The Kingless Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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