BRIEF MESSAGE  OF PROF. JOSE MARIA SISON

AT LAUNCHING OF VOLUMES 3 &4

10 February 2010
 

Dear Friends,  

I  thank all of you for your solidarity and support by participating in this launching of the books, Crisis of Imperialism and People’s Resistance and  People’s Struggle against Imperialist Plunder and Terror.  These are volumes three and four, respectively, of  the four-volume selection of my writings covering 1991-2009.   I hope that you enjoy the showing of the DVD of the musical play “Makata’y Mandirigma, Mandirigma’y Makata”, featuring songs based on some of  my poems. 

I  thank and congratulate Aklat ng Bayan for publishing the four volumes in the span of one year. I appreciate the fact that  Aklat ng Bayan was able to  surmount sudden and unforeseen obstacles, including  the Ondoy floods that victimized some of its key members and that damaged  at least eighty percent of its book inventories.   

I am elated that Aklat ng Bayan  has persevered in publishing  my written contributions to the Filipino people's struggle for national liberation and democracy as well as to the world people’s struggle against imperialist plunder and war. I commend Aklat ng Bayan for rendering an important service to the people, the progressive forces and the activists, scholars and others.

Volumes 3 and 4 reflect how  the Filipino people’s struggle  developed and advanced amidst  the rapid deterioration of the  local ruling system and the grave global economic and political crises during the period of 2001 to 2009.  They are the necessary and logical sequel to the first two volumes covering the decade from 1991 to 2000, which saw the  revitalization of the revolutionary forces and the resurgence of people’s struggles in the Philippines despite the  fierce ideological, political, economic and military  offensives unleashed by the  US-led imperialist powers and the local  reactionaries.

In the last nine years, imperialist plunder under the slogan of “free market” globalization intensified  as the world capitalist system rushed inexorably to its worst crisis in eighty years, culminating in the  bursting of the financial bubble in the US and causing the collapse of financial markets all over the world. The US also escalated imperialist aggression and state terrorism under the policy of a permanent and borderless “war on terror” in a futile attempt to stave off  the impending collapse of its bubble economy as well as to further expand and consolidate its global hegemony as sole superpower.

Attempts by imperialist states and their propagandists to cushion and cover up the impact of the financial meltdown have proven futile as public funds have  invariably bailed out the big culprit banks and corporations in the military industrial complex rather than the mass of victimized people suffering from unemployment, fallen incomes, homelessness and deprivation of social services. So called stimulus packages have dismally failed to  revive production, generate employment and expand the market.

The current global economic and financial crisis is bound to deepen further,   inflict further suffering on the people,  but is opening up the possibilities for dramatic advances in peoples’ struggles all over the world. Contradictions are intensifying between imperialism and the oppressed nations and peoples, among imperialist powers competing for economic territory and political control, between imperialism and countries asserting national independence and sovereignty, and between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the capitalist countries. The increasingly intolerable conditions of oppression and exploitation compel and impel more and more people all over the world to protest, resist and fight imperialist plunder and war. 

Under the weight of the grave crisis of the world capitalist system, the crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system in the Philippines will worsen at an accelerated rate.  The persistent evil forces of foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism will wreak further havoc on the lives of the people and ruin the environment.  But the broad masses of the people and their patriotic and progressive forces will become more determined than ever before to fight for their national and democratic rights and advance from one level of the struggle to a new a higher level.

Once again, thank you.  With your solidarity and support, we can  look forward to Aklat ng Bayan’s publishing more books from this author and others who are for a new and better Philippines, characterized by genuine national independence, democracy,  all-round development, social justice and peace.##

Elmer Ordoñez,  National Secretary, International PEN

Reviewer of Vol. 3

Rey Claro Casambre, Chair, ILPS-Philippines

Reviewer of Vol. 4