Advance the People's War!
Armando Liwanag Chairman Central Committee Communist Party of the Philippines
March 29, 1995
On behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Philippines, I convey warmest comradely greetings and congratulations to
the Red commanders and fighters as well as the Party cadres and members in
the New People's Army on the occasion of its 26th anniversary of
establishment.
The Filipino people and the Communist Party of the Philippines cherish
you for your hard work, fearless struggle and sacrifices. We joyfully
celebrate the victories of the NPA in its long history and in the past
year.
Victories of the New People's Army
Let me cite your most brilliant achievements in reaffirming basic
revolutionary principles, in serving the people, in further strengthening
your ranks and in fighting the enemy.
1. You have strengthened your unity by upholding and defending the
leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which is the
revolutionary party of the proletariat under the guidance of
Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, and by resolutely pursuing the general
line of the people's democratic revolution against foreign monopoly
capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, now chiefly
represented by the U.S.-Ramos regime.
2. You have frustrated the major campaigns of the enemy to destroy the NPA
under the U.S.-inspired "total war" policy or low-intensity conflict
strategy even as these have been assisted by the ultra-Left opportunist
currents of premature strategic counteroffensive, urban insurrectionism and
militarism and the Right opportunist currents of reformism, capitulationism
and liquidationism.
3. You have triumphed in the rectification movement against the
opportunist traitors, have overcome the errors, crimes and damage
perpetrated by them and have reinvigorated the armed revolutionary
movement. You have summed up your experience at various levels, drawing
positive and negative lessons, criticizing and repudiating errors and
raising your fighting will and capabilities against the enemy.
4. You have firmly followed the line of trusting and relying on the masses
and you have put revolutionary politics in command of all your activities,
including military training and combat, mass work, production and so on.
You have integrated armed struggle, land reform and mass base building,
all within the framework of the people's democratic revolution.
5. You have persevered in the strategic line of protracted people's war,
which is to encircle the cities from the countryside and accumulate
strength until it becomes possible to seize the cities. You have
streamlined your organization ad redeployed your units for mass work,
carried out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of
widening and deepening mass base and have significantly increased the
number of tactical offensives nationwide in the past year.
6. You have expanded and consolidated the mass base in scores of guerrilla
fronts and hundreds of guerrilla zones, have recovered areas previously
lost due to enemy onslaughts and grave errors and have opened new areas for
revolutionary work. Your guerrilla fronts cover significant portions of
more than 60 provinces and more than 600 municipalities, far beyond the
capacity of the reactionary armed forces to occupy and control.
7. You have organized a great number of appointive temporary organs of
political power (barrio organizing committees) and people's organizing
committees in expansion work and proceeded to organize the elective
permanent organs of political power (barrio revolutionary committees),
militia and self-defense units and the mass organizations of peasants,
workers, youth, women, children and cultural activists in consolidation
work.
8. You have mobilized millions of people for their empowerment and social
benefit in the course of campaigns for land reform, mass education, higher
production, health and sanitation, self-defense, environmental protection
and so on. These campaigns are being undertaken by the mass organizations
and the organs of political power.
9. You have increased the number of Red fighters and Party members within
the NPA by training and tempering them through studies, practical work and
struggle. You have also encouraged the cadres and advanced mass activists
from the urban-based legal democratic movement to learn from your ranks and
the people and to join the armed revolutionary movement.
10. You have become far more self-reliant than ever before by adopting
guerrilla warfare and removing the unnecessary and unsustainable costs of
prematurely larger military formations and by relying on the contributions
of the people, on your own production and on taxation.
Fertile Ground for the People's War
The socio-economic and political crisis of the domestic ruling system
is the fertile ground for the growth in strength and advance of all the
revolutionary forces. The chronic character of this crisis makes possible
and necessary the development of protracted people's war.
The U.S.-Ramos regime viciously opposes and works against national
industrialization and land reform. The Medium-Term Philippine Development
Plan (MTPDP) and other related economic policies of the regime, dictated by
the foreign monopolies and their international agencies (IMF, World Bank,
WTO and ADB), cannot industrialize the Philippines by the year 2000 but can
only aggravate and deepen the agrarian, underdeveloped and semifeudal
character of the economy.
The liberalization of investments, trade, foreign exchange and credit
in favor of the foreign monopolies and big compradors is further ruining
the economy. The growing trade and budgetary deficits, the mounting
foreign and local public debt, the sale of state assets (enterprises and
land) and dependence on short-term speculative capital from abroad are all
manifestations of the bankruptcy of the economy. The claim of investment-
led growth by 5.1 percent in 1994 is false and misleading because the GNP
is in fact the sum of goods and services without real industrial
development and is now puffed up by the estimated income of overseas
contract workers, short-term speculative capital, overpriced energy and
infrastructure projects, falsified data about increased agricultural
production and so on.
The budget of the reactionary government is as absurd and
counterproductive as ever, overloaded by debt service, military
expenditures, overpricing of supplies and the overcompensation an
corruption of the bureaucratic capitalists. The claim of budgetary surplus
amounting to 18 billion pesos is false. It is the result of the
nonrecurrent revenues from the privatization of state assets, the
postponement of expenses for infrastructure and social services, nonpayment
of the advances made by the Philippine National Bank and so on. While it
uses tax exemptions to benefit the foreign investors, the regime increases
the tax burden on the people, especially through the expanded value-added
tax and wasted the revenues on debt service, military expenditures and
bureaucratic corruption.
The exploitation of the workers and peasants and even the middle
social strata is accelerated. The rapidly rising costs of subsistence and
production relentlessly cut down their real incomes. The policy of the
regime is to press down their incomes, do away with the workers' job
security through casualization and even the land tenure and ancestral rights of peasants and ethnic minorities.
Accumulated unemployment goes
beyond 40 percent. Seventy-six percent of the population fall below the
poverty line. There is a general breakdown of social services and
infrastructure. The social, economic, political and cultural rights of the
people are being suppressed comprehensively.
Millions of people have left the country to become low-paid migrant
workers because of deteriorating economic and social conditions. There is
a high popular awareness that as a matter of policy the reactionary
government pushes the Filipinos to accept low wages abroad and does not
protect them in order to make the labor export more saleable and increase
the foreign exchange earnings from this. Thus, a giant wave of public
outrage has arisen from the unjust execution of Flor Contemplacion in
Singapore.
As the socioeconomic crisis worsens, the social unrest spreads and
becomes more intense. Thus, since last year, mass protest rallies and
strikes have intensified nationwide. Among the issues were the
"Philippines 2000", IMF structural adjustment loans, antilabor policies,
the oil price hike, the expanded VAT, the GATT issue and the violence of
the reactionary state. The social discontent is already so widespread and
intense that a wave of mass protests can easily arise from any of so many
specific social issues. Under current conditions, the armed revolution can
advance.
The class dictatorship of the comprador big bourgeosie and landlord
class reigns over the country. The open rule of terror against the working
people has persisted in the form of the U.S.-directed total war policy or
low-intensity conflict scheme since the fall of the Marcos fascist
autocracy. The bourgeois reformists and the special psy-war agents commit
a grave offense to the people and the revolutionary movement and support
the U.S.-Ramos regime by claiming that there has been democratization since
1986.
Human rights violations are rampant and have become more brutal,
especially in the course of base-denial operations or forced mass
evacuations in the countryside. Since 1986, more than two million people
have become refugees as a result of aerial and ground bombardments and
bulldozing. Massacres, selective murders, illegal arrests and detention,
torture, arson and looting bave been perpetrated by the military, police
and paramilitary forces. These barbarities are a clear manifestation of
the crisis of the ruling system and in the inability of the exploiting
classes to rule in the old way prior to 1972.
The increasingly conspicuous predominance of the political descendants
of the Marcos fascist dictatorship exposes the rottenness of the ruling
system. This is accompanied by the persistence of the armed reactionary
factions, the rise of military politicians and the growing involvement of
military and police officers in criminal syndicates.
The political crisis of the ruling system is bound to take the form of
violent contradictions among the reactionaries as the socioeconomic crisis
limits the ground for amicable relations among them and as the
revolutionary forces carry the people's war forward and the Moro people
intensify their own struggle for self-determination.
The crisis of the world capitalist system interacts with and
aggravates the crisis of a neocolony like the Philippines. The global
crisis of overproduction generated by the use of jobkilling high technology
for profit and by the overextended abuse of finance capital is driving the
global centers of capitalism to compete with each other and yet unite to
further exploit the countries of the third world and the former Soviet
bloc. This is pushing the Philippines further into a worse condition of
neocolonial underdevelopment.
This crisis of capitalism has already caused a new world disorder
which discredits and scatters the attention of the imperialist powers. It favors the development of the people's
war in the Philippines and the
eventual resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a
global scale. The people's war waged by the Communist Party of the
Philippines, the New People's Army and the National Democratic Front of the
Philippines is outstanding and exemplary amidst the new world disorder
wrought by monopoly capitalism, neocolonialism and revisionist betrayal of
socialism.
Call for the Intensification of the Revolutionary Struggle
The Communist Party of the Philippines calls for the intensification
of both the armed revolutionary movement based in the rural areas and the
legal democratic movement based in the urban areas. The directive of the
Party to the NPA is clear: carry out the rectification movement through to
the end and carry forward the people's war through extensive and intensive
guerrilla warfare on the basis of a widening and deepening mass base.
Armed struggle is the principal form of struggle in the people's
democratic revolution because it is the way by which the oppressors and
exploiters of the people are overthrown and democratic power of the people
is established. Social revolution is impossible without the people's
democratic power, replacing the state of the exploiting classes.
At the same time, it is absolutely necessary to advance the
urban-based legal democratic movement. It is the way to arouse, organize
and mobilize the people on a wide scale. The mass protest actions and
strikes are the most potent weapon of the legal democratic movement so long
as these adhere to the national democratic line and is based on solid mass
organizing.
The forthcoming legislative and local elections are a farce, a variety
show staged by the reactionaries for conjuring the illusion of democracy.
These elections limit the electorate to a choice of personalities and
factions that will continue to oppress and exploit them.
As a matter of principle, the revolutionary forces can neither
participate in these elections nor entertain the question of participating
in them or not, as if participation were a real choice. In fact, the
reactionaries ban the revolutionary forces from participation. However,
without proclaiming participation, the revolutionary forces can oppose the
reactionary candidates and support the relatively patriotic and progressive
candidates in approriate ways in accordance with the CPP's united front
policy.
The formal negotiations of the NDFP and the Government of the Republic
of the Philippines, which is scheduled to open on June 1 in Brussels,
Belgium, provide the revolutionary forces with one more specific form of
legal struggle through the duly-authorized NDFP negotiating panel.
In the course of these negotiations, the NDFP negotiating panel is
duty-bound to pursue the line for national liberation and democracy as the
line for a just and lasting peace. There should be no presumption that
these negotiations are by themselves the way to a just and lasting peace.
The NDFP negotiating panel must resolutely uphold, defend and advance the
position of the revolutionary forces and frustrate the attempts of the GRP
to spread false illusions and undermine the revolutionary movement.
The NDFP confronts the GRP across the table on equal legal terms in a
foreign neutral venue and under "mutually acceptable principles" and "no
precondition which negates the character and purposes of peace negotiations
(no surrender in principle and in fact). The revolutionary forces and the
people must intensify their mass struggles in order to push the basic
demands for national liberation and democracy and strengthen the position
of the NDFP in the negotiations.
I am confident that the New People's Army will be able to raise its
fighting will and capabilities to a new and higher level and win ever
greater victories in mass work and guerrilla warfare in order to advance
the people's war in the year ahead.
Long live the New People's Army!
Pursue the correct revolutionary line set by the Communist Party of
the Philippines!
Long live the Filipino people and the Philippine revolution!
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