Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines
July 1992

Building the United Front

The Party has a revolutionary class line in building the united front for the national democratic revolution and for armed struggle. This revolutionary class line is the building of the basic alliance of workers and peasants, winning over such middle forces as the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, taking advantage of splits among the reactionaries and isolating and defeating the reactionary diehards. There is a structure of requirements for the revolutionary united front to exist and develop along the revolutionary class line of the Party.

First, there must be the leadership of the working class through the Party, which initially recruited its members from the trade union, youth and urban-based mass movements and from the remnants of the previous revolutionary movement.

Second, there must be the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry through the Party arousing, organizing and mobilizing the peasant masses and building the New People's Army and the peasant associations led by the Party.

Third, there must be a broader alliance of the toiling masses of workers and peasants with the third basic force of the revolution, the urban petty bourgeoisie, through the underground National Democratic Front and other alliances aboveground.

Fourth, there must be a still broader alliance of the positive forces of the revolution, linking the basic forces of the revolution with the national bourgeoisie. There is yet no significant organizational expression of the united front of the positive forces, although members and groups of the national bourgeoisie cooperate with the revolutionary movement in areas where the armed revolutionary movement and the trade union movement are strong.

Fifth, there can be an alliance with certain sections of the reactionary classes against the most reactionary clique. This was well manifested on a nationwide scale in the antifascist struggle. Enlightened landlords and businessmen have shown cooperation by paying their taxes to the people's government and have cooperated with the Party, the NPA, NDF and mass organizations on such matters as land reform, wage relations, elections, etc.

Sixth, the broadest alliance can be ranged against the narrowest target, the reactionary clique that is ruling or the one most favored by U.S. imperialism. We fight and defeat one most reactionary clique after another and in the process we accumulate revolutionary strength.

The Party must play the vanguard role in representation of the immediate and long-term rights and interests of the working class and must be able to distinguish in class terms the stable and reliable allies from the unstable and unreliable ones.

But as early as in 1975, there was a motion to do away with the Marxist-Leninist language in Ang Bayan and specifically the politically precise term, anti-Marcos reactionaries, to refer to such allies as Benigno Aquino, Diosdado Macapagal and Joaquin Roces. There was the misunderstanding that such allies as Lorenzo Ta�ada and Jose W. Diokno, who in fact took a clearcut patriotic and progressive line (of the national bourgeois kind) on major issues, would feel referred to and be turned off by the term.

Thus, the term faded towards the end of the 1970s. What replaced it was the ideologically strict term "bourgeois reformists", used in the debates between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. This term was applied so widely by the central leadership up to 1986 as to lump together with reactionary elements and forces some of the basic as well as positive elements and forces of the revolution. The result was a certain amount of confusion within the Party.

One side used the term to support a sectarian position. This position adhered to the tactics of aiming for decisive victory in the revolution in the struggle against the U.S.- Marcos fascist dictatorship and the policy of neutralizing, dismantling and removing the influence of the "bourgeois reformist" bloc. Thus, it had a tendency to impose the advanced position and will of the Party on the legal organizations of a mass and alliance character to the point of creating splits within these organizations and separating the advanced elements from the broad antifascist front.

Another side also used the term in a reverse way from a liberal position. One extreme begot another. Thus, certain elements of the Party in the National Urban Commission (NUC), the United Front Commission, the National Military Staff (later called the General Command) and Ang Bayan would go so far as to describe Aquino's political stand as national bourgeois and her regime as liberal democratic rather than as a U.S.- supported big comprador-landlord regime. Echoing the American bourgeois mass media, they propagandized the line that the new reactionary regime was liberal democratic and thus they created confusion even among the Party members and the revolutionary mass organizations.

Errors keep on arising in united front work. There are those who, in their wish to hasten the ripening of the insurrectionary situation in the urban areas, advocate the development of direct and open alliance between the NDF and legal organizations and alliances _ progressive and otherwise _ within the framework of a common minimum program (the so-called people's agenda). The supposed objective is to position the NDF at the center of the people's struggles that will be developed towards armed mass uprisings. But what they are actually proposing is confusing the demarcation line between legal and illegal organizations and struggles and pulling the NDF down to the level of legal allied organizations and personalities, many of whom are still confined within the bounds of reformism although they maintain a progressive stand on certain questions.

There are also those who equate the united front with the entire people and then accuse the Party of instrumentalizing the people when the Party speaks of the armed struggle and the united front as weapons of the Party. They do not understand that the working class leadership through the Party, the armed struggle through the NPA and the united front through the NDF and other formations or informal cooperative relations are all functional aspects of the revolutionary movement and are all weapons or instruments of the Filipino people in the national democratic revolution.

There are also those who wish to equate the NDF with the entire united front and make the NDF a catch-all federation which assumes the leadership over the Philippine revolution and in which the Party is politically and organizationally subordinated not only to a "federal center" but to one with a preponderance of petty bourgeois formations.

There are those who erase from the history of the NDF the role and initiative of the Party in the formation of the NDF and who eliminate the leading role of the working class in the united front. Upon the elimination of the proletarian leadership, the democratic revolution then envisioned is nothing but a recycling of the old liberal revolution and the passing hegemony of petty bourgeois formations and ideas on behalf of today's exploiting classes. In fact, the program of the NDF has been overwritten and diluted several times under the wrong notion that even after the seizure of political power (the basic completion of the new democratic revolution) the goal is still to build the "national democratic society" and not the socialist society as well as under the influence of the (now failed) Sandinista program of "multiparty democracy" (no socialist revolution) and "mixed economy" (no socialist construction) and the policies of revisionist regimes, whose cornerstone is the elimination of the leading role of the working class.

Despite all the efforts aimed at expansion, the NDF remains an underground united front of the organizations of basic forces of the revolution (working class, peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie). Should there be a retreat from or should there be a reaffirmation of what the NDF is _ as a formal united front of the organizations of the basic revolutionary forces which accept the leadership of the working class, the new democratic line and the armed struggle?

Even as the NDF remains as it was originally envisioned in 1973, of course, with appropriate scaling down of the unrealized expectation in 1973 that it is the entire united front of all patriotic and progressive classes, it is possible to strengthen it internally and then proceed to seek out allies who do not wish to be within the NDF fold but within varied frames of bilateral and multilateral relations.

Strengthening it internally means reaffirming the NDF as the most advanced united front organization of the basic revolutionary forces along the new-democratic line; developing those underground allied organizations (even if led or influenced by the Party) other than the Party and the NPA; and creating the councils and commissions to assist and pave the way for the people's government at various levels.

Rather than have the concept of federation, it is more flexible to adopt the principle of conferential, consensual and consultative relations of allied organizations within the NDF. This is the way to uphold the independence and initiative of the Party and override such questions as to whether the NDF is under the democratic centralism of the Party or the other way around; and also keep the door indefinitely open to entities that wish to join, depending on the circumstances and strength of the revolutionary movement.

Seeking out groups as allies does not mean only dealing with those willing to join the NDF. It also means establishing bilateral or multilateral relations with them on a consultative and consensual basis. Such allies might prefer to deal with the NDF from the outside and possibly on an equal footing within a wider frame. Since 1986, the much-expanded legal alliances have shown the way how to build them on the consultative and consensual basis, without having to choose between federal and unitary forms of organization or without getting mixed up about these forms of organization.