Bungacast

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

On US derangement on screen.

The OG Bunga boys get togther for the annual end-of-year film episode. We discuss Ari Aster's Eddington, as well as a bit of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia: the three films that together marked 2025, and which deal with paranoia, conspiracy, disinformation and unmoored political activity.

Is this hyperpolitics on screen?

Do these films serve any critical purpose?

Is Eddington a faithful depiction of the society of immediacy or is it guilty of immediacy itself?

Are we all fkin r*****ed?

For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

Links:

/520/ Conspiracy Culture & Paranoid Styles ft. Catherine Liu

Hell in Ari Aster, Tara Heffernan & Felix McNamara, Corporate Total Art

/458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh (on 'immediacy')

America’s Unraveling on Screen, Monica Marks, New Lines Magazine

On homoploutia and national market liberalism.

Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at City University of New York, talks to Phil and Alex about his most recent book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World.

What unites the political trajectories of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?

How is global inequality, growth and political conflict evolving in the aftermath of globalisation?

How are hierarchies of global income shifting as the world rebalances towards East Asia?

What kind of political theories can we use to model the emergence of this new multipolar world – Adam Smith, Lenin, Luxembourg or John Rawls?

And what is Homoploutia? 

Links:

The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, Branko Milanovic

Global Inequality 3.0 and More, Branko's substack

An Economist’s Case for Open Borders, Branko Milanovic, Dissent Magazine

The ‘homoploutic’ elephant, with Branko Milanović, FT