7. Prospects of People's War in Southeast Asia
There are some bright prospects, especially in the objective conditions, for the resurgence of people's war in Southeast Asia. The world capitalist system is in an increasingly severe economic and financial crisis. Southeast Asia has never fully recovered from the crisis of 1997. This has been covered up merely by new lethal doses of foreign borrowing to cover trade and budgetary deficits. The people of Southeast Asia suffer from intensifying exploitation and oppression. They are therefore being driven to wage resistance.
The policy of "neoliberal globalization" has accelerated as never before the concentration and centralization of productive and finance capital in the hands of a few imperialist powers. The adoption of higher technology has only served to maximize imperialist profit-taking and step up the accumulation of constant capital and reduction of variable capital for wages. After every round in the crisis of overproduction, unemployment rises and incomes of the working people sink, thus the market is further constricted.
The economic and financial crisis of the world capitalist system has become so grave and deep that it is leading to acute political crisis and pushing the monopoly bourgeoisie to step up military production, whip up war hysteria, chauvinism, racism and fascism on a global scale and unleash wars of aggression under the pretext of a permanent and preemptive global war of terror. Since 9/11, US imperialism has been drumming up the line that the Philippines and the adjoining countries with large oil resources and Muslim population constitute the "second front" in the "global war on terror".
The restoration of capitalism in the former socialist countries has resulted in the increase of imperialist powers competing for economic territory (sources of oil and other natural resources, markets, fields of investment and spheres of influence) and struggling for a redivision of the world. The world cannot accommodate too many imperialist powers. As the US and the NATO preoccupy themselves and are overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, their attention to other parts of the world is reduced or their spurts of attention are increasingly rebuffed by the people and various forces.
The basic contradictions in the world are intensifying, those between the imperialist powers and the oppressed peoples, those among the imperialist powers and those between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the imperialist countries. Driven by greed for oil, the US imperialists insist on staying in Iraq and are incurring significant losses. Elsewhere in the world, especially in South Asia, there is high probability of widespread people's war. We can also look forward to the emergence of revolutionary forces in countries where the ever worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation drive the people to wage armed resistance.
In Southeast Asia, there is something precious to learn from the experience of the Communist Party of the Philippines in preserving and developing the people's army and in waging people's war for more than 38 years. If protracted people's war is viable in a country like the Philippines, it should be even more viable in a country like Indonesia, with a bigger number of people suffering from semicolonial and semifeudal oppression and exploitation and with an archipelagic and rough terrain of a scale far larger than that of the Philippines.
Indonesia has the high potential of becoming a major field of people's war against the US and other imperialist powers that were behind the massacre of more than three million Indonesians and the 33 years of the military fascist dictatorship of Suharto. We are gratified to know that proletarian revolutionaries here are determined to pursue the people's democratic revolution through protracted people's war and to grasp and realize such three magic weapons, as the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party, the people's army and the united front.
As the Communist Party of the Philippines was able to rise from the ashes of the 1950-52 defeat of its predecessor party and from the prolonged period of violent anti-communist reaction, so can other communist parties in Southeast Asia rise from defeats and setbacks through summing up and analysis of conditions and experience, through a rectification movement and through resolute and militant efforts to resume the revolutionary struggle.
In a country where the people have won the new democratic revolution through people's war and are carrying out socialist revolution and construction, modern revisionism can rear its ugly head in the bureaucracy and generate the line and policies for the restoration of capitalism. The genuine communists and the people can wage the ideological struggle and the cultural revolution to combat modern revisionism, prevent capitalist restoration and consolidate socialism. They can wage people's war if the modern revisionists succeed in overthrowing them. If they fail to do so, a later generation of communists will wage people's war under worse conditions of social retrogression.
