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Those activists taught us how to expand, how to imagine the world with compassion, a sense of mission and commitment, freely, creatively and scientifically. None of our goals end when our personal ambitions shatter. There is a bigger picture to this accord and even to the so-called student power that made it possible.
What do we do with this history? What must we do with our very own politicians - - Duterte and a consolidated Philippine senate and congress who have only looted us, shown us obscene disrespect, and barbarism? Their actions are akin to US-backed local operatives deployed to exact the most severe violence among the people-- mass murder, corruption, hunger, and repression.
Without undergoing a revolutionary process, governments in neo-colonies like the Philippines cannot plan. This government will always have to wait for imperialist dictates through neoliberal structural adjustment of the economy and culture. This government has no sense of nation because to think of nation and national sovereignty is to be up against imperialism, which has been the source of political and economic power by rich and corrupt Filipino politicians.
Neoliberal ideology marks the class struggle as a thing of the past. We are in the era of post-politics, as it were. No more class struggle, no more revolution, there is nothing to redistribute at a time when productivity is at its highest in the whole history of capitalism. Yet class struggle is raging in the peripheries and semi-colonies. That people are massively incarcerated, abused, brutalized by the police, rendered homeless with no access to health care and proper nutrition is also a sign of class struggle, especially considering how Occupy America’s one percent thrives precisely because of all that human misery.
This is why it is important to equate “poor” with “vulnerable.” Why, the most oppressed and exploited are also the most organized and politicized. More than ever, it is crucial for the ruling elite and their imperialist masters to deny that landless peasants, wage workers, informal workers and the unemployed wield the power of conceptual thought within the context of a protracted people's war for national liberation and socialism.
Peace talks comes primarily because in the country’s hinterlands, a people’s army, guided by a communist party, is building organs of democratic political power. And in various sites, the communist bid for land redistribution, national industrialization, and a participatory planned economy through socialism is paralleled by organized, institutionalized and legitimate endeavors pursuing the same vision. This is enough for a government that is provisionally hijacked by compradors and imperialists to talk peace and reforms.
The law is flagrantly used by judges, police and military to violate human rights. Organizations previously red tagged have endured painful outcomes such a the imprisonment, murder and massacre of their members. This is none other than full spectrum dominance.
One of the supreme ironies in the history of protest movements is the fact that Chile, a US laboratory for covert action and direct military aggression is also the place in which the slogan "¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!” (The people united will never be defeated) originates. It is chanted by peoples in protests and meetings which honor revolutionary international solidarity.
The book offers direct and comprehensive answers on various questions and debates on development. Organized movements of farmers are often viewed as a group of people whose stakes are an obstruction to development, especially when asserting their right to the land they till and opposing foreign capital-driven “development projects” sponsored by government.
We can only cringe at the US-Saudi imperialist war machine's audacity to make us believe that we are all hapless victims on the same side. The price of oil is controlled by the global oil cartel.
The 'Real' was not Irene Marcos. But rather, an instance in which the academe's complicity in that violent history is being displayed like anything. What the protest action affirms is a space that will not be defeated, that will not surrender, a space that turns itself into a place that battles academic freedom's free market version.
The predator, in this case, is a corrupt politician who had the police functioned as his private army. This equally brutal government is about to set him free. We have all the reasons to fear rape and death to this day.
The separate spheres theory has been rendered obsolete in modern times on account capitalism's inclusion of women workers in production while maintaining the wage gap and other sexist practices that serves the interest of profit accumulation.The separate spheres ideology also has a profound impact on culture, and therefore on mindsets, that it has normalized gendered restrictions in the use of public toilets.
he defense for Lisandro Claudio, PhD is an opportunistic reaction to a petition signed by 467 academics, artists and activists. The petition rightly argues that an academic who is engaged in tagging activist organizations as communist fronts is doing something unbecoming. It correctly articulates the global and local contexts in which such disposition is lamentable at the very least.
It is not by accident or a matter of racial superiority that rich countries have the technologies for disaster preparedness and management such as early warning signs, sturdy infrastructures. The resources at their disposal are proof of unequal development of nations as a direct result of imperialist plunder of resources and exploitation of cheap labor in the Global South by the Global North’s oligarchy. Imperialist plunder accounts for the stark differences in welfare, well-being and chances of survival people in this political-economic and spatial divide under global capitalism.
We are still suffering from a crisis-ridden capitalist system for which the First World War was fought and resolved and for which the superpowers imposed a division of the world that continues to emplace our lives and labors. We are still living and dying for the same system for which great wars were fought and ended so that proxy wars and multi-lateral formations like the United Nations (League of Nations resurrected), International Monetary Fund, World Bank, NATO, ASEAN, APEC, and the like will continue to consolidate, retool and recast, whenever necessary, the profits and liberties won by imperialist powers one hundred years ago.
This testimony focuses on Mary, Recca, Tin and Tanya who went to the University of the Philippines-Diliman. As activists and eventually as part of the revolutionary NPA, these women forged their identities by fighting across lines of interlocking oppressions. This account cannot give justice to their work. Rather, my goal is to talk about how revolution looks like in the lives of these revolutionary women.
To say that Palestine is in a “state of war” or “at war” is to obscure the fact that it has been occupied. The occupation of Palestine by Israel since 1948 is a state of war that breeds resistance. The terrorist tagging of Palestinians, the racism against the Arab people and the demonization of Islam are crucial to maintaining the architecture of a settler colonial state that now rides on western imperialist logic of accumulation of wealth by mass murder.
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