Guerrilla History - Intro to Colonialism & Imperialism (The Deprogram Collab)

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

In this collaboration, we went onto The Deprogram (hosted by comrades Hakim, JT, and Yugopnik) to provide an introduction to Colonialism and Imperialism.  While we didn't have  quite as much time to discuss newer theories of imperialism, such as World Systems Theory and Unequal Exchange, or specific forms of colonialism, such as settler-colonialism and neocolonialism, we hope that this primer will be  of use to you and we also hope to reconvene with The Deprogram boys again to talk about some of these other threads.   The Deprogram (Spotify | YouTube) can be supported on patreon, and you can  follow them on twitter @TheDeprogramPod Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You don't remember Dinn-Bin-Bin-Bou? No. The same thing happened in Algeria. In Africa, they didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hey, everybody. This is Brett O'Shea from Rev.

left radio and of course guerrilla history and today we're going to release an episode that a sort of collaborative episode that we did with the good folks over at the d program um eugopnik hakeem and jt um all of whom have been on rev left for their own interviews and we i've been on a d program as well you'll check that out if you haven't but then today we did it with the guerrilla history crew so me adnan and henry went on the d program um to talk about imperialism and colonialism and colonialism etc um some things did happen like you know for me personally my i had i had microphone issues so like there's an opening part that you can go listen to on the d program uh we cut it uh for this version of it um which in which i was trying to talk but nobody could hear me and so we

had to step back and then figure out the mic issues and then come to the episode and by the time we got to the episode i had a prior commitment that i had to leave early for so it was um you know through no fault of anybody just a situation in which you know i'm a little i was a little frustrated I wish I could have been around and actually, you know, been there the entire time and been part of that opening. But, I mean, obviously, no fault of anybody, just issues beyond any of our controls. So, you know, I had to leave early. So I'm hoping that we can reconnect with the D program and do another conversation. So, you know, it's a fun informal chat.

And we had a great time. We always have a great time when we talk with or have any, you know, communication with the boys from the D program. They're awesome comrades. Wonderful people, very funny. I love what they're doing. And while we got to talk for almost an hour and a half, or at least Adnan and Henry got to talk for almost an hour and a half about imperialism and colonialism, we were hoping to dive a little bit deeper into some newer theories around imperialism like world systems theory and unequal exchange, as well as having a little bit more time to discuss specific forms of colonialism like settler colonialism and neocolonialism. And we're kind of hoping and looking forward to the opportunity to getting back together with the D program guys to dive a bit deeper than we had time. for but it's still a fun um still a fun conversation still touch on on some really important things and uh henry and odd not in particular make really great points um that i think anybody will benefit from this episode but hopefully as i said we can have another collaboration with the d program without the mic issues and without the time restraints and uh and really kind

of flesh some of these things that we introduce in this episode flesh them out in a in a subsequent one so shout out to the d program definitely go subscribe to them on whatever podcast app you use, leave them a positive review to support them. And of course, if you have disposable income, you can always support them on Patreon. Just a really great group of guys doing good work. So we salute them. Yeah. And hopefully we'll, this is the first of more conversations that guerrilla history and the D program will have together. So without further do, enjoy. Hello and welcome back everybody to the program.

Today we have a fantastic episode with two fantastic guests that have combined into a... Three guests. I mean, no, no, two guests as in two podcast guests. Sorry, my bad. Three total people, but two units that have joined to make quite the cocktail. I'm sure you've heard of these two fantastic groupings. We have Red Left Radio, which has been on before, and our fantastic business. Brett, who has made beyond a contribution to the English-speaking left.

It is genuinely, his work is generally one of the best out there. And Gorilla History Pod, which likewise has become a force of its own. I could say most likely the two most influential socialist shows within the English language, and that is not something to take lightly. Their work is fantastic. It's academic. It's beautifully presented. It covers everything between anti-imperialist and class-conscious theory to struggles of people around the globe.

particularly against the ever-heavy, though paper-filled imperial boot. It is a pleasure to have you guys on board and on with us today. Please let the people know who you are, what you do, where they can find you, before we get started. Yeah, I'll start. I'm glad you pointed out Henry's facial hair looking a lot like Lenin. He's in his Lenin era. It looks great. I was thinking that the last three episodes, I just didn't get a chance to tell them that.

So that's funny. But yeah, my name is Brett. I'm the host of Rev Left Radio. co-host of Red Menace and the co-host of Gorilla History. So happy to be. I love the D program. Love being back with you too. So yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, the listeners couldn't see, but I just held up a Lenin bust in front of my face. And I do that to my wife sometimes when we're on the call, and she absolutely

hates that, which just encourages me to do it even more the next time. I love it. So, yeah, that's... Green, grublin energy. I love it. Yeah, that's my little hobby. while we're a part. But in any case, I'm Henry Huckimacki. I'm one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history alongside Adnan and Brett. I'm an educator, a long-time activist. And the only other really interesting thing about me, I guess, other than the fact that I'm an American that lives in Russia, which is quite interesting, is that I am one of the co-translators and editors of the new authorized English edition of Domenico Lassertos-Stalin history and critique of a black legend,

which came out from Iskra books. Fantastic. My God. So people are, for the listeners, this means that we have actually educated and qualified people on, unlike us. I love it. That's absolutely fantastic. Adnan, do you have anything to add?

Oh, sure. I'm not saying I'm also a co-host of guerrilla history, and I'm a historian of the medieval Mediterranean and Islam. world. So all this modern history is really just a fun side light, but I focus mostly on Muslim Christian Jewish interactions in the medieval world. So I think we'll get into it, I'm sure, but I think colonialism and imperialism basically has a really long history. So I might pull some of your listeners back into the dark ages. Please do. We absolutely love it. Fascinating for that. Thank you, boys, for the absolutely

lovely introduction that you gave us of course all their links will be provided below um so go check out their work they're going to have them we're going to go through it again at the end of the podcast but you should be already familiar with with everybody who's present here by now if you're not you're doing something wrong um but anyways bad boy bad boy absolutely this show that we were on we talk a lot about capitalism um sometimes we think that uh we take a bit of a centrist position sometimes we think that might not be the best thing in the world. Maybe it may have outlived its usefulness quite possibly. But yeah, moving aside from the silliness, though,

one of the things that we like to cover as well, not as deeply as you guys, though, is the topic of imperialism itself. Let's begin a conversation there. What is the, quote, objective definition of imperialism if there even is such a thing? How is it connected to capitalism? Why did capitalism give rise to this particular interesting development

of human socioeconomic and cultural and drag that historically never existed. Give us the deep dive, please. Sure, yeah, I can start. You know, there's probably a colloquial definition of imperialism that is sort of diluted and watered down, that sort of takes precedence outside the Marxist and Leninist context. Sometimes imperialism is just meant like one country going into another country, a bigger country, taking over a smaller country or whatever. But the importance of the Marxist analysis is that it understands imperialism as a product of, synonymous with a certain stage of capitalism, right? So Lenin famously called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism.

And throughout that entire text, he's really linking what we call modern imperialism to the development of monopoly capitalism. So I'm not going to be one of these guys that reads too much from text, but I'm going to read this one definition from Lenin's imperialism because I think it sort of clarifies what imperialism is in the context of this conversation. And interestingly, Lenin himself ties it to colonialism, which we're going to talk about here in a second. So Lenin says, quote, if it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital. Is the bank

capital of a very few big monopolist banks, merge with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists. And on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy, which has extended without hindrance to territories unseased by any capitalist power. So, you know, regular colonialism going into new territories and seizing them, back to Lenin, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up. So in both instances of his definition of imperialism, he's saying it's a it's the monopoly stage of capitalism and he's tying it to colonial policy and we might get into some of those differences um in a bit but standing back from that i would just say

as my final thoughts on on this on this subject is that imperialism capitalism colonialism these are different faces of a sort of unified process or phenomenon so when we talk about imperialism we're we're referencing and alluding to colonialism etc and that will hopefully become more clear throughout the rest of the conversation. I'll jump in now to kind of add into this. So Brett does open with Lenin. And of course, Lenin, he wasn't the first person to theorize imperialism, but I think that we can say that from the Marxist's perspective, he was the first great theorist of imperialism. Although I would say that in many ways, his analysis was so good for the time that it actually impeded further developments in the analysis of imperialism, which is something that

we can talk about. It probably doesn't even fit in this conversation. So we'll just put that aside. But the point is, is that Lenin's definition of imperialism was quite good for the time. It's still very applicable today, although it does need a little bit of tweaking to think about the modern context of society and political economy. But to add in just to kind of concretize what Lenin was saying were the five main features of imperialism or monopoly capitalism. I'm actually going to paraphrase him by using somebody who we've interviewed on guerrilla history before, Joma Sison, who paraphrises Lennon very well. I know imperialism isn't a long text in general, but Joma Sison takes the main points in one

of his works, basic principles of Marxism, Leninism, and condenses it better than I can. So, and just so the listeners know, Joma Sison was the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and like I said, we have an interview on guerrilla history with him. so just to clip some bits of what he used to summarize Lenin's position is that monopoly means that one company or a single combination of companies controlled by a single group of capitalists dominate the main part or entirety of an industry i think that most people are familiar with that definition of monopoly then the merger of industrial capital and bank capital has put more capital at the disposal of the monopoly capitalists than ever before

and has spawned to finance oligarchy that amasses profits not because of its entrepreneurial skills, but because it simply controls and manipulates finance capital. The monopoly capitalist class hires the managers to run its productive enterprises, and as a Rontier class simply sits back and awaits the dividends from shareholdings. Then moving on to the next point, and again, I'm skipping large portions of this, but listeners, you can get the PDF for free from Foreign Languages Press. The export of surplus capital takes the form of loans and direct investments. This is something that we've seen a lot.

of, by the way, just as an aside, these serve to relieve the capitalist economy not only of its capital glut, but also of its surplus commodities. We've talked about that on guerrilla history before, so I'm not going to belabor that point. Moving on, according to the law of uneven development, capitalist countries differ in economic strength, and they therefore take their place in the capitalist world accordingly. But according to the same law, growth and competition of the capitalist economies continues to upset every given balance of relations. And then, lastly, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no more part of the world that was not under the domination of a capitalist power or a number of capitalist powers. Africa had been the last

continent to be fully divided among the capitalist countries. The division of the world among the capitalist powers was completed. A redivision of the world was no longer possible without causing a war. And in this regard, Lenin said that imperialism means war. So just to get that out of the way, so when we talk about Lenin's definition of imperialism, these are kind of the five main points of it. But to talk a little bit more about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, we have to understand that capitalism as a system seeks to maximize profits and that imperialism is necessary at a certain stage to provide avenues through which this objective is achieved.

imperialist adventurism helps capitalist nations access natural resources in various parts of the world when they wouldn't have access to these resources in their own countries, enabling accumulation of wealth through resource extraction. And of course we can get into the conversation of unequal exchange at a certain point. Of course, we know about market expansion within certain capitalist countries. The market is actually relatively small, but as you expand, you provide more of a market for you to sell your produced products in. It also provides avenues for labor exploitation because of course in imperialist countries, the availability of cheap labor is often not large enough to sustain the production of

the goods, the commodities that are produced by the imperialist countries or by companies that are owned by capitalists in the imperialist countries. And therefore, they have to expand their reach in order to exploit cheap labor in other parts of the world that are not as developed. and imperialism allows capitalist powers to extend their control beyond their national borders and to extend monopolistic control over key industries and resources multinationally. And as you think about how these processes work, you think about how capitalism has to continue to develop itself, but at certain stages of its development,

it kind of runs up against hard limits of what it's able to do within a specific national context or within a specific resource context and therefore expansion into other territories is necessary in order to enable the expansion of capitalism, which of course is in the interest of the capitalists that are ruling those imperialist countries. Wow, that's some great stuff from both of you about what I would say is the co-evolution historically of imperialism and capitalism. And I think what Henry was talking about just there, about the way in which imperialism is necessary to enable the development of capitalism to overcome, you know, various political boundaries. I mean, that's the point, is that capitalism as an economic system doesn't want to have to be limited by, you know, political constraints.

And so we see imperialism is one necessary mechanism, you could say, for the extension of capital's reach. And if you think about it historically, I think you can see that they're very intimately connected. And it's important to see that historically because I think Marx, when people read capital, he's talking about a kind of ideal system almost in the abstract of how capital functions by critiquing these political. economic theorists on their own terms to, you know, really expose how capitalism actually works and what its consequences are. But what it means is that he doesn't cover some of the historical aspects of its initial development, you know, completely thoroughly. He's looking mostly at like the England case, right? And I think, you know, one big issue that he puts off until late chapters that he doesn't explore as much, but it's so important, is this idea of

primitive accumulation. That is absolutely the foundation for where does capital actually come from initially, before it develops industrial production, before it does various kinds of things that enable the social relations around how you organize labor in terms of wage labor. Well, all that has to come from somewhere, what's the beginning? point and I think really you have to look at conquest, war, militarism, colonialism as the key factors that enable the so-called European takeoff. I mean, that's how it's built. You know, when you look at, I think that there's, you know, other components of it that I think that are

important is when I think of imperialism, I think of that fundamentally as a very kind of modern ideological and set of practices that enable capitalism's extent. However, empires go back really far. So sometimes people are confused. Well, they're always empire. So how can we talk about the specific kind of analysis of imperialism? I think an important point to note here. Indeed, empires have a long history.

There's a real difference between empires and imperialism and the way these modern forms function. All of the empires you can think of in the past, from Roman times, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, Sasanian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and of course, the Abbasid Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Mongol World Empire. These were land-based empires based on conquest. They're contiguous. But also what's important and interesting is that they were dynastic. They were not of a nation state or a people that dominated some other people as a whole, as a totality.

and what made an empire is that it's composed of many different peoples who are subordinate as subjects, not as citizens, right? That's a very modern kind of concept, but as subjects to some ruling family that may have a particular ethnicity or identity or religion. But that's very different from what happens in the modern, what we call empires, but colonial empires. Modern colonialism is nation-states that create citizens or subjects, but nation states that totally dominate another nation, another country, other lands, and other peoples as subordinates to the entire nation and nation state.

And that's very different from, you know, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire of the Tsars. And so we need to distinguish historically when does imperialism come about? And I think you can see that it's very connected with the rise of capitalism as, you know, historically as it emerges and that the two really go hand in hand. There's a lot more we could talk about it. But I think the one other thing that I would want to say about it is that something happens in Europe that's unique and different. And of course,

that's what so much of history has been. It's like, why does Europe become this, you know, global hegemonies over the world? Is it because of the rise of capitalism? Is it because of of, you know, colonial, is it because of technological changes that allow it to colonize and that then, you know, there's just something in the water. I'm kidding. Well, yeah, this is the thing. Some people like Jared Diamond, you know, wants to come up with this like ecological, well, it's some unique set of ecological factors. I, what I would say is that it's the warmaking, the level of violence that it's prepared to unleash upon the world through its, it's colonizing ventures and you know this kind of campaign that it has of like ethnic cleansing forced conversion

inquisition expulsion and suppression of heresy and descent i take this back to the medieval period i think it's the crusades you know and the new settler colonies that it establishes and the crusader states the rise of these italian merchant you know kind of commerce and a system of enslavement, domination, and attempts to create plantation-style agricultural production in the Mediterranean, in Sicily, in Cyprus, in the Latin kingdoms, in the reconquered. They say reconquered, but it's just new settler colonialism, conquered areas of the Iberian Peninsula. They develop a whole system of religious and racialized hierarchy, of enslavement that goes hand in hand with some of these other technical and technological developments that are then

exported into the Atlantic world. And, you know, the kind of slave system of West African slaves, well, they already had slave systems. It's just on a smaller scale. What happens is it gets globalized by going out into the Atlantic system. And it's that kind of primitive accumulation through colonial and imperial exploitation, war and violence, and a whole system of racial exclusion that is what creates Europe's comparative advantage in the era of capitalism. We could talk a little bit more. I'm sure those are a lot.

That's a lot. But those were kind of two points if you look at it from a long history rather than just the modern perspective that I think help us understand why Lennon crystallize those key five factors in his study of it. imperialism. Beautifully, beautifully put, that was a fantastic master class, honestly, from all three of you. These ideas can be developed almost endlessly because imperialism as a world system is so

interconnected and has gone through so many stages of development, including primordial stages in pre-capist formations, as Adnan mentioned, which almost give it like an ethereal historical characteristic, not to make it too metaphysical, right? But the trend, it's much like capitalism, right? There are bits and pieces of what could be considered preliminary capitalist development, forms of primitive

accumulation, for example, that existed in pockets in the Northern Italian republics, in some of the North African and West Asian empires. Of course, Ibn Khaldoin is known for his groundbreaking historical work and

analyses of this fact. But it never took on the form that, or like the groteseness, let's say, that Adnan mentioned, until it was transported along with slave trade to the New World past the Atlantic. And this is something that makes it the most interesting system to analyze as part of capitalism because imperialism only took this form because of capitalism. It was almost as a, it was a stillborn child until the productive forces that could be mobilized along with capitalist production, centralization of capital, amongst others, the formation of long commodity chains across several continents even, which didn't really exist on the way that we know it now. Only once capitalism allowed itself to, or established itself, and through its roots down, could this system, this barbarity really emerge. Why do you guys think this is the case? Why was it capitalism per se? Maybe I kind of jumped the gun by answering it, of course, the centralization of capital and the massive commodity. Of course, but I would love to hear your perspective as well.

Why is it necessary that capitalism is a system that really, you know, shocked imperialism into life and, of course, then developed capitalism even further? That's a great question, a really, you know, big question. Like, we're taking on these really big, heavy questions. I mean, we have you here, so we got a milk you as hard as we can. Yeah, well, you know, one component I think that it's very important is that you could not get the kind of full-bored, you know, developed capitalism in Europe that comes to dominate the world without, I think, using violence. Like, it just wasn't possible. Like this, take one example. Okay, a very good book by Sven Beckert.

Empire of Cotton. You know, we think of, you know, Marks, what does he base his studies on? Like the principal example is looking at the textile mills, right? You know, in the Midlands in England, Industrial Revolution, the loon, you know, the steam loon, the automated loom and the factories that develop and how this kind of, you know, in Manchester, Birmingham and so on, and that is the basis for the industrial revolution. First thing to say is that textiles before the era of petroleum and petroleum products of plastics is like the high-tech industry. It's the most labor intensive and it's like so useful like everything from, it's not just like clothing that you wear, but like wall decorations, carpets, it bags, right? You know, things to contain things

and transport things. So textiles were like a key industry, you could say. And you had long thousand-year histories of artisanal craft development of techniques, you know, to really efficiently and effectively make good, good quality linen and cotton textiles in India, in Egypt. The British were not able to, you know, really out-compete the cottage or Indian weaver, despite all the supposed technological development. They couldn't actually out-compete them. them, they destroyed Indian weaving. They destroyed, actively destroyed it. And that was necessary, really, they had two factors. They had to destroy their competitors and they had to use enslaved labor to produce the cotton at a lower rate in the Americas, in the U.S. South. So, you know, capitalism

isn't just this kind of, you know, genius form of like social relations. It depends really on this kind of violent subordination and destruction of these other ways of producing in order to kind of eliminate the social relations. If you think about it, well, the Indian cottager is embedded in a whole set of local social relations, you know, in a kind of village society. They have to, you know, this kind of form of factory organization, like the whole point of it is it's both violence abroad and it's violence within. have to dispossess people of their land, make them completely dependent. This is all of Marx's analysis.

The other side of it, however, is just you also have to dispossess and destroy people's ways of life in other parts of the world in order for this to actually work successfully. So I think that's an example of the way they're intimately connected with one or another. Just very briefly to add in, and it's going to be very brief because I think Adnan hit everything super, super well. but one thing that I do want to add is that imperialism as we understand requires a certain degree of sophistication and it requires a certain degree of coordination and this is something that we really see arising in the era of capitalism with this consolidation of capital the centralization of capital and the development of these structures outside of like these monarchies

we actually have the development of capitalist industry within places that then allows for the coordination and complexity required for these processes that we underlined in terms of what is imperialism to be carried out. It's one thing to have some monarch say, you know, let's go out and carry out violence against our neighbor or some other place that has resource X that we would like. It's another thing to have the sophistication, the structures in place within your country, to be able to effectively do that and to benefit from doing so in a way that then consolidates your position in the world stage. So that's not to say that I disagree with anything that Adan said. I completely agree with everything Adnan said. I just want to underscore that in terms of we've had violence

throughout history. What is it about this stage of capitalism that really allowed for the expansion of imperialism? It is in part, in addition to what Adnan said, the fact that capitalism did allow for an increasing amount of complexity and organization within society as well, which was required for the development of imperialism. One thing that I think some people, the less sophisticated critics of Marxists or Marxism, happened to, or

they seem to be under the misconception that Marxists have a overwhelming, or not overwhelming, a spanning basically extensive and all expansive disdain for capitalism just because of the consequences of the system currently. We fundamentally understand that capitalism was and is a better

step in development over feudalism and other pre-capitalist formations. It allowed for the ability to create massive urban centers with highly developed interconnected industrial zones, which could allow the productive forces to develop to a point which eventually could lay the grounds to raise the collective well-being of society. The difference is that because of the logic of capital, instead of it raising the, this is more or less a undesired byproduct of capitalist development, raising the quality of life

of the lowest people. And by the way, it was a very short-lived thing that crumbled very quickly afterwards. The common graph that people are aware of where they're like, they see 1850, and then, oh, the living standards are improving after. Yeah, well, that just shows what they leave out of that is that past 350, 400 years of the primordial capitalism that eventually developed from the Venetian city states to the UK, which caused a drastic and massive deterioration of living standards across the globe. In some places, they still have not recovered even to this day. But moving all that aside, we understand that capitalism at one point did serve a useful function, but it has outlived its usefulness. That's the core of it. Allow me to step in for one second here very quickly.

So this is something that we often hear, and I think that most Marxists would agree with the idea that capitalism was an advancement on previous society. And in many cases, people will phrase it as capitalism was a progressive development on previous society. In productive forces in a sense, yeah. I think most Marxists would agree with you. But when you mentioned productive forces there, that is the key point. Because oftentimes when those of us that are thinking deeply about these issues will say something like capitalism was a progressive development upon previous systems, people who listen to that will tend to think of that in a more universalizing way. And so we have people like Alicagri, who's becoming a good friend of mine. I really appreciate him.

It's fantastic. Yeah, we text back and forth all the time. but he very frequently, I'm sure that he would love to talk with you, but in any case, he very frequently will say capitalism, it is false to call capitalism a progressive system. I do not believe in any way that Ali is saying that capitalism is not a progressive development of productive forces within society, but using the term progressive in any way then can allow capitalists to say well look it was an improvement on previous society but in some ways and in many ways and we talk about this with the increasing complexity the increasing ability to carry out

violence abroad yes it did allow for the raising of living standards over what was happening previously in those capitalist countries but it also allowed for the increasing terror abroad of the capitalist countries and therefore it is important that when we talk about if we're thinking of things in an even remotely stagist way, which I don't want to get into the conversation, stages, et cetera, because I mean, that's a whole other conversation. But the point is, is that

if we are thinking of it even slightly like, you know, there are stages that things can go through, not that they must go through, but that they can go through, we have to grapple with the fact that capitalism while having some of these benefits that we, that you've

enumerated, also has allowed for the increased repression and increased violence on populations not only within the country, but especially abroad outside of these developing capitalist countries. And so it's very, very important that we be careful when talking about the role of capitalism. So again, I don't think that you disagree with it. I just want to make sure that I push back a little bit on that term. No, no, no, thank you for the very needed clarification. Sometimes when we're in, when we're sitting amongst other Marxists, who we all kind of know what we're talking about between each other.

So the need for caveats kind of goes out the window, but sometimes we forget that there are people listening who may not have this necessary prerequisite perspective. So I very, thank you, Henry. I very much appreciate it. There's one more thing. Before I get into the next question, one more thing I want to build up on that ad non-said,

which was, by the way, what a dense answer that we've been dissecting for like 20 minutes. Thank you. What I was going to say is, you mentioned a point of, with the British, colonial attitudes or attempts at destroying, and then of course the successful attempts at destroying Indian industry, which was mostly artisanal, even though it was still complex to a degree, but most artisanal. They destroyed it with the hopes that, number one,

they can essentially root out and get rid of competitive, like essentially productive centers so that they can monopolize a particular sector themselves, as well as cause the immiseration of the labor pool in a particular area to keep raw inputs and lay. cheap. And what's interesting is that the incredibly transparent and clear way that this was done back then is paralleled very nicely to the day. It's just obfuscated through structural readjustment programs driven by the IMF or the World Bank is put in the phraseology of human rights and economic sanctions in order to dress up, you know, the drive for liberal democratic values that need to be pushed on X or Y in country when the basis is almost always exclusively

economic. This is just something to highlight that this is a thing that is a thread that is extended to this very day is just they've gotten slightly more sophisticated with the presentation, but not much, not by much, as we're saying in several parts of the world ongoing from West Asia to Eastern Europe. Moving on, I would love to get a question. This is going to be a long episode, guys. If you would indulge me, please. The trend of imperialism, of course, started with a very blatant colonialism, right? It was very in your face, boots on the ground with guns, trying to take direct political control over economic resources and the labor behind them to mobilize it towards the ends of the colonizing force and that particular nation, the economic productivity of said nation. This was the first step, colonialism, and then it transitioned into this more nebulous imperialism, more conglomerate-focused.

just more hands-off, but even more entrenched, if you understand what I'm saying. Why is it that colonialism was the first step? Why didn't it just immediately jump to this imperialist, you know, hands-off approach, let's say? Well, first and foremost, we have this sort of this outlay that, you know, our analysis of capitalism talks about colonialism as this necessary phase in the development of capitalism. We talk about primitive accumulation. So there's this process that takes place sort of before the rise of industrial capitalism that is necessary for that rise.

Then we talk about imperialism as the territorial domination of monopoly capital, which is a later development of capitalism. So earlier, my earlier answer, I was urging people to sort of see these as different faces of a singular process or phenomena. And I think that sort of makes sense. You know, colonialism is this primitive accumulation stage. Then you have the rise of industrial capitalism, the rise of finance monopoly capitalism, and ergo imperialism, which is synonymous with monopoly capitalism. but there's also some subtleties within within colonialism right there's like the classic example of colonialism i often think of that we were just talking about the british empire in india then there's settler colonialism where you're actively trying to take over the land and settle it

with a foreign population we see the brits do that in north america australia europeans do it in south africa obviously palestine which will get to eventually the french in algeria so that's a very so there's a different type of of colonialism there and then i think in the modern era we're much more used to seeing what we call neocolonialism, which is this more abstracted version of colonialism where it's not shoving a gun in somebody's face or it's not killing the quote unquote savages so you can take their land. But it's a more, it's a reflection of the increasing sophistication and subtlety of these mechanisms of domination where you have like the installation of compradore regimes, right, exploiting a country's resources and

economic output through these mechanisms like the IMF, through these globalized systems that are that are much more subtle and are allowed to be justified in terms of more subtle propaganda, etc. But the lines do kind of get blurry, right? French neocolonialism in Africa today takes the form of imperialism. So what? Is it neocolonialist or is an imperialist? Well, it's both at the same time. And in this way, you can kind of see imperialism and colonialism, not only sharing similar roots and being products of a similar underlying economic system, but as sort of merging into one another in the modern era in interesting ways. The U.S. is a settler colonial entity with oppressed nations within its borders,

who is the leading modern imperialist power in the world today. So these processes, while they are definitionally different and we should understand them conceptually as sort of these distinct periods of time, they're also part of this broader, singular process and phenomena that I think is important to emphasize as well. I'll hop in here and just mentioned that, as Brett said that when we think of colonialism, we're often thinking of examples of kind of just the bog standard form of colonialism in terms of what's going on. Now, we aren't typically thinking of settler colonialism. And in many cases, that is because, not because settler colonialism is not ongoing, but because it is ignored,

by most bourgeois academics. It is ignored by the media. It is ignored by most people that don't want to grapple with the fact that they're on stolen land in most cases. You know, the United States is an ongoing settler colonial project and to pretend otherwise is kind of foolish. You know, Palestine, as we mentioned, unless you're looking at the Marxist left, we're often not talking about how that is a textbook case of settler colonialism. So settler colonialism is an ongoing process and it is important to keep that in mind. And as Brett mentioned, neocolonialism is really an important analytical way of looking at how colonialism primarily manifests itself today.

And I think that I'll hold talking about neocolonialism for a little bit now, because that's really a rather dense topic in itself. And I'll just throw out a couple of book recommendations first. And then, again, maybe we'll loop back to the neocolonialism after I say my next bit, which is that if you're interested in neocolonialism, of course, you can read the book, Neo-Colonialism, the highest stage of imperialism by Incrumah. But as Brett mentioned, with the example of France acting as a neo-colonial power primarily in West Africa today, there's an absolutely terrific book that came out just a couple of years ago, and it's very short.

It's about 140 pages long, and I think that on guerrilla history, we should interview the authors sometime soon. It's called Africa's Last Colonial Currency, the CFA Frank story. like I said it just came out let me look I have it in my hands so came out 20 20 in English it originally came out in French in 2018 so it's only a couple years old and it's really an outstanding book by Fannie Puget and Ndongo Samba Sula so recommendation right there but if we're looking at colonialism versus imperialism I just want to and this will be I'll try to keep it brief I want to put these two things side by side on a couple of points just to look at them and how they relate to each other. So the first point would

be economic and political domination. So imperialism and colonialism are both rooted in that same pursuit of economic and political dominance by more powerful nations against less powerful nations. Under capitalism, that pursuit of domination is driven by the need, as I mentioned earlier for new markets, resources, labor, et cetera. Imperialism and colonialism both enable the dominant powers to exert their control over weaker nations and exploit resources and reap economic benefits for themselves. The second point is territorial control. Colonialism mostly, again, we're talking about different forms.

We talked about secularism, neo-colonialism, and we'll probably circle back to those two different forms eventually. but colonialism mostly focuses on the physical occupation and administration of territories by foreign powers whereby the colonizing nation establishes in some way direct rule or control over the colonized area and then uses that control to exploit the resources and labor for the benefit of the regime in the colonial power as well as to some extent the you know, people are going to be very mad at me. The working class in the colonial power.

They'll be mad at me if they don't believe in the aristocracy of labor in any case. whereby imperialism is a much broader idea in terms of how it manifests itself. It goes far beyond just thinking about territorial control in this very simple way. They don't have to necessarily physically colonize a territory. I know that, again, neo-colonialism is a different case. But instead, they exercise their economic and political hegem. Germany over it through things like indirect rule, economic coercion, supporting puppet regimes, which again feeds into neol colonialism. So they don't need to have that direct administration.

Ideological justification is another thing that I would like to put side by side for just a moment. Again, this is like very surface level analysis. We could get much deeper on any of these. But colonialism very, very often, almost always relied on explicitly racist or ethnocentric ideologies that justified and legitimized the colonization process. And as Brett said, quote unquote, savages earlier, that is the kind of phraseology that you often hear when we are talking about colonialism. Not that we don't also hear it in imperialism and not that that notion is not in the back of the minds with imperialism, but that is often a driving narrative in the ideological justification of colonialism. There's often this idea of a civilizing mission, which I know

Adnan could speak to far more at length and eloquently than I could. And this is often used to show the colonizers as morally superior that they can bring economic development and cultural superiority to these supposedly backwards societies, whereas imperialism usually uses, let's say, more subtle ideological justifications. In many cases, again, this is not like a one-size-fits-all analysis, just surface level here. So they'll often claim to, that they're spreading democracy. Where have we heard that before? Fostering economic progress,

promoting international stability or the rules-based order. I mean, these are the sorts of things that we hear today. But behind these ideological facades, the underlying motive is exactly the same. The pursuit of that economic and political interest for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class in the capitalist imperialist countries.

And then lastly, just very briefly, let's talk about the impact of the colonized very briefly, which is that under both imperialism and colonialism, the impact is absolutely devastating on the colonized peoples. The exploitation of resources, forced labor, cultural suppression under colonial rule, often almost always leads to tremendous suffering and deprivation of the peoples that live in those areas, whereas under imperialism, the economic hegemony and political interference of the dominant powers, they create a cycle of underdevelopment and dependency. And the profits extracted from the colonized territories perpetuate inequality's poverty

and social unrest that lead to, if not as explicit or graphic, a form of suffering and deprivation as colonialism oftentimes did. We still see those same sorts of structures perpetuate due to both imperialism and colonialism with these incredibly devastating consequences of the people in the colonized or dominated countries under imperialism. Yeah, that was just one quick thing. I think you were a very good question that you raised there, Akeem, about, you know, where does colonialism fit? When you look at the regimes of control in today's world, you know, you don't have always, I mean, you know, the United States has sent armies around the world. and it has a network of, you know, 800 or so military, you know, bases that are disclosed

around the world as part of its, you know, hegemony over the world militarily, but it doesn't always have to control, you know, nations, economies, and things through that kind of militaristic means or actual conquest and direct rule and control in the earlier era of colonialism. But then at period, they did not have the technical means, you know, and practices so organized for being able to exert that control. You actually had to, you know, kind of send a Navy and kind of work through those kind of direct sorts of means. And with all the developments that have taken place, now it's possible. And, of course, it's necessary after the era of decolonization, where colonized peoples waged, you know, struggles, bloody struggles to free themselves from. direct colonial rule, it wasn't going to be possible or easy to simply reimpose that.

And so they've developed more sophisticated techniques with the IMF, the World Bank, the global free trade agreements and their whole regimes of investment funds and so on that constrained the possibilities and horizons of even a, you know, basically take sovereignty in a real material sense away. And that's, of course, what Henry and Brett were both talking about as neo-colonialism and its practice. But I did want to say, you know, that it's a little bit like, you know, I was, I studied Arabic in Syria in like the 1990s because I'm a lot older that I think than the rest of you folks.

I'm the old fogey here. So I actually remember. Yeah. Too bad this is an audio. format, you know, so I studied in the 90s. So this is before the terrible events that have destroyed Syria. And, you know, people told me, oh, you're going to study in Syria. It's such an authoritarian, you know, country.

You must be afraid to, you know, the political repression. And, yeah, of course, it was an authoritarian, you know, it was a dictatorship. And there had been, there was and is political repression in various ways. But one thing people complain is like, well, the Muhabara, the secret police, they're always going to be trailing you and all that. And yes, I saw somebody like when I left my apartment. Occasionally I noticed, oh, there's the same person who seems to be like taking an interest in my affairs. But I told people, well, yeah, they actually have to send a guy to go do it, right? In the United States, they don't have to send a guy.

So you think you're free. But they've got mechanisms and techniques of surveillance. There's social mechanisms for control. If you get too far out of line, suddenly you're not getting job offers, your career is affected. And we know this from social media that the level of technology for surveillance has just ramped up so much higher. Now we provide freely all this information about ourselves. And so basically you move from crude techniques that involve direct kind of like in your face. Invasions of privacy.

That's right, yeah. And then it goes to, like, you know, more, you know, technical means that are less visible to you, but are far more pervasive and far more, you know, controlling. So I think that's kind of what we've seen in this transition is that there are different stages and techniques, you know, in these forms of social control, both at an individual level if we talk about in our own societies, but also globally when we speak of what controls the fates of nations. It's no longer, you know, these countries no longer have sovereignty to make certain kinds of decisions about their economy, their currency, what kinds of social supports and programs they're going to have because they have to follow these regimes through international organizations and through the organization of the international global economy that prevent them from meeting people's needs and having to make priorities of other people's, you know, interests. Beautifully put. I would say just one little point to add on to what you said at none about the surveillance point. The same people who will decry that even like low-scale crude attempt at monitoring in Syria, for example, these people who decry authoritarian regimes, quote unquote authoritarianism, whatever that's supposed to mean. That's a much bigger discussion on its own. These people who live in, again, practically bugged houses, who carry phones with

microphones and cameras on them at all times, which repeatedly, from the NSA to other intelligence services, have been known to be able to access everything from your emails, to your bank statements, to even the contents of your phone calls as they're going on, to the point that they were spying on the chancellor, the American secret, I mean, not secret service, excuse me, the American intelligence apparatus was spying on the German chancellor. Yeah, Merkel, that's right, at the UN. And it's just something that's. also interesting to point out on that point, not only were they spying on Merkel, but it made

only the headlines for a day or two, and there was no diplomatic blowback between the two countries. So not only was it forgotten by the media, but it was like, imagine your own leader, you know, you're the leader of the government, and you know that this country that you are subservient to in so many ways is now spying on you, and you have no recourse. You have nothing to say about that, like absolutely insane. Because they serve the same interests. Of course. Of course. Well, but that's hegemony right there. I mean, the fact that, you know, Germany really can't see its foreign policy is separate

from the priorities of U.S., you know, U.S. dictator. Look at what's happening right now. More importantly, the point that I'm trying to highlight is these, bringing all this hypocrisy into one little package, if you were to mention to anybody who regularly on the daily overlooks these facts, if you were to mention to them to Stasi in East Germany and the fairly light in comparison methods of either censorship or surveillance that occurred in that particular government, the amount of pop culture and media presentations and books and garbage we hear ad nauseum over and over again. Oh, in the Soviet system, in this system, wherever else

it may be, right, that these were horrible authoritarian systems. You couldn't live. You'd feel like you're trapped in a straight jacket because of all the limitations that are put on you, particularly from the surveillance apparatus. These same people live in a draconian and almost like otherworldly sort of surveillance, and they feel just fine. In fact, they are so not concerned with it that they don't even bother to read into it and realize just how much it affects their lives. It's just to kind of build up on your guys' point of not only hegemony, but also the, this penetration of the ideology that suits this particular system into every facet of like, be from justifications. for colonialism and imperialism, be it for the dressing up of horrific crimes, basically,

against particular nations, either economically or socially or militarily, in the guise of human rights and liberal democratic freedoms and other nonsense you'd go ad nauseum. It is genuinely an impressive network that we're up against, to put it into, I guess, a simple term. But let's move on to, I guess, kind of the main topic of today, as if this wasn't already fairly heavy, which is, we know what the 19th century and 20th century colonialism were like. We know what imperialism was like in the 20th century and kind of what it's like in the 21st. But what about examples of almost colonial attitudes that continue to exist within the 21st century? Could you please give us, because you guys kind of went on, touched onto this with the covering of the Franks still used in West Africa or Francophone Africa a little bit.

the 21st, quote unquote, 21st century colonialism that has managed to adapt itself to the modern political climate has managed to pass itself off through higher transparency. Could you please guide us through this? How did it do this? In what ways, which areas or countries or regions are currently affected in this flesh this out a little bit for us? Yeah, there's a lot of things to say here. I'll start with the most obvious example of 21st century colonialism, which is Israel and Palestine. And it's actually interesting, and it touches with the conversation we were just having about the sophisticated and subtle mechanisms of domination that are now in play, because I think modern Israel, with, of course, the backing of Europe and most notably the United States, is this sort of grotesque mixture of like 19th century brutal settler colonialism, with 21st century technology. So now you have unmanned drones, you have sniper drones, you have automated border policing, right?

Israel sort of mobilizes the cutting edge technology in order to impose itself on the Palestinian people. And you can see the ideology. What is the ideological superstructure of settler colonialism? Look in Israel. It's fascism. Look at how the people that are raised in that society that are conditioned under that ideological superstructure talk about Palestinians. They're animals. They're subhuman.

They're savages. We need to, you know, wipe them off the map. And it strikes the modern ear as sort of absurd and grotesque. Like, you know, at least America and these other countries are better at sort of being more subtle with the way they talk. I mean, even the war on terror in America, the U.S. got pretty damn colonial in its rhetoric about civilization, about, you know, Islam, et cetera. And we still hear that resonate down today. But I think looking at Israel, the way that the people are ideologically primed to dehumanize Palestinians, the way that they marry 20, first century technology with 19th century

settler colonialism is an interesting example of exactly that. And another aspect here, Israel is not the only settler colony in existence today. Of course, Australia, Canada, the United States, go down the list. But there's this weird sort of historical thing

that happens where some people, not in our opinion, but in the world's opinion, like some people are grandfathered into acceptability, right? Like what the U.S. did to the Native Americans, is absolutely genocidal, brutal, disgusting, and it's ongoing in so many ways, visit the reservation in the United States, see the immiseration, the poverty, the destruction of a cultural

legacies, and of course, people resisting those things, you know, it's just as real and it's an ongoing process. There are elements of so-called Marxists, you know, patriotic socialists, etc., that want to just wrinkle past this and say, hey, the U.S. has already been settled, right? The genocide has already happened. It's all in the past. Now we must move. forward and i think that ignores the very real ongoing sort of settler colonial um and and the oppression of nations within the united states's borders of course but but israel makes it so explicit israel makes all of this stuff not academic not going back into a book and thinking abstractly about what this means or what it's meant what could have been yeah but just turn on

the tv and look at how you know israeli prime minister talks about palestinians look at how they actually treat those people and it's it's the perfect example example. And I think you can learn a lot just by studying, by studying that iteration. I'm going to step, take us back for just a second. So when we're thinking about kind of new forms of colonialism, neo-colonialism, so it's worth remembering that the 21st century, as you mentioned, colonialism in the 21st century, the 21st century is often hailed as the age of globalization, progress, advancements in technology, connectivity, allowing people to come together, the development of the rules-based international order, talk about the advancement of feminism across

the world, all of these major advancements that we talk about and the fact that we can come together as a world community against these fundamental things. But just look beneath the surface, beneath this utopian facade of what the world is developing into and what do you see. You still see that same system of exploitation that. and domination that had taken place previously, but now we see it in the forms of neocolonialism, which is, again, an extension and, you know, constitutive of capitalism. So what we see is that these former colonial countries have continued in many ways. They're the colonial practices and processes that they had previously in economic, political, and cultural realms over their formerly colonized areas,

as well as, you know, we can talk about cultural hegemony and how they've expanded the scope of their colonialism far beyond their former colonial subjects. That'll take us a long time to get to. So I'm going to step past that for a second. But what we need to know is that neocolonialism is a manifestation of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and that we have to recognize it as such and then combat it as such. without recognizing that modern capitalism necessitates neocolonialism and neocolonialism is a process of modern capitalism without keeping those two things linked, our analysis is going to be very, very lacking.

So, you know, modern colonialism is an outgrowth in some ways, but also a further development on the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, which we've been talking about up to this point. So again, keeping a historical materialist analysis, in mind, we have to think about how colonialism was carried out in the past in order to understand how neocolonialism has developed and is carried out today. Again, that's, you know, something that's pretty heavy and would take us quite a bit of analysis to get through, which I think is not kind of the critical thing to do at this juncture in time, but perhaps some other time

we can talk about those ways in which that was carried out. But what we have to also, analyze is that one of the ways, one of the main ways in which neocolonialism operates is through the global economic system. We've talked about this globalization and how many people are hailing this as some sort of victory towards universal human rights and such. This is actually in many cases what allows the neocolonial system to perpetuate itself. I know that you've talked about things like the IMF and the World Bank before these institutions, which impose structural adjustment policies on developing countries, forcing them to open up their markets to foreign corporations,

adhere to free market principles, et cetera, et cetera. I know that this is something that we've talked about on guerrilla history. I know that this is something that you've talked about before and something that most of the listeners are going to be very intimately aware of and something that we probably don't need to talk about right now. I feel like I'm saying that a lot because this is such a huge conversation that like there's a lot of really interesting avenues and very important avenues that we could go down, but the scope of the conversation would become so huge that it would be impossible to actually get through

anything if we did. But in addition, the economic domination, neocolonialism operates through political means. This is another very critical point that we have to understand. The installation of puppet governments, support for authoritarian regimes in post-colonial countries is a very common tactic that's used by imperial powers to maintain control of their former colonial subjects as well as other countries that they would have liked to have been their former colonial subjects and would like to exert that same sort of influence on today. These regimes, I like using the term regime because it's been co-opted by the imperialists to describe any anti-imperialist country essentially. But the regimes of these kind of puppet governments that are serving in the

interest of the neocolonial masters serve the interest of the foreign allies rather than the needs of their own people in these countries leading to what we see massive scale of corruption within these countries human rights abuses to push down on any movement that is actually yearning for true independence from their former colonial masters suppression of dissent all we have to do is look at how fully embracing of the military dictatorship in Egypt, Western colonial powers are. We can look at the support for the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. We can look at interference in domestic affairs in countries like Venezuela and Cuba,

which are, of course, not neo-colonial subjects, but the colonial powers would like to subject them to the same sorts of structures that are in place in the other countries that we've mentioned throughout this conversation in terms of modern colonialism. These are examples of neocolonialism in action. We can also talk about the cultural sphere and how neocolonialism operates in the cultural sphere, how American culture is glorified through the media, entertainment, consumerism, homogenization of cultural cultural identities in various parts around the world, how local traditions, local customs are replaced by Western ideals,

consumerism. We can talk about how there's a dominance of the English language as a global language and how that's a form of modern imperialism and neo-colonialism. There's a book that came out a few years ago at this point. I believe it's called Imperial Linguistics. linguistic imperialism, I think, is the title of the book. I'll have to look it up again. But what we have to understand is that, again,

just to drive home that point that I made earlier, and I understand that this is probably a bit of a rambling answer because, again, there's so much to say. But from the perspective of any person who's coming at this from anything akin to a Marxist analysis of the world, we have to understand that neocolonialism, the colonialism of the 21st century, as I think you put it earlier or put it in the show notes, the running order of the show.

This is a direct result of the capitalist system. That is the key point that we have to understand it. It perpetuates inequalities between developed and developing world because capitalism thrives on exploitation of cheap labor and resources, and it has had to evolve over time in order to do it in a way that is conducive to utilizing the developments in things like, you know, globalization and and the advancement of the so-called human rights that we try to push around the world. I say we as if I'm still in, you know, the United States, but I'm not. Exactly right. And even if you were in the United States as a, even if you're a member

of the labor aristocracy generally, then this is only a tacit and very fragile relationship to the overarching systems of oppression across the world. And even more so for the internal peripheries within the United States and other quote unquote highly economically developed areas these people are not the ones driving this policy these people are very rarely even the people those who benefits mostly from these policies but I do understand what you mean definitely but it's kind of it's the same thing as a I'm sure you guys have seen this meme where it's a like a politician statement was like I want to raise taxes on the rich. And it's just a picture of a guy, a guy who makes less than $30,000 a year yelling

at this guy. It's like, all right, why? Anyways, that silliness aside, this has been an incredibly, incredibly dense episode today. We're going on in a very good way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, in a fantastic way. It's going on an hour and 10 minutes, roughly. I had three other or four other points, roughly, but that will very easily push us into like two and a half. our territory. So I think it would be a very good idea to instead have you guys back on in the future to cover everything from the, you know, propagandistic justifications to the way that current modern anti-imperial struggle struggles form, how they grow, how they survive, how they succeed. And then once they succeed, once national resources, for example, are collectivized,

nationalized, run on some sort of socialist basis, what changes in the anti-imperial struggle, what are anti-imperial struggles? And then we can do even more fun stuff like, you know, our favorite moments in history along these lines. Adnan has a big smile, just thinking about these. I love it. I do. I do. It sounds so fun.

Exactly right. And we absolutely had a blast having you guys on for our audience. Anybody who's not well aware of their work or the work of Rev Left, you're really genuinely missing out, not only on incredibly entertaining content, but academically presented, very tight and densely packaged and fruitful. conversations. It's generally it's an honor and privilege to have you guys on. I have to say that if you think that we're a very academic program, that's all Adnan's fault because he's the only one of the three of us that's an actual academic. So, hey, you know what? Somebody's got to do it. It's

honest work. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. People joke around all podcasts are each other's enemies and shit because, you know, there's a limited market, et cetera, et cetera, you know, capitalist brain talking now. But we kind of cover, you know, the complete shit posters, which is what I would like to call the D program, then podcast where you can sometimes learn something useful and shows where you can actually learn something useful like yours. So we're not exactly at odds because we are not fighting over the same, let's talk, mood that people are in during the 24-hour life cycle, but during which they would like to learn, you know. Have you seen American commutes to work with her two and a half hours of inner city highway driving? These people have enough time to listen to two podcasts and around. Yeah, exactly. It's not an issue whatsoever.

Which, by the way, the vast majority of our audience isn't even American, al-hando-a-law. Moving aside from this, I would like to wrap up. So, can you guys please give us a or give the audience particularly all the information where can they see you? what are you working on what do you have planned get them excited even more so than they probably have been from just listening to today's episode you can follow me at Twitter

on Twitter X whatever it is now at a non-A-D-N-A-N-A-N-A-Husain H-U-S-A-I-M and especially these days with all that's happening in the world I've kind of reactivated my Twitter you know polemical juices they've been flowing

And I also have another small podcast that people might be interested in. It's called the M-A-J-L-I-S, not the one that's about Radio Central Asia and sponsored by the CIA that's got the same name. But it's about the Middle East Islamic world, diasporic Muslim culture, things like that. We have an upcoming episode on a new book on The History of the Oud, wonderful. instrument that I am now obsessed with trying to learn. So I'm only on my third lesson, but I just think it's phenomenal. It's fabulous. So check that out. And also, I just say, the back catalog, we talked a little bit. You mentioned, Hakim mentioned Ibn Khaldun. We had an episode where we talked about Ibn Khaldun's social thought. And, you know, there might be other episodes like

our Sanctions at War series. We were talking about neocolonialism. That's probably the principal way. It's been operating most recently, and we've got a series of, I don't know how many, maybe eight. More than that. It's got to be at least 12. Right. Yeah. So it's based on this book Sanctions at War, and we take different case studies and the whole theme of sanctions and how they've been applied. So do check out our back catalog of guerrilla history. And it's great to be on the program is a fabulous show. And I think your audience might, might enjoy some of our episodes on guerrilla history. So check us out. I'm sure they will.

Please, everybody do go check out their work, check out their Patreon, check out their Twitters, and show them some love. They deserve it. Absolutely brilliant work. I'll tell the people how to find the Patreon and everything. Yes. You can, of course, you can also follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995.

I'm going to recommend everybody pick up Domenico-Lessardo-Stalin history and critique of a black legend, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, I co-translated and edited alongside my friend and collaborator Salvatore Engel de Maoro. I got a copy. You can get the physical copy, which is very affordable and looks very awesome. Or, listeners, if you are somebody who doesn't have the financial means to do so, we intentionally were very excited to work with Isker Books because they make all of their books available for free as PDF. So if you don't have the ability to pick up the print copy, and I'd love it if you did,

but if you don't have the financial means to do so, it was very important to us that the PDF would be available for free because this is really what are you fucking commies? Fuck me, you often see this on Twitter like, oh, you claim to be a Marxist or a communist or a socialist

and you wrote a book and you're charging people money for it. Well, I can probably say, we worked for a year and a half on this project and we are giving you the PDF for free. You can get that at iscribos.org. not to quote dang or dung however you want to say his name or whatever is proper but uh socialism is not poverty so no no i of course but and also just the pitch since i mentioned my my

lovely collaborator salvatore engleda mauro uh he and i also and this will be one of if not the first place that'll actually this will be announced on where uh most of the way through another book translation project right now. And it's from a French scholar, and the tentative title for it is going to be ecology, the highest stage of communism. I love it. Very nice. Which, of course, is playing off of both imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism,

as well as neo-colonialism, the highest stage of imperialism. But it's a history of the kind of agro-ecological history of the Soviet Union in Cuba. I love it. And that'll also be through Iskra books, which means, again, if you don't want to pick up the print copy, and we'd love it if you did, because there's a lot of work going into it. And just seeing copies like in people's hands and places around the world is a very gratifying feeling. It's going to be available for free as a PDF anyway. So, you know, keep that, keep that in mind. I'll give Henry the greatest honor.

You're the book that you worked on, the Lucerta translation, which, by the highly recommend everybody, check out. It is a fantastic work, and you guys have done a great job. I read the original, I think, at the time, the very first time I read it, I tasked one of my close friends who was visiting Italy to buy an Italian copy, which was professionally translated, and I sat there painstakingly with a dictionary trying to go through with that. So I read it the first time. And then afterwards, the second time I read it, I read the really bad Portuguese translation to English that some guy on Twitter did. And then finally, I bought the physical copy for it, and I managed to read it all the way through. But it was the book that broke the wood of my shelf. So thank you.

You're welcome. I'm glad to hear that, you know, I made some lasting impact on your dwelling, whether that's, you know, breaking things or whatever. But, you know, also, if you'd like to talk about the Stalin book sometime, just let me know. For sure. For sure. I know is also a fan of yours.

So I'm sure that he would be happy to talk about it as well. As for guerrilla history, you can support the show on Patreon at patreon. dot com forward slash gorilla history with gorilla being spelled g u e r r i l a history we're 100% listener funded and it's a political project so like the we don't really make much money on it but it's nice to pay for the platform fees and stuff like that so you know pitch in it if you're if you're a listener we've got some bonus content on on there and you can follow the show on Twitter at gorilla underscore pod with again gorilla being spelled g u e r r i l-l-a underscore pod

these guys make absolutely fantastic work likewise with RevLeft so check out all their work all the links will be in the description as mentioned and that is it for today this has been the video program I'm Hakeem

I'm Yugopnik I'm Adnan lovely and I'm Henry let's hope your nose does appeal off I'll break your nose maybe yeah I'm going to be able to be.

I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. You're going to be able to be. You're going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be able to be. You know what I'm going to do.