Bungacast

On global insurrection and identity politics. 

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• Onward Barbarians, Endnotes

• The Bleak Left, Tim Barker, n+1
• Endnotes no.5: A melancholic goodbye…, Angry Workers of the World
• On communisation and its theorists, Friends of the Classless Society

On liberal idealism and imperial overreach.

Why did the winners of the Cold War turn 'revisionist', undermining their own order? How has utopianism come to dominate the discipline of IR, such that we have lost the means to critique power?

We discuss Philip's recent book, The New Twenty Years’ Crisis 1999-2019: A Critique of International Relations, which is both a revisiting of EH Carr's international relations classic The Twenty Years' Crisis as well as an account of the contemporary crisis of the liberal international order. 

Reading:

The New Twenty Years’ Crisis 1999-2019: A Critique of International Relations, Philip Cunliffe, McGill-Queen's UP

• Stayed home, live streamed, got the T-shirt, Lev Parker, The Conservative Woman
• The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown, Emma Green, The Atlantic 
• Broad commodities price boom amplifies ‘supercycle’ talk, Neil Hume et al, FT 

We discuss the second of Perry Anderson's three LRB essays on the making and unmaking of the EU: "Ever Closer Union?" 

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On class reductionism, commodity fetishism, and value theory.

To discuss Covid, the state as 'PMC leviathan', and the politics of value theory, we’re joined by philosopher Elena Louisa Lange, who also explains why class reductionism is not a theoretical position or a mere mistake, but a social reality. We also address the value of 'going back to school', take on the new Leftist 'holy trinity' of class-race-gender, and hear from Elena why we need to theorise the world before we change it.

Readings:

• The Middle-Class Leviathan: Corona, the “Fascism” Blackmail, and the Defeat of the Working Class, Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett-Depaolis, Crisis and Critique, 2020
• Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan, Germaine A. Hoston, Princeton, 1987
• Lawyer’s Fees, Beetroot, and Music, Elena’s Substack
• Value Without Fetish, Elena Louisa Lange, Brill 2021
• Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World, Raju J. Das, Haymarket, 2018

• (00:04:15) - Interview with Mike Watson
• (01:02:00) - 'Afterparty' discussion on what a counter-culture might look like today

• Can the Left Learn to Meme? , Mike Watson, Zero Books
• The Acid Left, YouTube channel
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (pdf)