Celebrate 27 years of revolutionary struggle; strive all-out to fulfill the tasks set for 1996
Armando Liwanag
Chairman
Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
December 26, 1995 On behalf of the Central Committee, I wish to convey the warmest greetings to all the Party cadres and members on the occasion of the 27th anniversary of the reestablishment of our beloved Party under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
We congratulate you for the overwhelming and resounding victory of the second great rectification movement. The very act of launching and sustaining the rectification movement since 1992 constitutes a great victory. We have brought the unity and capabilities of the Party and the people to a new and higher level of waging revolutionary struggle in accordance with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and along the general line of new-democratic revolution.
We have won brilliant victories in the ideological, political and organizational fields in the course of carrying out the critical and constructive tasks of the rectification movement. As a result of the rectification movement, our Party is revitalized and further strengthened to perform all the fundamental tasks in the national-democratic revolution and to take advantage of the ever worsening crisis of the domestic ruling system and the world capitalist system.
We have reaffirmed the basic revolutionary principles of the Party as the advanced detachment of the proletariat and identified, criticized, repudiated and defeated the major errors of revisionism, subjectivism and opportunism that have undermined and weakened the Party and the revolutionary mass movement.
Under the leadership of the Party, the Filipino people and all the revolutionary forces are more than ever determined to fight the US-Ramos regime and the entire ruling system of comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class which are in the service of the US, Japanese and other imperialists.
We are determined to carry out the rectification movement through to the end. In the forthcoming year, we shall be making still greater strides in carrying out the tasks of the rectification movement. The Central Committee enjoins the entire Party to be guided by the assessment and the tasks defined last July. Since then, the Party has made advances.
Resounding Victories of the Rectification Movement
The Party has won a great ideological victory by upholding, defending and promoting Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its theoretical weapon to combat revisionism and various forms of subjectivism and opportunism within the Party and to frustrate the anticommunist ideological offensive of the imperialists, the local reactionaries and their special agents.
As a result of the rectification movement, a high level of ideological unity in accordance with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has been attained. There is common understanding among Party cadres and members that a strong ideological foundation guarantees the victory of the new-democratic revolution and consequently the socialist revolution until communism is reached.
The process of ideological building has proceeded vigorously through the summing-up and analysis of revolutionary practice, the criticism and repudiation of revisionist and subjectivist currents previously circulated by the renegades.
The Party is now increasingly putting the stress on criticizing the remaining influences of erroneous currents and conducting social investigations, summing up and analysis of current work and comradely criticism and self-criticism. The long-running major errors of the renegades and incorrigible opportunists have been amply identified, criticized and repudiated and the worst of the renegades have been thoroughly defeated through criticism and repudiation as well as through their own self-exposure.
Under the guidance of the rectification documents issued by the Central Committee, lower Party organs and units within their respective scope have undertaken collective summing-up and analysis of experience and have conducted criticism and self-criticism. The Central Committee has circulated for study a number of the rectification documents drawn up by organs lower than itself and some of these have been published in Rebolusyon.
At various levels, the Party is in the process of deepening and raising to a new and higher level the study of its revolutionary experience. Those who lag behind are encouraged to catch up. Those who are ahead are advised not to become complacent. There is no end to the process of study and further study. It is a constant process of widening and deepening knowledge on the basis of revolutionary practice.
The Central Committee is urging lower organs and units to look into internal causes of errors and damage even as the rectification documents it has issued look into the causes of major errors at higher levels. There is a dialectical relationship between the responsibility of higher and lower Party organs.
The living study of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought through the summing-up and analysis of our revolutionary experience and through the study of the rectification documents have appropriately run ahead of the formal study courses. In fact this living study must enrich and enliven the formal study courses.
The primary study course of the Party is earnestly being propagated in combination with the special courses in the line of work of the Party members. The works of the great communists and other study materials are being translated, reproduced and distributed and are being read by Party cadres and members. All Party cadres and members are encouraged to read and study these materials even before taking a higher formal Party course. Some Party organs and units have run ahead with the intermediate and advanced study courses. In due time, these courses shall be undertaken more widely.
The organs concerned are working hard to overcome previous delays in the training of instructors and preparation of study materials for the Party courses. We are determined to accelerate work in this regard. We commend the regional Party committees and the Party units among the youth and women for taking initiative in conducting study courses at various levels.
The Party has frustrated the ideological offensive of imperialism and the local reactionaries and has carried out a counteroffensive. Through a resolute two-line ideological struggle, the Party has ferreted out and done away with the revisionists and incorrigible opportunists. Furthermore, the ideological struggle has been extended to one against anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets which have long been in cahoots with the incorrigible opportunists and revisionist renegades.
The Party has brilliantly proven the need for the vanguard role of the proletariat in the ever raging anti-imperialist and class struggle. It has continued to integrate in its program the solutions to problems concerning human rights, development, environment, women, youth, ethnic minorities, peace, civil society and the like which the anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets wish to use against the Party and the new-democratic revolution. These grouplets have been instigated and financed by imperialist funding agencies to wage an anticommunist campaign.
In the international communist movement, the Party enjoys a high standing because of its resolute stand for Marxism-Leninism against modern revisionism, its achievements in the revolutionary struggle and its current rectification movement. In the international arena, the Party has taken an outstanding role in upholding Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the socialist cause and is combating modern revisionism and the anticommunist ideological offensive of the imperialists. In the spirit of proletarian internationalism it modestly offers its revolutionary practice and ideas in exchanges and critically learns from other parties and movements.
The Party learns from the full scope of the basic teachings and experience of such great communist thinkers and leaders as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and puts the main stress on learning the basic principles and the basic achievements in socialist revolution and construction in the past and studying how to bring about the resurgence of the world proletarian revolution and the anti-imperialist movement.
We have integrated more firmly the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the concrete conditions of the Philippines and our concrete revolutionary practice. The Party has won a great political victory by reaffirming and sharpening the analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal and resolutely carrying out the new type of national-democratic revolution, under the leadership of the proletariat and with a socialist perspective.
The Party has defeated the "Left" and Right opportunist lines that have originated from a misinterpretation of the character of Philippine society, especially that of the economy. It has successfully warded off various kinds of imperialist-inspired and antiquated petty-bourgeois notions for derailing the revolution and capitulating to and collaborating with the imperialists and the local reactionaries.
The Party is requiring Party cadres and members to conduct social investigation as the basis of revolutionary work on varying scales. We are thereby deepening and sharpening our analysis of Philippine society and revolution. Both the "Left" and Right opportunists have dogmatically and uncritically adopted models and ideas from abroad.
In their obsession to rationalize their urban-basing, the "Left" and Right opportunists have respectively espoused urban insurrectionism and reformism as the leading factor in the revolution and in common ascribed to the fascist dictatorship of the US-Marcos regime the achievement of having industrialized and urbanized the Philippines to such an extent as to "invalidate" the protracted people's war.
In fact, the fascist dictatorship aggravated and deepened the semifeudal and preindustrial character of the economy. And the population of Metro Manila and the provincial cities rose from 19.8 percent in 1960 to only 21 percent in 1990. Employment in the import-dependent industrial sector has fluctuated around 15 percent. In the manufacturing sector in particular, it has dropped from 12.1 percent in 1960 to 9.7 percent in 1990.
The revolutionary class line of the Party in the new-democratic revolution entails upholding and realizing the class leadership of the proletariat, relying mainly on the peasantry, winning over the urban petty bourgeoisie as a basic revolutionary force and the national bourgeoisie as an additional positive force and taking advantage of the splits among the reactionaries in order to isolate and defeat the enemy, now the US-Ramos regime.
The Party firmly wields armed struggle and the united front as weapons of the revolutionary struggle. Armed struggle is the principal form of revolutionary struggle. It is the weapon for overthrowing the counterrevolutionary state. The legal struggle is the secondary form of struggle but it is important and indispensable for advancing the revolutionary armed struggle.
The Party resolutely adheres to the strategic line of protracted people's war. It is the line of encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength in the countryside until it is possible to seize the cities.
The New People's Army has been reoriented, retrained and redeployed in order to create an ever widening and deepening mass base for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare within the stage of strategic defensive in the people's war. In every guerrilla front, the center of gravity has no more than 30 percent of the Red fighters and dispersed units comprise no less than 70 percent, with squads typically covering entire municipalities and subdividing into armed propaganda teams.
The typical guerrilla front now covers a congressional district or its equivalent and has a total force of a company of the NPA. The center of gravity is a platoon, serving as the headquarters force or rallying point of the Party and the NPA. The rest of the company of the guerrilla front is dispersed more widely than the components of the center of gravity in order to carry out mass work.
Some guerrilla fronts have expanded beyond their size in 1992 and in varying scope have recovered the mass base and areas previously lost as a result of the "Left" opportunist line of premature regularization, urban insurrectionism and militarism, previously promoted by the central leadership's line of "strategic counteroffensive" and the Mindanao Commission's "Red Area-White Area" line. Other guerrilla fronts have decelerated the decline of their mass base. At the same time, new guerrilla fronts have arisen for the first time or reemerged from areas lost previously for more than five or even ten years.
To expand the mass base, the armed propaganda teams engage in a series of activities like utilizing contacts, conducting social investigation, forming people's organizing groups and appointing the barrio organizing committees. To consolidate the mass base, the armed propaganda teams form the mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, women, children and cultural activists; guide the representatives of mass organizations to elect the barrio revolutionary committees and form the working committees to undertake various functions of government; encourage mass campaigns and train the militia and the self-defense units.
The number and frequency of NPA tactical offensives are gradually increasing. For some time, the long-running damage on the mass base and consequently the stress on mass-base building in the rectification movement have tended to decelerate tactical offensives. But rebuilding the mass base is the prerequisite to launching tactical offensives that we can win and sustain. For this reason, the NPA has deliberately let the enemy forces punch the air in certain areas and at certain times. At the same time, the reactionary regime and bourgeois mass media have blacked out information about our successful tactical offensives in order to conjure the illusion that the revolutionary forces are waning.
An outstanding politico-military campaign waged by the NPA, which cannot be ignored by the reactionary press, is the implementation of the policy of the Party to ban logging for export in Mindanao and other areas. But generally, the reactionary press has ignored the NPA actions related to the suppression of bad elements in the course of expanding and consolidating the mass base and carrying out the land reform campaign.
In the urban areas, the legal democratic mass movement is surging forward. The mass organizations of workers, urban poor, women, youth, teachers, cultural workers, human rights activists, health workers and other sectors have revitalized and further strengthened themselves. Their multisectoral and sectoral alliances have launched mass campaigns along the national-democratic line against the ruling system of the US-Ramos regime.
Mass protest actions are expanding and intensifying. These take up the basic issues against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and the specific policies that aggravate the oppression and exploitation of the people. As in the revolutionary armed struggle, the tactics of the united front are employed in the legal democratic movement and are utilized in order to mobilize the broad masses of the people.
The patriotic and progressive forces are prepared to celebrate the centennial of the old democratic revolution of 1896 up to the revolutionary resistance against the US war of aggression starting in 1899. They put the stress on the revolutionary essence of the old democratic revolution and its continuity with the anti-imperialist and antifeudal new-democratic revolution in contrast with the reactionary stress on June 12, 1898 proclamation of "independence" under the "noble protection" of the United States.
The economic and political crisis of the ruling system is so grave that any specific issue is likely to arise and galvanize the people into mass actions at any time. The outrage over the execution of the migrant worker Flor Contemplacion and the general plight of overseas Filipino workers have brought out hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in Metro Manila and other cities in order to condemn and isolate the US-Ramos regime.
The broad masses of the people in Metro Manila and more than twenty provincial cities have repeatedly conducted mass actions on such issues as the impositions of US-controlled international agencies (IMF, World Bank and WTO), the repression and exploitation of the working people, the increase in taxes in the form of the expanded value-added tax, the rising price of fuel, the shortage of rice and other staple food and so on. The mass protest actions in Negros island have been outstanding.
There is an increasingly effective coordination between the urban and rural mass movement and the legal and illegal forms of struggle. From the urban-based legal mass movement the Party is generating a great number of advanced mass activists, developing an increasing number of them to become Party members and encouraging a significant number of the workers and educated youth to join the revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside.
The most important development in the legal democratic movement is that the Party cadres and mass activists are in the main working at the grassroots level and are engaged in solid mass organizing as the basis of mass campaigns. In turn, the mass campaigns serve to draw in the spontaneous masses for solid organizing.
The practice of absorbing the Party cadres and the most advanced mass activists in urban-based bureaucratic offices and becoming dependent on resources from above or from funding agencies has been vigorously criticized and repudiated. The legal democratic movement relies on the masses. The imperialists and local reactionaries are unwittingly aiding the revolutionary movement by financing and further corrupting their special anticommunist petty-bourgeois agents who are in turn being exposed as negative example and being driven off from local areas by the revolutionary forces.
The Party has deliberately reduced the existence and operations of armed city partisans in Metro Manila and some other cities to stress the need for the development of the revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside and to prevent the revisionist renegades who have become enemy spies from jeopardizing their security. In the redeployment, the operation of armed city partisans shall be directed by responsible command based in the countryside and priority shall be given to assignment of armed personnel who cannot be easily identified by the enemy.
The Party has won a great organizational victory in the course of the rectification movement by upholding the principle of democratic centralism, combating bureaucratism and ultrademocracy, recruiting the Party candidate-members from the ranks of the advanced mass activists in the urban and rural mass movement and tempering the Party and the masses in revolutionary mass struggles.
The Party is solidly national in scale and is more than ever deeply rooted among the masses of workers and peasants. Both the legal mass movement and the armed revolutionary movement manifest and sustain the strength of the Party. The revolutionary mass activists augment the strength of the Party cadres and members.
The Party is determined to increase the proportion of Party members who are of worker and peasant status. This is in line with the revolutionary character of the Party. It is in response to a great need. The incorrigible opportunists and revisionists in the past sabotaged the Party's line of recruiting members mainly from the working people.
At the same time, there is a great need to attract the educated youth to the Party. An increasing number of them have joined the worker cadres in responding to the call for educated youth to serve in the people's army and do rural work. The Party is always open to individuals from the urban petty bourgeoisie who wish to remould themselves and become communists.
The Party has successfully streamlined the organization of its cadres and members and put them closer to the masses. Unnecessary layers of organization have been done away with. The leading organs of the Party outside Manila-Rizal are now required to closely link with the appropriate command of the people's army. The Central Committee is redeploying Party cadres and resources from relatively strong Party organizations to those lagging behind or previously damaged by the long-running opportunist currents and wrecking operations of the revisionist renegades.
All the fourteen regional Party organizations are financially self-reliant and many of them can deliver a part of their surplus to the Central Committee for general purposes and for assisting the regional Party committees in two regions where the counterrevolutionary opportunists did some serious damage. In all regions, mass work is basically self-reliant and is laying down the basis for the revitalization and reinforcement of the cadre personnel and armed strength.
The Party has become far more healthy and strong after the removal of the handful of incorrigible revisionists, opportunists and renegades as well as the few centrists who maliciously muddled right and wrong and espoused the unity of proletarian revolutionaries with the renegades. These few anti-Party elements have exposed their counterrevolutionary character and have followed the path of anticommunism, treason and criminal degeneration.
They have formed one grouplet that is flagrantly Trotskyite and attached to reactionary politicians. Its armed gangsters have misappropriated the name ABB and is engaged in extortion, union-busting, kidnap-for-ransom, killing for hire and intelligence work for the enemy. Another smaller grouplet also harps on anti-Stalinism and bourgeois democracy. It is directed by the principal criminals in Kampanyang Ahos and by enemy agents. Both grouplets are directed and manipulated by intelligence agencies of the US and Manila governments and collaborate with earlier anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets.
If the revisionist renegades and liquidationists had their way, the Party would have changed its character and disintegrated as in the case of many parties abroad. But the Party has been able to repel their malicious scheme and has used them as negative example in the course of the rectification movement. Unwittingly, they have helped the Party to reaffirm basic revolutionary principles and further strengthen all revolutionary forces.
Discipline and inner democracy are both flourishing within the Party. The summing-up and analysis of revolutionary experience and the concomitant comradely criticism and self-criticism lead to the definition of tasks to be carried out. Within the organs and units, the Party cadres and members begin their comradely discussions with the desire for unity, engage in the struggle of ideas on the basis of the facts and proceed to a new and higher level of revolutionary unity.
Taking Advantage of the Domestic Crisis
The new-democratic revolution through protracted people's war can take full advantage of the chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system, especially because this crisis is further taking a downward course. The US-Ramos regime is the instrument of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class and is utterly subservient to the foreign monopolies both directly and through multilateral agencies like the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. The ever worsening crisis of the ruling system is inextricably connected with the ever worsening crisis of the world capitalist system.
It is a foregone conclusion that the Medium-Term Development Plan (Philippines 2000) of the US-Ramos regime is not going to change the agrarian and semifeudal character of the economy. So many parts of the country have been declared as industrial zones, yet no basic industries are being established. Only in a few enclaves are there some enterprises engaged in labor-intensive fringe-processing of semiconductors, garments, shoes, toys and the like for reexport.
Under the policy of import-liberalization, the earlier enterprises of repackaging and reassembling foreign manufactures for domestic consumption are in the process of being wiped out. In fact, in terms of output and employment, manufacturing is decreasing. As during the Marcos regime, there is a flurry of energy projects and infrastructure-building. But this is on a smaller scale despite the rapid deterioration of existing energy facilities and infrastructures during the last 15 years.
There is certainly no land reform. There is merely a proliferation of signboards, declaring certain areas as agrarian reform communities. In fact, the process of land concentration in the hands of the few has accelerated. The most exploitative forms of tenancy are rampant. In the frontier areas, the corporate, bureaucratic and military landgrabbers continue to forcibly deprive the poor and middle peasants and indigenous people of what is left of their land.
The current reactionary regime makes scarce pretense of land reform. It has confiscated or canceled a great number of the certificates of land transfer (CLTs) and emancipation patents distributed by previous regimes. It has encouraged landlords to convert their rice and corn lands into other types of crop land exempted from its bogus agrarian reform program.
The socioeconomic crisis is rapidly worsening. And yet the US-Ramos regime is poised to claim a growth rate of more than 6 percent in the gross domestic product (GDP). This includes estimates of consumption, investment, government expenditures and exports as well as pure fabrications of production increases (including that in agricultural production despite the scandalous shortage and large importation of rice, sugar and fish).
Agricultural production for domestic consumption and export and mineral ore production for export are the main productive activities of the Philippine economy. The industrial sector is import-dependent, consumption-driven and lacks a foundation in heavy and basic industries. The economic value of import-dependent and low-value added manufacturing is exaggerated. It employs less workers than the old import-substitution manufacturing, pays far lower wages and yields a low net export income.
Foreign trade and budgetary deficits are ever growing. The reactionary government continues to beg for foreign loans. Foreign debt is now admitted to be more than US$40 billion. In the worsening of the financial crisis, the reactionary government has rapidly increased the tax burden on the people, local public borrowing and foreign borrowing. It has gone so far as to become dependent on the most speculative type of foreign capital and on the sale of state assets, including prime land, major enterprises and public utilities to the foreign monopolists.
The funds flow into the hands of foreign monopoly capitalists, big compradors, landlords and the bureaucrat capitalists at the expense of the working people and the middle social strata. At the expense of social services, like education and health, such coercive apparatuses of the state as the military, police and paramilitary forces also continue to enlarge their share of the reactionary government's annual budget.
The problem of unemployment is worsening and is concealed by the statistics of the reactionary government. In the system of random sampling, one who says that he has worked for one day is now considered employed for the entire year. The unemployed and underemployed are mostly classified as workers in "elementary forms" of occupation in the service sector. By overestimating the proportions of the service and industrial sectors, the reactionary government minimizes the share of the agricultural sector in terms of output and employment.
Some five to six million of the unemployed in the domestic economy have been exported as cheap labor. The foreign exchange income from this, now estimated at US$6 billion to US$7 billion, is officially regarded as a major component of the gross national product. The export of cheap labor has scored higher foreign exchange income than that of any of the fringe-processed reexports, agricultural crops or mineral ores. But nearly all of this income goes into consumption of the families of the migrant workers.
The actual high inflation rate is cutting down the income of the people. Prices are rising fast due to the breakdown of production and the scarcity of rice and other basic goods, the rising cost of importing producer and consumer goods and the corporate and bureaucratic upward manipulation of fuel prices. There is no escape for anyone from the inflation and the expanded value-added tax built into the prices of all commodities.
The most serious and credible estimates of those who fall below the poverty line range from 75 to 80 percent. The impoverished have no way out of poverty and misery as the economy continues to deteriorate. The land frontier which traditionally absorbed the surplus labor has disappeared since the late '60s. Thus, there has been a large buildup of rural and urban odd-jobbers.
The US-Ramos regime is intensifying exploitation and oppression through a deliberate policy of favoring the imperialists and local reactionaries and unleashing the military, police and paramilitary forces against the working people.
The workers are being forced to accept lower wage and more miserable living conditions. Unions are being busted. Strikes are banned and labor leaders and strikers are physically attacked and killed. Existing collective bargaining agreements are being violated on a wide scale. Foreign and domestic employers are encouraged to prevent unionization and relocate to so-called industrial zones where the "no-union, no-strike" policy is brazenly implemented. The shanties of workers, odd-jobbers and other urban poor are often the target of military-police zoning operations and demolition campaigns.
In the countryside, brutal military campaigns are conducted, whether the people's army is there or not. The objective is to grab the land from the peasants and the ethnic communities. The land is grabbed for corporate farming, integrated forest management, mining concessions and so on. The enemy onslaughts include aerial bombardments, artillery fire, rifle fire and arson. In the course of these, the peasants and indigenous people become the victims of looting, torture, rape and massacre.
The barbarities of the US-Ramos ruling clique can only incite more people to join the revolutionary armed struggle and to overthrow the entire ruling system. In the urban areas, the legal democratic movement is also surging forward to denounce the system and make demands for revolutionary change.
US imperialism and the local reactionaries have claimed that there is democratization after the fall of Marcos and the reestablishment of the pre-1972 reactionary institutions and processes. It was precisely after the fall of Marcos that military campaigns of suppression like Lambat Bitag I, II and III, far more brutal than any under the Marcos regime, were launched by the post-Marcos regimes. Fascism has persisted but has been camouflaged since the fall of Marcos.
General Fidel Ramos has been the chief puppet of US imperialism, the chief representative of the local reactionaries and the pivot in the continuity of fascist repression, even under the figurehead presidency of Aquino. The joint class dictatorship of the comprador bourgeoisie and landlord class continues. The political descendants of the Marcos dictatorship are still colluding and competing in ruling the Philippines and have coopted or marginalized most of the anti-Marcos reactionaries.
It is clear that under the low-intensity conflict scheme of US imperialism, the brutal military campaigns of suppression against the revolutionary movement have been complemented by psychological warfare. The most dangerous of this psywar is not the deployment of "special operation teams" (SOT) and death squads but the operations of those special ideological and political agents assigned to destroy the Party and revolutionary movement from within.
One set of these agents spread the line that after the fall of Marcos there is democratization, at first by the forces of "elite democracy" and then by those of "popular democracy" through a legal struggle for reforms. They have harped on the line that human rights violations are on a decline and that these are committed by both the counterrevolutionary and revolutionary forces. They claim all would be well if the revolutionary armed struggle were "de-emphasized" or stopped.
Another set of agents spread the line that the revolutionary forces had better win within a short period of time through urban insurrectionism and militarism and by securing foreign military assistance or else the armed revolution would stagnate, retrogress or become futile. They were awed by the enemy's strategic offensive and tactics of "gradual constriction". And yet they played into the hands of the enemy as they damaged the mass base, went into self-constriction and pushed the NPA units into a purely military situation.
The two sets of enemy agents have been directed by US and Philippine psy-war agencies. This is well verified by the fact that the principal agents have sought to destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement from within and have openly and shamelessly continued to engage in the grossest and most vicious type of anticommunist propaganda.
Unfortunately for these renegades and traitors, the Party has frustrated, exposed and repudiated them. They have chosen to openly betray and attack the Party at the time that General Ramos is president. In contrast, the revolutionary unity of the Party and the masses in political consciousness and militancy shines resplendently against the crisis-ridden and grievously factionalized ruling system.
Due to the worsening socioeconomic crisis, there is the worsening political crisis of the ruling system. The contradictions among the reactionaries are intensifying. Even as the reactionary factions unite against the people, they compete among themselves for political power and the spoils of office.
In the 1995 elections for legislative and local executive offices, Lakas-NUCD-UMDP (Lakas ng Tao-National Union of Christian Democrats-United Muslim Democratic Party) or Ramos' coalition and Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP) united in order to beat their opponents. They even colluded in electoral cheating under Oplan Dagdag-Bawas. But soon after the elections, the leaders of both political formations betrayed each other.
Ramos of Lakas-NUCD-UMDP engineered the ouster of Sen. Edgardo Angara of LDP as Senate President in order to pave the way for legislative actions aimed at realizing his own autocratic ambitions. Ramos wishes to amend the 1987 constitution in order to extend his rule as president beyond the limit of six years and eliminate certain guarantees formally provided by its bill of rights.
Aside from pushing for constitutional amendments that may be made by a congress acting as a constituent assembly, the Ramos regime is pushing the so-called Antiterrorism Bill, which is far more antidemocratic and repressive than the repealed Antisubversion Law. It seeks to curtail the freedom of expression, regard publications against the regime as criminal, restore the death penalty for political offenses and seize the properties of those accused of terrorism.
Ramos is hellbent on accumulating emergency powers without having to declare martial law. He used the fuel crisis in the past to get the emergency power allowing him to dispense with the public bidding for contracts with state corporations and to enrich himself through secret negotiations with big business. He has encouraged the worst of business practices and he seeks emergency powers under the guise of trying to control such practices. But in fact his objective is to suppres
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