The Kingless Generation

By Fergal Schmudlach

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priv

... more

4.5

2020 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about The Kingless Generation:

How many episodes does The Kingless Generation have?

The podcast currently has 79 episodes available.

The Kingless Generation episodes:

August 18, 2023 Doraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
1h 31min
July 19, 2023 Landback in Eurasia, 622 CE [PREVIEW]
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
22min
June 25, 2023 Traces of Japanese matriliny in the Rainy Night Critique of Ranks (by 1021)
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
3h 5min
June 08, 2023 Kingless Reads: How To Master Secret Work, pt 2 (South Africa, 1980s)
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
45min
June 07, 2023 Kingless Reads: How to Master Secret Work, pt 1 (South Africa, 1980s)
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
1h
June 05, 2023 Ruling classes have always wanted us dead [PREVIEW]: Atraḫasīs (Babylon, 18th c. BCE); The Extinction Narrative (2young Badazz, 2021 CE)
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
25min
May 18, 2023 Collectivize the Buddha: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 2
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
2h 15min
May 02, 2023 Land of the Rising Tensions [PREVIEW]
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
41min
April 15, 2023 A Host Questions a Host: Dharma talks w/ Marcus, pt 1
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
2h 23min
March 24, 2023 LoFi Botanical Ramble: Gerald Horne, Race War! (2004); etc [PREVIEW]
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
44min

FAQs about The Kingless Generation:

How many episodes does The Kingless Generation have?

The podcast currently has 79 episodes available.