Guerrilla History Newsletter #6

Our reading/listening list for 10 September 2022

Good morning Guerrilla History listeners!

After a couple weeks off from the newsletter in order to get caught up on material for the show, we’re back with a BIG roundup of things we have been up to recently. Since our last newsletter came out, we’ve released three incredibly interesting episodes! First, we had an episode with Comrade Booker Omole, National Vice Chairperson and National Organizing Secretary of the Communist Party of Kenya. In this episode, we discussed the history and class analysis of the recent elections in Kenya, and the feedback we heard from the episode was outstanding! If you’ve not checked that one out yet, it’s definitely one worth going back for. Next, we went back into the archives for The Fred Hampton Assassination & Judas and the Black Messiah - From the Archives. That conversation originally took place April 2, 2021, but we unlocked it to coincide with the week of Fred Hampton’s birthday this year. Our latest episode just dropped yesterday, and it’s a great one - Multipolarity with special guest Ben Norton. We brought on Mr. Multipolarista to discuss multipolarity through both theoretical and real world analytical lenses. We highly recommend checking out Multipolarista if you aren’t already avid consumers of their news and analysis, and of course we highly recommend sharing this latest episode around with comrades! We also want to make sure you know about a live event we are hosting tomorrow - a Twitter Space taking place on Sunday at 3pm Eastern Time on the topic “Why Political Education and Historical Knowledge Is KEY to Activism/Organizing”. We have a fabulous panel lined up, made up of activists, organizers, and political communicators, and it promises to be a really fun event, and one that will be particularly useful for younger comrades just getting into activism and organizing. If you know anyone who might be interested, be sure to let them know about the live event, we plan on taking some audience questions at the end of the panel discussion! We also plan on recording the Space, so if you are unable to make it live, do not worry, we will try to upload it in the coming weeks.

As usual, there has also been some excellent content coming out from Breht recently, which we’ll let you know about! At the end of August, Breht and Alyson put out a fantastic episode of The Red Menace titled Neither Liberalism nor Reaction: Centering the 3-Way Fight, which is a theoretical discussion of how Marxists and revolutionaries can avoid falling into either reactionary tendencies or liberalism - a very important topic. There have also been two tremendous episodes of Revolutionary Left Radio that have come out recently which everyone should check out. First, When the Balkans were Red: Reflections on Yugoslavia with guest Yugopnik, which is a wide ranging conversation that centers on Yugoslavia, but hits several other topics along the way. Our next Guerrilla History episode will also be about Yugoslavia, so this (along with Breht’s previous Yugoslavia based episode Yugoslavia: Socialist Construction in the Balkans) is great preparation for that. The next episode of RevLeft was The French Revolution, which is the communist analysis of that revolution that you’ve all been waiting for. Lots more coming down the pike as well!

The Reading List

Time for this week’s reading/listening list! 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:

A good starting point would be some of Devin Zane Shaw’s work. His text Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy was the starting point for the latest Red Menace episode, so if that topic interested you, you’d certainly enjoy this work.

As cohost Henry periodically says, “If you see the name ‘Patnaik’ in the author line, you read the piece”, and this article is no exception - Sanctions and the Decline of the Dollar by Prabhat Patnaik is a really interesting, short, and important piece for understanding where we stand at this moment.

Something we’re just looking at now is Tania: Undercover with Che Guevara in Bolivia, about Tamara Burke, who more commonly is known as Tania the Guerrillera, the Argentinian-born East German guerrilla and spy who worked in Cuba for some years before going to Bolivia with Che during that ill-fated insurgency. A fascinating character that doesn’t get the attention deserved.

Amanda Yee of Radio Free Amanda:

Two pieces about some recent events in South Korea. First, US media ignored major anti-US military protest in South Korea by Tim Shorrock (upcoming Guerrilla History guest) for Responsible Statecraft, about the media blackout in the US with regard to the thousands of people on both sides of the Korean peninsula who demonstrated against the US-ROK joint military exercises. Additionally, RFA episode 44 - War Rehearsals in South Korea w/ Ju-Hyun Park (Nodutdol) discusses the same. From Amanda: “On August 14, thousands of Koreans in Seoul protested against the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, the first joint US-South Korean military exercises since 2017. Ju-Hyun Park of diasporic Korean organization Nodutdol returns to talk about these demonstrations and the significance of the US and South Korea resuming these military exercises after five years. Ju-Hyun also gives a broader history of US involvement and provocation on the peninsula from the Korean War to after the signing of the armistice agreement, and how its presence has been an impediment to long lasting peace and reunification.”

Gregory Elich (episode forthcoming):

From next week’s guest Gregory Elich, we have been recommended Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton. A riveting account of the Communist Party's bold multi-racial organizing efforts in the Jim Crow South in the face of violent reaction. An important reminder that Communism in the American South not only existed, but was quite vibrant. For those who have read Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, this would be a great follow-up.

That will do it for this newsletter, thank you as always for reading. If you do find this resource 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.