Guerrilla History - Radical Independent Media as Anti-Imperialist Practice w/ Sina Rahmani

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History,  we present a crossover conversation we did with our friend Sina from The East Is a Podcast on the topic of Radical Independent Media As Anti-Imperialist Practice!  This topic stems from a talk Henry gave for the Friends of Socialist China, and will be continued in a forthcoming episode on Publishing As Anti-Imperialist Practice featuring several Editorial Board members of Iskra Books.  Be sure to Subscribe to Sina's show (links below), and also subscribe to our freshly made YouTube channel, which will begin uploading material very soon! Sina Rahmani is host of The East Is a Podcast, which is a critical lens on the history of the present on West Asia and North Africa (and beyond), featuring interviews with experts and archival mashups.  Be sure to also subscribe to his YouTube channel, and follow him on Twitter @urorientalist. 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 den, Ben, boo? 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. Hello, guerrilla history. Listeners, this is co-host Henry. Today for you, we have a crossover episode that we did

alongside our friend, Sina Rahmani, of the East is a Podcast. This episode will also be appearing on the East is a podcast, on the podcast feed, as well as on the YouTube channel for that show. The discussion that we have stems from a talk that I was invited to give at a Friends of Socialist China event a few weeks back. Friends of Socialist China hosted an event titled China at 75, and I was invited as a representative for Iskra Books. as well as guerrilla history to discuss the topic publishing and radical independent media as anti-imperialist practice. When I had discussed that I had given this talk with Adnan, we decided that this was actually

a topic that was not only worth having on guerrilla history, but was worth splitting into two parts alongside guests that are friends of the show. This is the component regarding radical independent media as anti-imperialist practice, and that is why we are having Sina on, who is a host of a radical independent show. And we will also be releasing in the coming weeks a conversation that is already recorded on publishing as anti-imperialist practice

alongside several editorial board members of Isker Books. That episode is already posted on our Patreon, so patrons you will get early access to the episode, but it will be coming on our general feed in a couple of weeks. before I go into and allow Sina to then introduce the episode as he is the one who begins talking, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support our show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, where you will allow us to continue

making episodes but also get early access to some episodes like the one that we have on publishing as anti-imperialist practice. Also included in that latter conversation, the one that we have with Isker Books, you'll hear a recording of the discussion that I did with Friends of Socialist China. So if you miss that event, you'll be able to hear my seven-ish minute-long discussion on the topic that bridges these two conversations. So listeners, before I turn it over also, I would like to make one other announcement, which is that Gorilla History is going to be starting a YouTube channel.

Much to my chagrin, Adnan has finally twisted my arm into convincing us to open a YouTube channel and start doing some video content. This episode eventually will be posted on our YouTube channel as well. The channel is now active, but we have not posted anything on it yet as of recording. The plan is that we will be uploading past episodes with a small animation that we've commissioned from a Vietnamese artist, as well as some new video content. We know that the audience that watches YouTube videos is not the same audience that necessarily listens to podcast episodes. So if you know someone who would like Gorilla History but is much more likely to watch or even just listen to content on YouTube than they are to find Gorilla History on a podcast app,

that's good news for us and for them because we are now going to be having episodes posted on our YouTube channel. I will include the link of the YouTube channel in the show notes, but as I mentioned, at the time of recording, we actually have no content on the channel yet, but it is coming as soon as that artwork comes through. So, without further ado, allow me to turn this over to Sina Rickmani of the East is a podcast, and please do ensure that you are subscribed to the East is a podcast on your podcast app of choice and also on the East is a podcast YouTube channel. If you're not already subscribed, you can subscribe at the same time that you subscribe to the guerrilla history YouTube channel again, which is linked in the show notes.

So, without further ado, here is the conversation that we have with Cina Rachmane of the East is a podcast on radical independent media as anti-imperialist practice. That's my hype up. That's my hype up track for the big podcast. We are here. We are here. We are saying things that are not recorded for legal reasons. but we are excited I'm speaking in the first person

plural for no reason but guys welcome to the show we are with friends of the show fellow podcast makers podcasters if you will active principle active participlers like me in the podcast industry

Henry and Adnan welcome guys great to be with you Sina well this podcast is slowly becoming the Adnan Hussein show thankfully an adult has showed up Adnan has made many appearances of late.

I've extracts it many hours of content from you. Thank you, Adnan. I'm a content provider. Yeah. I don't know if I'm a content producer, but I'm a provider. No, it's all part of the production process. But actually, production process of podcast is actually why we're here. Because we've been kicking around this for a little bit to talk about the role of podcasting specifically and anti-imperialism.

And in general, it's sort of larger question of anti-imperialist media. Like, what are we doing? what is the nature of this work? I kind of don't, I'm coming up personally to like my 10th, my sixth birthday of my show, which is like insane to me, six years of like talking on a mic.

And at this stage, especially given everything that's happened in the last year, there are times where I ask, and this is like, and I mean this sincerely, not to just be like a cheesy, provocative opening question. But I say like, what is the point of doing this? Like what we're screaming into a void and none of our, you know, none of our political leaders, at least, the elite of our society, care about what we say. They write us off and, in fact, they use their, like, tech oligarchies to, like, stamp us out of existence when they can.

And, you know, so I ask this, like, sincerely, like, what are we doing here, folks? Well, I mean, I think you characterize it as it going into a void. If it really was going into a void, then the tech overlords would not actually be interested in stifling and when possible, eliminating and suppressing shows like yours and ours. I think it's precisely because we're making free content that's available on kind of widely, fairly widely accessible platforms, even if they are private platforms owned by these tech companies, you know, it means that there's a potential audience for radical thinking, anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought and politics and I think also creating, you know, I'm old enough to know and to feel like being the only leftist that you know. I mean, okay, I know people who are on the left, maybe democratic socialists, you know, went into academia and you meet a lot of people who, you know, in the modern academy, style themselves as dissidents or radical and so on. But in point of fact, you know,

90%, 95% of academics and of academic work is pretty mainstream, pretty normative, and not very radical in any real political sense beyond some of the ideas, fostering and sponsoring kind of commitments broadly to social justice or to making space or accommodating difference. But when does it ever really turn into genuinely radical politics, seldom. that is the case. And so it's very possible if you grew up and came to political consciousness over the course of the 80s and the 90s to have felt that not only was a real existing socialism

defeated and eliminated as a possibility, but that the victory of neoliberalism had become almost so total that there wasn't except on the fringes and the margins. radical politics in the like, you know, serious eco, you know, ecological critique and activism like Earth First and, you know, groups like that that emerged, you know, during that time or in the emerging WTO and anarchist anti, you know, kind of trade, the black block and things like that. But you could genuinely feel like outside of a couple of outlets, like what was a little bit more radical for the time, democracy now, and places like that, that there was absolutely no community for you. Like, it was over politically. And what is so wonderful and was so exciting

and energizing with the emergence of left media, independent media, on places like YouTube and other kinds of platforms, and the whole podcasting movement, was that you were able to discover communities, not just the content. you know, and be exposed to a lot more interesting work and thoughts and perspectives, but to feel like as a leftist with a genuine materialist political critique against empire and against capitalism, against racism, that there were actually others around. And this was a vehicle for getting to know them and to know some of their ideas. And that, I have to say, has made such a world of difference in terms of increasing, you know, I wouldn't say,

I'm optimistic. I mean, I'm a pretty pessimistic person overall, but to feel like there is the possibility of struggle, that communication, that political education, that forging of a network is something that this form of media that has been opened up makes available and makes possible in ways that I can tell you as a younger person in my teens and 20s and, you know, early mid-30s, wasn't available at all. Yeah, just to add in, I agree with Adnan entirely that this idea of being able to form community around various independent, alternative, and radical media is an important thing because at the end of the day, our political movements are all the only way that we can

succeed is through a mass movement. And how do you generate a mass movement? Well, through mass political party is one option, but also by generating communities, by generating communities that then have a shared struggle that work together, have shared, they understand their shared oppression, and they have a shared vision of how to overcome that shared oppression. If you're just an individual who's consuming media and not forming community, you are not leading, you are not even being a part of any political movement that has any realistic goals or strategy of achieving political change. And at that point, you have no choice to be, but to become nihilistic about things. By forming community, by taking part within

community, and by linking that community with a shared political struggle, that is the avenue for achieving political change. Now, whether or not your particular community is geared towards achieving that political change is a different question entirely, but the fact remains that without forming communities and without working inside of communities and trying to link that community connection with the political struggle, you are not going to achieve any goals. So that's a very important point that Adnan raises, but also one of the things that I've been focusing on a lot lately is narrative and rhetoric. So this, This is something that I talked about a little bit at the China at 75 seminar from Friends

of Socialist China and something that I've talked about in various episodes, off and on. But the way in which the world is framed is not a passive process. It's an active process and this process is carried out by class interests. The way that media traditionally has worked is as a mouthpiece of the capitalist interests, the oppressing classes interests and the way in which narratives are constructed, the way in which arguments are made and framed, this is a result of class interests and class struggle. It's just that it was in the ballpark of the controlling classes, the capitalist classes, the oppressing classes. But as I quoted in that talk that I mentioned, the China at 75 talk, we have to think

about how to break down these dominant narratives. When we're talking about neoliberal capitalism, and again, this is something that I directly say within that talk, the narrative is one that has been constructed of inevitability and superiority. And that idea of inevitability and superiority is justifying the political goals of the neoliberal capitalists, which is inherently exploitation of the global south, exploitation of colonized people, and the continued domination and dominance of the North, and this narrative takes place through various avenues. Functional linguist Michael Halliday said, language does not passively reflect reality, language actively creates reality, without having a venue in which to try to

articulate these analyses in a way that makes sense to. people that they can then equip themselves with and take to their communities, we are living within the reality constructed by the oppressing classes. We have to construct an alternative narrative in order to imagine an alternative reality. And so this, even if we're not reaching, you know, the millions of people that mainstream media is going to be reaching, the goal here is not to reach as many people. It is to arm the people that have a vested interest in carrying out political change, not only with the analysis that we provide, an analysis that is diametrically opposed in most cases to the analysis being fed to people, but also utilizing the ability

and utilizing the expertise of our various guests that we bring on. I'm not going to claim that we're the ones doing it, but the various guests that we're able to shine the light on their work of in order to arm us with that alternative narrative and that rhetoric in which we can not only show that the system that we're living in is an unjust and oppressive system, but that it is not an inevitable system and that we must, it is a absolute necessity that we must move beyond that system, deconstruct it, and find a new political horizon. So I appreciate those answers. I guess the initial question probably came off as a bit nihilistic because you're right.

It's not shouting into a void. We don't, at the sometimes, I think I meant to say sometimes it feels like we are. And I struggle with that. And I think like everything both of you said is correct. Now, one thing that troubles me, though, is that what is the devil's in the details when it comes to like defeating kind of narratives, right? Because how we do that, how we embark upon that, first of all, requires on to agree what's the narratives we have to defeat in what realms and how do you, what's who then, like what, like, what are the, let's say like in sort of Hegelian terms, what are these sort of antithetical positions that we take up in this dialectic between like pro-capitalist and ostensibly anti-capitalist or in our case, pro-imperialist in the case of me and me and Adnan. But obviously, Henry, you come from, we come from the same. media sphere anyways and we live in the same media sphere and that media sphere is dominated by a handful of corporations all of them reactionary some having like a liberal overlay some having like a

right wing overlay but ultimately there's two the two sort of the sections of the american elite as much as they disagree like the various sort of cross-section of the american elite if you do as much as they disagree on domestic issues ultimately they're all imperialists and they all pull the same road. And if that's not clear to you after like a year of Gaza genocide that liberals and so-called conservatives alike are the same political animals when it comes to

imperialism, then like you're just the last person and what are you doing listening to this podcast. But maybe like I guess ultimately what I want to sort of reach to and kind of grapple with is to think about what are the natures of the communities built around the private

consumption of media like that we produce? Because ultimately one thing that sets apart the podcast era from sort of previous eras of media like let's say like media publication is sort of like I don't know how to put it like the problem with this kind of like episode is that we have to kind of draw we have to draw up a kind of you know relatively rudimentary map of like media history and kind of work our way through from things like manuscript print to the rise of newspapers to the rise of you know like radio to the rise of TV like mass communications and And then to our period, which is like insanely rapid from when we were, when I was a kid getting on the internet at like what, just like grade six, God, to say that, that was like 30 years ago. More. What was I was saying? It's 40 years ago. Almost.

Oh, it was like 30 years ago. Like getting on the internet for the first time to where we are now, where we publish on the internet. So like this itself is part of a sort of media. I don't want to say evolution, but unfortunately I'm going to reach for that word because the tech itself. did evolve and that plays a role here like data has been the cost of say sending data for instance the amount

of data has drastically reduced the speed at which it has gone compared to say 288 whatever people can remember that I don't know Henry if you remember dial-up you may not be I did you ever experienced dial-up yeah so you don't even know I'm not even

I'm not even 30 Sina and I didn't have a phone until I was 18 so there's a very small window in which I had a technology Like, kids will ever know the sound of a dial-up motor. And that's like a relic of an older era. And that was 20 years ago. Okay, so just to give us a sense of our heads are spinning here, not just as producers of media, but as consumers.

Right. And in the midst of all, these phones happen, smartphones. Like, these are interactive media revolutions that, like, nobody, we won't know the consequences of this. I mean, we're getting a sense from the fact that people have three second attention spans. anybody under the age of 25 has literally a four-second or five-second attention span. Like, these are, like, these are tectonic shifts in how we consume information. And we're just, like, in it, we're, like, surfing something.

You know, like, we're part of it, obviously. We're, we're peddlers. I've always thought that podcasting is a kind of pamphleteering of the 21st century that, like, insofar is that that was popular. and the pamphlets that you could reach with the physical limitation of paper to human eye, which is how they were broadcast, right? Like, that was the limit, whereas now I have people like writing me from wherever, like on my YouTube channel.

Like, we have people writing from Occupied Palestine watching the episodes that I produce for the MacDees. I mean, that's not, this is new. We've never been here. Like, we have no script for this, right? But the imperialists certainly know how to, they use it against this, right? Like the imperialists know how to convince people of things extremely quickly. They convince people of the necessity of destroying Ukraine. It had to convince people

of the necessity of destroying Syria. They told you that the Yemen, the Yemen was a civil war. They told you that like all this, like, you know what I mean? And people buy it. People buy this stuff. It works. It's not like, you know, I think if anything, our literacy has gone down. So these are just a big jumble of thoughts that I've like always bugged me. They're like these, we're really like, are we, are we ourselves like, we won't know the answers to these questions like until long from now, like the consequences of this era? Or is this just, we go with the times? Does media history just like this? And we just go with the times.

Am I like extrapolating too much? Well, I want to add something on a couple of things that you said. One was about attention spans. So this is an interesting point. I had always made essentially the same argument. that you did, that young people don't have attention spans because of technology. And that's true if you look at it in a specific way. But my wife argues with me, as, you know, spouses typically do.

But in this specific case, she has the expertise more so than I do. She's a linguist. And a lot of research has come out that is looking at the attention span of young people that have grown up within the technology age. And what they're finding is not that the attention span is shorter. It's just that it's different. And here's what I mean by that. When I was growing up, as I mentioned, I didn't have a computer or a phone until I was 18.

So, you know, for me, a book that was 370 pages long was, okay, I'll just sit down and read it over the course of one or two days. That was just a normal thing. It's not that children, you know, and not just when I'm saying children, I mean that broadly defined group of young people, younger than me, their attention span is not shorter in that they cannot sit down and consume information and media in a shorter period of time. What it is is that it has to be delivered in a more rapid way. So that is why we see young people who are able to consume extreme amounts of YouTube videos, for example, but don't read very often. It's not that the information intake is smaller. It's the form of the information is different. And so that's not to say that I'm like disagreeing with you because I always did take that same argument that you did. But I do want to add a little bit of nuance onto that because I've been corrected on that myself. But in terms of the other point that you made that I want to address, and I'll try to be brief so that none, you know, the more analytical one of us can actually say something useful. But regarding the question of community and regarding the idea that it's so much easier to get information out there, there is issues with both of these things as well.

So I know that in our previous answer, we took a relatively rosy view of community building through media. I don't think that that's something that inherently happens and inherently happens in very useful ways. As I mentioned, when a community forms, that does not mean that that community is going to be constructed in a way in which they're going to be able to eat. even coalesce around a political message, much less try to carry out any sort of political change as a result of the fact that they are some community. The point is, is that there is community foundation and formation that takes place as a result of sharing in anything, really, but, you know, if we're talking about media, there are communities that form around different types of media, different specific shows in some cases. I know we have a community

of guerrilla history listeners, and we are not a particularly big show. You know, this is just something that happens organically. Now, the question of what do you do with that community is a completely different question than just the idea of that there has to be some formation of a community. The problems inherent with this is how do you take a political line that is coherent but still manages to mean some sort of community without completely splitting that community into a hundred different ways. What is the purpose of that media creation?

Are you affiliated with a political party or not? So in the case of guerrilla history, we are completely independent. We work across multiple continents. You know, I live in Russia, nuns in Canada. Our former co-hosts is in the United States. We have guest hosts that join us from all over the place. Our guests are from all over the place. We can't really have a direct linkage to a political party

just as a result of us being split across the globe. But even if we were in one place, is the purpose of guerrilla history to drive a specific political party, or are we simply a tool in order to provide analysis and narrative? In my view, and Adnan is free to disagree with me on this, but in my view, our specific show being focused on history is not really for the creation of a single political movement coalesced around the fact that they listen to this show.

it's to arm people inside their other communities. That's not to say that we can't make a community of listeners to the show, but trying to form some coherent ideological edge to our listenership is rather difficult when the purpose of the show is rather to arm people in radical movements within their own communities, within their own organizing circles, within their own political parties globally. So that's one issue is how, do you, how do you orient your media? Is it for driving a specific political point or is it for

arming people regardless of their specific ideological orientation? So thinking about that is one issue. And then as I mentioned, also thinking about how to, if you are in the category where you are trying to form a community that is not just existing, but rather has some goal in mind, not in the case of us, but let's say you are a podcast that's associated with a political party, just as an example. You have to think about how do you go beyond simply people listening to your show and sharing in some analysis and actually taking some action in the real world? And that's a different question entirely. So just a couple of issues that we have with the fact that we are divorced from the listenership in many cases. Like I do know personally some people

that listen to the show. I've met several people who listen to the show in person. Yes, here in Russia, very strange, but you know, you'd bump into people all over the place. I know, Adnan, you were at a seminar where you met Sarah Jolani, who listens to the show and has been on the show since then, but you just bumped into her. You know, that happens, but that doesn't mean that we are at the locus of some community. And so there is some divorce from us in our case and the community that is our listeners to us, you know, that's another issue. So what what does one do with those inherent issues of being media rather than being involved in a political process?

Well, I do think it would be valuable to find ways using the podcast form, YouTube, other of these platforms to create a more active sense of community. that can be directed organically toward more political action and political purpose. Like, that's actually something that would be exciting to consider and develop and to explore how one does that. And I don't know too many examples where you have a very close relationship between the show and an activist community. That's something to think about.

Maybe there are some examples that I'm not so familiar with. And what that suggests in part is that there is a way in which the media and particularly the form of media in which we're operating on that can connect amazingly people from all across the world is also at some distance, just as Henry was saying, from a kind of physical community that's organizational in a face-to-face way at all, or even feels itself. It's very possible to be a lurker, have anonymous identities, to, you know, have like some kind of distance, really, that prevents genuine politics or only a certain form of politics, an online politics that has its own dynamic and isn't necessarily, you know, it has some consequences, but it isn't necessarily designed or engineered to a place. political pressure in the most efficient ways. So, you know, there's some questions really about, you know, how and whether one can do that. But it also suggests that a lot of people who are engaged and involved in online left media, for example, just as they would be in online right media or other kinds of shows that don't seem to, you know, have a political orientation, is that they are, in some ways in competition, or they see themselves in competition, you know, for attention,

which is the nature of media under neoliberal conditions, under capitalism, which is the selling of marketing, the selling of advertising, the monetizing of these medias means that having subscribers and, you know, eyes, you know, is somehow materially important and significant. And I think in some ways it does contribute to provocation, theatrical sorts of political performance and things like that because you've got an audience to appeal to and it may constrain and limit in some ways. active engagement in political activity because that's risky, because that can turn off people who are part of your audience. And so for a whole host of reasons, there's a relationship here to be negotiated. And I think it does contribute a little bit to some of the very fruitless. And it's a topic we've discussed on in guerrilla history at different times, because

Brett, our former co-host and a wonderful colleague on his shows, Rev. Left Radio and Red Menace, you know, is pretty ecumenical on the left and doesn't accentuate and emphasize sectarian kinds of divisions, but

tries to build a broad-based, radical sort of left that can accommodate, you know, having differences and having serious and sometimes even difficult conversations, but, you know, out of Comradly Solidarity because the greater goal is achieving success and victory in our struggles for social justice, for liberation, and so on, and not out of self-aggrandizement and egoism

that is, I think, a great temptation of the online media. And I think fuels a lot of the very silly divisions and spats, you know, like that you will get, especially of people who are on the kind of like social democratic left, who are trying to kind of take positions, vis-a-vis, you know, electoral politics and things like that. They will, you know, enathematize one another. They'll do all these things. And it actually channels discourse and genuine critical left thought, you know, into channels that are not particularly productive, but also divide and prevent the kinds of solidarity and cooperation that's going to be absolutely crucial for genuine organized opposition. So, you know, there are, you know,

things to be careful about on this, you know, it has to be approached, I think, with an eye to how can it be made productive in connecting with active communities, to be genuinely in a political process, as Henry sort of put it. And also, on the other hand, how do you avoid the temptations of, you know, celebrity culture, even if you're a minor, minor celebrity, because the left is not big, some people really feel like that's the most important thing to get that kind of feedback and creates this kind of like, you know, silly sort of left online culture that is a distraction from the genuine. And we can't afford to be very distracted right now. You mentioned, you know, I mean, we're in the midst of genocide for a year. You know, the fact that we haven't

stopped it, of course, is because we're fighting hugely powerful imperialist forces. But the fact that we haven't at least contributed more to slowing the war machine in the imperial core with all of this online media, with all of these protests, with all of this kind of activism, suggests that we have a lot of real thinking to do about how to be an effective left. And what I would hope, you know, these kinds of shows, your show, our show, a lot of the other really excellent kind of spaces that have been created are places where genuine, theoretical, conceptual, and practical, strategic and tactical analysis, deep dialogues on these things can be worked out

by creating strong connections, greater trust between people to be able to have more of these sorts of conversations that hopefully will translate into a smarter struggle. That's the hope. That's all we can, you know, hope can come out of this as the major good. No, those are great sort of think points.

to think about, I wonder about, I just wouldn't get sense of like, can we talk about the scale of our task in a sense? Because think about how I feel like I think I'm hearing what you guys are saying. And I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think part of me, you know, I can't take my own, my own perspective on all this, obviously like everything I say is comes from my own training in terms of like, you know, critical theory, right? In part of the sort of project of critical theory if you if you accept the you know it begins with plato argument is is a theory of textuality right is like how do you see the texts how do and and like it's in the sense that like the world in comes to us as textual right like we can't we can't and you know which is to say

that like the the problems of textuality also confront us in something called the reality of this world right in the rl as the kids say so like these similar and part of what like culture does for us is to prepare us for the so-called real world and to help train our brains. At least, this is part of the, I'm fast-forwarding a lot through thousands of years of critical history, critical theory, but essentially like the era of the novel and like the rise of individualism are very closely linked. And also there's a triangular, there's a triangle of also realism that's included in this too, is that we learned how to be real. We learned reality from our textualities. At least the textualities taught us.

of our reality. So it seems like poor Henry is having a gift. Well, I think that's, you know, an interesting point. And I had wanted to come back to that question of the history of the media form

and what that might imply. And your analogy between the podcast and the pamphlet, one might say the TikTok video and the broadside, right? You know, like these short, ephemeral public kind of statements that are that are shared and you know i think there is something to that um that uh there are different um modes of production of texts and of the material conditions

and there is some relationship between those two and there's always been a lot of study um on thinking of the book and the printing press and the move from manuscript script to, you know, the printed book as something that enabled or at least accompanied capitalism. And so it's kind of a chicken and the egg kind of question. You know, it's like how much do technological developments themselves impel social, political, and economic changes? And we might add here, forms of thinking, communication, and thought, like the It's very structure of it, versus how much are those products of various changing productive forces and social conditions that make something like the printing press suddenly

become feasible and effective and an agent of change because of a different era that has already changed the social conditions? And I think of as a case where, you know, Akbar, the mobile emperor, there's a sort of story that Akbar was presented with a printing press, you know, and it was an Arabic, you know, kind of a printing press that could do Arabic script, which of course is much more complicated than, you know, the separable letters of the non-cursive hand, right, in Latin scripts in the Latin alphabet. it was seen as a marvel, you know, was recognized as a wondrous sort of thing. Look, it can kind of make these texts, but it did not displace the scribal culture of the manuscript world until, you know, many, you know, decades, a century or so later. And so it wasn't that the technology itself could affect change. It's that you had to have the right social conditions. in which the technology could be an instrument for expressing political and social, you know, kinds of interests and forces who could capitalize upon it and then make it a, you know, a relevant new era of communication. And the same thing, you know, the other side of it is that question of how it shapes thinking. manuscripts are so interesting because it was a very different kind of attitude towards the text and towards knowledge and information.

And what was considered an authoritative text is a text that was commented upon, right? It wasn't being original. It was having commentary. It was influential. You wanted to understand it. You developed commentary. And most people consumed a lot of what we think of as the classic texts, great philosophical. works, scripture, like the Bible, the Quran, et cetera, when people read them as we think of

reading, really what they were all, what they were doing was reading them through a commentary tradition. And those would be often in the margins. So you have a text and then you have around it another parallel text that is commenting and interacting with it. And it represents communities of readership and knowledge and scholarship in different ways. So I think of that as much more like, you know, things that you can do, actually. That's sort of like... YouTube comments. Yeah, it's well, what it is is that, you know, you have, you know, you have like a way

of consuming a text that is really different from the era of the book, where it's the single text is represented in this physical object. Those were much more open to wider communities of readership, leaving their kind of interpretation and understanding. And it was an authoritative commentary that was really important. So, for example, you know, people know the story that Aristotle in pre-modern philosophy, you know, was always known, and if you look in Latin texts, as the philosopher. Like, you don't have to say his name. You say, the philosopher said, you know it's Aristotle. But interestingly enough, when it came to understanding Aristotle, people referred constantly to the commentator,

the commentator, and they meant Averroes or Ibn Rushd. In other words, the way you approached Aristotle was through the commentary, the explication, the interpretation of another authoritative thinker who happened to have been from a very different culture, a very different background. So when we think of cosmopolitanism today, I actually think it's in some ways closer, like the world was globalized in different ways, and there are ways in which the manuscript, especially like the illuminated manuscript, where we have image and text all interacting and commentary around that and rubrication that highlights, you know, red parts of the text and the titles are in this, you have a visual sort of mechanism that's a lot more like

a web page than it is like a typical 19th or 20th century printed book, you know? And so it's not, when you said evolution before, I think there are progressive changes, but there are also kind of things that cycle back to some of these older modes and modalities of engagement. And that's what's so interesting about history is that if we think about it, there are some ways in which networks of knowledge were tighter, you know, during the medieval period, you did have a kind of visual, multimedia text kind of mode that is a little bit different from, say, the high era of capitalism. And I find this actually useful because maybe it helps give us if we take a longer duet history. As you did when you said, well, we could go back

in terms of critical theory and start with Plato and ancient works and come to the present, is that when we have this longer duet perspective, we see actually different nodes, and episodes where there might be connections that help us understand the present in new and different ways, rather than just seeing it as teleological trajectory without any kind of shifts, gaps, or cyclical reappropriations and repurposings of the past. I think that's what we're always doing is we're repurposing, you know, aspects of the past that are legacies of culture, you know and you know now with that the internet doesn't forget i mean i think we're in the era of total recall and it's going to be very interesting how do we navigate uh ourselves in that world of

the excess of knowledge and information um the era of receipts that's right the era of receipts there's always receipts exactly exactly you know when adnan mentioned commentaries it's it's quite interesting you know just the first thing that comes to mind is in the the other room where my books are. I've got, some of my students had bought me a two book set of Evgeniannege, the novel in verse that like formalized the Russian soul in literature. Like if somebody wants to understand the Russian soul, they're referred to Evgeniannege. But this two volume set has the book, but then it also has the commentary and the commentary is like more than twice as long as the book is.

And so a lot of these books that are classics in Russian, they all come with commentaries if you want to buy a set. Like the set is not multiple books. It's the book and commentaries on the book, which is quite interesting. But then also interesting that, you know, when we think about what we're considered the great texts, even within our radical movements, you know, ones that are not embraced by culture writ large, like let's think of capital. Capital. Is Capital one of the great texts for our political movement because everybody in our political movement has read Capital? Or is it because the people who we look up to have commented on Capital? Is it the fact that the commentaries on Capital have been inspirational for many of our political movements, even if the people in those political movements haven't themselves read Capital. By the way, Adnan, the translators of the new edition of Capital are coming on guerrilla history soon. I forgot to tell you that. But there's that new edition that's

fresh out of capital volume one, the first translation from the original German in like a century or something like that. Anyway, we're going to talk with them sometime soon. Great. In any case, you know, the question of whether something is being commented on making it considered to be one of those foundational or great texts is an interesting one, particularly when we're thinking about what has happened with media. So I'm going to try to string two thoughts together and hopefully this comes out the way that I have it in my mind. So the first strand is that we've been talking about this evolution of the media. And it's something that Adnan was touching on and something I had talked about off the record before we started is that this evolution of media is not a passive process either.

This evolution takes part, takes place as a result of class interests. You know, the oppressing class wants to advance and propagate the narrative that they put forth into. broader society, and then there is a struggle between classes in how that media is going to be utilized. Now, of course, the oppressing classes have a massive leg up when it comes to utilizing the media that they control and operate, but that does not mean that there is not grounds in which struggle can be waged within those forms, even in the past. You know, let's think about printing presses, you know, maybe not old school printing presses, but, you know, the kind of underground printing presses as well. Of course,

Who owns the major printing presses, are corporatized outlets that are associated and affiliated with capital? But how did many of our underground radical groups that have been fighting against state interests, capitalist state interests, how did they organize their thought and how did they try to popularize their thought was through underground publishing? We can look at, and we'll be talking with some people from a revolutionary paper soon, which is a repository of some of these things, but they have many newspapers, underground newspapers, underground journals. This is a site of resistance of class struggle taking place in a media landscape that is dominated by the oppressing capitalist class.

There is still that opportunity for struggle in order to advance a narrative and also try to organize a political struggle. Now, the reason that I bring this up is because as we think about how things have advanced to today, those advancements are still taking place as a result of class interests, but with the way that the media landscape is now, there's almost this, I'm going to use air quotes here, democratization of the media apparatus because anybody, any random person, like I would consider myself a random person, can get their voice onto the internet. You know, we pay for some platform fees and whatnot, but like the barriers to having your voice out there,

whether or not somebody listens to it, the barriers are quite low compared to in the past where the barrier to getting something published or printed and then distributed were more than most groups were able to take to undergo. But there's a flip side to this. The flip side is that there's an almost an overproliferation of media, something that obfuscates political lines, political messages, political ideologies, where there is content for the sake of being content. We have Adnan mentioned earlier, the celebrity culture within some of our ostensibly political movements where people are making their living on political commentary rather than using their ability to provide narrative and provide analysis to aid political struggles.

You know, spoiler alert, guerrilla history listeners, we don't really make money on the show. I was just invited to speak at the National Congress at the Communist Party of Kenya this upcoming November. I would really love to go to Kenya, but I can assure you that I neither have the money nor the break in my day job in order to go to Kenya to go speak at their National Congress. If this was a show that was raking in tens of thousands of dollars, then yes, you can be sure I would be in Kenya. But if this was a show raking in tens of thousands of dollars, what is actually the goal of the show? You know, like, is the goal of the show to make a living on it for me? Of course, no. The goal of the show is to provide materials for organizing communities, activist communities, and political movements.

But that's an aside. To get back to the point that I'm trying to drive towards is that with this overproliferation of media, and by overproliferation, I don't mean that it's in. inherently a bad thing that there's so much media available. But the problem inherent in that is that there's so much that it makes it hard for there to be definitive commentaries on anything that make it to a mass audience. So even with guerrilla history, we have about 200 episodes at this point. You know, I can recall the 200 conversations that we've had on this show. And you'll frequently hear me referencing past conversations from two or three years ago on the

show, but even with just this one show, it's difficult for me, one of the hosts of this show to remember exactly which conversation some comment that I find useful came from. So how do you reference that? How do you make commentary on that? That's within one show. If you're thinking about, okay, well, we've got the Red Nation, we've got your show, Sina, we've got our show, we've got millennials are killing capitalism, we've got Rev Left, we've got this, we've got that. Now all of a sudden, you're thinking about thousands and thousands and thousands of episodes from people that are interested in political change along a certain line that you're having to recall. And commentaries are not being made on any of those episodes individually, which makes

it really hard to make any sort of real analysis that sticks from a specific episode from one of our shows. We don't have people who are going and writing articles about an individual episode of our show. Like maybe I'll remember some analysis and quote somebody from it, but that's not being formalized in the way that commentaries were. And then we also have people who, again, ostensibly are part of our political movement, but are not doing it with the goal of actually changing the political system in the same way that we, you know, are. And that gets to the last point that I'm going to make before I shut up for a bit, which is that one of the other issues with the media. landscape that we have today versus the media landscape going back thinking about those

underground pamphlets and newspapers coming from, you know, illegal political groups of the past, ones that were very explicit about trying to overthrow the system that they were in, is that the sort of work that's required to achieve the political goals that we believe in is dangerous work. But how do you advocate for this dangerous work over the airwaves to a broad base of people, which are not going to be necessarily targeted to the community that is going to undertake that work. It's a sad fact, even within our own audiences, which I would like to think that our audiences are among the most radical out there. It's a sad fact that there is not a constituent body of our listenership that is going to be able to undertake this

dangerous action at once. That possibility is not there. That is not the realm of a community from media itself. That's something that has to take place in the underground, you know? And so this change in the media landscape in terms of this is all out in the public. People can search it out if they want, they can find it, but what comes out of that versus if you're an underground, you know, we were talking about, we had an episode on the Black Liberation Army, you know, here we go referencing an episode from a year and a half ago. we have an episode on the Black Liberation Army.

They were producing materials in the underground for their communities to think about this dangerous work that would be necessary to undertake the political change that they were doing. Now, the barriers to producing that for them and distributing it are significantly higher than we have, but the ability to target that to people who may have the ability to carry out that work is actually much easier for them than it is for us. And that's another barrier that we have to face is how do we get this, again, thinking about the goal. You know, what is the goal of any of this is to change the political system in your countries, Canada, U.S., but also globally.

You know, we live in a global capitalist imperialist system. How do we break that global system? No, I appreciate that. And I guess one of my sort of overlying sort of like something that sort of gets to me and all of this is that like yeah the nature of reading has changed

the nature of like there are in the sense that first of all like what you were describing earlier about these like these these important works of canonical literature that are now paired with commentaries this is a relatively I feel like I mean it's not a new development as

as I made clear this is an old This is an old practice, but in the sense that we're talking about mass, like acts of mass publication, right? Like the difference between the manuscript that Edmund was describing a while ago and to what you just described in terms of what your students got you is that one is printed by the thousands. And it's like written once and it's printed by the thousands where the other ones were these, I guess in some ways like, I don't want to say organic because it's like embodied. Yeah, sure, exactly. It's manual. That's where it comes from the word hand. right like like it's it's from the hand and so it was hard work like i was halfway through grad school

before i made the connection to manuscript with man like the hand and i was like oh that's what that means because i'm like a 19th century kind but people are just writing letters we call those letters right and so like as media partly the problem here is that as media forms have and again this is my own formal you know like pickled brain like my Frankfurt school pickled brain is that like as the formal developments and publication accelerated during these last several seven these last few centuries right there was also a pairing with mass literacy right like mass literacy became a thing in the 20th century so people could read the pamphlet and the 19th a little bit but mostly during the 20th right so like the power of a pamphlet is unlocked to buy the existence

of something called literacy however what we do it does not require literacy right It just requires like hearing. And even then, you're going to get transcripts and you can read it. I mean, that is another question. But there is something else, though, is that the rise of video and the video has now been incorporated into the act of reading. So what you were describing earlier, Henry, and you're correct, I have nephews. I can attest to this. Their attention span is fine when there's a loser, 14-year-old talking about Fortnite.

They have no problems paying attention to like a close reading. of Fortnite strategy. Like, these are commentaries, right? Like, this is critical discourse, but it's something trivial. It's stupid and distracting, and it's Fortnite. Right? Like, we, I think that our skills of textuality

have never been greater. We have never been more literate. We have never been more able to consume multiple streams of information. However, with that being said, we have never been subject to so much imperialist propaganda at once. and it's never been as like what's the word like all encompassing like a panoramic dominance that you know like what what liberals imagine the Soviet Union infosphere was is actually the infosphere they live in and they are a part of and they help companies contribute to like that's their Orwellian thing where they even have a fucking two minutes of hate and our guys change every now and then it's one time it's Putin sometimes it's Khomeini you know one time it's Khomeini whatever like like it's

The same process, like liberals are just, that's liberals, and that's the media sphere. We live in their media sphere, unfortunately. Right? Like the media sphere they dominate. I want to throw something in very quickly in terms of when you were saying that with audio and with video, people can hear things, even if they're not literate. Yes and no. So again, the messaging is something that has to be taken very seriously and how to tailor that

messaging in a way that's accessible, but also doesn't compromise on the profound analysis that is necessary. So this is always the issue is, you know, how do you package that analysis in a way that's accessible but still rigorous? And that's the fine line that we try to tread. You know, we sometimes hear, wow, this show is really academic. It's like, you know, I'm kind of a dumb guy. It doesn't matter. Like, whatever. But if I can understand, it surely everybody can understand it. But no, it's true. You know, when you go back and you listen to our conversations, we use a lot of big terminology, even if the people aren't reading it. You know, that is a term that you would have had to picked up somehow at some time. And it's not just in the way, like specific

words, it's the way in which you construct your arguments as well and the way in which you construct, even your sentences. So here's just kind of a fun example. You know, I only read nonfiction. I read nonfiction, nonfiction, and more nonfiction. And I have even a schedule about how fast I need to finish various books. But here's the funny thing. I'm two days ahead of schedule right now. So what do I pick up? I think I need to work on my prose in my writing. I think I'm very dry in writing. So I pick up Moby Dick, which I remember loving when I was 10 and thinking, ah, yeah, this is going to be great. I loved it when I was 10. Like, you know, I can read just, you know, just as good or if not better. Like I'm reading really complex stuff and

really dry academic jargon right now and I'm comprehending and everything. I pick it up and for like the first 20 minutes, it was so slow going, not because I didn't understand it, but because it's a different skill to understand that style of writing than it is to understand academic writing. And it's something that I have not practiced in the last 19 years. You know, I haven't read fiction in like 19 years with a few minor exceptions of some Russian classics here or there. And so 20 minutes in, I'm thinking to myself, Henry, you're approaching this the wrong way. You're approaching this book as if it is an academic text like the ones that you're typically reading and that's why you're finding it hardgoing. Go back and think about how you read this as a 10-year-old

and it's not about understanding every single word about every single argument. It's about getting yourself immersed in that. It doesn't mean that the message is lost on you. It's just a different way of packaging a story, you know? And so thinking about this, this is just a fun example in that, you know, I can, I can read Moby Dick. I'm cooking along it pretty well right now. I have two days to read the book because then I back on schedule. But, you know, at first, it's a shock when you see that. And it makes me think about how do we package, how do we package our arguments? How do we package the narratives that we're constructing in a way that is understandable to the broadest possible group of people who have the capacity and the interest in taking out the

political work that we're talking about? It doesn't require hard literacy. It doesn't require the ability to read Capital Volume 1 in the original German or whatever. But we do have to think about how we can package that analysis, not compromise on that, but in a way that reaches the broadest group of people that aren't necessarily reading one style of writing or another style of writing or listening to one style of speaking or another style of speaking. And that's something that I have to be much more conscious of myself as well. Guys, unfortunately, before I have a meeting in five minutes, we went late, I'm sorry. I know we're just getting started. We're getting to the good parts. I'm sorry. It's like a Red Nation

meeting. We'll have to have a round two. I know. I have to have a round two. I'm sorry. I know. God, it's what a mess. But I think, I'm then why don't you finish up? Give us our, give us our closing. Well, all I wanted to say is that in our last conversation, Sina, when I mentioned how I got into medieval studies and medieval history was reading, you know, Arthurian, you know, legends and things like that, and you said, oh, you must have, like, you know, been dumped in a lot of, you know, waste baskets. I said, you were stuffed into a lot of locker. You were stuck into a lot of locker. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I'm saying, you know, Henry may have taken, you know, the cake there. He might have outdone me with, like, reading Moby Dick at age 10 and really enjoying it. And with his reading schedule,

you know, not disrupted either. So anyway, I just wanted to say, I think Henry is almost the only person I've met who, you know, may have been more of an kind of, you know, a leftist nerd at such an early age. So I just, I just loved that. I loved hearing. Well, you know, Adnan, when I was 12, I simultaneously was reading books about Ebola virus and also was portraying Ralph Nader in sixth grade school, uh, uh, mock elections. So, you know, you've got me pegged pretty well. I can't believe you were doing brown face. And they should have gotten an Arab guy to do that.

Yeah. I don't know. I think I look pretty Lebanese. I don't know about you. I mean, look, I've got the cedar memories in everything. I planned it. I planned it. He's got the cedar trees. He's from the north. He's from the Mediterranean. I'm Phoenician.

I love him. He's a descendant of the infringe. The crew of Sydney. well as we're joking about this Lebanon's faces of dark times so this is crazy time and I guess partly this is like I mean I guess this is to bring it home as much fun as we're having is that like these like scale of what we have to confront like imperialism is destroying our planets like as we're watching it and we're like these are the tools we have so like I only I say this to everyone like start to show don't worry if 100 people listen it doesn't matter it's better than zero like if you have something mean to say it just do it like i didn't think about what i was doing and i'm here six years later and like you know it's just you know and you build a community and it means something to people and if you can do that in this like you know brutal fucking world they want to convince us that we're alone yes so at the very at least exactly discover you are not alone your audience discovers

they are not alone and that's already something very positive that's yeah that itself because that's one of this that's one of their basic like poisons for us is to isolate you and to make you feel like oh god you're just a psychopath exile like you're just some weird exile in this normal sea of normal people like you're an extremist and yeah i just it's it's it's bro like that guys thank you very much i'm sorry i'm sorry to to shorten this um not at all our conversation going and i have 20 seconds yes of course of course of course just i want to underscore the point where you said don't be afraid to start your own media even if there's only 100 people i just got a message yesterday from one of our comrades who, you know, people might know on Twitter.

I'm not going to use his real name, just in case, but it's Ka underscore Joma underscore on Twitter. I'm sure many of you are familiar, but he just messaged me and said, you know, I just started a podcast. It's a third worldist podcast called J.D. Pod, you know, joint dictatorship of the proletariat pod. You know, they don't have a built-in audience. They're just starting it from the ground now, but I can tell you for sure.

I'm going to be listening. You should be listening. If there's 100 people listening, it's 100 more people consuming third world as content than there was before, and that can only be a good thing. That's a great way to edit. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you.