CPP pays tribute to Joma, vows intensified revolution

MANILA, Philippines — The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) pays tribute to its late founder, Jose Maria Sison, as it celebrates its 54th anniversary today with confidence that the revolutionary movement will gain “unprecedented strength.”

“Ka Joma has bequeathed to us a treasure trove of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist work in which his immortal revolutionary spirit will forever live to guide the next generation of Party cadres to greater heights,” the CPP central committee said in a press statement released on Christmas Day.

Sison died on Dec. 16 in the Netherlands, after being confined in a hospital in Utrecht for two weeks. He was 83.

Sison, who co-founded the Kabataang Makabayan in 1964, formed the CPP central committee in 1968. A few months later, the Sison-led CPP – in collaboration with a faction of Hukbong Mapagpalayang Bayan (formerly Hukbalahap) – organized the New People’s Army (NPA).

Sison had been in self-exile since 1987 after the Philippine government cancelled his passport while on a lecture tour in the Netherlands. He applied for political asylum and resided in Utrecht with his wife Juliet de Lima and other leaders of the communist movement.

Prior to his political asylum, Sison was arrested and detained in the Philippines in 1977 while fighting the dictatorial government of then-president Ferdinand Marcos, whose son is now the President.

Sison was released in 1986 as part of the reconciliation agenda of the administration of then-president Corazon Aquino who ousted the elder Marcos through the EDSA People Power Revolution.

In its statement yesterday, the CPP also paid tribute to all its members, cadres, fighters and mass activists, who perished while “serving the people and fighting for the national democratic cause.”

The party admitted that the revolutionary movement has “suffered losses and setbacks in various fields of revolutionary work resulting from subjectivism, internal weaknesses and errors, as it faced the enemy’s heightened strategic offensives of the past five years.”

Nonetheless, the CPP expressed confidence that it can “gain unprecedented strength, lead the revolutionary movement in the Philippines to steadily advance in the coming years and achieve victories much greater than ever before.”

It said the Filipino people are “more and more receptive to revolutionary propaganda and inclined to take action, get organized and wage mass struggles.”

“The grave suffering of the Filipino people amid the sharp downturn of the economic crisis, intensified imperialist intervention and oppression, and heightened use of state terrorism to preserve the ruling semicolonial and semifeudal, leave the Filipino people with no other option but to wage revolutionary resistance in order to advance their aspirations for genuine national freedom and true democracy,” the CPP statement read.

The party said its cadres and activists will continue to persevere in carrying forward the people’s revolution by waging “protracted people’s war to encircle the cities from the countryside, and advancing the mass movement in both the cities and rural areas.”

The CPP cited as among its achievements in the past five decades the creation of more than 110 guerrilla fronts across the country by its armed wing, the NPA. The CPP said it was also able to build thousands of local mass organizations.

“We have so far frustrated the enemy’s declared objective of crushing the Party, the NPA and all forms of people’s resistance. The Party and revolutionary movement have withstood more than five years of relentless attacks which have employed the worst forms of state terrorism,” the CPP said.

The CPP also enjoined all its fronts and leaders to “exert all efforts” to consolidate and strengthen the party, citing a clamor for revolution amid what it referred to as “heightened oppression and exploitation under the US-Marcos regime.”

“We must urgently identify and rectify all forms of subjectivist errors, which weaken and set back the different spheres of our work. We must raise our theoretical knowledge, firmly grasp basic principles, deepen our study of history, and be guided by lessons from the past to avoid repeating errors, enable the steady quantitative advance of our efforts, and carry forward the revolution to qualitatively higher levels,” it said.