Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
November 28, 2024
The struggle of oppressed peoples around the world for national liberation today remains one of the crucial elements in the overall strategy for advancing the international revolutionary cause of the proletariat. In the face of the worsening crisis of imperialism, the fight for national liberation acquires even greater significance. The situation requires the revolutionary proletariat to more firmly grasp the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory and principles that underpin the struggle for national liberation and how this plays a crucial part in the resurgence of the international socialist revolution.
Such is how we appreciate the profound significance of this Third Theoretical Conference sponsored by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) which we are presently holding. The topic “On national liberation from imperialism” is a fitting follow-up to the first and second theoretical conferences which focused on imperialist wars and economic crises. Countries which are under the imperialist yoke suffer the most from the crisis of the global capitalist system, and greatly desire national freedom.
We are greatly honored to present this keynote article to open the discussions. We hope that this article will encourage deeper theoretical studies and help raise the level of unity among communists and revolutionary fighters. More importantly, we hope that this article and the upcoming discussions will spur more vigorous revolutionary practice in terms of building, expanding and consolidating the communist parties capable of leading the revolutionary struggles of the working class and toiling masses, especially in the semicolonies and countries oppressed by imperialism.
Theory of the struggle for national liberation
The struggle for national liberation is the struggle of a people historically constituted, who share a common territory, language and heritage, seeking to free themselves from foreign domination and bondage, which subject them to the worst forms of economic, social, cultural and political oppression. It is the assertion of a people’s right to national self-determination, which according to Lenin “means the political separation of… nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.”
Lenin pointed out that the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions in Western and continental Europe spanned nearly a century, from 1789 to 1871, marked by upheavals against the old feudal monarchies, dynasties and empires. These movements were driven by the desire to establish national markets and create conditions for the development of capitalism. These demanded agrarian revolution and the abolition of serfdom to liberate peasants and allow them to become free wage laborers, the abolition of feudal privileges and internal tariffs which hindered the free movement of commodities across regions, the promotion of a legal system that protected property rights and others. Lenin pointed out that the period of bourgeois democratic revolutions didn’t start until 1905 in Russia, Persia, Turkey and China.
In the Philippines, a bourgeois democratic revolution broke out in the 1896 that fought for national freedom from Spanish colonial rule, inspired by the liberal bourgeois ideas of Europe. It fought for national sovereignty, civil rights and land reform, which represented the democratic and patriotic aspirations of the nascent bourgeoisie and the oppressed and exploited masses. Although an independent republic was established in 1898, the Philippines would soon be colonized by the newly rising US imperialist power.
With the rise of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the century, a great number of countries were placed under direct colonial rule of the imperialist powers, completely dividing the entire world among themselves. Millions of people were subjugated by means of wars of aggression, genocide, imprisonment, torture and the gravest forms of oppression. With its overwhelming power, imperialism completely transformed the economic system of colonies to serve as sources of raw materials, and as a dumping ground for surplus commodities. This resulted in the rise of the economic and political power of the comprador-type bourgeoisie, consisting mainly of merchants and traders whose operations were tied to colonial trade, serving as agents of foreign monopoly capitalism. Colonialism stymied the growth of local factors for capitalist development, perpetuated feudal and semifeudal forms of oppression, and undermined the growth of the local independent bourgeoisie. Imperialism and colonialism intensified the desire of oppressed peoples for national freedom and self-determination.
In the era of imperialism, the bourgeois democratic aspiration for national liberation or national self-determination became the most fervent aspiration of the oppressed peoples in the colonies. With the comprador big bourgeoisie tied to the colonial economy and subservient to the imperialist powers, and the national and petty-bourgeois classes economically and politically weak, it was incumbent upon the working class to unite all oppressed classes and lead the struggle for national liberation. Thus, in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the bourgeois democratic revolution has become a new type bourgeois democratic revolution, led by the proletariat, that is waged as a preparatory stage for carrying out socialist revolution and construction.
The history of national liberation struggles under imperialism
The victory of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia inspired and served as impetus for proletarian revolutionary forces to take up the mantle of leadership of national liberation struggles.
Lenin saw the struggle for national liberation in colonies as crucial in the fight against imperialism. He declared that the only salvation of all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities lies in the victory over world imperialism. He promoted the policy of achieving the closest alliance with all bourgeois-democratic national and anti-colonial liberation movements. In the years around the first and second world wars, workers and communist parties were established in over 50 countries with the direct and indirect assistance of the Soviet Union through the Third Internationale (established in 1919) and such mechanisms as the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (1921).
In the first half of the 20th century, newly established communist parties led or played an active role in the revolutionary resistance for national liberation around the world, in alliance with other patriotic forces. Under the Third Internationale’s policy of building a popular front, they united with broad class and political forces and waged revolutionary struggles against fascism during the years of World War II. They led armed revolutions in China, Vietnam and Korea, which won the struggle for national freedom from colonial occupation. Patriotic, people’s democratic and socialist governments were established. The socialist camp, led by the Soviet Union and China, expanded and served to further galvanize the national liberation struggles.
Emerging as the strongest military power after the second world war, the US imperialists violently opposed the national liberation movements. It carried out wars of aggression in Korea in 1950, which the DPRK resisted leading to a stalemate in 1953; and in Vietnam, from 1955 until its defeat in 1975 following the epic resistance of the Vietnamese and Indochinese peoples. It opposed the revolutionary victory of Cuba in 1959 and subjected the country to aggression and subversion.
The wave of anti-colonial revolutions, however, in the main led to a shift in the strategy of imperialist domination from direct colonial rule to semicolonial or neocolonial rule. This shift saw the employment of financial and political mechanisms of indirect rule, such as through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (established in the Bretton Woods conference of 1944), combined with the employment of overseas military forces and military bases.
Modern revisionism took over the Soviet Union in 1956, destroyed the socialist achievements of the working class and people, subsequently restored the capitalist system and turned the country into a social imperialist power. Within the framework of its rivalry with US imperialism, the Soviet Union extended political and material support to forces in neo-colonies fighting US imperialism. It depicted its support as “anti-imperialist international solidarity”, although these already formed part of its strategy to expand its hegemony and place more and more countries under its sway.
Under Mao Zedong, China carried out socialist revolution and construction and made big strides from the 1950s onwards. For ten years starting 1966, China carried out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to fight modern revisionism and prevent capitalist restoration. China under Mao established strong links with third world countries assertive of their national sovereignty, and extended material and political support to the revolutionary struggles of people in the semi-colonial countries.
Post-war reconstruction of capitalist countries led to overproduction and stagflation. To shift the crisis, US imperialism subjected its semicolonies to grossly unequal terms of trade, onerous loan conditions imposed by the IMF-World Bank, foreign military and political intervention, and support for fascist tyrants and repressive regimes. Intensifying imperialist oppression roused the peoples in semi-colonies to advance the cause of national liberation, which intensified throughout the period after the second world war and through to the 1970s.
Through this period, guerrilla warfare, armed uprisings, as well as military coups by patriotic officers were waged in various neocolonies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and other parts of the world. They availed of advantages and opportunities arising from inter-imperialist contradictions, and having China as a bulwark of anti-imperialism and socialist revolution. These were led by parties and movements that were conspicuously anti-imperialist and avowed socialist.
A number of these resistance movements achieved success and established governments that were invariably opposed to the US-dominated global world order and assertive of national sovereignty. Many of these countries wrested back their country’s resources from the hands of foreign monopoly companies, carried out land reform and other bourgeois democratic reforms, allocating resources to provide their people with public education and health care, and other radical reforms.
Many of these countries became targets of US imperialist subversion, and have been subjected to different degrees of aggression, intervention and economic sanctions. On the other hand, some of them received military and political assistance from the social-imperialist Soviet Union, in exchange for allowing themselves to be drawn into the scope of the so-called “international division of labor,” which promoted exports of raw materials and reliance on imported capital goods and commodities, and undermined their comprehensive economic development.
Revolutionary setbacks in the period of neoliberal globalization
Starting in the latter part of the 1970s, and especially from the 1980s onwards, imperialism accelerated neoliberal globalization in the vain hope of resolving the persistent problem of stagflation arising from the capitalist crisis of overproduction. The policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatization were imposed, through policy requirements along with structural adjustment programs of the IMF-World Bank, on economically debt-dependent countries, which exacerbated their crisis-ridden non-industrial and agrarian economies. These policies allowed the imperialists to lay out a more expansive global production line and more tightly integrate the world economy, which allowed the monopoly capitalists to plunder global resources and exploit labor power at unprecedented scales.
The modern revisionist betrayal and defeat of socialism in the Soviet Union and China paved the way for the acceleration of neoliberal globalization. After more than three decades of economic deterioration following capitalist restoration since 1956, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This allowed neoliberal globalization to go on an offensive to integrate Eastern Europe and other parts of the world that were once under the sway of the Soviet Union.
Soon after their 1976 counterrevolutionary coup, the modern revisionists in China dismantled the socialist system to pave the way for the restoration of capitalism and all-out partnership with the US. The defeat of socialism in China was an earth-shaking loss to the world’s proletariat, as it meant the loss of a crucial source of support for national liberation movements. This, in turn, taught revolutionary movements to rely primarily on their own strength, and not on foreign support.
Starting in the 1980s, US monopoly companies outsourced large parts of its low-tech manufacturing to Chinese sweatshops to take advantage of its vast army of cheap labor. The US economy retained manufacturing of big items, particularly its military industry, and concentrated on financial markets. In the 1990s, the US would allow the transfer of technology China to engage in high tech production of semiconductors, computers and electronic devices. The rapid growth of foreign investments and manufacturing in China allowed its economy to expand and counterbalance the global economic slowdown.
The strategy ultimately backfired on the US as its economy accumulated trade deficits with China and weakened its own industrial base. By the late 2000s, the US had consistently become the biggest debtor country. The US financial meltdown of 2008 resulted in a protracted stagnation of the US economy that persists until today, which in turn, has heightened inter-imperialist contradictions.
Over the past four decades, economic relations have become even more lopsided and exploitative. Neocolonial economic dependencies have greatly worsened. This is because of greater financialization, deeper embeddedness in monopoly capital’s production lines, and the accelerated devastation of domestic productive forces since the 1980s.
Persistent backwardness and economic dependence continue to drive more struggles to resist foreign domination, achieve economic independence, and assert national self-determination in many regions. To varying degrees, oppressed peoples seek greater control over their resources and economic policies, seek to break away from dependency on foreign powers, and aspire for greater national self-determination.
Despite setbacks, revolutionary wars for national liberation led by communist parties or anti-imperialist forces have emerged and were waged in a number of countries starting before and around the 1970s. Revolutionary armed struggles for national liberation were waged at different times and with varying degrees of success in different countries, including those in Aceh, Angola, Argentina, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, India, Kurdistan, Laos, Malaysia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, West Papua, Zimbabwe, and others.
National liberation through people’s democratic revolution
Although integrated into the world capitalist system, internally, countries that are colonial, semicolonial and semifeudal, or otherwise under imperialist domination, largely remain non-capitalist, non-industrial, backward, agrarian and feudal. These countries have been relegated by imperialism to being suppliers of minerals, other cheap raw materials and agricultural commodities.
These countries are under the joint class dictatorship of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists, principally the big bourgeois compradors. The comprador-landlords act as local agents of foreign monopoly capitalists and are engaged in large-scale extractive industries, importation and distribution of consumption goods, and in foreign-controlled export-oriented semiprocessing industries. To preserve the ruling system, they resort to state fascism and trample on people’s civil and political rights.
Many of these countries are characterized by having extensive rural areas with majority of the population being peasants, and where production remains largely agrarian, small-scale and backward, with the exception of plantations of crops for export. The urban population is comprised of a relatively smaller industrial proletariat, a mass of unemployed, informally employed or self-employed semiproletariat and a smaller petty-bourgeois population. There is a limited degree of industrial production. There are small-scale industries, mostly food processing, elementary processing of raw materials, and outsourced parts of industrial processes that are in the hands of the middle bourgeoisie. These are perennially on the brink of bankruptcy owing to high costs of imported inputs and competition with cheap imports. Limited large-scale production are in the foreign capitalists in partnership with big bourgeois compradors, and comprised mostly of labor-intensive assembly of imported parts which take advantage of low wages, including semiconductor assembly and inspection. Many of these form part of the “just-in-time” global chain of production of multinational corporations, and are not integrated with the rest of the domestic economy.
The imperialist-dominated comprador-type relations of production perpetuated under several decades of neocolonial rule have stunted production and has increasingly caused widespread destruction of productive forces, in the form of chronic unemployment, wage repression, growing poverty and hunger, unmitigated plunder of natural resources and environmental degradation, conversion of agricultural land to real estate, onerous foreign debt, wastage of public resources in corruption, white elephant infrastructure projects and foreign debt payments, factories idled by transfer of foreign capital to other countries. These relations of production have condemned these countries to a permanent state of backwardness, and subjected the majority of people to worsening forms of oppression and exploitation.
The fundamental aim of the struggle for national liberation is to overthrow imperialist domination and the reactionary rule of subservient classes of big bourgeois compradors and big landlords. National liberation seeks to eliminate the dominant comprador (semifeudal) relations of production and all vestiges of feudalism, in order to allow the forces of production to grow and develop. Specifically, it aims to take away control and ownership of the means of production from the hands of the imperialists and its agents, placing the commanding heights of the economy in the hands of the people’s democratic state and incentivizing all domestic forces to raise production and make these serve the needs of the people.
Resolving the land question remains the key question in semicolonial and semifeudal countries, because it affects the great majority of the people composed of landless peasant tillers, who are the most numerous of the exploited classes. The monopoly of land by big landlords and foreign monopoly capitalists prevents the peasants from developing. The majority of peasants are tied down by small-scale production. Thus, main content of the new democratic or national democratic revolution (as it was in the bourgeois revolution of the old type) is agrarian revolution, mainly the free distribution of land, to fulfill the demand of the majority of the people, and lay the ground for building the worker-peasant alliance. In the course of waging the people’s democratic revolution in the Philippines, a minimum program of land reform consisting of lowering land rent, eliminating usury, raising farm wages and increasing income from sideline occupation can be carried out widely, with the maximum program of land distribution implemented in guerrilla base areas where the gains can be effectively consolidated and defended by the masses and the people’s army. Land reform must be complemented with national industrialization, to ensure that the economy can stand on its own two feet with agriculture as base and heavy industry as the leading factor, with light industry serving as bridge.
Enlightened by the theories propounded by Lenin, Stalin and Mao, revolutionary proletarian forces are keenly aware, that in the era of imperialism and socialist revolution, it is the duty of the working class to lead the struggles for national liberation. Mao explained how the revolutionary struggle in colonial, semicolonial and semifeudal countries must pass through two stages: the new democratic and the socialist. The first stage aims to build an independent and democratic society, in order to allow the internal forces to develop and create the conditions necessary for carrying out the second stage of socialist revolution and construction for building a modern and progressive society. The socialist revolution commences immediately after the basic completion of the new democratic revolution. Under proletarian leadership, the struggle for national liberation takes the form of a new democratic revolution (or a new-type bourgeois democratic revolution), or people’s democratic or national democratic revolution.
The struggle for national liberation is a violent class struggle between those who are subservient to imperialist domination and rule by oppression, on the one hand, and those demanding national freedom and democracy, on the other hand. In leading the struggle for national liberation, the proletariat takes the revolutionary class line, in which the working class serves as the vanguard or leading class, and the peasant class serves as the main revolutionary force. The proletariat builds the worker-peasant as the basic alliance, by following the antifeudal class line of relying mainly on the poor peasants, the lower middle peasants, and farmworkers, winning over middle peasants, neutralizing the rich peasants while winning over the enlightened gentry to isolate the most despotic landlords. The proletariat further builds the progressive alliance with the petty-bourgeoisie; and the patriotic alliance with the national bourgeoisie. It takes advantage of splits within the ruling reactionary classes to create temporary alliances.
The struggle for national liberation takes the form of a revolutionary war to seize political power from the forces of national oppression, in order to establish the democratic power of the people under proletarian leadership. The backward conditions in countries under imperialist domination allow the revolutionary forces to commence armed struggle at the outset of the revolution, and wage protracted people’s war, following the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside. The small and weak revolutionary forces can become big and strong by waging guerrilla warfare, destroying the enemy’s forces part by part, and strengthening the people’s army from one level to the next higher level. Mao made clear distinction of the strategy of waging protracted people’s war in semicolonial and semifeudal countries, from the revolutionary strategy in capitalist countries where protracted legal struggles are waged as preparation for the final armed insurrection in cities, prior to liberating the countryside.
By carrying out agrarian revolution, building the organized mass base, and launching tactical offensives as the three components of the people’s war, the revolutionary forces can build Red political power in the vast countryside, which can exist side by side with reactionary political power. Mao’s theory was developed and proven correct in the course of waging the new democratic revolution in China, and has also been proven in practice in successful revolutions in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in waging protracted people’s war in the Philippines, India, Turkey and other countries.
Imperialist crisis and threats of wars underscore the need to wage struggles for national liberation
Directly or through proxy, the US has carried out wars of intervention and aggression throughout the world under the neoliberal policy regime of the past four decades. These include the Balkan Wars, the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the invasion of Libya and overthrow of Gadaffi, military and political intervention in Syria to seek the overthrow of the al-Assad regime, the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan on the pretext of its war against terror, assassinations and attacks against Iran, continuing arming of Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people, intervention in Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan and so on.
It has also imposed economic sanctions to subvert Cuba and Venezuela, and have made attempts at “regime change” resorting to so-called “hybrid warfare,” including parliamentary coups, electoral meddling, orchestrating the proliferation of fake news and disinformation, stoking and funding pseudo-democratic opposition demonstrations, as well as assassinations.
After emerging as the sole superpower in 1991, and in the next four decades, US imperialism has become increasingly aggressive and bellicose. It expanded its overseas troop deployment to impose neocolonial control of countries that were formerly part of the sphere of influence and control of the Soviet Union. It has spent (more than $8 trillion since 1991) on expanding its wars of aggression and maintaining its overseas military bases, and had become vulnerable to financial crises. Imperialist wars of aggression led by the US has been the main trend in the world.
The US imperialists waged wars of aggressions under the belief that it can overpower all its adversaries through “shock and awe” employing sheer overwhelming force. In doing so, however, it has provoked armed and non-armed resistance from governments and peoples asserting their independence. Mass struggles and armed resistance against imperialist aggression are being waged along the cause of defending national sovereignty. There are some countries in which these struggles are being led by revolutionary communist or workers parties. However, in majority of these countries, the cause of national liberation or defense of national sovereignty is led or represented by a diverse array of forces including including non-secular movements, feudal and semifeudal forces and even by some warlords.
The unipolar dominance of the US would soon give way to the rise of other imperialist rivals, who will assert their own power and demand a greater share in the global market. China, in particular, became conspicuously imperialist by the late 2000s, engaging in the export of capital to expand its sources of raw materials and spheres of influence, building overseas military facilities and bases, as well as engaging in war preparations. China and Russia are together pushing to establish themselves as a second center for global trade and finance. They have established the BRICS with Brazil, India and South Africa as a center for economic cooperation, which recently saw the addition of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2011, the US declared its “pivot to Asia” with the aim of containing the further growth of China’s economic, military and political power. This was a fundamental shift in US relations with China, after around three decades of strategic partnership in neoliberal globalization.
Currently, US imperialism is the most bellicose of the imperialist powers. It is the primary purveyor of war. For more than 30 years, it has been driven by its obsession to perpetuate a global world order under its hegemony. Presently, it is waging wars or actively provoking wars on three main fronts: in Eastern Europe (against Russia), in the Middle East (against Iran) and in Asia (against China).
After a US-supported coup and “uprising” in 2014, the US imperialists under the Trump regime (2016-2020) provided Ukraine with substantial military aid to provoke a war at the very borders of Russia, a policy continued by the Biden government. With the war in Ukraine since 2022, the US has now attained its objective of turning Ukraine into its military proxy against Russia. This completes the US push since 1991 to eliminate Russia’s allies in the former Warsaw Pact and place them under the NATO. The US and its NATO allies have armed Ukraine with tanks, missiles, jetfighters and drones. The US has sanctioned Ukraine to launch drone strikes in Moscow, and has recently allowed the use of US-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to strike in Russian territory, in a calculated escalation of its military conflict with Russia.
In the past year, the US has poured an unprecedented volume of weapons into the state of Israel to wage its Zionist genocide in Gaza, where a broad range of patriotic class forces are waging a life-and-death revolutionary war for Palestinian national liberation. Using Israel as proxy, the US is steadily expanding the war in the Middle East by attacking Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Yemen. The strategic aim of the US is to escalate attacks against Iran with the possibility of waging a major war of aggression to destroy one of the strongest bulwark of resistance to US hegemonism in the Middle East.
The US “pivot to Asia” has intensified in the past years. Under its so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy, the US imperialists have increased the deployment and operations of its overseas naval forces from the South China Sea, through to the Sea of Japan. It has brought the naval forces of its allies, mainly Japan, Austria, and South Korea, as well as those of France, UK and Germany, in joint operations and war exercises in the South China Sea. It has pushed Japan to increase defense spending, expand its military forces and deploy its warships, to make it serve as US proxy in its provocations against China, in much the same way that the US is using Israel to provoke a war with Iran.
Worsening imperialist crisis and heightening contradictions are presenting conditions that favor the cause of national liberation, and underscore the necessity and urgency for waging revolutionary armed struggle to attain its aims.
The struggle for national liberation and global revolutionary resurgence
The insoluble crisis of capitalist overproduction continues to intensify the major contradictions that define the current situation of the world capitalist system: the contradictions between the proletariat and the monopoly bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries; the contradictions between the imperialist powers; the contradictions between imperialist powers and oppressed peoples and nations; and the contradictions between the imperialist powers and the states that assert national independence and the socialist cause.
These intensifying contradictions are generating worsening conditions in both the advanced capitalist countries and the backward agrarian countries. The oppressed and exploited classes and toiling people in their billions are subjected to rising cost of living, low wages, landlessness and land grabbing, privatization of health and social services, climate crisis and environmental destruction, and other social ills.
The situation is especially severe in countries that are semicolonial and semifeudal, non-industrial, agrarian, or with significant vestiges of feudalism or semifeudalism. These countries are subjected to unmitigated plunder and destruction by the imperialists who race against one another to control sources of minerals and other raw materials. These countries remain non-industrial and are pulled down by backward state of the forces of production. They are crippled by their dependence on imports and export-oriented production leading to chronic crises, trade deficits, balance of payments crisis and debt dependence.
These countries are characterized by sharp social inequities as the vast majority of people are subjected to ever worsening forms of oppression and exploitation, living in poverty and hunger. All these are rousing the toiling masses and other oppressed classes and sectors to engage in various forms of struggles. They demand urgent democratic reforms and link these with the demand for revolutionary change.
The backward, agrarian, semicolonial and semifeudal countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East remain, what Lenin describes as, the weakest links in the imperialist chain. It is in these countries where people are most oppressed and exploited, where the desire for revolutionary change is strongest, and where conditions are most favorable for revolutionary forces to emerge and advance. Imperialist oppression in these countries invariably generate conditions for advancing the revolutionary cause for national liberation to prepare the conditions for a socialist revolution.
The oppressed classes in countries under imperialist domination form the majority of the world’s peoples. Their countries are under the debilitating weight, in particular, of US imperialism and its allies. They are carrying out various forms of resistance to attain their aspiration for national self-determination. There are people waging revolutionary armed struggle in countries such as India, Turkey, the Philippines, Palestine, Kurdistan, Colombia, Myanmar and other countries. Their revolutionary armed resistance forms the backbone of the struggle for national liberation. Today, the struggle for national liberation around the world is principally a struggle against US imperialist global domination. The international united front against US imperialism must continue to be expanded and strengthened.
While facing and fighting a common enemy, the oppressed peoples fighting imperialism seek each other’s solidarity. They are the core and main force of the global anti-imperialist united front. They are the strongest of allies in resisting neoliberal policies, foreign military intervention, wars of aggression, inter-imperialist proxy wars, genocide and the rise of all shades of fascism. This has been clearly demonstrated by the broad international support for the struggle of the Palestinian people. The situation calls for mobilizing and uniting the greatest number of people to support the just cause of national liberation of oppressed peoples around the world.
The struggle for national liberation from US imperialist domination, is closely linked to the defense of countries that are assertive of their independence against economic sanctions, political pressure and intervention, military aggression and other forms of attacks by US imperialism. These countries include Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, Iran, Syria and others. The ruling governments in most of these countries exercise one degree or another of national control over their resources and key economic sectors, with many declaring themselves to having socialist aspirations. These countries are being vilified by the US imperialists with all sorts of labels and are targeted with military action. They form the broader layer of the anti-imperialist alliance.
Countries that are assertive of national sovereignty can benefit from international anti-imperialist solidarity. The recent initiative of the Venezuelan government to convene a global conference involving governments and people’s movements against fascism and neofascism is a significant effort in building an international united front against US imperialism, and against its wars of intervention and aggression. Revolutionary communist forces must welcome this initiative and encourage similar endeavors.
Both the oppressed peoples fighting for national liberation and countries asserting national sovereignty can take advantage of the divisions among the imperialist powers, including between the main rival powers (US, China and Russia), as well as among the ranks of allied imperialist powers, especially among US imperialist allies who are growing restive over US heavy-handedness and unilateralism.
It is the duty of the proletariat around the world to unite all positive class and national forces to lead the struggle for national liberation against imperialism, with a clear perspective of linking this with the socialist revolution.
We must take stock of the current situation where there are still only a small number of communist parties capable of leading the national liberation struggles in their own countries. Without the proletariat, the aspiration for national liberation or national freedom becomes exclusively espoused by the petty-bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie, or by a ruling bureaucratic elite, who share the desire for national freedom in line with their own class interests.
However small at the start, the revolutionary proletarian forces must present clearly the revolutionary path for the national liberation struggle that relies primarily on the organized strength, high level of political consciousness, militance and class independence of the revolutionary masses of workers and peasants. They must apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism on the concrete conditions of their countries. They must assiduously conduct social investigation and study history to identify their friends and enemies, develop their revolutionary class line, and the strategy and tactics for waging revolutionary wars in their countries.
While leading the masses in their various forms of struggle, the class-conscious proletariat must make clear plans of commencing revolutionary armed struggle at the soonest possible time. They must learn and draw inspiration from the successful national liberation struggles through victorious people’s wars in China, Vietnam, Korea as well as other countries. In line with this, they must ardently study the military writings of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap and other great thinkers and strategists. They can also learn from the positive and negative experiences in waging people’s wars in the Philippines, India, Nepal, Turkey, Kurdistan and other countries.
It is the urgent task of proletarian revolutionary cadres, especially in countries under imperialist rule, to build, expand and consolidate the communist party that applies Marxism-Leninism-Maoism on the concrete situation, deeply and extensively rooted among the masses, and linked to all the patriotic, democratic and progressive social classes and sectors. At the same time, the proletariat must keenly observe how the crisis of the world capitalist system unfolds in order to take advantage of the contradictions, conflicts and wars to make these serve the purpose of advancing the cause of national liberation and the struggle for socialism.
