CPP CC Statement On The Occasion Of The 54th Anniversary Of The Party’s Founding

Central Committee | Communist Party Of The Philippines

December 25, 2022

Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines

December 26, 2022

[Early Edition] The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today extends its warmest revolutionary felicitations to all Party cadres, revolutionary forces, friends and allies of the Party, on the occasion of the 54th anniversary of the Party’s establishment on the theoretical basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Let us celebrate today the great achievements accumulated by the Party in more than five decades of leading the people’s democratic revolution and advancing the Filipino people’s aspiration for freedom and democracy. At the same time, let us take stock of our strength and self-critically assess our errors and weaknesses in order to set forth our plan of action to advance and attain even bigger victories in the coming years.

On this day, we give extraordinary tribute to Ka Jose Maria Sison (Amado Guerrero), founding chairman of the CPP Central Committee, whose masterly grasp of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism guided the Party from its inception, infancy and growth. Ka Joma has bequeathed to us a treasure trove of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist work in which his immortal revolutionary spirit will forever live to guide the next generation of Party cadres to greater heights.

The Party pays the highest tribute to all the heroes and martyrs of the Filipino people, including members of the Central Committee, its Political Bureau and Executive Committee, as well as cadres, Red fighters and mass activists, who paid the ultimate sacrifice while serving the people and fighting for the national democratic cause. At the same time, we extol the revolutionary masses, the activists of mass organizations, Red fighters, organizers and cadres of the Party who continue to persevere along the revolutionary path despite all the hardships and sacrifices especially in the face of heightened campaign of fascist terrorism instigated by US imperialism.

We are confronted by a worsening crisis of the reactionary ruling system both domestically and internationally, marked by prolonged stagnation and economic decline, deteriorating social conditions, by the rise of fascism and state terrorism and increasing threats of interimperialist wars. The crisis is generating extremely favorable conditions for the proletariat to lead the people and carry forward the revolutionary movement in the Philippines and across the world.

The crisis of the global capitalist system continues to worsen. The US economy and those of other leading capitalist countries are sliding into another round of recessions that threaten to engulf an unprecedented number of countries. The rotten core of the capitalist system is asserting itself and causing widespread destruction and suffering to the proletariat and people. Fascist forces are on the rise to attack the proletariat and preempt their leadership. Interimperialist contradictions and rivalries are intensifying. To counter its strategic decline, US imperialism has become increasingly bellicose and is pushing other imperialist powers to become more aggressive militarily. These have led to the war in Ukraine and is increasing the threat of direct inter-imperialist war, or world war.

The Filipino people continue to suffer from the tightening grip of US imperialism, and the subservience of the Marcos regime to the dictates and interests of the Pentagon, foreign banks, and multinational corporations.

The crisis of the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal system is sharpening, characterized by the widespread destruction of productive forces, and sharp decline in the socioeconomic conditions of the majority of the Filipino people. The ascension to power of the detested Marcos-Duterte clique, widely perceived to be illegitimate for having won the May 2022 elections through widespread electronic fraud, marks the further decay of the ruling political system.

It continues to wage an increasingly brutal war of suppression, unleashing the worst forms of fascist terrorism to terrorize the broad masses of the people. Workers, peasants and other oppressed classes and sectors, however, are being driven to fight back and defend their rights and interests. The justness, necessity and urgency of waging the people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war continue to become ever more crystal clear.

The Party’s cadres and activists continue to persevere in carrying forward the people’s democratic revolution by waging protracted people’s war to encircle the cities from the countryside, and advancing the mass movement in both the cities and rural areas. Over the past years, important achievements were made in various areas of work. However, the revolutionary movement has also suffered losses and setbacks in various fields of revolutionary work resulting from subjectivism, internal weaknesses and errors, as it faced the enemy’s heightened strategic offensives of the past five years.

Guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Party is undaunted by these setbacks. It is determined to overcome all weaknesses, rectify errors, consolidate and strengthen, in order to serve as the leading core of the Filipino people in their struggle to overthrow imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and attain national freedom and people’s democracy.

Contradictions intensify as the global capitalist system falls into another round of crisis

The global capitalist system is again set on a downward spiral, after a short period of momentary expansion last year following the global recession of 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decline comes less than a year after the International Monetary Fund predicted steady to high growth rates for 2022 onwards. The capitalist crisis is intensifying all forms of oppression and exploitation, deepening interimperialist conflict, heightening class contradictions and generating conditions for revolutionary resistance.

The recent sharp economic downturn is being explained away as a result of high inflation due to high oil prices and the aftershocks of pandemic-related disruptions of globalized supply chains. It is, in fact, a continuation of the protracted stagnation of the world capitalist system that started after the global financial crisis of 2008, almost 15 years ago. This was only briefly interrupted by the momentary debt-driven rebound since the last quarter of 2020, after the pandemic-related recession earlier that year. Even bourgeois economists have been prompted to coin the term “permacrisis” to describe the general stagnation and extended instability of the global economy entangled with food and energy crisis, wars and conflicts, and financial turmoil.

The world capitalist system is in the midst of the biggest financial bubble in world history. Total global public and private debt as of the third quarter of the year stood at $290 trillion, equivalent to 343% of global production. Since the pandemic hit, debt has been hitting record highs and reached over 360% of GDP in 2020 and $303 trillion in 2021. The recent drop is mainly from the strengthening US dollar making non-dollar denominated debt appear smaller, and from rising interest rates that cut into borrowing.

Global bonds and treasuries normally hailed as safe investments are also undergoing unprecedented volatility. The global bonds market has fallen 11% translating into $2.6 trillion losses — its worst since the 2008 financial crisis. Losses continue to mount from aggressive interest rate hikes by central banks. Long-term US treasuries are already down by over 24% even before the end of the year. Stock markets worldwide also suffered their worst losses since 2008 with global equities falling by some 20% this year. Volatility will worsen and losses deepen further in 2023 especially as economies deteriorate.

The OECD anticipates global economic growth to halve from 6% in 2021 to just 3.1% this year, dropping further to 2.2% in 2023. Leading capitalist countries are set on a trend towards recession after rapid increases in interest rates and tightened monetary policy to control inflation. These are causing production slowdowns, increasing job cuts and unemployment, and damaging the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. This will spill over into all the other countries tied to the global production line of multinational corporations which, after decades of globalization, comprise the majority of countries worldwide.

These interest hikes and the recessions and production slowdowns they trigger will cause more debt crises and defaults, worsen output losses and joblessness, and greatly worsen poverty and inequality. These conditions will intensify instability as well as deepen the economic stagnation.

The US economy stagnated at start the first half of the year, and is already on a trajectory towards a recession next year after the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates since mid-year which has pushed down production. This year has seen rising job cuts four times greater than last year in technology, automotive, health care, banks, retail and services. Currently, it is burdened with a gargantuan debt of more than $31 trillions. Real inflation is 16% not 7%. Some analysts believe that the US economy is on a path of an impending biggest bond crash since 1788, which presently is a financial balloon 40 times larger than the stock market. There is an increasing possibility of a “Greater Depression” as real estate is crashing and foreclosures are up 700% from last year. All these factors are expected to further accelerate in the coming months.

The Chinese economy, long regarded as the engine of global economic growth, continues to wobble amid a burgeoning financial crisis marked by high levels of debt and debt defaults in real estate and banking, a sharp decline in property development and slow production output. Real estate market is tumbling with over 90 million empty condos in China. Domestic and overseas infrastructure building has slowed. Retail sales are down. Economic growth is expected to drop to just above 3% this year, the lowest since the 1970s. Growth of Chinese exports are down and anticipated to fall to between 3-5% (from 29.8% last year) amid rising threats of recession in the US and Europe, which in turn will pull down many countries bound to Chinese production.

Economic growth in the European zone is projected to drop to 0.3% next year with many countries falling into long recessions. The UK is rocked by stagflation, is already in a recession and is expected to remain stuck up to late 2024. The Russian economy is expected to shrink by 4.5% next year, and the German economy by 0.7%, while France is expected to grow by a mere 0.8%. Many leading countries in Europe are suffering from US-imposed sanctions against Russian natural gas and having to purchase more expensive natural gas from the US. European companies (industrial, technology, travel, food, retail, banking and others) are cutting jobs or freezing hiring.

Japan is also set to slide into a recession by the end of the year and is projected to remain stuck up to next year. Production is being pulled down by high trade deficits with slow growth of exports amid decline in demand, rapid depreciation of the yen against the dollar, and record-high inflation.

The vast majority of undeveloped or backward economies suffer from steep inflation, acute unemployment, currency devaluations due to the US push to strengthen the dollar, resulting in sharp increases in the costs of food and other imports, downtrend in foreign direct investments, and chronic trade deficits. These countries have been condemned by decades of neoliberal impositions to allow unconstrained imperialist plunder resulting in the vast destruction of productive forces and economic resources. They are caught in an intensified debt crisis and overburdened by debt payments. Around 60% of the poorest countries are in high risk of debt default or are already in debt distress. Last October, the economy of Sri Lanka collapsed under the weight of unpayable foreign debt, and won’t likely be the last to suffer from the intensifying debt crisis.

At the core of the heightening crisis of the global capitalist system is the crisis of overproduction. There is an oversupply in the major commodities including oil, semiconductors, electronic products, steel, construction materials, vehicles, agricultural produce and others. The accelerated rise in production capacities (through the use of computers, robotics, artificial intelligence and other technologies) and the concomitant rise in fixed capital, combined with market saturation and unsold inventories is causing rates of profit to fall, disruptions in production and bankruptcies. Excess capital is being used to create one financial bubble after another, invariably leading to further concentration of finance capital in the hands of a few financial oligarchies.

The crisis of the capitalist system is resulting in the ever more rapid accumulation of capital and wealth in the hands of a few monopoly capitalists, and ever rising economic, class and national inequalities. Over the past months, monopoly oil companies and financial speculators jacked up oil prices allowing them to accumulate record-levels of profits. During the pandemic, one billionaire emerged every 30 hours, while one million people fell into conditions of extreme poverty due to loss of income, employment and rising cost of living. During the same period, the ten richest billionaires doubled their wealth, while the income of 99 percent of the world’s population fell. Less than 2,700 billionaires, more than 70% of whom come from just ten countries, control more wealth than 4.6 billion people or 60% of the global population.

Amid the worsening global economic crisis, we see the deepening and intensification of the four major contradictions in the world, namely, the contradiction between the monopoly capitalists and workers in the imperialist countries, that among imperialist countries, that between the imperialist powers and the oppressed peoples and nations, and that between the imperialist countries and those asserting national independence and declaring socialist aspirations.

Workers’ resistance continue to heighten in the US, the UK and other imperialist countries amid rising cost of living and low wages. Union organizing is on the rise in the US including those being formed in major corporations (Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, Google, Verizon and others). Workers are staging major strikes and mass demonstrations to amplify their demand for wage increases and better working conditions. These have erupted across Europe including the nationwide transport and airport workers strike in France, Spain, Belgium and others. This December, the UK saw a wave of workers strikes across a broad range of industries and services, the biggest the past three decades.

The failure of the monopoly capitalists to solve the worsening crisis in the imperialist states is bringing about the rise of fascist groups who foment ultranationalism, religious bigotry and anticommunism. Monopoly capitalists fund, organize and encourage these fascists to obscure the capitalist roots of the economic crisis and generate social and political conflicts that draw people’s attention and energy away from class struggles. They fight proletarian class leadership and oppose the growth of the anti-imperialist, democratic and socialist movements and trends. It is the duty of revolutionary proletarian forces and their party to go deep and wide among the workers, conduct widespread education to train thousands upon thousands of proletarian cadres, to lead the workers in their millions. They must guide their struggles for democratic reforms and make these serve the aims of the socialist revolution.

The resistance of the working class in the imperialist countries against worsening forms of exploitation and oppression set limits to the expansion of capital that monopoly capitalists can accumulate within their countries. The greater the resistance of labor in the imperialist countries, the more that monopoly capitalists seek broader fields overseas to carry out capitalist exploitation and plunder as a pressure valve to release their uncontrollable drive for capitalist expansion and thirst for superprofits.

The temperature of interimperialist conflict and wars continues to rise, amid the push of imperialist powers to protect and expand their global spheres of influence and investment. Presently, it is US imperialism that is the prime mover of war in its relentless drive to establish its global hegemony. The US has resorted to aggressive military means to contain the growth and expansion of its imperialist rivals China and Russia.

The war in Ukraine is the outcome of the unabated aggression of the US and NATO to expand its military alliance since 1991 by mounting wars of aggression into the Eastern European territories of former members of the Warsaw Pact, in violation of the Minsk agreement of 1991. The Russian armed assault against Ukraine started in February with the declaration of stopping the further expansion of the NATO to include Ukraine and defending the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass region which was subjected to relentless shelling by US-supported Ukrainian forces. Relentless US and NATO intervention and pouring virtually unlimited amount of weapons and funds to Ukraine to strike at Russia has prolonged the war and pushed Russia to place its nuclear arsenal on maximum alert. The US military has already deployed troops in Poland ready to escalate direct warfare with Russia. US officials are increasingly vocal about its aim of “strategically weakening” Russia and causing its dismemberment.

While waging a hot war in Ukraine, US imperialism’s bellicosity and provocations against China continue to rise, stoking the issue of Chinese sovereignty in Taiwan. On US instigation, the NATO published its “strategic outlook” denouncing Chinese “coercion” and declaring it as a “systemic challenge” to NATO security. The US Pentagon’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” outlines its plan of encircling China through such military alliances as the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-US) and the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Japan, India and the UK). It has stationed missiles in its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the Philippines. It seeks to control the “first-island chain” by strengthening its naval presence in the Sea of Japan, the Taiwan Strait and in the western and eastern Philippine seas.

The push towards direct inter-imperialist war is being constrained by the limits of US imperialist power, marked by contradictions within the NATO and the mixture of rival imperialist powers and highly independent and anti-war states in the UN and other international associations and conferences of states. The aggressive push by the US for its NATO allies to pour military aid to Ukraine, to cut the flow of Russian natural gas to Europe, and to instead import high-priced gas from the US have resulted in deep resentment in Germany, France and the UK and other countries. The sanctions imposed by the US against Russian oil failed as it has been largely ignored by most of the countries around the world. While the US has strengthened military ties with India, the latter remains adamant against condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and is now buyer of 20% of Russian oil.

There is heightened rhetoric by US government officials about “decoupling” and imposing restrictions and higher tariffs on imports from China. US talk of “decoupling,” however, is being met with rising demand for establishing a multipolar world and rejecting US hegemonism, and practical efforts to establish international partnerships and non-US dollar trade relations.

Countries belonging to the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are emboldened to forge an agreement to trade using a new international reserve currency meant to rival the US dollar and the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDRs) currency. High energy prices and US interest rates are driving emerging economies into joining the BRICS alliance. Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Pakistan and Venezuela have expressed interest in joining the organization. Potential BRICS+ applicants also include Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand and Turkey.

There is a substantial number of countries that are assertive of their national independence who are resisting imperialist impositions and intervention, and are actively taking advantage of interimperialist contradictions. Some of these countries declare their socialist programs and aspirations. These countries include Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. There is also the rise of the so-called “pink tide” in some Latin American countries marked by the election of parties that are avowedly anti-US and anti-neoliberal.

These countries can continue to strengthen themselves self-reliantly, ally with each other and with the oppressed peoples and nations fighting for national and social liberation. Proletarian revolutionary forces should help build international solidarity with these countries taking into mind the principal anti-imperialist aspect of these states, even as they grasp the class character and balance of internal forces.

Contradictions between imperialist powers and oppressed peoples and nations continue to heighten amid worsening social conditions in countries beset by anti-national policies on trade, investments, ownership of economic resources, and other neoliberal measures imposed by imperialist banks and governments. Social unrest continues to intensify in the face of sharp deterioration in living conditions of the toiling masses and middle-income sectors amid high inflation, low wages, widespread unemployment, food shortages, and overall decay of productive forces.

Strikes and mass demonstrations are exploding intermittently across various countries raising demands for democratic reforms such as wage increases, and resisting imperialist military intervention, wars and warmongering. Mass upheavals and political convulsions are bound to explode in more countries in the coming years as the broad masses of toiling people resist the worsening forms of national and social oppression imposed by imperialist powers. Goaded by their imperialist overlords, reactionary puppet states are increasingly turning to open fascist rule in the drive to suppress patriotic, democratic and socialist forces.

The crisis, especially in backward countries under neocolonial and fascist rule, continue to generate conditions favorable for waging armed revolution against imperialist domination and oppression. Oppressive and repressive regimes are leaving people with no other option but to fight back with arms. Guerrilla forces are emerging in various countries as people defend their national, political, social, economic and cultural rights. Revolutionary armed struggles being led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties continue to be waged in India, Turkey, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines and other countries.

Worsening socioeconomic conditions and state terrorism is provoking people’s resistance

The chronic crisis of the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal system in the Philippines is worsening rapidly, marked by sharp economic decline and deterioration of the living conditions of the vast majority of the people. The prevailing situation compels the broad masses of workers, peasants and small income earners to get organized and collectively clamor for urgent democratic reforms under the neocolonial state.

The ruling system is now being presided over by the widely detested Marcos kleptocratic clique. Under Marcos Jr, the reactionary state is increasingly unable to address the needs of the people. It weaves illusions of reform and unleashes fascist suppression to perpetuate the ruling system. Thus, people are more and more receptive to revolutionary propaganda and inclined to take action, get organized and wage mass struggles.

The return to power of the Marcos political dynasty is a clear manifestation of the deep levels of rottenness of the ruling system. Ousted from dictatorial rule in 1986 in the face of widespread people’s outrage over record-levels of corruption and plunder and abuse of human rights, the Marcos family was accommodated politically and economically by past regimes, under the US objective to stabilize the ruling classes.

The present regime of Ferdinand Marcos Jr is widely perceived as an illegitimate regime for having gained political power through electronic fraud, as well as from massive voter’s disenfranchisement, vote buying, and coercion by state agents during the May 2022 elections in connivance with the then ruling Duterte clique. The Marcoses aim to consolidate the billions upon billions of pesos worth of wealth illegally accumulated during the Marcos dictatorship, and perpetuate and expand its political dynasty.

The Marcos regime kowtows to both the US and Chinese imperialists to the detriment of the Filipino people and the country’s sovereignty. Nonetheless, Marcos clearly declared his allegiance to the US when he announced last November that he will allow the US to construct five military bases, in addition to the existing five US military facilities under the EDCA, as part of the US build up of forces against China.

The ruling reactionary state is a neocolonial state of the US. The US government remains the predominant imperialist power in the country, with the AFP serving as its primary pillar of dominance, and with bureaucrat capitalists beholden to US power and ruling at the behest of their imperialist masters. The American military enjoys privileged status and extraterritorial rights in the Philippines under the Mutual Defense Treaty and other unequal military agreements. Its military equipment and personnel are strategically deployed and prepositioned in key AFP camps and installations across the country.

China has emerged as an imperialist country but remains a far secondary power in the Philippines. Over the past few decades, monopoly capitalists in China colluded with the US imperialists and partook of liberalized trade and investment policies in the Philippines. They poured large amounts of investments in mining, as well as in labor-intensive semiprocessing (packaging and testing) of electronics. China projects its military presence in the West Philippine Sea through its military facilities constructed in reclaimed artificial islands within Philippine maritime territory in violation of the country’s sovereignty.

The economy and living conditions of the Filipino people continue to worsen under the Marcos regime. Marcos Jr is busying himself with overseas junkets, refurbishing the image of his tyrant father, and ensuring his stash. He offers nothing fundamentally new to alter the downward course of the Philippine economy. His declaration of “opening doors wide open” means only perpetuation of neoliberal economic policies that favor foreign capitalist investors with tax cuts and tax holidays, low workers wages, suppression of labor unions and strikes, and other incentives.

Marcos makes blusterous and baseless promises of economic revival only to lull the restless masses. Even his projections of increased foreign investments are totally incongruent with the global slowdown amid widespread recessions in leading imperialist countries, shrinking demand for semiprocessed commodities (particularly semiconductors), high costs of fuel and other factors. Manufacturing output is steadily going down, highlighted by closures of garment factories due to sharp decline in demand from US and other countries. In fact, the amount of new foreign direct investments has been declining since the start of the year including during the first months of Marcos.

Recent economic growth rates are seemingly high only because these are measured against contractions during the 2020-2021 lockdown. Growth will start to slow from the end of the year and fall further throughout 2023. The domestic economy does not have any sustainable growth drivers. Basic indicators expose the fundamental weakness of the import-dependent and export-oriented Philippine economy and its steep decline. The country’s trade deficit rose by 54% to $49.98 billion during the first ten months of the year. The balance of payment deficit grew by nearly 12 times to $7.8 billion in the first three quarters of 2022 compared to the same period last year.

Over the past three years, the total outstanding public debt has risen annually by ₱2 trillion, and stood at ₱13.6 trillion as of October 2022. The government’s budget deficit reached ₱1.1 trillion during the same period, strained by debt payments set to reach ₱1.298 trillion (₱513 billion interest payments and another ₱785 billion for off-budget principal amortization). Up to 30.9% (or ₱1.630 trillion) of the ₱5.268 trillion 2023 budget will go to public debt servicing (18.65% higher than 2022). The devaluation of the peso against the dollar puts more strain on Filipinos who are overburdened by higher and more taxes to generate funds to pay the country’s debts.

The country dependence on continuous debt-infusion is unprecedented, bleeding the country of capital and resources. The country’s wealth is siphoned out by foreign monopoly capitalist banks, robbed in large-scale corruption schemes of bureaucrat capitalists, and overspent for buying expensive weapons and paying pension for the bloated but unproductive and parasitic military and police.

Foreign debt infusions largely fund grandiose public infrastructure programs that merely create the illusion of growth but, in fact, do not help the economy become more productive and self-reliant. These infrastructure projects consume imported steel and equipment from imperialist lender countries, giving them a market for their otherwise idle capital. At best, these create a few thousand temporary jobs, at the cost of burying the country deeper into debt, feeding corruption of high government officials, destruction of the environment and privatization of public utilities.

Debt service, military spending, pork barrel funds, infrastructure projects and other unproductive spending planned throughout the Marcos government will be paid for by new loans, austerity and repressed spending on social services. Public education, health and housing will become even more underfunded. Tax cuts on large corporations and rich families will eventually be compensated by even more consumption taxes on the poor and middle-class, while avoiding demands to impose a billionaire wealth tax.

The socioeconomic conditions of the broad masses of the people deteriorated rapidly during the course of the year. The cost of living rose sharply with high costs of fuel, transportation, food and other basic commodities, education, health care and other services, electricity, water, and other utilities. Nearly 19 million families, or seven out of ten nationwide, do not have any savings and are living a hand-to-mouth existence; this is over three million more than before the pandemic lockdowns. As of 2021, up to around 70% of Filipino families had monthly incomes of ₱25,000 or less.

The daily cost of living for a family of five keeps rising and is now estimated at an average of ₱1,140. The daily minimum wage of ₱570 in Metro Manila is the highest in the country but is still only half the average family living wage. The situation is worse in other regions where minimum wages are just a third or less. The standards of living of workers, peasants, rank-and-file employees, small-income earners, professionals and millions of unemployed people are falling at an accelerated rate.

The country is gripped by an acute jobs crisis marked by widespread unemployment and large-scale retrenchments. Official statistics place the country’s unemployment rate at a ridiculously low 4.5% conjured by not counting at least 30% of potential workers as part of the labor force. More than 40% of employed are self-employed, informal family workers and domestic workers, who for all intents are, in fact, unemployed. The official unemployed plus discouraged workers, plus all people working informally could easily reach 55% of the total labor force. Just between September and October, up to 476,000 lost their jobs. Almost half of this number are in the agricultural sector, where entire communities are displaced economically by natural calamities, as well as by man-made calamities such as land grabbing for real estate development, infrastructure projects, expansion of mining operations, plantations, ecotourism and energy projects.

The ruling Marcoses are in alliance with the Duterte clique, with the fascist-minded Sara Duterte as his vice president. They are in further alliance with the Arroyos. Together they form the worst representatives of the ruling classes who are notorious for brutal repression, brazen corruption and utter subservience to the imperialists. With only six years in power, Marcos wants to rush all means to pocket the maximum amount from state funds and from cuts in government projects and investments. The Marcos family railroaded the formation of the Maharlika Investment Corporation which is set to control hundreds of billions of pesos in public funds to set the stage for megaplunder. Given the power to invest these funds anywhere, the corporation is set to be used by the Marcoses to give favor to cronies and for laundering the stolen wealth of the Marcoses.

To perpetuate itself in power, the US-Marcos regime is using the combined means of mass deception and armed repression.

Massive amounts of funds are being poured into the Marcos campaign of disinformation in social media and the media to drown critical news and information, reinterpret history to cover up the crimes of the Marcoses, promote false images of contentment, dismiss discourse on social issues as “communist propaganda,” carry out terrorist-labelling and red-tagging in order to draw away people’s attention from crucial issues, stifle their voices, keep them docile, undermine social unrest, and draw the people away from the path of collective struggle.

Under the US-Marcos regime, the defense and security establishment, specifically the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), continues to expand its power and influence over the bureaucratic state and society. In outright contempt of the principle of civilian supremacy over the military, the AFP through its agents in the National Task Force (NTF)-Elcac exercises command and control over various state agencies and government units in the name of counterinsurgency.

The AFP and the NTF-Elcac engage in relentless psywar operations and brazen disinformation combined with the use of armed might. It constantly feeds the public with false information. Anyone who does not conform with their ideas or refuses to echo their lies are branded as terrorists or supporters of terrorism. They use their vast resources to use social media and broadcast media as platform for disinformation.

With Marcos as commander-in-chief, the AFP continues to intensify and step-up its state terrorist drive against the people in order to crush all forms of organizations and take away the people’s capacity to defend and pursue their democratic rights. Attacks against unions, community organizations, school associations and others have been stepped up on the pretext of counterinsurgency.

In violation of people’s fundamental rights, their organizations are subjected to surveillance and harassment. Military and police agents hound their leaders and demand the list of their members in order to force them to “surrender.” In the hands of the Marcos government, the recently enacted SIM registration law will add to the machinery of the surveillance state.

Attacks against the people in the countryside are even more relentless and brutal. Guided by its US counterinsurgency advisers, the AFP is applying the barbaric but failed tactic of “draining the sea to catch the fish” employed by the US military in the Vietnam War. Entire communities are placed under hamlet or military control in the guise of “civil-military” programs such as the RCSP (Retooled Community Support Program). People’s rights to travel or work in their fields are restricted and monitored by the military. Curfews are imposed. Fascist soldiers conduct nighttime raids on homes to interrogate and intimidate residents. People who refuse to bow or cooperate with the military are subjected to arrest, torture and extrajudicial killing. To display their brazen terrorism, and in utter violation of international humanitarian law and every imaginable laws of civilized warfare, the AFP conducts aerial bombing and artillery shelling near communities, fields and forests causing widespread fear, damage to the people’s livelihood and the environment.

The US-led AFP and defense establishment have come up with the public relations line of having achieved “strategic victory.” This aim to justify more than five years of squandering hundreds of billions of pesos of people’s money to fund its relentless military offensives and rampant military abuses. It makes the ludicrous claim that the number of NPA guerrilla fronts is down to only five, and that around 25,000 members of the NPA have surrendered, several times more than its earlier public estimates of between 3,000 to 4,000 NPA fighters. Yet, the AFP and the PNP under Marcos continue to demand more money to buy bombs and artillery and sustain the operations of more than 160 battalions of combat troops in more than 40 provinces across the country, even in areas which they have declared “cleared” of the NPA.

Amid widespread impoverishment and hunger, the entire country sits on top of a social volcano that is constantly rumbling and ready to explode. The broad masses of workers, peasants and other toiling people are increasingly restless over the economic crisis and outraged by the Marcos regime’s gross disregard of the worsening conditions of the people since assuming power.

The Filipino people, including the youth, have not forgotten the unpunished crimes perpetrated by the dictatorship of Marcos Sr under martial law from 1972 to 1986. Giant mass actions during the election campaign early this year reflect the people’s hatred for the Marcos-Duterte clique. They denounce the electoral power grab through electronic fraud by the Marcoses, Dutertes and Arroyos during the May 2022 elections. The broad range of political forces against the Marcos regime are determined to unite in a democratic united front to fight corruption and all attempts to steal the people’s money, its drive to monopolize power, its subservience to US imperialism, neoliberal economic policies, and its campaign of state terrorism.

The overall crisis of the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal system is generating broad people’s resistance. There is a growing clamor for substantial wage and salary increases to help workers and employees cope with the increasing cost of living. There is also widespread demand for regularization of workers and better working conditions. Mass actions among the broad masses of workers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers, teachers and other sectors continue to develop. Workers’ strikes and protest actions are set to steadily rise amid the rapid decline of wages and complete disregard of the Marcos regime of the people’s welfare.

The US-Marcos regime is bound to face stiff people’s resistance in the coming period with its push to carry out its anti-national and anti-people policies and programs. These include plans to impose new tax measures against consumers. It continues to carry out the policy of import liberalization, especially of agricultural commodities to the detriment of local producers. Marcos wants to take in more public debt in order to fund its infrastructure projects. His 2023 budget continues to prioritize debt payments and military overspending over social spending for public health, education and other public services. He is pushing for the expansion of mining operations, plantations and other projects that cause widespread dislocation of peasants and minority communities from their land. With Marcos’ approval, the US military is set to build more exclusive facilities inside AFP military camps.

It is clear that the socioeconomic crisis and heightened state terrorism are inciting the people to resist, defend their civil, political, economic and cultural rights, fight for their well-being, and carry forward their anti-imperialist, antifeudal and antifascist struggles. The Party and all revolutionary forces are determined to carry out widespread propaganda and education, organize and mobilize people in their numbers, and advance the revolutionary armed struggle through protracted people’s war, in order to carry forward the national democratic cause.

The Party leads the revolution amid the enemy’s brutal onslaught

Standing on the theoretical foundation of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Party performs its duties as the vanguard and steel core of the people’s democratic revolution. The Party’s critique of the semicolonial and semifeudal system in the Philippines, and the necessity, justness and urgency of its program for a people’s democratic revolution, are daily validated by the chronic crisis and sharp downturns in the ruling political and economic system amid the repeated crisis of the global capitalist system. The correctness of the Party’s strategy of waging protracted people’s war to encircle the cities from the countryside, of waging revolutionary armed struggle combined with other forms of resistance, is affirmed by the political and military power which the revolutionary forces have systematically and self-reliantly built across the archipelago.

To perform its leading role, the Party strikes deep roots among the broad masses of workers, peasants, other toiling people, as well as among the petty-bourgeoisie and other progressive and patriotic classes and sectors. It has branches, sections, and committees at various levels in both the cities and countryside. The Party conducts propaganda, mass education and cultural activities to arouse, organize and mobilize the people in their numbers. It builds various forms of mass organizations at all levels, and links up with the people’s traditional forms of organizations, in order to recruit and train activists and cadres from the advanced section of the masses.

The Party has built thousands of committees of leadership and branches in 14 regions, in more than 70 provinces, in hundreds of towns and districts, and in thousands of villages. These Party committees are built in both cities and countryside, wherever the Party can build mass organizations, lead the masses in mass campaigns, and wage, or prepare for or support the armed struggle. The Party established the New People’s Army in 1969 from the ground up as its primary weapon for waging people’s war. It currently has thousands of Red fighters armed primarily with high-powered rifles and explosives.

The Party is currently carrying out the Central Committee’s 5-year program of 2017-2022. The cadres and activists of the Party have exerted all efforts to respond to the general call of the five-year program to carry forward the antifascist, antifeudal and anti-imperialist movement to fight and overthrow the US-Duterte regime, and to bring the people’s war to the advanced phase of the strategic defensive. The Central Committee is presently summing-up the experiences of the past five years in order to draw the main positive and negative lessons, and set forth the program for the coming period.

In the course of waging protracted people’s war, the NPA has established more than 110 guerrilla fronts across the country and has built thousands of local mass organizations. It carries out land reform and builds the people’s democratic government on the basis of the people’s organized strength. The NPA applies guerrilla tactics of concentration, shifting and dispersal to carry out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on an ever widening and deepening mass base.

The enemy’s strategic offensives are being frustrated by the NPA by applying tactics of counterencirclement comprised of shifting from one area of a guerrilla front to another, expanding its guerrilla fronts or building new guerrilla fronts to undermine the enemy’s focused and sustained operations. The NPA continues to heighten its agile capability by taking advantage of favorable terrain, cover and concealment, deep mass support from local population and highly mobile operations of guerrilla units. In doing so, it avoids the enemy’s detection and renders ineffective its electronic surveillance and human intelligence.

Guerrilla units of the NPA have shown that they are undaunted by the enemy’s superiority in number and weaponry. Through quick movement, shifting and counterencirclement, and taking advantage of their mastery of the terrain and deep support of the masses, units of the NPA successfully mount tactical offensives against the isolated, weak and tired units of the enemy. The NPA mounts attritive tactical offensives or military actions to disrupt the enemy’s tempo of operations and derail its plans. Annihilative or basic tactical offensives are carried out to overpower enemy units, seize its weapons in order to arm more Red fighters and build more NPA units. Through political and military trainings, the NPA constantly upgrades its fighting capability, tactics and knowledge of military science to defeat the enemy by employing local superiority of forces in battles of quick decision. The NPA makes the enemy bleed with a thousand cuts through guerrilla war of attrition while dealing it with head blows by annihilating weak and isolated fascist troops.

The Party has directed the NPA to exert all efforts to strengthen its bonds with the masses especially in the face of the enemy’s relentless attacks. Practice has proved that building and consolidating mass organizations, carrying out antifeudal and antifascist mass struggles, building organs of political power and waging guerrilla warfare can persist even in areas under the heavy presence of fascist troops. The Party, the NPA and the revolutionary masses combine tactics of clandestine and open methods of organizing and united front building, and wage illegal and legal forms of struggle.

We must learn from the fact that the NPA has had the most success in guerrilla fronts where the peasant masses have been organized and actively mobilized to wage antifeudal struggles and carry out agrarian revolution. The NPA has earned the deep-going support of the peasant masses by helping them fight for rent reduction, elimination of usury, fair farm gate prices for farm produce, and other demands; and at the same time, conducting economic, public health, literacy, political education, cultural and other campaigns to address the needs of the people. The NPA continues to help build and consolidate the mass organizations of peasants, youth, women, children and cultural workers. It helps build local militias, trains and mobilizes local peasant fighters to wage armed struggle on a wide scale.

While leading the NPA in waging armed struggle, the Party also works tirelessly to deepen its roots and widen its reach among the broad masses of workers and semiproletariat in the cities, as well as with the pettybourgeois intellectuals and other progressive sectors, groups and individuals. Leading Party committees in all regions are making it a point to build and strengthen its committees in the urban areas in order to establish branches in factories and workplaces, communities, campuses, offices and so on in order to effectively arouse, organize and mobilize the people in their numbers.

The Party develops and leads the revolutionary mass movement in the cities by addressing the urgent issues and demands of the working class and other sectors for socioeconomic reforms including wage increases and expansion of public spending for social services, as well as defense of civil and political rights, against government corruption, advancing the cause of national sovereignty against foreign interference and military intervention, and so on. The Party puts forward its analysis of these issues to raise the people’s militance and generate a mass movement that is distinctly anti-imperialist and antifascist, and supportive of the antifeudal mass movement in the countryside. The ranks of proletarian revolutionaries from among the workers and remolded pettybourgeoisie serve as the Party’s deep spring of cadres who are assigned to perform duties in the countryside and other critical tasks.

We have so far frustrated the enemy’s declared objective of crushing the Party, the NPA and all forms of people’s resistance. The Party and revolutionary movement have withstood more than five years of relentless attacks which have employed the worst forms of state terrorism. The Filipino people and their revolutionary forces are determined to advance the armed struggle and the mass movement, especially amid the growing clamor of the broad masses for revolution as they face heightened oppression and exploitation under the US-Marcos regime.

The Party remains strong and is in a position to further grow in the coming years despite having suffered some significant losses and setbacks in some parts. The Central Committee, together with all organs of leadership, is currently at the head of efforts to identify the internal ideological, political and organizational weaknesses, shortcomings and errors that are at the root of these setbacks. The Party is determined to rectify these errors by carrying out a thorough summing-up of experience guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the basic principles that were set forth and reaffirmed by the Party in the course of the first and second great rectification movements.

The Party organization remains steadfast even in the face of intense enemy attacks. Leading Party committees have made it a point to convene meetings and conferences in order to collectively assess their work, point out weaknesses, come up with plans to overcome obstacles and carry forward their work together with the overall advance of the revolution.

We continue to strengthen and replenish the leading committees of the Party from the center to the basic levels. Party leaders, both senior and young cadres, undergo criticism and self-criticism, and are evaluated and promoted based on their merit in the ideological, political and organizational fields. The Party will forever remain vibrant with the constant flow of young proletarian cadres who are determined to wage revolution and see the future of national freedom and socialism.

The Party is ever conscious of the need to strengthen itself ideologically in order to more effectively carry out its revolutionary tasks. By raising the theoretical knowledge and ideological level of its cadres and members, the Party seeks to raise its capability to carry forward the people’s democratic revolution to greater heights. Thus, Party committees make it a point that all its members undergo the Three Level Party Course. New Party recruits undergo the Basic Party Course and Intermediate Party Course within a year of their recruitment as full party members. Within two years upon recruitment, Party cadres complete the Advanced Party Course.

Party cadres are assiduously studying and using Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to conduct social investigation and class analysis, study the conditions and problems of the masses, draw plans for carrying out revolutionary work, conduct periodical assessment to measure achievements and identify problems in order to ensure the steady advance of their work, and undertake summing-up and draw lessons from their revolutionary practice. These lessons raise our level of understanding of the principles and concrete practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the daily conduct of our revolutionary work, formulation of policies and plans of action.

The Party is a dynamic, disciplined and unified organization that is built under the principles of democratic centralism. The myriad of Party committees and organizations march in one stead under the principle of centralized leadership and decentralized operations.

The Party shoulders the wide-ranging tasks for carrying forward the revolutionary movement across the archipelago. The Party’s committees at the regional, subregional, provincial, district and section levels perform leadership tasks at their level and scope. The entire Party is firmly united under the leadership of the Central Committee.

Amid the favorable objective conditions marked by the sharp downturn of the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal system under the US-Marcos regime, the Party is confident that the revolutionary movement will be able to more decisively overcome all obstacles and advance more vigorously in the coming years.

Consolidate and further strengthen the Party to carry the revolution forward

The Central Committee calls on all leading committees and cadres to exert all efforts to consolidate and strengthen the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally. The current 5-year program will be extended by six-months to allow all regions to complete and submit their 5-year summing-up documents, and for the CC to draw-up the next 5-year program (2022-2027).

We must urgently identify and rectify all forms of subjectivist errors, which weaken and set back the different spheres of our work. We must raise our theoretical knowledge, firmly grasp basic principles, deepen our study of history, and be guided by lessons from the past to avoid repeating errors, enable the steady quantitative advance of our efforts, and carry forward the revolution to qualitatively higher levels.

We must sum-up our revolutionary practice during the past five and 25 years. All our cadres must deepen their theoretical understanding of the laws of development of the protracted people’s war and the people’s democratic revolution. We must systematically review, study and use as guide our basic documents, particularly Our Urgent Tasks (1976), Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War (1974), Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and other documents of the Second Great Rectification Movement (1992), as well as relevant internal memoranda of the Central Committee, and its Political Bureau and Executive Committee.

We must decisively criticize and repudiate conservatism, tailism, legalism, economism, bourgeois reformism, NGOism, employee mentality; as well as commandism and “Left” sectarianism that impede the development of the militant political movement in the cities. On the one hand, these errors tend to overly demarcate the mass movement from the armed struggle, overstate the capacity of legal and parliamentary struggles, neglect the need to develop the underground Party organization and systems, generate undue illusions of reforming the ruling system and douse the people’s militance and determination, especially when faced with setbacks.

On the other hand, revolutionary forces commit the “Left” error of putting themselves way ahead the level of consciousness and activity of the masses. They are sometimes satisfied with issuing general slogans without doing enough painstaking study and research into the specific conditions of the people in a village, town, district or province, in order to put forward policies and plans that can arouse the people’s militance. There is the also some who fail to win-over the middle section and close the doors of unity against non-revolutionaries. We must, at all times, be conscientious of our task of raising the political and revolutionary consciousness of the masses to heighten their militance, sense of organization and determination to wage collective struggle.

In the field of armed struggle, we must decisively criticize and repudiate erroneous ideas leading to self-constriction, mountain stronghold mentality, civilianization of overdispersed guerrilla units and overextended periods of concentration. We must firmly grasp the principle of leadership and command in guerrilla warfare as centralized strategic command and decentralized command in campaigns and operations. We must correct erroneous concepts that weaken command and control of dispersed units which lead to conservatism, civilianization, guerrillaism, passivity and loss of initiative of NPA units.

We must reaffirm and strengthen our grasp and practice of mass line, and sharply point out our shortcomings and weaknesses. The principle of mass line means trusting, relying upon and enabling the people to defend their rights and fight for their aspirations. We draw up our program and plans of action on the basis of the concrete conditions, history and level of consciousness of the masses, and impart it for them to embrace and pursue. The national democratic revolution is a mass undertaking in which the masses themselves—galvanized and active, and through the dint of their numbers—change the course of history and create a new destiny.

We must immediately overcome the problem of some Party committees and NPA units who fail to immerse themselves among the masses and are not deeply perceptive of the urgent problems of the people. They have become timid in propaganda and education work. They are satisfied by the small numbers being mobilized in mass actions or to shoulder various tasks. A few have grown accustomed to giving material incentives in exchange for political work instead of raising the people’s militance and capacity to collectively address their needs.

We must mobilize the masses in great numbers. It is, thus, crucial for the Party, the NPA and all revolutionary forces to plunge into painstaking mass work and social investigation, and master sweeping and solid, and clandestine and open methods to arouse, organize and mobilize the people.

In some cases, in the face of intense and sustained enemy attacks, a number of NPA units commit errors of limiting their effective operations for an extended period in forested and mountainous areas where the population is thin and mass support is sparse and access to supply lines is difficult. They harbor illusions and a false sense of security that mountain strongholds provide an impenetrable fortress against the enemy.

We must fully grasp that in guerrilla warfare, mobility and support of the people is vital in ensuring the preservation and growth of the people’s army. It is, thus, urgent to point out the how some units of the NPA have become complacent and afflicted by conservatism, civilianization, guerrillaism, the desire for comfort and ease in narrow base areas, mountain stronghold mentality and other erroneous and pernicious thinking. These tend to overestimate the enemy and underestimate the importance of building mass support. As a result, they have neglected the need to expand the guerrilla zones and do mass work in more populated rural areas where armed propaganda units can clandestinely operate.

Party leaders and NPA commanders must ensure the NPA units expand and cover the plains, rolling hills, areas along main transportation lines, coastal areas and estuaries. In these areas, feudal and semifeudal forms of oppression and exploitation are acute, and the masses demand justice and are more than willing to be organized and participate in revolutionary struggles.

The Party must analyze and root out the ideas behind the failure of some units of the NPA to timely disperse and shift its forces as means of counter-encirclement and rendering ineffective the concentrated and sustained attacks of the enemy. The Party’s leadership at all levels, especially those in the command of the NPA, must grasp the dialectics of consolidating and expanding mass work and military work and steadily advancing wave upon wave in a timely manner. The aim is to build bigger circles or theaters for guerrilla warfare which would diminish the enemy’s capacity to encircle the revolutionary forces.

The Party organization and all military cadres in the people’s army must take lead in formulating the correct methods and tactics in waging guerrilla warfare and launching tactical offensives within the scope of guerrilla fronts and along exterior lines. Horizontal and vertical forces of the NPA must be mobilized in order to conduct active defense warfare within interior lines and launch various kinds of guerrilla actions to weaken the momentum of enemy offensives and break its encirclement campaigns. Units of the NPA must avoid attacking hard targets such as heavily fortified camps and command posts and prioritize soft targets that have greater probability of success. At the same time, the NPA must timely dispatch a part of its vertical forces to launch exterior line guerrilla operations.

We must firmly grasp the dialectical relations between the different aspects of our work, and strike the correct balance and interaction between the principal and secondary aspects. While it is correct for the Party to wield the NPA as its principal weapon, it will be fatal in the long run if the Party fails to wield other important weapons in its arsenal. Thus, while paying principal attention to waging armed struggle and building guerrilla fronts and bases, we must also exert all efforts to develop the mass movement in both the cities and countryside as crucial concomitant tasks.

We must strengthen the Party’s territorial work in all areas and at all levels—in both the cities and countryside, to serve as anchor for the overall strengthening of the revolutionary movement and the armed struggle. In the countryside, the Party must also build territorial committees to cover the wide ground that is currently beyond the scope of guerrilla zones or reach of the NPA, in order to arouse, organize and mobilize the masses to fight for their interests and support the people’s war. In the guerrilla zones, building mass organizations and organs of political power and waging anti-feudal and antifascist mass struggles, should all be combined to serve the needs and aims of strengthening the people’s army.

The leading cadres of the Party must cast away complacency, firmly grasp the dialectical laws of development of the revolutionary movement, and not allow our work to stagnate for extended periods of time. They must exercise vigilance in combating and rectifying bureaucratic style of work and leadership, liberalism and unhealthy petty-bourgeois ways and habits that run counter to the principle of democratic centralism and undermines the Party’s unity and discipline.

Given the extremely favorable social and political conditions, it is reasonable to expect that our work in arousing, organizing and mobilizing the people will follow a steady quantitative course of advance, and move from one level of quality to another. We must be quick to assess and evaluate our methods of work to ensure that our objectives and tasks at every given period are accomplished in a timely manner.

From its current strength, we must aim to qualitatively expand and develop the capacity of the mass movement in the national capital region and in all regions within a definite period of time. This can be measured in terms of the bigger number of factories, campuses, offices, communities, and sectors that our work encompasses. Further, we must measure our success in terms of a substantial increase in the number of active Party branches and members, unions and mass organizations, as well as in terms of the widening reach of our propaganda and cultural activities. The highest metric of our success in developing the mass movement in the cities is the increase in material and political support to the NPA, and the number of forces deployed to the countryside and other fields of work.

In the countryside, our success is measured in terms of developing company-sized guerrilla fronts in contiguous areas, achieving the desired balance of having one guerrilla company with 2-3 platoons acting as anchor for military work for every 6-9 independent horizontal platoons for mass work, of expansion and consolidation, and advancing wave upon wave within a medium-term time-frame in order to steadily widen and strengthen the people’s war.

We must increase the strength of the Party’s organization. We must build mass organizations and link up with existing organizations, conduct widespread national democratic propaganda, and wage mass campaigns and struggles, in order to identify and recruit the advanced elements among the masses. On the basis of the growth of the revolutionary mass movement, let us continue to boldly increase the Party membership without letting a single undesirable in, while maintaining the reasonable standards set by the Party constitution.

We must increase the Party’s membership in the hundreds of thousands. We must continue to strengthen the mass and cadre character Party, in which its membership is both strong in numbers and steep in quality. We must maintain the large proportion of members who come from the toiling masses, and further increase the number of members who hail from the ranks of workers in order to help strengthen the proletarian character of the Party, even as we continue to draw in members from the different classes and sectors.

We must vigorously conduct the Party’s Three-Level Course to raise the ideological and theoretical level of the Party members. We must also make available Marxist-Leninist-Maoist books and literatures in all forms (printed or digital, video, translated and original) and encourage Party cadres to conduct study meetings and seminars. We must make widely available to all Party members the Selected Works of Ka Joma in all major Philippine languages.

We must develop, train and boldly deploy and promote young cadres, especially from the working class and remolded petty-bourgeois intellectuals, to various fields of work, and areas of leadership across the country. Leading Party committees at all levels must systematically develop their second and third line of cadres to ensure continuity and youthful vigor in all our work. Leading committees at all levels should be well-balanced in terms of ideological, political and organizational excellence, as well as in terms of age by combining senior, middle-age and young cadres. Senior cadres who are in key positions or assigned to key duties may be maintained for as long as they are healthy. But younger excellent cadres must be assigned to support them and replace them when necessary.

We must always maintain and strengthen the committee system and collective leadership at all levels. We must conduct regular or special meetings and consultations of leading committees. At the same time, we must ensure the security of all cadres. We must master the art of secrecy and compartmentalization of information, while ensuring effective leadership in all areas of work.

The Party must continue to lead the New People’s Army in carrying forward the protracted people’s war following the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside. At the current middle-phase of strategic defensive, we must pursue the correct military line of waging extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base.

The NPA gains strength by fighting. We must combine annihilative and attritive tactical offensives in the course of waging guerrilla warfare. Annihilative tactical offensives form the principal aspect, while attritive tactical offensives are complementary. We must overcome conservatism in the form of one-sidedly mounting attritive actions while failing to plan and carry out annihilative actions.

Annihilative tactical offensive aim to take away the capacity of enemy units to fight by disarming them. The accumulation of basic tactical offensive weaken and tear the enemy piece by piece. These enable the people’s army to accumulate strength and raise its capability and quality in preparation for establishing regular guerrilla forces and waging regular mobile warfare in the next strategic stage.

The Party directs the NPA to mount annihilative (basic) tactical offensives combined with, and supplemented by widespread attritive and punitive tactical offensives.

Basic tactical offensives include ambushes to annihilate the isolated, detached and weakened troops of the enemy; and raids against weakly defended detachments, camps or tactical posts, in order to seize the enemy’s firearms and equipment. At the same time, the NPA must conduct extensive attritive tactical offensives through widespread sniping and use of command-detonated explosives, grenade or molotov throwing, sabotage and other forms of armed action against enemy detachments, air assets, transport vehicles, supply depots and operating troops.

The NPA is directed to carry out special operations and punitive actions outside the guerrilla zones. It must target enemy communications, transportation, supply lines, and other critical military installations; as well as destructive mining, plantation, ecotourism, and other big bourgeois comprador and big landlord operations that grab land and destroy livelihood of peasants and minority people.

Following standards and procedures of the revolutionary justice system, we must try and punish the most notorious fascist officers of the enemy, including the masterminds and operatives behind the massacres, murders and torture of civilians, activists and revolutionaries, and the kidnapping of their children or relatives.

Special units of the NPA must be formed and directed to carry out partisan operations. NPA must identify and decisively eliminate the enemy’s intelligence network, as well those traitors who have connived with the enemy in the worst forms of fascist abuses.

The combination of annihilative and attritive tactical offensives must be conducted across and beyond the scope of guerrilla fronts in order to derail the enemy’s plans and frustrate its strategic offensives. Horizontal and vertical NPA units must combine with local militia units and self-defense corps in conducting tactical offensives.

In the face of the enemy’s strategic offensives and focused military operations, guerrilla commanders and fighters must always maintain an offensive posture in political work, military work and mass work. The Party and the NPA must create more points of initiative for strengthening the people’s army, expanding and consolidating the revolutionary mass base and mounting tactical offensives against the enemy, by combining consolidation and expansion of guerrilla fronts, as well as by building new guerrilla fronts.

We must continue to build and develop guerrilla companies as center-of-gravity at the regional, provincial and sub-regional military areas comprising 3-5 contiguous company-sized guerrilla fronts. These companies should deploy its platoons to conduct mass work within a short radius when in relative dispersal, and should concentrate them to conduct consolidation activities and military work.

The company or a smaller formation must move from one point of concentration to another, unite and coordinate with territorial forces and local population. They advance wave upon wave by building political and military strength at every stage of advance. Units of the NPA that have decreased in numbers should be promptly augmented, reorganized, absorbed or merged into other units.

The Party and the NPA must assiduously expand the guerrilla fronts and make wide areas accessible for mass work including the highly-populated plains, by having mass work platoons temporarily dispatch NPA squads, or by deploying legal or semi-legal organizing teams, depending on conditions. There should be several corridors for maneuver to link up these areas with other NPA units in more favorable terrain of forested, mountainous or hilly areas with sizable population.

The NPA must continue to build contiguous guerrilla fronts under the leadership of sub-regional or provincial commands, with the aim of expanding its territories and widening the theater of guerrilla warfare. In doing so, NPA units will have a wide berth to counter-maneuver the enemy’s attacking forces, frustrate the enemy’s attempt to isolate and force NPA units to a purely military situation, counter-encircle and mount tactical offensives from the enemy’s rear or flank.

The Party and NPA must continue to deepen and widen the revolutionary mass base in the guerrilla zones primarily by implementing the Revolutionary Guide to Land Reform, and building mass organizations of peasants, youth, women, children and cultural workers. We must launch inter-village, town-wide or province-wide mass campaigns to reduce land rent, eliminate usury, raise farm gate prices, raise wages of farm workers and increase income from sideline occupations. There must be widespread campaigns to resist land grabbing by multinational corporations in connivance with local bureaucrats and big bourgeois compradors that dislocate and permanently take away the people’s livelihood.

The NPA must continue to assist the masses in production and in conducting health and literacy campaigns. Organs of political power must be established on the basis of the strength of mass organizations, the local party committee and the people’s army.

We must develop and strengthen the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement of the Filipino people and strive to mobilize the people in their millions across the country. We must build the broadest antifascist united front against the US-Marcos regime and resist its anti-national and anti-democratic policies and measures that aggravate the conditions of the Filipino people.

We must call on the Filipino people to heighten their demand to recover the billions of stolen wealth of the Marcoses, the punishment of Imelda and their criminal cohorts, and the complete remuneration of the tens of thousands of victims of the Marcos dictatorship. They must vigorously oppose the MIF and all corruption schemes being hatched by the ruling Marcos clique.

We must arouse the Filipino people to fight the Marcos regime’s subservience to US imperialism, US military intervention in the country, and stoking of inter-imperialist war. We must raise the demand for the abrogation of the Mutual Defense Treaty, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, the Visiting Forces Agreement and other unequal military treaties.

We must push for the dismantling of US naval base in Ulugan Bay, Puerto Princesa, Palawan as well as other US military bases in Central Luzon, Cebu, Cagayan de Oro, and plans to establish more US military installations in Cagayan, Isabela, Zambales and other provinces. At the same time, we must call for the dismantling of all Chinese military structures in the West Philippine Sea as well as Chinese-controlled cell towers inside AFP camps.

We must expose and oppose the surrender of Philippine sovereignty. We must denounce Marcos’ kowtowing to the economic, geopolitical and military interests of imperialist powers. We must develop mass struggles to oppose large-scale plunder of the country’s resources by foreign-owned and foreign-funded mining companies, plantations, ecotourism projects, reclamations, dams and other infrastructure projects. We must support the struggle of the Moro people and all other national minority groups against foreign plunder of their ancestral land, and in their struggle for their right to self-determination. We must unite the broad sectors to fight wanton import liberalization and dumping of foreign surplus agricultural commodities to the detriment of local producers.

We must demand the repeal of neoliberal laws such as the CREATE (tax deductions to foreign investors), Foreign Investments Act, the Retail Trade Liberalization Act, the amendments to the Public Service Act and other laws which give preferential treatment to foreign capitalists in the country to the economic detriment of the Filipino people. These laws perpetuate the country’s economic dependence on foreign capital and further exacerbate the export-oriented and import-dependent economy. We must denounce the country’s dependence on foreign loans that primarily go to non-productive spending. We must fight the massive burden of debt payment and servicing that take away much needed funds for social service.

The Party must lead and unite all revolutionary and progressive forces in exposing and developing nationwide resistance against state terrorism. We must widely expose and vigorously protest de facto martial law rule in the countryside, especially in the form of military occupation of communities, extrajudicial killings and torture of civilians, and rampant abuses of human rights. Rampant violations of international humanitarian law or war crimes, as well as violations of child rights, must be exposed and denounced. We must guide the masses to get organized and fight back against fascist terrorism, including the enemy’s oppressive “surrender drive” which brazenly violate their civil and political rights, aerial bombing, drone surveillance and others.

We must also widely expose and oppose repressive martial law-like measures in the cities which trample on the rights of workers to form unions, and violate civil and political rights. We must expose the link between fascist repression and imperialist plunder in the countryside, intensified exploitation of workers in the cities, and other oppressive and anti-people neoliberal measures. The resistance of youth and students to the proposed revival of the mandatory military training (ROTC) must be linked to the struggle against state terrorism by exposing in campuses the gross military abuses and crimes perpetrated by the AFP and PNP in the cities and countryside.

The Party must exert all efforts to raise the level of the revolutionary mass movement in the cities by leading and developing the economic and democratic struggles of different sectors. We must raise the political consciousness of the masses by exposing the imperialist roots of the issues and problems which they face every day. We must pay attention to developing a robust movement for organizing and mobilizing workers in their struggle for wage increases, job security and defense of union rights. We must boost the militant mass movement of youth and students that fights for their democratic rights, gives active support to the struggles of the toiling masses, and amplifies the clamor for national democracy.

The Party must raise the level of the revolutionary mass movement in the countryside. It must mobilize its forces, the NPA and other mass organizations, to carry forward the land reform movement, especially in the highly populated areas. They must resist the entry and expansion of mining operations, plantations, infrastructure, real estate, ecotourism and energy projects that grab agricultural and ancestral land, and bring permanent destruction to the livelihood of peasants and the environment. Broad alliances in support of the struggles of peasants and national minorities must be built, and their struggles brought to the cities and town centers.

The Party must also exert all efforts to strengthen the revolutionary movement of Filipino migrants abroad. We must develop close relations with Filipino communities and their organizations and build their revolutionary organizations to raise their democratic demands as workers and small-income earners, expose and oppose the labor-export policy, and link their struggles with the anti-imperialist, antifeudal and antifascist struggles in the home-front.

The Party must take advantage of the favorable international situation in order to help develop the anti-imperialist and proletarian forces across the world. We must link up with progressive and revolutionary forces, movements and states, and wage common struggles against neoliberal economic policies, the rise of fascism and imperialist wars. We must extend political and material support to the democratic mass struggles of workers and toiling people in different countries, even as we draw solidarity and support for the Philippine revolution.

We must encourage and help in the formation of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist parties across the world. We must continue to put forward our analysis of important international issues and promote our line against modern revisionism. We must continue to promote fraternal and cooperative relations with Marxist-Leninist parties, and encourage bilateral talks and multilateral consultations among them to serve as means for exchanging ideas and experiences, and forging other means of mutual assistance and cooperation.

The grave suffering of the Filipino people amid the sharp downturn of the economic crisis, intensified imperialist intervention and oppression, and heightened use of state terrorism to preserve the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal, leave the Filipino people with no other option but to wage revolutionary resistance in order to advance their aspirations for genuine national freedom and true democracy.

The Central Committee is fully confident that given the prevailing conditions of crisis and social unrest, and with the selfless dedication of its cadres, the Communist Party of the Philippines can gain unprecedented strength, lead the revolutionary movement in the Philippines to steadily advance in the coming years and achieve victories much greater than ever before.

Source : https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/cpp54-english-early-edition/