Central Committee

December 26, 1991

There Is a New World Disorder

In fact, high technology has already created an unprecedentedly severe crisis of overproduction and continues to wreak havoc on the lives of billions of people and causes rising levels of social turbulence, mainly in the South and East of the world in the meantime. There is a new world disorder.

The United States continues to be in strategic decline. It cannot solve its problem of huge budgetary and trade deficits, without generating severe social tensions within American society and without upsetting the balance among the capitalist powers. The U.S. decline can only be temporarily overshadowed by the disintegration of its former superpower rival, which is paying for the misallocation of resources for the arms race and overconsumption of the new bourgeoisie under the Brezhnev era.

The trumpeted end of the cold war is generating a demand from the American people for the so-called peace dividend. But the United States cannot easily draw back from its own high-tech military-industrial complex to pay for the overconsumption of the past which was done through massive foreign borrowing. Every kind of financial instrument has been scandalously abused by the United States in connection with military overspending and overconsumption.

The trade deficits of the United States are the trade surpluses of Japan, Germany and a handful of "newly industrializing" economies in the third world. As the U.S. tries to save and invest in the more efficient production of goods tradable in the world, it throws both white collar and blue collar workers out of jobs and goes through spasms of recession and unleashes economic problems in countries that have taken advantage of previous U.S. overconsumption. As a matter of fact, the U.S. economy is in prolonged recession, already in its third year.

There is a fragility in the economies of the other major capitalist powers like Germany and Japan. Germany is suffering from indigestion as a result of the reunification of East and West Germany and also from having to lend capital to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union which clearly have limited capabilities of paying back. Japan has expanded only at the sufferance of the United States and Western Europe.

U.S. President Bush has made another significant statement this year to the effect that trade war has replaced the cold war. This is a succinct reflection of the frustrating negotiations among the capitalist powers (within the Group of Seven, OECD and GATT) regarding trade and financial policies. The growing differences among the capitalist powers revolve around the question of "free trade" in all types of agricultural and industrial goods and around the question of sharing the responsibility of lending money to the countries that have no way of servicing their accumulated foreign debt, except by incurring more debt.

At the moment, in our part of the world, it looks like the United States and Japan are still cooperating very well in exploiting the people. Due to its serious budgetary and trade deficits, the United States is pushing Japan to share military burden and to increase its military forces under the pretext of peacekeeping under the U.N. flag and is trying to break open the well-protected Japanese market to U.S. products.

The United States and Japan are the closest foreign partners today in keeping the Philippines as a neocolony in economic and political terms. As the United States continues in strategic decline, Japan is increasing its economic and indirect military role in the Philippines and in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

The United States still has the edge over Japan in accumulated investments in the Philippines and expects to retain the Subic naval base after the 1992 elections as well as control over all the radar and communications stations dotting the country. But Japan has outstripped the United States in the rate of investments, trade and "development aid" and the thrust of new investments is to achieve direct control over land and natural resources.

Japan is taking advantage of the United States' own plea for military burden-sharing and the United Nations flag for building its forces of military aggression under the guise of peacekeeping. Within the decade, we shall see the U.S.-Japan cooperation in the domination of the Philippines and the Asia-Pacific region turn into rivalry. We are still fighting the United States as the main imperialist power and opposing the U.S.-Japan combination. But we must also anticipate the U.S.-Japan rivalry that is bound to develop and become conspicuous within the decade.

It is of great importance that the Philippine revolutionary movement is closely linked with the peoples and revolutionary movements in the neighboring countries in both Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia (China, Korea, Japan, etc.) and in North America as well as with the governments that continue to be or are likely to become anti-imperialist when violent interimperialist rivalries reemerge in the region.

Whether China remains socialist or not, it has built up a powerful industrial capacity and is among the countries in the region with their political independence and a higher capacity for resisting U.S. or Japanese imperialism than before World War II. China is the largest imponderable factor in the forthcoming rivalry between the United States and Japan in the region. Recently, China and India made a joint statement opposing oligarchy in world affairs.

In all capitalist countries today, there is the dramatic resurgence of the problem of stagflation. This was previously put under control through the mechanism of lending large amounts of money to countries in the third world and Eastern Europe since the 1970s and to the United States, China, India and the Soviet Union since the 1980s. Now, this mechanism has broken down as the economies of most debtor countries have deteriorated and have been unable to pay back the loans. In the capitalist countries, there is the sticky problem of unemployment and the cutbacks on social welfare and social services. Social tensions are manifested in contradictory currents, the perseverance of progressive organizations and the surge of racism and neofascism, now directed against migrants from the third world.

The success of neocolonialism is its own failure. It has succeeded in putting the world, especially the countries of the South and the East, under control principally through economic and financial means. But the failure lies in ultimately constricting the world capitalist market.

The general run of the countries of the South has been restricted to the production of raw materials for export, subjected to the ever deteriorating terms of trade, overburdened with foreign debt that cannot be paid back and afflicted with military overspending, bureaucratic corruption and conspicuous import-dependent consumption of a few. These third world countries suffer from a crisis of overproduction in raw materials rather than in finished products. The Philippines belongs to this group of countries.

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