Past Posts by Descending Date

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 Area, who immigrated from Iran and where he keeps contacts. He is a retired engineer and has been working as a journalist, who has translated articles from English into Farsi ...

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 operation, abducting President Nicolás Maduro. Yet the revolutionary leadership, the civil-military union, and the popular movement remained united under Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. In circumstances unprecedented in modern world ...

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 regularly raise an alarm about the threat to U.S. hegemony posed by a potential "red-green alliance," a unified revolutionary/anti-imperialist front involving Islamic resistance and revolutionary left movements at an international level. How should Marxists and ...

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 by using direct evidence to reveal its commitment and determination to improve wages and working conditions across the industrial, service, digital, and rural sectors of the Chinese economy.  Our speaker, Immanuel Ness, is the ...

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.  ...

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 on the internal contradictions and external forces responsible for its emerging decline in the 21st. The book predicts the likely trajectory of US imperialism over the next decade, 2025-2035, as it confronts intensifying ...

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 social-democratic movements that accommodated it. More than a century later, the world has changed dramatically. Yet the work’s concepts of monopoly capital, colonial exploitation, labor aristocracies, and the parasitic tendencies ...

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 long-time activist and past speaker Stansfield Smith to return. He was a leader of the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5 ...

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 the Chinese working class assert in China?  Should the present Chinese model be followed by other countries?  The speaker will also touch upon the state of productive forces, science and technology in China, ...

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 against international law" and a "crime against humanity." German military officers were executed because of those crimes. Therefore, President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu should face ...

In his book: The Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation, Brazillian-Italian Scholar João Romeiro Hermeto argues that Capital maintains itself by, among other means,  replacing the People’s consciousness of the past and vision of a better future with a constant, debilitating spectacle of the present.  In his talk João summarized his findings on this issue and discussed related matters relevant to the revolutionary struggle in the ICSS session of 3 May 2026. In the upcoming session several committee members will present their views on this book and invite comments from and discussion with the participants ...

In his new book (Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation, available from ingramspark.org for $12, or Amazon, $15) João argues that Capital maintains itself by, among other means,  replacing the People’s consciousness of the past and vision of a better future with a constant, debilitating spectacle of the present.  In his talk João will summarize his findings on this issue and discuss related matters relevant to the revolutionary struggle. He last spoke at the ICSS Marxist Forum in October 2024 on the subject of capitalist intellectual property.  Videos of that event can be found on YouTube, Rumble and at icssmarx.org and ...

The Current Crisis in Cuba: A historical and conjunctural perspective. Sinan Koont is Associate Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His visits to Cuba began in 1993 with a 3 month long sabbatical stay at the University of Havana in the middle of the Special Period in Cuba that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then he has  visited the island many times (three times with students) and published numerous articles (mostly on Urban Agriculture in Cuba) and a book titled Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba (University Press of Florida , 2011) ...

As the war in Iran continues and imperialism is trying to find excuses and reasons to justify the attack, we are witnessing a nation united in resisting this rapacious assault. However, the imperialist attack is not limited only to Israel, the US, or Iran. The wars in these times go well beyond a couple of borders, and from their first day become a regional conflict a hair breadth away from a world war. The war started by the US and Israel was sold to Americans as a 4- or 5-day war and it would be over very quickly as the ...

American workers stand on the precipice of an uncertain future. Behind them lies a century of U.S. global dominance. Marxists argue that imperialist expansion, buttressed by the world’s most powerful economy, produced this primacy, while capital garnered enormous profits from both foreign and domestic labor. For decades, especially in the mid-20th century, much of the American working class shared in these gains—through rising living standards, union growth, expanded social benefits, and advances in racial and gender equality. Today, however, after decades of gradual economic decline, U.S. economic, political, and military hegemony is foundering. As a result, the working class faces ...

Imperialism has decided to attack Iran recently, in its quest to dominate every inch of the globe, especially if that area is rich in oil.  Iran has a history of independence and fighting off foreign forces that challenge its sovereignty.  However, the war is not only directed against the people of Iran but also against its neighbors, as one by one they are pulled into this assault led by US and Israel.  Türkiye can no longer pretend to sit on the fence in this conflict, and, as the second-largest army in NATO, it must choose a side.  And the side ...