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MESSAGE TO THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE

OF ANAK NG BAYAN

By Jose Maria Sison


I wish to convey warmest greetings of solidarity to the National Organizing Committee of
Anakbayan and the National Conference of Anak ng Bayan

I wish you the utmost success in launching Anakbayan as a comprehensive youth organization, to
include the young men and women in factories, farms, urban poor communities, schools, offices
and the professions.

Your choice of name for the organization is excellent. I hope that you and members whom you
recruit and the chapters that you build will live up to the name.

Carry forward the tradition and principles of Kabataang Makabayan

To be Anak ng Bayan, you must join the peoples struggle for national freedom and democracy
against the three evils of foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat
capitalism. The general line of national democratic revolution must run through such issues as
employment, education, rights and services that you wish to focus upon.

It is necessary that you link the current struggle of the youth and the people to the old democratic
revolution, whose centennial we are celebrating, because the basic revolutionary task of fighting
for national liberation and democracy remains unfinished.

In your orientation and in your call to action, you must also refer to the role of Kabataang
Makabayan (KM) and the youth of the 60s and 70s, whose struggle was inspired by the
revolutionary tradition of 1896 and was a decisive factor in revitalizing and carrying forward the
new-democratic revolution. The KM is your direct antecedent.

Let me relate the recent history of Kabataang Makabayan and the youth movement to your
current effort to launch Anakbayan. In this regard, let me stress a few points.

First, you must be able to put Anakbayan in historical context as KM did in its own time. You
have the advantage over the KM in that you can learn from it both as resumption of 1896 and as
the reinvigoration of the new democratic revolution. You must know well the historical role and
record of the KM so that you would know what to build on, what odds to face and surmount and
what is to carry forward.

Second, you must retrieve and review the comprehensive program and constitution of Kabataang
Makabayan. The point is to carry over to the present the basic political and organizational
principles from these documents. You can learn from the KM program the economic, social,
political and cultural spheres of interest and activity. You would have less difficulty in drafting a
constitution, if you use the KM constitution as reference material.

Third, you must recognize and emulate certain basic achievements of the KM. It dedicated itself
to being an assistant of the working class and to being a training school for cadres. It acted as the
principal seeding machine of the national-democratic mass movement on nationwide scale. It
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promoted mass work and integration of the youth with the workers and peasants. While the old
revisionist party deteriorated, the KM served to nurture those who became cadres and members of
the revolutionary party of the proletariat and various types of mass organizations.

The KM was a very resolute and militant mass organization from November 30, 1964 onward. It
was the key mass organization in the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and the subsequent mass actions
in the period of 1970-72. Since the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus on August 21, 1971,
the KM has been compelled to go underground because of enemy raids on every known office of
the KM and arrests of known KM officers and members.

Since then, the loss of KM in the legal struggle has become in significant measure a gain of the
underground and the revolutionary movement. Many of the KM members have excelled as
revolutionaries and have made the supreme sacrifice in the service of the people. To this day,
many cadres of the revolutionary movement are alumni of the KM.

The Need for a comprehensive youth organization

The comprehensive youth organization is a necessary basic force of the national-democratic
movement. It exists and develops strongly in any successful revolution. Failure to build a
comprehensive youth organization would mean the aging and death of the revolutionary
movement, as can be seen in the case of parties and movements whose elders forget they were
once young revolutionaries and seem to think that they can only trust themselves and fail to
develop a great mass of young successors.

The imperialists and the local reactionaries would use to their advantage the lack of a patriotic and
progressive youth movement. We have seen how they either militate the youth against the
revolutionary movement or how they divert the youth away from it so that it can be debilitated. A
revolutionary movement that pays no attention to building the comprehensive youth movement
has no future.

There are tens of millions of young people waiting to be organized. But first you must start with a
reliable corps of members. As children of the working class, peasantry and middle social strata,
they are victims of the ruling system and suffer oppression and exploitation like their parents.
They are receptive to the national democratic movement and to revolutionary change. In general,
they can be more active and can be more easily deployed for revolutionary tasks than their elders.

Anakbayan must be determined to build it own strength through its self-reliant educational and
recruitment programs and through mass campaigns that can arouse and mobilize the youth in
large numbers. You have to undertake solid mass organizing even as you engage in sweeping
propaganda to reach the millions of youth.

It is alright to build Anakbayan like KM as a unitary mass organization, directly recruiting
individual members, dividing them into chapters and placing them in a national structure with
several levels of leading organs. But you must be open to the integration of certain priorly
existing local youth organizations as Anakbayan chapters, as a consequence of political education
and, if necessary, reorganization. Moreover, you must be ready to go into formal and informal
alliances with other youth organizations on the basis of issues and geographical concerns.

To develop Anakbayan as a distinct basic force, I propose that a general sense of proportion must
be followed. The leading organs and general membership must reflect the fact that young people
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outside the schools are the majority of the youth in the country. The student youth have an
important part to play in Anakbayan but should not predominate in it to the point of making
Anakbayan another student organization.

In other words, Anakbayan must build chapters in factories, farms, urban poor communities,
schools and offices and must consequently have leading organs and a general membership that on
a nationwide scale are predominantly young workers and young peasants. The youth movement
should draw its main strength from the youth of the working class and the peasantry.

Despite the long neglect of comprehensive youth organizing, you have a certain advantage over
the KM when it started in 1964. You can initially avail of the support of many well-developed
mass organizations of peasants, workers, urban poor, women, students and professionals that take
the national-democratic line. For a start, you can recruit some of the young people from these
organizations or from the vicinity of these organizations. But in the long run, Anakbayan must
expand on its own full account and must not be dependent on any other organization, although
cooperation among different types of mass organizations must always advance for common
benefit.

It is gratifying to see that the League of Filipino Students is taking a key role in establishing
Anakbayan. In the current circumstances, it enjoys a headstart in being the priorly existing youth
organization and in being able to assign organizers with some experience.

But the National Organizing Committee of Anakbayan must be able to persuade the trade unions,
peasant associations and other mass organizations to help in encouraging the young men and
women within their respective spheres of work to join Anakbayan and build chapters. Thus, there
can be a good class basis for Anakbayan.

The elders in the aforesaid mass organizations should be convinced that Anakbayan is a training
school for successors both in their type of mass organization and in the entire national-democratic
movement. Anakbayan is the mass organization which can muster the commitment, abilities and
energy of the youth as an indispensable basic force of the national-democratic movement.

The student movement cannot suffice as the youth movement. To narrow down the youth
movement to the student movement is to nail down the youth movement to the general tendency
of the petty-bourgeoisie, prevent the progressive students themselves from developing further
politically.

It is necessary to develop the student movement as a distinct component of the youth movement.
But the student movement will be stronger and will have a greater sense of strength if it can
combine in the mass movement with a far greater number of youth in the factories, farms, urban
poor communities and offices. The school leavers and graduates can also remain organized in the
youth movement if there is an organization like Anakbayan.

It is not a problem for Anakbayan to build its own chapters in schools. After all, the existing
national student organizations like the League of Filipino Students and the Student Christian
Movement and all other student organizations recruit only a tiny portion of the student masses. It
is permissible for the more committed and more militant student activists to belong to any student
organization and at the same time belong to Anakbayan.

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Young men and women can belong to trade unions, peasant associations, urban poor community
organizations, campus, cultural and professional organizations and at the same time belong to
Anakbayan, so long as they can perform the basic duties and responsibilities. Upon the increase
of their burden of work in several organizations, individual cadres and mass activists and their
collective units can determine their principal and secondary tasks and allocate their time and
effort.

Excellent conditions for organizing

The objective conditions, upon which KM was formed and developed, remain fundamentally the
same. You are still faced with a semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system. Therefore, the
program of Anakbayan, like that of KM, is necessarily one of completing the struggle for national
independence and democracy against the imperialists and the local exploiting classes.

There is one big difference between the time of KM and the time of Anakbayan. The semicolonial
and semifeudal conditions of oppression and exploitation are far worse now than ever before, after
going through the Marcos period of deepening and aggravating said conditions under the main
slogan of development and the post-Marcos period of further deepening and further aggravating
the same conditions under the main slogan of economic liberalization.

From period to period, the chronic crisis of the ruling system has worsened. The consistent line of
every ruling clique of big compradors and landlords is to violate the national sovereignty of the
people, oppose industrialization and genuine land reform, whip up a pro-imperialist and feudal
culture and suppress the patriotic and progressive forces advocating and fighting for national
liberation and democracy.

During the Marcos period, the foreign monopoly capitalist and local big-comprador firms favored
foreign-funded infrastructure-building and the accelerated raw-material production-for-export as
development. They extracted superprofits from the ceaseless unequal exchange of
manufactured imports with raw-material exports as well as cheap labor export. Trade deficits and
foreign debt mounted. There was the economic and financial collapse which caused the political
weakening and eventual fall of the fascist dictatorship.

In the post-Marcos period, the Aquino regime met the international credit crunch with unbridled
local public borrowing and subsequently the Ramos regime combined rapid local public
borrowing with the restricted inflow of foreign speculative funds, which resulted in a greater
outflow of foreign exchange. Trade deficits and foreign debt increased at a faster rate than during
the Marcos regime. Income from the export of low-value added semimanufactures, raw materials
and cheap labor increasingly fell below profit remittances, debt service and the high-consumption
spending of the exploiting classes on palaces, residential towers and car imports.

Now the country is in the throes of an unprecedented economic and social crisis. Within the
frame of the capitalist system, which is in the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the domestic
economy has gone into a collapse and a prolonged state of depression because the countrys types
of exports are squeezed by the global crisis of overproduction and because foreign speculative
capital has taken flight at the clear sight of the dwindling export income.

The newly installed US-Estrada regime does not offer any solution to the economic and social
crisis but only aggravates it. The regime is hellbent on outstripping the Ramos regime in pursuing
liberalization, deregulation and privatization, in opposing national industrialization and land
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reform, in turning the entire country into a US military base through the Visiting Forces
Agreement and suppressing the revolutionary forces and the democratic mass movement.

The US-Estrada regime includes at the core the Marcos family, the biggest of the Marcos cronies
(such as Eduardo Cojuango and Lucio Tan) and the most notorious violators of human rights
since the time of the Marcos regime. The political crisis of the ruling system is certain to worsen
as the return to power of the most greedy and most violent descendants of Marcos regime
coincides with the unprecedented economic and social crisis.

All the way, the broad masses of the people have been subjected to ever-rising levels of mass
unemployment and ever falling wage and income levels, ever rising prices of basic commodities,
ever mounting tax burden and prohibitive prices of basic services. The people and the youth are
undergoing terrible suffering. They have no way out but to fight the escalating oppression and
exploitation and for their own national and social liberation.

The Filipino youth must be aroused, organized and mobilized in their interest and in the service of
the entire Filipino people. They must unite and build a solid, comprehensive youth organization,
like Anakbayan, uphold the revolutionary leadership of the working class and must join up with
the broad masses of the people to fight for national and democratic rights and interests.

The Filipino youth must fight the ruling system that generates mass unemployment, makes the
cost of education unaffordable for the vast majority of the youth, suppresses their democratic
rights and deprives them of the most basic services and consigns them to a life of grinding
exploitation and poverty.

Anakbayan must fight for immediate basic reforms but must aim strategically for the full
attainment of national liberation and democracy. The program of Anakbayan must include long-
term general demands as well as immediate specific demands.