Author: icsswpadmin

A huge, unprecedented strike of academic workers started on November 14th, hitting all ten University of California campuses like a ton of bricks. The 48,000 striking workers perform the majority of the teaching and research at UC, yet the pay and benefits for these workers, members of the United Auto Workers union, is way too low especially for high-cost-of-living areas like Berkeley, California.

The UC Regents, who run the university and represent the most powerful business interests in the state, have so far refused to bargain over wages.

Come to a special session of Sunday Morning at the Marxist Library to hear the latest about this historic academic workers strike.

Speaker: Dave Welsh is a writer, musician, retired letter carrier, Labor Council delegate, and lifelong fighter for people’s power. Whether it was the civil rights movement in Mississippi, support for the Black Panther Party, solidarity with the grassroots movement in Haiti, or breaking the blockade of Cuba at the border with the Pastors for Peace caravans, or holding down Oscar Grant Plaza with Occupy Oakland or the ongoing fight to jail killer cops – he’s been a part of it.

In line with the tradition of Marxism-Leninism, this presentation argues that the elements constitutive of objectively revolutionary conditions are all present in the U.S.; what is missing for a successful revolutionary movement is the subjective factor. The presenter will argue that the purity fetish which predominates the outlook of modern American communism has presented a fundamental fetter for the development of the subjective factor in the American working masses; the development of a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, it will be argued, is the precondition for the advancement of the subjective conditions.

Speaker Bio:

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. His popular writings have appeared in dozens of socialist magazines in various languages. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba), he has appeared in dozens of radio and video interviews around the world. He also edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022).

 Professor Aleksandr Dugin of Russia has a wide sweep in scholarship, from Philosophy, Sociology to Geopolitics. He is 60 years of age. He has written 60 books. His book ‘The Fourth Political Theory’ has been translated into English by Michael Millerman, a Canadian, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Dugin is an idealist conservative philosopher. Liberalism, according to Dugin, is the theory of Capitalism, which has defeated its two challengers in the 20th century: Communism on the Left and Fascism on the Right. These cannot now pose an effective challenge to it. Further, that Liberalism has turned into “Postliberalism” after 1991, and it is totalitarian. So, a fourth political theory is needed to save humanity.  

 Raj Sahai will summarize Dugin’s theory and offer an analysis and offer a Marxist critique. Raj is a Marxist and a long time activist against capitalism and its wars. He is a member of the planning committee of ICSS.

 Pleading with arsonists to put out the fire they’ve ignited is what it is like to turn to the UN
Security Council, OAS, and United States government to “stabilize” the crisis in Haiti.
Haiti has been under US/ UN occupation for more than 18 years, ever since the US-backed coup
d’état in 2004 against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This
occupation has perpetrated gross human rights abuses including rape and other forms of sexual
abuse. The occupation has brought cholera to Haiti and has systematically destroyed Haiti’s
institutions while increasing hunger and misery.
Courageously facing police and paramilitary attacks, the population of Haiti has taken to the
streets in ever-growing numbers, demanding their basic human rights and democracy, along with
an end to corruption and to the plunder of public resources. They demand an end to US/UN
occupation and an end to the right-wing Haitian Tét Kale Party (PHTK) regime headed by Ariel
Henry.
They are demanding a transitional government of public safety (Sali Piblik) to create a
foundation for free and fair elections and a return to democratic rule. They are demanding an end
to IMF-imposed austerity, soaring prices of basic necessities, and declining real wages. They are
demanding that their tax money be invested in education, healthcare, sanitation, clean drinking
water, and support for Haiti’s peasant farmers who have been the backbone of local food
production.
Our speaker is Pierre Labossiere, a longtime activist and a leading member of the Haiti Action
Committee ( action.haiti@gmail.com; website www.haitisolidarity.net) and a supporter of Haiti’s
popular movement and the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

The London Revolution 1640-1643 refutes the attacks of revisionist historians who would write the concept of revolution out of history. A defense and restatement of the Marxist view of the English Revolution and Civil War. Chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641 – 1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how London’s growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with its decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons.

Our speaker, Michael Sturza, is a life-long socialist political activist. A native New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn, he learned about radical politics from his father who had been active in the labor movement of the 1930s. In 1966, at the age of 14, he attended his first mass anti-Vietnam War rally with other students from his high school. In college, while actively involved in working class struggles, he studied Marxism, and, in 1974, graduated cum laude from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

In the following decades, while continuing to study Marxism and the history of labor and liberation movements, he remained a labor activist with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Sturza continues to live, study, and write in New York City. Since his retirement in 2014, he has traveled a good deal, including a nine-week trip to London, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Among the places he enjoyed visiting were the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, and the National Civil War Centre in Newark. The trip reinforced his belief in the social nature of the English Revolution. It was revisionist historians’ attempts to excise the class basis of the English Revolution and Civil War that led him to the studies detailed in his work.