This is a free preview of the episode "China Pt. 2: Socialist Democracy and Democratic Centralism w/ Ken Hammond." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going.

“China is an authoritarian dystopia.” That’s probably the totality of your understanding when it comes to Chinese society and the political system it’s governed by if all you know about China is what you hear on MSNBC or Fox News. But is that really accurate? Is China a dystopian, authoritarian police state? Or is that just propaganda force fed to the mass of Americans because it serves the interests of Western capital? Well—the answer is an obvious and emphatic “no.” China is not authoritarian—in fact, the opposite is true. Their system of democracy is arguably and demonstrably much, much deeper and more effective than ours here in our bourgeois society. Don’t believe us? Well, we’ve brought on an expert on China to help explain why.

Ken Hammond is Professor of History at New Mexico State University, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, and the author of several books, including China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future and most recently, China and the World. 

In this conversion we dispel the myth that China is not a democratically run society. We take a deep dive into the mechanisms of democracy in China, exploring how democratic centralism and the mass line shape how the Communist Party of China and Chinese society practice and participate in democracy. We look at the history of Chinese democracy, get into the nuts and bolts of how democratic decision making and policy proposals take place, and end with an analysis of current geopolitical events when viewed within a historical materialist context. 

This episode is Part 2 of our Patreon series on China. Part 1, A Socialist Introduction with Jason Hickel, was published two weeks ago. Part 3, if all goes as planned, will feature Vijay Prashad and will build on today’s conversation to really focus in on the differences between bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy—so stay tuned, we’ve got a lot of material on China planned for the coming months. 

Artwork: The cover art for today’s episode is from 1804’s publication of Ken’s 2003 book, China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future, designed by Hannah Craig. 

Further resources:

• China's Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future, by Ken Hammond
• China and the World, by Ken Hammond
• Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)
• Pivot to Peace

Related episodes:

• China Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Jason Hickel
• (Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism
• Climate Leninism w/ Jodi Dean and Kai Heron
• [UNLOCKED] Voting for Socialism w/ Claudia De La Cruz & Karina Garcia

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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 Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Capitalism has placed us under many spells that influence and limit what we believe to be normal and natural. Parenting is one intimate site where capitalism’s spell is particularly impactful. Often leaving parents and children to feel especially isolated, alone, and precarious—perfect for keeping working people separated and oppressed and for grooming children into docile workers under capitalism. 

To kick off our new series on Post Capitalist Parenting, we’ve invited on Toi Smith, mother of four and a Growth and Impact Strategist. Toi’s work centers on doing life, business, and motherhood differently and collaborating with people who are countercultural, liberatory, and revolutionary. In this conversation, we start to reveal and unlearn what Capitalism has told us about what parenting should look like and what it is for. We deconstruct motherhood under capitalism and explore post capitalist parenting strategies, tools, and resources. And we look at how viewing parenting as a political act can help to empower, connect, and liberate both families and communities.

This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free online Weekly EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life—this is one of those episodes. We hope you can join the gathering on March 8, 2025 at 12pm - 1:30pm EST to discuss the topics covered in this episode. Find out more here.

Further Resources

• Toi Smith
• Loving Black Single Mothers
• Deconstructing Motherhood
• The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History By David F. Walker, Illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World By Anand Giridharadas
• Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion, By Gabrielle Stanley Blair
• Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It by Nancy Fraser
• Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser
• Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly 
• A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, By Hadas Thier 
• Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya
• Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams

Related Episodes:

• Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly
• A People's Guide to Capitalism with Hadas Thier
• Feminism for the 99 Percent (Documentary)

Cover art: Carolyn Raider Intermission music: "Left Fist Evolution" by Bianca Mikahn

Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

This is a free preview of the episode "China Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Jason Hickel." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going.

The world that we all grew up in is no longer a reality—although, in many ways, those in power are grasping onto it with the desperation of drowning men flailing, lashing out—furious, terrified, and in denial of what is staring them in their faces: imminent death. The rest of us are watching this process unfold before our very eyes—also terrified, but seemingly powerless. It’s a weird time to be alive. But when has it ever not been?

As we watch, experience, and feel the collapse of the state that we live within—or for those of us not currently living in the belly of the beast, the imperial world that this state rules over—it feels like an important time to explore this collapse. Specifically, it’s an important time to understand what’s happening in the imperial world order, and in order to do that, we must understand China. 

In this conversation, we’ve brought on a regular guest—a guest who you all know and love—Jason Hickel, to talk about China.  

Jason Hickel is a professor at the The Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the author of the books The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World.

In this conversion we first take a brief dive into modern Chinese history, looking at the  pre-revolution period, the 1949 communist revolution itself, the Mao period, the Deng period, and the Xi period. We analyze what the rise of China means in terms of the current world order and the implications for the United States. We tackle some common questions and dispel some common myths about China—like, is China capitalist? Is it imperialist? We analyze some current events like trade wars and Tiktok bans, and finally, we explain why it’s crucial not to fall into the trap of U.S. propaganda when it comes to how we on the Western left analyze China. 

Artwork: Berwyn Mure

Further resources:

• The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, Jason Hickel
• Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, Jason  Hickel
• "Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy," (Nature Communications) Hickel, Lamos, Barbour 
• "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015," (Global Environmental Change) Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland, Suwandi
• "Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018," (New Political Economy) Hickel, Sullivan, Zoomkawala
• "Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary," Jason Hickel (The Lancet)
• Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present, Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik
• Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis Paperback, John Smith
• "Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?" Dylan Sullivan, Michail Moatsos & Jason Hickel

Related episodes:

• (Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism
• Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel 
• How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel
• The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets with Jason Hickel
• International Development and Post-capitalism with Jason Hickel
• How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel
• The Green Transition Pt.1 – The Problem with Green Capitalism

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

If you know anything about the way the world works—and even more so if you’re someone who’s an expert in economics, political economy, etc.—then you’ll know that the narratives and rhetoric coming out of the White House on a whole variety of topics is, well, with the kindest interpretation, confused. Some harsher critics might say these narratives do a violence to reality. And it’s no different with the current discussion around tariffs: it’s all bluster, bloviation, and, ultimately, theater. 

What are tariffs, how are they being deployed and weaponized, and why? If these are questions you’ve considered over the past few weeks, you’re in the right place and today’s guest will walk you through all of the answers you wish you didn’t have to ask about what’s happening with the trade wars being concocted by the US against China, Mexico, and Canada. 

Richard Wolff is an economist, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School in New York, host of the Economic Update podcast, and founder of Democracy at Work. 

In this episode, we explore what tariffs are, how they work, and how and why the Trump administration is weaponizing them against China, Mexico, and Canada. We explore the impending decline of the U.S. as the leading global imperial power, why politicians in this country are in denial about the trajectory of the country’s economy, and much more. 

Further Resources

• Democracy at Work

Related Episodes:

• The Recession isn't Over, but is Capitalism? with Richard Wolff
• The Sickness is the System with Richard Wolff
• Inflation with Richard Wolff & Dean Baker

Intermission music: "The System Works for Them” by Aus Rotten

Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

This is a free preview of the episode "(Chinese) Socialism vs (U.S.) Capitalism." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going.

In this episode in our reading series, Robbie reads a piece written by Indrajit Samarajiva titled "How Communism Is Outcompeting Capitalism." Why is the entire techno-capitalist class, along with their loyal handmaidens in the media, freaking out about DeepSeek—a Chinese AI company's an open-source large language model? Why are electric vehicles (EVs) so much cheaper, efficient, and better in China? Why is the United States ramping up anti-China hysteria in this country? And why are living standards and life expectancy in China overtaking those in the United States? 

The answer is simple: socialism is better than capitalism. On every single front. And in this reading series, Robbie reads and reflects on Indrajit Samarajiva's piece as it provides a brief history of the rise of communism in China, the period of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms, and the superiority of socialist economies over capitalist ones. 

Further resources:

• How Communism Is Outcompeting Capitalism
• "Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?" Sullivan, Moatsos, Hickel in New Political Economy: Volume 29, 2024 - Issue 1
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 film)

Related episodes:

• Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen
• Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism: An Introduction
• Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism: An Introduction
• [UNLOCKED] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel
• Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison
• The Logical Case for Socialism (and Against Capitalism) w/ Scott Sehon
• The Green Transition Part 1: The Problem with Green Capitalism
• The Green Transition Part 2: A Green Deal for the People

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

Class is the thread that ties different systems of oppression together—whether it’s patriarchy, national oppression, racist oppression, reproductive injustice, anti-trans oppression. Although these forms of oppression impact individuals, they operate on systemic levels. These forms of oppression cannot be understood as single, isolated, or parallel struggles—they are all manifestations of class society and can only be abolished with the end of class society. Class is what ties it all together.  

When we understand this, we can begin to appreciate the importance of class-based organizing. We begin to understand why it’s crucial to identify class positions, class interests, and class politics when we talk about organizing workers, organizing tenants, or organizing around any issue within capitalism. 

This is what we’ll be focusing on in today’s episode in this second installment of our “From the Frontlines” series—where, far from simply analyzing these ideas from an armchair, we’ll be talking about them with someone who has spent many years organizing and building worker power—particularly in the Southeast of the United States. 

Cecilia Guerrero is a chair and founding member of A Luta Sigue, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations.

In this conversation we explore what it’s like organizing a wide variety of working class people in Nashville, Tennessee—from Uber and Lyft drivers to construction workers—most of whom are refugees and immigrants. We talk about the importance of injecting militancy and radical politics into labor organizing, of the failures of liberalism and the Democratic party, how A Luta Sigue identifies revolutionary classes and individuals and helps to incubate them and coordinate campaigns, organizing under Trump, the need for a communist party in the United States, and much, much more. 

Further Resources

• A Luta Sigue
• Poder Popular
• Tennessee Drivers Union
• Southern Youth Solidarity Network
• Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism, Frank Chapman
• "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," Jo Freeman
• The Communist Necessity, J. Moufawad-Paul
• The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, Torkil Lauesen

Related Episodes:

• What is to Be Done? with Breht O’Shea and Alyson Escalante
• The Sharing Economy? (Documentary)
• The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins
• Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante
• Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen
• Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism: An Introduction

Intermission music: "Payday at Coal Creek” by Odetta & Larry

Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

One thing that has become quite clear in recent decades is that the best form of disaster preparedness is …community. Being plugged into an organized community can make all the difference when disasters hit. This is just as true for the slow violence perpetrated against all of us under capitalism as it is for responding to emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or wildfires. 

In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about organizing in our communities—specifically focusing on some of the organizing taking place in response to the LA wildfires—but also zooming out much more broadly to talk about organizing in general. It’s the inaugural episode of our organizing series here on Patreon, taking deep dives into a wide variety of different organizing spaces and issues, from immigration to labor to issues around abortion access and trans rights and much more. 

Although we focus most of our political education work on upstream root causes—taking deep dives into many radical ideas and revolutionary theories—it’s crucial to also focus on the practice itself, the on-the-ground work taking place on the frontlines, so that we can, as Frank Chapman has so eloquently put it, also practice our way into correct thinking. And, of course, as Fred Hampton famously put it: "Theory's cool, but theory with no practice ain't shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together." 

In this inaugural episode, we’ve invited on two friends and comrades from the incredible All Power Books in Los Angeles to talk about their involvement in the grassroots, community response to the fires whose impacts are still being felt—and will be for years—on the broader Los Angeles population. 

Gage is a co-founder of All Power Books as well as an artist whose work is featured prominently at All Power. Sean is a co-founder and leader of the All Power Free Clinic. All Power Books is a radical bookstore and community space in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. They co-hosted our very first live episode last year with Abby Martin.

In this conversation we talk about Gage and Sean’s experiences during the first hours of the fires which erupted on January 7th. We talk about the emergence of mutual aid and survival programs which focus specifically on disaster response, the challenges and lessons that emerge from this kind of work, the role that disaster plays in capitalism, how to build class consciousness and infuse on-the-ground survival work with political education, the failure of the official response, All Power’s free clinic, and much more. 

Outro music by Stick to Your Guns

Further resources:

• All Power Books
• Support All Power Books
• AP Free Clinic
• Socialist Rifle Association
• Chinatown Community for Equitable Defense (CCED)
• Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA)
• Aetna Street Solidarity
• Ktown For All
• Southbay Mutual Aid Care Club
• People's Struggle San Fernando Valley
• A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
• Mutual Aid LA
• Midnight Books
• Mask Bloc LA

Related episodes:

• Capitalism, The State, and How We Got Here with Christian Parenti
• Breaking the Chains of Empire w/ Abby Martin (Live Show)

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

Technofeudalism—you might already have some sense of what the term means, even if you haven’t sat down and unpacked it fully. A mode of production with one hand in the past and another the future—an updated form of feudal relations married to an advanced epoch of the productive forces that mark late capitalism—forces that we often associate with futuristic feats of technology. Except this is not some kind of techno-utopia—it’s really a dystopia. 

Is capitalism over? Have we entered into a new mode of production defined by feudal relations and the technological forces of the algorithm? Did capitalism die, before our very eyes, in 2008? These are all questions that we tackle in today’s episode with a very special guest who’s written a book about all of this. 

Yanis Varoufakis is a self-described anti-economist and author of many books. He was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) which is a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. His latest book is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which we’ll be discussing in today’s episode. 

Further Resources

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis
• Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, Yanis Varoufakis
• Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)
• "How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century" by Erik Olin Wright
• Progressive International
• Make Amazon Pay

Related Episodes:

• Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison
• Breaking Things at Work with Gavin Mueller

Cover art: B. Mure Intermission music: "No State Solution" by Zombie Giuliani

Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

This is a free preview of the episode "World on Fire." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going.

In this bonus Patreon episode, Robbie takes some time to reflect on the fires in the LA area and reads a piece that he wrote for Huffington Post which exposed the privatization of firefighting services during the 2018 Woolsey Fire in LA.

This episode in our reading series covers a wide variety of topics from climate change, forest mismanagement, how neoliberalism shapes our municipalities, the rise of fascism and cop cities, the role of mutual aid, the rise of private firefighting services (and the rich assholes who utilize them while simultaneously working for the defunding of public services), the oligarchs who run California's agriculture industry, the connection between imperialism and climate change, and much more.

Further resources:

• "As California’s Wildfires Raged, The Ultra-Rich Hired Private Firefighters," Robert Raymond
• All Power Books
• Midnight Books
• PSL Los Angeles
• The People's Struggle San Fernando Valley
• Mutual Aid LA
• A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit

Related episodes:

• [UNLOCKED] Oil, Monopoly Capitalism, and Imperialism w/ Adam Hanieh
• The Curse w/ Carlee
• Breaking the Chains of Empire w/ Abby Martin (Live Show)
• Disabled Ecologies w/ Sunaura Taylor

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or 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.

This is a free preview of the episode "Four Ways to Be Anticapitalist." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. 

Can capitalism be reformed? Or does it have to be smashed? This is an age-old question that has generated much discussion, debate, and disagreement on the left. In this episode of our Patreon reading series, Della joins Robert to discuss these questions within the context of a Jacobin piece written by the late Erik Olin Wright, "How to Be an Anticaptialist Today."

Can capitalism be tamed? Can it be eroded? Can it be escaped? Or must it be smashed? In exploring and answering these questions, Della and Robert cover a wide variety of topics from historical materialism, Marxism, Leninism, anarchism, prefigurative politics, and much, much more. We synthesize learnings from many of our recent episodes, explore how we've developed in our analysis since some of our older episodes, bring in explorations of history and theory, and explore what has changed and shifted in the last decade of capitalism in the West. 

Further resources:

• "How to e an Anticapitalist Today," Erik Olin Wright
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Robert Pirsig
• The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, Torkil Lauesen
• The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin
• The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, Joshua Sykes

Related epsides:

• Universal Basic Income Pt. 1: an idea whose time has come? 
• Universal Basic Income Pt. 2: a bridge towards post-capitalism?
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism w/ Kristen Ghodsee
• Better Lives For All w/ Jason Hickel
• Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen
• The Logical Case for Socialism (and Against Capitalism) w/ Scott Sehon
• Palestine Pt. 14: Decolonial Marxism w/ Patrick Higgins
• Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante
• Prefigurative Politics and Workplace Democracy w/ Saio Gradin and Nicole Wires
• Dialectical Materialism w/ Joshua Sykes
• Worker Cooperatives Pt. 1 & 2