ARTICLES & SPEECHES, 2001 - Present

Keynote Address to the East Asia
and Oceania Consultative Conference

By Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples' Struggle
December 12, 2006

We, the International Coordinating Committee (ICC), are deeply pleased that the member and friendly organizations of the International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) in East Asia and Oceania are holding this consultative conference. We express our warmest greetings of solidarity to all the delegations.

We fully agree with you on all the objectives of the conference. We are confident that you can accomplish these. We are glad that you are acting in the spirit of the consensus within the ICC by striving to expand and consolidate the ILPS in East Asia and Oceania.

In its meeting in June 2005, the ICC discussed the importance of expanding the ILPS and consolidating the strength of ILPS member organizations in your part of the world. You promptly responded and seized the opportunity to hold a caucus of ILPS member organizations in the region during the People's Action Week against the WTO in Hongkong last December 2005. It was on the basis of the recommendations of your caucus that the ICC gave the go-signal for the formation of the ILPS East Asia and Oceania Coordinating Committee in its meeting last May 2006.

The successful anti-imperialist protest actions during the WTO 6th Ministerial Conference in Hongkong last December 2005 underscored the importance and efficacy of having a strong and active ILPS presence in the region. Excellent cooperation and coordination among the ILPS member and friendly organizations in the region, especially those based in Hongkong and the Philippines, along with correct united front and alliance tactics within the Hongkong People's Alliance, resulted in the effective projection of the anti-imperialist line against the WTO.

The ILPS can accomplish even more when ILPS member organizations from more countries in the region are mobilized in joint or coordinated actions. I am heartened to learn that in the just concluded International Conference on US Militarism and War on Terror sponsored by the ILPS with Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), Asia Pacific Migrants Mission (APMM), Asian Students' Association (ASA), Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), Action Research and Education Network of Aotearoa (ARENA) and Peace for Life Network, we were able to achieve wide and active participation from ILPS member organizations in the region, including those based in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Taiwan, as well as those from South Asia, the Middle East and North America.

We agree that first and foremost among the requirements for expanding and strengthening the ILPS in the region and coordinating its activities towards advancing the anti-imperialist line and mobilizing the forces of the anti-imperialist united front in East Asia-Oceania is to deepen our understanding and strengthen our unity on the analysis of the current economic and geopolitical situation in East Asia and Oceania.

We need to grasp the main and secondary contradictions that are in motion in the region: the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed peoples and nations, the inter-imperialist contradictions, the contradiction between imperialism and countries asserting national sovereignty and independence, and the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the imperialist countries. The just-concluded conference on US militarism and "war on terror" as well as the discussions you have lined up for this consultative conference are good starting points for discerning the problems of the region.

From an anti-imperialist and democratic viewpoint, we can define the most important and most urgent regional issues that need to be taken up in order to uphold, defend and promote the rights and interests of the people. In so doing, we pay attention to drawing the sharp line of distinction between the militant anti-imperialist line carried by the ILPS and the pseudo-progressive line of the reformists, Trotskyites and neo-Kautskyists who pretend to oppose imperialism but collaborate with and seek concessions from it.

You have the basis for a two-year (2007-2008) regional education and mass mobilization campaign plan against imperialist plunder and war. Aware of the most important and most urgent issues, you can plan educational programs and activities and you can begin to anticipate and calendar major campaigns of mass mobilization.

You can share information on prospective people's actions in your respective countries and explore possibilities for coordinated actions. The imperialist powers headed by the US are our common adversaries. We also confront local reactionaries that similarly engage in oppression and exploitation. It is possible and necessary to take up similar or related issues and undertake coordinated actions.

The ILPS member organizations in the region can initiate, conduct and participate in conferences on specific concerns or topics. They can form regional study commissions in order to undertake studies on the various concerns in the region. The conferences and meetings of the study commissions can also serve as means for networking and organizing.

You can draw up a plan for attracting more organizations to the fold of the ILPS, engaging these in the study commissions and in preparations for the Third International Assembly of the ILPS. You can increase the number of countries in which ILPS organizations exist and within every country, you can also increase the number of ILPS member-organizations.

Social and Economic Issues

The largest part of the geographic coverage of your conference is East Asia, which was previously called the Far East from a Euro-centric viewpoint.. It has a total population of around 2.1 billion or nearly 1/3 of the world population and a land area of 1.6 billion hectares or 15,073,000 square kilometers. This large global region is divisible into two parts, Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

Northeast Asia includes China, Japan, Korea (North and South) and Mongolia, with a population of around 1.55 billion and a land area of 10,573,000 square kilometers. Southeast Asia includes: the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Burma and East Timor, with a population of around 500 million and a land area of 4,500,000 square kilometers.

Oceania includes Australia, New Zealand and the island states in the South Pacific. These have a total population of more than 33 million and a land area of 8,600,000 square kilometers. Australia accounts for a population of more than 20 million or 60.6 percent and a land area of 7,687,000 square kilometers or 90 percent. In previous times, all Pacific islands, including the Malay archipelago were covered by the term Oceania. East-Asia and Oceania were for centuries coveted by the Western powers-first, by the European colonial powers (Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and Netherlands) out to grab markets for their products and sources of cheap labor and raw materials for production. These powers were joined in the late 19th century by the then emerging imperialist powers Germany, Japan and the US. The local peoples resisted foreign domination but were subjugated by the colonialists using superior military force and technology, combined with deception.

The two world wars in the first half of the 20th century brought about a redivision in the colonial possessions and spheres of influence among the imperialist powers, the establishment of socialist states and the rise of national liberation movements in East Asia. The US emerged as the dominant imperialist power in the region by the end of World War II, with Japan reconstructed as its junior partner. Socialist states were established in China and North Korea, forming along with Far Eastern Russia and Mongolia a large contiguous mass of territory and population under the socialist banner. This inspired the oppressed and exploited peoples in the neocolonies in Southeast Asia to advance their revolutionary struggles for national liberation and social emancipation.

The US and other Western capitalist powers embarked on a policy of containment against the socialist states and the national liberation movements and shifted to neocolonial rule by granting nominal independence to most of their colonies (with the exception of British Hongkong, Portuguese Macao and East Timor until the 1990s) in order to defuse the peoples' clamor for independence. The US engaged in two major wars of aggression and intervention - in Korea in 1950-53 and in Vietnam from 1965-75 in attempts to stop the unification of Korea and Vietnam under socialist rule.

More than 50 per cent of the world's merchant shipping traffic, equivalent to US$1.3 trillion worth of goods, passes through the sea lanes of East Asia and Oceania. The goods are produced and exchanged by the countries within and beyond the region. US$ 500 billion worth of these are goods traded to and from the US. The imperialist powers have long touted the economic importance of the region as a source of cheap labor and raw materials, as a field of investment and as a lucrative market.

There is wide diversity in the types of socio-economic formations and wide disparities in the levels of economic development in East Asia and Oceania. At one end is the industrial capitalist type, best represented by Japan and to a lesser extent by South Korea and Taiwan. At the other end are most of the countries (especially in Southeast Asia), which are still agrarian, underdeveloped and dependent on the export of raw materials even as they engage in a significant amount of semi-manufacturing for reexport. By and large, they have been victimized by the Great Commodities Depression since 1980.

China has inherited an industrial base from a prior socialist economy but which in the main has been privatized or reorganized in favor of capitalism. The degree of industrial capitalist development in China is small relative to the huge population. A significant part of manufacturing is the low value-added type for reexports. Conditions of underdevelopment afflict extensive areas of China. Most of the people are still peasants. The broad masses of the people are subjected to economic and social degradation. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam follows the socio-economic path of China. The People's Democratic Republic of Korea has a state-owned industrial base but is dependent on imported fuel and is cramped by the small scale of the economy and population.

The capitalist economies of Australia and New Zealand are unique. They have all the modern means of large-scale production in agriculture, mineral extraction, building construction and reassembly plants. But they import a lot of their equipment from the fully industrialized countries. They manage to maintain a high standard of living, far higher than most other countries in East Asia and Oceania, because of their long integration with the West European economy and their subsequent adaptation to the economies of Asia.

The biggest economic and social issues faced by the overwhelming majority of the people in East Asia and Oceania are the oppression and exploitation of the people by foreign monopoly capitalists and the local reactionary classes and the resultant underdevelopment, poverty and the gross social inequalities. This is especially true in Southeast Asia and China, where the working class and the peasantry are subjected to high levels of unemployment, declining real incomes, rising prices of basic commodities, deprivation of social services and attack on democratic rights.

The US-directed policy of "neoliberal globalization" has aggravated and deepened the economic and social ills of the underdeveloped countries.. Its objective is to further denationalize the economies for the aggrandizement of the foreign monopolies through privatization of public assets, liberalization of trade, investments and financial flows and deregulation at the expense of the working people, communities, women and the environment.

The goals of national industrial development, land reform, social welfare and social justice have been scoffed at and discarded by state authorities as anathema to letting the "free market" solve the economic and social problems. In fact, the term "free market'" is an anachronistic and obscurantist term for the dominance of the foreign monopolies and their economic and political instruments in bilateral and multilateral relations as well in the frameworks of the IMF, World Bank, WTO and trade agreements of varying scales.

The US and other imperialist powers can easily impose their policies on governments in the region that have lower levels of economic development, deficit-ridden, heavily burdened with foreign debt and dependent on foreign markets. The monopoly firms have subsidiaries and big comprador agents to ensure control from within the economies. The imperialists use the representatives of monopoly firms and banks, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its so-called Accelerating Growth, Investments and Liberalization with Equity (AGILE) to penetrate the bureaucracy and influence policies from within. They also use scholarships, fellowships, consultancies and travel grants to condition the thinking and behavior of prospective and current policy-makers in the so-called developing countries.

The Southeast Asian countries and China have been induced to go for export-oriented low-value added manufacturing, for a boom in private construction and for budgetary and trade deficits and to finance these with foreign direct investments and loans from commercial markets. The overproduction of semi-manufactures and private buildings caused the financial meltdown in Southeast Asia in 1997. Since then, this particular region has suffered from economic stagnation. China and Malaysia have so far avoided a financial crash by undertaking currency controls and other state measures.

Since 1990 Japan has reeled from prolonged recession due to a global overproduction of basic industrial products and due to the financial speculation based on the overvaluation of Tokyo real estate. It has tried in vain to counter its crisis and stagnation by spending heavily on public works as well as extending credit under neoliberal commercial terms to South Korea, China and Taiwan and the Southeast Asian countries. South Korean companies have used loans to further expand industrial production and have thus aggravated the crisis of overproduction in basic industrial products and consumer durables, which in turn has brought about a financial crisis due to bad loans.

China has boasted of a high economic growth rate of 8 to 10 per cent from year to year, even as the rest of East Asia has gone into stagnation. But the rate of unemployment is rising and the industrial base has been undermined. The apparent economic expansion is due to the inflows of foreign direct investments currently amounting to USD 350 billion, mainly in low-value added semi-manufacturing, private construction and trade. State funds have been used for infrastructure projects but these have not significantly raised the level of employment and consumption.

China has paid billions of dollars for importing foreign technology, but its level of technology has not improved significantly. Thus even official reports point to the problem of sustaining growth due to depletion of resources, high dependence on foreign investments and depreciable imported technology, rising net imports of fuel and food and the declining agricultural production.

The accession of China into the WTO in November 2001 formalized and capped a process of opening up China's economy (especially its financial system) to foreign monopoly capital and turning China into the multinationals' processing and assembly plant. Foreign investments have increased by leaps and bounds. Foreign corporations account for more than 60 per cent of China's exports. They have a big claim on China's one trillion US dollar holdings. At the same time, China has a foreign debt of USD 250 billion and faces the prospect of taking an economic fall in view of the looming recession and reduction of consumer demand in the US in the year 2007.

An economic recession as forecast in the US will lead to a fall in consumer demand for the semi-manufactured exports of China, industrial exports of South Korea and Taiwan and raw-material exports of other countries in East Asia. Combined with the stagnation of Japan and Europe, a US recession will aggravate the economic and social crisis in the entire region of East Asia and Oceania.

The US uses its partner and client states to keep the overwhelming majority of the people, the impoverished workers and peasants, in ever worsening conditions of exploitation and oppression. The imperialist and client states are currently using the slogan of "free market globalization" to accelerate capital accumulation by the foreign and local big bourgeoisie by pressing down the wage level and government social spending and preventing comprehensive national economic development in the Southeast Asian countries and in the wider expanse of China.

Japan, the biggest industrial capitalist economy in East Asia, continues to be in the doldrums and so are the lesser industrial capitalist economies of South Korea and Taiwan. They are all stricken by a persistent crisis of overproduction in basic industrial and high-tech products. Without their trade with China, they would be in a worse situation. China imports from them a great amount of structural steel for private and public construction and cars and other durable consumer goods for the new bourgeoisie. In turn they import from China nondurable consumer goods.

The US and Japan wish to further degrade the China's economy, pressuring it to revalue its currency and raise its level of consumption of imported goods as well as goods produced by foreign firms in China. Under the World Trade Organization, China is increasingly vulnerable to compradorization, de-industrialization and complete subservience to foreign finance capital. At the same time, it tries to counter these trends by selling its consumer goods to Russia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa in exchange for fuel and other raw materials.

Geo-Political Issues

The United States exercises hegemony over East Asia and Oceania through its role as senior partner of Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand and as patron in neocolonial relations with the local rulers of the Southeast Asian countries, especially the Philippines and Indonesia. It has maintained and developed military and economic footholds in the region both to secure its power and exact profits from direct and indirect investments.

The US Pacific Command (USPACOM) based in Hawaii is geographically the largest unified command in the US Armed Forces, with an area of responsibility covering the west coast of the American continent to the east coast of Africa, from the Arctic to Antarctica. It covers 43 countries in East Asia, South Asia and the Pacific and controls the US military bases and stations in the Pacific islands, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand as well as the movement of aircraft carriers, submarines and military aircraft and US troop deployment under various covers, including military treaties, agreements, war exercises, visitations and port calls.

The US strategically backs up its forward military positions in East Asia with military forces and facilities in the US West Coast, Hawaii and Oceania. At the highest level, the US military forces in East Asia are directed by the Pentagon with the use of the most powerful instruments of surveillance and intelligence, including its satellite intelligence installations and facilities in Australia, Taiwan and Japan.

The principal military ally of the US in the whole of East Asia is Japan. The two imperialist allies have long maintained the US-Japan Security Treaty since the time of the Cold War when this treaty served to confront China, North Korea and the Soviet Union and to intimidate the Southeast Asian countries. To this day, the US uses its military bases in Japan, South Korea and Oceania as well as US stations and facilities (for operational and intelligence-sharing) in Taiwan and other pro-US regimes in the region as coordinates in preventing the reunification of Korea and the return of Taiwan to China.

The main objective of US military power is to secure control and expansion of economic territory, as markets, fields of investments and cheap sources of raw materials and labor power. The US uses its military power to maintain its hegemony, to prop up any partner or client state and to oppose any recalcitrant state or any patriotic movement that seeks to end US dominance and fights for national independence, democracy, social justice and development.

The US gains influence within the military and police forces in the semi-colonies in Southeast Asia by providing indoctrination, training and supplies and engaging in intelligence exchange. It knows enough of the officers for recruiting spies and intelligence assets and for favoring or overthrowing a local ruling clique. It can prop up or drop any of the puppet leaders.

Under the Bush regime, with its neoconservative cabal, US attention on East Asia has been distracted to some extent by its wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. The US has sought to tighten its hegemony over Central Asia and the Middle East and its control over the sources and supply lines of oil and gas and thereby make East Asia dependent on the US for energy. But it has outwitted itself by failing to anticipate fully the people's resistance to occupation, following the blitzkrieg invasion. It has become bogged down in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alarmed by US encroachments in Central Asia, the governments of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan proclaimed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on June 15, 2001 as a "permanent intergovernmental international organization". This is evolving into a military alliance ostensibly to crack down on the "three forces" of terrorism, separatism and extremism. China has also moved to assure itself of energy supplies from across its borders. Right within the Middle East, China is making agreements with Iran to assure itself of energy from this source and in effect to counter US pressures on Iran.

China is widely considered to be an emerging global military power, with the largest army in the world (at least 2 million troops), nuclear weapons (including tens of ICBMs with a range of a range of 13,000 km, enough to reach the US), and a long-running military modernization program with annual expenditures second only to that of the US. Since the early 1990s, it has been named by US policymakers as the foremost potential rival, or the country most capable of challenging US global hegemony by 2020. However, a quick comparison of current US and Chinese military strength shows that the US is still vastly superior to the Chinese armed forces.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has successfully defied the US and has developed its missiles and nuclear weapons. The US, Japan and South Korea have to depend on China in making possible the resumption of negotiations for preventing US aggression against the DPRK, denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and removing US obstacles to the economic development and trade with DPRK.

In Southeast Asia, the ASEAN has observed the growing bankruptcy of economic relations with the US and Japan and is exploring further possibilities of relations with China, even as these could be those between the giant subcontractor of US and Japanese monopoly firms and the smaller subcontractors.

The US has boasted that it has succeeded in making the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference as an instrument for promoting not only "neoliberal globalization" and "growth" in the Asia Pacific region but also for regional security under the propulsion of the US global "war on terror". It has also claimed to have succeeded in making China a close partner in maintaining regional security, compelling the DPRK to give up its development of nuclear weapons and fighting terrorism. But US hegemony over the region is expected to be adversely affected by the looming US recession, the difficulties of the US in pulling out of the Iraq quagmire and worsening problems of trade due to the global crisis of overproduction and the protectionist trends and growing disputes among the big powers within the WTO.

The US has become increasingly isolated after invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and encountering stiff resistance from the Afghan and Iraqi peoples. It is finding more and more difficulties in continuing the war in Iraq because of the anti-war sentiment of the American people, rising US casualties, shortfalls in military recruitment, high financial costs, a dwindling "Coalition of the Willing" and the electoral debacle of Bush's Republican party.

The US has been pushing the APEC and ASEAN into discussing the issue of decision-making on regional security in the name of combating terrorism. It relies on its closest allies in the region-Japan, Korea, Australia the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand to support its hegemonic agenda in the APEC. However, China, Vietnam and Malaysia oppose the US moves to involve the APEC and ASEAN into military alliances, or refuse even to discuss security matters beyond counterterrorism. In an undisguised move to keep the US out of discussions on East Asian affairs, Malaysia and China pushed for the formation of the East Asia Summit, consisting now of the leaders of the ASEAN countries, Japan, China, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

The ASEAN Regional Forum, which was established by the ASEAN in 1994 on the instance of the US, is the only regional formation dedicated to the discussion of security issues in the region. Aside from the ASEAN members, it includes the US, Canada, European Union, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, the Russian Federation, China, Mongolia, Japan, North Korea and South Korea. However, like the ASEAN itself, it has not gone beyond discussions on forging binding security agreements or turning into a security alliance.

In the whole of East Asia and even in Southeast Asia alone, the US has most flagrantly engaged in military intervention with impunity in the Philippines. As soon as it launched its war of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001 in the wake of 9/11, the US declared the Philippines as the "second front" in the so-called permanent and preemptive war on terror. Since then, it has claimed that a small Muslim armed group like Abu Sayyaf organized by the CIA and the Philippine military against the Moro National Liberation Front in 1991 is an extension of the al Qaida. The US has taken a vantage point in Mindanao to lord over the sources of oil in the countries of Southeast Asia with predominantly Islamic population, including Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia.

The US has drummed up the fear of so-called terrorism in order to goad the Arroyo puppet regime into adopting an all-out war policy against the armed revolutionary movement of the Filipino people led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. From year to year US military forces in the thousands flow in and out of the Philippines under various guises. The US and Arroyo regime declare that these forces engage in military exercises, training, civic action, humanitarian work, and so on. But official US documents describe these as continuing counterterrorist operations with the AFP under Operation Enduring Freedom, directed by the Joint Task Force -Philippines of the US Special Operations Command, Pacific (SOCPAC).

The US military forces are building stations and are aiming to reestablish outright military bases in the Philippines under the US-RP Mutual Defense Agreement, Visiting Forces Agreement, the Mutual Logistics and Supply Arrangement and the new Security Enhancement Board agreement, citing "non-traditional operations", including "terrorism", "disaster relief and rescue", "epidemics", "humanitarian work", and so on as pretexts for US military intervention. The intent is to have the Philippine archipelago as an unsinkable US aircraft carrier and as strategic base at the frontline against revolutionary movements, governments that assert national independence and against any potential rival of the US in East Asia, with Oceania, the US territories in the Pacific Ocean and the US West Coast as strategic rear.

But the Filipino people have a growing revolutionary movement. The armed revolution in the Philippines plays a signal role in the entire region. The conditions of social unrest and international tensions are increasingly being fueled by the crisis of the world capitalist system. They are favorable for undertaking anti-imperialist mass movements and waging revolution in the Philippines and on a wider scale.

The US is afflicted by grave economic and financial problems. It has undermined its manufacturing capacity for exports for decades, due to market accommodation to its allies and outsourcing in cleap-labor countries. At any rate, whatever it can produce is overwhelmed by the crisis of overproduction. Despite the reduction of regular employment, worker incomes and government social spending, it has been able to maintain a high level of consumption by attracting foreign investments, running huge trade deficits and incurring a colossal foreign debt. The economic and financial system of the US is unsustainable.

The US relies heavily on its ability to produce and use its high-tech military weaponry and on the global deployment of US military forces in order to maintain global hegemony and in particular its hegemony over East Asia and Oceania. But it has been demonstrated that no matter how "awesome and shocking" may be the cruise missiles, aircraft and tanks and the other blitzkrieg weapons in the invasion phase of a US war of aggression, the people can fight back to their advantage when the aggressors go into the phase of occupation and try to collect the prize and profits of aggression on the ground. The people can fight even better if ahead of any aggression or intervention by the US they are already undertaking a mass movement to demand in their own country and their own region the dismantling of US military bases.

In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the US is in the reprehensible position of having more than 700 military bases (which do not include the huge US garrison in Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and bases built since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan) and hundreds of thousands of troops deployed outside of its borders.

The US uses its military power to impose political, economic and cultural policies on other countries and yet prates the loudest about the "free market" being able to solve everything. It is the height of hypocrisy for the US to invoke global stability and world peace and accuse its opponents of crimes against humanity and human rights violations, when in fact it is the No. 1 aggressor, terrorist and violator of the UN charter, the international bill of human rights and international humanitarian law.

It is a task of great decisive importance to generate a mass movement against the US-directed war of terror and the US military bases in East Asia and Oceania in order to pave the way for national and social liberation. The ILPS is proud of its role in the Conference Against US Militarism and "War on Terror" and in the launching of the campaign against US military bases and other campaigns to uphold, defend and promote the civil, political, economic, social and .cultural rights of the people.

Concluding Remarks

I have pointed to outstanding economic and geo-political issues in East Asia and Oceania, especially those issues involving the contradictions between imperialism and the oppressed peoples. I hope that my remarks can ignite among you more comprehensive and profound discussion of the regional issues and that your understanding of these can enhance your sense of solidarity and drive you to attract more organizations to the fold of the ILPS and that you can draw up in your present conference an organizational plan and list a number of issues around which you can build alliances and mobilize the broad masses of the people.

The conditions are favorable for building and strengthening the anti-imperialist and democratic forces in the region. The US-directed policies of "neoliberal globalization" and "war on terror" have aggravated and deepened the crisis of the world capitalist system and have wrought havoc on the lives of the people. The people are suffering rising levels of exploitation and oppression and are desirous of resisting the imperialists and the local reactionaries. The ILPS and its member organizations must work hard to succeed in arousing, organizing and mobilizing the people.

The International League of Peoples' Struggle must do everything possible to generate an anti-imperialist and democratic mass movement. We must strive to end the political, military, economic, social and cultural domination of the US and other imperialist powers and the local reactionary agents over the peoples of East Asia and Oceania. We must advance the people's struggle for national liberation, democracy, social justice, all-round development and peace. ###