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In Brighton, for a special recording of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar sat down with Naomi Klein, and organiser, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective, Astra Taylor. They gathered to discuss their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

An apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is gathering momentum. They aren’t just exploiting collapse, they’re provoking and accelerating it, whilst protecting themselves from the fallout. The world’s fate is increasingly in the hands of men who are ambivalent about its survival and betting money on the end.

Already, anger at the building of data centres is cutting across left and right, in a way that climate politics rarely has – but how do we make sure that anger is heard? How do we separate necessary alarm from fatalism? And what can we prepare for the impending AI crash? 

End Times Fascism (2026) by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor: https://shop.novaramedia.com/products/end-times-fascism

No one is disputed like Mao. Was he a mass murderer, a Communist hero, a charlatan, or a great poet? The saviour of the peasants, or the man who extracted from them all that he could?

Mao’s biography is a nest of contradictions. He led the largest revolution in world history, then presided over its largest famine – and even then, life expectancy rose 20 years over the course of his rule. He launched rebellions – against a government he already controlled. He purged his enemies and friends alike.

Some 50 years after his death, he remains a central figure in Chinese politics. The Communist Party of China posthumously declared him to be 70% right and 30% wrong, but his face still hangs over Tiananmen Square.

In this second episode on China’s history, Rebecca Karl – author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World – returns to tell Richard Hames about the Mao era, with all its promises, contradictions and catastrophes.

Watch the previous episode with Rebecca, on China’s century of revolutions.

Explore the map we’re making throughout this series of DYOR, of all the people, events and ideas of the Mao era.

00:00 Intro

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Three years ago, just weeks after the genocide began, writer Omar El Akkad posted a tweet, attached to some footage showing the extent of the ruin that Israel had already visited on Gaza. The compelling thought, crystallised in that viral tweet, would go on to become the name of his bestselling book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 

Steven Methven, editor of Novara Live, steps in for Aaron Bastani while he is on parental leave. He sat down with Omar to try to make sense of three years of horror. 

Why did Omar write his book focusing on the West’s role in the violence, rather than centring Palestine? What would meaningful accountability and justice for Palestinians look like? How does he think Hamas will be remembered? And has he found any source of hope amid the events he describes?

For a century, China underwent a series of invasions, revolutions and counter-revolutions. In China, it’s known as the Century of Humiliation.

It was a time of immense upheavals: from the Opium Wars of 1839, through the Taiping Rebellion, the Xinhai Republican Revolution, a Civil War, an invasion by the Japanese which merged into the Second World War; the resumption of the Civil War and, eventually coming to an end with the Communist Revolution of 1949.

Each one transformed the country more comprehensively than seemed possible beforehand.

Rebecca Karl is the author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, which tells us not only what happened, but how its participants tried to make sense of it all, and why that still matters for understanding China now – after all, the Chinese Communist Party haven’t forgotten any of it.

She joined Richard Hames to discuss the century that destroyed imperial China and set the stage for the largest revolution in history.

There is much more to explore on the map we’re making for this series, which shows all the people, ideas and event that define China’s history, present, and future. Get it here.

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0:00 Intro

4:37 Opium Wars

12:58 The Man Who Claimed to Be Jesus’s Brother

21:30 The Taiping Rebellion

30:16 1911 Revolution

42:47 The May Fourth Movement

52:10 How the Chinese Communist Party Began

1:01:38 Shanghai Massacre, Mao and the Long March

1:13:22 Japanese Invasion and World War II in China

1:24:30 Chinese Civil War and the 1949 Revolution

This week marked three years since the Hamas attack of October 7th, and the beginning of the Israeli state’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people. In that time, Western leaders from Joe Biden and Donald Trump to Keir Starmer and now Andy Burnham have refused to call the genocide what it is, despite the consensus of genocide scholars. One outlier among Western leaders during this period has been Humza Yousaf.

The former first minister of Scotland, and first Muslim leader of a Western nation, has written a book about his time in government, ‘Under Fire: My Family’s Escape from Gaza and the Cost of Leadership’. On Downstream this week, Aaron Bastani sat down with him to hear first-hand what it was like governing Scotland, while his family were trapped in Gaza.

How did he and his family manage the first few days and weeks of the genocide, while balancing his responsibilities as Scotland’s leader? What kind of pressures did he face internally, and externally, to support Israel? How did he make decisions in government, and how did he take the decision to stand down? What does good leadership require? And what does he think about the fate of the union, and the direction of travel in Britain today?

Huawei makes the pipes and cables that power the Chinese internet. Its global reach has made China into a superpower.

Huawei is often accused of spying for China. But how was the US so sure that Huawei’s technology could be used for spying? Because the US had already hacked Huawei’s technology and were using it to spy themselves.

That’s not even the strangest episode in the company’s history. Its installations in Iraq were bombed by the UK and US before 9/11. In 2018, its infrastructure allegedly pinged back the secrets of the Africa Union to China overnight. And it now stands accused of doing business in Iran.

Eva Dou is the author of the deeply researched House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the geopolitics of telecommunications, how Huawei made China into a global superpower, and whether or not Huawei is, in fact, a wing of the Chinese state.

And we’ll be making our map of everything that has ever mattered and ever will: this new edition focused on China, available here: novaramedia.com/dyor

0:00 Intro

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Are we in the era of trauma Top Trumps? ‘Lived Experience’ has become a byword for standpoint authority and progressive politics. It has allowed people from marginalised groups to speak and be heard, and forced us to confront how power plays out in interpersonal dynamics. But it has also become a way for people to brand themselves online, and excuse antisocial or even downright nasty behaviours. Has ‘lived experience’ helped the left, or turned us into self-obsessed therapy-speakers, incapable of communicating with the majority of people?

At the latest Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar sat down with Catherine Liu – cultural theorist, professor and author of Virtue Hoarders – to discuss her new book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. Liu argues that as class politics has declined, the language of psychology has stepped in to explain problems rooted in capitalism. But what happens when trauma becomes content and politics gives way to what Liu calls the ‘gentrification of pain’? Is ‘lived experience’ a prerequisite for legitimate political analysis? Why do movements so often end up policing each other rather than confronting power? And if politics becomes about who’s hurting most, who benefits?

Welcome to Series 2 of Do Your Own Research. Until the end of the year, I will be focusing on the most important and interesting country in the world: China.

We’re starting with Tianyu Fang, an editor of Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter all about the Chinese internet.

We’re starting with the internet because that’s so much of what we see of China: fragments of life online. What’s the reality behind them, and how do we square these beguiling, details with the vast story of China’s rise?

What is happening online in China is often reduced to a few memes or movements. We see the dazzling skyline and we stop thinking, and start gawping: that’s what I call the gawp-zone. How do we get out of it?

In this conversation, we go deep into the circuits and technology of the Chinese internet, from its earliest utopian moments to the hemisphere-spanning computing stack we see today.

And we’ll be making our map of everything that has ever mattered and ever will: this new edition focused on China, available here: novaramedia.com/dyor

The effect of pornography on the people who consume it is often moralised about, generally due to its influence over the nascent sexuality of young men. But the business model, technological innovations and broader, parasexual, cultural effects go crucially underexamined.

This week’s guest, investigative reporter for the Financial Times, Patricia Nilsson, has written a new book unearthing exactly the ways in which these underexamined forces emerged and how they continue to exert influence on society.

She spoke to Ash about pioneering camgirl entrepreneurs, the sado-masochistic-inflected rise of Andrew Tate, and how algorithms have entered the bedroom.

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Following their recent Trip episode on Situationism, the gang offer a close reading of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, first published in France in 1967. Nadia, Jem and Keir explore the layered references and subversions throughout Debord’s extremely quotable aphorisms, focusing on the first three chapters of the book.

Find a PDF of the book at Libcom.org

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