Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines
July 1992

On Urban-basing and Bureaucratism

The Party organization and mass organizations in Metro Manila and other urban areas have been the initial and continuing source of proletarian revolutionary cadres, well educated and with some professional and technical competence, for the countryside since the beginning of the armed revolution.

When martial law was declared in 1972, a large number of Party members and mass activists wanted to go to the few guerrilla zones. However, only a few could be absorbed by these zones. Thus, there was a big number of Party cadres and mass activists who had to be completely in the urban underground under several central staff organs and regional leading organs, especially in Metro Manila.

When guerrilla fronts and zones increased significantly in 1974, the Party members and mass activists who had bided their time in Metro Manila were dispatched in hundreds to the various regions. This line of deployment helped to strengthen the armed revolutionary movement and laid the basis for the resurgence of the legal democratic movement on a nationwide scale.

As a result of the veritable dissolution of the Manila-Rizal leading organs and Party organization in 1979, the central leadership assumed responsibility for the Party and the mass movement in the national capital region; and started to build and base central staff organs there, using Party cadres on the enemy manhunt list and former political detainees. Basing in urban areas had for its rationale the concept of the three strategic coordinations that overemphasized urban work.

In a short while, these vulnerable personnel would come under effective enemy surveillance and arrest operations in the early 1980s. But still the lesson has not been subsequently learned that such types of cadres should not be based in Metro Manila to run urban-based central staff organs; and that certain organs are not to be based in Metro Manila but in the countryside.

The organizational line pursued is a reversal of the line of the 1970s that cadres who are produced by the urban areas are dispatched to the countryside systematically in order to strengthen the armed revolution as well as to secure those Party cadres already exposed to and hunted by the enemy.

Leading organs of the Party have allowed staff organs or administrative structures based in urban areas to absorb the bulk of Party cadres. Even the NPA general command (earlier called national military staff) based itself since the 1980s in Metro Manila. And since 1986, there has been the yearning to accelerate the explosion of an urban insurrection and to issue commands from the big city by modern communications equipment to the people's army in the countryside. There was no end to special projects rationalizing the stay of the NPA general command in Metro Manila. These projects were not delegated to offices or personnel that could stay in cities more safely and more effectively.

Despite all the lip service paid to people's war, the line opposed to it gained influence to the detriment of the Party and the revolutionary movement. And such erroneous line has never been thoroughly criticized, especially with reference to the fact that the principal leaders of the urban-based commission and other organs in charge of Mindanao where that line was first implemented were either pushed out of the island or disabled by the enemy as early as 1984.

The NPA general command, together with the central staff organs of the Party, entrenched itself in Metro Manila along the erroneous line of "positioning" itself for an overanticipated "sudden turn" in the situation that could give rise to an urban insurrection. Lured by the urban convenience of high-tech electronic means that enabled it to issue commands for one "nationally coordinated offensive" to the people's army in the countryside, the NPA general command tended in practice to disregard the principle of centralized leadership and decentralized operations. Related to this line of the NPA general command is the preoccupation with special projects, which are considered essential for acquiring the logistics _ from above and from outside the country _ for prematurely enlarged military formations that cannot be supported by a declining mass base.

Some regional commands have also based themselves in urban areas.

At the same time, the staffing at various levels of command _ regional, guerrilla front, battalion and company _ has absorbed much of an already stagnant and decreasing number of Party cadres.

When certain elements speak of "regularization", they actually mean generating more staff levels and bureaucratization. Their designs of regularization on paper have gone too far ahead of the available personnel. At any rate, the predilection for building administrative structures and making topheavy staff has resulted in the phenomenon of gross bureaucratization within the Party.

Running the top-heavy military staff and administrative structures has eaten up the time and energy of leading cadres and committees which should have paid more attention to policy questions, ideological-building and in-depth study of our revolutionary practice for guiding the comprehensive development of Party life and Party work. It has taken such a long time and such unprecedented losses for the central leadership to fully identify and take firm and decisive steps to correct the erroneous lines afflicting the Party and the repeated grave errors in the anti-infiltration campaign (which threatened the very life of the Party in 1988).

There is no crescendo of Party cadres doing mass work and developing basic Party life at grassroots level in both urban and rural areas. The more Party cadres are promoted to leading and staff organs, the more are they taken away and alienated from basic Party life and the less Party members there are at the basic level. This has resulted in the neglect of Party recruitment.

From the mid-1980s, the overall growth of the Party membership stopped and even gradually started to decrease from 1988. The number of Party recruits decreased year by year in consonance with the overall lag in the expansion if not contraction of the mass organizations in the countryside and cities. On the other hand, there was increased loss of Party members as a result of death, captivity, demoralization or loss of connection due to enemy operations. Particular note should also be made of the big drop in the recruitment of Party members from the ranks of students and young intellectuals, an important source Party cadres.

For a long period, limited recruitment of Party members was done more by Party staff Party organs and by Party groups in mass organizations who were compelled to do so because of staff requirements. Out of desperation, they often gave priority to reviving long-time drop outs from the Party or recruiting raw elements from the youth movement or wherever possible without promptly checking and raising their ideological consciousness and political level. Or they recruit non-Party staffers and give them tasks and responsibilities (including those reserved for Party members) but without even bothering to give them Party education and recruit them into the Party.

There has been a proliferation of legal offices and institutions in conjunction with the increase in staff organs and a continuous build up in them of dropouts or near dropouts from the Party and the mass movement. An increasing number of political prisoners have also been lured into these offices instead of returning to direct work among the masses and the countryside where they are badly needed. Party work and Party life in them are often buried in office routine and office work away from the masses and the mass movement and where petty bourgeois views, habits, loose discipline and craving for comfort are strong and often go unchallenged.

Such a tendency within the Party has extended also to international work, where cadres are concentrated in legal offices and institutions, practically without giving consistent attention to conducting direct propaganda and organizing among our overseas compatriots, and where there is gross neglect of comprehensive Party work and Party life. In the last several years, many cadres based in the cities prefer deployment abroad (particularly in Western capitalist countries) rather than to underground work, especially if this is in the countryside.

Staff organs have been a good training ground for Party cadres. However, there are elements without sufficient experience and competence in Party and mass work and with low ideological, political and organizational level who get promoted to higher staff organs and even get appointed to leading organs simply because they come from the staff organs. They learn to rule by being appointed first as "political officers" or "secretaries".

There is a reproduction of staffers rather than the development of basic Party life and the systematic recruitment of Party members from the advanced elements of the revolutionary mass movement within the period of candidature set by the Constitution. There is a big delay in taking in candidate members and then there is another big delay in providing the basic education and trial work for someone to become a full Party member.

What is often passed off as organizational work is the frequent reorganizing and multiple organizing of the same limited number of Party members into committees, commissions, task forces, secretariats and so on. Issues and functions, although already well-covered or can be covered by an existing body, become excuses for new bodies to be created. There are constant reshuffling of cadres and reorganizations of Party cores and Party organs, thus further drawing attention away from more important tasks. There are those who are satisfied or preoccupied with mere administrative, contact and coordinative work. They think or act as if these are all there is to organizational work and Party life.

In ideological, political and technical terms, personnel of staff organs are not always necessarily superior to the cadres leading the lower Party organizations and the mass organizations. But using the authority of the Party and the leading organ to which they are attached, they impose themselves on the Party cadres leading the lower Party organizations, mass organizations and legal institutions.

The staff organs have been the sources of "political officers" and "appointive" secretaries who have comprised one-person layers of authority between higher and lower organs or units on the basis of the arrogant proposition that no one in the lower organ or unit qualifies to be a member of the higher organ or unit.

The system of "political officers", which is a bad copy of a good system in the people's army (good because the political officer is integrated into the army unit) was abolished in 1986. But the promoters of bureaucratism have merely shifted to another name, the "secretary", who is appointed by a higher organ and is not integrated into the organ or unit of which he is the "secretary".

The "PO" system, especially in a situation where important policies and decisions were often transmitted orally, fostered overreliance on the "political officer" by the lower leading committees, weakened the Party committee system and impaired the interaction between lower and higher Party collectives. Integral to the buildup of urban-based central staff organs and the stifling of basic Party life and mass organizations at the grassroots level in the course of growing bureaucratism, was the generation of the fear of taking initiative and expressing views at lower levels within the Party.

Insofar as there are still Party cadres and members who are attending to basic Party and mass work; and insofar as there are mass organizations which continue to grow or which can grow, there is a basis for combating bureaucratism and fostering comprehensive ideological, political and organizational life at the basic level rather than the compartmentalized kind of life in the administrative structure or bureaucracy.

The Party branches and groups in the trade unions, peasant associations, student and youth organizations, the people's army, women's associations, cultural activists and so on should see to it that there is comprehensive Party life and growth and should urge their current Party and mass members to create more local mass organizations on the basis of which more local Party branches can be built.