Armando Liwanag
Written by: Armando Liwanag (Jose Maria Sison);
Published: December 26, 1991.
Source: Text archived on Banned Thought which was retrieved from Philippine Revolution, (retrieved Feb. 24, 2012.);
Markup: Simoun Magsalin;
Copyright: No specific copyrights. Provided freely by the Communist Party of the Philippines.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Armando Liwanag
Chairman
CPP (Central Committee)
December 26, 1991
On the 23rd anniversary of the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines, let us reaffirm our basic principles and resolve to carry the revolutionary struggle of our people forward.
As set forth in the documents of the reestablishment of the Party, the basic principles are the following: adherence to the theory of Marxism-Leninism, repudiation of modern revisionism, the class analysis of Philippine society as semicolonial and semifeudal, the general line of the national democratic revolution, the theory of people’s war and strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside, the united front along the revolutionary class line, democratic centralism, the socialist perspective and proletarian internationalism.
We celebrate today the achievements of the Party under the guidance of the foregoing principles. We base ourselves upon these achievements in order to advance. At the same time, we face up to problems and solve them. In the course of doing so, we further temper and strengthen ourselves.
The overwhelming majority of our Party cadres and members are determined to follow the revolutionary principles and line set by the Party at its reestablishment. The entire Party is resolved to solve and overcome not only those problems posed by U.S. imperialism and the domestic ruling system and the enemy campaigns of suppression but also those problems due to major deviations and errors which we must identify, evaluate, criticize and rectify.
The enemy tries and expects to weaken and destroy the Party and the revolutionary movement in 1992 and 1993. But he will continue to fail and fail even more dismally as we further build upon the accumulated achievements of the Party, rectify errors and deviations, expand and consolidate our mass base and strengthen the Party and other revolutionary forces in an all-round way.
Under the leadership of our Party, the proletariat and the broad masses of the people are determined to throw off the yoke of oppression and exploitation; and fight to achieve national liberation and democracy against U.S. and Japanese imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords.
The crisis of the domestic ruling system continues to worsen and provides the fertile ground for the armed revolution. The world capitalist system is in an ever deeper crisis and in increasing turbulence, notwithstanding the triumphalist U.S. claim of a new world order.
We must strengthen the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally. We cannot do so without taking stock of our strengths and weaknesses. We must assess and evaluate all these, identifying and understanding what are the major accomplishments and problems. Only then can we set forth our tasks correctly.
We must rectify the deviations and errors which violate our basic principles and negate the hard work, struggle and sacrifices of our Party, the people and the revolutionary martyrs. The central leadership of the Party is taking the initiative of carrying out a comprehensive and deepgoing rectification movement.
The Party has succeeded in integrating the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Philippine revolution. It has clarified Philippine history, the semicolonial and semifeudal character of Philippine society, the new-democratic stage of the Philippine revolution, the leading class, all the motive forces and adversaries, the strategy and tactics of people’s war, the main tasks and socialist perspective of the Philippine revolution.
By clarifying these, the Party has been able to provide the theoretical and political guidance to the revolutionary movement as never done before in Philippine history. The revolutionary movement of the people has won victories surpassing those of the old democratic revolution and all attempts to resume the Philippine revolution before 1968.
The documents of the Party’s reestablishment and subsequent basic documents of the Party are the study materials for the basic level of Party education. Further, there are the distinctive content and study materials of the intermediate and advanced levels of Party education.
The intermediate level studies more thoroughly than the basic level our own revolutionary experience, compares it with and draws lessons from the most significant and most relevant experiences abroad in terms of building the Party, the people’s army and the united front in the new democratic revolution. This entails the evaluation of the revolutionary experience of our Party and that of others and gives due recognition to the significance and relevance of the Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Cuban and other revolutions to the Philippine revolution.
The advanced level provides the Party members with a comprehensive and profound knowledge of materialist philosophy, historical materialism, political economy, scientific socialism and the world revolution as taught by such great communist thinkers and leaders as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Ho. This provides us with the most extensive and deepgoing understanding of the basic principles of the proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship.
All Party members are enjoined to engage in theoretical study not only through formal courses but also in the course of revolutionary mass struggle and in the course of Party life in leading organs and in basic units and to strive to raise their collective experience and practical knowledge to the level of theory. They must ceaselessly develop their Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method.
Since the late 1970s, however, there has been a gross neglect of theoretical education and a gross inadequacy of study courses and materials. Worse, there has been a departure from a structure of theoretical education that is based on our revolutionary experience, that is suitable to our situation and revolutionary struggle and that properly takes into account the significance and relevance of the advances of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice abroad.
We must be able to evaluate the significance and relevance or applicability of the teachings of all the great communist thinkers and leaders. We must know how the teachings can shed light on our conditions and struggle. We must know the historic conditions from which the teachings have arisen. We must not take any successful foreign revolution or any segment of it out of the concrete context of its own national history as well as of world history.
The works of one great communist thinker should not be dogmatically used to squeeze out those of another, especially if the works of the latter which are more relevant in terms of historical and social conditions and can shed more direct light on the Philippine revolution. Lesser figures of revolutions that do not reach the socialist stage should not be evaluated more highly than any great communist thinker in an eclectic or dogmatic manner.
The basic writings of our Party, which are based on the analysis of our own concrete circumstances and our revolutionary experience, should never be laid aside nor depreciated in the desire to copy some recent model that is believed to be the easy way to victory, without full consideration of the history and conditions of such a model. We must not fly away from the actual conditions and level of the development of our own revolutionary struggle by pursuing any foreign model, be it a complete revolutionary process or a mere part of it.
There has been the subjectivist wish of certain elements to hasten the Philippine revolutionary process and bring it abruptly far beyond its actual level of development. They focus on and take out of historical context such dramatic events as the Bolsheviks’ Petrograd and Moscow uprisings of 1917, the Vietnamese uprising of 1945 or Tet offensive of 1968 and the Sandinista’s final offensive of 1979 in Nicaragua. These examples are counterposed to the entire theory of people’s war and to the entire process of developing people’s war in stages and the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside.
The mere wish for achieving total victory and a share of political power in the offing, unwarranted by the existing strength of the revolutionary movement and the objective conditions, is passed off as “new theory” and has been turned into a reason for reorienting and rearranging the revolutionary forces for armed urban insurrection, the premature formation of larger but unsustainable military units as well as topheavy staffing in both urban and rural areas. In areas where this “new strategy” has been carried out, mass work is neglected and the enemy gains ground in forcing the revolutionary forces into a purely military situation.
The basic principles and basic line of our Party have been put under question or denigrated by elements who have a narrow, one-sided and fragmented view of things and processes in the country and abroad and who have not really studied both Marxist-Leninist theory and the history and conditions of our own revolutionary movement in a comprehensive and deepgoing way. Because of their failure to understand our own revolutionary experience, they do not even realize that they are actually seeking to resurrect and combine both the Sakdalista concept of insurrection of the 1930s and the Jose Lava adventurism of the 1950s.
The erroneous thinking that power can be seized or shared with the bourgeoisie, regardless of the actual strength of the people’s army, by rousing and riding on the spontaneous masses has to be immediately cited because it has attacked the basic principles and line of the Party most systematically; and it has wrought the gravest damage _ unprecedented in the history of our Party and the ongoing revolutionary movement.
Since its reestablishment, the Party has been committed to a cogent antirevisionist line as a result of the study of the Lavaite errors and the modern revisionism promoted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on a world scale since 1956. The Party has never abandoned its Marxist-Leninist line. No leading or staff organ can overturn the decision of a Party Congress. The basic antirevisionist line in the basic documents of the Party’s reestablishment has never been erased, notwithstanding any previous current of thought among some elements that the revolutionary struggle would either stagnate or retrogress without the foreign assistance of Brezhnev and his successors.
The critical antirevisionist line of the Party is proven correct and vindicated by the disintegration and collapse of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There, capitalism and bourgeois class dictatorship have been blatantly restored after more than three decades of peaceful evolution (degeneration) from socialism to capitalism.
Gorbachov has the historical distinction of presiding over and carrying out the final stage of the destructive career of modern revisionism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The initial stage was that of Khrushchov who laid the foundation of modern revisionism by spouting bourgeois populism and pacifism and carrying out capitalist-oriented reforms in the economy. The middle and longest stage was that of Brezhnev who recentralized the bureaucracy and resources for the benefit of the new bourgeoisie as well as for the arms race and further promoted the so-called economic reforms of his predecessor.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and collapse of the revisionist ruling cliques and regimes mean the total discredit of modern revisionism as well as that of its consequence _ undisguised capitalism _ that continues to wreak havoc on the lives of the peoples in these countries. Contrary to the mocking propaganda claim of our enemy, it is not our Party which is embarrassed and orphaned by the fall of the revisionist ruling parties and regimes. It is the Lava revisionist group and its successors.
As far as the Party is concerned, Marxism-Leninism stands brilliantly as the proven correct guide in the new democratic revolution and in the future socialist transformation in our country. The new challenge in theoretical work is the further development of the theory of continuing the revolution, combating modern revisionism and preventing the restoration of capitalism in socialist society and resuming the revolution where modern revisionism has prevailed or has already passed on to blatant capitalism in the anticommunist and antisocialist counter-revolution.
Mao Zedong started theoretical and practical work on the problem of modern revisionism. The failure of the proletarian cultural revolution, after some years of success, has not invalidated the theory of continuing proletarian revolution in the same way that the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871, after a fleeting success, never invalidated the theory of proletarian revolution. Persevere in People’s War and Build the Mass Base!
There is no doubt whatsoever that under the oppressive and exploitative conditions of the semicolonial and semifeudal system the Filipino people have no choice but to engage in the new-democratic revolution under the leadership of the working class through its advanced detachment, the Party.
The people in their millions have been aroused, organized and mobilized by the Party as never before in Philippine history, in accordance with the general line of new democratic revolution. Through the revolutionary armed struggle and the united front, the Party has been able to lead the broad masses of the people in their millions.
By building the NPA and waging people’s war, the Party has been able to arouse, organize and mobilize the largest oppressed class in Philippine society, forge the basic alliance of the working class and peasantry and answer the central question of the revolution.
There are now scores of guerrilla fronts in the countryside in the overwhelming majority of Philippine provinces. Here the mass base is being expanded and consolidated. Organs of political power are not simply being built above the heads of the local people but mass organizations of workers, peasants, fishermen, women, youth, cultural workers and others are being formed to realize the most active and strongest participation of the people in the armed struggle and all types of mass campaigns for their benefit.
The key campaign is land reform. What is generally being carried out is the minimum program of rent reduction, control of interest rates, improvement of the wages of farm workers, better prices of farm products and raising production through rudimentary forms of cooperation, improved agricultural techniques and sideline occupation. Land confiscation is carried out against despotic landlords and restitution of land to the rightful owners is carried out in cases of landgrabbing.
Let us continue to remind ourselves that our people’s war is a revolutionary political mass movement within the framework of the new democratic revolution and that it integrates the armed struggle, land reform and building the mass base along the antifeudal line. This is being restated in view of a gross misrepresentation that the waging of people’s war and the building of the people’s army is mainly or primarily a military process.
The NPA has been able to preserve and strengthen itself through guerrilla warfare. The Party spreads the people’s army like a fisherman’s net to do mass work and draws it in to concentrate a force in order to wipe out the enemy forces piece by piece by surprise. If they are to fight effectively and self-reliantly and accumulate strength in the long term, the NPA guerrilla forces must rely on an ever expanding and consolidated mass base in view of the vastly superior military strength of the enemy.
At the present stage of the development of the people’s war, it is wrong to absolutely concentrate any company or battalion within the short radius of one, two or three villages or in a forest camp when it is not on an offensive mode or on training exercise. If such units are not spread out to conduct mass work, they become bogged down with problems of their own maintenance and other internal problems, they become isolated from a dwindling mass base and end up fighting less and less and becoming more and more vulnerable to enemy encirclement and attacks.
There has been a gross deviation from the line of developing the people’s war and the people’s army in stages and of building the foundation of victory through painstaking mass work. This deviation has caused setbacks through a process of self-constriction and has inflicted unprecedentedly heavy losses in the strength of the Party and the people’s army and gross reductions of our mass base. It has caused a reversal of what the Party has always been proud of: namely, when the enemy pours in his brigades and battalions on a particular area the revolutionary forces can flexibly fight back and grow in strength by leaps and bounds in so many other areas.
For nearly ten years, there has been the erroneous line of thought in certain parts of our Party that victory can be achieved sooner without so much the necessity of painstaking mass work and solid organizing by rapidly forming companies and battalions in absolute concentration and combining their offensive actions with urban uprisings of the spontaneous masses, the urban mass organizations and the armed city partisans. The armed urban uprisings, according to them, are the “highest form of struggle” that the movement is supposed to achieve. What is wrong and self-destructive about this deviation is that it argues against the necessity of developing the people’s army in stages by encircling the cities from the countryside, disregards the current stage of the development of the revolutionary forces and in the name of “regularization” draws away cadres and resources from mass work and concentrates them into urban-based staff and staff of military units.
This erroneous current of thought and action has brought about the gravest setbacks and destruction to the Party and the revolutionary movement, first in one major island and subsequently on a nationwide scale. It has brought about the lopsided distribution of cadres and resources, the costly building of urban-based staff organs and topheavy military staff (which are vulnerable to the enemy), gross reductions of the mass base, the eventual isolation and passivity of the prematurely enlarged and unsustainable armed units, defeats and demoralization in a purely military situation and finally a wild surge of panic like the anti-informer hysteria.
This erroneous trend falls into the enemy’s line of creating a purely military situation that allows him to effectively use his vastly superior military forces in his strategic offensive (war of quick decision) and blockhouse warfare (gradual constriction) in the countryside. The urban-based leading or staff organs which are supposed to coordinate and combine the urban and rural forces for the armed urban insurrection are also vulnerable to surveillance and punitive actions by the enemy, especially because many of the cadres are on the enemy manhunt list and can be easily identified.
In the exercise of its absolute leadership, the Party must in the first place decide the line and the strategy and tactics, and deploy cadres and resources correctly. No staff organ should be allowed to take away initiative from the comprehensive leadership of the Party in this regard.
The guerrilla forces of the New People’s Army must develop under the principle of centralized leadership (especially ideological and political) and decentralized operations. They must create more guerrilla fronts and conduct guerrilla warfare on all types of terrain in order to effect extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare. They must be able to maintain initiative and flexibility and skilfully use the tactics of dispersal, concentration and shifting.
When the enemy concentrates his forces, he can grab a certain territory but in the process gives away more space to the guerrilla forces. When he disperses his forces, the dispersed parts become more vulnerable to guerrilla attacks. When he keeps on shifting his forces, he also opens his parts to attacks by the guerrilla forces. He cannot carry out the same war of fluid movement conducted by the people’s army because he does not enjoy the popular support that the guerrilla forces have.
What spells victory for the NPA is the extensive and deepgoing mass participation and support, which keeps the enemy deaf and blind despite his superior military forces and war materiel. The people’s army ceases to be what it ought to be when it concedes the people to the special operations teams, the paramilitary forces and other organizational devices of the enemy and fails to deploy the armed propaganda teams, local guerrilla forces and militia as well as to build the organs of political power and the mass organizations.
We must cast away illusions that we can capture and keep the cities without breaking the military backbone of the enemy in the countryside. The NPA must keep to the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside. And even in parts of the countryside where there are big and well fortified enemy camps which we cannot as yet raid and capture, we can wipe out part by part the small units that go out of such camps so long as we can encircle them with an extensive and powerful mass base.
We are on the strategic defensive. But we can launch the tactical offensives that we are capable of winning. We can carry out this strategy and tactics only by availing of the widest room for maneuver in the countryside and by constantly expanding and consolidating the mass base. We should not imagine that the U.S. and the local exploiting classes are easy pushovers in our country. We should ensure that we have the capacity to seize power and hold it when in the future we decide to take their citadel.
The party has amplified its strength and expanded its influence by building the united front. The purpose of this united front is to broaden the support for and strengthen the revolutionary armed struggle and the legal democratic movement.
The revolutionary united front cannot exist without the leadership of the working class through the Party and without the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the foundation. The Party branches, the people’s army, the peasants’ and workers’ organizations, and the organs of political power built at the village level are the organized forms of the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry.
The National Democratic Front has been essentially the underground united front organization of the basic revolutionary forces (i.e., those of the working class, peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie) under the leadership of the working class through the Party. It is a united front for armed struggle and it serves to pave the way for the establishment of organs of political power, especially at levels higher than that of the village.
There have been proposals and attempts to erase the working class leadership and the leading role of the Party in the united front, to subordinate the Party to a specific formation of the united front and deny the independence and initiative of the Party and its allies and to negate the socialist perspective of the ongoing national democratic revolution.
Rather than try to attract more cooperating organizations within its fold by erasing the class leadership of the working class and the historical initiative of the Party in its formation and by diluting its new democratic program and socialist perspective, the NDF should maintain its character as the most advanced and most consolidated underground united front organization of the basic revolutionary forces under working class leadership and stay committed to the two stages of the Philippine revolution.
It must build its array of underground cooperating organizations, form conferential leading committees of representatives of such organizations and then proceed to invite worthy personalities from various organizations and trends to join the leading committees and commissions at various levels. Rather than have a federation, which subordinates the Party to the united front and runs counter to the principle of independence and initiative in the united front and which puts the Party and the NDF leadership on a potential collision course, the relations of cooperating organizations within the NDF framework should be consultative and consensual as should be the case in a united front.
In the legal democratic movement, there are sectoral and multisectoral alliances which take a patriotic and progressive stand on issues. These include mostly organizations of workers, peasants and the urban petty bourgeois. They have been effective in raising the political consciousness of the broad masses of the people in the entire country.
The national bourgeoisie is one of the positive forces, which include the basic revolutionary forces. But this stratum in the Philippines has a dual character; it has a progressive aspect being progressive as well as a reactionary aspect and it is weak and vacillating, especially because it does not own basic industries in the specific case of the Philippines. It has articulate spokesmen but no strong organization of its own.
The members of this stratum are in certain businessmen’s organizations together with the big compradors and the representatives of multinational firms. However, the national bourgeoisie cooperate with the revolutionary movement in areas where it is strong or when progressive political currents are strong as during the antifascist and anti-imperialist struggle against the U.S.-Marcos regime in 1983–86.
The concept and reality of the united front can extend to a formal or informal alliance of the revolutionary forces with sections of the reactionary classes. We have had extensive experience in dealing with local officials of the reactionary government and enlightened landlords and businessmen who comply with the laws of the people’s government on land reform, wages, business, taxation and so on. They have also cooperated with us in mass actions, elections and other events. In the 1983–86 antifascist movement, anti-Marcos reactionaries at all levels allied themselves with us, especially before they could secure full U.S. support.
To take advantage of the splits among the reactionaries is to be able to isolate and defeat the most reactionary faction at a given time. The policy of the Party is to fight and defeat one reactionary faction after another and in the process strengthen the revolutionary movement.
When we have reactionary allies, we must describe them as such to the Party rank and file and explain to them that these are unstable and unreliable allies so that there can be no confusion. We must neither lump them together with the petty bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie under the category of “bourgeois reformists” nor describe any big comprador-landlord political party or regime as “liberal democratic”. Errors have occurred in this regard.
The legal democratic movement based in the urban areas is of indispensable and great importance. As a matter of fact, this movement through its pronouncements and mass actions reaches and inspires people beyond those that the Party, the NPA and the NDF can reach directly at any given time. When we describe the legal form of struggle as secondary to the armed form of struggle, we are clearly addressing the question of smashing the bureaucratic and military machinery of the reactionary state and seizing political power. In this connection, the legal and defensive character of the democratic mass movement in the urban areas must be respected and must not be prejudiced. We should not give the reactionaries the excuse to smash it.
The organizations of the toiling masses of workers and peasants and the middle social strata are of great importance. We can wage all forms of legal struggle effectively if, in the first place, there is solid mass organizing at the basic level. Through the mass organizations, it is possible to mobilize more people and launch all kinds of democratic action in their places of work, communities, in halls, in the streets and in the premises of official structures or offices of the reactionary government.
We can build Party units within all kinds of legal organizations, including the reactionary organizations and institutions. Without being publicly known as such, these Party units can utilize the legal processes to promote patriotic and progressive ideas and forces. But bourgeois elections, particularly those previously staged by the Marcos fascist regime in 1978 and 1986, have been the occasions for heated debates on whether to “participate” in them or “boycott” them. In this regard, the question properly is: Can the Party utilize the process through Party cadres who are not publicly known as such and allies who take a patriotic and progressive stand?
Regarding these elections, the Party can correctly call them farces as a whole and in essence. At the same time, the Party undertakes measures to use these to promote the national democratic line and encourage progressive parties and candidates. This is in the exercise of revolutionary dual tactics to counter the counterrevolutionary dual tactics of the enemy.
The boycott error of 1986 was a major sectarian error separating the advanced section of the masses from the middle and backward sections of the antifascist mass movement and imposing the Party’s puristic will on the legal progressive mass organizations for the duration of the electoral campaign period of December 1985 to February 7, 1986. The boycott decision of 1978, which practically remained unimplemented, was another major error insofar as it led to developments divisive among cadres and damaging to the Party organization.
Principal cadres of the national capital region refused to carry out the decision and were subjected to disciplinary measures. Worse, the Manila-Rizal regional and district Party committees were not properly reorganized and practically went into shambles. The upsurge of the urban mass movement, which was possible from 1978 onward, could not be realized until the 1983–86 period.
There are honest elements who criticize the errors of the Party involving electoral exercises staged by the reactionaries. But there are other elements who have overdrawn the boycott error of 1986 in order to promote a line of urban armed insurrection that is opposed to or subordinates the entire people’s war to armed urban insurrection and to cover up the far more disastrous consequences of this erroneous line, which started to become clear in 1984 and extremely devastating from 1985 onward in one major island.
With regard to the forthcoming bourgeois elections, the Party describes them as farcical on the whole and in essence because these are controlled and monopolized by the political parties and agents of the exploiting classes. At the same time, we encourage and favor the most patriotic and progressive candidates in accordance with the revolutionary united front. We require all political parties and candidates to get safe conduct passes from the revolutionary forces before they can go into any area controlled by the revolutionary forces.
Since 1986, the question of peace negotiations has assumed a significance unseen in previous years of the Party. We have to learn lessons from the preceasefire talks and ceasefire agreement in 1986 and 1987. To this date, the enemy has clearly shown by his framework and actions that he wants the revolutionary forces to capitulate to his rule, his constitution and his armed forces; to split the revolutionary movement; and to surveil and attack the movement.
The NDF have clearly stated its willingness to negotiate with the reactionary government at the national bilateral level and in a proper venue abroad; and has presented the framework and strategic line for a just and lasting peace. These conform to the people’s demand for national liberation and democracy. The refusal of the enemy to negotiate with the NDF can only mean that the revolutionary forces need to fight harder and win more victories in order to change the balance of forces. The question of peace talks should not be allowed to undermine our revolutionary will to fight.
The duly-authorized representatives of the NDF have repeatedly met abroad in Europe and Hongkong with officials of the Manila government on an informal and preliminary basis regarding the question of peace talks since 1990. But Aquino has so far failed to formally reply to the September 20, 1990 letter of the NDF national chairman offering a new round of bilateral peace talks, with the U.N. secretary general as an intermediary.
Since 1991, the European Parliament in a resolution has called for peace negotiations between the NDF and the Manila government and the Swiss government has offered to both sides its good offices and Geneva as venue for the peace talks. But the reactionary government has been intransigent. It has also repeatedly frustrated the urgings of peace advocates in the Philippines and abroad for the start of a peace process.
All revolutionary forces at all levels have correctly and strongly rebuffed the calls of the Aquino regime and the reactionary armed forces for localized dialogues, localized ceasefires and localized surrenders, with revolutionary statements and actions. They have called on the local officials of the reactionary government and military and police forces to surrender to the revolutionary movement or to make a common front against the regime seated in Manila. Uphold Democratic Centralism and Revive Basic Party Life!
The Party is a nationwide organization and is deeply rooted among the toiling masses. It has a few tens of thousands of members and thousands of cadres. It is supported by a far greater number of mass activists in the organizations of workers, peasants, women, youth, professionals and so on.
The organizational principle of the Party is democratic centralism. This means centralized leadership based on democracy and democracy guided by centralized leadership. There is a body of basic revolutionary principles to which all Party members must adhere. And there are the basic conditions and processes by which decisions and discussions are made democratically within the Party structure. These are thoroughly made clear in the Party Constitution.
A correct style of work is also demanded of all Party members. This involves adhering to the principle and practice of democratic centralism, belonging to a basic Party unit and performing basic tasks and functions, being closely linked with the masses and making criticism and self-criticism in order to improve work, rectify errors and strengthen the unity of the Party.
The overwhelming majority of Party members are dedicated and hardworking. But there are certain problems which we have to face up to in order to stop any trend of decreasing or stagnating Party membership anywhere so that we can perform the gigantic tasks in the revolution.
If there is any erroneous line that has resulted in the reduction of our mass base, we must do away with that line. Without an expanding mass base, we have nothing to consolidate and we become unfit to lead the revolution. A key point in consolidation is the recruitment of the advanced elements in the mass movement to the Party within the period of candidature made clear by the Party Constitution.
We have to increase our Party membership and strengthen basic Party life ideologically, politically and organizationally. We must build the Party branches and groups at the grassroots level in both urban and rural areas.
It is wrong to concentrate the majority of our Party cadres and members in urban-based staff organs, in Party groups above the grassroots level (even if these are in mass organizations) and in topheavy military staff organs in the countryside. The so-called regularization is bureaucratization which prevents a huge number of our Party cadres and members from doing mass work and having a basic Party life at the grassroots level.
Overnight we can further strengthen the Party and the mass movement in the local communities if we redeploy the Party cadres and members in the staff organs and let them attend to basic work at the grassroots level. Every Party member must belong to a basic Party branch. No Party cadre of whatever rank is exempt from membership in a basic Party unit. This is clear in the Party Constitution.
We must also stop the practice of recruiting advanced elements in the mass movement only to employ them as staffers and not developing them to become fullfledged Party members within the period of candidature set by the Constitution.
The source and base of bureaucratism is the accumulation of Party cadres and members in higher staff organs and their alienation from mass work and basic Party life at the grassroots level. Lower organs and basic units are depleted of Party cadres. And then the wrong attitude arises that no one in these lower organs or units can represent them in higher organs. Thus, there is the phenomenon of the one-person layer of authority, the “political officer” abolished in 1986 but persisting as the appointive “secretary” who acts as a top-down representative of the higher organ to the lower organ and whose best argument is either the supposed command from above or his interpretation of the decision of the higher organ.
The most dangerous, most costly and most absurd situation has arisen, with the basing and proliferation of staff organs in urban areas, the concentration of cadres in these staff organs and the mixing and frequent contacts of cadres who are in the enemy’s manhunt list with surveilled former political detainees and with legal personalities of the legal mass movement (who are themselves the subject of enemy surveillance).
The illusion that the staff organs have to be “positioned” in the urban areas in anticipation of “sudden shifts” in the situation that would bring about the opportunity for armed urban insurrection must be cast away. The staff organs must be streamlined so as to release cadres for work in the countryside and at the grassroots level. This must be done before the enemy “streamlines” them out of existence. All cadres in the enemy manhunt list must be redeployed to the countryside. Staff organs that are appropriate to the countryside must be shifted. In the countryside itself, top-heavy military staff organs must also be streamlined to release cadres for work with the masses.
It is wrong to set up the straw figure that the Party has neglected urban work and to encourage Party cadres to stick to the cities and discourage them from going to the countryside. The peasant masses and the countryside cannot by themselves produce certain types of well-educated cadres, with ideological, political, professional and technical competence, required for the revolutionary work in the countryside.
The enemy has obviously surveilled the urban-based staff organs for long periods of time and has repeatedly hit these with precision raids and arrests. It now plans to launch a crackdown on these urban-based organs before May 1992. Since 1989, as a result of the 1988 arrests, the Party has issued comprehensive and detailed security guidelines. But these have been complied with only in a token and passing manner. The most absurd was the continued basing of the NPA general command in Metro Manila despite enemy actions in 1988 and onward.
Leading territorial organs as well as staff organs characteristically generate overly long meetings, debates and papers. Oftentimes, the presiding officer is a mere moderator and not a leader. There is no lack of discussion within these organs. Meetings on administrative and procedural matters eat so much time that no time is left for study or work. The disease of bureaucratism arises from the lack or inadequacy of basic Party life and the exaggeration of the top-down administrative structure, especially through the staff organs.
Bureaucratism has begotten ultrademocracy. In the long periods of noncontact with the leading territorial organs, staff organs acquire excessive discretion and authority and improperly issue policy directives, make major decisions and implement them without passing through the leading territorial organs to which these staff organs are subordinate and which they are supposed to assist. The leading territorial organs are made to chase after unauthorized acts, errors and debates of staff organs with other staff organs and even with some leading territorial committees.
When it suits them, certain staff organs invoke compartmentalization to shut off for long periods of time not only other staff organs but even the leading territorial committee of which they are mere appointive derivatives. Thus, there are unhealthy tendencies of “several centers”, independent kingdoms and ultrademocracy.
There are staff organs and individuals that issue publications questioning and attacking the line of the Party. They are engaged in ultrademocracy or liberalism. They wish to turn the Party into a liberal debating club and ape the modern revisionists and anticommunists that have destroyed the revisionist ruling parties and regimes from the inside. They act as if the Party had no basic principles to uphold and were not in a life-and-death struggle with the enemy.
Any revolutionary party or any organization for that matter is bound to degenerate or disintegrate when it allows its members to cast doubt on, denigrate, revise and attack its basic principles and line. We have seen entire revisionist-ruled states and entire revisionist parties go this way. We still have to see a declared communist remaining as a member of good standing in any bourgeois party or a declared atheist remaining a member of the Catholic Church.
There are a handful of elements who are either unreconstructed petty bourgeois or with petty bourgeois tails whose idea of democracy is to be able to do away with the leading role of the working class and the Party in the new democratic revolution and other basic principles, including democratic centralism. They promote the theory of spontaneous masses, especially in connection with insurrectionism. And they are falling into an anti-Party conjuncture with petty-bourgeois populists, liberals, “social-democrats”, “democratic socialists”, pacifists, advocates of pacification, Trotskyites and the like. The Party must uphold democratic centralism. Inner Party democracy must be given free rein under the guidance of the basic principles of the Party and within the structure and confines of the Party and especially through an all-rounded basic Party life. There are both discipline and freedom within the Party. The Party does not allow any individual to enter the Party to attack its basic principles and general line and even use the personnel, facilities and resources of the Party against the Party. The Party is so guided by democracy that it recruits its members on a conscious voluntary individual basis and at the same time allows anyone to quit the Party when he can no longer accept its basic principles.
The domestic conditions are fluid, volatile and favorable for waging the new democratic revolution, especially through a protracted people’s war. These are definitely and patently more favorable than the external conditions. In the case of the latter, we need to see through the apparent successes of imperialism and neocolonialism and see the essential further worsening of the crisis of the world capitalist system. The Socioeconomic Crisis Is Worsening
Since the reestablishment of the Party or from the regime of Marcos to Aquino, the basic characteristics of the Philippine social economy as backward, agrarian, preindustrial and semifeudal have deepened and have become ever more devastating to the people. The economic system is afflicted by a chronic crisis that keeps on worsening and ceaselessly lays the ground for the armed revolution of the people.
The economy is controlled by such local exploiting classes as the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class and is an appendage of the world capitalist system. It is an economy whose principal means of production is agriculture, that is without basic industries and that is dependent on imported equipment, components and fuel for the production of agricultural and manufactured goods for local consumption and of raw materials for export.
The economy exports raw materials in the main in order to earn the foreign exchange for purchasing from abroad a wide range of essential producer and consumer goods as well as luxuries for the upper classes. Such low value-added exports as garments, semiconductors and toys bring a marginal amount of foreign exchange income. The export of labor power has earned far more foreign exchange than any single export commodity. But this has diminished since the contraction of the labor market in the Middle East.
The economy is not only in a state of recession but is in a state of depression if the real figures can be established. Even the official statistics declare that the gross national product has continuously gone down since the last quarter of 1990. The fall in GNP up to the last quarter of 1991 is considerable. And the statisticians of the IMF and the Philippine government are trying to manipulate the figures to produce a year-end GNP growth rate of 0.5 percent or one-half percent.
At any rate, the Aquino regime has completely failed to fulfill its promise of making the economy recover to the level of 1981, notwithstanding budgetary expenditures of nearly P/ 1.3 trillion, more than P/ 100 billion additional domestic public borrowing (83 percent of which is in short-term treasury bills) and increased foreign borrowing which is up by several more billions of dollars up to the end of the regime in June 1992.
The IMF is applying on the Philippine government a “stabilization” or austerity program to cut down deficit spending, impose a levy of five percent even on essential producer and consumer imports and ensure that foreign debt-servicing enjoys the highest priority. The austerity measures have resulted in the sharp reduction of local production, the breakdown of public services and the deterioration of the standard of living.
The balance of trade deficit continues to rise. At yearend 1991, the trade deficit was expected to go beyond the level of US$ 4.0 billion out of an estimated total foreign trade of US$ 20 billion, despite the attempts to discourage imports. The terms of trade for Philippine exports have ceaselessly deteriorated in general. The Philippine economy has to keep on begging for more loans in order to maintain itself at lower levels of operation or at one lower level of austerity after another.
The accumulated foreign debt of US$29 billion by itself has become a crushing burden. This official figure is misleading because rescheduled debts are taken out of public accounting. At any rate, foreign commercial banks continue to reduce their lending. Thus, the Philippine government continues to beg for and incur debts on a bilateral basis and from the multilateral financial agencies. The debt service reached the level of US$ 5.6 billion or 76 per cent of export income last year.
The budgetary deficits have increased from year to year. Local public borrowing has been resorted to cover these and has gone beyond the level of P/300 billion. The bulk of public spending is for the servicing of foreign and local public debt and for the military and police establishment, including the paramilitary forces. Foreign debt service accounts for more than 40 per cent of the budget and the military and police establishment, easily more than 15 per cent, in a more accurate accounting.
The military budget is made to appear small by the segregation of the amounts for “civil” though total-war related offices, programs and projects of the national defense, interior and other departments; the Philippine National Police and paramilitary forces; the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, intelligence funds under various departments; military schools, etc. In addition to what the military takes from the Philippine government budget, it gets from the U.S. what is equivalent to 63 per cent of its total requirements for operations and equipment.
Government spending is largely nonproductive and characterized by corruption at various levels of the bureaucracy. Funds are dwindling for such basic social services as public health, education, housing and the maintenance of the infrastructure. Social relief and rehabilitation of victims of the long series of frequent major calamities (earthquakes, volcanic eruption, typhoons, floods and drought) have been grossly inadequate and further reduced by corrupt practices.
Aquino’s term is coming to an end. There has been a general economic decline from 1986 to 1991. The current regime is notorious for not having a single industrial project, for retrogressing in land reform legislation and spending billions of pesos for the maintenance of a department of agrarian reform but only a few millions for token expropriation of land for redistribution and for allowing the deterioration of infrastructure and public services.
Seventy percent of the population or 7.4 million of the 10.5 million families (average of six persons each) in the country fall below the poverty line of P/ 4997 (US$ 185). Some 30 percent or 4.5 million families live below the P/2283 (US$ 84.50) food threshold. Eighty percent or one million families in the national capital region (Metro Manila) live below the poverty line.
There is massive accumulated unemployment, approaching 50 per cent of the total labor force of 27.5 million. As of the third quarter of 1991, the official unemployment rate is 17 per cent (4.5 million) and the official underemployment rate, 30 per cent (9.0 million). Those classified as underemployed are in fact unemployed. And among those considered employed, a sizable percentage do not have full and regular employment. There are false criteria that official statisticians go by in their random surveys.
There is hyperinflation in the country although the officially admitted rate is only 19 per cent as of the third quarter of 1991. It is cutting down the real income of the people even as wages are being pressed down. There is now an extremely wide gap between the rate of increase in the legislated wage rates and the official rates of increase in the prices of basic commodities. The official rate of inflation is understated by a manipulation of the basket of basic goods.
Essential producer and consumer goods are in short supply. Staples are in short supply and are being imported. The cost of fuel is ever rising and being passed on to the ordinary consumers and riding public. The price of oil is domestically kept above the level of the world price in order to assure the multinational firms of a hefty profit. Basic social services have broken down and are being priced far beyond the ability of the masses to pay.
Taxes are being increased to satisfy the IMF demand to cut down deficit spending. Interest rates have gone up to more than 23 per cent. Local entrepreneurs are discouraged from production by the high costs, including the levy on imported producer goods, and by the inflow of foreign commodities under the regime’s policy of import liberalization.
With the ever deteriorating economic conditions, there is widespread and deepgoing social unrest. The legal democratic mass movement and the armed revolutionary movement can and must arouse, organize and mobilize the discontented masses.
The socioeconomic crisis continues to fuel the political crisis of the ruling system. The rivalries of the political parties and factions of the exploiting classes are becoming more bitter and more violent. The ruling system is increasingly being weakened internally as it escalates its attacks on the people.
The objective conditions for waging the armed revolution are better than ever. The crisis of the ruling system under the U.S.- Aquino ruling clique is far worse than under the U.S.-Marcos ruling clique. The current regime is thoroughly isolated. The people are desirous of a change of government; and they are in a revolutionary mood.
There is no doubt whatsoever that due to the chronic crisis of the system and the ceaseless aggravation of the crisis, the objective situation is fluid, volatile and favorable for bigger mass actions by the legal democratic forces and for accelerated tactical offensives by the people’s army. It can also be said that the subjective forces of the revolution are certainly stronger than in the earlier periods of revolutionary upsurge (as, for instance, in 1970–72). But there are problems besetting the revolutionary forces that reduce their capacity and effectiveness to take advantage of the situation.
These problems need to be identified and solved through an all-round rectification movement in order to enable the subjective forces of the revolution to take advantage of the fluid crisis-ridden situation and cause the revolutionary mass movement to surge forward. There are deepseated and long-running problems that have reduced the capacity of the Party to lead the masses at the basic level in both urban and rural areas. These problems should not be glossed over by casuistic argumentations over whether it can be said that the objective conditions are fluid or not.
Since July 1990, the acutely critical conditions in the country have been favorable for an upsurge in the revolutionary mass movement in the urban areas. But neither sweeping agitation for an “immediate insurrection” to crack the ruling system nor the scheme to degrade the revolutionary forces by building a paper alliance (with peace negotiations as its main concern supposedly in order to swing the middle forces and the unpoliticized masses to the Left in preparation for an “insurrection that would lead to a sharing of power in a coalition government in the medium term”) has brought about a great upsurge in the revolutionary mass movement. The revolutionary forces should neither be too far ahead (thus the need for the united front) nor too far behind (thus the need for revolutionary integrity) if allies and the masses are to be galvanized for an upsurge of protest actions on definite burning issues.
In the countryside, the objective of solving the problem of “regularization” and correcting the imbalances in the deployment of cadres and resources in favor of extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever expanding and consolidating mass base is precisely to enable the people’s army to launch more effectively the tactical offensives within the strategic defensive. Our guerrilla fighters must wage only those battles that they are capable and sure of winning.
Although stimulated by the favorable objective situation, the subjective forces of the revolution, the Party and other revolutionary organizations, have to know the measure of their strength, rectify errors and shortcomings and undertake all necessary measures to preserve and further strengthen themselves. In leading the masses, the Party must arouse, organize and mobilize them. Consequently, it can launch legal mass actions and armed tactical offensives that can be won within the strategic defensive.
The rectification of insurrectionism does not mean that we stop calling for and undertaking those mass actions within our capability. Neither does the rectification of “regularization” mean that we stop calling for and undertaking increased tactical offensives within our capability.
There is a stampede by some eight political figures seeking to replace the already isolated president in the forthcoming elections. But the more potent of the various reactionary political forces are those that have a substantial share of government resources, access to campaign money from the big U.S., Japanese and Taiwan-Chinese firms and the local exploiting classes and have a considerable armed following inside and outside the reactionary military and police forces.
It is expected that money and blood will flow to decide which candidates will win at the highest level as well as at lower levels. The stakes are extremely high in the contest between the Aquino and the Marcos factions even as they seem to have made secret deals regarding the question of stolen assets and human rights violations. The most formidable competing teams in the elections are offshoots of the Aquino and Marcos factions. But there are also the other parties that wish to take advantage of the main split within the ruling system.
It is the notion of the U.S. and local reactionaries that a brief electoral campaign period, elections for a day in a multiparty circus and making a choice among candidates of the exploiting classes can delude the people and make them believe that there is democracy. Thus the elections are supposed to stabilize the neocolony. But in fact these elections split the ruling system. The fragmentation of the exploiting classes is such that the winning party and presidential candidate are unlikely to garner more than 50 percent of the electorate.
Whoever gets elected president from whichever party will have to work out compromises with allies but will be faced with powerful opposition within the system. If the Aquino ruling clique retains power through a dummy presidential figure and cheats in the elections, there will probably be some major political violence soon after the elections. And yet even if the current ruling clique prevails, the Aquino family will have increasing differences with whomever may be its presidential front man.
The ruling system will become more fractious, weak and volatile. The commanders of the reactionary armed forces will become more ambitious as the political and economic crisis worsens, even as the same reactionary military and police forces remain fragmented into several factions. At the moment, there are as many as five of these military factions: the Aquino faction, the Ramos faction, the pro-Marcos Soldiers of the Filipino People (SFP), the pro-Enrile Rebolusyonaryong Alyansang Makabayan (RAM) and the Young Officers’ Union (YOU). These factions will not disappear despite the efforts of the United States to reunify them and concentrate them against the revolutionary movement. The reorganization of the Philippine Constabulary and the local police forces into the Philippine National Police creates additional conditions for fragmentation and allows local executive officials to cultivate their own armed following within the PNP in so many fiefdoms.
At the moment, the AFP and the PNP continue to coordinate in launching campaigns of suppression against the revolutionary forces and the people. But there is a growing division between the military and police forces not only because of clashing loyalties to political groups but also because of clashing interests over criminal activities and tong collection from gambling, prostitution and other vices.
In conducting operations against the Party, the NPA and NDF, the military and police forces appear to coordinate very well only because there are crack intelligence units directed by U.S. and Filipino intelligence officers who take advantage of the urban basing of the staff organs of the revolutionary movement and the identifiability of revolutionary personnel who are on the enemy manhunt list and yet are in these staff organs. Upon the withdrawal of such personnel to the countryside, the enemy will be deprived of easy targets.
All Party members and Red fighters must grasp the point that when the military and police forces are fractious and the ruling clique feels threatened by a coup d’etat, it concentrates its forces in the citadel and therefore makes it difficult for revolutionary forces to seize this citadel before the backbone of the enemy military forces is broken in the countryside. The illusion of hastening the seizure of the cities mainly through urban activities and urban concentration of cadres, who are on the enemy manhunt list, must be cast away.
The very perseverance of the revolutionary forces and the people along the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength through tactical offensives within the strategic defensive serves to weaken and crack the ruling system, as more and more resources are misdirected towards the military, police and paramilitary forces rather than towards other purposes. As the armed revolutionary movement and the legal democratic mass movement grow in strength, the ruling system weakens and cracks further.
The enemy is already under severe political and economic strain in pursuing his total war policy. He deploys brigades to concentrate on certain guerrilla fronts and in the process assaults and abuses the people but fails to destroy the guerrilla forces that are closely linked with the masses on a wide scale in far more guerrilla fronts than he can pounce on.
The broad masses of the people reject the ruling system and detest its military, police and paramilitary forces as they go on a rampage of killing, looting and burning to force the peasant masses to leave their homes and farms. The Aquino regime’s six-year record of human rights violations surpasses any six years of the Marcos fascist record in terms of disappearances, assassinations, illegal detention, torture, arson, bombings, strafing, food blockades, strategic hamlets and forced mass evacuation of people.
More than a million people have been displaced and turned into refugees by military operations. The military forces use blind bombing, artillery fire and strafing, massacre people, burn homes and crops and compel the people to flee from targeted areas in different parts of the archipelago. Several tens of thousands of people have been rounded up and illegally detained in both rural and urban areas. Worse than during the Marcos fascist regime, the military, police and paramilitary forces can kidnap people at will under the Supreme Court doctrine of warrantless arrest. Thousands have been subjected to torture and extrajudicial execution. Others are languishing in prison because their right to bail is violated or nonbailable charges are maliciously filed against them.
Hundreds of priests and pastors, human rights lawyers, journalists, leaders of legal progressive political parties and other well-respected personalities have been assassinated or have been made to disappear. The military has been more brutal under the Aquino regime than under the Marcos regime in this regard. Thousands of leaders and activists of the working class, peasantry and youth have been murdered.
The Aquino regime has viciously attacked the patriotic and progressive forces that consistently fought against the Marcos fascist regime. And yet under U.S. auspices, the Aquino and Marcos political factions of the same exploiting classes try to exercise restraint in fighting each other and even forge agreements on stolen assets. There is certainly close kinship between Marcos and Aquino not only in corruption but also in the continuing violation of human rights.
But the people are not helpless. They are determined to fight for their national and democratic rights. The struggle between armed revolution and counterrevolution is still at the center of the stage. The guerrilla forces of the New People’s Army continue to wipe out enemy units, inflict casualties and accumulate strength. They are resolved to expand and consolidate the mass base for their self-reliant revolutionary armed struggle.
Far more significant than the electoral farces and institutional games played by the already isolated ruling clique are the strengthening of the patriotic and progressive mass organizations and the launching of mass actions and campaigns to promote the rights and interests of the workers, peasants, fishermen, women, youth, professionals, small businessmen and other people.
The broad mass movement has taken up the issues of national independence and democracy. Among these major issues taken up by information campaigns and mass actions are the following: U.S. military bases, IMF economic policy dictates, foreign debt, oil price increases, wages and workers’ rights, land reform, human rights violations, the regime’s total war policy, women’s rights, education, ecology and peace.
Strikes and protest rallies and marches have been carried out. The most outstanding of these in the year have been the demonstration of nearly a hundred thousand people in February at Mendiola bridge and the May First workers’ rally and march on the U.S. embassy. On the issue of the U.S. military bases, the militant mass organizations and alliances have been able to inspire the majority of Philippine senators to reject the draft treaty agreed upon by the regime and the U.S. government.
The struggle against the U.S. military presence is far from over. The U.S. government is still in a position to deal with the next reactionary regime for the retention of the Subic naval base. The JUSMAG, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. control over all radar stations in the country will persist until they are removed by the people’s revolutionary struggle.
The legal democratic mass movement has high hopes of advancing further in the year ahead. The mass organizations and alliances have shown their determination to bring the struggle for national liberation and democracy to a new and higher level.
In the consideration of certain developments abroad in 1991, it looks like the “new world order” proclaimed by U.S. President Bush earlier in the year is valid and true. For a moment in history, it seems that the world is under the unchallenged unipolar hegemony of the United States. In this regard, the clear message to the Philippine revolutionary movement is to be more than ever self-reliant and not to be dependent on any expectation of immediate assistance from abroad. After all, the Philippine revolutionary movement has never been dependent on foreign assistance.
By high-tech mass media, the United States has been made to appear as the leader of all nations championing the sovereignty of other nations, democracy and human rights. And by high-tech means of destruction, the United States has devastated Iraq and massacred hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi people, with impunity and without compunction. It is also proclaimed that the U. S. has overcome its Vietnam war syndrome.
Once more in history, the United States has gotten its way by the perverse logic that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the entire Persian Gulf had to be saved from Saddam Hussein by the most cruel methods just as the Philippines had to be saved from Emilio Aguinaldo who had been demonized beyond all proportions by the U.S. yellow press upon the outbreak of the Filipino-American war. The U.S. has tightened its control over the oil resources, military sales and the regional security system in the Middle East and is now arranging a Pax Americana for its own maximum benefit and for Israel at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.
Following the alleged coup attempt by certain Soviet officials to preempt the divisive “union” treaty and preserve the Soviet Union, the two anticommunist demagogues, Gorbachov and Yeltsin, have combined and competed to dissolve and dispossess the Soviet revisionist party and the central regime and to break up the Soviet Union and regroup the remaining centrifugal republics into some loose “commonwealth”. Finally, the Soviet Union has basically gone the same way that the other revisionist-ruled countries have gone since 1989.
The revisionist party and regime have been abolished in favor of undisguised anticommunist bourgeois regimes as in Eastern Europe. Nationalism, ethnic conflicts, superstition and criminality are rampant. The worsening political chaos portend bloody ethnic conflicts and civil wars worse than that now raging in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
The economy of the former Soviet Union is in shambles, characterized by production breakdown and decline by as much as 20 percent; massive unemployment; privatization of public assets; profiteering; bureaucratic corruption; rapid increases of the money supply (100 percent in 1991); hyperinflation (already running at more than 300 percent and expected to accelerate when price decontrol takes effect on January 2, 1992); conspicuous consumption by the bourgeoisie; severe food shortages and begging for food aid from the West.
Within a short period of six years, Gorbachov and his band of capitalist restorationists have impoverished and turned the former Soviet Union into a full-fledged neocolonial client-state with a huge foreign debt of US$81 billion (starting at the level of only US$30 billion in 1985) that it has extreme difficulty in servicing. The borrowed foreign money has been used for importing consumer goods and also for lining the pockets of the bureaucrats through the joint ventures and private cooperatives.
The U.S. policy makers are confident that the bourgeois liberalization of the Chinese economy will continue to reproduce the Chinese bourgeoisie, corrupt the bureaucrats and generate an anticommunist intelligentsia and will inevitably result not only in the bourgeois liberalization of Chinese politics but the ultimate restoration of an undisguised bourgeois rule through peaceful evolution as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For the time being, the United States is using trade, financial and other levers to exert pressure on China and interfere in Chinese affairs.
The third world countries characteristically remain as neocolonial client-states, straining under deteriorating terms of trade for their raw-material exports and under heavy foreign debt burdens. The International Monetary Fund continues to dictate upon them to adopt “austerity measures” and “multiparty democracy” ala Philippines. An increasing number of them are wracked by political violence. And they seem to have no way out of the world capitalist system.
Even those regimes which were previously described as socialist or socialist-oriented and used Marxist and anti-imperialist rhetoric have climbed down and have pleaded for capitalist investments and trade and loan concessions or have been replaced by unabashed puppets of imperialism. The Ethiopian and Eritrean revolutionary movements have won power through protracted people’s war against the Soviet-supported regime but continue to face extreme difficulties due to domestic and international conditions.
Countries that are firmly resolved to remain socialist, like Cuba and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, are under tremendous pressures and threats from the United States. The United States cannot conceal its glee over the opportunities provided by the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.
Amidst the social turmoil throughout the world, the capitalist powers appear to be consolidating their positions and neatly redividing the world among themselves. The U.S.-Japan combination is supposed to have Asia as its sphere of influence. The United States is to remain dominant in its own backyard, Latin America, and in the Middle East. With Germany and France as the prime movers, Western Europe is building its economic and political union while the Soviet Union has disintegrated. The European Community is taking charge of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and most of Africa as spheres of influence.
However, it is not enough to look at the appearances of the world situation within a short period of time. We have to see through these ephemeral appearances. A certain aspect may be conspicuous or may actually be dominant in a given period of time. But it is inextricably linked to another contradictory aspect which resurges precisely at the moment that the dominant aspect is or appears to be overwhelmingly or unquestionably dominant.
Indeed, the world today is under the unquestionable dominance of capitalism. This is stressed by the obvious retreat and even disintegration of the anti-imperialist and socialist forces in several countries. But once upon a time, capitalism enjoyed dominance, with practically no serious opposition, until the great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 came.
This revolution came about as a result of the capitalist crisis of overproduction and interimperialist war. It confirmed the thesis of Marx that large-scale machine commodity production under capitalism leads to the crisis of overproduction and interimperialist rivalries and wars. The high technology that is in the hands of the capitalist powers today generates far more rapidly than the electromechanical processes of the past the crisis of overproduction.
In fact, high technology has already created an unprecedentedly severe crisis of overproduction and continues to wreak havoc on the lives of billions of people and causes rising levels of social turbulence, mainly in the South and East of the world in the meantime. There is a new world disorder.
The United States continues to be in strategic decline. It cannot solve its problem of huge budgetary and trade deficits, without generating severe social tensions within American society and without upsetting the balance among the capitalist powers. The U.S. decline can only be temporarily overshadowed by the disintegration of its former superpower rival, which is paying for the misallocation of resources for the arms race and overconsumption of the new bourgeoisie under the Brezhnev era.
The trumpeted end of the cold war is generating a demand from the American people for the so-called peace dividend. But the United States cannot easily draw back from its own high-tech military-industrial complex to pay for the overconsumption of the past which was done through massive foreign borrowing. Every kind of financial instrument has been scandalously abused by the United States in connection with military overspending and overconsumption.
The trade deficits of the United States are the trade surpluses of Japan, Germany and a handful of “newly industrializing” economies in the third world. As the U.S. tries to save and invest in the more efficient production of goods tradable in the world, it throws both white collar and blue collar workers out of jobs and goes through spasms of recession and unleashes economic problems in countries that have taken advantage of previous U.S. overconsumption. As a matter of fact, the U.S. economy is in prolonged recession, already in its third year.
There is a fragility in the economies of the other major capitalist powers like Germany and Japan. Germany is suffering from indigestion as a result of the reunification of East and West Germany and also from having to lend capital to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union which clearly have limited capabilities of paying back. Japan has expanded only at the sufferance of the United States and Western Europe.
U.S. President Bush has made another significant statement this year to the effect that trade war has replaced the cold war. This is a succinct reflection of the frustrating negotiations among the capitalist powers (within the Group of Seven, OECD and GATT) regarding trade and financial policies. The growing differences among the capitalist powers revolve around the question of “free trade” in all types of agricultural and industrial goods and around the question of sharing the responsibility of lending money to the countries that have no way of servicing their accumulated foreign debt, except by incurring more debt.
At the moment, in our part of the world, it looks like the United States and Japan are still cooperating very well in exploiting the people. Due to its serious budgetary and trade deficits, the United States is pushing Japan to share military burden and to increase its military forces under the pretext of peacekeeping under the U.N. flag and is trying to break open the well-protected Japanese market to U.S. products.
The United States and Japan are the closest foreign partners today in keeping the Philippines as a neocolony in economic and political terms. As the United States continues in strategic decline, Japan is increasing its economic and indirect military role in the Philippines and in the entire Asia-Pacific region.
The United States still has the edge over Japan in accumulated investments in the Philippines and expects to retain the Subic naval base after the 1992 elections as well as control over all the radar and communications stations dotting the country. But Japan has outstripped the United States in the rate of investments, trade and “development aid” and the thrust of new investments is to achieve direct control over land and natural resources.
Japan is taking advantage of the United States’ own plea for military burden-sharing and the United Nations flag for building its forces of military aggression under the guise of peacekeeping. Within the decade, we shall see the U.S.-Japan cooperation in the domination of the Philippines and the Asia-Pacific region turn into rivalry. We are still fighting the United States as the main imperialist power and opposing the U.S.-Japan combination. But we must also anticipate the U.S.-Japan rivalry that is bound to develop and become conspicuous within the decade.
It is of great importance that the Philippine revolutionary movement is closely linked with the peoples and revolutionary movements in the neighboring countries in both Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia (China, Korea, Japan, etc.) and in North America as well as with the governments that continue to be or are likely to become anti-imperialist when violent interimperialist rivalries reemerge in the region.
Whether China remains socialist or not, it has built up a powerful industrial capacity and is among the countries in the region with their political independence and a higher capacity for resisting U.S. or Japanese imperialism than before World War II. China is the largest imponderable factor in the forthcoming rivalry between the United States and Japan in the region. Recently, China and India made a joint statement opposing oligarchy in world affairs.
In all capitalist countries today, there is the dramatic resurgence of the problem of stagflation. This was previously put under control through the mechanism of lending large amounts of money to countries in the third world and Eastern Europe since the 1970s and to the United States, China, India and the Soviet Union since the 1980s. Now, this mechanism has broken down as the economies of most debtor countries have deteriorated and have been unable to pay back the loans. In the capitalist countries, there is the sticky problem of unemployment and the cutbacks on social welfare and social services. Social tensions are manifested in contradictory currents, the perseverance of progressive organizations and the surge of racism and neofascism, now directed against migrants from the third world.
The success of neocolonialism is its own failure. It has succeeded in putting the world, especially the countries of the South and the East, under control principally through economic and financial means. But the failure lies in ultimately constricting the world capitalist market.
The general run of the countries of the South has been restricted to the production of raw materials for export, subjected to the ever deteriorating terms of trade, overburdened with foreign debt that cannot be paid back and afflicted with military overspending, bureaucratic corruption and conspicuous import-dependent consumption of a few. These third world countries suffer from a crisis of overproduction in raw materials rather than in finished products. The Philippines belongs to this group of countries.
There are consequently rising levels of political violence in the third world countries. There are repeated food riots, coup attempts and counter-coups, ethnic and religious conflicts and civil wars. These are occurring on a widening scale. The passing illusion of world peace pertains mainly to the disappearance of the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and to the debilitation and defeat of political entities previously dependent on the Soviet Union.
The Persian Gulf war between the U.S.-led alliance and Iraq is actually a manifestation of the limits and crisis of neocolonialism. The United States was compelled to resort to the classical violence of modern imperialism (this time using hightech weapons of mass destruction effectively on the peculiar terrain of Iraq) on a recalcitrant neocolonial client-state, which had been driven by the costs of the Iran-Iraq war (instigated by the U.S.) and by the world oil glut to come into conflict with another neocolony, Kuwait.
Under socialism, certain countries of Eastern Europe were able to establish basic industries even while the Soviet Union overconcentrated on military production and channeled scientific research and high technology to arms production. But as they increasingly adopted capitalist-oriented reforms, they took on the ills afflicting the neocolonies. Even before the revisionist ruling parties and regimes were replaced by undisguised bourgeois parties and regimes, based on an anticommunist intelligentsia, the corrupt bureaucrats and private entrepreneurs, they had already become hooked to patterns of production and consumption dictated by the West and most of them had already been burdened with foreign debt which they could not pay back. To this day, the East European countries in varying degrees can export only agricultural, steel and textile products which are overproduced by the industrial capitalist countries and the newly-industrializing economies.
The capitalist wonderland has not at all come to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Such ills of third world capitalism as unrestrained bureaucratic corruption and privatization, blackmarketeering, massive unemployment, lack of social guarantees, hyperinflation, fuel shortage, shortages of basic necessities and so on are rampant. Only the upper five percent of the population relish the new conditions.
In so short a time, capitalism is in total disrepute among the broad masses of the people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The new regimes, which are bureaucratic combinations of long-time anticommunists and a large number of overnight excommunists, are proving to be worse than the regimes in the pre-Gorbachov period. The advantage for genuine communists who are now under persecution in these countries is that the downfall of revisionist ruling parties and regimes that used to maintain communist and socialist facades, has put the responsibility squarely on the new bourgeoisie.
The main civil exports of the former Soviet Union are oil, natural gas and gold. But the production of these has broken down as a result of continuing misallocation of resources, political chaos, ethnic conflicts, previous withholding of funds from the center by the republics and general strikes. At the same time, the former Soviet Union has already abused foreign borrowing in so short a time. This has been used mainly for the importation of Western consumer products and not for the retooling and expansion of production facilities. The successor states of the Soviet Union can sell weapons for hard currency. But the capitalist powers discourage them from doing so.
In brief, the full integration of former revisionist-ruled countries of the East into the world capitalist system is not an undiluted blessing for it. These countries do not have export-products in high demand in the West. At the same time , there is a shortage of capital for lending to those who have patently limited capacity to pay pack. Besides, in the current shrinkage of the world capitalist market, the capitalist powers cannot be too eager to allow these countries to become additional industrial competitors.
Multinational firms have preferred to export their surplus finished products to these countries and have invested only in the most profitable lines of business, which often do not involve new production facilities nor retooling of old ones. There is in fact a process of de-industrialization, involving the closure of industries and the redirection of manpower and resources away from industrialization.
A study of Yugoslavia is useful to illustrate the total bankruptcy of modern revisionism. Yugoslavia has had the distinction of being the first country (since 1948) to be ruled by modern revisionism. It has not grown into a strong industrial capitalist country under the new bourgeoisie. Neither have the capitalist powers heavily invested in it in order to develop it industrially. It has even been worse than the Philippines as an overconsuming and overborrowing country. Now, it is in the throes of disintegration and rebalkanization. It is rent asunder by a civil war, arising from the nationalism and separatism of the dominant ethnic and religious communities in the various republics and the rising passions of deepseated ethnic conflicts.
Regarding the former Soviet Union, what the capitalist powers are most worried about now is the dispersed location of 28,000 nuclear warheads in four independent republics (Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and Kazakhstan) and the probability of civil wars bigger than the current ones. At the moment, these republics are preoccupied with replacing the old Soviet center with a “commonwealth of independent states”. The strong currents of nationalism, the interrepublic and intrarepublic ethnic and religious conflicts, the gross differences in economic development, the breakdown of the economies, the border disputes of the republics and the presence of large foreign enclaves (especially Russian) in non-Russian territory are likely to generate more turmoil and civil wars.
There is potential civil war between a Great-Russian chauvinist center or a central military command dominated by Russians and a republic that possesses nuclear weapons and refuses to follow the dictat from the Russian or military center and is accused of mistreating the Russian enclave in its territory. The republics with nuclear weapons can also take opposing sides in the various conflicts of republics and the ethnic and religious communities within republics. Because of their economic interests and fear of the possible mishandling of the nuclear weapons, the capitalist powers would be more prone to intervene in civil wars in the former Soviet Union than in the current ones in Yugoslavia.
A civil war in the former Soviet Union, similar to that in Yugoslavia but gravely dissimilar due to the factor of nuclear weapons in the equation, is not a farfetched possibility. Great-Russian chauvinism is likely to arise to oppress and exploit the other nations and use the Russian enclaves within the other republics to exercise Russian domination. After the demagogues of today shall have passed away (and they will do so soon because of the overwhelming economic crisis and political chaos), the rise of fiercer nationalists and military fascists can run ahead of the resurgence of the revolutionary forces.
In several respects, the status of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been degraded to that before World War I. There can be no complete duplication of any previous period in history but there can be comparisons of historical periods in certain respects and under precise qualifications. At any rate, the leaders and strategists of the capitalist powers have started to fear that there is a greater possibility of a war breaking out in Europe than during the cold war period as a result of the disintegration of Soviet power. The current ravages of capitalism can give way to unbridled nationalism and military fascism.
However, the proletariat and the people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have come to know what is socialism, modern revisionism and undisguised capitalism. They have made great achievements under socialism, while disguised and undisguised capitalism has degraded them. They certainly abhor their disempowerment by the bourgeoisie and the scandalous private appropriation of the social wealth created by them in more than seven decades. The great legacy of Lenin and Stalin cannot be totally extirpated. The genuine communists who are now under persecution and the oppressed and exploited proletariat and people are certain to fight back and wrest back the power appropriated by the bourgeoisie. The resurgence of the forces of socialism is bound to come.
In taking an overview of the world today, the Communist Party of the Philippines considers itself as being among the proletarian revolutionary parties adhering to the revolutionary essence of Marxism and persevering in revolutionary struggle mainly on the ground of the domestic crisis, like the Bolsheviks in the period when capitalism was expanding and developing into modern imperialism and the Second International was dominated by the classical revisionists who ultimately became embarrassed and disintegrated in 1914. Soon after the collapse of the Second International, the Bolsheviks won the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917.
Another dark period for the anti-imperialist and socialist movement arose when fascist regimes wiped out communist parties in the period before World War II; and the forces of fascism invaded and wrought havoc on the Soviet Union in World War II. From that dark period, several socialist countries would emerge and the national liberation movements would forge ahead in an unprecedented way.
The anti-imperialist and socialist movement is bound to resurge at a new and higher level because of the insoluble crisis of the world capitalist system, the lessons from more than three decades of peaceful evolution of socialism to blatant capitalism and the irresistible demands of the proletariat and the people for national liberation, democracy and genuine socialism.
History goes into twists and turns. It will not end until the earth goes into a blackhole. Capitalism is not the end of history but is the forerunner of socialism. As proletarian internationalists, we must link up with all revolutionary parties, movements and peoples in all countries and work together with them in bringing about the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement.
For the Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines