Global and domestic economic crisis is pushing the people to wage revolutionary struggle

The global and domestic economic crisis is pushing the people to wage revolutionary struggle

Communist Party of the Philippines
January 30, 2009
The worsening global and domestic economic crisis is pressing down hard on the masses of the Filipino people. The rotten ruling system is sinking so deep, it is helpless to lift itself and is only pushing the masses into ever worse squalor. Millions are being dislocated by the crisis. It is becoming increasingly clear to the Filipino people that there is no other option but to wage revolutionary struggle to put an end to the rotten, plunderous and oppressive semicolonial and semifeudal system.

In the past few weeks, tens of thousands of Filipino workers in the semiconductor and other semimanufacturing sectors have lost their jobs as subsidiaries and comprador firms of multinationals in the export processing zones closed or drastically slowed down production. Government statistics show about 20,000 workers have been retrenched as of last week while up to 34,000 were working with reduced hours. The actual situation is much worse.

Several hundred thousands more in the private sector are expected be retrenched in the coming months. Tens of thousands more government employees are also set to be retrenched by the Arroyo regime in callous obedience to the IMF-imposed government "streamlining and rationalization" program.

Thousands of Filipino migrant workers terminated from their jobs abroad have already been forced to return home in the past few weeks. Close to half a million migrant workers are expected to lose their jobs and add to the growing unemployment in the country in the next few months.

The Filipino people have long been suffering from a permanent crisis under prevailing semicolonial and semifeudal conditions that allow the imperialists to exploit the people and plunder the economy. The imperialists and the puppet state prevent industrial growth and land reform. The local economy is overly dominated by the export of semi-manufactures and more heavily dependent on imports. The permanent crisis of the local economy has been further exacerbated by the policies of imperialist "globalization" carried out intensively by successive puppet regimes since the early 1990s.

Imperialist "globalization" has shown itself to be totally bankrupt. As a result of the global production slowdown, local semiconductor "manufacturing" is on the verge of collapse. It is the impoverished workers and toiling masses and the tens of millions of the unemployed who are bearing the brunt of total compliance with imperialist "globalization" under the US-Arroyo regime. The crisis is fast reaching the point where the prolonged global and domestic economic crisis is developing into a depression.

Gloria Arroyo, one of the foremost proponents of imperialist "globalization" since its onset, insists on its discredited policies. She downplays the fact that, all along, it is these policies which have caused the destruction of local productive forces, the aggravation of poverty and hunger in the country and the plunge of the Philippine economy deeper and deeper into crisis. Her policies run counter to the long-standing need for genuine land reform and national industrialization. She feeds the people with empty palliatives. She conceals the massive unemployment figures and has no sympathy at all for the toiling masses and Filipino people. She has nothing but contempt for the people who are offered nothing but suggestions to find work overseas.

Worse, in the guise of putting up a so-called "economic stimulus package," she grabs and mobilizes billions in public funds and even government and private workers' and employees' social security funds in order to steal all the more and use these as stash funds for her continued hold on power.

The exacerbated crisis in the country is gathering storm. Workers, government employees, the urban poor, the unemployed, students and other sectors are bound to pour out into the streets and other places of assembly to protest growing unemployment, widespread hunger, deteriorating social services, rampant corruption, fascist repression and the US-Arroyo regime's dirty schemes to perpetuate itself in power.

The Filipino people are left with no other option but to wage revolutionary struggle in order to smash the rotten exploitative and oppressive puppet ruling system and replace it with one that is truly liberated, democratic, propeople, equitable and progressive. Conditions are ever ripe for revolution. The revolutionary forces should do their utmost to arouse, organize and mobilize the masses as extensively and intensively as possible.

The Communist Party calls on the masses of the Filipino people to rise up and muster their collective strength in the factories, farms, offices and other workplaces, schools and communities in the cities and countryside, heighten their mass struggles and wage revolution. The CPP calls on the working class, in particular, to take their place at the forefront of revolutionary struggle.

The Party-led revolutionary forces are further expanding and intensifying people's war and raising it to a higher level amid the escalating crisis of the ruling system. Recruitment in the revolutionary mass organizations and the people's army is rising. The New People's Army is launching more frequent and intensified tactical offensives. The propagation of revolutionary land reform and the establishment of people's democratic political power are proceeding hand-in-hand with the advance of armed struggle.

The revolutionary people's war is bound to progress throughout the country in the next few years as the global and local crisis deepens further. The Filipino people and their revolutionary forces are ever determined to bring people's war to a new and higher stage and accumulate bigger and greater victories.