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The Kingless Generation — Science
The Kingless Generation

A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital.

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Copyright: © George Psalmanazar

Latest Episodes:

Fireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 1 Aug 29, 2024

I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settlers, relatives and friends on both sides of the Trump/Kamala cultic divide, I managed to do some real-life investigation of Indigenous reservations, visiting museums and cultural events, albeit in a shallow, short-term capacity. Herein I share some musings on this experience of questionable depth but with fireside vibes aplenty.

This version is a short take which I did earlier on in the visit and which got interrupted, though it’s nice and snappy and focused. A longer take done later with a bit more information and a lot more vibes will follow on the premium feed only.

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The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (Kʾicheʾ, 1550s) Jul 27, 2024

The first half of the Popol Vuh as we have it from the Kʾicheʾ colonial tradition is a quintessentially Kingless epic, as the story revolves around pre-human gods, successive generations of hero twins, who must defeat a series of aggrandizer figures, including the lords of death in the underworld, in order to bring about the dawning of the human age. Although the same basic story can be found in earlier art and hieroglyphic inscriptions which since the 1990s are being deciphered at an exhilarating pace, recent research has pointed out that this anti-accumulative tendency of the story may be somewhat unique to the Popol Vuh as we have it, which, it is hypothesised, may represent a retelling slanted toward anti-colonial resistance. While I agree that this may also be the case, I (based on my limited understanding as an ignorant outsider) think it might make even more sense to take this story, written down only some thirty years after first European contact, as faithfully reflecting older layers, though perhaps not of the somewhat exploitative and stratified Classic Maya (ca 250–950 CE) but rather of the socially creative, decentralized, and egalitarian Postclassic Maya (950–1539), which represents one of the great examples in world history of the deescalation of class struggle, when people came together to build the Kingless Generation.

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Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) May 24, 2024

In a series that I hope will include Martin Bernal’s classic Black Athena (about the modern British fabrication of “ancient Greece” and its true roots in ancient Egypt), we start with the East: in recent decades, great advances in Hittite studies have illuminated much of the mechanics of transmission of Mesopotamian literature and religion to a nascent Greece from a grain state in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) which used cuneiform writing (in addition to their own distinctive hieroglyphs) and was ruled over by an Indo-European-speaking ruling class. In addition to illuminating details of class struggle between slave-owning city council members against a king who wants to free the slaves—though perhaps only in order that they may serve the cult of his ancestors in the temple—we contemplate the dependent origination and lack of perduring essence of ‘ancient Greece’, that flimsy idol enshrined at the center of the white supremacist worldview.

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Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan) May 02, 2024

A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything concocted by the capitalist dictatorships of the Century of the Self, was wielded as a weapon of class struggle by the rising urban commoner class against the de facto feudal rulers, the samurai.

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The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees [PREVIEW] Mar 14, 2024

The rise of ancient empires in the Eurasian continent ushered in the Axial Age, with its ideologies of absolute good and evil and the promise of revolutionary recompense for unheard-of oppression by the Occupiers of the Earth (שכני הארץ). The books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, quoted by name in the New Testament, still contained in the Bible of the Ethiopic churches, and exerting a massive influence over the entire Christian view of human history, have recently been re-edited and re-translated with reference to the Aramaic and Hebrew originals partially recovered from the Dead Sea scrolls. Their text shows a greater class consciousness than ever, declaring, “it was not ordained for a man to be a slave, nor was a decree given for a woman to be a handmaid: but it happened because of oppression. This lawlessness was not sent upon the earth: but men created it by themselves, and those who do it will come to a great curse,” (98:4) proclaiming, “woe to those who build their houses not with their own labors, and make the whole house of the stones and bricks of sin,” (99:13) while we workers “toiled and labored and were not masters of our labor; we became the food of the sinners.” (103:11) In response to this situation—ambiguously connected with the idea of God’s angelic police (עירין “watchers”) and prosecutors (שׂטנין “accusers”) betraying Him and engaging in a kind of mafia side hustle which corrupted some humans so that they began to consume and exploit others—the patriarchs Enoch and Moses are given secret knowledge of the cosmic surveillance apparatus that will bring reward to the just, punishment to the rich, and justice to the victims of oppression. We engage in an extended meditation on the impact of these ideas as a weapon of class struggle, both from above and below, in late antique, medieval, capitalist, and our own techno-feudal times.

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Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min Feb 19, 2024

I thought I had a hot take in response to the Little Mermaid discourse last year, but predictably I’m not the first one to think of reading the Isle of Venus in Camões’ Lusiads against the Age of Exploration diary entries in which roving European savages discuss their adventures in more complex Indigenous kinship structures where sex was not commodified and the family was not specialized to pass down private property—as well as (what one suspects was actually much more common) rolling up on Indigenous women around the world and committing sexual violence. Sure enough, my guest Min has written an entire scholarly thesis on two different poetic re-imaginings of the Isle of Venus which highlight the colonial violence that Camões’ poem works to conceal: one by a white Anglo woman in Brazil, and another by the leader of the Angolan revolution against Portuguese domination, António Agostinho Neto.

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ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW] Feb 14, 2024

The antisemitic, Nazi-adjacent ideology of Zionism says that members of the Jewish religion must be uprooted from their ancestral homelands and gathered into a white supremacist settler colony ruled by Jews native to Europe—a new kind of crusader state. And like the crusader states, at the behest of their Euro-American masters, the Zionist entity practices the fascist economics of nomadic destruction and chaos, taking the lead in illicit trade in weapons, drugs, and human beings. We are joined by Klonny Gosch of the ParaPower Mapping podcast to discuss the last of these as only he can.

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive Jan 24, 2024

In the final installment of the series, we cover all that is known about the mysterious death of this strangely GLADIO-brained scholar of classical Japanese literature and favorite translator of “aesthetic terrorist” Mishima Yukio.

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW] Dec 22, 2023

We explore the Windsor Free Festival, Sunday Head, Albion Free State milieu of hedonist, individualist, libertarian (and decidedly anti-communist) radicalism in 1970s Britain, led by figures like Ubi Dwyer, Sid Rawle, and Paul Pawlowski, as well as scions of elite families like Heathcote Williams and Nic Albery—in light of the fact that, as we have already seen, Nic Albery and his movement appear in Nobuko Albery’s semi-autobiographical novel merged together (and not-so-subtly equated) with Mishima Yukio and his far-right Shield Society, with whom Nobuko and Ivan Morris were also closely associated.

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion Dec 13, 2023

From the semi-autobiographical novel of Ivan’s second Japanese wife, Nobuko Albery (née Uenishi), we have some very sardonic portraits of the Morrises and their upper-crust left-wing milieu in France, as well as a fascinating subplot involving a drug-trafficking, blue-blooded hippie cult leader character who seems a fusion of Mishima Yukio and Nic Albery, the son of Nobuko’s elderly second husband and a pioneering figure in post-left radical politics and early internet-style social experimentation in 1970s Britain, and who is here connected to an attempt on the life of a certain Labour prime minister—with the Ivan Morris character giving wry and knowing commentary on these antics throughout.

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 5: Ogawa Ayako, ballet master of Cold War Japan [PREVIEW] Dec 01, 2023

From 1956 through 1966, during which time he moved from London to Tokyo to New York, Ivan was married to the ballerina Ogawa Ayako, known in the society papers—by analogy with Jackie (Kennedy)—as Yakkie. In the realm of ballet, where other important Cold War battles were fought such as securing the defection of the Tatar dancer Rudolf Nureyev from the Soviet Union, Ayako became one of the first Japanese to work at the highest levels, then returned to Japan to spread her knowledge to a new generation here. Ultimately she played her part in proving Japan’s ‘eligibility’ for the honorary white status it ‘achieved’ in the postwar, as well as the supposedly unlimited translation powers of Anglo-American capitalism.

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 4: beasts in human guise Nov 22, 2023

We finish our run through Ivan’s parents’ adventures, including their support for Kenyan Mao Mao revolutionaries and participation in the American-sponsored “Kenyan airlift” that also produced Barack Obama Sr, supporting Greek, Turkish, and Mexican communists in their way, but for one reason or another being unable to stop their son Ivan from becoming the essentially conservative creature of the British establishment that he became, really quite naturally given the course that they had consistently set him on: elite boarding school, Harvard—and then came Hiroshima...

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 3: in the shadow of HUAC [PREVIEW] Nov 17, 2023

We follow Ivan’s parents, the peripatetic idle rich leftist novelist/journalists Ira and Edita Morris, from their wartime career “writing” in Haiti on the eve of the coup that brought the progressive President Estimé to power, then making “democratic” anti-fascist propaganda for the American Office of War Information and the Voice of America while moving in Brecht’s circle including the Eisler siblings, whose persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee led the brothers to flee to Europe and the sister, Ruth Fischer, to turn anti-communist professor at Harvard. In this context, Edita leaves behind a most puzzling letter to a member of the Eisler family, talking mysteriously about “the step which I have taken”...

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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 2: communists in cashmere Nov 10, 2023

I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Tokyo, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical strategic analysis on how the Fourth Reich might best rule Japan, and was the preferred translator and lifelong friend of aesthetic GLADIO agent Mishima Yukio—all at the same damn time. On this outing we begin to deal with his parents: I promise you’ll never guess what they did for a living.

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The Last Crusade (inshAllah) [PREVIEW] Oct 19, 2023

A chatty episode to break the hiatus. I discuss recent news of the new final solution being demoed by the Zionist entity in Gaza. These days I’m walking around with posture like a ballerina because I’ve been de-settlerising and un-domesticating my leg muscles by running in huaraches and doing squats. We take a look at the First Crusade as seen in Arab chronicles, as well as the image of the rose in the Zohar, among other things.

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Doraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion Aug 18, 2023

Family movie day with the Schmudlachs in Tokyo usually results in a special episode of the Kingless Generation, as I dissect the petit bourgeois propaganda to which I’ve been subjected in an (arguably) more constructive forum than ranting to my kids—but this latest Doraemon film outdid even last year’s Ukraine War puff piece, and I had to call on Prez of the Minyan to help me recover some sanity points. This time we have a tale of utopian hopes betrayed, dramatizing point for point the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: there are definitely hints in the direction of Jewish identity for certain bad guys, and explicit “early-20th-century German” atmospherics for the good guys for some reason, but more than anything the true main point of the Protocols—that anyone who tries to get you to strive for a better world, to struggle against the ruling class, is only plotting to brainwash and enslave you and become an even more dangerous ruling class—is the central and bombastically delivered message of this film.

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Landback in Eurasia, 622 CE [PREVIEW] Jul 19, 2023

How does an Indigenous-led movement rebuild in the wake of imperial decline? With the spectacular collapse of both Sassanian Persia and Byzantime Rome in 622 CE, a certain revolutionary communal movement led by masses of nomadic herders, merchants, and farmers, provides us with one of the greatest and earliest examples, albeit one poorly attested in surviving contemporaneous sources. We turn to recent historical-critical scholarship on the birth of this movement (often quite tendentious in ways we’re not so interested in) for hints about its genesis and growth. To keep me from perfectionism in the face of this daunting topic and to perform the conditions of pure orality in which this movement would have begun and spread, I record while walking through a midsummer Japanese mountain forest.

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Traces of Japanese matriliny in the Rainy Night Critique of Ranks (by 1021) Jun 25, 2023

Kinship in Heian Japan (roughly 800–1200 CE) was matrilocal, which means it was men who moved in with their wives’ families and lived largely under their control. Although already thoroughly patriarchal in most respects, these last vestiges of what Engels calls Mother Right create fascinating tensions in a society where the world-historic defeat of the female sex was not quite complete—and reveals to us that it was never set in stone. This scene from the Tale of G*nji gives us an engaging tour of a sex/gender system which seems quite exotic today (though it has many close relatives throughout history): where women were cultivated to possess every cultural accomplishment and practical skill, and it is the men who were socialized to pursue the refinement of emotional and aesthetic taste to help them choose—and they were empowered (by now) to choose—whose boudoir to visit. This leads us into meditations on the possibilities of kinship, particularly the open question of what arrangements (plural) might work best as we pursue revolutionary leveling of material relations of production.

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Kingless Reads: How To Master Secret Work, pt 2 (South Africa, 1980s) Jun 08, 2023

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.

https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-work

https://ycl.bigcartel.com/product/anti-apartheid

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Kingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 1 (South Africa, 1980s) Jun 07, 2023

Purely for purposes of historical and mythological interest, here is a reading of a pamphlet on underground work by the Communist Party of South Africa.

https://manifestopress.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-master-secret-work

https://ycl.bigcartel.com/product/anti-apartheid

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Ruling classes have always wanted us dead [PREVIEW]: Atraḫasīs (Babylon, 18th c. BCE); The Extinction Narrative (2young Badazz, 2021 CE) Jun 05, 2023

Plague, famine, flood; nuclear holocaust, nuclear winter, global warming. Seen through a class lens, these existential threats to humanity are threats indeed, but they are ultimately threats directed by the capitalist ruling class at the rest of humanity: that if they are truly faced with losing their position, they will carry out the mass depopulation that they have been plotting in myriad ways for decades now, and which they hope will constitute a final solution to the problem of class struggle—all the while keeping the nature and meaning of these threats carefully veiled so that most people only ever consciously perceive them as forces of nature or blind human folly, rather than class power wielded shrewdly and mercilessly. An Old Babylonian epic reveals that they have been at this a long time, since the days when they were cult leaders in a little backwater called Mesopotamia, spinning stories for their tiny captive audience about the first ever final solution. Nevertheless, this is not so long ago compared to 300,000 years of human history, and it is nothing compared to the eons of human flourishing we can build if we refuse to give in to panic or despair, if we reject mechanistic or economistic understandings of class struggle and instead put politics in command.

https://twitter.com/2youngBadazz/status/1451303496351825931

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Collectivize the Buddha: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 2 May 18, 2023

We continue our free flowing conversation about our respective journeys as sketchy gaijin wandering in and out of the capitalist puppet states of East Asia and searching for ways to build the revolutionary saṃgha.

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Land of the Rising Tensions [PREVIEW] May 02, 2023

A newsy update on the non-release of the Abe Shinzō autopsy; the apparently accidental crash of a Japanese SDF helicopter which left multiple high-ranking military and intelligence officers dead including the leader of arguably the most important division of Japan’s Western Command (and about whom I have an interesting discovery to share); and finally an assassination attempt on PM Kishida using more home-made weaponry, this time a pipe bomb—all in the run-up to elections which saw a further drift to the right, of both liberal and fascist varieties, as well as America’s increasingly desperate demands to start that proxy war on China. Meanwhile, spectacular wall-to-wall coverage of Japanese people beating Americans at baseball is performing its diversionary function perfectly.

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A Host Questions a Host: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 1 Apr 15, 2023

I interview Marcus of the podcast Return of the Repressed about his journey, partially with reference to Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Japan, 13th c.) and the Record of Linji (China, 9th c.), and featuring a song from the noh play “Xiwangmu,” or the Queen Mother of the West.

On the Feast of Winding Water, block the flow with your hand and watch the water wind around, and isn’t this cup making even the flowers tipsy? Isn’t this cup making even the flowers tipsy? The sleeves and fringed hems of lovely maidens that sport and play in the waters of the great River flow out to the side like clouds off a mountaintop. And as the flowers and the birds of the clouds become one with the winds of Spring, we are transported to the cloud-road and on it we climb up and up, accompanied by the Queen Mother herself. Shall we rise on the road of heaven, accompanied by the Queen Mother herself, and away we go, we know not where?

On Yōmeishu: https://www.yomeishu.my/power_of_herbal/

On Tōtōshu: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%99%B6%E9%99%B6%E9%85%92

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LoFi Botanical Ramble: Gerald Horne, Race War! (2004); etc [PREVIEW] Mar 24, 2023

We take a ramble through the diverse forest, plains, and mountainside biomes of a historic botanical garden here in Tokyo while discussing, among many other things, Gerald Horne’s fascinating first book on Imperial Japan and Black America, as well as that book’s perfidious falsification in Japanese translation, the rights to which were somehow given to a far-right press who translated less than half the original text and replaced Prof. Horne’s very nuanced and original argument with the typical postwar-Japanese boilerplate of Anglo-worshiping honorary whiteness and vehement denial of the crimes of Japanese imperialism.

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Hammurabi’s COIN: Agushaya; The Cleaner; The Poor Man of Nippur; The Doctor; Sargon, Lord of the Lies (Akkad, 18th c. BCE seq) Mar 11, 2023

In the 19th c., working backwards from Old Persian to Hittite to Amorite, modern scholars rediscovered the long-forgotten Semitic language Akkadian, and then an even older language, Sumerian. The logographic cuneiform script which was created to write Sumerian was adapted to write Akkadian, and a complex matrix of graphic and linguistic play was opened up by the power of the rebus principle, which arguably lies at the base of all writing—which in turn is only known to have originated in grain states where bookkeeping was necessary to ensure maximum exploitation of the peasantry. While comparing the relationship of Sumerian and Akkadian to that between Chinese and Japanese today, we explore the deep consciousness of class struggle and the fragility and perversity of the grain state and early ancient empires which can be seen on nearly every clay tablet on which this literature comes down to us. We see how the goddess of state violence is thwarted by the god of wisdom, who creates a goddess of revolt to stop her and put her in her place in the Agushaya, an epic poem dating to the reign of Hammurabi, famous for the first law code—though it was really only the first punitive code, whereas human beings outside class society have usually depended on the much more productive practices of restorative justice. We explore vignettes of various trades in the early grain state, as well as the story of a lone hustler who overcomes a greedy bureaucrat with some very picaresque tricks. Finally, a parody on the epic tradition in praise of King Sargon (which dates earlier than any extant example of that tradition) uses puns on similar-sounding words in Sumerian and Akkadian to encode a clandestine critique of class rule.

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Weebs of the Ages: Ivan Morris, Mishima, and aesthetic GLADIO in Japan’s fourth reich, part 1 w/ Prez [PREVIEW] Feb 12, 2023

In this ongoing series, we savor the weebery of the greatest weebs of history, pondering the roles they play in various regimes of class struggle including whiteness, patriarchy, capital, and data counterinsurgency. This time, the President of the United States joins me from the Minyan to explore the life of Ivan Morris, a Swedish-Jewish man who grew up in rural France and New York City, attended the most elite of British boarding schools, joined American naval intelligence, and proceeded to act the proper British gentleman from his perch atop the crown jewel of American Japanology, the department at Columbia. He is most famous for his work on Heian court literature, as well as his promotion of anti-Communist liberals like Maruyama Masao, but in fact he was also the preferred translator and close companion of Japan Romantic aesthete and fascist paramilitary leader Mishima Yukio. In what became his final book, and a classic among the Japan Panic–era Anglo-American business class, Morris gave an interpretation of Mishima’s spectacular death by outlining a series of tragic heroes in Japanese history, from which he derives a Japanese national character that is chivalric and militant enough to achieve honorary whiteness but ultimately docile, clumsy, and non-threatening. Meanwhile, at the core of Morris’ most important chapter here lies an interpretation of medieval Japanese political economy that seems utterly alien to the subject at hand but which bears striking resemblances to the PR logic of GLADIO and the strategy of tension. Sadly no further explanation was forthcoming from Morris himself, as he was mysteriously found dead in a cheap hotel in Bologna shortly thereafter and only a few years before the Bologna train station bombing...

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The ‘Real Little Mermaid’ was Indigenous, w/ Šuŋgmánitu: The Lusíads (Portugal, 1572), Disney’s Little Mermaid (1989), Ponyo (2008) Jan 31, 2023

The Rob Marshall–directed live-action Little Mermaid, which should be coming out this May, was buzzed up by a good old culture war psy-op of which the two sides were: 1. Errm, the real Little Mermaid was white! This is cultural appropriation of marginalized white settler bodies and spaces and voices!; 2. The Little Mermaid is a fictional character, dumbass! But it occurred to me that the modern image of the mermaid as seen in the Disney movie mostly derives from the Age of Exploration encounter between white male explorers and Indigenous women, on which a voluminous archive exists. Sometimes this involved denizens of feudal Europe having their minds blown by the complex galaxies of non–hetero-patriarchal deep kinship and community that exist in Indigenous societies where the family is not specialized to pass down private property. But most of the time we can see from diaries that they were just rolling up on Indigenous women and r*ping them, and in fact there is an entire canto of an epic poem celebrating this practice: Canto 9 of Camões’ Lusíads has the goddess Venus reward Vasco da Gama and his brave sailors for their labors in blasting and murdering their way into the Silk Road of the Indian Ocean by preparing a magical sex island for them where they can force themselves (only role-play! they swear) on a host of minor sea sprites whom she has gathered, Epstein-like, for this purpose. So the really remarkable thing is that the old Disney little mermaid was white! The sailor guy she falls in love with seems to be an explorer on the seven seas, but somehow he’s exploring places where there are white mermaids? Her whiteness is the only thing (quite artificially) keeping us from thinking about the colonial origins of this whole story as it exists in the modern imagination, making her only just a metaphor for accepting the role of housewife in the Disney style picket fence Lebensraum, etc. I am joined by Lakota organizer and podcaster Šuŋgmánitu of Chunka Luta, recently rebranded from Bands of Turtle Island.

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Transcendental Settlerism vs Landback Enlightenment: Thoreau, Kunikida Doppo, Walt Whitman, Jairus Banaji, Arthur Rosenberg [PREVIEW] Dec 01, 2022

We go long, looking at “progressive” settler idealism in Throeau and Walt Whitman, and a Japanese analogue, the romantic or naturalist novelist Kunikida Doppo. Connections are drawn to the mass appeal of fascism which comes in part from its partaking of the settler relation.

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w/ Prez: Fascism from Hispania to Manchuria Nov 02, 2022

Prez of the Minyan is here to discuss the dialectical deep history of fascism, starting with some readings from the Japanese far right and ranging back to Anglo settler colonialism, Iberian conquistadors, crusaders, even Mongol absolutism and tanistry.

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The Islamic Picaresque and the Birth of the Bourgeoisie: al-Jawbarī, Book of Charlatans (Damascus, 1210s) [PREVIEW] Oct 26, 2022

The picaresque, a genre of satirical novel which is usually traced from Spain to Britain to America, where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would be the best-known examples, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top of “respectable” society, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most successful of the world’s many gangsters. However, as we know the European bourgeoisie emerged from the margins of the merchant capital networks that were already flowing between China, India, and the Islamic world, and indeed we find many Islamic precedents for the picaresque in the numerous stories, songs, and plays about the banū sāsān, the gentleman (and woman) thieves who live free and easy (sometimes not so easy) from Morocco to India and beyond. The most voluminous of these works, which sadly does not survive, was written in al-ʾAndalus (Muslim Spain) itself, and so they give us a window into the biome of class struggle that birthed the modern European bourgeoisie, as well as provide hints how we proletarian hustlers might draw on the energies of the “dangerous class” to bring about the Kingless Generation.

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Mythodology with Marcus Oct 05, 2022

A free-rambling conversation with Marcus, the host of Return of the Repressed, a podcast on the psychology of mass movements both good and bad, an ordained Pure Land Buddhist monk, a painter of temple walls across China, an expert in natural farming, a new father, and a new resident of Japan. Topics include———Marcus’ travels around China and Europe, Daoist geomancy and natural foods, archaeobotany, the artefact versus the container, peoples’ archaeology and anti-malarial drugs during the Cultural Revolution, the immunology of smoking mugwort on different continents, ergot bacteria and sacred exstatic experiences, iron as a democratic metal, destruction of surplus as value producing spectacle, Jim Jones as stage magician, Hegel and ritual cannibalism, the word “apophatic”, the pedastal and the figurine, Thomas Aquinas’ friends boiling the meat off his bones, the whip inside the mind, the (di)vision of labor, Sino-Japanese comparisons, restoration versus acceptance in curatorship, insides and outsides of Kyoto and the rule by retired soveregns, Buddhist clerks and bean counters, Amino Yoshihiko: peasants are more than just farmers, Japanese castles are all fake, Latin poetry under Mussolini, the division of labor as the thing that the most successful Indigenous societies kept at bay, Adam’s calendar in Mpumalanga, southern Africa

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Imperial Liberalism Lost: Endō Shūsaku, “Mothers,” (Japan, 1969) [PREVIEW] Sep 16, 2022

The author of Silence, the famous novel of Japan’s early-modern persecution of Christianity recently adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese (and actually drawing in revealing ways on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory), bares his soul and reveals some of the sources of his obsession with the late-medieval Japanese Christians in a short story that switches between scenes of him, the famous Japanese Christian author, visiting some of the last remaining hidden Christians who refused to (re)join the Catholic church in the modern period and cling to their idiosyncratic but perhaps somehow authentically Japanese version of the faith—and, on the other hand, his own childhood which was troubled by his parents’ divorce, his mother’s various obsessions, and his secret discovery of violent male sexuality. We discuss the unspoken colonial and imperial background to the story, Endō’s prominent placement in the Cold War pantheon of “Christian Democratic” writers, his mysterious trip to France to “study the works of the Marquis de Sade,” etc.

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch5, The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper; Conclusion Sep 12, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 5. The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper: a) Who was offended by the article ‘Where to Begin?’; b) Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?; c) What type of organisation do we need? / Conclusion

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 2, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries Sep 11, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: d) The sweep of organisational work; e) A ‘conspiratorial’ organisation and ‘democratism’; f) Local and all-Russian work

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 4 pt 1, The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries Sep 10, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: a) What are artisanal limitations?, b) Artisanal limitations and economism, c) Organisation of workers and organisation of revolutionaries

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 2, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics Sep 09, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: e) The worker class as advanced fighter for democracy, f) Once more ‘slanderers’, once more ‘mystifiers’

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 3 pt 1, Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics Sep 08, 2022

Lenin’s What is to be Done? in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: a) Political agitation and its narrowing by the economists, b) The story of how Martynov made Plekhanov deep, c) Political indictments and ‘education for revolutionary activeness’, d) What do economism and terrorism have in common?

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 2, The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy Sep 06, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 2. The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy: a) The beginnings of the stikhiinyi upsurge, b) Kow-towing to stikhiinost: Rabochaia mysl, c) The Self-Liberation Group and Rabochee delo.

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Kingless Reads: WitbD? ch 1, Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’ Aug 25, 2022

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. Foreword; Chapter 1: Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’: a) What does ‘freedom of criticism’ mean?, b) New defenders of ‘freedom of criticism’, c) Criticism in Russia, d) Engels on the significance of theoretical struggle.

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The Hellenistic Synthesis and the Christian Image of Man (When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible) Aug 18, 2022

In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Second Temple—not because of their mastery of a pure Hebrew tradition but because of their bold and broadminded adaptation of it in a cosmopolitan context. Their great literary achievement was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint, and as we now know from the discovery of contemporary Hebrew manuscripts that agree with it, it was often based on different (though to contemporaries no less authoritative) Hebrew textual lineages than the Masoretic Hebrew text later standardized in the medieval period. It also included many books (the deuterocanonicals) which the later Rabbinic tradition would come to exclude. Ultimately under the influence of Jerome, Medieval Western Christianity would abandon the Greek bible so crucial to the birth of their religion and come to rely almost exclusively on the Rabbinic Hebrew text for their “old testament”, while Protestants even exclude the deuterocanonical books, even though it was precisely the idiosyncrasies of the Greek bible, especially the deuterocanonicals with their diasporic syncretisms, that provided the basis for distinctive Christian beliefs as basic as the existence of angels and demons as warriors in a battle between cosmic good and cosmic evil which is playing out in this world, and which will culminate in the victory of cosmic good in an “end of the world”—when a leader called the Messiah, whose coming was prophesied in the Hebrew scriptures, will unite all nations in a final victory of cosmic good. All of these ideas are simply taken for granted in the New Testament, but it was in the Septuagint, particularly the deuterocanonical books later rejected by medieval Judaism, that they are actually developed and explained, and later Jewish critics are quite right that these ideas are not inherent in their Hebrew bible. I am no longer a practicing Abrahamist, really, but I feel like I see a seminal example here of the possibilities of revolutionary internationalism and multicultural solidarity and synthesis, which must be embraced in all its complexity and “impurity”.

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Hearts and Minds: Imamura Eiji, “Travelling Companion” (Changchun, 1938); Chae Manshik, “Mr. Pang” (Seoul, 1946) [PREVIEW] Aug 11, 2022

After my conversations with Keith Allen Dennis and Recluse of the Farm podcast, I keep thinking how it’s the second-string fascists, the Nazi and Japanese imperial collaborators of Ukraine and Korea, who go on to be the absolute MVPs of the Cold War–era fascist international. Operating from the American puppet ROK and the Ukranian diaspora, this passionate minority within each country worked tirelessly to advance the fascist cause and sabotage socialist construction in their own homelands and around the world. The Moon organization, for example, can be directly tied to the drug and weapons trading and other logistics in support of fascist death squads in Latin America (see The Farm’s magisterial WACL series). Today we explore the heart of the collaborator through two Korean short stories. First, we have a semi-autobiographical maudlin fantasy depicting the immense frustration of a Korean settler in China, who despite his obsessive determination to be a model minority and live out his devotion to all things Japanese, has failed as a professional intellectual largely due to ethnic discrimination and, on his way to become a colonist on the Manchurian frontier, sacrifices himself in a suicide attack on the Korean People’s Army to save a Japanese travelling companion—despite experiencing nothing but discrimination even from him. Second, we have a satirical portrait of the changing of the guard from Japanese collaborators to Yankee collaborators, one set of imperial middlemen merely replacing another, after the thoroughly sabotaged “liberation” of Korea in 1945.

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Shotgun Blues: The Abe Shinzō Assassination Jul 14, 2022

“According to the hospital, there were two bullet holes in the right front side of Mr. Abe’s neck, spaced about five centimeters apart. It appears that the bullets went into his body from his neck, damaging his heart and the large arteries in his chest. Doctors say a large hole had been opened in the wall of his heart. On his left shoulder there was one wound which seemed to be from a bullet that had pierced through his body. They say no bullets were recovered from inside his body.” Asahi Newspaper report on the doctors’ press conference: https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ7864WZQ78PTIL02W.html

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w/ Laihall: Combat Techno-Transegalitarianism [PREVIEW] Jul 07, 2022

My second conversation with Laihallll is followed by my own extended meditations on the secret society in prehistory and the present. I develop my hypothesis that the post-capitalist dystopia which the ruling class are currently ushering us into may be most accurately described as not techno-feudalism but rather techno-transegalitarianism. Indeed, I suspect that the term “transhumanism” was coined with reference to these transegalitarian relations of production. With a fully automated means of production, all the same forces tending towards a stateless, classless society return, at least as strong as they were for egalitarian hunter gatherers who could get everything they needed directly from the landscape with only a fifteen-hour ‘work week’. The only way to fight this tendency toward equality and the death of scarcity will be with psychological warfare on the populace in the mode of the most exploitative of the ancient secret societies, but this time armed with modern social networking and surveillance technology. Accordingly, I issue a call for developing counter–secret societies in the mode of the ancient counter–secret societies, of which there was also a robust ecosystem in prehistory: call it paleo-Leninism.

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w/ Laihall: The Secret of Societies (Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, NW Turtle Island, 2018) Jul 02, 2022

It’s not every day that you get to learn about a whole new mode of production, or phase in the meta of class society—much less the earliest one that we are (possibly) able to reconstruct or learn anything about—but here we are. Coordinating with anthropological data (problematically enough collected by and for settlers during the narrow window in which any Indigenous person would both still know the pre-contact forms firsthand and be willing to record them for posterity) from around Turtle Island, Africa, and Polynesia, archaeologist Brian Hayden argues that we should read late-Paleolithic archaeological sites from the cradle of so-called “civilization”—Palestine, Syria, Turkey, France, Britain—as preserving relics of secret societies, proto–ruling classes that arise in early societies with some surplus, around feasting and/or performing arts like dance or theatre, to play a central role in what is known as trans-egalitarian or complex hunter-gatherer relations of production, and subsequently more or less secretly appointing the chiefs or kings who seem to rule in the early state. By staging extravagant feasts and spectacles of both their own spiritual and cultural power and the (often imaginary) terror and threat that the community would face without their esoteric knowledge, secret societies are able to build engines of accumulation of material surplus wealth on their own part and of debt on others’. However, as the Davids point out in The Dawn of Everything, many of the transegalitarian societies still extant in modernity (as well as many ancient ones) can just as easily be read as hard-won instances of actually existing full communism for their time and place, and any given secret society may have really functioned to limit class struggle as they indeed claim in modern indigenous contexts. Moreover, the 19th-c. anthropologists were all on the payroll of the settler banks and development companies for good reason, so their “data” cannot simply be taken as “given”. Also, the fact that these rituals sometimes involved human sacrifice, and at least the claim of ritual cannibalism, continues illogically to be used as justification for ongoing colonization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Accordingly, we approach this subject under the guidance of a real live member of a dance group in a potlatch society of Northwest Turtle Island, as well as an anointed member of the Kingless Generation: Laihallll.

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Thulêan Kewpie Doll ET: Doraemon’s Little Star Wars (1985/2022) [PREVIEW] May 27, 2022

Doraemon: Nobita’s Little Star Wars (1985) was a masterpiece of late–Cold War bourgeois libertarian mythmaking: the kids of the Doraemon world join a miniature alien race in a righteous struggle for liberty from a totalitarian (aggressively Soviet-coded) regime, using Doraemon’s shrink ray to move back and forth between branded action figure size and regular size to bring about the triumphant end of history—and maybe even record a cool home movie on their consumer electronics while Mom works on obliviously in her spacious capitalist kitchen. This year’s remake, supposed to come out last year but delayed until eight days after the start of the Ukranian war, includes changes to character design and plot which just happen to echo the imagery of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the same war: blond-haired, blue-eyed children under threat from a totalitarian Asiatic aggressor, and you get to go fight alongside them, kids!—a pitch that actually resonates so powerfully with Japan’s honorary (?) whiteness complex that even the (center-right SocDem) Japanese Communist Party are leading the charge to escalate the war.

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Turning the Wheel of the Dialectic: Bhagavad Gītā (India, after 5 c. BCE); Ajith, “A Critique of Brahmanist Ethics” May 10, 2022

We have seen how D.T. Suzuki’s take on zen was a very modern thing, tailor made in Illinois as a bourgeois ideology. This time, under the guidance of Ajith’s dialectical materialist critique of Brahmanism, we take up the Bhagavad Gītā (India, post 5th c. BCE), especially its modern bourgeois idealist interpretations as represented by Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya, a foundational text for India’s comprador Brahman classes and their English masters. We notice here the emphasis on karma yoga, the spiritual practice of carrying out one’s varṇa dharma or caste destiny, within an absolute monist worldview of advaita, non-dualism. Is this “class rule as spiritual practice”—relatively obscure in the premodern Japanese Buddhist tradition but so beloved of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie for similar reasons to their enthusiastic embrace of the Gītā—the secret ingredient in D.T. Suzuki’s zen? And what happens when we read the Gītā from the dialectical materialist perspective which accords so much better with South Asian thought?

Critiquing Brahmanism https://foreignlanguages.press/new-roads/critiquing-brahmanism-k-murali-ajith/

K. Muralidharan (Ajith) on Medium https://ajithspage.medium.com/

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The Liberality of Evil: there’s a right way and a wrong way to wither away (Ariyoshi Sawako, “Village of Eguchi,” 1958) [PREVIEW] Apr 27, 2022

Meditations on the differences between some similar things that we can’t afford to get twisted. Unprincipled opportunism, idealist insistence that revolutionary organizing always be only prefigurative of stateless, classless society—and meanwhile outright manifestations of reactionary class power are something we can just wink at slyly because we’re good-hearted, tolerant, liberal sophisticates. Ariyoshi Sawako’s story is a Rockefeller Foundation-funded magnum opus of postwar class collaborationism, the kind and gentle face of Fourth Reich fascism in its infancy. By contrast, principled members of the Kingless Generation use things like armies, laws, courts—things which must someday wither away—to achieve the concrete material conditions under which they could wither away.

Featuring music by Laihall: Namgis Love Song

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Azov vs. the Orcs: a dialectical demonology of whiteness (Amadís de Gaula, James Connolly, Einsatzgruppen) Apr 07, 2022

The historical symbolism of the Zelyonka industrial dye attack—by which members of the Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine claim to be marking their victims, whether they be Roma or other central Asian peoples or just supposed Russophiles, as “orcs” tainted by Asiatic racial contagion—lies in the orcos of Spanish chivalric fantasy, the true inspiration for Tolkien’s hordes of Mordor besieging the holy city, surely much more than Beowulf as is often claimed. A kind of dialectical demonology of demonization comes into view, the hammer strokes with which whiteness was forged, as well as clues to how it can be cast into the fires again.

Featuring music performed by Kingless Generation member Laihallll.

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Zen was made up by a guy in Illinois: D.T. Suzuki & Paul Carus [PREVIEW] Mar 08, 2022

As Anglo-American capitalism swept across the globe in the nineteenth century, the school of Japanese Buddhism most closely associated with the thoroughly discredited feudal government, Zen, was struggling to rebrand. Meanwhile, Paul Carus, a German immigrant serving as court philosopher to a zinc magnate in LaSalle, Illinois, published a book identifying Buddhism as a possible source for the “Religion of Science” purified of all superstitions, which he believed must become the ideology of modern, capitalist “Teutonic peoples” (Anglo-Saxons and Germans both). Enthralled by this welcome departure from the standard dogma, accepted no less in Japan than in Anglo-America, that Christianity was the source of everything modern, capitalist, and democratic, young Suzuki Teitarō (who had spent no more than a few days visiting a Buddhist temple) eagerly translated Carus’ book on Buddhism into Japanese and asked to go and study at his feet. Thus began eleven years in Illinois, where the man later known as D.T. Suzuki imbibed Carus’ ideas on “modernizing” religion—and, crucially, techniques for claiming whiteness on behalf of a non-Anglo-Saxon people—that would serve him so well decades later when he suddenly started talking about “Zen”.

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Light and Air for the Proletariat Mar 04, 2022

A more newsy, free-flowing episode. I see many socialists confused by paired spectacles of astroturfed extremism and carefully misdirected popular energy: caravans of hooting hollering settler hogs on the one side, caravans of moozlamic hispanic terrorists on the other. I’m pretty sure the plan is to numb you to the current violence of bio-gladio, and the climate massacres to come, by convincing you that any given authoritarian crackdown is only going to hit the invading “caravan” who fall on the “side” opposite you, not of the class divide but the partisan divide. But while you were cheering or jeering at the trucker-branded, spook-seeded rodeo clowns—indigenous organizers of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations have had their accounts frozen. And when the “caravans” of climate refugees arrive, all the totalitarian measures you helped them pass will come mercilessly down on their heads and yours. We take up texts from Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin on the importance of civic freedoms not as the sole end in themselves but as strategic “light and air” for the proletarian struggle. We’ll miss freedom of movement and freedom of assembly when they’re gone.

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w/ Khālid ibn Yaʿqūb: Idolatry, Semiotics & the Self [PREVIEW] Mar 03, 2022

A wide-ranging conversation on historical comparative psychology, spirituality, and leftist politics, with Khalid ibn Yaʿqūb, co-host of the Subliminal Jihad podcast.

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The First Private Property: Mother (Sumer, 3 m. BCE); Chūshingura (Japan, 1748 CE) Feb 03, 2022

The first private property was the body of the woman, with the historic defeat of the female sex and the birth of the father. We catch fleeting glimpses of the extended clan (gens) family as it existed right down to the 20th century among human beings outside class society, then examine the unexpectedly cucked “traditional” family, a perversion of human community specialised to pass down private property and bring class power to bear on its members at the expense of authentic kinship. Like prisons or the police, the family is a product of class society, and there will come a day when we no longer need it, but on the other hand, while we build the Kingless Generation it is probably as necessary a tool as the People’s Army or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Serious revolutionaries have always struggled to go beyond the old family, but attempts to “abolish” it now reflect, at best, some hippie idealism which may have an analysis and a program but lacks an expedient means (Sanskrit upaya) to get us to that goal.

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Combat Parasocialism: Book of Thoth (Egypt, 300 BCE – 300 CE?), Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations (Kenya, 1971), The Gateless Gate (China, 1228) [PREVIEW] Dec 28, 2021

With the internet, every ordinary social interaction is now subject to counterinsurgency tactics like COINTELPRO and GLADIO. In places like Vietnam, Kenya, and Ireland, counterinsurgency strategists have allowed the working class to organize while embedding agents within their orgs and also encapsulating these orgs within controlled structures, so that they may be manipulated, frustrated, and even misdirected to cause general chaos and drive society as a whole further toward authoritarianism. Today with Signature Reduction, Integrity Initiative, and similar programs in Japan and across the world, we know (and they want us to know) that similar forces are being brought to bear directly on every human mind. On the other hand, this is nothing new: ancient Egyptian scribes’ guilds celebrated initiation rites glorifying their craft of writing itself as being able to grab like a claw, catch like a net, or embalm like salt, any element of reality in the interest of ruling class control (and this general idea became the loose basis for hellenistic Hermeticism, or logos mysticism like that found in the Gospel of John). So what the fuck am I doing recording a podcast?

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Marx failed to consider: Ishikawa Jun, “Jesus of the Ruins”; Joe Moore, “Production Control” (Japan, 1945) Dec 10, 2021

It’s bourgeois liberal literature versus the actual history of worker and peasant struggle, as we contrast Ishikawa Jun’s very anti-human view of the unwashed masses of postwar Tokyo, with the economy of autonomous workers’ councils that seized the means of production and traded their products to feed the people for two years until they were finally crushed by a retrenched Japanese bourgeoisie, MacArthur’s occupation government, and the opportunist faction of the Japanese Communist Party.

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Rule by Causing to Speak: Discourses of the Eloquent Peasant (Egypt, 20th c. BCE) [PREVIEW] Nov 24, 2021

From the 20th c. BCE, discourses on truth and justice delivered by a peasant who has been robbed by a dishonest official. This leads us into meditations on the class basis of the State, discourses of class compromise, and finally the way that class rule can operate not only by speaking to its subjects or by silencing dissenting views but also by making them speak.

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Thought Living and Dead and the Mass Line Nov 17, 2021

A little supplement to yesterday’s episode, as my new more spontaneous and hopefully sustainable format may I fear have left some things unsaid and invited misunderstanding.

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Revisionist Buddhism: Nihon ryōi ki (Japan, 9th c.) Nov 16, 2021

A kind of critical support or supportive criticism of the parapolitics left, particularly what we might call the vampire hunter faction, as we take a look at Buddhist folk tales from early–Heian-period Japan, a time and place where the Abrahamic worldview has no purchase but we still see religious ideology working within class struggle and relations of production in a variety of ways.

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Capitalist Modernity: Kobayashi Takiji (Japan, 1930) [PREVIEW] Sep 29, 2021

Japanese Proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji takes us into class consciousness, gendered violence, wage labor, the commodity, even the revolutionary potential of the working class, all through the eyes of a child, in the short story “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow.”

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White Devils: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (Morocco, al-ʾAndalus, Mali, 14th c.), Esplandián (Spain, ca. 1500) Aug 31, 2021

A wander through the hall of mirrors that produced white supremacy, anti-blackness, and the demonic expansion of capital networks in the wake of the “re”conquista of Spain, the crusades, and the age of European exploration.

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Silk Road: Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (Iran, China, India), Ibn Faḍlān (Iraq, Russia), 10th c. CE [PREVIEW] Aug 17, 2021

We take a tour of the Silk Road, where merchant capital moved and grew value between the ancient empires of China, India, and the newly formed Muslim world, with its roots in nomadism and trade and frontier relationships with nomads, including future “white people” like the Viking Rus.

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Ancient Empires: Cain & Abel (Hebrew/Greek, 3rd c. BCE), Umisachi & Yamasachi (Japan, 712 CE) Aug 05, 2021

In ancient myths from opposite sides of the globe, we find ancestral memories of the violent conspiracy that gave birth to class society, and we also trace the growth of cosmologies of good and evil through class struggle and the growth of the great ancient empires: do we live in a cosmic empire? A cosmic insurgency? A cosmic counter-insurgency?

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The Grain State: Sheep and Grain (Sumer, 22nd c. BCE), Aizawa Seishisai (Japan, 1825 CE) [PREVIEW] Aug 03, 2021

We get an intimate view of the transition to the grain state, straight out of Sumer (modern-day Iraq) in the 22nd century BCE, and compare it to one of the last defenders of the grain state, Aizawa Seishisai in 19th-c. CE Japan, Aristotle in 4th-c. BCE Greece, and current events.

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The Hypostasis of the Archons: Human history as the history of relations of production Jul 30, 2021

A quick ramble through the deep history of class struggle. We rise like Mary Magdalene through the heavenly spheres and meet each of the demonic rulers and powers of the air which we must organize to defeat as we build the Kingless Generation.

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