WHAT IS POLITICS?
Politics is one of the only practical disciplines where none of the main concepts have clear, coherent definitions.
We define ourselves with terms like "left” and "right" and we believe in things like "democracy," “markets,” "capitalism" and "socialism" even though we don’t really know what any of these words actually mean.
This series aims to make sense out of the political muddle that we've inherited from media, academia, and from decades of cold war propaganda, so that we can figure what it is that we want when it comes to politics, and how we can achieve it.
- Update frequency
- every 52 days
- Episodes
- 30
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
8. Idealism vs. Materlialism – How History is Made: Haudenosaunee Women / the Suffragettes / the Double V Campaign / The English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 / The Anarchist Revolution in Spain 1936-39
Human beings have free will, but our actions are constrained by material realities. Understanding how material and practical conditions shape human behaviour can make all the difference between succ…
7.1. Material Conditions: Why You Can’t Eliminate Sexism Just by Eliminating Sexism
What would happen if you could end sexism overnight by giving everyone a magic pink pill?
Why we need to target material and practical conditions if we want to eliminate cultural hierarchies.
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7. The Origin of Social Hierarchy and Male Dominance: why David Graeber and Jordan Peterson are Wrong
Why are hierarchy and male dominance so prevalent in human societies?
According to anthropologists David Graeber & David Wengrow, it’s because people were “self-consciously experimenting with dif…
6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works
Everywhere we look, past and present we see hierarchical societies where some people have more wealth, more power, and more rights than others. Was this always the state of the human world? Is hier…
5. How Do We Know What Left and Right Mean? Who’s who on the left and right: 1789-1917
This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definitions of Left and Right is actually the correct one.
How do we know the left an…
Understanding the News: How Tax Cuts Fuel Police Brutality
Politicians’ dependence on police as a revenue stream, prosecutors’ dependence on police for convictions, and falling tax cuts on the wealthy combine to give police incredible power. This is a key r…
4. How Political Definitions Shape Reality
Definitions of political terms affect what we see and don’t see in the world around us, and turn us into effective or ineffective communicators and political actors.
The definition of government that…
3. The Left-Right Political Spectrum is About Class Conflict
Most journalists and Doctor-Professor academics don’t really know what the left-right political spectrum is about, but you will after listening to this episode!
tweeter: @WorbsIntoWor…
2. What is Politics and Why Should I Care? (video)
How can people who don’t have official decision-making power exert their influence over those who do? A quick overview of some basic political concepts:
POLITICS
PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE POLITICS
POLITIES
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1. Worbs: when political terms have no meaning
Politics is unique among practical fields in that almost all of the main political terms are worbs: words that everyone (including academics and journalists) uses without really knowing what they mea…