Common Wealth with Safa Bee

podcast season one coming soon

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 and simply attaching them to gulags and authoritarianism. 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.

Your Oat Milk Doesn't Save The Planet

When the core of the problem itself is over-consumption, it’s obvious that the solution isn’t just "better consumption" – and yet the belief that we can heal the world through perfecting our consumer choices is incredibly pervasive. This is no accident; public opinion has been shaped by culture-making institutions whose goal is to transform potential catalysts of collective change into isolated individuals who are very busy sorting their recycling.

The Physiology of Chronic Economic Threat

Our capacity to imagine life organized around care rather than extraction requires certain conditions to exist. Chronic threat forecloses those conditions, contracting our imaginations to the horizon of the immediate. This episode explores the impact that economic structures have on our basic biological and cognitive functioning.

Caretaking Your Nervous System As A Political Act

The body that can access its full cognitive and creative capacity is a body that is capable of imagining and building alternatives. The body that knows it regulates better in a group, might also begin organizing and imagining in community. That’s the point where the individual taps into extraordinary power.

The Sun Is Rising On A New Economy

A departure from extractive economic models is already happening – and its pioneers have been successful for decades. This episode takes a closer look at the alternative models that already exist, and the resources available to all of us as we join the movement to build the cooperative economy.

Defining Your Impact

Nature thrives with biodiversity, and likewise a resilient economy will develop many creative solutions. Now that you know a post-capitalist world is more than a possibility, in fact it's an imperative, the next logical question to ask yourself is: what are you personally being called upon to build, and on what terms?

Season One: Coming Soon

Season One of Common Wealth with Safa Bee will be kicking off in Fall 2026. If you're intrigued by what you've read so far, we'd love to have you along for the ride! Fill out the form below and you'll be the first to know when each new episode drops.

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