Bungacast

Latest Episodes:

/466/ Regime Change in the West? Jan 30, 2025

Show notes

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

/465/ Quick Coups & Post-Development in Korea ft. Jamie Doucette Jan 28, 2025

Show notes

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

/464/ Decline Under The Donald ft. Daniel Bessner Jan 21, 2025

Show notes

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

/463/ Reading Club: Place 3 – Sennett Jan 14, 2025

Show notes

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

/462/ Blame Carter ft. Tim Barker Jan 08, 2025

Show notes

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

/461/ Welcome to the World of the Right ft. Michael C. Williams Jan 02, 2025

Show notes

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

/460/ The Profane Appeal of Sacred Authority Dec 23, 2024

Show notes

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?

/459/ Reading Club: Place 2 - Augé Dec 20, 2024

Show notes

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)

/458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh Dec 17, 2024

Show notes

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?