Central Committee,
Communist Party of the Philippines

March 3, 1972

Tanging Palathala

We have won great ideological victories. The single most important of these is the re-establishment of the Party on the theoretical basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. We have cast away modern revisionism projected from the Soviet Union and practised locally by the Lava revisionist renegades. We have also rejected modern revisionism cowering behind centrism. We have kept a firm grasp of the most comprehensive, most advanced and most powerful ideological weapon in the present era and have managed to put on the correct road the glorious Communist Party of the Philippines.

To the best of its ability and as far as its limited circumstances can permit, the Party has attended to ideological building as the first requisite in rebuilding itself. It has taken the lead in the propagation, that is to say, in the study and application of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought in a living way in the Philippines. In so short a time, it has become a formidable ideological and political force against U.S. imperialism and all its reactionary stooges. The enemy fears us most. The broad masses of the people regard us today as the most significant and consistent revolutionary force.

We have re-opened in an unprecedented way the great treasury of Marxism- Leninism to Filipino revolutionaries. We have made available to them as constant reference in their daily work the Five Golden Rays and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung and as texts for more extensive and profound study Chairman Mao's works under the seven headings of philosophy, class analysis and social investigation, party building, armed struggle, united front, economic work and land reform, and culture. We have also circulated the works of the great predecessors of Chairman Mao: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. As the great communist works are increasingly made available, especially in Pilipino translation, we can expect the ideological foundation of our Party to become stronger; we can expect the Party cadres and members to improve their grasp of the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, viewpoint and method.

To give a national form to the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought or to link the world proletarian revolution with the concrete practice of the Philippine revolution, we have had the Guide for Cadres and Members of the Communist Party of the Philippines since the early part of 1969 and Philippine Society and Revolution since the late part of 1970.

The Guide for Cadres and Members of the Communist Party of the Philippines contains the basic documents of the Party Congress of Re- Establishment and those pertaining to the formation of the New People's Army. The document of rectification, "Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party", upholds the most advanced theory of the proletariat, unfolds the history of the Party and the grave errors of the Lava revisionist renegades and states the three main tasks of the Party. The Party programme correctly defines the people's democratic line for the Philippine revolution and states our general and specific tasks. The Party Constitution elaborates on the principle of democratic centralism and guides our work of rebuilding the Party.

The document for rectification for the people's army, "Statement for the New People's Army",repudiates the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique as a historical ramification of Laviate opportunism and paves the way for the formation of New People's Army. The Basic Rules of the New Peolple's Army recognizes the absolute leadership of the Party and lays down points for building the people's army.

The Philippine Society and Revolution is a comprehensive study on Philippine history, on the basic problems of the Philippine Revolution and on the people's democratic revolution. It presents the basic character, motive forces, targets, tasks and perspective of the Philippine Revolution. It has served as a basic textbook for Party mass education. At the same time, it has served to guide further study and investigation of Philippine conditions.

The Party Central Committee has adopted and circulated the political reports of the Political Bureau and has put out statements and comments on current national and international issues. These have been popularized through Ang Bayan, publication of the Central Committee. Towards the establishment of regional Party organizations, the Party Central Committee has time and again dispatched and urged Party cadres to make surveys and investigations of varying scope, from the regional to the barrio level. Local Party organs have also issued statements and manifiestoes on local and current issues to arouse and mobillize the masses. Party groups in various mass organizations, large and small, have caused revolutionary propaganda to spread on an unprecedented scale throughout the archipelago.

Struggling through to the end against modern revisionism, the Party Central Committee has put out Report on Lavaite Propaganda for Revisionism and Fascism to smash the slanderous filth of the Lava revisionist renegades and expose their utter degeneration into fascist puppets of Soviet social- imperialism and the U.S.-Marcos clique. Recent articles of such scoundrels as Jesus Lava and Luis Taruc against the Party have been subjected to effective counterattack. We have undertaken thorough criticism and repudiation of William J. Pomeroy's noxious works which express most the counterrevolutionary line of Soviet modern revisionism and social-imperialism and are much circulated by the Lava revisionist renegades. Our critical and repudiatory articles are now being compiled under the general title, Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade.

In firmly upholding the correct ideological guide and combatting medern revisionism, the Party as a whole has succeeded in avoiding ideological errors of such gravity as to prevent its steady and consistent advance. But still the shades of grave errors, shades that can become disastrous if unrectified and magnified through time have appeared within the Party. In certain parts of the Party certain times, grave errors have also made their full appearance. In general, we may say that mistaken ideas or erroneous tendencies have cropped up within our ranks.

Subjectivist trends of the dogmatist and empiricist type are most likely to beset a Party that is actually still in the process of formation. We may even say that our Party has just been reborn and is still in the stage of infancy. The cadres and members, except a very few, are new in the revolutionary struggle and are liable to commit many errors and shortcomings. We have our weaknesses in being a newly established party and furthermore, we live in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. We are surrounded by the pernicious influence of the ruling classes as well as by the petty-bourgeoisie which is of considerable number and influence. Within the Party itself, there are many Party members of petty-bourgeois origin and many of them are most likely to bring in bourgeois or petty-bourgeois "tails". We have a basis for saying that within the Party there is class contradiction and class struggle and there are currents and countercurrent of ideas. Our Party members have different class backgrounds and have been exposed to various negative influences. Because it is impossible for anyone to be born Red, even our Party members of workers and poor peasant origin--like those of petty-bourgeois origin--have ideological weaknesses and have to undergo an unremitting process of remoulding themselves through revolutionary study and work.

There are comrades who are smugly satisfied with the thought that they have read a few or a big number of Marxist books and that they can memorize quotations and utter certain phrases to impress people. They do not care to learn from the masses, investigate local conditions and relate through concrete analysis whatever general principles they may know to concrete reality. When inevitably they are confronted with certain conditions, they fail to see through the surface in order to reach the truth or they try to distort and force the facts to support their preconceptions. They feel lost when they cannot find in their books an explicit explanation for a specific problem or situation that arises before them. We speak here of the dogmatists. In the Party today, most of them have a distinctly petty-bourgeois background. It is also the characteristic of some of these to use their old learning from the bourgeois universities as support for their stereotyped learning. They know more about foreign lands than their own country.

There are also comrades who carry their disdain for booklearning to the point of refusing or being reluctant to raise their theoretical knowledge. They even go around bragging that their experience alone can make them good revolutionaries. We speak here of the empiricists. They do not care to relate their limited experience to the general principles and the rich experience of the world proletariat. They do not even care to relate their limited experience to conclusions derived from research into the economic, political, military and cultural history and current situation of their own country. They forget that the experience of a single man or a small group can be nothing but partial, narrow and one-sided if unrelated to or isolated from the totality of the revolutionary movement. Even in their own units, the empiricists fail to sum up and draw lessons from their own experience and they act in the most slipshod and unplanned manner.

Because the Party has set the correct ideological and political line and has continued to struggle resolutely against modern revisionism, whose main advocates and spokesmen in the country are outside the Party, we have to be most alert within the Party to the current of dogmatism that is "Left" in form but Right in essence. It has been observed that at a level as high as the regional there are certain comrades who try to beat down each other by simply calling each other "opportunists" without so much as providing concrete facts and concrete analysis and without using the method of persuasion towards erring comrades. There is evidently an erroneous tendency to duplicate the same methods of struggle that we have employed against Lava revisionist renegades; it must be borne in mind that the Lava revisionist renegades have been called to account and have been repudiated for lines and policies having disastrous effects on the old merger party through more than three decades.

The current of empiricism is due mainly to the fact that the Party has just been re-established and it is normal for new Party members, who are in overwhelming numbers, to grope because of limited experience. Furthermore, we have quite a number of Party members peasant origin who barely fulfill the basic literacy requirement for Party members. They can develop the habits of reading and study, especially now that we can provide them with Marxist- Leninist works in Pilipino. In this regard, we are determined to break what appears to be some monopoly of higher knowledge by the dogmatists. All Party members should learn from each other such that those who have more theoretical knowledge can learn from those who have more practical experience and those who have more practical experience can learn from those who have more theoretical knowledge. United together, all our Party members should draw lessons from the toiling masses and from revolutionary practice with them. Learning from each other with modesty will certainly strengthen our unity. Party cadres who can handle study classes are steadily increasing in number and are expected to conduct ideological study in a lively way.

Study classes and programmes of reading are supposed to be carried out at the three levels of the primary, intermediate and advanced. At all levels, it should never be forgotten that we must consistently develop among Party cadres and members their ability to keep to the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, viewpoint and method in dealing with the problems of the Philippine revolution. The primary course is aimed at making all Party members and candidate-members grasp the basic Marxist-Leninist principles of the Party and their application on the general practice of the people's democratic revolution. The intermediate course is aimed at making all Party members relate Marxist-Leninist theory to their own practice, sum up their experience and exchange experience with one another. The advanced course is aimed at developing among Party members an all-around knowledge of the basic teachings of the great communist teachers. Political-military trainings in the New People's Army is being conducted by Party cadres. This entails the primary and intermediate courses of study plus military training.

The biggest shortcoming in our ideological building during the last three years was the failure to put out a definite educational plan. Even only the definition of the three courses of study and the listing of study materials for the primary and intermediate levels were made only in September 1970. In the countryside, the holding of study classes was too shifty, irregular and sporadic due to the difficulties peculiar to guerrilla zones and to the scarcity of political instructors for the people's army. In the Manila- Rizal region, where political instructors could have been drawn for the countryside since 1969, the system and methods of educating Party members were too complicated and reading requirements were so heavy and difficult to fulfill. In this light, it is clear why we have been very slow in developing Party members from the ranks of workers. From early 1969 to the end of 1970, there were also too few cadres who could be assigned as political instructors in the New People's Army and in rural areas. Also, we had difficulties in providing enough reading and study materials.

Since the beginning of 1971, ideological study has been intensified by a rapidly increasing number of Party members and candidate-members. There have been such favorable conditions as the upsurges of the revolutionary mass movement and the increased ability of our Central Publishing House to produce reading and study materials. The number of copies of our publications have leaped from a general average of a few hundreds in previous years to a general average of several thousands, varying from a minimum of 2,000 copies to a maximum of 10,000 copies per publication. Of course, this count does not include the far bigger volume of newspaper copies and manifestoes of various mass organizations which carry the Party line. To serve our Party members and the broad masses of the people who cannot read foreign languages, translation work into Pilipino principally and local dialects secondarily has accelerated and is bound to further accelerate.

We are aware that so far only the primary course has been fulfilled on a wide scale. This course can easily be fulfilled in Party branches and groups or by individual Party members who are responsible for the ideological and political education of applicants for Party membership. But, whereas before we were worried about fulfilling the primary course, our worry now is to deepen the understanding of the primary course among all Party members and to fulfill the intermediate course on a wide scale. Our problem now is to select competent political instructors to conduct the primary and intermediate courses. In the meantime, we pin our hopes on all Party members taking the initiative to read and study the materials that we are distributing in advance. With regard to the advanced cource, the Party Central Committee is expected to take the lead in conducting it among Party cadres through the higher Party school, the Revolutionary School of Mao Tsetung Thought.

For this years, an educational plan has been submitted by the Party Secretariat and endorsed by the Executive Committee to the Central Committee; it is synchronized width an organizational plan. This plan seeks to heighten ideological study among several thousands of candidate-members and full members of the Party. It seeks to actually improve the grasp of the entire Party rank and file of the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, viewpoint and method. Materialism and dialectics should always be their powerful weapons for solving problems. We expect that our Party cadres and members will become better-equipped ideologically to integrate theory and practice, undertake criticism and self-criticism and link themselves with the masses more closely. In the final analysis, we engage in thoroughgoing study only to apply what we have studied in the service of the people.

If ideological building is not seriously undertaken, there can be no organizational building and there can be no victory of the revolution for that matter. We have to make sure that our Party cadres and members have an adequate and deep understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and apply it creatively in the course of the revolutionary struggle for people's democracy. The enemy cannot be defeated without a powerful unity that springs from ideological unity and conscious discipline. Problems cannot be solved by us if we do not keep to the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, viewpoint and method. The Party has from the beginning adopted a correct ideological and political line. But in saying so, we cannot rest assured that all problems have been solved. There are so many problems always arising at various levels and in various areas of work. As old problems are solved, new ones keep on arising. Old problems become more complicated when they are overtaken by new ones. All of these can be dealt with only if we have a good grasp of the Marxist- Leninist standpoint, viewpoint and method.

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