ABSTRACT
Jose Maria Sison explained the revolution's goals as the liberation of Filipinos from the forces of US imperialism and domestic feudalism. Sison had purposely selected the date—the twenty—seventh anniversary of the founding of the World War II Hukbalahap communist guerrilla organization-to formally launch the reconstituted communist army, the New People's Army. The blueprint of an army that Sison had drafted in early 1969 was an imaginative exercise in audacity that went far beyond any of his organizational schemes. Sison prescribed an intensive program of political education within the army to be conducted by Party cadres and commissars. Military patrols drove through the dusty barrios, but the existence of the new Communist Party was unknown to authorities, and so Sison and his men were able to watch with casual amusement as the soldiers passed. Sison characterized the Philippines as a "semicolonial, semifeudal" nation in which workers and peasants—the vast majority of the population—were oppressed by foreign imperialists, domestic capitalists, and landlords.
