The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the revolutionary mass movement it leads are invincible and continue to grow, its founder said on the underground party’s 51st founding anniversary today, December 26.

In a statement, Jose Maria Sison said that seven succeeding Philippine governments over the past five decades have failed to crush the local communist movement despite repeated announcements they would do so.

“The CPP and revolutionary mass movement are invincible. They have been tempered by more than 50 years of revolutionary struggle against the ruling system and all the strategic plans devised by US imperialism and their Filipino puppets to destroy them,” Sison said.

Sison said the CPP keeps on growing “because the objective conditions for waging [its] armed revolution are increasingly favorable and the broad masses of the people demand revolutionary change.”

Sison and 10 other comrades founded the CPP on December 26, 1968 in Alaminos, Pangasinan which then formed the New People’s Army (NPA) in March the next year. The CPP and the NPA is known as the longest-running Marxist-Leninist-Maoist armed revolution in the country today.

Weathering anti-insurgency drives

The CPP was the first underground armed resistance launched against the emergent Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and widely acknowledged to have substantially contributed to the late strongman’s eventual ouster in 1986.

Internal conflict racked the party in the late 1980s to early 1990s however that led to the issuance and implementation of its “Second Great Rectification Movement.”

The CPP said the rectification movement successfully stopped the party’s disintegration and has since resulted in its biggest membership in its history.

The NPA for its part said it currently has about 120 guerrilla fronts in 73 of the country’s 81 provinces.

Consistently seen by seven succeeding Manila governments as the biggest security threat to the Republic, the CPP has weathered many counter-insurgency drives: Marcos’ Operational Plan (Oplan) Katatagan; Corazon C. Aquino’s Oplan Mamamayan and Oplan Lambat-Bitag I and II; Fidel Ramos’ Lambat-Bitag III and IV, and Oplans Makabayan and Balangay (which transitted into Joseph Estrada’s presidency); Gloria Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya I and II; Benigno Aquino III’s Oplan Bayanihan; and Rodrigo Duterte’s Oplan Kapayapaan and Oplan Kapanatagan.

During the NPA’s 50th founding anniversary last March, AFP Spokesperson BGen. Edgard Arevalo predicted it would be the revolutionary army’s last.

“We say there is nothing for them to celebrate. The AFP with other relevant agencies of government is working diligently to ensure that this anniversary will be their last,” Arevalo said.

Sison however said the Duterte government has failed to destroy the revolutionary movement even with its “all out war” strategies.

“All efforts of the Duterte regime to destroy the CPP and the revolutionary mass movement have failed,” Sison said.

“Since he became president in 2016, Duterte has been obsessed with seeking to destroy the revolutionary movement in order to please US imperialism and the local reactionary classes,” he said.

Sison said Duterte even went as far as claiming to be “Left” and “socialist” and pretended to be for peace negotiations only to later implement anti-CPP measures such as Proclamations Nos. 360 and 374 to Executive Order No. 70, terminating the peace talks, declaring the CPP and NPA as terrorists, and creating an anti-insurgency task force, respectively.

‘Systemic crisis begets resistance’

Sison, the President’s college political science professor, said Duterte’s escalating oppression and exploitation drive more Filipinos to wage people’s war and all forms of resistance.

“[The Duterte government] has worsened the conditions of underdevelopment, high unemployment, low incomes, soaring prices of basic commodities and mass poverty that. It has further bankrupted the economy by shunning land reform and national industrialization, increasing import-dependent consumption and rapidly making the local and foreign debt burden and tax burden of the people intolerably heavier,” he explained.

Sison also said that colossal amounts of public funds are wasted on bureaucratic and military corruption and on futile schemes to destroy the revolutionary movement and impose a fascist dictatorship on the people.

“It is apt to describe the regime of state terrorism and unbridled greed as unwittingly the best recruiter of CPP members, Red fighters and other revolutionaries. It is also the best transport and supply officer of the New People’s Army for sending its troops for annihilation on terrain advantageous to guerrilla warfare,” he said. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)