Volume VI, No. 06 - March 31, 2024
The broad masses of Filipinos rejoice the 55th anniversary of the New People’s Army (NPA) as the beacon of hope for national liberation and democracy. The chronic crisis of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal society underscores the necessity and sustainability of armed struggle.
Over the past 55 years, the NPA has overcome the greatest difficulties and obstacles in waging people’s war in the Philippines as an archipelagic country. It has succeeded in self-reliantly developing guerrilla warfare on a nationwide scale despite the disadvantage of having no physical rear. Guerilla fronts and consolidated rural bases with fairly strong units of the NPA were establihed in all the major islands of the country. These guerilla fronts have served as theaters for NPA units to wage guerrilla warfare. They create guerrilla zones and bases first in the less-populated mountainous terrain, where they could consolidate, train and plan to expand to the better-populated plains, riverine, main lines of transportation and coastal areas.
Starting with only 60 Red fighters armed with only nine automatic rifles and 26 inferior firearms in the second district of Tarlac province, the CPP (Communist Party of the Philippines) has succeeded in developing NPA forces from squads and platoons, to company-strength guerrilla forces. It created 14 regional commands of the NPA, each having reached a peak strength of a few hundred to more or less a thousand Red fighters, and each having a number of subregional or provincial commands with several guerrilla fronts.
The New People’s Army has successfully frustrated the yearly declared targets of the enemy to crush the revolutionary armed movement. It surmounted the successive campaigns of encirclement and suppression and have, by and large, emerged stronger. The Party leadership estimated that the people’s war reached the middle phase of the strategic defensive in and around the middle of the 2000s, and made plans to fulfill the requirements to reach the advanced phase, and onto the threshold of the strategic stalemate.
Red political power were established across thousands of villages across the country. The Party has built the rudimentary forms of the people’s democratic government at the barrio or inter-barrio level, with officers elected in village assemblies or selected from local revolutionary mass organizations.
The US-Marcos regime is the current concentrated expression of the Filipino people’s oppressor. It represents the moribund ruling system and the worst facets of the ruling exploiting classes. Its neoliberal economic policies, outright subservience to US geopolitical interests, corruption, high-style living, and fascist suppression of democratic rights are causing even greater suffering on the Filipino people and rousing them to fight for national democracy with even greater tenacity.
The Philippine national democratic revolution has had the distinction of having advanced with great strides and waging armed struggle in the current era of international retreat of the world proletariat. With the defeat of the socialist revolution and capitalist restoration in China and the Soviet Union under modern revisionist rule, the Filipino people had to wage and self-reliantly develop revolutionary armed struggle.
The situation of rising inter-imperialist rivalries is rousing the Filipino people to defend the country’s freedom and demand the imperialist giants – both the US and China – to end their saber-rattling and withdraw their troops from the country’s territory. So far, the anti-imperialist revolutionary armed struggle of the Filipino people is the biggest factor preventing an inter-imperialist war from erupting in the region. To the US imperialists, the NPA is a critical impediment that prevents it from fully using the country as springboard for aggresion and using the AFP as pawn in its scheme of stoking military tensions in the South China Sea and dragging the country into a conflict with China in line with its geopolitical interests.