II. Crisis conditions in the domestic ruling system
The Arroyo regime has been extremely reactionary and obscurantist in misrepresenting the character of the ruling system in the Philippines. It has brought upon the people the crushing weight of foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism under such US-dictated policies as "neoliberal globalization" and "global war on terror."
And yet the regime has harped on turning the Philippines into a "first world country" and perversely puts the blame on the people's resistance to oppression and exploitation as the cause of underdevelopment and poverty. And it is using such a big lie as the rationale for seeking to destroy or reduce the revolutionary movement to inconsequentiality through brutal campaigns of military suppression since 2001.
Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL) has utterly failed in all its counterrevolutionary objectives. The New People's Army has successfully launched tactical offensives nationwide, thus belying the regime's psywar claims and demonstrating the growing strength of the armed revolutionary movement.
The people dismiss the psywar claims of the reactionary military about so many "NPA camps overrun," "NPA mass surrenders," "social integration of rebel returnees" and the like. Abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings of social activists and ordinary people are passed off as legitimate actions against the "enemies of the state" and the perpetrators rewarded and cited as "heroes."
The chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system in the Philippines will persist and continue to worsen. Nothing in sight indicates that a new administration would arise from the current presidential elections to make the Philippines truly independent and take the path of industrial development through land reform and national industrialization. Those in power at the highest level tend to monopolize bureaucrat looting and increase their take by further exploiting and oppressing the people, especially the toiling masses.
The abject semicolonial agrarian character of the Philippines provides the conditions for the development of people's war. The absence of genuine thoroughgoing land reform guarantees that the peasant masses follow the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines in carrying out agrarian revolution and participating in the people's war.
The chronic socioeconomic crisis of the ruling system will generate an unprecedentedly worse political crisis enough to render the ruling classes of big compradors and landlords incapable of ruling in the old way. Factions of the ruling classes have become more violent against each other as spoils of political power are reduced as a result of the worsening crisis.
As exposed by the Ampatuan massacre, the reactionary factions can use parts of the military, police and paramilitary forces as their private armed groups and build their own undisguised private armies by taking military supplies from the armories of the state. The rampancy of private armies has been generated by the US-Arroyo policy of state terrorism against the people.
The current presidential elections will not muffle but will intensify the contradictions among the reactionaries. The periodic elections for officials of the reactionary government have served to ensure the dominance of the politicians who are pro-imperialist and are representatives of the big compradors and landlords and have been a process for excluding the representatives of the working people and for redistributing and rotating power among the political dynasties and factions.
But the current presidential elections are becoming the gateway to further crisis of the system and further violence among the reactionaries. The competing political factions are spending more heavily than ever before on the electoral campaign. The winners will try to recoup and profit from their government positions. The losers will become bitter with disappointment.
Whichever reactionary faction captures the presidency in May will continue the US-dictated policy of state terrorism against the people and the revolutionary forces. Not one among the four major presidential candidates is expressing a determination to carry out peace negotiations to address the roots of the armed conflict through social, economic and political reforms.
The resistance of the reactionaries, especially the pro-imperialist militarists and clerico-fascists, to serious peace negotiations is a good thing. It serves to cast away false illusions about peace negotiations and to drive the revolutionary forces further on to the great task of waging people's war.
The worst among the reactionaries and their pseudo-progressive followers, including the renegades exposed by the Second Great Rectification Movement, have long claimed that the people and forces in the new democratic revolution have been undercut and debilitated by the unarmed people's uprisings in 1986 and 2001 and the succession of pseudo-democratic post-Marcos regimes.
The detractors of the new democratic revolution through protracted people's war obscure the fact that the revolutionary forces have contributed greatly to the success of the unarmed people's uprisings and that the NPA has not only preserved but has also expanded its revolutionary armed strength to stand out in Philippine history as the largest ever revolutionary army of the people.
Oplan Bantay Laya I and II have failed to suppress the armed revolutionary movement. The reactionaries unwittingly admit the significant strength of the people's army every time they declare that it remains the biggest threat to the ruling system. They merely make fools of themselves by endlessly repeating the lie that the NPA had 25,000 fighters in the mid-1980s and is now reduced to a few thousands.
From week to week, from month to month and from year to year, the NPA has demonstrated its capability to wipe out enemy units and will continue to do so under the policy and strategic plan of advancing from the stage of strategic defensive to that of the strategic stalemate. The NPA is bound to grow in strength ever more rapidly by continuing to apply the specific line of extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever expanding and deepening mass base.
