I often refer to myself as a radical, reminding people that the word radical comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. I think we need to get to the roots of problems as we try to solve them. I also like the word anti-capitalist.

There is a cultural norm on the left of being afraid to declare victory, which is related to the binary of reform/revolution. Whereas reformists are winning small gains, revolutionaries don't want people to be satisfied with those small victories because they worry this will lead to acceptance of the bigger picture of capitalism domination, and so they find a way to turn every victory into a defeat. In the book, I call for a culture of declaring victory wherever we can.

In Marxism there are some very unhelpful ideas about the need to push for a revolution that will overturn all of society. Marx gets that from Hegel, and it leads to some very bad politics, such as the hope that things must get worse because that will then turn into the antithesis and get better from there. A kind of wishful thinking then grows out of not seeing a realistic path forward.

Communism then defines a society in which there are communal forms for dealing with resources. Many communal forms exist where there are not communist governments. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain and the thousands of worker-owned cooperatives in the United States, are viable alternatives to capitalism.

he issue of inequality in this country [USA], and the ways that money has captured our political system, are serious indicators of that. And climate change is a game-changer. We really are in serious trouble as a species if we stick with business as usual. We desperately need to find alternatives, and in fact we are surrounded by them.

We see ourselves as inhabiting a complex social world that has some capitalist things going on in it as well as some socialist ones, some communist ones, and many where economics are not separated out of the broader fabric of life (such as sharing and gift giving, and mutual support).

You build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn't very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how social movements actually succeed.