Bungacast

On Empire of Conspiracy and agency panics.   [ Patreon Exclusive - Tiers II & III ]   We focus our discussion on the notion of 'agency panic' that is at the centre of Timothy Melley 's account of conspiracy theories in postwar America. Does it apply to the Great Reset and Russiagate equally?   Melley's approach is a useful way of understanding what conspiracy theories give voice to – but is Melley...

On the meaning of Gorbachev.   [ Patreon Exclusive ]   Mikhail Gorbachev continues to be lauded in Western circles for overseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union without much bloodshed. But given the historic societal disaster that followed, is this status unmerited? How naive was Gorbachev about the wolves at the door? And to what extent was the writing on the wall by the late '80s – was there a...

On Brazil's containment of the crisis. We talk to members of the Unbridled Possibility Collective ( Fabio Luis B. Santos | Thais Pavez | Daniel Cunha ) about their intervention, trying to look beyond this week's election in Brazil. What does establishment support for Lula this time round represent? Is Lula guilty of "unrealistic pragmatism"? How will Brazil react to a potential coup attempt by Bol...

On the Brothers of Italy. We talk to Mattia Salvia, former Rolling Stone Italia politics editor and author of Interregno , about Italy's election last weekend in the context of a Europe in crisis. The big question to start: is Meloni a fascist - and will her government be fascist? With very low turnout, it seems like the working class has deserted politics, with 5 Star being the last gasp of prole...

On La Macronie, or Macronistan Is France in perma-crisis? We talk to Nathan Sperber, independent researcher on political economy based in Paris and the author of a recent piece on Macronistan in American Affairs.   Does Macron evince a neo-statist turn, away from the entrepreneurial, neoliberal rhetoric of 2017? And what about the anti-establishment forces, left and right – how much of a chance do...

On your questions and criticisms. [ Patreon Exclusive ] We discuss the Chinese Dream, speculation and horizontal politics, foreign fighters and spies, Dune, and killing Phil.

[ Patreon Exclusive ]   On the death of Queen Elizabeth, a 20th century figure   To our own surprise, we are doing an episode on the Queen of England. How will her death impact the UK when she was basically the only institution that still retained popular trust? Will Britons be made to face up to the question of what kind of country they want?   We revisit the Nairn-Anderson theses about how and w...

On Communism's historic role.   We talk to renowned Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic about growing up in Yugoslavia and how, in much of the world, History never ended. We then dedicate much of the episode to discussing Branko's claim that communism was essentially an engine of economic convergence, allowing developing countries to haul themselves into the industrial age.   We also talk...

On Brazil's elections and the military.   A month away from the first round showdown between former president Lula and current president Jair Bolsonaro, lawyer, podcaster and communist Alcysio Canette joins us to look at the features that have shaped the past years.   How did Bolsonaro's response to the Covid pandemic – denialism, essentially – tarnish his image? What role is the military playing...

On Anthony Giddens' The Consequences of Modernity (ch.3) [ Patreon Tier 2&3 Exclusive ] In the second episode of the Cynical Ideology section of the 2022 Reading Club, we look at what trust is and why it has declined so precipitously in recent decades, especially in relation to institutions.  Is the opposite of trust mistrust, or is it existential angst? What's the link between the absence of trus...

Just a short announcement about what's coming up, while we're off on summer holidays. Subscribe to the podcast to support us and get two new, original, paywalled episodes a month ($5/mo). For $10/mo you also get access to the Reading Club. Sign up at patreon.com/bungacast

On Rojava and Ukraine. We talk to Stefan Bertram-Lee, former volunteer fighter for the the YPG in Rojava, about whom a Hollywood movie is being made. We ask him about the type of person who volunteers, and how this compares to those who have gone to Ukraine. How does this stop you "being a teenage nihilist"? And who would win in a fight: ISIS, Azov or the YPG? Part two of this episode is available...

[ Patreon Exclusive ] With European liberals waving Ukraine flags, how might the war and escalating geopolitical tensions between major power be prompting a return to nationalism and patriotism? Is it just a means for elites to extract sacrifices from the people? And how 'real' are nations anyway? Articles: As we unite for the jubilee, let’s believe Britain’s best days are ahead , not behind, Lucy...

On our financialised world.  We talk to Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou about his new book, Speculative Communities . How has speculation become the very practice around which modern societies coalesce? And how does speculation actually give voice to the  waning legitimacy of neoliberalism?  Do dating apps, Tik Tok and other social media give birth to 'speculative communities'? And is populism a specul...

[ Patreon Tier 2&3 Exclusive ]   On Zizek's "How Marx Invented the Symptom" from The Sublime Object of Ideology.   We kick off the second phase of the 2022 Reading Club, on Cynical Ideology, with this selection from Slavoj Zizek's landmark first book in English. How does he supplement Marx's conception of ideology? Are we post-ideological or trapped in cynical ideology? How would we go about break...

On the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism. Fritz Bartel talks to us about his new book in which the 1970s crisis and its aftermath takes centre-stage. How did the response to this global crisis differ in Western democratic capitalism versus Eastern state socialism? And why did this determine which side won the Cold War? How did the twin factors of global finance and energy emerge th...

On the climate emergency. We are specially unlocking this episode of our monthly Reading Club – the concluding episode of the first half of the 2022 syllabus ( download it here ). If you'd like full access to all of the Reading Club, go to patreon.com/bungacast We discuss Andreas Malm's Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency and Adam Tooze's review essay, "Ecological Leninism". How convincing is Malm'...

On reviews of our book, The End of the End of History   [ Patreon Exclusive ]   A year since the book came out, and two years since we finished writing it, we take a look at published reviews the book has received and respond to them.   Questions addressed include: have we overstated our case? Do we ignore the importance of the 1970s in favour of the 1990s? Might war matter more than class struggl...

[ Patreon Exclusive ] On your questions & criticisms. We discuss the link between Covid and war in Ukraine and return to the question of who exactly is the ruling class. Plus: inflation, what actually happened in the 1990s, contemporary art, and the politics of abortion.  

On abortion. After the US Supreme Court ruling, where does this leave women in the US? Political theorist Alex Gourevitch joins us to discuss Roe v Wade, and how the fact it rooted abortion in a right to privacy was problematic. How can we ground the right to abortion in an argument for freedom in general? And is the US really faced with a rising tide of reaction, as liberals claim? Are same-sex m...

On the endgame to war in Ukraine.   Eminent Russian expert, Putin and Gorbachev biographer and ex-Sovietologist, Prof Richard Sakwa, joins us in advance of his imminent retirement from the University of Kent. We talk about the geopolitics of NATO expansion and the dynamics of the Ukraine war reaching back to 2014. How high is the risk of nuclear war now, and how might the Ukraine war play out? Rea...

[ Patreon Exclusive ]   On the whatever decade.   People are turning back to reinterpret the 1990s. Clearly, they were peak End of History years. But does that mean that no politics actually happened? If it's the period of the cultural turn, does that mean we should seek to understand that decade culturally?   And what are the political consequences of how we interpret the 1990s?   Readings: The 1...

If the End of History was characterised by post-politics, and the 'populist decade' of the 2010s dominated by anti-politics, then how should we understand more recent phenomena? Are the following of a qualitatively different nature to anti-politics, namely: the intensification of culture wars, growing polarisation that does not always align neatly with class, of increasingly hysterical and persona...

To commemorate the publication of the German edition of The End of the End of History, co-author Alex Hochuli was in conversation with David Broder, Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine at Spike Magazine , Berlin.   The crumbling of the liberal, technocratic order over the past decade has led to a variety of hysterical reactions from the establishment. Faced with new challenges to their authority, th...

[Live events in Germany: Berlin / Munich ] On emergency politics today. We talk to Geoff Shullenberger about competing emergency politics, left and right. Should politics be enjoyable and provide a frisson of transgression, or not? Is bare life all that's on offer? And is declaring the predominance of 'emergency politics' itself an emergency a problem? Readings: How We Forgot Foucault , American A...