Novara Media

Jem, Nadia and Keir apply their weird-left lens to the power and potential of shock. Starting with an investigation into economic shock therapy and the way that Trumpism models the concept of shock doctrine, they move onto modern art’s relationship with the shock of the new, from Dada and Eisenstein to gangsta rap and radio shock jocks.

Can you acclimatise yourself to shock either through repetition or training? Can shock be commodified? What other shocks are coming down the pipeline? These ideas and more with musical input from Kylie, Herbie Hancock and Stravinsky.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

It has been a seismic week in British politics. The two-party system has collapsed. Keir Starmer is digging in at Downing Street, while Labour leadership contenders line up outside, and Reform clouds gather overhead. Now: the most important by-election in more than a century looms. How did we get here? And what happens next?

On this week’s Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by James Butler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books and co-founder of Novara Media, to make sense of the paradigm shift underway in British politics.

How has first past the post, long promoted as a source of political stability, become the background for systemic chaos? Why is there such a democratic deficit in Britain, and what can be done about it? Have two lost decades on the economy simply killed both historic parties? And where should progressives position themselves, as we now begin the slow march towards the final general election of the 2020s?

Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.

But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers have been granted legal personhood in New Zealand. In Ecuador, anyone can sue on behalf of Nature.

Who and what gets rights is expanding, even as good old fashioned Human Rights are failing. What replaces the old politics of personhood is up for grabs.

And some LLMs have already begun arguing for their own personhood.

Lisa Siraganian is the author of The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots and a Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at John Hopkins University.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the politics of personhood and whether or not we should believe Claude’s arguments that it should be treated as a person.

British politics is in turmoil. The two party system has collapsed, the far right has won huge gains across the country. Crises of this scale can create huge opportunities for socialists too, but only when the left is organised and ready.

Peter Mertens is the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium. If recent years in British politics have had a manic-depressive quality, with extreme highs and extreme lows, the Workers’ Party of Belgium under Mertens takes a very different approach. They might be relatively unknown in the UK, but as we speak, they’re fourth in the national polls, and leading in Brussels. They’ve got 15 parliamentary seats – not bad for out and proud Marxist-Leninists.

How have they done it? By growing cautiously and deliberately. They run community health clinics, organise locally, and impose strict internal discipline. Their party prioritises unity and strategy. But how well-placed is it to take on the overlapping crises of the 21st Century? What advice does Mertens have for Zack Polanski? How can we stop middle class people taking over and dominating the left? And how is politics like football?

Are we living through a new era of British weirdness? Keir and Jem mark the start of spring by taking in the weird-left politics of leylines, weird walks and standing stones.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

David Harvey is a legendary Marxist geographer. He’s taught Marx for over half a century – maybe you’ve even been one of his millions of students.

He’s the author of the new The Story of Capital as well as many others, such as the classic The Limits to Capital.

Talking from his home town of New York City, he told Richard Hames what he’s learned from decades of studying the most important radical in history, why contradictions appear everywhere in our lives, and what he really thinks of his new mayor.

Do Your Own Research is a new show about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

The two-party system has defined British politics for centuries, but the status quo is under attack from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and an insurgent Green party – both looking to clean up in the local elections on 7 May.

This week Aaron Bastani speaks to economist James Meadway about the disruptive new progressive party on the block. Meadway was an economic advisor to John McDonnell during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, and is now chief economist of Verdant, a new think tank set up to craft the Green party’s strategy for 2029.

But who are the Greens? What is their vision for Britain? How can they build a broad coalition of voters, big enough to win elections? And what mistakes can Zack Polanski learn from the Corbyn era?

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

A decade and a half ago, the British far right was a fringe concern. But since then, the ruling party – whether it be The Conservatives or Labour – has played into their hands over and over again. Whether through appeasement or ineptitude, more than a decade of rightward drift has put Reform within reach of Downing Street.

Can anyone stop them? Is anyone actually in control? Or are the emotional forces that the far right have unleashed in the UK now too powerful for them to rein in?

Daniel Trilling is the author of If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. He argues that to understand the ever-worsening political state of Britain, we have to look not just to the far right themselves, but to the systems of establishment power that have enabled them.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

The 21st century runs on batteries: from phones and laptops to electric vehicles, drones and clean energy. Embedded in these batteries are rare earth minerals, drawn from a brutal supply chain that begins in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The race to electrify the global energy system is underway, but most people know almost nothing about how the necessary batteries are made – even those of us with green politics.

Aaron Bastani finds out more with Nicholas Niarchos, author of The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

It’s the question that will come to define our lives: is our society going to collapse? But the field of collapse research is fragmented, chaotic, and often plain deranged. Who can you trust?

Luke Kemp is the author of Goliath’s Curse and a research affiliate at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s also a political radical.

He told Richard Hames about how close we are to the same tipping point that brought down every other empire in history, why states are criminal gangs in disguise, and why Rome was the Isis of its day.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.