Salute the New People's Army on its Founding Anniversary

Armando Liwanag
Chairman
Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
March 29, 1996

On behalf of the Central Committee and the entire membership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, I salute the Party cadres and members, Red commanders and fighters of the New People�s Army on the occasion of the 27th anniversary of its founding on March 29. We congratulate you for your heroism and perseverance in protracted people�s war in order to carry out the new-democratic revolution and for the victories accumulated over a long period of time. We congratulate you for rectifying errors and rebuilding your strength in the course of the second great rectification movement and for your victories in the course of revolutionary struggle against the US-Ramos regime.

The people cherish and nurture you because you fight for their national and democratic rights and interests against foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and because you are the decisive instrument for overthrowing the reactionary state, establishing the people�s democratic state and realizing the socialist future.

As the great Mao taught us, �Without the people�s army, the people have nothing.� With the people�s army, the people can liberate themselves from oppression and exploitation, build their own democratic power and create a new Philippines that is independent, free, just and progressive.

The Communist Party of the Philippines has realized its absolute leadership over the New People�s Army by setting the correct ideological and political line, building the army as a revolutionary force for mass work and combat, building the Party at the core of this army and recruiting fighters from among the best sons and daughters of the people.

As a result of the rectification movement, the revolutionary party of the proletariat is more then ever firmly committed to the ideological line of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and to the general line of new-democratic revolution through protracted people�s war. The NPA is directly restrengthened and revitalized by having a correct party at the leadership and core. In turn, the NPA as the main organization of the people with a high proportion of Party membership provides the Party with a powerful revolutionary base.

The Central Committee and regional committees of the Party have correctly summed up the revolutionary experience of the NPA, drawn lessons from it and set forth the revolutionary tasks. They have reaffirmed basic revolutionary principles and policies and upheld the great achievements of the NPA. At the same time, they have criticized and repudiated the major subjectivist and opportunist errors that have wrought damage on the revolutionary forces and the mass base in more than 15 years.

In restrengthening and revitalizing the NPA, the second great rectification movement has cast off the pernicious currents of modern revisionism, empiricism and dogmatism in the ideological field and �Left� and Right opportunism in the political field. This is similar to the first great rectification movement against the Lava revisionist renegades and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique. Rectification of major errors was necessary for reestablishing the Party in 1968 and the NPA in 1969.

After pretending to be revolutionaries and yet trying to liquidate the armed revolutionary movement ideologically, politically and organizationally, the revisionists, incorrigible opportunists and all renegades have openly gone to the side of the enemy. Their current counterrevolutionary standing and behavior are literally visual aids to the rectification documents of the Party.

The proletarian revolutionaries and the Red commanders and fighters have won overwhelming and resounding victories against major errors. Nonetheless, criticism and self-criticism are being conducted not only against the lingering influence of major errors in the past but also against the specific errors and shortcomings in the past and current work of particular organs, units and individuals that are loyal to the revolutionary cause and are ever desirous of improving the methods and style of work and struggle.

The rectification movement and the comradely conduct of criticism and self-criticism at various levels constitute the living study of MarxismLeninism-Maoism and the general political line. At the same time, standardized politico-military training in the NPA, special courses of mass organizations and formal courses in Party education at various levels are being vigorously promoted.

Revolutionary education, putting politics in command, has strengthened the unity of the NPA with the Party and the people and raised the conscious discipline and fighting morale of the Red commanders and fighters. More than ever, we have the confidence to implement and put into full play the long-standing policy of centralized leadership and decentralized operations, with the Party Central Committee setting the correct ideological and political line and the NPA having the flexibility of tactics in carrying out guerrilla warfare.

We are carrying out the national-democratic revolution through protracted people�s war. This is in consonance with the semicolonial and semifeudal character of Philippine society whose chronic crisis is ever worsening. Together with the entire people, you are carrying out the principal form of struggle, which is armed struggle based on rural mass work.

We pursue the revolutionary class line of the proletariat regarding all classes in the country in waging the national-democratic revolution. Along the general line, we pursue the antifeudal class line in the countryside where the forces of the New People�s Army can base themselves among the peasantry, the most numerous exploited class, have room for maneuver and accumulate armed strength until they can ultimately seize the cities. Within the current stage of the strategic defensive, we carry out tactical offensives in order to accumulate victories.

As a result of the rectification movement, the New People�s Army has been reoriented, retrained and redeployed for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever expanding and deepening mass base. There are no more companies and battalions being maintained the expense of mass work and as an unbearable logistical burden. There are only a few oversized platoons as centers of gravity in large guerrilla fronts on mountainous terrain.

The typical guerrilla front now has a platoon as the center of gravity for many squads which are dispersed for extensive mass work. These are divisible into armed propaganda teams and are augmented by the local people�s militia. Thus, the NPA has retained scores of guerrilla fronts, expanded these and recovered areas previously lost. The unit serving as center of gravity itself does mass work even as it takes on a radius smaller than that of the squads for expansion work.

The current deployment of forces allows the NPA to use small teams, squads, platoons or even a company for tactical offensives. The use of a company for tactical offensives or for campaigns to implement policies and laws (e.g., land reform, taxation, protection of the environment, etc.) requires the prior approval and guidance of the regional Party committee.

The scale, frequency and intensity of the tactical offensives have relied on the extent of mass work already achieved. When tactical offensives are launched, the capacity of the mass base to provide logistical and intelligence support and frustrate enemy reaction is taken into account. The people�s army can flexibly use the tactics of dispersal, concentration and shifting in a fluid guerrilla war only if there is a mass base that provides all necessary support and room for maneuver.

At this point in time, in practically all guerrilla fronts, the NPA is capable of using teams, squads or platoons for tactical offensives without causing strain on the mass base. In making a judgment about launching a tactical offensive under the principle of decentralized operations, the guerrilla front command has to weigh all factors on our side and the enemy�s and the implications and consequences of an armed action.

The expansion and consolidation of the mass base have raised the ability of the NPA to discover and create the opportunities for tactical offensives. The tactical offensives of the NPA have gradually and steadily increased on a nationwide scale and on the scale of specific guerrilla fronts. Several scores of armed tactical offensives of varying sizes, including ambushes, raids and arrests were successfully carried out in the previous year on a nationwide scale. These have increased the armed strength of the NPA.

Hundreds of NPA operations to implement policies and laws were carried out. The NPA has encouraged and supported the campaigns initiated by the local organs of political power and mass organizations to conduct revolutionary education, achieve land reform, raise production, improve health conditions, train the militia and self-defense units, undertake cultural performances and so on. It has also interdicted logging for export in extensive areas in Northern Luzon and Mindanao and prevented the intrusion of counterrevolutionary groups, including �NGOs�, financed by the reactionary government and imperialist agencies to undermine and slander the revolutionary movement. The NPA is the main instrument of the Party to achieve self-reliance in the revolutionary mass movement. It gathers the contributions of the masses. It enforces the tax policy. It engages in a significant of production for its own needs. It confiscates arms and other logistics from the enemy.

The enemy and the bourgeois mass media have deliberately suppressed news about the tactical offensives of the NPA in order to conjure the illusion of a weakening revolutionary movement. In due time, the scale, frequency and intensity of the tactical offensives will increase and the psy-war personnel of the enemy and the reactionary media will find these difficult to deny. The Red commanders and fighters are highly conscious that the emphasis on rectification and mass work in the previous years is to create the basis for extending and intensifying guerrilla warfare.

All organs and NPA commands have been instructed to keep and accumulate prisoners of war, who hold the rank of second lieutenant or municipal mayor (active in armed counterrevolution) and upward, for the purpose of exchanging prisoners of war under international law and through the NDF Negotiating Panel, unless trial for grave criminal offenses takes precedence on the basis of strong evidence. The discretion of NPA units to release captives of lower rank remains the same but the release must be made to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The leading and staff members of the Central Committee and regional Party committees are in the main based in the countryside. They are either secured by special units or by the units serving as the centers of gravity of the regional and guerrilla front forces of the NPA. They share the weal and woe of the Red fighters and the masses and learn from their situation.

The Central Committee oversees the development of the armed revolutionary movement and reallocates relative surpluses in personnel, arms and funds from one region to another and directs the regional Party committees to raise the general level of development of the guerrilla fronts under them without impairing the principle of self-reliance.

The Central Committee has paid special attention to areas damaged by the counterrevolutionary renegades for a long period of time and in their desperate effort to misrepresent and stop the rectification movement. It has wisely required the expansion and consolidation of the mass base, preparatory to tactical offensives against the enemy. The Party and the NPA have successfully prevented the provocations of the enemy and his special counterrevolutionary agents from deflecting them from the necessary tasks of rectification and mass work. In due course, the tactical offensives will increase dramatically.

Current successes continue to demonstrate that the correct methods of expansion and consolidation worked out and applied in the first ten years of the armed revolutionary movement, remain valid and effective. A great deal of the mass work since 1992 has been to recover the mass base previously lost due to the �Left� opportunist errors of building prematurely larger NPA units and rejecting painstaking mass work and solid mass organizing. In the course of the rectification movement, the mass base has steadily and significantly expanded on a nationwide scale.

In expansion work, social investigations are being conducted; initial contacts, liaison groups, people�s organizing groups and barrio organizing committees are being formed; and meetings of varying scales according to situation and purpose are being held. The prior existence of progressive or friendly legal organizations in the expansion areas has been helpful.

In the work of consolidation, the revolutionary mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, women, cultural activists and others are being formed, barrio revolutionary committees are being elected by the representatives of the mass organizations and people�s militia units are being trained to augment the guerrilla units.

Mass campaigns have been carried out to effect the minimum land reform program and raise production, train the people in self-defense, raise the cultural level of the people, improve public health and sanitation, prevent landgrabbing and the devastation of the environment by the logging and mining firms, and so on. In the process of consolidating the mass base, local Party branches have been built among the advanced revolutionary mass activists.

The local organs of political power have been built under the leadership of the proletariat through the Party even while the reactionary state is still entrenched in Manila and other cities. The Rules for Establishing the People�s Democratic Government is the constitutional guide for these organs of political power.

In pursuing the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside, the Party and the NPA scored victories in integrating the revolutionary armed struggle, genuine land reform and building the mass base by building the mass organizations and the organs of political power.

On a nationwide scale and in the countryside, we have continued to succeed in employing the policy and tactics of the national united front and the antifeudal united front. Our united front policy is one for promoting both armed and legal forms of struggle and mainly for armed struggle. The entire united front policy is not reducible to legal struggle even as there are united front organizations that concentrate on legal struggle.

The main foundation of the united front is the basic alliance of the working class and peasantry. Upon this foundation, the alliance of the basic forces of the revolution (including the petty bourgeoisie) has been developed, as in the National Democratic Front; the alliance of the positive forces of the revolution (including the middle bourgeoisie) has been encouraged and the contradictions among the reactionaries have been taken advantage of in order to isolate and destroy the most reactionary force at every given time.

It is necessary to win over the urban petty bourgeoisie as a basic revolutionary force. But it is equally necessary to expose and oppose the anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets that specialize in undermining and attacking the revolutionary forces. These grouplets are directed and financed by the imperialists and the exploiting classes to attack the revolutionary forces from within and from the flanks.

In dealing with the problem of incorrigible opportunists, renegades and traitors, the Party has concentrated on the two-line ideological, political and organizational struggle and has distinguished those ideologically and politically in error from those with criminal accountabilities. The criminal wrongdoers have the right to due process in the revolutionary justice system but are subject to battle operations when they are armed and resist arrest.

The psy-war and intelligence agencies of the imperialists and local reactionaries have orchestrated the renegades and their foreign collaborators in the campaign of vilification against the revolutionary movement on a national and international scale. The full scope of the campaign is clear. It is a major part of the low-intensity conflict scheme instigated by US imperialism and carried out mainly by the Ramos regime.

As a result of the rectification movement, the legal democratic mass movement has dramatically advanced. The basic legal mass organizations, sectoral and multisectoral alliances have strengthened and developed themselves politically and organizationally and have launched protest mass actions and mass campaigns on a nationwide scale on a wide range of issues.

Revolutionary mass activists in the urban and rural areas have come forward to become proletarian revolutionaries. An increasing number of them have joined the New People�s Army and render revolutionary service in the countryside. Service in the mass movement for a certain period of time is a prerequisite for recruitment into the NPA.

The NPA has also gradually created teams of armed city partisans from among those who have served in NPA units for a number of years, who know the urban areas well and who are not identifiable by the enemy and the renegades. These teams of armed city partisans are under the appropriate NPA command based in the countryside and are within the compass of Party organs concerned.

The Party is in a better position than ever before to coordinate the revolutionary struggle in the countryside and the cities, in different islands and the armed and legal forms of struggle. In view of the development of the revolutionary forces, communications between the urban and rural areas and on a nationwide scale are difficult or impossible for the enemy to break.

Contrary to the claims of the US-Ramos regime, the personnel and arms of the NPA are increasing. By aggravating the chronic crisis of the ruling system, the regime itself unwittingly serves as the NPA�s best recruiter. By deploying its military, police and paramilitary forces against the revolutionary forces and the people, it likewise serves as the NPA�s best supplier of arms and logistics. The failure of the regime in its campaigns of suppression is demonstrated by the government�s ever increasing military budget. The invention of ghost surrenderees has become a major racket of both civil and military officials who personally appropriate money from �amnesty and rehabilitation� funds.

The NPA is determined to develop the protracted people�s war in strategic stages and to wage extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on an ever widening and deepening mass base in the current stage of the strategic defensive. The rectification movement has clearly demonstrated what is correct and effective in ideological, political and organizational as well as in military strategy and tactics.

II. Favorable Domestic Conditions for Protracted People�s War

The chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal system is rapidly worsening. The objective conditions in the Philippines are favorable for carrying forward the new-democratic revolution through protracted people�s war. All that is needed is to develop the subjective forces of the revolution along the correct ideological and political line against blatant counterrevolution and against the currents of subjectivism and opportunism.

The policies and measures undertaken by the US-Ramos regime under the dictation of the foreign monopoly firms and banks directly and through the IMF, World Bank and WTO have deepened and aggravated the backward and agrarian character of the economy. The so-called Medium-Term Development Program of the US-Ramos regime is a program of anti-industrialization rather than one of making a newly industrializing country.

There is not a single heavy or basic industrial project to start breaking the fundamental preindustrial and agrarian character of the economy. There is heavy importation of manufactured components for the reassembly plants and equipment and structural steel for infrastructure projects and real estate projects to bloat the gross output value of industry. Imported luxury cars and computer gadgets are accounted as producer goods. There is a proliferation of �industrial zones� even in areas where no industrial plant whatsoever is being built.

The regime does not even pretend to undertake any kind of land reform and has in fact abandoned the bogus land reform programs of its predecessors. Peasants who were previously issued �land transfer certificates� and �emancipation patents� are being compelled to give these up. Nevertheless, the regime cynically promises technical and credit assistance, instead of land distribution and puts up the signboard of �agrarian reform communities� in areas where there are no more �land reform beneficiaries�.

All sorts of tactics are being used by the regime to dispossess peasants and ethnic minorities of their land. Most outrageous is armed force and intimidation used in varying degrees against them. Vast tracts of agricultural land are being taken over by foreign and local corporate real estate speculators and plantation owners. The World Bank-financed National Integrated Protected Areas (NIPAS), the Integrated Forest Management Agreement and the Mining Law of 1995 are new legal devices to drive off peasants and ethnic minorities from the land and alienate the public domain to foreign and local corporate landgrabbers.

Under the latter law, more than 6 million hectares or 22 percent of the Philippine land area are being offered to foreign mining corporations for the exploitation of mineral, timber, water and other resources. The plunder and destruction of the environment by the logging and mining firms are ruining agriculture, fisheries animal husbandry and other means of livelihood of the people.

The economic and financial resources under the control and disposal of the reactionary government are misdirected towards the showy consumption of imported goods in a few urban centers, high bureaucratic and military overspending, graft-ridden public utility and other infrastructure projects, real estate speculation and export enterprises in agriculture and import-dependent manufacturing.

The country is deliberately prevented from building the basic industries to produce capital goods, basic metals and basic chemicals. The illusion of industrialization is conjured by larger importation of finished components for reassembly and repackaging and consumption-oriented equipment in the industrial and service sectors. Agricultural production for domestic consumption has fallen. The agrarian economy is paradoxically importing larger amounts of food products, including rice, corn, sugar and dairy products.

The yearly claim of increase in gross domestic product does not mean increased production and improvement of social conditions of the people but accelerated bloodsucking by the foreign monopoly firms and banks, the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords and the bureaucrat capitalists. The income from the export of agricultural products, mineral ores, low value-added reexports and cheap labor keeps falling far below the expenditures for imported goods and services, debt service and profit remittances.

The aggravation of the Philippine economic crisis is clearly manifested by the growing foreign debt burden, accelerated local public borrowing, the use of highly speculative foreign capital, the privatization of state assets and various ways of increasing the tax burden and accelerating inflation, like the expanded value- added tax and repeated oil price increases. These are desperate and self-defeating devices being used by the reactionary state to tide itself over the ever growing budgetary and trade deficits.

Unemployment is rampant. The cities are glutted with odd jobbers in shanty communities. The countryside has a huge surplus of farm workers competing for a few odd jobs. They are the effluence of poor and lower middle peasants and earlier generations of farm workers, with no land to own or tenant. They are churned up in the main by the sheer increase of population and not by the capitalist mechanization of farms.

The employed workers are subjected to a policy of pressing down wages and are deprived of job security and trade union rights. Large areas of the country are being designated as �industrial zones� that are union-free and strike-free zones in order to encourage foreign investments. Military, police and paramilitary forces of the state as well as private armed gangs are being used to attack the workers and bust the unions.

The peasants are subjected to severe feudal and semifeudal exactions by the landlords and merchant-usurers. There is a reversal from the fixed rent system (mislabeled as land reform by the reactionary state) to the old sharecropping system. Landgrabbing is being carried out on a widening scale by the bureaucrat capitalists and by agricultural, logging, ranch and mining corporations. These use the military, police and paramilitary forces as well as private armed gangs to attack the peasants and the ethnic minorities. In the most scandalous cases, as in Agusan del Sur and Davao Oriental, aerial bombings, artillery fire, strafing, bulldozing, arson and massacres have been used to drive the people off the land.

Inflation, heavier taxes and rising costs of public utilities are cutting down the real income of the broad masses of the people. The urban petty bourgeoisie is finding its small and limited income cut down and is facing less income opportunities. A large number of college-educated people are driven to seek overseas employment as low-paid bottom jobbers without the rights of the workers in the host country.

The middle bourgeoisie, which is producing for the local market and using relatively high, is also directly hard pressed or squeezed out by the foreign monopolies and the comprador big bourgeoisie which are favored by the policy of import-liberalization and by he incentives to the production of low value-added consumer goods for reexport.

Social unrest is widespread and intense. The legal democratic mass movement of the workers, peasants and urban petty-bourgeoisie is surging forward. The mass protest actions are rising and spreading. An increasing number of workers and educated youth are eager to join the revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside. The peasants and farm workers are enthusiastically joining and supporting the revolutionary armed struggle. The NPA recruits its Red fighters from them in the main.

The political crisis of the ruling system, which was totally exposed under the US-Marcos regime, has not abated. The open rule of terror has continued despite the thin bourgeois-democratic veneer of the institutions and processes monopolized by the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class. Unable to find a way out of the ever worsening socioeconomic crisis, the US-Ramos regime is using many of the repressive laws, the enlarged coercive apparatuses and campaigns of suppression that have been extended from the 1972-86 Marcos fascist dictatorship in order to intimidate rival political factions and the entire people.

Not satisfied with the official terrorist devices carried over from the period of the US-Marcos regime, the current regime has been trying to amend the 1987 constitution of the reactionary state and push bills under the pretext of combating terrorism and crime in order to accumulate power, go beyond the six-year limit of the presidential term, do away with the formal guarantees of civil and political rights, outmaneuver rival factions and coerce the entire people. At the same time, the most ruthless criminal syndicates are run by military and police officers.

The rapidly worsening socioeconomic crisis is constricting and straining the capability of the reactionary political factions to amicably divide the spoils of political power among themselves. Behind their unity against the people and their common use of the reactionary institutions and periodic elections is an intensifying competition in building private armed groups and in gaining influence among factions of military and police officers.

The political factions, which are direct descendants of the Marcos fascist dictatorship, are clearly dominant because they have the biggest funds and are linked to the strongest factions within the reactionary armed forces. In the temporary use of the Aquino faction to head off the revolutionary movement in 1986, the United States made use of General Ramos to ensure the continuity of armed counterrevolution. Thus, the political descendants of Marcos, though factionalized, have made a comeback to hog the political and electoral arena, coopt or marginalize the anti-Marcos reactionaries and frustrate the people�s demand for justice.

The memory and living forces of Marcos are being rehabilitated nationally. The political stocks of the family are rising. After ten years since his fall, no criminal case has been finally decided in the Philippine reactionary courts against his biggest criminal cohorts. The more than 10,000 victims of human rights violations who have won their tort case against the estate of Marcos in a US court continue to suffer injustice in the hands of the Philippine reactionary state. Their continuing victimization cry for revolutionary justice.

There is the so-called general peace agreement among the factions of Ramos, Enrile and the Marcos family within the reactionary armed forces. This has long been pushed by the Pentagon and has been arranged behind the scenes. It was formally staged in order to counter the dramatic defection of Brig. Gen. Raymundo Jarque to the National Democratic Front. The so-called general peace agreement is poised against other factions and against the people. But conflicting material interests persist even among the currently dominant factions.

Factionalization of the reactionary armed forces, police and paramilitary is due not only to the dictates of their national political leaders but also due to the fact that military and police officers at all levels are driven by their own rapacity and they use their subordinates in the most brazen criminal activities. They grab land, business concessions and cut into the operations of others. They run criminal syndicates for the protection of gambling, prostitution, illegal logging, smuggling, kidnap for ransom, murder for hire and robbery.

Huge amounts of public money are allocated for the �modernization� of the armed forces and the police. Consequently, the president himself and high military officials make the most money from the contracts to purchase supplies locally and from abroad. The official pay of military, police and paramilitary forces are kept low. Thus, their morale is extremely low. Military and police personnel at all levels engage in criminal activities on a wide scale. The CAFGU and CVO paramilitary personnel have also become the private and armed gangs of local tyrants or have turned to outright banditry, except in instances where the NPA has either won over or disintegrated the CAFGU and CVO units.

The United States still controls the reactionary armed forces and police through indoctrination, strategic subordination, officer training, military supplies, logistics and so on. Despite the dismantling of the US military bases, US military forces continue to have access to Philippine territory and military facilities. The cost of maintaining the US military bases in the Philippines has merely been eliminated and US military forces have shifted to using Philippine military facilities maintained by the reactionary government.

In an attempt to increase US military assistance and induce the return of US military bases, the US-Ramos regime has made provocations against China in the Spratly islands. Like a true and trusted mercenary of US imperialism, the regime has enthusiastically engaged in US-instigated war games and allowed the use of Subic for port calls of US warships in a show of support for the Taiwan regime against China.

The US-Ramos regime has failed to work out the terms of capitulation that would satisfy the Moro National Liberation Front. The MNLF is willing to accept autonomy under the current oppressive state on the condition that the MNLF leadership is granted the privilege of ruling the non-Moro majority of the people in 13 provinces, if not the whole of Mindanao. The sole interest of the regime is to prolong the ceasefire agreement with the MNLF by engaging in �peace� negotiations as well as to insist on elections as the method for determining the leaders of designated provinces.

In the meantime, both the Manila government and the MNLF are already overtaken by the growth of other armed Moro organizations challenging the claim of the MNLF to represent the entire Moro people. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has displaced the MNLF in many Moro areas and has built an army stronger than that of the MNLF. The regime is facing a far more complex situation than ever before in the Moro areas. Anticipating the rise of armed conflict in these areas, it has deployed most of the combat forces of the Philippine Army there.

Since February this year, the reactionary armed forces have deployed two-thirds of the Philippine Army in the Moro areas and have provoked armed hostilities with the MILF. The MNLF has to resume armed struggle or else further lose initiative to the MILF. The growing armed resistance of the Moro people is creating favorable conditions for the NPA to expand and intensify the armed revolution on a nationwide scale, as in the first half of the �70s but this time at a new and higher level.

The peace negotiations between the GRP and the NDFP are at a standstill. The US-Ramos regime is responsible for the violation of the GRP-NDFP Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) by failing to release NDFP political consultant Sotero Llamas and for the unilateral suspension of the formal meetings of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations on the day after the opening session of the formal peace negotiations hosted by the Belgian government in Brussels on June 26, 1995.

The NDFP Negotiating Panel has consistently adhered to the line that a just and lasting peace is possible only through the completion of the struggle for national liberation and democracy and that peace negotiations when properly conducted are merely one more form of legal struggle, subordinate to the armed struggle and the legal democratic mass movement. The US-Ramos regime has thus failed to use the rumors or siren song of peace to confuse and split the ranks of the revolutionary forces and the people.

As a result of the rectification movement, the revolutionary armed struggle and the legal democratic mass movement are revitalized and resurgent. These are the most unrelenting and powerful forces that pressure and strain the ruling system because of its inherent rottenness, as glaringly manifested by the socioeconomic and political crisis, the violence-prone rivalry of political and military factions, the terrorism and criminality of military and police officers and the outbreak of armed hostilities in the Moro areas.

The imperialists and the local reactionaries have failed to destroy the armed revolutionary movement with frontal campaigns of military suppression and deception under the total war policy. They have also failed to split and weaken this movement by using psychological warfare, orchestrating the revisionist renegades and reformists (including those who swung from �Left� to Right opportunism) and the anticommunist petty bourgeois grouplets. John Negroponte, Generals Ramos and Almonte must be terribly embarrassed.

The incorrigible �Left� and Right opportunists of the past are pathetic even as they are obnoxious. First, in the time of the Marcos fascist dictatorship they credited Marcos with having industrialized and urbanized the Philippines to the extent of having lifted it from semifeudalism. Then in the time of Aquino they started to claim that there was democratization and a decline in human rights violations. Finally, in the time of Ramos, they have openly sought to destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement and completely exposed their counterrevolutionary anticommunist character.

The anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets formed by the renegades are Sanlakas, a Trotskyite and criminal gang, and the Siglaya, a mixed bag of admitted anti-Marxist neoliberals, Trotskyites, bourgeois populists and Gorbachovites. They have taken to the same anticommunist track like the old revisionist Confredem, the proto-Trotskyite Bisig, the �social-democrat� or Christian democrat Pandayan and the �popular democrats� based in the CIA-instituted Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM).

These anticommunist petty-bourgeois groups band together on the line of opposing Marxism-Leninism and the national-democratic revolution. The worst elements claim that the revolutionary forces and the people led by the CPP are inherently antidemocratic, that the struggle for national liberation is passe and that nothing can be done against the global power of capitalism except to seek reforms endlessly and to make occasional legal protests. They are against so-called Stalinism of the revolutionary forces but condone Kampanyang Ahos and beg for civility and pluralism under the bourgeois reactionary state. They are puppets of foreign funding agencies and use the latest phraseology from the ideological and propaganda mills of the imperialists.

Having criticized and repudiated �Left� and Right opportunism and having restrengthened and revitalized themselves, the Party, the NPA and the NDFP have raised their revolutionary consciousness and militancy to a new and higher level and are in a position to win ever greater victories through revolutionary struggle and to take full advantage of the chronic crisis and inherent rottenness of the ruling system.

The crisis of the world capitalist system is rapidly worsening and generating the new world disorder. As a neocolonial agrarian adjunct of foreign monopoly capitalism, the Philippines cannot find relief for its own domestic crisis. On the other hand, this crisis is being aggravated and deepened by the ever deteriorating terms of trade for raw-material exports and the reexport of low value-added manufactures and by dependence on foreign credit, foreign speculative capital, sale of state assets to foreign investors in order to cover trade and budgetary deficits.

The crisis of overproduction in the world capitalist system is the result of the contradiction of the forces and relations of production. It is accelerated and deepened by the most wanton abuse of finance capital, adoption of higher technology and the rapid disemployment of the proletariat, both blue collars and white collars, in the industrial capitalist countries for the purpose of maximizing the profits of the supermonopolies.

The adoption of higher technology and the massive elimination of jobs have resulted in the higher concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of the supermonopolies, in massive bankruptcies of monopoly firms losing in the competition, in massive unemployment and therefore in the destruction of productive forces in the industrial capitalist countries as well as on a global scale, in the lesser industrial capitalist countries and in the far more numerous underdeveloped countries.

In the past year, the supermonopolies could make profits to please the stockholders only by eliminating jobs in huge numbers, forcing those who remain on the job to do the work of those displaced and using low-paid part-timers and outside jobbers. But in all industrial capitalist countries, including such global centers as the United States, Japan and the European Union or principally Germany, the national rates of productivity and profitability have fallen. There is a new round of global recession going on.

In trying to recover from its strategic industrial decline since 1975 and to solve its colossal budgetary and trade deficit problems, the United States is upsetting the balance of its relations with Japan and Western Europe by pushing its lead in high technology, reviving its manufacturing capacity, undervaluing the US dollar and carrying out a trade offensive. Nevertheless, the United States has failed to solve its fundamental economic problems and is still caught up with a large inventory of what it overproduced in 1994 and 1995. Frictions are increasing among the global centers of capitalism on various issues in their international organizations (UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, G-7, OECD and the like) even while they use these to unite in exploiting the people of the world.

Within the industrial capitalist countries, social unrest has risen dramatically as a result of high rates of unemployment and cutbacks on social programs. General strikes have surged among the workers and youth. The biggest so far has been the general strike in France last December. Although the monopoly bourgeoisie and its major political parties are discredited, the better times of the past, the powerful mass media, the bureaucratic dominance of the labor aristocrats, the petty-bourgeoisification of the proletariat and the influence of classical and modern revisionism continue to have adverse effects on the working class movement.

The proletariat and the rest of the people are not only being materially harmed by disemployment, degradation of wage and living conditions and cutbacks on social programs but are also daily provoked by the bourgeois propaganda with the insult that they are parasites who are either overpaid or are on social welfare. At the same time, the supermonopolies ceaselessly use the state and its resources in so many ways for their corporate benefit while they push cutbacks on social programs.

The monopoly bourgeoisie also spreads the chauvinist propaganda that migrant workers take away jobs from the local workers and that third world countries have industrialized under the auspices of monopoly capitalism and have taken away industries, jobs and markets from the industrial capitalist countries. The counterrevolutionary presumption is that imperialism has spread rather than stunted industrial development in the world.

The fact is that the industrial capitalist countries have historically and currently de-capitalized and kept down the technological level of the general run of their neocolonial adjuncts. To only a few of these have they shifted labor-intensive low-technology manufacturing to penetrate the local or regional market and make available cheaper consumer goods for themselves. Still fewer are economies like those of South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil allowed by the US in the course of the cold war to acquire an industrial foundation or some basic industries. Most of the countries that have acquired these after World War II owe these to either socialist policy (as in China, North Korea and Eastern Europe) or to national bourgeois policy (Argentina, India, Egypt and the like).

The large-scale destruction of productive forces continues in the former revisionist-ruled countries. Heavy and basic industries have either been closed, cannibalized or made to operate far below capacity. The persistent bureaucrat monopoly capitalists as well as the private monopoly capitalists opt for big comprador operations in collaboration with the leading imperialist countries.

On their part, the foreign monopoly capitalists keep a policy of dumping surplus consumer products as well as quick-profit and nonproductive speculative capital on the former Soviet bloc countries. So far, the drive of the West is mainly to take over oil and other natural resources from Russia and the Central Asian republics and secondarily to operate some subsidiary plants using the cheap but highly skilled workers and give some market accommodation in the West to certain cheap agricultural, textile and metal products.

The blatantly anticommunist regimes that previously replaced the revisionist regimes have been rapidly discredited by their own subservience to the Western imperialists, their rapacity in privatization schemes and failure to solve the problem of economic depression, social misery and disorder. Thus, the main revisionist parties have been winning elections by using a medley of nationalist, social-democratic and neoliberal slogans.

The conditions for civil war and the rise of military fascism exist all over the former Soviet revisionist-ruled countries. But there is yet no revolutionary party of the proletariat that has done a comprehensive and profound criticism and repudiation of modern revisionism and capitalist restoration and proceeded to prepare the forces of armed revolution within and outside the official armed forces. So far, the civil wars in Chechnya, Tadjikistan, Georgia and the like are being fought by competing bureaucratic cliques using the slogans of nationalism, religion, neoliberalism and social democracy.

The European Union has maneuvered the US into assuming main responsibility for the Dayton accord over Bosnia. At the same time, the US is also taking advantage of the violent turmoil in Bosnia and the Balkans to make bilateral military alliances with Central and Eastern European countries, expand the NATO and neutralize Russia with a �partnership for peace�. The civil war in Bosnia among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims has been significant, if only because it is the first war to break out in Europe in which the NATO combat forces have been directly embroiled. It can be expected that war will flare up again in Bosnia after the scheduled withdrawal of US troops.

Imperialism still means war. The danger of a global war will most likely arise in the future when the political forces subservient to foreign monopoly capitalism in Russia will be supplanted by military fascists determined to revive the industrial and military power of Russia and restore an imperial order and the foreign capitalist powers unite and compete to intervene in the affairs of the former Soviet bloc countries and nearby countries. In the absence of a genuine proletarian revolutionary party, the military fascists are in the best position to ride on the rising wave of resentment over the misery and the enlargement of the NATO.

The widescale destruction of productive forces in the third world countries has deepened and accelerated. The general run of these countries are dependent on raw-material production and continue to suffer from deteriorating terms of trade. The limits on foreign borrowing, local public borrowing, taxation and privatization of state assets have been exhausted in many countries.

Africa is the continent most devastated economically by neocolonial methods of imperialist and social-imperialist exploitation and oppression. Thirty-three of the third world�s 50 poorest countries are here. The African countries dependent on agricultural and mineral products for export have been depressed by the global overproduction of raw materials since the late �70s and by the deteriorating terms of trade with the industrial capitalist countries.

Oil producing countries like Nigeria in West Africa or Algeria in North Africa have not escaped the long running crisis of overproduction in raw materials. As a result, the crushing debt burden, state bankruptcies and austerity measures have generated a turbulent situation, characterized by coups and countercoups and civil wars between bureaucratic cliques with at least one side manipulating the slogans of ethnocentrism and religion. There is massive displacement of people and massacres in the African continent.

In South Africa, the big bourgeoisie of the white minority, continues to control the urban and industrial enclaves and the security forces. As in other parts of Africa, the leaders of national liberation movements coming to power are coopted and develop into bureaucrat capitalists. The miserable conditions of the masses persist and remain rife for revolutionary work.

In Latin America, the original stage of neocolonialism since the 19th century, most of the countries have remained backward and agrarian, contrary to illusions of development conjured by imperialist propaganda. In the minority are countries which are relatively better off historically with some basic industries, reassembly plants, ranches and oil resources, like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile. But even in these latter countries, the economies are rapidly deteriorating.

The collapse of the Mexican economy has exposed the devastating effects of imperialist �free trade�, privatization and the free flow of speculative capital; and has had adverse repercussions in the whole of Latin America, East Asia and elsewhere. The armed revolutionary movement in Chiapas is a new storm signal for the whole of Latin America even as the long-running revolutionary armed struggles in Peru, Guatemala and Colombia continue.

The mass movement is developing in the whole of Latin America and the proletarian revolutionaries and the masses are preparing themselves against the danger of military suppression. They have learned from the betrayals of classical and modern revisionism and one-sided focus on urban-based struggles, or on any form of military struggle (insurrectionist, focoist or urban guerrilla) which is inspired by the theory of spontaneous masses. The Cuban people and government continue to defend their national independence and the level of social welfare they have achieved even as the imperialists exert all effort to subjugate Cuba through the US embargo as well as through West European investments.

In the Near East, Turkey is both the site of an intensifying struggle between revolution and counterrevolution and is at the crossroads of turbulent currents in the Balkans, Middle East and Central Asia. The US and the European Union use Turkey as a base for counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. But the revolutionary movement of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples persevere in armed struggle.

In the Middle East, the scheme of the US to control the oil resources and put the Palestinian and Arab peoples under control in favor of the US-Israeli tandem is widely resented and is a constant source of conflict. Following the Gulf war, the US has not only punished Iraq but has effectively captivated its oil-producing allies with the most expensive military contracts as a way of draining their oil income. The misuse of the oil income by the royal families has already resulted in lower living standards and incited mass protests. The imposition of Pax Americana is a guarantee for bigger armed conflicts within and among countries in the region.

Central Asian countries, like Afghanistan and Tadjikistan, continue to be the scenes of brutal civil wars between bureaucratic cliques, utilizing or opposing the slogans of nationalism and religion. Various imperialists and competing factions of the local reactionaries are scheming to control the oil resources here. In South Asia, the semifeudal economies are in grave crisis. As elsewhere in the third world, the imposition of IMF-World Bank-WTO policies on these economies have resulted in worse crisis. The promotion of cheap labor-intensive and low-technology manufacture of consumer goods for the industrial capitalist countries does not change the feudal and semifeudal fundamentals and does not save them from the crushing deficits and foreign debt burden. The huge Indian economy, with heavy and basic industries, continue to be undermined by further compradorization through tighter integration with the world capitalist system since the late �80s.

The worsening economic crisis is generating social turmoil and revolutionary armed struggle. Revolutionary mass movements and armed struggles are dramatically rising up in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties are determined to undertake people�s war and turn South Asia, especially India, into a globally significant stage for the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement.

In East Asia, all the economies are taking a downturn. Japanese monopoly capitalism has not recovered from the bursting of its bubble economy, is going into heavy deficit spending and local public borrowing and is confronted with intensified competition from US monopoly capitalism. In view of the crisis of the industrial capitalist countries, the lessened consumption of such countries and repercussions of the collapse of the Mexican economy, the export of consumer manufactures from the �tiger economies� of Asia and the coastal provinces of China is adversely affected.

The repercussions of the collapse of the Mexican economy on the export-oriented manufacturing in the region includes the lessened inflow of foreign speculative capital since last year and the tendency of the US and other foreign investors to take advantage of the greatly cheapened labor in Mexico, now running at US$4 to 5 per day, compared to around US$4 per day in East Asia. NAFTA is now in the process of taking away the glow from the maquiladoras (reassembly plants) of East Asia.

The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia are now dramatically exposing the same economic disease that has stricken Mexico. This consists of the false promise of industrialization through reassembly plants, ceaseless foreign trade deficits due to the overconsumption and corruption of a few and the destructive results of dependence on foreign loans and foreign investments of a quick-profit character.

Countries in East Asia which have a socialist background are under economic, political and military pressures by the US to further privatize and open up their economies. The US is obsessed with seeking to discredit and dissolve the state enterprises and to demand political liberalization in correspondence to the economic liberalization. It has used both �engagement� and �containment� in order to impose its hegemony over China.

The United States has insisted on using Okinawa and other parts of Japan as well as the whole of South Korea as military bases to oppose the reunification of Korea and to threaten China. It has also used the countries of Southeast Asia to whip up anti-China attitudes up to a certain level and has supplied more weapons to Taiwan in order to oppose reunification with China.

We have a special interest in the development of the revolutionary forces in our neighboring countries in East Asia. We strongly support all of them. We support the Japanese and other peoples in fighting against both US and Japanese monopoly capitalism. We support the reunification of Taiwan with China and South Korea with the People�s Democratic Republic of Korea. We support the advance of the democratic movement and all the revolutionary forces in Indonesia, Malaysia, Indochina, Thailand, Burma and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Amidst the worsening crisis and disorder in the world capitalist system, there are armed revolutionary movements led by working class parties guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. These are the parties which seriously answer the central question of revolution and inspire the proletariat and people of the world to wage revolutionary struggle against monopoly capitalism and for socialism.

While upholding the ideological line of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism among proletarian revolutionaries, the Communist Party of the Philippines stands firmly in political solidarity with all revolutionary forces and people fighting for their national liberation and independence against imperialism. We unconditionally extend political support to the Cuban, Korean, Chinese, Libyan and other peoples and governments in defending their national independence and territorial integrity against encroachment by the imperialists and their lackeys.

The Communist Party of the Philippines is leading the New People�s Army and carrying out the revolutionary armed struggle not only in the immediate and concrete interest of the Filipino people along the line of national-democratic revolution but also in the spirit of proletarian internationalism and along the broad international united front against imperialism. We are conscious of the exemplary character of the Philippine revolution and its being a contributory factor to the international communist movement and the world anti-imperialist and socialist movement.

Adhere to the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines!

Long live the New People�s Army!

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