Bungacast

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?

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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