Ang Bayan, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 15, 1972
The masses of workers are stirring. They are breaking out everywhere against the intensified exploitation characterizing this crumbling semicolonial and semifeudal system. They are throwing off the yellow labor leaders, labor dealers and labor aristocrats from their backs and rising up in irrepressible political and economic struggle against the rule of the exploiters and oppressors.
A great wave of mass strikes battered the reactionary ruling order in 1971. The two unprecedented general transport strikes of January 5-13 and February 2-10, which started off the mass actions for the year, brought about the mobilization of masses of jeepney drivers, transport workers and the broad masses of the people against the intensified exploitative schemes of the US imperialist oil monopoly and its local running dogs.
Widespread industrial strikes affected a number of plants in the tire and rubber, textile and textile goods, metal products, cement, food manufacturing industries, in fact practically every other significant manufacturing industry. Long drawn-out strikes likewise hit a considerable number of restaurants, hotels, department stores, insurance and accounting firms, private schools and other establishments.
A month long general strike was held by thousands of Filipino workers in Clark Air Force Base with the support of the people of Angeles City and other towns in Pampanga. Significantly, this strike culminated in a giant march and rally at the gates of the US imperialist military installation.
Farm workers, particularly those in sugar and coconut plantations in Central and Southern Luzon and Western Visayas, also fought for their democratic rights throughout the year, organizing themselves into effective forces against all reaction.
Everywhere youth activists have been linking up with the masses of militant workers in fighting against the strikebreaking and union busting tactics of the reactionary capitalist managements, their labor stooges and the constabulary police and lumpen gangsters.
Significant progress has been made in building up a broad alliance of militant labor federations encompassing the whole trade union movement. The big-time labor leaders and labor aristocrats Oca, Lacsina, Hernandez, Lerum, Mendoza, Cid and others of their yellow stripe, are more and more starkly exposed and one by one cast away by the rapidly surging revolutionary trade union movement.
The Filipino proletariat repeatedly proved its high sense of self-sacrifice in the service of the people in the January 13 Plaza Miranda massacre, May Day massacre and Caloocan massacre, which saw the heroic death, among others, of Liza Balando and Fred Tibar, representatives of the new militant worker activists, and the wounding of hundreds of other militant youth and workers.
The break of a glorious new day has come for the Filipino proletariat. Once again it has the glorious opportunity to give full play to its revolutionary ideology, militancy and organization in leading the struggle of the Filipino people for national liberation and democracy.
Great strides were taken in 1971. Bound by unshakable unity with the masses of peasants and revolutionary intelligentsia and integrating the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought with the concrete practice of the Philippine revolution, the Filipino proletariat will surely take greater strides in leading the people’s cause further on the road to victory in the coming year.
