Common Wealth with Safa Bee

Most of us were taught that capitalism and entrepreneurship are the same thing. Safa Bee untangles the two, exploring what sets capitalism apart from its alternatives, why it persists, and what it looks like to operate on different terms.

Warm, rigorous, and grounded in the knowledge that the cooperative economy is already being built, listeners will move from understanding the system to questioning it – and from questioning it to knowing how to build what comes next, and why.

take a sneak peek at season one

Surplus Value: Money's Not the Problem. Theft Is.

Value, in economic terms, is wealth created by workers. Surplus value is wealth that, under capitalism, flows upward to the owner rather than being shared among the people who generated it, in proportion to the value they each created. Surplus value extraction is the mechanism of capitalism. If you want to come up with ideas, bring your talents and solutions to the market, and engage in trade, it's commerce you want to protect, not capitalism. Let's take a closer look.

The Bakery That Ate the Neighborhood

We follow a single business from its first day of operation through every stage of what capitalism asks of it – then we play out the same scenario, following a cooperative model. By the time we're done, you'll have a concrete, specific image of how privatized profit and socialized cost work, and how it can be done differently, at the scale of one business anyone could walk into, order something from, and understand.

Exposing The Risk Myth

When we talk about who takes on risk in a business, the honest accounting includes everyone. The owner takes on financial risk. The workers take on risk to their livelihood. Both are meaningful vulnerabilities, but capitalism compensates only one of them. Fiduciary duty compounds the risks to workers while serving as a forcing function to create short term gains for owners – it's a toxic equation that executives cannot escape, and it's one of the reasons why 'conscious capitalism' is an oxymoron.

Before the Boss: Slavery, Serfdom & the Long History of Extraction

Capitalism didn't invent the extraction of wealth from workers, it just updated the paperwork. Surplus value, when extracted from labor, has always flowed upward. When we understand the symmetry between the logic of slavery, feudalism and capitalism, the latter stops looking like the natural order of economic life and starts looking like the latest iteration of a very old story.

Enclosure: How Dispossession From the Land Impacted the Body

Dispossession is more than a political and economic event. It changes the biology of stress and threat and safety. It alters what the body understands as home. And those changes are carried forward through generations, shaping what we reach for, what we fear, what we crave, and what we are able to imagine.

Why “Socialism” Became a Slur

In the United States, you cannot discuss policies most successful nations consider unremarkable, such as public ownership of utilities, workers sharing in a company's profits, or any form of socialized healthcare, without these proposals being politically neutralized — bypassing any engagement of their merits, simply attaching them to gulags and totalitarianism. This episode examines how the Overton window shifted so far to the right.

I Might Be the One Percent Someday

The logic of 'keeping your options open' is extraordinarily effective at maintaining compliance. It's a gamble, and most people who make it will lose. But the bet itself is internally coherent, and while you're still in it, changing the rules feels like playing against yourself.