NATO

The imperialist US, not a friend but a foe

Published on July 9, 2024 in Countercurrent

US leaders from its president to lawmakers and military chiefs call the Philippines its oldest, longest treaty partner in Asia. Before, the oft-repeated descriptions were “special relations” or “friendship.” Much earlier before that, the relationship was said to be between a big brother teaching its little brown brother “civilization.”

For 125 years now, the US has never lacked for altruistic cover for making use of the Philippines’ human and natural resources for its profit. And, for maintaining a strategic territory to carve other territories and markets in Asia especially China. From 1898, the Philippines has indeed become the oldest or longest bastion in Asia, right at the beginning of the US entry into the world stage as an imperialist power. The imperialist US not only kills and harms the Filipino people, it has used its arsenal of brutal suppression and deception of Filipinos and Americans to launch wars in other countries such as Vietnam.

Far from being a friend, the imperialist US is a cruel, sinister enemy of the Filipino people. It has been blocking the people’s path to genuine freedom and development. It has been the enemy of the Filipino masses since it extended its claws here in 1898.

Below in a nutshell is a bird’s eyeview, a timeline of the imperialist US wars of aggression and deception against the Filipino people.

Filipino-American War since 1898: massacres and atrocities to ‘civilize’ Filipinos

When the US in its first imperialist act seized control of the Philippines from the then victorious revolutionaries, it lied to Filipinos and anti-colonialist Americans. At first the US posed as a friend in 1898. But it used the Filipinos to fight the Spaniards until its colonizing troops arrived in the Philippines. It robbed the people of their valiantly fought independence in the Treaty of Paris—where Spain who was already routed by the Filipinos ceded the Philippines to US for a sum of U$ 20 million, plus protection of Spanish colonialist landholdings or businesses. Shortly after, in 1898, under the guise of US President McKinley’s deceptive proclamation of “Benevolent Assimilation”, the US attacked the Filipino people.

On February 4, 1899 American troops fired shots at Filipino soldiers on a bridge in San Juan, Manila, igniting armed hostilities and officially starting the Filipino-American war. In just a couple of years of massacres and atrocities that horrified even American anti-imperialists and critics, the US tried to downgrade the Filipino armed struggle as mere “Philippine insurrection.”

In 1902, US President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the war was over even though resistance continued and guerrillas were widely supported by the people. Then US General Arthur MacArthur was adamant that Filipinos would need “bayonet treatment for at least a decade”. Despite this, imperialist US leaders hastened to “normalize” the situation to placate critics in the US, to gloss over the terrible slaughter being committed by US troops in the Philippines, and to open the Philippines to economic exploitation at the earliest possible time.

Nevertheless, parts of the country were still turned into a “howling wilderness”, following a series of successful, mass-supported guerrilla attacks against US invaders. In retaliation, US troops shipped to the US the famous Balangiga bell, which was used by Filipino revolutionaries as a signal and a symbol of the concerted defense of the motherland. The Balangiga bell was returned decades later amid Filipino insistence, and despite years of colonial control and miseducation.

Long before the Vietnam war, US troops had resorted to inhuman forms of torture including “water-boarding,” executions, massacres and burning of men, women and children, Filipino fighters tied to and being dragged by horses, plundering of captured and killed revolutionaries and communities, and hamletting or forcing communites into concentration camps. Up to a million died (in a population of six to eight million) as a result of the US war of suppression in the Philippines from 1899 to 1910s.

This brutal war of suppression of Filipinos in 1899 “signaled the start of its [US] global conquest through war and terror,” said the Communist Party of the Philippines in a statement last February marking the 125th year since the American troops first fired shots at Filipino soldiers.

“Benevolent Assimilation” since 1898

Essentially the Philippine-American War has remained, albeit, using not just superior arms but manifold lies, double-dealing and deception. US brutality and plunder has been continuously whitewashed at every step. Though colonial history has presented Fil-Am war as just a short one, it extended to a decade of constant uprising even after Emilio Aguinaldo and his elite clique capitulated to US in 1901.

Fact is, from an armed struggle to overthrow the Spaniards to an armed struggle to counter a new imperialist power, the ilustrado or elite leadership proved vacillating, capitulationist, and only looking out for the selfish interests of its landlord, local ruling class. They surrendered the struggle for independence but the masses did not.

As soon as the US invaded and ruled the Philippines, it molded the country’s economy to its needs–raw materials, market of surplus, gateway to Asia especially China. It imposed its colonial miseducation system. It created and trained the reactionary armed forces and constabulary (same as “Vietnamization” during the Vietnam war). It honored and awarded collaborators, led by the capitulationist and elite “leaders” or dealers of Katipunan and 1898 revolution, through lucrative positions in puppet government and business deals in the new colonial economy.

The local collaborators were used to suppress the resistance of the masses and American criticisms of the war. They misrepresented the intent of the US to exploit and invade through its programs (e.g. road building to reach mines and plantations, to bring troops faster to insurgent areas, teach English as mode of instruction to develop new tastes, colonial culture and market) as examples of “altruism” from a colonial ruler. And, for so-called normalcy and peace and order, they also brutally and insidiously suppressed the resistance of the people.

They used methods such as banning the display of Philippine flag (Flag Law 1907-1919), imposing death penalty to advocates of independence even by peaceful means (Sedition Law 1901), jailing nationalist writers and critics such as Aurelio Tolentino who staged a play depicting a victorious group of armed guerillas, and misrepresenting or vilifying guerilla resistance (Brigandage Act 1902).

Today’s red-tagging was preceded by the US branding of Filipino revolutionaries in 1900s as “bandits or tulisanes.” US forces cemented alliances with local elite by giving them power to execute “hamletting” to capture guerillas (Reconcentration Act 1903), resulting in jampacked jails and high mortality rate of prisoners.

The laid down policies, profits and experiences earned by US imperialists in its first colonization and expansion propelled it to greater imperial reach, hegemonic status and more wars of aggression. The strategic importance of US aggression in the Philippines resulted to the eventual rise to US presidency of William Howard Taft, the former Secretary of War and governor general who steered the imperialist acquisition of the Philippines.

Dragging, abandoning Filipinos to inter-imperialist war, then coming back [“I shall return”] as a neo-colonizer

World War II wreaked heavy losses on the Filipino people. It was an inter-imperialist war where the Philippines, a US colony, was targeted and colonized by Japan. The US retreated using Filipino soldiers as meat shields in escaping via Bataan in Central Luzon. In their absence, it was the Hukbo ng Bayan laban sa Hapon or Hukbalahap who waged a fierce guerrilla warfare against the Japanese.

When the imperialist US returned “as promised,” and to bring Japanese power to its knees, it rained much too much bombs, destroying infrastructure and further bankrupting the country. As the Philippines was heavily damaged, the US secured an opening to remain as its neocolonial master. At the end of World War 2, the imperialists settled a redivision of territories, but contending with another victorious Communist Party in China that succeeded in its people’s war to liberate China from foreign and capitalist oppressors.

US feared the communist influence and intensifying liberation movements around the globe. In the Philippines the cry for independence remained and to placate the Filipino people, the US favored neocolonialism than direct colonialism. The Philippines was granted “independence” but the US maintained its stranglehold through unequal treaties such as the Mutual Defense Treaty and Military Bases Agreement.

That independence was a hard-won victory by the Filipino people who had first succeeded but were robbed of it 50 years earlier. This time, the imperialist US can only “respect” that independence by keeping up with appearances. In reality, it continued slapping all its imperialist demands on the country’s people and resources via its trained and controlled armed forces and puppet government.

Using Ph as second front of the US-led “war on terrror”

Following the shocking attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, imperialist US latched on to a new justification for continuing its wars of aggression and intervention in other countries.

Because it couldn’t continue hyping an anti-communist hysteria after former communist China joined the ranks of capitalists and had trade and investment deals with the US, the latter demonized as “terrorists” and “rouges” its targets among its rivals and other independent nations it wished to control for resources and geopolitical reasons.

In the mold of communist hysteria whipped up during the 50s to galvanize support for US wars of aggression and Cold War against the then communist states of China and Russia, the “war on terror” relied on tagging and demonizing US targets. It didn’t stop even in the face of protests from the United Nations nor persistent demands of the people for proven basis and evidences for launching wars.

The war on terror led the rulers of other countries in enacting anti-terror laws with very broad definition of terrorism, in effect maligning and targeting the democratic protesters, critics, liberation movements, and revolutionary forces.

The Philippines was designated as the “second front” in the US-led “war on terror.” This war was supported by puppet Philippine presidents from Gloria Arroyo to present. They tried to enact an Anti-Terror Law and succeeded only under the Aquino 2 regime, but they were dissatisfied with the safeguards for human rights in the law that under the US-Duterte regime, they railroaded a more sinister Anti-Terror Act during the lockdowns of COVID-19 pandemic.

The imperialist US-led “war on terror” is unleashed also in the Philippines. The reactionary puppet governments from Arroyo to Marcos 2 have used the language of “war on terror” to whitewash their brutal, dirty war against the Filipino people and the national democratic revolutionaries. True to the brutal heavy-handed pattern of war laid down by imperialist US at its first foray in the Philippines, the war called “counter-insurgency” by its puppet regimes have meant bombings and artillery shelling of rural communities, “focused military operations” that do not distinguish between civilian and combatant targets, killings of armed revolutionaries, hors d combats and unarmed activists to create a false picture that their “war on terror” is winning. On the contrary the masses are seeing them more clearly as, in fact, the actual terrorists and enemies of the people.

Dragging Ph into the looming proxy war between US and China

By dint of the people’s clamor, the puppet Philippine government would sometimes be prodded to take action to defend Philippine sovereignty on its territories in the South China Sea. This included the case it filed under the United Nations Convention in the Laws of the Seas (UNCLOS) that succeeded in establishing the country’s territorial maritime claims.

The tensions in the West Philippine Sea have been the latest justification by imperialist US and puppet Philippine presidents in welcoming more US troops and building US military bases and facilities despite its own reactionary Constitution’s ban on it. The US not only bound the Philippines as a so-called “treaty ally” (under Mutual Defense Treaty of 1950s) but also included the Philippines in the 18 countries it designated as a “major non-NATO ally”. By US definition, such an ally, though not a part of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), has a deep strategic and security partnership with US. Such an ally can get loans of materials and equipment for research, development and testing, enter formal agreement with the US defense department to carry out such research and development projects, even purchase depleted uranium ammunition. In short, it reads like what a US extended territory is good for. Worse for the Filipino people, the US can place their war reserve stockpiles on countries it designated as major non-NATO ally.

Yet, for all its crows over defending the allies and Philippine sovereignty, over the years the fisherfolk have been raising the alarm over China’s massive reclamation and eventual military base-building on waters and islets within the Philippine territory.

Still, the Philippine reactionary military and navy have only used this to justify calls for more budget to finance the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ “modernization,” and under Marcos 2, to increase the number of “agreed locations” of US military bases. Amid push from the people to actually defend the territory, the reactionary AFP has been responding only with promises to patrol, to increase the patrolling and patrol for what it calls as “minimum credible defense posture.”

Recently though, as the US-China collusion and competition grow sharper, the US has become more driven on expanding the reach of its war machines and aggression in Asia. With its increasingly frequent and larger war games and bases in the Philippines, it is further grooming its puppet government and controlled reactionary troops to be in position for US use should it launch war against China in Taiwan.

This is a war at the expense of the Filipino people because not only will it drag the nation to a war because of the US, the US has been more strenuously pushing and propping the local reactionary Armed Forces of the Philippines to crush the forces of the Philippine national democratic revolution. At present, it is the national democratic forces who are the biggest stumbling block to the imperialist US and its puppet government in freely exploiting the people and resources of the Philippines. If it wants to use the AFP for a proxy war with China in Taiwan, it wants to maintain the Philippines as its territory, through its puppet, and as such, it seeks the more vicious “counterinsurgency” operations against the revolutionaries to remove the forces calling for genuine liberation and sovereignty of the Philippines. For this, the imperialist US is utterly not a friend but a vicious enemy of the Filipino people.

These are some flashpoints in Philippine history where the US starkly showed that it is very very far from being a friend or an ally of the Filipino people. On the contrary, in every flashpoint, the US worked to disadvantage the people. It robbed the victories the people won in their struggle. It used the Filipinos and their resources for their narrow ends, unleashing disasters, poverty, persistent hunger and crises. The Filipino people have every reason to dissociate from and repel the imperialist US, starting with its puppet government and reactionary troops. The Filipino people has every reason and right to cherish, establish, and expand their genuine democratic government in the countryside, through their continuing support of the New People’s Army that is continuing the national democratic revolution began by their ancestors in Katipunan of 1890s. ### (Pinky Ang)

Imperialism means war, imperialism means terrorism

Published on May 15, 2024 in Countercurrent

Before they underwent massive PR makeovers in Hollywood movies, the vampires are some of the best graphic tools used to explain the secret of capitalist accumulation. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx describes capital as “dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

In other words, capitalists gain and expand their capital by sucking their laborers’ values, just as the mythical vampires drain their victims’ blood and lifesource for them to survive and become stronger. But while capitalism lives and grows stronger by sucking the blood of its victims, in doing so it encounters existential crises as its bloodsucking ultimately leads to scantier volume of blood to suck.

In Karl Marx’s summary: capitalism digs its own grave.

Today, as capitalism has globally spread its dominance, what monstrous vampire has capitalism become? Capitalism has reached its highest historical stage of development, described as monopoly capitalism or capitalist imperialism, since the early 20^th century.

At the time, Russian proletarian leader Vladimir Lenin said in the preface of the German and French edition of his popular outline, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism:

“Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’countries.”

At the time, the “three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth”—America, Great Britain, and Japan—involved the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.”

True to its vampiric likeness, when capitalist imperialism made its global debut, its bloody, merciless party was the first world war. It was a war between rival monopoly capitalists or imperialists, for the purpose of deciding who among the rival financial marauders was to receive the lion’s share of control over the economies of the world.

From the first to the second world war, to the “cold war” and today’s so-called “war on terrorism”, all are wars launched by imperialists to seize control of resources, territories, trade routes, and spheres of power. In the latter cases of “cold war” and “war on terrorism”, it is no longer just a war among imperialist rivals. It has become also a war between imperialists and states or parties waging proletariat revolution, national liberation, or struggles for self-determination away from capitalist rule.

Below is a brief review of imperialism’s systemic compulsion to launch war, mainly to remind ourselves that over the years, this breed of vampire has not only become more merciless, rapacious and gluttonous when it reached its imperialist stage of development. It has also become more duplicitous and insidious. The fact that the dominant media hardly mention the word imperialism when it reports about the wars that are supported, armed and directly or covertly being waged by imperialist states is one of the biggest indications of its insidiousness.

Imperialism 101

Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the successful Russian proletariat revolution in 1917, previously listed the general features that distinguished imperialism from its early stages of capitalism. A cursory look at world events today shows that these distinguishing features remain true, even if the names and modes by which these happen may have varied over the years:

the highest and final stage of capitalism, imperialism, is the thoroughly parasitic and decaying stage of capitalism. The capitalists do not contribute at all to social production, yet they amass for themselves profits by extracting and appropriating surplus values through their ownership of capital, stocks, bonds, securities, derivatives or other ways they have devised to own, monopolize and maximize capital;

the ruling capitalists have become finance oligarchs, after industrial and finance capital merged: so now they jointly reap profits not just from exporting surplus manufactures but also surplus capital by way of foreign investments and loans;

monopoly firms of every imperialist state protect their own interests, but for these, they also combine and compete with monopoly firms of other imperialist states, seeking control of “spheres of influence” or territories to secure resources, low-cost labor, captive markets and supply routes;

imperialist states advance the interests of their monopoly capitalists and the international groupings they have formed or joined, maintaining a power structure between imperialists and “client-states” to install an economic structure where the imperialists can exploit the proletariat, oppress nations and peoples;

to keep its cycles of production and profit-taking running and profitable, competition between imperialist states for territories and “spheres of influence” is never-ending; and

imperialism breeds war, as every imperialist power or alliance is driven to redivide the world to feed their growing economic and military power.

System-generated compulsion to war

When imperialism is described as the most decaying stage of capitalism it means that as a system, it no longer has positive developments—efforts spent to evade or withstand its chronic crises of overproduction destroy rather than uplift its productive forces. It can no longer march history to unprecedented heights.

Organic in the DNA of the capitalist system is its drive for profits—even if the means to achieve it would eventually destroy its golden goose, like its own workers and markets, its “own” domestic industries, the environment, the relations of peoples and nations, and culture. In short, by default its operations lead to crisis of overproduction that it cannot resolve.

But no capitalist or imperialist will let that happen without a fight. To imperialists the recourse left to maintain itself is to wrest control of markets and territories from rival imperialists. And, prevent socialist states from wresting away their territories and ideological sway.

Imperialists in the business of war

Today we are bombarded by wars and pestered by saber-rattling. There are wars raging in the Ukraine, in Israel, in the Red Sea between Yemen, Iran and US “allies” and the West. Much destruction has been wreaked on “rogue” states previously targeted by the US-led imperialist “allies” who previously brought war to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and before that, in the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, and where wars for national liberation and right to self-determination are being fought, like in the Philippines and Colombia.

As we write this, war threatens to break out in the Indo-Pacific region over Taiwan. Like in the war in Ukraine which is a war between imperialist US with imperialist European allies in NATO against Russia, the looming war in Taiwan will be a proxy war between the US and its regional allies against their rival China.

To counter China, the US is itching to use “treaty allies” such as the Philippines in the Indo-Pacific. To keep its foothold and expand against China in the Indo-Pacific region, the US has recently been ratcheting its stockpiling of weapons and positioning of forces in its military bases in Japan, South Korea, and in the Philippines—where its military “facilities” are inside Philippine bases by virtue of the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

In the Philippines, the US is building more military bases and installations, and is continuously and more frequently holding joint wargames and exercises with Filipino reactionary troops to better train them in using US and its military allies’ weapons and ammunitions, warships and warplanes. They call it enhancing interoperability.

In the Indo-Pacific, specifically in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea. the US claims the war provocations are for ensuring “freedom of navigation”. In all the ongoing and prospective theaters of war, the imperialists claim they are fighting “terrorism” and/or defending “democracy” (or what some Western media define as Western-style democracy). The latter simply means holding regular elections in which the people could vent their frustrations by choosing and voting candidates for public office from a pool of supposed traditional leaders, who are in fact stooges or representatives of the imperialists. Against China and Russia, the US and European imperialists even invoke “human rights” when they indiscriminately bomb cities, including hospitals and public service facilities.

All the above are just some of the latest examples of imperialists, particularly the US imperialists, who are currently at war in various countries and regions or itching for war in certain “hot spots”, and the justifications they concoct feed the dominant media reports about their aggression. The truth is, the imperialist needs war and is compelled to go to war that kill and maim millions of people because they have military-industrial enclaves whose thirst for profits couldn’t be quenched.

More importantly, as Lenin observed in his meticulous study of capitalist imperialism:

“(T)he characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agricultural regions, but even highly industrialised regions because the fact that the world is already divided up (between imperialist states) obliges those contemplating a new division to reach out for any kind of territory, and because an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between a number of great powers in the striving for hegemony…”

This is particularly stark as imperialist US, for example, maintains its support of Israel in the latter’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. The US uses Israel as a base for encroaching into the Middle East (or West Asia). The US has similar intentions in keeping the Korean peninsula divided between North and South and also to counter China.

In the Philippines, a strategic archipelago for projecting military power in the Indo-Pacific region, the imperialist US has maintained its seven-decade “iron-clad” mutual defense treaty with its former colony and puppet-government partner. Nowadays, they are building more military bases and talking about nuclear power.

Amid all these imperialist scheming, the Filipino people (and the people everywhere else) are justified in opposing militarization and imperialist wars of aggression. They are justified in opposing huge increases in the national budget allocations for highly-destructive arms purchases; the presence of foreign military bases, troops, facilities, and war materiel stockpiles; all military alliances and agreements with imperialist US and its allies; and the saber-rattling and calling for proxy war in Taiwan against China.

Moreover, the Filipino people and people everywhere who are seeking and fighting for national liberation are justified in continuing to resist and to overthrow their local and foreign oppressors.(Pinky Ang)###

Theoretical Conference on Imperialism and War highlights need for international revolutionary work

Published on March 27, 2024 in Mainstream

The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) has successfully led the first-ever Theoretical Conference on Imperialism and War amid the intensifying crisis of the monopoly capitalist system, fueled by conflicts and wars causing greater havoc on workers and other toiling peoples. Held in a European country in the last quarter of 2023, the conference aimed to further promote and enrich Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) in the course of resisting imperialism and waging revolution for people’s democracy and socialism.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) delivered the keynote addresses. These were followed by presentations from the following organizations:

The Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist (TKP-ML), the Party of the Committees to Support Resistance for Communism (CARC-Italy), the Freedom Road Socialist Organization-USA, the Korean Committee for Solidarity with the World People, the Russian Communist Workers Party, the (New) Communist Party of Canada, the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), the Revolutionaire Eenheid (Netherlands), the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of Belgium, the People’s Democratic Party (South Korea), and the Marxistisch-Leninistiche Partei Deutschlands (Germany).

Certain comrades and experts from China also participated.

Participants numbering 139 represented various proletarian-socialist, anti-imperialist, and democratic parties from Belgium, Canada, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Netherlands, North Korea, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and the USA.

The Conference was also in line with the CPP Central Committee’s (CC) call, in its 55th anniversary statement, for rectification of subjectivism in the form of empiricism attributed to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois mindset. It was mainly manifested in politics as right tendencies and bureaucratism; and liberalism and ultrademocracy in the organization.

The rectification movement, described as an ideological and study movement within the Party and among its allied organizations, called for study campaigns and strengthening of international revolutionary work, among others. The latter in particular included strengthening fraternal communist relations with MLM parties and organizations, and strengthening international communist dialogue and cooperation. The CC also called on the revolutionary forces to wage active ideological struggle to expose modern revisionism, and repudiate Trotskyism, Gonzaloism, and other revisionist currents that misrepresent Marxism, Leninism and Maoism.

Keynote Address

The CPP keynote address laid out the key questions of the Conference: 1) the theoretical framework governing the question of the inevitability of wars—specifically imperialist wars of annexation and intervention; 2) the current balance of power among the imperialists and key flashpoints in the violent and non-violent conflicts between them; and 3) the working class attitude and policy of opposing and preventing inter-imperialist wars.

We remain in the era of monopoly capitalism and proletarian revolution as characterized by Vladimir Lenin. According to the CPP, “Lenin’s ‘Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism’ is still the most scientific and thoroughgoing analysis of the end-stage of the capitalist system. It is a theoretical progression of Marx’s Das Kapital, in which Lenin incisively points out how capital and capitalist production have become so centralized that it has rendered free competition of the previous period no longer possible.”

Written in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution’s victory, Lenin’s analysis describes the essential features of imperialism which—106 years later—remain true:

(1) production and capital has become greatly concentrated that it has formed all-powerful monopolies; (2) the formation and predominance of finance capital or the financial oligarchy based on the merging of bank and industrial capital; (3) the export of capital, as distinguished from the export of commodities, has gained exceptional importance; (4) formation of international monopoly associations which share the world among themselves; and, (5) territorial division of the entire world among the biggest imperialist powers is completed.

Discussing the current flashpoints of inter-imperialist conflicts, the CPP pointed to the following major contradictions following the revisionist betrayal of the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union and China: the contradiction between monopoly capital and the proletariat in capitalist countries; between rival imperialist powers; between the imperialist powers and oppressed peoples and nations; and between imperialist powers and countries assertive of national sovereignty and socialist programs.

US imperialism has been ceaselessly fomenting wars since the 1990s. It is “driven by US finance capital, including banks and venture capitalists, which are deeply intertwined with the US military-industrial complex including arms manufacturers, defense contractors and private mercenaries.” It has been directing its might at Russia and China in its effort to assert superiority in an already multipolar world.

The CPP discussed the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, which was among those tackled in the Conference reflecting divergences in analysis. According to Ang Bayan, the official publication of the CPP, the Conference also discussed the current occupation and bombardment of Palestine by Israel, fueled and supported by the US.

Secondary flashpoints, according to the CPP, are results of inter-imperialist rivalries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. At this writing, the US has expanded its imperialist war in the Middle East, bombing Houthi forces in North Yemen. The Houthis are in support of the Palestinian people’s struggle against US backed-Israel in Gaza.

Asia is also a flashpoint of inter-imperialist rivalries as the US has sought to contain China’s growth since 2011. These include increased military presence in Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and strengthened military foothold through bases, training exercises, and aid to the Philippines. The latter has largely been directed at “counterinsurgency” operations.

The CPP called on the international proletariat to “unite and condemn the war preparations and do everything to mobilize the masses to prevent the outbreak of an inter-imperialist war that can only succeed in bringing untold misery and disaster to the working class and people, especially in the smaller countries which are being dragged into the conflict between the imperialist ‘great’ powers.”

Some major points

Conference participants largely acknowledged Lenin’s identification of the essential features of imperialism as the foundation in understanding and analysis of key developments today. The Marxist-Leninist theoretical framework was affirmed as guide to building unities and identifying tasks for moving forward in revolutionary struggles.

Participants were united on the analysis of US imperialism as the world’s dominant imperialist power, even if the current period has seen the decline of its superpower hegemony especially in relation to the challenge posed by China’s rapid economic and military rise.

Acknowledging the need to constantly build and strengthen Marxist-Leninist parties in each of their countries and elsewhere, the participants stated that “Marxist-Leninist parties should support the people’s struggles for national liberation with a sense of urgency, including the Palestinian struggle against occupation and genocide.”

Some practical questions raised included the following: In our duty as proletarian internationalists, how can Marxist-Leninist parties and our movements and organization be in solidarity with each other? How do we determine alliances and relations between our parties, movements and formations? What is the role of Marxist-Leninist party in each of our countries and what should our objectives, strategies, and tactics be?

NDFP Theoretical Conferences

As reported in Ang Bayan, the participants forged a common understanding of the theoretical framework and analysis of the current state of the world.

Following the Imperialism and War Conference, the NDFP is slated to hold an International Theoretical Conference on Economic Crises of Imperialism in 2024.

These theoretical conferences aim to serve the broad united front against imperialist war within the proletarian-socialist and anti-imperialist movement. For NDFP allied member organizations, understanding the contradictions of the moribund world capitalist system is vital in resisting imperialism and all form of reaction, and advancing the national democratic revolution with a socialist perspective through people’s war. (Aya Servando, CNL) ###

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