Novara FM – Novara Media Podcasts

Who dares to rewrite 40,000 years of history? Archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber offer a radically different story of our social evolution in their new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity . Drawing on groundbreaking research gathered over a decade of collaboration, their mighty 700-page tome upends just about everything we thought we knew abou...

Just like COVID-19, climate breakdown is an anthropogenic crisis that requires an anthropogenic solution, according to Benjamin Bratton, author of Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World . In a conversation touching on Foucault, eschatology, China’s future and the archetypal “Karen”, Bratton tells Aaron Bastani why we need a new, positive biopolitics on a planetar...

Log on to any social media and you’ll be plunged into a whirlwind of demands for recognition, each voice trying to shout louder than the others. And for decades, political theorists have thought that the demand for recognition is one of the most powerful forces driving popular discontent – on right and left. But what happens to the demand for recognition when it collides with the digital pla...

#ACFM host Keir Milburn takes #NovaraFM producer Chal Ravens on a tour of Leeds, one of northern England’s historic epicentres of industry, trade and capital. From trouble at the flax mill to face-offs with fascists, Keir maps out a working class history that’s as much about violence as it is about solidarity. We meet Chartists and communists, rioters and rebellious servants, and consider so...

The cycle of struggle that erupted in 2011 – from the Arab Spring to the movement of the squares to the anti-austerity demonstrations in Britain – was characterised by stress on horizontalism and decentralised leadership. But as that movement grew and changed, it found itself running into the limits of that form, and entered into political parties – or founded new ones. But it found both resistanc...

Desire. It takes a young, working-class man out of the car factory, through the academy, and out of it again. It takes him through nightclubs and seminar rooms, cruising grounds and bathhouses, through intense relationships – both enduring and transient – and into a restless, enduring inquiry into human life as condensed in our greatest literature. Jonathan Dollimore is one of Britain’s grea...

Why is it so hard to imagine a world without coppers? In this special episode, Novara Media reporter Rivkah Brown examines how the blue tentacles of police power creep into our daily lives and invade our minds. We hear the shocking stories of Bea, a left-wing activist who discovered her ex was a police spy, and Judah Adunbi, whose years as a race adviser to the Bristol police didn’t stop them from...

In the next decade, all politics will be climate politics. But climate politics isn’t always progressive. In the US, outright pseudoscientific denialism has been replaced by a softer, economist-led denialism: there might be a problem, but we just can’t afford to do anything serious about it. And there are darker possibilities lurking in the shadows. But, says Kate Aronoff , there are r...

What if everything you thought you knew about freedom was wrong? For generations of political activists, revolutionaries, utopians and dreamers, freedom has been the watchword of political struggle. People have stood on barricades and in front of tanks demanding it, wasted in prisons in defence of it and stood in front of firing squads for fighting for it. But what kind of freedom were they fighti...

Who decides how we’re governed? What can’t a government do? And who gets to vote – or who doesn’t? And where is it all written down? In a constitution, of course. At the end of the 18th century, in a time of war and revolution, a spate of constitution-writing broke out across the globe. They put limits on government, and gave citizens – mostly men, and very often white men...

Blue Devils! A little band of tyrants! A plague of blue locusts! So the Northern radical press reacted to attempts to impose a new police force in the 1840s. But today that tradition of scepticism and hostility to the police is largely forgotten. As new movements against racist violence in the US raise the slogan of police abolition, many on the left wonder: what exactly are the police for? Did th...

At the birth of industry in England, a movement of weavers gathered together to resist the imposition of technologies which threatened their way of life. Their actions – which ranged from petitioning government to direct sabotage and destruction of the new weaving frames – were done in the name of their fictional leader, the ‘mass pseudonym’ Ned Ludd. The Luddites became a byword for a...

150 years ago this week, workers and the poor of Paris seized control of the city and established a popular, elected municipal government: they took over great buildings, wiped out debts, instituted free education – and inspired countless radicals worldwide. The Commune lasted only 72 days before being drowned in blood. But each of those days was a political earthquake. James Butler is joined by L...

We all dream of a better world. In fact, all politics of emancipation – all serious politics of the left – is rooted in claims about a better world and a vision of the future. Why, then, do so many leftists disdain “making recipes for the cookshops of the future”? Did Marx really think we couldn’t – or shouldn’t – think of a new world? And what lessons might this argument h...

Following the headlines of recent years, you might be forgiven for thinking the problem of sex and power can be solved just by thinking about consent. But what if consent was only the beginning, not the final answer, to the question of desire? What would it mean to face the intractability and difficulty of sexual politics without seeking easy solutions? What might the search for a ‘female Vi...

Once, it was enough just to work. Now everyone – from self-help gurus to employment counsellors, from superstar artists to glassy-eyed Silicon Valley CEOs – tells us we have to love it as well. Why? When did this change happen? And what should we love, if not work? Sarah Jaffe has reported for years on work and workers’ organisation on both sides of the Atlantic, and joins James Butler to ex...

Every election we hear of the “care crisis” as if it’s about to explode. But care affects us all, and not just in election cycles. And rather than an explosion, the reality of care in the UK looks more like the slow and gradual erosion of the fabric of social provision. But why is care in crisis? Who does care work in Britain? Why are big corporations and financiers so interested...

2021 marks a decade since Aaron Bastani and James Butler started the radio show which would eventually become #NovaraFM, and which would give birth to Novara Media. To mark the start of the new year – a year in which all the crises which prompted the show’s creation are more visible and more pressing than they were a decade ago – join James for a trip through just some of the twi...

Everyone’s heard about the rise of the robots: they’re going to put us out of jobs, Skynet is going to usher in a miserable dystopia, or a friendly AI will automate everything we hate, freeing us to live a life of luxury. But what if both of these accounts are wrong? A deeper look at the actual consequences of automation might suggest something quite different is happening. The gains i...

What would it mean to take climate change as seriously as it demands to be taken? What kinds of political action are adequate to the climate crisis? Why are states acting so slowly, and so inadequately? And why is the climate movement so wedded to a near-absolute pacifism? Andreas Malm , author of one of the most penetrating accounts of carbon capitalism, thinks he knows why – and what is to be do...

What is it to live a good life? Does it mean endless consumption? More air travel to farther places, fast food and faster fashion, and an endlessly expanding market? And if so, doesn’t climate change mean an end to anything like a good life? The philosopher Kate Soper doesn’t think so. She joins Clare Hymer to discuss alternative hedonism, political optimism and post-growth living. Kat...

In the jungles of Jharkhand and Bihar, armed Maoists continue their decades-long insurgency against the Indian state. Sparked off by a rebellion in Naxalbari in 1967, after taking to the jungles, the Naxalites encountered and recruited from Adivasi populations, often living in resource-rich areas eyed by mining and extraction companies. Alpa Shah , who teaches anthropology at LSE, became intrigued...

London is red. In both 2017 and 2019, the capital city went overwhelmingly red – a story repeated in other English cities, but especially pronounced in London. Yet the left has rarely had much interest in London’s socialist story, preferring to deride the capital as a decadent seat of power or a parasitical drain on the rest of the country. But London has a deep, long history as a laboratory...

You’re probably tired of hearing about ‘fake news.’ You probably think everything that needs to be said about it has been said. What if you were wrong? What if those arguments had barely scratched the surface? James Butler is joined by Marcus Gilroy-Ware to delve behind the facade of fake news and uncover what lies beneath: from a hollowed-out democracy, to the clash of reason an...

The votes are still being counted, but it now looks certain that Joe Biden will be the next president of the USA. Despite the predictions of liberal pundits, though, the Biden landslide didn’t emerge. Why? What does the US look like after four years of Trump? Has American political culture changed – and is it permanent? And what hope does the fledgling left in the US have? James Butler is jo...