THE REESTABLISHMENT OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE PHILIPPINES
By Arthur J. Tariman
National Council Member, ANAD Party-list
The reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was founded by Jose Maria Sison on 28 December 1968 – the birthday of Chairman Mao Zedong – to seize political power thru a bloody revolution.
Writing under the nom de guerre Amado Guerrero, Sison published the “Philippine Society and Revolution” , PSR for brevity, to lay down the basic principles of the two-stage revolution in the Philippines based on his dialectical analysis of concrete conditions of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system.
In that thesis, Sison noted several observations on the Philippine society and history by applying the Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought.
Sison used Marxism to examine class struggle, Leninism to review the so-called proletarian revolution and Maoism to adapt the so-called Protracted People’s War , PPW for short, in the Philippine setting.
According to Sison, the essential task of the National Democratic Revolution , NDR for brevity, is “to liberate the people from foreign and feudal domination and establish an independent and democratic Philippines.”
As a Maoist communist party, the CPP listens very well to Chairman Mao Tse Tung advice that a “Revolution is neither a dinner party nor having a picnic, it is a violent overthrow of one class by the other.” According to Mao Tse Tung, “Political power grows out from the barrel of a gun.”
Sison himself once said, “Bloody struggle is the primary form of struggle that we must wage.”
The CPP Founding Chairman would always emphasize that while fighting for the so-called National Democratic Revolution, the People’s Protracted War would also prepare the ground for a Socialist Revolution.
Accordingly, the NDR should be completed first before the Socialist Revolution can be started. As such, socialism creates the foundation for communism.
It should be emphasized here that the NDR has two main components – the PPW and the International Solidarity Works , ISW for brevity. The PPW has pursued two forms of struggle – the armed and the legal.
The general line of the National Political Design of 1969 carries the political line of heightening class struggle and specifies armed struggle as the primary form of struggle.
Thus to put the concept of armed struggle into actual practice, the CPP established the New People’s Army or NPA on March 29, 1969 – same founding day of Red China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
By emphasizing the glaring contrast between the oppressor and the oppressed, Joma Sison aimed to heighten class struggle.
Peasants in the rural areas are to be lured into the so-called agrarian revolution . Workers in the urban areas are organized and agitated to stage strikes against their employers. Youth and students would be continuously subjected to psychological operations to make them drift away from their authorities at home, in school and in the community. And the national bourgeoisie has to be factionalized thru tactical alliances to make it possible to focus the broadest front on the narrowest target.
All these would continuously cause friction in the society that will build up the heat of conflict in the entire country – all paving the way for the attainment of a social condition that would be ripe for the revolution.
However, the strategy of class struggle requires the laying down of the so-called Echelon of Alliances and the United Front.
To accomplish the task of united front building, the CPP founded the National Democratic Front-Philippines (NDFP). The CPP formed Preparatory Commission of the National Democratic Front 1971.
To provide a firm basis of unity for all popular forces forced underground by the martial law regime, the Preparatory Commission of the NDF issued a 12-Point Program , on April 24, 1973, which would be acknowledged and celebrated as the founding day of the NDF. Thousands would eventually join the NDF through revolutionary mass organizations in various sectors.
NDF became the umbrella organization of radical underground organizations after the dissolution of the National Bureaus under the Department on Organization. These radical underground organizations are the National Democratic Underground Mass Organizations (NDUGMO), together with the legal or “open ND” organizations, now served as the base of the NDF.
However, it is the National Politico-Military Design of 1974 that clearly defines the specific character of the PPW. It defined the objective of the PPW as to complete the NDR and to lay down the foundation for the Socialist Revolution.
PPW’s central task is the destruction and overthrow of the enemy rule and the seizure of political power thru armed struggle.
On the other hand, CPP waged legal struggle mainly in four forms. First is the united front building and mass protests, second is the electoral struggle, third is the peace process, and fourth is the International Solidarity Works which is also a form of legal struggle.
PPW’s secondary task is the development of the revolutionary underground and the broad anti-imperialist and democratic mass movement in the cities thru the building of a broad united front.
Under this context, PPW’s objective would be to isolate the government from the people and their support by using the methodology of arouse (should be read as agitate), organize and mobilize or AOM.
Finally the organized masses are mobilized when they are called on in the conduct of mass protest actions against government.
Ultimately, PPW aims to divert the people’s support initially to the National Democratic Revolution and eventually to the CPP thru ideological, political and organizational works, in short, IPO.
In ideological work, the people’s rights are being championed thru AOM that the revolutionary ideology the Party embodies becomes acceptable to the masses
In political work, the Party’s constant questioning of the government’s integrity weakens its hold on the people but strengthens the ties between the masses and the revolutionary movement.
In organizational work, the organized sectors are either directly or indirectly linked to the National United Front Commission (NUFC) and the National Organizational Department (NOD) of the CPP.
As a strategy, the Party would conduct IPO works on the basic sectors – the workers and the peasants – then builds an Echelon of Alliances and later forges tactical alliance with the Bangsamoro revolutionary groups in Mindanao like the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
PPW’s general design to seize power took notice that the archipelagic character of the Philippines complemented by its mountainous terrain provides depth for guerilla warfare which should be protracted, i.e., from main islands to small islands, from weak to strong, and by stages: Strategic Defense , Strategic Stalemate , Strategic Offense .
The National Politico-Military Design of 1974 clearly defined the PPW’s strategy of seizing power:
“The long-term task of our Mindanao forces is to draw enemy forces from Luzon and destroy them. In this regard we can cooperate very well with the Moro National Liberation Front and the Bangsa Moro Army.
Our forces in the Visayas can take advantage of our gains in Luzon and Mindanao and contribute their own share in the task of forcing the enemy to split his forces and of destroying them.
On the eve of the nationwide seizure of power, Manila-Rizal shall be caught in a pincer between regular mobile forces from the north and from the two regions of Southern Luzon.”
Under this strategy, PPW’s two main forms of struggle would eventually culminate in general Offensive from the red areas and General Uprising in the white areas (urban and rural).
To better understand the concept of General Offensive and General Uprising, let us backtrack a little further.
The basic sectors being laid down into Echelon of Alliances is the so-called subjective force of the revolution and is a vital element in creating the so-called objective condition of the revolution.
The objective condition of the revolution comes with the creation of a revolutionary environment thru the weakening of the economy as a social condition once the subjective forces are in place.
The communists always believed that the economic forces influence the political forces so does the subjective force influence the objective condition. The political implication is that those who hold the economy wield influence over politics. A strong economy means strength of hold on political power.
The Maoists maintain that economic class conflict would weaken political authorities that will ultimately lead to the seizure of political power. Hence, to attain the required objective condition of the revolution – that is the weakening of the economy – the CPP has been targeting the basic industries thru the mobilization of the basic sectors.
True to the essence of democratic centralism, which is a centralized leadership and a decentralized operation, the CPP has tasked every Regional Party Committee to target the weakening of specific economic bases.
The CPP therefore expects that the weakening of the regional economic bases would lead to general uprising and general offensive to seize political power.
The general uprising within the so-called white areas – both in rural and urban centers – has the following objectives:
• weakening of the state machineries,
• isolating the government from the people,
• creating a revolutionary conditions,
• infiltrating the government, and
• sabotaging of government programs.
On the other hand, the general design for general offensive from the so-called red areas in the countryside requires the building of the NPA from the national to local level that would result to the thin spread of the AFP.
It also prescribes the conduct of IPO works with the peasants for horizontal development, and with the indigenous people or IP for vertical development.
The general uprising and general offensive would come during the short-period of strategic offensive that follows the strategic stalemate.
Preconditioning the ultimately failure of its current peace talks with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GPH), the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF has come up with a five-year plan to advance the so-called people’s war from the stage of strategic defensive to strategic stalemate.
The strategic stalemate stage should not be taken literally to liken the condition to the evenness of government and terrorist forces but on the condition where state apparatus including the local government units, armed services and law enforcement agencies would be afraid and restrained or would perceive to have been restrained from performing their official duties and functions due to the threats and/or influence exerted by the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF on the duly-constituted authorities.
In its 42nd anniversary message to the NPA last March 29 entitled, “Fight and defeat the US-Aquino regime and fulfill the requirements for advance toward the strategic stalemate,” the CPP Central Committee boldly warned that:
“The Aquino regime cannot take comfort from the notion that the revolutionary movement cannot yet be the ruling system in the next five years or from any scheme for the counter-revolutionary armed forces to destroy the revolutionary movement render it inconsequential or make it capitulate.”
The CPP CENCOM added:
“The revolutionary mass movement is capable of removing the Aquino ruling clique from power in the same manner that the Marcos and Estrada ruling cliques were removed and the Arroyo ruling clique was almost removed. Lessons must be learned from the failure to overthrow the Arroyo ruling clique despite its extreme isolation and unpopularity. Errors must be reviewed and rectified so that the revolutionary mass movement can realize the full potential of the favorable objective situation.”
It further announced that:
“The crisis conditions, the growing strength of the revolutionary movement, the rapid rate at which the Aquino regime is being expose as anti-people, anti-national, anti-democratic, corrupt and brutal are such that the revolutionary forces can build a broad united front and generate a mass movement to isolate and remove the Aquino ruling clique from power in a relatively short period of time.”
One may conclude that the CPP is just boasting by making such bold pronouncement against the PNoy administration. But let us take a close look at its so-called five-year plan and examine one by one its essential components and elements, and the objective condition of the ground in order to determine if indeed it is capable of doing what it is saying; if it can attain victory in five to ten years time from today.
The Party aims to accomplish the following objectives in the next five years:
• “In ideological building, the Party must ensure that all current full members briefly review the Party Constitution and Program and the content of the basic Party course and proceed quickly to accelerate the basic education of the candidate-members in connection with fulfilling the tasks for advancing the people's war in the next five years…”
(Comment: The acceleration of Party education is necessary to facilitate the acceptance of more Full-pledge Members from the ranks of “advance mass activists” especially in the urban areas.)
• “We need to increase our Party membership from the current tens of thousands to at least 250,000 in the next five years or so at the annual average of one Party member recruiting another to become a Party member. Party organs and units at all levels, from the branch to the Central
Committee must assess the Party membership and plan how the current Party members within their respective scopes can be increased…We must be able to deploy more Party members from the ranks of workers and the educated youth for service in the people's army and for mass work and building Party branches, mass organizations and organs of political power in the countryside. We must systematically send urban-based Party candidate-members and mass activists to do social investigation and mass work in the countryside and become Red fighters of the people's army…”
(Comment: It would mean that there would be more Party Members from the ranks of workers, youth-students and professionals joining the NPA in the next five years or before the next Presidential elections.)
• “In political building, the Party must propagate the new-democratic revolution and generate the mass movement by arousing, organizing and mobilizing the toiling masses of workers and peasants and all other patriotic and progressive strata and sectors in both urban and rural areas…
“The urban-based mass movement must grow in strength and advance in order to raise the burning issues affecting the lives of the people, to enlighten and militate the people and press hard against the ruling clique and the entire ruling system. There is no dearth of outstanding issues that should be addressed by the mass movement. The incessant increases in oil prices, the rising costs of living, widespread unemployment, landlessness and homelessness, rural poverty, hunger, the spread of disease and the rapid deterioration of social services all infuriate the people and rouse them to political action…”
(Comment: This means that the Party would increase its united front efforts to correspond the intensification of armed struggle thru an enlarged NPA.)
• “The New People's Army is the main organization of the Party for arousing, organizing and mobilizing the people wherever it operates in the countryside. Its units can effectively engage in mass work and initiate the formation of organs of political power, mass organizations, militia in localities and self-defense units in mass organizations. But responsibilities for mass organizing must be continually passed on to the local Party branches and the mass organizations in order to allow the units of the people's army increasingly to have definite periods of politico-military training and combat duty…”
• “The NPA must relentlessly carry out tactical offensives in order to seize weapons and increase the thousands of Red fighters into many thousands more and cover all the rural congressional districts within the next five years…”
(Comment: The Party objective is to increase the NPA arms stockpile to at least 25,000 rifles at the end of the five-year period.)
• “The revolutionary armed struggle must be integrated with the agrarian revolution and the building of revolutionary bases…”
• “At every given time in the struggle, the Party, the NPA and the NDFP have a definite amount of strength. But through united front work, they can augment, amplify and maximize such strength directly or indirectly through allied forces...”
(Comment: It means an increase in alliance work.)
• “We have long respected and supported the right of the Moro people to self-determination. Their revolutionary struggle benefits ours and ours benefits theirs. We must maintain our alliance with them for our mutual benefit against US imperialism and the reactionary Manila government. The US and the local reactionaries must be frustrated in their scheme to derail or destroy either the NDFP or the MILF in order to turn the full force of the reactionary armed forces against either of them. We are confident that the NDFP-MILF alliance will hold because their common enemy cannot meet the just demands of the Filipino people and the Moro people.”
(Comment: The CPP-NPA-NDF earlier allied itself with the MNLF before it entered into and signed a Final Peace Agreement with the government in 1996.)
• “The New People's Army must be resolute and fierce in strengthening itself and striving to defeat Oplan Bayanihan in the same revolutionary spirit that it strengthened itself and defeated the 14-year Marcos fascist dictatorship and all succeeding internal security plans of the reactionary successors of Marcos. The NPA must raise higher its revolutionary consciousness and fighting capability and intensify its tactical offensives in order to advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate within one or two five-year plans…
(Comment: The CPP-NPA-NDF aims to advance to strategic stalemate within a time frame of five to 10 years, i.e., from 2011 to 2016 or from 2011 to 2021.)
“The NPA must firmly and vigorously pursue the strategic line of protracted people's war. This involves encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating sufficient armed strength here over a protracted period of time until it gains the capability to launch the strategic offensive against the enemy holdouts in the cities and seize political power on a nationwide scale…”
• “It must exercise flexibility in the use of tactics of concentration, dispersal and shifting. It concentrates strength superior to that of a target enemy unit for attack. It disperses to deprive the enemy of any visible target or when it conducts mass work among the people. It shifts position when it evades the attack of a superior enemy force and maneuvers to gain time or an advantageous position.”
• “The existing 110 guerrilla fronts must continuously be developed so that all or most of them become company-size fronts and give rise to new guerrilla fronts. They must increase to at least 180 guerrilla fronts in the next five years…”
(Comment: This is in consonant with the objective of one guerilla front for each rural congressional district in the country.)
• “Guerrilla fronts adjacent to each other are clustered to form a wider war theater that enables a wider scope of command, coordination, mutual support and maneuver…”
(Comment: Such is the recent case in Claver where three guerilla fronts had combined their strengths to simultaneously attacked three mining and mineral processing firms.)
• “The Party must direct the formation of various levels of command in order to make effective deployment of NPA units for various objectives on varied scales…”
• “The NPA has already accumulated a critical mass for bold intensification of guerrilla warfare and advance toward a higher stage in the people's war. The people's army must relentlessly launch tactical offensives in order to seize weapons for creating new units, to increasingly change the balance of forces and to move from the stage of strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. It must aim to accumulate 25,000 rifles in order to develop into the stage of the strategic stalemate…
“Every level of command and every unit of the NPA must be conscious of its current armed strength, estimate and plan or target how many more weapons can be seized within a certain period and how to carry out the tactical offensives to seize weapons. The people's army must always be alert to opportunities for tactical offensives aimed at seizing weapons.
“The whole array of the structure of force of the NPA which should include regional forces, local forces, people's militia and urban partisans must continue to wage intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base in order to seize firearms and develop the capability of platoons and companies to wipe out enemy units. The main form of tactical offensives must be annihilative, the objective being to wipe out enemy units in order to seize weapons and demoralize the enemy forces.”
(Comment: Heavily-guarded mining sites are good sources of firearms as proven in the Claver incident and other NPA raids and attacks prior to it.)
• “But certain other tactical offensives must be undertaken to inflict attrition and wear down the enemy forces. These include partisan warfare in urban areas, sparrow warfare, sniping operations, land mine warfare, interdiction of the fuel and supply lines of the enemy and destruction of military vehicles, depots and other fixed installations that are being used against the people's army…”
(Comment: The NPA has already carried out all these instructions.)
• “The extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare will yield additional weapons and additional fighting units, improve the tactics and technique of the people's army and raise higher command effectiveness at every level in terms of formations and territorial scope. It will produce the elements of regular mobile warfare, especially when the NPA companies begin to cohere or increasingly coordinate in carrying out tactical offensives. The new and higher level of warfare will be attained on the basis of the victories of guerrilla warfare.”
(Comment: In advancing to strategic stalemate, the NPA is expected to engage government forces in semi-conventional techniques that would require larger formations such as company or battalion. In the recent Claver incident, the NPA was able to raise a battalion size force without being detected and pre-empted by the government.)
• “The revolutionary armed struggle is facilitated when the reactionary armed forces, police and paramilitary forces tend to disintegrate. Special units of the Party as well as close friends and relatives who are on the revolutionary side must encourage the officers and rank-and-file personnel of the reactionary armed forces to take a patriotic and progressive position on issues and to act in the national and democratic interests of the Filipino people.”
(Comment: The NPA would induce some sympathetic AFP, PNP and other armed services to betray the government by switching side. In the Claver incident, there is no evidence to this effect yet.)
• “In guerrilla fronts, certain alliances can be formed by which local reactionary government units can be used to prevent or counter the worst enemy military operations. But the guerrilla fronts can increase to such a great number that they can cover all or most of the rural congressional districts, reduce or eliminate the power of reactionary local governments, and cohere to form relatively stable base areas.”
(Comment: Such is the current case of the City Government of Davao under the Duterte daughter-and-father administration. A recent media leak revealed the unholy alliance between the Dutertes and the NPA in Davao.)
• “The people's army must dispatch units to arrest for prosecution the plunderers, violators of human rights, local tyrants, the most antisocial criminal elements and enemy informers. Such units must be prepared to give battle to targets of arrest who are armed and dangerous or who head criminal armed groups. The local tyrants and the worst of exploiters include the evil landed gentry, the local warlords and those who grab the land, destroy the environment and rob the people of their natural resources…
“The most effective way for the people to stop the reactionary government from delivering the land and mineral resources to foreign corporations is to build an effective mass movement against them and to allow the people's army to disable and destroy the equipment and other facilities of the antinational and antipeople corporations and their local agents…”
(Comment: This is the pretext used by the CPP-NPA-NDF in staging the simultaneous attacks on three mining and mineral processing companies in Claver on October 3, and similar offensives the last few months.)
In an earlier Message on the 42nd anniversary of the CPP on December 26, 2010 entitled, “Fullfill the requirements for the advance of the people's war from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate,” the CPP Central Committee decreed that:
“Enterprises that do not comply with the rules and regulations of the people's democratic government, disregard and violate the welfare and interests of the people, and conduct abusive and antagonistic actions against the people must be banned, disabled or dismantled. These include those that engage in destructive large-scale logging, mining and plantations for export; plunder non-renewable resources; ruin the environment and take land away from land reform. The military forces and security agencies protecting these enterprises are targets for annihilation by the people's army.”
Immediately following the CPP CENCOM pronouncement, the NPA increased the tempo of its attacks on mining sites nationwide, the latest of which was in Claver, Surigao del Norte on Oct. 3, 2011.
On the other hand, take a hard look at the concrete condition in the Southern Mindanao Region as a case in point. The Army’s 10th Infantry Division has stationed a brigade of soldiers in each of the provinces of Compostela Valley, Davao Oriental and Davao del Norte including Davao City. This is not to mention a battalion of the Philippine National Police’s Special Action Force and the Regional Public Safety Battalion 11.
In Davao City – the country’s so-called killing field capital – the Army keep two infantry battalions and a counter-terrorism task force to fight the merged Guerilla Front 52 and Pulang Bagani Company 1 and some parts of Guerilla Front 54.
The consolidated Order of Battle, 3rd Quarter 2010 of the military and the police would show however that the number of NPA fighters did increase in 10ID PA’s AOR.
Despite the grandiose claim of the AFP and the PNP that the NPA has no more than five thousand warm bodies nationwide, the Maoist communist terrorists are still able to conduct successful tactical offensives not just in the Davao Region but also in North-Central and Northeastern Mindanao, Eastern and Western Visayas, Bicol, Southern Tagalog, Northern Luzon and elsewhere in the country.
The NPA is extensively and intensively using Improvised Explosive Devices – the terrorists’ weapons of choice – not just against military forces but also on some civilians as in the case of the recent Maco Massacre.
With threat and intimidation, the NPA is collecting millions of pesos in revolutionary taxes from businesses, individual traders and even from ordinary citizens. In the 4th Quarter of Current Year 2008, the Army 10th Infantry Division’s Joint Components Intelligence Coordinating Committee (JCICC) estimated that the Southern Mindanao Regional Committee, CPP-NPA-NDF was able to generate more than P19-million in revolutionary taxes alone, prompting the defense establishment to tag SMRC as the “mother of all regions.”
The figure was considered conservative as many individuals and businesses that paid revolutionary taxes refused to report and to cooperate with the police and the military as the government appeared helpless in curtailing the illegal activities of the Maoist communists.
Dr. John Whitehall, an Australian anti-communism missionary, had once toured the Philippines to investigate the CPP-NPA-NDF phenomena and concluded that:
“The Communist Party of the Philippines is committed to wrecking the economy of the nation in order to increase the miseries of the masses with the hope that they rise against the government and carry the communists into power.”
This reality brings to front the question the correctness of the military solution to the Maoist communist insurgency problem in the country.
When the NPA’s strength reached a high of some 25,000 men immediately after the EDSA Revolt of 1986, the total strength of the AFP to include the defunct Philippine Constabulary and the Integrated National Police is only around 150,000 or even less.
And yet the Ramos administration managed to bring down the number of insurgents and even split the Party into reaffirmist and rejectionist factions, forcing Joma Sison to order the Second Great Rectification Movement (SGRM) from 1992 to 1998.
To ANAD Partylist and many civil society groups, the military approach is not and is never a solution to the political issue of Communist insurgencies. It is a palliative. It would only prolong and worsen the problem. ANAD Partylist believes that while the military should be tasked to confront squarely the internal armed threats particularly that posed by the CPP-NPA-NDF, the civil authorities especially local officials including elected barangay leaders shall be obliged to take the lead role in addressing insurgencies in their respective localities, to ensure the delivery of basic services and to improve the standard of living of their constituents – in short, to address the root causes of insurgency.
ANAD Partylist also maintained that there is no point for the government to continue talking peace with the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF as it never has a desire to abandon violence and bloody struggle in order to seize political power.
As the arms of the CPP-NPA-NDF extend to the international arena, ANAD Partylist also sees it fit for the Philippine government and the Filipino people to confront its shadows overseas.
It maintains that CPP-NPA-NDF should be deprived a good reason to agitate, organize and mobilize the people to destroy the nation’s democratic way of life and to illegally seize political power thru bloody revolution from our democratically-constituted government.
Along this line, the AFP is deemed correct in its desired end state in the Internal Peace and Security Plan BAYANIHAN which is to reduce the “capabilities of internal armed threats...to a level that they can no longer threaten the stability of the state and civil authorities can ensure the safety and well-being of the Filipino people.”
By Arthur J. Tariman
National Council Member, ANAD Party-list
The reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was founded by Jose Maria Sison on 28 December 1968 – the birthday of Chairman Mao Zedong – to seize political power thru a bloody revolution.
Writing under the nom de guerre Amado Guerrero, Sison published the “Philippine Society and Revolution” , PSR for brevity, to lay down the basic principles of the two-stage revolution in the Philippines based on his dialectical analysis of concrete conditions of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system.
In that thesis, Sison noted several observations on the Philippine society and history by applying the Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought.
Sison used Marxism to examine class struggle, Leninism to review the so-called proletarian revolution and Maoism to adapt the so-called Protracted People’s War , PPW for short, in the Philippine setting.
According to Sison, the essential task of the National Democratic Revolution , NDR for brevity, is “to liberate the people from foreign and feudal domination and establish an independent and democratic Philippines.”
As a Maoist communist party, the CPP listens very well to Chairman Mao Tse Tung advice that a “Revolution is neither a dinner party nor having a picnic, it is a violent overthrow of one class by the other.” According to Mao Tse Tung, “Political power grows out from the barrel of a gun.”
Sison himself once said, “Bloody struggle is the primary form of struggle that we must wage.”
The CPP Founding Chairman would always emphasize that while fighting for the so-called National Democratic Revolution, the People’s Protracted War would also prepare the ground for a Socialist Revolution.
Accordingly, the NDR should be completed first before the Socialist Revolution can be started. As such, socialism creates the foundation for communism.
It should be emphasized here that the NDR has two main components – the PPW and the International Solidarity Works , ISW for brevity. The PPW has pursued two forms of struggle – the armed and the legal.
The general line of the National Political Design of 1969 carries the political line of heightening class struggle and specifies armed struggle as the primary form of struggle.
Thus to put the concept of armed struggle into actual practice, the CPP established the New People’s Army or NPA on March 29, 1969 – same founding day of Red China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
By emphasizing the glaring contrast between the oppressor and the oppressed, Joma Sison aimed to heighten class struggle.
Peasants in the rural areas are to be lured into the so-called agrarian revolution . Workers in the urban areas are organized and agitated to stage strikes against their employers. Youth and students would be continuously subjected to psychological operations to make them drift away from their authorities at home, in school and in the community. And the national bourgeoisie has to be factionalized thru tactical alliances to make it possible to focus the broadest front on the narrowest target.
All these would continuously cause friction in the society that will build up the heat of conflict in the entire country – all paving the way for the attainment of a social condition that would be ripe for the revolution.
However, the strategy of class struggle requires the laying down of the so-called Echelon of Alliances and the United Front.
To accomplish the task of united front building, the CPP founded the National Democratic Front-Philippines (NDFP). The CPP formed Preparatory Commission of the National Democratic Front 1971.
To provide a firm basis of unity for all popular forces forced underground by the martial law regime, the Preparatory Commission of the NDF issued a 12-Point Program , on April 24, 1973, which would be acknowledged and celebrated as the founding day of the NDF. Thousands would eventually join the NDF through revolutionary mass organizations in various sectors.
NDF became the umbrella organization of radical underground organizations after the dissolution of the National Bureaus under the Department on Organization. These radical underground organizations are the National Democratic Underground Mass Organizations (NDUGMO), together with the legal or “open ND” organizations, now served as the base of the NDF.
However, it is the National Politico-Military Design of 1974 that clearly defines the specific character of the PPW. It defined the objective of the PPW as to complete the NDR and to lay down the foundation for the Socialist Revolution.
PPW’s central task is the destruction and overthrow of the enemy rule and the seizure of political power thru armed struggle.
On the other hand, CPP waged legal struggle mainly in four forms. First is the united front building and mass protests, second is the electoral struggle, third is the peace process, and fourth is the International Solidarity Works which is also a form of legal struggle.
PPW’s secondary task is the development of the revolutionary underground and the broad anti-imperialist and democratic mass movement in the cities thru the building of a broad united front.
Under this context, PPW’s objective would be to isolate the government from the people and their support by using the methodology of arouse (should be read as agitate), organize and mobilize or AOM.
Finally the organized masses are mobilized when they are called on in the conduct of mass protest actions against government.
Ultimately, PPW aims to divert the people’s support initially to the National Democratic Revolution and eventually to the CPP thru ideological, political and organizational works, in short, IPO.
In ideological work, the people’s rights are being championed thru AOM that the revolutionary ideology the Party embodies becomes acceptable to the masses
In political work, the Party’s constant questioning of the government’s integrity weakens its hold on the people but strengthens the ties between the masses and the revolutionary movement.
In organizational work, the organized sectors are either directly or indirectly linked to the National United Front Commission (NUFC) and the National Organizational Department (NOD) of the CPP.
As a strategy, the Party would conduct IPO works on the basic sectors – the workers and the peasants – then builds an Echelon of Alliances and later forges tactical alliance with the Bangsamoro revolutionary groups in Mindanao like the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
PPW’s general design to seize power took notice that the archipelagic character of the Philippines complemented by its mountainous terrain provides depth for guerilla warfare which should be protracted, i.e., from main islands to small islands, from weak to strong, and by stages: Strategic Defense , Strategic Stalemate , Strategic Offense .
The National Politico-Military Design of 1974 clearly defined the PPW’s strategy of seizing power:
“The long-term task of our Mindanao forces is to draw enemy forces from Luzon and destroy them. In this regard we can cooperate very well with the Moro National Liberation Front and the Bangsa Moro Army.
Our forces in the Visayas can take advantage of our gains in Luzon and Mindanao and contribute their own share in the task of forcing the enemy to split his forces and of destroying them.
On the eve of the nationwide seizure of power, Manila-Rizal shall be caught in a pincer between regular mobile forces from the north and from the two regions of Southern Luzon.”
Under this strategy, PPW’s two main forms of struggle would eventually culminate in general Offensive from the red areas and General Uprising in the white areas (urban and rural).
To better understand the concept of General Offensive and General Uprising, let us backtrack a little further.
The basic sectors being laid down into Echelon of Alliances is the so-called subjective force of the revolution and is a vital element in creating the so-called objective condition of the revolution.
The objective condition of the revolution comes with the creation of a revolutionary environment thru the weakening of the economy as a social condition once the subjective forces are in place.
The communists always believed that the economic forces influence the political forces so does the subjective force influence the objective condition. The political implication is that those who hold the economy wield influence over politics. A strong economy means strength of hold on political power.
The Maoists maintain that economic class conflict would weaken political authorities that will ultimately lead to the seizure of political power. Hence, to attain the required objective condition of the revolution – that is the weakening of the economy – the CPP has been targeting the basic industries thru the mobilization of the basic sectors.
True to the essence of democratic centralism, which is a centralized leadership and a decentralized operation, the CPP has tasked every Regional Party Committee to target the weakening of specific economic bases.
The CPP therefore expects that the weakening of the regional economic bases would lead to general uprising and general offensive to seize political power.
The general uprising within the so-called white areas – both in rural and urban centers – has the following objectives:
• weakening of the state machineries,
• isolating the government from the people,
• creating a revolutionary conditions,
• infiltrating the government, and
• sabotaging of government programs.
On the other hand, the general design for general offensive from the so-called red areas in the countryside requires the building of the NPA from the national to local level that would result to the thin spread of the AFP.
It also prescribes the conduct of IPO works with the peasants for horizontal development, and with the indigenous people or IP for vertical development.
The general uprising and general offensive would come during the short-period of strategic offensive that follows the strategic stalemate.
Preconditioning the ultimately failure of its current peace talks with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GPH), the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF has come up with a five-year plan to advance the so-called people’s war from the stage of strategic defensive to strategic stalemate.
The strategic stalemate stage should not be taken literally to liken the condition to the evenness of government and terrorist forces but on the condition where state apparatus including the local government units, armed services and law enforcement agencies would be afraid and restrained or would perceive to have been restrained from performing their official duties and functions due to the threats and/or influence exerted by the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF on the duly-constituted authorities.
In its 42nd anniversary message to the NPA last March 29 entitled, “Fight and defeat the US-Aquino regime and fulfill the requirements for advance toward the strategic stalemate,” the CPP Central Committee boldly warned that:
“The Aquino regime cannot take comfort from the notion that the revolutionary movement cannot yet be the ruling system in the next five years or from any scheme for the counter-revolutionary armed forces to destroy the revolutionary movement render it inconsequential or make it capitulate.”
The CPP CENCOM added:
“The revolutionary mass movement is capable of removing the Aquino ruling clique from power in the same manner that the Marcos and Estrada ruling cliques were removed and the Arroyo ruling clique was almost removed. Lessons must be learned from the failure to overthrow the Arroyo ruling clique despite its extreme isolation and unpopularity. Errors must be reviewed and rectified so that the revolutionary mass movement can realize the full potential of the favorable objective situation.”
It further announced that:
“The crisis conditions, the growing strength of the revolutionary movement, the rapid rate at which the Aquino regime is being expose as anti-people, anti-national, anti-democratic, corrupt and brutal are such that the revolutionary forces can build a broad united front and generate a mass movement to isolate and remove the Aquino ruling clique from power in a relatively short period of time.”
One may conclude that the CPP is just boasting by making such bold pronouncement against the PNoy administration. But let us take a close look at its so-called five-year plan and examine one by one its essential components and elements, and the objective condition of the ground in order to determine if indeed it is capable of doing what it is saying; if it can attain victory in five to ten years time from today.
The Party aims to accomplish the following objectives in the next five years:
• “In ideological building, the Party must ensure that all current full members briefly review the Party Constitution and Program and the content of the basic Party course and proceed quickly to accelerate the basic education of the candidate-members in connection with fulfilling the tasks for advancing the people's war in the next five years…”
(Comment: The acceleration of Party education is necessary to facilitate the acceptance of more Full-pledge Members from the ranks of “advance mass activists” especially in the urban areas.)
• “We need to increase our Party membership from the current tens of thousands to at least 250,000 in the next five years or so at the annual average of one Party member recruiting another to become a Party member. Party organs and units at all levels, from the branch to the Central
Committee must assess the Party membership and plan how the current Party members within their respective scopes can be increased…We must be able to deploy more Party members from the ranks of workers and the educated youth for service in the people's army and for mass work and building Party branches, mass organizations and organs of political power in the countryside. We must systematically send urban-based Party candidate-members and mass activists to do social investigation and mass work in the countryside and become Red fighters of the people's army…”
(Comment: It would mean that there would be more Party Members from the ranks of workers, youth-students and professionals joining the NPA in the next five years or before the next Presidential elections.)
• “In political building, the Party must propagate the new-democratic revolution and generate the mass movement by arousing, organizing and mobilizing the toiling masses of workers and peasants and all other patriotic and progressive strata and sectors in both urban and rural areas…
“The urban-based mass movement must grow in strength and advance in order to raise the burning issues affecting the lives of the people, to enlighten and militate the people and press hard against the ruling clique and the entire ruling system. There is no dearth of outstanding issues that should be addressed by the mass movement. The incessant increases in oil prices, the rising costs of living, widespread unemployment, landlessness and homelessness, rural poverty, hunger, the spread of disease and the rapid deterioration of social services all infuriate the people and rouse them to political action…”
(Comment: This means that the Party would increase its united front efforts to correspond the intensification of armed struggle thru an enlarged NPA.)
• “The New People's Army is the main organization of the Party for arousing, organizing and mobilizing the people wherever it operates in the countryside. Its units can effectively engage in mass work and initiate the formation of organs of political power, mass organizations, militia in localities and self-defense units in mass organizations. But responsibilities for mass organizing must be continually passed on to the local Party branches and the mass organizations in order to allow the units of the people's army increasingly to have definite periods of politico-military training and combat duty…”
• “The NPA must relentlessly carry out tactical offensives in order to seize weapons and increase the thousands of Red fighters into many thousands more and cover all the rural congressional districts within the next five years…”
(Comment: The Party objective is to increase the NPA arms stockpile to at least 25,000 rifles at the end of the five-year period.)
• “The revolutionary armed struggle must be integrated with the agrarian revolution and the building of revolutionary bases…”
• “At every given time in the struggle, the Party, the NPA and the NDFP have a definite amount of strength. But through united front work, they can augment, amplify and maximize such strength directly or indirectly through allied forces...”
(Comment: It means an increase in alliance work.)
• “We have long respected and supported the right of the Moro people to self-determination. Their revolutionary struggle benefits ours and ours benefits theirs. We must maintain our alliance with them for our mutual benefit against US imperialism and the reactionary Manila government. The US and the local reactionaries must be frustrated in their scheme to derail or destroy either the NDFP or the MILF in order to turn the full force of the reactionary armed forces against either of them. We are confident that the NDFP-MILF alliance will hold because their common enemy cannot meet the just demands of the Filipino people and the Moro people.”
(Comment: The CPP-NPA-NDF earlier allied itself with the MNLF before it entered into and signed a Final Peace Agreement with the government in 1996.)
• “The New People's Army must be resolute and fierce in strengthening itself and striving to defeat Oplan Bayanihan in the same revolutionary spirit that it strengthened itself and defeated the 14-year Marcos fascist dictatorship and all succeeding internal security plans of the reactionary successors of Marcos. The NPA must raise higher its revolutionary consciousness and fighting capability and intensify its tactical offensives in order to advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate within one or two five-year plans…
(Comment: The CPP-NPA-NDF aims to advance to strategic stalemate within a time frame of five to 10 years, i.e., from 2011 to 2016 or from 2011 to 2021.)
“The NPA must firmly and vigorously pursue the strategic line of protracted people's war. This involves encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating sufficient armed strength here over a protracted period of time until it gains the capability to launch the strategic offensive against the enemy holdouts in the cities and seize political power on a nationwide scale…”
• “It must exercise flexibility in the use of tactics of concentration, dispersal and shifting. It concentrates strength superior to that of a target enemy unit for attack. It disperses to deprive the enemy of any visible target or when it conducts mass work among the people. It shifts position when it evades the attack of a superior enemy force and maneuvers to gain time or an advantageous position.”
• “The existing 110 guerrilla fronts must continuously be developed so that all or most of them become company-size fronts and give rise to new guerrilla fronts. They must increase to at least 180 guerrilla fronts in the next five years…”
(Comment: This is in consonant with the objective of one guerilla front for each rural congressional district in the country.)
• “Guerrilla fronts adjacent to each other are clustered to form a wider war theater that enables a wider scope of command, coordination, mutual support and maneuver…”
(Comment: Such is the recent case in Claver where three guerilla fronts had combined their strengths to simultaneously attacked three mining and mineral processing firms.)
• “The Party must direct the formation of various levels of command in order to make effective deployment of NPA units for various objectives on varied scales…”
• “The NPA has already accumulated a critical mass for bold intensification of guerrilla warfare and advance toward a higher stage in the people's war. The people's army must relentlessly launch tactical offensives in order to seize weapons for creating new units, to increasingly change the balance of forces and to move from the stage of strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. It must aim to accumulate 25,000 rifles in order to develop into the stage of the strategic stalemate…
“Every level of command and every unit of the NPA must be conscious of its current armed strength, estimate and plan or target how many more weapons can be seized within a certain period and how to carry out the tactical offensives to seize weapons. The people's army must always be alert to opportunities for tactical offensives aimed at seizing weapons.
“The whole array of the structure of force of the NPA which should include regional forces, local forces, people's militia and urban partisans must continue to wage intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base in order to seize firearms and develop the capability of platoons and companies to wipe out enemy units. The main form of tactical offensives must be annihilative, the objective being to wipe out enemy units in order to seize weapons and demoralize the enemy forces.”
(Comment: Heavily-guarded mining sites are good sources of firearms as proven in the Claver incident and other NPA raids and attacks prior to it.)
• “But certain other tactical offensives must be undertaken to inflict attrition and wear down the enemy forces. These include partisan warfare in urban areas, sparrow warfare, sniping operations, land mine warfare, interdiction of the fuel and supply lines of the enemy and destruction of military vehicles, depots and other fixed installations that are being used against the people's army…”
(Comment: The NPA has already carried out all these instructions.)
• “The extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare will yield additional weapons and additional fighting units, improve the tactics and technique of the people's army and raise higher command effectiveness at every level in terms of formations and territorial scope. It will produce the elements of regular mobile warfare, especially when the NPA companies begin to cohere or increasingly coordinate in carrying out tactical offensives. The new and higher level of warfare will be attained on the basis of the victories of guerrilla warfare.”
(Comment: In advancing to strategic stalemate, the NPA is expected to engage government forces in semi-conventional techniques that would require larger formations such as company or battalion. In the recent Claver incident, the NPA was able to raise a battalion size force without being detected and pre-empted by the government.)
• “The revolutionary armed struggle is facilitated when the reactionary armed forces, police and paramilitary forces tend to disintegrate. Special units of the Party as well as close friends and relatives who are on the revolutionary side must encourage the officers and rank-and-file personnel of the reactionary armed forces to take a patriotic and progressive position on issues and to act in the national and democratic interests of the Filipino people.”
(Comment: The NPA would induce some sympathetic AFP, PNP and other armed services to betray the government by switching side. In the Claver incident, there is no evidence to this effect yet.)
• “In guerrilla fronts, certain alliances can be formed by which local reactionary government units can be used to prevent or counter the worst enemy military operations. But the guerrilla fronts can increase to such a great number that they can cover all or most of the rural congressional districts, reduce or eliminate the power of reactionary local governments, and cohere to form relatively stable base areas.”
(Comment: Such is the current case of the City Government of Davao under the Duterte daughter-and-father administration. A recent media leak revealed the unholy alliance between the Dutertes and the NPA in Davao.)
• “The people's army must dispatch units to arrest for prosecution the plunderers, violators of human rights, local tyrants, the most antisocial criminal elements and enemy informers. Such units must be prepared to give battle to targets of arrest who are armed and dangerous or who head criminal armed groups. The local tyrants and the worst of exploiters include the evil landed gentry, the local warlords and those who grab the land, destroy the environment and rob the people of their natural resources…
“The most effective way for the people to stop the reactionary government from delivering the land and mineral resources to foreign corporations is to build an effective mass movement against them and to allow the people's army to disable and destroy the equipment and other facilities of the antinational and antipeople corporations and their local agents…”
(Comment: This is the pretext used by the CPP-NPA-NDF in staging the simultaneous attacks on three mining and mineral processing companies in Claver on October 3, and similar offensives the last few months.)
In an earlier Message on the 42nd anniversary of the CPP on December 26, 2010 entitled, “Fullfill the requirements for the advance of the people's war from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate,” the CPP Central Committee decreed that:
“Enterprises that do not comply with the rules and regulations of the people's democratic government, disregard and violate the welfare and interests of the people, and conduct abusive and antagonistic actions against the people must be banned, disabled or dismantled. These include those that engage in destructive large-scale logging, mining and plantations for export; plunder non-renewable resources; ruin the environment and take land away from land reform. The military forces and security agencies protecting these enterprises are targets for annihilation by the people's army.”
Immediately following the CPP CENCOM pronouncement, the NPA increased the tempo of its attacks on mining sites nationwide, the latest of which was in Claver, Surigao del Norte on Oct. 3, 2011.
On the other hand, take a hard look at the concrete condition in the Southern Mindanao Region as a case in point. The Army’s 10th Infantry Division has stationed a brigade of soldiers in each of the provinces of Compostela Valley, Davao Oriental and Davao del Norte including Davao City. This is not to mention a battalion of the Philippine National Police’s Special Action Force and the Regional Public Safety Battalion 11.
In Davao City – the country’s so-called killing field capital – the Army keep two infantry battalions and a counter-terrorism task force to fight the merged Guerilla Front 52 and Pulang Bagani Company 1 and some parts of Guerilla Front 54.
The consolidated Order of Battle, 3rd Quarter 2010 of the military and the police would show however that the number of NPA fighters did increase in 10ID PA’s AOR.
Despite the grandiose claim of the AFP and the PNP that the NPA has no more than five thousand warm bodies nationwide, the Maoist communist terrorists are still able to conduct successful tactical offensives not just in the Davao Region but also in North-Central and Northeastern Mindanao, Eastern and Western Visayas, Bicol, Southern Tagalog, Northern Luzon and elsewhere in the country.
The NPA is extensively and intensively using Improvised Explosive Devices – the terrorists’ weapons of choice – not just against military forces but also on some civilians as in the case of the recent Maco Massacre.
With threat and intimidation, the NPA is collecting millions of pesos in revolutionary taxes from businesses, individual traders and even from ordinary citizens. In the 4th Quarter of Current Year 2008, the Army 10th Infantry Division’s Joint Components Intelligence Coordinating Committee (JCICC) estimated that the Southern Mindanao Regional Committee, CPP-NPA-NDF was able to generate more than P19-million in revolutionary taxes alone, prompting the defense establishment to tag SMRC as the “mother of all regions.”
The figure was considered conservative as many individuals and businesses that paid revolutionary taxes refused to report and to cooperate with the police and the military as the government appeared helpless in curtailing the illegal activities of the Maoist communists.
Dr. John Whitehall, an Australian anti-communism missionary, had once toured the Philippines to investigate the CPP-NPA-NDF phenomena and concluded that:
“The Communist Party of the Philippines is committed to wrecking the economy of the nation in order to increase the miseries of the masses with the hope that they rise against the government and carry the communists into power.”
This reality brings to front the question the correctness of the military solution to the Maoist communist insurgency problem in the country.
When the NPA’s strength reached a high of some 25,000 men immediately after the EDSA Revolt of 1986, the total strength of the AFP to include the defunct Philippine Constabulary and the Integrated National Police is only around 150,000 or even less.
And yet the Ramos administration managed to bring down the number of insurgents and even split the Party into reaffirmist and rejectionist factions, forcing Joma Sison to order the Second Great Rectification Movement (SGRM) from 1992 to 1998.
To ANAD Partylist and many civil society groups, the military approach is not and is never a solution to the political issue of Communist insurgencies. It is a palliative. It would only prolong and worsen the problem. ANAD Partylist believes that while the military should be tasked to confront squarely the internal armed threats particularly that posed by the CPP-NPA-NDF, the civil authorities especially local officials including elected barangay leaders shall be obliged to take the lead role in addressing insurgencies in their respective localities, to ensure the delivery of basic services and to improve the standard of living of their constituents – in short, to address the root causes of insurgency.
ANAD Partylist also maintained that there is no point for the government to continue talking peace with the Maoist CPP-NPA-NDF as it never has a desire to abandon violence and bloody struggle in order to seize political power.
As the arms of the CPP-NPA-NDF extend to the international arena, ANAD Partylist also sees it fit for the Philippine government and the Filipino people to confront its shadows overseas.
It maintains that CPP-NPA-NDF should be deprived a good reason to agitate, organize and mobilize the people to destroy the nation’s democratic way of life and to illegally seize political power thru bloody revolution from our democratically-constituted government.
Along this line, the AFP is deemed correct in its desired end state in the Internal Peace and Security Plan BAYANIHAN which is to reduce the “capabilities of internal armed threats...to a level that they can no longer threaten the stability of the state and civil authorities can ensure the safety and well-being of the Filipino people.”
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