(Author’s Introduction to Philippine Economy and Politics)
Jose Maria Sison
April 1995
I am deeply pleased and grateful that my long interview with Julie, On the Mode of Production in the Philippines in 1983, while I was still detained by the Marcos fascist dictatorship, and my series of lectures as research fellow of the Center for Asian Studies of the University of the Philippines, Philippine Crisis and Revolution, in April May 1986 are published together in this volume, Philippine Economy and Politics.
Since its congress of reestablishment on December 26, 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has described Philippine society as semi-colonial and semi-feudal. The Philippine political system has been semi-colonial since 1946, under the indirect rule of U.S. imperialism through the parties and politicians of the local exploiting classes. The Philippine economic system has been semi-feudal since the first decade of the 20th century, exploited by the homegrown comprador big bourgeoisie and landlord class in the service of foreign monopoly capitalism.
Correspondent to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Philippine society, the CPP has put forward the general line of national democratic revolution through protracted people’s war under the leadership of the proletariat. The strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength in the countryside until it becomes possible to seize the cities realizes and activates the basic class alliance of the working class and the peasantry.
In this regard, the CPP has deployed its cadres in the countryside in order to build the people’s army and the peasant movement, solve the land problem as the main problem of the democratic revolution and build the people’s democratic power even while reactionary state power is still entrenched in the cities. Responding to the demand of the peasant majority of the people for an agrarian revolution, the anti-feudal line is the main component of the general line of national democratic revolution.
On the Question of Semi-feudalism
Some opponents of the general line of national democratic revolution pretend to be anti imperialist and progressive and therefore avoid questioning the description of the Philippine ruling system as semi-colonial or neocolonial. But they concentrate on attacking the description of the Philippine economy as semi-feudal in order to do away with its precision, confuse the situation and exaggerate “development” or prospects of it under the auspices of the imperialists and the local reactionaries and attack the general line of the national democratic revolution, especially the strategic line of protracted people’s war.
The Philippine economy has been called many names — “free enterprise,” “market,” “mixed,” “developing,” “dependent capitalist” and so on. But none of these is more precise than “semi-feudal” in denoting the level of development of the productive forces and the relations of production, particularly the shift from the feudal economy of the 19th century under Spanish colonialism to the semi-feudal economy of the 20th century under U.S. imperialism. Bourgeois economists adopt their own terminology to stress private ownership of the means of production, the commodity system or the primacy of the market and the promise of development under capitalism. And political counter-revolutionaries wish to get rid of the term semi-feudal to impugn the general line of national democratic revolution through protracted people’s war.
In its entire 20 year period of the rule from 1966, especially during its imposition of fascist dictatorship on the Filipino people from 1972 to 1986, the U.S. Marcos ruling clique aggravated and deepened the agrarian, preindustrial and semi-feudal character of the Philippine social economy. It did not undertake national industrialization and land reform but exacerbated the socioeconomic problems inflicted by foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.
Under the policy dictates of the U.S. and such multilateral agencies as the IMF and the World Bank, the Marcos regime poured domestic as well as borrowed foreign resources into big comprador operations, bureaucratic corruption and into a military buildup. It made a big portion of agricultural production of staples dependent on imported inputs under the “green revolution,” expanded mineral and agricultural raw material production for export, maintained the infrastructure for the exchange of raw material exports and manufactured imports and deepened the dependence on imported machinery and inputs.
However, in the late ‘70s, a handful of subjectivist elements within the CPP started to question and undermine the description of the Philippine economy as semi-feudal, agrarian and without basic industries. They cited data on the commodity system, wage relations, the increase of rural and urban oddjobbers and distribution of gross output values. They came to the conclusion that the Philippine economy was no longer semi-feudal, implying that it was already industrial capitalist without analyzing the kind of industry that existed and the socioeconomic relations.
In effect they credited the Marcos regime for “industrializing”the Philippines. They also exaggerated the extent of the urban population as 40 percent and implied that the purported percentage increase in urban population was due to industrialization and not merely due to the exhaustion of the land frontier in the ‘60s and the increase of the unemployed and oddjobbers in both rural and urban areas throughout the ‘70s.
The subjectivists falsely claimed that the Philippines had been industrialized and urbanized to an extent that it was necessary to “modify, adjust and refine”the general line of the national democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. In fact, they were undercutting and assailing this general line. They were rationalizing the urban basing of the CPP central leadership and the concentration of cadres in the cities. They were promoting revisionism by pushing subjectivist and opportunist lines of thinking.
In 1980, the subjectivists pushed distinguishably “Left”and Right opportunist lines of policy. They blamed the founders of the CPP for the supposed inaccuracy of describing the Philippine economy as semi-feudal and for the supposed neglect of revolutionary work in the urban areas. They obscured the fact that the proletarian revolutionary cadres of the CPP had been ceaselessly developing the legal democratic movement in the urban areas since the entire decade of the ‘60s and that it was the open rule of terror of the Marcos regime rather than the anti-feudal line of the Party that had required the urban based legal democratic movement to go underground in the ‘70s.
Throughout the ‘80s, the worst of the Left opportunists pushed the line of accelerating the advance of the armed revolution through urban based armed insurrections, incited by armed city partisans, and through premature enlargement and “regularization”of units of the people’s army. They had contempt for the legal and defensive character of the struggle in the urban areas and for the constant necessity of ever expanding and consolidating the mass base in the urban and rural areas through painstaking mass work.
“Left” opportunism was pushed either under the premature notion of “strategic counteroffensive” or making urban based insurrections the leading factor in the process of armed revolution. They kept on wishing for an exceptional conjuncture of domestic and international factors that would invalidate the strategic line of protracted people’s war. They considered as more important the external rather than the internal factors of the revolutionary process and confused the principal and secondary aspects of this process. They took the victorious uprisings in Vietnam in 1945 and in Nicaragua in 1979 out of historical context and cited these as the best models of the Philippine revolution.
At the same time, the Right opportunists pushed the erroneous line that the urban based legal mass movement was of higher importance than the rural based armed struggle, and that more people would be attracted to the united front and to the revolution if the leadership would be entrusted to the anti Marcos section of the reactionaries under the concept of a bourgeois nationalist “New Katipunan” and that the leadership of the working class and the CPP would have to be cut down or even liquidated. Under the stimulus of funding from Western Europe, the urban based Right opportunists produced a considerable amount of bourgeois reformist propaganda and drew as well as withheld CPP cadres from the countryside.
In any communist party, even at its best, there is always an internal basis for the emergence and development of subjectivism and opportunism because of the inflow of petty bourgeois elements who fail to remould themselves to become genuine proletarian revolutionaries and because there is the constant impact of influences from outside the Party, either from the social environment in general or from deliberate attempts of the enemy to penetrate and influence the CPP. The dangers of subjectivism and opportunism rise when ideological, political and organizational standards for Party membership are lowered as in certain urban based units of the CPP and when the antifascist aspect of the revolutionary struggle is cut off from the anti imperialist and anti-feudal aspects.
The communists are always bombarded by the official development theory of foreign monopoly capitalism and the local reactionaries. In the absence of or due to the weakening of Marxist Leninist study, the unremoulded petty bourgeois elements in the CPP can become impressed with the glossy presentation of “development”programs and projects of the reactionaries, the heavy importation of consumer goods and rapid infrastructure building financed through deficit spending and foreign borrowing. Whenever a communist party is ideologically and politically lax, the class enemy can even introduce or recruit in place agents to sow political confusion. In addition, there are those outside the Party who pretend to be Left and progressive, deliberately address themselves to the communists and spread wrong notions about the Philippine economy which in fact assist the counter-revolutionaryline of the barefaced enemies of the Philippine revolution.
After the imposition of martial rule on the Philippines, the so called social democrats, who are in fact Christian democrats trained for anti-communist work but who deck themselves out as progressive competitors of and alternatives to the communists, circulated the notion that the Marcos regime even if repressive had adopted an excellent economic policy of development under the auspices of the IMF and World Bank. The Lava revisionist group openly capitulated to the Marcos regime and misrepresented it as representative of the national bourgeoisie, as one interested in “noncapitalist development”and as one trying hard to free itself from a U.S. dictated policy of “neocolonial industrialization.” The flunkeys of Soviet social imperialism presumed that industrialization was a foregone conclusion and that the struggle was only about whether it is foreign owned or Filipino owned with Soviet aid.
Those who presumed that the Philippines had become “dependent capitalist”also tried to sow confusion in petty bourgeois circles about the character of the Philippine economy. Among them were either Trotskyites with pretensions of advocating world revolution or simply neo Kautskyites with reformist intentions. They babbled that the Philippine economy was no longer semi-feudal and that it was no longer valid and important to take into account the distinct Philippine mode of production in the face of the globalization of capital and the metropolis periphery schema. It was implied that the ground had been taken away from the strategic line of people’s war.
A highly placed “development”technocrat of the Marcos regime (now the head of the CIA instituted Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement [PRRM]) who had “defected”to the NDF in December 1977 drummed up the line of “reexamining”the Party’s analysis that the Philippine economy is semi-feudal and found resonance among some members of the CPP Central Committee. The push for a reexamination was based on superficial observations of the commodity system in agriculture involving types of cash crop such as onions in Bongabon, Nueva Ecija.
In 1978, the criticism and repudiation of modern revisionism wavered within the CPP. There was no Marxist Leninist criticism and repudiation of the already clear ascendance of the Chinese revisionists headed by Deng in China. Marxism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought became depreciated. Some members of the CPP Central Committee started to float the notion that the Soviet Union and China were similarly socialist and that their socialist economies were being strengthened by capitalist oriented reforms.
In 1979 Philippine military intelligence officers were telling several prisoners, suspected as high cadres of the CPP, that they could be released from prison immediately if they pledged to push the line that the Philippines was no longer semi-feudal and that the Marcos regime had made substantial economic progress under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank.
In the late ‘70s, the Filipino assets of U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA and DIA) inserted themselves into and used the U.S. based Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) to question the description of the Philippine economy as semi-feudal and push the twisted line of “support the Philippine armed struggle, drop Mao Zedong’s theory of people’s war and seek the decisive support of the Soviet Union.” Soon, the KDP openly attacked the CPP. Some of the KDP activists pretended to remain loyal to the CPP but in fact continued to push such notions as that “export oriented manufacturing”could be the cutting edge of U.S. inspired industrialization and that democratization was simply a matter of overthrowing Marcos, without the need for people’s war.
By the early ‘80s, there was already a loud debate in narrow petty bourgeois circles whether the Philippine economy was semi-feudal or not. I responded to the attempts of the opportunist elements within the CPP and pseudo Left elements outside the CPP to sow confusion regarding the character of the Philippine economy. It so happened that Julie was already out of prison and could relate to me developments in the current debate and bring to me reference materials every weekend. We agreed on the format of an interview by her with me on the Philippine mode of production in order to clarify the essential character of the Philippine economy and counter the wrong notions about it.
It is of vital importance to publish this interview in this volume in order to bridge the economic analysis in the founding documents of the CPP in 1968 and Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution in 1970 on the one hand and the current reality and information about the Philippine economy on the other hand and in order to counter the persistent attempts of anti CPP elements to discredit the Marxist Leninist analysis of the Philippine economy as semi-feudal and undermine the general line of the national democratic revolution through protracted people’s war.
The Semi-feudal Economy, 1960 90
The Philippine economy continues to have no industries producing basic metals, basic chemicals and capital goods from the local primary production of raw materials. It remains basically agrarian even as it has some kind of floating industry dependent on imported capital goods. The socioeconomic relations are dominated by the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class in the service of foreign monopoly capitalism. The semi-feudal economy is a commodity system that has departed from the feudal economy of self subsistence but it is one dominated by the comprador big bourgeoisie rather than by a homegrown industrial bourgeoisie. The urban based comprador big bourgeoisie is in close partnership with the rural based landlord class. At the same time, the whole semi-feudal economy is a neocolonial preindustrial or an agrarian adjunct of the world capitalist system.
Whatever are the current proportions of gross output values and employment in the agriculture, industry and service sectors of the economy, all these are dependent on imported equipment, fuel, other raw materials and manufactured components from abroad. The latest high tech tools may be used in any sector but the Philippine economy until now does not produce these tools. Production for local consumption as well as for export has become more import dependent than ever under the policy of trade liberalization. Agricultural and mineral production for export and low value added production of semiconductors, garments and toys for reexport have consigned the Philippine economy to chronic foreign trade deficit and ever mounting foreign debt.
In all sectors of the economy, the imported producer and consumer goods count high in the gross output values. Subtracting the value of the import content will reveal the following: the highest net value is still contributed by agricultural and mineral ore production and the rising high payments for the imports. In essence, the imports are paid for in part by export income (mainly from raw material exports) and in another part by an increasing amount of foreign borrowings.
The export of cheap labor for unskilled work has become a bigger earner of foreign exchange than any of the agricultural, mineral or manufactured exports. However, the income of the overseas contract workers is not large enough to close the foreign trade gap. The export of cheap labor is a manifestation of the inability of the economy to employ the huge number of college educated Filipinos who are driven to take menial jobs abroad.
Under the Aquino and Ramos regimes, like their predecessor Marcos regime, the Philippine reactionary government has rabidly followed the same policies dictated by foreign monopoly capitalism. These have run counter to national industrialization and land reform, aggravated and deepened the agrarian and semi-feudal character of the economy and, in the face of international credit difficulties, compelled the state to resort more and more to local public borrowing, privatization of state assets, increasing the tax burden and attracting short term speculative foreign capital.
It is instructive to go over some important data from 1960 to 1990 in order to see how much the Philippine economy has undergone degradation. According to official statistics, some 15.4 percent of the labor force was in industry in 1960. This dropped to 15.0 percent in 1990. Within the industrial sector, manufacturing plunged from 12.1 percent share of employment in 1960 to only 9.7 percent in 1990. In 1979, it was supposed to have gone down to 14 percent. The upward fluctuation to 15 percent in 1990 is not believable but is still indicative of retrogression. This is evidence of de industrialization rather than industrialization. The proportion of employment in manufacturing has become smaller in the period of “export oriented”manufacturing since the ‘70s than in the earlier period of “import substitution”manufacturing in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
The share of industry in the gross national product (GNP) is supposed to have risen from 28.5 percent in 1960 to 32.9 percent in 1990. Most of this share of industry (34.3 percent in 1991) is contributed by manufacturing (25.4 percent), construction (5 percent) and utilities (2.5 percent), all of which are import dependent for equipment, fuel, other raw materials or component parts. Manufacturing of consumer goods accounts for an average of 55 percent in 1985 91, petroleum and coal processing 32.6 percent and local fabrication of imported basic metals, reassembly or fringe processing of manufactured components and repairs, 10.7 percent.
Eighty percent out of the 76,288 manufacturing firms surveyed recently employ on the average one to nine people and 800 large firms employing more than 200 people and above comprise only one percent and account for half of the total manufacturing labor force. Of the total value in manufacturing, 71.4 percent is overconcentrated in Metro Manila, Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon.
Employment in agriculture is supposed to have fallen from 61.2 percent in 1960 to only 45.2 percent in 1990 and the share of agriculture in the GNP is supposed to have decreased from 31.1 percent in 1960 to 23.2 percent in 1990. The service sector is supposed to have absorbed mainly the labor force shifting from agriculture, especially in the form of rural and urban oddjobbers who are in fact unemployed or grossly underemployed. Anyhow, “employment”in the service sector is supposed to have risen from 23.5 percent in 1960 to 43 percent in 1993 and the share of the service sector in the GNP from 40.4 percent in 1960 to 43.9 percent in 1990.
The former “Left”and Right opportunists in the CPP who have become outright traitors to the Philippine revolution and the Filipino people have made so much out of their continuing false claim that the Philippines has become far more urbanized than Russia during the Bolshevik revolution or China during the protracted people’s war of liberation in order to rationalize the erroneous line of shifting the focus of the revolutionary movement from the rural to the urban areas and basing themselves in the latter even while the people’s war is still at the stage of the strategic defensive.
They produce the high figure of at least 40 percent urban population by adding up the population of Metro Manila, the provincial cities, provincial capitals and town centers. By the same measure, the proportion of the urban population in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949 should be far bigger than that in the Philippines. Russia and China have far longer histories of urbanization under feudalism and the development of handicrafts and manufacturing. Moreover, Russia was also radically different from semi-feudal China by having basic industries and an industrial bourgeoisie which was strategically dominant in the economy.
Out of the total Philippine population of 27,088,000 in 1960, the population of Metro Manila and all provincial cities was 5,370,000 or 19.8 percent, with Metro Manila accounting for 2,460,000 or 9 percent. Out of the total Philippine population of 60,703,000 in 1990, the population of Metro Manila and all the provincial cities was 13,012,000 or 21 percent, with Metro Manila accounting for 7,928,000 or 13 percent.
The increase in city population from 19.8 percent of the total national population in 1960 to 21 percent in 1990 is not really big and does not necessarily mean either real urbanization or industrialization. Only a small portion of the urban population enjoys such amenities as piped in water and electricity. In fact, the conditions of rural backwardness and poverty are brought into the cities by the huge reserve army of labor (unemployed) coming from the countryside.
Philippine cities are basically centers of operations of the comprador big bourgeoisie and not of an industrial bourgeoisie. The prevalent kind of economic activity in Metro Manila is commercial rather than industrial and in provincial cities there is generally a small area as center of commercial activity. The population outside the small commercial centers in so called provincial cities is actually rural. The provincial capitals and town centers which are not classified as cities have generally less commerce and less urban amenities than those classified as cities.
The same incorrigible opportunist elements who have unduly credited the Marcos regime for “industrializing”and “urbanizing”the Philippines and who have faulted the CPP for refusing to accept this wrong view are still the same elements who have praised the Aquino regime for “economic recovery”and who have self contradictorily declared that the Ramos regime is still in the process of making the agrarian Philippine economy a “newly industrializing country”by the year 2000. Consistently, they wish the big comprador landlord regime to industrialize the Philippines in the vain hope of liquidating soon the protracted people’s war. Thus, they have shamelessly pushed the line of “seeking convergences”with the “development”program of the Ramos regime, pretending to criticize it up to a certain point but on the whole supporting it.
On the Question of Dictatorship and Democratization
In the upsurge of the broad popular struggle against the Marcos fascist dictatorship from 1983 to 1986, after the outrageous assassination of Benigno Aquino and when the anti Marcos reactionaries became emboldened to oppose the dictatorship, the “Left”opportunists exaggerated the possibility of winning total victory or taking a major share of political power in the offing through urban insurrections and premature regularization of the NPA and became unmindful of the conspicuous grave loss and weakening of the mass base in the rural areas, starting from 1984, and the occurrence of Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao, starting from 1985, due to the putschist line.
At the same time, the Right opportunists exaggerated the possibility of winning a major share of political power upon the condition that they prevailed with their bourgeois reformist line. They wished the revolutionary forces to tail after the leadership of the anti Marcos reactionaries, engage solely or mainly in legal struggle and become mere footstool for the anti Marcos reactionaries in their rise to power.
The most corrosive line that the Right opportunist elements (under the influence of the Filipino assets of U.S. imperialism) pushed within the CPP was the one presuming that there would be “democratization”and a simple case of expanding the “democratic space”through legal struggle if the Marcos fascist dictatorship had been replaced by another big comprador landlord clique, especially one headed by the widow of Aquino.
They claimed that with the end of the personal dictatorship or autocracy of Marcos, the ensuing “elite democracy”would still constitute “democratization”open to reform and to conversion into “popular democracy”through reformist legal struggle. The series of dichotomies between dictatorship and democratization and between “elite”and “popular”democracy was meant to obfuscate the persistence of the joint class dictatorship of the big compradors and landlords even after the fall of Marcos in the absence of a successful people’s war.
After the fall of Marcos in the manner foretold by the earlier fall of Baby “Doc”Duvalier in Haiti and military juntas in Latin America, through the combination of a big split in the reactionary armed forces and a popular uprising, the Filipino assets of U.S. imperialism and the “Left”and Right opportunists in the CPP combined to declare that the CPP had had nothing to do with the downfall of Marcos, had become marginalized and had suffered a strategic defeat because of its boycott policy in the 1986 snap presidential elections.
They misconstrued democracy as merely the “democratic space”for them within the ruling system in terms of civil and political liberties, claimed that there was no more ground for people’s war and deliberately obfuscated the fact that the joint class dictatorship of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class and the open rule of terror was persistent, despite the temporary liberal facade of the Aquino regime. In fact, the Aquino regime retained or made worse the antiworker and antipeasant decrees of Marcos and General Ramos intensified the military campaigns of suppression against the revolutionary forces and the people.
The “Left”opportunist exponents of urban insurrectionism and military adventurism who had been responsible for the consequent grave damage to the rural mass base and for Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao as early as 1985 also joined the Filipino assets of U.S. imperialism and the Right opportunists in recriminations against the Party for the boycott policy error and in making misrepresentations about the character, implications, magnitude and consequences of this error. Both “Left”and Right opportunists in effect asserted that the banned revolutionary forces should have participated in the Marcos staged elections and considered the boycott policy as the Party’s biggest error in its entire history.
The most blatant assets of U.S. imperialism compared the Aquino regime to the Magsaysay regime as one effectively undercutting the revolutionary movement by restoring “democratic institutions and processes”and seriously carrying out “land reform”under a U.S. and World Bank supported mini Marshall plan. They boasted that the post Marcos period was one of democratization through legal institutions and processes, rendering useless and outdated the armed revolution. Since then, they have ceaselessly prated about alternatives (including foreign funded NGOism, job placements in the reactionary government, electoral politics and the like) to the armed revolution rather than to the oppressive and exploitative ruling system. They conveniently forget the fact that the CPP was reestablished in 1968 and built the NPA in 1969 when Marcos was the big display in Washington’s “show window of democracy”in Asia and he too was threatening to carry out land reform.
The popdems, socdems, Bisig and the like were all happy to take a ride on the Aquino bandwagon. Even the old line pro Soviet revisionists wanted to take the ride with them immediately after serving the Marcos regime for a long time. The Right opportunist line within the CPP described the Aquino regime as a “liberal democratic”regime worthy of critical support. The “Left”opportunists responsible for unprecedented damage to the revolutionary movement and for Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao ceaselessly overstated the boycott policy error as the biggest error ever in the history of the CPP in order to cover up their far graver culpability in Mindanao and elsewhere in the country.
Amidst all the attempts at confusing the revolutionary forces, I delivered the series of lectures on Philippine crisis and revolution at the Asian Studies Center of the University of the Philippines from April to May 1986 in order to clarify the new situation and the big comprador landlord class character of the U.S. Aquino regime and update Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution. The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPP subsequently adopted this series of lectures as basic study material for the Party in 1987 and was able to circulate and promote it in 1988, much to the chagrin of the incorrigible Right opportunists and the “Left”opportunists who were then on the path of turning into blatant Right opportunists, revisionists and even criminal gangsters from year to year.
It is of vital importance to publish again this series of lectures on the Philippine crisis and revolution to demonstrate that all along there has been a timely response to attempts of the agents of U.S. imperialism and the incorrigible opportunists at confusing the ranks of the revolutionaries and the people about the post Marcos period and to heighten the fighting consciousness of communists and all revolutionary militants.
This series of lectures has upheld the continuing validity and vitality of the national democratic revolution against foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. It has helped carry over the revolutionary cadres and the masses from the Marcos to the post Marcos period along the general line of national democratic revolution and to foil the U.S. imperialists, the local exploiting classes and their special agents to destroy or derail the armed revolution.
The Second Great Rectification Movement
The incorrigible “Left”and Right opportunists within the CPP have fully exposed themselves as counter-revolutionaryopponents of Marxism Leninism, the CPP and the national democratic revolution. They are now shameless bootlickers of the U.S. Ramos regime and barefaced traitors to the revolutionary cause. Irony of all ironies, they have chosen to expose themselves and act viciously as counter-revolutionaries during the presidency of General Ramos, the continuity man in the open rule of terror under the joint class dictatorship of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class.
After failing in their vicious attempt to liquidate the CPP from the inside, they continue to specialize in slandering the CPP and the entire revolutionary mass movement. In so many devious ways, they deny the persistence of the joint class dictatorship of the comprador big bourgeoisie and landlord class. They obscure the continuing rule of open terror under the Aquino and the Ramos regimes and claim that human rights violations have been on the decline, despite the brutalities of Lambat Bitag I, II and III and other military campaigns under the “total war”policy or “low intensity conflict”directed by U.S.imperialism. Having fully exposed themselves as special agents of psychological warfare, they have become more and more ineffective in their attempts to show confusion.
The conjuncture and convergence of the three sectors of neocolonialism (government, big business and foreign funded NGOs), the false promises of “Philippines 2000”and the escalation of the “total war”policy, the brutal military campaigns and intrigues of “low intensity conflict,” the opportunist errors and crimes, the open betrayal by the incorrigible opportunists and revisionists and the anti-communist ideological and political offensive of the imperialists and their local lackeys in connection with the disintegration of the revisionist parties and regimes abroad have failed to break or demoralize the forces of the national democratic revolution.
Instead, the revolutionary forces have reaffirmed basic revolutionary principles, have drawn strength from their reservoir of ideological, political and organizational accomplishments, have repudiated the errors and crimes of the “Left”and Right opportunists and have raised the fighting will and capabilities of the people. The victory of the Second Great Rectification Movement cannot be fully understood without reading and studying the interview on the Philippine mode of production and the series of lectures on the Philippine crisis and revolution.
These countered the most devious and vicious attacks on the general line of the national democratic revolution in the ‘80s and laid the ground for the Second Great Rectification Movement. From year to year since 1988, the proletarian revolutionaries in the Central Committee of the CPP increasingly combatted the “Left”and Right opportunist c] c s until the Second Great Rectification Movement was carried out in a comprehensive and deepgoing way, starting in 1992
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