IV. THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE, 1980-1991

Regarding the period of revolutionary struggle from 1980 to 1991, the most recent comprehensive and important documents of the Communist Party of the Philippines to read and study are: Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors, General Review of Important Events and Decisions, 1980-1991 and Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism. These documents approved by the 1992 Plenum of the CPP Central Committee strongly reaffirm Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as the guide to revolutionary action under the leadership of the CPP as well as to the current rectification movement, the second great one since the first in the period of 1967-69, for the purpose of overcoming deviations, errors and shortcomings and reinvigorating the Party and the revolutionary mass movement.

In the period of 1980-83, the revolutionary movement advanced at a rate faster than in any year in the 1976-79 period. Party membership increased annualy by almost 4000. Basic Party units were established in the barrios, factories, schools, communities, in the people's army and mass organizations. In 1982, there were 34 platoons as centers of gravity of guerrilla fronts and more than 200 squads at the base, doing mass work. An annual average of 800 to 900 rifles were confiscated from the enemy by squads and platoons. By the end of 1983, the armed strength of the NPA was 5000 automatic rifles. To this day, the record shows that most of the NPA's weapons have been seized from the enemy by the squads and platoons.

In 1982-83, guerrilla fronts covered almost entire provinces and big portions of regions. Those of Mindanao, Samar, Negros and Bicol covered two-thirds to three-fourths of the total land area and total number of barrios. All guerrilla fronts in the country extended to well-populated areas, including environs of town centers, along highways, seashore and plains. In 1983, the majority of regions had two or three big and relatively stable guerrilla fronts. Tactical offensives by the NPA echoed each other all over the archipelago. Land reform and other mass campaigns thrived in the guerrilla fronts.

In the 1980-83 period, the legal democratic movement in both urban and rural areas steadily developed. Then it rose rapidly to an unprecedented level in the entire history of the revolutionary movement in 1983, following the assassination of Benigno Aquino and continued to surge until the Marcos fascist dictatorship was overthrown in 1986. It continued to grow until 1987. The contradictions within the ruling clique had led to the assassination in 1983 of Marcos' arch political rival Aquino and consequently the split of the reactionary armed forces between the Marcos-Ver and the Enrile-Ramos factions.

The rapid advance of the revolutionary armed struggle and the legal democratic movement and rapid increase of armed strength was the result of a number of factors: (1) the strong foundation of the revolutionary movement developed in the 1970s; (2) the perseverance of the revolutionary forces along the correct line in most regions, in accordance particularly with the founding documents of the Party, Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines, Our Urgent Tasks and the Basic Party Course; and (3) the rapid worsening of the crisis of the ruling system, which exacerbated not only the contradictions among the reactionaries but even within sections of the ruling clique.

Throughout the period of 1980-91, the correct line was upheld by the overwhelming majority of Party cadres and members and in most regional Party committees and organizations. But certain erroneous currents, which had started in the late 1970s to run among a few elements in the Central Committee and certain central staff organs, took shape and force through certain "Left" and Right opportunist lines in the 1980 Central Committee Plenum to challenge, undermine and reverse the correct line. In this Plenum, much time was devoted to questioning the Party's long standing analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal with the end in view of modifying the strategic line of protracted people's war, giving more importance than ever to revolutionary work in the urban areas and effecting the leap from the early to the advance substage of the strategic defensive through urban insurrections. It was asserted that the Philippines was more industrialized and urbanized than pre-1949 China and that therefore urban revolutionary struggles had a bigger role to play in the Philippines than in China in the past. The urban population of 40 per cent was arrived at by adding the population of the chartered cities and poblaciones (town centers).

In the 1981 meeting of the Political Bureau, the tasks of accomplishing both the leap from the early to the advance substage of the strategic defensive and moving on to the "strategic counteroffensive" and "regularization" were laid down. In 1982, the Mindanao Commission adopted the line of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism under the inspiration of the 1981 Political Bureau meeting. In its 1983 meeting, the Political Bureau, elaborated on the line of "strategic counteroffensive" and "regularization". It presupposed the accomplishment of the advance substage of the strategic defensive, described it as the second substage and called for carrying out the strategic counteroffensive as the third and final substage. Third and fourth class municipalities were classified as urban areas and as initial targets for uprisings.

The term "strategic counteroffensive" was a misnomer which meant the "Left" opportunist wish to accomplish far more than what the given forces of the revolution could permit. It overrated the role of armed urban insurrections in opposition to the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside. In fact, third and fourth class municipalities are categorizable as rural. Even the city of Yenan was rural relative to the city of Sian or faraway Shanghai. The line of "regularization" meant creating more layers of the Party bureaucracy and filling up the positions with Party members, without undertaking the corresponding theoretical and political education. It also meant -- for the people's army -- additional levels of command and further staffing, premature formation of larger units and aiming for an intensification of the war through regular mobile warfare, irrespective of the general level of development. The term "full-time Red fighters" was reinterpreted to mean separation from mass work and preoccupation with military tasks.

Even while the central leadership pushed the wrong line, the overwhelming majority of Party cadres and members adhered to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, studied the founding documents of the Party, the basic Party study course along this line, studied Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines and Our Urgent Tasks. In 1982, a definitive article, On the Philippine Mode of Production, argued against the misconception about the character of the Philippine economy. In 1983, another article, "On the Losing Course of the Armed Forces of the Philippines", argued against premature verticalization of the people's army and pointed out its potential damage to the mass base. These articles were circulated to oppose the wrong line.

It took some time before the wrong line from the central leadership could be put into practice extensively. In the early 1980s the revolutionary forces in Samar and Negros continued to demonstrate that it was possible to intensify armed struggle while attending to mass work. Running counter was the attempt to put up a battalion in Samar. But the central leadership decided to disband it and redeploy the most capable cadres to other regions. Learning lessons from bitter experiences in the 1970s, the forces in Northern Luzon, Bicol, and Western Visayas paid close attention to mass work and gradually developed their armed strength by launching tactical offensives with platoons and squads. Even the forces in Mindanao generally followed the pattern of the other regions until 1982. With the exception of two platoons, the forces of Central Luzon persisted with squads and small teams in carrying out revolutionary work in the plains.

The line of "strategic counteroffensive" and "regularization" encouraged the more blatant militarist line of combining urban insurrectionism with military adventurism in Mindanao from 1982 to 1984. This line exaggerated the urbanization and industrialization of the Philippines in general and Mindanao in particular, in effect wrongly praising the U.S.-Marcos regime for supposedly developing and industrializing the country. It also wrongly presupposed that the Party had neglected urban revolutionary work, notwithstanding the fact that the Party had consistently developed and led the urban-based legal democratic movement. It put forward the idea that urban insurrection, prepared by armed city partisans and by sweeping propaganda and ultimately accomplished by the spontaneous masses, was the highest form of political struggle and that the people's army was a purely military force and was secondary to the armed urban insurrection. It also exaggerated the international work of the Party as a decisive factor for winning the revolution.

The erroneous line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism was aggressively carried out in Mindanao from 1982 to 1984. Sweeping contact and propaganda work was done in the urban areas, armed city partisan warfare was intensified and people's strikes were carried out by busing in peasants or using NPA units to set up "checkpoints". Solid mass organizing was neglected and underground cadres in the narrow and small provincial cities exposed themselves to the enemy. In the countryside, fifteen absolutely concentrated NPA companies were rapidly formed from 1983-85. Fifty percent of the Red fighters were absorbed by the main regional guerrilla units (companies) and another large percentage were absorbed by secondary regional guerrilla units (usually platoons). These left a very few squads doing mass work, especially because they were converted into supply units of the main units. By 1984, the prematurely formed companies in absolute concentration had been put in a passive and isolated position both by the self-imposed drastic shrinkage of the mass base and the intensified strategic and tactical offensives by the enemy. Most of the time, these companies were preoccupied with logistical problems and were vulnerable to enemy attacks.

As a result of precision raids by the enemy on the urban underground and the military defeats of the absolutely concentrated NPA companies, the "Left" opportunists explained away the setbacks as the work of deep penetration agents. Thus, hysteria set in and led to the Ahos campaign in 1985. This bloody witchhunt was approved by the 1985 Executive Committee of the Mindanao Commission and was carried out by the so-called caretaker committee. It allowed the torture and execution of suspects without sufficient evidence. It victimized hundreds upon hundreds of Party members, Red fighters, mass activists and allies. At no time had the enemy killed as many CPP members, NPA fighters, mass activists and allies in so short a time and demoralized so many others. Party membership in Mindanao dropped from 9000 to 3000, the mass base decreased by more than 50 percent and the armed strength of the people's army fell from 15 companies and 30 platoons to two companies and 17 platoons.

There were definitely some deep penetration agents because of the loose recruitment policy along the wrong line of combining armed urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. But Ahos campaign was not the way to pinpoint them. On the other hand, it was the way for the real enemy agents to cause further destruction and to conceal themselves. Above all, the Party cannot permit the violation of the basic rights of Party members and Red fighters as set forth by the Party Constitution and the Rules of the New People's Army as well as the basic democratic rights of the people guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the Rules for Establishing the People's Government.

In 1984, the first national military conference was held by the national military staff of the NPA. It adopted the line of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, which was already resulting in gross setbacks in Mindanao. The line was pushed chiefly by the chief of staff who had just been promoted from his position as NPA commander in Mindanao on the basis of the false reputation of having achieved great military victories. The Executive Committee and Military Commission uncritically approved the results of the military conference.

The NPA chief of staff and the members of the Executive Committee of the Mindanao Commission who were at the same time members of the Central Committee withheld from the 1985 Central Committee Plenum information about their erroneous line, the gross setbacks in 1984 and the Ahos campaign. They misrepresented themselves as cadres of a successful line and arrogantly demanded the withdrawal of the strategic line of protracted people's war in favor of the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. The Central Committee repulsed the demand by invoking the fact that the strategic line of people's war was still in the Constitution and Program of the Party but failed to withdraw and correct the line of "strategic counteroffensive" which fathered the disastrous "Left" opportunist line in Mindanao. Instead, the Plenum put forward a three-year program of "developing/making" the NPA "as a regular army", building the factors of regular mobile warfare, maximizing the advantages of guerrilla warfare and "intensifying the war" towards the "strategic counteroffensive". In effect, the strategic line of protracted people's war was discarded, despite lip service to it.

In the absence of a factual assessment and correct evaluation of the situation in Mindanao, the highest officials of the Executive Committee of the 1985 Mindanao Commission kept their high positions and were promoted to higher positions of central leadership (Political Bureau, Executive Committee and Military Commission). Thus they gained the position which enabled them to further push their erroneous and disastrous line on a nationwide scale, especially because they bandied about their line as exceedingly successful in Mindanao. Their obsession was to create 36 absolutely concentrated companies and several battalions throughout the country by 1987. In July-August 1987, the NPA general command bypassed the territorial Party committees and ordered a so-called nationally coordinated offensive. It consisted of 600 big and small attacks on enemy hard points and wasted ammunition and other resources.

From 1986 to as late as 1990, one regional Party organization after another was pushed to adopt a variant of insurrectionism or putschism. In the formation of the premature and unsustainable larger military formations, the mass base drastically shrank and the situation became purely military as the enemy launched brigade-size offensives and at the same time fielded "special operations teams" (SOTs) to conduct psy-war and intelligence operations in the guerrilla fronts. The enemy could effectively carry out its war of quick decision and gradual constriction because in the first place the "Left" opportunist line had played into his hands. The gross error of the "Left" opportunists can be seen in the fact that they had reduced the number of squads and armed propaganda teams doing mass work and therefore reduced the mass base as the area of maneuver for the people's army, while the enemy was the one fielding "special operations teams" in order to create his "mass base" with the help of the local reactionary government, local police, paramilitary forces and religious fanatical cults. Since 1984, the enemy had been deploying brigades to concentrate on areas known as bastions of the NPA, to try to "clear and hold" and then to "consolidate and develop" them through small-unit operations. But the enemy left unattended far larger areas of the country and has never achieved control without gaps over any guerrilla front.

The loss of mass base meant the loss of political and material support of the masses for the people's army as well as the loss of capability to collect taxes from the relatively enlightened sections of the exploiting classes. The resulting loss of self-reliance strengthened the notion among the "Left" opportunists that the revolutionary movement could be supported by gangster activities in the urban areas and by foreign military and financial assistance. While still the NPA commander in Mindanao up to 1984, the 1984-91 head of the NPA national military staff conducted gangster activities, combining NPA armed city partisans with elements of criminal syndicates to carry out robbery hold-ups and kidnap-for-ransom. These were not authorized by the Party at the appropriate level. He spread the wrong notion that the people's army had a separate machinery from the Party. He also considered foreign military assistance as the factor that would decide the fate of the revolutionary movement and that without such assistance, the revolutionary movement would suffer stagnation or retrogression.

From 1984 onward, the national military staff (later called "general command") of the people's army based itself in Manila in accordance with the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. The head of the national military staff preoccupied himself with so-called special operations, including gangster activities in Manila and other urban areas in the country, and seeking foreign military and financial assistance. After the overthrow of Marcos in 1986, he further justified his basing in Metro Manila by claiming to be ever on the alert for "a sudden turn of events" for "seizing opportunities" towards urban insurrection. In fact, he was overseeing and participating in gangster activities and in corruption at the customs bureau of the reactionary government. He sought to separate the people's army from the absolute leadership of the Party and pretended to command the units of the people's army all over the country by radio transmissions from Manila. Later, he escalated gangster activities independently or in collaboration with certain elements in the Manila-Rizal Party committee and the Visayas Commission.

By 1985, there was already a conspicuous degree of ideological degeneration among some members of the Central Committee. This was the result of the sheer disappearance of Marxist-Leninist study courses and reading materials, the rampancy of eclecticism, the depreciation of Mao Zedong Thought, the baseless questioning of the Marxist-Leninist analysis of Philippine society, the underrating of the Philippine revolutionary experience in people's war and the propagation of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism. Elements who never seriously studied and applied Mao Zedong Thought rated the examples of movements for decolonization and against despotic rule higher than the accomplished two-stage Chinese revolution and the already rich experience of the new-democratic revolution with a socialist perspective in the Philippines.

The line of seeking foreign military and financial assistance from the Soviet party and its allied parties had been pushed since 1982. It had a "Left" opportunist objective of accelerating the victory of the Philippine armed revolution through the importation of heavy military weapons. But in fact it had a Rightist content as it meant deviating from the antirevisionist line of the Party. As early as 1984, the "general command" of the NPA was already dispatching couriers to contact pro-Soviet parties abroad to seek military and financial assistance without full information given to the Executive Committee of the Central Committee.

In 1985, a proposal was made at the 9th Plenum of the Central Committee to consider the Soviet Union a socialist country. But the Central Committee decided to subject the proposal to further study. However, there was already a paper of the International Liaison Department as well as a study commissioned by the central leadership picturing the Soviet Union as a socialist and no longer a social-imperialist country and the Soviet party as a Marxist-Leninist, no longer a revisionist party. The Brezhnev ruling clique was hailed as a champion of proletarian internationalism. It was praised for achieving military parity with the United States and for giving assistance to national liberation movements and third world countries.

The "Left" opportunists who pushed the line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism at the central and regional levels of the Party based themselves in the urban areas, notwithstanding the development of consolidated and stable guerrilla base areas and their proclaimed desire to build companies and battalions. The urban-basing is a clear manifestation of the greater value given to urban insurrectionism; it was the clearest point of departure for violating the strategic line of protracted people's war. If the "Left" opportunists had been more interested in building larger military formations, even if premature, than in wishing for an armed urban insurrection, they would have positioned themselves in the countryside rather than in the cities.

While the revolutionary forces in Mindanao suffered gross setbacks between 1984 and 1986, those in Luzon, (especially Northern Luzon) and the Visayas regions continued to make advances in the revolutionary armed struggle until 1987 and made up to a great extent for the big losses in Mindanao. However, the overall rate of growth for the entire movement declined from 1984 to 1987. As a result of the nationwide promotion of the "Left" opportunist line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, the revolutionary forces registered overall negative growth from 1987 to 1990. Relative to 1986, Party membership declined by 15 percent, the number of barrios covered by local organs of political power by 16 percent and, worst of all, the membership in rural mass organizations by 60 percent as a result of both errors and enemy action. The rifle strength of the NPA continued to grow but the rate of growth dropped to that of 1976-78. Cadres at the provincial, front and district levels were lost. A large percentage of the consolidated barrios were also lost.

From 1986 onward, one interregional or regional Party committees after another was pushed to build absolutely concentrated companies and adopt some insurrectionist and putschist plan. But most of the interregional commissions and regional Party committees and army commands eventually complained of the unreasonable targets imposed on them by the "Left" opportunists with regard to the formation of NPA companies and launching of offensives. Some of them were forced by circumstances to make adjustments in the years 1988-91. As late as 1987, the Political Bureau endorsed the rapid increase of absolutely concentrated companies and considered peasant uprisings within two years as the way to advance the peasant movement. In 1988, however, the central leadership noticed the decline of the mass base and heeded the demands of certain regions to allow them to redeploy the Red fighters and pay attention to mass work. Thus, it had a strong basis for starting to criticize the imbalances in revolutionary work and call for painstaking mass work and solid mass organizing.

The 1988 Party anniversary statement, which briefly summed up the 20-year history of the Party, criticized the imbalances in revolutionary work. In 1989, conferences on mass work were held at regional and interregional levels and a large portion of the NPA forces were redeployed for mass work, especially for recovery and expansion. The 1989 Party anniversary statement called for rectification, the further strengthening of the Party and the intensification of the people's revolutionary struggle. Like that of 1989, the 1990 Party anniversary statement clearly identified and criticized the errors of "regularization" and verticalization of the forces at the expense of developing the horizontal forces in stages and called for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and ever deepening mass base. The struggle between the proletarian revolutionary line and the bourgeois opportunist line intensified within the central organs of the Party. The "Left" and Right opportunists tried and succeeded in certain regions to block the documents of the central leadership which carried the correct line.

In 1990, the Political Bureau nullified the erroneous concept of "strategic counteroffensive" and put a stop to its implementation; but inconsistently it approved the results of the National Military Command Conference due to pressures by the "Left" opportunists. The trend in 1990 and 1991, however, was for the proletarian revolutionaries to defeat the wrong line and unscrupulous maneuvers of the "Left" opportunists. The Military Commission of the Central Committee and the Political Department of the NPA , in cognizance of the problems confronting the people's army, moved to hold the First National Conference on the Political Work of the New People's Army in March-April 1991, which basically adhered to the proletarian revolutionary line. In 1990 and 1991, the rapid narrowing of many guerrilla fronts was stopped. The people's army was further redeployed for mass work. There was a significant recovery of the mass base.

By the middle of 1991, the "Left" opportunist line was basically defeated at the level of the central leadership on the basis of the incontrovertible facts about its disastrous character and results and as a consequence of the assertion of the proletarian revolutionary line. But defeating the "Left" opportunist line also involved defeating the Right opportunist line in 1990 and 1991 because the most persistent and most malicious elements pushed the Right opportunist line of class collaboration, reformism and capitulationism for the avowed purpose of reaching the "Left" opportunist goal of armed urban insurrection irrespective of or even without the development of the people's war.

The questioning and denial, since 1968, of the character of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal society in chronic crisis gave rise not only to the "Left" opportunist line of urban insurrection and military adventurism but also to the Right opportunist line of "regularization", "strategic counteroffensive", reformism, capitulationism and liquidationism. Some of the chief opportunists could flip-flop from one type of opportunist position to another or make schemes which metaphysically combine the two, usually pushing a Right opportunist line in practice and at the same time wishing for an armed urban insurrection at the expense of the revolutionary mass movement in both urban and rural areas.

In common with the "Left" opportunists, the Right opportunists gave the utmost importance to urban legal struggles and to urban-basing. They considered urban-based legal struggles -- not the revolutionary armed struggle -- as the principal form of revolutionary struggle. As early as 1978-79, one group of Right opportunists in the Manila-Rizal Party organization provoked a struggle with the central leadership by insisting on the participation of the Communist Party of the Philippines in the farcical elections held by the U.S.-Marcos regime.

The debate was erroneously formulated as one of choosing between participation and boycott. The central leadership failed to resolve the debate at a level of principle higher than the boycott-participation dichotomy which certain elements in the Manila-Rizal Party committee wanted to dictate. The Party could have declared the 1978 elections as a farce and still allowed the legal progressive forces to use the elections as an opportunity to expose and oppose the fascist dictatorship. Disciplinary measures were meted out to the elements in the Manila-Rizal Party organization who generated struggle mania and ultrademocratic actions and made physical threats.

These elements disrupted the Manila-Rizal Party organization. After the disciplinary actions were taken against these unruly elements, another group of Right opportunists in charge of the urban mass movement and the united front was able to seize the opportunity to push its own Rightist line in the national capital region (NCR). They strengthened their position by their access to Western bourgeois and religious funding agencies and by using these funds to create urban-based offices and promote the line that sheer urban legal struggle and building urban institutions and coalitions could advance the revolution.

The Plenum of the Central Committee in 1980 encouraged the exponents of "Left" and Right opportunism to espouse urban insurrectionism and parliamentarism, respectively, by allowing both opportunists to spread doubts about the strategic line of people's war. The Politburo meeting in 1981 went further in favoring both types of opportunism. The "Left" opportunists were allowed to lump together and reject both liberal democrats (petty-bourgeois) and the anti-Marcos reactionaries (big comprador-landlord politicians) as "bourgeois reformists" along the line of monopolizing victory in the antifascist struggle, which was anticipated as forthcoming. At the same time, the Right opportunists were allowed to spread their own notion of "broad legal alliances" which aimed at playing down the revolutionary forces and tailing after the anti-Marcos reactionaries.

In 1981, the Right opportunists were already proposing the replacement of the vanguard proletarian party with a "vanguard front" called the New Katipunan. But the Party repulsed this blatantly liquidationist proposal. At any rate, the Right opportunists proceeded to realize their concept of "broad legal alliance", which meant denying or concealing the role of the Party in the antifascist struggle, kowtowing to and carrying the sedan chair for the anti-Marcos reactionaries and diluting the national democratic program. They preoccupied themselves with high level meetings and sweeping propaganda calls. They drew cadres from the countryside to the cities and recruited those whom they called "national democrats" to staff their offices.

The Right opportunist line ran so deep that "national democrats" (those who accepted the general line of the new-democratic revolution) from the ranks of the mass activist were enrolled into the Party without any Marxist-Leninist education and that only a few of these recruits were sent from the cities to the countryside. Party recruitment and education were sparsely undertaken in the course of the flow of the legal democratic movement in the period 1983-86 which occurred due to the long pent-up popular hatred against the fascist dictatorship and the sustained public outrage at the Aquino assassination. Instead, cadres were attracted and drawn from the countryside to the cities and from work at the grassroots level in both urban and rural areas to higher levels, without replenishment at the grassroots level.

Following the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, there were recriminations within the Party over the boycott policy taken by the central leadership, particularly the Executive Committee of the Central Committee in the 1986 snap presidential elections. The Political Bureau decided that the boycott policy was a major tactical error and the Party chairman was compelled to resign. But the Right opportunists continued to insist that the error was a strategic one that occurred due to the commitment of the Party to the strategic line of people's war and not due to a "Left" opportunist and sectarian illusion that the Party could win victory through a boycott. In collaboration with anti-Party pseudoprogressive petty-bourgeois groups, they insisted that the Party should de-emphasize or stop the revolutionary armed struggle as the main form of struggle and emphasize the legal forms of struggle in the new situation in order to be in a better position to gain power sooner through elections or insurrection.

Among those who also took this line were the "Left" opportunists who had committed grave errors resulting in the 1984-86 disaster in Mindanao. They overstated the boycott error as the biggest error in the entire history of the Party in order to conceal their far greater errors and crimes in Mindanao. They even went to the extent of saying that the Party could have seized or taken a major share of political power had it been prepared for the Edsa uprising and had it not been obsessed with the strategic line of people's war. Subsequently, from 1986 onward, they used the Edsa uprising as an argument for both parliamentarism and urban insurrectionism and as a possible model for effecting social revolution.

They failed to understand the Edsa uprising as merely an anti-authoritarian uprising and not a social revolution. It was a phenomenon whose course and outcome were chiefly determined by the U.S. and the reactionary forces even as the forces of the Left and the spontaneous masses hated the tyrant and participated in his overthrow. The proletarian revolutionaries put forward Philippine Crisis and Revolution and Continuing Struggle in the Philippines to expose the counterrevolutionary character and weaknesses of the U.S.-Aquino ruling clique and to clarify the line of the revolutionary struggle amidst the confusion whipped up by the "Left" and Right opportunists. The Party study course on Lenin was also put forward to counter the opportunists and was combined with the study of the people's war in China. But this was sporadically undertaken and was not followed up by a more comprehensive and thoroughgoing campaign of Marxist-Leninist education.

From 1986 onward, the Right opportunists who advocated parliamentarism pure and simple as well as those who combined parliamentarism with urban insurrectionism collaborated with the promoters of anticommunist petty bourgeois currents outside the Party, such as the Christian-democrats, bourgeois populists, the pro-imperialist liberals, the old-type revisionists and the Trotskyite petty-bourgeois socialists in caricaturing and attacking the Party's strategy of people's war. By 1988, the Right opportunists began to openly adopt Gorbachovite revisionism and to babble about the "marginalization of the class struggle" and the need to get rid of working class leadership and the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism to achieve "openness" and "democracy".

It was from 1986 onward that the limits of peace talks with the enemy, electoral politics, parliamentary struggle and foreign-funded NGOs became clearly demonstrated as the pseudoprogressive petty-bourgeois groups remained marginal and inconsequential and became no more than tails of the big comprador-landlord politicians. But the Right opportunists became more aggressive from year to year in pushing their reformist, pacifist and capitulationist line and in attempting to undermine the legal democratic movement. By 1988, it was clear that they had already sabotaged the legal mass movement in conjunction with the exponents of urban insurrectionism with whom they collaborated in drawing away personnel and resources from solid organizing among the basic masses and from Marxist-Leninist education.

The legal democratic movement peaked in 1986 and began to slow down in 1987, especially among the workers, peasants, fishermen, urban poor, women and teachers. The Right opportunists specialized in misdirecting personnel and resources towards building foreign-funded institutions and coalitions out of the same pool of legal organizations and steering them towards parliamentarism and reformism. The most talented youth were also influenced to veer away from the mass movement. At the same time, the "Left" opportunists in the urban areas departed from solid mass organizing and concentrated on forming small groups of armed city partisans and ordering these to go into indiscriminate killings that provoked the enemy to assassinate mass activists and suppress the most militant mass organizations, especially in urban poor communities in 1987 and 1988.

However, from 1988 onward, upon the increasing frustration and bankruptcy of the "Left" opportunist line of combining urban insurrectionism and military adventurism, a conspiratorial, factionalist and splittist bloc of Right and "Left" opportunists increasingly promoted Gorbachov's revisionist line in certain central staff organs, certain regions and Party groups within certain institutions.

In 1990, the Right opportunists tried to usurp the authority of the central leadership and sought to liquidate the Party and the revolutionary movement through a series of maneuvers. They tried to do away with the Executive Committee of the Political Bureau as the daily collective leading organ of the Party. They sought to replace the Party as the center of the revolution with the NDF. At the same time, they tried to change the NDF program from one of new-democratic revolution into one of bourgeois nationalism, pluralism and mixed economy; and convert the NDF from a united front or alliance into a mix-up of member-organizations and individual members.

They peddled the concept of the "anti-imperialist democratic front" which meant combining the Left, Middle and Right against the U.S.-Aquino regime. They pushed the line of going Right supposedly in order to reach the goal of urban insurrection (medium-term plan) and promoted the line of capitulation and pacifism on the question of peace. They also tried hard to entrap the legal progressive forces into the capitulationist framework of the "multisectoral peace advocates" and people's caucus and convert them into a "third force" between the revolutionary movement and the reactionary government. They tried to remove the Central Committee as publisher of Ang Bayan and used a number of issues to espouse the Right and "Left" opportunist lines and actions and to hail Gorbachov as "a communist renewing socialism" even as he was already unmasking himself as an anticommunist completely restoring capitalism.

Within the organs of the central leadership, the proletarian revolutionaries struggled against the ideas of the "Left" and Right opportunists who tended to support each other. From year to year on one major issue to another since 1988, the opportunists were beaten through reasoning on the basis of the facts of the disastrous results of their erroneous ideas. In 1990, they took advantage of the dislocation and difficulties of the central leadership due to enemy pressure and tried to go on a rampage of usurping authority and promoting their counterrevolutionary Rightist line. But in 1991, they were basically repulsed and beaten. Towards the end of 1991, the chief advocate of parliamentarism and urban insurrection prepared four long letters addressed to the general membership attacking the central leadership which by then was securely in the hands of the proletarian revolutionaries. The central leadership undertook a series of decisions to assert the proletarian revolutionary line and resolved to launch a comprehensive and thoroughgoing rectification movement in the Party.

In reaction to the rectification movement, the ringleaders of the "Left" and Right opportunists have thoroughly exposed themselves as a counterrevolutionary Rightist group, using anticommunist, anti-Stalin slogans and serving as special psy-war and intelligence agents of the U.S.-Ramos regime after trying in vain to decapitate, discredit, disintegrate and destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement through factional, splittist and wrecking activities. The most vicious counterrevolutionary Rightists who attack the rectification movement include those who have committed not only serious ideological, political and organizational errors but also serious criminal offenses against the Party and the people. They have thoroughly exposed themselves and are now the target of criticism and repudiation by the Party rank and file.

Despite the serious deviations and errors committed by the "Left" and Right opportunists for a long time without prompt correction and which are only now being comprehensively and thoroughly rectified, the all-round strength of the Party and the revolutionary movement remains formidable and in varying respects is equal to the level of 1983 or 1984. The Party has several tens of thousands of members both in rural and urban areas and is deeply rooted among the toiling masses of workers and peasants. There are millions of people in the armed revolutionary movement and the legal democratic movement under the leadership of the Party. Most of these people are covered by the organs of political power both in rural and urban areas. They are in the mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, women, professionals and other people. There are the Party branches in factories, farms, schools and communities and the Party groups in institutions and mass organization.

The New People's Army is under the absolute leadership of the Party. The strength of the people's army includes several thousands of full-time Red fighters, with automatic rifles and other high-powered weapons. These weapons are nearly 100 percent seized from the enemy through tactical offensives. The Red fighters are augmented by part-time guerrilla squads, the militia and self-defense units. The Party is at the core of and leads the organs of political power and the rural-based mass organizations. The Party also leads the united front. This encompasses the organs of political power, the National Democratic Front and legal alliances based on class and sectoral interests and major national issues.

Introduction
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