BRIEF MESSAGES & LETTERS, 2001 - Present

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
General Consultant
International League of Peoples’ Struggle

January 17, 2004

I wish to express my warmest greetings of solidarity to the Indian convenor and host organizations, all the delegations and the hundreds of organizations in India and abroad represented in Mumbai Resistance 2004 against Imperialist Globalization and War.

The organizations and personnel concerned deserve all the congratulations for having succeeded in realizing Mumbai Resistance 2004 as a coalition against the US and other imperialist powers and their bilateral and multilateral instruments for plunder and war as well as against the special agents of imperialism that dominate and manipulate the so-called World Social Forum.

It is gratifying that MR 2004 covers comprehensively the major topics related to imperialist globalization and war and the classes and sectors of society that are oppressed and exploited and are poised to wage every necessary form of struggle in order to achieve national and social liberation.

MR 2004 upholds, defends and promotes the national and democratic rights and interests of the working class, the peasantry, the dalits, the oppressed nations and tribes, the women, the youth, the children and the rest of the people who are victimized by the imperialists and by their puppets. Like everyone in MR 2004, I am confident that the people can determine their own destiny and liberate themselves from oppression and exploitation through revolutionary struggles.

It is fine that MR 2004 is confronting the so-called World Social Forum and exposing its reformist and counterrevolutionary character, its undemocratic practices and processes and its dependence on funding from imperialist states and big business. The WSF seeks to derail and coopt the growing militancy of the people against imperialist globalization and war and redirect this towards reformism in order to perpetuate the world capitalist system.

It includes political bosses of the imperialist and puppet states but excludes representatives of national liberation movements. In accordance with its pro-imperialist ideological and political bias so evident in its charter of principles, it maligns armed revolutionary movements as "totalitarian", "reductionist", "violence to the people", "inhuman" and "uncivil". It harps on "civil society" as to mean good citizenship and docile nongovernmental organizations under the bourgeois state system whose violence is directed against the working people. It paints "civil society" as an equal party in a raunchy menage a trois with the bourgeois state and big business.

The imperialists conceived of the WSF as a reaction to the militant mass actions in Seattle and to the announced process of forming the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) in 1999. Subsequently, in 1990 US intelligence operatives under the cover of Ford Foundation prodded some French Trostkyites embedded in ATTAC and Le Monde Diplomatique and some crypto-Trotskyite academics and journalists to engage the collaboration of social democrats in France and Brazil and bigwigs of NGOs in order to form WSF.

It is good united front policy and tactics to expose the pro-imperialist character of WSF, the shady manipulators and the imperialist funding and at the same time to encourage WSF participants to demand the end of these and to break away if the demand is futile. The WSF has attracted participants by offering itself as an "open space" for airing views against neoliberal policies, by featuring prominent personalities as special guests and by providing air fare and hotel accommodation. At this point, it is clear to a significant number of participants that the WSF is an imperialist project designed to canalyze criticisms towards proposals for "reforming" and cosmeticizing imperialism.

I can make only a brief message of greetings for purposes of the opening plenary session. But let me take this opportunity to call attention to a paper that I am contributing to the ILPS Workshop on National Liberation, Democracy and Social Liberation. Even as the US and other imperialists list me as "terrorist" and prevent me from travelling to India, I can somehow be with you to share my views with all of you, my colleagues in struggle, and with the people of the world.

I hope that your plenary sessions, workshops, your cultural activities and the march against against the US-British war of aggression and occupation of Iraq will all be successful and will serve to help raise the level of solidarity and militancy among the peoples of the world against the US as the No. 1 terrorist force and enemy and against all other forces of imperialism and reaction. #

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