Bulatlatan
Written by: Ka. Rosendo Monteroso
Published: Bulatlatan, February 2, 2010;
Source: Bulatlatan snapshot at the Internet Archive;
Markup: Simoun Magsalin.
The national democratic revolutionary forces under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its people’s army, unified under the National Democratic Front, are now in an important historical juncture. All revolutionary forces both in the legal and illegal arenas are geared towards advancing the struggle to the next higher strategic stage within the next five years.
Never before have this protracted people’s war reached a critical mass towards the achievement of the decisive shift in balance of forces. Party cadres and members are all set for the massive expansion of the Party organization by a thousand-fold to enable it to lead on a wider scale of guerilla fronts. Red commanders and fighters of the New People’s Army have mastered squad to platoon level operations and are prepared to open scores of guerilla fronts in new areas with favorable terrain and depressed socio-economic conditions. The united front has caused the full bloom of revolutionary sectoral mass organizations and the development of the open united front with different progressive political forces. In the next several years the reactionary armed forces and the moribund semi-colonial and semi-feudal state will find itself in an increasingly defensive position before a continuously growing armed revolutionary force.
The worsening crisis of world capitalism and the deepening corruption and plunder of state coffers of the country’s semi-colonial state will prevent it from beefing up the reactionary armed forces in order to recover lost grounds. The forward advance of the revolutionary forces is inevitable and favored by historical circumstances.
The conduct of work in the parliamentary arena should support this general advance towards the strategic stalemate. Revolutionary work in the reactionary bureaucracy and in the electoral struggle should strongly support certain needs of the revolutionary movement. Logistically, it should produce the much needed funds to procure weapons and military supplies for a fast growing revolutionary army. Politically, it should erode the over-all reactionary rule by mobilizing the masses in unmasking its corrupt, pro-imperialist and fascist character. Finally, it should paralyze and weaken the ruling classes by driving a wedge between the warring reactionary factions.
However, the Utrecht Mafia composed of a handful of party old-guards has distorted the conduct of the parliamentary work and electoral struggle. Instead of rechanneling funds to build up military logistics, they have wasted them in their luxurious high-living abroad and in their expensive operations in the party-list organizations and legal political campaigns. They have engaged in political “horse trading” and have compromised the revolutionary movement with corrupt bureaucrats who eventually were rejected by the whole society as plunderers and thieves. Instead of weakening the political rule of the ruling classes and of projecting the integrity and transparency of proletarian political leadership, the Utrecht mafia have allowed themselves to be devoured by the corrupt bourgeois politics.
The irresponsible conduct of parliamentary work and electoral struggle failed to sharpen the revolutionary consciousness of the Filipino masses by building their false hopes on reactionary political cliques such as the collaboration with the Macapagal-Arroyo clique during the EDSA II and now with the Villar-Marcos group against the Macapagal-Arroyo ruling clique. Such political bankruptcy of the “Bayan-Muna politics” has now alienated the open-legal united front from the consistent revolutionary path of the rural-based people’s war.
We need to immediately impose the correct proletarian leadership in the open-legal united front to harness its revolutionary potential and make it serve its complementary role in the over-all revolutionary effort to build up our capability to advance the revolution towards a strategic stalemate in the next several years. If we fail to accomplish this task, we shall lose a significant section of the revolutionary forces to the reactionary political system and further delay the achievement of revolutionary victory by decades of years.
The political bankruptcy of the Utrecht Mafia should be systematically exposed to the wide ranks of our revolutionary cadres and organized masses, to isolate them from our ranks and rally the majority of the revolutionary forces to the correct path towards a people’s revolutionary victory.
I send this call to the Central Committee of our revolutionary party. Let us not put the sacrifices of our martyrs to naught. Let us not forsake the revolutionary hopes of the workers and peasants who suffer from this oppressive economic and political system. Let us act decisively, let us act now!