Pramathyus
LOOTING THE TOWER
My faithful reader,
I am writing to announce the 1st class in my FADO course, the class that was the impetus to this new creative catharsis. I hope you have been intrigued by this new offering and I hope that this announcement will continue to pique your interest.
The Tower is the card of chaos. It is provocateur. It is a burning building struck by lighting from above, as two figures fall from up high. Divine pronouncement has cast them out, has rescinded the mandate of heaven. In the Tower, the Divine conspires to attack property regimes. It inspires emancipation as it incites riot to portend that emancipation will always be an incendiary achievement.
If you read my Tower essay in Red Tarot you will know that decolonization absolutely demands abolition, for reform only maintains a liberal sensitivity that thinks a black woman president is progress. As I said in that section, “anything owned by the police gets set on fire.”
The entire white establishment of America maintains an insidious moral division in its 400 years of barbaric, colonial, genocidal, white supremacist history. The only civil rights history it edifies is nonviolent political action. The nonviolent is held to be moral, normative and is widely supported. But there is no such thing as nonviolence.
Liberals never support looting and rioting, for only the picket line protest is legible to their sensibilities. And yet representative democracies build the plantation, the reservation, the factory, the colony, the prison. Statecraft is absolutely a modality of violence.
I’m so tired for the liberal knee jerk response from those who even consider or claim themselves radical, unable to simply condone the actual radical strategies required of abolition. Instead the most radical acts of revolution are read as pure “criminality.” Much ideological work goes into repressing the message of the riot, which is unequivocally:
FUCK POLITICS, FUCK THE POLICE, FUCK YOUR PROPERTY.
The riot speaks its refusal through destruction but it is not total obscenity nor pure nonsense. For so many, looting or attacks on property are opaque or unspeakable, even for those earnestly on the side of liberation. But rioting and looting are core tactics of resistance that maintain a strategic intelligibility.
In the Tarot, the Tower maintains this aesthetic gesture against the regime of racial capitalism. I am offering this class to survey some of the history of this frightening revolutionary history that makes people so squeamish. In this class we will clear away the ash and dirt thrown on revolutionaries by reactionaries, we will strike against the ideological social constructs that serve to reinforce the white supremacist juncture of property and race.
The State is on fire because we will burn it down. We are looters, rioters, and rebels. We are children of Pramathyus, we bludgeon the status quo and burn down de big house.
I’ll see you October 8, 3pm pst; bring your matches.
x,
Christopher
Curious about FADO enrollment options?
There are two primary ways to participate in the full Fado container.
The first is to enroll by investing for the total course tuition upfront, or set up a payment plan. This will give you year-long access along with additional resources unique to students who enroll in the full course.
The second option is to enroll via these individual substack class announcements. Students who sign up for any single class, w/o signing up for the full course, will maintain 2-week access to the class recording. Each standalone class will be offered at $80 per class. (vs the $65 class rate for the full course enrollment)