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BRIEF REMARKS AT LAUNCHING OF VOLUMES 1 & 2
OF SELECTED WRITINGS OF JOSE MARIA SISON, 1991-2009
Jose Maria Sison
19 February 2009
Dear friends,
Thank you for participating in this launching of the first two volumes of
a four-volume selection of my writings within the period 1991-2009. I
appreciate your solidarity and support.
I congratulate Aklat ng Bayan for successfully publishing these first two
volumes. I look forward to the next two volumes coming off the press
during the last quarter of this year.
I am grateful to Aklat ng Bayan for the publication of the four-volume
series. This serves to facilitate the access of activists, intellectuals and
others to my written contributions to the Filipino people's struggle for
national liberation and democracy.
I hope that these volumes can further shed light on the history and
circumstances of the Filipino people and the origins and development of
the current financial and economic crisis that has swept the whole capitalist
world and is wreaking havoc on the lives of the broad masses of the people.
For some three decades already, the US has been boasting that the policy
of “neoliberal” globalization spreads prosperity and democracy on the basis
of a supposedly ever expanding “free market” protected by US imperialist
military might. In fact, the US and other imperialist powers have accelerated
the concentration and centralization of capital in their hands and have
compelled the rest of the world to stagnate and sustain their consumption
with debt financing,
Since the social turmoil in China, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
disintegration of revisionist ruling cliques in the period of 1989 to 1991, the
US has arrogantly played the role of sole superpower, proclaimed the death
of the cause of national liberation and democracy and launched economic,
social, political and military offensive against the people of the world.
But now the world capitalist system is imploding. One kind of financial market
after another has collapsed and has repeatedly cascaded to collapse the
real economy. The crisis continues to worsen and deepen. The conditions
of stagnation and depression are expected to run for at least 15 years. The
US rulers are setting the pattern of bailing out the financial oligarchy and
the industrial giants long before adequate measures are taken to provide
relief to the working class and to simulate production.
Only recently the Arroyo regime has been saying that the fundamentals
of the Philippine semifeudal and semicolonial economy are strong. Arroyo
thought then that she could continue with foreign and domestic borrowing
without end in order to cover trade and budgetary deficits and to misrepresent
debt-financed consumption as the proof of economic growth.
Within the remaining limited time of the current reactionary regime and
thereafter, the broad masses of the people can be expected to rise in protest
against the escalation of exploitation and oppression. They are confronted by
lockouts, mass lay-offs, drastic fall of wages, soaring prices of basic commodities
and the deterioration of social services.
Under these circumstances, all forms of people's resistance are growing. The
legal democratic mass movement is surging forward. The people's war in the
countryside is intensifying as the regime has used counterrevolutionary violence
to suppress the people's demands for basic social, economic and political reforms.
Once more thank you.
--Jose Maria Sison
February 19, 2009
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