Novara Media

Aaron Bastani sat down with Novara Media's own Ash Sarkar, to celebrate the paperback release of her bestselling book, Minority Rule. ‘Minority rule' is the term Ash used to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. She revealed how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars […]

The most powerful CEO in history is barely a person anymore. But it's not just his X-addled brain that has transformed him. He has deeply integrated himself in the ‘cyborg collective' – a world of electrons, brain implants, fantastical promises, financial systems, bots, and memes – he has made for himself. Henry Ford gave his name to […]

Rising unemployment, increased military spending, and a decline in living standards for most people, including the middle class: the description fits both the 1930s and the 2020s. In the 1930s, it was a situation that morphed into the destruction and horror of the Second World War. On Downstream with Aaron Bastani this week is Clara […]

Trillions of dollars of AI build-out. An economy poised on the edge of a giant crisis. Some say it's a bubble. But what if it's an entirely new kind of economics? One that has no need of humans at all? Marek Poliks is the co-author with Roberto Alonso Trillo of Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No […]

The final episode. Back in Westminster, Kojo confronts the human cost of hidden wealth – and asks if change is still possible. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen […]

In episode three, the dark web of offshore finance connects Britain's imperial past with its political present. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are […]

In episode two, the trail leads offshore. From Westminster to the Cayman Islands, Kojo uncovers how tax havens are fuelling London's housing crisis. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza […]

New four-part podcast. A homeless man dies in Westminster surrounded by vast wealth and empty homes. His death sparks a disturbing investigation into how secrecy and evasion have become normalised in the heart of British power. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires […]

Nearly all of us on Earth live within a ‘nation-state'. Nation-states are an invisible and seemingly inevitable and eternal part of the infrastructure that forms our society: the water we swim in. Rarely do we pause to consider how this global system of nation-states came into being, and what might replace it after its gone. […]

Have the Greens got what it takes to become the main political vehicle of the radical left? Following their Trip episode on Ecology, the ACFM crew take a closer look at Zack Polanski's party as it nudges past Labour in the polls. From the '60s dream of ‘steady state economics' to the anarcho-green convergence of […]

The US military is changing shape: it's increasingly high-tech, intelligence led, and focused on assassinations. In short, the Israeli model. And the changing shape of war means changing flows of money and power. The primes, which have dominated the military industrial for decades, now face competition from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Anduril. But […]

The notion that the Global South is affected ‘first and worst' by global shocks they didn't cause, namely climate change, is one of the cornerstones of leftist thought. But what if it's not entirely true? What if, contrary to this tenet, it's wealthy Western nations who have over-developed and lost their resilience in the process? […]

Cheap food holds capitalism together. But to get it, we've had to cheapen almost everything on the planet: the work of women, nature and colonies. We've made strange new ecologies all over the world, and now we're living in the metabolic sh*tshow. How will the ruling class keep control? On this week's Do Your Own Research, […]

In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: an investigation into the toxic depths of America's food industry.  Twenty five years later, the book remains an urgent intervention, as much for what it says about workers' rights as for our agricultural systems and dietary health. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser […]

Are humans distinct from nature? Are there natural limits to inequality? Can you have action without effort? Do bacteria have agency? Jem, Nadia and Keir find themselves dwarfed by the concept of ecology in this planetary-scale episode, which touches on cybernetics, systems thinking, ecofeminism and actor-network theory. Their ACFM guide to ecological thinking includes ideas […]

There's nothing in the world more important than the food system. The twentieth century was scarred by enormous famines – and, like the one in Gaza, they are still deliberately engineered. But since the 1970s, the absolute number of deaths from famine have dropped by over 90%. On a global scale, we now make so much food […]

Just a week ago, the architect of Starmer's rise to power, Morgan McSweeney, resigned over his connections to Peter Mandelson, after further proof of Mandelson's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein emerged in the newest batch of files released by the US Department of Justice. According to this week's guest, this scandal isn't an anomaly, but an […]

When it comes to the relationship between capitalism and crime, those on the left generally think of exploitation. People often turn to crime, so the thinking goes, because they can't make ends meet by legitimate means. Whatever your views on that framing, there is also another – far less discussed – connection between capitalism and […]

Over the past three years, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people has become a flash point for freedom of speech in the West. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians has given Western governments an excuse to crack down on dissenters. There has been intimidation and job insecurity at one end of the scale, through to brutal […]

This week, Donald Trump continued his streak of threatening tariffs against any country that opposes him, increasing the odds of an escalating trade war and further destabilising the global economic system. But according to this week's guest, the system is in desperate need of reform. Indeed, she thinks without a complete structural overhaul, it will […]

Our guest this week was born in 1943, in what was then British India – modern day Pakistan. Unlike most, who have learned history through books and second-hand sources, he has witnessed first-hand a great deal of the 20th and 21st centuries. Tariq Ali founded Verso Books, the leading left-wing publishing house in Britain, as well […]

It has been a bellicose start to 2026, with the US army kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threatening to annex Greenland, putting many more nations, including Mexico and Colombia, on high alert. On Downstream this week is investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who's best known for helping Edward Snowden's disclosures about the NSA's global surveillance […]

After ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood' on October 7th, a specific narrative quickly emerged and pervaded the entire Western mainstream media. Namely, that unprecedented horrors were committed against the state of Israel and that whatever way it responded was justified. Any deviation from this narrative was quickly shut down. In the intervening years, the British state has […]

Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani joined each other on 17th December for a special end-of-year Downstream, wrapping up the year in politics.

Norman Finkelstein is one of the west's leading anti-Zionist scholars. The son of Holocaust survivors, he has spent his life studying and critiquing Israel's assault on Palestine, decades before it became socially acceptable to do so. Yet despite having dedicated his career to it, by the day before Hamas' attack in October 2023, Norman had […]

After a Trip episode about the meaning of mainstream, this time the gang go deeper into ‘Mainstream' – that is, the new soft-left faction inside Labour. Yes, a festive episode about the inner workings of a political party! Don't say we don't spoil you. Jem, Nadia and Keir explain the emergence of Mainstream's ‘radical realists' […]

Since Hamas launched its assault on October 7th, 2023, the group has become synonymous with evil in large parts of the Western media. Condemnation has come at the expense of critical engagement with the group's actions, objectives, and history, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with racist assumptions and conspiracy theories. Tareq Baconi is […]

NEW LIVE SHOW! Join us at Crossed Wires festival in Sheffield on 4th July 2026. Presale tickets available at 11AM on 10th December – go to crossedwires.live and use the code CW26EARLY. After watching the Wicked sequel, Moya wonders if politeness is stopping us from seriously addressing women's shrinking bodies and changing faces. Are we allowing […]

Did you know that the standard of Google searches has actually gotten worse over recent years? Once you think about it, it makes sense. Highly effective search means fewer searches overall. And fewer searches means less ad revenue. The financial basis of Alphabet, which is Google's parent company, is, of course, digital advertising. Which means […]

Jem, Nadia and Keir debate the meaning of ‘mainstream' – something none of them could ever possibly be, of course. Is ‘woke' the new mainstream? Can there be a mainstream if we don't all have access to the same culture? Is Tommy Robinson shifting the Overton Window? Why is nonconformity associated with coolness? And who engineers […]

Whether you love or loathe his tactics, it's hard to deny the disruptive impact that Roger Hallam has had on British politics via the activist organisations he has led, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. He joins Ash Sarkar fresh from his latest stint in prison, where he wrote a treatise for Your Party that […]

Support for the Green party in Britain has been steadily rising for the past few decades. However, few predicted that when Zack Polanski took office as Green party leader in September, membership would surge from 70,000 to 150,000 members in a matter of months. According to the latest polling, the party's share of the vote […]

At Novara, we focus on the trends that are remaking the world and affecting our lives: technological development and automation, multipolarity, the demise of an American-led world order and the rise of China. On Downstream this week is a man whose work draws together all of these themes: former World Bank macroeconomist and leading expert […]

Investigative journalist Paul Holden has spent the last four years digging into the political machinations that brought Keir Starmer's Labour Party into office – findings that propel his powerful 2025 book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Labour Together and the Crisis of British Democracy. He tells Ash Sarkar about the cache of leaked emails that revealed the […]

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then a very young political scientist, declared that history was over. He wrote a book with the same title just a couple of years later. The Cold War had finished, the USSR had collapsed, liberal democracy and market capitalism reigned supreme, and it wasn't going to change. And yet in the […]

After last week's episode on Parties, this time ACFM exposes the predicament facing Your Party, the new leftwing faction led by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. What expectations do leftwing voters have for Your Party? Does the Corbyn faction distrust the membership? Is Zarah a politician or a poster? And does ‘Yorp' stand a chance […]

Iran has been in the news a lot in 2025. Over recent decades, it has been a variable in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. But during the Twelve Day War with Israel in June of this year, Iran very much took centre stage. People started asking questions, chief among them being: What does […]

The Gaza Strip, home to 2.2 million people, is a tiny land mass about the same size as the Isle of Wight. Yet in terms of munitions by weight, Gaza has been subjected to more than all of the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined, over the whole of World War II. Another […]

Just over two years after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and just days after the announcement of a ceasefire, Aaron Bastani spoke to three Palestinian writers in front of a live audience at EartH in Hackney. Ahmed Alnaouq is the host of Palestine Deep Dive and the co-founder of ‘We Are Not Numbers', […]

Amid the bumpy launch of a new left-wing party and the rise of the Greens and Reform, the ACFM crew turn their attention to parties. Do we still need them? Do parties work by drawing people together, or by excluding the uninvited? And should a political party have anything in common with a dance party? […]

Artificial intelligence is set to be one of the most disruptive technologies this century. For some, a machine capable of augmenting its own intelligence is a matter of time — and could even arrive within a decade. This week's guest is philosopher and author William MacAskill. One of the leading thinkers in the Effective Altruism […]

Economist, and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis joins Aaron to discuss his most recent book Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance, a memoir about the women in Yanis' family who raised him, and gave him his political conscience. They discuss the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, is patriarchy harmful to the perpetrators, as […]

In the summer of 2024, hotels sheltering Muslim asylum seekers across Britain were attacked by violent mobs. A year later, as the summer of 2025 drew to a close, a far-right demonstration of 100,000 people marched through London, bearing St George's flags and led by Tommy Robinson. On Downstream this week is Myriam François, a […]

After last week's ACFM Trip to the Future, Jem and Keir reconvene to talk about science fiction. Is sci-fi a reaction to the “time-space compression” of the present? Is it inherently progressive? How did dystopian and paranoids visions of the future come to dominate sci-fi? Was Arthur C. Clarke an early acid communist? Find all […]

It's almost 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU, and we're still dealing with the consequences. In his new book, Between The Waves, Politico's chief UK political correspondent Tom McTague argues that the journey to Brexit really began with Enoch Powell, before be taken up by his political heir, Nigel Farage. He talks […]

What if we stopped treating the future like a speculative asset and started trying to actually build and prepare? The ACFM gang look to the horizon in this Trip episode. Did young people always worry so much about their futures? Has the currency of emergency been devalued? Does conservatism have an idea of the future? […]

What were the ancient alternatives to democracy? Did people in the Bronze Age forget how to write – or deliberately stop? And what's the use in studying ancient languages? In a Downstream IRL recorded at EartH Hackney, Aaron Bastani speaks to Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, about some lesser-known aspects of the […]

What can the collapse of the Ottoman Empire teach us about the danger of the current discourse around migration? ‘Re-migration' is not a new concept conjured up by the far-right, but rather something that would be familiar to many Europeans of a century ago. What would those involved in these tragedies think of the direction […]

Our politicians don't agree on much, but one thing most of them agree on is that growth is universally good. Grow the pie, they assure us, and there will be more to go around. Our guest on Downstream this week could not disagree more. Professor Jason Hickel argues that the mindless pursuit of Gross Domestic […]

Are gardens a sanctuary or an enclosure? The ACFM gang sketch out a weird-left history of gardening, from the walled gardens of paradise to the tarmacked lawns of suburban Britain. Find the books, music and Dunmore Pineapple mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Dan Wang is a technology analyst and author whose life experience, spent partly in North America, partly in China, sets him up as an authoritative observer of the differences and similarities between the American and Chinese empires. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Wang shares his thesis that elite overproduction of engineers in China, and lawyers in […]