By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle
July 1, 2017
As chairperson of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), I wish to congratulate the People’s Resource for International Solidarity and Mass Mobilization (PRISMM) and the member-organizations of the ILPS in the US for cooperating and successfully preparing this study conference today and the cultural festival tomorrow to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in advance of November 7, 2017.
I am thankful, delighted and honored to be afforded the opportunity to express warmest greetings of solidarity and some remarks to the speakers and all other participants in this study conference. I am thankful to the organizers for making available tomorrow during the cultural festival advance copies of my latest book, Combat Neoliberal Globalization, which is pertinent to your subject today.
The theme of your study conference is highly significant and urgent: “Advance the Global People’s Resistance! Carry Forward the Vision and Tasks of the Great October Socialist Revolution!” The US and world capitalist system are in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the thirties. All the smart guys of monopoly capitalism have turned stupid with their unbridled greed. They can neither solve nor salve the crisis but have only succeeded in aggravating it, particularly since the financial meltdown of 2008.
The call to action is fittingly direct to the point. The proletariat and the rest of the people cannot tolerate the gross violations of their rights and the deprivations and suffering inflicted by the oppressors and exploiters. They must resist monopoly capitalism resolutely and militantly. They must fight for their democratic rights and aim for the realization of socialism. They must be guided and inspired by the vision of the Great October Socialist Revolution and perform the tasks required by the struggle for socialism.
Since the years of 1989 to 1991, when the revisionist betrayers of socialism rapidly, openly and fully restored capitalism in the countries that they ruled and the Soviet Union no less collapsed, US imperialism had appeared with overweening arrogance as the winner in the bipolar world of the Cold War and as the unchallenged sole superpower that had the liberty to launch any kind of offensive in a supposedly unipolar world against the proletariat and the oppressed peoples and nations. The moguls and touts of US imperialism dared to prate that history could not go beyond capitalism and liberal democracy.
The US proceeded to pursue even harder its neoliberal economic offensive. It foisted on the whole world the notion that the capitalists are the creators of social wealth and that they could create more jobs and more wealth if they could maximize their profits an accumulate more capital by paying less taxes, pressing down wages, cutting back on social spending by government, liberalizing investments and trade, privatizing profitable public assets, deregulating restrictions on the abuse of labor, women, children and the environment and denationalizing the economies of the semicolonies and dependent countries.
The US seemed oblivious of the fact that the crisis of overproduction in a capitalist country arises when the workers have insufficient income to buy what they produce. It seemed not to notice that the boom and bust cycles had become more frequent and worse since the mid-1970s when the industrial countries that had been devastated in World War II recovered and made capitalist countries more vulnerable to the crisis of overproduction. The use of finance capital, the arms race and wars of aggression to override the crisis of overproduction was precisely the cause of stagflation, the ever worsening economic and financial crisis and the strategic decline of the US.
In the 1980s the US pushed hard the neoliberal economic policy. It expanded the outsourcing of consumer manufactures to China in order to accelerate its integration in the world capitalist system. It concentrated on the production of hight tech weaponry and other big items produced by the military industrial complex. It was overconfident that it could maintain global hegemony by being ahead in hightech weaponry, exporting big items for foreign consumption and taking debt service and superprofits from the third world. In less than a decade, the biggest creditor of the world became the biggest debtor by decreasing employment and consumer manufacturing in the US and increasing consumer imports.
The neoliberal dogma is to shun state intervention in the economy and give free rein to the unregulated market, with the big exception of delivering to the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the military industrial complex, all kinds of favors to corporate welfare like wage freezes, tax cuts, social cutbacks, financial bailouts and, of course, overpriced military contracts. Under the stimulus of the so-called neoconservative policy in foreign relations, the economic neoliberals welcome and give way to pump-priming the US economy with public funds for war production, overseas deployment of US military forces and wars of aggression. Thus, trillions of dollars have been spent on wars in Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.
For awhile in the 1990s, the US appeared to profit most from the information technology and the financialization of the economy until the economic and financial crisis came at the end of the 20th century. The attempt to buoy up the US economy since the beginning of the 21st century with the use of unrepayable mortgages, war production and wars of aggression inevitably led to the financial meltdown of 2008. This has plagued the entire capitalist world, plunging it to a depression longer and deeper than the Great Depression, accelerating the strategic decline of the US and unfolding more clearly than ever before a multipolar world of intensifying contradictions among capitalist powers, between labor and capital, between the imperialist and the anti-imperialist governments and between the imperialists and the oppressed peoples and nations.
Because of the betrayal of socialism by the modern revisionists, we the revolutionary forces and people of the whole world are still in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution and we have to advance from a temporary strategic retreat. But because of the ever worsening crisis of the world capitalist system, we are now in transition to a greatly favorable situation in which the forces of anti-imperialism, democracy and socialism are resurging and advancing and socialist societies can once more arise in several countries. To make this transition successful, we must build and develop through relentless struggle the various subjective forces of the revolution.
We must adhere to the ideological, political and organizational lines that made victorious the Great October Socialist Revolution by the great Lenin and further revolutions led by the proletariat. We must build the revolutionary party of the proletariat that can lead the broad masses of the people to victory against imperialism and all reaction. We must build the mass organizations of the workers, peasants, women, youth, children, the professionals and intelligentsia. We must build alliances to reach the people in their millions. We must wage various forms of struggle and ultimately overthrow the state power of the bourgeoisie. Wherever possible, we must build the organs of political power to establish people’s democracy and socialism.
May the study conference and further studies shed light on what is to be done in order to advance the anti-imperialist movement and proletarian revolution and bring about the victory of socialism! Thank you. ###
