[PRWC Party Documents] Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism, January 15, 1992

Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism

I. The Party's Marxist-Leninist Stand Against Modern Revisionism

Failed Efforts at Establishing Relations

Basahin sa Pilipino Basahon sa Hiligaynon

Armando Liwanag, Chairman, Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines

January 15, 1992

In June 1988, the "World Situation and Our Line" was issued to replace "The Present World Situation and the CPP's General International Line and Policies". The correct and positive side of the new document reiterated the principles of national integrity, independence, equality noninterference and mutual support and mutual benefit to guide the Party's international relations; and upheld the basic principles of socialism, anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism and peaceful coexistence as a diplomatic policy. Furthermore, it noted and warned against the unhealthy trends of cynicism, anticommunism, nationalism, consumerism, superstition, criminality and the like already running rampant in the countries ruled by the revisionist parties.

The negative side included accepting at face value and endorsing the catchphrases of Gorbachov; describing the revisionist regimes as socialist under a "lowered" definition; and diplomatic avoidance of the antirevisionist terms of the Party.

In the course of trying to establish friendly relations with the revisionist ruling parties in 1987 and onward, Party representatives were able to discern that Gorbachov and his revisionist followers were reorganizing these parties towards their eventual weakening and dissolution. Despite Gorbachov's avowed line of allowing the other East European ruling parties to decide matters for themselves, Soviet agents pushed these parties to reorganize themselves by replacing Brezhnevite holdovers at various levels with Gorbachovites and subsequently paralyzed the Party organizations. However, it would be in 1989 that it became clear without any doubt that all the revisionist ruling parties and regimes were on the path of self-disintegration, blatant restoration of capitalism and bourgeois dictatorship under the slogans of "multiparty democracy" and "economic reforms".

It is correct for the Party to seek friendly relations with any foreign party or movement on the basis of anti-imperialism. But it is wrong to go into any "fraternal" relations involving the repudiation of the Party's Marxist-Leninist stand against modern revisionism.

In this regard, we must be self-critical for wavering or temporarily veering away from the Party's antirevisionist line and engaging in a futile expedition. The motivation was to seek greater material and moral support for the Filipino people's revolutionary struggle. Although such motivation is good, it can only mitigate but cannot completely excuse the departure from the correct line. The error is a major one but it can be rectified through education far more easily than other errors unless ideological confusion over the developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is allowed to continue. Most comrades assigned to do international work were merely following the wrong line from above.

The worst damage caused by the unconsummated and belated flirtation with the revisionist ruling parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is not so much the waste of effort and resources but the circulation of incorrect ideas, such as that these parties were still socialist and that the availability or nonavailability of material assistance from them, especially heavy weapons, would spell the advance or stagnation and retrogression of the Philippine revolutionary movement. It should be pointed out that the Lava group had the best of relations with these parties since the sixties but this domestic revisionist group never amounted to anything more than being an inconsequential toady of Soviet foreign policy and the Marcos regime.

At this point, the central leadership and entirety of the Party must renew their resolve to adhere to Marxism-Leninism and to the antirevisionist line. We are in a period which requires profound and farsighted conviction in the new democratic revolution as well as the socialist revolution. This is a period comparable to that when the classical revisionist parties disintegrated and it seemed as if socialism had become a futile dream and the world seemed to be merely a helpless object of imperialist oppression and exploitation. But that period was exactly the eve of socialist revolution.