F. The Party In the Period of Continued Military Defeat
After the capture of the Secretariat or the Politburo-In in Manila, the Politburo-Out organized a Central Committee conference in February and March of 1951 in order to discuss the new situation. As clear proof of the increasingly desperate situation of the Party, the conference itself was under heavy military pressure by a massive enemy encirclement. With only a negligible armed force for protection, the conference could only depend on mere physical concealment within the encirclement.
The Central Committee conference failed to pose and criticize the adventurist errors of the Jose Lava leadership organizationally, politically and ideologically. The Jesus Lava leadership elected by the conference was essentially a part of the previous leadership; the Politburo-Out merely replaced the apprehended Politburo-In as the main leading body. At the most, the capture of the entire Politburo-In was narrowly adduced to tactical errors like negligence of security particularly in the city. The Central Committee failed to make a profound and systematic self-criticism as basis for a rectification movement.
The CC Resolutions of 1951 merely reiterated mechanically with the same over-confidence as that of the Jose Lava leadership the PB Resolutions of 1950. Grossly ignorant of the strategy and tactics of people's war, the Jesus Lava leadership could not state categorically that the people's army was on the strategic defensive; instead it muddle-headedly considered the incumbent stage of armed struggle as strategic "counter-offensive". As in previous stages of the Party history, a new situation within the Party developed due to grave errors of a previous Party leadership and yet no rectification movement was launched to correct the basic mistakes and weaknesses in ideology, politics, organization and armed struggle.
The errors of the Jose Lava leadership were obscured by the inner-Party struggle which arose between Jesus Lava and the Taruc brothers on fragmented issues. In this regard, the Jesus Lava leadership resorted mainly to organizational maneuvers to cover up for the adventurist errors of the Party leadership and to combat the capitulationist ideas of the Taruc brothers.
As a result of the unrectified ideological and political weaknesses, and as a result of the disastrous military adventures of the Jose Lava leadership, capitulationism started to set in the ranks of the Party leadership and was represented by the disgruntled and traitorous Luis Taruc who surrendered to the reactionary puppet government of Ramon Magsaysay in 1954. The outright capitulationist trend was aggravated to become the principal current by successive military defeats and by the chronic incorrect handling of cadres and the sectarian and liberal manipulation of cadres to perpetuate the clannish chain of Lava leadership.
Upon its assumption of office, the Jesus Lava leadership was buffetted from one military defeat to another. After the 1951 Central Committee conference, the Party headquarters, with its complement of staff members and security force, divided itself into several smaller groups and these were in blind flight within the massive enemy encirclement that enveloped the Sierra Madre from Laguna to Nueva Ecija and on both sides of Quezon. At a time that the Party leadership needed to concentrate its armed forces and smash or break through the weak points of the enemy encirclement, there was no sufficient number of men it could command. From this time on, the Jesus Lava leadership was never in effective control of any sizeable armed force because the strongest regional command (Reco 2) closely associated with Luis Taruc became disaffected with the Lava leadership and all other forces had been fragmented because of the over-extended dispersal of armed units during the adventurist leadership of Jose Lava.
During the period of 1951-1954, many principal leaders of the armed struggle fell under the massive encirclement campaigns in Southern Tagalog, Central Luzon, Bicol and Panay. It was during this period that roving rebel tendencies developed in the HMB because of ineffective central command and the slicing-off tactics of the enemy.
Under the impact and conditions of military defeat, the Jesus Lava leadership decided to adopt parliamentary struggle as the main form of struggle in 1955, thus falling into the same capitulationist line of Luis Taruc. The policy of armed struggle was abandoned and those who had opposed this policy before became gleeful, wrongly feeling vindicated by the adventurist error of the Jose Lava leadership and by the Right opportunist about-face of the Jesus Lava leadership.
The Jesus Lava leadership went as far as de-activating armed units that were accessible to its command, and these were converted into so-called organizational brigades. Under the impact of the world revisionist campaign that was being waged by the Khrushchev revisionists, the Jesus Lava leadership in succeeding years felt more justified in its wrong policy. Around 1958, he disbanded his own security men and fled from the countryside to the city to start the life of a city fugitive, isolated from the masses. This pattern of flight from the countryside to the city resulted in the capture of the principal leaders of the Party in the Greater Manila area. It signified the utter failure of the series of Lava leaderships in the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Living the life of a city fugitive, Lava wrote political transmissions and directives and made appointments without the benefit of collective Party discussions. It was during this period that Jesus Lava acting alone decided to adopt the liquidationist "single-file" policy. This policy required one Party member to be in contact with only one other Party member. The whole Party organization was, at first, reduced to a few one-way files until the loss of only one member in a single file would result in the automatic disconnection of several others from the Party or the complete dissolution of the entire file. This process led to the grave disorganization of the Party. After a few more years, Jesus Lava was to lose contact with both legal and armed cadres of the Party.
It was during this liquidationist period that the Party fell behind, even behind the national bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie which were raising the banner of nationalism of the Recto brand as early as 1957 and more strongly in 1961. Until new Party cadres emerged and some Party members were reactivated, the Party fell too far behind the events of the day. Meanwhile, Jesus Lava made decisions for the Party all by himself as Party discussions would now reveal. In May 1964, Jesus Lava was finally arrested in Sampaloc, Manila under circumstances which clearly showed that he surrendered himself. In the first place, he had deliberately, by his own Right opportunism, one-man flightism and liquidationism, placed himself into the urban mouth of the reactionary whale.
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