Bungacast

We deal with your questions, comments and criticisms from the past month or so. Key issues this month are: What are the wrongs of the postmodern right – aand left? Will the civilisational paradigm become hegemonic? Is Trump's foreign policy techno-populist? Whether, and how, to protest anti-immigration policing To defend or to smash the professions? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

On anti-racism, communism, and philosophy. Alex Gourevitch talks to political philosopher Paul Gomberg about his original and deep Marxist arguments for what makes racism wrong, why racism cannot be eradicated without overcoming capitalism, and the limits of many contemporary anti-racist arguments. What does it mean to "alienate" race? What is the harm in racism? How does it harm everyone, not just its obvious victims? Why does Gomberg argue that can racism cannot be overcome in capitalist society? Has official racism been replaced by official anti-racism in the neoliberal era? What does it mean to understand anti-racism as communism? How did Gomberg's communist militancy impact his philosophy? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Anti-Racism as Communism, Paul Gomberg, Bloomsbury How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice, Paul Gomberg, Blackwell

On postmodern conservatives. Matt McManus talks to Alex and George about a Right increasingly shaped by the parameters of postmodern culture – and his Damage article on this. Who are the key thinkers of postmodern conservatism? Does truth matter anymore? Is "flooding the zone" an act of post-truth politics? Does all that is solid melt into advertising – and is it Charlie Kirk's fault? Is postmodern conservatism an adequate response the dissolution of the traditional “sources of the self”? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Conservativism as Postmodernism, Matt McManus, Damage Why only Socialism can redeem Conservatism, Maurice Glassman, Together For The Common Good  

On Trump and Rubio, Venezuela and Cuba. Writer Juan David Rojas talks to Alex and Lee about the abduction of Maduro, what next for Venezuela, and Trump's "hemispheric" foreign policy. What is the Trump administration's policy toward Latin America? Is the attack on Venezuela a war for oil? Or a war vs 'narcoterrorism'? What are the internal divisions in Venezuela, and could it fall into civil war? What are the armed groups in the country? Who's calling the shots in Washington: neocons or paleocons? Is the US open-border policy for Cubans going to cause a rift within the Trump admin? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: How Maduro Sealed His Own Fate, Juan David Rojas, Compact Atlas Shrugged: Decoding Trump’s National Security Strategy, Lee Jones, American Affairs From Rogue State to Failed State?: The Perils of Intervention in Venezuela, Juan David Rojas, American Affairs Trump’s Venezuela Actions Are About More Than Oil, Matt Huber, Jacobin  

On "thin ideologies" in a postmodern age. The Reading Club kicks off with an exploration of illiberalism, a "new ideological universe" that exists in "a permanent situational relation to liberalism." For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast/membership What are examples of this backlash against liberalism? How is illiberalism different from populism, conservatism, or the far right? What is a thin versus a thick ideology? Are we condemned to a 21st century of only thin ideologies? Is 'illiberalism' a useful term to describe what is going on in politics today? Is liberalism versus illiberalism just a terminal culture war? Links: Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction, Marlene Laruelle, East European Politics (2022) /114/ Reading Club: The Light That Failed | Patreon

On Trump & radical right ideology. Jean-François Drolet, a leading researcher into the 'World of the Right', talks to Alex and Lee about Donald Trump's coveting of Greenland, and puts the move into its ideological context. What is the paleoconservative worldview, how is it different from the neoconservative one, and which is more influential in the Trump regime? How does paleoconservatism translate into actual foreign policy? What's in Trump's new National Security Strategy? Are we back to a 19th century-style 'spheres of influence' arrangement? Does the radical right's foreign policy lead back to a populist kind of isolationism – or to a 'civilisational nationalism'? Will Trump solidify the transatlantic alliance, or generate a rift? Links: /461/ Welcome to the World of the Right ft. Michael C. Williams World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). International Relations and the Geopolitics of the European New Right, European Journal of International Relations, JF Drolet From Critique to Reaction: The New Right, Critical Theory and International Relations, Journal of International Political Theory, JF Drolet & Michael C. Williams Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy: Goodbye, Liberal International Order; Hello, Radical Right, Lee Jones, American Affairs (forthcoming  

On ICE, Minneapolis – and your questions & comments. Contributing editor Ryan Zickgraf is back from Minnesota and tells us what is happening on the ground. We also discuss: If this was Trump picking a fight, why Minnesota? Do the slayings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti mark a step-change in who can be killed in the US with relative impunity? What are the implications for the 2nd Amendment and will this divide MAGA World? Does a hard border necessarily entail a hard, militarised society too? Is the interiorisation of the border inevitable? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast We then discuss listener questions on: What is important that Bungacast cover? The benefits of citizenship Capitalists paying themselves for labour The post-doomer personality Readings: South Minneapolis has had enough, Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd Enforcement Regime, Michael Macher, Phenomenal World  Minneapolis Is a Second Amendment Wake-Up Call, Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic ICE unloads, Ken Klippenstein, Substack

On the social turn in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts Christie and Ricky talk to Alex and George about their article in issue #5 of Damage, on ill-fated attempts at solving social problems through therapy. What is the 'social turn' and is it another case of immediacy? Why are the social problems to be dealt with treated as both urgent and impossible to resolve? Is this a case of hyperpolitics? Is psychoanalysis actually white supremacy? Do the professions need defending? Do they need to accept their limitations? Subscribers to this podcast get 15% off print subscriptions to Damage magazine – and access to to this episode. Go to patreon.com/bungacast Links: The Regression in Psychoanalysis’s “Social Turn”, Christie Offenbacher & Ricky Levitt /210/ Reading Club: Psychoanalysis & Spirit of Capitalism    

On Southeast Asia's scam compounds. Mark Bo, organised-crime researcher and co-author of Scam, talks to Alex and Lee about his book, his experiences and why this fusion of gangsterism and speculation has taken root in the contemporary economy. What is the scale of the scam industry? How do scams like pig butchering, fish butchering, or law-enforcement impersonation work? How does organised crime structure itself on corporate lines? How does this fit with modern slavery? Do illicit zones signal the coming of a kind of "compound capitalism"? Is scamming a symptom of the death of the developmental state? The full episode is only available to subscribers. Sign up at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo, Verso  

On the making of independent India – and its lessons. Assistant professor of politics at The New School, Sandipto Dasgupta, talks to contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about this new book, Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony. Why was the postcolonial movement insufficiently anti-colonial? What is the difference between the legal and political meaning of popular sovereignty – and why does it matter? What was the hidden, repressive element to the Indian Constitution? Did post-colonial leaders create something novel, even heroic? Or did they fail even on their own terms? Where do the democratic and counter-revolutionary aspects of the Indian revolution express themselves? How do symbolic substitutes for genuine popular participation play themselves out in Modi's India? Links: Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, Sandipto Dasgupta, Cambridge UP /198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik /417/ Has India passed peak Modi? ft. Achin Vanaik  

On the collective subject at the end of the End of History. Panagiotis Sotiris, Historical Materialism editorial board member and assistant professor at the University of the Aegean, talks to Alex and Lee about class and the "national-popular". Is the way to recover popular sovereignty to "return" to the nation? Is there a contradiction between this and declaring oneself to be "in favour of open frontiers for migrants and refugees"? What is the meaning of citizenship in this case? What's the difference between Gramsci's conceptions of people-nation and nation-rhetoric? Does the radical right's "civilisational nationalism" offer the left an opportunity to reclaim a popular notion of nationhood? Links: Rethinking the “We” of Emancipation, Panagiotis Sotiris, Communis /471/ Reforming the Deformed ft. Nathan Sperber & George Hoare  

On US derangement on screen. The OG Bunga boys get togther for the annual end-of-year film episode. We discuss Ari Aster's Eddington, as well as a bit of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia: the three films that together marked 2025, and which deal with paranoia, conspiracy, disinformation and unmoored political activity. Is this hyperpolitics on screen? Do these films serve any critical purpose? Is Eddington a faithful depiction of the society of immediacy or is it guilty of immediacy itself? Are we all fkin r*****ed? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: /520/ Conspiracy Culture & Paranoid Styles ft. Catherine Liu Hell in Ari Aster, Tara Heffernan & Felix McNamara, Corporate Total Art /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh (on 'immediacy') America’s Unraveling on Screen, Monica Marks, New Lines Magazine

On homoploutia and national market liberalism. Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at City University of New York, talks to Phil and Alex about his most recent book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World. What unites the political trajectories of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump? How is global inequality, growth and political conflict evolving in the aftermath of globalisation? How are hierarchies of global income shifting as the world rebalances towards East Asia? What kind of political theories can we use to model the emergence of this new multipolar world – Adam Smith, Lenin, Luxembourg or John Rawls? And what is Homoploutia?  Links: The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, Branko Milanovic Global Inequality 3.0 and More, Branko's substack An Economist’s Case for Open Borders, Branko Milanovic, Dissent Magazine The ‘homoploutic’ elephant, with Branko Milanović, FT  

On overmedicalisation and the crisis of authority. Amber Trotter, practicing psychologist and an editor at Damage magazine, and George Hoare tell Alex about their co-written article in the print issue of Damage on "the pre-political". What is driving the explosion in mental health diagnoses? Why are people seeking diagnosis? How is it the product of the subjective and the purely scientific? Does capitalism make us ill? Is blaming 'capitalism' abstractly part of the problem? What is the crisis of authority? Whose authority? Can we solve pre-political problems with politics? And political problems with pre-political approaches? Damage, Issue 5: The Pre-Political  

On post-woke strategies. Ryan Z is back on, talking to Alex and George about the US Democrats' attempt to respond to Trump/MAGA. In association with Damage magazine. Can the Democrats escape the shadow of woke? Is Big Woke dying? Everywhere? Who are the groups and think-tanks pushing for a reorientation, and what are they proposing? Will the Dems adapt to Trump’s challenge or pretend nothing is happening?  We then take listener questions and comments on transport infrastructure, left-wing gatekeeping, and the crisis in education everywhere, high and low. For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Can the Democrats Escape the Shadow of Woke?, Ryan Zickgraf, Damage Inside the Democratic identity crisis, Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd    

On legitimacy and chronic crisis. Benjamin Studebaker talks to Alex and Lee about his book, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracy – and why the absence of the threat of revolution makes the crisis drag on. What's wrong with 20th century accounts of legitimacy crises? What's changed? Why is contemporary politics so stuck? Is it inescapable? How does the breakdown of consensus make the emergence of a social majority so difficult? Is there no common programme we can agree on, focused on bread-and-butter issues? Do we need to stare despair in the face? Is catastrophe the only way out? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Legitimacy in Liberal Democracy, Benjamin Studebaker, Edinburgh UP UNLOCKED: /361/ A Nightmare on the Brains of the Living ft. Benjamin Studebaker Debilitated democracy: When the legs get ripped off, Dirk Jörke and Benjamin Studebaker, European Journal of Social Theory

On the crisis in literacy. Poet, podcaster and teacher, C. Derick Varn – who has taught in Mexico, Korea, Egypt and the US, at various levels – joins Alex and George to interrogate the coming "post-literate society". What do we mean when we say 'post-literate'? This seems a global problem – so is it a problem of the education system? Is it as simple as blaming smartphones? How else has education become degraded? How have progressives and conservatives combined to do this? Are we becoming on oral culture again? What are the consequences? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Are we becoming a post-literate society?, Sarah O'Connor, FT Have humans passed peak brain power?, John Burn-Murdoch, FT Visible Learning (synthesis of meta analyses), John Hattie Why Knowledge Matters, ED Hirsch, Harvard Seven Myths about Education, Daisy Christodoulou Insensitivity Readers!, Nina Power    

In this special episode, we present talks given by contributing editor Catherine Liu and co-host George Hoare on the paranoid style at a recent conference at UC Irvine, co-hosted by the Palm Springs School for Social Research. 00:01:23 – Catherine Liu: Opening Remarks, on Richard Hofstatder’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” 00:12:18 – George Hoare: The Paranoid Style in British Politics 00:36:06 – Catherine Liu: "Zombies Clowns and Gangsters" For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

On the middle classes and cultural compression. For the concluding episode of the 2024/25 Reading Club, we discuss C. Wright Mills' White Collar, plus some additional short texts on what mass culture is like today. credit: Ryan Zickgraf, based on The Wilson Quarterly/Russell Lynes 1949   For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Does Mills' account of the “economic psychology” of the White Collar worker still ring true today? What about their "political psychology"? What is the state of White Collar trade unionism today? Is there no possibility of the middle class leading a political movement? Do the distinctions of high- middle- and low-brow still make sense today, in our era of levelling-down and slop? Should we defend democracy in the economy and elitism in culture? Readings: White Collar: The American Middle Classes, C. Wright Mills, 1951 (esp final two chapters) Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, Russell Lynes, Wilson Quarterly, 1976 reprint of 1949 article (pdf attached) Post-Mass Culture, Dylan Riley, Sidecar Unionizing the “Cultural Apparatus”, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jacobin

On technology, transhumanism, and progress. James Hughes (Exec Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) and Eli Sennesh (postdoc, Vanderbilt) present a futurist approach to Alex and contributing editor Leigh Phillips. What is wrong with the acronym TESCREAL? Why is it wrong to worry about future transhumanism when we need to grapple with the technologies of now? What are the limits of bourgeois futurism? What is an alternative futurism? Has AI changed everything? Will it? Are we actually living in an age of rapid technological advance? Links: Conspiracy Theories, Left Futurism, and the Attack on TESCREAL, James Hughes & Eli Sennesh /306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power /335/ AI & the End of the End of History /446/ The Techno-Fantasy of Perfect Freedom ft. Amber Trotter /488/ Homo-Techno, Homo-Solo ...Post-Homo? ft. Alex Gendler The Obama-to-Yarvin Pipeline, Geoff Schullenberger, Compact Substack