By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples´ Struggle
October 28, 2017
Dear Comrades and Friends,
It is my honor and pleasure to convey warmest greetings of solidarity to all of you as participants in the event titled Peace, Bread and Land celebrating the Centenary of the 1917 October Revolution.
For successfully sponsoring and organizing this event, I congratulate the International League of Peoples´ Struggle-Australia, Migrante Australia, Philippines Australia Union Link and the Federation of Italian Migrant Workers and their Families.
I anticipate that you will enjoy the cultural presentations , such as the performances of the Sydney Trade Union Choir and Migrante Kultura Singing Collective and the video excerpts from Sergei Eisentein´s 1927 film October: Ten Days That Shook the World and from Warren Beatty´s 1981 move The Reds.
I am sure that you will learn much from the discourses on the events of 1917 in Russia and on the cultural impact of the Revolution on the Russian people as well as on the wider political impact on various countries, including Australia and the Philippines. You will learn even more by raising questions and interacting with the speakers.
I hope that you will be able to discuss the significance of the October Revolution in the advance of human civilization, the great achievements of the Soviet Union in socialist revolution and construction, the rise of several socialist countries and national liberation movements, the revisionist betrayal of socialism and continuing crisis of monopoly capitalism and the continuing validity of the October Revolution.
The great Lenin led and built the Bolshevik Party to serve as the advance detachment of the working class in the revolution ideologically, politically and organizationally. He developed further the fundamental principles of Marxism laid down by Marx and Engels in the fields of philosophy, political economy and social science inn the era of free competition capitalism. He put forward the principles, policies, line and methods for winning the democratic and socialist stages of the revolution in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution.
For the first time in the entire history of humankind, through the October Revolution of 1917, an exploited class—the working class—was able to seize political power and engage in socialist revolution and construction for several decades. The Bolsheviks established the Third International in 1919 after all power went to the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers. The October Revolution opened the road towards the end of class oppression and exploitation, the doom of imperialism and the bright future of socialism as transition to communism.
After overcoming the rigors of the inter-imperialist war, the Civil War and the foreign interventionist war by undertaking ¨war communism” and the New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin proceeded to build socialist industry and to collectivize and mechanize agriculture through a series of five year economic plans starting in 1928. The Soviet economy became a strong and powerful basis for great advances in the social, political and cultural fields. The Soviet Union became a bulwark of socialism and proletarian internationalism against imperialism and the rising threat of fascism.
In World War II Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and wrought great havoc in the Soviet Union, especially the killing of 27 million Soviet people and destruction or incapacitation of more than two-thirds of Soviet industry. The Soviet resistance and counteroffensive broke the backbone of the fascist forces, rolled them back and enabled the rise of people´s democracies and socialist countries in Eastern Europe and in East Germany.
In China, the most populous country in the world, the people led by the Communist Party of China defeated the Japanese occupation in 1945 and subsequently the Guomindang regime in 1949, causing the biggest breach on the imperialist front in the East. In the aftermath of World War II, wars of national liberation also broke out in Korea, Southeast Asia and elsewhere against US imperialism and other Western colonial powers.
By 1956 one third of humankind could be described as belonging to the socialist camp under the leadership of communist and workers’ parties in various countries. But alas this was also the year when modern revisionism under Khrushchov took power in the Soviet Union and started in a big way to subvert and undermine socialism not only in the Soviet Union but also in other countries. Under the leadership of Comrade Mao, the Chinese Communist Party took a Marxist-Leninist stand against modern revisionism centered in the Soviet Union.
The great Mao put forward the theory and practice of cultural revolution under proletarian dictatorship to combat modern revisionism, prevent the restoration of capitalism and consolidate socialism. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was victorious during most of the decade 1966 to 1976 but was defeated by the Dengist coup and counterrevolution soon after the death of Mao in 1976. To this day the GPCR remains a reservoir of principles and methods for upholding the socialist cause against the imperialist, revisionist and reactionaries who claim that socialism is dead and can no longer resurge against them.
The rapid and full restoration of capitalism in revisionist-ruled countries and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years of 1989 to 1991 have vindicated the Marxist-Leninist teachings of Lenin and Mao against revisionism. For a while, until the end of the 20th century, the US appeared to be the sole superpower. But the crisis of the world capitalist system has become worse in a wider and deepgoing way under the neoliberal policy regime. The economic and financial crisis has become more frequent and worse. It has given rise to a ceaseless series of wars which are inflamed by the US neoconservative policy of full spectrum dominance.
The US has unwittingly undermined itself and accelerated its strategic decline through the financialization of its economy, ever rising war production and proneness to wars of aggression. Wishing to stop its strategic decline and maintain economic and military dominance, the US is foolishly exacerbating all major contradictions in the world: those between the working class and the monopoly bourgeoisie in industrial capitalist countries, those between the imperialist powers and the oppressed peoples; those between imperialism and countries assertive of national independence and those among the imperialist countries themselves that are now hardpressed by the general crisis of capitalism to struggle for a redivision of the world.
This is a time for the workers and all oppressed peoples of the world to unite and intensify their revolutionary struggle against imperialism, revisionism and all reaction. The ever worsening socio-economic crisis, the political disorder, the rise of state terrorism and the wars of aggression inflict grave suffering on the broad masses of the people. But they also drive the people to wage various forms of resistance and to aim for a fundamentally better life of greater freedom, democracy and socialism. Thus, they constitute favorable conditions for the subjective forces of the revolution to arise, resurge, advance and win victories, as in the October Revolution and further revolutions led by the proletariat. Thank you. ###
