By Prof. Jose Maria Sison Founding Chairman, Communist Party of the Philippines Chief Political Consultant, National Democratic Front of the Philippines The preparation, establishment and growth of...

The great Lenin extended and developed the theory and practice of Marxism to that of Marxism-Leninism in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution. He led the Bolsheviks and the people in turning the inter-imperialist World War I into a revolutionary civil war, thus overthrowing Tsarism through the February 1917 revolution and subsequently the bourgeois Kerensky government in the Great October Socialist Revolution. All power passed on to the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union on one-sixth of the surface of the earth.

Duterte is using his so-called war on illegal drugs as a means of projecting an image as a strong man with an iron fist in order to intimidate the people and his political opponents and to popularize extrajudicial killings as a device for building a fascist dictatorship. But in only 14 months he has murdered too many, some 14,000, on mere suspicion as drug users and pushers in urban poor communities. He has gained notoriety for himself as a human rights violator. At the same time, it turns out that he is the protector of his compadre Peter Lim who is one of the biggest drug lords. His son Paolo Duterte has been exposed as a big drug smuggler and a rising drug lord himself.

To sharpen the sense of reality of some speculators, I ask the following questions as teasers: What is better proof of consistent struggle by the Left against the Duterte regime than the people's war along the general line of new democratic revolution under the leadership of the working class and on the basis of the worker-peasant alliance? Among the legal forces of the Left, which organizations have been the earliest in making national democratic demands on the Duterte regime and exposing it as a US-directed puppet regime of big compradors and landlords?

By his own public declarations and expressions of admiration for the fascist dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, Philippine President Rodrigo R. Duterte has long been obsessed with his scheme to establish his own iron-fisted rule through martial law and extrajudicial killings..

When the time comes that socialism is dominant on a global scale as a result of the defeat and end of imperialism, the way would become wide open for reaching the stage of communism on the basis of the achievements of socialist revolution and construction.

President Rodrigo Duterte of the Republic of the Philippines is now emboldened by the Supreme Court decision last July 4, 2017, upholding his authority and discretion to proclaim martial law and suspend the writ of habeas corpus not only in Mindanao but nationwide and providing no caveats or safeguards whatsoever to protect human rights and the fundamental freedoms.

In Europe, Christian “democracy” or Christian “socialism” has merely helped preserve the monopoly capitalist system. In Latin America, it has merely helped preserve the semicolonial and semifeudal conditions. It has nothing special to offer in this country except clerical cretinism and clericofascism.