Socialism and the New World Order^*

First of all, let me convey to all the conference participants and guests my warmest greetings of solidarity.

I am deeply pleased to be invited as the main speaker. In this regard, I wish to thank the Student Christian Movement and its leadership for the invitation.

I congratulate you for convening the conference and for your choice of theme. You are confronting the reality of a new world disorder that has resulted from the ravages of the global capitalist crisis, neocolonialism and the revisionist betrayal of socialism. And you are taking as a challenge the struggle for socialism against imperialism.

I propose to perform my role as speaker by posing a series of questions on the subject, socialism and the new world order, and trying to answer each of them.

There are four parts in my presentation. Part I consists of preliminary questions. Part II is about the basic principles and achievements of socialism. Part III is about modern revisionism and the theory of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship. Part IV is about the capitalist crisis of overproduction and the new world disorder. I hope that my contribution to your conference is helpful enough in your effort to inform and enlighten yourselves on so important a subject.

I. Preliminary Questions

1. As you well know, the Philippine revolutionary movement continues to be one of the most outstanding armed revolutionary movements led by a communist party. How do we account for this fact?

A.: There is intolerable oppression and exploitation of the Filipino people by the foreign monopolies, big compradors and landlords. Thus, the people are eager to wage armed revolution.

The chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system makes possible protracted people’s war along the general line of the democratic revolution. This is directed against the three evils of monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

The crisis of the ruling system is connected with the crisis of the world capitalist system. The persistent agrarian and semifeudal character of the economy, the extraction of superprofits by the foreign monopolies, the unfavorable terms of trade, the intolerable debt burden and so on weigh heavily on the people.

Having pointed out the favorable conditions for making revolution, let me refer you to the decisive role of the subjective forces. Chief of these forces is the Communist Party of the Philippines. It is guided by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and has correctly integrated this with the concrete conditions of the Philippines. Thus, the national- democratic revolution in the Philippines has grown in strength and advanced.

If you wish to know more about the Communist Party of the Philippines and the entire armed revolutionary movement, I advise you to read and study the issues of Rebolusyon and Ang Bayan.

2. What is the impact of the collapse of the ruling parties and regimes in the former Soviet bloc countries in the years of 1989 to 1991? Are there adverse results? Is there demoralization because help cannot be expected such countries and even the prospect of socialism is probably gone?

A.: The impact is minimal. There are adverse results only among some petty bourgeois progressives who in the first place do not understand the difference between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism, between socialism and monopoly bureaucrat capitalism and between proletarian internationalism and Soviet social-imperialism and who therefore are easily swayed by the imperialist ideological and political offensive related to the collapse of the ruling revisionist parties and regimes in the former Soviet bloc.

As far as the Communist Party of the Philippines is concerned, it feels vindicated that it has opposed Soviet modern revisionism and capitalist restoration since the reestablishment of the party in 1968. The Soviet and pro-Soviet parties have never been of help to the CPP and the Philippine revolution.

The pro-Soviet group of the Lavaites and all the Soviet and pro- Soviet parties abroad supported the Marcos dictatorship and opposed the revolutionary forces and the Filipino people. It should be the small inconsequential group of the Lavaites that is most embarrassed and demoralized by the disintegration of the Soviet and pro-Soviet parties and regimes abroad.

3. Can we agree with the view that the end of history has come, with capitalism and liberal democracy as the highest level of human development. Why?

A.: We certainly cannot agree with the view that the end of history has come. Capitalism has developed into monopoly capitalism, state monopoly-capitalism and neocolonialism and is creating the conditions for its overthrow and the eventual rise of socialism to a new and higher level. Under conditions of monopoly capitalism or imperialism, there can be no liberal democracy but the class dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie.

It is a temporary phenomenon that the United States, Japan and Western Europe have greatly benefited from high technology for superprofits, neocolonialism and the revisionist betrayal of socialism. Even now, the capitalist crisis of overproduction has already created a new world disorder.

The countries subjected for so long to neocolonialism and revisionist betrayal of socialism are in turmoil. The global centers of capitalism are now reeling from a prolonged recession and from what is called jobless growth. Investments are going further into higher technology, are killing jobs and are intensifying cutthroat competition within and among capitalist countries.

The conditions for the eventual resurgence of anti-imperialist and socialist movements are increasingly favorable.

So long as humanity continues to exist, history does not end. It does not end even after the attainment of socialism or even communism.

4. Can we be optimistic about the future and about the history of humanity. What are the current driving forces for historical change against monopoly capitalism?

A.: Within the industrial centers of capitalism, the class struggle between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the working class is intensifying. The still employed and increasingly unemployed blue and white collar workers as well as the well- educated but largely unemployed youth will eventually press for socialism.

At the same time, the expanded number of oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America and in the countries where socialism has been betrayed for several decades have no choice now and in the future but to fight for national liberation and democracy against imperialism and reaction and aim for socialism.

5. The socialist future is something arising from current class contradictions. Can we describe what stages of development the working class has gone through in struggling for socialism?

A.: The struggle of the working class for socialism has gone through ups and downs and through twists and turns. But basically this global struggle has gone through three basic historical stages.

First stage is that of Marx and Engels. They laid down the basic principles of scientific socialism in the period of free competition capitalism in the 19th century.

Second stage is that of Lenin and Stalin. They made the first successful socialist revolution and construction in one country and proceeded to inspire socialist revolution in several countries and the national liberation movements in the global era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution.

Third stage is that of Mao. He inherited the legacy of his great communist predecessors. But his unique contribution is the theory and initial practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship to combat revisionism, prevent the restoration of capitalism and consolidate socialism. This contribution opens the third stage.

II. Basic Principles and Achievements of Socialism

1. What are the principles of socialism laid down by Marx and Engels? Cite the conditions for the emergence of these principles?

A.: Before Marx and Engels, there were utopian ideas about socialism. They were utopian or impractical because they were based on sheer voluntarism.

Marx and Engels put the basic principles of socialism on a scientific basis by developing the philosophy of dialectical materialism, making a comprehensive critique of the capitalist political economy and showing how socialism can arise from the development and self-defeating career of capitalism.

The capitalist class wields its class dictatorship or state power over the working class and accumulates capital by extracting surplus value from the exploitation of the working class.

There is a contradiction between the social character of largescale machine production and the private mode of appropriation. Consequently, the forces of production can no longer be contained by the capitalist relations of production. The working class wages class struggle against the bourgeoisie and rises up to overthrow it.

To make the socialist revolution, the working class smashes and destroys the state power or class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and replaces it with the proletarian class dictatorship or workers’ state power.

Consequently, the socialist economy can be established and developed, with public ownership of the means of production, central planning, full employment and the constant raising of the cultural and living standard of the people.

The surplus value previously alienated from the working class is allocated for expanding production, raising wages, welfare measures, administration and defense.

2. Have the teachings of Marx and Engels been proven in the industrial capitalist countries? How?

A: Yes, of course. In the industrial capitalist countries, the big division is between the few who are big bourgeois who live on dividends and the more than 75 percent of society who do not live on dividends but on wages and salaries.

Since the time of Marx and Engels, great polarization has occurred. The workers’ class struggle has taken the form of the trade union movement and then the proletarian revolutionary parties. The capitalist class has used a variety of political weapons to deceive and suppress the working class. The anti- proletarian forces include those espousing liberal democracy, social democracy, Christian democracy, liberal fascism and so on

Capitalism has gone into global crises and wars. World War I provided the conditions for the rise of socialism in one country. Russia was a country with a capitalist industrial base although this was surrounded by an ocean of feudalism and medievalism. World War II provided the conditions for the rise of a giant wave of national liberation movements and socialism in several countries.

The current global centers of capitalism have been able to superimpose themselves on the world because of neocolonialism and the revisionist betrayal of socialism. But there is now social turmoil on an unprecedented scale in the world.

3. Lenin who inherited the legacy of Marxism and developed it further to the stage of Leninism. What were his main contributions?

In philosophy, Lenin successfully fought against the bourgeois subjectivists, especially the empiricists, to defend Marxist philosophy. He propounded the theory of uneven development to show that socialism can arise from Russia which was the weakest link in the chain of imperialist countries. In political economy, he critiqued monopoly capitalism or modern imperialism. In the twentieth century, free competition capitalism had grown into monopoly capitalism as the dominant force.

Leninism is Marxism in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution. Lenin showed the way to win the proletarian revolution and build the first socialist state by strengthening the vanguard party of the proletariat and relying on the masses. He successfully fought not only the gross evil of czarism but also classical revisionism and the other more recognizable stripes of bourgeois ideology and politics.

As far as establishing socialism is concerned, Lenin followed the Marxist principle that the socialist state is a class dictatorship of the working class and he nationalized the large industrial enterprises and the land to provide the proletariat with the commanding heights of the economy.

Because of civil war and the foreign interventionist war, during which “war communism” or the ration system was followed, Lenin consequently had to resort to the temporary necessity of the new economic policy which was designed to revive the Soviet economy as soon as possible by giving concessions to the petty commodity producers (including the rich peasants and small entrepreneurs) and the traders.

It would fall upon the shoulders of Stalin to carry out the new economic policy (NEP) up to a certain point and then push forward in earnest socialist industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture in 1929.

4. What were the achievements of Stalin in socialist revolution and construction?

He continued Lenin’s line of socialist revolution. He united and consolidated the Soviet Union as a socialist country. He stood firmly for the line of socialism in one country and defeated the ultra-Leftist and yet defeatist line of Trotsky that socialism could survive in the Soviet Union only if there would be successful uprisings in western Europe.

After the NEP served its purposes, Stalin pushed forward socialist industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. He stood firmly against the Right opportunist line of Bukharin. If Bukharin had had his way, the bourgeoisie would have grown out of control from the rich peasants, the traders and other bourgeois forces and swamped the proletarian state. Without the prompt advance of socialist revolution and construction, the Soviet Union would have been unable to face subsequently the threats of the bourgeois nationalists and international fascism in the thirties.

After the first five-year economic plan, the cultural and living and cultural standards of the Soviet people were vastly improved. The peasant masses benefited from collectivization and the mechanization which was made possible by the fullscale industrialization. Before the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union had already established a comprehensive industrial base.

Under Stalin’s leadership, great numbers of the children of the working class and peasantry became educated up to the university and graduate levels. The Soviet Union produced the greatest number of research scientists, engineers, doctors of medicine, fulltime writers and artists and so on. Marxism- Leninism, scientific training and socialist realism had the upper hand in the cultural field.

Stalin continued Lenin’s general line of proletarian internationalism, promoted the national liberation movements in the colonial and semicolonial countries, defended the Soviet Union and turned the tide against the Nazi invasionary forces and international fascism.

After World War II, Stalin reconstructed socialist industry and agriculture, developed a powerful defense, countered US imperialism in Europe and Asia and inspired and supported the national liberation movements and socialism in several countries

5. While the achievements of Stalin were great and undeniable, he must have made some serious mistakes in his long period of leadership. What are those serious errors?

A.: The most serious ideological errors of Stalin included his notion that socialism could prevail so long as the productive forces were developing, that there could be a full correspondence between the relations and forces of production and between the mode of production and the superstructure and that there were no more exploiting classes and no more class struggle in the Soviet society, except the intensifying one between the Soviet people and the external enemy (the imperialists and their local agents).

The difference between the contradictions among the people and the contradictions between the people and the enemy was slurred over. There was a great deal of dependence on administrative measures in pushing production, in maintaining social order and in going after those construed as enemies of the people. There was no narrowing of the target in the mass campaigns against the enemy. The security agencies were too powerful. The judicial process and the principle of due process were not rigorously used to narrow the target

On the soft side of Stalin, he abolished the communist minimum and the communist maximum in the compensation of communists. Communist minimum was equivalent to the average wage of workers and communist maximum was equivalent to the highest workers’ wage. Communist cadres were allowed to get compensation similar to that of the experts bought off from the old regime.

Levels of compensation were raised en masse for the bureaucracy and the new intelligentsia. Concessions were also given to the Russian Orthodox Church and other reactionary institutions in 1939 in the spirit of forging the patriotic unity of the Soviet people against the threat of Nazi invasion.

6. In the period before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, what were the achievements of Mao Zedong?

A.: Up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the achievements of Mao Zedong in carrying out the new democratic revolution through protracted people’s war and subsequently in socialist revolution and construction were very much within the stage of Leninism. Mao was the unprecedentedly great master of protracted people’s war but the theory and practice of the two-stage revolution was still mainly essentially the achievement of Lenin.

Mao learnt much from Lenin and Stalin in upholding the leadership of the proletariat in the people’s democratic state, in taking over the commanding heights of the economy, in adopting transition measures and in carrying out the basic socialist transformation of the economy. He also agreed with Stalin in maintaining the socialist momentum in economic construction.

But he greatly improved on the pioneering example of Stalin in socialist construction by putting forward and carrying out the line of developing heavy and basic industry as the leading factor, agriculture as the base and light industry as the bridge to serve immediate producer and consumer needs. Thus he lightened the load on the peasantry.

The Great Leap Forward, which is much maligned in the West, conformed to this line and was successful in countering the effects of natural calamities, the sabotage by the Soviet revisionists and the continuously running imperialist blockade.

In confronting the revisionist renegades centered in the Soviet Union as well as the opportunists in the Chinese party, Mao made the most comprehensive and most profound critique of modern revisionism. Before he positively put forward the theory of continuing revolution and before he initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he had already laid the theoretical ground for these through the critique of modern revisionism.

7. What was the course of development in the countries of Eastern Europe other than the Soviet Union?

A.: These countries were successful for a while in socialist revolution and construction in so far as they followed the teachings of Lenin and Stalin. However, there were inherent weaknesses in the parties that came to power in Eastern Europe. Also, the Khrushchovite influence came too soon to sabotage the course of socialism.

In most East European countries, the ruling parties consisted of a mix-up of communists and social democrats who became communists overnight. Even before the Khrushchovite revisionist influence took effect, the Right opportunist trend was already strong among the former social democrats in the ruling party and the bourgeois nationalists and religious forces in society were likewise strong. There was fertile ground for the Khrushchov influence to thrive on as early as 1956.

Programs of industrialization were adopted and there was a erroneous belief that industrialization would automatically solve the land problem. Thus, land reform was not seriously carried out. In all East European countries, except Albania, the rich peasants or the rural bourgeoisie continued to be a strong base for generating the bourgeoisie.

Special mention must be made of Yugoslavia. Tito became a bourgeois nationalist and revisionist. He pulled backed from land reform and whipped up workplace egoism under the guise of workers’ self-management. He was ahead of Khrushchov in modern revisionism and in fighting Stalin. He went overboard to the side of the imperialists despite his nonalignment rhetoric.

III. Modern Revisionism and the Theory of Continuing Revolution

1. What is revisionism? What are the similarities and differences between classical and modern revisionism? Please elaborate on modern revisionism?

A.: Revisionism is bourgeois ideology masquerading as Marxism and revising the fundamental principles of Marxism. This is the common ground and similarity of classical and modern revisionism.

The fundamental principles pertain to materialist dialectics, class struggle, state and revolution, the nature of imperialism and so on. The essential purpose of revisionism is to replace the proletarian revolutionary line with the bourgeois reactionary line within the ranks of the proletarian revolutionaries.

The most glaring difference between classical and modern revisionism is that the principal exponents of classical revisionism were not in power and were parliamentary tails of the bourgeoisie and supporters of imperialism in the period before World War I and the principal exponents of modern revisionism held state power after World War II and restored capitalism in socialist countries.

More differences can be cited if we relate the ideological revisions to the different concrete circumstances in which the classical and modern revisionists operated.

2. How did the revisionists come to power? When did the modern revisionists start to restore capitalism?

A: Before the revisionists came to power, they existed within the ruling communist party even as the proletarian revolutionary line prevailed. This is true in the case of the Soviet and Chinese parties.

The influence of the old exploiting classes persists in socialist society and is reflected in the communist party. More subtle is the emergence of a new bourgeoisie among the party and state bureaucrats. At first, a new petty bourgeoisie arises among them and generates a line against socialist revolution and construction.

The subjectivists, opportunists and revisionists are bred by conditions internal and external to the ruling communist party. Thus, there is always a two-line struggle, only varying in intensity at various times.

All Marxist-Leninists recognize that there must be a comprehensive, scientific view of things as a precondition for taking the proletarian revolutionary stand, viewpoint and method. But there are those who systematically take a rightist or bourgeois stand, viewpoint and method and capitalize and speculate on that side of the objective reality which serves them.

The mass of new petty bourgeoisie serves as the social base for the rise of the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie. In coming to power, the revisionists at the highest level of the ruling party and state undertake a series of actions to split the ranks of the proletarian revolutionaries, including a series of coups d’etat.

Upon coming to power, the highest revisionists begin to restore capitalism, become the highest stratum of bureaucrat capitalists. At first, they do not privatize public assets and place these under their names. Their main job is to make revisionist ideas dominant and ideologically to discredit the proletarian revolutionary line through a personalistic line of attack on Stalin as in Soviet Union and on Mao as in China and to adopt and implement policies that destroy the foundation of socialism and restore capitalism.

3. How was modern revisionism promoted as the ruling ideology and how was capitalism first restored by Khrushchov?

A: The ruling modern revisionists in the Soviet Union, from Khrushchov through Brezhnev to Gorbachov consistently preached that the working class had accomplished the historic mission of the working class, that the proletarian class stand and class struggle within Soviet society have become outdated and that it was time to go supraclass and go for universal humanism or for a cosmopolitan civilization which is contemptible of the proletariat and its class struggle.

This revisionist view is an extension and magnification of the 1936 error of considering that exploiting classes and antagonistic class struggle had ceased in the Soviet Union, except the struggle between the Soviet people and the external enemy.

Under the guise of denouncing the personality cult of Stalin, Khrushchov completely negated his achievements and undermined the socialist achievements of the Soviet proletariat and people. He invoked the name of Lenin in order to attack Leninism in essence.

Under the pretext of going supraclass, Khrushchov put forward bourgeois populist slogans which denied the proletarian character of the communist party and state. He preached bourgeois pacifism and said that the transition from capitalism to socialism had become peaceful, that imperialism had changed its aggressive nature, that defeating imperialism was a matter of economic competition, that it was possible to have a world without arms and without wars and that the general line of the international communist movement was peaceful coexistence.

As regards the Soviet economy, Khrushchov invoked the law of value in accordance with Adam Smith, laid aside the critical Marxist theory of surplus value and with the objective of removing labor power and the principal means of production from the sphere of socialist planning and transforming them fully into commodities for buy-and-sell in the market.

To start breaking up the Soviet economy and creating a capitalist economy and market, he dissolved the central planning ministries and pretended to decentralize and bring down the highest level of planning to the regions, promoted factory egoism by making enterprises individually responsible for cost-and-profit accounting, broke up the machine and tractor stations controlled by the working class and made the farm collectives the buyers and direct owners of the machines and tractors, encouraged direct business transactions between enterprises and regions, expanded the private plots of the members of collectives and encouraged petty commodity production in agriculture, services and trade and the free market.

Khrushchov whipped up material incentives and economism and prated about building the material and technical foundation of communism in twenty years exactly when he was breaking up the socialist economy and laying the basis for the economic rise of the bourgeoisie as private owners of productive assets.

In the cultural sphere, it became fashionable to scorn the achievements of socialism as the works of the demonized Stalin, to look up to the West for higher learning and business management, to either camouflage or flaunt bourgeois ideas against Marxism-Leninism and to go for “universal humanism” and even mysticism against socialist realism.

4. How did Brezhnev push the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union? What was the outcome domestically and internationally?

A: Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union for a long period of time, was even more deceptive than Khrushchov. He pretended to rehabilitate the prestige of Stalin but went full blast to restore capitalism, carrying out vigorously what Khrushchov started.

He restored some central planning ministries, to assure the central level of the Soviet state of revenues and the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie of superprofits and accelerate spending for the military-industrial complex engaged in the arms race. In fact, it became impossible to have socialist planning because the state enterprises and collectives were transformed into private fiefdoms and prices of the same commodities varied widely in prices from place to place.

The new economic system of Brezhnev and Kosygin allowed the entire new bourgeoisie to rob the state, to take cuts in the buy-and-sell of the means of production and consumer goods between the Soviet Union and foreign countries, regions and enterprises, to autonomize industrial enterprises and collectives on a far wider scale than during Khrushchov’s time and to fire workers in large numbers from their jobs and make so-called savings on the wage fund in enterprises in order to increase the salaries, bonuses and other perks for the managers.

The revisionists misrepresented the new economic system as similar to the new economic policy of Lenin in the twenties and as the way to socialism. They lied against Lenin by claiming that he meant the new economic policy to be the socialist road itself and not as a transitory measure of concessions to nonsocialist forces.

The bureaucrat capitalists encouraged the increase in number of the privateers in both industry, agriculture and the services and collaborated with them in rechanneling goods from the state to the private sector. Goods were bought cheap from the state enterprises and sold dear to the public. The pilferage which started during Khrushchov’s time assumed colossal proportions. The criminal syndicates had connections up to the level of Brezhnev’s family.

At the end of the Brezhnev rule, there were already 30 million private capitalists, specialized in collaborating with the bureaucrat capitalists.

Brezhnev was fond of saying that socialism in the Soviet Union was irreversible exactly at the time that he was rapidly restoring capitalism. He prated about proletarian internationalism but engaged in social imperialism and neocolonialism in relations with other countries in the Soviet bloc and in the third world.

The rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union in the cold war gave the latter at certain times the appearance of being anti-imperialist and progressive. But in fact, the Soviet Union engaged in social imperialist aggression as in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan and in neocolonial methods of exploitation as in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in which it delivered shoddy overpriced equipment on credit and took back underpriced products from the debtor countries.

In the latter part of the ’70s, the Soviet economy was already in a state of depression, exhausted by the ravages of bureaucrat monopoly capitalism and the arms race. The Soviet Union which was a neocolonial power was itself prey to the superior neocolonialism of West Germany and the entire West.

5. How did Gorbachov complete the process of capitalist restoration?

A: By the time Gorbachov came to power, the Soviet Union was ripe for an undisguised and much faster restoration of capitalism. The bureaucrat monopoly capitalists were eager to legalize their ill-gotten assets to shed off their socialist masks and to privatize public assets on a full scale.

The catchphrases of “perestroika” and “glasnost” were flimsy and short-term devices for discarding the phony communist party and equally phony socialist facade of the bourgeois class dictatorship and for accelerating the direct privatization of state and party assets.

To mislead the Soviet people, Gorbachov urged them to join private cooperatives patterned after those in Yugoslavia. But the main thing was not to favor the 50 million people who registered as members of such private cooperatives but to create the atmosphere for legalizing the ill-gotten assets of the bureaucrat and private capitalists and pave the way for a vigorous privatization of public assets.

Gorbachov converted the Soviet Union fully into a neocolony of the West. By one indicator, he incurred a foreign debt of 50 billion dollars within a few years on top of the 30 billion dollars incurred by the Brezhnev regime. Then, he proceeded to break up the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself. At the end of his regime and the Soviet Union, he spoke in undiluted anticommunist terms.

I need not speak at length on Gorbachov because there is general recognition that he, together with Yeltsin, Yakovlev and Sheverdnadze, is responsible for the final stage in the restoration of capitalism by the modern revisionists or the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union.

6. Can you describe concisely the course of socialism in Yugoslavia, the other East European countries, North Korea and Vietnam?

A: The Tito ruling clique was the first to become revisionist in Eastern Europe. It walked off the socialist road as early as 1948. Tito’s economist Kardelij was ahead of Lieberman, Ota Sik and the like in theorizing and working out the economic policy of capitalist restoration under the guise of making socialism more efficient with the help of capitalism [capitalist methods].

Since 1956, when Khrushchov started to destroy socialism in the Soviet Union, the countries that were in the Comecon and Warsaw Pact also started to take the capitalist road. The counterrevolutionary uprisings in Hungary and Poland were crude but signal attempts of the reactionaries to take power and get out of the Warsaw Pact. The revisionists suppressed them but they themselves were out to restore capitalism through peaceful evolution.

The socialist foundation of the East European countries up to 1956 was in the first place still weak. Even if certain countries like Czechoslovakia and East Germany eventually became stronger industrial economies than the rest in Eastern Europe, socialism was more of a facade than a reality because the working class was alienated from the state and from what they produced. The monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie appropriated the political power and social economy.

The regimes in Hungary and Poland had a cearly bureaucrat big-comprador character. Mongolia and Bulgaria were the most underdeveloped and were practically the ranch economy and orchard economy of the Soviet Union respectively in the Comecon division of labor.

Romania appeared to be assertively independent of the Soviet Union. But in fact, it became tied to the Western economies as early as the ’70s like the other Eastern European countries in the Soviet bloc. As soon as its oil resources were depleted, Romania was in deep economic trouble. Ceausescu was a bourgeois nationalist and a revisionist and appeared good to both China and the West because he tried to maintain independence from the Soviet Union.

By the time that Gorbachov decided to sell off its fraternal countries to the West, he could easily do so. That is an indication of how much of capitalism had developed in these countries and how decisive was the willingness of the Soviet Union to concede defeat. The Soviet troops stood by as the revisionist regimes fell one after the other in Eastern Europe. Gorbachov had already arranged with Bush and Kohl the collapse of the revisionist-ruled regimes.

Albania under Enver Hoxha cut a heroic figure up to sometime in the ’70s because it stood defiant of Soviet social imperialism as well as of Chinese modern revisionism which he falsely ascribed to Mao Zedong and not to Deng Xiaoping and the like. But the scale of Albania is small, was overdependent on the export of copper and hydroelectric power and was vulnerable to capitalist pressure and penetration. The ruling clique there turned blatantly revisionist before it was overthrown.

Vietnam has gone the way of China after the breakup of the Soviet bloc. Cuba was constricted within the Comecon and remained dependent on sugar production. But the communist party and the state have stayed on because of the political will to defend its national independence and social achievements. In view of the economic scale of Cuba, the odds and threats from US imperialism are tremendous.

North Korea remains now relatively the strongest exponent of national independence and socialism. It has a comprehensive economy and takes pride in self-reliance. Its geographic proximity to China is an advantage against imperialist threats. At the same time, US and Japanese imperialism are doing everything in their power to pressure and induce Korea to make capitalist-oriented reforms

7. Is China a socialist or capitalist country? If it is capitalist, how has it become so?

A: China has become a capitalist country since the revisionist came to power in 1976. The bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie is in power. The all-China and provincial officials of the communist party and state enrich themselves by using their offices in getting kickbacks on business contracts and loans from the state and acquiring shares of stocks and other assets for themselves, their relatives and friends

Deng Xiaoping returned to the bourgeoisie the capital it had owned and allowed it to enlarge this capital by raiding the state banks and engaging in all kinds of businesses autonomously and in combination with the transnational firms and banks and overseas Chinese capitalists.

The rural industries developed on a widescale during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were turned over to the private entrepreneurs under the legal fiction of management lease. The communes have been broken up and the land has been delivered only to a portion of the individual peasant households under the legal fiction of land lease.

The surplus labor has been directed towards construction jobs and work in sweat shops under working and living conditions worse than those in the Philippines. The jobs are unstable. Thus, there is now a floating population of oddjobbers of about 130 million. Unemployment could be as high as 300 million in China.

The foreign and domestic big bourgeoisie has all the right to form its business organizations and hire and fire workers. But the workers are subjected to so-called socialist labor discipline which is actually bourgeois exploitation and are prohibited from organizing their own unions, independent of the official revisionist-controlled unions.

The state enterprises and banks are milking cows of both bureaucrat and private capitalists. Goods and services are bought from the state and delivered cheap to the private capitalists, foreign and domestic. State ownership of major enterprises does not necessarily mean socialism. It is also a tool of bureaucrat capitalism.

State employees amount now only to 19 percent of those employed. This is a glaring indicator of the break-up of socialism in China. Even in post-revisionist Russia, state employees still amount to 52 percent of those employed because the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie cannot privatize or close down all at once the public enterprises.

An overwhelming majority of consumer goods, at least two-thirds, is now produced by the private sector which buys cheap equipment, energy and raw materials from the public sector and yet decries the public sector for being financed by taxes.

Private ownership of the means of production has gone wide and deep. Because labor power and the means of production have been fully re-commodified and because the prices are anarchic, there is no more effective central state planning to develop socialism and serve social needs.

The income structure in China now is similar to that of the United States and the Philippines. The gross income differences show that only a small portion of the population, less than 10 percent, is getting the largess while the rest suffer increasing poverty and misery.

The Chinese economy is now fully integrated with and subordinate to the world capitalist system. It is preoccupied by the most favored nation status and other business accommodations from the United States. It is vulnerable to the current world capitalist crisis of overproduction and to manipulation by the imperialists. The entire pattern of Chinese economic development is already determined by the imperialists and is on the course of neocolonialism. We are witness today how the US officials use economic and political threats to pressure China.

It is only a matter of time that the so-called forces of political liberalization generated by the bourgeois forces of economic liberalization will discard the names and shells of the communist party and state. After all, these are already dominated by the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie.

8. How did the Chinese revisionists revise the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism? What were those principles revised in order to undermine and destroy socialism?

A: The Chinese revisionists from Liu Shaoqi to Deng Xiaoping, put forward the idea that building socialism was merely a matter of developing the productive forces and considered the socialist relations of production as backward, that the national-democratic revolution must first be consolidated and the socialist revolution and construction must be restrained and that there was no need for the working class to revolutionize the relations of production and the superstructure to promote the forces of production.

And yet self-contradictorily they prated about the dying out of classes and class struggle even while they promoted the persistence and growth of the influence of the old reactionary classes and the new bourgeoisie in the Party, state and economy in opposition to the line of Lenin and Mao that socialism will last for a whole historical epoch and Mao’s correct view that the main contradiction is between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in socialist society.

To attack the Marxist-Leninist comprehension of the law of value, they went back to Adam Smith, as if Marx had never discovered the theory of surplus value and as if he had never put forward the scientific socialist line that the working class must control and use what they produce in a planned way in order to prevent the bourgeoisie from appropriating this for itself and for using it to dominate the proletariat and the rest of the people.

The Chinese revisionists have caricatured socialism as nothing more than an absolutely egalitarian supply system based on permanent poverty, a pot from which everyone gets his equal rice share irrespective of the quantity and quality of work done, as if there had been no system of wage differentials under Mao, and no possibility of moral incentives and civic sense. They have scorned the people’s communes as collective irresponsibility and the restoration of the rich peasants as individual household responsibility.

9. What are the achievements of Mao in developing the theory and practice of scientific socialism? How do you relate his achievements to those of his great predecessors like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin? If Mao’s achievements were so great, how come that his revisionist opponents eventually defeated his line starting from 1976?

An excellent summary of the theoretical and practical achievements of Mao is the General Declaration on Mao Zedong Thought signed recently by several Marxism-Leninism parties and organizations on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of Mao on December 26 last year. These great contributions are in the spheres of materialist philosophy, political economy, social science and strategy and tactics. All these have a bearing on the theory and practice of scientific socialism.

In dialectical materialist philosophy, Mao penetrated and elaborated on the law of the unity of opposites as operating in all things and processes, and explained the dialectical relationship between knowledge and social practice, between the forces of production and the relations of production within the mode of production and between the mode of production and the superstructure.

In political economy, Mao extended the critique of capitalism and imperialism to the critique of neocolonialism and monopoly bureaucrat capitalism in revisionist ruled societies, improved on the pioneering example of Soviet socialism and demonstrated in theory and practice the development of socialist revolution and construction in various stages in the Chinese revolution, going through the stages of the basic socialist transformation of the economy, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

In strategy and tactics, everyone acknowledges Mao’s great mastery in theorizing and practicing the new-democratic revolution through protracted people’s war and his subsequent great leadership in socialist revolution and construction against tremendous odds, including a relentless imperialist blockade and revisionist sabotage, up to the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He was a great victor in his own lifetime.

He adhered resolutely to the general line of proletarian internationalism in the international communist movement, promoted the international united front against imperialism, revisionism and reaction, firmly supported the struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America and practiced correctly the diplomatic policy of peaceful coexistence.

Mao succeeded in bringing the theory and practice of Marxism to a new and higher stage, that of Marxism-Leninism- Mao Zedong Thought. He made the most comprehensive and most profound critique of modern revisionism and put forward the theory of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship in order to combat modern revisionism, prevent the restoration of capitalism and consolidate socialism and carried out the initial practice of this theory through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

It is to the great credit of Mao that he was able to prevent modern revisionism from gaining a dominant position in China for twenty years since 1956 and proceeding further to make the most comprehensive critique of modern revisionism and putting forward the theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship. This great achievement of Mao is a further development of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism which he inherited from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

In his lifetime Mao won great victories in the struggle against imperialism, revisionism and neocolonialism and for socialist revolution and construction. He waged his revolutionary struggle still under the conditions of the global era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. But he provided the theory and initial practice of combating and defeating revisionism and neocolonialism. It is true that soon after the death of Mao, revisionism and neocolonialism would start to become dominant in China. This regressive development has occurred precisely because of the violation of Mao’s theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship.

Let us remember that Mao had to overcome not only the blatant enemies of the Chinese revolution and the “Left” and Right opportunists and revisionists within the Chinese party and state when the Chinese proletarian won one great victory after another. Mao himself pointed out that the main contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in socialist society will take a long historical period and that one cultural revolution such as the one between 1967 to 1976, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, would not be enough to finally resolve the contradiction but several cultural revolutions will finally resolve this if the proletarian dictatorship continues to exist.

We must admit that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has proven not to be enough to prevent the peaceful evolution from socialism to capitalism. This has already occurred using as factors of retrogression the following: the revisionist bureaucrat bourgeoisie, the remnants of the exploiting classes, the tens of thousands of Chinese students and trainees who came under revisionist influence in the Soviet Union during the ’50s, the expatriates Chinese capitalists, the great mass of restored rich peasants and the resurrected big and medium and small entrepreneurs and traders in Chinese society.

The undeniable capitalist restoration in China is precisely now the reason for upholding the theory and practice of Mao Zedong Thought. To misrepresent it, chop it up or to blatantly violate it is to restore capitalism as the Chinese revisionists headed by Deng Xiaoping have already done.

10. Why should Mao Zedong Thought hold any significance, relevance or influence to the theory and practice of scientific socialism despite the restoration of capitalism in China?

A: Scientific socialism is the way out of or the way forward from capitalism. But some people will always raise the point that socialism in so far as it has existed can only lead to revisionism and the restoration of capitalism. If we were to limit our understanding of the theory and practice of scientific socialism only up to Stalin or even up to the Great Leap Forward of Mao, we would not be able to understand and explain the problem of revisionism and the problem of capitalist restoration within socialist society.

Among the communist leaders, it was Mao Zedong who confronted the problem of revisionism and capitalist restoration and put forward a series of principles and methods for continuing the revolution under proletarian dictatorship in order to combat revisionism, prevent the restoration of capitalism and consolidate socialism. His theory and initial practice of continuing revolution give us the foresight that we can make advances in socialism up to the threshold of communism in addition to the well-proven theory of scientific socialism up to Lenin and Stalin. Every basic proposition that Mao made about modern revisionism has been proven correct. If revisionism can misrepresent itself as Marxism-Leninism, and capitalist restoration as socialism, then socialism can be defeated as in the former Soviet Union, China and elsewhere.

As Lenin pointed out before him, Mao reaffirmed that socialism would take a whole historical epoch contrary to the view of the revisionists that the working class had accomplished its historic mission of building socialism and that socialism was irreversible. He categorically stated that the main contradiction in socialist society was still between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and that socialism was reversible through peaceful evolution unless the revolutionary proletariat found a way to solve the problem.

And Mao found a solution in his theory of continuing revolution which was initially put into practice in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Guided by materialist dialectics, Mao said that revolutionary politics must be in command of production, that the socialist relations of production must enhance the forces of production and that the revolutionary proletariat must revolutionize the superstructure in order to enhance the socialist mode of production.

Mao was vigilant towards the vestigial influence of the old exploiting classes and even more so towards the emergence of the new bourgeoisie among the bureaucrats and new intelligentsia. He was always mindful of restricting bourgeois rights in order to keep the socialist direction and advance the socialist revolution and construction. To counter the distancing of one generation after another from revolutionary experience among the youth, he conceived of and initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as the way for them to gain revolutionary experience and overthrow the capitalist-roaders in the state, party, economy and culture.

Like all his great communist predecessors, Mao was firm about putting revolutionary politics in command, about solving the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, between urban and rural areas and between manual and mental labor, about preventing gross disparities in income, about the dangers of petty commodity production and about the force of old habits and customs.

In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged the masses to criticize and overthrow party and state officials who were taking the capitalist road. The revolutionary committees arose in factories and communes. The three-in-one combination was formed to make the leadership include the representatives of the party, the masses and the experts. There was the requirement for being Red and expert among cadres and the requirement of mutual supervision between officials and masses. A system was adopted in which directors participated in work and the workers and peasants participated in management. The top-down Soviet system of one-man directorship was junked in favor of collectivity and the mass line.

The Cultural Revolution sought to make Marxism-Leninism to guide to all fields of study and practice, to eradicate all bourgeois, revisionist and reactionary ideas and to make possible the children of the working class and peasantry to reach the university level in great numbers and assume responsibilities in the ruling party and state, without becoming transformed into a new bourgeoisie.

The restoration of capitalism in China does not invalidate the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought but proves that discarding it is a precondition for the restoration of capitalism. The defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 never invalidated the theory of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship but clarified the basic principles of proletarian revolution and provided the positive and negative lessons for the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is therefore absolutely necessary to study Mao’s theory of continuing revolution and learn the lessons from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

IV. The Capitalist Crisis of Overproduction and the New World Disorder

1. What have been the outstanding characteristics of the world capitalist system since World War II up to the present?

A: The major industrial capitalist countries have gone into an unprecedented global integration through multilateral agencies like the IMF, World Bank, GATT, OECD, Group of 7 and the like and have gone into unprecedented global expansion of capital. These have been motivated by lessons learnt from the crisis that led to World War I and World War II and by the scheme to counter the spread of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement after World War II.

The development of high technology has been accelerated in military production and passed on to civil production for the purpose of raking in superprofits. All kinds of public and private financial instruments and devices have been developed, in one part to assist production, in another part to accelerate circulation and consumerism and to fuel corporate speculation in industrial capitalist countries.

Finance capitalism has been developed as never before not only to allow the monopolies to rob public and private savings in industrial capitalist countries but also to undertake neocolonialism for the purposes of dominating the economies and negating the formal political independence of semicolonies and dependent countries. Learning from the methods of Soviet social-imperialism and learning lessons from the futility of the wars of imperialist aggression in the Korean and Vietnam war, the United States and other major industrial capitalist countries have used loan capital in unprecedentedly great amounts, in addition to direct investments, to penetrate and control not only the semicolonies and former colonies of western imperialism but even countries that had become revisionist-ruled but still calling themselves socialist.

The revisionist restoration of capitalism in socialist countries has also been a major and crucial component of the world capitalist system. Even before the collapse of the revisionist regimes in the Soviet-bloc countries, they were already drawn into the world capitalist system. The revisionist betrayal of socialism in the Soviet Union and other countries since 1956 did not only mean the peaceful evolution of socialism to capitalism in those countries but also the co-participation and competition of Soviet Union in neocolonialism, notwithstanding the peaking of cold war rivalry in Brezhnev’s time.

2. How did the Soviet Union practise neocolonialism?

A: Since the time of Khrushchov, the Soviet Union pretended to extend loans to other countries at no interest rate or at small fixed interest. But the shoddy equipment delivered was overpriced, thus concealing the actual high interest rates on the loans. The loans were either paid for by products of the industrial equipment delivered or by agricultural products. The products delivered in payment for the loans were underpriced.

The Soviet social imperialists practised this kind of neocolonialism on the other COMECON countries, on China up to the end of the ’50s, Egypt until the early ’70s, on Angola and several African countries and on India until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Payments in the form of goods were underpriced, thus maximizing the profits from the overpriced delivery of Soviet equipment and fuel. The effects of neocolonialism practised by Soviet social imperialism were no different from those of the one practised by US imperialism. The economic development of the neocolonial client states became retarded and lopsided.

The prevalent notion before was that the main thrust of Soviet assistance was industrial development while that of US assistance was anti-industrial. But the Soviet Union conceived of an international division of labor in which the Soviet Union was the comprehensive economy while the satellite economies concentrated on certain raw material and only on certain aspects of an industry.

While the Soviet Union practised neocolonialism on several countries, the Soviet monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie became beaten in the competition at the game of neocolonialism by the economically superior imperialist powers and itself tended to become a neocolonial client state of Western imperialism, especially West Germany.

3. What are the implications of high technology in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the industrial capitalist countries and in the world at large?

A: The high technology consisting of the use of computers, robotics and genetic engineering to raise industrial and agricultural productivity should hasten the contradiction between the capitalist relations of production and the forces of production and sharpen the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie faster than the old electromechanical and chemical processes. Right now, there is an unprecedented crisis of overproduction. There are large inventories of goods in both industry and agriculture which cannot be sold profitably. Thus there is a prolonged recession in the world capitalist system.

Large numbers of capitalist firms have gone into bankruptcy or into mergers. The winning monopolies are driven to adopt higher technology to assure themselves lower production costs and higher profits. There is now the phenomenon of jobless growth, meaning to say higher investments are being made by the winning monopolies but these are accompanied by layoffs. At any rate, the national economies of the industrial capitalist countries are registering low rates of growth.

There are high unemployment rates in the industrial capitalist countries. The official figures conceal a lot of the unemployment by excluding from the accounting of employment those who stop looking for jobs after a few months, those who are on retraining or on make-work programs, those who are put off on early retirement and those who claim to be self-employed.

To make up for the general tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the bourgeoisie as a whole is more greedily swiping off public and private savings, cutting down social benefits and privatizing sure-profit public utilities. The three strongest centers of capitalism, the United States, Japan and Western Europe, are engaged in national and regional consolidation, are trying to revive their manufacturing capabilities and reducing their purchase orders of manufactured consumer goods from other countries, have serious problems with their agricultural surpluses are in increasingly sharp competition. The countries that once before depended on high technology equipment without the capability to reproduce this or produce the spare parts are now at the mercy of the major industrial capitalist countries.

The current crisis of overproduction in the centers of world capitalism is preceded by the crisis of overproduction in raw materials, deteriorating terms of trade and intolerable debt burden that have been grievously suffered by countries of the South and East since the ’70s. The crisis of the so-called developing countries is curtailing their ability to pay back loans and absorb surplus goods from the industrial capitalist countries. These recoil upon the global centers of capitalism.

4. How do we describe the crisis of the neocolonial countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America?

A: As early as the ’70s, the colonial and dependent countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America were already in a state of economic depression because of a crisis of overproduction in raw materials. With the exception of oil up to the second half of the ’70s, all raw material products of the third world have been subjected to ever worsening terms of trade.

The chain of events that led to the Gulf war in 1991 involved the oil glut, Iraq’s drive to raise resources as a result of its heavy military expenditures in the Iran-Iraq war and of course the US determination to tighten its control over the oil resources in the Middle East.

One glaring indicator of the terrible plight of the third world countries is their exceedingly heavy debt burden. Most of the loans they incurred were for infrastructure building, enhancement of raw material production, consumption, bureaucratic corruption and military spending. In the period of unbridled consumption in the US and free spending, only a few economies like the tigers of East Asia and some Latin American countries have been able to raise the level of their export-oriented manufacturing.

The economic basis for the social and political turmoil in the South and East of the world consists of lopsided investments, enrichment and overconsumption by a few, superprofit remittances, deteriorating terms of trade, crushing debt burdens, bureaucratic corruption, unemployment, inflation and austerity measures for the people.

5. How do we describe the crisis of the revisionist- ruled countries as part of the crisis of the world capitalist system? Can China avoid the fate of the Soviet Union

A: The crisis of the revisionist-ruled countries is similar to that of Asia, Africa and Latin America. On the whole, the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe could produce mainly raw materials for exports. A glut in raw materials was deliberately created in Asia, Africa and Latin America by the major industrial capitalist countries in order to beat the raw material exports of the revisionist-ruled countries. Thus, as early as the second half of the ’70s, the revisionist-ruled countries were already in a state of depression so soon after being linked to the Western capitalist countries by foreign loans and so-called export-oriented manufacturing whose products the western economies did not absorb.

The Soviet Union itself got hooked to consumer imports from West Germany for the satisfaction of the new bourgeoisie and eventually could not pay for these. So was the new bourgeoisie of Eastern Europe hooked to consumer imports and yet their exports were restricted by the West. These countries were in the unhappy situation of being taken advantage of by the neocolonialism of Soviet social- imperialism and Western imperialism.

China is deeply and comprehensively integrated into the world capitalist system. Its pattern of investments and trade are already in the neocolonial mold as a result of the capitalist- oriented reforms and the opening of their economies to the capitalist world.

The development of the Chinese economy is now lopsided with resources serving the foreign and domestic big bourgeoisie and export-oriented manufacturing thriving for a while in the coastal areas while compradorization, refeudalization, bureaucratic corruption, unemployment and inflation are impoverishing the people all over China. The global centers of capitalism, especially the United States and Japan, can manipulate China because of its dependence on them for direct investments, loan capital, trade accommodations and high-technology imports.

The proletariat has been overthrown since 1976. The ruling party and state are in the hands of the bureaucrat monopoly bourgeoisie at the central and provincial levels.

Learning from the peaceful evolution of socialism to capitalism in the Soviet Union, the US strategists recognize that the forces of economic liberalization are promoting and enlarging the forces of political liberalization until it is time for the Chinese revisionists themselves to cast away the shells of the communist party and the socialist facade.

Thus, the United States is already satisfied that the uprisings in more than 80 Chinese cities in 1989 are a far larger signal political event than the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and has relaxed its so-called human-rights or political demands on China on the assumption that the economic liberalization is anyway promoting the forces of political liberalization even at a faster rate than during the time of the revisionists from 1956 to 1991 in the Soviet Union.

China may not collapse like the Soviet Union but can be something like a turbulent Russia. Even in the long feudal past, China and Russia could have a centralized state over a wide expanse.

6. Is the New World Order the consequence of the crisis of the world capitalist system? Let us describe what is in fact the new world disorder.

A: Certainly, the new world disorder is the result of the crisis of the world capitalist system. In the heartland of capitalism, we are witness today to the rising strike movement of the working class and the protest actions of the youth and other people, to the corruption scandals and discredit of the major political parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie, and the rise of neo-fascism, racism and the like. The monopoly bourgeoisie is trying to deflect attention from its responsibility for the massive unemployment and other manifestations of the capitalist crisis by generating reactionary currents and by promoting nationalism and interventionism under the guise of humanitarianism in other parts of the world.

The countries formerly ruled by revisionist regimes are suffering from further economic, political, social and moral breakdowns and are now hotbeds of fascism, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, religious fanaticism, the scourge of criminality and so on. Yugoslavia has broken up and in only two years time, more than 250,000 have been killed in the civil war in Bosnia. Czechoslovakia has also broken up. Easily hundreds of thousands have been killed in Tadjihkistan, in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, in Georgia and other areas in the Soviet Union.

Russia no less is in danger of breaking up. Centrifugal forces are at work in its various republics and regions. The relationship between Russia and the Ukraine is volatile and fragile. Substantial Russian minorities in many of the former Soviet republics are in friction with the local population.

The so-called regional conflicts supposedly resolved by the United States and the former Soviet Union continue to flare up. Afghanistan is still a bloody field for various Islamic factions. The armed counterrevolutionaries in Angola and Mozambique continue to wreak havoc. Nicaragua and El Salvador are now hotbeds of social turmoil and armed gangsterism. Of late, the United States is engaged in a military intervention in Haiti once more to create the illusion of installing democracy. Cambodia is still a field of civil war.

In Africa, imperialism has been responsible for the despoliation and for the bloody rivalry of political groups not only in such countries as Angola and Mozambique but also in such countries as Somalia and Rwanda. In the last two countries, the United States is engaged in military intervention under the guise of humanitarianism. In Rwanda, at least half a million people were massacred by the former regime and tens of thousands died of cholera in 1994.

Tens of millions of people are internal and external refugees in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc countries. They are victims of both political persecution and economic despoliation.

The oppressed nations and peoples of the world comprise more than 80 percent of the world’s population. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so many nationalities were oppressed within the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc. Without any doubt, these have now sunk to the level of the nationalities in the general run of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Still engaged in the old anticommunist crusade, the United States continues to engage in embargo and military threats against the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea and Cuba. At the same time, the United States is offering inducements for these countries to undertake capitalist oriented reforms. But these countries are trying to hold out along the line of fighting for national independence and socialism.

7. How will the capitalist crisis and the new world disorder proceed? What is the status of the progressive or revolutionary forces in the various parts of the world?

A: The global capitalist crisis and the new world disorder will eventually lead to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement. There are various progressive and revolutionary forces at work in various parts of the world.

In some industrial capitalist countries, there are some small Marxist-Leninist parties while there is yet no significantly large Marxist-Leninist parties. The social-democratic and neorevisionist parties are still operating to engage the more blatant parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie in the game of musical chairs. Progressive movements among the workers and the youth continue to exist. Significant strikes have occurred against the worsening conditions of employment and against social cutbacks.

In the third world today, the most outstanding revolutionary forces are those led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso). These forces are keeping alive the flames of the armed revolutionary movement against the counter- revolutionary state. At the same time, there are legal progressive forces in all countries exposing and opposing the impositions of the US and other imperialist powers and their reactionary cohorts.

Special mention should be made about Chinese society. So far some 6,000 worker strikes have occurred during the last two 206 years against working and living conditions worse than in the Philippines. Hundreds of peasant uprisings occurred against unpaid IOUs and arbitrary levies reminiscent of Koumintang rule. However, it remains to be seen whether there is a party or movement of Marxist-Leninists under the banner of Mao Zedong Thought to fight the revisionists in power.

In the former Soviet-bloc countries, there are various parties which call themselves Marxist-Leninists but it remains to be seen whether they can study and apply the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Otherwise, the much bigger neorevisionist and social democratic parties alongside the bourgeois nationalist and other types of more reactionary parties will continue to block them.

Whether we like it or not, the social turmoil occurring all over the world will lead to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement. Oppression engenders revolution. The scale and intensity of the social turmoil is already unprecedented. It is reasonable to expect that in due time the forces of the world proletarian-socialist revolution will rebound and march to a new and higher stage.

8. What about the status and prospects of the revolutionary forces in the Philippines?

A: The revolutionary forces led by the Communist Party of the Philippines are committed to the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and are at the center of the stage in the struggle between armed revolution and counter-revolution. Their strength is a far cry from their modest beginnings in 1968, despite the serious damage inflicted on them by the Left and Right opportunists.

There is a rectification movement going on to correct previous errors and further strengthen the party and the entire revolutionary mass movement. This rectification movement has 207 already won resounding success since two years ago and is reinvigorating and further strengthening the party and all other revolutionary forces. The ever worsening crisis of the ruling system as well as the crisis of the world capitalist system serves to guarantee the advance of the armed revolutionary movement.

The Communist Party of the Philippines is determined to complete the ongoing new democratic revolution and to proceed to socialist revolution and construction. It has the advantage of learning from the positive and negative lessons of all previous socialist revolution and construction and of being endowed with Mao’s theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship.

The fact that the Communist Party is engaged in a protracted people’s war allows it to make a significant contribution to and be in stride with the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a world scale. The CPP considers it a matter of internationalist duty to keep on upholding the torch of armed revolution because this serves to inspire other parties and peoples in the world to fight and overcome the long drawn effects of capitalist domination, neocolonialism and revisionist betrayal

In conclusion, I wish your conference the utmost success in informing and enlightening yourselves about the realities of the world and about the revolutionary road of socialism. But the point, according to Marx, is to change the world. Therefore, I wish that your conference will raise not only your ability to interpret the world or raise higher the level of your revolutionary consciousness but also to raise higher the level of your revolutionary militancy in the people’s struggle against imperialism and for a socialist future.

* Contribution to the Conference on Socialism and the New World Order. ↩︎