Upstream is a quarterly documentary and bi-weekly conversation series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Blurring the line between economic analysis and storytelling, we look beyond the numbers to explore a wide variety of themes pertaining to our tumultuous 21st century economy.
231 episodes transcribed“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 an...
Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing division...
When you think about the philosophies and practices of Buddhism and Marxism, you might not immediately think that they have much in common. However, y...
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 t...
Elements of capitalism have existed throughout history — in institutions like markets, class relations, ownership laws, credit systems, etc. But they...
It’s perhaps more important than ever in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is p...
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...
We’ve been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of nonwhite labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule...
Although its intellectual handmaidens love to insist otherwise — capitalism is not a system that truly embodies freedom. We all feel it, of course — t...
At the beginning of the 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance...
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 l...
Imagine this week you spent half your time growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking food for yourself, your family, and perhaps your community —...
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 fe...
Today on the show — surviving the collapse, permaculture and agroecology, native seed bombing, and much more with Andy C. from Poor Prole’s Almanac....
In order to understand the disconnection, alienation, and immiseration wrought upon us by capitalism, it’s imperative to understand this social and...
Much of what we learn about U.S. history — from middle school to high school to, well, most of adulthood, is a myth. Oftentimes these tales leave out...
Although many therapists are beginning to understand the importance of the natural world in healing and overall mental health — for example by recomme...
As the capitalist class continues to glom onto a kind of tech-utopianism, many of us are starting to recognize not just the detrimental impacts of cer...
Happy Winter Solstice! In the 3rd year of this annual tradition, Upstream host and producer Della Duncan joins two friends to reflect on the past year...
Mainstream psychology has been complicit — whether intentionally or not — in the establishment of colonial, white-supremacist, capitalist hierarchies...
