We finish our run through Ivan’s parents’ adventures, including their support for Kenyan Mao Mao revolutionaries and participation in the American-sponsored “Kenyan airlift” that also produced Barack Obama Sr, supporting Greek and Turkish and Mexican communists in their way, but for one reason or another being unable to stop their son Ivan from becoming the essentially conservative creature of the British establishment that he became, actually quite naturally given the course that they had consistently set him on: elite boarding school, Harvard—and then came Hiroshima...
We follow Ivan’s parents, the peripatetic idle rich leftist novelist/journalists Ira and Edita Morris, from their wartime career “writing” in Haiti on the eve of the coup that brought the progressive President Estimé to power, then making “democratic” anti-fascist propaganda for the American Office of War Information and the Voice of America while moving in Brecht’s circle including the Eisler siblings, whose persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee led the brothers to flee to Europe and the sister, Ruth Fischer, to turn anti-communist professor at Harvard. In this context, Edita leaves behind a most puzzling letter to a member of the Eisler family, talking mysteriously about “the step which I have taken”...
I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Osaka, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical strategic analysis on how the Fourth Reich might best rule Japan, and was the preferred translator and lifelong friend of aesthetic GLADIO agent Mishima Yukio—all at the same damn time. On this outing we begin to deal with his parents: I promise you’ll never guess what they did for a living.
A chatty episode to break the hiatus. I discuss recent news of the new final solution being demoed by the Zionist entity in Gaza. These days I’m walking around with posture like a ballerina because I’ve been de-settlerising and un-domesticating my leg muscles by running in huaraches and doing squats. We take a look at the First Crusade as seen in Arab chronicles, as well as the image of the rose in the Zohar, among other things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (about whom I have made an interesting discovery); 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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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 image of the mermaid as seen in the Disney movie mostly derives from the Age of Exploration encounter between white male explorers and Indigenous women, on which a voluminous archive exists. Sometimes this involved denizens of feudal Europe having their minds blown by the complex galaxies of non–hetero-patriarchal deep kinship and community that exist in Indigenous societies where the family is not specialized to pass down private property. But most of the time we can see from diaries that they were just rolling up on Indigenous women and r*ping them, and in fact there is an entire canto of an epic poem celebrating this practice: Canto 9 of Luís Vaz de Camões’ Lusíads has the goddess Venus reward Vasco da Gama and his brave sailors for their labors in blasting and murdering their way into the Silk Road of the Indian Ocean by preparing a magical sex island for them where they can force themselves (only role-play! they swear) on a host of minor sea sprites whom she has gathered, Epstein-like, for this purpose. So the really remarkable thing is that the old Disney little mermaid was white! The sailor guy she falls in love with seems to be an explorer on the seven seas, but somehow he’s exploring places where there are white mermaids? Her whiteness is the only thing (quite artificially) keeping us from thinking about the colonial origins of this whole story as it exists in the modern imagination, making her only just a metaphor for accepting the role of housewife in the Disney style picket fence Lebensraum, etc. I am joined by Lakota organizer and podcaster Šuŋgmánitu of Chunka Luta, formerly known as Bands of Turtle Island.
We go long, looking at “progressive” settler idealism in Throeau and Walt Whitman, as well as 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.
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, and even the crusades.
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 example, follows the adventures of hucksters, preachers, and charlatans on the underside of capitalist society—as opposed to those on the top, who, these works often hint, just happen to be the most successful of the world’s many gangsters. However, as we know the European bourgeoisie emerged from the margins of the merchant capital networks that were already flowing between China, India, and the Islamic world, and indeed we find many Islamic precedents for the picaresque in the numerous stories, songs, and plays about the banū sāsān, the gentleman (and woman) thieves who live free and easy (sometimes not so easy) from Morocco to India and beyond. The most voluminous of these works, which sadly does not survive, was written in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) itself, and so they give us a window into the biome of class struggle that birthed the modern European bourgeoisie, as well as provide hints how we proletarian hustlers might draw on the arts of the “dangerous class” to bring about the Kingless Generation.
Marcus’ travels around China and Europe, Daoist geomancy and natural foods, archaeobotany, the artefact versus the container, peoples’ archaeology and anti-malarial drugs during the Cultural Revolution, the immunology of smoking mugwort on different continents, ergot bacteria and sacred exstatic experiences, iron as a democratic metal, destruction of surplus as value producing spectacle, Jim Jones as stage magician, Hegel and ritual cannibalism, the word “apophatic”, the pedastal and the figurine, Thomas Aquinas’ friends boiling the meat off his bones, the whip inside the mind, the (di)vision of labor, Sino-Japanese comparisons, restoration versus acceptance in curatorship, insides and outsides of Kyoto and the rule by retired soveregns, Buddhist clerks and bean counters, Amino Yoshihiko: peasants are more than just farmers, Japanese castles are all fake, Latin poetry under Mussolini, the division of labor as the thing that the most successful Indigenous societies kept at bay, Adam’s calendar in Mpumalanga
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 heavily 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 Japanese Christian author, visiting some of the last remaining hidden Christians who refused to (re)join the Catholic church in the modern period and cling to their idiosyncratic but perhaps somehow authentically Japanese version of the faith—and, on the other hand, his own childhood which was troubled by his parents’ divorce, his mother’s various obsessions, and his secret discovery of violent male sexuality. We discuss the unspoken colonial and imperial background to the story, Endō’s prominent placement in the Cold War pantheon of “Christian Democratic” writers, his mysterious trip to France to “study the works of the Marquis de Sade,” etc.
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 Second Temple—not because of their mastery of a pure Hebrew tradition but because of their bold and broadminded adaptation of it in a cosmopolitan context. Their great literary achievement was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint, and as we now know from the discovery of contemporary Hebrew manuscripts that agree with it, it was often based on different (though to contemporaries no less authoritative) Hebrew textual lineages than the Masoretic Hebrew text later standardized in the medieval period. It also included many books (the deuterocanonicals) which the later Rabbinic tradition would come to exclude. Ultimately under the influence of Jerome, Medieval Western Christianity would abandon the Greek bible so crucial to the birth of their religion and come to rely almost exclusively on the Rabbinic Hebrew text for their “old testament”, while Protestants even exclude the deuterocanonical books, even though it was precisely the idiosyncrasies of the Greek bible, especially the deuterocanonicals with their diasporic syncretisms, that provided the basis for distinctive Christian beliefs as basic as the existence of angels and demons as warriors in a battle between cosmic good and cosmic evil which is playing out in this world, and which will culminate in the victory of cosmic good in an “end of the world”—when a leader called the Messiah, whose coming was prophesied in the Hebrew scriptures, will unite all nations in a final victory of cosmic good. All of these ideas are simply taken for granted in the New Testament, but it was in the Septuagint, particularly the deuterocanonical books later rejected by medieval Judaism, that they are actually developed and explained, and later Jewish critics are quite right that these ideas are not inherent in their Hebrew bible. I am no longer a practicing Abrahamist, really, but I feel like I see a seminal example here of the possibilities of revolutionary internationalism and multicultural solidarity and synthesis, which must be embraced in all its complexity and “impurity”.
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 tirelessly to advance the fascist cause and sabotage socialist construction in their own homelands and around the world. The Moon organization, for example, can be directly tied to the funding and other logistics work for the assassination of Chilean socialist diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, and the activities of Nazis like Paul Schäfer and Klaus Barbie in South America (see The Farm’s magisterial WACL series). Today we explore the heart of the collaborator through two Korean short stories. First, we have a semi-autobiographical maudlin fantasy depicting the immense frustration of a Korean settler in China, who despite his obsessive determination to be a model minority and live out his devotion to all things Japanese, has failed as a professional intellectual largely due to ethnic discrimination and, on his way to become a colonist on the Manchurian frontier, sacrifices himself in a suicide attack on the Korean People’s Army to save a Japanese travelling companion—despite experiencing nothing but discrimination even from him. Second, we have a satirical portrait of the changing of the guard from Japanese collaborators to Yankee collaborators, one set of imperial middlemen merely replacing another, after the thoroughly sabotaged “liberation” of Korea in 1945.
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So, no big deal I hope, but I think I'm going to change my pseudonym real quick here: you see, schlampen means much the same as lumpen in German, like lumpenproletariat in Marx, and a schlamper means a chancer or a vagabond, so I was going for a picaresque kind of vibe, but under patriarchy the feminine schlampe has the unfortunate negative sexual connotations, of course—so rather than be a hipster and just expect people to get it, I think I'd better avoid any potential stumbling block and just go with an actual family name extant in my Volga Deutsch community.
Schmudlach, in addition to also sounding good and funny (like my real name) means “grimy puddle” so you get the whole package without it potentially sounding problematic to someone who will never quite feel like they can ask why I chose it.
“According to the hospital, there were two bullet holes in the right front side of Mr. Abe’s neck, spaced about five centimeters apart. It appears that the bullets went into his body from his neck, damaging his heart and the large arteries in his chest. Doctors say a large hole had been opened in the wall of his heart. On his left shoulder there was one wound which seemed to be from a bullet that had pierced through his body. They say no bullets were recovered from inside his body.” Asahi Newspaper report on the doctors’ press conference: https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ7864WZQ78PTIL02W.html
Translated by Fergal SCHMUDLACH of the Kingless Generation podcast
Fukushima: When he arrived he had two bullet wounds, and considering that he was not breathing and had no pulse due to damage to the heart and the aorta, in our unit we performed hemostasis and a large amount of blood transfusions, but unfortuntely the result was—not fortunate.
Yomiuri Newspaper: You say he had two wounds on his neck. Could you tell us where and how big, specifically?
Fukushima: (pointing to his throat) The two wounds were located in the center and slightly to the right. They were extremely small in size.
Kansai TV: Could you tell us how deep they were?
Fukushima: I think it’s safe to say that they went deep enough to reach the heart.
…
NHK: What did you feel, to see those bullet holes, fired from such close range: did you feel a strong intent to kill, or…?
Fukushima: All I saw was the wounds I saw, so I don’t know anything about that.
ABC TV: What sort of operations, specifically, were being carried out during the four and a half hours from the time he was brought in until his death was confirmed?
Fukushima: Hemostasis of the chest area, and a large amount of blood transfusions: these two things.
…
Asahi Newspaper: Were the bullets still in the body?
Fukushima: When we were operating on him, we were unable to find bullets. After that, we—um, after this we may go on to learn more, but in the course of our operations we didn’t find anything.
NHK: Of the two wounds, which one was the fatal one?
Fukushima: That I do not know. All I know is that there were two wounds which seemed to be bullet holes.
NHK: So all we know is that he died from these wounds.
Fukushima: Those wounds, as I just said, did reach to his heart and his aorta in his chest area, and so he was bleeding due to his heart and his aorta being wounded: this is essentially what happened.
Nikkei Newspaper: Two wounds—to his neck? Not his chest? His neck?
Fukushima: To his neck.
Nikkei: But they hit his heart so—
Fukushima: (tracing a line from above his right clavicle diagonally down and to the left to his heart) I believe this was the direction in which they travelled.
…
NHK: So as for the main cause which led to his death, would it be death by loss of blood?
Fukushima: Exsanguination, I believe that is correct.
NHK: You say the bullets reached his heart, but as you were—operating, did you notice organ damage, like, was the organ damage severe?
Fukushima: There was a wound to the heart itself, a large one.
NHK: And what shape was that wound, specifically?
Fukushima: Maybe—the bullet wound in his heart was, it was a big hole: a big hole in the wall of his heart.
NHK: How would that hole compare to—other things?
Fukushima: I wasn’t comparing this to anything else, really—I’m given to understand that the internal wounds get bigger than the entrance wound.
Chūnichi Newspaper: So you say the bullets reached his heart, into his heart, and the bullet holes were in his neck, two of them. You say you didn’t find any bullets, but were there any wounds on the other side, in his back, from the bullets piercing through his body?
Fukushima: There was just one other wound, on his left shoulder, so I believe that would be what is called an exit wound.
NHK: And that’s one, on his left shoulder?
Fukushima: That is correct.
NHK: You’re saying that one of the two may have pierced through, out that hole.
Fukushima: Yes.
NHK: You’re saying that there is no wound from which the other one might have come out?
Fukushima: No such wound. Not that we found.
NHK: And neither of the bullets have been found?
Fukushima: No.
…
ABC TV: Were the wounds close together? How were they positioned, exactly?
Fukushima: I believe they were about 5 cm apart.
…
Chūnichi: It’s said that he was attacked from behind, but are you saying that the wounds were on the front of his body?
Fukushima: Yes. On the front of his neck. He had no wounds on the reverse, including his back.
Chūnichi: So both shots entered from the front, and are you saying one came out the left side?
Fukushima: I said he was hit in the front, but the angle at which he was hit is a separate—it could have been from the side. (points to the center of his neck) But the wounds were in the front.
Chūnichi: And the apparent exit wound, was that on the back side of his left shoulder?
Fukushima: It was on the front [ventral] part of his left shoulder.
Chūnichi: But then it must have traveled sideways across the body—
Fukushima: I don’t know that; all I can say is that there were wounds that might make you think that.
Chūnichi: But anyway it was on the front, the wound?
Fukushima: Yes.
Asahi Weekly: So you say that the wound goes in from the front and comes out the front on the left, and there was a large hole in his heart, so did it hit his heart and come out the left?
Fukushima: The one that came out the left could have been from the second shot, or the first, or maybe a—different bullet. I really don’t know.
Asahi Weekly: Either way, there was a large hole in his heart. What part of the heart was it?
Fukushima: In a ventricle. The wall of the heart.
…
NHK: Do you know if the bullets passed through the right or left ventricle, or which arteries it went through?
Fukushima: Bullets can move around here and there as they travel through the body, so I’m not sure at this point in time exactly how they moved.
NHK: So at this point in time it looks as though the bullet entered through one of the two holes in the neck, ultimately striking the heart, and then they each went out through the shoulder hole: is that a good characterization?
Fukushima: At this point that is my opinion, but a specialist might come to a different conclusion.
…
Kyōdō Broadcasting: I apologize, but I just want to check: so there were two wounds on the front of Prime Minister Abe’s neck, and no wounds on the back of his neck, and on his shoulder there was what appeared to be an exit wound. Is that a good characterization?
Fukushima: That is my understanding at this point in time.
…
Chūnichi Newspaper: I’m sorry to repeat this, but: by “his neck”, do you mean the bullets entered from above the clavicle?
Fukushima: They entered at a height above the clavicle, yes.
Chūnichi Newspaper: Was there any damage or anything to the clavicle itself?
Fukushima: Not to the clavicle, I don’t think, no.
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.
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.
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.
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?
