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 c...
2023-05-10 18:07:45 +0000 UTC
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The first three episodes of the 2023 Reading Club saw us carrying out an in-depth reading of Martin Hagglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
The fourth and final episode on the theme of FREEDOM will cover the following responses to Martin Hägglund's important book:
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 l...
2023-05-09 15:12:47 +0000 UTC
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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 ...
2023-05-02 20:17:11 +0000 UTC
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On history-ending technology.
[Patreon Exclusive]
The economist Tyler Cowen recently suggested that radical technological change today marks a turning point in history. Is he right, and how would we evaluate such a claim?
Should we be sceptical about these big claims, especially given all the Silicon Valley-driven hype around AI? Or is 'radical agnosticism' the right stance?
And what about calls to rein-in the development of artificial intelligence, especially when the...
2023-04-25 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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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 discu...
2023-04-18 15:29:35 +0000 UTC
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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.
2023-04-11 13:13:38 +0000 UTC
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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 nightmar...
2023-04-06 13:48:09 +0000 UTC
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Due to a logistical mix-up / Bezos' generosity, we have a spare copy of Jürgen Habermas' Legitimation Crisis to send out to a patron who's a member of the Reading Club (and is based in the UK due to postage costs). This is the text we'll be doing June to September.
First come, first served: please reply to this and then we'll message you for the address.
Note: there may or may not be nudes within the pages.
2023-04-05 13:27:53 +0000 UTC
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On cracked-up capitalism.
[Patreon Exclusive]
We continue our discussion with Quinn Slobodian on his book, Crack-Up Capitalism. Is the movement for police abolitionism a case of left-neoliberalism, and if so would the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) be one of those 'zones' Slobodian analyses?
What is the notion of 'soft secession', and is that what everyone is moving towards – or have we passed 'peak zone'? And how best to understand Brexit - a move to create ...
2023-04-04 06:02:00 +0000 UTC
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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 fo...
2023-04-04 06:00:59 +0000 UTC
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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 a...
2023-03-28 07:00:05 +0000 UTC
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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) ...
2023-03-21 17:09:00 +0000 UTC
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On the crisis of crisis.
Bulgarian critical theorist Albena Azmanova joins us to discuss her widely-discussed 2020 book, Capitalism on Edge. We talk critical theory, the paradox of emancipation, her criticisms of Thomas Piketty and why we should be thinking in terms of precarity capitalism, not neol...
2023-03-14 07:00:03 +0000 UTC
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As previously announced, the 2023 Reading Club will focus on three principal works. The first part of the year will be an in-depth reading of Martin Hagglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (the UK edition's subtitle is "Why mortality makes us free")
...
2023-03-13 13:33:55 +0000 UTC
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On what comes after neo-liberalism.
[Patreon Exclusive]
After 40 years of neo-liberalism, governments are inching their way to some new settlement, under the pressure of repeated crises, as well as populist upsurges. In this episode we try to take a political, not academic, approach to the question. This is not about categorising and labelling, but about understanding what the stakes are in saying a new arrangement is emerging, and grasping how it informs political practice. ...
2023-03-07 14:40:52 +0000 UTC
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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, many liberals and supposed anti-racists sustain racial thinking? H...
2023-02-28 07:00:02 +0000 UTC
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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 rights? Are delivery apps out to kill off traditional restaurants? And should we d...
2023-02-21 07:00:02 +0000 UTC
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On The Covid Consensus.
[Patreon Exclusive]
In the second part of the interview, we discuss the devastating impact of lockdowns on poor and middle-income countries where the informal economy is the norm. How did the consensus go global?
And we discuss those few countries that bucked the trend in different ways: Sweden, Mexico, Brazil. Is there a risk of the opposite extreme to lockdowns – social neglect?
In the After Party, the boys debate how importan...
2023-02-14 07:02:00 +0000 UTC
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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 across the majority of countries: was it coordination, imitation, or coercion?...
2023-02-14 07:00:03 +0000 UTC
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On your questions and criticisms.
[Patreon Exclusive]
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.
2023-02-07 07:01:00 +0000 UTC
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On the left's understanding of freedom.
[Patreon Exclusive]
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 wha...
2023-01-31 07:02:00 +0000 UTC
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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 argu...
2023-01-31 07:01:00 +0000 UTC
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[UPDATE: see bold sections below]
As previously announced, the 2023 Reading Club will focus on three principal works. We will start the year by doing an in-depth reading of Martin Hagglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (the UK edition's subt...
2023-01-30 16:37:26 +0000 UTC
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On labour militancy and our predictions for 2023.
[Patreon Exclusive]
We discuss what the substance is of the apparent rise in labour militancy in some Western countries, and contrast it with the reality that much protest is directed at the state.
We finish of by identifying some things to look forward to in 2023.
2023-01-24 07:02:01 +0000 UTC
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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 are taking over from economic populists.
2023-01-24 07:00:02 +0000 UTC
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The 2023 Reading Club will broach three key themes to understand politics in our current era: FREEDOM, LEGITIMACY, GLOBALISATION.
This year we will focus on three key texts, one per theme:
On cinema in 2023 and 'anti-capitalist' film & TV.
[Patreon Exclusive]
We continue our discussion with Maren Thom and Alex Dale from the Performance Anxiety podcast. We debate representation in film, and the backlash against wokeness as a form of anti-politics.
Also, looking forward to what cinema might hold in 2023 and what do works like White Lotus, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness actually tell us about the elite they portray, or for that mat...
2023-01-17 13:45:39 +0000 UTC
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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.
Links:
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 ar...
2023-01-10 07:00:03 +0000 UTC
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