Libsyn Directory

Be More Pirate w/ Sam Conniff

Release Date: 02/13/2024

Righteous Indignation, Love, and Running for President w/ Dr. Cornel West

Upstream

Righteous indignation, truth, justice, and, maybe most important, love. These are some of the pillars that support the work that , 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...

[TEASER] Palestine Pt. 11: Israel and the U.S. Empire w/ Max Ajl

Upstream

You can listen to the full episode "Israel and the U.S. Empire w/ Max Ajl" by subscribing to our Patreon here: 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 or at . Thank you. There’s a widespread misconception among a significant number of...

Palestine Pt. 10: Healing from Zionism w/ Meital Yaniv

Upstream

"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 book Bloodlines which traces their paternal...

[UNLOCKED] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel

Upstream

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,...

[TEASER] Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities

Upstream

You can listen to the full episode "Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities" by subscribing to our Patreon here: 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/support. Thank you. Why is even just driving through suburbia...

Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes

Upstream

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...

The Big Tech Con w/ Cory Doctorow

Upstream

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 seem...

[TEASER] How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel

Upstream

You can listen to the full episode "How the North Plunders the South" by subscribing to our Patreon here: 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 or at . Thank you. The imperial core—which is comprised of settler-colonial states like...

Battling the Duopoly w/ Jill Stein

Upstream

There’s no question that the crisis of capitalism and imperialism have reached a breaking point—it’s clearly visible not only in opinion polls but also just simply through our lived experiences. The system, and those who run it, have clearly abandoned any sense of popular wellbeing or even basic accommodations for a vast segment of the population. The system is running on fumes, the engines are sputtering out, and it’s only a matter of time before the decline turns into a freefall. Although the electoral process here in the United States is just one part of the puzzle—it’s an...

[TEASER] International Workers' Day w/ John from Working Class History

Upstream

You can listen to the full episode "International Workers' Day" by subscribing to our Patreon here: 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 or at . Thank you. Militant workers, strikes, murder, dynamite, massacres—working class history is...

More Episodes

What do you typically think of when you think of pirates? Parrots? Peg Legs? Eye patches? Treasure? Is there more to pirates than these things, than corny jokes and a Disney franchise starring Johnny Depp?

Our guest for today’s episode certainly thinks so. Sam Conniff’s book Be More Pirate: How to Take on the World and Win, was published in 2018, and sparked a sequel How To: Be More Pirate, a podcast titled “Be More Pirate,” and a movement of people studying the principles and strategies of Golden Age Pirates to bring them into activism and leadership in the 21st century.

In this conversation, we learn about pirate history, including their symbols, ethics, and labor policies; we discuss David Graeber’s last book published posthumously, Pirate Enlightenment, or the real Libertalia which covers lost forms of social and political order that inspire hopeful possibilities for today, and we explore invitations for how we can each be more pirate in our projects, organizations, and social movements.

Although 1690 to 1725, was the so-called Golden Age of Piracy which is the focus of this conversation, elements of piracy very much still exist—for example, Ansarallah, or the Houthis in Yemen, have been likened to pirates in popular narratives recently. You may know them as the group that’s been in the news lately for attacking Israeli, US, and UK-connected ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Ansarallah see themselves as acting on their obligation to international law to do all they can to help stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.

As Sam Conniff shares “Rather than simply voice their complaints, (pirates) choose instead to do something about the situation. No longer prepared to sit quietly and accept the bad deal on the table, they decide to break the rules and then remake the rules ... with a new social code built on purposeful principles such as fair pay, fair say, social equality, freedom, and justice. And rum.”

Thank you to Storm Weather Shanty Choir for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond

Further Resources:

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