Under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the people’s democratic revolution through people’s war is advancing. It is making substantial progress in carrying out the strategic plan to advance the people’s war from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. In this connection, the Party has strengthened itself ideologically, politically and organizationally.
The Party and the revolutionary movement are frustrating and thwarting the US-Aquino regime’s use of Oplan Bayanihan for the stated objective of debilitating or destroying the revolutionary movement from 2011 to 2013 and transferring from the reactionary armed forces to the police the task of mopping up the remnants of the revolutionary forces from 2014 to 2016. It is instructive to point out that even when the NPA was still small and weak in the early 1970s, the Marcos fascist dictatorship with more available resources could not prevent its growth.
The US-Aquino regime’s Oplan Bayanihan is a vicious monster. The regime hypocritically and cynically calls its triad military operations (psy-war, intelligence and combat) as “peace and development” operations. In fact, these operations involve abductions, enforced disappearances, torture, assassinations, massacres, forced mass evacuations and population control operations through intimidation and coercion, bombardments, strafing and artillery fire. All these are done to preserve the ruling system and allow foreign and domestic exploiters to oppress and exploit the people.
The main thrust of Oplan Bayanihan is to kill suspected revolutionaries and whip up military units to a competition of “body counts” It is complemented by psy-war actions in the form of civic actions, medical missions, money dole-outs and other deceptive tactics conducted by “peace and development teams” to engage in intelligence work and intimidation of the families of suspected revolutionaries.
Even children in suspected guerrilla fronts are not spared. They are misrepresented as NPA child soldiers and subjected to intimidation, arrest, torture or extrajudicial killing. Thus, the NDFP has issued the General Declaration and Program of Action for the Rights, Protection and Welfare of Children. This covers the children in the entire country and in all respects and gives special attention to children in areas of armed conflict.
The growth of the various subjective forces of the revolution cannot be stopped because of the Party’s correct line and because of the crisis conditions and the expanse of the countryside which cannot be intensively covered by the coercive apparatuses of the reactionary state. The current grave crisis of the world capitalist system and the far graver crisis of the domestic ruling system are exceedingly favorable conditions for further advancing the armed revolutionary movement of the Filipino people. Their determination to wage armed resistance does not wane despite forty years of difficult struggle. The increasingly intolerable conditions of exploitation and oppression suffered by the broad masses of the people heighten their desire revolutionary change.
Under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Party is vigorously engaged in ideological building among Party cadres and members as well as among mass activists who wish to join the Party. They are eager to study the history and circumstances of Philippine society and revolution and the global context of imperialism and proletarian revolution; and to widen and deepen their knowledge of revolutionary theory and practice through the three levels of Party education. The Party is determined to make prompt assignment of instructors and arrangement of study meetings to respond to the enthusiasm of those who wish to study.
The revolutionary forces daily conduct countless study meetings. They employ various creative ways to keep these secret from the enemy who desire to put a stop to the propagation of revolutionary ideas. Study sessions conducted by Red fighters as well as by peasants mass organizations and local Party branches are secured and defended by units of the people’s army.
In all Party study courses, the use of materialist dialectics in thinking and action is inculcated to enable Party members to discern and analyze what is correct in relation to subjectivism, be it in the form of empiricism or dogmatism as well as reformism and revisionism.
The Party has been able to conduct the basic Party course in order to make the Party candidate-members become full members. Party leading organs and units are aware that the accelerated increase of Party members is a crucial component of the strategic plan to advance to the strategic stalemate. The Party has also been able to conduct the intermediate and advanced Party courses in order to widen and deepen the understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism among Party members and cadres.
Oplan Bayanihan has no way of stopping the recruitment and education of Party candidate-members and full members from the trade unions, farms, schools, offices and the mass movement in general. The Party has been able to digitize the storage, retrieval and publication of revolutionary study materials on a wide scale. It has also used new technology to produce and reproduce for people with limited formal education simplified study materials in various Philippine languages. Thousands of local Party cadres, as well as worker and peasant activists, are being trained as instructors of the Party and the national democratic school.By having easy access to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist references, activists can more actively engage in study and propaganda and wage debates against the reactionaries and their ideological apologists.
The Party has propagated and carried out the general line of new democratic revolution through propaganda and agitation, through the expansion and consolidation of mass organizations and through the mobilization of the broad masses of the people on urgent and long-running issues. The people’s army, the mass organizations and the organs of political power have been effective in arousing, organizing and mobilizing the masses.
The Party combats “Left” and Right opportunism. It defines the correct political line on particular issues and processes, guided by the Program for the of People’s Democratic Revolution, by subjecting facts and circumstances to class analysis, and by determining the principal and secondary aspects and thus arriving at the course of action that carries the revolutionary movement forward.
The Party engages in research and publications on domestic and global issues. The lies churned out daily by the reactionary spin factory are exposed, denounced and challenged. News of revolutionary struggles and victories are promptly circulated. Various publications are issued by the Central Committee, regional Party committees and various mass organizations. These are published in print and on the internet. Local Party branches are setting up guerrilla printing shops to screen print Ang Bayan and ensure that copies reach every Party member, Red fighter and activist. Leaders and speakers are trained and gain experience by explaining issues to the masses and expressing their demands at public meetings.
The Party encourages the working people and the middle social strata to build open and underground mass organizations and to uphold, defend and promote the national and democratic rights and interests of the Filipino people. The underground mass organizations are allied within the framework of the National Democratic Front and support the local organs of political power.
The Party’s main mass organization is the New People’s Army. It is different from all other mass organizations by being armed and by serving as the people’s instrument for smashing the power of the reactionary state and enabling the local organs of political power and in sum the people’s democratic state to arise and develop.
The NPA is responsible for waging revolutionary armed struggle. It has thousands of high-powered rifles in the hands of its fighters and aims to increase this to the level of 25,000 in order to reach the threshold of the strategic stalemate in the next few years. It currently operates in more than 100 guerrilla fronts and is striving to increase these to 180 within the next five years since 2010 or for a longer period if need be. There are efforts to assist those regions that are lagging behind other regions in order to keep them apace with the overall advance.
In order to achieve the strategic plan of creating a guerrilla front per congressional district, regional Party committes subdivide their areas of responsibilty to inter-front and front commands without necessarily immediately dividing or liquidating the regional and inter-front commands and their respective headquarters and strike forces. To expand existing guerilla fronts or establish new ones, NPA units can advance wave upon wave from an established guerilla front. The Party and the mass movement can also expand ahead of NPA units. Party cadres and mass activists can be assigned to the expansion area to conduct social investigation and initial organizing and the NPA can subsequently forward initial armed propaganda teams.
The Party is currently concerned with strengthening the leading committees and NPA commands at the level of the region, inter-front and the guerrilla front in order to seize initiative in launching tactical offensives and defeating enemy campaigns and operations. Every level has a center of gravity (headquarters and strike force) with an armed strength sufficient to protect the Party leadership and NPA command and deliver lethal blows on enemy units independently or in conjunction with NPA units at lower levels.
The Party can develop the NPA national operational command (NOC) on the basis of the regional operational commands. These can serve as the source of highly competent officers. The NOC can base itself on any regional command and organization at any given time before it can develop its own distinct central base in a relatively stable base area in the future.
The current modus operandi of the enemy is to concentrate large forces against certain guerrilla fronts in various regions for extended periods. Southern Mindanao, Samar-Leyte and Negros have been top priority for sustained enemy attacks involving eight to twelve battalions for each region. Bicol, Southern Tagalog, Central Luzon, Northeast Luzon and Northeast Mindanao have been attacked by six to ten battalions per region.
An NPA force within a guerrilla front under enemy encirclement avails of the tactics of using the wide gaps between enemy units in order to move from interior line to exterior line to launch tactical offensives and wipe out weak segments of the enemy forces. NPA units have been able to deliver lethal blows on enemy forces even where these are concentrated by hitting their weak points.
Outside a guerrilla front under enemy attack, the regional and inter-front commands can launch tactical offensives against the enemy forces besieging the guerrilla front or against the enemy forces in areas at some distance from the guerrilla front under attack. NPA tactical offensives are unstoppable because enemy weak points to observe and attack abound.
The enemy does not have sufficient armed strength to target and encircle all the guerrilla fronts in the country and conduct prolonged and in-depth attacks against them all at the same time. Whenever the enemy chooses to concentrate on a number of regions or guerrilla fronts at a given time, the NPA elsewhere can attack weak points of the enemy, be these military, police, paramilitary forces and private security agencies as well as facilities and supply lines.
The NPA undertakes annihilative actions as the main tactic to wipe out enemy units in order to seize weapons for increasing NPA units. It concentrates its forces to launch ambuscades against enemy troops and carry out raids against lightly-guarded enemy detachments and camps, police stations as well as against secret armories maintained by the private security agencies. Such methods as sniping, zapping, deploying land mines and other explosives and inflammables (including sprayer and cigarette lighter) are used. Attritive actions are launched to inflict damage on the fighting capacity and morale of the enemy. Disintegrative actions are done by propaganda suited to the enemy personnel and by lenient treatment of those who are captured.
The NPA uses intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare on an ever expanding and deepening mass base in order to accumulate armed strength for regular mobile warfare and building relatively stable base areas in the future. It concentrates a superior force to wipe out an enemy unit. It shifts to get more advantageous position for attacking the weak points of the enemy. It disperses units to do mass work when conditions permit.
The Party makes sure that the revolutionary armed struggle is integrated with land reform and mass base building. The NPA is invincible as long as the peasant masses benefit from genuine land reform and remain the inexhaustible source of strength for the NPA. At the same time, the mass base is expanded and consolidated with the building of the organs of political power and the mass organizations.
Land reform is the main content of the democratic revolution. It has been carried out in stages, from the minimum to the maximum program. The minimum program consists of rent reduction, elimination of usury, raising farm wages, improving farm-gate prices and increasing production in agriculture and sideline occupation through rudimentary forms of cooperation. The maximum program of confiscation and free distribution of land is possible upon the defeat of feudal power.
In certain regions, especially in Mindanao, the NPA has carried out significant offensives against mining, logging and plantation enterprises. Nationwide, these offensives are meant to stop and discourage landgrabbing, the plunder of natural resources for export and the destruction of the environment and agriculture; and to make more land available for land reform, to conserve the natural resources and use them wisely for national industrialization.
The US-Aquino regime has shamelessly used the reactionary armed forces as security guards for the mining, logging and plantation enterprises and has encouraged these to form larger private armies called “investment defense forces.” It is fine that the NPA is compelling the enemy forces to be tied down by guard duty. The formation of so many dispersed state and private armies can turn into its opposite and they can subsequently serve as sources of arms for expanding NPA ranks.
The strengthening and proper functioning of the local organs of political power and mass organizations under the leadership of the local Party branch relieve the NPA of work overload as they shoulder more responsibilities. By assuming responsibilities in defense and production, the people’s militia at the barrio level and self-defense units of the mass organizations can reduce the work load of NPA units and allow them more time for combat, politico-military training, and other military duties. Even so, the people’s army maintains a balance of combat and non-combat duties (including mass work, especially in new areas).
The mass line is to trust, rely on and enable the people to look after their own good through the local organs of political power and the mass organizations under Party leadership. The committees which are the organs of political power are supported by the working committees in charge of mass education, organizing, land reform, production, health and sanitation, defense, arbitration and cultural work. The mass organizations rouse and mobilize the people to engage in campaigns for their own benefit.
In establishing the people’s government from the level of the villages and upward, it has been necessary for the NPA to defeat the enemy forces cumulatively and for the peasant masses to wage mass struggles in order to break up reactionary power in the localities and to eliminate or cause the flight of incorrigible reactionary officials who oppress the people and incur blood debts. Higher levels of people’s government have an underground character while the reactionary government can still operate and extort levies from the people.
The Party applies the antifeudal united front in the countryside by relying mainly on the poor and lower middle peasants, befriending the rich peasants, taking advantage of the splits among the landlords and isolating and defeating the despotic landlords. The antifeudal united front is at the base of the national united front. The Party ensures that the united front policy is mainly for the armed struggle, especially through the National Democratic Front. At the same time, the policy serves to encourage the development of patriotic and progressive forces in the legal mass movement. These are of vital importance in propagating the people’s demand for fundamental change towards national and social liberation.
In any case, the united front policy and tactics are meant to arouse, mobilize and organize the masses in their millions. To maintain the patriotic and progressive character of the united front, the Party in principle and in proper style leads every possible combination of forces in the echelon of alliances, such as the basic worker-peasant alliance, the progressive alliance of the toiling masses and the urban petty bourgeoisie, the patriotic alliance with the national bourgeoisie and the unstable alliance with any section of the reactionary classes that cooperates in opposing the enemy.
Through the united front, the people in great numbers ventilate and act upon the issues arising from the people’s struggle for national liberation and democracy. The people are united and mobilized to uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity against the imperialists, to defend and uphold human rights against state terrorism and repression, to condemn corruption and to remove from power corrupt and oppressive government officials. Marcos and Estrada were isolated and then overthrown, with the Party applying the united front policy. This policy is now directed against the puppet, corrupt, exploitative, brutal and deceptive regime of Aquino.
Engaging in peace negotiations is relevant to the united front. It involves propagating the program of people’s democratic revolution and exposing to the public how the reactionary government reacts to demands for basic reforms and offers of truce and alliance or cooperation against imperialism and the worst forms of local reaction.
Tolerating the electoral process of the reactionary government on whatever scale is also relevant to the united front. It involves developing cooperation with patriotic and progressive candidates and groups and encouraging them to fight the worst reactionaries in the reactionary government and do what they can to help disintegrate the reactionary ruling system.
As always, the Party is bound by the principle of democratic centralism. This is centralized leadership based on democracy and democracy guided by centralism. The Party promotes both discipline and democracy. It is always on guard against bureaucratism and ultrademocracy. It practices criticism and self-criticism on ideological, political and organizational issues.
Party membership has increased under the impetus of the strategic plan to advance the people’s war from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate and upon the proper expeditious implementation of the provisions of the Party Constitution on membership.
Activists in the trade unions and the mass organizations of peasants and fisher folk, women, youth, professionals and other sectors have become Party candidate members by accepting the Party Constitution and Program and applying for Party membership. Previous causes of stagnation or slow growth of Party membership are being addressed and rectified.
Mass activists are being recruited in great number and are promptly provided with basic Party education within the period of candidature stipulated by the Party constitution. Negligence of the basic tasks of Party recruitment and education, conceit by setting standards higher than those required by the Party constitution and failing to trust mass activists are being rectified.
The period of candidature for workers, peasants, fisherfolk and other toilers is six months; for those from the urban petty bourgeoisie, one year; and for other classes, two years. To become full Party members the candidate-members finish the basic Party course and join a basic Party unit.
The Party’s policy is to recruit Party members mainly from the ranks of mass activists and to boldly expand the Party membership without letting in a single unreliable. The expansion of Party membership is necessitated by the intensifying revolutionary struggle and the gigantic tasks to be carried out by Party cadres and members in serving the people and carrying the revolution forward.
The Party is now present in nearly all provinces of the country. It runs ahead of the building of the New People’s Army. It expands with the mass movement. It prepares the way for the advance of the people’s army, which it heads and within which it is the core. The Party grows not only from the ranks of Red commanders and fighters but also from the far greater number of activists in the mass organizations of the toiling masses and the urban petty bourgeoisie.
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