ICSS Past Presentations

https://youtu.be/4n4tAAEDMEU San Francisco based journalist and political analyst, Farshid Vahedian, who recently returned from Iran where he attended the funeral of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, will provide his observations, based on his conversations with other journalists and people who attended the funeral proceedings which brought together an estimated tens of millions of people in Iran and neighboring countries. Resume: Farshid Vahedian is a long time resident of San Francisco Bay...

https://youtu.be/popH17f1Y24 Since its inception 27 years ago, the US hegemon has sought to destroy Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution’s "threat of a good example." A campaign of "maximum pressure" – crippling sanctions, coup attempts, diplomatic isolation, and other coercion – has prevented the socialist project from reaching its full potential, but it has not defeated it. On January 3, following two months of an asphyxiating oil blockade, the imperial power carried out a decapitation...

https://youtu.be/iBUmbOT7BcM Around the world, and particularly in the Arab and Iranian region (West Asia), the leading anti-imperialist forces coming into direct confrontation with the United States and the Zionist project are Islamic Resistance forces, including in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. The United States targets these organizations, and states, with criminalization, sanctions and direct military assault. At the same time, imperialist politicians, governments and think tanks...

https://youtu.be/IPH4ayqiyk4 The Dialectics of Chinese Labor examines China’s trade union adaptation to the changing demands of the working class. For nearly 50 years, market socialism has transformed China from a rural to an urban economy, posing significant challenges to China’s trade union federation (ACFTU). The labor federation has skillfully reshaped its organizing strategies to respond to workers’ new material realities. Our speaker counters the monolithic position that devalues ACFTU...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdH8csNeRkg India based war historian Amaresh Misra returns to ICSS Sunday Marxist Forum to analyze and discuss what are the prospects of peace in the Gulf region of West Asia following the MOU signed between the US and Iran. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cA-jDYj-yY The Twilight of American Imperialism by Dr. Jack Rasmus describes the political, military, economic, and cultural aspects of imperialism; how these practices have been employed over the course of the 250-year rise, and the present decline of the American imperial project. Special attention is paid to identifying the distinctive characteristics particular to the American empire in its phase as the dominant hegemon after the mid-20th century—as well as...

https://youtu.be/76e8AJkqsTs Has Lenin’s Imperialism Withstood the Test of Time? Reassessing Lenin’s Theory in the Age of Global Capital  Peter Fay - 14 June 2026 Few political works have shaped anti-colonial and revolutionary movements more profoundly than Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Written amid the collapse of the Second International and the support of many socialist parties for World War I, it condemned both monopoly capital and the...

https://youtu.be/C1qu2CYOQmg Is the decline of the US empire anything more than a leftist prayer? Believers in US empire decline note three economic factors: the US economic position in the world has seriously weakened, particularly in relation to China; countries are turning away from the dollar as the currency for international trade, which would cripple the US; the US national debt is a weight that will crush the economy. To have a provocative discussion on this topic, we have invited...

https://youtu.be/dFsxBXejr28 Should China be characterized as capitalist/state-capitalist or  market socialist (socialism with Chinese characteristics) or semi-peripheral or imperialist or semi-colonial or oppressed or oppressor? Should the emergence of China as a competitor of the US  in many areas be seen as a great anti-imperialist development? Or, can it be argued that Chinese capitalist development will lead to inter-imperialist conflicts and wars throughout the world? How much power do...

https://youtu.be/pItXqZx07rg On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched an illegal war of aggression against Iran, and Iran is on the defensive against the most powerful military in the world. The United States and Israel's illegal war of aggression is exactly what Hitler did when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering the European Theater of World War II. The American-dominated Nuremberg Trials declared that unprovoked wars of aggression were a "crime...