Further strengthen the Party to advance the people’s war
CPP (Central Committee)
December 26, 2011
We celebrate today with boundless happiness the 43rd anniversary of the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and all the victories that we have won since then in the Filipino people’s democratic revolution against US imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords.
We salute and honor all Party cadres and members, all the revolutionary forces and the entire people for all their efforts and sacrifices in bringing about victories in the revolution. Let us fervently extol and emulate our revolutionary martyrs and outstanding heroes.
Since last year, we have seen significant achievements in our ideological, political and organizational work. We have scored major successes in fulfilling the political requirements for realizing the plan to advance from strategic defensive to strategic stalemate. We have strengthened the political foundation for intensifying the people’s war.
As a result, the NPA has been able to launch and win more and more tactical offensives despite prolonged large-scale military offensives by the fascist puppet state. It has delivered lethal blows on the enemy and captured weapons to form more fighting units. It has carried out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base.
The crisis conditions in the world capitalist system and in the Philippine ruling system are extremely favorable for waging the people’s democratic revolution and for realizing the medium-term plan to advance from strategic defensive to strategic stalemate. Let us take full advantage of the ever worsening and deepening crisis conditions.
Monopoly capitalism and the neoliberal policy are in total discredit. The time has come for the proletariat and people in the Philippines and throughout the world to intensify the counteroffensive against imperialism and reaction. Let us march forward in the struggle for national liberation and democracy and unite with the global anti-imperialist and socialist movement.
I. Protracted and worsening crisis of global capitalism
In recent decades, the monopoly capitalists in various countries have been driven by the profit motive and competition to adopt new technology and bring new products into the market as a necessary way for capital expansion. The adoption of higher levels of technology has intensified the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation in the capitalist economy.
The monopoly bourgeoisie has used information technology and other new technologies to raise productivity and to accelerate profit making and capital accumulation by reducing the wages paid to the working class. It has also used the more efficient forms of transport and communications to accelerate the commerce in goods and services and to spread the ideology and propaganda of monopoly capitalism, usually packaged in petty-bourgeois language.
Faced with the recurrent and worsening crisis of overproduction and the tendency of the profit rate to fall, the monopoly bourgeoisie has used information technology to speed up financial transactions and generate all sorts of financial derivatives above the real economy. It has thus accelerated the extraction of superprofits and the accumulation of fictitious capital. It has promoted the financialization of the US and the other most advanced capitalist countries and the rise of the financial oligarchy sitting on top of the monopoly capitalist heap.
The neoliberal policy of “free market globalization” is concurrent with the rapid rise of technology and the recurrence of ever worsening economic and financial crises. It has brought the capitalist system to a far worse crisis than what has been described as stagflation in the 1970s. It has accelerated the accumulation and concentration of both productive and finance capital in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the financial oligarchy.
Since the adoption of the neoliberal policy, which misrepresents monopoly capitalism as free market capitalism, the world capitalist system has been wracked by successive crises. But for a while until 2008, each crisis appeared remediable by further expansion of the money supply and heavy doses of credit at the level of the state, corporations and households. The world still has to see the full destructive effect of the accumulated derivatives worth more than US$600 trillion generated by banks and investment houses in recent decades.
It used to be said that all problems could be solved by helicoptering more money from the central banks and pouring it on the problem. Since the financial meltdown in 2008, it has become conspicuous that the abuse of finance capital to override the crisis of overproduction has limits and leads to a crisis comparable to that in the Great Depression. The limits have been exceeded by the public treasuries providing trillions of dollars (US$7.7 trillion in the US alone) to bail out the crisis-stricken banks and corporations and letting them raise profits on their balance sheets.
The bailouts have served to conjure at times the illusion of recovery in the financial markets even as production continues to stagnate and unemployment continues to rise at the very center of global capitalism. But the financial crisis arising from further borrowing has taken the form of enormous public deficits and public debt. This has been aggravated not only by the colossal amounts of bailout money for the banks and corporations but by the persistent tax cuts provided to the corporations and the wealthy and the rising bureaucratic and military expenditures even while social spending is reduced.
The response of the international banks and the imperialist states to the crisis of public deficits and debts is to impose austerity measures and cut social spending that shift the burden of the crisis to the people who are already suffering from high levels of unemployment, much reduced incomes and soaring prices of basic goods and services. The austerity measures have only served to worsen and deepen the economic crisis due to the dogmatic adherence to the neoliberal policy and the stubborn refusal to undertake fiscal measures to directly generate employment, revive demand and stimulate production. The imperialists have repeatedly made claims since 2009 that the global economy is on the way to recovery. Yet, the crisis persists and threatens to take another downturn. Even the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) which have fared better than the industrial powers during the crisis and were perceived as alternative engines of growth have already started to show signs of slowing down.
All imperialist countries are beset by the crisis of public deficit and debt and by falling value of currencies, especially the US dollar and the Euro. Like the Third World countries, they are chronically at the brink of default and bankruptcy but get temporary relief by taking new loans that sink them deeper into the debt trap. The imposition of austerity measures at the expense of the people has resulted in massive protests and social disorder in several imperialist states.
The grave economic and financial crises are pushing the imperialist powers to step up war production and to wage wars of aggression. Their objective is to stimulate production by the military-industrial complex and expand economic territory abroad through threats and wars of aggression. Since 2001, the US has spent more than US$4 trillion on wars of aggression, apart from huge expenditures on so-called homeland security.
Under the neoliberal economic policy regime and the persistent influence of the neoconservative military policy, the US and the NATO countries have unleashed wars of aggression at an increasingly rapid rate, including those in the Balkans, West Asia, Central Asia and Africa since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The main thrust of the wars is to seize markets and fields of investment, control sources and routes of oil and other natural resources and install puppet governments.
The reactionary political parties in the service of the monopoly capitalists promote jingoism and war hysteria and obfuscate the roots of the economic crisis by whipping up chauvinism, racism, religious bigotry and xenophobia against migrant workers, Muslims and immigrants. They use these reactionary currents to try to counter the anti-imperialist and socialist-oriented forces, which the crisis has caused to resurge. Thus, there is currently a tug of war between pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist forces in the industrial capitalist countries.
Nevertheless, the worsening economic and social conditions in the imperialist countries are steadily engendering mass protests among the people. Gigantic mass protest actions have broken out in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe. The Occupy movement has arisen in Wall Street and spread out to many cities in and beyond the US. The working class is becoming increasingly conscious of the need to engage in class struggle against the monopoly bourgeoisie that has long pressed them down. The subjective forces of the revolution have ample favorable conditions on which to grow in strength.
The already prolonged and ever worsening economic and financial crisis in the imperialist countries has a heavy adverse impact on the rest of the world in terms of reduced import orders and exports, decline of production and tightening of international credit. An economic depression has fallen upon the entire world, especially in the underdeveloped countries, which in turn recoils on the imperialist countries.
The imperialist powers, the foreign banks and corporations are extremely demanding on the client states. They impose ever more onerous terms of debt and use loans as leverage for taking over domestic public and private assets and plundering the natural resources of the country. The puppet governments yield to the monopoly firms their local capital assets, land and natural resources at dirt cheap prices.
The imperialist powers are more than ever prone to engage in military intervention and wars of aggression in order to acquire cheap sources of raw materials, markets, fields of investment and spheres of influence. The struggle among the imperialist powers for a redivision of the world is growing. The integration of China and Russia into the world capitalist system has cramped the space for mutual accommodation among the imperialist powers.
The conditions of economic depression and worsening exploitation have intensely aggrieved the people. Mass uprisings and political turmoil are surging to shake and topple the rulers and autocrats of the client states of the US and other imperialist powers. Conditions are ripe for revolutionary armed struggles in many countries and entire global regions.
The so-called Arab Spring has swept the Middle East and North Africa, with the masses demanding democratic changes, toppling despotic regimes and shaking others. Contrary to their hypocritical claims to democracy, the imperialist powers headed by the US are trying to redirect the people’s uprisings and install new puppets in certain countries and perpetuate puppet monarchies in other countries.
The revolutionary movements for national liberation and democracy are growing stronger in India, the Philippines, Kurdistan, Colombia and Nigeria. Where the imperialist powers have unleashed wars of aggression, the people are engaged in armed struggles, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Libya. Revolutionary parties in Asia, Africa and Latin America are preparing to wage armed revolution.
The US has announced the reduction of the number of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq but it retains strategic military bases in and around these countries. It seeks to concentrate on the Asia-Pacific region under what it declared to be the American Pacific Century. It considers increasing investments in the region as the key to its prosperity.It seeks to counter China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and has made clear its intention of maintaining and increasing military presence and missions in the Asia-Pacific despite planned defense spending cuts.
However, the US continues to be bogged down in the Middle East and North Africa. Aside from keeping permanent strategic military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies have unleashed a vicious war of aggression on Libya, massacring 100,000 Libyans under the slogan of “humanitarian intervention”. Also under this pretext, they are increasingly getting embroiled militarily in such African countries as Sudan and Somalia and making war preparations against Syria and Iran.
At any rate, the US is trying to develop the Trans-Pacific Partnership on top of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and regional and bilateral trade agreements either to contain China or to continue to engage it and press for the dismantling of its state-owned enterprises which have made the Chinese economy more resilient than other monopoly capitalist economies in coping with the crisis of global capitalism.
The US openly regards China as its rising rival despite their close relations under the neoliberal policy and the US reliance on China in bringing the DPRK to the negotiating table with regard to the latter’s nuclear research and development program. The US does not cease to make war provocations against the DPRK, supply arms to Taiwan, stir up tensions over the Spratly islands issue and incite social unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. Part of the US’ long-term interest and objectives in Africa is to contain and counter the steadily developing trade and diplomatic inroads of China in the continent.
China is wary of the US and has been active in building the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a forum for collective security against the US and NATO. It has also entered into bilateral and multilateral trade agreement with Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries without the US. Since 2010, the BRICS countries have activated themselves as an economic bloc in order to counter the global dominance of the US-led alliance of imperialist powers.
In the Americas, more countries and their peoples are asserting their independence against US imperialist aggression and intervention. Thirty-three countries participated in the establishment of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) which aims to promote greater integration, cooperation and dialogue in the Americas minus the US and Canada. Widely perceived as an alternative to the US-dominated Organization of American States, the CELAC is described by its leaders as an attempt to reduce US intervention and promote the independence of the countries in the region.
China is in a position to cooperate with the Philippines in a program of national industrialization. But the US and Philippine governments seek to block such a possibility by generating tensions between China on one side and the Philippines and other countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) over the issue of the Spratly islands. The US seeks to manipulate the issue in order to justify the maintenance and enlargement of US military forces in the Philippines and restrain Sino-Philippine economic relations.
But no matter how hard the US tries to retain hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region, its efforts are undermined and weakened by its internal economic decline, its overextension over several regions of the world and the increasingly assertive forces for national independence and democracy in the region.
The US can no longer maintain an unchallenged hegemony as in the recent past when it strutted as the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A multipolar world has emerged. The peoples in various global regions are increasingly vigilant and militant against plunderous and aggressive US actions and activities.
II. The Philippines in the vortex of crisis
Like the pseudo-development policy of the big comprador-landlord Marcos regime, the series of post-Marcos regimes have aggravated and deepened the semifeudal character of the Philippine economy under the US-instigated neoliberal economic policy since the 1980s. The ever worsening crisis, itself generated by the basic laws of motion of the world capitalist system and its supposed remedy, neoliberal economic policy, has pushed the Philippine economy into the vortex of an unprecedented crisis.
The current Aquino regime has been in power for more than a year already. Like its imperialist masters, it clings dogmatically to the neoliberal economic policy. The regime has not put forward any policy proposal to assert national independence and carry out economic development through genuine land reform and national industrialization. Instead, it has adopted a policy of keeping the agrarian and underdeveloped character of the economy.
Its so-called Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016 pushes primarily the private-public partnership program of infrastructure projects. These projects are calcula/ted to draw away resources from any potential for industrial development. However, global financial restraints prevent the projects from being implemented as fast as expected. Thus, the US stands out with its Millennium Challenge Corporation grant of US$434 million funding for infrastructure and so-called community development projects within the “counterinsurgency” scheme Oplan Bayanihan.
Lacking a program of national industrialization, the Aquino regime has practically limited itself to touting business call centers, pushing the plunder of our natural resources by foreign mining companies and doling out cash under the so-called Conditional Cash Transfer program which is misrepresented as an antipoverty program but is actually a palliative for psywar purposes being pushed and funded by US imperialism through the World Bank.
The Philippine economy is depressed. It is under the stress of the protracted and worsening crisis of global capitalism. The global demand for the kind of exports that the Philippines produces—raw materials and semi-manufactures—has fallen drastically. The growth of remittances of overseas contract workers is slowing down. The bubble in private construction is bursting as effective demand for housing is decreasing.
Unemployment is rising rapidly with mass layoffs in the sectors of low value-added manufacturing and in private construction. Production of food staples like rice and corn have been cut down by decades of liberalized imports and reviving it is difficult as prices of imported agricultural inputs have risen. The regime is carrying out an unannounced severe policy of austerity at the expense of the people, with cutbacks on government expenditures for education, health and other social services.
Even as incomes of the working people have plunged, the prices of basic goods and services are soaring. Despite the depressed condition of the economy, the Aquino regime is raising the tax burden. The Aquino psywar machine continues to prate about fighting corruption. But until now, the regime runs too slow in going after the crimes of corruption under the Arroyo regime. It continues to provide tax cuts to the big corporations and the wealthy and is blind to the grand corruption of the big compradors and former Marcos cronies (e.g., Eduardo Cojuangco and Lucio Tan) simply because they were big contributors to the Aquino electoral campaign. It has carried out successive demolitions of urban poor settlements to clear valuable real estate for Aquino’s big business friends.
The biggest corruption of the Aquino regime is letting the foreign monopoly firms and banks run rampant in plundering the economy and making superprofits. Even as international credit is tightening, debt service on accumulated debts continues to drain the country of precious funds. The reactionary government continues to waste tax revenues through bureaucratic corruption, military expenditures and doleouts of cash in a futile attempt to undermine and counter the revolutionary movement.
As a result of the economic crisis, conditions of hunger and poverty have worsened and afflict more people than ever before. But the National Statistical Coordination Board manipulates the data and changes the terms for determining poverty to reach the false conclusion that the Aquino regime has reduced the incidence of poverty. Underscoring the fakery in official statistics, the rate of unemployment in the Philippines is also made to appear much lower than that in the industrial capitalist countries. The truth is that the real unemployment rate in the Philippines is one of the worst in the region and in the world, coupled with rapidly increasing numbers of underemployment, low quality and unpaid work.
As economic conditions deteriorate and the regime fails to solve the growing problem of unemployment and poverty, the popularity rating of Aquino is made to rise through the ceaseless hype generated by the Lopez-owned mass media and poll surveys manipulated by Pulse Asia, owned and controlled by Aquino relatives. Aquino’s recent attacks on Arroyo and the Supreme Court are calculated to deflect public attention away from the worsening economic and social crisis and the continuing gross violations of human rights as well as to boost his popularity rating in poll surveys. The Aquino regime seeks to thrive on sheer manipulation of the media and poll surveys.
Social discontent is widespread and deep-going. The broad masses of the people are conspicuously restive. Mass protests are increasing against the worsening economic and social conditions. The tactics of the global Occupy movement, which have been familiar to the Philippine mass movement since the 1960s, are now intensifying. The people’s mass uprisings cannot be stopped so long as there is a revolutionary political leadership that is resolute, militant and does not fear the coercive actions of the regime.
The revolutionary forces and the people are persistently growing in strength. The social and economic crisis is pressing hard on the ruling classes and the rival political factions and is resulting in a political crisis of the ruling system. At the national level, the Aquino ruling clique is challenged by the Arroyo, Marcos and other factions. The contradictions among them are reflected between and within the three branches of the reactionary government (executive, legislative and judiciary). At lower levels, the internal contradictions within the ruling class are also intensifying.
The contradictions between the Aquino and the Arroyo factions have taken center stage for the time being, especially since Arroyo’s attempt to leave the country under the pretext of seeking medical care. Aquino is going through the motions of running after Arroyo for electoral sabotage and corruption but not for gross and systematic violations of human rights. Behind all the sound and fury is Aquino’s resentment over the decision of the Supreme Court, dominated by Arroyo appointees, to invalidate the stock distribution option as a way of cheating the farm workers of Hacienda Luisita.
The competing factions of the ruling class have armed strength by having followers within the reactionary armed forces and police and by maintaining private armed groups. The worst reactionary factions build their private armed groups under various legalized methods such as so-called force multipliers of the army and police with such names as CAFGU, CVO, CAA, bodyguards with special gun permits and private security agencies.
The intensifying competition for bureaucratic loot and the political rivalry among the reactionary factions are objectively favorable to the revolutionary movement as they split and weaken the ruling system. Under the current circumstances, the revolutionary forces can augment their own strength by employing broad united front tactics to oppose the worst reactionary faction, which is targeted as the enemy.
The mass movement of workers, peasants, fisherfolk, the national minorities, urban poor, women, youth, teachers, lawyers, health professionals and other patriotic and progressive forces is surging. The various mass organizations are determined to give voice to the socio-economic and political demands of the people and to act militantly in pursuing compliance with these just and reasonable demands.
The workers demand respect for their trade union and other democratic rights, for job security and better wage and living conditions for stopping the ceaseless layoffs and for national industrialization so that employment expands and they do not have to leave their families to seek employment abroad. The mass layoffs in low value-added semi-manufacturing for export and in private construction and the dismal trend abroad against foreign migrant workers are pressing hard on the entire Philippine economy.
The peasants demand genuine and thoroughgoing land reform, not the bogus land reform law CARPER; recovery of staple-food production, credit and technical assistance, and development of production for industrial processing. The revolutionary forces and the people are carrying out minimum land reform as the general line and maximum land reform wherever possible.
Many people are pleased that the protracted struggle of farm workers to own Hacienda Luisita has been rewarded as a result of the final decision of the Supreme Court, though belated, to scrap the Stock Distribution Option and allow the distribution of the land to the farm workers. However, it is still unclear how much the farm workers would be made to pay for the land. Aquino and his Cojuangco relatives are demanding so-called current market value, absolutely way beyond the paying capacity of the farm workers. The farm workers, on the other hand, see the immeasurable misery they had to endure and the unearned largess appropriated by the Cojuangcos over the decades as more than enough payment for the land to be distributed to them.
The fisherfolk demand respect for their rights, a stop to the preemption of fishing areas and markets by the big fishing corporations, the right of small fishermen to operate and the provision of credit and technical assistance. They oppose the reactionary government’s policy of allowing the fishing magnates to monopolize fishing in lakes and bays, and foreign fishing vessels and factory ships to encroach on the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The national minorities demand respect for their right to self-determination and ancestral domain. They demand that their land must not be taken away from them, that they are not displaced from their home grounds by foreign and local corporations that plunder the forest, mineral and water resources. Together with the rest of the people, the national minorities applaud the NPA offensives to dismantle and shut down the operations of foreign and big comprador mining firms in Mindanao and throughout the country.
The urban poor that include workers, oddjobbers, small vendors and poor self-employed demand their right to livelihood, housing and other democratic rights. They demand that they must not be subjected to eviction, demolition of their dwellings and deprivation of nearby sources of livelihood as well as to all kinds of indignity, harassment, physical attacks and dispossession. They fight to oppose the demolition of their dwellings to make way for the interests of real estate developers and actively resist the deployment of police and military to intimidate and attack them.
The women demand respect for their right to gender equality, enjoyment of equal opportunities in all socio-economic activities, a systematic stop to violence against women and to women trafficking. They demand respect and support for the children who suffer victimization under the dire economic and social conditions and campaigns of military suppression. They demand the right to gender equality and against discrimination that extends to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered.
The youth demand their right to education, an increase of state appropriations for public education at all levels, a stop to the wastage of public resources on military spending, debt service and bureaucratic corruption. They oppose the soaring prices of basic commodities, unemployment, the rapid rise of poverty, and the reduction of public funds for public schools. They demand respect for the democratic right to speak and act in the interest of the students, youth and the entire people. They condemn and oppose the increasingly violent reaction of the Aquino regime to mass protest actions, as exemplified by the repeated brutal dispersal of the youth attempting to hold a camp-out protest at Mendiola earlier this month.
The professionals, small entrepreneurs and the entire middle class demand a stop to the imposition of higher taxes, fees and other onerous burdens, the judicious use of their tax and other contributions, instead of being wasted on bureaucratic corruption, military expenditures and debt service. The urban petty-bourgeoisie is ever more ready to join the toiling masses as a revolutionary force. The middle bourgeoisie is concerned about the surrender of national rights to foreign powers and monopoly firms.
More than ever, the crisis conditions are providing fertile ground for the growth in strength and advance of the people’s war and the people’s army. The escalation of oppression and exploitation incites the people to engage in mass protests and to rise up in arms against the reactionary state and to build the people’s democratic state. The conditions for armed revolution are exceedingly favorable.
The people and the revolutionary forces represented by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) are willing to negotiate with the reactionary government to address the roots of the armed conflict by forging agreements on social, economic and political reforms in order to lay the basis for a just and lasting peace. But the Aquino regime is hellbent on using the US-instigated Oplan Bayanihan to destroy the revolutionary movement of the people. It is obsessed with using the peace negotiations as a mere tool for psywar and as a way to seek the capitulation and pacification of the revolutionary forces.
The Aquino regime is not seriously interested in peace negotiations with the NDFP. It is preconditioning the peace negotiations with demands for the capitulation and pacification of the revolutionary movement. It is backtracking on and invalidating previous bilateral agreements by qualifying and putting them aside. It has not rectified the Arroyo policy of abducting, torturing and murdering NDFP consultants in the peace negotiations. It has condoned and upheld the actions of the Arroyo regime to have the NPA, the CPP and the NDFP chief political consultant in the peace negotiations maintained in the terrorist list of the US and other foreign governments; and likewise to have the NDFP chief political consultant arrested and detained in 2007 by the Dutch government for criminal charges, which the Dutch court in The Hague dismissed as baseless and politically motivated. It refuses to release imprisoned NDFP consultants and to comply with the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG).
It has condoned gross and systematic abuses of human rights in violation of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) under the Arroyo regime and is emboldening the military, police and paramilitary forces to further commit atrocities. It refuses to release hundreds of political prisoners who are accused of participation in the revolutionary movement but are falsely charged with common crimes in violation of the CARHRIHL and the Hernandez political offense doctrine.
The reactionary government recurrently demands ceasefire for this or that reason in order to avoid negotiating the substantive agenda of the peace negotiations and in effect obtain the capitulation and pacification of the revolutionary movement. But it refuses the NDFP offer of truce and alliance on the basis of a ten-point general declaration of common intent regarding national independence, democracy, economic development, social justice and other important demands of the people.
It conducts sham peace negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) like it does with the NDFP by backtracking on previous agreements and nullifying them and ever wishing to trick or bend the opposite party towards capitulation and pacification. It has blocked real progress in the peace negotiations with the NDFP as well as the MILF. The GPH has gone as far as scamming and racketeering by recycling the CPLA and the RPA-ABB surrenderees and hirelings as rebel groups and using their names to malverse public funds.
It is advantageous for both the NDFP and the MILF to continue fighting against their common enemy. Although waged separately, their revolutionary armed struggles support each other. The reactionary government has increasing difficulties in trying to fight on two major fronts. The crisis will further reduce the capabilities of the reactionary state and all its coercive apparatuses. The reactionary state and its armed forces will further weaken upon the growth in strength of the NDFP and the MILF separately and simultaneously.
The broad masses of the Filipino people are acutely aware of the growing US military intervention in the Philippines under the US-RP Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement. Such intervention is aimed at perpetuating US control of the Philippines and using the Philippines as a strategic base for securing US hegemony in East Asia. The Filipino people and their revolutionary forces are prepared for the escalation of US military intervention and to wage a war of national liberation against US imperialism.
III. The growing strength of the Party
The CPP continues to strengthen itself and perform its role of leading the Philippine revolution by resolutely and vigorously engaging in ideological, political and organizational work. In this connection, we are confident that we can successfully carry out our plan to advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate in the people’s war.
Strengthening our Party is the most important of the political prerequisites for realizing our plan. Ideological work ensures that all our cadres and members have a basic level of knowledge of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Philippine revolution and continue to raise their level of knowledge through revolutionary practice and higher study courses (intermediate and advanced).
To remain in superb fighting shape, the Party should keep constant watch and wage persistent struggle against bourgeois and other reactionary influences and tendencies within the Party such as bourgeois reformism, modern revisionism, empiricism, dogmatism, right and left opportunism, liberalism, bureaucratism, complacency and desire for ease and comfort. Through vigilant and conscious struggle against these pernicious influences, the Party strengthens its proletarian revolutionary line, raises its fighting capacity and develops the militant style of work that is well-appreciated by the masses.
Party units and committees at different levels have undertaken summings-up and assessments of revolutionary work, conducted regular criticism and self-criticism and in so doing, identified shortcomings and errors in order to rectify them. Through self-criticism and prompt and conscientious correction of errors and shortcomings, the Party continuously improves its work and style of work and truly becomes the proletarian vanguard of the revolution.
The number of Party cadres and members educated in the ideological line of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the political line of people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war are increasing and are therefore in a position to perform the various tasks and functions in the revolution. They guarantee the revolutionary character and direction of the struggle of the proletariat and the people.
However, our efforts in training and developing cadres in number and quality are still way below the level required by the next and even the current stage of the people’s war. Our educational work and cadre training must be given greater attention by leading Party committees at all levels. Problems and difficulties arising from lack of training personnel and facilities and the ruthlessness and exceeding fluidity of our people’s war have to be overcome step-by-step by more persistent effort, better planning and taking full advantage of every available resource and opportunity.
We have identified the factors and reasons in previous years and decades for the slow growth of the Party, especially lack of planning and diligence and insensitivity to the desire of advanced mass activists to become Party candidate-members and of the latter to become full members according to the time frame and reasonable requirements stipulated in our Party Constitution.
To a large extent, we have learned to overcome the obstacles and are now providing the basic Party education promptly to the old stock and the new flow of Party candidate-members and are promptly swearing them in as full members after they complete the basic Party course.
To ensure that the majority of our members who come from the working class and the peasantry can effectively undergo the necessary training and education, we have simplified study materials and audio-visual aids in various Philippine languages and more important, we have trained instructors who can explain Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in terms comprehensible to our comrades who come from the ranks of the working people.
The Party is now ideologically stronger than before and is in a better position to engage in political work and lead the revolutionary movement. We have Party cadres and members who grasp the principles, policies and line of the revolution and who are at the head and at the core of the revolutionary mass movement. As a result, the mass movement, the revolutionary armed struggle and the united front are resolutely and militantly growing in strength.
Party groups and branches are at the core of the trade unions and other mass organizations as well as in units of the people’s army. Thus, the mass movement continues to grow and becomes firmer and vigorous in the urban and rural areas. The message of the people’s democratic movement resounds among the people in their millions throughout the archipelago. We also have Party groups in certain offices of the reactionary government as well as in educational, social service, religious and other kinds of institutions.
The Party ensures that the NPA integrates revolutionary armed struggle with land reform and mass base building. Party committees, branches and groups within the people’s army work hard to carry out the general policy of minimum land reform and, wherever possible, maximum land reform and to conduct mass work for building the mass organizations and the local organs of political power.
We are well on the path of increasing the number of guerrilla fronts, whose millions of people are the direct reliable mass base of the people’s war and the people’s army. The mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, women, children and cultural activists are growing in strength. They are the broad mass base of the organs of political power.
These organs constitute the people’s democratic government of the workers and peasants opposing the city-based reactionary government of the big compradors and landlords. The revolutionary government comprehensively renders public services through the working committees in charge of mass education, mass organizing, land reform and production, health care, defense, arbitration and cultural activities.
As the guerrilla fronts gain in strength in political and military terms, the reactionary and puppet state has unleashed even larger, more prolonged and more intensive attacks against them. To frustrate the enemy offensives, it is imperative to force the enemy to spread itself thin by expanding and intensifying guerrilla warfare on a nation-wide scale, strengthening inter-front coordination and mutual support, accelerating the rate of expansion and consolidation of the guerrilla fronts, and developing in an all-rounded way the military and political forces and struggles of the masses.
But in some old guerrilla bases and zones, serious losses have been incurred in organizational, political and military strength not only and not so much due to the intensified enemy attacks but as a result of passivity in military work; long-running neglect of the mass organizations, the antifeudal class struggle and political education among the masses; and deterioration of the basic Party units which have come under strong influence by rich peasant elements, thinking and practices. These reflect errors and shortcomings not only at the basic level but also in Party and army work and leadership in the higher levels.
The participation and support of the people have enabled the NPA to launch tactical offensives and win victories. The people are the inexhaustible source of strength for the people’s army. The people’s militia, acting as the local police forces of the local organs of political power, and the self-defense units of the various mass organizations, reinforce and amplify the strength of the people’s army.
NPA tactical offensives have been intensified and have resulted in increased number of arms for creating new combat units. Casualties on enemy troops are increasing and causing demoralization among their ranks. The NPA units have destroyed or disabled enemy transport and supply lines, depots and vehicles. They have broken up large landed estates in the course of conducting land reform.
They have dismantled or paralyzed business enterprises and landed estates that violate the laws of the people’s democratic government. These violations involve ruining the environment and agricultural production, taking away land from the people, opposing and preventing land reform or exporting mineral ores at the expense of future industrialization.
The broad masses of the people welcome the tactical offensives of the people’s army against the armed personnel and military facilities of the reactionary state; the arrest and trial of despotic landlords, human rights violators, plunderers, drug lords and other criminal elements; and the dismantling of mining and logging enterprises and plantations that are grievously harmful to the people and the environment.
By intensifying the people’s war, the NPA has captured an increasing number of weapons from the enemy and has enlarged the people’s army and increased the guerrilla fronts. In turn, the greater number of people in more guerrilla fronts helps the people’s army to achieve greater feats in the people’s war. At various levels of the Party and the NPA commands, guidelines and plans for tactical offensives are developed and implemented according to the capabilities of NPA units concerned.
All NPA units are keenly conscious of their duty to carry out offensives that they can win. They wage operations to ambush or raid enemy units as well as operations to destroy enemy facilities. They carry out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of ever widening and deepening mass base. They therefore engage in mass work, production and cultural activities in order to complement and pave the ground for the tactical offensives.
The Party has achieved successes in employing the united front policy to strengthen the basic alliance of the workers and peasants, the progressive alliance of the toiling masses with the urban petty bourgeoisie, the patriotic alliance of the aforesaid progressive forces and the national bourgeoisie and the broad alliance with such temporary and unreliable allies among factions of the ruling system that fight the ruling clique as the common enemy.
The united front is aimed at uniting various forces to oppose the common enemy. The legal patriotic and progressive forces form multisectoral, sectoral and issue-based alliances in order to reach the broadest ranks of the people. At the same time, the united front is principally aimed at facilitating the advance of the people’s war.
The Aquino regime has amply shown its lack of sincerity and seriousness in peace negotiations with the NDFP. We should dispel any illusion that the regime is interested in addressing the roots of the armed conflict and forging agreements with the NDFP on social, economic and political reforms. Clearly, it is hellbent on destroying the Party and the revolutionary movement.
The formal meetings in the GPH-NDFP peace negotiations cannot be held unless the GPH addresses the prejudicial issues being raised by the NDFP and makes amends. However, we continue to express our desire for peace negotiations in order to prevent the enemy from claiming falsely that we are not interested in a just and lasting peace and also to keep open the possibility that the enemy regime would be compelled by the crisis and/or by our significant victories in people’s war to seriously seek negotiations. Indeed, the only way to compel the enemy to engage in serious negotiations is to inflict major defeats on it and make it realize the futility of its attempt to destroy the revolutionary movement, especially the people’s army.
Our Party is highly respected in the international communist movement and in the global anti-imperialist movement because of our revolutionary achievements in the Philippines and because of our well-known concern and support for overseas Filipinos. We have extensive relations with Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist parties and organizations abroad. Our international united front policy has enabled us to have well-developed relations with revolutionary and anti-imperialist mass organizations, social movements and other progressive formations.
By our revolutionary struggle in our country, we have contributed significantly to the development of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a global scale. Our Party delegations have participated in various international conferences, forums and seminars aimed at strengthening the ideological and political position of communist and workers’ parties against imperialism and all reaction and for national liberation, democracy and socialism.
We uphold and advance proletarian internationalism and the anti-imperialist solidarity of the world’s peoples. We look forward to a new and higher level of development in the international communist movement through the revolutionary victories of communist and workers’ parties in various countries and continents.
IV. Urgent fighting tasks for advancing the revolution
1. We must further strengthen the Party as the leading force in the democratic revolution and in the socialist future of the Filipino people. We must exert all efforts to further strengthen the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally.
Still greater attention and effort must be exerted in bolstering and consolidating Party education and training. Study and instruction guides and aids must be completed and produced in adequate quantities; more cadres selected, trained and mobilized for instruction work; and more study courses conducted involving more students at all levels.
Summings-up and assessments must be done regularly and whenever needed to take stock of the situation of revolutionary forces and work, identify and solve problems, and clarify tasks, policies and priorities . Researches and investigations must be conducted to probe, analyze and solve important issues and problems. Problems must not be allowed to fester and pile up, but must be promptly confronted and solved. Work and study conferences must be held to involve more cadres from different areas and lines of work in discussions about policy and theory, making decisions and plans, and summing up and exchanges of experiences.
We must strengthen the Party committee system and Party leadership at all levels. Tens of thousands of cadres must be developed and trained to fill up positions of responsibility and serve as core elements in different levels and areas of work. Party committees must be kept strong and vigorous through the bold promotion of the most dedicated and most capable cadres, the replacement of those who have deteriorated or failed to advance, and the combination of old and experienced cadres with young and more energetic ones. The system of regular and special reports must be improved as an essential requisite of strengthening democratic centralism and Party leadership.
We must accelerate the recruitment of Party candidate-members from the ranks of advanced mass activists. We must follow the requirements for facilitating the process of raising candidate-members to full members as stipulated by our Party Constitution. All Party members must finish the basic Party course and advance in due time to higher courses. They must fulfill tasks in their Party branches in units of the people’s army and in the mass organizations to which they belong.
We must tirelessly expand and deepen the Party underground in urban and rural areas and steel Party cadres and members in strict underground rules and methods. This is an absolute necessity if we are to persevere and advance in revolutionary work and struggle in the face of the fascist and puppet state’s unremitting attacks and schemes to crush and decapitate the Party as well as the wide-ranging and intensifying intelligence and special military operations by the US which categorizes the Philippine revolutionary movement as a target in its global antiterror war.
2. We must expand and intensify the mass movement in both the urban and rural areas. We must encourage the urban-based mass organizations to uphold, defend and advance national independence and democracy. We must develop the mass movement resulting directly from our mass work in the guerrilla fronts.
We must encourage the mass activists in the urban areas to learn from the workers and peasants, render service to the people and devote their lives to the worker and peasant movements. We must encourage and help the mass activists based in both urban and rural areas to support and work for the expansion of the people’s army.
We must lead and support the peasant masses in carrying out widespread mass struggles against feudal and semifeudal exploitation and against brutal campaigns of suppression of military, police and paramilitary forces of the state. We must encourage the peasant masses to rise up in their hundreds of thousands in mass campaigns to demand and carry out land reform, take over abandoned and idle agricultural lands for tilling, and promote production and the people’s livelihood.
We must boldly expand the revolutionary mass organizations and continuously broaden and strengthen them through political education and mass campaigns and struggles. Neglect and other shortcomings in planning and guidance by the Party of mass work and the mass movement must be rectified resolutely and thoroughly.
3. We must intensify the people’s war and accelerate efforts to fulfill the plan to advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. We must carry out the tactical offensives to deliver lethal blows to the enemy, increase our NPA fighting units, carry out land reform, build mass organizations and organs of political power and create new guerrilla fronts.
We must encourage workers and the educated youth to join the people’s army or render rural service. We must redeploy some cadres and weapons from one region to another in the communist spirit of the relatively stronger helping the relatively weaker. We must recognize the uneven development of our revolutionary forces and decide how the stronger forces in a region help weaker ones in other regions.
We must hamper and prevent enemy intrusions into the guerrilla fronts through ambushes and other actions, including sniper fire, grenade attacks, mortar and land mines. We must destroy the transport and supply lines and depots of the enemy. We must give the enemy forces no rest by launching attacks on their camps and detachments whenever possible, even at night. When enemy personnel hide in fortifications, we can wait for them to take the road and expose themselves to our attacks.
We must arrest and try landlords who violently oppose land reform, the human rights violators, the plunderers, drug lords and enemy spies. We must interdict and dismantle enterprises that violate the laws and regulations of the people’s government and destroy the environment and agricultural production, plunder natural resources and prevent land reform and national industrialization.
4. We must implement united front policy along the correct class line: rely on the basic worker-peasant alliance, win over the urban petty bourgeoisie to develop the alliance of basic revolutionary forces, further win over the middle bourgeoisie to form the patriotic alliance and broaden the united front through temporary alliances with sections of the reactionary classes to isolate to the utmost and defeat the enemy in the shortest possible time. We must employ the united front to reach the masses and arouse, organize and mobilize them in their millions and to promote the people’s war.
We must unite all the patriotic and progressive forces to fight the US imperialists and their die-hard puppets. When possible and necessary, we must develop temporary and tactical alliances with reactionaries who oppose the worst of the reactionaries as the enemy target. We must pursue the tactic of defeating the reactionaries one by one. We must maintain our independence and initiative and avoid being completely or mainly integrated or subordinated into the reactionary political system.
5. We must continue to develop the anti-imperialist solidarity of all peoples and contribute to the steady advance of the international communist movement on the basis of the growing strength of proletarian revolutionary parties in their home countries amidst the most favorable conditions arising from the global crisis.
We must build the broadest possible international united front of all anti-imperialist forces. We must relate with various communist forces through bilateral and multilateral meetings and conferences as means of promoting proletarian internationalism, exchanging ideas and experiences and raising the level of common understanding and practical cooperation.