The Kingless Generation

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...

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.

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.

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 f...

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.

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 m...

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...

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 ha...

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...

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 Rob Marshall–directed live-action Little Mermaid, which should be coming out this May, was buzzed up by a good old culture war psy-op of which the two sides were: 1. Errm, the real Little Mermaid was white! This is cultural appropriation of marginalized white settler bodies and spaces and voices!; 2. The Little Mermaid is a fictional character, dumbass! But it occurred to me that the modern im...

We go long, looking at “progressive” settler idealism in Throeau and Walt Whitman, and a Japanese analogue, the romantic or naturalist novelist Kunikida Doppo. Connections are drawn to the mass appeal of fascism which comes in part from its partaking of the settler relation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Prez of the Minyan is here to discuss the dialectical deep history of fascism, starting with some readings from the Japanese far right and ranging back to Anglo settler colonialism, Iberian conquistadors, crusaders, even Mongol absolutism and tanistry. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The picaresque, a genre of satirical novel which is usually traced from Spain to Britain to America, where Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would be the best-known examples, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top of “respectable” society, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most succes...

A free-rambling conversation with Marcus, the host of Return of the Repressed, a podcast on the psychology of mass movements both good and bad, an ordained Pure Land Buddhist monk, a painter of temple walls across China, an expert in natural farming, a new father, and a new resident of Japan. Topics include———Marcus’ travels around China and Europe, Daoist geomancy and natural foods, archaeobotany...

The author of Silence , the famous novel of Japan’s early-modern persecution of Christianity recently adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese (and actually drawing in revealing ways on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory ), bares his soul and reveals some of the sources of his obsession with the late-medieval Japanese Christians in a short story that switches between scenes of him, the famous...

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 5. The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper: a) Who was offended by the article ‘Where to Begin?’; b) Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?; c) What type of organisation do we need? / Conclusion Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: d) The sweep of organisational work; e) A ‘conspiratorial’ organisation and ‘democratism’; f) Local and all-Russian work Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 4. The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries: a) What are artisanal limitations?, b) Artisanal limitations and economism, c) Organisation of workers and organisation of revolutionaries Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new Lars T. Lih translation. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: e) The worker class as advanced fighter for democracy, f) Once more ‘slanderers’, once more ‘mystifiers’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s What is to be Done? in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 3. Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics: a) Political agitation and its narrowing by the economists, b) The story of how Martynov made Plekhanov deep, c) Political indictments and ‘education for revolutionary activeness’, d) What do economism and terrorism have in common? Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. 2. The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy: a) The beginnings of the stikhiinyi upsurge, b) Kow-towing to stikhiinost: Rabochaia mysl , c) The Self-Liberation Group and Rabochee delo . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lenin’s *What is to be Done?* in the illuminating new translation by Lars T. Lih. Foreword; Chapter 1: Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’: a) What does ‘freedom of criticism’ mean?, b) New defenders of ‘freedom of criticism’, c) Criticism in Russia, d) Engels on the significance of theoretical struggle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Secon...

After my conversations with Keith Allen Dennis and Recluse of the Farm podcast , I keep thinking how it’s the second-string fascists, the Nazi and Japanese imperial collaborators of Ukraine and Korea, who go on to be the absolute MVPs of the Cold War–era fascist international. Operating from the American puppet ROK and the Ukranian diaspora, this passionate minority within each country worked tire...