Meditations on the differences between some superficially 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 people’s armies, laws, courts—things which must someday wither away—to achieve the concrete material conditions under which they could wither away.
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 by Kingless Generation member Laihallll.
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’ modernist, capitalist, social-Darwinist thought—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”.
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.
A wide-ranging conversation on historical comparative psychology, spirituality, and leftist politics, with Khālid ibn Yaʿqūb, co-host of the Subliminal Jihad podcast.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
We explore the hall of mirrors that produced white supremacy, anti-blackness, and the explosive expansion of capital networks in the wake of the “re”conquista of Spain, the crusades, and the age of European exploration.
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.
The original conspiracy theory. In ancient myths from opposite sides of the globe, we find ancestral memories of the violent conspiracy that gave birth to class society. 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? Are the rulers good? Or are the rebels good? Or is it the rebels against the rebels who are good?
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.
Human history through the lens of relations of production. 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.
