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You can listen to the full episode "The Puritanical Eye" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you will 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. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Than...

As socialists in the United States one of our most important tasks—at least under our current material conditions—is to raise class consciousness among the mass of people: the basic work of tuning people in to the existence of structures and systems that define and limit our lives. 

As much as we on the left might take these things for granted, it’s always important to remember that many, many folks out there don’t think of the world in terms of socialism, capitalism, Marx, Engels—certainly not the relations of production under monopoly capitalism. But that doesn’...

Listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you will 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. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you.

Weight loss...

Righteous indignation, truth, justice, and, maybe most important, love. These are some of the pillars that support the work that Dr. Cornel West, today’s guest, has been committed to throughout his entire life.

Dr. West, as you may likely already know,  is a longtime political activist, philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual. He is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary where he teaches courses in Philosophy of Religion and African American Critical Thought. He’s the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr. West has w...

You can listen to the full episode "Israel and the U.S. Empire w/ Max Ajl" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber you will 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. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstr...

"What Israel is doing right now has nothing to do with antisemitism. What Israel is doing right now is a genocide. What Israel has been doing for the past 75 years is apartheid, is occupation. There is no need for any one of us to serve in the IDF. The IDF should not exist. The state of Israel should not exist." These are the words of a former Israeli soldier turned anti-Zionist organizer: Meital Yaniv.

Meital describes themself as a “death laborer tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine” and has recently written the...

The imperial core—which is comprised of settler-colonial states like those in Western Europe, as well as states like the United States, Canada and Australia—have been stealing the resources and labor of the Global South—or the periphery—for centuries. It started with the direct colonial violence and resource exploitation that marked much of the last few centuries, but it didn’t end there.  

Neo-colonialism—a term that you’re probably familiar with—is broadly defined as the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former colonies. But what does it actu...

You can listen to the full episode "Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities" by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

As a Patreon subscriber, not only will you get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, as well as early access to certain episodes and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers, depending on which tier you subscribe to, but you’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/sup...

Contradiction is one of the most important concepts in Marxist philosophy. When we think about Marxism, we typically think about the contributions that Marx, Engels, Lenin (and many others since) have made specifically to the study of political economy—but there are also deep philosophical underpinnings that form the foundation of Marxist political economy, and one of these foundational philosophies is dialectical materialism. 

Dialectical materialism brings together two important components of Marxist thought: dialectics and materialism. Broadly speaking, dialectics is grounded in the idea that in order to understand the world, we must look at things in rel...

Ever wonder why it feels like almost every single tech product you use is actively trying to screw you? Why it is that your printer requires you to subscribe to ink cartridges that, ounce for ounce, cost more than gold? Why you can’t read websites anymore because of all the moving, deceptive advertisements clogging up the screen? Why you’re paying substantially more for an entire suite of buggy streaming services than your parents ever were for cable TV? Why your BlueTooth enabled electric toothbrush keeps breaking? Why airplanes are falling apart mid-flight? 

Well, it might not s...