The launch of Prof. Jose Ma. Sison’s latest book titled “Little Book on Fascism and How to Fight It” last May 30 in Utrecht, The Netherlands drew activists, revolutionaries, anti-imperialists, trade unionists, community organizers and solidarity groups, eager to learn more about what Professor Sison, founding chairperson of the CPP, had to say about fighting fascism. This latest book is a compilation of eight articles written between 1986 and 2022 on fascism and covers topics such as the origin and development of fascism, the basis of a fascist state and tools and technologies of contemporary fascism.
The Jose Maria Sison Legacy Foundation, which published the book, emphasizes that the book’s relevance comes not only from its discussion of fascism but more importantly on Sison’s exhortation to all anti-fascists and anti-imperialists “to fight to eliminate fascism at its roots”, “Makibaka, huwag matakot” (Fight, do not fear!), as the slogan echoes.
Reading from the foreword of the book during the launch, Comrade Julie de Lima, chairperson of the NDFP Peace Panel and Sison’s partner, collaborator and editor, stressed that conditions are ripe for a revolutionary resurgence because of the worsening economic crises of imperialism, which necessitates the ruling class to use fascism against the people, especially against the working class.
UP Professor Sarah Raymundo in her review of the book and analysis on fascism said Sison refuses “to reduce fascism to personalities, political temperament, or democratic backsliding. Fascism, for Sison, is not simply the excess of cruel leaders or the erosion of liberal institutions. It is a historical and political response to crisis—a mode through which ruling classes preserve domination when ordinary mechanisms of consent become increasingly unstable”.
Citing the recent massacre of 19 revolutionaries and activists in Toboso, Negros by fascist forces of the US-Marcos regime, Raymundo explained that fascism is real and concrete in the context of the regime’s war against the Filipino people. “Counterinsurgency does not simply emerge from security concerns. It secures the social order necessary for land monopoly, extractive development, militarized governance, and foreign strategic priorities. State violence against dissenting communities is not anomaly. It is political economy in a semicolony of the US made visible,” she stated.
Sison’s book on fascism, Raymundo says, compels us to recognize fascism not only in the spectacle of strongmen, but in the normalization of militarization, surveillance, permanent war, dispossession, techno-imperial control, and the criminalization of dissent. “It asks us to see the connections between missile systems and massacres, between foreign military access and domestic counterinsurgency, between elite corruption and deepening repression,” she said.
Prof. Ramon Guillermo, of the UP Center for International Studies, in his insight on the issue of fascism emphasized the need to pursue an anti-fascist education, and to fight for and continually develop a nationalist, scientific and mass–oriented education inside and
outside our classrooms as one of the central areas of struggle against fascism. He explains that fascist ideology and philosophy in the educational system and structures contribute to the rise and domination of a fascist state.
Guillermo cites the example of education in Israel, which promotes the racist Zionist historical narrative as the only valid one and marginalizes, if not erases, Arab and Palestinian history and identity. “Arabs are portrayed in their curricula with negative stereotypes as the Jews once were in Nazi Germany,” he emphasized. In the Philippine context, he explained, systematic efforts of all US puppet regimes to suppress and eliminate critical thinking, expand intellectual horizons, and emphasize patriotism and service to the people are reflected in the revisions in and implementation of the educational curriculum.
Providing their insights on the struggle against fascism, Chris de Ploeg, journalist, author, and board member of political party De Vonk, based in the Netherlands, Joe Iosbaker, founding member of Freedom Road Socialist Organisation, based in the United States and Azra Sayeed, Secretary General of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), based in Pakistan, spoke about their respective struggles with repression and fascism and their own organizational experiences as examples on the use of anti-terror laws as instruments of fascism, taking advantage of sharpening contradictions to bring about new and higher levels of struggle, and most importantly on building a broad global united front against imperialism and fascism.
Ultimately, in all his writings on fascism especially this latest one, Comrade Sison never fails to affirm that because fascism is rooted in the capitalist state structure, the complete elimination of fascism requires the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a socialist society through the people’s democratic revolution.
Copies of Ka Joma’s Little Book on Fascism and How to Fight It are available at the JMS Legacy Foundation Museum in Utrecht or by writing to [email protected]. #