Guerrilla History Newsletter #2
Our reading/listening list for 30 July 2022
Hello Guerrilla History listeners!
Thank you to all who have already subscribed to our newsletter! The response to our first edition was excellent, and we are all looking forward to expanding it as time goes by so as best to serve as a resource for everyone. Before we get to our reading/listening list for the week, we’d like to let you know about the latest content that has been released from the Guerrilla History hosts. Yesterday, we released our highly anticipated episode with Professor Richard Wolff on The Economics of Imperialism and Inflation, and we highly recommend checking it out if you’ve not downloaded it yet. While all of us are anti-imperialists, we often forget to think deeply about the economic drivers and mechanisms of imperialism, which is critically important to understand if we are to overturn the imperialist world order. We, regardless of where we live, also are all living in the midst of an inflationary crisis, so we were grateful for Professor Wolff to give us a bit of information about this as well. While we would’ve needed a few more hours to get to everything we wanted to in the discussion, this episode is a very good starting point from which we can hopefully build off of in future conversations with the Professor. Meanwhile, Breht has released two episodes of Revolutionary Left Radio this week - Songs of Slavery and Emancipation with Mat Callahan and RIBPP Update: Rashid's Cancer Diagnosis, Mass Work, and Carceral Cruelty with Comrade Garlic. The former is about Mat’s titular book, album, and documentary - wherein he and his team searched for, found, and recreated both old slave resistance songs as well as old abolitionist songs, while the latter discusses Kevin Rashid Johnson's cancer diagnosis and struggle for adequate care within the brutal carceral system, a lack of medical care as a weapon against political prisoners, updates on the RIBPP and its mass org, serving the people, compassionate release, and more. Adnan has been abroad, including presenting at a conference on Islamophobia in Istanbul, so there has been a bit of a hiatus on releases from The Majlis Podcast. That being said, there is a ton of great content previously released from the show, including the latest episode Qissah and The Art of Indian Storytelling w/ Prof. Pasha M. Khan, which you should absolutely check out. Henry and his cohost Safie have recently released an episode of What the Huck?! with Sina Rahmani from The East Is A Podcast titled Translation - Commodification and Hegemony (which is also available on YouTube). One final note before we go to the reading/viewing list, we want to remind you all that this newsletter is meant to be a free resource for political education. If you find this useful, please send it around to comrades that you think may be interested in it, that’s how this will make the biggest impact. And while this newsletter (and the vast majority of our episodes) are available totally for free, you can support the show, help us stay “on the air”, and get bonus material by signing up for our Patreon.
The Reading List
We now turn to this week’s 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!
Guerrilla History:
There is a wonderful online event we would like to invite everyone to participate in - the Guerrilla History Film Festival, which is free to attend. The first film of the online festival was screened last week, but you will still have the opportunity to catch the next two films! Tomorrow, 31 July at 2pm Eastern Time, the fabulous Pontecorvo film Burn! (1969) will be screened, and next Sunday, 7 August at 2pm Eastern Time, the legendary film by Costas-Gavras Z (1969) will be screened. If you like films with subversive (and relatively radical) messages, this is a great opportunity for you!
Breht O’Shea:
Related to the episode just released on RevLeft about Kevin Rashid Johnson’s cancer diagnosis, you should check out Red Voice News, a great radical resource for news and commentary of current events.
Mat Callahan’s Songs of Slavery and Emancipation is available as a documentary on YouTube and also as a book. If you enjoy the episode of Rev Left with him on it, you should check out his project itself!
Adnan Husain:
Within the last week, Ben Burgis put out an episode of his show Give Them An Argument featuring Adnan titled Understanding Marxism: GA Cohen vs EP Thompson where they discuss each of these somewhat legendary figures of history and philosophy. Those on our Patreon will know that Adnan has been doing a series of exclusives on the British Marxist academics, so if the YouTube video above is interesting to you, you should check out the Patreon posts Adnan has done.
Henry Hakamaki:
Our friend (and former guest) Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is far too humble to recommend his book Socialist States and the Environment, so we will do it for him. Really a tremendous work, and the episode we made with him about it is one of the episodes we’ve heard the most positive comments about. Within the last week, there was a great event titled the International Manifesto Group Livestream Socialist States and the Environment where Salvatore, Max Ajl, and many more panelists got together to discuss the book. Highly recommended viewing!
Relatively recently, the University of Michigan published a policy brief study titled Understanding the Psychosocial Effects of the Flint Water Crisis on School-Age Children in Michigan, which looks at the impact on education outcomes that the Flint Water Crisis has had in the past 8 years or so. The results are both depressing yet unsurprising, and the policy brief is written in a very accessible way for even those with no background in science.
Richard Wolff:
In addition to our episode with the Professor that came out yesterday, he also has had two other appearances within the last week that are worth checking out. On Economic Update, he just released an episode titled Twin Upsurges - Unionizing and Left Politics which, in addition to the two topics in the title, also spends some time discussing Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. Within the past couple of days, he also appeared on Democracy Now! in a segment Fed Rate Hikes Are “Body Blow” to Workers Reeling from Pandemic, Growing Inequality, which is a topic we have been touching on in some recent Intelligence Briefings, and also in some Rev Left episodes.
Vijay Prashad:
Vijay’s Tricontinental Institute for Social Research has an excellent newsletter that is also highly worth subscribing to. Their latest, All That I Ask Is That You Fight For Peace Today is a piece focused on NATO and the conflict in Ukraine. It’s short, accessible, yet has some very useful information in it, definitely check it out!
Gregory Elich (Episode forthcoming):
Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966–1985 is a book of the collected writings of Anti-apartheid and South African Communist Party activist and internationalist Alex La Guma. A fantastic effort by editor Christopher J. Lee to recover these long unseen works. La Guma's fierce opposition to capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and racism is as relevant today as in his time.
Amanda Yee of Radio Free Amanda:
A good media criticism article on US media characterizations of Putin as—or worse than—Hitler serve to advance US foreign policy objectives and negate opportunities for de-escalation is Joshua Cho at FAIR’s Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’. As a supplement to this article, episode 31 of RFA "Worse Than Hitler" w/ Louis Allday discusses this topic, as well as the wide range of foreign leaders across the political spectrum over the last few decades the media and political pundits have applied this Hitler comparison to—with their single commonality being that they stood in the way of US imperialism
NYC labor unions demand reinstatement of fired Starbucks organizer is by Amanda herself at Liberation News. Earlier this month Austin Locke, a Starbucks worker, was terminated by the company as retaliation for the successful unionization push at his Astoria, Queens store. His firing occured just days after his store unionized. Amanda wrote about the rally in solidarity with Austin, in which labor unions across New York City demanded his reinstatement. And speaking of coffee, episode 41 of RFA, What's Disgusting? Union Busting w/ the Heine Brothers Workers Union is about Heine Brothers Coffee baristas in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky unionizing! They announced their intention to unionize back in April, and they've already received pushback, and even retaliation, from the owner and CEO, Mike Mays. In this episode, Amanda speaks with two of the workers on the conditions which drove them to unionize, as well as the union-busting tactics that have been employed against them.
Lastly, Panamanian trade unions reach agreement with government on essential commodities by Peoples Dispatch. After almost a month of national strike, Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo was forced to engage in negotiations with the organizations behind the protests in Penonomé on July 21. They've succeeded in convincing the national government to reduce the cost of essential commodities by 30%. According to the agreement, the government will reduce the prices of some 72 products, including food and hygiene items, by implementing measures such as price caps, subsidies on national products, and tariff reduction with control of the marketing margin.
Thank you all once again for reading and subscribing to our newsletter! The feedback we received from the first one was wonderful, and we hope that this will continue to be a valuable resource for all of you! Once again, 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.