Long live the New People's Army
Onward to total victory!
Onward to total victory!
(This statement was made in the late 80s, as the New Peoples Army, despite the challenges set through time, tried enough to deal-not through the use of arms alone, but of services rendered to the people. It was also the start of rectification and eventually remolding of guerrilla forces into disciplined force capable of greater victories. Through its title stated, shows the willingness of red fighters to reap more victories, not just in the field of war, but on ceaseless service to the masses, being a weapon of the revolution.)
Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
March 29, 1989
Introduction
Twenty years have passed since the establishment of the New People's Army on March 29, 1969 under the leadership of the working class through the Communist Party of the Philippines. The NPA has made great achievements in strengthening itself as a revolutionary force, in building its mass base and in fighting for the national and democratic interests of the Filipino people against foreign and feudal domination.
The Communist Party of the Philippines and the entire Filipino people are proud of these achievements and celebrate them together with the Red commanders and fighters of the NPA. These achievements have been made possible by the hard struggle and sacrifices of the Party, the people's army and the revolutionary masses. The Party and the people honor the revolutionary martyrs and heroes.
In the entire history of the Philippines, the New People's Army has emerged as the largest, most widespread and most powerful army fighting for the national and social liberation of the people.
It has carried forward and brought to a new and higher level the revolutionary struggle of the Katipunan and the Philippine revolutionary army in the old democratic revolution as well as that of the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (HUKBALAHAP) and the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB).
Without the New People's Army, there is no light of hope for the Filipino people amidst the darkness cast over the Philippine archipelago by US imperialism and the local reactionary classes of big compradors and landlords.
The Filipino people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants, cherish and nourish the New People's Army because it is the fighting organization of their best sons and daughters and because it is the weapon for vanquishing the forces of darkness and winning total victory in the revolution.
The Communist Party of the Philippines and the entire Filipino people are proud of these achievements and celebrate them together with the Red commanders and fighters of the NPA. These achievements have been made possible by the hard struggle and sacrifices of the Party, the people's army and the revolutionary masses. The Party and the people honor the revolutionary martyrs and heroes.
In the entire history of the Philippines, the New People's Army has emerged as the largest, most widespread and most powerful army fighting for the national and social liberation of the people.
It has carried forward and brought to a new and higher level the revolutionary struggle of the Katipunan and the Philippine revolutionary army in the old democratic revolution as well as that of the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (HUKBALAHAP) and the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB).
Without the New People's Army, there is no light of hope for the Filipino people amidst the darkness cast over the Philippine archipelago by US imperialism and the local reactionary classes of big compradors and landlords.
The Filipino people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants, cherish and nourish the New People's Army because it is the fighting organization of their best sons and daughters and because it is the weapon for vanquishing the forces of darkness and winning total victory in the revolution.
1. Revolutionary Principles of the New People's Army
The New People's Army is the main instrument of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the National Democratic Front and the entire Filipino people for carrying out the central task of smashing the military-bureaucratic machinery of the reactionary state, seizing political power and bringing about the total victory of the national democratic revolution.
The New People's Army adheres to the revolutionary class line of new democratic revolution. This means following the leadership of the proletariat, building the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry, winning over the urban petty bourgeoisie as a basic force of the revolution, and the middle bourgeoisie as a positive force, and taking advantage of the splits among the big compradors and landlords in order to isolate and destroy the most reactionary big-comprador-landlord clique in the service of US imperialism.
Within the context of the national democratic revolution, the New People's Army pursues an antifeudal class line in the countryside. Following the leadership of the proletariat, it relies mainly on the poor peasants and farm workers, wins over the middle peasants, neutralizes the rich peasants and takes advantage of the splits among the landlords in order to isolate and destroy the power of the despotic landlords and in effect that of the entire landlord class.
The New People's Army plays the decisive role of bringing to the revolutionary fold the peasant majority of the people and in building the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the foundation of the national united front. through the people's army, the proletarian revolutionaries forge the most intimate links with the peasant masses.
In waging the revolutionary struggle, the new People's Army integrates armed struggle, agrarian revolution and base building. One cannot succeed without the two others.
The New People's Army is engaged in a protracted people's war. This involves the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside, accumulating strength in the countryside until the people's army becomes capable of seizing political power in the cities. The last twenty years have proven the correctness of this line.
The people's army grows from small and weak to big and strong by repeatedly and cumulatively defeating enemy forces. It is in the countryside where most of the people in the Philippines are, where the New People's Army has the widest room for maneuver and where it can build solid strength because of popular support and favorable terrain.
The protracted people's war involves three probable strategic stages of development: the defensive, stalemate and offensive. While on the strategic defensive, the New People's Army can launch tactical offensives to defeat the enemy piece by piece and accumulate strength.
Although strategically on the offensive, the enemy cannot use his military superiority to prevent the growth of the NPA, much less to crush it because he is blinded by his reactionary interests, gropes in the dark for the people's army and attacks the people wildly. Ultimately the NPA will win because it fights for a revolutionary and just cause and enjoys the support of the broad masses of the people. On the other hand, the AFP is bound to lose because it fights for the reactionary and anti-people interests of the ruling classes.
The peasant masses participate in the armed revolution not only because they must defend themselves from depredations of the enemy but because they are for genuine land reform and the entire national democratic program of the revolutionary movement.
The New People's Army adheres to the line of the Party that the solution of the agrarian problem is the main substance of the democratic revolution and has been instrumental in promoting the peasant movement and carrying out genuine land reform.
The New People's Army is determined to accomplish the minimum land reform program of reducing land rent, eliminating usury or controlling interest rates, improving the wages of farm workers, maintaining fair prices for farm products and enhancing agricultural and sideline production through elementary forms of cooperation and individual enterprises.
By relying on the strength of the revolutionary mass movement, the New People's Army is determined to ultimately realize on a nationwide scale the maximum land reform program of confiscating land from despotic landlords, redistributing the land to the peasants and distributing land at no cost to the tillers. Even now, the maximum land reform program has been carried out against despotic landlords and landgrabbers.
Genuine and thoroughgoing land reform enables the peasant masses to achieve economic and political liberation. This is possible only because there is a growing people's army to defend all the democratic gains made by the people.
The New People's Army does not simply strengthen its own organization but builds the necessary mass base for it and develops guerrilla fronts, guerrilla bases and guerrilla zones. Painstakingly building the people's political, organizational and military strength in the localities and developing whole barrios and municipalities into bastions of the armed revolution guarantees the survival, continuous growth and ultimate victory of the people's army.
It is an absolute commitment and necessity for the Party within the NPA and the NPA to build the organs of political power, the mass organizations, the Party and people's militia in the localities.
The organs of political power are committees of people's self-government from the village level upward. These are assisted by working committees in charge of mass organization, education, land reform, livelihood, finance, defense, health, arbitration, cultural affairs and other aspects of administration and social life.
The mass organization of workers, peasants, women, youth, cultural activists and the like provide a broad base for the organs of political power in the countryside. They are the source of the men and women in the local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units that are the reserves and active complements of the NPA in the defense of the people.
As it wages the principal form of revolutionary struggle--which is armed struggle--in the countryside, the NPA is highly conscious of the necessity for the broad masses of the people to wage all forms of struggle in both urban and rural areas.
There must be the integration, coordination and spiraling interaction of all forms of struggle--armed and unarmed, legal and illegal and underground and aboveground--until the strength of the people's army converges with the popular uprising to finally bring down the entire ruling system.
The people's army is the principal weapon for destroying the enemy's apparatuses of coercion but it takes all kinds of weapons, wielded by the people from various walks of life, to weaken and destroy the ruling system.
It would not have been possible to build the NPA on a national scale without the prior and continuing development of the legal democratic mass movement on a national scale. Many of the Party cadres in the NPA and rural areas have come from the urban mass organizations, especially those of the workers, youth, women and professionals.
To be ever victorious in armed struggle, the New People's Army must consistently adhere to the national democratic program, follow the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and gather the widest possible popular support through the National Democratic Front, the local organs of political power and the mass organizations in the urban and rural areas.
After victory of the national democratic revolution, the socialist revolution commences. The New People's Army is determined to help bring about and defend the revolutionary victories of the people at every stage of the Philippine revolution.
The New People's Army adheres to the revolutionary class line of new democratic revolution. This means following the leadership of the proletariat, building the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry, winning over the urban petty bourgeoisie as a basic force of the revolution, and the middle bourgeoisie as a positive force, and taking advantage of the splits among the big compradors and landlords in order to isolate and destroy the most reactionary big-comprador-landlord clique in the service of US imperialism.
Within the context of the national democratic revolution, the New People's Army pursues an antifeudal class line in the countryside. Following the leadership of the proletariat, it relies mainly on the poor peasants and farm workers, wins over the middle peasants, neutralizes the rich peasants and takes advantage of the splits among the landlords in order to isolate and destroy the power of the despotic landlords and in effect that of the entire landlord class.
The New People's Army plays the decisive role of bringing to the revolutionary fold the peasant majority of the people and in building the basic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the foundation of the national united front. through the people's army, the proletarian revolutionaries forge the most intimate links with the peasant masses.
In waging the revolutionary struggle, the new People's Army integrates armed struggle, agrarian revolution and base building. One cannot succeed without the two others.
The New People's Army is engaged in a protracted people's war. This involves the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside, accumulating strength in the countryside until the people's army becomes capable of seizing political power in the cities. The last twenty years have proven the correctness of this line.
The people's army grows from small and weak to big and strong by repeatedly and cumulatively defeating enemy forces. It is in the countryside where most of the people in the Philippines are, where the New People's Army has the widest room for maneuver and where it can build solid strength because of popular support and favorable terrain.
The protracted people's war involves three probable strategic stages of development: the defensive, stalemate and offensive. While on the strategic defensive, the New People's Army can launch tactical offensives to defeat the enemy piece by piece and accumulate strength.
Although strategically on the offensive, the enemy cannot use his military superiority to prevent the growth of the NPA, much less to crush it because he is blinded by his reactionary interests, gropes in the dark for the people's army and attacks the people wildly. Ultimately the NPA will win because it fights for a revolutionary and just cause and enjoys the support of the broad masses of the people. On the other hand, the AFP is bound to lose because it fights for the reactionary and anti-people interests of the ruling classes.
The peasant masses participate in the armed revolution not only because they must defend themselves from depredations of the enemy but because they are for genuine land reform and the entire national democratic program of the revolutionary movement.
The New People's Army adheres to the line of the Party that the solution of the agrarian problem is the main substance of the democratic revolution and has been instrumental in promoting the peasant movement and carrying out genuine land reform.
The New People's Army is determined to accomplish the minimum land reform program of reducing land rent, eliminating usury or controlling interest rates, improving the wages of farm workers, maintaining fair prices for farm products and enhancing agricultural and sideline production through elementary forms of cooperation and individual enterprises.
By relying on the strength of the revolutionary mass movement, the New People's Army is determined to ultimately realize on a nationwide scale the maximum land reform program of confiscating land from despotic landlords, redistributing the land to the peasants and distributing land at no cost to the tillers. Even now, the maximum land reform program has been carried out against despotic landlords and landgrabbers.
Genuine and thoroughgoing land reform enables the peasant masses to achieve economic and political liberation. This is possible only because there is a growing people's army to defend all the democratic gains made by the people.
The New People's Army does not simply strengthen its own organization but builds the necessary mass base for it and develops guerrilla fronts, guerrilla bases and guerrilla zones. Painstakingly building the people's political, organizational and military strength in the localities and developing whole barrios and municipalities into bastions of the armed revolution guarantees the survival, continuous growth and ultimate victory of the people's army.
It is an absolute commitment and necessity for the Party within the NPA and the NPA to build the organs of political power, the mass organizations, the Party and people's militia in the localities.
The organs of political power are committees of people's self-government from the village level upward. These are assisted by working committees in charge of mass organization, education, land reform, livelihood, finance, defense, health, arbitration, cultural affairs and other aspects of administration and social life.
The mass organization of workers, peasants, women, youth, cultural activists and the like provide a broad base for the organs of political power in the countryside. They are the source of the men and women in the local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units that are the reserves and active complements of the NPA in the defense of the people.
As it wages the principal form of revolutionary struggle--which is armed struggle--in the countryside, the NPA is highly conscious of the necessity for the broad masses of the people to wage all forms of struggle in both urban and rural areas.
There must be the integration, coordination and spiraling interaction of all forms of struggle--armed and unarmed, legal and illegal and underground and aboveground--until the strength of the people's army converges with the popular uprising to finally bring down the entire ruling system.
The people's army is the principal weapon for destroying the enemy's apparatuses of coercion but it takes all kinds of weapons, wielded by the people from various walks of life, to weaken and destroy the ruling system.
It would not have been possible to build the NPA on a national scale without the prior and continuing development of the legal democratic mass movement on a national scale. Many of the Party cadres in the NPA and rural areas have come from the urban mass organizations, especially those of the workers, youth, women and professionals.
To be ever victorious in armed struggle, the New People's Army must consistently adhere to the national democratic program, follow the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and gather the widest possible popular support through the National Democratic Front, the local organs of political power and the mass organizations in the urban and rural areas.
After victory of the national democratic revolution, the socialist revolution commences. The New People's Army is determined to help bring about and defend the revolutionary victories of the people at every stage of the Philippine revolution.
2. Development of the New People's Army
The Communist Party of the Philippines envisioned the New People's Army and provided for its establishment in the CPP Constitution ratified on December 26, 1968.
The re-establishment of the CPP under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism, in accordance with the general line of national democratic revolution and on the road of armed revolution coincided with the breakaway of the Red commanders and fighters in February 1969 from the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique which had usurped leadership over the old people's army.
Subsequently, the Communist Party of the Philippines brought together the experienced Red commanders and fighters of the old people's army and the proletarian revolutionary cadres who had come forward from the urban revolutionary mass movement in order to establish the New People's Army.
The NPA started with only sixty Red fighters, armed with nine automatic rifles and twenty-six inferior firearms; and direct rural mass base of some 80,000 people in the second district of Tarlac; and the hope of nationwide expansion offered by a few scores of Party cadres and hundreds of advance mass activists from the urban revolutionary mass movement of some 50,000 people in mass organizations.
In 1969 and 1970, the New People's Army was able to increase its armed strength to some 200 automatic rifles through tactical offensives, form and consolidate organs of political power and militate a peasant movement in the second district of Tarlac. It inspired the worker and youth movement in the cities.
The upsurge of armed struggle and the peasant movement coincided with the upsurge of the urban revolutionary mass movement. The enemy reacted by unleashing the division-size Task Force Lawin and the "Barrio Self-Defense Units" and by murdering peasant leaders in the countryside and by disrupting the mass actions of the youth and workers in the urban areas in a futile attempt to stop the surging anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement.
Until its disintegration in 1971, the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique prevented the expansion of the New People's Army beyond Mabalacat, Pampanga and a small portion of Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon. So, as a result of division-size enemy operations against the fledgling people's army, the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army shifted to Isabela.
Even before formal establishment of the New People's Army on March 29, 1969, a few cadres had been trained and dispatched to undertake revolutionary mass work in Isabela and Negros provinces. The first expansion team sent to Negros failed because some of its members engaged the police in a firefight before the mass base could be developed.
The few cadres assigned to Isabela were able to create a mass base of 150,000 and form scores of armed propaganda units of the New People's Army from an initial armed strength of only twenty rifles and handguns from Tarlac before the enemy formed the division-size Task Force Saranay to go after the New People's Army in 1971.
By that time, the NPA had expanded to several provinces in the Cagayan Valley and the Cordillera and trained a considerable number of cadres for nationwide expansion in the armed revolution. These cadres who had politico-military training and practical experience in rural mass work would be combined with other cadres produced by the First Quarter Storm of 197O and the entire 197O-72 upsurge of the progressive mass movement in cities all over the archipelago.
In 1971 and 1973, the 197O decision to create regional Party committees and regional commands of the NPA resulted in their formation in Northern Luzon, Central Luzon, Manila-Rizal, Southern Luzon, Western Visayas, Eastern Visayas and Mindanao.
Without the prior benefit of politico-military training in Isabela, cadres from the urban youth movement started the armed struggle in Camarines Sur in the Bicol region. In 1972, the NPA was able not only to recover lost precious ground in the second district of Tarlac but also to expand rapidly in most Central Luzon provinces.
When martial law was declared in September 1972, the skeletal nationwide network of regional Party committees and army commands was already building guerrilla zones at strategic points in all major islands of the country. For the Party and the NPA 1972-74 was a period of going nationwide, striking deep roots among the toiling masses and igniting the revolutionary armed struggle on a wide scale.
From 1972 to 1974, the declaration of martial law and imposition of fascist dictatorship on the country appeared to the US and local reactionaries to have succeeded in containing and suppressing the revolutionary mass movement, especially the main units of the NPA in Isabela and the urban mass movement. The newly organized regional Party and army organizations were confronted with many limitations and difficulties. The ill-experienced, ill-armed and small units of the people's army were highly vulnerable to the search and destroy tactics of the enemy. Hundreds of Party cadres and Red fighters were arrested and tortured or fell in the battlefield.
But on the whole, the fascist dictatorship had merely served to fan the flames of the revolutionary armed struggle. More Party cadres and mass activists stepped forward to join the underground and the armed revolutionary movement. Losses in one guerilla front were more than compensated for by the opening up and advance of others. By 1974, most of the regional Party and army organizations had struck deep roots among the masses and had become self-reliant.
In 1974, "Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines" was issued to clarify the nature, conduct and prospects of the revolutionary armed struggle in the Philippine archipelago and give confidence to the armed revolutionary movement. It gave answers to a series of questions, which if left unanswered, would have undermined the fighting spirit of the revolutionary movement.
In 1976, "Our Urgent Tasks" was issued to further clarify the situation between the enemy and the revolutionary movement; and to lay down the all-round tasks and practical methods for carrying out mass work and building popular support for the armed revolution and the legal democratic mass movement.
Up to 1979, the armed propaganda units and guerrilla squads were the widespread form of NPA units, topped by a few platoons as rallying point and strike force. The period of 1969-79, the first decade of the NPA, was one of laying the ground work for the armed revolution nationwide and developing guerrilla zones at the most strategic points in the country.
In 1979, the platoons and the company main units of Samar showed the entire nation how the revolutionary movement could be strengthened by launching frequent tactical offensives. By this time, the Party and the NPA had built a sufficiently wide and deep mass support in the island.
The period from 198O to 1983 was characterized by the rapid establishment and expansion of guerrilla fronts throughout the country. Platoons, oversized platoons and companies came into prominence in Samar, Mindanao and elsewhere. Tactical offensives by the NPA became widespread, including sparrow and partisan operations in the plains and the urban areas.
In 1983, the strength of the armed revolutionary movement reached the critical mass of 5,000 high-powered rifles, resulting in the intensification of the armed struggle and the rapid expansion of the mass base all over the archipelago.
Taking the lead in the phenomenal advance of the armed struggle since 1981 were the NPA units in Mindanao. Such factors as favorable terrain, worsening economic crisis, growing social unrest and a developing political upsurge were fully taken advantage of by the Party and the NPA to rapidly advance the guerrilla warfare and the mass movement in the rural and urban areas of Mindanao.
From 1983 to the middle of 1985, the armed struggle in Mindanao reached an unprecedented scale and level of intensification by launching repeated company-size operations in combination with widespread operations by the squads and platoons of local guerrillas and by partisan units in the urban centers. At the same time, the masses in urban and rural areas launched militant protest actions punctuated by general people's and workers' strikes. These struggles taken together delivered one of the more powerful blows which caused the eventual overthrow of the Marcos fascist regime.
By the end of 1984, certain problems resulting from enemy moves to counter the NPA's company operations, the backlog in consolidation work in the Party and mass base, and the need to sustain and develop bigger formations were increasingly felt. But the revolutionary forces became too preoccupied with the actual intensification of military actions and mass campaigns and struggles to give prompt and full attention to these problems, especially those of consolidation.
This was the situation in Mindanao when the problem of enemy infiltration was detected in the middle of 1985. Unfortunately, this problem was overestimated and mishandled to the point of causing dislocations, confusion and demoralization within the revolutionary ranks. The result was some weakening of the revolutionary process but not to the extent of bringing the movement to a level below that of 1983.
In the other regions of the country, company-size units appeared one after another. Samar rebuilt its company and formed new ones in 1983--two years after dispersing their first company into platoons in 1981. Northern Luzon followed suit in late 1984. Then Negros, Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Panay and Central Luzon in 1985. These companies were built on top of numerous platoons and squads operating in the front, district and section levels.
Partisan units for the plains and the urban centers outside of Mindanao were set up in 1985, some in 1984. Their full impact would be felt in the ensuing years. Of special significance is the rebuilding of the armed city partisans in Manila-Rizal region in 1984 and its development in the years that followed.
Amidst all these, the Party Central Committee found it timely to convene the Party's First National Military Conference in December 1984 to assess the fast-developing armed struggle and the whole military situation obtaining in the country, exchange experiences in army building and armed struggle, and draft resolutions concerning the NPA's national command structure, standard training courses for officers and ordinary fighters, and guidelines for the building of regular companies and partisan units.
As 1985 ended, the NPA approached the strength of 7,000 high-powered rifles. The nationwide armed struggle led by the Party played an undeniably crucial and outstanding role in bringing about the downfall of the Marcos fascist regime.
During the first year of the Aquino regime, there was a slowdown of the armed struggle due to a decision of the Party leadership to effect some restraint in the conduct of the armed struggle in the face of the new political situation. Another factor was the indecisiveness brought about by internal debates regarding the new regime and the democratic possibilities it offered. Tactical offensives stopped for sixty days during the ceasefire period.
But it was not all political. The fighting units of the NPA were still having difficulties learning how to cope with the bigger formations, armor, artillery and air support, and fortifications being increasingly employed by the enemy since 1985.
Despite the complications and the difficulties, the revolutionary forces, especially those in Northern Luzon, carried high the banner of armed revolution and accounted for the increase of overall armed strength by several hundreds of high-powered rifles.
Soon after the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement in early 1987, the NPA went on a nationally coordinated offensive campaign--its first ever--to counter the declaration of total war by Aquino and the AFP's vicious campaign of terror. In this military campaign, the combination of annihilative and attritive attacks on the enemy was first tested on such a wide scale and level of intensity. Coupled with the nationwide people's strike and other mass protest actions, the NPA's campaign dealt a powerful blow against the US-Aquino regime's low-intensity warfare and fueled the violent conflicts among the reactionaries which erupted in the August 27 coup d'etat.
Since 1987 the NPA has achieved an unprecedented level of intensity in the armed struggle through tactical offensives and political work. There has been a dramatic rise in company- and platoon-size tactical offensives, and a notable increase in battalion-size operations in Northern Luzon, Samar and Mindanao. More enemy officers and men have been captured and more of his armored vehicles and helicopters have been destroyed. There has been a big improvement in command ability and in military tactics and techniques.
The NPA in every region continues to form platoons and companies under guerrilla front commands and does not cease to form armed propaganda teams, full-time guerrilla squads, armed city partisan teams, militia units and self-defense units.
The revolutionary forces in Mindanao have recovered in 1987 from the internal problems and damage wrought by intense enemy attacks. After a brief period of dispersing the armed units to help in mass work and military work in the localities, the company formations were rebuilt and more platoons established to gain more initiative and flexibility against the enemy's regular base, the Party and army organization is being attended to, but not without the difficulties caused by the sustained and large-scale enemy operations.
Today, the NPA has 10,000 guerilla fighters armed with high-powered rifles and another 20,000 guerilla fighters with inferior weapons. It operates in more than 60 guerilla fronts in 65 out of the 73 Philippine provinces, 800 of the 1,500 Philippine cities and municipalities and in 12,000 villages.
NPA regulars are augmented by the armed propaganda teams, local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units. The NPA has deployed armed city partisans and self-defense units in most cities of the Philippines. The armed city partisans are punishing the enemy and seizing a considerable number of firearms from him even in his own rear areas.
The NPA enjoys the support of the local Party organizations, the organs of political power and mass organizations which it has helped to create and has defended from enemy attacks. The nationwide mass base in ten million people in both rural and urban areas. From this mass base the revolutionary movement can reach the rest of the Filipino people.
The re-establishment of the CPP under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism, in accordance with the general line of national democratic revolution and on the road of armed revolution coincided with the breakaway of the Red commanders and fighters in February 1969 from the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique which had usurped leadership over the old people's army.
Subsequently, the Communist Party of the Philippines brought together the experienced Red commanders and fighters of the old people's army and the proletarian revolutionary cadres who had come forward from the urban revolutionary mass movement in order to establish the New People's Army.
The NPA started with only sixty Red fighters, armed with nine automatic rifles and twenty-six inferior firearms; and direct rural mass base of some 80,000 people in the second district of Tarlac; and the hope of nationwide expansion offered by a few scores of Party cadres and hundreds of advance mass activists from the urban revolutionary mass movement of some 50,000 people in mass organizations.
In 1969 and 1970, the New People's Army was able to increase its armed strength to some 200 automatic rifles through tactical offensives, form and consolidate organs of political power and militate a peasant movement in the second district of Tarlac. It inspired the worker and youth movement in the cities.
The upsurge of armed struggle and the peasant movement coincided with the upsurge of the urban revolutionary mass movement. The enemy reacted by unleashing the division-size Task Force Lawin and the "Barrio Self-Defense Units" and by murdering peasant leaders in the countryside and by disrupting the mass actions of the youth and workers in the urban areas in a futile attempt to stop the surging anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement.
Until its disintegration in 1971, the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique prevented the expansion of the New People's Army beyond Mabalacat, Pampanga and a small portion of Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon. So, as a result of division-size enemy operations against the fledgling people's army, the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army shifted to Isabela.
Even before formal establishment of the New People's Army on March 29, 1969, a few cadres had been trained and dispatched to undertake revolutionary mass work in Isabela and Negros provinces. The first expansion team sent to Negros failed because some of its members engaged the police in a firefight before the mass base could be developed.
The few cadres assigned to Isabela were able to create a mass base of 150,000 and form scores of armed propaganda units of the New People's Army from an initial armed strength of only twenty rifles and handguns from Tarlac before the enemy formed the division-size Task Force Saranay to go after the New People's Army in 1971.
By that time, the NPA had expanded to several provinces in the Cagayan Valley and the Cordillera and trained a considerable number of cadres for nationwide expansion in the armed revolution. These cadres who had politico-military training and practical experience in rural mass work would be combined with other cadres produced by the First Quarter Storm of 197O and the entire 197O-72 upsurge of the progressive mass movement in cities all over the archipelago.
In 1971 and 1973, the 197O decision to create regional Party committees and regional commands of the NPA resulted in their formation in Northern Luzon, Central Luzon, Manila-Rizal, Southern Luzon, Western Visayas, Eastern Visayas and Mindanao.
Without the prior benefit of politico-military training in Isabela, cadres from the urban youth movement started the armed struggle in Camarines Sur in the Bicol region. In 1972, the NPA was able not only to recover lost precious ground in the second district of Tarlac but also to expand rapidly in most Central Luzon provinces.
When martial law was declared in September 1972, the skeletal nationwide network of regional Party committees and army commands was already building guerrilla zones at strategic points in all major islands of the country. For the Party and the NPA 1972-74 was a period of going nationwide, striking deep roots among the toiling masses and igniting the revolutionary armed struggle on a wide scale.
From 1972 to 1974, the declaration of martial law and imposition of fascist dictatorship on the country appeared to the US and local reactionaries to have succeeded in containing and suppressing the revolutionary mass movement, especially the main units of the NPA in Isabela and the urban mass movement. The newly organized regional Party and army organizations were confronted with many limitations and difficulties. The ill-experienced, ill-armed and small units of the people's army were highly vulnerable to the search and destroy tactics of the enemy. Hundreds of Party cadres and Red fighters were arrested and tortured or fell in the battlefield.
But on the whole, the fascist dictatorship had merely served to fan the flames of the revolutionary armed struggle. More Party cadres and mass activists stepped forward to join the underground and the armed revolutionary movement. Losses in one guerilla front were more than compensated for by the opening up and advance of others. By 1974, most of the regional Party and army organizations had struck deep roots among the masses and had become self-reliant.
In 1974, "Specific Characteristics of People's War in the Philippines" was issued to clarify the nature, conduct and prospects of the revolutionary armed struggle in the Philippine archipelago and give confidence to the armed revolutionary movement. It gave answers to a series of questions, which if left unanswered, would have undermined the fighting spirit of the revolutionary movement.
In 1976, "Our Urgent Tasks" was issued to further clarify the situation between the enemy and the revolutionary movement; and to lay down the all-round tasks and practical methods for carrying out mass work and building popular support for the armed revolution and the legal democratic mass movement.
Up to 1979, the armed propaganda units and guerrilla squads were the widespread form of NPA units, topped by a few platoons as rallying point and strike force. The period of 1969-79, the first decade of the NPA, was one of laying the ground work for the armed revolution nationwide and developing guerrilla zones at the most strategic points in the country.
In 1979, the platoons and the company main units of Samar showed the entire nation how the revolutionary movement could be strengthened by launching frequent tactical offensives. By this time, the Party and the NPA had built a sufficiently wide and deep mass support in the island.
The period from 198O to 1983 was characterized by the rapid establishment and expansion of guerrilla fronts throughout the country. Platoons, oversized platoons and companies came into prominence in Samar, Mindanao and elsewhere. Tactical offensives by the NPA became widespread, including sparrow and partisan operations in the plains and the urban areas.
In 1983, the strength of the armed revolutionary movement reached the critical mass of 5,000 high-powered rifles, resulting in the intensification of the armed struggle and the rapid expansion of the mass base all over the archipelago.
Taking the lead in the phenomenal advance of the armed struggle since 1981 were the NPA units in Mindanao. Such factors as favorable terrain, worsening economic crisis, growing social unrest and a developing political upsurge were fully taken advantage of by the Party and the NPA to rapidly advance the guerrilla warfare and the mass movement in the rural and urban areas of Mindanao.
From 1983 to the middle of 1985, the armed struggle in Mindanao reached an unprecedented scale and level of intensification by launching repeated company-size operations in combination with widespread operations by the squads and platoons of local guerrillas and by partisan units in the urban centers. At the same time, the masses in urban and rural areas launched militant protest actions punctuated by general people's and workers' strikes. These struggles taken together delivered one of the more powerful blows which caused the eventual overthrow of the Marcos fascist regime.
By the end of 1984, certain problems resulting from enemy moves to counter the NPA's company operations, the backlog in consolidation work in the Party and mass base, and the need to sustain and develop bigger formations were increasingly felt. But the revolutionary forces became too preoccupied with the actual intensification of military actions and mass campaigns and struggles to give prompt and full attention to these problems, especially those of consolidation.
This was the situation in Mindanao when the problem of enemy infiltration was detected in the middle of 1985. Unfortunately, this problem was overestimated and mishandled to the point of causing dislocations, confusion and demoralization within the revolutionary ranks. The result was some weakening of the revolutionary process but not to the extent of bringing the movement to a level below that of 1983.
In the other regions of the country, company-size units appeared one after another. Samar rebuilt its company and formed new ones in 1983--two years after dispersing their first company into platoons in 1981. Northern Luzon followed suit in late 1984. Then Negros, Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Panay and Central Luzon in 1985. These companies were built on top of numerous platoons and squads operating in the front, district and section levels.
Partisan units for the plains and the urban centers outside of Mindanao were set up in 1985, some in 1984. Their full impact would be felt in the ensuing years. Of special significance is the rebuilding of the armed city partisans in Manila-Rizal region in 1984 and its development in the years that followed.
Amidst all these, the Party Central Committee found it timely to convene the Party's First National Military Conference in December 1984 to assess the fast-developing armed struggle and the whole military situation obtaining in the country, exchange experiences in army building and armed struggle, and draft resolutions concerning the NPA's national command structure, standard training courses for officers and ordinary fighters, and guidelines for the building of regular companies and partisan units.
As 1985 ended, the NPA approached the strength of 7,000 high-powered rifles. The nationwide armed struggle led by the Party played an undeniably crucial and outstanding role in bringing about the downfall of the Marcos fascist regime.
During the first year of the Aquino regime, there was a slowdown of the armed struggle due to a decision of the Party leadership to effect some restraint in the conduct of the armed struggle in the face of the new political situation. Another factor was the indecisiveness brought about by internal debates regarding the new regime and the democratic possibilities it offered. Tactical offensives stopped for sixty days during the ceasefire period.
But it was not all political. The fighting units of the NPA were still having difficulties learning how to cope with the bigger formations, armor, artillery and air support, and fortifications being increasingly employed by the enemy since 1985.
Despite the complications and the difficulties, the revolutionary forces, especially those in Northern Luzon, carried high the banner of armed revolution and accounted for the increase of overall armed strength by several hundreds of high-powered rifles.
Soon after the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement in early 1987, the NPA went on a nationally coordinated offensive campaign--its first ever--to counter the declaration of total war by Aquino and the AFP's vicious campaign of terror. In this military campaign, the combination of annihilative and attritive attacks on the enemy was first tested on such a wide scale and level of intensity. Coupled with the nationwide people's strike and other mass protest actions, the NPA's campaign dealt a powerful blow against the US-Aquino regime's low-intensity warfare and fueled the violent conflicts among the reactionaries which erupted in the August 27 coup d'etat.
Since 1987 the NPA has achieved an unprecedented level of intensity in the armed struggle through tactical offensives and political work. There has been a dramatic rise in company- and platoon-size tactical offensives, and a notable increase in battalion-size operations in Northern Luzon, Samar and Mindanao. More enemy officers and men have been captured and more of his armored vehicles and helicopters have been destroyed. There has been a big improvement in command ability and in military tactics and techniques.
The NPA in every region continues to form platoons and companies under guerrilla front commands and does not cease to form armed propaganda teams, full-time guerrilla squads, armed city partisan teams, militia units and self-defense units.
The revolutionary forces in Mindanao have recovered in 1987 from the internal problems and damage wrought by intense enemy attacks. After a brief period of dispersing the armed units to help in mass work and military work in the localities, the company formations were rebuilt and more platoons established to gain more initiative and flexibility against the enemy's regular base, the Party and army organization is being attended to, but not without the difficulties caused by the sustained and large-scale enemy operations.
Today, the NPA has 10,000 guerilla fighters armed with high-powered rifles and another 20,000 guerilla fighters with inferior weapons. It operates in more than 60 guerilla fronts in 65 out of the 73 Philippine provinces, 800 of the 1,500 Philippine cities and municipalities and in 12,000 villages.
NPA regulars are augmented by the armed propaganda teams, local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units. The NPA has deployed armed city partisans and self-defense units in most cities of the Philippines. The armed city partisans are punishing the enemy and seizing a considerable number of firearms from him even in his own rear areas.
The NPA enjoys the support of the local Party organizations, the organs of political power and mass organizations which it has helped to create and has defended from enemy attacks. The nationwide mass base in ten million people in both rural and urban areas. From this mass base the revolutionary movement can reach the rest of the Filipino people.
3. National and International Circumstances
There are those who think that the replacement of the barefaced fascist dictatorship of Marcos by the Aquino regime has removed the basis for the existence and growth of the New People's Army the entire process of armed revolution.
Among these wishful thinkers are the new puppet ruling cliques and its rabid supporters, and the very forces, especially the United States, that had instigated the Marcos dictatorship and expected it to destroy what was then a newly-resumed armed revolutionary movement.
The euphoria over the downfall of Marcos and the rise of Aquino to the presidency is gone. The stark realities, especially the fundamental problems which brought about the fascist dictatorship, confront everyone.
There has been merely a change from one puppet ruling clique to another. US imperialist domination and the class rule of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class persist. The Filipino people continue to suffer increasingly acute oppression and exploitation.
Even as the fascist dictator has been overthrown, the same coercive apparatuses of the counter-revolutionary state remain. The same fascists in the military continue to attack the people at an accelerated rate and serve the exploiting classes and their corrupt politicians.
The very same socio-economic and political crisis that brought about the rise, decline and fall of the Marcos dictatorship continues to worsen and undermine the US-Aquino regime.
This new puppet regime is in a far worse situation than the old regime economically and financially. It is ever begging for new loans and debt reschedulings just to keep up with the ever mounting foreign debt service payments.
The accumulated foreign debt has risen to $3O billion and debt service runs at $3.5 billion annually. Under the Aquino regime's latest Letter of Intent submitted to the International Monetary Fund this debt burden will remain at that high level up to 1992. The debt service is more than 6O percent of export earnings made from raw-material exports of the agrarian economy and some low value-added reexports.
The trade deficit remains high. Last year's import bill was US$8.7 billion while export income was US$6.9 billion, or a deficit of $1.8 billion.
The Aquino regime claims a GNP growth rate in 1988 that is higher than what it projected. But this was due to consumption-led expenditures, especially by the government, that cannot be maintained. There is no development of the productive system beyond that of raw-material production-for-export and import-dependent manufacturing. There is no real industrialization to propel sustained growth.
Foreign debt service gobble up 44 percent of government budgetary expenditures while the military eats up 22 percent (including military items concealed under departments other than that of national department). Under these terms alone, the reactionary government and armed forces are working hard to beat themselves.
There is no outlet for the ever increasing surplus labor in the country because of lack of national industrialization, the exhaustion of the land frontier and the dwindling of job opportunities for Filipinos abroad.
Unemployment runs at the rate of at least 45 percent if correct measurement is done. Inflation continues to cut down real wages and other incomes of the working people. A heavier tax burden is imposed on the working people and the middle social strata.
More than 7O percent of the people subsist below the poverty line and suffer the pangs of hunger and deprivation. The urban workers, the peasants and farm workers and even the middle social strata are increasingly being impoverished. Consequently social unrest is intensifying.
Amidst the impoverishment of the people, the corruption of the new ruling clique is conspicuous. It is made even more conspicuous by the fact that bureaucratic crooks and cronies of those in power are looting the government in deeper financial bankruptcy.
The contradictions among factions of the same exploiting classes are becoming more and more acute. The previous attempt of Marcos to monopolize the instruments of violence has given way to a factionalization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the rapid arming of private reactionary groups.
The restoration of certain institutions and processes of the pre-fascist or pre-1972 period cannot moderate the rivalries of ruling class politicians and cannot contain the social unrest of the people. On the other hand, these institutions and processes fuel fratricidal conflict among the reactionaries and generate social unrest and popular protest.
The revolutionary movement continues to be seen as the just and necessary course for the broad masses of the people because the constitution, institutions and processes of the ruling system effectively exclude them from any substantive participation and run counter to their rights and interests.
The ruling system continues to run on a general course of disintegration because of the bitter conflicts of the reactionaries themselves. Fascism is a fact behind the flimsy bourgeois-democratic facade of the big comprador-landlord regime.
Under the blows of the ever growing armed revolutionary movement, the ruling system tends to crack and accelerate its own process of disintegration. This process in turn accelerates the process of revolution. In addition to the revolutionary movement led by the CPP there is the armed movement of the Moro people for national self-determination.
The Aquino regime has painted itself into a corner by trying like Marcos to pursue an armed conflict both with the revolutionary forces and its reactionary rivals. It has submitted itself to all the anti-national and anti-democratic demands of the US and local exploiting classes. Yet these very same counter-revolutionary forces never cease to put the regime under threat of replacement by coup d'etat.
The Aquino regime has adopted all US-dictated policies, like granting further incentives to multinational firms, assuming all the foreign debt obligations, retaining the US military bases and unleashing the low-intensity warfare against the people.
Laws against the workers--worse than those under Marcos--have been made. The right of workers to organize themselves, strike and engage in collective bargaining is being violated. Trade unionists are being murdered on and off picket lines by the military and police and by private security agencies.
The so-called land reform law of the regime is actually a law to prevent land reform and perpetuate landlordism. There is merely a cynical offer to the tenant masses to buy the land at the going market price negotiated by the state and the landlord; and to farm workers to buy shares of stocks in agricorporations controlled by foreign multinational firms and landlords.
The working people and their representatives are effectively excluded from state institutions and processes not only because of lack of election campaign money and lack of access to the means of information but more importantly because of the use of official and quasi-official violence through the military, police and paramilitary forces.
The people suffer not only the daily violence of exploitation but also the more dramatic violent acts of oppression when they rise in legal protest or in armed revolution. Low-intensity warfare has meant the acceleration of assassinations, torture and extrajudicial killings, massacres, bombardment of communities, fake surrenders and forced evacuations of the people from their homes and farms.
The US-Aquino regime offers nothing to the broad masses of the people but increased oppression and exploitation. Therefore, social unrest and popular resistance cannot but intensify. The ground for the armed revolution is ever more fertile than before.
Under the leadership of the CPP, the NPA bases itself and relies on the broad masses of the people. It draws from them the Red fighters and the resources for advancing the armed struggle and winning total victory in the national democratic revolution.
The NPA is conscious that it fights for the Filipino people's national and democratic interests in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution. The long-standing US imperialist domination of the Philippines, the attachment of the Philippine ruling system to the world capitalist system and escalating US intervention in the Philippines require the revolutionary forces to comprehend the situation of the United States and the world capitalist system and to seek the support of all anti-imperialist, progressive and proletarian revolutionary forces abroad.
The world capitalist system is in a deep-going crisis of overproduction. It has exhausted the general run of third world countries as an outlet for its surplus capital and surplus products. It has overburdened these countries with loans that they can never pay back but which they are compelled to service, amidst deteriorating terms of trade between manufactured imports from the developed countries and their raw-material exports and low value-added reexports (like garments and semiconductors).
The United States is in general decline as an imperialist power and as head of the capitalist alliance. It is already weighed down both by its military overspending and its importation of consumer products from other capitalist countries, especially Japan and West Germany, and a handful of so-called newly industrializing countries. The United States cannot solve its trade deficit problem without cutting down the trade surpluses of its allies. It cannot cut its budgetary deficit without shifting the burden of military spending to its allies.
As a consequence of this twin problem of enormous trade, and budgetary deficits, the United States has turned from beign the world's largest lender to being the largest borrower country. Its capability to expand economic and military aid to client governments like the Aquino regime is greatly diminished.
It is for this reason that the US is harnessing the help of other capitalist countries, especially Japan which has a huge foreign exchange surplus, to pitch in and make a go of the so-called Philippine Aid Plan (PAP). This much-vaunted assistance program, however, cannot get the Philippine economy out of bankruptcy and crisis. It suffers from the basic weaknesses of the projects it is intended to finance and from the constraints and conditions imposed by the contibutor-countries, chiefly by the United States.
The United States and the other capitalist countries are desperately seeking to utilize the socialist countries as a new outlet for surplus capital and surplus products. They intend to take advantage of the expressed need of the socialist countries for technology transfer from and expanded trade with the capitalist countries in order to accelerate their industrial development and meet the rising demand of their peoples for varied consumer products in accord with their desire to raise their standards of living.
Socialist countries can benefit from peaceful economic relations with the capitalist countries. they have to make decisions on what proportions of new technology, financial credit and consumer products from the capitalist countries that their economies ne4ed and can absorb and on the kind of products they can successfully sell in the world capitalist market. The positive and negative experiences of socialist countries offer valuable lessons in this regard. The trend of unity among socialist countries and among communist and workers parties that have been at odds for more than two decades is welcome. It sets the proper atmosphere for settling long-standing historical and ideological differences and developing mutual economic assistance among socialist countries, thus strengthening their position in competing peacefully with capitalist countries. Moreover, it creates the conditions for correctly reexamining their attitudes and policies towards national liberation movements.
But there is also the very strong impulse among socialist states toward carrying out the policy of peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Unavoidably, the drive for peaceful coexistence focuses on the relations between the major socialist countries and the United States, which is at the head of the capitalist countries and the main source of bellicosity since the end of World War II. There is consequently the tendency to play up the need for peaceful coexistence at the expense of the need for anti-imperialist unity and proletarian internationalism not only at the appropriate level of states but even at other levels of international relations.
The fact is that there is no conflict between the peaceful coexistence of states and the anti-imperialist struggle of the people. True, another world war ought to be averted, complete nuclear disarmament ought to be aimed for and the arms rce ought to be stopped under the principle of peaceful coexistence. But it also accords with the same principle of peaceful coexistence that no imperialist power be allowed to dominate, oppress, exploit, intervene in, subvert, agress against another country.
By all means, third world countries and peoples must continue to fight for political and economic liberation from foreign domination. The need for anti-imperialist unity and proletarian internationalism should not and can never be obscured.
The third world countries and peoples are under the strain of the worst form of finance capitalism. There is widespread social unrest and popular resistance. the third world states can either ride on the anti-imperialist movement or go under the wave of the revolutionary mass movement. In a neocolony like the Philippines, the Filipino people have every right to wage a revolution against US imperialism and the puppet regime.
The question has often been raised as to whether the Philippine revolutionary movement can find adequate international support in view of the perceived vigorous efforts of socialist countries to develop detente with the United States and discourage armed conflicts beyond their national boundaries. There is even the expressed view that the United States is assured of complete freedom to dominate the Philippines and concentrate its strength against the revolutionary movement.
Much too long has the US been misrepresenting the Philippine revolutionary movement as a creature of another superpower. No matter how vigorously the US tries to deny the fact that the armed revolution is the creation and instrument of the Filipino people in their resolute struggle to achieve national liberation and democracy, the peoples of the world appreciate the hard struggle, sacrifices, achievements and self-riliant advance of the Philippine revolutionary movement. The Philippine revolution has thus been getting increasing international support mainly from the anti-imperialist solidarity mass movement, progressive people's organizations and political parties all over the world.
While deeply appreciative of this support from abroad, the revolutionary forces are ever determined to wage a self-reliant people's war. They are also confident that the stronger and more effective the armed revolutionary movement becomes, the more abundant international support will flow in.
Certainly the time will come when the belligerency status of the revolutionary movement will have to be recognized by states and governments of the world. Subsequently, the time will come for states andgovernments to openly recognize and extends support to the People's Democratic Republic of the Philippines.
Among these wishful thinkers are the new puppet ruling cliques and its rabid supporters, and the very forces, especially the United States, that had instigated the Marcos dictatorship and expected it to destroy what was then a newly-resumed armed revolutionary movement.
The euphoria over the downfall of Marcos and the rise of Aquino to the presidency is gone. The stark realities, especially the fundamental problems which brought about the fascist dictatorship, confront everyone.
There has been merely a change from one puppet ruling clique to another. US imperialist domination and the class rule of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class persist. The Filipino people continue to suffer increasingly acute oppression and exploitation.
Even as the fascist dictator has been overthrown, the same coercive apparatuses of the counter-revolutionary state remain. The same fascists in the military continue to attack the people at an accelerated rate and serve the exploiting classes and their corrupt politicians.
The very same socio-economic and political crisis that brought about the rise, decline and fall of the Marcos dictatorship continues to worsen and undermine the US-Aquino regime.
This new puppet regime is in a far worse situation than the old regime economically and financially. It is ever begging for new loans and debt reschedulings just to keep up with the ever mounting foreign debt service payments.
The accumulated foreign debt has risen to $3O billion and debt service runs at $3.5 billion annually. Under the Aquino regime's latest Letter of Intent submitted to the International Monetary Fund this debt burden will remain at that high level up to 1992. The debt service is more than 6O percent of export earnings made from raw-material exports of the agrarian economy and some low value-added reexports.
The trade deficit remains high. Last year's import bill was US$8.7 billion while export income was US$6.9 billion, or a deficit of $1.8 billion.
The Aquino regime claims a GNP growth rate in 1988 that is higher than what it projected. But this was due to consumption-led expenditures, especially by the government, that cannot be maintained. There is no development of the productive system beyond that of raw-material production-for-export and import-dependent manufacturing. There is no real industrialization to propel sustained growth.
Foreign debt service gobble up 44 percent of government budgetary expenditures while the military eats up 22 percent (including military items concealed under departments other than that of national department). Under these terms alone, the reactionary government and armed forces are working hard to beat themselves.
There is no outlet for the ever increasing surplus labor in the country because of lack of national industrialization, the exhaustion of the land frontier and the dwindling of job opportunities for Filipinos abroad.
Unemployment runs at the rate of at least 45 percent if correct measurement is done. Inflation continues to cut down real wages and other incomes of the working people. A heavier tax burden is imposed on the working people and the middle social strata.
More than 7O percent of the people subsist below the poverty line and suffer the pangs of hunger and deprivation. The urban workers, the peasants and farm workers and even the middle social strata are increasingly being impoverished. Consequently social unrest is intensifying.
Amidst the impoverishment of the people, the corruption of the new ruling clique is conspicuous. It is made even more conspicuous by the fact that bureaucratic crooks and cronies of those in power are looting the government in deeper financial bankruptcy.
The contradictions among factions of the same exploiting classes are becoming more and more acute. The previous attempt of Marcos to monopolize the instruments of violence has given way to a factionalization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the rapid arming of private reactionary groups.
The restoration of certain institutions and processes of the pre-fascist or pre-1972 period cannot moderate the rivalries of ruling class politicians and cannot contain the social unrest of the people. On the other hand, these institutions and processes fuel fratricidal conflict among the reactionaries and generate social unrest and popular protest.
The revolutionary movement continues to be seen as the just and necessary course for the broad masses of the people because the constitution, institutions and processes of the ruling system effectively exclude them from any substantive participation and run counter to their rights and interests.
The ruling system continues to run on a general course of disintegration because of the bitter conflicts of the reactionaries themselves. Fascism is a fact behind the flimsy bourgeois-democratic facade of the big comprador-landlord regime.
Under the blows of the ever growing armed revolutionary movement, the ruling system tends to crack and accelerate its own process of disintegration. This process in turn accelerates the process of revolution. In addition to the revolutionary movement led by the CPP there is the armed movement of the Moro people for national self-determination.
The Aquino regime has painted itself into a corner by trying like Marcos to pursue an armed conflict both with the revolutionary forces and its reactionary rivals. It has submitted itself to all the anti-national and anti-democratic demands of the US and local exploiting classes. Yet these very same counter-revolutionary forces never cease to put the regime under threat of replacement by coup d'etat.
The Aquino regime has adopted all US-dictated policies, like granting further incentives to multinational firms, assuming all the foreign debt obligations, retaining the US military bases and unleashing the low-intensity warfare against the people.
Laws against the workers--worse than those under Marcos--have been made. The right of workers to organize themselves, strike and engage in collective bargaining is being violated. Trade unionists are being murdered on and off picket lines by the military and police and by private security agencies.
The so-called land reform law of the regime is actually a law to prevent land reform and perpetuate landlordism. There is merely a cynical offer to the tenant masses to buy the land at the going market price negotiated by the state and the landlord; and to farm workers to buy shares of stocks in agricorporations controlled by foreign multinational firms and landlords.
The working people and their representatives are effectively excluded from state institutions and processes not only because of lack of election campaign money and lack of access to the means of information but more importantly because of the use of official and quasi-official violence through the military, police and paramilitary forces.
The people suffer not only the daily violence of exploitation but also the more dramatic violent acts of oppression when they rise in legal protest or in armed revolution. Low-intensity warfare has meant the acceleration of assassinations, torture and extrajudicial killings, massacres, bombardment of communities, fake surrenders and forced evacuations of the people from their homes and farms.
The US-Aquino regime offers nothing to the broad masses of the people but increased oppression and exploitation. Therefore, social unrest and popular resistance cannot but intensify. The ground for the armed revolution is ever more fertile than before.
Under the leadership of the CPP, the NPA bases itself and relies on the broad masses of the people. It draws from them the Red fighters and the resources for advancing the armed struggle and winning total victory in the national democratic revolution.
The NPA is conscious that it fights for the Filipino people's national and democratic interests in the era of modern imperialism and proletarian revolution. The long-standing US imperialist domination of the Philippines, the attachment of the Philippine ruling system to the world capitalist system and escalating US intervention in the Philippines require the revolutionary forces to comprehend the situation of the United States and the world capitalist system and to seek the support of all anti-imperialist, progressive and proletarian revolutionary forces abroad.
The world capitalist system is in a deep-going crisis of overproduction. It has exhausted the general run of third world countries as an outlet for its surplus capital and surplus products. It has overburdened these countries with loans that they can never pay back but which they are compelled to service, amidst deteriorating terms of trade between manufactured imports from the developed countries and their raw-material exports and low value-added reexports (like garments and semiconductors).
The United States is in general decline as an imperialist power and as head of the capitalist alliance. It is already weighed down both by its military overspending and its importation of consumer products from other capitalist countries, especially Japan and West Germany, and a handful of so-called newly industrializing countries. The United States cannot solve its trade deficit problem without cutting down the trade surpluses of its allies. It cannot cut its budgetary deficit without shifting the burden of military spending to its allies.
As a consequence of this twin problem of enormous trade, and budgetary deficits, the United States has turned from beign the world's largest lender to being the largest borrower country. Its capability to expand economic and military aid to client governments like the Aquino regime is greatly diminished.
It is for this reason that the US is harnessing the help of other capitalist countries, especially Japan which has a huge foreign exchange surplus, to pitch in and make a go of the so-called Philippine Aid Plan (PAP). This much-vaunted assistance program, however, cannot get the Philippine economy out of bankruptcy and crisis. It suffers from the basic weaknesses of the projects it is intended to finance and from the constraints and conditions imposed by the contibutor-countries, chiefly by the United States.
The United States and the other capitalist countries are desperately seeking to utilize the socialist countries as a new outlet for surplus capital and surplus products. They intend to take advantage of the expressed need of the socialist countries for technology transfer from and expanded trade with the capitalist countries in order to accelerate their industrial development and meet the rising demand of their peoples for varied consumer products in accord with their desire to raise their standards of living.
Socialist countries can benefit from peaceful economic relations with the capitalist countries. they have to make decisions on what proportions of new technology, financial credit and consumer products from the capitalist countries that their economies ne4ed and can absorb and on the kind of products they can successfully sell in the world capitalist market. The positive and negative experiences of socialist countries offer valuable lessons in this regard. The trend of unity among socialist countries and among communist and workers parties that have been at odds for more than two decades is welcome. It sets the proper atmosphere for settling long-standing historical and ideological differences and developing mutual economic assistance among socialist countries, thus strengthening their position in competing peacefully with capitalist countries. Moreover, it creates the conditions for correctly reexamining their attitudes and policies towards national liberation movements.
But there is also the very strong impulse among socialist states toward carrying out the policy of peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Unavoidably, the drive for peaceful coexistence focuses on the relations between the major socialist countries and the United States, which is at the head of the capitalist countries and the main source of bellicosity since the end of World War II. There is consequently the tendency to play up the need for peaceful coexistence at the expense of the need for anti-imperialist unity and proletarian internationalism not only at the appropriate level of states but even at other levels of international relations.
The fact is that there is no conflict between the peaceful coexistence of states and the anti-imperialist struggle of the people. True, another world war ought to be averted, complete nuclear disarmament ought to be aimed for and the arms rce ought to be stopped under the principle of peaceful coexistence. But it also accords with the same principle of peaceful coexistence that no imperialist power be allowed to dominate, oppress, exploit, intervene in, subvert, agress against another country.
By all means, third world countries and peoples must continue to fight for political and economic liberation from foreign domination. The need for anti-imperialist unity and proletarian internationalism should not and can never be obscured.
The third world countries and peoples are under the strain of the worst form of finance capitalism. There is widespread social unrest and popular resistance. the third world states can either ride on the anti-imperialist movement or go under the wave of the revolutionary mass movement. In a neocolony like the Philippines, the Filipino people have every right to wage a revolution against US imperialism and the puppet regime.
The question has often been raised as to whether the Philippine revolutionary movement can find adequate international support in view of the perceived vigorous efforts of socialist countries to develop detente with the United States and discourage armed conflicts beyond their national boundaries. There is even the expressed view that the United States is assured of complete freedom to dominate the Philippines and concentrate its strength against the revolutionary movement.
Much too long has the US been misrepresenting the Philippine revolutionary movement as a creature of another superpower. No matter how vigorously the US tries to deny the fact that the armed revolution is the creation and instrument of the Filipino people in their resolute struggle to achieve national liberation and democracy, the peoples of the world appreciate the hard struggle, sacrifices, achievements and self-riliant advance of the Philippine revolutionary movement. The Philippine revolution has thus been getting increasing international support mainly from the anti-imperialist solidarity mass movement, progressive people's organizations and political parties all over the world.
While deeply appreciative of this support from abroad, the revolutionary forces are ever determined to wage a self-reliant people's war. They are also confident that the stronger and more effective the armed revolutionary movement becomes, the more abundant international support will flow in.
Certainly the time will come when the belligerency status of the revolutionary movement will have to be recognized by states and governments of the world. Subsequently, the time will come for states andgovernments to openly recognize and extends support to the People's Democratic Republic of the Philippines.
4. Main Tasks of the New People's Army
The principal mandate of the New People's Army from the Communist Party of the Philippines, the National Democratic Front and the entire Filipino people is to smash the military-bureaucratic machinery of the counterrevolutionary state and effect the establishment of the people's democratic state.
Never before has the New People's Army been in a better position than today in fulfilling this mandate. After twenty years, the armed struggle has reached a level of strength that is sufficient for the people's army to set its course towards attaining total victory. The aggravation of the crisis of the ruling system--an irreversible process which is itself induced by the continuous growth of the revolutionary movement--ensures the development of all positive forces for the further acceleration of the armed struggle. It is reasonable to aim for total victory in the national-democratic revolution within the next ten years.
If ten years are not enough, then the NPA is ready to continue fighting for another ten or twenty years or whatever length of time necessary for defeating the enemy. The people's democratic power grows even while the reactionary state is still entrenched in the major cities and staggers on before finally falling. The revolutionary strategy of protracted people's war is an insoluble problem for the US and the local reactionaries.
However, the Party and the united front are ready to employ the NPA at any time in effecting a coalition government, short of destroying the reactionary state, or in delivering a death blow to it when the opportunity is provided by a convergence of sufficient revolutionary strength, rapid disintegration of the ruling system and ineffective imperialist intervention.
NPA cadres and fighters must have a clear knowledge of the strength of the revolutionary forces and that of the counterrevolutionary forces at every given time. Plaaning must be based on the facts, the given quantities and qualities of NPA strength. The wish to make short shrift of the enemy militarily must not carry the cadres and fighters away from the facts and what can reasonably be accomplished within a given period.
The great achievements of the NPA during the last twenty years have been the result of the fulfilment of the ideological, political, military and cultural requirements of people's war. Further NPA advances are possible only by continuing to fulfill these requirements.
The great NPA achievements give its cadres and fighters the confidence to state the facts, assess their work, conduct criticism and self-criticism, know what strengths to maximize and what weaknesses and mistakes to overcome and arrive at the correct plan, including the tasks and methods for carrying the revolutionary struggle forward.
Since the beginning, the Party has always held that the preservation and success of the NPA depends on its close links with the masses. The most repeated errors--major and minor--have had something to do directly with the failure to gain the participation and support of the masses. The biggest losses and setbacks have often been caused by the purely military viewpoint, adventurism, commandism, arrogance and impetuousity.
What makes the people's army invincible and ever victorious is the participation and support of the people. If there were a loss of popular support and the situtation became purely military, the NPA would not last long against the militarily superior forces of the enemy. The highest attention must always be given to the expansion and consolidation of the guerrilla fronts and the maintainance of a mass base that is wide and deep enough for the NPA to maximize guerrilla warfare. The NPA must have the ability to ambush, raid and arrest the enemy at will. Even if the enemy would concentrate his forces on any particular area, he could do so only at the cost of letting the NPA destroy his forces elsewhere and he could do so only for some time after which the NPA would return to the area.
The mass base is built by the Party, the Party within the NPA and the NPA by building the organs of political power, the mass organizations and the units of the Party in the localities and workplaces. These gain life and more adherents by carrying out campaigns of political education, land reform, production, military training, literacy, health andthe like.
After twenty years of hard and painstaking work, guerrilla fronts have been established in almost all strategic parts of the archipelago. Many of these fronts cover whole provinces and islands, including town centers and some district centers. At the center of these guerrilla fronts are the guerrilla bases weher the organs of political power and the Party, mass and militia organizations are strongest and most consolidated.
The Party and the NPA must continuously expand and consolidate the guerrilla fronts. In Luzon and Mindanao, some areas necessary in linking up guerrilla fronts have yet to be effectively covered. There must be the uniring effort to organize more and more barrios and muicipalities. On the other hand, the all-round consolidation of the existing guerrilla fronts and bases must be continuously and assidiously done. There must be more study and more work spent on building the Party and other civil organizations, and on waging the agrarian revolution.
The US-Aquino regime has launched a campaign of "gradual constriction" in the countryside. This involves the intensvie, sustained and ruthless use of terror in order to crush the guerrilla fronts and mass base area-by-area and to cut off the gerrilla forces from the masses. To counteract and defeat this enemy scheme, the revolutionary forces must engage in the all-out mobilization of the masses for both political and military actions, and in the interplay of battles of annihilation and widespread attritive operations. At the same time, concrete steps must be taken to implement land reform and improve the condition of the masses.
The formation of NPA companies in all regions and major guerrilla fronts during the fist half of the 198Os radically improved the annihilative capacity of the people's army, setting a new high in such terms as size of overpowered targets, fighting techniques and arms haul. It also gave the NPA greater initiative and flexibility against an adversary that had started to move in platoons and companies, enlarged his standby forces and upgraded his mobility.
To maintain proper balance, the NPA has adopted a policy of employing at least half of the high-powered rifles in each region for local fulltime forces such as the district and local guerilla units and armed propaganda units. Guerrilla platoons must be built continously in the districts and municipalities, territorial Party cadres armed and provided with adequate security, and the masses encouraged to arm themselves.
Where cases of overemphasis on company-size main units and overconcentration of rifles and units under the regional command appeared, overall military work suffered. Large areas were left without armed units, becoming defenseless even against the enemy's paramilitary forces. Higher territorial commands were overburdened with direct administrative and logistical tasks for large units. Unnecessary friction points between the army and local territorail organizations appeared. There were instances when cadres became so concentrated in the regular formations that only a few were left to attend to mass work over wide areas.
Experience tells us that while regular companies are necessary for annihilating enemy forces and accumulating large quantities of arms, armed local fulltimers are indispensable in expanding, consolidating, maintaining and recovering guerrilla fronts, destroying local enemy forces and strengthening the forces of the Party, the NPA, the mass organizations and the organs of poltical power in the localities. Proper balance between the two has to be maintained depending on the concrete circumstances obtaining in each guerrila front and region.
Since 1985 the AFP has been launching brigade- and division-size operations--a fact which further underscores the need for the NPA to develop company-size strike forces as centers of gravity of guerrilla platoons and squads. The drive however to build larger NPA formations must be based on the incread capability of the Party to lead, increased support capability of the mass base, the continuing growth of smaller and more widespead NPA units, the intensification of the armed struggle, the politico-military training of more officers, men and reserves, the upgrading of command skills, tactics and technique, and of course, the favorablesness of terrain. Otherwise, large NPA formations tend to be carried away by the momentum of a purely military situation, aside from becoming easy targets of the enemy and a big drain on limited resources.
Guidelines and orders have been issued to 1O,OOO Red fighters with highpowered rifles by the Central Committee through its Military Commision and the NPA General Command for further developing the revolutionary armed struggle in an all-round way and for the conduct of offensive campaigns.
The totality of this revolutionary force is already equivalent to anywhere from ten to twenty battalions or several regiments or some three divisions (without service battalions), excluding the armed propaganda teams, local gerrilla squads, militia, self-defense units and armed city partisans.
Regional Party committees and regional NPA commands can now say that they have battalions under them. But for the time being and for some more time to come it is sufficient for a typical regional command to have an organic company as its rallying pint and strike force which can join up with companies or platoons of the guerrilla front to make a larger offensive force even up to battalion-size.
To keep on organic company or a larger formation less visible to or detectable by the enemy and more supportable by the people, it is necessary to deploy its components within a sufficiently wide area within the reach of radio contact and not to keep it in any single camp or within a small radius. The components can converge on enemy targets but can subsequently disperse.
The guerrilla fronts must aim for the development of companies or platoons as their strike forces, depending on the support capability of the mass base, the overall situation between us and the enemy, and the terrain. The need for an incrase of guerrilla fronts may also necessitate the increase of platoons rather than companies.
The value of armed propaganda teams in opening new areas or recovering old areas must not be underestimated. Local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units and armed city partisans must be continuously increased.
Local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units must be continuously. Even if they are armed with only primitive weapons or inferior firearms, they can perform police or internal security, communications, food provisioning, widespread sabotage and other support functions. They are the reserve force of the NPA.
Armed city partisans and commando units must be formed to udnertake special operations like punitive actions against the worst enemy personnel, deliver head blows against the enemy and seize firearms from him.
The NPA's main task is to annihilate enemy units and seize their weapons. However, attritive actions should be undertaken on a widescale against the enemy, especially against antipeople facilities. The point is to inflict a heavy cost on the enemy, undermine his morale and weaken his capacity to attack the revolutionary movement.
It is important to conduct sabotage and wage a war of attrition against the enemy so that no matter what amount of US and other foreign support the enemy gets it is never enough in the face of the revolutionary forces.
The state of strategic defensive is already maturing. The stage of strategic stalemate will be shorter than that of the strategic defensive. In turn, the stage of strategic offensive will be shorter than that of the strategic stalemate. This is because the NPA growth in strength and capability to annihilate enemy forces is cumulative.
Guerrilla warfare has been the main form of the people's war in the strategic defensive but elements of regular mobile warfare arise within the strategic defensive and leads to the next strategic stage.
Regular mobile warfare will definitely be the main form of people's war in the strategic stalemate. But even when there shall be NPA maneuver battalions, the NPA must be ready to redeploy the maneuver battalions into maneuver companies, capable of ever more widespread and more intensive warfare, depriving the enemy of any visible target and making every inch of the country unsafe for him, in case the United States launches a war of aggression.
Even in the strategic offensive, regular mobile warfare will knock out the enemy forces from place to place until there remain only a few hard points as enemy holdouts to be either forced to surrender or to knock out through positional warfare.
Until the strategic offensive can be undertaken, it is absolutely necessary to force the adversary to divide his forces and lure them into their graves. The NPA must do everything to bait the enemy out of his lair. Bringing the fight too often to his strongholds or hard points can be counterproductive.
Based on our experience, it is best to draw out the enemy form his fortified encampments and to attack him while on the move. Ambushes have generally netted for us a bigger number of arms confiscation and entailed lesser ammunition expenditures and casualties than raids of strong enemy headquarters. Without the benefit of heavy weapons, success in overrunning heavily protected enemy camps would largely depend on an excellent and meticulous planning premised on good intelligence work, and on the ability of the attacking force to clase in on the target unnoticed. To rely merely on comparatively large formations or concentrable force against smaller but deeply entrenched enemy forces in conducting raid operations may prove to be costly.
Drawing the enemy to the countryside or to terrain favorable to the NPA compels him to spread his forces and creates opportunities for the NPA not only to destroy them one by one but also to deliver head blows to his command posts even in urban areas. When the enemy sticks to his hard points and uses the highways from one hard point to another under the protection of helicopters and tanks, he loses the population and ground and allows the NPA to repeatedly wipe out or disarm his police and paramilitary forces.
With the rise of bigger NPA formations, Party building and the entire range of ideological and political work within the army becomes even more important. The Party committees at the company level and Party branches at the platoon level and the whole system of political officers must ensure ideological soundness, high fighting spirit, strong discipline, democracy in the relations between officers and men and adherence to the mass line among the officers and men of the people's army.
The development of companies as strike forces, combinable into battalions means fighting with short rest periods between battles and constantly seeking or creating opportunities for annihilating the enemy. However, NPA regulars are duty bound to undertake propaganda, cultural, productive and other types of mass work among the people. This is to ensure that regular fighters are not divorced from the political life of the people in the localities.
The main source of NPA support should be the Filipino people, especially those who have benefited from the campaigns of the revolutionary movement and who are therefore willing to give contributions.
The NPA can engage in productive activities to help fulfill its own material requirements; and can also actively cooperate with the masses in production.
Taxes must be collected from those allowed to conduct business and other profitable operations in the guerrilla fronts and thereabouts. The difference between the enlightened gentry and the evil gentry is that the former conform to the laws of the people's government, especially on land reform and the payment of taxes.
The NPA must benefit from the moral and material support of the peoples abroad. But this should merely supplement and enhance self-reliant efforts. The NPA should never become dependent on foreign assistance. It should be able to make advances even if no foreign military assistance comes from abroad.
It may be possible to acquire some heavy weapons not from the battlefield but by importation. Notwithstanding the latter's significance, this should only supplement and enhance the main effort of arming the growing number of NPA fighters with weapons seized from the enemy. Domestic capacity is the more decisive factor. It would be well to remember that in a war of heavy weapons, the side that has more of them and can prevent the further inflow of these weapons to the other side would win decisively.
The NPA must seek not only to annihilate enemy forces but also to disintegrate them. The policy of lenient treatment of captives from the battlefield must continue. The NPA must use every possible means to persuade enemy personnel, especially those recruited from the working people, to abandon the counterrevolutionary side.
In any war, spies are meted out severed punishment. But the NPA has a scientific spirit and a high sense of justice superior to that of the enemy side. Despite its limited resources, the NPA takes pains to gather facts through careful investigation of suspects before and after arrest and adheres to due process in the course of trial and judgment.
The enemy arrests, tortures, detains and kills people arbitrarily. The NPA has the revolutionary right to arrest, detain, investigate, try and punish counterrevolutionaries. The time will certainly come that the NPA shall have captured such a great number of prisoners of war that the reactionary government shall be compelled to negotiate and exchange of prisoners of war and make an agreement with the revolutionary movement. Along this course, the revolutionary shall be able to gain recognition for the belligerency status under international law.
It is a consistent policy of the revolutionary movement to seek a liberating just and durable peace. This can be achieved either by forming some progressive coalition government, truly beneficial to the people; or by going all the way to win total victory and establishing a revolutionary coalition government.
With the NPA destroying the Armed Forces of the Philippines and all the coercive apparatuses of the counterrevolutionary state, the Filipino people under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines can liberate themselves in more and more areas until they can establish the People's Democratic Republic of the Philippines.
The Communist Party of the Philippines urges the entire New People's Army--its cadres, commanders and fighters--to win ever greater victories and to fight for total victory in the national democratic revolution.
Long live the New People's Army!Never before has the New People's Army been in a better position than today in fulfilling this mandate. After twenty years, the armed struggle has reached a level of strength that is sufficient for the people's army to set its course towards attaining total victory. The aggravation of the crisis of the ruling system--an irreversible process which is itself induced by the continuous growth of the revolutionary movement--ensures the development of all positive forces for the further acceleration of the armed struggle. It is reasonable to aim for total victory in the national-democratic revolution within the next ten years.
If ten years are not enough, then the NPA is ready to continue fighting for another ten or twenty years or whatever length of time necessary for defeating the enemy. The people's democratic power grows even while the reactionary state is still entrenched in the major cities and staggers on before finally falling. The revolutionary strategy of protracted people's war is an insoluble problem for the US and the local reactionaries.
However, the Party and the united front are ready to employ the NPA at any time in effecting a coalition government, short of destroying the reactionary state, or in delivering a death blow to it when the opportunity is provided by a convergence of sufficient revolutionary strength, rapid disintegration of the ruling system and ineffective imperialist intervention.
NPA cadres and fighters must have a clear knowledge of the strength of the revolutionary forces and that of the counterrevolutionary forces at every given time. Plaaning must be based on the facts, the given quantities and qualities of NPA strength. The wish to make short shrift of the enemy militarily must not carry the cadres and fighters away from the facts and what can reasonably be accomplished within a given period.
The great achievements of the NPA during the last twenty years have been the result of the fulfilment of the ideological, political, military and cultural requirements of people's war. Further NPA advances are possible only by continuing to fulfill these requirements.
The great NPA achievements give its cadres and fighters the confidence to state the facts, assess their work, conduct criticism and self-criticism, know what strengths to maximize and what weaknesses and mistakes to overcome and arrive at the correct plan, including the tasks and methods for carrying the revolutionary struggle forward.
Since the beginning, the Party has always held that the preservation and success of the NPA depends on its close links with the masses. The most repeated errors--major and minor--have had something to do directly with the failure to gain the participation and support of the masses. The biggest losses and setbacks have often been caused by the purely military viewpoint, adventurism, commandism, arrogance and impetuousity.
What makes the people's army invincible and ever victorious is the participation and support of the people. If there were a loss of popular support and the situtation became purely military, the NPA would not last long against the militarily superior forces of the enemy. The highest attention must always be given to the expansion and consolidation of the guerrilla fronts and the maintainance of a mass base that is wide and deep enough for the NPA to maximize guerrilla warfare. The NPA must have the ability to ambush, raid and arrest the enemy at will. Even if the enemy would concentrate his forces on any particular area, he could do so only at the cost of letting the NPA destroy his forces elsewhere and he could do so only for some time after which the NPA would return to the area.
The mass base is built by the Party, the Party within the NPA and the NPA by building the organs of political power, the mass organizations and the units of the Party in the localities and workplaces. These gain life and more adherents by carrying out campaigns of political education, land reform, production, military training, literacy, health andthe like.
After twenty years of hard and painstaking work, guerrilla fronts have been established in almost all strategic parts of the archipelago. Many of these fronts cover whole provinces and islands, including town centers and some district centers. At the center of these guerrilla fronts are the guerrilla bases weher the organs of political power and the Party, mass and militia organizations are strongest and most consolidated.
The Party and the NPA must continuously expand and consolidate the guerrilla fronts. In Luzon and Mindanao, some areas necessary in linking up guerrilla fronts have yet to be effectively covered. There must be the uniring effort to organize more and more barrios and muicipalities. On the other hand, the all-round consolidation of the existing guerrilla fronts and bases must be continuously and assidiously done. There must be more study and more work spent on building the Party and other civil organizations, and on waging the agrarian revolution.
The US-Aquino regime has launched a campaign of "gradual constriction" in the countryside. This involves the intensvie, sustained and ruthless use of terror in order to crush the guerrilla fronts and mass base area-by-area and to cut off the gerrilla forces from the masses. To counteract and defeat this enemy scheme, the revolutionary forces must engage in the all-out mobilization of the masses for both political and military actions, and in the interplay of battles of annihilation and widespread attritive operations. At the same time, concrete steps must be taken to implement land reform and improve the condition of the masses.
The formation of NPA companies in all regions and major guerrilla fronts during the fist half of the 198Os radically improved the annihilative capacity of the people's army, setting a new high in such terms as size of overpowered targets, fighting techniques and arms haul. It also gave the NPA greater initiative and flexibility against an adversary that had started to move in platoons and companies, enlarged his standby forces and upgraded his mobility.
To maintain proper balance, the NPA has adopted a policy of employing at least half of the high-powered rifles in each region for local fulltime forces such as the district and local guerilla units and armed propaganda units. Guerrilla platoons must be built continously in the districts and municipalities, territorial Party cadres armed and provided with adequate security, and the masses encouraged to arm themselves.
Where cases of overemphasis on company-size main units and overconcentration of rifles and units under the regional command appeared, overall military work suffered. Large areas were left without armed units, becoming defenseless even against the enemy's paramilitary forces. Higher territorial commands were overburdened with direct administrative and logistical tasks for large units. Unnecessary friction points between the army and local territorail organizations appeared. There were instances when cadres became so concentrated in the regular formations that only a few were left to attend to mass work over wide areas.
Experience tells us that while regular companies are necessary for annihilating enemy forces and accumulating large quantities of arms, armed local fulltimers are indispensable in expanding, consolidating, maintaining and recovering guerrilla fronts, destroying local enemy forces and strengthening the forces of the Party, the NPA, the mass organizations and the organs of poltical power in the localities. Proper balance between the two has to be maintained depending on the concrete circumstances obtaining in each guerrila front and region.
Since 1985 the AFP has been launching brigade- and division-size operations--a fact which further underscores the need for the NPA to develop company-size strike forces as centers of gravity of guerrilla platoons and squads. The drive however to build larger NPA formations must be based on the incread capability of the Party to lead, increased support capability of the mass base, the continuing growth of smaller and more widespead NPA units, the intensification of the armed struggle, the politico-military training of more officers, men and reserves, the upgrading of command skills, tactics and technique, and of course, the favorablesness of terrain. Otherwise, large NPA formations tend to be carried away by the momentum of a purely military situation, aside from becoming easy targets of the enemy and a big drain on limited resources.
Guidelines and orders have been issued to 1O,OOO Red fighters with highpowered rifles by the Central Committee through its Military Commision and the NPA General Command for further developing the revolutionary armed struggle in an all-round way and for the conduct of offensive campaigns.
The totality of this revolutionary force is already equivalent to anywhere from ten to twenty battalions or several regiments or some three divisions (without service battalions), excluding the armed propaganda teams, local gerrilla squads, militia, self-defense units and armed city partisans.
Regional Party committees and regional NPA commands can now say that they have battalions under them. But for the time being and for some more time to come it is sufficient for a typical regional command to have an organic company as its rallying pint and strike force which can join up with companies or platoons of the guerrilla front to make a larger offensive force even up to battalion-size.
To keep on organic company or a larger formation less visible to or detectable by the enemy and more supportable by the people, it is necessary to deploy its components within a sufficiently wide area within the reach of radio contact and not to keep it in any single camp or within a small radius. The components can converge on enemy targets but can subsequently disperse.
The guerrilla fronts must aim for the development of companies or platoons as their strike forces, depending on the support capability of the mass base, the overall situation between us and the enemy, and the terrain. The need for an incrase of guerrilla fronts may also necessitate the increase of platoons rather than companies.
The value of armed propaganda teams in opening new areas or recovering old areas must not be underestimated. Local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units and armed city partisans must be continuously increased.
Local guerrilla squads, militia and self-defense units must be continuously. Even if they are armed with only primitive weapons or inferior firearms, they can perform police or internal security, communications, food provisioning, widespread sabotage and other support functions. They are the reserve force of the NPA.
Armed city partisans and commando units must be formed to udnertake special operations like punitive actions against the worst enemy personnel, deliver head blows against the enemy and seize firearms from him.
The NPA's main task is to annihilate enemy units and seize their weapons. However, attritive actions should be undertaken on a widescale against the enemy, especially against antipeople facilities. The point is to inflict a heavy cost on the enemy, undermine his morale and weaken his capacity to attack the revolutionary movement.
It is important to conduct sabotage and wage a war of attrition against the enemy so that no matter what amount of US and other foreign support the enemy gets it is never enough in the face of the revolutionary forces.
The state of strategic defensive is already maturing. The stage of strategic stalemate will be shorter than that of the strategic defensive. In turn, the stage of strategic offensive will be shorter than that of the strategic stalemate. This is because the NPA growth in strength and capability to annihilate enemy forces is cumulative.
Guerrilla warfare has been the main form of the people's war in the strategic defensive but elements of regular mobile warfare arise within the strategic defensive and leads to the next strategic stage.
Regular mobile warfare will definitely be the main form of people's war in the strategic stalemate. But even when there shall be NPA maneuver battalions, the NPA must be ready to redeploy the maneuver battalions into maneuver companies, capable of ever more widespread and more intensive warfare, depriving the enemy of any visible target and making every inch of the country unsafe for him, in case the United States launches a war of aggression.
Even in the strategic offensive, regular mobile warfare will knock out the enemy forces from place to place until there remain only a few hard points as enemy holdouts to be either forced to surrender or to knock out through positional warfare.
Until the strategic offensive can be undertaken, it is absolutely necessary to force the adversary to divide his forces and lure them into their graves. The NPA must do everything to bait the enemy out of his lair. Bringing the fight too often to his strongholds or hard points can be counterproductive.
Based on our experience, it is best to draw out the enemy form his fortified encampments and to attack him while on the move. Ambushes have generally netted for us a bigger number of arms confiscation and entailed lesser ammunition expenditures and casualties than raids of strong enemy headquarters. Without the benefit of heavy weapons, success in overrunning heavily protected enemy camps would largely depend on an excellent and meticulous planning premised on good intelligence work, and on the ability of the attacking force to clase in on the target unnoticed. To rely merely on comparatively large formations or concentrable force against smaller but deeply entrenched enemy forces in conducting raid operations may prove to be costly.
Drawing the enemy to the countryside or to terrain favorable to the NPA compels him to spread his forces and creates opportunities for the NPA not only to destroy them one by one but also to deliver head blows to his command posts even in urban areas. When the enemy sticks to his hard points and uses the highways from one hard point to another under the protection of helicopters and tanks, he loses the population and ground and allows the NPA to repeatedly wipe out or disarm his police and paramilitary forces.
With the rise of bigger NPA formations, Party building and the entire range of ideological and political work within the army becomes even more important. The Party committees at the company level and Party branches at the platoon level and the whole system of political officers must ensure ideological soundness, high fighting spirit, strong discipline, democracy in the relations between officers and men and adherence to the mass line among the officers and men of the people's army.
The development of companies as strike forces, combinable into battalions means fighting with short rest periods between battles and constantly seeking or creating opportunities for annihilating the enemy. However, NPA regulars are duty bound to undertake propaganda, cultural, productive and other types of mass work among the people. This is to ensure that regular fighters are not divorced from the political life of the people in the localities.
The main source of NPA support should be the Filipino people, especially those who have benefited from the campaigns of the revolutionary movement and who are therefore willing to give contributions.
The NPA can engage in productive activities to help fulfill its own material requirements; and can also actively cooperate with the masses in production.
Taxes must be collected from those allowed to conduct business and other profitable operations in the guerrilla fronts and thereabouts. The difference between the enlightened gentry and the evil gentry is that the former conform to the laws of the people's government, especially on land reform and the payment of taxes.
The NPA must benefit from the moral and material support of the peoples abroad. But this should merely supplement and enhance self-reliant efforts. The NPA should never become dependent on foreign assistance. It should be able to make advances even if no foreign military assistance comes from abroad.
It may be possible to acquire some heavy weapons not from the battlefield but by importation. Notwithstanding the latter's significance, this should only supplement and enhance the main effort of arming the growing number of NPA fighters with weapons seized from the enemy. Domestic capacity is the more decisive factor. It would be well to remember that in a war of heavy weapons, the side that has more of them and can prevent the further inflow of these weapons to the other side would win decisively.
The NPA must seek not only to annihilate enemy forces but also to disintegrate them. The policy of lenient treatment of captives from the battlefield must continue. The NPA must use every possible means to persuade enemy personnel, especially those recruited from the working people, to abandon the counterrevolutionary side.
In any war, spies are meted out severed punishment. But the NPA has a scientific spirit and a high sense of justice superior to that of the enemy side. Despite its limited resources, the NPA takes pains to gather facts through careful investigation of suspects before and after arrest and adheres to due process in the course of trial and judgment.
The enemy arrests, tortures, detains and kills people arbitrarily. The NPA has the revolutionary right to arrest, detain, investigate, try and punish counterrevolutionaries. The time will certainly come that the NPA shall have captured such a great number of prisoners of war that the reactionary government shall be compelled to negotiate and exchange of prisoners of war and make an agreement with the revolutionary movement. Along this course, the revolutionary shall be able to gain recognition for the belligerency status under international law.
It is a consistent policy of the revolutionary movement to seek a liberating just and durable peace. This can be achieved either by forming some progressive coalition government, truly beneficial to the people; or by going all the way to win total victory and establishing a revolutionary coalition government.
With the NPA destroying the Armed Forces of the Philippines and all the coercive apparatuses of the counterrevolutionary state, the Filipino people under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines can liberate themselves in more and more areas until they can establish the People's Democratic Republic of the Philippines.
The Communist Party of the Philippines urges the entire New People's Army--its cadres, commanders and fighters--to win ever greater victories and to fight for total victory in the national democratic revolution.
Onward to total victory!
Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines!
Long live the National Democratic Front!
Long live the Filipino people!
