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Fergal Schmudlach

Fergal Schmudlach

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Fergal Schmudlach posts

The Liberality of Evil: there’s a right way and a wrong way to wither away (Ariyoshi Sawako, “Village of Eguchi,” 1958)

Meditations on the differences between some superficially similar things that we can’t afford to get twisted. Unprincipled opportunism, idealist insistence that revolutionary organizing always be...

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Azov vs. the Orcs: a dialectical demonology of whiteness (Amadís de Gaula, James Connolly, Einsatzgruppen)

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 Asia...

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Zen was made up by a guy in Illinois: D.T. Suzuki & Paul Carus

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 st...

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Light and Air for the Proletariat

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...

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w/ Khālid ibn Yaʿqūb: Idolatry, Semiotics & the Self

A wide-ranging conversation on historical comparative psychology, spirituality, and leftist politics, with Khālid ibn Yaʿqūb, co-host of the Subliminal Jihad podcast.

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The First Private Property: Mother (Sumer, 3 m. BCE); Chūshingura (Japan, 1748 CE)

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 exi...

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Combat Parasocialism: Book of Thoth (Egypt, 300 BCE – 300 CE?), Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations (Kenya, 1971), The Gateless Gate (China, 1228) [PREVIEW]

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 strategist...

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Marx failed to consider: Ishikawa Jun, “Jesus of the Ruins”; Joe Moore, “Production Control” (Japan, 1945)

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 ...

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Rule by Causing to Speak: Discourses of the Eloquent Peasant (Egypt, 20th c. BCE)

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 ...

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Thought Living and Dead and the Mass Line

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.

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Revisionist Buddhism: Nihon ryōi ki (Japan, 9th c.)

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-...

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Capitalist Modernity: Kobayashi Takiji (Japan, 1930)

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 ...

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White Devils: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (Morocco, Andalus, Mali, 14th c), Esplandián (Spain, ca 1500)

We explore the hall of mirrors that produced white supremacy, anti-blackness, and the explosive expansion of capital networks in the wake of the “re”conquista of Spain, the crusades, and the ag...

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Silk Roads: Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (Iran, China, India), Ibn Faḍlān (Iraq, Russia), 10th c. CE

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...

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Ancient Empires: Cain & Abel (Hebrew/Greek, 3rd c. BCE), Umisachi & Yamasachi (Japan, 712 CE)

The original conspiracy theory. In ancient myths from opposite sides of the globe, we find ancestral memories of the violent conspiracy that gave birth to class society. We also trace the growth of...

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The Grain State: Sheep and Grain (Sumer, 22nd c. BCE), Aizawa Seishisai (Japan, 1825 CE)

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...

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The Hypostasis of the Archons: Human history as the history of relations of production

Human history through the lens of relations of production. A quick ramble through the deep history of class struggle. We rise like Mary Magdalene through the heavenly spheres and meet each of the d...

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