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The Kingless Generation

By: Fergal Schmudlach
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  • Summary

  • A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    George Psalmanazar
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Episodes
  • The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (Kʾicheʾ, 1550s)

    The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (Kʾicheʾ, 1550s)
    Jul 27 2024
    The first half of the Popol Vuh as we have it from the Kʾicheʾ colonial tradition is a quintessentially Kingless epic, as the story revolves around pre-human gods, successive generations of hero twins, who must defeat a series of aggrandizer figures, including the lords of death in the underworld, in order to bring about the dawning of the human age. Although the same basic story can be found in earlier art and hieroglyphic inscriptions which since the 1990s are being deciphered at an exhilarating pace, recent research has pointed out that this anti-accumulative tendency of the story may be somewhat unique to the Popol Vuh as we have it, which, it is hypothesised, may represent a retelling slanted toward anti-colonial resistance. While I agree that this may also be the case, I (based on my limited understanding as an ignorant outsider) think it might make even more sense to take this story, written down only some thirty years after first European contact, as faithfully reflecting older layers, though perhaps not of the somewhat exploitative and stratified Classic Maya (ca 250–950 CE) but rather of the socially creative, decentralized, and egalitarian Postclassic Maya (950–1539), which represents one of the great examples in world history of the deescalation of class struggle, when people came together to build the Kingless Generation.

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    3 hrs and 37 mins
  • Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE)

    Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE)
    May 24 2024
    In a series that I hope will include Martin Bernal’s classic Black Athena (about the modern British fabrication of “ancient Greece” and its true roots in ancient Egypt), we start with the East: in recent decades, great advances in Hittite studies have illuminated much of the mechanics of transmission of Mesopotamian literature and religion to a nascent Greece from a grain state in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) which used cuneiform writing (in addition to their own distinctive hieroglyphs) and was ruled over by an Indo-European-speaking ruling class. In addition to illuminating details of class struggle between slave-owning city council members against a king who wants to free the slaves—though perhaps only in order that they may serve the cult of his ancestors in the temple—we contemplate the dependent origination and lack of perduring essence of ‘ancient Greece’, that flimsy idol enshrined at the center of the white supremacist worldview.

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    46 mins
  • Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)

    Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)
    May 2 2024
    A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything concocted by the capitalist dictatorships of the Century of the Self, was wielded as a weapon of class struggle by the rising urban commoner class against the de facto feudal rulers, the samurai.

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    2 hrs and 2 mins
Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality Science
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