Message to the Symposium on Mao Zedong Thought Celebrating the 100th Birth Anniversary of Mao Zedong in the Philippines

I wish to express my warmest greetings of solidarity with all the participants in today’s seminar on Mao Zedong Thought and with the Center for Nationalist Studies, the Institute for Alternative Studies and the League of Filipino Student that have organized this symposium in advance celebration of the 100th birth anniversary of Mao Zedong.

Through the proletarian revolutionary cadres, Mao Zedong has provided immeasurable inspiration to the anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement in the Philippines since the early sixties. Since December 26, 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines has adopted Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as its theoretical guide and has integrated it with the concrete practice of the Philippine revolution.

As a result, the Filipino people’s democratic revolution under the leadership of the proletariat has won great victories. There has been dual political power in the Philippines. While the counterrevolutionary state is still well entrenched in urban areas, revolutionary organs of political power have arisen in the countryside. They have been created by the Party, the New People’s Army, the National Democratic Front, the mass organizations and the broad masses of the people.

But deviations from Mao Zedong Thought have resulted in serious setbacks since the middle of the 1980s. Once more Mao Zedong Thought is resolutely being upheld as the guide to the rectification movement being carried out by the Communist Party of the Philippines in order to overcome grave errors and shortcomings, strengthen the Party and the revolutionary mass movement and raise the people’s revolutionary struggle to a new and higher level.

The great contributions of Mao to the revolutionary theory and practice of the proletariat do not consist only of his teachings on the new democratic revolution and the theory and strategic line of people’s war in a semicolonial and semifeudal country and on socialist revolution and construction, consequent to the basic completion of the national democratic revolution upon the seizure of political power.

The great contributions of Mao Zedong to the three components of Marxism, i.e., materialist philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism, bring us up to a new and higher level of understanding social revolution from the new democratic stage to the socialist stage and further on to the stage of communism.

The greatest contribution of Mao Zedong to the development of Marxism-Leninism is the theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship in order to combat revisionism, prevent the restoration of capitalism and consolidate socialism for an entire historical epoch up to the point that imperialism is defeated on a world scale and communism becomes possible.

Those who can comprehend the full range of Marxism- Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought can see that the anti-imperialist and socialist movement is bound to resurge in an unprecedented way. The objective conditions for social revolution have become exceedingly favorable on an unprecedentedly wide scale. These include the disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes, the basic exhaustion of neocolonialism and the retrogression of the capitalist world to the worst forms of oppression and exploitation, the far worsened crisis of capitalism due to superexploitation and high technology and the widening scale of social turmoil in all continents of the world.

You can observe in the Philippines and abroad that it is the Maoists who have the scientific basis and the confidence of persevering in the revolutionary cause of the proletariat, confront the growing monsters churned out by the rampaging crisis of monopoly capitalism and fight for what they foresee as a bright socialist future. It is those who adhere to Mao Zedong Thought who can answer the question of how to keep socialism after it is won. They are in the best position to learn from Mao’s theory and practice of continuing revolution and from the disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes.

The sharpest of the ideologues of capitalism have started to worry that upon the discredit of modern revisionism, social democracy and other pseudoprogressive ideologies there is fertile ground for Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought to reemerge as a formidable revolutionary force and replace the so-called “moderate” opposition to imperialism which used to undermine and block the way of the revolutionary forces led by the proletariat in various countries.

In the history of the modern world, the revolutionary theory and practice of the proletariat comes later than the petty bourgeois enlightenment and petty bourgeois subordination to the big bourgeoisie. But there are in the Philippines today petty bourgeois subjectivists and opportunists of the Rightist variety who imagine themselves to be superior to Marxism-Leninism by mocking at it as outdated and by misrepresenting the bourgeois ideology of modern revisionism and the practice of restoring capitalism and bourgeois class dictatorship as the renewal and democratization of socialism.

These few anti-Marxists and antiproletarians among the unremoulded urban petty bourgeoisie try to dish up as new and fresh such stale ideas as populism, liberalism, social democracy and anarchism as well as the most blatant anticommunist ideas of Trotsky, Khrushchov and Gorbachov. Under the signboard of “democracy” and “anti-Stalinism”, they have combined with the militarists, insurrectionists and criminal gangsters who have swung from an ultra-Left posture to a Rightist position, after committing not only grave ideological, political and organizational errors but also criminal offenses violative of civil liberties and human rights.

There is now a hodgepodge of petty-bourgeois anticommunists seeking to discredit and destroy the Communist Party of the Philippines under the slogan of “pluralism.” They demagogically take a free ride on the imperialist ideological offensive. They have adopted the anticommunist, anti-Stalin and anti-Mao slogans of the cold war as their own. And they have gone into an anticommunist alliance, which specializes in Red-baiting legal activists and shouting the slogan of “Oust the Stalinists.” They wish to liquidate the armed revolution and seek convergences with the US-Ramos regime. What a spectacle of intellectual backwardness and retrogression!

Among the detractors of Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party of the Philippines, there are hired psywar and intelligence agents of the US and local reactionaries. It would be pure naivete on our part not to be aware of the scheme of the US and the Ramos regime to seek the destruction of the CPP and the revolutionary mass movement by every foul means, including the attempt to destroy them from within through ideological, political and organizational liquidation of the working class leadership in the two-stage Philippine revolution

It is of crucial importance to study and apply Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It is necessary to be armed with this revolutionary theory in order to be able to fight effectively not only the barefaced enemy but also his special agents who seek to destroy the CPP and the revolutionary mass movement from the flanks. Mao Zedong Thought is the scientific theory that provides us with the comprehensive and profound understanding of the past, the present and the future on the scale of the Philippines and the world.

To refuse or oppose learning from Mao Zedong Thought is to accept the rule of the big bourgeoisie, even if one is self-satisfied to be in some small petty bourgeois creek or in the morass of religious fantasy. The proletarian revolutionaries can never accept oppression and exploitation, especially when it becomes intolerably worse, as in the current period domestically and internationally. And of course, they choose the revolutionary theory that can guide the revolutionary mass movement not only in overthrowing the foreign and local oppressors and exploiters but also in creating a new social system and preempting those who try to restore capitalism and bourgeois class dictatorship.

Today, the armed revolutionary movement of the Filipino people for national liberation and democracy is at the forefront of the struggle of the proletariat and the people of the world against imperialism, neocolonialism, modern revisionism and all reaction. That is because the vanguard force of this movement is well endowed with the legacy of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The Communist Party of the Philippines has successfully led the Filipino people in marching from an old period to a new period of revolutionary struggle in the world, a period in which the upcoming revolutionary movements have to be guided by Mao Zedong Thought in order to win and consolidate victory.

The CPP has some special importance in the world today. It is holding high the banner of Mao Zedong Thought, carrying out an armed revolution and demonstrating to the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world an example which the imperialists and reactionaries wish to extinguish. That is why all kinds of violence and deception are being used by the counterrevolutionary forces.

In closing, may I congratulate you for having the revolutionary wisdom and militancy in undertaking this symposium on Mao Zedong Thought. You come well ahead of the International Seminar on Mao Zedong Thought which will be held on November 6 and 7 in Germany.

This seminar is being organized under the auspices of the Center for Social Studies, which I chair, the Workers’ Education Center and other organizations. May I invite you to attend this seminar and, if you cannot come due to financial constraints, please read and study its forthcoming Declaration on Mao Zedong Thought and the other papers that it shall issue.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to extend to you this message of solidarity. I wish you the utmost success in your present seminar and in your further seminars on Mao Zedong Thought.