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.
261 episodes transcribedFor those of us living in the United States, today — what we call Thanksgiving — is a very significant holiday because, for some of us at least, it’s...
The Red Scare — perhaps most well known through the era of McCarthyism that dominated the social, political, and legal spheres of the U.S. in the 1950...
“This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” “Voting for a third-party candidate? Might as well throw away your vote!” “You may not like hi...
As we continue to work towards outer transformation, building the structures and models that will shape the transition to a post-capitalist society, i...
Before 1948, the land of Palestine was dotted with olive groves along rolling hills between mountains and the Mediterranean sea. Palestinians, Arabs,...
Before 1948, the land of Palestine was dotted with olive groves along rolling hills between mountains and the Mediterranean sea. Palestinians, Arabs,...
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 o...
What is the connection between capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, and Christianity? How do these systems and ideologies uphold and support one anot...
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 foug...
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...
“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...
