Armando Liwanag
Written by: Armando Liwanag (Jose Maria Sison);
Published: November 6, 1993.
Source: Text archived on Banned Thought which was retrieved from Philippine Revolution, (retrieved Oct. 4, 2007.);
Markup: Simoun Magsalin;
Copyright: No specific copyrights. Provided freely by the Communist Party of the Philippines.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Armando Liwanag,
Chairman,
Central Committee,
Communist Party of the Philippines
November 6, 1993
Proletarian revolutionary cadres reestablished the Communist Party of the Philippines on December 26, 1968 and proclaimed Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as their theoretical guide. The CPP armed itself with the most powerful ideological weapon of the world’s proletariat for analyzing the revolutionary history and circumstances of the Filipino people, for resuming the new-democratic revolution through people’s war and for looking forward to the socialist future up to the threshold of communism. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought is the microscope and telescope of the Philippine revolution.
After the crushing defeat of the revolutionary movement in 1950 and for nearly a decade afterwards, the revolutionary road had been enveloped in darkness both by the power of U.S. imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords and by a long chain of unrectified grave errors and shortcomings. Were it not for the adoption of Mao Zedong Thought as its theoretical guide, the Communist Party of the Philippines could not have been reestablished and the revolutionary movement of the Filipino proletariat and people could not have been resumed. Mao Zedong Thought served to illumine the road of armed revolution.
The great victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 breached the imperialist front in the East in a big way and resounded in the Philippines. But this was also the time that the revolutionary forces were being brought to destruction by the Left opportunist Jose Lava leadership of the old merger party of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. What followed the defeat of the revolution in 1950 was a decade of intense reaction, made more acute by the Cold War and McCarthyism.
In the period of defeat, the Jesus Lava leadership of the old CP-SP merger party swung to a Right opportunist line and the followers of this line continued to be influenced by the Browderite line of “peace and democracy” and were further influenced by the rise of Khrushchovite modern revisionism. The proletarian revolutionary cadres therefore faced tremendous odds in striving to continue the unfinished Philippine revolution along the new-democratic line.
The works of Comrade Mao Zedong were scarce in the Philippines before the decade of the 1960s. As early as the late 1930’s and during World War II, some of his works on the united front and armed struggle were already available to the comrades in the Chinese bureau in the Philippines. But these remained in the Chinese original. It would be through the efforts of the proletarian revolutionary cadres themselves that the works of Comrade Mao Zedong became readily available, with the assistance of Indonesian and Chinese comrades, at the time of the Great Leap Forward and subsequently the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The Filipino communists necessarily read and studied the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. They recognized that the teachings of Mao proceeded from the basic principles laid down by his great predecessors and were a further development of the revolutionary theory of the proletariat in the particular conditions of China as well as the world. They also recognized in 1966 that the stage of Mao Zedong Thought could be reached because of the earlier stages of Marxism and Leninism.
Marx and Engels laid the theoretical foundation of Marxism by putting forward for the first time the basic principles of dialectical materialism; the critique of capitalist political economy; and scientific socialism in the era of free competition capitalism. Lenin further developed the three components of Marxism in confrontation with the bourgeois subjectivists and classical revisionists and together with Stalin realized the stage of Leninism through the establishment of the Soviet Union as a proletarian dictatorship and through the sustained process of socialist revolution and construction until the emergence of several socialist countries in the era of modern imperialism and socialist revolution.
Mao Zedong Thought emerged as the third stage in the development of Marxism when Mao confronted the problem of modern revisionism and capitalist restoration already evident in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as in the manifestation of the same problem in China. He put forward the theory of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship in order to consolidate socialism, combat modern revisionism and prevent the restoration of capitalism and successfully put the theory into practice for the first time, from 1966 to 1976.
But the teachings of Mao pertaining to the new-democratic revolution had the most powerful immediate influence on the Filipino proletarian revolutionaries for the simple reason that those teachings had a strong relevance to the social conditions in the Philippines and showed the way to make the new-democratic and socialist stages of the Philippine revolution. Further on, Mao Zedong Thought provides the theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship until it becomes possible to defeat imperialism and attain communism on a global scale.
Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought is the most comprehensive and profound guide of the Filipino proletarian revolutionaries, the reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines and the Philippine revolution with regard to the analysis of Philippine history and society; the first great rectification movement from 1967 to 1969; the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines; the revolutionary struggle from 1968 to 1980; the revolutionary struggle from 1980 to 1991; the second great rectification movement from 1992 onward; the Philippine revolution in the new world situation; and the socialist and communist future of the Filipino people.
In 1959, a few young men and women, independent of the old merger party of the Communist and Socialist Parties, started forming study circles to read and study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong that could be gotten from secret collections. They initially did so amidst the open and legal studies about the problems of national independence and democracy. The Marxist-Leninist works that they read included the Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Wages, Prices and Pro fit, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Two Tactics of Social Democracy, State and Revolution, The Foundations of Leninism, the Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society and Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.
The most avid students of Marxism-Leninism read and studied Das Kapital, The Dialectics of Nature, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), Short Course; the first edition of the Soviet-published Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. The volumes of the selected works of the great communists began to reach the Philippines in 1962. To get hold of Marxist reading materials in the period of 1959–62 was by itself an achievement in view of the anticommunist hysteria and repressive measures since the end of World War II.
The objective of the beginners in the study of Marxism-Leninism was to seek solutions to what they perceived as the fundamental problems of the Filipino people, use Marxism-Leninism to shed light on the history and concrete circumstances of the Filipino people and find ways to resume the Philippine revolution and carry it out until victory. In the study of Marxism-Leninism, with special reference to the Philippine revolution, they sought to grasp the three components of Marxism, which are materialist philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism as laid down by Marx and Engels, developed by Lenin and Stalin and further developed by Mao Zedong.
The beginners in the study of proletarian revolutionary theory were exceedingly receptive to Mao’s teachings because of their proven correctness and success in so vast a country neighboring the Philippines and their recognized applicability to the Philippines. The most read works of Mao Zedong were On Contradiction, On Practice, the Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War, Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan, On Protracted People’s War and On New Democracy.
In the light of Mao’s teachings, the Filipino proletarian revolutionaries could define clearly the periods of Philippine history; the precolonial communities until the 16th century; the colonial and feudal society until the end of Spanish colonialism; the colonial and semifeudal society under U.S. imperialism until 1946; and the semicolonial and semifeudal society which has continued to this day since 1946.
The semicolonial and semifeudal character of present-day Philippine society is basically similar to that of China before the 1949. This is a society ruled by the joint class dictatorship of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class, which are subservient to the foreign monopoly bourgeoisie. The basic oppressed classes are the working class and the peasantry, which in the main produce the surplus product appropriated by the basic exploiting classes. The intermediate social strata are the urban petty bourgeoisie and the middle or national bourgeoisie.
The social economy is mainly agrarian, semifeudal and preindustrial. There is some import-dependent manufacturing undertaken by the imperialists and the big compradors but there are no basic industries producing basic metals, basic chemicals, machine tools and precision instruments to qualify the Philippines as a “newly industrializing country”. The economy is principally dependent on agricultural production for domestic staples and exports; and secondarily on the production of raw minerals for export. Even today, import-dependent and low value-added manufacturing for reexport is a showy but negligible part of the economy, providing little or no net income for the country because of transfer-pricing.
Correspondent to the semicolonial and semifeudal character of Philippine society, a national democratic revolution is required in order to liberate the Filipino people from foreign and feudal domination. It is a democratic revolution of a new type because it is no longer led by the bourgeoisie but by the proletariat in the historical context of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution or the world proletarian-socialist revolution; and it can proceed from the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution under the class leadership of the proletariat.
The motive forces of the revolution are the working class comprising about 15 percent of the population; the peasantry, at least 75 percent; the urban petty bourgeoisie, about 8 percent; and the middle bourgeoisie, about one percent. These are the motive forces of the revolution fighting to overthrow such class enemies as the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class that comprise fractions of one percent of the population.
The working class is the leading class because it is the most advanced productive and political force. For this class to carry out its historic mission, it must have an advance detachment such as the Communist Party of the Philippines, armed with the revolutionary theory of the proletariat and pursuing the general political line that can arouse, organize and mobilize the broad masses of the people against the enemies of national and social liberation.
The proletariat through the Party overcomes its being a minority in the population and draws the overwhelming majority of the people to the revolutionary cause by linking up with the peasant masses in order to develop them as the main force of the revolution and form the basic worker-peasant alliance encompassing at least 90 percent of the people. The proletarian revolutionary cadres deployed in the countryside rely mainly on the poor peasants, lower-middle peasants and farm workers, win over the middle peasants and neutralize the rich peasants, take advantage of the splits between the enlightened and despotic landlords in order to isolate and destroy the power of the latter.
In pursuing the antifeudal class line, the proletarian revolutionary cadres and the peasant masses must fulfill the main content of the new-democratic revolution, namely the solution of the land problem. To do so, they have to carry out revolutionary armed struggle, land reform and mass-base building as integral components of the protracted people’s war in the new-democratic revolution.
The semicolonial and semifeudal society is in chronic crisis. On the basis of this concrete fact, the armed revolution can and must be waged. The peasant masses are an inexhaustible source of support for the people’s war led by the proletariat through its advance detachment, the Communist Party. The countryside provides the revolutionary forces with a vast field of maneuver for its growth in stages and accumulation of strength until it becomes possible to seize the cities. Even while the enemy is still well entrenched in the cities, Red political power can be built in the countryside.
The urban petty bourgeoisie is a smaller minority of the population than the proletariat. But this stratum of the bourgeoisie is highly instrumental in assisting the exploiting classes to rule society. It is highly influential in society. It is therefore absolutely necessary to win over sections if not the entirety of it in order to tilt the balance in favor of the revolutionary movement. The urban petty bourgeoisie is relatively the most exploited stratum of the bourgeoisie. In going over to the side of the revolution, it can become a basic force of the revolution.
The middle or national bourgeoisie is another bourgeois stratum, far thinner than the urban petty bourgeoisie. It is economically and politically weak, particularly in the Philippines, due to the lack of basic industries. It has a dual character. In pursuit of its legitimate but selfish interests, it is capable of opposing imperialism and feudalism. But at the same time, it participates in the exploitation of the working classes, wishes to gain power for itself and distrusts the masses. However, it can still be induced to become a positive force of the revolution, if the proletariat through the Communist Party of the Philippines has, in the first place, successfully built the basic worker-peasant alliance and, in the second place, won over the urban petty bourgeoisie.
It is also part of the revolutionary class line in the armed struggle and the united front to take advantage of the splits among the factions of the reactionary classes of the big compradors and landlords. The internal contradictions of the exploiting classes weaken their class rule and indirectly aid the advance of the revolutionary movement. When internecine conflicts arise among the reactionaries, it becomes possible to further isolate and range the widest array of forces against the ruling clique, which is usually the most reactionary and the most subservient to the foreign monopoly capitalists.
In the simplest of terms, the program of the new-democratic revolution is to overthrow foreign and feudal domination and to effect national liberation and democracy. Upon the nationwide seizure of political power, the new-democratic revolution is basically completed and the socialist revolution can begin. We therefore speak of two stages in the ongoing Philippine revolution: national democratic and socialist. These are continuous but distinct stages.
In the course of winning power through the new-democratic revolution, the prerequisites for subsequently making socialist revolution are prepared and developed. The state that arises after the nationwide seizure of political power takes the form of people’s democracy which is founded on the basic worker-peasant alliance. But the new state is under the leadership of the proletariat and at its core is the proletarian dictatorship.
The capital and landed assets of the imperialists and the local reactionary classes are nationalized or put into the public sector. All strategic enterprises, main sources of raw materials and main lines of distribution are likewise put into the public sector or placed under state ownership. The agrarian revolution is completed and cooperativization is carried out in stages. Socialist industries are built and socialist education is carried out. Concessions are extended to the petty-bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie for a certain time but the consistent and relentless objective is to realize the socialist transformation.
In most of the 1960’s the proletarian revolutionary cadres learnt the principles of the new-democratic revolution from the teachings and successful experience of the Chinese revolution led by Comrade Mao Zedong. These encompass the character of Philippine society and the current stage of the revolution, the motive forces and targets, the tasks, and the socialist perspective of the revolution.
It is quite easy for anyone with a high degree of book learning to read Marxist-Leninist works; but to absorb the revolutionary ideas and apply them on the concrete conditions of the Philippines is another matter. The proletarian revolutionary cadres who studied Marxist-Leninist works sought from the very beginning to initiate the revolutionary mass movement. They knew that it was the only way that the revolutionary ideas could become a material force in the Philippines.
The period of 1959–68 may be described as that of rekindling the anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement and gestating a new communist party. These had been destroyed in the 1950s. In the absence of the revolutionary mass movement, the U.S. imperialists and the local reactionaries were unchallenged in promoting all sorts of organizations to preempt its resurgence.
The single event that broke the long period of reaction and began to inspire the resurgence of the mass movement was the demonstration of 5000 students, mostly from the state university, to oppose and stop the anticommunist witchhunt in 1961. The witchhunt was an attempt to enforce the antisubversion law which had been enacted in 1957 to threaten with the death penalty anyone who dared to propagate Marxism-Leninism and resume any communist activity. Ironically, the law challenged and incited the youth to rise up in protest and to take interest in what would emerge as the national democratic movement.
The young proletarian revolutionaries initiated the mass protest action, without direction from the underground remnant of the old merger CP-SP party. Following their success, they expanded their study and organizing activities from the University of the Philippines to other Manila universities and proceeded to take leadership over student governments and campus publications. While openly promoting the general line of the national democratic revolution they also secretly organized Marxist-Leninist study groups.
Taking notice of the militant progressive movement and the initial efforts of the youth militants to link up with the progressive workers’ and peasants’ organizations, the general secretary of the CP-SP merger party, Jesus Lava, invited the representative of the youth militants and the representative of the progressive trade unions to become members of the old CP-SP merger party and also to become members of the executive committee which he formed in late 1962. Following the Lava’s dynastic tradition, he also appointed to the five-person committee two of his nephews who were not at all linked to any kind of mass movement.
The young proletarian revolutionaries linked up in earnest with the veteran cadres and masses in the progressive trade unions and peasant associations. The mass movement of the youth, the workers and peasants, grew steadily. The Kabataang Makabayan was formed in 1964 as a comprehensive mass organization of students, young workers, young peasants and young professionals. Two legal labor federations and several unions became militated under the banner of the Workers’ Party in 1963 (renamed Socialist Party in 1964). The peasant movement reemerged under the name of Masaka in 1963.
The young proletarian revolutionary cadres were the most active in promoting the study of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and in creating Party groups within the mass organizations and Party branches in localities to serve as the revolutionary core of the mass movement. They were also the most militant in launching workers’ strikes and mass actions to expose and oppose the antinational and antidemocratic policies of the reactionary government.
The Progressive Review started to be published in 1963 and had a circulation of only 1000 to 2000 copies; but it was the most important periodical in clarifying economic, political and cultural issues along the national democratic line. As separate speeches in pamphlet form or in the 1967 book form, Struggle for National Democracy, using the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, became the most important material for propagating the national democratic line. Also of great significance in reflecting the mass struggles in the 1960s were the leaflets and pamphlets issued for various mass actions. A compilation of these will show comprehensively the march of progressive events along the national democratic line.
Despite the estrangement of the Lava clique in the old CP-SP merger party from the remnants of the people’s army that disobeyed Jesus Lava’s 1955 policy of liquidating the people’s army, the young proletarian revolutionaries developed relations with the cadres and commanders of the remnant people’s army by supplying them with revolutionary propaganda and with Marxist-Leninist works, especially of Comrade Mao Zedong. The strongest Kabataang Makabayan chapters outside Manila in the 1960s were in Central Luzon. Thus, it was possible for the young proletarian revolutionaries to keep in touch with the remnants of the people’s army, despite the Lavas’ aversion to them.
In the old merger party, the young proletarian revolutionary cadres who studied and acted according to the teachings of Comrade Mao Zedong succeeded in taking the ideological, political and organizational initiative. They created Party branches and caused the revolutionary mass movement to resurge. For a time, the scions of the Lava dynasty pretended to go along with the revolutionary line. But in December 1965, inner Party struggle began to simmer over fundamental issues when the representative of the young proletarian cadres presented the general report which the executive committee had assigned him to draft.
The general report appropriately sought to present and analyze the history of the old merger party and to explain the major errors and shortcomings that had led to the debacle of the revolutionary movement in the 1950s. Its main thrust was to rectify the serious errors and shortcomings and point to the necessity of resuming the armed revolution. Although the report was openly and honestly presented in accordance with the assignment, the scions of the Lava dynasty reacted bitterly and one of them made a motion to make the report a mere memorandum supposedly to assist him in making a new draft which he would never do. And worse, he proceeded to spread intrigues against the drafter of the report and against the revolutionary line.
The inner-Party struggle revolved around the issues of Lavaite subjectivism and opportunism, and Soviet-centered modern revisionism. Inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the proletarian revolutionary cadres held their ground even more firmly and upheld the line of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It became inevitable that in April-May 1967 the proletarian revolutionary cadres decided to leave the old CP-SP merger party and to start preparing for the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
At this juncture, it is helpful to review certain points in the history of the original Communist Party which was established in 1930 and which became the CP-SP merger party in 1938. The reestablished CPP highly respects Comrade Crisanto Evangelista, the founder of the original CPP. He was the most formidable leader of the trade union movement in his time. Credit must be accorded to him for having had the wisdom and courage to pioneer the formation of the revolutionary party of the proletariat and for seeking to integrate the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism with concrete Philippine conditions.
However, he had limited opportunities and therefore limited achievements in building the CPP ideologically, politically and organizationally. Soon after its establishment, the Party was outlawed and came under severe repression. Evangelista wrote propaganda about the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in general terms, about the factories as command posts of the revolution, and about the “communist paradise” to come but he was not able to define clearly the line of the new-democratic revolution and to build a nationwide revolutionary party of the proletariat. He tended to concede that the struggle for national independence was already being satisfied by the decolonization process being undertaken by the U.S. and the local reactionaries. He saw the peasant struggle as a struggle for reforms but did not yet see the peasant masses as the main force for carrying out a new-democratic revolution through people’s war under the leadership of the proletariat.
In 1935, the underground Communist Party was joined by Dr. Vicente Lava who had learned his Marxism from the Browderite Communist Party of the USA. He eventually became the leader of the second line of leadership which was supposed to replace the first line led by Crisanto Evangelista in case this would be wiped out by the enemy. The notion that the struggle for national liberation could be accomplished through parliamentary struggle was reinforced. So was the notion that the struggle for democracy was one of demanding civil liberties and had nothing or little to do with the substantive democratic question of land.
In 1937, the CPP was legalized, as a result of domestic and international calls by communist and bourgeois-democratic forces for a Popular Front against fascism and also as a result of the pretense of the Commonwealth government for a program of social justice amidst the grave economic crisis generated by the Great Depression. The CPUSA played a key role in pressing for the legalization of the CPP and the release of its leaders from domestic exile. In 1938, the CPP merged with the Socialist Party of the Philippines, which had arisen in 1932 and had continuously remained legal, essentially as an agrarian party. This merger was fraught with problems as it automatically incorporated into the CPP so many peasant militants who had not undergone any study of Marxism-Leninism.
The CP-SP leaders who constituted the first line of leadership were all arrested by the Japanese fascists in Manila in February 1942. They suffered martyrdom after refusing to call on Party members to capitulate to and register with the enemy. Thus, Vicente Lava, the first of a series of three brothers who became general secretaries, assumed the position of general secretary in March 1942. He conceived of the barrio united defense corps and presided over the formation of the people’s army against Japan on March 29, 1942.
But Vicente Lava was basically a Right opportunist. After the Japanese military onslaught on Mt. Arayat in whose vicinity the squadrons (companies) of the people’s army were concentrated, he pursued the “retreat-for-defense” policy, which concretely meant the excessive fragmentation of the Huk squadrons into small teams of three to five armed members and merely echoed the “wait-and-see” policy dictated by the United States on pro-U.S. Filipino guerrillas to serve merely as the eyes and ears of the U.S. military intelligence and not to actively wage armed struggle far ahead of the return of the U.S. military forces.
Until September 1944, the most successful fighting Huk units were the platoons that disobeyed the “retreat-for-defense” policy. The Central Committee of the CP-SP merger party corrected this wrong policy but only when the U.S. military forces were about to land in the Philippines. The Huk squadrons were re-formed to take advantage of the retreat of the Japanese troops to the mountain provinces of Northern Luzon and to seize power at the municipal and provincial levels in Central Luzon just before the arrival of the U.S. troops.
Lava admitted his error and agreed to its correction. But he pushed another Right opportunist policy — that of welcoming the U.S. military forces, the formal grant of national independence, the installation of a neocolonial puppet republic; and preparing for the conversion of the people’s army and armed peasant movement into a veterans’ organization and a legal peasant organization for the purpose of waging parliamentary struggle.
Lava pushed the line of “peace and democracy” and Right opportunist leaders of the CP-SP merger party and the Hukbalahap ran for positions in the big comprador-bourgeois and landlord congress under the banner of the Democratic Alliance in 1946 when the United States shifted from direct colonial to semicolonial rule. But even as they genuinely won their seats in Congress, these known leaders of the CP-SP merger party and their allies were kicked out from their seats in Congress on trumped-up charges of fraud and terrorism.
In the countryside, the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps, the Philippine Constabulary and the civilian guards perpetrated massacres in order to wrest back political power and put the land back under landlord control in Central Luzon. Right opportunists worse than Lava (Pedro Castro and Jorge Frianeza) gained the upper hand in the leadership of the CP-SP merger party, pushed the line of collaborating with the Roxas puppet regime and agreed to the registration of Hukbalahap fighters.
Under these conditions, Jose Lava, the second of the Lava brothers to become the secretary general of the CP-SP merger party, took the initiative of fighting the Right opportunists and called for the resumption of the revolutionary armed struggle in 1948. But he failed to clarify the strategy and tactics. Inconsistently in 1948 and 1949, the Huk commander-in-chief Luis Taruc was allowed to negotiate for general amnesty. Following the discovery of the scheme of the reactionary regime to murder the underground leaders who surfaced under the amnesty agreement, Jose Lava pushed the line of “all-out armed struggle” against the Quirino puppet regime in 1950. He spelled out his line of achieving military victory within two years, imagining a geometric progression of spontaneous popular support and banking on armed uprisings promised by the Nacionalista Party politicians — the former Japanese puppet president Jose Laurel and Eulogio Rodriguez.
The battalions and companies of the people’s army were renamed People’s Liberation Army in 1950. They added up to some 3000 fighters with rifles. Two thousand of these were concentrated in military camps in the unpopulated forests of the Sierra Madre mountain range. In August 1950, they launched coordinated attacks on enemy forces on a wide scale. But in October 1950, the entire Political Bureau led by Jose Lava was captured in Manila. The second coordinated offensive slated for November 1950 could no t be carried out. Instead, the 30 army battalions newly equipped and trained by the United States were taking both strategic and tactical offensives against the forest military camps of the people’s army in a purely military situation favorable to the enemy.
The “Left” opportunist Jose Lava leadership never bothered to work out the line of the new-democratic revolution and the integration of revolutionary armed struggle, land reform and painstaking mass work for a protracted people’s war. After the 1950 debacle, Jesus Lava (brother of Vicente and Jose) became the Party general secretary. He also failed to consider and work out the requirements of a protracted people’s war. Both Jose and Jesus Lava suffered from the petty-bourgeois mentality of wishing for an easy way to seize political power without fully and seriously studying the realities and weighing all the necessary factors in the revolutionary struggle.
In the case of Jesus Lava, he briefly wished to continue armed struggle and then took a Right opportunist line and proceeded to adopt policies seeking to liquidate the people’s army and subsequently the CP-SP merger party. He tried to liquidate the remnants of the old people’s army in 1955 by calling on them to turn themselves into “organizational brigades” for parliamentary struggle and, subsequently, the Party itself by devising in 1957 what he called the “single-file” policy of dissolving every Party collective and ordering Party members to form single files and receive his political transmissions from his isolated Manila hideout.
The old merger party practically ceased to exist in late 1950s. There was not a single existing Party branch in late 1962. The general secretary Jesus Lava was completely isolated from any mass movement. He had been drafting his political transmissions from 1955 to 1962 on the basis of clippings from the bourgeois press. He had no significant connections with any mass movement or with the remnants of the people’s army which continued to exist as roving rebel bands in the plains of some provinces in Central Luzon.
Meanwhile, among the remnants of the people’s army, there were the cadres and commanders who persevered in serving the peasant masses and there were also others who degenerated into banditry and running protection rackets in Angeles City adjoining the U.S. Clark Air Force Base and compromising with the landlords in the class struggle between landlords and peasants. This latter type of the remnants of the people’s army, most represented by the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique, also became the target of criticism and repudiation by the proletarian revolutionaries and by the New People’s Army.
There was the crying need to reestablish the Communist Party of the Philippines and the people’s army. This was realizable only because the proletarian revolutionaries had already grasped the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought through which they could make the correct analysis of Philippine history and society and the criticism and repudiation of previous grave errors of the Lava brothers and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique and proceed to wage the new-democratic revolution.
The Lava revisionist renegades wished to impose their line of indefinite parliamentary struggle on the proletarian revolutionaries and the people. Their line was engendered by their own bourgeois subjectivist and opportunist world outlook and by the line of the Soviet revisionist renegades. The two-line struggle between the proletarian revolutionaries and the Lava revisionist renegades became so intense that the latter threatened to inflict physical harm on the former. It was necessary for the proletarian revolutionaries to break away from the counterrevolutionary revisionists in April 1967, to wage a vigorous campaign of criticism and repudiation of the Lava revisionist renegades and reestablish the Communist Party of the Philippines under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
It took more than a year to prepare for the reestablishment of the Party. The preparations included consolidation meetings of the proletarian revolutionaries, consultations with Party members and mass activists and drafting of the documents of reestablishment: Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party and the Constitution and the Program of the CPP. The Congress of Reestablishment had only twelve delegates (one in absentia) representing only a few scores of Party members and candidate-members in the trade unions and the youth movement. They had the support of a few hundreds of advance mass activists and an urban mass base of nearly 15 thousand workers and youth. Soon after the reestablishment of the Party in 1968, the proletarian revolutionaries linked up with the good part of the remnant people’s army with a rural mass base of 80 thousand peasants in the second district of Tarlac in Central Luzon.
On March 29, 1969, on the 27th anniversary of the founding of the people’s army against Japan, the Party established the New People’s Army and promulgated the Rules of the NPA. This entailed the criticism and repudiation of the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique which had discredited the name of the armed revolutionary movement with its unprincipled and criminal activities. The NPA started with only sixty fighters, with nine automatic rifles and 25 inferior firearms. Expansion cadres for Northern Luzon, Southern Tagalog and the Visayas were trained from February to May 1969. The first expansion team was dispatched to Isabela province. In May 1969, the Central Committee of the CPP held a plenum to study further the strategy and tactics of people’s war and also the peasant movement, and to include in its ranks peasant cadres and battle-tested Red fighters. The plenum decided that Tarlac and the whole of Central Luzon would serve as the resource base for nationwide expansion.
In both urban and rural areas, the reestablished CPP inherited the fine revolutionary tradition of the proletariat as well as the senior and middle-aged cadres of the long-drawn workers’ and peasants’ movement. The mass organizations of workers, peasants and youth condemned both the Lava revisionist group and the Sumulong gangster clique and fully criticized and repudiated the long unrectified grave errors of subjectivism and opportunism and the blatant degeneration of these renegades. The Lava revisionist renegades prated about parliamentary struggle as the main form of struggle but it was the proletarian revolutionaries who actually continued to lead the legal democratic movement. In fact, the revolutionary armed struggle inspired and served to strengthen the legal struggle.
From the very beginning, the objective of the proletarian revolutionaries was to create a nationwide Party organization with a cadre and mass character, deeply rooted among the working people and building a people’s army waging protracted people’s war and recruiting most of its fighters from the peasantry. The proletarian revolutionaries recognized that the people’s army would be in a vulnerable position if it existed only in a small part or even in a much larger part of the plains of Central Luzon. They understood the necessity of developing guerrilla zones at various strategic points in the Philippine countryside and archipelago as soon as possible. Thus, from the very outset, members of the Party Central Committee were assigned particular regions to pay attention to and cadres for nationwide expansion were given politico-military training.
Even as it resumed the revolutionary armed struggle in earnest, the Party continued to lead the legal democratic mass movement in the urban areas. All sorts of legal mass organizations sprouted among the workers, peasants, youth, women, cultural activists, teachers and other professionals. In April 1969, the Party led a legal peasant demonstration of 15,000 in Manila and another one of 50,000 in Tarlac. In the first quarter of 1970, it was able to conduct weekly converging marches and demonstrations against the U.S.-Marcos regime over a comprehensive range of domestic and international issues, including the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. The participants ranged in number from 50 thousand to 100 thousand youth and workers per mass action. The First Quarter Storm of 1970 served to strengthen all the patriotic and progressive mass organizations, especially the Kabataang Makabayan, on a nationwide scale. The timely statements of the Party, later compiled in the book The First Quarter Storm of 1970, gave direction to the militant urban mass movement.
The urban-based Kabataang Makabayan acted as the seeding machine of the national democratic revolution all over the archipelago. It became the most important source of cadres who were immediately deployable for mass work. The Party accelerated its urban mass work. It encouraged the formation of new progressive unions and trade union federations such as KASAMA and PAKMAP and the transformation of reactionary unions into progressive ones. It built mass organizations among the urban poor and among the poor fishermen. It enlarged the KM chapters in urban poor communities as well as in colleges and high schools. It formed various types of organization among teachers, creative writers, artists, scientists and technologists, health workers, lawyers and other professionals.
Simultaneous to the militant mass actions in Manila and scores of other cities, the NPA intensified its armed tactical offensives in the second district of Tarlac. This enraged the enemy which accelerated search-and-destroy operations with the full force of a division and a wide network of paramilitary units against the barely 200 fighters of the NPA. By December 1970, the enemy declared that the NPA had been finished off. The NPA in Central Luzon was indeed in an extremely difficult situation due to the overwhelming concentration of enemy military strength. But unknown to the enemy, the work of expansion in Cagayan Valley had already resulted in a far wider mass base in Isabela and which extended to Nueva Vizcaya and Quirino. Also, revolutionary work had started in the Cordilleras.
Amidst the fierce revolutionary struggle, the Party was able to run courses of study on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and on the basic documents of the Party. It would be able to reproduce eventually seven volumes of its own selections from the works of Mao Zedong as well as the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. It was able to put out Ang Bayan which published reports on and analyses of the ongoing revolutionary struggle in the Philippines and abroad and made critiques of the ruling system and U.S. imperialism.
After the reestablishment of the Party, the earliest and most sustained work that emerged from the revolutionary struggle was Philippine Society and Revolution (in its 1969 mimeographed form). Inspired by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and using the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, the book traced the basic strands of Philippine history, defined the basic problems of the Filipino people and clarified the class strategy and tactics of the new-democratic revolution.
The ideological struggle against modern revisionism was kept up against the Lava revisionist renegades, the American revisionist renegade William Pomeroy and against their Soviet revisionist renegade masters, Khrushchov and Brezhnev. The sizeable collection of antirevisionist articles by the CPP is now a major part of the treasury of the proletarian revolutionary struggle.
As a result of the decisions taken by the August 1970 meeting of the Political Bureau in the forest region of Isabela, The Organizational Guide and Outline of Reports was formulated to explain the principles and methods of making social investigation, building the Party, the people’s army, mass organizations and organs of political power and making reports on the situation and activities. The Organization Department of the Party took vigorous efforts to recruit Party members from the ranks of the revolutionary mass activists that had emerged from the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and ensuing mass actions and to urge the new Party recruits and the mass activists to take assignments in the rural areas. In the urban areas, Party recruitment and education among the youth was done mainly through the schools for national democracy, undertaken by organization-education teams of the Kabataang Makabayan and other organizations.
In April 1971, the Central Committee held its Plenum in the forest region of Isabela. As a result of this, the Rules for Establishing the People’s Government and the Revolutionary Guide to Land Reform were formulated; and the work of nationwide expansion of the Party and the people’s army was pushed further. The membership of the Party had risen to more than 1000 members. The mass base in Cagayan Valley was already 300,000. The revolutionary armed struggle was started in the Partido district of Camarines Sur. By 1972, expansion cadres were creating Party organizations and guerrilla zones in eight regions of the country: Northern Luzon, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Eastern Visayas, Central Visayas, Western Visayas, and Mindanao. United front work at various levels assisted the emergence and development of the revolutionary armed struggle.
Following up the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1971, the U.S.-Marcos regime imposed martial rule on the Philippines in 1972 and suppressed all the aboveground progressive mass organizations. Hypocritically, Marcos announced that he wished to “save the republic” and “build a new society” in the face of the severe crisis of the ruling system and the newly-emergent armed revolutionary movement. At this point in time, however, the Party had only 2000 Party members, the NPA had only 300 full-time fighters with automatic rifles, hundreds of militia units, thousands of part-time guerrillas and local militia and a rural mass base of less than 400 thousand under local organs of political power and an urban mass base of some 50,000.
With the outlawing of the progressive mass organizations and the manhunt for their leaders, the Party decided to deploy to the countryside the Party members and mass activists who had been forced underground. However, the capacity of the rural Party organizations and the people’s army to absorb them was limited. So, quite a number were encouraged to further develop the urban underground or start underground work in their home provinces, irrespective of the presence or absence of revolutionary forces. In 1973, the Preparatory Commission of the National Democratic Front adopted the 10-point program of the NDF and provided a framework for uniting the progressive mass organizations which had been forced underground as well as other possible allies.
Some petty-bourgeois commentators with superficial and partial knowledge of CPP history denigrate the people’s war being waged by the reestablished Party as merely a dogmatic copy of that led by Mao Zedong. They cannot grasp that in accordance with the teachings of Mao Zedong, the CPP applies the theory of Marxism-Leninism on the concrete conditions of the Philippines and consequently the concrete development of the Philippine revolution has its unique features. There are indeed, basic similarities and common adherence to basic principles. The social conditions in the Philippines and pre-1949 China are basically similar and therefore the corresponding character of the revolution is similar. There are the common basic principles such as that painstaking mass work must be done and popular support must be gained as the inexhaustible and invincible base of the Party and the NPA, that the people’s army must grow from small to big and from weak to strong over a protracted period of time and follow a probability course of strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and strategic offensive. And while the NPA is on the strategic defensive, it must wage tactical offensives in order to accumulate strength and build Red political power in the countryside until it becomes possible to seize political power in the cities and on a nationwide scale.
At the same time, there are marked dissimilarities between the Philippine and Chinese people’s war, such as that the NPA had to start with guerrilla squads and not with large forces breaking away from the national army of the CPC-KMT alliance, that the main form of struggle in the strategic defensive is guerrilla warfare and not regular mobile warfare, that the minimum land reform program of rent reduction and elimination of usury is being carried out before the maximum program of land confiscation, that a single imperialist power overextended all over the world dominates the Philippines and not several imperialist powers at odds with each other inside the country through their respective puppets as in China, that China is a vast country where the Long March could take place while the Philippines is a medium-sized archipelagic country in which the short marches can add up to long marches and that, of course, international conditions are now different.
The CPP made timely criticisms of both dogmatism and empiricism and both adventurism and conservatism in the revolutionary struggle. It criticized the formalistic and ritualistic use of Marxist-Leninist terminology without providing the concrete facts on the basis of social investigation and mass work. It also criticized adventurist tendencies and the tendency of some cadres to look to foreign military assistance as a decisive factor in winning victory as well as tendencies of conservatism in mass work and armed struggle. It constantly called for a self-reliant revolutionary armed struggle, integrating armed struggle, land reform and mass base building and coordinating urban and rural work within the framework of the new-democratic revolution.
In 1974, it was clear that the great overall achievement of the Party was building itself and the NPA on a nationwide scale. Party membership rose to 4,000. The Party had well-consolidated guerrilla zones at so many strategic points favorable for guerrilla warfare on a nationwide scale. It had a wealth of experience in people’s war in terms of positive and negative experiences and overall success. The isolation of the main military units of the NPA in Isabela due to heavy enemy concentration and due to the grave error of keeping these units in the forest region after the enemy’s forced mass evacuation of the people was more than compensated for by the nationwide expansion of the Party and the people’s army.
On the basis of social research and the abundant experience in the armed revolution, Specific Characteristics of People’s War in the Philippines was written in 1974. This was a comprehensive and thoroughgoing application of Mao Zedong’s theory and strategic line of protracted people’s war in the Philippines. It carried a number of propositions that clarified the way to wage armed revolution in the Philippines and raised the fighting confidence of the Party members and Red fighters to a new and higher level. Among the important propositions were that, aside from the use of the countryside and the rough terrain as a wide room for maneuver, the archipelagic character of the country can be converted from being a disadvantage to being an advantage for further dividing the forces of the enemy so long as the correct revolutionary class line and mass work are carried out in the struggle. The slogan, “major islands first, minor islands next,” was put forward. The principle of centralized leadership, ideological and political, and decentralized operations was adopted.
Open mass work and secret Party work flourished in the trade union movement from 1969 to 1972. Under conditions of martial rule, the progressive labor federations and trade unions were suppressed. So, work in the trade unions were carried out underground from 1972 onward. But in 1974, the workers’ strike movement came to life, starting with the La Tondea strike and spreading to 300 workplaces all over the country. It became clear that the workers’ movement would become the main force in forthcoming mass struggles in the urban areas. The urban poor communities were also becoming militated, uncowed by frequent enemy zoning operations or raids.
The student movement began to stir anew, demanding democratic rights and the restoration of student governments and publications which were suppressed by martial rule. Simultaneously, the capacity of the Party organizations in the rural areas to absorb manhunted Party personnel and mass activists increased greatly. Thus in 1974, the Party could dispatch more of them to the countryside.
By the end of 1975, Party membership nationwide had risen to 5000 and the NPA had 1000 full-time fighters with automatic rifles and a thousand more with inferior firearms. On the basis of the discussions and decisions of the plenum of the Central Committee in December 1975, a comprehensive and deepgoing summing-up and rectification document, Our Urgent Tasks was drafted in 1976 and published in the first issue of Rebolusyon in the middle of that year. This systematized the principles, methods and steps in building the mass organizations, the local organs of political power, the people’s army and the local Party branches. This document distilled the most successful experiences of the revolutionary cadres and combated the wrong ideas and wrong methods in carrying out the armed revolution. The draconian situation in the country persisted.
By 1976, it was clear that the NPA on a nationwide scale was approaching the phase in which guerrilla fronts would multiply, with platoons as centers of gravity, and in which frequent and widespread platoon-size offensive operations could be launched against the enemy. Previously, these were rare and could be launched in only a few places. Well-consolidated guerrilla zones and even stable guerrilla bases were becoming more defined in contrast to the guerrilla zones in areas of expansion. Previously, guerrilla zones meant a cluster of a few barrios. Now, entire municipalities had become guerrilla zones. These guerrilla zones or several municipalities comprised the guerrilla fronts.
One squad of the NPA often sufficed to effect control of a municipality and often divided into armed propaganda teams in order to do mass work. This was possible because the rural municipality usually has a police force of ten to twenty-five men and the regular troops of the enemy (constabulary and army) simply do not have the force to maintain superior presence in every one of the 1500 municipalities and cities of the Philippines. On the basis of the expansion and consolidation of the mass base and the multiplication of the NPA guerrilla squads over time, it became possible to form platoons as centers of gravity and as strike forces in guerrilla fronts.
Since the beginning of the armed struggle, the creation of new guerrilla zones or expansion work had been the most challenging and most dangerous work. It could be done best only when there was a consolidated guerrilla zone from which to expand or, in a completely new area, when mass work was done without the premature show of arms. Errors in carrying or showing arms without prior mass work were paid for in blood by comrades, as in Zambales from 1969–71, Negros in 1969, Antique in 1972 and Mindanao in 1972, to cite only a few cases.
From 1970 onward, there were cases of grave errors involving the premature formation of absolutely concentrated companies, the purely military viewpoint and mountain-stronghold mentality. The first one was that of a premature company-size formation in 1970 in the sparsely wooded areas of Tarlac-Zambales which was completely wiped out in one tactical encirclement by the enemy resulting in the loss of at least 60 high-powered rifles. In 1973, an ill-armed company formation disintegrated under the blows of the enemy in Nueva Vizcaya. The remnant platoon proceeded to Quirino province and built itself up into a full company formation through rapid armed tactical offensives but without consolidation and expansion through mass work. Eventually, this company failed to withstand the counteroffensive of overwhelmingly superior enemy forces in 1975. In Sorsogon province in 1974, another full company which had rapidly grown from armed tactical offensives, but without solid mass organizing, also failed to withstand a powerful enemy counterattack.
The worst cases of prematurely concentrated company formations included the case of two well-armed companies in the Isabela forest region from 1972 to 1976. The regional Party committee and army command (especially those who were members of the Central Committee) insisted on staying in the forest region, despite the forced mass evacuation of the people. The two companies put themselve in an isolated and passive position, allowing the enemy to use the Cagayan river to cut them off from the masses, despite the instructions of the Central Committee for them to follow the example of the NPA platoon in Tumauini, slip out of the enemy encirclement, redeploy into smaller units and move towards the masses in Cagayan Province. In the Northern Luzon Party Conference in 1977, a thoroughgoing criticism of the error was made by the Central Committee and by the cadres and commanders of the region themselves.
Up to 1979, the regional Party organization and people’s army in Eastern Visayas (particularly Samar island) showed the way to create a wide and deepgoing mass base and to build the revolutionary forces on this basis: Each guerrilla zone was taken care of by an NPA squad and on the scale of the guerrilla front, platoon-size tactical offensives were frequently undertaken. Municipal police forces and paramilitary units were disarmed and small detachments of regular troops were wiped out frequently. Thus, the Party and the people’s army in Samar island became the model of revolutionary armed struggle throughout the country.
On the whole, the CPP was successful in waging the armed revolution from 1968 to 1979. The growth of the revolutionary forces was gradual and steady but cumulative. The municipal police forces, the paramilitary units at the barrio level and small detachments of regular enemy troops became the prime targets of NPA operations. Never was there an instance that a regional Party or army organization was decimated. In the twists and turns of the armed revolution, there were separate instances when grave losses were incurred by leading organs at various levels and by particular local forces. But on a nationwide scale, the revolutionary movement grew in strength and advanced from year to year. Even during the exceedingly difficult period of 1972–73, when martial rule had been recently imposed, the Party and other revolutionary forces were able to preserve themselves and grow on a nationwide scale.
While the decade of the 1970s was characterized by revolutionary successes from year to year, there were already certain unhealthy tendencies manifested at the level of the NPA national operational command. There was the notion spread by the head of the NPA national operational command up to 1976 that no stable base areas could arise in the Philippines before the total liberation of the country and that foreign military assistance was an absolute necessity for winning victory. At the 1975 Plenum of the Central Committee, there was also a Rightist demand from another cadre to withdraw Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought from the masthead of Ang Bayan as well as the categorical term, anti-Marcos reactionaries, previously used to refer to such big comprador-landlord politicians as Benigno Aquino. From his previous insistence in 1976 that small teams of three to five armed fighters (reminiscent of the 1942 “retreat-for-defense” policy) should be the model for mass and guerrilla work, still another prominent cadre of Central Luzon swung in 1977 to the “Left” opportunist line that a company be concentrated out of the measly total of 105 armed personnel of the entire region.
Also in 1977, the questioning of the Marxist analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal started. A few cadres were impressed by the big-comprador infrastructure-building and fake land reform programs of the U.S.-Marcos regime and misconstrued these as promoting urbanization and industrialization. They even considered the export of cheap Filipino labor and engineering skills to the Middle East as an overflow of Philippine economic development. These comrades could not see that Marcos was not putting up basic industries and not carrying out land reform but was aggravating the agrarian, semifeudal and preindustrial character of the Philippine economy.
The U.S.-Marcos technocrats, with their theory of development; the Lava revisionist renegades, with their theory of noncapitalist development; the exponents of dependent capitalism; and the recipients of funds from the Australian Trotskyites were active in spreading the notion that the multinational firms and banks were out to turn the Philippines into a foreign-owned industrial base. All these served to stimulate the tendency of some Party cadres to speculate that the analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal was already outdated, notwithstanding the actual deepening and aggravation of the semifeudal character of the Philippine economy due to excessive foreign borrowing for anti-industrial purposes.
In 1978, the thrust of the questioning of the Party’s correct description of the character of Philippine society was to put forward the idea of making a leap from the early substage of the strategic defensive to the advanced substage and accelerating the victory of the Philippine revolution by deploying more cadres for armed city partisan warfare and for a potential urban insurrection. The 1945 uprising and the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam and the 1979 final offensive in the Nicaraguan revolution were taken out of historical context and used to denigrate the theory and strategic line of protracted people’s war. Although the NPA had only around 1500 full-time Red fighters with automatic rifles, the Central Committee declared that preparations had to be made for the leap from the early to the advanced substage of the strategic defensive. Thus, it designated “war fronts”, administratively coalesced guerrilla fronts and created new command levels (even if unnecessary). This line of thinking ran counter to the need for multiplying platoons as centers of gravity and multiplying the number of guerrilla fronts.
From 1976 to 1980, there was a rapid nationwide growth of the Party, the people’s army and the mass base as a result of the strong foundation built under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and such definitive documents as the founding documents of the Party and the NPA, Philippine Society and Revolution, Specific Characteristics of People’s War in the Philippines and Our Urgent Tasks. As regards the NPA, its Red fighters with automatic rifles grew in number up to 2000 or by 100 per cent because of the tactical offensives carried out by platoons and oversized platoons. They benefited from an expanding and consolidated mass base in which land reform and other mass campaigns for the benefit of the people were conducted.
Abroad during this period, the essentials of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought were being negated and reversed in China. The depreciation of Mao Zedong in his own homeland tended to influence a few Party cadres in the central leadership. Although no member of the Central Committee ever dared to frontally attack the theory and strategic line of people’s war, it became fashionable for a few members of the Central Committee and some central staff organs to propose the “innovation” on the strategic line of protracted people’s war by putting forward the line of urban insurrectionism and the premature formation of absolutely concentrated NPA companies.
At the same time, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency financed and instigated its Filipino assets in Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino in the United States to spread the propaganda in the Philippines that the way to victory in the Philippines was to drop Mao’s theory and strategic line of protracted people’s war. To camouflage their U.S. imperialist connections, they proposed having the military and financial assistance of the Soviet Union as the decisive factor in the victory of the Philippine revolution.
Regarding the period of revolutionary struggle from 1980 to 1991, the most recent comprehensive and important documents of the Communist Party of the Philippines to read and study are: Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors, General Review of Important Events and Decisions, 1980–1991 and Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism. These documents approved by the 1992 Plenum of the CPP Central Committee strongly reaffirm Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as the guide to revolutionary action under the leadership of the CPP as well as to the current rectification movement, the second great one since the first in the period of 1967–69, for the purpose of overcoming deviations, errors and shortcomings and reinvigorating the Party and the revolutionary mass movement.
In the period of 1980–83, the revolutionary movement advanced at a rate faster than in any year in the 1976–79 period. Party membership increased annually by almost 4000. Basic Party units were established in the barrios, factories, schools, communities, in the people’s army and mass organizations. In 1982, there were 34 platoons as centers of gravity of guerrilla fronts and more than 200 squads at the base, doing mass work. An annual average of 800 to 900 rifles were confiscated from the enemy by squads and platoons. By the end of 1983, the armed strength of the NPA was 5000 automatic rifles. To this day, the record shows that most of the NPA’s weapons have been seized from the enemy by the squads and platoons.
In 1982–83, guerrilla fronts covered almost entire provinces and big portions of regions. Those of Mindanao, Samar, Negros and Bicol covered two-thirds to three-fourths of the total land area and total number of barrios. All guerrilla fronts in the country extended to well-populated areas, including environs of town centers, along highways, seashore and plains. In 1983, the majority of regions had two or three big and relatively stable guerrilla fronts. Tactical offensives by the NPA echoed each other all over the archipelago. Land reform and other mass campaigns thrived in the guerrilla fronts.
In the 1980–83 period, the legal democratic movement in both urban and rural areas steadily developed. Then it rose rapidly to an unprecedented level in the entire history of the revolutionary movement in 1983, following the assassination of Benigno Aquino and continued to surge until the Marcos fascist dictatorship was overthrown in 1986. It continued to grow until 1987. The contradictions within the ruling clique had led to the assassination in 1983 of Marcos’ arch political rival Aquino and consequently the split of the reactionary armed forces between the Marcos-Ver and the Enrile-Ramos factions.
The rapid advance of the revolutionary armed struggle and the legal democratic movement and rapid increase of armed strength was the result of a number of factors: (1) the strong foundation of the revolutionary movement developed in the 1970s; (2) the perseverance of the revolutionary forces along the correct line in most regions, in accordance particularly with the founding documents of the Party, Specific Characteristics of People’s War in the Philippines, Our Urgent Tasks and the Basic Party Course; and (3) the rapid worsening of the crisis of the ruling system, which exacerbated not only the contradictions among the reactionaries but even within sections of the ruling clique.
Throughout the period of 1980–91, the correct line was upheld by the overwhelming majority of Party cadres and members and in most regional Party committees and organizations. But certain erroneous currents, which had started in the late 1970s to run among a few elements in the Central Committee and certain central staff organs, took shape and force through certain “Left” and Right opportunist lines in the 1980 Central Committee Plenum to challenge, undermine and reverse the correct line. In this Plenum, much time was devoted to questioning the Party’s long standing analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal with the end in view of modifying the strategic line of protracted people’s war, giving more importance than ever to revolutionary work in the urban areas and effecting the leap from the early to the advance substage of the strategic defensive through urban insurrections. It was asserted that the Philippines was more industrialized and urbanized than pre-1949 China and that therefore urban revolutionary struggles had a bigger role to play in the Philippines than in China in the past. The urban population of 40 per cent was arrived at by adding the population of the chartered cities and poblaciones (town centers).
In the 1981 meeting of the Political Bureau, the tasks of accomplishing both the leap from the early to the advance substage of the strategic defensive and moving on to the “strategic counteroffensive” and “regularization” were laid down. In 1982, the Mindanao Commission adopted the line of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism under the inspiration of the 1981 Political Bureau meeting. In its 1983 meeting, the Political Bureau, elaborated on the line of “strategic counteroffensive” and “regularization”. It presupposed the accomplishment of the advance substage of the strategic defensive, described it as the second substage and called for carrying out the strategic counteroffensive as the third and final substage. Third and fourth class municipalities were classified as urban areas and as initial targets for uprisings.
The term “strategic counteroffensive” was a misnomer which meant the “Left” opportunist wish to accomplish far more than what the given forces of the revolution could permit. It overrated the role of armed urban insurrections in opposition to the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside. In fact, third and fourth class municipalities are categorizable as rural. Even the city of Yenan was rural relative to the city of Sian or faraway Shanghai. The line of “regularization” meant creating more layers of the Party bureaucracy and filling up the positions with Party members, without undertaking the corresponding theoretical and political education. It also meant — for the people’s army — additional levels of command and further staffing, premature formation of larger units and aiming for an intensification of the war through regular mobile warfare, irrespective of the general level of development. The term “full-time Red fighters” was reinterpreted to mean separation from mass work and preoccupation with military tasks.
Even while the central leadership pushed the wrong line, the overwhelming majority of Party cadres and members adhered to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, studied the founding documents of the Party, the basic Party study course along this line, studied Specific Characteristics of People’s War in the Philippines and Our Urgent Tasks. In 1982, a definitive article, On the Philippine Mode of Production, argued against the misconception about the character of the Philippine economy. In 1983, another article, “On the Losing Course of the Armed Forces of the Philippines”, argued against premature verticalization of the people’s army and pointed out its potential damage to the mass base. These articles were circulated to oppose the wrong line.
It took some time before the wrong line from the central leadership could be put into practice extensively. In the early 1980s the revolutionary forces in Samar and Negros continued to demonstrate that it was possible to intensify armed struggle while attending to mass work. Running counter was the attempt to put up a battalion in Samar. But the central leadership decided to disband it and redeploy the most capable cadres to other regions. Learning lessons from bitter experiences in the 1970s, the forces in Northern Luzon, Bicol, and Western Visayas paid close attention to mass work and gradually developed their armed strength by launching tactical offensives with platoons and squads. Even the forces in Mindanao generally followed the pattern of the other regions until 1982. With the exception of two platoons, the forces of Central Luzon persisted with squads and small teams in carrying out revolutionary work in the plains.
The line of “strategic counteroffensive” and “regularization” encouraged the more blatant militarist line of combining urban insurrectionism with military adventurism in Mindanao from 1982 to 1984. This line exaggerated the urbanization and industrialization of the Philippines in general and Mindanao in particular, in effect wrongly praising the U.S.-Marcos regime for supposedly developing and industrializing the country. It also wrongly presupposed that the Party had neglected urban revolutionary work, notwithstanding the fact that the Party had consistently developed and led the urban-based legal democratic movement. It put forward the idea that urban insurrection, prepared by armed city partisans and by sweeping propaganda and ultimately accomplished by the spontaneous masses, was the highest form of political struggle and that the people’s army was a purely military force and was secondary to the armed urban insurrection. It also exaggerated the international work of the Party as a decisive factor for winning the revolution.
The erroneous line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism was aggressively carried out in Mindanao from 1982 to 1984. Sweeping contact and propaganda work was done in the urban areas, armed city partisan warfare was intensified and people’s strikes were carried out by busing in peasants or using NPA units to set up “checkpoints”. Solid mass organizing was neglected and underground cadres in the narrow and small provincial cities exposed themselves to the enemy. In the countryside, fifteen absolutely concentrated NPA companies were rapidly formed from 1983–85. Fifty percent of the Red fighters were absorbed by the main regional guerrilla units (companies) and another large percentage were absorbed by secondary regional guerrilla units (usually platoons). These left a very few squads doing mass work, especially because they were converted into supply units of the main units. By 1984, the prematurely formed companies in absolute concentration had been put in a passive and isolated position both by the self-imposed drastic shrinkage of the mass base and the intensified strategic and tactical offensives by the enemy. Most of the time, these companies were preoccupied with logistical problems and were vulnerable to enemy attacks.
As a result of precision raids by the enemy on the urban underground and the military defeats of the absolutely concentrated NPA companies, the “Left” opportunists explained away the setbacks as the work of deep penetration agents. Thus, hysteria set in and led to the Ahos campaign in 1985. This bloody witchhunt was approved by the 1985 Executive Committee of the Mindanao Commission and was carried out by the so-called caretaker committee. It allowed the torture and execution of suspects without sufficient evidence. It victimized hundreds upon hundreds of Party members, Red fighters, mass activists and allies. At no time had the enemy killed as many CPP members, NPA fighters, mass activists and allies in so short a time and demoralized so many others. Party membership in Mindanao dropped from 9000 to 3000, the mass base decreased by more than 50 percent and the armed strength of the people’s army fell from 15 companies and 30 platoons to two companies and 17 platoons.
There were definitely some deep penetration agents because of the loose recruitment policy along the wrong line of combining armed urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. But Ahos campaign was not the way to pinpoint them. On the other hand, it was the way for the real enemy agents to cause further destruction and to conceal themselves. Above all, the Party cannot permit the violation of the basic rights of Party members and Red fighters as set forth by the Party Constitution and the Rules of the New People’s Army as well as the basic democratic rights of the people guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the Rules for Establishing the People’s Government.
In 1984, the first national military conference was held by the national military staff of the NPA. It adopted the line of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, which was already resulting in gross setbacks in Mindanao. The line was pushed chiefly by the chief of staff who had just been promoted from his position as NPA commander in Mindanao on the basis of the false reputation of having achieved great military victories. The Executive Committee and Military Commission uncritically approved the results of the military conference.
The NPA chief of staff and the members of the Executive Committee of the Mindanao Commission who were at the same time members of the Central Committee withheld from the 1985 Central Committee Plenum information about their erroneous line, the gross setbacks in 1984 and the Ahos campaign. They misrepresented themselves as cadres of a successful line and arrogantly demanded the withdrawal of the strategic line of protracted people’s war in favor of the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. The Central Committee repulsed the demand by invoking the fact that the strategic line of people’s war was still in the Constitution and Program of the Party but failed to withdraw and correct the line of “strategic counteroffensive” which fathered the disastrous “Left” opportunist line in Mindanao. Instead, the Plenum put forward a three-year program of “developing/making” the NPA “as a regular army”, building the factors of regular mobile warfare, maximizing the advantages of guerrilla warfare and “intensifying the war” towards the “strategic counteroffensive”. In effect, the strategic line of protracted people’s war was discarded, despite lip service to it.
In the absence of a factual assessment and correct evaluation of the situation in Mindanao, the highest officials of the Executive Committee of the 1985 Mindanao Commission kept their high positions and were promoted to higher positions of central leadership (Political Bureau, Executive Committee and Military Commission). Thus they gained the position which enabled them to further push their erroneous and disastrous line on a nationwide scale, especially because they bandied about their line as exceedingly successful in Mindanao. Their obsession was to create 36 absolutely concentrated companies and several battalions throughout the country by 1987. In July-August 1987, the NPA general command bypassed the territorial Party committees and ordered a so-called nationally coordinated offensive. It consisted of 600 big and small attacks on enemy hard points and wasted ammunition and other resources.
From 1986 to as late as 1990, one regional Party organization after another was pushed to adopt a variant of insurrectionism or putschism. In the formation of the premature and unsustainable larger military formations, the mass base drastically shrank and the situation became purely military as the enemy launched brigade-size offensives and at the same time fielded “special operations teams” (SOTs) to conduct psy-war and intelligence operations in the guerrilla fronts. The enemy could effectively carry out its war of quick decision and gradual constriction because in the first place the “Left” opportunist line had played into his hands. The gross error of the “Left” opportunists can be seen in the fact that they had reduced the number of squads and armed propaganda teams doing mass work and therefore reduced the mass base as the area of maneuver for the people’s army, while the enemy was the one fielding “special operations teams” in order to create his “mass base” with the help of the local reactionary government, local police, paramilitary forces and religious fanatical cults. Since 1984, the enemy had been deploying brigades to concentrate on areas known as bastions of the NPA, to try to “clear and hold” and then to “consolidate and develop” them through small-unit operations. But the enemy left unattended far larger areas of the country and has never achieved control without gaps over any guerrilla front.
The loss of mass base meant the loss of political and material support of the masses for the people’s army as well as the loss of capability to collect taxes from the relatively enlightened sections of the exploiting classes. The resulting loss of self-reliance strengthened the notion among the “Left” opportunists that the revolutionary movement could be supported by gangster activities in the urban areas and by foreign military and financial assistance. While still the NPA commander in Mindanao up to 1984, the 1984–91 head of the NPA national military staff conducted gangster activities, combining NPA armed city partisans with elements of criminal syndicates to carry out robbery hold-ups and kidnap-for-ransom. These were not authorized by the Party at the appropriate level. He spread the wrong notion that the people’s army had a separate machinery from the Party. He also considered foreign military assistance as the factor that would decide the fate of the revolutionary movement and that without such assistance, the revolutionary movement would suffer stagnation or retrogression.
From 1984 onward, the national military staff (later called “general command”) of the people’s army based itself in Manila in accordance with the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. The head of the national military staff preoccupied himself with so-called special operations, including gangster activities in Manila and other urban areas in the country, and seeking foreign military and financial assistance. After the overthrow of Marcos in 1986, he further justified his basing in Metro Manila by claiming to be ever on the alert for “a sudden turn of events” for “seizing opportunities” towards urban insurrection. In fact, he was overseeing and participating in gangster activities and in corruption at the customs bureau of the reactionary government. He sought to separate the people’s army from the absolute leadership of the Party and pretended to command the units of the people’s army all over the country by radio transmissions from Manila. Later, he escalated gangster activities independently or in collaboration with certain elements in the Manila-Rizal Party committee and the Visayas Commission.
By 1985, there was already a conspicuous degree of ideological degeneration among some members of the Central Committee. This was the result of the sheer disappearance of Marxist-Leninist study courses and reading materials, the rampancy of eclecticism, the depreciation of Mao Zedong Thought, the baseless questioning of the Marxist-Leninist analysis of Philippine society, the underrating of the Philippine revolutionary experience in people’s war and the propagation of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. Elements who never seriously studied and applied Mao Zedong Thought rated the examples of movements for decolonization and against despotic rule higher than the accomplished two-stage Chinese revolution and the already rich experience of the new-democratic revolution with a socialist perspective in the Philippines.
The line of seeking foreign military and financial assistance from the Soviet party and its allied parties had been pushed since 1982. It had a “Left” opportunist objective of accelerating the victory of the Philippine armed revolution through the importation of heavy military weapons. But in fact it had a Rightist content as it meant deviating from the antirevisionist line of the Party. As early as 1984, the “general command” of the NPA was already dispatching couriers to contact pro-Soviet parties abroad to seek military and financial assistance without full information given to the Executive Committee of the Central Committee.
In 1985, a proposal was made at the 9th Plenum of the Central Committee to consider the Soviet Union a socialist country. But the Central Committee decided to subject the proposal to further study. However, there was already a paper of the International Liaison Department as well as a study commissioned by the central leadership picturing the Soviet Union as a socialist and no longer a social-imperialist country and the Soviet party as a Marxist-Leninist, no longer a revisionist party. The Brezhnev ruling clique was hailed as a champion of proletarian internationalism. It was praised for achieving military parity with the United States and for giving assistance to national liberation movements and third world countries.
The “Left” opportunists who pushed the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism at the central and regional levels of the Party based themselves in the urban areas, notwithstanding the development of consolidated and stable guerrilla base areas and their proclaimed desire to build companies and battalions. The urban-basing is a clear manifestation of the greater value given to urban insurrectionism; it was the clearest point of departure for violating the strategic line of protracted people’s war. If the “Left” opportunists had been more interested in building larger military formations, even if premature, than in wishing for an armed urban insurrection, they would have positioned themselves in the countryside rather than in the cities.
While the revolutionary forces in Mindanao suffered gross setbacks between 1984 and 1986, those in Luzon, (especially Northern Luzon) and the Visayas regions continued to make advances in the revolutionary armed struggle until 1987 and made up to a great extent for the big losses in Mindanao. However, the overall rate of growth for the entire movement declined from 1984 to 1987. As a result of the nationwide promotion of the “Left” opportunist line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, the revolutionary forces registered overall negative growth from 1987 to 1990. Relative to 1986, Party membership declined by 15 percent, the number of barrios covered by local organs of political power by 16 percent and, worst of all, the membership in rural mass organizations by 60 percent as a result of both errors and enemy action. The rifle strength of the NPA continued to grow but the rate of growth dropped to that of 1976–78. Cadres at the provincial, front and district levels were lost. A large percentage of the consolidated barrios were also lost.
From 1986 onward, one interregional or regional Party committees after another was pushed to build absolutely concentrated companies and adopt some insurrectionist and putschist plan. But most of the interregional commissions and regional Party committees and army commands eventually complained of the unreasonable targets imposed on them by the “Left” opportunists with regard to the formation of NPA companies and launching of offensives. Some of them were forced by circumstances to make adjustments in the years 1988–91. As late as 1987, the Political Bureau endorsed the rapid increase of absolutely concentrated companies and considered peasant uprisings within two years as the way to advance the peasant movement. In 1988, however, the central leadership noticed the decline of the mass base and heeded the demands of certain regions to allow them to redeploy the Red fighters and pay attention to mass work. Thus, it had a strong basis for starting to criticize the imbalances in revolutionary work and call for painstaking mass work and solid mass organizing.
The 1988 Party anniversary statement, which briefly summed up the 20-year history of the Party, criticized the imbalances in revolutionary work. In 1989, conferences on mass work were held at regional and interregional levels and a large portion of the NPA forces were redeployed for mass work, especially for recovery and expansion. The 1989 Party anniversary statement called for rectification, the further strengthening of the Party and the intensification of the people’s revolutionary struggle. Like that of 1989, the 1990 Party anniversary statement clearly identified and criticized the errors of “regularization” and verticalization of the forces at the expense of developing the horizontal forces in stages and called for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and ever deepening mass base. The struggle between the proletarian revolutionary line and the bourgeois opportunist line intensified within the central organs of the Party. The “Left” and Right opportunists tried and succeeded in certain regions to block the documents of the central leadership which carried the correct line.
In 1990, the Political Bureau nullified the erroneous concept of “strategic counteroffensive” and put a stop to its implementation; but inconsistently it approved the results of the National Military Command Conference due to pressures by the “Left” opportunists. The trend in 1990 and 1991, however, was for the proletarian revolutionaries to defeat the wrong line and unscrupulous maneuvers of the “Left” opportunists. The Military Commission of the Central Committee and the Political Department of the NPA , in cognizance of the problems confronting the people’s army, moved to hold the First National Conference on the Political Work of the New People’s Army in March-April 1991, which basically adhered to the proletarian revolutionary line. In 1990 and 1991, the rapid narrowing of many guerrilla fronts was stopped. The people’s army was further redeployed for mass work. There was a significant recovery of the mass base.
By the middle of 1991, the “Left” opportunist line was basically defeated at the level of the central leadership on the basis of the incontrovertible facts about its disastrous character and results and as a consequence of the assertion of the proletarian revolutionary line. But defeating the “Left” opportunist line also involved defeating the Right opportunist line in 1990 and 1991 because the most persistent and most malicious elements pushed the Right opportunist line of class collaboration, reformism and capitulationism for the avowed purpose of reaching the “Left” opportunist goal of armed urban insurrection irrespective of or even without the development of the people’s war.
The questioning and denial, since 1968, of the character of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal society in chronic crisis gave rise not only to the “Left” opportunist line of urban insurrection and military adventurism but also to the Right opportunist line of “regularization”, “strategic counteroffensive”, reformism, capitulationism and liquidationism. Some of the chief opportunists could flip-flop from one type of opportunist position to another or make schemes which metaphysically combine the two, usually pushing a Right opportunist line in practice and at the same time wishing for an armed urban insurrection at the expense of the revolutionary mass movement in both urban and rural areas.
In common with the “Left” opportunists, the Right opportunists gave the utmost importance to urban legal struggles and to urban-basing. They considered urban-based legal struggles — not the revolutionary armed struggle — as the principal form of revolutionary struggle. As early as 1978–79, one group of Right opportunists in the Manila-Rizal Party organization provoked a struggle with the central leadership by insisting on the participation of the Communist Party of the Philippines in the farcical elections held by the U.S.-Marcos regime.
The debate was erroneously formulated as one of choosing between participation and boycott. The central leadership failed to resolve the debate at a level of principle higher than the boycott-participation dichotomy which certain elements in the Manila-Rizal Party committee wanted to dictate. The Party could have declared the 1978 elections as a farce and still allowed the legal progressive forces to use the elections as an opportunity to expose and oppose the fascist dictatorship. Disciplinary measures were meted out to the elements in the Manila-Rizal Party organization who generated struggle mania and ultrademocratic actions and made physical threats.
These elements disrupted the Manila-Rizal Party organization. After the disciplinary actions were taken against these unruly elements, another group of Right opportunists in charge of the urban mass movement and the united front was able to seize the opportunity to push its own Rightist line in the national capital region (NCR). They strengthened their position by their access to Western bourgeois and religious funding agencies and by using these funds to create urban-based offices and promote the line that sheer urban legal struggle and building urban institutions and coalitions could advance the revolution.
The Plenum of the Central Committee in 1980 encouraged the exponents of “Left” and Right opportunism to espouse urban insurrectionism and parliamentarism, respectively, by allowing both opportunists to spread doubts about the strategic line of people’s war. The Politburo meeting in 1981 went further in favoring both types of opportunism. The “Left” opportunists were allowed to lump together and reject both liberal democrats (petty-bourgeois) and the anti-Marcos reactionaries (big comprador-landlord politicians) as “bourgeois reformists” along the line of monopolizing victory in the antifascist struggle, which was anticipated as forthcoming. At the same time, the Right opportunists were allowed to spread their own notion of “broad legal alliances” which aimed at playing down the revolutionary forces and tailing after the anti-Marcos reactionaries.
In 1981, the Right opportunists were already proposing the replacement of the vanguard proletarian party with a “vanguard front” called the New Katipunan. But the Party repulsed this blatantly liquidationist proposal. At any rate, the Right opportunists proceeded to realize their concept of “broad legal alliance”, which meant denying or concealing the role of the Party in the antifascist struggle, kowtowing to and carrying the sedan chair for the anti-Marcos reactionaries and diluting the national democratic program. They preoccupied themselves with high level meetings and sweeping propaganda calls. They drew cadres from the countryside to the cities and recruited those whom they called “national democrats” to staff their offices.
The Right opportunist line ran so deep that “national democrats” (those who accepted the general line of the new-democratic revolution) from the ranks of the mass activist were enrolled into the Party without any Marxist-Leninist education and that only a few of these recruits were sent from the cities to the countryside. Party recruitment and education were sparsely undertaken in the course of the flow of the legal democratic movement in the period 1983–86 which occurred due to the long pent-up popular hatred against the fascist dictatorship and the sustained public outrage at the Aquino assassination. Instead, cadres were attracted and drawn from the countryside to the cities and from work at the grassroots level in both urban and rural areas to higher levels, without replenishment at the grassroots level.
Following the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, there were recriminations within the Party over the boycott policy taken by the central leadership, particularly the Executive Committee of the Central Committee in the 1986 snap presidential elections. The Political Bureau decided that the boycott policy was a major tactical error and the Party chairman was compelled to resign. But the Right opportunists continued to insist that the error was a strategic one that occurred due to the commitment of the Party to the strategic line of people’s war and not due to a “Left” opportunist and sectarian illusion that the Party could win victory through a boycott. In collaboration with anti-Party pseudoprogressive petty-bourgeois groups, they insisted that the Party should de-emphasize or stop the revolutionary armed struggle as the main form of struggle and emphasize the legal forms of struggle in the new situation in order to be in a better position to gain power sooner through elections or insurrection.
Among those who also took this line were the “Left” opportunists who had committed grave errors resulting in the 1984–86 disaster in Mindanao. They overstated the boycott error as the biggest error in the entire history of the Party in order to conceal their far greater errors and crimes in Mindanao. They even went to the extent of saying that the Party could have seized or taken a major share of political power had it been prepared for the Edsa uprising and had it not been obsessed with the strategic line of people’s war. Subsequently, from 1986 onward, they used the Edsa uprising as an argument for both parliamentarism and urban insurrectionism and as a possible model for effecting social revolution.
They failed to understand the Edsa uprising as merely an anti-authoritarian uprising and not a social revolution. It was a phenomenon whose course and outcome were chiefly determined by the U.S. and the reactionary forces even as the forces of the Left and the spontaneous masses hated the tyrant and participated in his overthrow. The proletarian revolutionaries put forward Philippine Crisis and Revolution and Continuing Struggle in the Philippines to expose the counterrevolutionary character and weaknesses of the U.S.-Aquino ruling clique and to clarify the line of the revolutionary struggle amidst the confusion whipped up by the “Left” and Right opportunists. The Party study course on Lenin was also put forward to counter the opportunists and was combined with the study of the people’s war in China. But this was sporadically undertaken and was not followed up by a more comprehensive and thoroughgoing campaign of Marxist-Leninist education.
From 1986 onward, the Right opportunists who advocated parliamentarism pure and simple as well as those who combined parliamentarism with urban insurrectionism collaborated with the promoters of anticommunist petty bourgeois currents outside the Party, such as the Christian-democrats, bourgeois populists, the pro-imperialist liberals, the old-type revisionists and the Trotskyite petty-bourgeois socialists in caricaturing and attacking the Party’s strategy of people’s war. By 1988, the Right opportunists began to openly adopt Gorbachovite revisionism and to babble about the “marginalization of the class struggle” and the need to get rid of working class leadership and the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism to achieve “openness” and “democracy”.
It was from 1986 onward that the limits of peace talks with the enemy, electoral politics, parliamentary struggle and foreign-funded NGOs became clearly demonstrated as the pseudoprogressive petty-bourgeois groups remained marginal and inconsequential and became no more than tails of the big comprador-landlord politicians. But the Right opportunists became more aggressive from year to year in pushing their reformist, pacifist and capitulationist line and in attempting to undermine the legal democratic movement. By 1988, it was clear that they had already sabotaged the legal mass movement in conjunction with the exponents of urban insurrectionism with whom they collaborated in drawing away personnel and resources from solid organizing among the basic masses and from Marxist-Leninist education.
The legal democratic movement peaked in 1986 and began to slow down in 1987, especially among the workers, peasants, fishermen, urban poor, women and teachers. The Right opportunists specialized in misdirecting personnel and resources towards building foreign-funded institutions and coalitions out of the same pool of legal organizations and steering them towards parliamentarism and reformism. The most talented youth were also influenced to veer away from the mass movement. At the same time, the “Left” opportunists in the urban areas departed from solid mass organizing and concentrated on forming small groups of armed city partisans and ordering these to go into indiscriminate killings that provoked the enemy to assassinate mass activists and suppress the most militant mass organizations, especially in urban poor communities in 1987 and 1988.
However, from 1988 onward, upon the increasing frustration and bankruptcy of the “Left” opportunist line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, a conspiratorial, factionalist and splittist bloc of Right and “Left” opportunists increasingly promoted Gorbachov’s revisionist line in certain central staff organs, certain regions and Party groups within certain institutions.
In 1990, the Right opportunists tried to usurp the authority of the central leadership and sought to liquidate the Party and the revolutionary movement through a series of maneuvers. They tried to do away with the Executive Committee of the Political Bureau as the daily collective leading organ of the Party. They sought to replace the Party as the center of the revolution with the NDF. At the same time, they tried to change the NDF program from one of new-democratic revolution into one of bourgeois nationalism, pluralism and mixed economy; and convert the NDF from a united front or alliance into a mix-up of member-organizations and individual members.
They peddled the concept of the “anti-imperialist democratic front” which meant combining the Left, Middle and Right against the U.S.-Aquino regime. They pushed the line of going Right supposedly in order to reach the goal of urban insurrection (medium-term plan) and promoted the line of capitulation and pacifism on the question of peace. They also tried hard to entrap the legal progressive forces into the capitulationist framework of the “multisectoral peace advocates” and people’s caucus and convert them into a “third force” between the revolutionary movement and the reactionary government. They tried to remove the Central Committee as publisher of Ang Bayan and used a number of issues to espouse the Right and “Left” opportunist lines and actions and to hail Gorbachov as “a communist renewing socialism” even as he was already unmasking himself as an anticommunist completely restoring capitalism.
Within the organs of the central leadership, the proletarian revolutionaries struggled against the ideas of the “Left” and Right opportunists who tended to support each other. From year to year on one major issue to another since 1988, the opportunists were beaten through reasoning on the basis of the facts of the disastrous results of their erroneous ideas. In 1990, they took advantage of the dislocation and difficulties of the central leadership due to enemy pressure and tried to go on a rampage of usurping authority and promoting their counterrevolutionary Rightist line. But in 1991, they were basically repulsed and beaten. Towards the end of 1991, the chief advocate of parliamentarism and urban insurrection prepared four long letters addressed to the general membership attacking the central leadership which by then was securely in the hands of the proletarian revolutionaries. The central leadership undertook a series of decisions to assert the proletarian revolutionary line and resolved to launch a comprehensive and thoroughgoing rectification movement in the Party.
In reaction to the rectification movement, the ringleaders of the “Left” and Right opportunists have thoroughly exposed themselves as a counterrevolutionary Rightist group, using anticommunist, anti-Stalin slogans and serving as special psy-war and intelligence agents of the U.S.-Ramos regime after trying in vain to decapitate, discredit, disintegrate and destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement through factional, splittist and wrecking activities. The most vicious counterrevolutionary Rightists who attack the rectification movement include those who have committed not only serious ideological, political and organizational errors but also serious criminal offenses against the Party and the people. They have thoroughly exposed themselves and are now the target of criticism and repudiation by the Party rank and file.
Despite the serious deviations and errors committed by the “Left” and Right opportunists for a long time without prompt correction and which are only now being comprehensively and thoroughly rectified, the all-round strength of the Party and the revolutionary movement remains formidable and in varying respects is equal to the level of 1983 or 1984. The Party has several tens of thousands of members both in rural and urban areas and is deeply rooted among the toiling masses of workers and peasants. There are millions of people in the armed revolutionary movement and the legal democratic movement under the leadership of the Party. Most of these people are covered by the organs of political power both in rural and urban areas. They are in the mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, women, professionals and other people. There are the Party branches in factories, farms, schools and communities and the Party groups in institutions and mass organization.
The New People’s Army is under the absolute leadership of the Party. The strength of the people’s army includes several thousands of full-time Red fighters, with automatic rifles and other high-powered weapons. These weapons are nearly 100 percent seized from the enemy through tactical offensives. The Red fighters are augmented by part-time guerrilla squads, the militia and self-defense units. The Party is at the core of and leads the organs of political power and the rural-based mass organizations. The Party also leads the united front. This encompasses the organs of political power, the National Democratic Front and legal alliances based on class and sectoral interests and major national issues.
A comparison between the period of 1968–77 and the subsequent period of 1978–91 shows that in the former period deviations, errors and shortcomings were promptly and thoroughly criticized and repudiated in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought; while in the latter period the most serious deviations and errors arose, accumulated and hardened within central leading and staff organs without being promptly criticized and rectified, thus increasingly undermining and violating the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Subjectivism and opportunism ran rampant within the Party as a result of the slackening of ideological vigilance and militancy along the proletarian revolutionary line.
At the root of all the ideological, political and organizational deviations, errors and shortcomings within the Party was the diminution and in certain areas even disappearance of the study and conscious application of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. When the ideological line is not correctly and clearly defined and followed, then all kinds of deviations, errors and shortcomings can thrive. Preoccupation with practical work from day to day, without the guidance of theory leads to unhealthy currents, degeneration and grave losses.
At the end of 1991, the proletarian revolutionary cadres and the entire Party membership recognized the urgent need for a comprehensive and thoroughgoing rectification movement. The first and main rectification document, Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors was drafted and together with other rectification documents was processed by the Executive Committee, the Political Bureau and the Central Committee, one after the other in 1992. It is based on scores of major documents and hundreds of other documents over a period of several years, reflecting the democratic interaction of the central leadership with lower Party organs and organizations through direct investigations, consultations, reports and minutes of conferences and meetings at various levels of the Party.
The most important task in the rectification movement is theoretical education in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The rectification movement is mainly and essentially an education movement. After a long period of neglecting theoretical education, the Party is compelled to make a new start in accordance with the principle that there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. But this time, the Party is endowed with a far greater amount of revolutionary experience, both positive and negative, than that which the proletarian revolutionaries had in 1967 to 1969, during the first great rectification movement. There is also far greater confidence because there is now a far greater number of Party cadres and members and they are determined to overcome the deviations, errors and shortcomings.
In this education movement, the most important study materials are Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors, the supporting document, General Review of Important Events and Decisions from 1980 to 1991 and Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism. The first two documents focus on deviations, errors and shortcomings in the Philippine revolutionary struggle and the third document deals with the revisionist deviation, explains the phenomenon of modern revisionism and capitalist restoration, firms up the resolve to achieve the national-democratic and socialist stages of the Philippine revolution, combats the ideological offensive of the imperialists and their anticommunist petty-bourgeois camp followers and points to the bright socialist and communist future of mankind.
Even as these documents are the result of the study and analysis of accomplished facts and are based on democratic discussions within the Party, these are open and subject to the endless dialectical process of study and practice. So, the lower Party organs and organizations are being encouraged to further sum up and analyze their experience in the light of these documents, drawn by the central leadership in the exercise of its duty to provide ideological and political leadership to the entire Party organization and the revolutionary movement. In giving life to the principle of democratic centralism, the Party follows the dictum of Mao Zedong Thought, “from the masses to the masses” of the Party membership through the appropriate organs and units of the Party.
In view of the prolonged period in which theoretical education has been diminished or neglected in the entire Party, there is currently the drive to reproduce the classic works of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and basic Party documents along the proletarian revolutionary line within the Party, promote immediately the reading and study of these by all Party collectives and to undertake a three-level program of study: basic, intermediate and advance. In the past, there was either a scarcity or complete lack of these Marxist-Leninist study materials. At the same time, where and when there were some studies, these were sporadic and either incomplete or lopsided. To correct such a situation, the cadres in charge of education are instructed to push the three-level program of study.
The basic Party course seeks to instill the spirit of serving the people, self-sacrifice, combating liberalism and proletarian internationalism and to provide an initial understanding of dialectical and historical materialism, a comprehensive grasp of Philippine history, the basic problems of Philippine society, the new-democratic revolution and the current rectification movement.
The intermediate Party course seeks to develop the ability of the Party cadres and members to analyze their own experience and the experience of their particular collectives and the entire Party organization in actual revolutionary struggle — in Party building, army building and united-front building, economic work and cultural work, in the light of the basic central and regional documents of rectification and, above all, in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Comparative studies are also made within the framework of the national revolutionary struggle and of the world proletarian revolution, in accordance with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The main thrust is to study the experience of the Party and the essential and relevant works of Comrade Mao Zedong.
The advance Party course seeks to provide a thoroughgoing, comprehensive and deepgoing understanding of the three stages of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought in materialist philosophy, in the critique of capitalism and revisionism, in the grasp of socialist political economy, and the strategy and tactics of the proletariat in the new-democratic and socialist stages of the revolution and in continuing the revolution under proletarian dictatorship in socialist society until communism can arise. The objective of the advance Party course is to create a corps of senior and middle-level cadres capable of leading the Philippine revolution now and in the long future.
Theoretical education in the CPP is not formalistic. It is integrated with the concrete practice of the Philippine revolution. There is a wealth of experience and an accumulation of problems to solve in the ongoing revolutionary practice of the Party cadres and members. The living study of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought is most intense when confronting the long unrectified and deepgoing deviations and errors of the past and the current serious problems. The rectification movement is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the Party cannot overcome the long-accumulated problems and the drive of the imperialists and the petty-bourgeois anticommunists to destroy it through ideological and psychological warfare in combination with the most brutal military means.
The current circumstances for pushing Marxist-Leninist theoretical education are exceedingly favorable. Firstly, the subjectivist and opportunist currents that have been pushed by unremoulded petty-bourgeois elements within the Party have been frustrated in actual revolutionary practice and have been basically defeated by the central leadership through its basic rectification documents and by the entire Party membership through further study and analysis of their experience. Secondly, the disintegration and collapse of the revisionist ruling parties have in a big way cleared the way for the advance of the proletarian revolutionary cadres who are armed with Mao Zedong Thought. Thirdly, the crisis of the world capitalist system is rapidly worsening and the imperialists and their retinue of petty-bourgeois anticommunists are now embarrassed by their own triumphalist propaganda about their “victory over socialism”. Their straw-figure socialism is in fact modern revisionism and bureaucrat capitalism masquerading as socialism.
The old and new Filipino revisionists (Gorbachovites), bourgeois populists, liberals and neoliberals, the petty-bourgeois socialists, Christian-democrats, social-democrats, Trotskyites, insurrectionists and militarists who have hitched a ride on the anticommunist ideological and political offensive of the imperialists and who have separately and jointly mocked at Marxism-Leninism and at the CPP have dramatically exposed themselves as a small band of anticommunist counterrevolutionaries by their own proclamations and actions. They draw their slogans from the antiquated arsenal of the Cold War by declaring themselves as an anti-Stalinist alliance and by acting directly and indirectly in collaboration with and in support of the U.S.-Ramos regime.
Since the late 1970s, the most blatant attack on the line of the CPP has been on its analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal. It took the form of ceaseless questioning without respect for the facts. This was followed by the proposal to change the strategy and tactics of the new-democratic revolution, especially in the sphere of armed struggle, under the guise of innovating on, refining and adjusting strategy and tactics. Thus, the “Left” opportunist line of “regularization” and “strategic counteroffensive” as well as of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism; and the Right opportunist line of liquidationism, reformism, capitulationism and pacifism were pushed.
By way of rectification in the field of political education, such works as Philippine Society and Revolution, Specific Characteristics of People’s War in the Philippines, Our Urgent Tasks, On the Mode of Production in the Philippines, Philippine Crisis and Revolution, Continuing Struggle in the Philippines are being put forward as study materials concerning the character of Philippine society, the character of the ongoing stage of the Philippine revolution, the motive forces, the targets, the tasks, the socialist perspective of the Philippine revolution.
To rectify the grave error of militarism, there is now a wide recognition of the need to develop extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare with a widening and deepening mass base in the entire stage of the strategic defensive of the people’s war. There is now a clear recognition that the drive to form NPA companies and battalions interfered with and prevented the full development of platoon-size forces and operations and the multiplication and consolidation of the guerrilla fronts; unduly lessened the number of guerrilla squads and armed propaganda units as the horizontal forces for mass work and the sustainable guerrilla platoons and companies as centers of gravity of guerrilla fronts and regions, respectively; shallowed and narrowed the mass base; and resulted in intolerable logistical burden on the masses because of the top-heavy structure of the NPA.
Thus, a major point in the rectification movement is the redeployment of the forces of the NPA. The main thrust is to have only 25 to 30 percent of NPA personnel in platoons and companies serving as centers of gravity (rallying points and strike forces) from the level of the guerrilla fronts upward; and 70 to 75 percent of the personnel serving in local guerrilla squads, subdivisible into armed propaganda teams for mass work under favorable conditions (where enemy forces are not concentrated). The NPA retains the capacity to launch offensives involving various sizes (small teams, squads, platoons, companies and upward) according to the level of development and concrete circumstances.
Even the centers of gravity are to be in relative concentration when not in an offensive mode, so that they can also participate in mass work and other nonmilitary work. The center of gravity goes for absolute concentration only when conducting tactical offensives, politico-military training, security duty, tax enforcement, and other similar operations. A big number of guerrilla squads are now deliberately spread out in order to expand and consolidate the existing guerrilla fronts, recover lost ground and open and develop new areas of work. At the same time, these guerrilla squads can be drawn in like a net by the center of gravity to muster the superior strength for annihilating or disarming an enemy target.
The drive to prematurely build NPA companies and battalions in violation of the line of extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare has resulted in gross setbacks. There is therefore a return to the period before the full development of platoon-size forces and operations and multiplication and consolidation of the guerrilla fronts was aborted. It is wrong to form prematurely larger units, fight in the way that the enemy wants us to fight and thus play into his hands. Thus, the line of “strategic counteroffensive” and “regularization” and its worst application in the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism have been criticized and repudiated.
There is no mystery about the apparent success of the enemy with its offensive strategy or war of quick decision and its tactics of gradual constriction. Due to his far superior military forces, it suits him to deploy brigades in order to concentrate on a guerrilla front or a province and then tries to convert his strategic advantage into tactical advantage by using special operations teams for intelligence and psywar purposes and also well-informed and well-armed platoons, companies and battalions for specific offensive operations. He can be successful only if in the first place the NPA forces in his target area have given up the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare that is widely and deeply based among the people in a protracted people’s war. The copy-cat special operations teams can be successful only insofar as the NPA has previously given up mass work and the expansion and consolidation of the mass base.
Through correct redeployment and mass work, the NPA can go back to the strategy and tactics which yielded the most weapons by launching only those offensives that can be won. It can disarm the paramilitary forces and the local police and wipe out small units of the regular enemy forces. It can evade the superior enemy forces that it cannot yet defeat. Instead of trying to hit the large forces or hard points of the enemy, it can wait for in ambush or lure in the small part of the enemy force that it can beat. The NPA can defeat the reactionary armed forces only piece by piece and thereby accumulate strength over time.
The CPP’s revolutionary experience has proven again and again that people’s war cannot be developed without the full and widespread realization of the minimum land reform program, consisting of rent reduction, elimination of usury, raising of farm wages, restitution of grabbed land, improving prices of farm products, increasing agricultural production and promotion of sideline occupations, and rudimentary cooperation through exchange of labor, work animals and tools. Land reform is undertaken along the antifeudal line, with the proletarian cadres relying mainly on the poor and lower middle peasants and farm workers winning over the middle peasants, neutralizing the rich peasants and taking advantage of the splits between the enlightened and despotic landlords in order to isolate and destroy the power of the latter. The antifeudal line is within the framework of the entire new-democratic revolution.
It is worthwhile to review and improve the Revolutionary Guide to Land Reform on the basis of the rich experience in the antifeudal struggle. The main content of the new-democratic revolution is the solution of the land problem, up to the confiscation of landlord property and free distribution of land in the maximum land reform program. But this program is best carried out after the realization of the minimum land reform program on so wide a scale that the potentially unified landlord class and the enemy troops can no longer effectively counter the confiscation of land with the massacre of the peasant leaders and masses. Undoubtedly the best time to carry out the maximum land reform program is when the enemy is defeated over extensive liberated areas or when the entire country is already liberated.
Without a comprehensively organized mass base, the Party and the people’s army cannot thrive and advance. Thus, the organs of political power are necessarily set up. These are supported by the mass organizations of workers, peasants, women, youth, cultural activists and children. From these organizations, working committees to assist the organs of political power are created and put in charge of public education, mass organizing, self-defense, land reform, production, finance, health, cultural activities, arbitration and so on. Where there is a strong mass base, there can be a strong Party and deep reserves for the people’s army through such augmentative forces as the self-defense units, militia and local guerrilla forces.
There is dual political power in the Philippines today. One is the revolutionary government in the guerrilla fronts. And the other is the reactionary government still entrenched in the cities. The revolutionary government can be expanded and consolidated only through the integral factors of revolutionary armed struggle, land reform and mass base-building. If the Party gives up any of these factors, the revolutionary movement begins to shrink and fail. When the territory of the revolutionary government grows, that of the reactionary government shrinks.
To prevent such phenomena as Ahos campaign and other instances of anti-informer hysteria from recurring, the system of law and justice in the revolutionary movement is being developed, with the proper legal and judicial code and trained personnel to apply these. Since the beginning, the Party and the revolutionary movement have been committed to the development of a democratic system of law and justice. There is an accumulation of decisions and rules pertaining to these. Since 1972, the Rules for Establishing the People’s Revolutionary Government has laid down a bill of rights which guarantees the civil and political rights of the people.
There is a crying need for proletarian revolutionary cadres in the countryside because for a long period of time, there was a reverse flow of Party cadres and members (especially experienced ones) from the rural areas to the urban areas, propelled by the “Left” opportunist line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism and by the Right opportunist line of reformism and parliamentarism. The Party is once more stressing the importance of revolutionary work in the countryside because it is here where the armed strength is accumulated and developed to overthrow the ruling system and because the guerrilla fronts are in dire need of certain competent personnel that only the cities can provide.
The urban-basing and repeated arrests in 1988 to 1991 of the former NPA “general command” in Metro Manila and certain regional commands are negative examples for the entire Party and the people’s army. The rectification movement repudiates the previous practice of the “general command” and some regional army commands to base themselves in urban areas under such pretexts as operating radios, computers and other high-tech equipment, leading both the rural-based people’s army and armed city partisans or waiting for a sudden turn of events in the urban areas. Certainly so-called special operations, which in fact deteriorated into gangsterism, is an impermissible reason for urban basing. The eventual control of town and provincial centers shall be the result of the wave-upon-wave advance of the revolutionary forces.
There is the Party organization that properly belongs to the urban areas. From the underground, it leads the legal democratic mass movement, which has a defensive character. The entire Party is repudiating the previous error of being carried away by the “Left” opportunist illusion which regards armed city partisan warfare and armed urban insurrections as the decisive factor for advancing or winning the revolution or by the Right opportunist illusion which regards reformism and parliamentarism or any combination of Right and “Left” opportunism or by a flip-flop from one to the other as likewise the decisive factor for advancing or winning the revolution. Any muddleheadedness in this regard is impermissible because it has proven to be very costly.
For a considerable period of time, the legal democratic mass movement will play an important role in the development of the revolutionary armed struggle but it shall be a role secondary to the revolutionary armed struggle being carried out in the countryside. It means that the legal democratic forces in the urban areas cannot by themselves overthrow or radically transform the ruling system even if on certain occasions the unarmed uprising of the people as in 1986 is capable of causing the downfall of one reactionary ruling clique and replacing it with another reactionary ruling clique. In a country like the Philippines, it takes more than an armed or unarmed urban uprising to defeat the entire reactionary armed forces, bring down the entire ruling system and make social revolution. Through the process of protracted people’s war, the revolutionary forces develop the strength not only to overthrow the entire ruling system but also to basically complete the new-democratic revolution and start the socialist revolution.
The pull of both the “Left” opportunist line of urban insurrectionism and the Right opportunist line of reformism on Party cadres and members to stick to the urban areas even when they can no longer operate effectively in the urban areas have wrought serious damage to the urban-based Party underground and legal democratic mass movement as well as to the armed revolutionary movement in the countryside. The Party is systematically dispatching Party cadres and members and revolutionary activists to the countryside in order to help raise the level of revolutionary work in the countryside and not only to put into relatively safer conditions in the countryside those who can no longer work effectively in the urban areas. There is a lot of catching up to do in dispatching fresh revolutionary cadres and activists to the countryside in order to respond to the crying need for them there.
There are certain anticommunist elements who wish to induce the Party to take the road of counterrevolutionary reformism. They claim that the people have gotten tired of waging armed resistance against their oppressors and exploiters and that by implication prefer to suffer in silence the violence of oppression and exploitation indefinitely. They prate about deemphasizing the people’s war or even altogether abandoning it. The best proof of the fallacy and chicanery of this counterrevolutionary line is that the pseudoprogressive petty-bourgeois groups like the revisionists, bourgeois populists, petty-bourgeois socialists, liberals and neoliberals, Christian democrats and the like have remained small, marginal and inconsequential. They seem to be larger than they are only when they are used as tools of anticommunist propaganda by the ruling system and by foreign anticommunist agencies. The legal mass movement that has a national democratic character is still led by the proletarian revolutionary party. Were the CPP to terminate or diminish the people’s war, then it would become impotent and marginalized like these anticommunist petty-bourgeois groups.
Those who are pushing the counterrevolutionary reformist line also make a hue and cry about peace at any cost to the people and to the revolutionary cause. They wish pacifism to take hold of the revolutionary forces and thereby liquidate them. These reformist elements wish to appropriate the name of the people for their own counterrevolutionary purposes under the pretext of being the “third force” between the reactionary government and the National Democratic Front but they have exposed themselves completely by going so low as to provide intelligence briefings and psywar support to the U.S.-Ramos regime and collaborate with the agents of the regime in holding anticommunist rallies.
The Party and the entire revolutionary mass movement are systematically smashing the counterrevolutionary line being peddled by the alliance of the anticommunist petty-bourgeois that echo the anti-Stalin slogans of the U.S. imperialists and that actively assist the U.S.-Ramos regime, especially in intelligence and psywar. By unmasking these elements, all Party members and mass activists can raise the level of their consciousness and militancy. These anticommunist petty-bourgeois groups have incorporated into their ranks the frustrated ringleaders of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism and criminals who have engaged in bloody witchhunts, gangster activities and intelligence service to the enemy.
To further develop the urban-based legal democratic mass movement, the Party continues to do painstaking mass work among the workers, urban poor, poor fishermen, students, youth, women, the professionals, and the small and medium businessmen. The work in the trade unions, urban poor communities, student movement, institutions and so on results in solid mass organizations and secret Party branches and groups. And the masses are aroused, organized and mobilized along the national democratic line on the issues that most affect their lives.
The rectification movement combats and rejects the pernicious suggestion from various pseudorevolutionary quarters that the working class must give up its vanguard role or that the Party must be liquidated in favor of a united front at first dominated by petty-bourgeois groups but ultimately serving the imperialists, the big compradors and landlords. There would have been no revolutionary movement at all in the Philippines now if not for the leadership of the working class through its advance detachment, the Communist Party of the Philippines. Those who say otherwise have no other intention but to undermine, sabotage and destroy the revolutionary movement.
It is the CPP’s continuing achievement that its organization is nationwide and deeply rooted among the masses of the workers and peasants. It is a Party with a cadre and mass character. The quantity and quality of the Party membership are examined. The ideological and political quality is examined first of all. Those who do not come up to the standards are given special attention to become truly qualified as Party members. Those who do not wish to raise the level of their qualifications through ideological and political studies and practical work are allowed to leave the Party.
There is a new resolve to increase the proportion of Party members with worker and peasant status to at least ninety percent and to reduce the proportion of those from the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, not by turning away those who are willing to remould themselves but by positively accelerating the recruitment of members from the toiling masses. The all-round strength of the membership of the Party is drawn from and tested in the revolutionary mass moment. The advance elements in the revolutionary mass movement are invited to become candidate-members. Emphasis is on the recruitment of the advance elements from the working class movement, from the people’s army and the peasant movement and from the intelligentsia.
Party leading organs and units take responsibility for and plan the systematic recruitment of candidate-members and their development into full Party members within the prescribed period of candidature. It is a long-running shortcoming of the Party that the mass activists of the national democratic movement are recognized and yet are not being invited to become candidate-members and that in the case of those invited as candidate-members, they are not developed to become full Party members within the prescribed period. An individual Party member can recommend a mass activist to become a candidate-member. It is subsequently the responsibility of the Party unit receiving the recommendation to see to it that a cadre verifies the personality and record of the recommendee and see to it that he or she becomes a full Party member by taking the basic Party course and fulfilling trial work.
The practice of assessing and evaluating work and making criticism and self-criticism is being reinvigorated and encouraged in every leading organ and in every unit. The leading organs are required to take responsibility for and take initiative in the promotion of criticism and self-criticism even after the successful end of the current rectification movement.
The principle of democratic centralism is upheld. It means that centralized leadership is based on democracy and the latter is guided by the former in accordance with the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Both bureaucratism and ultrademocracy are being combated. There is inner Party democracy but at the same time there is Party discipline. Exponents of ultrademocracy have recently exposed themselves as inveterate liquidationists and anticommunists.
To guard against bureaucratism, the leading organs consist of elected representatives of lower Party organs and organizations and are not cut off from but continuously interact with them in order to gather facts and recommendations from below, through direct investigation, reports, consultations, and study and work conferences. All leading organs up to the National Party Congress are required to meet as regularly as possible in accordance with the provisions of the Party constitution. Thus, the experience of the Party can be promptly summed up and the tasks can be defined.
At the same time, the phenomenon of independent kingdoms, factionalism or autonomism is being vigorously combated. The most rabid opponents of the rectification movement have tried to destroy the Party by whipping up ultrademocracy or anarchy. They wish to decapitate and disintegrate the Party and thereby preempt their grave accountabilities. The so-called “freedom of criticism” long ago criticized by the great Lenin is rejected. Any communist party, whether out of power or in power loses its proletarian revolutionary character when it admits into its ranks alien elements and allows them to promote petty-bourgeois and other antiproletarian ideas and actions within the Party.
While the ringleaders of the “Left” and Right opportunists were still formally in the Party, they sought to liquidate the leadership of the working class and the Party. The “Left” opportunists wanted to do away with the absolute leadership of the Party over the New People’s Army. They demanded that the NPA have a separate machinery independent of the Party so that they could freely push their line of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism and conduct “special operations”, including gangster activities. The Right opportunists wanted to liquidate the Party as the vanguard and center of the revolution, replace it with a bogus united front and reduce the Party to a member organization, giving up its independence and initiative and subordinating itself to a majority of petty-bourgeois groups and individuals that depict the Party as an unwelcome “authoritarian” entity. The Party has smashed both types of opportunists by issuing the directive on the Relationship of the Party with the NPA and the United Front.
The problem of security for the Party, especially in the urban underground, has become complicated and aggravated by the treachery of a handful of “Left” and Right opportunists who have become outright enemy agents, engaged not only in a campaign of slander and lies against the Party but also assisting the enemy in so-called keyhole operations. The Party is therefore reorganizing its personnel, shifting a number of them to the countryside and, most important of all, recruiting more Party members in order to render useless the previous information level of the renegades.
As a result of the current rectification movement, the Communist Party of the Philippines can be expected to become stronger ideologically, politically and organizationally. The rectification movement is guided by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It seeks to reinforce the foundation of the Party, enhance the victories already won, overcome deviations, errors and shortcomings and raise to a new and higher level the fighting will and capabilities of the Party and the people against the enemy. It is a method learned from Mao Zedong in strengthening the revolutionary party of the proletariat. It is a major component of Mao Zedong Thought.
So long as the ruling system in the Philippines remains semicolonial and semifeudal, there is the urgent need for the new-democratic revolution and there is the fertile ground for the growth in strength and advance of the armed revolutionary movement of the people. The chronic crisis of the system makes the protracted people’s war possible and necessary. And this crisis is ever worsening.
The fundamental causes that gave rise to the Marcos fascist dictatorship persist. The shift from the rule of Marcos to that of Aquino and then to that of Ramos has entailed the aggravation and deepening of the crisis from one level to another. Foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism still ride roughshod over the people and are intensifying the oppression and exploitation of the people.
The U.S. imperialists instigated Marcos to unleash the open rule of terror in 1972 in order to eliminate the newly-resumed armed revolutionary and to have a free hand in imposing neocolonial economic policies on the people. The result was nationwide expansion of the armed revolutionary movement and the aggravation of the Philippine agrarian backwardness and an insatiable addiction to foreign loans for anti-industrial purposes.
To preempt the rising hatred of the people and the surge of the armed revolutionary movement, the U.S. imperialists had to foment a big split in the reactionary armed forces in order to cause the downfall of its puppet. Under the Aquino regime, further splits within the reactionary armed forces occurred and the economy further slid down after a brief seeming recovery. Under the Ramos regime, the new chieftain of the reactionaries bases himself on only 23.5 percent of the vote and desperately flaps about to serve the greed of his imperialist masters and his own clique and to appease his political rivals within the exploitative system. The regime knows no way by which to maintain its rule but to beg for foreign investments and loans and escalate total war which combines utmost brutality and psychological warfare.
The chronic socioeconomic and political crisis is guaranteed to worsen by the internal laws of motion of the ruling system. These mean the relentless oppression and exploitation of the people by the exploiting classes of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class, the ceaseless contradictions among the reactionary factions and the irrepressible resistance of the people. The ultimate doom of the ruling system is ensured by the perseverance of the people in their armed revolutionary movement.
The current regime is at a loss as to how to draw from domestic and foreign sources the wherewithal for its maintenance. The people have been sucked dry of their sweat and blood for the benefit of the imperialists and the local reactionary classes. At the same time, it has become absurd for the imperialists to be further extending loans that can never be repaid. New loans are still being incurred to cover the chronic deficits and increasingly to pay the debt service.
After crowing about the triumph of neocolonialism and the triumph of capitalism over revisionist bureaucrat capitalism, the three centers of the world capitalist system (the United States, Japan and Western Europe) no less are conspicuously afflicted by the crisis of overproduction. The unprecedented development of high technology and abuse of finance capital in corporate speculation and neocolonialism in the period after World War II has deepened and aggravated the general crisis of capitalism, including the economic and financial devastation of the third world and former Soviet bloc countries. The field for maximizing profits has shrunk due to the ruin of the countries floundering in foreign debt. The Philippines is a prime example of the floundering loan-client.
The laws of capitalism continue to drive the winning monopolies in the industrial capitalist countries to adopt higher technology that raises their own profit and productivity rates but kills jobs of both blue and white collar workers and drives down the profit and productivity rates of their entire national economies. The abuse of finance capital since the sixties has brought about supermonopolies and has ravaged the neocolonies. Now, monopoly capitalism is at a loss as to how to dispose of surplus goods and services it produces amidst the wasteland of neocolonialism, bankrupt bureaucrat capitalism and the ongoing mass unemployment even in the centers of the world capitalist system.
All major industrial capitalist countries are now engaged in the reconsolidation of their national and regional positions and in the redivision of the global market, sources of raw materials and fields of investment. The trend among the supermonopolies is to restrain themselves from extending productive investments as well as loan capital for nonproductive purposes to countries like the Philippines. Under these circumstances, the promise of the Ramos regime to turn the Philippines into a “newly-industrializing country” is a mere pipe-dream. Even the “tigers” of East Asia, including the coastal provinces of China, are now feeling the adverse effects of the contraction of the American consumer market and the impending shift to Mexico of the low value-added manufacturing-for-reexport under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The gravity of the crisis of the world capitalist system can be seen not only in the conditions of economic depression in industrial capitalist countries and the priorly long-running economic and financial ravages of neocolonialism in the third world and the former Soviet-bloc countries but also in the rising and widescale rampages of nationalism, fascism, racism, ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism and other blatant factors of political crisis in the wake of the global economic crisis.
The worsening crisis of the world capitalist system and that of the domestic ruling system converge, interact and help each other to generate an ever worse crisis in the Philippines and guarantee the favorable conditions for protracted people’s war. The global crisis of capitalism now tends to draw simultaneously the attention of the imperialist forces to so many “trouble spots” (the former Yugoslavia, Central Asia, Somalia, Angola, Haiti, Kampuchea, and so on) of their own making even as they wish to focus on and mop up the remaining anti-imperialist states like the People’s Democratic of Korea and Cuba and the armed revolutionary movements led by Marxist-Leninist parties.
For 25 years already, the United States, Japan and Western Europe have directly and indirectly poured resources into the armed counterrevolution in the Philippines. But this has proven futile. The armed revolution continues to exist and grow. The desire of the imperialist powers to extinguish the Philippine armed revolution is ever growing but their capability to do so is not limitless.
The Communist Party of the Philippines looks forward to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movements as a result of the unprecedented crisis of the world capitalist system. It is the internationalist duty of the CPP to uphold the torch of armed revolution and wage protracted people’s war self-reliantly in order to help bring about such resurgence on an unprecedented scale. There can be no better way than this for the Communist Party of the Philippines to carry out the principle of proletarian internationalism.
The Communist Party of the Philippines engages mainly in bilateral relations with parties, organizations and movements abroad on the basis of ideological-political understanding of Marxism-Leninism as well as on the basis of anti-imperialist political solidarity. The Party also participates in multilateral seminars and conferences that may forge agreements, resolutions or declarations as a result of consensus and unanimity.
In foreign relations, the Party upholds the principles of mutual respect for independence, equality, noninterference, cooperation and mutual benefit. The Party is interested in the international propagation of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought through ideological-political exchanges. It is also interested in broad anti-imperialist solidarity, irrespective of the ideological stand of those involved.
The perspective of the new-democratic revolution in the Philippines is socialist. In the first place, the new democratic revolution can be won only because the leading force is the working class, the main force is the peasantry and the additional basic revolutionary force is the urban petty bourgeoisie. The revolutionary forces are waging the new-democratic revolution, working hard, struggling fiercely and making sacrifices essentially because they want the current revolution to lead to socialism rather than to capitalism.
The theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought guides the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Filipino people in the struggle to achieve the new-democratic and socialist stages of the Philippine revolution. Moreover, this theory provides the basic principles and the foresight of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship in order to consolidate socialism, combat modern revisionism and prevent the restoration of capitalism in socialist society until imperialism is defeated on a global scale and communism becomes possible.
The disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and revisionist-ruled social systems and the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system vindicate the full scope of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, including Mao’s successful practice of the new-democratic and the socialist revolution; his critique of imperialism, modern revisionism and neocolonialism; and his theory and pioneering practice in applying the theory of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. With a comprehensive and profound understanding of Mao Zedong Thought, the proletarian revolutionaries of the world cannot be assailed by doubts about the future of socialism and communism and cannot be misled by any kind of revisionism.
The time has come for the proletarian revolutionaries who uphold Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought to seize the revolutionary initiative. They can grow in strength and advance on the fertile ground provided by the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system and by the proven bankruptcy of modern revisionism.
While the protracted people’s war continues, the Party, the people’s army and the organs of political power and the revolutionary mass organizations can continue to exist and grow in strength until they can seize the cities on a nationwide scale. On the way to total victory in the new-democratic revolution, the revolutionary forces and the people achieve definite and tangible victories and enjoy definite gains. The moment the revolutionary forces capitulate, they are reduced to small and inconsequential entities at the mercy of the imperialists and the exploiting classes; the organs of political power already established would disappear. The people under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines cannot be any inferior to their ancestors who fought the colonialists for more than 300 years to reach the old democratic revolution.
It is a great victory that the revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party of the Philippines has already attained in a far shorter time a level of strength and a scale far greater than that reached by any previous revolutionary movement in the entire history of the Philippines. The accumulated strength and experience of the current revolutionary movement must proceed to a new and higher level.
The accumulated achievements and experience of the Party in the new-democratic revolution are abundant and rich. These are bound to become far more abundant and richer upon the basic completion of the new-democratic revolution and the start of the socialist revolution. The protraction of the people’s war provides an ample opportunity for the wider and deeper development of the revolutionary forces and for more favorable conditions in the world.
The Filipino people have won brilliant victories in revolution because they are led by the Communist Party of the Philippines under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Modern revisionism has become discredited and most revisionist regimes, including the Soviet Union, have collapsed. Soviet-sponsored regimes that arose by coup d’état in the 1970s have disappeared. So have been those regimes established by petty-bourgeois-led insurrection. Anticolonial movements dependent on Soviet social-imperialism have gone into neocolonial compromises, reminiscent of 1935 and 1946 in the Philippines. In contrast, the Philippine revolution continues to stand as a pillar of resolute armed revolution against imperialism and the local reactionaries.
But Filipino communists should not become conceited and complacent about their current position in the world proletarian revolution. They have no choice but to work harder, fight more fiercely and be prepared for further sacrifices because the imperialists and the reactionaries are now exerting more efforts to defeat and destroy the Philippine revolution by every foul means. At the same time, there is hope that the widespread social turmoil will lead to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a global scale.
In leading the Philippine revolution, the Communist Party of the Philippines consciously integrates the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. When it follows the proletarian revolutionary line, the Party marches from victory to victory. But wherever and whenever this line is violated, the revolutionary movement suffers setbacks. Consequent to the rectification movement that is now being carried out, the Party is enhancing its ideological, political and organizational strength, overcoming deviations, errors and shortcomings and is raising to a new and higher level the fighting will and capabilities of all the revolutionary forces and the broad masses of the people against imperialism and the reactionaries.