February 24, 1992

(Note: Insurrectionism is inseparably combined with "regularization" in the line originally promoted by the Mindanao commission since the early 1980s and promoted nationwide by the NPA general command since the mid-1980s. However, if a distinction has to be made between the two combinates, insurrectionism is the ideological spearhead against the theory of protracted people's war and "regularization" has been the larger and more effective organizationally in causing self-constriction, self-destruction and the now alarming drastic reduction of the rural mass base.

But the reason for discussing only insurrectionism here is to respond to the feedbacks to the editorial in the second issue of Rebolusyon 1991. This attention to insurrectionism should not be interpreted as evaluating insurrectionism to be worse than "regularization" in all respects. The article below also seeks to clarify that among several kinds of insurrectionism, what is most destructive to the Party and the entire movement is that most systematized and most applied kind which has been inseparably linked with "regularization". "Regularization" deserves an even longer piece than the subject of insurrectionism.)

Five kinds of insurrectionism have been pushed in the Philippines since the early 1980s. All of these try to spread and implement the theory of spontaneous masses. In the wish to hasten revolutionary victory, spontaneous uprisings of the masses is actually rated higher than steady and solid organizing of a proletarian revolutionary party and other revolutionary forces. The premium is put on sweeping propaganda, street activism, transport paralisation by armed units and other dramatic acts of violence rather than on painstaking mass work.

The role of the organized revolutionary masses as well as that of the organized enemy (U.S., big business, Church, AFP, etc.) is obscured as in the insurrectionist interpretations of the Edsa uprising in 1986. The actual level of development of the organized revolutionary forces is not fully taken into account. Spontaneous mass uprisings are expected to be the decisive factor in changing the overall balance of forces between revolution and counterrevolution and even in seizing political power, irrespective of the development of people's war and the people's army in the countryside.

All these kinds of insurrectionism run counter to the Party's general line of new democratic revolution (that requires the leading role of the working class through the Party) and the strategic line of people's war (which is an armed revolutionary mass movement, building in stages the basic worker-peasant alliance and the people's army as the force to smash and replace the bureaucratic-military machinery of the reactionary state).

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