[PRWC Party Documents] REAFFIRM OUR BASIC PRINCIPLES AND CARRY THE REVOLUTION FORWARD, December 26, 1991

REAFFIRM OUR BASIC PRINCIPLES AND RECTIFY ERRORS

I. In the Field of Ideology

Basahin sa Pilipino Basahon sa Hiligaynon

Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines
July 1992

Worst Kind of Disorientation

The worst kind of disorientation started to emerge in 1981 in the form of the concept of the "strategic counteroffensive" (SCO) and "three strategic coordinations", which originated from the central leadership itself. The concept of the "strategic counteroffensive" _ before it became the principal vehicle for the nationwide propagation of the combination of urban insurrectionism and "regularization" after the 9th Central Committee Plenum in 1985 _ already carried the notion of a rapid shortcut to regular mobile warfare which was set as the principal form of warfare during the strategic defensive; encouraged the desire for insurrection, which was regarded as a means of rapidly strengthening the army and of advancing towards a higher strategic stage or a decisive victory; propagated the concept of coordinated political and military offensives nationwide; and factored in the possibility that such offensives would lead to the achievement of a decisive victory in the revolution.

The concept of "three strategic coordinations" was an attempt to stress the strategic significance of coordinating the struggles in the countryside and the cities, political struggle and military struggle, and domestic work and international work. It was in fact a deviation from the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside as it expounds that the main force of the revolution is the worker-peasant combination, instead of the peasant masses, and in effect de-emphasize the Party's work in the countryside and shift it to the urban centers instead of strengthening the basic worker- peasant alliance in pursuit of the line of encircling the cities from the countryside in the protracted people's war.

Under the concept, widespread political mobilizations to directly build the mass base for the armed revolution was substituted for or put above the painstaking work of organizing the peasant masses. It set a 60-40 balance between work in the countryside and work in the cities, consonant with the view that the principal stress on the countryside could shift to the cities because of some supposed changes (whose degrees and extent were unclear) in the situation. Furthermore it encouraged the tendency to rely on support from abroad.

This concept (three strategic coordinations) was formulated in the attempt to clarify the tasks and the process of advancing at a time that the guerrilla fronts and the guerrilla units were rapidly growing in strength and the fascist dictatorship was rapidly declining. But impelled by petty-bourgeois impatience and subjectivism, concern was were prematurely focused on the leap towards the strategic stalemate and strategic victory under the circumstances that the necessity was to take advantage of favorable conditions for consolidating initial victories, further expanding and strengthening our mass base nationwide and deploying our guerrilla forces over wider areas, transforming our initial guerrilla bases and consolidated zones into more extensive and stronger bastions of the revolution, and hasten the weakening not only of the fascist dictatorship but also of the entire reactionary ruling system.

There was open impatience even among some leading cadres over the protraction of the people's war. There were those who spoke out as if the protraction were a subjective wish or a lack of determination or imagination rather than the demand of objective conditions and the objective process necessary for building strength of the revolutionary forces and weakening the forces of reaction. Thus emerged such illusions as taking shortcuts towards a strategic leap, rushing towards strategically decisive engagements through regular mobile warfare or urban insurrection and belittling or skipping painstaking work of building an expanding and deepening mass base; and thus also developed the penchant for eclectically putting together disparate fragments of foreign examples _ from such revolutions as those of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Zimbabwe _ to build a "strategy" for hastening our advance and our victory in the revolution.

The Mindanao Commission implemented the concept of the three strategic coordinations as policy in the island, despite the decision of the central leadership to subject this to further study and discussion (Cf., "Mga Tala sa Estratehiya at Taktika ng ating Digmang Bayan", 1982). The policy was quickly approved by some cadres, particularly those who had expressed doubts over the practicability and appropriateness of building revolutionary bases and conducting antifeudal struggles in the countryside. Under their concept of "comprehensively advancing the struggle in the island", they superimposed the frame of the strategic coordination or combination of countryside and cities on the what had been the strategic emphasis on work in the countryside. Another obvious result was the concept and practice of intensifying "politico-military struggles" in Davao City and other urban centers in the form of all- out partisan warfare, sweeping propaganda, confrontational street actions and combinations of these.

Further encouraged by the initial impact of partisan warfare in Davao City from 1982 and later on by the upsurge of antifascist protest in the urban areas after the Aquino assassination in 1983, the Mindanao Commission took hold of some phrases (such as "seizing opportunities" used in August 1945 uprising and "strategy of war and uprising" in south Vietnam in the 1960s) from the writings of Vietnamese revolutionary leaders on their own people's war but gave them an urban insurrectionary twist, incorporated ideas of spontaneous mass uprisings and armed urban insurrection from Central America into the theory and practice of people's war and devised the "Red area (military struggle) - White area (political struggle)" schema that systematically deviated from the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside and favored uprisings and insurrections as the "highest form of political struggle to be achieved". (Cf., "Batayan sa Pagpapaunlad at Papel ng Kilusan sa Puting Purok sa Buong Estratehiya ng Digmang Bayan sa Mindanao", 1984.)

Manifesting a lack of understanding of basic theory, the Mindanao Commission in several major documents redefined the term "political" and counterposed it to or put it on the same plane as "armed" or "military". Political struggles are defined by these documents as "those that are based principally on popular forces and armed strength of the masses or political forces waged principally in urban areas" while "armed struggle" is defined as "principally launched in the countryside and principally relying on the armed forces or the army focused on the objective of defeating the military force of the regime". (Cf., Ibid., p. 6.) Our armed struggle, which is a people's war, is denied its character as a revolutionary political mass movement. The mere wish for an armed urban insurrection virtually relegates our people's army into being merely a "regularized" military force not unlike that of the enemy's.

Let us remind ourselves without end that the people's war has a revolutionary political nature and that the people's army itself is an armed mass organization. Our people's war is within the framework of the national democratic revolution. And within the antifeudal framework, there is the necessary political integration of armed struggle, genuine land reform and mass base building. Our people's war is a revolutionary political mass movement encompassing all forms of struggle, legal and illegal, armed and nonarmed. And a people's army is able to grow and prevail over a vastly superior enemy military force essentially because of popular participation and support.

The worst form of deviation which has also proven to be the most resistant to rectification has been the propensity to adopt a successful but flaky foreign model taken out of the context of its history and exceptional conditions and then superimposed on the Party's and the Filipino people's own revolutionary practice. It is correct to say that the Party should learn from all revolutionary experiences abroad. But we should know how to evaluate and rate them according to their significance and relevance to the Philippine revolution.

The clear insurrectionist frame of the "Red area-White area" schema was presented by the Mindanao Commission to the 9th CC Plenum in 1985. Although it was rejected, one of its principal ingredients were endorsed, adopted and incorporated into the program for the "strategic counteroffensive or the latter already contained similar ingredients. A general insurrection or uprising was set as a target within the first year of the strategic counteroffensive, aside from "rehearsal" uprisings before it. After the experience of the EDSA uprising, "seizing opportunities" also became a byword. It meant preparing to rush into an uprising every time there is a developing violent confrontation among the reactionaries while pursuing "regularization" for the "strategic counteroffensive". Thus, during the second half of the 1980s the program for the "strategic counteroffensive" consisted of combining the wrong and the correct lines and became the vehicle for the nationwide propagation of the combination of insurrection and "regularization".

From 1985 the program for the "strategic counteroffensive" played a big and direct role in propagating and pushing the "regularization" of the people's army. While in the "Red area-White area" Mindanao schema "regularization" served urban insurrection, in the SCO program "regularization" itself leading to regular mobile warfare was to be the focus served by the uprisings. Views and analyses such as that the people's war since 1983 had reached the stage of "being intensified in order to raise its level", "having a sufficient mass base for continuous intensification of the war" and having the company formation as the principal or typical formation of the people's army and as the principal vehicle/factor of the entire war since 1985 also impelled the drive towards "regularization". Thus the overall stress of the armed struggle and army building was set towards building of larger formations and "regularization" of the command and staff structures at various levels. Fighting became the main/principal task of the entire army to the exclusion of mass work.

In 1987-88, there was another push for "regularization" towards the building of even bigger formations (battalions), coordinated campaigns and "regularization" of commands at various levels, on the basis of the analysis that the "strategic reserves of the enemy had been deployed", conditions for local "strategic counteroffensives" were present and the key to the sustained advance of the war and the army was to "further raise quality".

But it did not take long before the impact of the AFP "general offensive" exposed the gaping weaknesses of the guerrilla fronts, especially the mass base, as well as the destructive effect of "regularization" and the program for the "strategic counteroffensive". Despite the initial objections to the criticisms and rectification of "regularization" initiated by the Executive Committee of the Central Committee towards the end of 1988, the adjustments to overcome shortcomings in mass work, the stress on building guerrilla units in the localities and the gradual correction of imbalances in the disposition of cadres started to gain momentum in the countryside. The Political Bureau of the Central Committee withdrew the program for the "strategic counteroffensive" in 1990 and replaced it with the program stressing extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare.

The purveyors of armed urban insurrections in the main were satisfied with the space given to insurrectionism in the program for the "strategic counteroffensive" since 1985. However, in 1990, with their views regarding the "rare opportunity" for insurrection after the 1989 coup attempt and in face of the crisis in the Gulf and the intensified socioeconomic crisis, they became aggressive in pushing their own line and peddling various insurrectionist notions and the "strategy of war and uprising aiming at the best possible combination of politico-military struggles" (none other than the "Red area - White area" schema in new disguise).

Through maneuvers, one leading cadre kept the central leadership ignorant of the grandiose politico-military plans in the national capital region aimed at igniting an armed urban insurrection. Recklessly in pursuit of the theory of the spontaneous masses and in a surge of military adventurism, "politico-military" actions were undertaken using agent-provocateur tactics to effect a general paralyzations and confrontational mass actions combined with an ambitious plan to project the NDF in the bourgeois mass media and build a broad coalition serving as a political center for insurrection. The result, aside from the serious and immediate political and security problem, was grave disorientation and deviation from the strategic line of people's war as well as from the class line of the people's democratic revolution.

The gross neglect in observing and clarifying the theory and the line and the longrunning failure to make a comprehensive summing up of our experience at the national level resulted in grave errors and deviations causing complications and disasters that continued to spread and recur. So many problems have piled up and interacted to cause more complications. Large phenomena and experiences have been subjected to widely differing interpretations and assessments and correct and wrong concepts have been blended. It has thus become so easy for such wrong lines as the "Red area - White area" schema that had already wrought so much devastation in Mindanao in 1984 and 1985 to continue to be presented as something superior even as it directly contravened the general and strategic line of the Party.

Our Line Against Revisionism

Since the early '80s, the deviation from the antirevisionist line of the Party has been prompted by a desire for rapid military advances, be these the Jose Lava-type of quick military victory or the "strategic counteroffensive" within the strategic defensive. The National Democratic Front, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other liberation movements, could try to establish friendly relations with the revisionist ruling parties and regimes in the early 1980s. However, some elements wished to override the preemptive relations between the Lava group and the revisionist ruling parties and even wanted to repudiate the antirevisionist line of the Party in order to establish "fraternal" relations with these revisionist ruling parties and secure material assistance.

In 1984, there was already the draft of a policy paper on the international situation and line on international relations, which toadied up to the Brezhnev ruling clique and unnecessarily attacked China even if the Soviet Union and its flunkeys in the Lava group were collaborating even more closely with the Marcos fascist regime. In 1985, this paper was read to the Central Committee plenum, which decided to subject it to further study.

At any rate, it was circulated and promoted by the International Liaison Department until it was counteracted in 1987 and replaced in 1988 by a new policy paper which upheld the correct principles of party-to-party relations and the basic principles of socialism but accepted at face value the avowals of Gorbachov, with some amount of tactful critical observations.

Thus, even beyond 1989 (collapse of revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe), the 28th CPSU Congress in 1990 and August 1991 (the coup and the banning of the CPSU), there are elements within the Party who continue to adulate Gorbachov on a simplistic notion of anti-Stalinism (which holds Stalin responsible even for the revisionist ruling parties and regimes since 1956) and do not believe that the revisionist ruling parties and regimes have collapsed and their "fallen" leaders (misleaders) and their relatives have characteristically become excommunists and anticommunists, business entrepreneurs, openly milking the state enterprises and privatizing the social wealth of the proletariat and the people in collaboration with the flagrant anticommunist regimes which oppress and exploit the proletariat and people and persecute the genuine communists.

The criticism and repudiation of modern revisionism are a basic component of the theoretical foundation and reestablishment of our Party. No leading organ can do away with the basic documents of the Congress of Reestablishment, short of a new congress. And why should anyone at this point consider doing away with the critique of modern revisionism or capitalist restoration when in fact it has been vindicated and proven by the blatant restoration of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? The shame that properly belongs to the Lava revisionist group should not be shifted to or shared by the Party.

Inside and outside the Party, there are a few but articulate elements espousing ideas of insurrectionism, populism, liberalism, social democracy and the like who have been influenced by the swindling and wrecking operations of the Gorbachovite crew in the Soviet Union and who have derided, denigrated and attacked the basic principles of the Party. Just as it is important to take the most responsible among them to account for celebrating Aquino in the past as the champion of democracy and economic recovery, let us take them to account for continuing to celebrate Gorbachov as the ideologist of "socialist renewal and democracy" (in fact the restoration of capitalism, bourgeois class dictatorship and disintegration of the Soviet Union).

The glib advertising job of Gorbachov drummed up the total negation of Marxism- Leninism and the entire course of Bolshevik history; the accelerated capitalist restructuring and the breakdown of production; the rise of the bourgeois class dictatorship; the unleashing of nationalism, ethnic conflicts and civil war; and the emergence of all kinds of monsters, including racism, fascism and rampant criminality.

The imperialists and those who echo them wish the proletarian revolutionaries in the Philippines to become shamed and demoralized by the collapse of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes and to give up Marxism-Leninism and the Philippine revolution. Let it be stated forthrightly that the theory of Marxism-Leninism has proven to be the correct guide in the making of the new democratic revolution and in laying the political and economic foundation of the socialist system.

The New Great Challenge

At the same time, the Party recognizes that the truly new great challenge for Marxist- Leninist theoretical and practical work is the problem of combating modern revisionism, preventing the restoration of capitalism and continuing the socialist revolution. The greatest contribution of Mao to Marxist-Leninist theory is the recognition of this problem and his attempt to solve it. That attempt met with temporary success for a number of years but eventually failed. The Paris Commune of 1871 succeeded briefly and failed. But the theory of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship was not invalidated by the failure of the Paris Commune. After 46 years, the first proletarian state would arise.

It took thirty to forty years to build socialism (proletarian dictatorship and socialist economic construction) among more than a billion people and it took another thirty to forty years for modern revisionism to peacefully evolve into blatant capitalism and the full restoration of bourgeois class dictatorship in several countries.

It is an advantage for the Philippine revolution that while it is still at the new democratic stage it has seen how socialism was built elsewhere only to be subverted and destroyed. We, as proletarian revolutionaries, have the advantage of availing ourselves of proven Marxist-Leninist theory in the new democratic revolution and the socialist revolution and construction as well as of learning lessons from the peaceful evolution of socialism to capitalism and prospectively from an inevitable resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement. By learning positive and negative lessons in revolutionary history, the Philippine revolution will have the opportunity to contribute to the effort of building socialism and preventing the restoration of capitalism in more effective ways.

In the meantime, especially after the bourgeois euphoria over the downfall and disintegration of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes, we witness today the aggravated problems of the world capitalist system. The most developed capitalist countries are increasingly in contradiction with each other over economic, financial, trade and security matters. High technology is accelerating the insoluble capitalist crisis of overproduction. High productivity is in contradiction with the shrinking of the world market. The monopoly capitalist sale of goods and services to the client states can be maintained only by loans that cannot be paid back. The client states are debt- ridden and are squeezing each other out in the export trade, yielding no surplus to save them from further indebtedness but incurring more budgetary and trade deficits.

In fact social turmoil and violent upheavals are occurring with increasing frequency throughout the world, despite the peace rhetoric of the "new world order". Food riots, coups and countercoups, ethnic strife, civil wars, and various types of violence are bursting out in the third world and in the new client states of imperialism in the East. Even in the capitalist countries, the economic recession is causing unemployment, cutting down social welfare measures, generating social tensions and breeding racism and racist violence against workers from the third world.

In due time, from the new world disorder, the anti-imperialist and socialist movements will resurge. By force of circumstances, the Marxist-Leninist parties that retain their proletarian revolutionary integrity and continue to wage revolutionary struggles and some parties that will reemerge in countries where revisionist parties have disintegrated or degenerated will spring up once more to wage revolutionary struggles at a new and higher level under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism and under the banner of proletarian internationalism.