpt from the seven author book Liberating Theory. It presents a set of concepts and general observations about their likely mutual relations meant to inform activism better than past conceptions, including Historical Materialism. The authors--Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Holly Sklar, and Lydia Sargent--observe that history is messy because people make it and each pivotal part of society pushes on every other pivotal part. They start with a simple belief: To pursue attainable, worthy aims with strategy that actually works, we need a theory of social change able to explain both stability and change without pretending there’s a single master determinant of each.
The excerpted chapter breaks down two kinds of change that get blurred all the time: the daily activity that keeps core structures intact, or social reproduction, and the kind of revolutionary shift that alters defining institutions and lived experience, or social transformation.
From there the episode considers a question that keeps recurring across movements: what counts as “real” revolution? Instead of treating the economy as the only sphere of life that matters, Liberating Theory emphasizes a four-sphere view of society--economic, kinship and gender, community and culture (including race and nationality), and politics and the state--and argues that fundamental change in any of them can be revolutionary.
A key concept emerges and is in play when the dynamics of any one sphere actively reproduce the defining relations of one or more others. When "co-reproduction" is the case, when, for example, racism, sexism, class domination, and authoritarian power mutually reproduce one another, then “winning” in one sphere can get pulled back into old patterns by the spheres left untouched. We also consider how other interconnections impact how core characteristics can change or persist and why though precise prediction in history is limited, broad prediction is essential for activist planning.
The episode addresses social theory, historical materialism, revolutionary possibilities, and building movements that don’t trade one domination for another. The authors felt they provided a sharp conceptual toolbox to engage with and either reject or further refine. So which will it be? You decide.
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