IV. Achieving victory in the people's war
We are confident of winning complete victory in the new democratic revolution in the early part of the 21st century. The worsening crisis of the world capitalist system and the domestic ruling system is exceedingly favorable for the advance of the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary forces have accumulated experience and strength for carrying the revolutionary movement forward. The Second Great Rectification Movement has prepared the Party and the entire revolutionary movement for greater victories ahead.
The New People's Army must continue to play the crucial role of carrying out the principal form of struggle. This is to defeat the armed forces of the enemy and thereby overthrow the ruling system of the big compradors and landlords in order to establish the people's democratic government based on the alliance of the working class and the peasantry. Then, we shall be able to proceed to the socialist revolution.
The NPA is chiefly a fighting force for destroying the enemy. It must preserve itself, win battles and gain strength by integrating its military tasks with such other necessary and important tasks as propaganda, mass organizing and production. It must grow ever stronger as a political, military, economic and cultural force. It is a force for transforming the backward villages into the advanced political, military, economic and cultural bastions of the revolution. Thus, it is intimately linked with the masses in an all-round way.
The Communist Party of the Philippines must exercise absolute leadership over the NPA and ensure that revolutionary politics is in command. At every level, the leading organ of the Party must direct the corresponding command of the people's army. Party units within the people's army ensure that the mass line of trusting the masses and relying on them is upheld.
The people are the inexhaustible source of strength of the people's army. They participate in the revolutionary war, encourage their best sons and daughters to join the people's army and extend all possible support to it because it fights for their national and democratic rights and interests.
The semicolonial and semifeudal character of the ruling system requires the new-democratic revolution through protracted people's war. The strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside over a long period of time allows the people's army to avail of the widest possible social and physical terrain for maneuver to fight the enemy and to grow from small to big and from weak to strong.
We must solve the main problem of the democratic revolution, which is the land problem. We must implement the minimum land reform program and eventually the maximum land reform program. Thus, the peasant masses will maintain their allegiance to the revolution and follow the leadership of the proletariat. The people's army must grow in stages in the process of revolutionary armed struggle. Currently, we are in the stage of the strategic defensive while the enemy is in the strategic offensive because of his vast superiority in equipment and trained military personnel. But we can and must change the balance of forces by carrying out only those tactical offensives that we are capable of winning against the enemy.
By accumulating strength from our successful tactical offensives, through extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare, we shall surely reach the stage of strategic stalemate, when our strength shall be practically equal to the strength of the enemy. We shall finally be able to reach the stage of the strategic offensive when the enemy shall have been reduced to the position of strategic defensive.
We can only outline now the course of probability but we are certain that the increase of our strength and our advances shall be cumulative, unless we incur major errors or need to adjust the tactics and rate of advance in the event that foreign aggressor troops come in. The possibility of foreign aggression is offset by the possibility that the imperialist powers are preoccupied elsewhere in the world.
The most effective way for the people's army to anticipate and frustrate the constant attempt of the enemy to concentrate his forces and destroy us in a guerrilla zone, a guerrilla front or a region is to keep on expanding and consolidating our mass base on a nationwide scale.
The strength of the enemy is not limitless. In fact, it is overextended and spread out thinly. The crisis of the ruling system limits the military capability of the enemy. It is rapidly worsening and will further worsen if the enemy increases the personnel and equipment of the military police and paramilitary forces. It is pertinent to know that the reactionary government is so bankrupt that the IMF has ordered it to slash personnel from the civil bureaucracy and to cut back expenditures for health, education and other social services.
The enemy can concentrate forces on some but never on all our existing guerrilla zones, guerrilla fronts and regions. We can launch more offensives where enemy forces have thinned out. And even where these are concentrated, we can adopt flexible tactics of tying them down by certain offensive actions or by trading space for time on varying scales.
The expansion and consolidation of the revolutionary mass base should enable us to fight a war of fluid movement and avoid any decisive engagement that puts to risk the entire armed strength of any guerrilla front. Thus, we constantly remind ourselves to conduct painstaking mass work in order to expand and consolidate our mass base and build the organs of political power.
To seize the initiative in launching tactical offensives, we must discover weak points of the enemy forces and we must also induce them to commit mistakes and lay bare their weak points. At the tactical level, we muster superior armed strength and use the element of surprise to attack the weak point of the enemy forces at the place and time that we choose. At the same time, we maintain vigilance and preempt the enemy forces from catching us in an isolated and passive position.
Only by constantly expanding and deepening our mass base can we carry out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare. We must avail of tactics of dispersal concentration and shifting. We disperse to do mass work. We concentrate the force to launch tactical offensives. We shift to evade the concentrated attack of a superior enemy force.
Even as we say that the enemy is strategically superior to us in military terms and that we must adopt the strategic defensive, we must maintain our strategic contempt for the enemy. Our revolutionary cause is just. The enemy is the despicable instrument of US imperialism and the local exploiting classes and he is far weaker now than ever before economically and politically. But we must always take him seriously at the tactical level.
The NPA must accelerate the development of the armed struggle, the implementation of land reform and mass base building, i.e., building organs of political power and mass organizations in the countryside. The number of guerrilla fronts must further increase in order to cover the gap between existing ones. Under the direction of the regional Party committees, priorly existing guerrilla fronts must give birth to new guerrilla fronts and yield their relative surplus of personnel and arms for the purpose. As we intensify our mass work and tactical offensives, the NPA must pay attention to politico- economic training, training of medical, munitions and communications personnel, intelligence gathering, production, health care, cultural work and enforcement of the tax policy of the people.s democratic government. There can be functional specialization as well as rotation of cadres and personnel in the performance of tasks under the leadership of the Party.
We must carry out the basic tactical offensives for the purpose of seizing arms from the enemy and accumulating armed strength. For this purpose, the people's army relies mainly on the advance of mass work wave upon wave. There can be some instances when a commando unit of sufficient force can launch a tactical offensive away from the guerrilla front and has ample time and means to return to the guerrilla front. In all cases of tactical offensives, there must be a long-term build-up of intelligence and timely reconnaissance to ensure success.
We must also carry out from time to time some special offensives to punish the worst enemies of the people, the biggest human rights violators and plunderers, the traitors and other notorious criminals. The people have long demanded revolutionary justice with regard to these despicable elements. These elements must be prevented from further oppressing and exploiting the people, harming the revolutionary movement, enjoying the fruits of their crimes and running for offices in the reactionary elections.
The reactionaries stage elections to conjure the illusion of democracy. They use force and the power of money to exclude genuine representatives of the people. They practically insult the people by limiting their electoral choice only to their oppressors and exploiters. In response, the revolutionary movement applies tactics of the united front on the internal contradictions among the reactionaries, punishes or prevents from running as candidates the hostile elements and dispels the false illusion that reactionary elections constitute democracy.
The reactionary state is extremely dependent on foreign investments. We must undertake special tactical offensives to discourage these, particularly when the foreign enterprises ignore and violate the laws of the people's democratic government, are detrimental to the people, run counter to genuine economic development and are harmful to the environment. We must discourage from entering the territory of the people's democratic government those agencies of the reactionary government and imperialist-funded private groups that engage in counterrevolutionary propaganda and schemes of corruption. At the same time, we distinguish the diehards from those willing to cooperate with us and we calibrate our acts of discouragement towards the former and our acts of persuasion towards the latter.
Our resolute response to the regime's declaration of all-out war and termination of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations is the intensification of people's war. We must do everything possible and necessary in both revolutionary armed struggle and united front work in order to render the enemy incapable of ruling the people and to isolate and destroy him.
The increasingly bitter conflicts among the reactionaries and the rising armed struggle of the Moro people for self-determination are favorable conditions for the growth in strength and advance of the NPA and all revolutionary forces.
As the regime concentrates its campaigns of suppression, on some regions of the NPA as well as the areas of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, it leaves out so many other areas open to our mass work and tactical offensives. Even in the few areas that the enemy forces choose to concentrate on, they leave so many gaps and expose their weak points.
In such areas, we must take the view that we have succeeded in luring the enemy forces in deep and we must deal them deadly blows by maneuvering to launch tactical offensives on exterior lines. In so many areas where the enemy forces have thinned out, we must launch tactical offensives as frequently as possible to relieve our comrades who are under concentrated enemy attack elsewhere. Over a long period of time, we must make the enemy bleed to death from countless wounds.
The arrogance of the US-Estrada regime is hitched to the military power of US imperialism, particularly to the US-RP Visiting Forces Agreement and related agreements. But US imperialism is a strategically overextended monster that is afraid of incurring American casualties in a ground war and is overdependent on high-tech weapons and on puppet mercenary troops. The strategy and tactics of US imperialism are impotent in the face of protracted people's war, as proven in China and Indochina in the past.
By the time that the revolutionary movement has gained enough strength as to drive the local reactionaries to beg for a US war of aggression, the NPA shall have gained the strength to inflict heavy casualties on US troops on the ground or the US shall have become preoccupied with people's wars and other forms of struggle in so many other countries. By winning the armed revolution, we shall bring about a Philippines that is completely independent, democratic, just, progressive, peaceful and prosperous. We base our revolutionary aspirations on the self- reliant revolutionary struggle of the entire people while the new world disorder grows in turbulence and leads to revolutions elsewhere in the world.
It is our internationalist duty to persevere in the protracted people's war, intensify our tactical offensives and deal deadly blows on the enemy. Our revolutionary struggle and victories are our contribution to the world proletarian revo- lution and the broad anti- imperialist struggle of the people of the world. We must reciprocate the inspiration and support that the proletariat and people abroad extend to us by their revolutionary struggles and victories.The fact that US imperialism has been able to dominate the Philippines for a century does not mean that it can continue to do so for another century or forever. It only means that we need to fight even better until we can win complete victory. We must fight US imperialism in order make it pay for its crimes of aggression, oppression and exploitation and lift the nation from the humiliation that it has suffered for so long.
The fact that US imperialism has won the Cold War, with modern revisionism doing the main job of destroying socialism from within, does not mean that monopoly capitalism is the end of history. It only means that we need to fight even better until we defeat imperialism so that we can build socialism. The ultimate aim is to defeat imperialism on a global scale and attain communism for the benefit of all mankind.
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