February 24, 1992

1. One kind of insurrectionism proposes to stop the current revolutionary armed struggle and carry out a protracted or indefinite legal struggle until it becomes possible and necessary to launch mass uprisings for seizing political power. This has practically no outright proponent within the Party.

Originally and continuously, this has been promoted by the Lava revisionist group and its successors, in emulation of the Russian paradigm of uprisings in Petrograd and Moscow (minus the more extended armed struggle in the countryside during the civil war and anti-interventionist war), which were preceded by a long period of legal struggle.

But since after the Edsa uprising of 1986, this idea of parliamentarism before insurrection has been proposed by a writer belonging to a petty-bourgeois populist group. In 1986 and 1987, the proposal was for the revolutionary forces to stop the armed struggle, cooperate with the Aquino regime and combine with it against the coup schemes of other reactionary forces.

This kind of insurrectionism spread a number of false propositions, such as the following:

a. Political struggle is limited to legal struggle while waging a people's war and building the people's army is viewed as purely military. Such a counterposing of the terms political and military denies the political character of the people's war.

It accuses the Party and the New People's Army of militarism for simply pursuing the revolutionary armed struggle against the U.S.-Aquino regime. It also takes advantage of the errors connected with excessive or inappropriate armed city partisan actions supposedly for the purpose of raising armed urban insurrectionary consciousness or preparing for urban insurrection.

b. The rise to power of the "liberal democratic" Aquino ruling clique was purely or mainly the result of "people power", with the proletarian revolutionary party and revolutionary mass movement "excluded".

Because of the boycott error of 1986, the role of the revolutionary forces in the long-term anti-fascist resistance and Edsa uprising is denied. The convergence of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces which caused the fall of the Marcos fascist regime is obscured. The "democratic space" is owed to the Aquino regime and not to the legal democratic movement and the armed revolutionary movement.

Within the Party, this kind of insurrectionism is merely a latent or potential fallback position for the more hot-headed insurrectionists, if after a long time the armed urban insurrection does not come. Omar Tupas (in Debate) now proposes insurrection or else peaceful settlement.

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