Guerrilla History Newsletter #3
Our reading/listening list for 5 August 2022
Hello once again Guerrilla History listeners!
Things have recently been a bit crazy in the respective Guerrilla History studios, as each of our hosts had recently been abroad, but fear not - we’re all back now! Breht was in Paris, France seeing the major sights and sounds as well as the gravesites of various figures that have inspired/challenged him over the years, Adnan just returned from a trip to Istanbul (with a stop in London on the way back) where he was presenting at a new conference on Islamophobia, and Henry was in the city formerly known as Leningrad (St. Petersburg) seeing sites associated with the Russian Revolution. On this topic, we just released a Patreon exclusive episode nearly an hour and a half long debriefing our respective travels. Some fun stories, some analysis, and overall a great conversation worth checking out. We highly appreciate anyone who is able to contribute to the show by joining our patreon. We’re currently pushing to get to 250 patrons by the end of August, and while we’re a bit short now, if you help spread the word a little, we know we can get there. Before we get to our reading/listening list for the week, we also need to let you know about Breht's latest episode of Rev Left, Intro to German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, & Hegel. As always, a great conversation, and one which gives us a very good base of understanding of the German Idealist philosophical tendency. Highly recommended listening for all of you. And lastly before the list, we want to remind everyone that tomorrow is the final day of the Guerrilla History Film Festival, which is free to attend. The final film is the marvelous film by Costas-Gavras, Z (1969), and it will be screened at Sunday, 7 August at 2pm Eastern Time. If you’re looking for something fun and relaxing to do, what better than to take in a great movie with a very political message?
The Reading List
Turning towards 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.
Guerrilla History:
We just released an episode of Announcements and Recommendations where we let you know about some upcoming things, and also made some recommendations for listening. We know many of you are new listeners to the show, who may not have gone back and listened to some of our older episodes in our catalogue. Each of us selected one episode to recommend to you, which is a good point to jump back to if you’ve not heard them yet! Breht's recommendation: The Counterrevolution of 1776 w/ Gerald Horne, Adnan's recommendation: Why Turkey Is Authoritarian w/ Halil Karaveli, Henry's recommendation: Women In Nepal's Civil War w/ Hisila Yami. We hope you enjoy these early episodes of the show, be sure to let us know what you think of them!
Breht O’Shea:
Shouting out a fellow podcast, Mass Struggle, which is a new show brought to you by the comrade behind the Faith and Capital Podcast. This show is a reading and analysis of primary texts of the communist movement, particularly within the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist sphere. Definitely worth checking out to get a deeper understanding of these texts!
footnotes2plato.com is the website where you can find the works of Matthew Segall, the guest on the new episode of Rev Left on German Idealism, and an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Adnan Husain:
Something that we’ve referenced several times recently are the two-part series Adnan was the guest for on The Red Nation on The War on Terror and “The Crusading Society”, which traces a line from the medieval crusades to the racial capitalism and settler colonialism that arose in Europe and the Americas. Adnan is currently working on developing this idea further, but in the meantime you should listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of this excellent conversation.
Also, upcoming on The Majlis podcast in the near future will be a discussion about the brand new book Islam and Anarchism, which is written by Mohamed Abdou (who coincidently was Adnan’s former PhD student). Check out this book, and look forward to the upcoming episode focusing on it!
Henry Hakamaki:
Climate Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is an incredibly interesting piece written by Jayati Ghosh, Shouvik Chakraborty, and Debamanyu Das in Monthly Review that maintains the critical perspective of analyzing imperialism on a global basis, operating within an imperialist dominated world system, but focuses on the often overlooked component of the environment within this. A necessary look at many components of climate imperialism, not least of which the “monopolies of knowledge created by the global regime of intellectual property rights that has been instituted and cemented by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights between World Trade Organization countries”, which is particularly glossed over in popular discourse.
“Neither liberal nor social democratic policies have a structured approach to understanding imperialism, including its ecological history” will certainly be of interest to many of you. This piece is an edited interview of Max Ajl, made by our listener and comrade Alejandro Pedregal in an Agrarian South Network Research Bulletin. Max, as many of you know, is the author of A People's Green New Deal, which we think is one of the most important works on the climate crisis that you could possibly read. This interview is also tremendous, and is both a great supplement, or introduction, to Max’s book.
From our friend Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, there is an excellent new piece out titled The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74. We had mentioned the PAIGC/Amilcar Cabral’s efforts towards political education in their revolutionary struggle in a few of our early episodes, but it has been quite some time. This is a great resource to refresh our collective memories of these initiatives, and perhaps is a good jumping off point for an upcoming episode of Guerrilla History.
Richard Wolff:
Professor Wolff has three new pieces that he would like you to be aware of, and we highly recommend checking them out. The Role of Capitalism in the War on Ukraine is a primer into the economics of the conflict taking place in Ukraine. It’s short and well worth your time to read.
There Are Better Ways for Societies to Address Inflation Than by Hiking Interest Rates is an article that both says what the purpose of raising interest rates is, as well as alternatives that would be much preferable for the vast majority of individuals. We know the United States government works for those with capital, so we much envision alternatives ourselves, because they will never be presented to us by the powerful.
On Prime Day, declare independence from Amazon is an op-ed the Professor wrote for the New York Daily News. He analogizes Jeff Bezos to King George III, and uses the example of the American Revolutionary War as a way to demonstrate the need to “declare independence” from this corporation.
Helen Yaffe (Episode forthcoming):
Professor Yaffe (who will appear in an episode on the blockade on Cuba in the near future) released a documentary at the beginning of this year titled Cuba's Life Task: Combatting Climate Change, which is free to watch on YouTube. Cuba is particularly hard hit by the effects of the climate crisis, and they are on course to be devastated by them in the near future. As a response, innovative and interlocking initiatives and strategies aimed at mitigating and adapting to the impacts of the crisis. A crucial resource for those interested in what initiatives are being undertaken in the Global South, which in many ways are more ambitious in relative AND absolute terms than what is being done by the Global North.
For those more inclined to read, the Professor also has put out a piece in Jacobin titled Cuba Shows How to Take Action on Climate Change, which is on the same topic.
Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt:
Brandon has said that despite the Know Your Enemy Podcast being mainstream, and the author being interviewed being a Straussian conservative, their episode After Nationalism w/ Samuel Goldman is very enjoyable, and he’s also liking the book despite the dramatic ideological disagreements with the author. Could be worth looking into for listeners inclined to learning from people that we largely disagree with.
For those a bit more…nerdy…From Status Politics to the Paranoid Style: Richard Hofstadter and the Pitfalls of Psychologizing History is an intellectual history of Richard Hofstadter (the American historian who, despite being a socialist in his youth, became one of the most widely touted historians in liberal circles during his academic career). And for those who were unaware, Brandon’s book The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy borrows its title from Hofstadter’s famous essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
In a similar vein, there is an H-Diplo Roundtable Teaching the Wisconsin School that, in part, serves as an intellectual history of William Appleman Williams. This school of diplomatic history views economic motive, particularly that of increasing markets abroad, as critical to analyze in order to understand events.
Many thanks to all readers of this newsletter and the listeners of our show. We really hope that we are serving you in some positive way as a source of political education. If you do 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.