Bungacast

On the mainstreaming of racial thinking. We welcome back author and broadcaster Kenan Malik to talk about his new book, Not So Black and White. The book presents a historical account of how racial thinking has accompanied the spread of notions of equality and common humanity.  How is it that many supposed humanitarians in the past were often racists? And how have we reached a point where today, ma...

On the app economy.   [ Patreon Exclusive ]   Delivery apps have taken the world by storm, and the pandemic only deepened our dependence on them. What is the price of convenience – and is there anything wrong with wanting ease? Capitalist keep propping up these money-losing enterprises – why? And can they survive the end of cheap money?   Is the app economy just a battering ram against labour righ...

On The Covid Consensus.   We're joined by two authors whose new book asks why lockdowns were adopted almost universally. National and transnational health authorities dropped pre-pandemic plans in favour of open-ended nationwide lockdowns which were to remain in place until vaccines were developed. Why this course of action?    And how to account for the unprecedented level of policy alignment acr...

[ Patreon Exclusive ]   On your questions and criticisms.   A bumper episode as we respond to your points from December through to the end of January. We discuss 'political capitalism', where the left is today, atomisation, degrowth, disciplining the working class, critical cinema, and family abolition.

On the death of the left.   We talk to 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 .   Is the left indeed dead, and what killed it? The turn to culture undoubtedly plays a part, but was the left wrong to turn to liberty, as Hall & Winlow argue? How can we turn back to political e...

On the key events and developments in 2022.   We look back at how the world transitioned from the pandemic to war over the past year, and what the socio-political fallouts have been. Is everything "better than expected"? Has managerial technocracy been rejuvenated?    We discuss whether we're in a Third World War, how the US empire is strengthening its grip on Europe, and how cultural populists ar...

On aesthetic criticism & performance. The hosts of a new podcast on film, Performance Anxiety, join us to talk about how a focus on performance can break through endless squabbles over wokeness and representation in film.  We also discuss our best and worst films of 2022.  Part two of this episode is at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Performance Anxiety podcast The Greatest Films of All Time , Sight...

On the achievement of democracy and the 'impartial' state. We speak to sociologist Dylan Riley about his new book Microverses, a series of aphorisms on social theory and politics. The rational-legal state seems to be under threat by politicians who have no sense of the division between public and private – patrimonialists like Donald Trump, or Silvio Berlusconi. What are we to make of this attack...

Is there a new 'transformative' class?   [ Patreon Tier II & III Exclusive ] We close of the 2022 Reading Club, and the final section on 'Neo-Feudalism', by discussing how class is changing. Through readings by Guy Standing and Ruy Braga, we ask if the precariat are the new serfs in a supposed feudal-ish social formation. It's clear the old Fordist arrangements have broken down, so what does the w...

On 'degrowth communism'. [ Patreon Exclusive ] Why the rage for degrowth now? With deindustrialisation, energy rationing and severe pressure on standards of living, it looks increasingly like degrowth is official policy. Yet its advocates, drawing from the work of radicals like Mike Davis, John Bellamy Foster, Jason Hickel, and Kohei Saito, would argue that ecological Marxism or degrowth communism...

On atomisation and association.   Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone came out 22 years ago and the structural changes he identified then – increasing atomisation – have only worsened. Everyone now blames the internet, and though it may have accelerated some aspects, the problem goes deeper. The social consequences – loneliness, mistrust, depression – are widely discussed, but the political ones less so...

On the global left after the Cold War. [ Patreon Exclusive ] Has the left declined, been defeated, or is it dead? Is the continuity with the Old and New Lefts of the 20th century, or should we understand 1989 as marking a definitive break? We use a long essay by Swedish Marxist sociologist Göran Therborn in the latest New Left Review as a plank to examine these questions. Therborn tries to present...

On your questions & criticisms. [ Patreon Exclusive ] We debate what kind of work 'shared-labour socialism' would involve in a complex society, and what role 'dispossession' or 'expropriation' has in the contemporary economy. Plus: strategies on Ukraine – backing independence, guerilla warfare, and what an 'anti-NATO' stance actually looks like; and whether the forces exist for exiting the EU. Fil...

On Inhuman Power.   [ Patreon Tier II & III Exclusive ]   Contemporary capitalism is possessed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) question – one of the few areas today in which capitalist 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 S...

On "techno-feudalism". In the Bungacast Reading Club for patrons, we've been discussing various works on "neo-feudalism" - a thesis that tries to explain capitalist stagnation and inequality by arguing that we are moving beyond capitalism – toward something worse.  In this free episode, we discuss one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of this thesis: Evgeny Morozov's " Critique of Techno-Feudal...

On Mali and the Sahel.   French president Emmanuel Macron declared the end of Opération Barkhane on 9 November 2022, bringing to an end to nearly 10 years of French military intervention in Mali. But what is the legacy of the French Forever War in the Sahel, and what happens next?   Sahel expert Yvan Guichaou joins us to talk about French defeat in the war on terror, the continued French military...

A special five-part series on generational consciousness and conflict. Previously released in 2021 only to subscribers at patreon.com/bungacast , a year on we're releasing the whole series to everyone. Part 1: (00:00:00) Part 2: (00:38:11) Part 3: (01:07:54) Part 4: (02:50:32) Part 5: (03:59:24) Part 1: We look at the current, vexed discourse around generations, and analyse competing theories on h...

On your questions & criticisms. [ Patreon Exclusive ]   The weakness of anti-EU forces; the implications of defending Ukrainian sovereignty; what should we call the new far-right and what does it *do* in power? And the gravity of nuclear war   Also, is Phil okay?

On Joel Kotkin's The Coming of Neo-Feudalism   We start off by discussing your points on the last RC, on conspiracy theory. Then we delve into Kotkin's book, asking whether he has an adequate understanding of feudalism, and whether this is the right lens to understand transformations underway now. Is 'techno-feudalism' not just a downturn in 'systemic cycles of accumulation', related to the declin...

On nuclear exterminism.  To commemorate our 300th episode, we discuss how the world is closer to a nuclear conflict than at any point since the Cold War. After decades of inconsequential 'permawar' (at least inside the Western bubble), the proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia is suddenly very consequential indeed. How does our situation differ from that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis? Wh...

On reclaiming populism.   With only a couple of days to go until the decisive runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro, we continue our Bungazão 2022 series by talking to to political scientist Miguel Lago about how Lula and Bolsonaro both construct a Brazilian people. Lula does so broadly on class lines, while Bolsonaro's construction is a moral one: "good citizens" and those to be excluded.    Why is p...

On shared-labour socialism. Political theorist Alex Gourevitch talks to us about his critique of post-work thought, and how it presupposes the very labour it seeks to free us from. We start of by distinguishing post-work socialism (e.g. Fully Automated Luxury Communism) from various propositions for a Universal Basic Income, and discuss why these ideas are popular today. We then dedicate much of t...

On corruption & anti-corruption. When Bolsonaro won in 2018, he rode a wave of anti-corruption sentiment. Now he's doled out billions in pork via a secret budget, but this doesn't seem to bother his supporters. What happened? Benjamin Fogel, who studies the history of corruption in Brazil, comes on to discuss how a moralistic account of corruption has fortified the far right. How has corruption be...

On Trussonomics.   [ Patreon Exclusive ]   Having stumbled upon a successful recipe under Boris Johnson which would see greater state intervention, Britain's Tories then pivoted to a much more pro-market approach. But the markets haven't liked it – they've hated it.   What does this say about neoliberalism and what the new orthodoxy is? Why did markets react so badly against a budget that featured...

On who's responsible for prolonging the Ukraine War + your questions & criticisms.   [ Patreon Exclusive ]   We start off by discussing whether the Zelensky tail is wagging the NATO dog, and what possible exits to conflict there might be.    Then, in the main section, we respond to listener comments: we talk about the possibility of a "Chinese Dream", what the point of economic growth is, the mona...