ICSS 20210509 – Theory of Revolution – Mehmet Bayram

ICSS 20210509 Theory of Revolution – Mehmet Bayram

Sun, May 9, 2021: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Pacific

The recent events call us to revisit Historical Materialism to understand what is happening.  The COVID-19 Pandemic, the re-emergence of the cold-war racing towards a real war, the Minneapolis murders by the police, the US police force becoming the third largest army in the world, the Amazon workers’ organizing efforts, the struggle of the health care workers, the Indian Farmers’ Strike, the failure of the world capitalist system to deal with a simple and preventable disease, and to allow millions of people to die from it shows the world, as we know it, is bubbling and boiling.  “A Change is gonna’ come,” for sure, but why, how, when, or where?  Where are the “Locomotives of History,” the revolutions, as Marx called them?
As the saying goes, there is no revolutionary action without a revolutionary theory. 
We will not offer solutions or chart a path to revolution in this session.  However, we will visit Historical Materialism and see why revolutions are a way of life, a natural phenomenon, a natural way for anything, including human societies, to evolve and change.  When, how, or do the dialectically consequential evolutionary and revolutionary stages of development merge into one?  We will discuss the assertion of the inevitability of revolutions, the development, needed conditions, the necessary organizations for societal change and revolutions.  The possibility of change without violence, a peaceful transition, will be discussed alongside what constitutes a revolution.  We may even talk about what happens if a change does not occur in the current human societies.
Our speaker will be Mehmet Bayram of the ICSS group is an activist, journalist, photographer, videographer, and translator.  His writings, news articles, and commentaries could be found in https://Sendika.org, or in English, https://sendika.org/kategori/english/, a progressive site that survived for more than 20 years, even after the Turkish government shut it down 62 times.