Author: icsswpadmin

The Modi led BJP is in its 10th year governing India. India is 5th largest economy, has landed a mobile land rover on Moon’s South pole, improved industrial infrastructure and has reduced absolute poverty. In 2023, India also surpassed China in population, but the per capita income remained low, with unemployment rising, and widened income and wealth disparity under the neoliberal economy. Social tensions have risen with its aggressive Hindutva ideology. India is in BRICS, SCO, and G20, of which it is the president in 2023. With its strong ties with the US cemented in his visit to Washington this year, India has placed itself in the center of rising international tensions, with Russia and China emerging at the opposite pole to the US led unipolar order. National elections are due in March/April 2024. Raj Sahai will provide his assessment of the emerging economic and political picture in India.

Our speaker, Raj Sahai, is a native of India and a longtime resident/citizen of the U.S. He is a founding member of our Program Committee.

President Obama famously announced the US foreign policy pivot to Asia: “To preserve
US hegemony, we have to make sure that America writes the rules of the global economy
or China will." The US ruling class has pushed this topic of China to the top of our
agenda.

US imperialism’s hostility to China is increasing with military threats, new rounds of
sanctions, and increasingly wild fabrications. The media have been saturated with
allegations of human rights abuses, forced labor, religious persecution and “genocide.”
Addressing these topics from an anti-imperialist perspective will be Sara Flounders.
She will comment on the recent BRICS summit, flashpoints Xinjiang and Taiwan, and
the formation of an Asian NATO.

The big question for those on the side of socialist revolution is what is the class character
of People’s China? Sara will discuss China’s road to building socialism and what it
means to have a socialist state with “Chinese characteristics.” What is the critical role of
mass mobilizations in the long struggle for communist ideals and the ideological
commitment to egalitarian ideals? How does China’s international geopolitical role
compare to that of the former Soviet Union?

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.