February 24, 1992

5. A fifth kind of insurrectionism seeks to push the peasant masses into uprisings for the immediate attainment of the maximum kind of land reform, entailing the confiscation of land, warehouses, houses and other properties of landlords. Some elements must have read Mao's work on the autumn harvest uprising but failed to recognize that the Chinese land reform program during the anti-Japanese struggle is more suitable to the current level of our revolutionary strength in the Philippines.

The worst proposal is to encourage "uprisings" by peasants supported by units of the people's army in order to raid and confiscate certain assets and destroy those that cannot be taken over like municipal buildings, nurseries and so on. Obviously, those who made this kind of proposal do not understand that there are certain physical structures which the revolutionary movement and the people's government will eventually use for the public good and which the people will always respect.

We have not in fact fully and widely carried out the minimum land reform program (rent reduction, reduction of interest rates, better farm wages, better prices at the farm gate and increased production through rudimentary forms of cooperation, etc.) in our guerrilla fronts. We still have to rectify the root causes of the ongoing drastic reduction of our rural mass base. Calls for peasant uprisings at this point should not obscure the fact that we still have a lot to do in solid peasant organizing in both our old and new areas.

It is possible to have some peasant uprisings. But how far can we go?

When the peasants are well organized and the people's army is behind them, they can hold back the produce of the land and compel the landlord or his representative to come to the farm to negotiate. When the peasants are not well organized and there is insufficient or no people's army behind it, why go for a line of rousing them and putting them into violent confrontations with or, into the firing line of, well-organized and well-armed opponents.

To leap into the maximum land reform program is to leap into disaster, not victory. It would mean goading both enlightened and despotic landlords and all the small, medium and big landlords to unite against us not only in our guerrilla fronts (which are mainly in the hinterlands) but also outside, the much larger part of the country.

Are the revolutionary forces strong enough to carry out and defend the maximum land reform program as the general line. We may be strong in our guerrilla fronts but what about the rest of the country where a unified landlord class will anticipate us? Do we have enough cadres to administer the fair and equable redistribution of the land? Can we set up the productive, financial, marketing and technical system to replace the existing one?

Let us consider the peasant uprisings for the confiscation of land (or burning of land titles) in our country (Tayug and Colorum uprisings), in China and Vietnam in the twenties and thirties and in India (Telenggana in 1948 and Naxalbari movement in the late sixties). They did not last long. Our premature land confiscation and distribution of land titles in Nueva Vizcaya and Mindoro (complete with videotaping) should serve as a lesson to us, if nobody now recalls Ramon Sanchez' maximum land reform in Tarlac in 1972 and Sorsogon in 1974.

What succeeded in China and Vietnam was the minimum land reform program during the anti-Japanese struggle. It was only after seizure of political power in China and North Vietnam that the maximum land reform program could be carried out. In the case of the Philippines during the anti-Japanese struggle, peasants in effect took over the land in certain portions of Central Luzon because the generally pro-U.S. landlords were afraid of asking the Japanese military and puppet forces to collect the land rent for them and incurring the ire not only of the Hukbalahap but also the USAFFE. But after World War II, they recovered the land and tried to collect the arrears in land rent.

As exceptions to the general line, land confiscation or restitution of the land to their rightful owners should be carried out against the despotic landlords and the landgrabbers. These exceptions serve the general line in making it clear to the landlords that they lose their land and probably more if they do not negotiate with the peasants and that landgrabbers are never allowed.

Peasant insurrectionism, which leaps into the maximum land reform program, is not a solution. It will aggravate the problem if in the first place we cannot stop the dwindling of Party cadres for rural mass work due to urban basedinsurrectionism and absorption by the urban-based staff organs.

All the five foregoing kinds of insurrectionism proceed from an urban petty bourgeois stand, viewpoint and method of thinking. The urban petty bourgeoisie wants to decide the course of the Philippines from the convenience, if not comfort, of the urban areas. There is the impetuosity which disregards what it takes to take on and defeat the comprador bourgeoisie and landlord class (more politically developed and sophisticated those of Somoza's Nicaragua) and the U.S. imperialists behind them.

There is a sea of difference between an understanding of the probable role of insurrection within the framework of people's war and insurrectionism as a system of notions and wishful thinking to attack or replace the theory and line of people's war.

The central leadership of the Party and all good cadres, who have upheld the theory and line of people's war as a major development in Marxist-Leninist theory and practice and, in our national historical experience, as something suitable to our own social and geographic conditions, have correctly stated that people's war encompasses insurrection, when correctly undertaken under certain conditions. There will be instances in the future when the people's army will combine with mass uprisings to seize towns, provincial capitals, small cities and big cities in that probable order.

The probability of uprisings to seize urban areas will not be realized if today's insurrectionists by wishful thinking succeed in putting the Party off the line of people's war and cause damages to the Party and the revolutionary movement, as in Mindanao and currently on a nationwide scale.

It is not enough for the central leadership and the good cadres stay on the correct line of people's war. They must thoroughly criticize and repudiate the various kinds of insurrectionism allows the confusion that these create. Otherwise, some of these will continue to cause confusion and wreak havoc on the Party and the movement.

It is such a pity that the line of armed urban insurrectionism cum premature and nonsustainable higher military formations undermines and attacks the theory of people's war and the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside in the same period that the Reagan and Bush administration and the counter revolutionaries have adopted and successfully implemented some kind of "people's war" based on tribal and religious anticommunist mass loyalty as in the use of the Unita in Angola, the Renamo in Mozambique, the mujaheddins in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua.

In the Philippines, it is the AFP trying hard to copy and replace our SYPs (armed propaganda teams) with the SOTs and to build a "mass base" while the number of our SYPs decrease, our mass base has been drastically reduced and militia units have not been organized in many areas. While it is the GRP agencies or pro-GRP NGOs trying hard to field agents in the countryside, most of the urban insurrectionist trends tend to withhold cadres (due to their own staffing needs and ACP building) from the countryside.

If our rural mass base disappears, the strategically superior military forces of the enemy can become effective in encircling and destroying our forces at the tactical level. And if the people's army is defeated, the legal democratic movement in the urban areas will certainly be adversely affected.

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