Upstream

Is the growing ascendance of digital money simply an organic evolution away from the purported inconveniences of physical cash? Or is this transition actually a nefarious, corporate-engineered, neo-enclosure of money by Big Finance and Big Tech? In his latest book, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets, author, journalist, and financial hacker Brett Scott lays out an extremely compelling case arguing that corporations are engineering an enclosure of money — transforming it into a completely digital form which they alone will control. In this Conversation, we take a deep dive beneath the surface of the global financial system to explore the technical and political differences between various forms of money, why corporations are attacking physical cash and plotting to completely replace it with digital money, who will really benefit from a cashless society, and why the fight for ownership of our digital footprints is one of the most pressing battles of our time. 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.

Traditionally within Marxist thought, there are two major classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or workers and capitalists. Within these two classes, however, there are many strata — and in this episode we take a deep dive into one particular stratum. The professional managerial class, or the PMC, is comprised of highly educated, often centrist or liberal leaning individuals who tend to uphold the systems and institutions of capitalist society while at the same time viewing itself as the virtuous vanguard of progress. And although this class falls within the working class, its allegiances and sympathies lie with capitalists. And indeed, in most ways, it does benefit from capitalism. To discuss the professional managerial class and its position within capitalism further, we've brought on someone who's written an entire book about it. Catherine Liu is a professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. In this conversation we discuss who the PMC is comprised of, how this class emerged, and why it poses a unique threat to socialist and communist aspirations. 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 may not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that capitalism is the root cause of climate change. But if we unpack this a little bit, we see that it's a specific component of capitalism that's mostly responsible: the need for exponential and perpetual expansion. Growth isn't just a byproduct of capitalism, it's an imperative — an imperative to which we are all hostage. That's why, according to our guest in this week's Conversation, unless the climate movement centers degrowth in its strategies and policy proposals, nothing will fundamentally change. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and author most recently of Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World. We first spoke with Jason five years ago on his book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, and then again in 2020 on international capitalism during the pandemic. In this conversation, Jason explains why 'growthism' is so problematic for our health and the health of the planet. He talks us through alternatives to growth, and shares how we could realistically unhook from perpetual expansion and transition to a post-growth, post-capitalist economic system where we are all living healthier, happier lives on a thriving planet. 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 logic of orthodox economic thinking has come to dominate and permeate every aspect of our lives, from the deeply internalized capitalism which shapes our thoughts and hopes and dreams, to policy decisions that shape our lives, constrain our possibilities, and steal public goods out from under our noses. How did we get here? How did economic rigidity gain such supremacy? Are the principles of orthodox economics really value neutral, as its champions claim? And if not, what moral philosophies underpin them? What are their origins? And how have they come to dominate policymaking in the last several decades? In the first half of this Conversation, we've brought on Jonathan Aldred, a Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Emmanuel College, Lecturer in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, and author of the book License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us. Jonathan will walk us through the philosophical foundations of orthodox and neoliberal economics. And then in the second half we've brought on Elizabeth Popp Berman, an economic sociologist, associate professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and author of the book Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. We'll talk with Elizabeth about the policy implications of dogmatic economic thinking. 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 US Supreme Court has just overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights which had set the precedent for almost 50 years, throwing authority over abortion down to the states to decide. As of now, a dozen or so states have trigger laws which will outlaw abortion fairly rapidly, and many others will likely follow suit in the coming weeks and months. In light of this, we're interrupting our regular 2 week episode release schedule to bring you a special extra episode. There's a lot of media coverage on the Roe decision, of course, but a lot of it is lacking in its analysis, and that's why we've brought on two guests to provide a much needed perspective. Diana Moreno is an immigrant rights activist and Democratic Socialists of America organizer in Queens, and Jenny Brown is an organizer with National Women's Liberation and the author of several books on feminism, reproductive rights, and labor, including Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now and Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women's Work. Both Diana and Jenny approach their feminism with a socialist analysis that provides a strong materialist grounding, a deep understanding of the dynamics around immigration, and an orientation that challenges traditional liberal and oftentimes white, heteronormative feminism that dominates most mainstream discussions. In this Conversation we explore the history of abortion in the United States, a class analyses on abortion and reproductive justice, the ideologies of liberal versus socialist feminisms, the abject failure of the Democratic Party, possible paths forward, and much more. 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.

There's a broad conflation within our present day capitalist society between the success of individual members of certain oppressed and marginalized groups and their collective success and liberation. This is particularly true when it comes to Black people and their liberatory struggles. Too often, the successes of individual people — Oprah, or LeBron James, for example — or their rise to certain leadership positions, take Barack Obama — are seen as collective successes, whereas, when it comes to the material conditions of all Black people, these individual successes don't have a significant impact. What are the dangers of this conflation between individual and collective success? Can Black liberation be achieved through individual successes within capitalism — through Black capitalism? And what would it mean to truly build Black wealth in the United States and beyond? In today's Conversation, we've brought on someone to help unpack these questions. Francisco Pérez is the Executive Director of the Center for Popular Economics and author of the recent piece in Nonprofit Quarterly: How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism. 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.

What if what we thought we knew about environmental conservation is wrong and it's not the ethical and regenerative movement we thought it was? Turns out the philosophy and practices of conservation — pioneered by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir — are intimately intertwined with colonialism, imperialism, and racialized capitalism. And, unfortunately, this isn't just a historical analysis — it's a legacy that has continued well into the movement's modern day configurations. In fact, things may have even gotten worse. This is according to a recent paper in the journal Environment titled "From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation." In the paper, the authors outline the problems with mainstream conservation methods and policies — policies that impose artificial binaries between Indigenous communities and the lands they have stewarded, perpetuating patterns of extractivism and greenwashing and leading to countless harms inflicted onto these communities all in the name of 'wildlife preservation.' In this Conversation we've brought on the paper's lead author, Prakash Kashwan, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights at the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. Prakash is the author of the widely reviewed and acclaimed book "Democracy in the Woods" and a Co-Editor of the journal Environmental Politics. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of Earth Systems Governance, Progress in Development Studies, Sage Open, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. How is much of the modern conservation movement still steeped in its racist, colonial, imperial past? And what might an inclusive and regenerative conservation look like? Join us to explore these questions and more. You can request a full-text version of the paper From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation at Research Gate. You can also write to Prakash to request a pdf copy of the paper at kashwan@gmail.com. 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.

Fully automated luxury communism. Fully automated luxury gay space communism..? Fully automated, queer, neo-decadent, meta-modern communism? Okay so, what does all of that mean? You've probably heard the phrase fully automated luxury communism before, whether in a podcast like this, or in a meme maybe, but what exactly does it mean? Maybe the phrase conjures up images of a utopian, moneyless society where all of our jobs have been taken by robots and we just frolic and play all day? Perhaps it evokes ideas of a Starship Enterprise tech utopian world marked by adventures and quests. Maybe it's something in between. In this conversation we've brought on two guests to explain what fully automated luxury communism is, what some different iterations of it might look like, why it's an important Northstar for the left to reach for, and how we might get there. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. And Eric Wycoff Rogers is a scholar, organizer, designer, artist, and currently PhD student in American history at Cambridge and also part of the Beyond Return organization. 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.

More than just a region, Silicon Valley has also become a concept — and what that concept represents means a lot of different things to different people. Some might think of it as a techno-utopian dreamland where billionaires are made. Others, perhaps a soul-sucking dystopia driven by a never ending rat race — also where billionaires are made. Whatever you may think, one thing that's hard to disagree with is the idea that work dominates Silicon Valley, and while some here are simply working to live, a certain privileged class of society actually lives to work. It's this class of workers that are the main characters in Carolyn Chen's new book: Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Carolyn Chen is an Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. How has work become the new religion in Silicon Valley? What material and historical conditions led to the spiritualization of work? What strategies do workplaces deploy to ensure workers find meaning and purpose in work — and what other realms of life does this impact? What happens when work takes over the institutions that shape our souls? These are just some of the questions we'll explore in this conversation with Carolyn Chen. 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 latest installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC report, released this month, gives us three years to drastically cut emissions. "It's now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees," the authors of the report warn. But in reality, it's more likely that we'll double that number. If you haven't already seen the headlines, the report indicates that we'd need to cut emissions by almost half by 2030 and be at negative emissions by 2050 — that means we'd need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere at that point — in order to avert the worst of climate change. But these are just the headlines — the actual report is around 3000 pages long, and is a pretty groundbreaking and radical document, at least when it comes to these kinds of reports by typically conservative scientific bodies. The report includes a great deal of research from social scientists, and for the first time, in a major way, debunks much of the economics behind neoliberal climate solutions, even going so far as to name colonialism as a driver for climate change, and even alludes to capitalism as a major contributing factor. To unpack it all, we've brought on someone who's actually started reading all of the entire 3000 pages of the report. Amy Westervelt is an award-winning climate journalist, founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network, and host of the podcast Drilled. Is the fossil fuel industry, as they would like us to believe, a demand-driven industry? Or has it really become more of a market looking for a product? Are we getting to a place where mainstream narratives no longer simply call for individual actions, but focus much more heavily on collective and systemic solutions to climate change? And are we finally moving away from seeing global warming as a strictly environmental issue, and instead to seeing it as one more rooted class struggles against systems like capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism? These are some of the topics we explore in this conversation with Amy Westervelt. Thanks to Bedouine for the intermission music. 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.