Chapter 1 
Review of Philippine History 
 

Chapter 2 
Basic Prolems of the Filipino People 
 

Chapter 3 
The People's Democratic Revolution 
 
 

This abandonment of fundamental Leninist principles on the inevitability of violence in the destruction of the bourgeois state machine by the leadership of Jesus Lava was paralleled organizationally by the degeneration of democratic centralism in Party ranks and the disintegration of the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan or Huks,  the former people’s army, into a number of roving rebel bands specializing in extortion and protection rackets in the red-light districts surrounding U.S. military bases in Luzon.  Seldom in the history of Marxist-Leninist parties had a revolutionary organization decayed so rapidly and completely. 

Rectification was initially launched as a struggle within the Party.  However, the process became antagonistic as the entrenched leadership ¾ a tight nepotistic clique of Lava kinsmen and close friends ¾ systematically tried to kill democratic discussion of its shortcomings.  By 1968, there remained no other way to assert the revolutionary alternative than by forging a new Party.  This process culminated on Dec. 26, 1968, the anniversary of the birth of Mao Tsetung, when the revolutionary wing headed by Amado Guerrero reestablished the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). 

Serving as the foundation stone of the reestablished Party was a detailed summation document,  Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party,  which could now be considered the second major work to spring from the national-democratic movement.  By all counts, Rectify is a remarkable document.  It synthesizes a process which, though protracted and bitter, thoroughly and systematically examined the 38-year experience of the Communist Party of the purpose of recementing its weakening proletarian foundations.  Representing one of the few successful attempts to retrieve a proletarian party by means of a thoroughgoing ideological rectification in the history of communist  movements, Rectify  dwells on the ideological, political and organizational dimensions of Party degeneration, draws out their interrelationships, and traces them to their roots. 

The fundamental cause of the Party’s many serious errors, according to the document, was the subjectivist, non-materialist and non-dialectical philosophical outlook of the unremolded petty-bourgeois cadres who had established themselves in Party leadership in the late thirties and forties.  Subjectivism had two principal ideological manifestations:  empiricism and dogmatism.  Dogmatism, the rigid application of the general theories of Marxism-Leninism without specifying them to concrete conditions, led to “Left” opportunist political policies in the period  1948-55 when the Party overestimated the strength of the people’s forces and then threw them into a foolhardy attempt to seize  political power through a swift, armed uprising.  However by far the more dominant subjectivist trend in the Party was empiricism, or the tendency to separate political practice from theoretical guidance.  In the concrete, the documents states, 
“Empiricism grows on static underestimation of the people’s democratic forces and on a static overestimation of the enemy strength.... Party work becomes dictated by the actions of the enemy instead of by a dialectical comprehension of the situation and balance of forces.  Revolutionary initiative becomes lost because of a static, one-sided fragmented and narrow view of the requirements of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-fascist struggle.” 7 

Right opportunist and revisionist political lines took firm control of the Party’s practice.  It manifested itself in a reliance on parliamentary work as the principal form of struggle, overconcentration on urban political work,  and underestimation of the importance of mass work in the countryside, resulted in the loss of strategic initiative and a reduction of Left “strategy” into a series of tactical shifts to meet the strategic initiatives of imperialism and the local ruling class. 

Such practice characterized the Party in its first two decades of existence (1930-48) and reemerged again in the period 1955-68, when it was reinforced by the revisionist line on the priority of the parliamentary struggle adopted by the Soviet Communist Party in 1956.  To this day, the Soviet Party and state extend support to the by now thoroughly isolated Lava clique, which has for all intents and purposes, become the Soviet Union’s “hot line” to the Marcos regime. 

The experience of the old Party further revealed that empiricism and dogmatism were, however, only superficially ideological opposites.  In reality, they were “two sides of the same petty-bourgeois coin.” 8  In a masterful example of dialectical analysis, the document goes on: 

“Reversals from empiricism to dogmatism and from dogmatism to empiricism are peculiarly common to those who still retain the petty-bourgeois world  outlook.  Nevertheless, when one is the principal aspect of a subjectivist stand, the other is bound to be the principal at another moment.  That is the dialectical relationship of empiricism and dogmatism... Comrades should not wonder why a leadership with the same petty-bourgeois orientation should swing from empiricism to dogmatism and back to empiricism, and so on and so forth.  All subjectivists fail to grasp the laws of dialectical development and so they are volatile and erratic.”9 

After this all-sided criticism of the practice of the old Party, Rectify sets out the three strategic tasks of the reestablished Party:  building the Party, initiating armed struggle, and forging the national united front. 
Building the Party consisted of the manifold task of setting the Party securely on the revolutionary heritage of the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tsetung, sinking Party roots deep among the Filipino masses, and spreading them throughout  the country.  “The ultimate test,” states the document, lies in the revolutionary practice and further revolutionary practice... Our cadres must go deep among the masses of workers and peasants.  They must be well-distributed on a national scale in order  to build up a nationwide party.” 10 

Forging the national united front meant gathering together all patriotic classes and strata with an objective interest in overthrowing imperialism and feudalism into a powerful social and political force.  In contrast to the old Party, whose handling of class alliances was so confused and erratic that it failed to tap the anti-imperialist energies of the peasantry, national bourgeoisie, and petty bourgeoisie, and ended up dangerously isolating the working-class vanguard, the Party’s special task was to “win over the middle forces and elements in order to isolate the die-hards.”11  To this end, class analysis and the policy of class alliances had to continually match shifting political conditions: 

“.... the Party must make clear and repeated class analysis which can distinguish the middle forces and elements from the diehard reactionaries, the principal enemies from the secondary enemies, the enemies of today from the enemies of tomorrow, and among friends, the reliable from the unreliable.”12 

The united front was one of the key weapons of the national-democratic movement; the other, and principal weapon, was the armed struggle.  Unlike the PKP’s adventurist strategy of attempting to seize power in the period 1948-55 by means of a swift armed uprising carried out by no more than 3,000 Red fighters,  Rectify established protracted people’s war as the strategic form of struggle in a semicolonial, semifeudal country like the Philippines.  And in opposition to the urban military focus of the PKP, the countryside would be the center of gravity of the armed struggle, with popular power being steadily built up through the creation of rural base areas by armed fighters winning over the peasantry with measures of revolutionary land reform.  From such bases, the revolutionary movement would advance “wave upon wave,” encircling the urban centers like Manila, which constituted the bastions of bourgeois state power. 

The resolution on the armed struggle was not to be postponed to the indefinite future.  The old Communist Party’s military arm, the Huks, had decayed into an incorrigibly  lumpen-proletarian gang.  Thus, three months after the reestablishment conference, on March 29, 1969, the CPP founded the New People’s Army (NPA), incorporating into it honest and uncorrupted peasant guerrilla leaders from the old Huks, like the legendary Commander Dante, as well as “defectors” from the reactionary army like Lt. Victor Corpuz. 

Under the guidance of the Party, the NPA immediately went about the task of establishing rural bases in Central and Northern Luzon, from which it was soon launching a number of tactical offensives against a reactionary army. 
Though the reactionary state, presided over by Marcos, threw all of its resources at immediately crushing the purified Party, it became the leading subjective factor which unleashed the objective revolutionary potential of the masses, not only in the Philippine countryside but also in the cities.  Under Party guidance, the anti-imperialist student movement grew by leaps and bounds, until it finally exploded in what came to be known as the “First Quarter Storm” in early 1970, after Marcos’ security forces slaughtered a number of students and youth demonstrating in front of the presidential palace.  The student movement, in turn, helped radicalize the struggles of workers and the urban poor.  By late 1972, while NPA squads were engaging government troops in battle in a number of provinces, Manila was being constantly rocked by massive demonstrations and strikes, which linked together demands of higher wages, land reform, withdrawal of Philippine and U.S. troops from Vietnam, and an end to all unequal treaties imposed by the United States.  “The protest movement breaking out in the cities is starkly unprecedented in the entire national history in terms of significance and magnitude.”  Sison evaluated the situation in December 1971.  “The problem is no longer how to start a revolution.  It is how to extend and intensify it.”13