Upstream

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Synopsis

Support us at https://www.upstreampodcast.org/support and subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/upstream/id1082594532?mt=2Upstream is a radio documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

Episodes

  • How We Show Up with Mia Birdsong

    24/10/2023 Duration: 01h06min

    As we continue to work towards outer transformation, building the structures and models that will shape the transition to a post-capitalist society, it’s also important to think about the inner transitions within ourselves — particularly, how we relate to one another personally and socially. How we show up together for a liberated future is the core theme of the book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, written by our guest in this episode, Mia Birdsong. Mia is the Executive Director of the Next River Institute and the host of the More than Enough podcast miniseries. In How We Show Up, Mia shares how we have separated from one another despite our deep desire for belonging. She explores how we can instead turn towards one another, remembering our inherent interconnectedness, and how we can find connection and support in vulnerability and generosity.  In this conversation we explore how capitalism has undermined our ability to create and sustain healthy communities, what it really mean

  • [BONUS] Palestine Pt. 1 with Sumaya Awad

    20/10/2023 Duration: 59min

    Before 1948, the land of Palestine was dotted with olive groves along rolling hills between mountains and the Mediterranean sea. Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and Christians all lived alongside one another in relative harmony, practicing agriculture and embroidery, or working in factories or along the coast in thriving port villages. Not to romanticize it too much, but in comparison to what was to come, this region was thriving.  If you’ve been paying any attention to the news lately, you’ll know that an image of harmony is no longer the case in this region. In 1948, the state of Israel was founded, and the campaign leading up to, during, and following the founding of this ethno-state threw this region into a turmoil that has produced one of the most subjugated and immiserated populations in the world — a population that has been subjected to ongoing ethnic cleansing and a campaign of genocide aimed at replacing Palestinians and their towns, villages, and cities, with Israeli settlements.  In this episo

  • [BONUS] What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante (In Conversation)

    17/10/2023 Duration: 01h54min

    What Is To Be Done? This is the question so profoundly posed by the Russian Revolutionary and Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, in his landmark text of the same name. Although it was written well over a century ago, this text, the questions it asked, and the paths forward that it provided, are just as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. And just as urgent. What roles do spontaneity and disciplined organization have in leftist movements? Can we focus simply on economic reform, or do our actions need a larger political framework to structure, guide, and propel them?  Why does it feel like even though so many of us are motivated to work towards structural change, that things continue to get worse? Why does it seem like potential revolutionary struggles in the West always seem to stall and fail to move from a singular moment to a protracted movement?  These are old and familiar questions — a lot of ink has been spilled and speeches made exploring them — and in this Conversation, we’ve brought on two

  • How to Decolonize and Indigenize with Sikowis Nobiss (In Conversation)

    09/10/2023 Duration: 40min

    What is the connection between capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, and Christianity? How do these systems and ideologies uphold and support one another? How do we work to dismantle them and cultivate in their place a decolonized culture and politics that supports Indigenous sovereignty, human health and wellbeing, and flourishing ecosystems? These are some of the questions that we’ll explore today on this special Indigenous People’s Day conversation with Sikowis Nobiss. Sikowis is Plains Cree/Saulteaux of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada At 19 she began her life's work of uplifting Indigenous rights and voices when she got her first job at the New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council in Fredericton, Canada, during the Burnt Church Rebellion. Between 2010 and 2015, Sikowis attempted to work with various Indigenous folks in Iowa City to build a climate and environment organization but was unsuccessful. However, her goal to found such an organization became a reality in 2016 when she join

  • Class War and Beer with Brace Belden (In Conversation)

    26/09/2023 Duration: 01h08min

    Although the reference to war that you just heard could very much be real, actual military conflict — after all, our guest on today’s episode has fought as a freedom fighter in a Kurdish militia in Syria — today’s episode isn’t about that. It’s about a different kind of war: class war. Specifically, class conflict as it manifests in the workplace between employees and employers. You may already know about Anchor Brewery — maybe you love the beer, maybe you’ve seen the iconic steam beer bottle around, or maybe you don’t know anything about it. Whatever your relationship to Anchor Brewery — you’re about to hear a story that stretches from early San Francisco union history, to the dawn of the craft beer renaissance, and into the present. A story about class war and worker solidarity in the beer industry. You might also have heard about Anchor Brewery’s unionization campaign that took place in 2019 after this locally beloved brewery was bought by a giant beer conglomerate, Sapporo. That unionization campaign was

  • Microlending and the Financialization of Poverty with Sohini Kar (In Conversation)

    12/09/2023 Duration: 01h02min

    It was once very difficult for people experiencing poverty in the Global South to obtain credit and loans because they were seen as unable to provide adequate collateral. This situation changed with the emergence of microfinance, a model pioneered by Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which has now been widely disseminated to countries around the world.  At the heart of the Grameen system is the organization of borrowers into groups of women (97 percent of the bank’s loans are to women) where collateral is each woman's social connections and reputation. This model is touted for contributing to Women’s Empowerment and for “rising people out of poverty” and even won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.  But does this model actually empower women? Does it address the structural causes of poverty? Or is it just another frontier for capitalism — a new way of profiting off of the most marginalized, exploiting the trust and social cohesion among groups of women, and even triggering what’s been described as “I

  • Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes (In Conversation)

    29/08/2023 Duration: 02h23min

    “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Those words have been attributed to both the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek decades ago, but they couldn’t feel more true today. As we continue to stare down the double barrels of climate change and COVID without any meaningful response from those who rule over us, without organized and collective action that has been able to make a transformative material impact, and for many out there without even really fully absorbing the reality staring us in the face…yeah. , it certainly seems like it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of this horrifying social order.  This phenomenon, which was so aptly distilled into a bite-sized quote by Jameson and Žižek, has come to be known as capitalist realism — a concept popularized by the late Mark Fisher in a book of the same name written in 2008. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher, an author and educator, explains in eighty pages, just how deeply capitalism has permeated ou

  • Life Beyond the Clock with Jenny Odell (In Conversation)

    14/08/2023 Duration: 01h02min

    Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing divisions — and ultimately, towards inevitable collapse? What if this particular perception of time contributes to our feelings of despair and hopelessness about our futures? What if it limits our ability to imagine and fight for a more just, equitable, and regenerative system? In this conversation, we’ve brought on Bay Area artist and author Jenny Odell to help us unpack and reimagine our experience of time and to foster hope and inspire action for a better future. We focus on insights and stories from Jenny’s two books, her 2019 New York Times Bestseller How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and most recently, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. In this conversation, we learn about the commodification and colonization of time under capitalism, how it happened, when it happened, and how the fungibility of time contributes to human and planetary

  • Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea (In Conversation)

    01/08/2023 Duration: 01h21min

    When you think about the philosophies and practices of Buddhism and Marxism, you might not immediately think that they have much in common. However, you might be surprised at how much overlap and complementary resonance there actually is between these two rich and beautiful traditions.  In this conversation, we’ve brought on Breht O’Shea, a Buddhist practitioner and Marxist political educator based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Breht is the host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the podcasts Red Menace, Guerrilla History, and, most recently, Shoeless in South Dakota. You might remember Breht from when he was on the show about a year ago to talk about revolutionary leftist theory.  In this conversation, we explore how both Buddhism & Marxism offer helpful pathways to liberation and provide a spot-on analysis of the root causes of suffering. We also explore some of the potential tensions between Buddhism and Marxism, as well as what each tradition can learn from the other. And we end with a p

  • Health Communism with Beatrice Adler-Bolton (In Conversation)

    17/07/2023 Duration: 01h36min

    When we think of health under capitalism, it's easy to go straight to the fight for universal healthcare, and understandably — that battle is one of the most contentious and important in the ongoing class war between the mass of people and those who rule us, the capitalist class. But it would be a mistake to think that that’s where our battle ends, that there isn't an expanded struggle over the ways that health and sickness are even conceptualized under the capitalist ideological framework which shapes how we value ourselves and how we are either utilized or abandoned by this system.  In this episode, we’ll take a deep dive into all of the different places where health overlaps with capitalism, with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel and co-author, along with Artie Vierkant, of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. This conversation glides from Marxist economic analysis to healthcare policy to history and to some of the most foundational philosophical underpinnings of the political eco

  • Capitalism, The State, and How We Got Here with Christian Parenti (In Conversation)

    03/07/2023 Duration: 01h09min

    Elements of capitalism have existed throughout history — in institutions like markets, class relations, ownership laws, credit systems, etc. But they were never dominant until they came together, escaping the isolated, laboratory conditions in which they once existed, to coalesce and form a world-dominating capitalist order.  How did the bubonic plague, the world-shattering pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia in the 14th century, along with the Little Ice Age that followed it, give rise in the 1600s to the mode of production that has now come to take hold of the entire world? What is capital, and how is it a social relation, as Marx wrote? And what exactly is the relationship between capitalism and the state? Are these two opposed, like many on the reactionary right tend to assume, or are they one and the same thing, there to support and uphold one another? And what about capitalism itself — what different stages or phases of capitalism exist? How did we go from the more classic mercantile capitalist system

  • Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee

    19/06/2023 Duration: 02h33s

    It’s perhaps more important than ever in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is possible. Simply reimagining the way we raise our children, the homes that we dwell in, the property we horde or share, and the form of the families we choose — can have profound and long-term impacts on the quality of our lives and on the world we’re living in more broadly. By challenging these seemingly ordinary structures of everyday life we can spark and re-spark our collective and individual desire to live in a more just and equitable world. This is the premise of new book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, written by Kristen Ghodsee. In this conversation, we take a journey around the world and through time, exploring some of the most fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes quirky, experiments in alternative ways of living. From Plato to the Buddha, from the Bible to the Communist Manifesto, from ancient At

  • The Political Economy of Jazz with Gerald Horne (In Conversation)

    06/06/2023 Duration: 50min

    The music we know today as jazz has deep and contested roots, but likely arose in New Orleans, Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The music is based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery, and particularly by the tradition of the blues, an art form known for expressing the suffering and hardship of Jim Crow America.   In his book, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music, author and scholar Dr. Gerald Horne examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped jazz into what we know today.   In this conversation, Dr. Horne guides us through the emergence of jazz as a musical art form, the brutal realities of white supremacy and economic exploitation faced by jazz musicians, and how this music blossomed into a force that has shaped and defined so much of U.S. American culture in so many profound ways. Thank you to Elvis Phillips for the intermission music and Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream's theme music

  • A History of California, Capitalism, and the World with Malcolm Harris (In Conversation)

    23/05/2023 Duration: 01h05min

    We’ve been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of nonwhite  labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule as bugs within the capitalist system — things to be corrected by capitalist technology and innovation — but in fact, all of these things are anything but bugs — they are features of this system, baked deep into it at its very core. And, in many respects, the birthplace of modern, global capitalism, with its exclusion of racialized others, its rabid anti-labor ideology, its universalized immiseration, and its unrelenting push for hyperproductivity, is a place that might surprise you at first: California. Specifically? Silicon Valley. Even more specifically? Palo Alto.  In his book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, author Malcolm Harris traces a very bold line from early Californian history, with its brutal enslavement of Indigenous peoples, its railroad and agricultural barons, the codification of corporations as people, and the fou

  • Ep. 16: The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism (Documentary)

    08/05/2023 Duration: 01h39min

    Although its intellectual handmaidens love to insist otherwise — capitalism is not a system that truly embodies freedom. We all feel it, of course — that nagging sense that we lack any agency over the choices that shape our lives, the frustration we feel at our bosses, the tension we feel with our landlords, the sense that we’re all just stuck in a rat race. We might lack the language to articulate it, or a framework within which to situate it, but we all know, deep down, that this ain’t it — that there’s something deeply wrong. In this episode, we explore why this is — why, despite what we’re constantly being told — that we currently live under the freest system ever — that we’re not actually free — and why we’re all imprisoned within capitalism. We start with a brief history of how we got here, what different conceptions of freedom have meant historically — and how they can be applied to our current condition — and then we take a deep dive into the mechanisms this system uses to keep us all imprisoned, and,

  • Reclaiming Time with Oliver Burkeman (In Conversation)

    25/04/2023 Duration: 58min

    At the beginning of the 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advances of technology, that no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. The challenge, in Keynes's view, would be how to fill all of our newfound leisure time without going crazy.’   That obviously never happened — so, what went wrong? Technology has advanced to the point where we could all be working much less, and with all sorts of time-management apps and tips from experts, why does it somehow feel like there’s never enough time in the day?   In this episode, we’ve brought on someone who might help us figure that out. Oliver Burkeman is the author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — a book about why life today often feels like a battle against endless to-do lists. In this conversation, we explore with Oliver how time has been instrumentalized under capitalism, why it’s important to “waste time” on activities that are not productive and cul

  • Half Farmer, Half X with Mika Furugori and Naoki Shiomi (In Conversation)

    10/04/2023 Duration: 49min

    Imagine this week you spent half your time growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking food for yourself, your family, and perhaps your community — and the other half your time doing something else that you love, something that brings you joy — perhaps writing, podcasting, coaching, caring for others, or anything else. How would you feel? What would change about your relationship to food, to place, to work, and to the seasons? This is the lifestyle model championed by farmer and writer Naoki Shiomi.   Since the 1990s, the idea of "Half Farmer, Half X" — combining sustainable farming with an income-generating “X” variable that represents one’s calling, has inspired people across Japan and other parts of Asia to abandon corporate-capitalist modes of mass production, mass consumption, overwork, and long commutes — and to instead realign their priorities and make dramatic life changes to empower food sovereignty, community sufficiency, and meaningful livelihoods.   In the first half of this conversation

  • Trans Liberation and Solidarity with Alyson Escalante (In Conversation)

    28/03/2023 Duration: 01h08min

    Our transgender comrades are under attack — not just by incendiary reactionaries on the right, but also by many of those on the more liberal or even left side of the political spectrum. The attacks come in many forms, from outright violence, to genocidal language, to the often arbitrary and reactionary demarcations around what constitutes “womanhood,” to the “just asking questions” industrial complex led by liberal institutions like the New York Times.  In this episode, we explore a robust rebuttal to anti-trans and transphobic narratives and actions — from an explicitly Marxist perspective. And we’ve brought on the perfect guest to lead us in this.  Alsyon Escalante is the co-host of Red Menace — a podcast that explains and analyzes revolutionary theory and then applies its lessons to our contemporary conditions. The conversation we’re going to have is inspired by a cross-over episode of Red Menace and Revolutionary Left Radio titled, “Our Transgender Comrades: Dialectical Materialism, Marxist Feminism, and

  • Stop Cop City with Keyanna Jones and Matthew Johnson (In Conversation)

    14/03/2023 Duration: 01h07min

    For the past couple of years, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, has been pushing forward a project known as “Cop City” — a tactical training compound featuring a mock city which has been referred to as a kind of 'war base' where police will learn military-style tactics and maneuvers. The $90 million compound would be built on somewhere between over 300 acres of forest in Atlanta — a space known as the Weelaunee Forest, one of the largest urban forests in the country. As a result of this controversial and extremely unpopular development, a grassroots response has taken shape to stop Cop City. In today’s episode, we’ve brought on two individuals who are part of that movement. Keyanna Jones is an interfaith leader and member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City. She’s lived in the neighborhood around the Weelaunee Forest for her whole life. Matthew Johnson is a minister at Beloved Comnmune, an activist, and also a member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City. Both Keyanna and Matthew are organizers who ha

  • Surviving the Collapse, Agroecology, & Mutual Aid with Andy C. of Poor Prole's Almanac (In Conversation)

    28/02/2023 Duration: 01h03min

    Today on the show — surviving the collapse, permaculture and agroecology, native seed bombing, and much more with Andy C. from Poor Prole’s Almanac.   This week’s Conversation is a rebroadcast of an interview originally produced by The Response — a podcast that explores how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.   The Response, co-produced by our very own Robert Raymond, is another podcast of interviews and documentaries — we definitely recommend checking them out and giving them some love by rating and reviewing them on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They've done episodes on topics like mobile abortion vans, mutual aid efforts in war-torn Ukraine, and the Stop Cop City movement — and they just did an excellent episode on the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.   In this episode, Robert and Andy talk about a wide range of fascinating topics — including agroecology and sound ecological practices regarding the growing of food and the stewardship of

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