By Bulatlat.com
MANILA – The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) took the occasion of the birthday of Andres Bonifacio on November 30, which is also National Heroes’ day, to call for the intensification of its people’s war. In anticipation of the celebration of the hero’s 150th next year, the CPP said, “the revolutionary forces are looking forward to further intensifying people’s war nationwide, and to raising higher the red banner of the national democratic cultural revolution.”
For 43 years now the CPP has been waging a national democratic armed revolution, which they describe as a continuation of Andres Bonifacio’s “unfinished war.” Today, they find the significance of Andres Bonifacio’s revolutionary life story as “not lost” on the Filipino people, given how “the oppression and exploitation of the Filipino working class by foreign big companies, their local big business partners and big landlords are not essentially different from the grave socio-economic and political conditions under Spanish colonial rule.” The CPP traces to such conditions then and now the Filipino people’s “fervor for revolutionary change,” spurring armed resistance and democratic mass struggles.
In the latter part of 19th century, Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan rallied the Filipino people around the banner of national freedom and against feudal exploitation. They waged a revolutionary war of resistance against three centuries of colonial rule.
Thousands march Nov 30 to mark Andres Bonifacio’s 149th birthday. (Photo by Marya Salamat / bulatlat.com)
“The Katipunan-led armed uprisings of 1896-1898 succeeded in defeating the Spanish colonial forces and establishing the first independent revolutionary government, before being usurped by the bigger, more modern and extremely brutal US colonialists,” the CPP said.
The revolutionary group said the Filipino people’s history is actually “a continuum of revolutionary armed resistance against colonial and neocolonial subjugation.” The past four centuries show Filipinos had launched innumerable armed uprisings and waged guerrilla warfare in hopes to resist the brutal suppression of their democratic rights and achieve national and social liberation.
The “extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare currently being waged by the New People’s Army (NPA) also forms part of the Filipino people’s uninterrupted history of armed resistance,” the CPP said. The group looks back to more than four decades of how, the NPA, for example, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), “has been achieving unprecedented victories in armed revolution and is bound to achieve even bigger victories in the next few years.”
Undeniable crisis prompts people to struggle
Contrary to optimistic news occasioned by a 7.1-percent economic growth, the CPP said, “the ruling system is in an “ever deepening and worsening crisis.”
The Filipino people are suffering from widespread landlessness, unemployment and low wages, the CPP said, “The people contend daily with such problems as increases in the prices of oil and other basic commodities and services. The puppet reactionary government protects and promotes the interests of foreign big capitalists, their local big business partners and big landlords. It imposes one tax burden after another in complete disregard for the people’s grave socio-economic conditions. It allows the US and its allied foreign militaries to trample on Philippine soil and exercises no independence in foreign policy. It dishes out empty promises and high-flying rhetoric to cover up festering social wounds, filling the people with false hopes and lulling them to passivity and inaction.”
This increasingly intolerable condition of the Filipino people shows up despite the government’s advertisements of so-called growth, because the people are compelled to take action, the CPP said. They noted for instance how peasants and farm-workers “wage revolutionary struggles for genuine land reform to break up the feudal land monopoly of big landlords, oppose land grabbing by foreign mining companies and raise production through collective farming and other forms of cooperation.”
In urban areas, news is often rife with barricades and mass actions of workers, urban poor community dwellers, students, rank-and-file employees and other oppressed and exploited classes and sectors.
In the countryside, the New People’s Army, according to the CPP, continues to expand as they welcome new Red fighters from young workers, students and peasants. This army, they said, conducts “painstaking mass work to build organs of political power to exercise economic, political, military, social, educational and cultural functions. They launch ever more frequent and bigger tactical offensives in order to strengthen and expand the people’s revolutionary armed resistance.”
The revolutionary group however, also said they made adjustments on the Bonifacio-led Katipunan war by “employing the correct strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, with a clear understanding of the requisites for growing from small and weak to big and strong.” The CPP traced from this correct strategy the achievement of the current people’s war, which includes “unprecedented revolutionary victories that previous armed resistance movements failed to accomplish.”
Furthermore, the CPP foresees that these victories are “bound to expand geometrically and intensify further in the next few years as the NPA builds more guerrilla fronts, acquires more weapons through tactical offensives and benefits from widespread agrarian struggles and the intensification of the people’s revolutionary struggles in various fronts.”
With the preparation to mark the 150th year of Andres Bonifacio’s birth, the CPP called on all units of the New People’s Army “to further intensify guerrilla warfare nationwide by launching more frequent and more numerous tactical offensives to seize more weapons from the enemy.”
The revolutionary group reiterated that further success in revolutionary armed struggle means the “NPA must continue to conduct painstaking mass work to help the peasant masses wage land reform struggles and build their democratic political power.”
They said they need to “heighten efforts to imbue the people with Bonifacio’s spirit of armed resistance.”
KM anniversary and Bonifacio birthday
Simultaneous with marking the birth anniversary of Andres Bonifacio, the revolutionary movement celebrates the founding anniversary of the Kabataang Makabayan, as the CPP urged the Filipino youth “to further raise their historical, political and social consciousness by waging a patriotic and scientific study movement.”
The CPP calls on the Filipino youth to intensify their participation in social revolution “by recognizing the inextricable link that ties their problems with those of the rest of the people and by deeply integrating with the toiling masses of workers and peasants, imbued with Bonifacio’s spirit of serving the people and guided by the principle that the masses are the makers of history.”
It is the present generation of Filipino youth who will likely bear witness to “the total victory of the war for national liberation,” the CPP said, adding it is also likely the present generation who would see “the opening of a new chapter of socialist revolution and construction and the building of a modern and just social system.” 
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