Brief Remarks at the Launch of Crisis Generates Resistance
at the NDF Information Office in Utrecht, 7 February 2016
By Jose Maria Sison, Author

Good afternoon and warmest greetings of solidarity! I wish to thank the sponsoring organizations, the speakers in the forum on the people’s resistance (the heroine and leader of the Palestinian people Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Luis Jalandoni of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and Bob Scholte of Revolutionair Eenheid), the cultural performers and the book reviewers Consie Lozano Taguba and Thomas van Beersum) and all others present. I appreciate deeply your high sense of solidarity in our coming together this afternoon.

Let me say a few words about Crisis Generates Resistance. This consists of statements, articles and speeches that I made in the years of 2009 and 2010 either as Chairperson of the International League of People’s Struggle, as Chief Consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines or as a resource person of the national democratic movement in the Philippines. I was able to comment on the varied global and Philippine issues in the aforesaid years.

But I wish to draw your utmost attention to the contents of the book that present and analyze the financial and economic crisis that burst out in 2008 and calls on the people to wage resistance. The said crisis was the worst in a series of crises since the adoption of the neoliberal economic policy by US and other capitalist powers and was immediately comparable in severity and scale to the start of the Great Depression in 1929. It resulted in a global depression which continues to this day.

So many initiatives of the US, so many summits of the capitalist powers and so many conferences of their multilateral agencies have failed to revive production and employment. Now coming on top of the persistent economic and financial crisis of 2008 is a new one that has begun to burst in earnest in this year of 2016. This coincides with the increasingly serious concerns about the wars unleashed by the US and NATO and about the degradation of the environment and global warming.

The monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the financial oligarchy, clings to the fundamentals of the capitalist system and the neoliberal dogma of unbridled greed because these continue to bring superprofits to the monopoly banks and firms. According to Oxfam, the 1 per cent richest is wealthier than 99 per cent of the world population. And only 62 individuals of the super-rich now own assets equivalent to those of 3.5 billion people or 50 per cent of humanity. In the last ten years, the former have increased their wealth by 44 per cent and the former have lost by 41 per cent.

Aside from creating one financial bubble after another and devising bailouts and credit expansion after every big burst of the bubble, the monopoly bourgeoisie and its puppets are employing more state terrorism to suppress the proletariat and the rest of the people who are restless because of high levels of unemployment and widespread poverty. The imperialist powers are unleashing more counterrevolutionary wars and wars of aggression in connection with the increasing struggle for a division of the world.

There is the need to further understand the continuing and ever worsening crisis of monopoly capitalism and to further strive to arouse, organize and mobilize the people’s resistance against imperialist plunder and war. Crisis Generates Resistance can be relevant and helpful to those who wish to understand the root causes of the crisis that burst out in 2008 and the worse crisis that is now bursting out in 2016 and the dire consequences to the broad masses of the people in the homegrounds of imperialism and in the underdeveloped countries.

The frequent and worse recurrence and protraction of the crises escalate the exploitation and oppression of the people and the spread of state terrorism and war by the imperialist powers and their puppets. The people are therefore impelled more than ever before to wage greater revolutionary resistance. This is needed to achieve greater freedom, democracy, all-round development, social justice and peace.###