The Kingless Generation

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A wide-ranging conversation on historical comparative psychology, spirituality, and leftist politics, with Khalid ibn Yaʿqūb, co-host of the Subliminal Jihad podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.