The Kingless Generation

By Fergal SchmudlachSociety & Culture Science Social Sciences Religion & Spirituality Spirituality Philosophy

The Kingless Generation episodes

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.
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3 hr 5 min
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
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45 min
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
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1 hr
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
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25 min
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.
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2 hr 15 min
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.
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41 min
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
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2 hr 23 min
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.
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44 min
March 11, 2023 Hammurabi’s COIN: Agushaya; The Cleaner; The Poor Man of Nippur; The Doctor; Sargon, Lord of the Lies (Akkad, 18th c. BCE seq)
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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2 hr 28 min
February 12, 2023 Weebs of the Ages: Ivan Morris, Mishima, and aesthetic GLADIO in Japan’s fourth reich, part 1 w/ Prez [PREVIEW]
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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22 min