Guerrilla History Newsletter #1

Our reading/listening list for 23 July 2022

Hello Guerrilla History listeners!

Today we’re bringing you our inaugural newsletter, with articles and audio/visual media selected by our hosts and former guests. Before we get to the recommendations for you to read/watch/listen to, we’d like to briefly pitch our last few episodes for those of you who have not yet listened to them. A couple weeks ago, we posted an exceptional 3 hour long episode titled Coups, Oil, the CIA, and Arab Nationalism in Iraq with Professor Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, and the response to it from listeners has been exceptional! We then followed that up with a supplemental chat between Brandon, Henry, and fan-favorite Professor Alexander Aviña, which discussed Coups, Oil, and Oil Nationalization. We highly recommend spreading these two episodes within your circles, the conversations are deep yet entertaining, and are on topics that should continuously be discussed. Yesterday, we released an old intelligence briefing that was previously only available to Patreon subscribers, From the Archives - The 1776 Report. This episode, which was made just after the release of the ahistorical 1776 Report that the sham known as the 1776 Commission (commissioned by the Trump Administration), was fun to make, and we’re happy that it’ll now be available to everyone without a paywall. Of course, you can still support the show, help us stay “on the air”, and get bonus material by signing up for our Patreon.

The Reading List

Without further ado, we present to you our inaugural reading list, selected by hosts and guests of the show. To find the article/episode, just click on the name and the link will take you to it! If you want to go back to the episode(s) of Guerrilla History that the guests have appeared on, simply click on their name and you will be directed straight to the episode. Hopefully this will make it easy for listening and sharing purposes!

Henry Hakamaki:

Imperialism in the Era of Globalization by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik. Published by Monthly Review in 2015, this piece is still useful, particularly when one is looking for the role and value of money itself within a capitalist society.

Amanda Yee from Radio Free Amanda

'Progressive' Kentucky Coffee Chain Fights Staff Unionization Effort by Molly Shah. Published by The Real News Network on July 8, this is a good article on the unionization push by baristas of Heine Brothers Coffee in Louisville, Kentucky.

"Fascism Is the Final Solution to Class Struggle" w/ Gabriel Rockhill. This is episode 36 of Radio Free Amanda. Fascism is on the rise, which makes our need to understand it and its origins all the more imperative. In this episode, Professor of Philosophy Gabriel Rockhill discusses how we should understand and approach fascism as historical materialists, and most importantly, how to prepare ourselves to confront the fascist wave that's rapidly mobilizing.

On Sri Lanka, two pieces - Real debt trap: Sri Lanka owes vast majority to West, not China from (future Guerrilla History guest) Ben Norton’s Multipolarista, and Western Debt Is Driving Sri Lanka's Crisis from Jerome Phelps at Tribune. Washington is blaming China's "debt trap diplomacy" for the current crisis in Sri Lanka, but these articles show how this narrative obscures the debt owned by Western financial institutions, which account for 81% of the country's overall debt.

Ghana's unions and left reject bailout talks with the IMF as economic crisis spirals by Tanupriya Singh at Peoples Dispatch. A good article on what's going in Ghana right now, where it looks like they're undergoing a similar crisis to Sri Lanka. 

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

Urban Food Production for Ecosocialism by Salvatore and George Martin. This new book explores the critical role of urban food production in strengthening communities and in building ecosocialism, and integrates theory and practice, with case studies from across four continents. If you are unable to buy or rent this book, get in touch with us via twitter and we can help you out.

Biophysical questions: Relating Marxism to physical geography, Finding Dialectical Materialism through Soils Research, Materialist Dialectics and Biophysical Worlds, and Learning Dialectics to Grow Better Soils Knowledge, not Bigger Crops: A Materialist Dialectics and Relationality for Soil Science are four articles written by Salvatore in various journals on using Marxist methodologies in the biophysical sciences. Once again, if you do not have access to any of the articles you’re interested in, contact us via twitter and we can help you.

The Routledge Handbook on Ecosocialism is an edited collection by several editors including Salvatore. The Handbook acquaints readers with the varied roots of and sometimes conflicting approaches to ecosocialism. As with the previous entries, if you are unable to get a copy, let us know and we’ll do what we can to help.

Chris Saltmarsh

Can Just Stop Oil stop oil? This brand new piece by Chris may interest readers. The topic is the latest environmental protest group to cause controversy in the UK, and how it relates to the recent history of Extinction Rebellion's development.

Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt

Brandon is recommending four books that he is currently teaching, and if we continue to be nice to him (follow him on twitter!), he may even write reviews of these books for the newsletter in the future. These books are Greg Grandin’s End of the Myth (which takes a look at the meaning of the frontier throughout the history of the US), Jonathan Katz’s Gangsters for Capitalism (the story of Smedley Butler, amid the backdrop of American expansionism), Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (an exploration of the Ottoman Empire as a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain), and Brian Catlos’s Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (which aims to show the sophistication and complexities of Islamic Spain).

Marlon Ettinger

Trial Date in Giuffre Vs. Dershowitz Libel Case by Marlon. The witness list Dershowitz and Giuffre have put together involves some of the principal participants in the Epstein affair, and if this case does indeed come to trial, it will mean hearing from people on the stand who have never taken it before and possibly filling in gaps and answering questions about this affair that many of us want answers too.

Zemmour & Gaullism, the new book by Marlon. As we move further away from the presidential and legislative elections in France, many people are writing Zemmour off entirely. But his movement remains, and though it's out in the wilderness politically, its ideas are ascendantly hegemonic in French society.

Thank you for looking through our newsletter! As we go forward, we hope to make it look much more slick, and bring even more members of the Guerrilla History family into it! As we previously said, we are maintaining this totally for free as an additional resource for political education purposes. If you find this useful, please consider sharing it with friends, family, comrades, and/or on social media. You can help support the show at Patreon, but the most important thing is that we help educate as many people as we can. Use the button below to get this newsletter into your inbox, and until next time, solidarity.