Message of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army on the occasion of the NDF’s 46th anniversary

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) expresses solidarity with all its allies in the National Democratic Front (NDF) on the occasion of its 46th founding anniversary. With 17 allied organizations, the NDF serves as the solid core for uniting the Filipino people in their historic struggle for national and social liberation.

The NDF unites the broad toiling masses primarily workers and poor peasants, as well as the semiproletarian masses, unemployed people and migrant workers, and the various sections of the petty-bourgeoisie including intellectuals, professionals and small salary earners. It unites various democratic sectors including women, church people and the youth. It draws in, as well, the middle or national bourgeoisie under the common aim of achieving freedom from foreign domination.

By uniting all patriotic and democratic classes and sectors, the NDF isolates the oppressive and exploitative classes of big bourgeois compradors and landlords who have long ruled the Philippine reactionary state. They are subservient to foreign interests and betray the national and democratic interests of the Filipino people.

United by the NDF’s 12 Point Program, its allied organizations aim to put an end to the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal system and establish the ground for waging socialist revolution and construction in the future. The NDF’s program represents a modern break from the old rotten system established through more than a century of US colonialism and neocolonialism. It is in stark contrast to the rapidly declining global capitalist system that has been weighed down by incessant crisis over the past several decades.

The allied organizations of the NDF are strongly bound by their common recognition of and confidence in the leadership of the working class as key element in the Filipino people’s revolutionary struggle in the era of imperialism. The working class, represented by the Party, serves as the NDF’s vanguard and most solid core, and provides it with a scientific view of both historical and current circumstances and the tasks for carrying forward the Filipino people’s revolutionary resistance. The NDF serves as the most consolidated united front organization in the Philippines.

The allied organizations of the NDF are united in supporting the revolutionary armed struggle being waged by the NPA. Their membership serve as fertile ground for recruiting NPA Red fighters. It provides the NPA with political and material support.

By waging armed struggle, the revolutionary forces have built organs of political power in the countryside which serve as basic units of the incipient People’s Democratic Government (PDG) in the Philippines. Bringing together the basic revolutionary mass organizations that are at the foundation of the people’s regime, the NDF serves to represent the PDG at the provincial, regional and national levels.

For more than 30 years, the NDF has represented the PDG in peace negotiations with the GRP, with which it is engaged in incessant civil war. In so doing, the NDF has been able to further broaden its links, further elucidate its program and gain adherents to its espousal for a just and lasting peace.

Overseas, the NDF represents the Filipino people in establishing people-to-people relations, especially with other anti-imperialist and national liberation movements and forces, as well as quasi-diplomatic relations with other governments.

Today, the NDF and the Filipino people are confronted with the rotten, tracherous and fascist Duterte regime whose scheme to establish an open fascist dictatorship is rapidly unfolding.

Allied organizations of the NDF are ever determined to wage revolutionary resistance as Duterte and his military and police death squads conduct widespread all-out war against the people. Over the past months, there has been a sharp rise in the number of killings, military occupation of communities, abductions, illegal arrests, torture and other gross abuses of human rights. The attacks are most vicious against the peasant masses and workers, but have not spared journalists, lawyers, teachers, academics, students, children and other sectors.

The intensification of the all-out of war of suppression is a crucial element in Duterte’s scheme to install himself as dictator. He aims to perpetuate himself, his family and bureaucrat capitalist clique in power. He seeks to monopolize power either by pushing for a change to a federal form of government where the president enjoys centralized authority over his regional and provincial allies of warlords and political dynasties, or through outright imposition of martial law.

He covets absolute power so he can continue giving foreign big capitalists unimpeded access to the country’s resources and patrimony and get fat kickbacks from onerous loans and government contracts, in exchange. He wants to arrogate sole power in order to control state funds and make everyone profess fealty and pay homage to his tyrannical regime.

Because of his drive to monopolize political power, Duterte is increasingly becoming politically isolated. Conflicts with rival political cliques are intensifying. The broad masses are increasingly roused and emboldened to stand up against the Duterte regime and its scheme to establish a fascist dictatorship.

The conditions are ever favorable to expand and strengthen the broad anti-fascist and anti-tyranny united front. Building the broadest united front is the key to defeating the US-Duterte regime. It must arouse and mobilize the Filipino people in their millions and manifest their political will in demonstrations and other forms of mass actions.

The NDF and all its allied organizations must serve as strong core of the anti-Duterte united front and imbue it will militancy and courage to surmount the tyrannical regime’s campaign of suppression.

As the crisis of the ruling system further worsens under the US-Duterte regime, the NDF and its forces must exert all-out effort to raise the political consciousness of the broad masses and show the necessity of waging national democratic revolution.

It must take advantage of the current situation to surpass all past accomplishments in terms of organizing the broad masses and generating unprecedented support for the revolutionary armed struggle.

Long live the National Democratic Front! Long live the Filipino people! Down with the US-Duterte fascist regime!