Guerrilla History - Why Political Education & Historical Knowledge is KEY for Activism/Organizing - Panel Part 1

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

For this Intelligence Briefing, we gathered a panel of great activists and organizers for a discussion on why political education is crucial to building our movements.  This is part one of the conversation, the panel discussion.  Part two, the Q&A segment, will come out next week.  To follow each of the panelists on Twitter, just click on the link after their name: James: @GoodVibePolitik, Ilima: @ItsIlima, Isa: @endsanctions, Matt: @MattxRed, Mikey: @karaokecomputer, Mirah: @snackvampire, Sam: @zukosmama, Shatha: @shathawho Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, a great resource for political education!

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacky. What you're about to hear is part one of a recorded Twitter space that we recently made on the topic of why political education and historical knowledge is key for activism and organizing. It was an excellent panel discussion. It went for nearly three hours long. It was just a shade under that.

And with an really excellent panel of activists and organizers talking about, why they find political education and historical knowledge to be absolutely crucial for their efforts in their activism and in their organizing. I think that it's a really fascinating conversation that we had, a very important one, especially for younger listeners and younger comrades who perhaps aren't listeners of the show but are getting into activism themselves. This is part one of the discussion. This part of the discussion is just a discussion amongst the panelists as well as myself

and Adnan Hussein, one of the other co-hosts of guerrilla history. Part two, which will be coming out next week, is a Q&A segment. Each segment is about an hour and a half long, so this week's episode will just be the discussion part between the panelists, and next week will be the Q&A segment. So hopefully you're looking forward to that Q&A segment. It was really interesting. We got some very interesting questions and the responses also from the panelists. were very, very thought-provoking and informative.

The entire recorded Twitter space is already available on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, and it's been there for a little bit over a week and in one piece. That's a way of saying thank you for those individuals who are financially able to support the show and keep us up and running. The more that we're able to get on Patreon, the more that we're able to expand what we're doing, more of these Twitter spaces, more newsletters,

We have some other ideas for things that we're looking at branching off into in the future to just act as more resources for political education, really. So if you are financially able to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Any donation is greatly appreciated and you will also get bonus material there, including early releases like this entire episode, which, as I said, has already. been available for over a week for individuals on our Patreon and some bonus episodes as well. The last thing that I will say is that you should absolutely follow all of the panelists that we bring on to this episode on Twitter. The information for how to follow them is available in the description box, the pod notes, I guess you could call them, below the episode right now. So go down, click on their username, and give them a follow on social media, let them know what you thought of

their appearance on the show, and we will be sure to bring them all back for future discussions. But instead of me introducing each of them, I will allow them to introduce themselves in the recording they all introduce themselves and talked about the activism that they are active in. So without further ado, here is part one of the recorded Twitter space, Gorilla History's Why Political Education and Historical Knowledge is key to activism and organizing. I hope you enjoy and stay tuned for next week's installment of this space. You remember Den Van Booh? No!

The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a ranker. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. The topic that we have today is why political education and historical knowledge is key to activism and organizing. And one of the reasons that we decided that we should talk about this topic is that it seems that a lot of podcasts that focus heavily on political education, including guerrilla history, I'm going to say get criticism, but we hear pretty frequently that the show has a very academic focus, which is interesting. in considering only one of our hosts is an actual academic. And, you know, we're not criticizing you, Adnan. I know that you're here and you'll be speaking in just a second. But that is something

that we hear is that, you know, the show is pretty academic. And personally, I think that this criticism, critique, whatever you might call it, is a little bit wide of the mark because everybody that listens to this show and the intention of this show is to serve as political education for movements, for activists, for organizers, and for people who are trying to create a better world. And we think that taking political education is incredibly important to this end. And so we do take things very seriously on the show. We try to get into some very dense topics. But we don't think that it's like only geared for academics and the like. So this space is a way for us to take some of our friends who are activists and organizers and have them have their say as to why political

education and historical knowledge is imminently important for these movements, these activist movements and organizing movements. So without further ado, let me bring in one of my guerrilla history co-hosts, Adnan Hussein. Adnan, if you wouldn't mind just letting the listeners who perhaps don't listen to the podcast yet, let them know who you are. And I will also mention that our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, who hosts Revolutionary Left Radio and co-hosts the Red Menace, is also hoping to make it, but right now he's currently recording an episode of Revolutionary Left Radio, so depending on how long that recording goes for, he may or may not be able to make it. But Adnan, why don't you let everybody know who you are?

Hi, everyone. I'm Adnan Hussein, co-host with Henry and Brett of guerrilla history. I happen to teach history, but also try and stay politically engaged and active in my local community and on many other causes and issues. So I'm delighted that we have this opportunity to have more of back and forth with activists and organizers because, as Henry mentioned, the show was conceived as trying to not do academic style history for the sake of just knowing about the past,

but to inform historical materialist consciousness and analysis so that, history can be a resource for active contemporary social struggles for justice. So I'm looking forward to the conversation and to hear from all of the other speakers. Absolutely. And as we get into the introductions for the panelists that are currently here, I know that one or two more that we are expecting to come and go as their schedules allow. I just also want to say that, you know, take this opportunity, if this is a topic, that you think is important, you know, why political education is something that is really important

for activism and organizing. If this topic is important to you, feel free to share this space with people. If you know any younger comrades who are just getting into activism, this may be a conversation that's particularly well suited to them. And who knows, you know, maybe eventually they'll find some of our pretty, I don't want to say dense, but are very rigorous episodes of the show useful for whatever struggles they're active in. But this space, I think, is really geared towards those younger activists and organizers, especially people that are just starting to get into these spaces from a principled left position. So without further ado, I turn it over to each of our panelists right now. Panelists, why don't you just let the listeners

know who you are and perhaps some of the activism and organizing that you have been doing recently or, you know, if there's something in the past that you were particularly proud of, why don't you let them know about that? So I'll just turn it over to our panel right now to each introduce themselves in turn. Sure, I guess alphabetically, I'll start. Hi, James. I'm an organizer in Philadelphia working alongside the Young Communist League, as well as helping out DSA's BDS Working Group. That's primarily what I've been doing as of late. Aloha. I'm Mikey. I'm with the Oahuata Protectors and the shutdown, Rid Hill,

mutual aid collective. And, yeah, that's a lot of the organizing I've been doing in the past. year has been around down Red Hill. But also, yeah, there's a lot of political education involved in that, particularly with the affected family members, many of whom live on military housing. Hi, I'm Mira. I am currently organizing with the DSA International Committee. I'm one of the co-chairs of the Middle East and Africa Subcommittee. Also in the past, I've done some Palestine organizing with the 2014 Block the Boat. I'm Steph here in the Seattle area. I'm very happy to be here.

And thanks to Gorilla HistoryPod for inviting everyone. Hi, my name's Matt. I'm Florida. I am an organizer, artist, activist, political educator, currently organizing with the Dream Defenders, the DSA, I see. and part-time with Progressive International as one of the coordinators. In the past, I was a co-founder, chief strategist, executive director for the March for Our Lives Foundation and Action Fund. Co-founded the protests around gun violence prevention.

And I've also taught organizing workshops and political education workshops around the world for left-wing organizers, especially youth organizers, from Northern Ireland, Africa, Kenya. And, yeah, so really excited to be here. I love the panel and, yeah, excited to talk about these things that I care very much about. Hi, my name's Sam. Some of you might know me as Suki's mom after my sweet, perfect, beautiful cat. And I was formerly a tenant organizing with the Connecticut Tenants Union and Central Connecticut DSA.

I'm going to that. I just had like a lot of family and life issues this past year. I'm also a member of the National Lawyers Guild and we're going to be doing an annual week against mass incarceration and some other work around like legal, a legal kind of framework. And then in terms of like activism, my biggest thing is like Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Rico will be free. And that's something that I talk about a lot and think is important. And I'm really excited to be here. I'm listening not only to guerrilla history for a while, but also like everyone on this panel who has been. like instrumental in my political development. So it's really, really cool to be involved with all these people who have helped me develop as politically and as a person. So thank you. Hi, my name is Sheda. I'm a Palestinian refugee from Occupy Palestine 48. I work with the Palestinian youth movement. And funnily enough,

like this topic about academic language, barriers to entry when it comes to political education is something that we've spoken about in the past and how to organize or work around that. So a lot of my focus right now or my organizing is how to reach community and how a lot of times like leftists or the words that we use and the phrases that we use tend to isolate some members of our community locally, not on the internet because Twitter is a whole different space for organizing or lack of organizing. Let me keep my opinion myself. So that is kind of what my work is currently

and how to meet people where they are through political education and organizing. Yeah, excellent. I think that that's all of the panelists that are currently here, but like I said, we do have a couple of others that I know will be coming and going as their schedules permit. I know that from my perspective,

political education is something that's really important and was critical for me getting into activism during my city years, my undergrad, a lot of the activism that I was doing was involved with Palestinian solidarity, as well as Cuban solidarity. And when I was in Germany, I know some of the people here listen to the podcast, so they may know my trajectory was from United States to Germany to Russia, where I currently am. Interestingly, there wasn't very many opportunities to get into activism and organizing for Palestinian solidarity in Germany. I mean, kind of obvious reasons. there. But interestingly, there was a lot of solidarity work that was going on in Germany while I was there, which was quite interesting. But political education was something that actually got me involved with these activist circles that I was in up until, you know, very recently where I'm now living in a country that I don't speak the language yet. So it's a little bit more difficult for me to get involved in things, although I know that I will be doing so once my language abilities improve.

for this first question, for this panel, I know, Adnan, you'll have some questions that you'll want to follow up with, but I want to leave this more of a discussion-based thing as we begin. I want everybody to have their say, you know, why is political education, why is historical knowledge important for activism and organizing? I know this is the topic for the entire space, and, you know, there's a million things that everybody could say about it, and we will have enough time to talk at some length about this topic. But I want to have everybody at least have their opening thoughts on why is political education important or crucial to activism and organizing. So that's just the topic I'll throw out there and panel take it away. You know,

this is this is your show. We just brought you together and we'll have a nice conversation here. I guess I can start. If someone else isn't going to step up, I'll fall in the sword. Political education to me is so crucial in everything we do because it's really, like, so I could just speak from my own experience, right? Like, I was activated into being an activist, an organizer because of tragedy, a mass shooting affected my community. I lost a friend. I didn't really know what to do. The first thing you do is you try to look at how to make change, and the way that we're taught how to make change is very different than how change actually is made. And so for me, political education is about learning actually how that goes about, how to actually organize for power and how to actually understand like the context that you're in and articulate who the enemy is, what you're organizing against, how you can unify people against that enemy. And so when you lack political, you're going to just be reinventing the wheel.

And that's really what I feel organizers that aren't in tune with how deep this tradition of struggle goes end up doing. again, just speaking for myself, when we did the March in Washington for March for our lives, is because that was our understanding of how change happens. You get a lot of people riled up and bring them to D.C., demand change, and then boom, change happens. And, yeah, and, like, obviously that's not what happened. And so we had to figure out what else to do. And it wasn't until I really confronted the country, and I went on a 100-city tour,

63 days where I was going every day from the gun violence center, which was tended to be the poorest, blackest, most indigenous part of whatever community I was in, then to the political center, which was the whitest, most, the richest part of the town or community. And you just experience that every day for 60-something days in a row. And you start to realize what you're actually looking at. And when you're building relationships with organizers who have been in the struggle for decades, generations, you start learning how a lot of the tactics that you think are new and fresh have been tired and worn out and organized against. And so after the tour in 2018, I met elders, movement elders, and I was handed Redsh of the Earth by Franz Fanon. I started

reading Lenin, and I had wish I did that before I started organizing because I had, like, it was It was as if I felt less crazy engaging the struggle from a historical lens because it led me to understand, like, it is so welcoming when you realize that people have been struggling on these questions and have come up with incredible answers for generations and hundreds of years. And so a lot of work has been done and a lot of work has to be done, but political education is the first step in understanding, like, where are we at? What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what we move forward? How do we actually to engage these problems critically? Um, and it doesn't come in any one form. And so when I'm teaching people about political education, I lean a lot into art, documentary, short film, comedy, satire, anything that can help get these concepts into people's hands. And then they can apply it to their own world, their own lives, uh, uh, because it's really hard with the way that formal study is, uh, attacked and dismantled in this country. And so, creating any sort of group setting or community dynamic in which you're learning together is a huge step towards actually in a liberation struggle. Yeah, I mean, I think building a lot of that as well. You know, I know my personal journey started years back, you know, when I, growing up,

I grew up in southern Indiana and a fairly low-income household, and there was a lot of, I think, experiencing the kind of like brunt reality of like a capitalist system, but due to like lack of political education and just the area I was at, you know, growing up in a very conservative area, I became a lot, very liberal, I think, in my analysis and my frameworks. And it wasn't until college, really, where I had started talking with somebody who became a close friend of mine from, he was a Palestinian from Occupy Jerusalem in his family, as well as a trip I ended up taking over to Eastern Europe, where I spent time in Bosnia, Srebrenica, but particularly that read me historical context in regards to kind of the abject horrors of the U.S. government

on a bipartisan basis internationally. But, you know, also kind of getting into, I think political education in particular, I know Matt had noted, like, The Ritch of the Earth was the first book I had read. The first, like, leftist theory I ended up picking up, actually due to Brett suggesting it in one of the, I think the Rep Left podcast episodes, it, it, I think, the rep left podcast episodes, it, it, It kind of changed a lot of my perspective on how I analyzed a lot of things, how I saw the U.S. places in the, the U.S.'s place in the world, which I don't see one now, you know, how I kind of food history and how I viewed how I viewed how things work. I think there to be said about combining historical knowledge with an actual political, like, Marxist framework, you know, being able to understand history and the changes through history from a Marxist lens is so unbelievably beneficial, I think, to be. people studying it, but also beneficial to any organizer who's really looking and trying to figure out,

okay, how do I combat these issues? You know, we could say in Philadelphia right now, we have the UC Townhome issue in Western Philadelphia. It's an area being gentrified very rapidly by developers in universities like Penn and Drexel. And we're trying to see, and a lot of organizers are trying to fight this gentrification effort that, you know, a lot of the strategy and tactics have been developed from historic anti-geniturification battles, you know, taking knowledge and frameworks from these past experiences to formulate how we are going to overcome present-day issues. It's unbelievably critical, in my opinion. And I think it's really just the value of education and really developing hard political lines and understanding kind of the frameworks in

which we're operating in. And before I continue with the conversation about why political education is crucial, we just added another speaker to the panel. So we have Ilima Long. with us now. Elima, can you just briefly introduce yourself to the listeners that we have here? And then we are going to continue with this discussion about why political education and historical knowledge is really crucial for activism and organizing. Yeah, thanks. Sorry for jumping on late. My name is Elim Along. I'm calling in from Honolulu, and I'm with an organization called Huyaloha Aina, which actually started in 1893 in response to the overthrow of Lili Uokalani. And then,

their main organizing folks in the 1890s was to basically organize the petitions across all of the islands. They got 40,000 signatures to say that Hawaii does not, we oppose annexation dates. This is who was reconstituted in recent times. And now political education is a huge part of what we do. And I'll just leave it at that for now. Excellent. So now I guess we'll just go back to the conversation of why is political education crucial for organizing. So I know James you just spoke. If anybody else wants to hop in, now is the time. Okay, so I wanted to piggyback off of something that James had said that I think is really important. And you said like about you had more liberal ideas, a more liberal worldview growing up. And I think that's something that

is so like, I'm sure a lot of people here who have read and read theory the first time you've read it, it feels like you're unlocking this part of your brain where you're like, oh, my God, this makes so much sense. And you realize that you've kind of been indoctrinated your entire life into believing, like, you know, these liberal ideas of like nonviolence and that's going to get, you know, earn as equity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that like as I started to, you know, A, look at history and realize, oh, I've been taught the wrong history in my entire life, but also political education being something so, and for me, something that I found that was really, really instrumental in my political development and my ability to understand the world and history

was a dialectical and historical materialism. And I did like quote poll because I'm super annoying, but there's a part in dialectical and historical materialism where he says, further, if the world is in a state of constant movement and development, if the dying way of the old and ungrowth of the new is a law of development, then it is clear there can be no immutable social systems, no eternal principles of private property and exploitation, no eternal idea of the subjugation of the peasant to the landlord of the worker to the capitalist. And just stuff that, like, when I read that, it says to me, like, wow, it really does like kind of break away so much of that liberal indoctrination of like, well, this is the best

we can do. The best we can do is some reforms, right? Because, of course, like, in 2016, I got home. I was like 19 in 2016. I was like a big Bernie girl, you know? And like, I believed, I wholeheartedly. believe that there was, you know, a way that we could reform this society so that it would be, you know, a free society and equal society for all people under capitalism. And that was,

you know, it took a lot. I took political education for me to be able to undo that in my brain. And then to pull another quote, sorry, from Mao's opposed book worship, he says, when we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not because Marx is a profit, but because this theory has been proved correct in our practice and our struggle. I think that's the other half, because you get a lot of critique from liberals who will say, well, you just pull this theory, you're just like, you know, dogmatic and you're reading this theory from these, you know, centuries-old dead people, and it's not applicable to the world today. But there is so much history that shows, A, that the socialist struggle has been successful globally in different places around the

globe, and, you know, that our theory has been proven correct, that our theory is proven to emancipate, you know, working class people, emancipate the peasantry, that, you know, these historical movements that we were told were so horrible and so, you know, so opposed to liberation, we're actually truly liberatory movements. And I think that that unlocking that part and like really engaging with history, with a Marxist lens, with a historical materialist lens, you come to realize so much, A, about what you, you know, have been lied to about, but also what we can build and what is possible because the main, I'm reading right now, the cultural Cold War, And the main, you know, weapon that they use against us, and I believe Antonio Graham, she talks about this as well, is that, you know, they want us to believe that there is no way to combat this system.

There's no, there's no possibility of a better world the way we envision it. And we can only hope to, you know, get meager reforms that will make things slightly less awful. And I think having the correct political education and the correct historical knowledge can really aid in, you know, helping find, helping all of us move forward in our struggle. So I'm going to jump in, kind of piggyback off of Sam with using a quote, because I have George Jackson's book right in front of me right now. So in the beginning of the introduction, the first line that I saw that really stuck with me was, nothing has been willed, written, or composed for the sake of a book. It is both a weapon of liberation and a poem of

love. So I see coming with my background as a Palestinian resistance coinciding with political education. So all of our revolutionaries were not just, you know, resistance fighters. It was the pen and the sword or the pen and the gun. And you have Basel Aara, who was a Palestinian who was murdered by the occupation, who in his position of hiding was found, you know, dead with his gun. And just a ton of Marxist books next to him, you have Gassan Canafani, you have Phenon, which people like a classic favorite the wretched of the earth which i think has changed every leftist's life um after reading that book so i think it's twofold so there is no praxis without theory and there is no theory without praxis you can't do one without without the other and i think

the rise patriot leftist is kind of to me um like people are trying to understand what is happening in their world they're trying to understand their material conditions and when you don't have theory you have public education we don't have history you tend to become very reactionary and it's also very easy for liberals or, you know, people on the right to kind of take advantage of you and use these buzzwords to like pull you in because you kind of believe the same thing, but not really. So I think the rise of patriot left is like a big indication of the fight, a huge lack of both political education and history. I think that, sorry, I was, I was going to go to a different quote, but this one is also by George Jackson, but where he talks about in prison,

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao, and they redeemed me for the first four years. I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I have been in rebellion all my life. I just didn't know it. So it's also making sense of your conditions. I think reading The Wretcher of the Earth for me, it was a time of my life where I was like very isolated in the university. It was in a very like Zionist, very like right university, the only Palestinian there. And for the first time, I felt like I had a community within a book and things made sense.

And it's kind of like what Sam said, it gives you the, people have done it before. I think Matt has said this, like there is a blueprint that's out there from before. But it kind of really reads that we can do this. These things are hidden purposefully. And I think being able to have podcasts, being able to have spaces, being able to have blogs or what have you, a way to articulate that and disseminate it in a world where it's so purposely guarded is so, so, so important. And also in ways that people are able to articulate it. So there is no barriers to entry, which is why the whole academic jargon and the kind of debate in the beginning or the first thing that you said, Henry, about how people say that it's all academic language.

I don't think that's true. I think that we do a disservice because that all of our revolutionaries were all thinkers, we're all people who were so involved in political education. Okay, I'm going to keep rambling, so I'm just going to end right there. Well, I'll jump in for a second and just, you know, one of the last things that you said was that people complain about the academic jargon and it being a big barrier to entry. I think that that's both true and not true in different ways. So from one perspective, we have to realize that some of these theorists that we're talking about people like Marx and Lenin and Mao, their writing, which at first glance seems, you know, very turgid, a little bit hard to get through. these were the texts that inspired people that, you know, were fighting liberation struggles in the global South, you know, Vietnamese people that were fighting their liberation

wars against the French and the Americans, they were being motivated by these texts and the speeches of, you know, Ho Chi Minh, among others, they were getting through this with the limited resources in terms of education, you know, formal education that was provided to them within that colonial system that they were that they were living under under the French and of course the Japanese during World War II they were using these texts in a way that advanced their struggle if they are able to do that us with our you know university degrees or high school education in a very advanced country and I'm speaking for the majority of the listeners here obviously there is going to probably be some people from other parts of

the world you know the global south and whatnot but if you have a university degree in any field, you're probably better equipped to be able to sit down and get through work than the people that relate on these sorts of work. So that's not really a good argument that you're making of, well, the barrier to entry is very, very high. But on the other hand, it also is like us to try to break down these arguments in a way, encourages people to get more into those more formalized texts. And that's something that guerrilla history tries to do is, you know, We go through long texts, long books, you know, deep history, and we try to present it in a way that, sure, are we talking about some pretty, you know, deep intense stuff? Of course. That's, that's the entire job of understanding the world. But we have to do this in order to bridge people that otherwise would just give up as soon as they see this, you know, more quote unquote academic jargon in these texts from Marx or Lenin or, you know, Kwame and Krumah, you know, whoever, whoever you want. want to hold up, Walter Rodney, whatever.

If that would push them away, we have to encourage them to help them understand the concepts and understand why going through this material is important. So I think that that's just one thing I wanted to say. And then one other thing that I want to say before I turn it over to Adnan, because I know Adnan hasn't gotten a chance to really jump in and say anything yet, is that we mentioned that there are these barriers to entry within left texts. I think that there's also a counter-tendency, and this is something that is particularly true among,

well, I won't be too specific on various tendencies, but I will say patriotic socialists tend to do this, which is that they will say anytime you bring up, that was written by somebody who wasn't like a Marxist-Leninist, for example, to say, ah, you're reading this in, you know, bourgeois, whatever, book or paper. And this is a very, very poor way of looking at the world.

Like, no information can be gleaned from somebody who wasn't a committed communist themselves. Let's think about back to the beginning. Was Marx basing his analysis of the world based off of communist thinkers? Of course not. He was basing his analysis off of the existing bourgeois information that was available to him and then was advancing self. And I, since everybody was quoting, I figured I'd quote Lenin, and a shout out to Comrade, I believe it was Comrades to put this in our moments, but I actually had he's pulled up

already. It is the tasks of the youth leagues from Lenin, just a little bit of that. But he's talking about what kind of knowledge we need to attain. And the answer is, of course, a large body of all knowledge. he said, but it would mean falling into a grave error for you to try to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without assimilating the wealth of knowledge amassed by mankind. It would be mistaken to think it's sufficient to learn communist slogans and the conclusions of communist science without acquiring that some knowledge of which communism itself is a result. Marxism is an example which shows how communism arose out of the sum of human knowledge is essentially the point that I just made about Marx himself having to make his analysis based off of bourgeoisie. sources. So dismiss these things out of hand, and that's actually an episode that we have

planned for guerrilla history in the relatively near future, is why it's important to read things outside of your tendency in order to understand the world a little bit better. So I know that there's some people on the panel that want to speak right now, but Adnan, if you have anything that you want to throw into the conversation, I know that I haven't given you the opportunity to speak yet, so I apologize for that. Oh, no, apologies necessary. I don't have, you know, anything that I desperately feel need to be said. I've thrown a couple of comments into the replies and, you know, about a couple questions and also an invitation to anybody who's from an activist comrade in the Global South or who's engaged in anti-racism, struggles,

Black Lives Matters, indigenous struggles for decolonization and so forth, you know, to throw their comments in. I don't know how to make people speakers, but I would invite them to share their views to the dialogue and discussion as well. I'm just eager to continue what has been so far a really terrific and excellent conversation. I'm so glad that this issue also of patriotic socialism or whatever is happening now, I think really the question here is just to think a little bit more about what is happening. What does this phenomenon mean? How do we analyze and understand it? So there are these, you know, odd moments where the organized left and institutions on whatever passes for the left in the global north have been very quiet and silent on various issues or gone along with the consensus establishment positions. And yet we hear occasionally some bad faith, I presume, they're in bad faith because the people who are saying these things don't. have any kind of a record of solidarity with working class people or engagement in, you know,

real liberation or liberatory struggles, but they're saying some of the things that actually need to be said. So what is the position of, you know, what role should we take in connection to these and how do we avoid some of the pitfalls and traps of previous eras? I think that's one of the values of both political education, conceptually, theoretically, but also that historical knowledge that there have been many cases like this before, maybe we need to pay attention to them. And I'm just eager to hear what people might, you know, say about this from the perspective of working on the ground in various causes. So that's all I have, but I'm looking forward to hearing more from everybody.

Absolutely. And as we turn it over to the panel again now, I will let the listeners just know that if you have any questions, we will be taking listener questions at the end of this space. So as we get a little bit deeper into the conversation, once we explore a few of these topics that the panel has for one another, we will turn it over to the listener. So keep hold of your questions. We are definitely interested in those listener questions. But now let's turn it back over to the panel. I'm going to continue this quote-pulling trend we got going here with a little bit of Marx himself. You know, talking about how the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

And I think that is a huge component of political education and what distinguishes it from, I think, what is stereotype as kind of this ossified, inscrutable, hard-to-access. Western academic kind of like ivory tower of knowledge that's kind of like it's designed for academia and the people who can pay the tuition paywall

to access it but then it stays there when actual knowledge that you get from a revolutionary political education is designed specifically to put things into motion to change the course of history to change material conditions

by getting you to understand where you are in history and in this world system, this system of capitalism. And I think that's been, it's amazing just to hear stories from other organizers about how their own political education really opened up a world of possibility to them because I think that's one of like the biggest most beautiful things about you know getting into radicalization on that path to radicalization through political education as you realize like how things are actually within your power to change them

and and so many people have pointed out like all of like capitalist pedagogy is basically designed to make us feel completely powerless and not only powerless but that the best thing you can hope for is kind of like nibble around the edges to reform this broken, you know, sinking ship and hopefully, you know, get to get to where we're all trying to go when in reality, the only way things ever changes is through, you know, really forceful, organize and discipline mass movement. And in my own organizing, I think, around Red Hill, because it's like, you know, it's, you know, it's. It's, you know, so thousands of gallons of fuel leaked into our aquifer and continue to be threatened by the military's Red Hill fuel tanks, which still hold over 100 million gallons of toxic jet fuel and marine diesel, just 100 feet above our sole source aquifer that provides water to over 400,000 people. And to know that that is still, you know, kind of this sort of Damocles hanging over the entire island of Oahu, like, people feel. helpless, right? And affected family and other, you know, local and Kanaka community members will come up to us and be like, I'm so angry, but I have no idea what to do. And I think

that's where political education really comes in. It's not just coming up with this prescriptive list of like, what is to be done. And that is important. But to get people kind of like centered enough to in history the history of this place and their context within it to be able to understand how they how they move forward what is within their power to do what is their Kuliana and how they can take active steps to change it sorry I just I think that was an incredible point I just wanted to go back to really quickly the barriers of entry because I have a lot of thoughts on it that I wanted to like articulate a little bit more than just saying that there are no barriers to entry. I think that there are absolutely barriers to entry

in a lot of leftist spaces in the West. I think that sometimes it becomes like this like pissing contest where people just use like really big words for no reason. And like if your point, I think it has to go back to why do we do political education. Is it to help articulate points, help educate, or is it to show that you know a word that has like 50 syllables in it? I think that we do, I think it's twofold. So you have people on the left who'll say things like reading is ablest and then find out that they work for Raytheon or whatever contract defense company. And then you have people on the other hand who are like, you know, there is no barriers, academic. It's understandable to everyone. I don't think it is. I think that as organizers or as people who are trying to meet their community, we also have like an onus on ourselves to meet people where they're at. And I think that's why podcasts are helpful. Spaces are helpful. YouTube videos. much as like a bread tube is a little bit of a point of contention with me, I think is helpful and able to like have, bring people in. I think in Stokely speaks the first chapter, Miterre, I think it's called, I'm going to pull

out another quote from a book or just summarize it called notes about a class. And it was just only four pages, but it really stuck with me because it was about a time where he was in a class and how in order for him to teach his class, they had to trust. him but in order for them to trust him they had to you know believe that he was one of them and he spoke like them and he he was from the people as opposed to someone from the outside coming and lecturing them um so it was it was like a two like an equal platform between two people so i think that at the same time we do have an onus as organizers to present information in ways that are accessible and bring people in um but and then a

I think this is the third point. I think saying that it is inaccessible and that people shouldn't have to read is also very infantilizing. I don't think it's, I don't like it. I don't like it's, I don't like people can't read and people, you know, don't understand this stuff. That's not true. Like Henry mentioned previously, like people on like battlefields used to read this stuff. Its favorite photo of mine is of the PLO with Mao's little red book in their guns in the fields. So I don't think that. Yeah, sorry, that is my summary of my points. Hey, I'm going to jump in a little bit. I get my hand down. Okay. Oh. Can someone else put my hand down?

Anyways, so, yeah, I appreciate this conversation, and I just want to jump in a little bit because for me and my comrades and in the work that we're doing, I mean, we're either left or left leaning and developing, but our audience is by no means. the left. It's totally and 100% our community. And our community has no idea. What they think is the left is whatever, you know, fucking CNN has told him is the left, which is really sad that CNN is, you know, and then that that's even on a spectrum or what Fox News has told them is the left, which is CNN, which is just ridiculous. So our people don't even like my community, people in my community don't even really things. And I'm never going to put an article in front of them. Because that's not a doorway to walk through for most people. It is for some. Some will latch on to that and be totally, like, down and that's what they're ready for. But most are not.

So we, our approach to political education is actually rooted in their education. And it's to center the experiences of the people. And the questions that are formed are formed to get them to explore their experience and to share about what they are. It assumes that the knowledge that we are trying to kind of bring out and create collective cohesion around is situated within the people. And we also do political history through what resonates with them, which is not, for us, it's not a Marxist text.

It's our own history. And it's through our own history. and our violent encounters with capitalism and colonialism that resonates with the people and resonates with our communities. And when I say our communities, our target audience is the Native Hawaiian community, indigenous Hawaiians. So maybe down the line because developing curriculum is huge, it's a huge heavy lift and we're all doing it on top of, you know, everything else and top of our paid jobs and things like that. But maybe down the line, we will do like explicitly like left political education where we're just going through like left text, like a little red school or something like that. But right now, focused on bringing language to folks that explains their experiences and that teaches the structures of oppression through our own history and situations. and for us, like, that's also rooted in our connection to land.

And then the other piece I just want to bring to light, because this is a part of our very recent history and it was huge, was when we did the occupation on Mauna Kea, we had all these thousands of people coming up, and there's like not much to do up there. It's literally an occupation on a barren lava field. So we started Pu'uulu-Hulu University. Pu-Ulu-Hulu was the place that we were going.

that. And we found the flattest part of the lava field. And we set up five stations literally with like cardboard. I was just saying one, two, three, four, five. And we just, we asked everybody who was coming up there because there was so much knowledge within the people that were coming up there to sign up for slots to teach. And we advertise those. And that lava field was packed with people, either every day or when things slowed down on the weekends and sometimes one class would have 400 people and other times most classes would have anywhere on normal days from like 10 to 30 or 40 people and the action itself so in these moments where there's like high visibility and there's like spectacle and there's emotions it's a huge opportunity to open up an educational space so it was

the seeing the elders get arrested that brought thousands and thousands of people up to a 6,000 foot, you know, elevation on a lava field on a mountain. And they, most of them didn't necessarily have any background in education. Hawaiian Studies is an awesome program at the university here, but only it's so limited in terms of access. So this was a lot of people's first entry point into political education was up there. And the classes that were being offered And it was such a, it was such a huge, like, it was such an important piece of it, that all of the smaller land occupations that were inspired by Monacoia, in it throughout the islands, around that same period, the university ended up being a template. So there was, you know, Hunananiho University and Kahuku University. And so incorporating live political edge into sites of indigenous land occupation became a template now in Hawaii.

And, you know, maybe Mikey or maybe there was some stuff up there, you know, that was explicitly, quote unquote, left. But really, it was exposing people to their culture, to their history, to political frameworks. And it was totally transformative. for a lot of people. So, yeah, I just wanted to share that. Like, audience is important. And I don't, I think that it's more useful instead of trying to figure out amongst ourselves, whether or not the barriers, people's arguments about barriers are legitimate or not. It's better to just get in, get into the ground. Get to the ground. I mean, if, if your format is a podcast, yeah, it's not going to be accessible to everybody, but then there's an audience that is going to love it and get a

lot out of it. I get a lot out of guerrilla history. I'm, I'm the audience. For guerrilla history, but you're not going to catch everybody, right? And so you just got to know who your targeted audience is. And then for our target audience, we're going to be doing a totally different framework. And if it's not received, then that's the answer to the question. We have to go back and like look at what we're doing. That may be an access issue or whatever. And then I also just want to encourage anybody who's facilitating political education in the community, school for unity and liberation twice a year. They do their training for trainers.

And it is amazing. And it's grounded in Gramsci and it's grounded in freer. They teach the theory piece and then they teach you all these skills that make you a political educator that is more prepared to talk to regular folks in your community. model. Thank you so much to Elima. I am also from Hawaii, so I really appreciate hearing more about the struggles that are going on there

to protect the land and the water and to reclaim the nation of Hawaii from the colonial occupation of the United States government. And something that Elima was saying that really struck me in the context of having reread Wretched of the Earth recently with an international committee reading group is how critical it is to meet the people where they are. And I think Alima's example really illustrates that, that, you know, you are understanding your audience, understanding the struggle, and it doesn't even have to be

something that, you know, is highly technical or draws from old text necessarily. Fenon talked so much about the process of decolonization as a process of national development and that national development coming through the collective struggle, you know, to create a national character, to understand your relationship to the occupier, to the colonizer, and the violence inherent in maintaining that system that through that collective struggle, you know, a new kind of like character and identity of the people who are in the struggle is formed. And I do believe that political education and history is really key to that. I think it's also key for people, you know, who are settlers in the United States to really understand the history and context of, you know,

how their nation came to be and how it operates in the world. You know, maybe it's optimistic of me, but I sort of feel deeply that if people really understand the history of how the world has developed under colonialism and, you know, through the resource exploitations of capitalism, to modern imperialism, and neoliberalism, that they really will come to our side eventually. That's, that's sort of how I believe that knowledge functions for people. But we're combating is just a tide of, you know, anti-communism, of propaganda, you know, about countries around the world that are opposed to U.S. imperialism. And I think without understanding sort of like the historical basis for these various struggles and kind of what material conditions have led to, you know, why the Palestinian people are resisting, what the people are. of Hawaii are, you know, trying to achieve with their goals. You know, why Iran is anti-imperialists. There's so many nations around the world that are engaged in the struggle against imperialism. And they all have different stories. But to really understand them, I think, that's where history, you know, comes in to understand sort of the repeated episodes of violence that have led to

create the kind of world that we see now that people have suffered under and are still, you know, organizing to resist all across the world and to understand, you know, how we as Westerners can offer solidarity to these struggles is an important task for people to undertake. And then theory, I think, also helps to tie things together, you know, so that people really understand kind of the shared themes of struggle and how we translate, you know, what we see on the ground in one place to patterns that exist all over the world. So I really just think that, you know, political education is something that can benefit people no matter where they're at, but as Alima is saying, like, as somebody who's trying to do this

work in the community, it's so important to understand. understand where people are coming from and to meet them, you know, where they are. I'll just jump in very briefly. I know that we have a couple more people with our hands raised, so we will let the panelists each get their say on this topic. But I want to let the listeners know that if you have questions for the panelists to find the host tweet here, you can either raise your hand request to speak and you can ask your question live, or if you do not want to ask your question live by speaking and you would rather tweet it in the comment section below. Just type your comment in that case and after we have the panelists that have their hands raised to

speak right now, once we run through them, then we will do listener question and answer. So this is your notice that we will be starting that relatively soon. So either request to speak and be ready for asking your question or if you would prefer to type it, you can do so in the, again, the replies below this space. So, panelists, I'll let you continue until we get to the end of the raised hands here. Sure. I kind of want to just built off what Shiloha was saying earlier because I think the whole political, like the whole barriers to entry argument is very interesting in how we engage with it and how

it's kind of propagated. I think it lies in a couple of faulty assumptions. I think one of it, you know, I will admit there is like genuine, I think, an argument of inaccessibility in some texts, but it's not a permanent inaccessibility. And I think inaccessibility broadly is kind of used to overgeneralize leftist history and literature as being broadly inaccessible. But I think we also have to look at the fact that from my perspective, I think a lot of people when they think about reading, when they think about learning, education, they think of it as a series of defined events and points. So reading X book, reading, you know, or listening to X podcast, et cetera. when I always kind of viewed it more as like an evolution of a journey of sorts, right, with education, especially

political education. You know, I look at myself when I kind of go through like how my political journey started or like at least my journey in political education and the leftist politics and history, I should not have started with Wretched of the Earth. Great read. I left it very angry, but I had no basis ideologically for how to understand it. And as a result, I kind of like, I had to go back years later, like a year and a half or so later in reread. it to really get the full value of the text, right? State and Revolution, I was so unbelievably lucky when I read it that before I had read it, I had spent several months listening to like Mike Duncan's Revolution cast.

He had a series on the Bolsheviks because otherwise I would have been so unbelievably confused with what was going on in the book because I would have just been like, wow, why is Lennon so mad at all of these seemingly random Russian guys? Like there is, I think a lot to be said about treating education as a journey of sort. And I see that a lot. Like when I growing up in Indiana, I going to college in Indiana as well, surrounding people who don't really have a background, who don't really have any educational background in politics,

you know, talking to them about like Lenin or Stalin or Mao, they'd be like, okay, I don't really know what to do with this. But because they just didn't have the background. But what I could do instead was talk to them about some contemporary issue, right? Something that either is happening in their lives or an international issue that they wanted to learn more about. Palestine was a really great educational tool because you could get a lot of, I think I can't tell you the amount of guys that I knew who would be like, well, I don't really understand Marxism, but what's going on in Palestine seems fucking terrible.

And I'd be like, yeah, like, let's look at that things of like how I'm observing it and kind of see where we get to from there. And by the end of conversations like that, you would really get a lot of people who are like, okay, I don't even know if I completely agree with what you're saying, but that is actually something that I had never considered. And that's something that's really interesting. And then you can offer them more resources, right? I mean, like I said earlier, I would never suggest to someone to read, like, State and Reb as, like, their first book. But I do think that I would suggest to them, like, a podcast that goes over, like, Bolshevik revolutionary history and then give them state and rev so they know all of the actors that are being discussed and criticized. You know, maybe even not even giving them political theory, maybe giving them, like, historical theory. You know, for me, the collected speeches of Ayaka, Tatake Yatake, a sitting bowl, was really formative in my development. man. It's a communist, right? Little to no application on the face of it, right? But it has a lot.

You know, reading books like from a native daughter, ruling Pine Ridge, the Red Deal, other books regarding to Palestine, like the Hundred Years War on Palestine, Israel's occupation, justice for some, like these are all really foundational texts that might not even seem as if they are initially because they're historically focused. But once you're able to really contextual, I mean, the Red Deal being an exception because it's literally just a Marxist book, but like these are things that you can you can use to contextualize and build your education. You know, even things like socialism in the idea, right, like understanding historically where socialism has played a role in these mass historic events and really meeting people

who might have a background in these events and saying, look, like this has played a role in your own history, it's a really good way of getting people engaged. I'm sorry, I probably seemed really rambly, but I think there's a lot to be said about really prompting education through seeing it as a journey rather than just, handing people a lot of books, which I know no one on this panel does. But I think that's kind of the constant argument that you hear from people who don't want to really delve into theory and things is they think that it's like a very big barrier to entry where it's like, well, you could read We Are the Years of the World's Revolutions by Thomas and Kara and not have

to Google a single word or anything that's going on. He'll come out of it with a pretty good understanding of Burkina Faso. It's an interesting thing. And I think it's just finding ways to meet people in the middle and kind of over getting over that hurdle of like oh everything that i read is going to be inaccessible yeah exactly i want to build off that too and bring up a quote that uh i really love from wretcher the earth we as we talked a lot about it just everything can be explained to the people on the single condition that you really want them to understand uh we have to be committed to helping people learn and unlearn because it is a constant struggle every day. There's a joke around the internet around like the meme is like the person who says it's

not my job to educate you and the other person is a Nazi saying let me give you some Nazi facts and stats. And so it's like making yourself someone that wants that if you have the capacity to be discussing this with people, not every interaction has to be an interaction dedicated to raising the consciousness of others. But creating the space is so important. Spaces like this, group facilitation, getting trained to be a facilitator, training people to then train more people is so key in the work. And everyone's political journey and political education journey is different, but there are these similarities that we can learn. So I always ask people to trace themselves of how they got to where they're at, to have principled politics. It's never a one book, one meeting,

one day thing. It is a journey of months and years. And like I said, at a constant struggle. And when you're able to tap into that history of knowing that the struggle that you are a part of for liberation is hundreds of years old, you start to dispel some of the things that get in the way of convening all the people who need to be convened and unified, something that I struggled with in the youth movement was that we didn't want to listen to anyone over 25. And now that I'm approaching that age, obviously I realize how silly that is in stride. But some of the most important lessons I was able to learn in my organizing came from meeting with movement elders, having our questions answered, and being critical with other comrades. And so the organizer, Willie Baptist, who I had the honor of seeing speak a few weeks ago, and he said, like, Muhammad has to go to the mountain, the mountains, the people.

You have to meet the people where they're at. You have a lot of people writing critical analysis of the mountain from a plane far away. And so it's important to know that revolutionaries aren't separate from the people. If your aim is to be a revolutionary, it has to be with the people meeting the most advanced or the people who are asking these questions and helping facilitate that learning into action and then that action into things that can be politically emulated and escalated. Those are the parts of the struggle that we can all tap into from wherever we're at. If you're on this space right now or you're listening to this recorded, like, do not let this

conversation around political education end when this thing ends. You have to continue it with the people that you may not talk to about these things ever. And that doesn't mean to strain your friendships or strain relationships, but find ways to introduce these ideas to the people that you care about because we understand the liberation that comes from grasping these ideas and putting them into action. The last point I'll say before I pass the mic is around, I lost my chain of thought. I'm sorry, I was on a roll. I would say why I'm an artist is because I view language is incredibly limited, like an art as a way of trying to invent new language or use language in a more accessible way.

And so I think English is very limited in how we're able to engage a lot of these things. And so a lot of the times for me, I lean into visual arts, experimental art, as a way to get past these predefined terms. If someone hears certain things, they might shut down. But there are other ways to introduce them to these things, especially through storytelling, through narrative.

When we study how the right is organizing, Oh, I remember what I was going to say. It was about how there is this undercurrent of nihilism that exists throughout the United States and a lot of different parts of the world that are aligned with Western thought. And as we dismantle the myths that lead people down to fascist ideology

and nihilistic tendencies, it's important not just to dismantle the myths, but provide a new context, a new frame of reference, because if you only dismantle the myth, people will feel lost and alone. And so it's important to not only dismantle the fascist myths, but tell these stories, provide this education, show the traditions, the history,

so that people can tap into the struggle wherever they're at and find the actual pro-people, pro-social, pro-communist side of what's been going on because there is more people struggling than not, right? Like there are more people trying to, trying to fight for freedom and liberation than most people believe or understand. So I think reading is a great way to tap into these histories, podcasts, documentaries, all these things. But it's really about trying to tie it all together and make it accessible not only

to the people in your lives, but try to make those contributions that can open up the door for other people. Well, great remarks. I just wanted to pick up. on some of these points that Matt was just making, Elima and others, that the, you know, the purpose of this podcast was to, you know, it can't cover everything, but to inspire people to be guerrilla historians, to use and engage history, their histories, retell these histories, just as Matt was saying, even if you critique the bourgeois and fascist, myths of the past because they are very steeped in the past. And there's a politics that's

absolutely embedded in what gets talked about, what gets remembered, how it's framed. We can dismantle them, but we need to put in place the real historical materialist understanding of history to be inspired by the heroic and courage, courageous struggles of the past to learn from the mistakes that were made. How do we analyze the specific circumstances to design our political and socioeconomic struggles to be effective and so on. Like, this is all why we have to be guerrilla historians. And it starts, much as Alima said, with retelling, reframing our own histories in each of our struggles. So important. To that end, I've been thinking for about a year or more about trying to put together some kind of series of a few workshops, a kind of

guerrilla history basic training, you know, on, you know, history and social theory about, like, archiving and research, about oral histories, analysis of primary source talking, just the kind of basic kind of techniques and approaches to historical knowledge. And I don't know if that would be interesting or useful for people, but I think, you know, the purpose of it would be designed to really encourage people to be guerrilla historians in their particular activism and in their in their communities. If that's of interest, then that's something I'd like to try and develop and make available to everybody. The last thing is we've been talking a lot about these barriers and kind of bridging, you know, the divide between research that's being done and actually

socially engaged struggle. So I'm actually planning on offering the course that I'm actually teaching, which is called the Crusading Society, because I'm a medieval historian, and I'm going to be offering a kind of open, online, drop-in version of the course for the next 10 weeks or so. You know, there's no preparation needed, but, you know, I'll sort of talk about some historical background, then maybe we'll look at his primary sources from the period, It analyzed them and then try and think about the contemporary environment and understand the connection. So people who are interested in this whole emergent and rise of Christian nationalism, people who are interested in the histories and the intertwined and interconnected histories of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism and colonialism, i.e. the birth of what I think of as when white supremacy really started to formulate itself as a historical phenomenon. in this era might find it interesting. So that's just open. I just want to announce it here. I'll

be posting it on my, you know, Twitter feed and so on, but it'll happen on Saturdays, 930 to 11, Eastern Time, and, you know, I'll post the Zoom for people to register and come in. And I'd like to do more of these kinds of things with the community. So anybody who's interested, please drop in and do this kind of thing yourself in your local communities and share historical knowledge and analysis. I'm looking forward to the rest of the discussion and what listeners might have to say, but this has been really, really helpful and profoundly useful, I think, for me, and even inspiring for me. So I'm going to try and do that basic training, and I'm going to get this open course organized. Let me turn it over to the other speakers.

Well, and I'm done, I will add that I have already heard from people that the kind of workshops, guerrilla historian workshops would have quite an, there's quite an interest in them. So we will certainly be putting that together for people in all of those methods. And I also just want to add quickly before we turn it back over to the panelists that historical materialism as a method is something that would really make understanding history and organizing much easier for people. And that's something that I'm personally trying to organize us having an episode on historical materialism as a concept and as a method for analyzing history. I have a couple of

friends who are historians that, well, they run the historical materialism podcast, which is also worth a follow. So yeah, historical materialism, we're not going to get into the topic right now because that's kind of apropos of nothing at this point. It's not, you know, directly related to the topic. And we do definitely want to get to the listener questions. But I just wanted to throw out there that historical materialism as a method is something that if we can try to instill that, if nothing, it will give people the tools to understand historical happenings, historical events, and even political theory, and use that in a way that will positively benefit their activism and organizing. So I'm going to turn it back over to the panelists now. I know we have just a couple of

people left that want to say things. And again, listeners, if you want to ask a question, request to speak in the space itself or type your comment into the replies of the tweet that we put out about this Twitter space. Oh, and I will let everybody know, follow Adnan's Twitter. That way you can keep up on all of those things that he's organizing. It's at Adnan A-Husain, A-D-N-A-H-U-S-N. You can also follow me on Twitter at Huck-N-N-N-N-N-E-N-E-N-E-N-E-N-E-N-E-E-N-E-E-N-E-E-E-N-E-E-N-E-E-E-N-E-E-V-E-E. You can also follow, panelist, take it way. Yeah, so I wanted to like drill down on like the historical knowledge being really key to activism and organizing. I think some other panelists spoke on this and I think there's no greater example of how important it is than in the struggles of colonized people. So we see something

a lot of the time like you know, before I was politically educated before I had like investigated this stuff, you'll see people say, well, why, why does it, why would Hawaii want independence? Why, why is that something that, you know, we should care about? And they don't know that Hawaii was illegally annexed and its native people had their culture exploited and stolen from them and marketed. Or, you know, with Palestine, you'll have people say, well, why can we just do this two-state solution? When, no, there's only one state. That's Palestine from the river to the sea. Palestine is an occupied state. There is no two-state solution. But for me, what, um, is super important, it's in Puerto Rico.

So growing up, I was always told, like, Puerto Ricans are Americans. Like, you guys are Americans. And, you know, you should, like, love this country and da-da-da. And all we just need is just the ability to vote. And if we could vote for president, if we become a state, that'll solve all our issues. And it wasn't until I learned about a history that's been whitewash completely. I mean, I was not taught this in school. I'm sure not, you know, nobody here in an American public school was taught.

how Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain for hundreds of years before 1898, when the United States took over. And the United States took over Puerto Rico as a colony. They raised all of our agriculture and turned us into a sugar monoculture to turn out profits for empire, which caused famine. And then there started to be nationalist uprisings of Puerto Ricans who wanted independence. And these Puerto Ricans were met with extreme violence. They were, you know, they were imprisoned. There was Leila de la Mordaza, which was the gag law, which prohibited Puerto Ricans from flying the Puerto Rican flag. And it prohibited them from speaking at all in favor of independence. And there were uprisings that I never learned about.

Grito de Hayuilla, where Pedro Obiso Campos led his people, like a group of insurgents to take over Hayuga and Puerto Rico. They were ultimately the United States sent in the National Guard and shut that down. But these are things that I had never learned about. So when we come to the present day, right, our present day activism organizing, people will be like, well, there's no support for independence for Puerto Rico. And they don't know this history. They don't know that it was illegal, that it was literally something that you could go to jail for that Pedro Vizocampos was tortured in prison for. He was exposed to radiation torture. And this was, you know, the fate of those who dared to, you know, fight or speak out for Puerto Rican independence.

They don't know that, you know, we were, we have an illegal colonial debt that, um, that was. was manufactured by the United States by, you know, them pulling out all these corporations in 1996. It was, I believe, Bill Clinton. And we ended up with this huge debt that we're now expected to pay, which is causing extreme economic strife. And then we have promiss of the unelected fiscal board for the United States imposed on Puerto Rico that's implementing austerity measures, including, you know, the House of Representatives in Puerto Rico, voting against the privatization of energy and that being overturned by Promo Mesa completely despite, you know, these elected representatives from Puerto Rico voting against this privatization.

And now we have Luma Energy in Puerto Rico that is extremely expensive, extremely consistent. Puerto Ricans are suffering with massive power outages. And we have Puerto Ricans fleeing the island in the hundreds of thousands and losing our home. And, you know, so people will say, well, why don't we just become a state and this and that? And that's going to fix our issues when the deal know, like Puerto Rico, we will continue promissa if they become a state. And they don't know the history of the repression of independentistas and also, you know, the history of why we are in the position that we are, why we became economically dependent on the U.S. and how consent has been manufactured from the repression of independent visas and also from this economic dependence that has been developed. How we were a target of coin tell pro, that this was a major thing.

there were 1.3 million pages on Puerto Rican independence fighters after Puerto Rican stormed the Capitol. And I believe, 1953 and shot into the house chambers. And they ended up, that was the first Cointel mission, Port Pro mission was going in and, you know, gathering info on these Puerto Rican independence groups to disrupt divide and destroy them. And so now we have people saying that there's no support for independence without that historical knowledge. of why that is, what happened, and, you know, how consent has been manufactured to keep Puerto Ricans, you know, from, and make them believe that statehood is the best option or the colonial status quo. And people, you know, have been propagandized not to fight for our

independence, and this serves U.S. interests and capitalist interest, how Puerto Rico was considered a bulwark against communism. There are literal articles that you can look up about people saying we need to keep Puerto Rico because, you know, we don't want them to fall to communism. And this is all extremely important. This historical knowledge is extremely important in our activism and organizing because we cannot conceive of why Puerto Rican liberation is so important without this kind of knowledge. So I think having that, and I'm sure, like, you know, the same goes for other, you know, national liberation struggles worldwide, where on the outside, if you don't know the information,

you might believe the way they've felt. feel or whatever, or why it's important, and having that historical knowledge can really ground you in that kind and in understanding that. I can go now. So I think it's really interesting all the different forms that political education can take, you know, from very formal settings like, you know, revolutionary schools and organized political education programs, reading groups, to things like spaces and podcasts. And also, like, I encourage, you know, listeners and everybody to consider, like, your personal relationships to other people to be, like, a venue of

political education. I think sometimes about kind of the way that the enemy operates, which is the slow drip, drip, drip of misinformation that is being fed to people all the time. And I think that people also have the ability in their own personal lives, the people that they're connected to to help counteract that. You know, some of that is just giving people more accurate information or pointing out some of the, you know, historical patterns of oppression and exploitation that have created our modern world. Or, you know, maybe just questioning some of the narratives that you hear in the news, you know,

some of the information about China. Is this really accurate? it. And in that way, you know, kind of expanding people's ability to question what they're hearing and, you know, look for more information, a funny story about this. So like my husband and I had conversations, you know, a couple years ago, probably now about things going on in China that have been in the mainstream media a lot. And, you know, he did a ton of research on his own just out of curiosity. you know back to like original sources and trying to figure out where some of this news was coming from and now he is continuing that process although you know for all intensive purposes my husband is liberal um with his circle of guy friends you know and now they're all like having a guy's weekend and everyone has like suggested a podcast or like other piece of information for everyone to listen to um before showing up so i really think that it only takes um

you know, don't, don't play down like your own personal level of influence in the circles that you have contact with and your ability to, you know, push people left. I've been myself, a communist for probably long. Some of the people listening to this have been alive, but I still find myself continuing to move further left. So there's just so much room to go. Um, and, uh, I just, you know, want to encourage people to, to bring those you love along with you. Okay. Um, so I kind of want to circle back, um, to the question of like, how do we meet people where they're at? Because I think that's an expression that gets used a lot, uh, and, and deployed, um, by people who don't really know what that means, um, or, or, or how to actually

do it. I think recently especially, I think that the idea meeting people where they're at gets conflated as like the need to like lie to people or coddle them or placate them with notions that we think are palatable to them as opposed to, you know, being, you know, like getting them ready for a revolutionary project and actually organizing them. And I think recently especially it's been made as a case to appeal to workers' like basis, most reactionary views. And I think we actually do the opposite, right? We choose our battles to be sure as organizers and people in political education. But I think meeting people where they're at is like start identifying where the contradictions are sharpest,

the people we intend to organize with, because we understand. understand that where the contradictions are most intense for people is where people generally can think and analyze things in the most dialectical way, right? And trying to organize them around that issue, get them to understand that it is within their power to change them and provide those resources and that political education so that they can do that within their own community. But also like the longer term project of getting them to take that one area, where they can analyze things from a dialectical materialist analysis and allow them to understand that you can apply this analysis to every other struggle and to see that everyone else's struggle is their own in that way. And I think this is, I think, part of, also circling back to Elima's question,

We did have a couple of classes on socialism, but they weren't really that well attended. Like 10 times as many people came to like the How to Be a Better Howley class. And much more people came to like, you know, classes on Hula, on Moolello, on Mountainequia specifically. And I think it was that that was like, I guess like it was, it was, I'm glad that we had them. But like I felt like a lot of folks just like we hadn't really, softened the soil for that

yet. And there was like so much other work to be done in order to like meet folks where they were at to be even ready to be interested in that conversation at all. And I think like for me like I experienced a deep political

education going to the Mounta, you know, as this Asian settler socialist. You know, it took me like over three decades to get what I think still is the most important political education I could possibly receive. And that was from Mount Achaia.

Not just, you know, from all the amazing folks and educators I learned from there, but from Mount Akeia itself. Like, you know, the Poo-Hulu-Hulu classes, like, you could see what we were fighting for, like, right there in the largest way possible. I mean that both literally and figuratively. And it was so instructive. And I think this is also another way, I think, to think of political education and how it can be structured and how we can think outside of the classroom or outside of the Zoom is this idea of looking to the actual primary source, right, beyond just human relations.

Nana Ike Kumu, like look to the source. And for everyone, no matter where you are, the primary source is the land. The primary source is Ainah, right? It's wretched of the earth, not wretched of the suburbs, right? And I think like learning in, like getting in the land and having political education occur there if it's possible. I think those are some of the most illuminating and educational moments. And I can think of one, like, really just powerful example that's just kind of like burned into my memory. Through this Oahu water protector, saying there's this other very connected struggle at Makua Valley on the west side of Oahu, where, you know, for decades, the U.S. Army just bombed and conducted so many live fire trainings in this beautiful valley called Makua.

and it is one of the most beautiful places on this island. And folks from Malama Makua, these Kanaka organizers, were able to stop it, kind of like at the peak of ramping up towards, you know, the invasion of Iraq. And they continue to have these site visits, which are also kind of like acts of resistance, pushing their way deeper and deeper into the valley under military supervision. and I asked one of the organizers, Auntie Lynette, if we could, you know, bring some of the people who we felt were ready, affected family members, many of the military spouses who were poisoned by the Red Hill Fuel Leaks, who seemed like they were ready to experience Makua. And she said, fuck yeah, bring them. And so they went. And political education occurs on all of these visits all the time, like in the in the introduction, circling up, telling stories. You know, people like Uncle Sparky tells a lot of the story of Makua

and the lessons of Makua and encouraging all of us to kind of like quiet ourselves and listen to Makua. And every single one of these family members that we brought over, they were forever changed. And no amount of like, you know, PowerPoint, political ed webinars despite how amazing and effective

those can be could move these folks and teach these folks in the way that that experience did where I'll get to where they moved in a second but I think what's so important about that moment I think was

understanding that the land is not only our greatest caretaker, our greatest provider our greatest protector, it's also our greatest teacher. And we just, we have to understand that in order to, you know, engage in, in the political education that builds mass movements, because this is all about, you know, like land and who controls it, right? And, and if, if we can't listen to the land and be educated by the land, then we're fought, right? Especially with climate change, you know, on the horizon. And so, um, a lot of these people, like, some of them were completely apolitical.

some of them were leaning liberal, some of them were lean conservative, but so many of them now, not all of them, but many of them, after that experience, like they moved within a matter of a couple of weeks into full demilitarization, deoccupation, sovereignty for Hawaii and Konakamali in a heartbeat, right? And that's the kind of political ed where, you know, all the most effective political ed kind of striving. to achieve where, you know, if you meet people, meeting people where they're at means, means showing up to people's struggles to the point where they see other struggles as just as much bound up with theirs and their liberation as well. Because a lot of these folks, when they saw Makua Valley hurting, they, I think many of them saw, you know, someone hurting in the same way that they were hurting, and hurt by the same people who hurt them. And I think when you're able to do that, like finding the right context to ground people

in a way where they are ready to receive political education, especially revolutionary political education, that's where you can move them much further than if you were just kind of like a stranger trying to deliver a very set curriculum to a person that's like a kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. And I think that's, I think one of the most important components to like a revolutionary political education is meeting people where they're at is, like, answering first that question

is like, where are we at, literally? I love that point so much of meeting people where they're at and like where they're at. Because I think, okay, and this is going to go to a different thing. I know we're wrapping up, so I'm just going to go with my own point really quickly, but I really love that point, Mikey. I kind of wanted to build back on what Sam was talking about and even what Adnan mentioned about how our struggles have been erased from public memory and that is a very purposeful erasure.

So as a Palestinian, entirely a settler state project is built and propagated on a lie that, you know, it was a barren desert, a land without a people, for people without a land. You have these continuous lies of a, the only democracy in the Middle East, you have pink washing, you have greenwashing, and it's a billion-dollar propaganda industry that Sattler Project, its existence, depends on. And in America, you have so much red scare propaganda, or you have, you know, the propaganda of the war and terror in order to feed the military industry complex. So using, you know, political education, historical knowledge as a way to combat that is so, so important, powerful. So in May 2021, we had the rise of the Sheikh Sharraha protests. And a lot of people had

no idea what was happening in Palestine and being able to ground, you know, the ethnic cleansing happening in Sheikh Sharra is just a microcosm of what Israel is. It's a microcosm of a larger settler project. So, so important people's understanding of Palestine. The recent bombing on Gaza and like, like breaking up that, those propaganda that they spent so much money on just through very simple things. I'm not sure who it said, who had said, don't underestimate what your organizing does or what you do on whatever platform you are on. Because even when I was doing

stupid TikToks, I'd get so many messages for people being like, I had no idea what was happening. This has helped me. This has helped ground me. So the power to narrate, the power to break up, whatever like hegemonic narratives we've been told by empire is so, so important in mass mobilization, in organizing.

So even with the case of Palestinians, like a Palestinian kid in university will get docks put on so many different websites. When I was trying to do my master's and applying for it, every single professor of mine was saying, don't even mention in your application that you are Palestinian because you are not going to get any position. No one's going to want to take you on. We've had so many problems with this and this professor and that professor. So like it isn't just, you know, education for the sake of education or

history for the sake of history. It you are, it is a form of resistance when you then use that knowledge in your organizing. It's, um, I think, we also underestimate how powerful it is for communities who have historically been just erased both physically and through knowledge production. That's also why I think it's super, super important to why political education and historic knowledge is super important to activism and organizing. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.