Upstream

A discussion on microfinance and its impact on poverty in the Global South, with a focus on India. Dr. Sohini Kar explores the empowerment and exploitation aspects of microfinance, highlighting concerns about the financialization of poverty. The conversation also delves into the story of Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and practical ways to support women in India and the global south through microfinance institutions. The podcast concludes with a call to question investment financing and leverage financialization for social change.

Explore capitalist realism and its pervasive impact on our lives. Discuss the commodification of everything, including healthcare and cultural experiences. Examine the co-option of rebellion and anti-establishment movements by capitalism. Delve into the concept of inter-passivity and its influence on our desires and decision-making. Reflect on the portrayal of the real versus reality in various mediums. Explore the relationship between capitalism and mental illness, advocating for a collective understanding. Analyze distorted time perception and the hyper-mediated existence of the youth generation. Discern the centralistness of capitalism and its failure in the neoliberal world. Examine the impersonal and individualizing nature of capitalism and the importance of collective responses.

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 suffering. We explore her unique reframe of classes to include those who time, those who are timed, and those who self-time. We also talk about a more ecological and place-based sense of time, a life beyond the clock, unbound from capitalism, that shows that neither our lives nor the life of our planet is a foregone conclusion, that we are not alone in our efforts to dismantle capitalism, and that the more-than-human world is actually an active participant in the endeavor — and here to help.  Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Bowerbirds for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns. Further Resources: Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock, by Jenny Odell How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell The Bureau of Suspended Objects Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Breht O'Shea, a Buddhist practitioner and Marxist political educator known for his work on Revolutionary Left Radio, delves deep into the fascinating overlaps between Buddhism and Marxism. He explores how both traditions seek liberation from suffering and the shared dialectical frameworks that challenge capitalism's individualism. Breht emphasizes the importance of integrating inner and outer liberation, the role of compassion in revolutionary struggle, and the concept of the 'Bodhisattva Revolutionary' as a guide for achieving social justice in a post-capitalist world.

Guest: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, an expert in health under capitalism. Topics: Critique of health capitalism, struggle for universal healthcare, history of the asylum system, understanding madness as a political category, reclaiming language, threat of pharmaceutical companies, health capitalism, surplus populations, potential of health communism in leftist movements.

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 to industrialization, culminating in monopoly, imperialism, and now what we tend to call neoliberal capitalism? And what’s coming next? To help us zoom out and give us a historical and overarching understanding of capitalism as a system and a process, we’ve brought on investigative journalist and scholar, Christian Parenti. Christian is the author of books such as Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, and, more recently, Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder.  And just in case you were wondering, yes, Christian is the son of the political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic Michael Parenti, author of classics like Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, as well as Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media. You might have come across Michael Parenti on our Instagram where Robert loves to post so-called Yellow Parenti lectures and memes — check out our Instagram page @upstreampodcast if you want to know more. This conversation is also an excellent complement to our recent documentary, The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism, which you can learn more about at upstreampodcast.org Further resources: Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time By Karl Polanyi Thank you to James Xerxes Fussell for the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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 Athens to the Soviet Union, we’ll explore what utopian thinking and practice has achieved, not just materially, but also in igniting our capacity for hope, radical imagination, and militant optimism.  Kristen Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence and Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism.  Further resources: Just on the Horizon: Nine Utopian Books to Deprogram Our Brains Thank you to Alice Phoebe Lou for the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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 was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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 founding of Stanford University — the intellectual heart of modern capitalism — all the way to our modern tech-dystopia, marked by permanently unstable and low wage gig jobs, unimaginably harsh housing markets, and one of the deepest divides between the working and owning classes that this country has ever seen. And it all comes back, over and over again, to Palo Alto.  Thank you to Dead Kennedys for the intermission music. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

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, finally, how we can break free. Featured Guests: Matt Christman: Co-host of Chapo Trap House Ayesha Khan: Infectious diseases scientist, germ doctor, grassroots organizer, writer, astrobiologist, and educator Corey Mohler: Creator of Existential Comics Jessica Gordon Nembhard: Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College of the City University of New York and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice David Bollier: Activist, Scholar, and blogger focused on the commons and author of The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tooks for the Transitions Ahead. Music by Collections of Colonies of Bees, Peder, Mammoth Star, Do Make Say Think, and Chris Zabriskie, Thank you to Bethan Mure for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. You can read the full transcript of this episode here.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.