Central Committee

December 26, 1991

In the consideration of certain developments abroad in 1991, it looks like the "new world order" proclaimed by U.S. President Bush earlier in the year is valid and true. For a moment in history, it seems that the world is under the unchallenged unipolar hegemony of the United States. In this regard, the clear message to the Philippine revolutionary movement is to be more than ever self-reliant and not to be dependent on any expectation of immediate assistance from abroad. After all, the Philippine revolutionary movement has never been dependent on foreign assistance.

By high-tech mass media, the United States has been made to appear as the leader of all nations championing the sovereignty of other nations, democracy and human rights. And by high-tech means of destruction, the United States has devastated Iraq and massacred hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi people, with impunity and without compunction. It is also proclaimed that the U. S. has overcome its Vietnam war syndrome.

Once more in history, the United States has gotten its way by the perverse logic that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the entire Persian Gulf had to be saved from Saddam Hussein by the most cruel methods just as the Philippines had to be saved from Emilio Aguinaldo who had been demonized beyond all proportions by the U.S. yellow press upon the outbreak of the Filipino-American war. The U.S. has tightened its control over the oil resources, military sales and the regional security system in the Middle East and is now arranging a Pax Americana for its own maximum benefit and for Israel at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.

Following the alleged coup attempt by certain Soviet officials to preempt the divisive "union" treaty and preserve the Soviet Union, the two anticommunist demagogues, Gorbachov and Yeltsin, have combined and competed to dissolve and dispossess the Soviet revisionist party and the central regime and to break up the Soviet Union and regroup the remaining centrifugal republics into some loose "commonwealth". Finally, the Soviet Union has basically gone the same way that the other revisionist-ruled countries have gone since 1989.

The revisionist party and regime have been abolished in favor of undisguised anticommunist bourgeois regimes as in Eastern Europe. Nationalism, ethnic conflicts, superstition and criminality are rampant. The worsening political chaos portend bloody ethnic conflicts and civil wars worse than that now raging in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

The economy of the former Soviet Union is in shambles, characterized by production breakdown and decline by as much as 20 percent; massive unemployment; privatization of public assets; profiteering; bureaucratic corruption; rapid increases of the money supply (100 percent in 1991); hyperinflation (already running at more than 300 percent and expected to accelerate when price decontrol takes effect on January 2, 1992); conspicuous consumption by the bourgeoisie; severe food shortages and begging for food aid from the West.

Within a short period of six years, Gorbachov and his band of capitalist restorationists have impoverished and turned the former Soviet Union into a full-fledged neocolonial client-state with a huge foreign debt of US$81 billion (starting at the level of only US$30 billion in 1985) that it has extreme difficulty in servicing. The borrowed foreign money has been used for importing consumer goods and also for lining the pockets of the bureaucrats through the joint ventures and private cooperatives.

The U.S. policy makers are confident that the bourgeois liberalization of the Chinese economy will continue to reproduce the Chinese bourgeoisie, corrupt the bureaucrats and generate an anticommunist intelligentsia and will inevitably result not only in the bourgeois liberalization of Chinese politics but the ultimate restoration of an undisguised bourgeois rule through peaceful evolution as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For the time being, the United States is using trade, financial and other levers to exert pressure on China and interfere in Chinese affairs.

The third world countries characteristically remain as neocolonial client-states, straining under deteriorating terms of trade for their raw-material exports and under heavy foreign debt burdens. The International Monetary Fund continues to dictate upon them to adopt "austerity measures" and "multiparty democracy" ala Philippines. An increasing number of them are wracked by political violence. And they seem to have no way out of the world capitalist system.

Even those regimes which were previously described as socialist or socialist-oriented and used Marxist and anti-imperialist rhetoric have climbed down and have pleaded for capitalist investments and trade and loan concessions or have been replaced by unabashed puppets of imperialism. The Ethiopian and Eritrean revolutionary movements have won power through protracted people's war against the Soviet-supported regime but continue to face extreme difficulties due to domestic and international conditions.

Countries that are firmly resolved to remain socialist, like Cuba and the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, are under tremendous pressures and threats from the United States. The United States cannot conceal its glee over the opportunities provided by the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.

Amidst the social turmoil throughout the world, the capitalist powers appear to be consolidating their positions and neatly redividing the world among themselves. The U.S.-Japan combination is supposed to have Asia as its sphere of influence. The United States is to remain dominant in its own backyard, Latin America, and in the Middle East. With Germany and France as the prime movers, Western Europe is building its economic and political union while the Soviet Union has disintegrated. The European Community is taking charge of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and most of Africa as spheres of influence.

However, it is not enough to look at the appearances of the world situation within a short period of time. We have to see through these ephemeral appearances. A certain aspect may be conspicuous or may actually be dominant in a given period of time. But it is inextricably linked to another contradictory aspect which resurges precisely at the moment that the dominant aspect is or appears to be overwhelmingly or unquestionably dominant.

Indeed, the world today is under the unquestionable dominance of capitalism. This is stressed by the obvious retreat and even disintegration of the anti-imperialist and socialist forces in several countries. But once upon a time, capitalism enjoyed dominance, with practically no serious opposition, until the great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 came.

This revolution came about as a result of the capitalist crisis of overproduction and interimperialist war. It confirmed the thesis of Marx that large-scale machine commodity production under capitalism leads to the crisis of overproduction and interimperialist rivalries and wars. The high technology that is in the hands of the capitalist powers today generates far more rapidly than the electromechanical processes of the past the crisis of overproduction.

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