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MESSAGE TO THE LEAGUE OF FILIPINO STUDENTS
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Founding Chairperson
Kabataang Makabayan
31 May 2008
Dear Fellow Activists,
Militant greetings of solidarity to the leadership at various levels,
chapters and members of the League of Filipino Students!
The schools are about to open this June. Expectations are high among the
students and the people that the LFS will take a leading role in arousing,
organizing and mobilizing the students against the US-directed Arroyo
regime in order to advance the people's struggle for national freedom and
democracy.
The students are indignant over the reactionary and profit-driven policies
of certain school administrations and the anti-national and
anti-democratic content of subjects and study materials. They are outraged
by the rapid worsening of their study and living conditions. The tuition
fees and other costs of study are ever rising even as school facilities
are deteriorating. The real incomes of the parents of students are
plunging as the prices of basic goods and services are soaring.
The students are revolted by the curtailment of their democratic rights.
They detest the shadow cast on them by state terrorism. They are being
subjected to gross and systematic human rights violations, including
extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, brutal disruption of mass
actions, repressive school regulations, suppression of student governments
and publications and the intimidating presence of the armed personnel and
spies of the state on campus.
The extreme exploitative and oppressive conditions that the Filipino
students suffer are the outcome of the rabidly canine devotion of the
Arroyo regime to the US-dictated policies of “neoliberal globalization”
and “permanent global war on terror”. These have started to unravel. But
the Arroyo regime continues to follow them and shifts to the broad masses
of the people the mounting burden of the grave crisis of the domestic
ruling system and the world capitalist system.
The League of Filipino Students is expected to reinvigorate the student
movement and play a major role in the people's movement to oust the Arroyo
puppet regime, as in the overthrow of the Marcos fascist dictatorship in
1986 and the Estrada regime in 2001. The LFS and student masses are called
upon to act in the great tradition of the First Quarter Storm of 1970 when
the student youth linked up with the youth in other classes and sectors to
conduct giant rallies and marches in the national capital region and other
regions.
The LFS can arouse the student masses by taking up the burning issues
against the semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruling system, against the
current regime and against the reactionary policies and conditions in
schools. It can always highlight the defense and promotion of the rights
and interests of students in the handling of on-campus and off-campus
issues. By doing so, it can engage the student masses in sectoral and
multi-sectoral issues. It can use a wide range of methods in the work of
agitation, propaganda and education.
The LFS can organize more chapters in universities, colleges and high
schools. Wherever a chapter exists, this can be enlarged or more chapters
can formed at the level of colleges in a university or departments in a
college. The point is to recruit a certain percentage of the student
population within a given period. Why not ten, then twenty and still
further thirty per cent? Students can become LFS members by understanding
and accepting the LFS Constitution and Program and participating in LFS
activities. Upon the increase of the chapters, the LFS leading organs and
organizations at the national, regional, district, provincial, city and
municipal levels can become stronger.
The LFS can engage in various kinds of campaigns in order to demonstrate
its significance and usefulness and thereby attract an increasing number
of students to join its ranks and its activities. It can mobilize the
existing LFS members during the school enrolment period to serve the
students, especially the new ones. It can engage in information and
recruitment campaigns. It can somehow participate in campus elections and
in preparing editors and writers for the student publication. It can
initiate meetings and mass actions to take up the burning issues on and
off campus.
It can engage in alliances at every level with other student and youth
organizations and with sympathetic teachers and school administrators in
order to maximize the participation of students in mass mobilizations of
any kind, be it for a protest rally, a nationwide or local boycott
campaign or the entire campaign to oust the Arroyo regime. The mass
mobilizations have the objective of mustering the biggest possible
strength at a given time, demanding change for the better for the benefit
of the students and the people, attracting more students to join LFS and
rising to a new and higher level of strength in subsequent
mass mobilizations.
I hope that this message can shed some light on what the LFS can do to
strike deep roots among the students and strengthen itself and the student
movement in order to advance student rights and interests and to maximize
the role of the student masses in the people's movement to oust the Arroyo
regime and to carry forward the long-term struggle for national freedom
and democracy against imperialism and local reaction.###
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