Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines
July 1992

Urban Insurrectionism and Military Adventurism

There is a gross lack of understanding of the theory of people's war and the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside. This strategic line is not an arbitrary edict for a permanent condition. It simply means that when the people's army cannot as yet seize the cities, the revolutionary forces have to accumulate armed strength first in the countryside where reactionary power and control is relatively weaker and where there is a wide area of maneuver for the people's army to launch tactical offensives, accumulate armed strength and engage in mass work.

Conditions in the future will arise to allow the people's army and the people in mass uprisings led by the Party to finally seize the centers of municipalities, provincial capitals, minor cities and major cities, in that probable order. But it would be foolhardy to believe that Metro Manila could fall in an uprising led by the Party earlier than the time that the backbone of the enemy forces is broken in the countryside or before they go into a process of final disintegration.

The EDSA uprising in 1986 involved both a military mutiny and an anti-Marcos or antifascist uprising but the United States, the reactionary classes, the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Catholic Church were still in a position to determine the outcome of the uprising. They understood the balance of forces in their favor. They were out only to change one reactionary ruling clique with another, notwithstanding the popular uprising.

Building the people's army in stages is ridiculed by certain elements who have not really studied the theory of people's war and who obviously do not believe that it is necessary for the NPA to smash the reactionary armed forces and replace it in the end. We have seen how the NPA started from scratch in 1969 and grew. The people's war will certainly have to go through a middle stage of development before it can totally and finally defeat the enemy forces and replace them.

The initial, middle and final stages of the people's war cannot be dismissed as useless concepts by those who hold the opportunist notion that urban armed insurrection and imported heavy weapons can replace the full development of people's war. When the term probability (closer to realization than the term possibility) instead of certainty is used to refer to the stages of people's war, it is to give allowance for nonrealization or defeat due to deviations and errors like those committed by the Mindanao Commission against the line of people's war or due to a forced retreat in the face of foreign aggression.

The expression Left opportunism is apt when it refers to demagogically taking advantage of the natural desire for quick and easy victory but leading the revolutionary forces to defeat and self-destruction. Urban insurrectionism and military adventurism have so far been the gravest form of Left opportunism in the history of the Party since 1968. These are retrogressions to the line of urban guerrilla warfare (Carlos Marighela) and the foco theory (promoted by Regis Debray), which some elements tried to promote within the Party in the early 1970s but which were effectively combated by the Party.

Before the Party could be reestablished in 1968, there had been almost a full decade of mainly urban work among the workers and the youth undertaken by the new proletarian cadres together with a few veterans in the revolutionary movement. Upon the reestablishment of the Party, there were more proletarian cadres in the cities than in the countryside. They emerged from the resurgent anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement that was based in Metro Manila. The claim that the Party neglected revolutionary work in urban areas and overemphasized work in the rural areas is untrue.

Soon after the Party reestablishment, with hardly 200 Party members concentrated in Metro Manila, the Party was able to carry out the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and other mass actions in the 1970-72 period. From these mass actions would emerge a few thousands of mass activists who would become Party members. Among the regions, the highest concentration of Party members would be in Metro Manila for a considerable period of time.

It is to the credit of the Party that it has pushed the general line of new democratic revolution through people's war since its reestablishment. Thus, the proletarian cadres from Metro Manila were aroused and motivated to join up with the good remnants of the old people's army to form the New People's Army in 1969 and to build the armed revolutionary movement in the countryside on a nationwide scale. And when martial rule and the fascist dictatorship were imposed, Party members and activists in the cities had been ideologically prepared, so that in droves they went to the countryside in 1972 onward and there subsequently participated in the painstaking work of laying and building the revolutionary armed strength and the revolutionary mass movement that served as the firm basis and backbone of rapid advance of the revolutionary movement in the 1980s.

The pattern has been for the cadres produced by the urban-based mass movement to go from the cities to the countryside. Without such a pattern inspired and directed by the Party, there would be no or so few cadres to build the people's army, the mass organizations and the organs of political power in the countryside. This pattern has promoted the people's war. Without the theory and strategic line of people's war, Party members would have preferred to stay in the urban areas. It is so much easier to stick to the relative comfort and convenience of the city than to break new ground in the countryside.

But since the early 1980s, there had been an increasing movement away from such a pattern. This was initiated by the central leadership under the concept of 60-40 balance between countryside work and urban work and of giving stress on a comprehensive political movement and broad alliance work based in the cities, on the basis of the tactical priority set on making urban work and broad alliance work catch up with the more advanced work in the countryside and on the basic alliance, as well as on some views that such is the appropriate balance at the given level of urbanization in the country. From 1981 onward, there had been a stop to the deployment of significant numbers of cadres and activists from the cities to the countryside. The trend towards city-basing involving the central leadership and national organs and, subsequently, even many regional leading committees and staff organs, also started and worsened. The concept of the "strategic counteroffensive" within the strategic defensive that was adopted by the central leadership (PB) in 1981, affirmed by the 9th CC Plenum in 1985 and formally withdrawn in 1990 promoted the "three strategic coordinations", the nationally coordinated political and military offensives, regular mobile warfare as the main form of warfare to advance the people's war from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate, and the possibility of such offensives leading directly to the realization of the decisive victory of the revolution. As such, it tended to encourage urban insurrectionism and had an even bigger and more direct role in fostering "regularization" and military adventurism.

Leading Party committees and cadres became drawn increasingly to urban-centered questions and tasks and farther and farther away from urgent questions and tasks in the all-rounded development of the people's army, mass base and Party organization in the countryside, which to begin with were no longer being adequately taken care of. The cadres were encouraged to stay in leading and staff organs of the urban-based Party organization, legal mass organizations and institutions or join the armed city partisans rather than go to the countryside. They failed to recognize that the peasant masses do not by themselves produce the kind of cadres and other personnel that the urban areas produce and which the rural areas need.

Under the guidance of the so-called "three strategic coordinations" (which had been converted into the "three strategic combinations") and the mechanical 60-40 balance between countryside and urban work, key cadres of the Mindanao Commission, positioned themselves in the small cities of Mindanao (urban centers and adjacent rural areas), pursued a line of intensifying "political-military" struggle in the white areas and developed this into a full-blown line of armed urban insurrection under the influence of the Sandinista victory. They combined this line with the adventurist line of building many company formations and intensifying company-size operations in the countryside, reminiscent of the adventurist line of the Jose Lava leadership in forming companies and battalions in 1949 and 1950, without giving due attention to Party and mass base building, i.e., the organs of political power and the mass organizations, when the overall task was shifted from expanding the guerrilla warfare to "intensifying" it and later to "raising" its level. The erroneous line would eventually result in the exact opposite of what it sought to accomplish.

Inherent to the line of seeking to seize power through urban uprisings, with the aid of a few prematurely enlarged NPA units that lacked extensive and deepgoing mass base, was the undermining and lessening of the interest of Party members and mass activists in going to the countryside to do revolutionary work. In the long run, especially from 1983 to the fall of Marcos, the deployment of cadres to the countryside did not only stop but was reversed when large numbers of cadres deployed in the countryside were drawn towards the cities.

In conjunction with the line of urban insurrection, the line of intensifying and raising the level of warfare virtually became a line of quick military victory. Layers of army commands and staff were increased and companies built without minding the necessary balance and interaction of military formation and the mass base and vice versa. The larger military formations and increased layers of staff were formed and took cadres and material resources away from the already thinly-spread, undermanned, ill-trained and ill-armed units in charge of the various forms of mass work, military work and Party work in the localities. In 1984 and 1985, when the full-scale building of company formations and the intensification of company-size operations were being undertaken, only then were there efforts to catch up in building the Party section committees from among the fresh recruits of Party cadres and members who were extremely lacking in political and military knowledge and capability. On top of this was the insistence of some leading cadres in the Mindanao Commission to reduce attention on antifeudal education, propaganda and struggles in favor of the expansion of the mass movement in the countryside along an almost purely antifascist line. The quality of the mass base, Party work and military work in many localities either stagnated at a very low level or even deteriorated.

For a very short period, from 1983 to 1984, the military offensives of companies, oversized companies and coordinated companies were effective in Mindanao. Fighters were recruited rapidly and hundreds of high-powered rifles were confiscated from the enemy. But when the enemy military forces increased and paramilitary forces and anti- communist fanatic sects were formed in ever widening areas, the mass work units and local guerrilla units could no longer sustain mass work and military work in increasing numbers of barrios. The mass base dwindled and deteriorated. Also in that period, the mass bases, which were either still new, had stopped to develop or had started to decline as a result of the shortcomings, were further forced into a more intense military situation and thus declined and deteriorated at an even faster rate. From 1985 to 1987 large chunks of the mass base and the guerrilla fronts were entirely lost in the face of the repeated onslaughts of the large-scale enemy military offensives, the damage and demoralization as a result of Ahos Campaign, the disorientation in the immediate post- Marcos situation, and the lack of guidance and support from higher Party committees.

The enemy objective was clear: to destroy the revolutionary mass base, force the companies and oversized companies of the people's army into a purely military situation where the enemy forces could use to their advantage their militarily superior forces. A people's army can use most effectively the principle of concentration in offensives if it has extensive and deepgoing mass base. But in a purely military situation, it is, of course, the truly larger military force that gains the upper hand and wins.

Because of the extensive loss of mass base resulting from the wrong line and the destruction wrought by Ahos Campaign, as well as from the impact of the enemy offensives, many of the small and weak units deployed to do mass work and guerrilla units in the localities became extremely vulnerable and were destroyed by the enemy. Eventually, the companies in Mindanao were pushed into passive and vulnerable positions and could no longer launch nor win tactical offensives. Problems in recruitment, morale, maneuver, coordination, intelligence-gathering and supply increased. As a result of these problems and in response to the glaring need to attend first to the mass base in many areas, the regional Party committees either took the initiative to reduce the companies or simply allowed these to dwindle into platoon or over-sized platoon formations. By 1987, the number of companies in the island stood at five.

In the small and easily surveilled cities of Mindanao (Davao City for one is not really the biggest city in the world; beyond its commercial core of a square kilometer, it is rural), cadres who were on the manhunt list of the enemy were carried away by their "insurrectionary" mentality and displayed themselves in public places during mass actions and became preoccupied with contact work among allies and coordination of mass actions rather than attending to and guiding solid organizational work. "Broadness", fast confrontational actions and rapid intensification became the rule and norm above all else.

The welgang bayans were regarded as "a process of building up towards popular uprisings" serving to hasten political polarization, to expose government ineffectuality, to train the masses and to make the entire situation explode. In practice, these were more of transport paralysis rather than mammoth rallies of the people. On such occasions, armed units set up "checkpoints" to block the highway and at assembly points a few hundreds to a few thousands of people converged. At the same time, the armed city partisans heated up these small cities beyond the capacity of the "wanted" cadres to conceal themselves. In 1984, the principal leaders of the Mindanao Commission obviously had extreme difficulties staying in Mindanao and were forced to shift to Cebu City, which was beyond the commission's jurisdiction. As the enemy saturated the identified partisan bases and fronts, intensified intelligence operations against the urban underground, tightened the checkpoints, carried out frequent zoning raids and militarized the target communities and cities, the casualties among the white area forces began to mount and work could no longer be pursued in an increasing number of these areas.

Sa kalagayang may mga kabiguan sa mga puting purok at lumalaki ang kahirapan sa mga larangang gerilya bunga ng tumitinding atake ng kaaway, at mayroong paabot mula sa sentral na pamunuan tungkol sa pag-aalerto sa impiltrasyon ng kaaway, ang mga namumunong kadre sa antas ng larangan, rehiyon at teritoryo ng Mindanaw ay madaling kinapitan at natangay ng labis na pagdududa at pagkasindak sa posibilidad na maraming ahente ng kaaway sa kanilang hanay na nagkakanulo sa kanila. Naging madali ang pagkiling sa mga panlabas na dahilang tulad ng impiltrasyon at pananalakay ng kaaway para ipaliwanag ang mga pinsalang natamo, sa kalagayang akala nila'y tumpak at matagumpay ang kanilang linya at hindi nila nakikita ang kamalian at mga tunay na epekto nito.

Based on the report of a former political detainee and some unverified confessions _ extracted through torture _ of some suspected infiltrators who had been initially arrested in one guerrilla front during the early part of 1985, these leading cadres easily believed that there were enemy deep penetration agents (DPAs) who had infiltrated the Party, the people's army, the mass organizations and the legal institutions. They began arresting suspected saboteurs and infiltrators and subjected them to torture to extract self-incriminating confessions about their alleged crimes and co-conspirators. They became convinced that large numbers of enemy deep penetration agents had infiltrated the Party over a long period of time through the white area organizations and were already being mobilized to bring down and destroy the revolutionary movement in late 1985 or early 1986. The Party organizations which had overexpanded and neglected ideological, political and organizational consolidation proved to be extremely susceptible to mutual suspicion among its cadres and members. Thus, from mid-1985 onward, the anti-infiltrator hysteria started and raged in Mindanao.

The resultant devastation was unprecedented in the entire history of the Philippine revolution. Never has the enemy inflicted as much damage as this to the revolutionary forces in so short a period of time. The wrong political line resulted in setbacks and problems that started to be felt in 1984. Under such a situation, the anti-infiltration hysteria easily took effect and resulted in self-destruction from 1985 onward. On the basis of mere suspicion, close to a thousand people (including Party cadres and members and mass activists) became victims of civil rights violations and severe punishment. Due process was completely disregarded as panic and hysteria took over. The Party membership fell abruptly from 9000 to 3000. The mass base which was shallow shrank by 50 percent. The 15 companies and 30 platoons were reduced to 2 companies and 17 platoons.

The leading cadres of the Mindanao Commission refer to a "first draft of Bicol" ("unang borador ng Bikol") as their guide and for some time declared a revolutionary success in eliminating enemy agents at the expense of so many times more innocent comrades and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary movement. In terms of rate and absolute numbers, the destruction wrought had never before been achieved by the enemy frontally in so short a time. Basic civil rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the Guide for Establishing the People's Democratic Government issued in 1972 and by the Party Constitution and the Rules of the New People's Army were grossly violated.

Many of those responsible for the devastation and the victimization of comrades and the people in Mindanao have expressed remorse for the hysteria and tried to account for their part. But at the most the accounting had been merely partial. Some of those who have not accounted for nor been taken to account for their political and criminal responsibility have even been promoted to national positions in the Party and allowed to spread their wrong line at the further and bigger expense of the Party and the revolutionary movement.