Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle August 27, 2015
Colleagues and friends,
We in the International Coordinating Committee and entirety of the
International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) express our most
militant greetings and solidarity with the Kilusang Mayo Uno KMU) on the
occasion of its 11th National Congress. As always, we are proud of the
KMU as the center of genuine trade unionism in the Philippines and as
one of the most important member-organizations of the ILPS in the
international working class movement.
This is a time for you and
us to celebrate your victories since your last congress. It is also a
time for you to understand further the international and national
context of your movement, sum up your experience and learn both positive
and negative lessons; and put forward the tasks for raising the
struggle to a new and higher level and achieve greater victories.
I am highly honored and deeply pleased that I am entrusted with the
task of presenting the international and national situation and the
consequent tasks of the working class and the KMU. I am guided by the
theme that you have defined: Intensify the struggle against the
neoliberal attacks on the workers and the people! Carry forward genuine,
militant and patriotic unionism! Advance the national democratic
struggle with a socialist perspective!
International Situation: Neoliberalism, Crisis, Wars and People’s Struggle
The neoliberal economic policy has been pushed by the US since 1979 and
carried out in earnest in the US and abroad since the Reagan regime. It
is based on the malicious the anti-working class lie that the cause of
stagflation was wage inflation and big government spending for social
services. It obscures the fact that in the capitalist system the
extraction of high profits by reducing real wages while raising
production causes the crisis of overproduction, which is variably called
stagnation, recession and depression, according to the degree of
severity of the crisis.
It also obscures the fact that high
spending for bureaucratic corruption, military production, deployment of
overseas bases and wars of aggression generates inflation. Furthermore,
it obscures the fact that the attempts of the capitalist state to use
finance capitalism, like printing money, expansion of credit and
invention of so many kinds of financial products, appear at first to
buoy up the economy, deliver more profits to the capitalists and raise
the value of their assets. But ultimately, the financial bubbles burst
and the real economy suffers in terms of production breakdown and
massive unemployment.
On the basis of anti-worker and anti-social
premises, the neoliberal policy accelerates and aggravates the process
of extracting profits from the surplus capital created by labor. The
monopoly bourgeioisie uses various methods to compel the workers to
accept lower real wages. It adopts higher technology to reduce the work
force. It uses mass unemployment in order to play off the unemployed
against the employed. It increases the short-term contractuals, casuals,
apprentices and the like to cut the number of workers with tenure. It
uses the state to adopt policies and use coercive actions to violate the
basic democratic rights and trade union rights of the workers.
It is a big lie for the monopoly capitalists to claim that economic and
social matters are decided by the so-called free market. There is no
free market under monopoly capitalism. The monopoly capitalists decide
matters by using their economic power as well as their state power to
undermine and suppress the working class and to provide more benefits to
the capitalist corporations through investment and trade
liberalization, privatization of public assets, deregulation of social
and environmental restrictions and the denationalization of the less
developed and underdeveloped economies.
The international
bourgeoisie, from the monopolies based in the industrial capitalist
countries to the big compradors in the underdeveloped countries,
continue to cling to the neoliberal economic policy dictated by US
imperialism and its allies in the G-7 and such multilateral agencies as
the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. Thus, global capitalism continues to
lurch from one crisis to ever worse ones. The world is still in the
throes of the crisis and depression that burst out in 2008. We are now
witnessing another worse crisis unfolding.
The unbridled printing
of money and rapid expansion of credit, without the corresponding
expansion of production and employment, have long burdened private
households, corporations and governments with unpayable debts. Whenever
there is monetary expansion, the money goes mainly to the financial
markets and bureaucratic-military spending. But when austerity measures
are adopted supposedly to rein in government spending and cut down the
public deficit and public debt, social benefits and social services
(especially for education, health, housing and so on) are cut down,
government employment is reduced and production and employment in
general are adversely affected.
An economic and financial crisis
worse than 2008 is already being manifested by the bursting of bubbles
in public debt as in Greece, the bond market in Japan and the stock
markets in China and 22 other countries; to cite just a few symptoms. A
big financial explosion is expected to burst either in China or the US
or in both, and once more cause an unprecdented global economic crisis.
Every capitalist state in the world today is sitting on a huge public
debt bomb. China and the US are being anticipated to trigger the big
explosion. China has abused public borrowing since 2008 by six times
more than the US to keep on financing private and public construction
and make up for the drastic fall in exports.
The integration of
China and Russia in the capitalist world poses a problem to US
imperialism and its erstwhile Cold War allies in economic, financial,
political and military terms. The crisis of overproduction is
intensifying economic and financial contradictions among the capitalist
powers. China and Russia have formed the BRICS economic bloc, together
with Brazil, India and South Africa; and the BRICS Development Bank to
assert economic independence. China has also established the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank to assume the lead role in constructing a
new Silk Road interlinking China and Russia as well as all of Asia and
Europe.
China and Russia continue to develop the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a collective security organization.
This was formed in reaction to the US propensity to unleash wars of
aggression in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and to expand
NATO operations to the borders of Russia, to the Balkans, Central Asia
and the Middle East. Not satisfied with the quagmires into which it has
already put itself in these regions, the US is making provocations
against Russia by using their neofascist stooges in the Ukraine and is
making the so-called strategic pivot to Asia to contain China and boost
pro-US forces within it. It is now taking advantage of China’s claim
over 90 per cent of South China Sea, thus grabbing the exclusive
economic zones and extended continental shelves of the Philippines and
other Southeast Asian countries, in order to entrench US military
forces, principally in the Philippines.
The US and other
imperialist countries have been able to override contradictions among
themselves and as well as within their respective borders since the end
of World War II by shifting the burden of crisis to the oppressed
peoples and nations in the underdeveloped countries. But now with China
and Russia being among the capitalist powers, economic competition and
political rivalry among such powers are intensifying. Too many
capitalist vultures are competing to feast on the blood of the working
people, causing ever worsening economic and financial crisis and driving
the the US and NATO war machines to become more aggressive in
maintaining and expanding economic territory.
The economic and social conditions of the proletariat and people in the developed countries
have deteriorated from decade to decade since the adoption of the
neoliberal economic policy. Many of them are already living practically
under the same conditions as the working people in the third world
countries. But even while they are in much-worsened conditions and mass
movements arise among them against issues of oppression and
exploitation, there is still the need to build genuine revolutionary
parties of the proletariat that must set the effective general line of
revolutionary struggle for socialism; arouse the masses of workers and
the people; organize the progressive trade unions and other people’s
organizations; and mobilize the people.
In the underdeveloped
countries, some genuine revolutionary parties of the proletariat are
leading the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie
along the general line of people’s democratic revolution against
foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat
capitalism. They are the torch bearers of the anti-imperialist and
democratic movement and the world proletarian revolution. They are the
pathbreakers of revolutionary resistance in a world is beset by extreme
oppression and exploitation, state terrorism and war of aggression; and
about to break out in revolutionary resistance on an unprecedented
scale.
Philippine Situation: Puppet Rulers, Deepening Underdevelopment, Crisis and Revolution
Since the 1980s, one puppet regime after another has accepted the
neoliberal dictates of US imperialism. The first Aquino regime carried
over from the Marcos fascist regime all the anti-labor decrees, pushed
trade and investment liberalization, accepted all the odious foreign
loans incurred by the Marcos regime and abused local public borrowing
for the government budget.
Under the flag of neoliberalism, the
Ramos regime proceeded to take a huge amount of commercial loans and
portfolio investments, sped up the privatization of major public assets
to cover the public deficit, removing nationality restrictions on
mining, banking, wholesale and retail trade and other types of
enterprises; and sponsored the private construction boom that collapsed
in the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
The Estrada regime was
bound by the neoliberal economic policy and was also restricted by the
consequences of the 1997 crisis. Its idea of development was reviving
the private fortunes of the Marcos cronies and promoting gambling with
loans from the social insurance system.
The Arroyo regime was vociferous in following the neoliberal economic policy and
went so far as to badmouth the workers as “economic terrorists” for
exercising their democratic trade union rights. It gained more financial
leeway as the US shifted from the bursting of the high tech bubble to
the making of the mortgage bubble.
It also promoted big comprador
relations with China, semi-manufacturing semiconductors for the final
Chinese reassembly platform, collaborating with Chinese public and
private corporations in graft-ridden energy, transport and
infrastructure projects; and opening up the Philippine economy to
Chinese mining, plantations, real estate, supermarkets, finance and
exploration of the mineral resources under the West Philippine Sea. When
the mortgage meltdown occurred in 2008, the Philippine export of
low-value-added semiconductors started to fall drastically. The
Philippines was once more in a grave financial crisis.
As during
previous regimes, there has been no real economic development through
national industrialization and genuine land reform during the Aquino
regime. The semifeudal economy remains consumption-led and dependent on
imported manufactures and undervalued raw material exports and is
overburdened by government and foreign trade deficits and by local and
foreign debt. The export of women and men for work abroad, the business
call centers and the private construction boom dependent on foreign
debts and foreign supplies do not spell economic development.
But
the Aquino regime claims a growth rate of 7% or thereabouts. This is
nothing but the statistical growth of consumption, government spending
and non-industrial investments. This kind of growth does not mean real
lasting economic development. It has been sustained by an extraordinary
amount of portfolio investments going to the stock market and other
financial markets. It gives high profits to foreign companies and to big
compradors that are billionaires and are outstanding in the Forbes list
of magnates. It does not create the most needed manufacturing plants
and does not generate jobs.
The country remains semifeudal and
pre-industrial. The unemployment rate of 7%is a big lie. The government
economists and statisticians invent employment figures by doing random
surveys, asking people whether they had worked one hour the previous
week or they had done chores in their household. They keep out of the
reckoning the unemployed who have given up looking for work. The figure
of 12 million overseas contract workers is a categorical measure of
about 20 per cent of the work force that cannot be employed in the
Philippines. The unemployment rate far exceeds the government figures of
unemployed and underemployed combined.
The reactionary
government keeps on throwing statistical lies at the working class and
the public about the adequacy of wages for an average household to
subsist. It always opposes demands for a minimum wage for an adequate
and decent level of family subsistence. And it gives all the leeway for
the capitalist employers to chop up their employees into a diminishing
group of regulars and an ever increasing groups of short-term
contractuals or temporaries, part-timers, casuals and apprentices.
All of these are in accordance with the neoliberal economic policy of
using the state to squeeze the working class and to provide all means
and opportunities for the capitalist employers to extract profits.
Why the large flow of portfolio investments to the Philippines during
most years of the Aquino regime? It is connected with the US scheme of
using the Aquino regime to either destroy or cripple the armed
revolutionary movement of the Filipino people. The US strategy planners
have calculated to realize its counterrevolutionary objective by
crediting the regime with economic growth and good governance and
efficient delivery of services, allowing the distribution of dole outs
to communities within the people’s democratic government, prolonging the
ceasefire agreement with the MILF though false promises of Bangsamoro
autonomy and other benefits; and unleashing the military and police dogs
of Oplan Bayanihan to attack the revolutionary forces and people.
The US-Aquino scheme is futile and self-defeating. There can be no
economic development without genuine land reform and national
industrialization. “Good” governance and efficient delivery of social
services are impossible while bureaucratic and military corruption and
the gross violations of human rights run rampant. The general line of
people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war has
enabled the revolutionary forces and people to build a strong people’s
army in Mindanao and on a nationwide scale. If the enemy attack
escalates against it in Eastern Mindanao, the NPA is capable of fighting
there and encourages the NPA in other parts of Mindanao and in Luzon
and the Visayas to fight against reduced strength of the enemy.
The US and the local reactionary classes of big compradors and landlords
are mortally afraid of the armed revolutionary movement and even of the
legal anti-imperialist and democratic forces. They are aware of their
vulnerabilities amidst the worsening crisis of the world capitalist
system and the domestic ruling system. They violently oppose the
people’s demands for full national independence, the democratic
empowerment of the toiling masses, economic development through land
reforn and national industrialization, social justice, a patriotic and
progressive culture and the anti-imperialist and democratic solidarity
of all peoples of the world.
One reactionary regime after another
has refused to come to terms with the people’s demands and has failed
to fully avail of peace negotiations as a way of addressing the roots of
the armed conflict and laying the basis for a just and lasting peace.
The further degeneration of the ruling system can be seen in the failure
of the major political parties and presidential candidates to offer a
comprehensive program of national independence and development the
Filipino people and the patriotic and progressive forces. The contest
seems to be about personal popularity rating, closeness to those who
control and pre-program the automated electoral system, access to the
largest campaign contributors and ability to manipulate the mass media.
Oppression and exploitation are escalating in the Philippines as the
imperialist powers and the local exploiting classes keep on imposing the
neoliberal liberal economic policy on the people. As one more economic
and financial crisis is growing, even as the previous one is still
wreaking havoc on the lives of the people, we must gear up for
intensified resistance. We must cease to suffer and convert our
suffering to an irresistible force to defeat our enemy and brings about a
fundamentally new and better world of socialism.
Tasks of the Working Class and the Kilusang Mayo Uno!
We, the ILPS, urge you to intensify the struggle against the neoliberal
economic policy and the purveyors of this policy. You must uphold,
defend and advance basic democratic rights of the working class,
especially the right to a true, militant and patriotic unionism. You
must carry forward the national democratic struggle with a socialist
perspective. In this regard, we must uphold the leadership of the
working class.
You must fight the neoliberal attacks by the
reactionary government and the big capitalists on your wages, jobs and
rights. You must arouse the class consciousness and revolutionary spirit
of the workers. You must organize them as genuine, militant and
patriotic unions. You must mobilize them to advance the trade union
movement and the strike movement fight for higher wages, protect their
jobs and uphold their rights as well as to develop political strength
for the achievement of immediate aims of the workin g class and the
ultimate aim of socialism.
We, the ILPS, endorse and support your determination:
1. To wage a campaign for raising the wage on a national scale, on the
scale of enterprises and other levels and for establishing a just
minimum wage.
2. To wage a campaign against contractualization and for declaring this as a crime to be prohibited.
3. To arouse, organize and mobilize the contractual workers.
4. To study promptly the neoliberal attacks on the workers and the labor movement and the ways of combatting such attacks.
5. To engage in political education concerning the semicolonial and
semifeudal system in the Philippines, imperialism on a world scale and
related matters.
6. Combat the economistic tendency and
envigorate the participation of unions in arousing, orgamizing and
mobilizing the workers.
7. Grasp the methods of secret and yet rapid organizing.
8. Organize the communities in the vicinity of the enterprises.
9. Unite with the workers inside and outside the country and the progressive organizations of various classes and sectors.
10. Keep in mind that the class struggle of the proletariat and the
monopoly capitalists is long and arduous, with twists and turns and ups
and down, but the ultimate outcome is the victory of the proletariat and
socialism.
Long live Kilusang Mayo Uno!
Long live the working class!
Long live the Filipino people!
