With the backing of the United States and the IAEA, it is only a matter of time before the wastewater dump begins. Once the discharge starts, the Pacific ocean will be contaminated with radiation for the next three decades. With no clear prediction on how the radioactive discharge might disrupt the ecosystem of the ocean and the planet, what choices should we make? It is time for the people around the world to come in solidarity with the people of Fukushima and international environmental organizations to engage in a sweeping campaign to fight against the wastewater dump. Such a global ecological catastrophe must be stopped.

In order to see the intentions behind the Korea-Japan and Korea-US summits, we need to look at their various contexts. Yet, it appears that the highest priority for these various contexts is the US strategy for global dominance, and in particular the East Asian strategy. As for the Korean society’s attitude towards Japan, anti-Japanese sentiment is still strong. Despite this, the improvement of relations between Korea and Japan or the act of emphasizing future partnership can be seen as being in line with the US Northeast Asian strategy. Japan is the primary partner in the US strategy to contain China. Japan is also working hard to be faithful to this position. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to view the improvement of Japan-Korea relations in Northeast Asia as a reflection of the will to realize a strong united front centered on the US strategy for Northeast Asia. 

In the end it is a policy that represents the interest of the capitalists. From a global perspective, the Korean work hours are already very long, so it would not be feasible to formally extend them further. As a result, the government presented their flexibilization as a workaround. The government presented “mutual consent on working conditions”, but without a labor union’s power to defy the employer, this would obviously be a consent in name only. According to the information released by the Ministry of Labor last December, the union membership rate in Korea is only 14.2%, with 2.93 million members. It is only clear that working hours would increase under paper-thin consent in smaller, non-unionized workplaces. This increase in working hours serve only to increase the profit of capitalists. The availability of profit is limited under currently allowed working hours, and in the cutthroat competition between capitalists, securing additional working hours would be a godsend.

Korea has no choice but to raise interest rates in line with the global trend of interest rate hikes, but the situation in Korea is a little different from other countries. Hence the burden caused by the interest rate hike, even when taking into account some speculative elements, is causing financial difficulties to households and businesses.

SADD's "taking the subway at rush hour" is an act of disobedience toward a non-disabled-centered society, which does not guarantee the rights of the disabled as citizens as stipulated in the Constitution of the Republic of Korea. The responsibility lies with Korean politics and the government, who do not listen unless the disabled resort to screaming.

People’s movement rapidly decreased as more people began working from home and many restaurants and cafes closed due to the lack of customers. In order to overcome the crisis, each country has injected huge amounts of money to restore the economy, but workers, ordinary people, small and medium-sized business owners and the self-employed are still experiencing much hardship.

"The movement for disability rights in Korea has been full-fledged since the 2001 struggle for the right to mobility. That year, the death of a person on a wheelchair after falling off a subway station lift sparked fierce protests and struggles demanding elevators at subway stations and low floor buses. Activists chained themselves to subway tracks and placed themselves in front of buses. The movement fought, often enduring insults, to expose society’s hypocrisy and change a society centered on the non-disabled towards one in which no one is marginalized."

Like the rest of the world, South Korea is also experiencing economic difficulties due to COVID-19. In Korea, resentment among self-employed shopkeepers is increasing. This is because the government's measures for self-employed shopkeepers are not enough while the latter have to bear great financial losses due to the government's social distancing measures. The government’s compensation for the shopkeepers remains paltry and its social distancing measures are sacrificing them again.

The International Strategy Center (ISC) spent June and July hosting events and study groups on queer issues. We have had movie nights and book clubs centered around media representation, queer theory in the context of leftism, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US. On July 28th, we concluded these two months with our Progressive Forum interviewing Holic, the president of the Korean Sexual Minority Culture and Rights Center. 

The interview was part of the International Strategy Center’s Progressive Forum where we interviewed James Mudoon, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter, a research association at the Oxford Internet Institute, and head of digital research at the Autonomy think tank. The interview was conducted by Mariam Ibrahim and edited for clarity and brevity by Matthew Phillips.    

On April 28th, the International Strategy Center and Progressives for All of the Justice Party invited Nick Srnicek, lecturer at King’s College London and author of Platform Capitalism to its monthly Progressive Forum to talk about the political-economic of platforms. The interview was conducted by Norbert Morvan and edited for clarity and brevity by Matthew Phillips.

Ana Cha is a member of MST’s National Coordination and does work at the national school with the International and political education collectives. She has been a member of the MST for the past 20 years and became involved in the northeast part of Brazil. We interviewed her for our monthly ISC Progressive Forum on Sunday Feb. 19th. The interview was carried out by the International Strategy Center’s Zoe Yungmi Blank and Mike Cannon.

On Aug. 28, the International Strategy Center (ISC) and the Seoul Women’s Association held a Progressive Forum entitled “Post Roe v. Wade: Reproductive Rights Through a US Lens.” The following is the interview (conducted by ISC’s Zoe Yungmi Blank) with Joyce Chediac, a Redstockings member in the 1970s and currently an editor with the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Liberation News and a staff member with its women’s publication Breaking The Chain. This is an abridged version edited for clarity and brevity.

On April 10, the International Strategy Center held its monthly Progressive Forum on “How NATO and Sanctions Perpetuate War and Suffering.” It hosted Reiner Braun (executive director of the 131 year old International Peace Bureau, a founder of the No to NATO Network, and author of Einstein - Peace Now); and Vijay Prashad (journalist, author, and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Change). The event involved presentations, followed by questions from the ISC and audience members. Below is a synthesis of the presentations and Q&A.

On April 10, the International Strategy Center held its monthly Progressive Forum on “How NATO and Sanctions Perpetuate War and Suffering.” It hosted Reiner Braun (executive director of the 131 year old International Peace Bureau, a founder of the No to NATO Network, and author of Einstein - Peace Now); and Vijay Prashad, journalist, author, and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Change. The event involved presentations, followed by questions from the ISC and audience members.

“...Even the prominent US diplomat George Kennan, who authored the post Second World War American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, warned, in 1998, that NATO expansion was not a good idea. Russians would "gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies." It was a strategic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.

Now, there is an interesting dynamic in NATO expansion. We, of course, also have the agency of the countries between NATO and Russia. Most of these countries historically felt a threat from the east. And that's why their elites (in Poland, or Czech Republic, etc) wanted to be part of the NATO security structure. So there is also that local agency there. It's not only about two big powers.

However, when the expansion came closer and closer to the Russian border, that of course increased the tension. And so if American policy played a role that would be opening the door of NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. If we had a time machine and went back to 1991, and defined Ukraine, Belarus as neutral states, as happened with Finland and Austria, we wouldn't be experiencing many issues we are experiencing now. But that's, of course, a missed opportunity. Now, we have a completely different reality and dynamics…”

To help explain the crisis in Ukraine, the International Strategy Center (ISC) interviewed Volodomyr Ishchenko (Ishchenko), a Research Associate at Osteuropa-Institut Berlin and a member of PONARS Eurasia. Ischenko’s work on deficient revolutions and Ukrainian protest movements have made him a sought out left wing voice on Ukrainian politics, including interviews and articles with the Jacobin Magazine, Al Jazeera, and Truthout. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Ischenko by the International Strategic Center for our monthly Progressive Forum.

We invite Fatima Hassan, co-founder and director of Health Justice Initiative and discuss how to dismantle justice inequity and injustice and finally resolve the COVID19 pandemic.

The ISC, the Yongsan Citizens' Alliance, Justice Party of Seoul, the South Korean Network for Housing Rights and Solidarity for Housing Rights talk with Volkan Sayman (sociologist and researcher with the Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.) about the organizing that achieved the victory, the challenges and tasks ahead, and their vision of social housing.

On October 7th, at 7pm, the International Strategy Center welcomed Vijay Prashad to the Progressive Forum monthly series. Vijay Prashad -- author, journalist, international solidarity activist, and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research -- educated and engaged with us about Afghanistan's past, present, and future.

On June 19, 2019, the International attended the Justic Party’s World Progressive Politics Forum and World Advancement Politics Forum’s video interview with journalist David Perejil.

4월 25일 국제전략센터가 참여하는 정의당서울시당 세계진보정치포럼에서 대만의 진보정당 시대역량과의 화상간담회를 진행했습니다.

1월 23일 국제전략센터가 참여하고 있는 정의당 세계진보정치포럼에서 스페인의 진보정당 바르셀로나엔꼬무와의 화상간담회를 진행했습니다.

We seldom hear about modern Africa from an African perspective. As part of his second of three parts in “Understanding Africa,” a Kenyan organizer writes about how a changing global order after World War II and African people’s collaboration and resistance shaped modern Africa.

This enlarging cache of U.S.-led anti-China coalitions in the region, and the intensification of joint and multinational war games—such as the live-fire “Combined Annihilation drills” this May, the “largest U.S.-South Korea military drills in 70 years,” or Ulchi Freedom Shield this August, which involved the use of nuclear assets—raises the threat of regional or even global war. To prevent war and build peace in Northeast Asia, and join forces with activists and groups working toward a growing non-aligned movement within and beyond the region, the Seoul-based International Strategy Center organized a two-day online forum on October 28, focused on frontline anti-war struggles in Northeast Asia, and the 29th, focused on peace and non-aligned movements around the world. This article details the key topics and discussions from the October 28th forum.

The Kishida government has ramped up military buildup in preparation for a potential war in Taiwan, including upgrading civilian airports for military use. The most vocal protests to the Japanese government’s militarism have come from Okinawa, who would bear the brunt of the cost of war. A 2022 study revealed that 83 percent of Okinawans believed that Okinawa’s bases would be targeted during a conflict.

Those that call China an enemy of the U.S. have yet to tell us how and why that is so.  The Western media repeatedly fails to uphold the basic tenets of good journalism when painting China as a global threat: China’s last armed conflict was the four-week Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979; in contrast, since 1945, when it “cast itself as the global peacekeeper,” the US has been in a state of  endless war and invasion , not to mention its  20-year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet based on media portrayals, Russian or Chinese spy balloons are flying all around us. Why does the US conjure imaginary enemies? For armaments to be manufactured and generate profit for the war industry, public consent also needs to be manufactured. Without such an enemy, real or perceived, maintaining military budgets ten and a hundred times the size of most countries would be impossible.

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Yoshikawa says that peace movements are responding by working to “create a larger, more cohesive peace movement” that is organizing events and rallies to which peace groups from mainland Japan and abroad are invited. The growing US-Japan-South Korea trilateral alliance has “sparked a counter-alliance among peace movements” in each country. If Okinawa is an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US to wage war, it can also become a bastion for movements to wage peace.

July 27 marked the 70th anniversary of the 1953 ceasefire to the Korean War. In the three years leading up to the anniversary, South Korean peace movements organized the international Korea Peace Appeal campaign to replace the armistice agreement with a peace treaty to conclude the 70-plus-year Korean War. The anniversary has come and gone, but, instead of peace, the Joe Biden, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Fumio Kishida administrations are stoking tensions in the Korean Peninsula as a smokescreen to build a NATO-level U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral alliance against China.

Platform Capitalism is a set of economic tendencies that emerged with the rise of digital platforms (e.g. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber...). Platforms collect user data while facilitating the exchange of goods. This gives them great near-insurmountable advantages.

You’ve likely heard of International Women’s day, but let’s look a little deeper. How did it start? Why is it held on March 8th? Did you know it was originally ‘working women’s day’?

Here is a bite size overview of IWD’s origins and some of the celebrations and protests held around the world this week!

As the world braces to deal with global warming, there is much focus on Green New Deals that can stimulate the economy, provide good paying jobs, and transition our economies away from fossil-fuel intensive production and towards sustainable production. Economist, activist, and co-founder of the Jubilee 2000 campaign (to forgive Third World Debt) Ann Pettifor describes how a Green New Deal might be funded by government financing and how it must radically transform our economies to be sustainable and equitable. This information deck summarizes her key ideas as well as critically evaluating them.

It is not overpopulation that causes hunger as is often argued, but rather inequality and a profit-driven, agribusiness-dominated food system in which the basic material need for food for hundreds of millions of people – at minimum – is sacrificed to quench the hunger for profit of the few.

A few countries have done relatively well in responding to COVID-19, and they all approach health care and public health very differently from the United States, even if their economies are capitalist. I focus now on one of those countries that I know best: South Korea. I then move the focus to that other mysterious, noncapitalist country on the same peninsula: North Korea.