Bungacast

On critical theory and autonomy.

[For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

Jensen Suther, a junior fellow at Harvard working in philosophy and literature, talks to Alex H and contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about art, culture, and socialism. He also offers a riposte to previous guest Anna Kornbluh's discussion of immediacy, and its cultural forms such as autoficition.

• What does Suther think Kornbluh gets wrong – and right – in her critique of contemporary culture?

• How autonomous is art from society and the economy?

• To what extent can we tie cultural forms to deep changes in the economy?

• What is the right response to the historical defeat of the working class? What does it mean for critical theory?

• What is the difference between immanent critique and critique from the outside – and how dow this relate to freedom?

• And what does it matter if you read Hegel right?

Links:

• The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?, Jensen Suther, Nonsite.org

• /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh

• /473/ Make Alienation Great Again ft. Todd McGowan (features a different response to the question about critical theory after the defeat of the working class)

• Jensen's thread on X on capitalist totality and the end of the working class

• Jensen's thread on X on the return to Hegel, against economic determinism

On class formation, fragmentation, pessimism and optimism.

George and contributing editor Leigh Phillips talk to Dan Evans, a writer and academic based in South Wales. We discuss his piece in the New Socialist, ‘Is the Working Class Back?’ and themes emerging from it.

• How important are definitions of class?

• If the working class remains weak and fragmented, and its politics increasingly chaotic, what is to be done?

• How does Gabriel Winant's pessimism about the industrial working class compare to Evans'?

• What are the class contradictions of the contemporary Left?

• Who is the real oppositional class today? Should we be more positive about the petite bourgeoisie?

Links:

• Is the Working Class Back?, Dan Evans, New Socialist

• A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie, Dan Evans, Repeater Books

• /349/ The PMC & Their Politics ft. Dan Evans & Catherine Liu

On cities and the politics of development.

[For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

Ben Bradlow, assistant professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton, talks to Alex about his book Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg.

• If our future is urban – and it is – why is it different to what we imagined?

• Are Johannesburg and São Paulo representative of what is going on in cities?

• How did democratic promise and neoliberal disappointment go together in the 1990s, through to today?

• What has been the role of social movements (e.g. for housing) in transforming cities and municipal government?

• Is the radical right in the global North and South fundamentally different? What is the urban dimension?

• What does China's lead in industries like electric vehicles mean for countries like Brazil?

• Is industrial upgrading possible under post-neoliberalism?

Links:

• Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow, Princeton UP

• A processual framework for understanding the rise of the populist right: the case of Brazil (2013–2018), Tomás Gold and Benjamin Bradlow, Social Forces

• Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Peter Evans, Princeton UP

On Embracing Alienation.

Todd McGowan is back on the pod, talking to George and Alex about his book, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try To Find Ourselves.

• Why is alienation good actually? What does it give us?

• How is alienation related to subjectivity and freedom?

• What is the problem with anti-alienation politics of Left and Right?

• What happened to the 1960s concern with alienation, where did it go?

• Why is an embrace of the public realm, against therapy culture, the right response?

• What is the task of critical theory today?

Links:

• /167/ The Kingdom of God Is on Main Street ft. Todd McGowan

• Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try To Find Ourselves

On Trumpworld: Vance in Munich; Musk in South Africa.

[This contains only the interview on South Africa – for the full episode subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

Alex, George and Ryan Zickgraf round up events in Germany: first the elections, then US Vice-President JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference where he called out Western elites' hypocrisy on liberalism and democracy.

Then Alex speaks to Will Shoki, editor at Africa Is A Country, about what Musk wants from South Africa, why the global radical right has fixated on land reform in South Africa, and what is really at stake for South Africans.

We round out by taking your questions and comments – and by welcoming in carnival by discussing drinking & socialising, and its anti-social enemies.

Running Order

• 00:03:10 – German elections

• 00:08:20 – Vance's Munich speech

• 00:26:00 – Will Shoki on South African politics

• 01:04:55 – Musk and the global radical right

• 01:13:20 – Letters to the Editors

• 01:23:10 – Carnival and social drinking

Links:

• Trump’s Tool: The Limits of Bannon’s Postmodern Nationalism, Alex Gourevitch, The Northern Star

• Make Afrikaners great again! National populism, democracy and the new white minority politics in post- apartheid South Africa, Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, Ethnic and Racial Studies 

• Why Trump loves corrupt Democrats, Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd

• The Case for Social Drinking, Ryan Zickgraf, Jacobin

• The Hangover and Life as a Commodity, George Hoare, Damage

• Segregation Is Still Alive in Mardi Gras’s Birthplace, Ryan Zickgraf, Jacobin

On Gramsci in the 21st century.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Sociologist Nathan Sperber and our own George Hoare talk to Alex H and Lee Jones about the new edition to their book, An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy, which includes a new chapter on Gramsci's relevance to contemporary politics and events and a new section on Gramsci's influence on the New Right. We discuss:

• How does this book differ from other introductions to Gramsci?

• What is wrong with the post-Marxist, post-colonial or culturalist version of Gramsci?

• What are Gramsci's top 3 insights into politics?

• How has Gramsci been taken up by the political Right?

• How has Gramsci been used and abused by the Left? What to make of the post-Marxist radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe ("left-populism")?

• Why is the concept of the "national-popular" that Gramsci takes from the Jacobins so important to rediscover?

This episode, originally published in June 2024 only for subscribers, is crucial backdrop to this Sunday's (23 Feb 2025) snap elections in Germany. 

For more like this, join us at patreon.com/bungacast

On German political derangement.

Independent researcher and writer Gregor Baszak joins us to talk about German centrism being squeezed under pressure from both left and right — Sahra Wagenknecht and the AFD. Meanwhile the German economy is getting squeezed between the US and Russia, and NATO pressures Germany to up its defence spending.  

• Is German public life remilitarising? 

• What are the prospects for Sahra Wagenknecht’s new ‘left-conservative’ politics? 

• What was the original political vision behind the Nordstream 2 pipeline? 

• Why are Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni trying to carve the AFD out of pan-European national-populist cooperation? 

• Where does Germany now stand in relation to the Ukraine War? 

Links:

• Europe After America, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative 
• What’s the Matter With Germany?, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative
• The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD For many, Sahra Wagenknecht is a tribune of the people, Gregor Baszak, UnHerd

On the world under Trump, and British responses. 

Tim Pendry, author of the Unstable Times substack, as well as an international affairs consultant, talks to Alex H and Lee Jones about the world under Trump II, the massive shifts underway, and his own policy work with the Workers Party of Britain.

• How has intra-bourgeois struggle shaped the past decades in politics?

• What is "American imperial nationalism (MAGA)" plus a "real-estate negotiation style"?

• Who are the winners & losers of a "rational" return to classical great-power, sphere-of-influence politics?

• Why are the UK's tensions and problems an extreme version of what may soon apply to any ostensible American ally?

• What is the Workers Party of Britain's pitch and strategy?

• Are the bulk of British people really "left on economics, right on culture", and how does the WPB try to appeal to workers?

• What are the practical challenges of building and organising a new party?

Links:

• Manifesto – Britain Deserves Better, Workers Party of Britain

• The Foundations of the Liberal Polycrisis, Unstable Times, Tim Pendry

• Taking Trump Seriously, Unstable Times, Tim Pendry

• Trumpism and Geo-Politics, Unstable Times, Tim Pendry

On European decline and inertia.

[For full episode: patreon.com/bungacast]

Anton Jäger is back, talking to Alex and George about Belgium's new right-wing government, American hyperpolitics, and the lack of a European future.

• The radical right has prevailed in Belgium, despite having factors that should impede this, like higher union density, lower inequality and so on. Why?

• Why is the US particularly 'hyperpolitical'?

• Are those who say hyperpolitics is over correct?

• Why is Europe now a pale imitation of authoritarians in the East and the unbridled capitalism to its West?

• Is it Europe's capitalists – not its workers or pensioners – who are in need of strict market discipline?

Links:

• Things Are Terrible in Europe, and They’re Only Going to Get Worse, Anton Jäger, NYT

• Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over, Ross Barkan, NYT

• My Country Shows What Europe Has Become, Anton Jäger, NYT

• Hyperpolitics in America, Anton Jäger, New Left Review 

• Is Trump 2 the End of ‘Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome’?, Lee Jones, The North Star

• /454/ The Last Man at the Euro Tango ft. Michael Wilkinson

On David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).

[Patreon Exclusive - subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

We focus in particular on Part III: The Experience of Space and Time – and reflect on the general themes of this section. The central question is:

How do we rescue a sense of ‘place’ – in a political, forward-looking and future-oriented way – after the age of globalisation?

• The age of globalisation generated and emphasised placelessness. But if oppositional struggles need to start from a definite place, where is that?

• And how do they not get restricted by that same sense of place – that is, not becoming particular, nostalgic or backward-looking?

• And if walls are now being put up, halting globalisation, then does this provide a more propitious scenario for struggle?

On Syria, the fall of Assad, and nationalism in the Middle-East.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Historian Djene Bajalan talks to Alex about a major rearrangement in the Levant. We discuss:

• Who are Syria's new rulers HTS, and what is their vision – if any?

• Did geopolitics really determine the fall of Assad and the Ba'ath Party?

• How HTS's victory is so profoundly different from Islamism in Iran 1979

• Why 2025 finally closes the book on the Arab Spring – and on secular Arab nationalism

• Were the Kurds wrong to rely on US protection?

And in the full episode we continue by discussing...

• Is Turkey the big winner of the decade?

• What the Left gets wrong on nationalism

• Civic versus ethnic nationalism, revisited

• What was democratic, liberal and revolutionary about nationalism – and whether it can be again

• How conservatives recuperate left-wing ideas, which were always conservative from the start

Links:

• Djene's writing at Jacobin

• /95/ The Fall of Rojava? ft. Dani Ellis / Alexander Norton

On disinformation, NATO vs Russia, terrorism + more.

[Full episode for subscribers only. Go to patreon.com/bungacast]

We look back at a turbulent last month or so with the help of guest and "disinformation bot" Tara McCormack. We put it all in the context of Trump's return, post-neoliberalism and deglobalisation.

• 00:13:52 – Jacob Siegel  talks to Alex about Meta's policy U-turn on censorship and what it means for the public-private partnership on digital surveillance.

• 00:50:11 – How will European powers react to the US's relative withdrawal of its protection? Will France, Britain and Germany double-down on the Ukraine war?

• 01:06:21 – Why is Luigi Mangione not understood as 'terrorism' while the Magdeburg Christmas market attack is? What drives terrorism and is that even the right term to understand explosive anomie?

•  01:15:24 – Letters to the Editors: on the global radical right, and Trump's foreign policy

Links:

• /369/ Information-War and War-Politics ft. Jacob Siegel

• /34/ War Propaganda ft. Tara McCormack

• To the Finland Station, Branko Milanovic, Substack

• Trumpism & Geopolitics, Tim Pendry, Substack

• Class Patricide, Dustin Guastella, Damage

On the martial law crisis in South Korea.

For the full episode: patreon.com/bungacast

Jamie Doucette, who researches contemporary political economy and Korea's development at the University of Manchester, talks to Alex and George about December 2024's coup attempt and the past 50 years in the Republic of Korea.

•  Why is South Korea western capitalism's best propaganda tool?

• Did Yoon Suk Yeol want to institute a dictatorship? Did he want to militarise all of society, or only politics?

• How "unreconstructed" is the South Korean right? Do they dream of dicatorship?

• What was the Park Chung-hee regime of the 60s and 70s like? What is authoritarian developmentalism?

• Why did S. Korea democratise? Did the workers win it or did elites concede it?

• What is the post-developmental state, how neoliberal is ROK, and what does the left-right spectrum look like now?

• What was the Candlelight movement of 2016?

Links:

•  /420/ Fertility Freefall & Gender Strife in South Korea ft. Hyeyoung Woo

• The Postdevelopmental State: Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea, Jamie Doucette (OPEN ACCESS)

• The Logic of Compressed Modernity, Chang Kyung-Sup 

On Trump's foreign policy, the 2nd time round.

Historian and podcaster Daniel Bessner joins Alex Hochuli and contributing editor Lee Jones to ask how this era of rot and decay will proceed under Trump II, from Ukraine to China and beyond. We discuss:

• Will we see "America First transactionalism"?

• Does Trump have a capable cadre to bend the state to his will?

• What will Trump’s relationship be to the deep state?

• How important are generational splits in attitudes to the US empire?

• Will there be a peace deal in Ukraine? Where does that leave 'Atlanticism'?

• Is confrontation with China baked in?

• Is the Middle East the key to world peace?

Links:

• Empire’s Critic: The Worlds of Noam Chomsky, Daniel Bessner, The Nation

• American Prestige podcast

• EU blows hot and cold over Trump, Benoît Bréville, Le Monde diplomatique

• America First, Russia, & Ukraine, Lt. General (Ret.) Keith Kellogg, Fred Fleitz, AFPI

• /171/ Fukuyama & the End of History ft. Daniel Bessner 

• /142/ Dollar Empire (2) ft. Daniel Bessner

On The Fall of Public Man.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We continue working through the 2024/25 syllabus and the first theme, The Future of Place. We ask is politics possible without a sense of place. Here we discuss chapter 13, "Community becomes uncivilised", and deal with listener questions.

• How does the changed relationship between public and private impact notions of community and of place?

• How does the maintenance of impersonal relations signify 'civility'?

• Is impersonality really the summation of all the worst evils of industrial capitalism?

• What is wrong with yearning for community, or specifically “love of the ghetto, especially the middle-class ghetto”

• How does "fratricide" become "logical" when people use intimate relations as a basis for social relations? Why is fratricide "system-maintaining"?

Links:

• 2024/25 Bungacast Syllabus (with links to readings)

• Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, Christina B. Hanhardt

• The Making of a New Political Subject, George Hoare, Café americain

On President Jimmy Carter's responsibility for neoliberalism.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Writer and historian Tim Barker talks to Alex Hochuli and contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about the former president's life and legacy.

• What do people get wrong about Carter? Was Carter, not Reagan, the start of neoliberalism?

• How is Carter's much-admired 'decency' of a piece with his neoliberalism?

• What is 'austerity' and how does it relate to questions of public and private, vice and virtue?

• What was the alternative to the neoliberal pivot in the late 1970s?

• How did the appointment of Fed chairman Volcker change the entire world?

• Did Carter set the script for the Democrats, of being 'noble losers' (but actually on the side of the winners)?

Links:

• Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024, Tim Barker, Origins of Our Time

• Weapons of the Week newsletter

• On neoliberalism and the Cold War: /276/ Broken Promises ft. Fritz Bartel

  Other biographical/obituary episodes:

• Silvio Berlusconi: An Oral History

• /293/ Goodbye 20th Century (RIP Gorby)

• /410/ Reading Club: Deutscher's Stalin

• /435/ Reading Club: Stalin's General – Winning WWII

On radical conservatism and global order.

Professor Michael C. Williams talks to George and Alex about his co-authored World of the Right and how the radical right has gone global. We discuss:

• Does academia takes the Right as seriously as it should?

• What's the difference between the radical right and the far right, the new right, national conservatives, or fascists?

• How is the right 'global' – not just through international conferences but by being "co-constituted by its relation to the global"?

• Why is the radical right focused on the global liberal managerial elite? What does it get right and what does it get wrong about this stratum?

• How did the radical right come to take Gramsci seriously?

• Is the radical right just parasitic on the breakdown of liberal universalism?

• What does this analysis of the radical right say about the Left – is it the force that protects the status quo of the liberal international order?

Links:

• World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order, Michael C. Williams et al., Cambridge UP

• /351/ Eating the Left’s Lunch? ft. Cecilia Lero & Tamás Gerőcs

• /129/ The Right Is Weak ft. Corey Robin

On Conclave.

In our final episode of the year, we debate Edgar Berger's new film about a Papal election, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci as Cardinals and Isabella Rossellini as a nun.

• Is the film about an alien, abstruse process – the conclave – or is it about something familiar and earthly? Is the film about the sacred or the profane? About temporal or holy power?

• What does it say about process and neutrality, in times of lawfare and contested elections?

• ⁠Why is there so much film and TV about the Pope? What is it that appeals today about Papal authority?

• The film features a good liberal, a corrupt moderate, a nasty reactionary, a tainted idpol candiate (a homophobic African) – do these politics matter? Why so crude?

• ⁠Is it mere Oscar bait?

On Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

[For access, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast/membership]

We continue working through the 2024/25 syllabus with the first theme, The Future of Place, asking, is politics possible without a sense of place. We discuss Marc Augé's much-referenced 1992 work on 'non-places': airports, shopping malls, corporate hotels, motorways... We discuss:

• Are non-places proliferating, and what would this mean for society and politics?

• Are non-places the spatial accompaniment to post-politics, to the foreclosure of political contestation?

• Is the distinction between non-places and places/spaces useful?

• Is there anything to the notion of a hyper- or super-modernity?

• Is Augé too deterministic? Does he miss how non-places can be places for culture or politics?

Links:

• 2024/25 Bungacast Syllabus (with links to readings)

On immediacy, representation, and anti-politics.

Anna Kornbluh, professor of English and author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism talks to Alex about the cultural, political, and economic changes she refers to as 'immediacy'. We discuss:

• Is 'immediacy' just a vibe, or is vibe itself non-mediated?

• How does anti-representation in film, TV and books relate to anti-representation in politics?

• And can we relate culture immediacy to the 'material base'?

• How do Fleabag, Uncut Gems, and the turn to memoirs and autofiction exemplify immediacy?

• Why does self-disclosure fit so well with the data economy?

• In what way is contemporary anti-theory nihilistic and apologetic?

• How does the style of immediacy relate to Frederic Jameson's understanding of postmodernism?

• Is the desire to put everything private on show a response to alienation?

• And is the professionalisation of 'theory' a problem or solution?

Links:

• Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh, Verso

• Has culture become pure vibe?, Anna Kornbluh, Spike Art Magazine

• The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?, Jensen Suther, Nonsite

• Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves, Todd McGowan, Repeater

On your questions, comments & criticisms.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We're back with a final letters to the editor episode of 2024 in which we discuss:

• the universalisation of 'anti-fascism' as a kind of politics

• whether there are any actual 'family abolitionists' out there

• humanitarian intervention in Palestine

• the hard and less hard facts of US imperial decline

• the legitimacy of 'existential' politics

• whether anti-corruption politics are good, actually

• and why Phil loves Hillary

On Taiwan, semiconductors, and war.

[Full episode for subscribers only]

James Lin, Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle, talks to Phil about Taiwanese politics and the country's place in the world, in terms of the global economy and Sino-American geopolitical rivalry. We talk about Taiwanese history and politics, from Japanese occupation and colonisation across the Cold War, to the present day, including: 

• Taiwanese politics in the shadow of the geopolitical crisis

• The paradox of political divergence and economic convergence between China and Taiwan since the 1980s

• How did Taiwan corner the market for manufacturing computer chips? 

• How successful is the ongoing US reshoring of chip production?

• Will there be a Marco Rubio/Elon Musk divide on China in the Trump White House? 

• How might a war over Taiwan play out? 

Links:

• In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, James Lin, UC Press

• What Works in Taiwan Doesn’t Always in Arizona, a Chipmaking Giant Learns, John Liu, NY Times

• Will Trump take the Musk path or the Rubio path on Taiwan?, Lev Nachman, Nikkei Asia

On Mothers and the institution of the family.

We're happy to bring you the recording of the launch event for the third issue of Damage magazine, with whom we're partnered. George and Alex were present for the event as part of a sequence of recordings on the future of place that will be released as a docu-series in the New Year.

For now, here is regular contributor Catherine Liu and friend of the pod Dustin Guastella debating the family to a packed-out bookstore at Moma's PS1 in Queens, NY.

On the End of History and Europe.

[For full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

LSE professor Mike Wilkinson talks to Phil and Alex about how the history of European integration fits with constitutional theories and ideas of sovereignty. We discuss: 

• In what way are the conspiracy theories about the EU true?

• What are the origins of European integration in the inter-war crisis?

• How did European integration tie into the history of ideas and development of 20th century legal history?

• How far does European integration overlap with counter-revolutionary theories and ideas?

• And who is the Last European? 

Links:

• Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe, Michael Wilkinson

• Political Constitutionalism in Europe Revisited, Michael Wilkinson, Journal of Law and Society

• The Rise and Fall of World Constitutionalism, Michael Wilkinson, Verfassungsblog

On the maelstrom of the metropolis.

[Full episode only available to subscribers. Join at patreon.com/bungacast]

We kick of the 2024/25 syllabus with the first theme, The Future of Place, asking, is politics possible without a sense of place. We discuss Georg Simmel's short essay "Metropolis and Mental Life" and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air (chapter 5, on New York).

• How does Simmel relate the metropolitan condition to a historical passage from the 18th century to the 19th?

• Is city life intellectual and blasé, versus small town emotionality?

• Is narcissism built into modernity? Is there an aristocratic individualist revolt in evidence today?

• Do we need places to hang out in before we can do political organising?

• Are we nostalgic for top-down modernisation?

Readings:

• "Metropolis and Mental Life"

• All That Is Solid Melts into Air (chapter 5, on New York)

On the military decline of the American empire.

[Patreon Exclusive]

The Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune talks to Phil about what happens to the evil empire when the stormtroopers can’t shoot straight and the empire isn’t producing enough star destroyers. They discuss:

• What happens to international politics in a world of new geopolitical rivalries? 

• How does American industrial decline affect US military capacity and strength? 

• Why is America unable to produce enough ships? 

• Why is the US unable to do conscription anymore? 

• Who would win in a showdown between China and America? 

Links:

• America will have to dodge the draft, Malcom Kyeyune, UnHerd

• The Houthis now rule the Red Sea, Malcom Kyeyune, UnHerd

• The West can no longer make war, Malcom Kyeyune, New Statesman

• The American Empire’s Burning Peripheries, Malcom Kyeyune, Compact

• /240/ Populist Interventions: Örebro Party ft. Malcolm Kyeyune | Bungacast

• Facing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the US looks feeble. But is it just an act?, Adam Tooze, The Guardian

On pro-family politics, and the US election and labour.

[Patreon Exclusive - in association with Damage magazine]

Dustin Guastella talks to Phil and Alex about what the election of Trump will mean for US labour organisations. We then move on to Dustin's proposal for progressive pro-family policies.

• What actually is "the family" today? 

• Social democrats are proud of policies but wary of encouraging family growth. Why?

• What would pro-family policies look like, what would they do, and what might their negative effects be?

• Is the family not a pillar for the reproduction of authoritarian norms?

• How do we explain the fertility crisis in global terms?

• How do we confront the growing marketisation of everything?

Links:

• Damage issue #3 - MOTHERS - Bungacast subscribers get free access

• NY live event: issue launch - Family Trouble

On Trump's return and the end of the End of History (still!)

Historian and Jacobin contributing editor Matt Karp joins us to extract the true meaning of the US election. We discuss:

• How Trump's victory explodes so many Democrat assumptions about demography and identity

• How this election re-writes the past ten years' history

• Whether Trump still retains an anti-political or anti-establishment charge

• If the Democrats are preponderant in leading sectors of the knowledge economy, is this a political rejection of its assumptions?

• How to place this election in the sweep of the global anti-incumbency wave

• What the relationship is between inflation, labour and legitimacy

Links:

• Power Lines, Matt Karp, Harper's

• It’s Happening Again, Matt Karp, Jacobin

• Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents, John Burn-Murdoch, FT

• /262/ The Useless Past ft. Matt Karp

• /447/ Brunch Back Better ft. Ryan Zickgraf & Amber A'Lee Frost

• /445/ How I Hacked the US Election ft. Alex Gourevitch

On your questions, comments, criticisms.

[Patreon Exclusive]

It's our letter to the episode show where we have a chance to answer you, the listener. We discuss:

• Has Bungacast gone eco-austerian?

• Are Marx and Freud in conflict?

• Is abortion about healthcare or about freedom?

• Why has the left abandoned liberty?

• Did we underestimate Israel’s existential fears?

• And what’s so “complex” about the Arab-Israeli conflict anyway?

Links:

• 2024/25 Reading Club on Place, Nation, Class

• Direct link to the syllabus PDF

• Our substack newsletter

On Georgia's pivotal elections and its post-Soviet history.

[Full episode only for patrons]

Hans Gutbrod, who has been working in the Caucasus region since 1999 and now teaches at Ilia State University in Tblisi, talks to Alex about Georgia's choice between the EU and Russia. We discuss:

• Who is Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose wealth is equal to 1/4 of GDP?

• What is the ruling Georgian Dream's pitch to voters, and how has it turned 'rightward'?

• Did Georgia witness the end of history, or merely the de-development of the post-Soviet years?

• How has civil society become dominated by NGOs, and is this a problem?

• Can Georgia flourish in a multipolar world, acting as an entrepôt between East and West?

Links:

• In Georgia, a National Election Is a Geopolitical Struggle, Bryan Gigantino, Jacobin

• Telling Time the New Way: 17 Years of Reform, Hans Gutbrod, Civil Georgia

• Macbeth in the Caucasus: Omnipotence and Loneliness - Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream, Hans Gutbrod (PDF)

On the US election, messaging and learning stupid lessons.

[Full episode only at Patreon]

We welcome Amber A'Lee Frost (California via Indiana and New York) and Ryan Zickgraf (Pennsylvania via Illinois and Georgia) to preview the US election. We discuss:

• Why the campaigns have been so focused on micro-targeting demographics

• Whether Russians or Brits are illegitimately swinging the election

• How the Democrats have gone back to being smug

• Why it feels like Pennsylvania is the only state voting (and not even there!)

• Whether the US is going back to a pre-2016 period

• How each side will react if they lose

Damage Magazine will hold a launch of its third print issue, "Mothers," in NYC on 23 November at 4-6pm at MoMA’s PS 1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens 11101. Catherine Liu will be in conversation with Dustin Guastella on the question of the family.

Links:

• The Battleground State that Isn't, Ryan Zickgraf, Compact

• The Gospel According to Elon Musk, Ryan Zickgraf, Compact

• To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump, Dustin Guastella, The Guardian

• Obviousness, Scorn, and Losing Ground, Benjamin Fife, Damage

On egg-freezing, 'having it all', and neoliberal liberty.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We welcome Damage editor and practicing psychologist Amber Trotter on to talk about "Frozen Freedom", Amber's piece on artificial reproductive technology and different kinds of freedom. Alex and George ask her about:

• How empowering is female emancipation from biological limitations and compulsions?

• Can women now "have it all"?

• Do men feel the contradictions of this type of freedom too?

• Is a proliferation of individual choice making us all neurotic?

• The childhood fantasy of adulthood is of omnipotence – where did it come from?

• What is the relationship between commitment, responsibility, collectivity, the individual, and freedom?

Links:

• "Frozen Freedom", Amber Trotter – Damage issue #3

• /440/ Dear Tradmother, Why Are You Sad? ft. Amber A'Lee Frost

• /210/ Reading Club: Psychoanalysis & Spirit of Capitalism

• /235/ Reading Club: Freedom – on mortality & freedom

• Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage

Damage issue #3 launch event in NYC: Saturday 23 November, MoMA PS 1 Bookstore

On the left-wing case for freedom.

Regular contributor Alex Gourevitch is back on to talk about how the Democrats are approaching the US presidential election. Alex talks us through an influential and widely-read article that he wrote in 2020 with Corey Robin on how the left needed to reclaim freedom as its own.

We discuss:

• Why is the left suddenly talking about freedom?

• When did it abandon freedom in favour of human rights, welfare, or identity?

• What are the consequences of leaving "freedom" to the libertarians and oligarchs?

• How would one critique what the Democrats are doing today from this perspective?

Plus: we hear about Alex’s debate with Tyler Cowen on whether capitalism is defensible.

Links:

• Gaining freedom by escaping the unfreedom of the workplace - PNHP

• Freedom Now, Alex Gourevitch & Corey Robin, Polity: Vol 52, No 3

• The US presidential race will be fought over competing definitions of ‘freedom’, Eric Foner, The Guardian

• The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner

• /298/ Working For Freedom ft. Alex Gourevitch

On Israel's invasion of Lebanon and beyond.

Karl Sharro (Lebanese-Iraqi architect and satirist @KarlreMarks) and Iranian writer and historian Arash Azizi join us to discuss war in the Middle East. We ask:

• Is Israel finally waging the great war that will rid it of all enemies? 

• Does Israel have any real plan? What motivates its actions in Gaza and Lebanon?

• What is the impact on Hezbollah of losing its leadership layers?

• How will Iran respond and what is the balance between moderates and hardliners there?

• If Hezbollah is severely weakened, what happens to the Lebanese state?

• What should we make of the global culture war around Israel, Palestine and the rest

Links

• Lebanon in the heart of the storm, Akram Belkaïd, Monde Diplo

• Israel is not ‘saving western civilisation’. Nor is Hamas leading ‘the resistance’, Kenan Malik, The Guardian

• Iran Is Not Ready for War With Israel, Arash Azizi, The Atlantic

• /225/ Wokeistan & Lebanonworld ft. Karl Sharro

• /141/ Oh Lebanon, What Now? ft. Rima Majed

On Nations & Nationalism since 1870.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We start by dealing with your questions regarding last month's RC, on Stalin, Zhukhov and WWII.

Then we read and discuss Eric Hobsbawm's classic work in which he emphasises that nations are exclusively modern constructions. We discuss:

• How succulent Hobsbawm's account is

• Whether he was wrong about globalisation eclipsing nationalism – and why he argued this

• Whether the revolutionary-democratic aspects of nationalism can be rescued from its later ethnic-particularist elements

• What the relationship is between citizenship, patriotism and nationalism

• How nationalism intersected with revolution - and fascism

• And whether the nation is any more solid an exit from our political vacuum than whatever other postmodern BS

Links:

• Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Eric Hobsbawm

• Film: Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History, LRB

• Some reflections on 'The Break-up of Britain', Eric Hobsbawm, New Left Review (pdf)

• /421/ Who Are the Wrong Ukrainians? ft. Volodymyr Ishchenko

On France's permacrisis.

[Patreon Exclusive]

French sociologist Nathan Sperber talks to George and Alex about his new essay in the New Left Review, "The French Crisis: Organic or Conjunctural". We catch up with what has happened in France since Macron gambled and called impromptu elections in the summer. We discuss:

• Why does France always seem to be more in crisis than its neighbours? 

• How has France ended up with hollow "leaderist" parties?

• Is Macron a true neoliberal or a reactive emergency politician?

• Did the left-wing France Insoumise miss its shot?

• How inevitable is a Le Pen government, and will it be co-opted by the French bureaucracy?

• What's the difference between an organic and a conjunctural crisis – and which one is France in?

Readings:

• The French Crisis: Organic or Conjunctural?, Nathan Sperber, New Left Review (pdf attached)
• An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy, George Hoare & Nathan Sperber, Bloomsbury (Feb 2025)

On liberal takes on the end of the End of History.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We start by discussing Yasha Mounk's dismissal of an end to the End of History. Does he underestimate liberal democracy's inability to legitimise itself anymore? Is the talk of populism a way of deflecting from liberalism's undoing?

We then deal with your comments and questions [for patrons only, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast]

On tradwives, influencers, and boys.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Amber is back on the pod, talking to Alex and George about her forthcoming piece on neo-traditionalism and women, in Damage issue 3, which will be on Mothers. We discuss:

• What are the models of 'tradwives' out there?

• If homemakers make homes, do tradwives make content?

• Does the tradwife phenomenon speak to sense of exhaustion with being a neoliberal girlboss?

• When does internet crap start being real? Do influencers actually influence?

• What is the political upshot of all this?

On "eco-modernism".

Ted Nordhaus, co-founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, talks to Leigh and Alex the 20th anniversary of "The Death of Environmentalism" and the 10th anniversary of "The Ecomodernist Manifesto". We discuss:

• The fundamental philosophical differences between "building-out" and "restraint".

• Whether industrial policy like the Inflation Reduction Act is in line with the ecomodern approach

• Why environmentalism differs in the US versus Western Europe

• Why modernisation gets lost in discussions on the environment

• What techno-optimism and what techno-fixes are

• What the Abundance Agenda is

Links:

• The Death of Environmentalism, Breakthrough Institute

• An ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO

On the US culture wars, then and now.

Historian Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America, talks to Alex about how US Americans have been sorted into cultural camps over the past fifty years. We discuss:

• Who started it? And who perpetuates it?

• What is the "culture" in the culture war? And is it a war, or a series of skirmishes?

• Is there something particularly American about culture wars?

• The culture wars have followed the breakup of liberalism – so, what comes next?

• Do culture wars necessarily presuppose identity politics?

Links:

• A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, Andrew Hartman, UC Press

• The Culture Wars are Dead, Andrew Hartman, The Baffler

On disinformation, misinformation and the popular will.

Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, joins us to talk about her recent pieces arguing that the climate movement's focus on disinformation is misguided. We discuss:

• What is disinformation and misinformation in the climate context?

• Are there parallels to be drawn with anti-disinfo campaigns on vaccines during the pandemic?

• How is the deterioration in trust in elites and scientific institutions to be responded to?

• What do Holly's focus groups tell her about popular views on climate politics?

• Does the return to industrial policy mean we should focus on "people who know how to make and run stuff"?

• And what is solar radiation management, carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, and related technologies?

Links:

• Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn, Holly Jean Buck, Jacobin

• A Climate Disinformation Focus Takes Us the Wrong Way, Holly Jean Buck, Jacobin

• Of Course "Misinformation" Isn’t the Cause of Climate Change, Alex Tremblath, Breakthrough Institute

  Books:

• After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, Holly Jean Buck, Verso

• Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough, Holly Jean Buck, Verso

On corruption, charisma, populism & assassination in Slovakia.

Slovak sociologist Dominik Zelinksy joins us to discuss Slovakia's positioning between East and West. We discuss:

• Why was Prime Minister Robert Fico a target of an assassination attempt?

• Whether Fico – not a zany outsider but a competent insider – is a "populist"

• Why Slovaks are not so anti-Russian, and why they are sceptical of NATO

• How has anti-corruption politics played a role

• What is "charismatic mimicry" and why have Western leaders aped Ukraine's Zelenskyy?

Links:

• Slovakia's election: "more than a fight between democracy and autocracy", Dominik Zelinsky, LeftEast

• Assassination Attempt Prompts Soul-Searching in Slovakia, Jakub Bokes, Jacobin

• Slovakia’s Election Result Is About Declining Living Standards, Not Just Ukraine, Jakub Bokes, Jacobin

• Charismatic Mimicry: Innovation and Imitation in the Case of Volodymyr Zelensky, Paul Joosse & Dominik Zelinsky, Sociological Theory. Thread on Twitter/X about the article

On the electricity grid and the institutions involved.

[Episode originally released only to subscribers on 20 June 2024. Join us at patreon.com/bungacast]

Fred Stafford, a STEM professional, a writer on energy and power, and an editor at Damage, talks to Alex and regular contributor Leigh Phillips about the utility of utilities and his recent essay in the second print issue of Damage, "Deinstitutionalized"./

• What actually is a utility: is it a question of ownership, structure, purpose..?

• How did the 70s energy crisis, neoliberal economics, and environmentalism create a perfect storm that broke up regulated utilities?

• How does the regulatory regime on energy in the US actually work?

• Why have environmentalists been so keen to line up with neoliberal deregulation and to attack utilities – in Europe as well as the US?

• Why should the left think about a restoration of the investor-owned utility model, and not just jump straight to public ownership?

Links:

• The Utility of Utilities, Fred Stafford & Matt Huber, Damage

• Big Public Power from the Atom, Matt Huber & Fred Stafford, Damage

• Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System, Richard F Hirsch

On Geoffrey Roberts’ 2013 biography of Field Marshal Zhukov.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Who was the Soviet general and architect of Soviet victory on the Eastern Front during the Second World War? We discuss:

• What does Zhukov’s life tell us about modern warfare?

• What can we learn about the life and fate of the Soviet regime?

• How should we view the Ukraine war and renewed geopolitical rivalry between the West and Russia today?

• What are the popular perceptions and folk memories of world war?  

Links:

• Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov, Geoffrey Roberts

• Saving Private Ivan, Mike Davis, The Guardian

• Negotiate Now, or Capitulate Later: Ten Incentives for Ukraine to Make Peace with Russia, Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe

• Putin’s Trump Card: Ukrainian Membership of NATO, Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe

• ‘Now or Never’: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine, Geoffrey Roberts, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies

On the NGO-isation of the state.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Researchers and writers Matthew Thompson and Jonny Gordon-Farleigh join us to discuss their recent Damage article with George Hoare.

Civil society was once occupied by popular forces that could function as a bulwark against both capitalist marketization and state authoritarianism. Today, it has been colonized by the NGO, which, in turn, colonizes our hollowed-out politics. We ask:

• What are 'private NGOs', and what are quangos?

• How has 'projectification' taken over?

• What does the NGOisation of society mean? How does this kill public accountability?

• What are concrete examples of this process?

• What comes next? Any possibility for resurrecting things like Working Men’s Clubs? 

Links:

• Bodiless Bodies: The Rise of Para-Institutions, George, Matt & Jonny, Damage

• Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives, Matthew Thompson

• The NGOization of the West, George Hoare, Café american

On your questions & criticisms.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We respond with comments on episodes 420 to 432 and various other points you wanted to us to discuss. In this episode:

• Does our politics lack self-critique?

• When did the breakdown of the UK's political system begin?

• How hegemonic is "settler" discourse?

• Will there be a coup in France?

• Do we need more analysis of the PMC?

• How did victimhood become a means for the expression of political demands?

Links:

• The Making of a New Political Subject, George Hoare, Café americain

• Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star

On Naomi Klein & Naomi Wolf and "political diagonalism"

Episode in association with Damage magazine. Patreon Exclusive.

Ben Burgis talks to Alex and George about his review in Damage of Naomi Klein's Doppelgangers. We discuss:

• Whether Naomi Klein is representative of the average left-wing position this century

• What Klein's trajectory and that of Naomi Wolf tell us about contemporary politics

• What is "pipiking" – Philip Roth's term for making everything a farce?

• What role do conspiracy theories play for the Right today? For the Left?

• What's wrong with the idea of "settlers" and "indigenous", and how does it play out with regard to Jews and to Native Americans?

• Are we right to hold up “proper left” and “proper right” as ideals to which the ideological confusion of our times should return?

   

Links:

• Left Identitarianism Is Also A Mirror World, Ben Burgis, Damage

• Ben Burgis' columns at Jacobin

• What comes after wokeness?, Alex Hochuli, Substack

• The Making of a New Political Subject, George Hoare, Café american

On the structure of the Chinese state and its external relations.

[Patreon Exclusive: for the full episode, go to patreon.com/bungacast]

We welcome back Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri to reflect on the outcome of the recent plenum of the Chinese Communist Party and to ask who, if anyone beyond Xi Jinping, is calling the shots.

• How will the CCP respond to the US election?

• Why is China not a monolithic, integrated state in the way some think?

• How important is the the Sino-Russian alliance? Does it matter more to Russia or to China?

• What happened to "wolf-warrior diplomacy"? Is it still a thing? 

• What's going on economically with the property bubble, and with Chinese manufacturing over-capacity?

• Should we be worried about WWIII over Taiwan or the South China Sea?

Links:

• China’s plenum must offer action not rote slogans, Financial Times

• Views of China and Xi Jinping in 35 countries, Pew Research Centre

• Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise, Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri

On the tourist city, the tourist industry, and its critics.

Renowned Italian journalist Marco d'Eramo joins us to talk about his wide-ranging inquiry into the age of tourism, The World in a Selfie. We also discuss how migration is the obverse of tourism, and take a look at Marco's most recent book, Masters, on the neoliberal revolution from above.

• Why is hating tourists the main characteristic of being a tourist? Why is the tourist/traveller dichotomy a false one?

• What is the threshold for a city becoming a place that exists primarily for tourists?

• How should we understand tourism economically, and why is the tourist city a mono-industry?

• Is the "authentic" travel experience ever possible?

• Why do critiques of tourism so often slide into snobbery or outright class contempt?

• How is the city changing under the impact not just of "over-tourism" but rising rents, exclusions, and remote working?

Links:

• The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age, Marco d'Eramo, Verso

• Masters: The Invisible War of the Powerful Against Their Subjects, Marco d'Eramo, Wiley

• Barbed Wire, Marco D'Eramo, Sidecar

• The cost of Europe’s backlash against tourists, Barney Jopson, Financial Times

On Julien Benda's famous 1927 work.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We continue on the theme of 'Intellectuals and the Public' by discussing the often cited by little read The Treason of the Clerks. We ask:

• If Benda was responding to the intellectuals' role in the Dreyfus Affair and WWI, was he already a man out of his time?

• What are intellectuals' proper role in society? Can they be abstract universalist moralists?

• Benda laments the end of humanism – can we endorse this lament, even if things are too far gone now?

• Is Benda a centrist dad, urging us all not to get too passionate or engaged?

• How do Benda’s ideas related to Gramsci’s notion of the traditional versus the organic intellectual?

• If Benda was critical of the 'realism' of his day – as opposed to the detached ethics of pre-20th century intellectuals – how might we use Benda to critique the cynicism of today?

Readings:

• Treason of the Intellectuals, Mark Lilla, Tablet (from preface to new edition)

• The Treason of the Intellectuals, Niall Ferguson, The Free Press

• Julien Benda’s political Europe and the treason of intellectuals, Davide Caddedu

• Edward Said on imperialist hypocrisy on Kosova: The treason of the intellectuals, Green Left

On JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, and arresting decline.

[For the full episode: patreon.com/bungacast]

We discuss the Netflix adaptation of vice-presidential nominee JD Vance's memoir – and the memoir itself – and what it tells us about the direction of US politics, Trump, and MAGA. We ask:

• What is Ryan's own anti-hillbilly elegy, drawn from his experience in Central Illinois?

• How far does the character in the film correspond with Vance’s public persona today? 

• How do we account for Vance’s political pivot – at least in rhetoric – from “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” meritocracy to pro-labour nationalism? 

• What will happen to rural/small-town US American life?

• Plus: Is reading books gay? Is a "hillbilly" just Hillary + Bill? And what is a horseshoe sandwich?

Links:

• The State of Illinois is Killing My Family, Ryan Zickgraf, Jacobin

• An anti-Hillbilly Elegy, Ryan Zickgraf, The Third Rail (Substack) 

• Hillbilly Elegy Doesn’t Reflect the Appalachia I Know, Cassie Chambers Armstrong, The Atlantic 

• Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong, Zaid Jilani, Compact

On emotional capitalism + Israeli politics.

Renowned sociologist Eva Illouz joins us to talk about her recent book on the emotions of populism, and her work on the sociology of emotions in general. We discuss:

• Why have emotions become such a collective obsession?

• Where can you buy emotional commodities? What are influencers really selling?

• What emotions accompany victim culture?

• How is identity and victimhood linked in a way that allow us never to forgive or forget?

  Plus:

• How has Netanyahu failed even on his own terms?

• How has Israeli populism channelled fear, disgust, resentment, and love?

• Why have Eva's views on the progressive left changed?

Readings & Links:

• The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy, Eva Illouz

• Emotion Sickness: The Politics of Feelings, Bungacast series

• Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Eva Illouz

• /232/ Reading Club: Cold, Hard / Warm, Soft - on Eva's 'Cold Intimacies'

• The Global Left Needs to Renounce Judith Butler, Eva Illouz, Ha'aretz

• 'Never has peace seemed so necessary and impossible' — Eva Illouz on the horrors of Oct. 7 and its aftermath, Forward

• Eva Illouz, sociologist: 'I think that after the terrorist attacks, for Israeli society, Hamas has become the Nazi' Le Monde

• Israel Is Facing Existential Threats From Inside and Out. There's One Solution, Eva Illouz, Ha'aretz

Subscribe: patreon.com/BungaCast

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On the disaster of the culture wars.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Regular contributor Catherine Liu is back on to talk about her essay in Damage, issue 2, "Professional Populists in the Culture Wars". We discuss:

• What were the original 'culture wars' and how are they different to today?

• Why are the "academic populists" more elitist than anyone?

• Was there a need in the 1980s to "disrupt" the humanities?

• Why does conservatism now need to wear "populist" clothes?

• How should we defend the "canon"?

• What is the "Catherine Liu Foundation for Attacking Badness"?

Links:

• Professional Populists in the Culture Wars, Catherine Liu, Damage

• /246/ Why Isn't There Revolution? ft. Vivek Chibber

• /67/ Legacies of Postmodernism ft. Catherine Liu

• Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice Radway 

On the late Dmitri Furman's account of post-Soviet Russia.

Patreon Exclusive: for the Reading Club, join for $12/mo and get access to ALL Bungacast content, incl. 4 exclusive, original episodes a month

We continue our discussions along this year's themes (rise and fall of nations; Russia past and present) by tackling Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System.

• Why has there been a revival in interest in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period? And in the global 1990s in general?

• What does it really mean to be without-alternative?

• Why didn't democracy take hold in Russia? And why did it become an "imitation democracy" and not something else?

• How was Yeltsin a disaster? And what was Putin's appeal?

• Does 'Putinism' actually exist? Is it interesting or novel in any way?

• What happened after Furman's death and Russia's turn to "violent parody of the West"?

Readings:

• Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System, Dmitri Furman, Verso

• Imitation Democracies: The Post-Soviet Penumbra, Dmitri Furman, New Left Review (pdf)

• Imitation Democracy: Perry Anderson writes about Dmitri Furman’s analysis of Russia’s post-communism, Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

Listening Links:

• /114/ Reading Club: The Light That Failed - on the end of the "Age of Imitation"

• /270/ Russia vs the West ft. Richard Sakwa - on the endgame to war in Ukraine; and /271/ Russia vs the West (2) ft. Richard Sakwa - on the post-Soviet landscape

• /410/ Reading Club: Deutscher's Stalin - On Isaac Deutscher's classic Stalin: A Political Biography

• /421/ Who Are the Wrong Ukrainians? ft. Volodymyr Ishchenko - on post-Soviet Ukraine, from Maidan to war

Music: Éva Csepregi, "O.K. Gorbacsov", Hungaroton , WEA, High Fashion Music, Dureco

On your questions & criticisms about fertility, culture war, and more.

[Patreon Exclusive]

In our monthly mailbag episode we take points from the discussion on patreon, including on futuristic music, holocaust movies, german populism, whether culture war can be global, and the link between modernisation, productivity and birth rates.

On France's surprise parliamentary election.

The left-wing 'New Popular Front' came a surprise first, for now putting a halt to expectations that the far-right Rassemblement National would soon enter government. We talk to political scientist and commentator Charles Devellennes, and ask:

• What was Macron's gamble in calling this early election? 

• Is becoming Prime Minister actually a bad thing for your future prospects?

• Is the Left actually 'far left' and the Right 'far right'? Is Le Pen a fascist?

• Did the Left actually save Macron? Why not an alliance between Left and Right against the centre?

• Will France opt for the undemocratic 'Italian Solution' and appoint an unelected technocrat?

• Can Macron's party and his style of rule survive Macron eventually being out of office?

• Does the uncertainty mean France is back to the postwar 4th Republic? Is this continuity? Something new?

Links:

The Macron Régime: The Ideology of the New Right in France, Charles Devellennes

On Labour's landslide and sandcastle majority.

We unpick what happened in the UK's general election, discussing:

• How did Labour get such a large majority with so little enthusiasm for them?

• Is the UK now a multiparty democracy, and will there be demands for serious electoral reform?

• What accounts for low turnout and the fragmentation of the vote (Reform, Greens, Independents, etc)?

• What is Keir Starmer's electoral base and how will he govern? What is their electoral programme?

• Is Nigel Farage's reform the real opposition now? 

• Is the Brexit period now definitely over? Will there be a move to rejoin the EU?

Links:

• The McSweeney Project, Tom McTague, UnHerd

• Debasing Citizenship, Peter Ramsay, TNS

• Data on the nationalist right + driving to work in the UK and French train stations

Ukraine, from Maidan to war.

[For the full episode: patreon.com/bungacast]

Berlin-based Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko joins us to talk about his new book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War and his dissection of the war and the underlying political crisis in Ukraine. We discuss:

• class conflict in Ukraine as a legacy of the collapse of the USSR and the stagnation of the Brezhnev regime in the 1970s. 

• The role of the Ukrainian professional classes in the conflict and oversize influence of relatively small neo-Nazi and far-right movements 

• The meaning of ‘Soviet Ukrainians’ today and whether a neo-Soviet revival is happening among youth across the post-Soviet landscape 

• The difference between neo-Soviet revival and Eastern bloc ‘Ostalgie’

• The concept of de-modernisation

• The vicious post-Soviet cycle of passive revolutions and corrupt oligarchic regimes

Links: 

• Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, Volodymyr Ishchenko

• The crisis of Soviet Ukraine, Volodymyr Ishchenko, UnHerd

• The class conflict behind Russia’s war, Volodymyr Ishchenko, Lefteast

• Russia’s War on Ukraine Has Already Changed the World, interview w/ Volodymyr Ishchenko, Jacobin

• As Ukraine Expands Military Draft, Some Men Go Into Hiding, NYT

On baby bust, feminism and male resentment.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Alex and regular contributor Leigh Phillips call up Korean sociologist Hyeyoung Woo, director of the Institute for Asian Studies at Portland State University, to talk about demography, family and gender in the Republic of Korea.

• How urgent is the national debate on fertility?

• What policy measures have been introduced to reverse the decline?

• How is work organised and how do long hours contribute to the lack of family formation?

• What has been the impact of feminist movements in Korea?

• Is there a male backlash against feminism underway?

• Why is there such a huge gender gap in voting behaviour among the young?

Links:

• /394/ Girls, Left / Boys, Right ft. Nina Power

• The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies, Anna Louie Sussman, The Atlantic

• Foreign maids and no military service: South Korea criticised over ideas to boost birthrate, The Guardian

• South Korea's incel election, S. Nathan Park, UnHerd

• Why South Korean women aren't having babies, BBC News

• This demographic catastrophe will hit us all, Peter Franklin, UnHerd

• Korean Families Yesterday and Today, eds. Hyunjoon Park & Hyeyoung Woo

On the electricity grid and the institutions involved.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Fred Stafford, a STEM professional, a writer on energy and power, and an editor at Damage, talks to Alex and regular contributor Leigh Phillips about the utility of utilities and his recent essay in the second print issue of Damage, "Deinstitutionalized"./

• What actually is a utility: is it a question of ownership, structure, purpose..?

• How did the 70s energy crisis, neoliberal economics, and environmentalism create a perfect storm that broke up regulated utilities?

• How does the regulatory regime on energy in the US actually work?

• Why have environmentalists been so keen to line up with neoliberal deregulation and to attack utilities – in Europe as well as the US?

• Why should the left think about a restoration of the investor-owned utility model, and not just jump straight to public ownership?

Links:

• The Utility of Utilities, Fred Stafford & Matt Huber, Damage

• Big Public Power from the Atom, Matt Huber & Fred Stafford, Damage

• Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System, Richard F Hirsch

On German political derangement.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Independent researcher and writer Gregor Baszak joins us to talk about German centrism being squeezed under pressure from both left and right — Sahra Wagenknecht and the AFD. Meanwhile the German economy is getting squeezed between the US and Russia, and NATO pressures Germany to up its defence spending.  

• Is German public life remilitarising? 

• What are the prospects for Sahra Wagenknecht’s new ‘left-conservative’ politics? 

• What was the original political vision behind the Nordstream 2 pipeline? 

• Why are Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni trying to carve the AFD out of pan-European national-populist cooperation? 

• Where does Germany now stand in relation to the Ukraine War? 

Links:

• Europe After America, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative 
• What’s the Matter With Germany?, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative
• The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD For many, Sahra Wagenknecht is a tribune of the people, Gregor Baszak, UnHerd

On the one-year anniversary of the death of our evil patron saint, Silvio Berlusconi, we are re-releasing our audio obituary. RIP Silvio.

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi died on 12 June 2023 at the age of 86. In this special episode, we say goodbye to the towering figure of the End of History, and explore how the contradictions he exemplified spoke to our age. 

Contributions in order of appearance:

• Mattia Salvia
• Alice Oliveri
• Nadia Urbinati 
• Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti
• Paolo Gerbaudo 
• Thomas Fazi 
• Pier Paolo Tamburelli 
• The Bungacast Boys: Alex, George, Phil

Music:

• Bunga theme tune: Nous Non Plus / Bunga Bunga / courtesy of Sugaroo
• Rune Dale / Tell You Something / courtesy of http://www.epidemicsound.com

On India's election and a blow for the BJP.

Esteemed writer and social activist Achin Vanaik is back on Bungacast to unpick India's monumental, seven-week-long electoral process in which over 600m people took part.

• How did the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP lose its majority?

• Is there really a cult of personality around Modi?

• How does the BJP differ in important ways from Western 'national conservatives'?

• Does the BJP losing seats reflect a loss of support for Hindutva ideology?

• Modi claims India will reach developed economy status by 2047. Is this true?

• How bad are problems of under- and un-employment, especially for the youth?

• What is the nature of India's "crony oligarchy"?

• How does the National Population Register threaten to divest people of citizenship?

• How does the BJP see Israel as an example for itself?

Links:

• /198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik

• In State Repression and Its Justification, India and Israel Have Much in Common, Achin Vanaik, The Wire

• Narendra Modi Is Preparing New Attacks on Democratic Rights, Achin Vanaik, Jacobin

• How do ideas of victimhood relate to the material reality of international politics?

• What really are the aims of the protesters and how likely are they to achieve them?

• Are we cynical in our approach or conclusions?

• How do the protests relate to populism and the end of the End of History?

• What is the proper basis of nationhood?

• How do these protests relate to the millennial Left?

• Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, Northern Star

• The victimological imagination, Matthew B. Crawford, Substack

On MORENA and Claudia Sheinbaum's huge victory.

Mexico has elected its first woman president, tasked with extending the hugely popular AMLO'S legacy. What are her prospects and challenges? We ask:

• What was the effect of NAFTA on Mexico, and particularly manufacturing?

• How is US-China competition playing out in Mexico?

• Why did Trump and leftist AMLO get along? What about Scheinbaum and Trump?

• How does the politics of migration play out in Mexico?

• How come there is no hardline Mexican right, especially given the problems of crime and drug trafficking?

• Can other countries follow MORENA's example of centre-left success?

Links:

• Mexico’s Political Revolution, Juan David Rojas, Compact

• AMLO and Mexico’s Fourth Transformation, Juan David Rojas, American Affairs

• Lessons of the AMLO-Trump Bromance, Juan David Rojas, Compact

• /413/ Left-Populism That Works? (I) ft. Roger Lancaster

• How does the film fit in the pantheon of Holocaust films? Is it a Holocaust film?

• How well does it deal with its obvious subject matter: the banality of evil?

• Is the film neutral and detached or preachy, condescending, moralising?

• What to make of the commentary around the film, including director Jonathan Glazer's statements? How does it relate to Israel/Palestine?

• What to make of present-day Auschwitz? Should it be preserved?

• The Zone of Interest is an extreme form of 'Holokitsch', Richard Brody, New Yorker
• Is The Zone of Interest simply uninteresting? Toby Marshall, Substack
• The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities – including in Gaza, Naomi Klein, The Guardian
• The Zone of Interest Reminds Us How Easy It Is to Ignore a Genocide on Your Doorstep, Juliet Jacques, Novara
• The Banality of Evil is No Longer Banal, Maren Thom, Café americain
• One-star review of Zone of Interest

• What are the stakes in this election?
• Has Mexico bucked the trend of class realignment? Where is the 'Brahmin Left'?
• What is "republican austerity" and has this actually combatted corruption?
• What do make of AMLO's use of the military? Militarising public life or domesticating the military?
• What has AMLO done for the working class? And what might it do for itself?
• What is AMLO's populism and has he rekindled class consciousness?

Links:

• The AMLO Project, Edwin Ackerman, Sidecar
• The Mexican Question, Ramon Centeno, Sidecar
• The Struggle to Be Gay—in Mexico, for Example, Roger Lancaster

• Is talk about popular music stuck between the poles of “rockism” and “poptimism”?

• How did Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder invent "electronic dance music"?

• Why is "future music" good? What are its pitfalls?

• How did Daft Punk run out of futurity?

• Why is Auto-Tune actually not the worst invention?

• How are genres like trap technically exciting but thematically glum?

• Is there any way of bringing the future back?

• Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today, Simon Reynolds
• blissblog, Simon Reynolds blog
• Futuromania companion playlist with Reynolds' introductions, on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/simon-reynolds-9th-april-2024
• Futuromania companion playlist on Spotify
• No Bells music blog

• What kind of film is this: a dystopian fantasy, a war movie, a road movie?

• Why the focus on the media? Does the film celebrate or satirise journalists?

• Does Garland’s dystopia tell us anything about the landscape of US politics today?

• Why is political polarisation between liberals and populists seen in terms of civil war? 

• What would a civil war look like in geopolitical terms, along the lines Garland suggests?

• What side would you choose?

• Where will America's Civil War be fought?, Michael Lind, UnHerd
• The Civil War Will Not Be Mediated, Nina Power, Compact
• Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show, Simon Tisdall, The Guardian

• Deutscher's work in historical context

• Stalin’s parents' experience as serfs and the significance of his boyhood education in an Orthodox seminary

• How the oppression of the Russian Empire and the promises of Soviet industrialisation shaped young Stalin's lifecourse

• Whether, compared to other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin would have succeeded anytime, anywhere

• Was Stalin honest in his commitment to the revolution? Was Trotsky right that Stalin was just a cynic?

• How did Stalin compare to the other leaders at Yalta, such as the aristocratic Churchill?

• How do we compare Stalin to Cromwell or Napoleon?

• And what's behind cheeky internet Stalinism today?

• Message of the Non-Jewish Jew, Isaac Deutscher, Marxists.org

• On Orwell: 1984 - The Mysticism of Cruelty, Isaac Deutscher, Marxists.org

• I must start completely alone: Gonzalo Pozo on Isaac Deutscher’s wartime years in London, LRB

• Is the police repression and associated censorship (the anti-semitism bill) a reflection of the fact the content of the protest unsettles the establishment? Why?

• Why is the Left breaking with Biden and the Dems over this and not before?

• How do these student protests compare to BLM? And how do they compare to those of the late 60s and Vietnam?

• What should those in Western countries do in response to Israel’s war?

• Is the Palestinian struggle dead?

• What are the risks of regional war? And does Israel's assault on Gaza presage a new era of warfare?

• The Triumph of American Idealism, Alex Hochuli, Damage

• Like it or not, the politics of war is upon us, David Jamieson, Conter

• Express Train to Nowhere: Class and the Crisis of the Modern Jewish Soul, Samuel Biagetti, American Affairs 

• Is this How We Can STOP Genocide Joe?, Doug Lain interviews Dr. Elektra Kostopoulos & Dave Fox, Sublation Media

• The Left Cannot Make Use of the Gaza War, Benjamin Studebaker, Sublation Media

• Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke, Ryan Zickgraf, Telegraph

• Their Fight, Not Ours, Alex Gourevitch, The Northern Star

• Why did their grandparents/great-grandparents become Mensheviks?

• How did one half of the family leave the USSR and the other half remain?

• What was life like in exile in Berlin before the Nazis took power? And how did the family know to flee?

• What was distinctive about fascism and the terroristic assault on democracy?

• How was the escape from Paris just like the film Casablanca?

• What happened to those who remained in the Soviet Union and how did one member meet death via torture?

• What is the legacy of Menshevism – and what is the relationship between socialism and democracy?

Links:

Who Lived, Who Died? My Family's Struggle with Stalin and Hitler, Peter Gourevitch, Dio Press

Full episode for subscribers only. Go to patreon.com/bungacast. Members who sign up for $7/mo get 4 original paywalled episodes a month and a free subscription to Damage magazine.

• How have American cities developed such problems?

• What are the pros and cons of the 'Portuguese Model' of drug decriminalization?

• What is the problem with harm reduction, and how does it connect to notions of 'bare life'?

• How are insecurity and precarity changing people's political demands and expectations?

• Is there something to be learned from the Christian tradition? Should we all be reading Alasdair MacIntyre?

• How do we build a politics of human flourishing?

• Making the Present the Enemy of the Future, Dino Guastella, Damage
• Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dino Guastella, Damage
• Christianity, Morality, and Socialism, Dino Guastella, Jacobin
• The left must embrace law and order, Slavoj Zizek, New Statesman
• After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre

• If cultural production is already monopolistic, can it be democratically planned?

• Should we problematise "mental health"?

• Is love a dangerous political emotion?

• What happens if you leave the left?

• How do we kill the ghosts of the 20th century?

• Is a generational analysis of left-populism wrong?

• How do we get beyond a world of media and images?

• NatCon: are centrists the real threat to free speech?, Alex Hochuli, UnHerd

• What is the "penis anxiety industry"
• How does it serve individual, cultural and unconscious demands?
• How does 'Big Hard Dick' provide a brittle solution to a deep social problem?
• Is the Freudian analysis passé? Is it phallus-obsessed?
• Does a making your penis bigger and harder help deal with imposter syndrome?
• Does neoliberal capitalism make us feel "small"? Does the liberal elite want you to accept your smallness?
• How might we be big – make ambitious, large-scale change – without falling for fake solutions?

• Size Queen Nation, Christie Offenbacher & Benjamin Fife, Damage
• /215/ Organize the Incels?! ft. Alex Gendler
• The New Superfluous Men, Alex Gendler, American Affairs
• On masquerade vs imposture: How Should a Woman Look?: Scopic Strategies for Sexuated Subjects, Jennifer Friedlander
• Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life, Mari Ruti, Columbia UP

• What is the bourgeois subject, why was it good, and where did it go?
• What is melodrama?
• Does public crying make us feel connected? Is it all Oprah's fault?
• Why is psychoanalysis the solution to, not the cause of, therapy culture?
• How is indignation used today? Is the political scene just villains and victims?

• Emotion Sickness I ft. Nina Power
• Emotion Sickness II ft. Ashley Frawley
• Emotion Sickness III ft. Alex Hochuli
• Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, Eva Illouz
• Interview with Christine Gledhill, from the book Melodrama After the Tears 

• How has popular conservatism served as a boost for radicalism and revolution 
• Is there any basis for a 'romantic' anti-capitalism, in Mexico, or in the Global North?
• Is President AMLO synthesising a new politics? 
• Has he “ended neoliberalism” or on the way to it?
• How socially conservative is AMLO really?

• What role do the institutions of the public sphere and the media have in producing, sustaining or undermining this culture?

• How does Habermas' account contrast with B. Anderson on print capitalism?

• Is 'deliberative' democracy a trap? Who sets the rules of deliberation?

• Is a good media structure a 'constitutional imperative'?

• How do interests fit into Habermas' model? Do we need to leave our interests at the door?

• A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, Jurgen Habermas
• Jürgen Habermas is a major public intellectual. What are his key ideas?, Duncan Ivison, The Conversation
• /362/ Life Doesn’t Have to Zuck ft. Cory Doctorow - on social media

• How much is being gay tied to being modern? And conversely, how much of globalized culture is itself "gay"?

• Do you need to be middle class to be gay?

• Why did neoliberalism provide more sexual freedom than corporatism in Mexico? 

• How was Mexico ahead of the US in introducing ‘progressive neoliberalism’?

• Is now a time of freedom, or should we think of it differently?

• How does Portugal see itself, with regard to Europe, and its own history?
• How did the right-populist Chega party break through amid high turnout?
• What kind of anti-politics did Chega bring to the table?
• Is there nostalgia for the dictatorship?
• How did immigration become an issue in a country where emigration is the big problem?
• What is going on with Portugal's huge housing crisis?
• Why has the EU disappeared as a political issue, 10 years on from the peak of the crisis?

Bungacast is expanding, with new regular contributors, partnership with Damage magazine and more. Read about it here or see the video.

• In Portugal’s Election, the Center Left Struggles to Hold On, João Murta & Guilherme Rodrigues
• Europe After Brexit, Bungacast live event, ft. Catarina Principe + others

• Right-populism: insurgency or incorporation
• The Left: engagement or reclusion
• Multipolarity: opportunity or restriction
• War: inertia or action

• Work: precarity or militancy
• Green Capitalism: industry or austerity
• Tech: exhaustion or enchantment

• Truth: the image or the word
• Belief: reason or romanticism

• Subjectivity: vulnerability or resilience
• Sex: liberation or puritanism
• Sociability: virtuality or embodiment

• If we are disengaging from politics, what is the associated feeling - resentment or resignation?

• Why are our times "hypermodern" – and why is this exhausting?

• What can the examples of the 'great resignation', 15-minute cities, and postliberalism all tell us about the ways people are withdrawing from modernity?

• Why do we need to decelerate to save modernity?

• How might we gain control of time?

• From ADHD to Let Me Be: Taking Control of Time, Alex Hochuli, Damage

• Damage issue 2: "Deinstitutionalized" (subscribe for Alex's essay + more)
• /365/ It’s So Over (Again) ft. Ryan Zickgraf (see also the links in show notes)
• Hypermodern Times, Gilles Lipovetsky
• Social Acceleration, Hartmut Rosa
• Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary

• How was “happiness” a policy concern – and when did it disappear and why?
• What’s going on with universities and their focus on the mental health of students?
• Is there much emotion about, in a romantic sense of deep feeling?
• Or is it emotion ersatz, instrumentalised, superficial, sentimentalised?
• How does affect polarise politically Left and Right?
• Can we solve the crisis of subjectivity by focusing on the self?
• And who is the Big-Ass Subject?

• Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age, Ashley Frawley, Bloomsbury
• Sublation Media
• Ashley's YouTube channel

• How is imagined different from imaginary?
• Did nations emerge first in Latin America?
• Does Anderson's account of print capitalism still apply – and is it more valid than ever?
• Are we really in a post-national era?
• Does Anderson underestimate the political side – the project of achieving your 'own' state?

• Was left-populism a media event? 
• Was the Millennial Left just a moment in internet history?
• Having bought into the internet's possibilities, can we abandon it?
• Does it make sense to speak of a "millennial" left? 
• Faced with so many dead ends, do we need to "go monastic"?

• The Millennial Left as a Moment in Internet History, Benjamin Studebaker
• Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs. Additional comments on Alex's Substack 

• Why define it as the "Millennial" Left?
• Was the anti-Stalinism of leaderless protests a good thing?
• Did the talk of "winning" from 2015 onwards represent maturity?
• Should the turn to a more public, statist capitalism make us more optimistic?
• How will the 'lawfare' used against Trump play out?

• The Millennial Left is dead, Chris Cutrone, Platypus
• The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006-2022, Chris Cutrone, Sublation

• Do we complain too little or too much? Should we be more repressed?
• Political passions were meant to be dead. Has anger overtaken apathy?
• Should we hate our enemies? Is that okay?
• Has contemporary society become hysterical?
• Why does everyone want to be a victim today? How does this relate to self-interest?
• Is evil a psychological concept?

For part two, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

• What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents, Nina Power, Penguin Books
• Nina's columns at Compact Magazine
• Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski, Red Pill Press (pdf)

• How did Prabowo go from wannabe fascist dictator to cuddly populist grandpa?
• Why is Jokowi "Indonesia's Obama"?
• What is Indonesia's Trump/Hunter Biden ticket?
• What's up with the $32bn new capital being built in Borneo?
• What is the Museum of Anticommunism, and how successfully has Indonesia's ruling class rewritten its history?
• Plus: why is metal so popular in Indonesia?

• Suharto’s Old Guard Is Still Calling the Shots in Indonesia, Michael Vann, Jacobin
• Shadow Puppets and Special Forces: Indonesia’s Fragile Democracy, Michael Vann, The Diplomat (on police v military clashes)
• Indonesia state apparatus is preparing to throw election to a notorious massacre general, Allan Nairn, The Intercept
• Prabowo's 'fashy' 2014 campaign video
• Prabowo's 'cuddly' 2024 persona
• /391/ The Biggest Country No One Talks About ft. Vedi Hadiz

• Palestinians as surplus population
• Peripheral countries as 'imitators'
• Whether Brexit has led to greater political accountability
• Why Ridley Scott sucks
• Why contemporary art sucks
• Bonapartism and techno-populism
• Romanticising dead workers - and old social-democrats
• Esoteric knowledge about how the world *really* works

• Lenin's Lesson for Western Liberals, Philip Cunliffe, UnHerd
• Why the Tories Are Blowing Brexit, George Hoare, The Northern Star

• What was the authoritarian order that followed the 1965 anti-communist massacres?
• How did the Asian financial crisis lead towards democratisation – and how did the old oligarchy manage to retain much of its power?
• How has Indonesia become "Islamified", and what is "Islamic populism"?
• How do class and ethnicity/religion interact in Indonesia? Who speaks for the "downtrodden"?
• Is the upcoming election a contestation between oligarchic populisms?

• /121/ Those Murdering Bastards ft. Vincent Bevins, Bungacast
• Marketing Morality in Indonesia's Democracy, Vedi Hadiz, East Asia Forum
• The demise of the left and the Islamisation of dissent in Indonesia, Vedi Hadiz, Melbourne Asia Review (video)
• Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Election Could Be the Last Battle of the Titans, Carnegie Endowment
• The Act of Killing, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012

• El Salvador’s Bitcoin Paradise Is a Mirage, Nelson Rauda, NYT
• Behind Bukele's Revolution, Juan Rojas & Geoff Shullenberger, Compact
• On Security, Bukele and Petro Have a Problem in Common, Juan Rojas, Americas Quarterly
• In response to killings, El Salvador’s bitcoin president attacks civil liberties, Nelson Rauda, LA Times
• The Rise of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's Authoritarian President, Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker
• Chaos in Ecuador, Guillaume Long, Sidecar/NLR
• ¡Viva la ‘eficracia’!, Martin Caparrós, El País

• Why are the kids taking less drugs?
• Can we respond to our nihilistic times with nihilistic art?
• What is the nature of conformity today?
• How to challenge conformity without sneering at the masses?
• Is there a romantic revival going on? Why is Lias interested in Ivan Illich?
• If living cheaply in big cities is now very difficult for artists, will something new emerge from the provinces?

• Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family & the Miracle of Failure, Lias Saoudi & Adelle Stripe, White Rabbit Books
• Punk's spirit is broken, Lias Saoudi, UnHerd
• Is modern medicine making us sick?, Lias Saoudi, UnHerd
• Forthcoming album: Forgiveness Is Yours
• /353/ Bunga Sells Out ft. Jason Myles - on music and the spectacle
• /359/ Apollo Gets High ft. Benjamin Fong - on drugs in America

• How important was the neo-cons' Project for a New American Century?
• What were the long-term consequences of the Iraq invasion?
• What do we make of Arrighi's theoretical account of imperialism and the tension between territorial and capitalistic logics?
• Did the USA represent a "world state" after WWII, and how did it fail?
• What is the world-historic meaning of China’s development?
• Do we buy Arrighi’s attempt at a Smithean vision of inter-civilizational harmony?

• Adam Smith in Beijing:Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Giovanni Arrighi
• /305/ Techno-Feudal Unreason - on 'political' capitalism and plunder
• /250/ Oil & Disorder ft. Helen Thompson - on imperialism, the world system and energy
• /195/ No Shock China ft. Isabella Weber - on China avoiding neoliberal shock-therapy

• Why "millennial"? Does it make sense to talk in generational terms?
• What are the left's "perversions" as Amber sees them?
• 'Occupy' was all leaderless, horizontalist crap. Why did Amber stick around?
• Bernie Sanders did not leave an organizational legacy – why?
• After the failure of left-populism, in US and Europe, was it all worth it?

At patreon.com/bungacast we continue discussing the problems of DSA, as well as look forward to the US election and ask whether there's a vibe-shift at Davos. 

Links:

• Dirtbag
• OK Bunger! The Problem of Generations (5-part Bungacast docu-series on generations)

• What was humanitarianism, and why was it the "last utopia"?
• What does humanitarianism look like in an era of multipolarity?
• Does Western liberal democracy have any gas left in it? What should we defend?
• What politics are generated by the prevailing sense of anxiety and melancholia?
• If modernity is over, do we need to reject all progressivism?
• And how do we orient around catastrophe without falling into the trap of emergency politics?

• "Notes on our Melancholy Present" in Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order, Juliano Fiori
• Towards a strategic catastrophism - a radicalism for catastrophic times, Juliano Fiori
• About Alameda

• Why define it as the "Millennial" Left?
• Was the anti-Stalinism of leaderless protests a good thing?
• Did the talk of "winning" from 2015 onwards represent maturity?
• Should the turn to a more public, statist capitalism make us more optimistic?
• How will the 'lawfare' used against Trump play out?

• The Millennial Left is dead, Chris Cutrone, Platypus
• The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006-2022, Chris Cutrone, Sublation

• Why did Sweden and Finland give up decades of neutrality - and why now?
• What happens with an enlarged alliance in light of the conflict in Ukraine?
• How does the current moment compare to the apogee of the Non-Aligned Movement?
• Why were the realists right?
• How is tech mythology helping to build 'digital nationalism'?
• Why is there beef over grain between Poland and Ukraine?
• And what the hell are the "skin suit of social democracy" and the "Waluigi of neutrality"?

• Joining the West, Lily Lynch, Sidecar
• The realists were right, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• The EU’s great power delusions, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• Guns, grain, and history, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• Tech-Mythologies, Lily Lynch, Sidecar
• Imperfect Unity, Lily Lynch, Sidecar

FROM THE VAULT: PHIL'S PICK (1)

On British decline.

Much ink has been spilled over the Britain’s fate since the end of its empire. Could it be that decline has been overstated? And what will happen to Britain as it leaves the European Union? We discuss how the history of the Industrial Revolution and Cold War militarism still shapes British politics today, as David Edgerton joins us to talk about the his latest book, 'The Rise and Fall of the British Nation'.

Readings:

• A misremembered empire, David Edgerton, Tortoise
• Britain’s 20th-century industrial revolution, Colin Kidd, New Statesman (review of Edgerton's book)
• Britain's persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history, David Edgerton, The Guardian

FROM THE VAULT: PHIL'S PICK (2)

The third in our Neoliberal Breakdown series. In which we discuss the late Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, 10 years on. Does his analysis still hold? The mood music of the time - the age of 'TINA' and the end of history - was acutely described by Fisher. But did it only really describe Britain? And has the world now entered a new period?

Readings:

Capitalist Realism http://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalist-realism 

'Exiting the Vampire Castle' https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle 

Mark Fisher's k-punk blog https://k-punk.org/ 

Cover image: 📸 Stephanie Jung

FROM THE VAULT: GEORGE'S PICK (1)

FROM THE VAULT: GEORGE'S PICK (2)

On the unexpected origins of neoliberalism. We talk to Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists, about how neoliberals look back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the League of Nations. Why does neoliberalism talk about freedom, but promote order? Is neoliberalism about more or less state - or is it about what kind of state?

Plus why the genuine neoliberals didn’t care about the Cold War and how Murray Rothbard laid the ground for Trump.

Readings:

• Globalists, Quinn Slobodian
• Neoliberalism’s World Order, Adam Tooze
• Why I am not a conservative, F.A. von Hayek
• The EU is a betrayal of Europe’s exceptionalism, Douglas Carswell

Subscribe for access to the Synthesis Session, where the guys discuss the broader implications: patreon.com/bungacast

FROM THE VAULT: ALEX'S PICK (1)

In which we lay the liberal establishment down on the shrink's sofa. It's a systematic analysis of liberal derangement: of the inability to accept, explain, or respond to the breakdown of the current order. Why can't the liberal establishment accept that the 2008 crisis would eventually have political consequences? Why can't liberals explain why they keep losing? Why can't they offer anything but more of the same?

Symptoms:

• Incredulity and denial of political change
• Unwillingness to take responsibility
• Moralisation
• No belief in political causation (things just happen)
• Fetishising disinformation
• Elite persecution complex
• Hysteria & catastrophism
• Nostalgia for a very recent past & rewriting history
• Repetition compulsion

FROM THE VAULT: ALEX'S PICK (2)

On The Economist and the contradictions of global liberalism.

Alexander Zevin joins us to discuss his work on the 176 year history of the magazine that has accompanied liberalism's global expansion. Has it just reflected the world or has it actually influenced politics? How has The Economist balanced democracy against the interests of finance and the needs of empire? And is the magazine suffering from N.O.B.S.? 

Subscribe: patreon.com/BungaCast

Running order:

• (06:02) Overview & early days
• (29:52) 19th century & empire
• (34:18) 20th century, esp 1930s and '40s
• (48:08) End of the Cold War and NOBS
• (01:02:19) Liberalism & its enemies

• Why is art no longer about beauty?
• Are we stuck between art that is either superficial or hyperpolitical?
• Why has there been a turn towards the mystical and irrational in art?
• How are ideas of the indigenous and the ecological represented in art today?
• Is there a romantic revolt against reason and is it new?

• Criticism, Art and Theory in 1970s Britain: The Critical War, JJ Charlesworth
• The Return of Magic in Art, JJ Charlesworth, Art Review
• Gabriel Massan’s Decolonial Games, JJ Charlesworth, Art Review
• The naked truth about Marina Abramović – her ‘art’ is a joke, JJ Charlesworth, Telegraph

• Why did Scott choose to focus on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine?
• What is Scott trying to say, if anything, about Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars?
• Where are the depictions of youth, revolution and modernity?
• Are there any redeeming aspects to the film?
• What do we make of Phoenix's portrayal?
• Are we seeing the return of films about Great Men of History?

• Why all the fuss for Brexit, when things have ended up the same as they were before?
• Why Brexit when the same politicians are still in charge?
• Why was no section of society able to lead Brexit with a positive vision of the future?
• Did Brexiteers need a more concrete proposal beyond "democracy"?
• What lessons can be learned from Brexit by others in the EU?

• Are you 'Team Brenner' or 'Team Arrighi'?
• Was neoliberalism a counter-revolution? A passive revolution? A restoration?
• How does the depression of the 1870s compare to that of the 1970s or the post-2008 period?
• What are the characteristics of our own Belle Époque (1993-2007)
• What matters more in explaining the downturn: inter-capitalist global competition? Upward wage pressure? The role of the global South?

• Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, Giovanni Arrighi, Verso (2008)

• Was the pandemic another success for the 'lucky country'?
• How was the Australian state transformed from the 1970s to the 2020s?
• Why was Australia's pandemic planning inadequate?
• What was up with the hotel-based quarantines?
• Why did the public largely support these measure?
• And what can the rest of the world learn from the experience?

• How does John Gray use Hobbes and the idea of a Leviathan?
• What is a "state of nature", and what would an artificial state of nature be?
• Is Gray right in this characterization of liberalism?
• Is hyperliberalism the product of liberalism's decay?
• What is postliberalism and how does Gray’s project fit with it?

• The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, John Gray
• Pseudo-Leviathans, George Hoare, Damage

• Why were protests in places that were so different all look so similar?
• Why was there such a focus on spontaneity, leaderlessness, peformativity, and horizontalism?
• What are some examples of the ways protests rejected representation?
• Was class or generation more important in driving these protests?
• Why did media becomes so important in pursuing political change?
• How can we avoid a repeat of the failures of the 2010s?

• If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins, Public Affairs
• The mass protest decade: why did the street movements of the 2010s fail?, Vincent Bevins, The Guardian
• The End of the End of History: Politics in the 21st Century, Bungacast authors, Zer0 Books
• /121/ Those Murdering Bastards ft. Vincent Bevins
• /279/ Society of the Speculative ft. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

• Why did Sweden and Finland give up decades of neutrality - and why now?
• What happens with an enlarged alliance in light of the conflict in Ukraine?
• How does the current moment compare to the apogee of the Non-Aligned Movement?
• Why were the realists right?
• How is tech mythology helping to build 'digital nationalism'?
• Why is there beef over grain between Poland and Ukraine?
• And what the hell are the "skin suit of social democracy" and the "Waluigi of neutrality"?

• Joining the West, Lily Lynch, Sidecar
• The realists were right, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• The EU’s great power delusions, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• Guns, grain, and history, Lily Lynch, New Statesman
• Tech-Mythologies, Lily Lynch, Sidecar
• Imperfect Unity, Lily Lynch, Sidecar

• What's at stake in thinking of East Asian growth as a renaissance, or correction of the historical blip of European ascendency?
• How compelling is the account of East Asian success as a fusion of industrious and industrial revolution?
• Was Arrighi right to focus on the neoconservative Project for a New American Century?
• What do we think about Adam Smith's account of different classes' capacity for political action
• What's at stake in the revisionist view of Adam Smith as pro-state Enlightenment thinker rather than patron saint of the free market?

Subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

• Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, Giovanni Arrighi, Verso (2008)
• The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, Razmig Keucheyan, Verso (2010)

• What is 'Peronism' and how does it occupy so much political space?
• How does Milei appeal to informal workers using market ideology?
• What is distinct about Latin American populism?
• How is anti-populism used to denigrate the masses?
• What is the role of nostalgia for the golden age in Argentina?

• In Chile and Argentina, anti-populist politics is failing, Ernesto Seman, FT
• Breve historia del antipopulismo (Brief History of Antipopulism), Ernesto Seman
• Ambassadors of the Working Class, Ernesto Seman
• Javier Milei is not done yet, Alex Hochuli, Unherd
• Javier Milei is not a South American Trump, Alex Hochuli, Unherd

• /367/ Don’t Pay Them Back ft. Jerome Roos
• /189/ Pink Tide Paradoxes ft. Fabio Luis
• /93/ Hot Chile and Other Neoliberal Failures ft. Pablo Pryluka

• why Hamas was becoming irrelevant and how the 7 October attack was an attempt to combat that; 
• why violence is necessary but the Palestinians are in a catch-22; 
• how the West is implicated in the violence and callousness on show; 
• why the Palestinians are the most oppressed and forgotten people; 
• why Hamas is not an anticolonial freedom struggle; and 
• what is the right way to compare this to Ukraine.

• No end in sight: Israel’s search for a Gaza strategy, Lawrence Freedman, FT (attached)
• The House of Zion, Perry Anderson, NLR
• Whither Palestine, David Polansky, Strange Frequencies

• On disinformation: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, Jacob Siegel, Tablet
• A trap has been set for Israel, Jacob Siegel, Unherd
• End US Aid to Israel, Jacob Siegel & Liel Leibovitz, Tablet
• On data: The Nanny vs. The Nanny State, Jacob Siegel & John Robb, Tablet
• Manifesto Podcast, Jacob Siegel & Phil Klay

• Why Not Default?: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt, Jerome Roos
• Memoria del saqueo (Social Genocide), film on 2001 debt crisis and uprising in Argentina (many versions available online)
• /83/ Now It’s Syrizous (episode on Syriza's defeat in Greece)
• The World in One Country: Greece, Jonas Kyratzes (part of ep.200)

• Why the West's elites invented a permacrisis, Thomas Fazi, Unherd
• Welcome to the world of the polycrisis, Adam Tooze, FT 
• Year in a word: Polycrisis, Jonathan Derbyshire, FT 
• On the crisis of crisis: /327/ Capitalism on Edge ft. Albena Azmanova 
• On the structural reasons why the regime survives: /246/ Why Isn’t There Revolution? ft. Vivek Chibber 

• America's Politics of Nothing, Ryan Zickgraf, Compact
• After Anti-Politics: The Apeiron, Alex Hochuli, Sublation
• Everything is Hyperpolitical, Anton Jäger, The Point
• /361/ A Nightmare on the Brains of the Living ft. Benjamin Studebaker

• ‘A deranged masterpiece’: why you should watch The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian
• What Have the Bourgeoisie Done for us Lately?, Stephan Bertram-Lee, Sublation
• A Brief History of the Bourgeoisie, or We Are All Bourgeois Now, David Polansky, Strange Frequencies
• The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality, Immanuel Wallerstein, New Left Review

• Turkey /339/ Erdogone? People vs Nation in Turkey ft. Alp Kayserilioglu
• Brazil: /299/ Micropower & Transcendence in Brazil (Bungazão 2022) ft. Miguel Lago
• Brazil: /292/ Bungazão 2022: Unrealistic Pragmatism, ft. Unbridled Possibility Collective
• India: /198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik
• Hungary: /33/ Hungary's Illiberal Democracy ft. Tamas Gerocs
• Philippines: /52/ Duterte's Despotism ft. Nicole Curato

• In Clover, Laleh Khalili, LRB (attached)
• The Big Con — the case against consultancies (review of Mazzucatto & Collington), Diane Coyle, FT (attached)
• Letter: Groundless assertions about a trusted profession (response from a consultant), FT
• How PwC captured Australia, Shahar Hameiri, Unherd
• Consultancies Have Been the Handmaidens of Neoliberalism, Nathan Akehurst, Jacobin
• Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right, Ashwin Parameswaran, Macroresilience
• The limits of government outsourcing, Martin Bortz, Pursuit
• /267/ South Africa Mafia State ft. Benjamin Fogel

• The Internet Con: How to seize the means of computation, Cory Doctorow, Verso 
• Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow's blog
• Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle, Tricontinental Institute

• Legitimation Crisis, Jurgen Habermas
• The Return of the Repressed, Wolfgang Streeck, NLR 104, March–April 2017

• Building Big Things, Damage Magazine, Issue 1
• Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, Benjamin Y. Fong, Verso
• Who Deserves Amphetamines, Benjamin Fong, The Point

• Australian Labor’s hollow victory, Shahar Hameiri & Tom Chodor, UnHerd
• Jacinda Ardern still haunts New Zealand, Tom Chodor, UnHerd
• /136/ Banana Monarchy ft. David Edgerton

• Episode on Berlusconi biopic, Loro: UNLOCKED /87/ Berluscoming  
• Symptom of the post-political – Terrorism in Contemporary German, British and Hollywood Cinema, Maren Thom (pdf)
• "The State I Am In", Christian Petzold (2000)

• /303/ The Failure of the French Forever War ft. Yvan Guichaoua
• /304/ The Failure of the French Forever War (2) ft. Yvan Guichaoua
• Russia in Africa, Financial Times series of articles
• Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, Tricontinental Institute
• Italophone Somalia, Then and Now, Iman Mohamed, The Drift
• Emmanuel Macron must reset France’s Africa policy, Sylvie Kauffman (Le Monde editor), FT
• Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-trap Diplomacy’, Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri, Chatham House
• Let’s talk about neo-colonialism in Africa, Mark Langan, LSE blog
• /267/ South Africa Mafia State ft. Benjamin Fogel

• Stakes is High: Addicted to the Spectacle, Jason Myles, Sublation
• Is The Contemporary Left A Lifestyle Brand?, Jason Myles, Sublation
• Virtual Insanity: A Freak Show for Left Media, Jason Myles, Sublation

Readings:

• Radical Philosophy turns 50, Jonathan Rée, Sean Sayers, Christopher J. Arthur, Kate Soper, Diana Coole, Stella Sandford
• Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America (review), Ruth Kinna, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
• Marx and Progress, Sean Sayers, International Critical Thought (pdf)

• Turkey /339/ Erdogone? People vs Nation in Turkey ft. Alp Kayserilioglu
• Brazil: /299/ Micropower & Transcendence in Brazil (Bungazão 2022) ft. Miguel Lago
• Brazil: /292/ Bungazão 2022: Unrealistic Pragmatism, ft. Unbridled Possibility Collective
• India: /198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik
• Hungary: /33/ Hungary's Illiberal Democracy ft. Tamas Gerocs
• Philippines: /52/ Duterte's Despotism ft. Nicole Curato

• Feminism against Progress, Mary Harrington, Regenery 
• Reactionary Feminist, Mary Harrington, Substack
• /49/ Kids & Confessions ft. Amber A'Lee Frost
• /50/ On The Market ft. Anna Khachiyan

RIP Silvio

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi died on 12 June 2023 at the age of 86. In this special episode, we say goodbye to the towering figure of the End of History, and explore how the contradictions he exemplified spoke to our age. 

Contributions in order of appearance:

• Mattia Salvia
• Alice Oliveri
• Nadia Urbinati 
• Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti
• Paolo Gerbaudo 
• Thomas Fazi 
• Pier Paolo Tamburelli 
• The Bungacast Boys: Alex, George, Phil

Music:

• Bunga theme tune: Nous Non Plus / Bunga Bunga / courtesy of Sugaroo
• Rune Dale / Tell You Something / courtesy of http://www.epidemicsound.com

Silvio Berlusconi is no more. In mourning of our evil patron saint's passing, we're unlocking this previously paywalled episode in which we discuss a cinematic depiction of the big man.

Keep an eye out for more on Berlusca coming out from us in the next days!

———

We discuss Paolo Sorrentino's "Loro" (2018), a dreamlike cinematic depiction of Silvio Berlusconi. Does the film succeed in capturing Silvio, or does it glamourise him? What explains the appeal he had - and why was the left never able to properly dethrone him? What does it say about 2000s Italy, and its relevance to our times?

• National Swing Man, the British electorate’s new-old tribe, Bagehot, The Economist
• A decade of SNP one-party rule left Scotland in a state, Matthew Goodwin, The Times
• Sunak’s Tories have lost the Red Wall – and are destined for oblivion, Matthew Goodwin, The Telegraph
• The New Elite is in complete denial, Matthew Goodwin, spiked

On work stoppages and work-doings.

Ben Hickman, published poet and senior lecturer in English at the University of Kent, joins us to discuss his project on different understandings of work, or rather, The Work. 

What is The Work and why is it so pernicious? Ben wrote a piece for Compact regarding how the American poet and radical professor Audre Lorde transformed the way we think about work. We talk through the differences between work and The Work, how it impacted radical activism, and how middle class work became all about self-exploration. 

Ben talks through a new book project on work and how it is understood culturally through figures such as Jackson Pollock, among others. Plus, what is happening with industrial relations on UK campuses, and how has radical politics unfolded in the Labour Party over the last few years? 

Reading:

• Stop Doing The Work, Ben Hickman, Compact
• “Atlantis Buried Outside”: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth, and the Crises of War, Ben Hickman, Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 2015)

On Martin Hägglund's This Life.

We continue on the theme of freedom by discussing Martin Hägglund's case for 'democratic socialism'. In this episode, we leave the book itself to one side and attempt to "put the concepts to work". 

We survey the many intelligent responses the book has generated and discuss what their strengths and weaknesses are.  

• Is 'secular faith' just a therapeutic ethos to do with caring about your loved ones?
• What guarantees that we will use our free time appropriately? Why would we work freely for others?
• How does Hägglund’s vision work on a global scale?
• What kind of post-capitalist “state” does Hagglund actually propose?
• Does Hägglund evade class struggle? Does he have any vision of agency?

For access to the Reading Club, join for $10/mo at patreon.com/bungacast

Readings:

• Limited Time: On Martin Hägglund’s This Life, Robert Pippin – and response by Martin Hägglund (pdf)
• Response 2: The Problem of Agency, Lea Ypi, The Philosopher
• Socialism For Our Time: Freedom, Value, Transition, Conall Cash, Boundary2 (esp. Sections IV and V)
• LA Review of Books symposium. Pieces by Walter Benn Michaels, Benjamin Kunkel, William Clare Roberts and three-part response by Hägglund: 1, 2, 3

On family abolition.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Amber A'Lee Frost joins us to talk through recent radical proposals to do away with the family as an institution. Author Sophie Lewis claims that "ever since the capitalist victory over the long Sixties, the shout for abolition of the family has been buried beneath a strange kind of shame”, but that now it’s back. Why?

What problems does family abolition address? And how do contemporary accounts sit in relation to earlier radical proposals by the Old and New Lefts?

• Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis, Verso

• Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso

• Profile of Sophie Lewis in VICE

• Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch

• Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star

• The Lockdown Left: socialists against society, Philip Cunliffe, spiked

• Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage

On utopia and individualism.

Renowned intellectual historian and critic Russell Jacoby joins us to talk about his lifetime of left critique. We discuss his early criticisms of psychology in light of the advance of therapy culture over the past 50 years, before moving on to the question of utopianism.

Will the breakdown of the neoliberal era lead to new utopian thinking? Does enthusiasm for a universal basic income signal serious thinking about the nature of work? Or are we still in a world where only dystopian thinking is permitted?

The episode concludes by discussing how all the talk of diversity today obscures the reality of increasing homogeneity. What does this say about the individual? Is the way children are brought up today killing the capacity for imagination and making us all conformists?

Part two of the interview, and our After Party, is available at patreon.com/bungacast 

Selected books by Jacoby:

• Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology (Beacon Press, 1975; Transaction, 1997)
• The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987; new edition with new Introduction, Basic Books 2000)
• The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy (Basic Books, 1999)
• Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005)
• On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era (Seven Stories Press, 2020)

Other recent articles and interviews:

• D’une pensée critique sous emprise – Un entretien avec Russell Jacoby, Comptoir
• A Climate of Fear, Russell Jacoby, Harper's
• The Takeover, Russell Jacoby, Tablet

On Turkey's elections.

Alp Kayserilioglu joins us to talk about a crucial election. Erdogan’s rule is seriously threatened for the first time, with high inflation biting into living standards. 

Who are the main candidates and do what they propose? Where does AKP draw its support from, and what has sustained its legitimacy? We discuss the supposed supposed culture war between conservative Islamic values and secular liberal ones. And ask how Erdogan has managed the economic crisis of the past few years. 

We conclude with Alp trying to place Erdogan in longer historical context: 2023 marks 100 years of the Turkish Republic. Does Erdogan represent a radical break, or nationalist continuity?

Readings:

• Turkey’s Statequake, Alp Kayserilioglu, Sidecar
• Goodbye Erdoğan?, Alp Kayserilioglu, Sidecar
• Alp's writing at Jacobin 

On who owns the power.

Matt Huber joins us to discuss his article, "Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid", and how organised labour is central to a politics of plenty. What is the grid and who owns it? What are the limitations of a "100% renewables" approach? 

On the politics of energy, the left is divided in a similar way to the ruling class. How do we move from a strategy of 'blocking' (preventing new infrastructure) to one of 'building'? And why does a movement to limit climate change need to focus on production, rather than consumption?

We conclude by discussing the conflict between struggles around "the end of the month" (living standards) and those around "the end of the world" (climate change).

Readings & Links:

• Socialist Politics & the Electricity Grid, Matt Huber & Fred Stafford, Catalyst
• Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Matt Huber, Verso
• On post-neoliberalism: /326/ What Did Capitalism Do Next?, Bungacast
• On de-growth: /310/ Do You Want to De-Grow?, Bungacast
• On green activism: /91/ Exhaustion Revealing ft. Leigh Phillips, Bungacast
• Matt's Twitter thread on Kokei Saito's degrowth communism 

On Nigeria's 'end of the end of history'.

Sa'eed Husaini from The Nigerian Scam podcast joins us to reflect on all things Nigeria: oil, debt, corruption and February's election. What was all that hype about the 'outsider' who wasn't much of an outsider? Has the country's populist moment passed?

More Nigerians are falling into poverty due to low economic growth, while the state is due to spend 96% of its income on debt service. How is this sustainable?

We also talk about oil and corruption: the 'resource curse' and the 'survival of the fattest'. And conclude on China's role in the country and Nigeria as a cultural powerhouse.

Links & Readings:

• Buharism is dead, long live Buharism, Sa’eed Husaini, Africa is a Country
• /61/ Making Plans for Naija ft. Sa'eed Husaini
• The Nigerian Scam podcast
• The Oil Thieves of Nigeria, James Barnett, New Lines
• Survival of the Fattest, Paulo Collier, The American Interest

On Martin Hägglund's This Life.

[Patreon Tier II & III Exclusive]

We continue on the theme of freedom by discussing Martin Hägglund's case for 'democratic socialism'. Would we actually work under socialism, or do we need the threat of starvation or the promise of profit to motivate us? And what, if anything, is to structure all that free time we would gain?

Why is Hägglund's critique of religion – specifically the critique of 'political theology' – so central to his arguments? And how do we avoid the various temptations to retreat from passion, be it therapy-junk, new age buddhism, the goon cave, or post-politics? 

For local Reading Clubs, email info@bungacast.com

Readings & resources:

• This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, Martin Hägglund, Profile Books ––Chapter 6 and Conclusion
• On time, work, freedom and necessity: /298/ Working For Freedom ft. Alex Gourevitch
• On Hegel and contradiction: /167/ The Kingdom of God Is on Main Street ft. Todd McGowan

• Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history, Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
• Is this the end of “The End of History”?, Robert Stark
• The call for an AI halt disguises the real problems with tech, Jason Walsh, Tech Central
• /306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power (unlocked Bungacast Reading Club episode)

On the US cultural climate.

Renowned/notorious writer Norman Finkelstein joins us to discuss the themes of his latest and last book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!

What unites the leading intellectual proponents of wokeness today, people like Ibram X Kendi or Kimberlé Crenshaw? How do they differ from anti-racist and liberationist heroes of the past? What continuities are there between today's cancel culture and the politics of the New Left? 

We discuss the definition of wokeness and ask whether we have already reached peak wokeness, and examine the emergence of anti-wokness.

Subscribe to the podcast: patreon.com/bungacast

Readings:

I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, Norman Finkelstein, Sublation

On your questions & criticisms.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Is the Left dead? Did the turn to culture really kill it? Or is the nostalgia for the post-war Left the real problem?

We also debate what the function of imperialism in Africa is; the 'pro-worker' conservatives in the US; surveillance of app workers; what economic growth is for; and whether to f**k models. 

On Inhuman Power.

[Unlocked episode from Bungacast 'Reading Club', originally released 6 December 2022] 

Contemporary capitalism is possessed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) question – one of the few areas today in which capitalists still seem to have ambition. Why is this so, and is there something about AI that gets to the nub of what capitalism is, as a mode of production?

Is capitalism without humanity anything more than a dystopian Skynet nightmare? And would the creation of a surplus humanity still be capitalism? Would it be techno-feudal, or something else?

Reading:

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, Pluto Books

On cracked-up capitalism.

Historian of ideas Quinn Slobodian joins us again, this time to discuss his latest book, Crack-up Capitalism – the vision of a global capitalism with its constituent nation-states perforated by ‘zones’ shorn of any national oversight or democratic accountability. We talk through these archetypal zones encompassing deregulation, investment and sweatshop labour, ranging from the glittering city scapes of Hong Kong, Singapore and Canary Wharf to forgotten zones such as Ciskei in apartheid South Africa as well as the gated communities of California and bit-coin paradise Honduras.

We also talk about archetypal crack-up capitalists such as Peter Thiel, William Rees-Mogg and Milton Friedman’s offspring. How did crack-up capitalism feature in the Tory vision of Brexit? Plus, why is Dominic Cummings the one true Singaporean, and why do crack-up capitalists love medieval LARPing?

For part two, sign up at patreon.com/bungacast

Readings:

• Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Quinn Slobodian
• The Ciskei experiment: a libertarian fantasy in apartheid South Africa, Quinn Slobodian, The Guardian
• /115/ Singapore Shangri-La ft. Lee Jones
• As special enclaves proliferate, what are the consequences for democracy?, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, The Spectator
• Dominic Cummings understands Singapore. The Tories still don’t, Quinn Slobodian, The Spectator

• Crack-up Capitalism video trailer, Twitter

On Martin Hägglund's This Life.

We continue on the theme of freedom. In this episode, we look at what Martin Hägglund describes as 'spiritual freedom', which can ultimately be seen as a question of what we do with our time. Across the two chapters in question, Hägglund ties together his philosophical vision rooted in the notion of mortality and temporal life, with a social critique that draws on Hegel and Marx. He does this by centring the question of time, the only truly scarce resource.

How can we negotiate anxiety-inducing freedom today? Where do our 'existential identities' come from, and does Hägglund put too much emphasis on identity? And is Buddhist karma a system analogous to the market?

For local Reading Clubs, email info@bungacast.com

Readings & resources:

• This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, Martin Hägglund, Profile Books ––Chapter 4 and 5
• On time, work, freedom and necessity: /298/ Working For Freedom ft. Alex Gourevitch
• On Hegel and contradiction: /167/ The Kingdom of God Is on Main Street ft. Todd McGowan
• On Sartre: Being and Nothingness (1943) and his subsequent 1946 essay summarising ideas in the book, "Existentialism Is a Humanism"

On depicting dystopia.

Acclaimed cartoonists, writers and artists Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson join us for something a little different: to talk about their new comic book, Justice Warriors. Set in a grotesquely unequal world, a police procedural (of sorts) encounters an astrology-based social movement seeking justice.

We talk about how dystopian fiction often serves to manufacture consent and about how fiction can confront us with images of social decline. We also debate free will and determinism in a world that presents few opportunities, social justice warriors and politics that perpetuate the present, and why there is no 'pure' people set against the elite.

Links:

• Justice Warriors, Matt Bors, Ben Clarkson, Felipe Sobreiro, Simon & Schuster
• The Nib - political satire & cartoons

On geopolitical competition over Africa.

[Patreon Exclusive]

In light of the 'new Cold War', we look at what the US, Europe, Russia and China's respective "pitches" are to African countries – what are they selling? And we examine the factors that contribute to Africa's place in geopolitics today: Chinese hunger for raw materials, the global war on terror, the green energy transition, drug and people smuggling, and more. 

If the original Scramble for Africa (1884-1914) was driven by an attempt to displace European class war onto another terrain, can we say anything analogous is happening today?

Links:

• /303/ The Failure of the French Forever War ft. Yvan Guichaoua 
• /304/ The Failure of the French Forever War (2) ft. Yvan Guichaoua 
• Russia in Africa, Financial Times series of articles
• Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, Tricontinental Institute
• Italophone Somalia, Then and Now, Iman Mohamed, The Drift
• Emmanuel Macron must reset France’s Africa policy, Sylvie Kauffman (Le Monde editor), FT
• Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-trap Diplomacy’, Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri, Chatham House
• Let’s talk about neo-colonialism in Africa, Mark Langan, LSE blog
• /267/ South Africa Mafia State ft. Benjamin Fogel

• It’s the Economic Precarity, Stupid, Albena Azmanova & Marshall Auerback, The Nation
• Uber’s dangerous drive to serfdom, Albena Azmanova, Unherd
• Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia, Albena Azmanova, Columbia UP

On the left's understanding of freedom.

We continue our talk with Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, social scientists in the northeast of England, about their new book, The Death of the Left: Why We Must Begin From the Beginning Again.

This is followed by the After Party, where we debate the extent to which Thatcher 'sold' freedom and what the left's understanding of liberty is.

To gain access to episodes like this that normally remain paywalled, subscribe to our patreon: patreon.com/bungacast

Part 1 is here: https://bungacast.podbean.com/e/318-the-dead-left-ft-steve-hall-simon-winlow/ 

Links:

• /65/ Bunga Gets Ultra-Real ft. Steve Hall
• /111/ Big Money Talk: The Case for MMT ft. Bill Mitchell
• /68/ Big Money Talk: The Case against MMT ft. Doug Henwood

• TCS Special Issue: ‘Post-Neoliberalism?’, Various, Theory Culture & Society
• End of the Neoliberal Era?, David Kotz, NLR
• The new rules for business in a post-neoliberal world, Rana Forfoohar, FT
• What's beyond "beyond neoliberalism"?, Amy Kapczynski, LPE Project
• Reading the post-neoliberal right, Amy Kapczynski, LPE Project