Author: icsswpadmin

Labor Day is more than just a holiday or a day for sales. From the first Labor Day March in 1882 in New York City to the historic Pullman Strike of 1894, Labor Day has its roots in struggle. It was brought to you by the same folks who gave you the weekend: the Labor Movement. Labor Day is the twin of May Day! Let’s reclaim our history!

Gene Ruyle is a retired union member with the California Faculty Association, a former delegate to the LA County Federation of Labor, and President of Veterans For Peace, East Bay Chapter. He is also a member of the ICSS Program Committee.

MaryLouise Patterson is the daughter of Langston Hughes’s cherished friends Louise Thompson Patterson, and William L. Patterson. Hughes was a frequent guest at the Patterson’s home and was like an uncle to MaryLouise.   In 2016 she co-authored with Evelyn Louise Crawford a book entitled “Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond” in which they attempted to show Langston’s belief that a better world was a worker’s world that had never died.

Turkiye has come to the end of its rope, living the “good life” without producing but borrowing constantly and selling off its assets, pennies-to-the-dollar. Now the country is in a total collapse with the bills becoming due and nothing to show from all the years of endless wasting away of the national resources under capitalism.

 Neocolonialism was created to be like this. Imperialism holds the client states in constant disequilibrium, debt, and violence, yet nurtures the hope of sitting at the table with the big boys one day. Unless there is a workers’ revolution and a planned economy to reverse the downward spin, the theater of constant hope stages plays involving elections, change, leaders, economy, crises, borrowing, paying, tight measures, ups-and-downs, yet, while everything changes, nothing changes. Exploitation and resource transfers continue to feed the imperialist centers.

Turkiye fostered the idea of a change, a post-Erdogan regime, while the elections approached last May. Elections, no surprise to revolutionaries, were yet another scheme to spread the lie that there was a democracy. Once the charade was over, establishing a full-scale Islamofascism under an extended regime of apartheid was again in full swing. Islamofascism is only the latest “fascism du jour” of the neocolonial, dependent, client, continuous fascism that is the default regime under imperialist exploitation. Its agents in Turkiye, the lumpen bourgeoisie, were born under imperialist dominance and know nothing else. All they need is to find a master that will treat them better, while they facilitate the resource transfer and labor exploitation. However, as the leash shortens, the docile lumpen bourgeoise flirts with whoever throws them a splinter of a bone, be it Russia, China, or the UAE. This only exacerbates the turbulent, violent, brutal system of theft under fascism and apartheid. Welcome to the modern Turkiye.

Mehmet Bayram, a journalist, has been visiting Turkiye for the last three months and will report on the daily life, politics, apartheid, and relations during the societal collapse of Turkiye.

On the night of January 12-13, 1948, Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels, a prominent actor and director in the Yiddish language Soviet theater and winner of the Stalin prize in 1946, together with a friend, Vladimir Golubov, were killed in a hit-and-run accident on a dark street in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR.

Mikhoels was buried with honors and praised in the Soviet press. Nevertheless, rumors that he had been murdered by the Soviet state began to circulate almost immediately. During the 1960s these rumors multiplied, occasionally being repeated in official sources.

Beginning in 1991 documents began to appear claiming that Joseph Stalin had ordered Mikhoels murdered. These documents continued to appear during the 1990s. Several of them have now been inserted in Soviet archives to give the impression that they are genuine. Today the story that Stalin ordered Mikhoels murdered is repeated by all researchers and popularizers of Soviet history. 

The Mikhoels murder case is an unusually blatant example of fraudulent “scholarship” intended to smear Stalin and the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Grover Furr is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University and a widely-published author focusing on Stalin and the USSR.

As the world marks the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Eugene E Ruyle, member of the ICSS Program Committee, reviews the history of nuclear weapons and their continuing threat to human existence.

Our speaker is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies, CSU, Long Beach and President, Veterans for Peace, East Bay Chapter 162.