Author: icsswpadmin

Michael Roberts will analyse the latest developments in the major economies as inflation rates...

The AFL-CIO has since its existence been involved in taking money from the CIA and other government agencies for international operations around the world It has supported coups in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Ukraine, and attempted coups in Venezuela, Cuba. It now operates in over 60 countries without real transparency and reports to the membership of the AFL-CIO members. Most workers in the AFL-CIO do not know about this history or the fact that the AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center” gets $75 million a year from the National Endowment for Democracy which is directly from the US government.

This panel of Professor Kim Scipes and labor journalist Steve Zeltzer are members of the newly formed organization Labor Education Project On AFL-CIO International Operations LEPAIO.

https://aflcio-int.education

Our speakers, Steve Zeltzer and Kim Scipes, are labor activists.

Background: Reckoning with the AFL-CIO’s Imperialist History. https://jacobin.com/2020/01/afl-cio-cold-war-imperialism-solidarity

Our speaker will be Professor Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston has published dozens of books. Hear his presentation on his latest: ‘The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism’, 2022, which has implications for California and Indigenous History–and the prospects for a unique form of fascism.

What are the motives and likely effects of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan? We will be looking at these questions in the light of the interlocking crises of the US empire, US capitalism and the US Democratic Party. We will start the discussion with short presentations by Gene Ruyle, Veterans for Peace and ICSS, Raj Sahai of ICSS, and David Ewing, Chair of the US-China Friendship Society.

‘The canonical accounts of Lenin’s last writings accept the version that Lenin left a “testament” that included a number of negative remarks about Joseph Stalin, and that Lenin wished to remove Stalin from the position of General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). This version stems partly from Leon Trotsky, who embraced it eagerly in his campaign to replace Stalin as Party leader; partly from Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya; and partly from Nikita Khrushchev and the Khrushchev-era last edition of Lenin’s works, the Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (“Complete Collection of Writings”), or PSS.
Professor Valentin A. Sakharov of Moscow State University conducted extensive research in the 1990s on this subject. His 2003 book, Lenin’s “Political Testament”, published by Moscow State University Press, is the result of years of access to and study of many of the archival copies of Lenin’s works, drafts of those works, and originals of other important documents related to the question of Lenin’s “testament.”

A new book by Professor Grover Furr concludes that Lenin’s so-called “Testament” is a fraud, same as Skharov reached earlier and is largely based on that research. The new book by Prof. Furr also examines the role Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s wife N. Krupskaya and his sister Maria Ulyanova played in this fraud. Further, it reveals the errors and falsehoods in the book ‘Lenin’s Last Struggle’ by the late historian Moshe Lewin. Furr’s book also analyzes the role of Lenin’s wife.