III. THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE, 1968-1979

The Lava revisionist renegades wished to impose their line of indefinite parliamentary struggle on the proletarian revolutionaries and the people. Their line was engendered by their own bourgeois subjectivist and opportunist world outlook and by the line of the Soviet revisionist renegades. The two-line struggle between the proletarian revolutionaries and the Lava revisionist renegades became so intense that the latter threatened to inflict physical harm on the former. It was necessary for the proletarian revolutionaries to break away from the counterrevolutionary revisionists in April 1967, to wage a vigorous campaign of criticism and repudiation of the Lava revisionist renegades and reestablish the Communist Party of the Philippines under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

It took more than a year to prepare for the reestablishment of the Party. The preparations included consolidation meetings of the proletarian revolutionaries, consultations with Party members and mass activists and drafting of the documents of reestablishment: Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party and the Constitution and the Program of the CPP. The Congress of Reestablishment had only twelve delegates (one in absentia) representing only a few scores of Party members and candidate-members in the trade unions and the youth movement. They had the support of a few hundreds of advance mass activists and an urban mass base of nearly 15 thousand workers and youth. Soon after the reestablishment of the Party in 1968, the proletarian revolutionaries linked up with the good part of the remnant people's army with a rural mass base of 80 thousand peasants in the second district of Tarlac in Central Luzon.

On March 29, 1969, on the 27th anniversary of the founding of the people's army against Japan, the Party established the New People's Army and promulgated the Rules of the NPA. This entailed the criticism and repudiation of the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique which had discredited the name of the armed revolutionary movement with its unprincipled and criminal activities. The NPA started with only sixty fighters, with nine automatic rifles and 25 inferior firearms. Expansion cadres for Northern Luzon, Southern Tagalog and the Visayas were trained from February to May 1969. The first expansion team was dispatched to Isabela province. In May 1969, the Central Committee of the CPP held a plenum to study further the strategy and tactics of people's war and also the peasant movement, and to include in its ranks peasant cadres and battle-tested Red fighters. The plenum decided that Tarlac and the whole of Central Luzon would serve as the resource base for nationwide expansion.

In both urban and rural areas, the reestablished CPP inherited the fine revolutionary tradition of the proletariat as well as the senior and middle-aged cadres of the long-drawn workers' and peasants' movement. The mass organizations of workers, peasants and youth condemned both the Lava revisionist group and the Sumulong gangster clique and fully criticized and repudiated the long unrectified grave errors of subjectivism and opportunism and the blatant degeneration of these renegades. The Lava revisionist renegades prated about parliamentary struggle as the main form of struggle but it was the proletarian revolutionaries who actually continued to lead the legal democratic movement. In fact, the revolutionary armed struggle inspired and served to strengthen the legal struggle.

From the very beginning, the objective of the proletarian revolutionaries was to create a nationwide Party organization with a cadre and mass character, deeply rooted among the working people and building a people's army waging protracted people's war and recruiting most of its fighters from the peasantry. The proletarian revolutionaries recognized that the people's army would be in a vulnerable position if it existed only in a small part or even in a much larger part of the plains of Central Luzon. They understood the necessity of developing guerrilla zones at various strategic points in the Philippine countryside and archipelago as soon as possible. Thus, from the very outset, members of the Party Central Committee were assigned particular regions to pay attention to and cadres for nationwide expansion were given politico-military training.

Even as it resumed the revolutionary armed struggle in earnest, the Party continued to lead the legal democratic mass movement in the urban areas. All sorts of legal mass organizations sprouted among the workers, peasants, youth, women, cultural activists, teachers and other professionals. In April 1969, the Party led a legal peasant demonstration of 15,000 in Manila and another one of 50,000 in Tarlac. In the first quarter of 1970, it was able to conduct weekly converging marches and demonstrations against the U.S.-Marcos regime over a comprehensive range of domestic and international issues, including the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. The participants ranged in number from 50 thousand to 100 thousand youth and workers per mass action. The First Quarter Storm of 1970 served to strengthen all the patriotic and progressive mass organizations, especially the Kabataang Makabayan, on a nationwide scale. The timely statements of the Party, later compiled in the book The First Quarter Storm of 1970, gave direction to the militant urban mass movement.

The urban-based Kabataang Makabayan acted as the seeding machine of the national democratic revolution all over the archipelago. It became the most important source of cadres who were immediately deployable for mass work. The Party accelerated its urban mass work. It encouraged the formation of new progressive unions and trade union federations such as KASAMA and PAKMAP and the transformation of reactionary unions into progressive ones. It built mass organizations among the urban poor and among the poor fishermen. It enlarged the KM chapters in urban poor communities as well as in colleges and high schools. It formed various types of organization among teachers, creative writers, artists, scientists and technologists, health workers, lawyers and other professionals.

Simultaneous to the militant mass actions in Manila and scores of other cities, the NPA intensified its armed tactical offensives in the second district of Tarlac. This enraged the enemy which accelerated search-and-destroy operations with the full force of a division and a wide network of paramilitary units against the barely 200 fighters of the NPA. By December 1970, the enemy declared that the NPA had been finished off. The NPA in Central Luzon was indeed in an extremely difficult situation due to th e overwhelming concentration of enemy military strength. But unknown to the enemy, the work of expansion in Cagayan Valley had already resulted in a far wider mass base in Isabela and which extended to Nueva Vizcaya and Quirino. Also, revolutionary work had started in the Cordilleras.

Amidst the fierce revolutionary struggle, the Party was able to run courses of study on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and on the basic documents of the Party. It would be able to reproduce eventually seven volumes of its own selections from the works of Mao Zedong as well as the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. It was able to put out Ang Bayan which published reports on and analyses of the ongoing revolutionary struggle in the Philippines and abroad and made critiques of the ruling system and U.S. imperialism.

After the reestablishment of the Party, the earliest and most sustained work that emerged from the revolutionary struggle was Philippine Society and Revolution (in its 1969 mimeographed form). Inspired by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and using the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, the book traced the basic strands of Philippine history, defined the basic problems of the Filipino people and clarified the class strategy and tactics of the new-democratic revolution.

The ideological struggle against modern revisionism was kept up against the Lava revisionist renegades, the American revisionist renegade William Pomeroy and against their Soviet revisionist renegade masters, Khrushchov and Brezhnev. The sizeable collection of antirevisionist articles by the CPP is now a major part of the treasury of the proletarian revolutionary struggle.

As a result of the decisions taken by the August 1970 meeting of the Political Bureau in the forest region of Isabela, The Organizational Guide and Outline of Reports was formulated to explain the principles and methods of making social investigation, building the Party, the people's army, mass organizations and organs of political power and making reports on the situation and activities. The Organization Department of the Party took vigorous efforts to recruit Party members from the ranks of the revolutionary mass activists that had emerged from the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and ensuing mass actions and to urge the new Party recruits and the mass activists to take assignments in the rural areas. In the urban areas, Party recruitment and education among the youth was done mainly through the schools for national democracy, undertaken by organization-education teams of the Kabataang Makabayan and other organizations.

In April 1971, the Central Committee held its Plenum in the forest region of Isabela. As a result of this, the Rules for Establishing the People's Government and the Revolutionary Guide to Land Reform were formulated; and the work of nationwide expansion of the Party and the people's army was pushed further. The membership of the Party had risen to more than 1000 members. The mass base in Cagayan Valley was already 300,000. The revolutionary armed struggle was started in the Partido district of Camarines Sur. By 1972, expansion cadres were creating Party organizations and guerrilla zones in eight regions of the country: Northern Luzon, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Eastern Visayas, Central Visayas, Western Visayas, and Mindanao. United front work at various levels assisted the emergence and development of the revolutionary armed struggle.

Following up the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1971, the U.S.-Marcos regime imposed martial rule on the Philippines in 1972 and suppressed all the aboveground progressive mass organizations. Hypocritically, Marcos announced that he wished to "save the republic" and "build a new society" in the face of the severe crisis of the ruling system and the newly-emergent armed revolutionary movement. At this point in time, however, the Party had only 2000 Party members, the NPA had only 300 full-time fighters with automatic rifles, hundreds of militia units, thousands of part-time guerrillas and local militia and a rural mass base of less than 400 thousand under local organs of political power and an urban mass base of some 50,000.

With the outlawing of the progressive mass organizations and the manhunt for their leaders, the Party decided to deploy to the countryside the Party members and mass activists who had been forced underground. However, the capacity of the rural Party organizations and the people's army to absorb them was limited. So, quite a number were encouraged to further develop the urban underground or start underground work in their home provinces, irrespective of the presence or absence of revolutionary forces. In 1973, the Preparatory Commission of the National Democratic Front adopted the 10-point program of the NDF and provided a framework for uniting the progressive mass organizations which had been forced underground as well as other possible allies.

Some petty-bourgeois commentators with superficial and partial knowledge of CPP history denigrate the people's war being waged by the reestablished Party as merely a dogmatic copy of that led by Mao Zedong. They cannot grasp that in accordance with the teachings of Mao Zedong, the CPP applies the theory of Marxism-Leninism on the concrete conditions of the Philippines and consequently the concrete development of the Philippine revolution has its unique features. There are indeed, basic similarities and common adherence to basic principles. The social conditions in the Philippines and pre-1949 China are basically similar and therefore the corresponding character of the revolution is similar. There are the common basic principles such as that painstaking mass work must be done and popular support must be gained as the inexhaustible and invincible base of the Party and the NPA, that the people's army must grow from small to big and from weak to strong over a protracted period of time and follow a probability course of strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and strategic offensive. And while the NPA is on the strategic defensive, it must wage tactical offensives in order to accumulate strength and build Red political power in the countryside until it becomes possible to seize political power in the cities and on a nationwide scale.

At the same time, there are marked dissimilarities between the Philippine and Chinese people's war, such as that the NPA had to start with guerrilla squads and not with large forces breaking away from the national army of the CPC-KMT alliance, that the main form of struggle in the strategic defensive is guerrilla warfare and not regular mobile warfare, that the minimum land reform program of rent reduction and elimination of usury is being carried out before the maximum program of land confiscation, that a single imperialist power overextended all over the world dominates the Philippines and not several imperialist powers at odds with each other inside the country through their respective puppets as in China, that China is a vast country where the Long March could take place while the Philippines is a medium-sized archipelagic country in which the short marches can add up to long marches and that, of course, international conditions are now different.

The CPP made timely criticisms of both dogmatism and empiricism and both adventurism and conservatism in the revolutionary struggle. It criticized the formalistic and ritualistic use of Marxist-Leninist terminology without providing the concrete facts on the basis of social investigation and mass work. It also criticized adventurist tendencies and the tendency of some cadres to look to foreign military assistance as a decisive factor in winning victory as well as tendencies of conservatism in mass work and armed struggle. It constantly called for a self-reliant revolutionary armed struggle, integrating armed struggle, land reform and mass base building and coordinating urban and rural work within the framework of the new-democratic revolution.

In 1974, it was clear that the great overall achievement of the Party was building itself and the NPA on a nationwide scale. Party membership rose to 4,000. The Party had well-consolidated guerrilla zones at so many strategic points favorable for guerrilla warfare on a nationwide scale. It had a wealth of experience in people's war in terms of positive and negative experiences and overall success. The isolation of the main military units of the NPA in Isabela due to heavy enemy concentration and due to the grave error of keeping these units in the forest region after the enemy's forced mass evacuation of the people was more than compensated for by the nationwide expansion of the Party and the people's army.

On the basis of social research and the abundant experience in the armed revolution, Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines was written in 1974. This was a comprehensive and thoroughgoing application of Mao Zedong's theory and strategic line of protracted people's war in the Philippines. It carried a number of propositions that clarified the way to wage armed revolution in the Philippines and raised the fighting confidence of the Party members and Red fighters to a new and higher level. Among the important propositions were that, aside from the use of the countryside and the rough terrain as a wide room for maneuver, the archipelagic character of the country can be converted from being a disadvantage to being an advantage for further dividing the forces of the enemy so long as the correct revolutionary class line and mass work are carried out in the struggle. The slogan, "major islands first, minor islands next," was put forward. The principle of centralized leadership, ideological and political, and decentralized operations was adopted.

Open mass work and secret Party work flourished in the trade union movement from 1969 to 1972. Under conditions of martial rule, the progressive labor federations and trade unions were suppressed. So, work in the trade unions were carried out underground from 1972 onward. But in 1974, the workers' strike movement came to life, starting with the La Tondea strike and spreading to 300 workplaces all over the country. It became clear that the workers' movement would become the main force in forthcoming mass struggles in the urban areas. The urban poor communities were also becoming militated, uncowed by frequent enemy zoning operations or raids.

The student movement began to stir anew, demanding democratic rights and the restoration of student governments and publications which were suppressed by martial rule. Simultaneously, the capacity of the Party organizations in the rural areas to absorb manhunted Party personnel and mass activists increased greatly. Thus in 1974, the Party could dispatch more of them to the countryside.

By the end of 1975, Party membership nationwide had risen to 5000 and the NPA had 1000 full-time fighters with automatic rifles and a thousand more with inferior firearms. On the basis of the discussions and decisions of the plenum of the Central Committee in December 1975, a comprehensive and deepgoing summing-up and rectification document, Our Urgent Tasks was drafted in 1976 and published in the first issue of Rebolusyon in the middle of that year. This systematized the principles, methods and steps in building the mass organizations, the local organs of political power, the people's army and the local Party branches. This document distilled the most successful experiences of the revolutionary cadres and combated the wrong ideas and wrong methods in carrying out the armed revolution. The draconian situation in the country persisted.

By 1976, it was clear that the NPA on a nationwide scale was approaching the phase in which guerrilla fronts would multiply, with platoons as centers of gravity, and in which frequent and widespread platoon-size offensive operations could be launched against the enemy. Previously, these were rare and could be launched in only a few places. Well-consolidated guerrilla zones and even stable guerrilla bases were becoming more defined in contrast to the guerrilla zones in areas of expansion. Previously, guerrilla zones meant a cluster of a few barrios. Now, entire municipalities had become guerrilla zones. These guerrilla zones or several municipalities comprised the guerrilla fronts.

One squad of the NPA often sufficed to effect control of a municipality and often divided into armed propaganda teams in order to do mass work. This was possible because the rural municipality usually has a police force of ten to twenty-five men and the regular troops of the enemy (constabulary and army) simply do not have the force to maintain superior presence in every one of the 1500 municipalities and cities of the Philippines. On the basis of the expansion and consolidation of the mass base and the multiplication of the NPA guerrilla squads over time, it became possible to form platoons as centers of gravity and as strike forces in guerrilla fronts.

Since the beginning of the armed struggle, the creation of new guerrilla zones or expansion work had been the most challenging and most dangerous work. It could be done best only when there was a consolidated guerrilla zone from which to expand or, in a completely new area, when mass work was done without the premature show of arms. Errors in carrying or showing arms without prior mass work were paid for in blood by comrades, as in Zambales from 1969-71, Negros in 1969, Antique in 1972 and Mindanao in 1972, to cite only a few cases.

From 1970 onward, there were cases of grave errors involving the premature formation of absolutely concentrated companies, the purely military viewpoint and mountain-stronghold mentality. The first one was that of a premature company-size formation in 1970 in the sparsely wooded areas of Tarlac-Zambales which was completely wiped out in one tactical encirclement by the enemy resulting in the loss of at least 60 high-powered rifles. In 1973, an ill-armed company formation disintegrated under the blows of the enemy in Nueva Vizcaya. The remnant platoon proceeded to Quirino province and built itself up into a full company formation through rapid armed tactical offensives but without consolidation and expansion through mass work. Eventually, this company failed to withstand the counteroffensive of overwhelmingly superior enemy forces in 1975. In Sorsogon province in 1974, another full company which had rapidly grown from armed tactical offensives, but without solid mass organizing, also failed to withstand a powerful enemy counterattack.

The worst cases of prematurely concentrated company formations included the case of two well-armed companies in the Isabela forest region from 1972 to 1976. The regional Party committee and army command (especially those who were members of the Central Committee) insisted on staying in the forest region, despite the forced mass evacuation of the people. The two companies put themselve in an isolated and passive position, allowing the enemy to use the Cagayan river to cut them off from the masses, despite the instructions of the Central Committee for them to follow the example of the NPA platoon in Tumauini, slip out of the enemy encirclement, redeploy into smaller units and move towards the masses in Cagayan Province. In the Northern Luzon Party Conference in 1977, a thoroughgoing criticism of the error was made by the Central Committee and by the cadres and commanders of the region themselves.

Up to 1979, the regional Party organization and people's army in Eastern Visayas (particularly Samar island) showed the way to create a wide and deepgoing mass base and to build the revolutionary forces on this basis: Each guerrilla zone was taken care of by an NPA squad and on the scale of the guerrilla front, platoon-size tactical offensives were frequently undertaken. Municipal police forces and paramilitary units were disarmed and small detachments of regular troops were wiped out frequently. Thus, the Party and the people's army in Samar island became the model of revolutionary armed struggle throughout the country.

On the whole, the CPP was successful in waging the armed revolution from 1968 to 1979. The growth of the revolutionary forces was gradual and steady but cumulative. The municipal police forces, the paramilitary units at the barrio level and small detachments of regular enemy troops became the prime targets of NPA operations. Never was there an instance that a regional Party or army organization was decimated. In the twists and turns of the armed revolution, there were separate instances when grave losses were incurred by leading organs at various levels and by particular local forces. But on a nationwide scale, the revolutionary movement grew in strength and advanced from year to year. Even during the exceedingly difficult period of 1972-73, when martial rule had been recently imposed, the Party and other revolutionary forces were able to preserve themselves and grow on a nationwide scale.

While the decade of the 1970s was characterized by revolutionary successes from year to year, there were already certain unhealthy tendencies manifested at the level of the NPA national operational command. There was the notion spread by the head of the NPA national operational command up to 1976 that no stable base areas could arise in the Philippines before the total liberation of the country and that foreign military assistance was an absolute necessity for winning victory. At the 1975 Plenum of the Central Committee, there was also a Rightist demand from another cadre to withdraw Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought from the masthead of Ang Bayan as well as the categorical term, anti-Marcos reactionaries, previously used to refer to such big comprador-landlord politicians as Benigno Aquino. From his previous insistence in 1976 that small teams of three to five armed fighters (reminiscent of the 1942 "retreat-for-defense" policy) should be the model for mass and guerrilla work, still another prominent cadre of Central Luzon swung in 1977 to the "Left" opportunist line that a company be concentrated out of the measly total of 105 armed personnel of the entire region.

Also in 1977, the questioning of the Marxist analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal started. A few cadres were impressed by the big-comprador infrastructure-building and fake land reform programs of the U.S.-Marcos regime and misconstrued these as promoting urbanization and industrialization. They even considered the export of cheap Filipino labor and engineering skills to the Middle East as an overflow of Philippine economic development. These comrades could not see that Marcos was not putting up basic industries and not carrying out land reform but was aggravating the agrarian, semifeudal and preindustrial character of the Philippine economy.

The U.S.-Marcos technocrats, with their theory of development; the Lava revisionist renegades, with their theory of noncapitalist development; the exponents of dependent capitalism; and the recipients of funds from the Australian Trotskyites were active in spreading the notion that the multinational firms and banks were out to turn the Philippines into a foreign-owned industrial base. All these served to stimulate the tendency of some Party cadres to speculate that the analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal was already outdated, notwithstanding the actual deepening and aggravation of the semifeudal character of the Philippine economy due to excessive foreign borrowing for anti-industrial purposes.

In 1978, the thrust of the questioning of the Party's correct description of the character of Philippine society was to put forward the idea of making a leap from the early substage of the strategic defensive to the advanced substage and accelerating the victory of the Philippine revolution by deploying more cadres for armed city partisan warfare and for a potential urban insurrection. The 1945 uprising and the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam and the 1979 final offensive in the Nicaraguan revolution were taken out of historical context and used to denigrate the theory and strategic line of protracted people's war. Although the NPA had only around 1500 full-time Red fighters with automatic rifles, the Central Committee declared that preparations had to be made for the leap from the early to the advanced substage of the strategic defensive. Thus, it designated "war fronts", administratively coalesced guerrilla fronts and created new command levels (even if unnecessary). This line of thinking ran counter to the need for multiplying platoons as centers of gravity and multiplying the number of guerrilla fronts.

From 1976 to 1980, there was a rapid nationwide growth of the Party, the people's army and the mass base as a result of the strong foundation built under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and such definitive documents as the founding documents of the Party and the NPA, Philippine Society and Revolution, Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines and Our Urgent Tasks. As regards the NPA, its Red fighters with automatic rifles grew in number up to 2000 or by 100 per cent because of the tactical offensives carried out by platoons and oversized platoons. They benefited from an expanding and consolidated mass base in which land reform and other mass campaigns for the benefit of the people were conducted.

Abroad during this period, the essentials of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought were being negated and reversed in China. The depreciation of Mao Zedong in his own homeland tended to influence a few Party cadres in the central leadership. Although no member of the Central Committee ever dared to frontally attack the theory and strategic line of people's war, it became fashionable for a few members of the Central Committee and some central staff organs to propose the "innovation" on the strategic line of protracted people's war by putting forward the line of urban insurrectionism and the premature formation of absolutely concentrated NPA companies.

At the same time, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency financed and instigated its Filipino assets in Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino in the United States to spread the propaganda in the Philippines that the way to victory in the Philippines was to drop Mao's theory and strategic line of protracted people's war. To camouflage their U.S. imperialist connections, they proposed having the military and financial assistance of the Soviet Union as the decisive factor in the victory of the Philippine revolution.

Introduction
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