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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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