The International Youth and Students for Social Equality at San Diego State held an event on Thursday to mark the 15-year anniversary of the World Socialist Web Site, an international online news and information center.
With an international daily readership of 40,000 to 50,000, the WSWS is financed by its readers’ donations to help improve and expand its website, which covers news ranging from social inequality and international politics, to science and art.
Chairman of the WSWS international editorial board David North spoke at the event, which is part of a globally held series to mark the website’s anniversary.
North, who has spoken and lectured several times at SDSU, said WSWS uses a materialist method when covering news. This means that “politics is an expression in concentrated form of the struggle between classes,” North said.
“Politicians are not free agents acting out on their own on the basis of their own ideas—good or bad as they may be—but represent definite material interests,” North said.
The purpose of marking the 15-year anniversary of WSWS is to review historical events that give “a deeper insight into the significance of the period through which we are living,” North said.
North emphasized the importance of understanding what’s happening around the world from a historical standpoint. He compared similar geostrategic and economical crises in the 15-year period—1998 to 2013—to another 15-year period a century earlier—1898 to 1913.
North quoted Mark Twain’s famous phrase, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” and explained that the two periods “rhymed.”
The period of 1898 to 1913 was mounting geopolitical tensions and wars, such as the Spanish-American War, the Moroccan Crisis, the Balkan war and the Italian invasion of Libya, North said.
He also said the period of 1998 to 2013 could be seen in a similar way with additional geopolitical tensions, such as China and North Korea.
The Asia-Pacific has become a central geostrategic focus because the U.S. is not prepared to accept China as a challenge to its economic and political interests, according to North.
