Novara Media

You’ve probably heard of Boots Riley’s work – Sorry To Bother You starring LaKeith Stanfield was a surprise hit, and his series I’m A Virgo got picked up by Amazon Prime. But the Oakland-raised rapper-turned-director doesn’t just want you to leave the cinema having had a good time: he wants you to start a revolution.

His new film I Love Boosters – starring the incredibly charming Keke Palmer – is about three women who shoplift from high end boutiques, and sell the clothes at a cut price in the hood. But it wouldn’t be a Boots Riley film if it stopped there. What starts as a paean to shoplifters turns into a story of working class shop floor organisation – and international communist action.

Is all art propaganda? Is shoplifting a revolutionary act? What role does style play in the revolution? And what’s it like being the most high profile communist in Hollywood, in Trump’s America?

Spoilers Warning: Information about the plot is disclosed at 17:50 – 19:20, 26:40 – 27:50, and 54:10 – 54:50.

00:00 Introduction

00:53 What’s It Like Being a Communist in Hollywood?

02:24 The Contradictions of Having Radical Politics Under Capitalism

03:23 “Suits for Rage”: The Contradictions We All Embody

08:27 How Boots Riley Became Communist

09:03 Exposing Injustice Isn’t Enough: Action is Needed

11:24 What Actually Makes People Join Movements?

13:08 Hollywood’s Problem With Radical Politics

20:10 On Craft, Creativity and Alienation

23:08 Boots Riley’s Superhero Origin Story

31:00 General Strike Now!

35:02 Every Film Is Political

42:28 Is the Right Better at Propaganda?

48:05 How the Cops Manufactured a Shoplifting Panic

53:08 It’s All Propaganda

Support our work

Buy Novara Media merch

Ever felt like an imposter? Jem, Nadia and Keir offer a weird-left analysis of confidence – from market dynamics and private school to the power of positive thinking – with ideas from Barbara Ehrenreich, Dale Carnegie and Foucault.

For the musical version of this episode – featuring Wiley, Dolly Parton and Gloria Gaynor – head to our SoundCloud:

Find the books mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Become a Novara Media supporter: https://novara.media/support

Through the 1990s and the 2000s, the West told itself a story: let China get rich, and it’ll become like us. But then China got rich – and it become less and less like the West.

Kaiser Kuo – host of the Sinica Podcast, former Baidu executive, and founding guitarist of China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty – thinks we need to reckon with this fact: that China has not only now caught up, but is making its own path in modernity.

China has replaced liberal democracy with a strange alloy of Confucianism, Leninism, technocracy, state capitalism and markets – and that combination is outperforming the West. What liberals assumed was the triumphant end of history might turn out to have been a historical cul-de-sac.

Kaiser and Richard Hames talk Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, Wang Huning and the late Qing Dynasty, solar panels and performance legitimacy, and discuss what happens when the future stops looking Western.

Explore the map of everything in the world that has ever mattered.

Support our work.

00:00 Intro
03:35 Is Chinese Tech The Best?
10:42 The Great Reckoning: Why the West Must Rethink China
21:56 Confucianism, Leninism and Technocracy
31:03 Confucianism and Modern China
41:44 Can China’s State Control Capitalism?
52:04 Many Kinds of Modernity: China as a Model and China Shock 2.0
1:02:53 Green Energy, Industrial Policy and US-China Convergence
1:16:20 Fukuyama, Huntington and Wang Huning: Visions of the Future

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
4:00 Who Was Mao?
10:52 The 1950s: Land Reform & Early Socialism
24:27 Gender, Class Divides & Welfare
38:37 The Hundred Flowers Campaign Explained
50:15 Famine & The Great Leap Forward
1:03:09 Was the Famine the End of Socialism? Cold War & the Third Front
1:15:02 The Cultural Revolution Explained
1:28:57 How the Cultural Revolution Ended
1:37:30 Jiang Qing, the Gang of Four & Deng Xiaoping’s Return
1:47:49 Mao’s Legacy: Is China Socialist Today?

Support our work.

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.

Support our work: novaramedia.com/support

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
3:57 Huawei’s Current Legal Battle
14:14 Huawei & Espionage
24:34 Huawei in Africa and Iraq
33:07 The Great Firewall and Tech Rivalry
46:40 The Mysterious CEO: Ren Zhengfei and Shenzhen
55:04 Who Owns Huawei?
1:03:09 How Tiananmen Square Changed Chinese Tech
1:11:19 AI and Microchips
1:19:46 Sanctions, the UK and Huawei’s future

Support our work: https://novaramedia.com/support

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.

Support our work: https://novara.media/support

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

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

When and why did liberal democracy stop working for the many? On Downstream this week is Daron Acemoglu, joint recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, whose 2012 book Why Nations Fail has sold over a million copies.

He talks to Aaron Bastani about his data-packed new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which seeks to diagnose and remedy democracy before it’s too late. They talk about the transition to a post-industrial economy, the loss of community, how progressive politics became overrun by middle-class interests, and how AI further threatens our capacity to self-govern and lead flourishing lives.

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

This summer’s extreme heat, wildfires and thousands of excess deaths have shown that the climate is destabilising faster than predicted. In the face of this undeniable crisis, what should be done?

Tessa Khan is the founder of Uplift, an organisation working to decarbonise our energy system before it’s too late. The former human rights lawyer realised a decade ago that none of the other social questions matter if we don’t address the climate crisis.

Tessa talks to Aaron Bastani about the calls to keep drilling in the North Sea, whether renewables are susceptible to economic shocks, and how an ageing population impacts climate politics.

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

What did the Situationists actually achieve? Nadia, Jem and Keir look back on the antics and manifestos of the socialist revolutionaries who gathered under the banner of the Situationist International.

With ideas from Debord and Khayati and music from the KLF and Negativland, the gang chart the SI’s influence on politics and media theory, from the central concept of the Spectacle to their lingering influence on pop music, psychogeography and political organising.

Find the music and books mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

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

AI is set to take all of our jobs. It will irrevocably transform our relationships – and it might even kill us all. These are some of the big claims made about artificial intelligence today. And they are claims that on Novara, we take seriously. This week’s Downstream guest thinks that giving weight to those grand concerns is a mistake. He believes that by talking up the possibility that AI could replace significant amounts of labour – or develop an agency of its own – only serves to exaggerate the capacity of AI – and therefore just helps tech CEOs drive more investors to buy their already overpriced stocks.

Cory Doctorow is a writer and activist – who’s written 36 books – spanning non-fiction and science fiction. He famously coined the term “ensh*ttification” to describe the modern trajectory of the internet. And he has a new book on AI – it’s called the “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”. As Aaron Bastani takes time off on paternity leave, Michael Walker, host of Novara Live, sat down with Cory to ask one of the world’s leading tech writers his burning questions about AI.

Is Cory surprised at the speed of AI’s so-called “evolution”? What does the latest AI “Hugging Face” tell us about AI? Does the AI presented to us in 2026 present a threat to life on Earth, or is that just hype? Is it really intelligent, or just a simulacrum of intelligence? Does it matter?

We live in a moment when the working class is fractured along a great many lines. Gone are the days of solidarity built around a shared experience of factory work that formed the bedrock of Karl Marx’s analysis of class struggle – and his vision of emancipation. Meanwhile in the halls of power, elites in our politics have failed for decades now to really grasp what people in Britain care about and need – resorting to lame stand-ins such as ‘Mondeo man’ and ‘Stevenage woman’, Farage’s new favourite: ‘alarm clock Britain’.

What are they missing? Lived experience, apart from anything else. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar sat down with campaigner and author Jonas Patrick Marvin to discuss his new book ‘The Breaking of the English Working Class’. Weaving autobiographical detail with political theory, Marvin tackles head-on the class forces that have shaped his own life.

Why can’t people born in London afford to stay and build lives there? Who gets to define themselves as working class, and on what grounds? How should the left respond to rising anti-immigration politics? Why has the working class become so fragmented, and what can be done to repair it?

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2026 is roughly the same as when, in the very, very distant past, the Earth was between 6 and 8 degrees warmer. If the Earth were to reach those temperatures again, the majority of mammals would go extinct.

While we’re not at those temperatures now, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could cause the climate to accelerate towards planetary conditions that pre-date the dinosaurs. This is the stark warning of this week’s guest, Bill McGuire.

A geologist and volcanologist by training, he has spent time as an expert and government advisor on extreme weather events, before becoming an author. According to him, there is no plan for the extreme climactic upheaval that is to come.

The genocide of Palestinians, carried out by the Israeli army with backing from the US and the British state, has lead to an almighty breakdown in public trust in the West. Now more than ever, citizens are turning away from establishment media sources in search of journalism that more closely resembles the world as we see it.

This week on Downstream, Ash Sarkar sits down with Amy Goodman, veteran journalist and founder of Democracy Now!, one of the leading independent media organisations in the US. Goodman is the subject of a new film, Steal This Story, Please!, which documents her storied career covering some of the most consequential moments in American living history. She has confronted sitting presidents, bore firsthand witness to 9/11, survived a firing squad in East Timor and exposed major corporate crime in the Niger Delta.

What drives Amy to do the work she does – shining light on humanity’s darkness, decade after decade? How did her Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn inform her work? What does good journalism look like to her? Why does she believe we all need to re-learn the lost art of disagreement? And does she think American democracy can survive?