Category: Presentations

Dr. Halbi will present on the class character of the Chinese state. touching on changes in the conditions of the working class in China, why we cannot call China socialist but also why the Chinese state is such an important advance for the international working class. He will also cover the nature of US imperialism’s antagonism towards China.

Speaker will be Wadi’h Halbi , Communist Party, USA

The administration at City College of San Francisco is planning to lay off over 50 full-time tenured faculty and to replace few, if any, retiring faculty. Even before the pandemic, despite expecting increases in funding, they planned and acted to lay off 250 part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 term. The number of faculty at CCSF have been reduced by over 40% in the last ten years.

These actions have come at the expense of CCSF’s predominantly working class and lower middle-class students of color. Their education opportunities have been greatly reduced.

Rick Baum has been teaching American Government part-time at CCSF for over 20 years, has been active in fights to save CCSF, and is currently a member of CCSF HEAT.

He will discuss the downsizing of CCSF and address why it has been happening, something that has been occurring, less dramatically, at many other colleges, and here in a state dominated by the Democratic Party.  

Beginning with the recognition that war is not so much between individuals as between states, we therefore examine Engels: “The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax” (Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State).

Eugene E Ruyle, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Cal State Long Beach, and President of the East Bay Chapter of Veterans For Peace (Berkeley/Oakland).

The economic depression ongoing since 2008 has put the dangers of fascism and imperialist
world war, but also popular revolts and revolutions, back on the agenda. While the working class and oppressed communities around the world have been rising in revolt for more than a decade, no revolutionary organization adequate to face up to the task of bringing down the bourgeois
order has crystallized. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic and the danger of fascism have been
ravaging humanity.

Laura Wells will discuss the historic decision this year in which the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party created a Left Unity Slate of statewide candidates for the June 7, 2022 primary in California. This cooperative strategy was based on the many shared values between the two parties, all of which will save lives, money, and the planet. Among the values are a single-payer “Medicare for All” healthcare system, real justice not increasing criminalization, truly affordable housing, public ownership of energy, ending wars for profit, public banking, and a comprehensive climate plan including meaningful work that provides a living without destroying the planet. 

Robert Jensen will outline four key challenges facing humanity: size, scale, scope, and speed. What is the sustainable size of the human population? What is the appropriate scale of a human community? What is the scope of human competence to manage our interventions into the larger living world? At what speed must we move toward different living arrangements if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences? The sooner we face the realities of these challenges without unwarranted faith in ideology or technology, the more likely we can create the conditions for a soft landing for humanity. These ideas are drawn from the forthcoming book that Jensen coauthored with Wes Jackson, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity.

Robert Jensen, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas in Austin, collaborates with the New Perennials Project. He is the coauthor with Wes Jackson of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, which will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in fall 2022. Other books are articles by Jensen are online at https://robertwjensen.org/.

After brief presentations by members of the ICSS Program Committee, we will continue our discussion on the situation on Ukraine. Speakers will include Allan Miller, Mehmet Bayram , Richard Fallenbaum, Gene Ruyle, and perhaps others.

The presentation will be a combination: the overall political-strategic outlook and, of course, the military aspect of the campaign. References will be made to such Soviet era theorists as Mikhail Tuchachevsky, Mikhail Frunze, Alexander Svechen an artillery specialist and Leon Trotsky, and such generals as Georgi Zhukov, Vasili Chuikov, defender at Stalingrad and armored theorist, Pavel Rotmistrov. And, of course, the importance of airpower will be included, with a comparison to the United States.

Speaker: Mark Albertson is the historical research editor at Army Aviation magazine in Monroe, Connecticut; and, the historian for the Army Aviation Association of America. He has authored numerous books and has taught at
Norwalk Community College. In May 2005, Mark was presented with a General Assembly Citation by both houses of Congress in Hartford, Connecticut for his commemoration of the centennial of battleship Connecticut.

This Sunday at the Marxist Library, we will review the destructive impact of the Covid pandemic, the catastrophic capitalist response, political and economic repercussions, and a prognosis for our future. Speaker: Allan Miller, ICSS Program Committee