Draft:Third Great Rectification Movement

• Comment: No WP:RS, WP:IS have been provided. QEnigma talk 19:35, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

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Third Great Rectification Movement

The Third Great Rectification Movement refers to an ideological campaign initiated by the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) wherein an effort was made to combat conservatism and complacency within the Party and within its armed revolutionary wing, the New People's Army.

The CPP launched The Third Great Rectification against conservatism during the Second Party Congress from October 24 to November 7, 2016. The rectification movement slowly gained momentum, and the CPP Founder Jose Maria Sison noted in 2018, "Currently, the CPP is subjecting to criticism and rectification among others the phenomenon of conservatism, which overly stresses mass work, unwittingly favors the style of roving rebel bands and neglects the need to intensify guerilla tactical offensives in order to annihilate the enemy forces and seize the weapons from them and to bring about the full development of the strategic defensive and reach the strategic stalemate in the people´s war."

Ideological Underpinnings

Maybelle Guerrero characterized the Third Rectification Movement as a continuation of the Second Great Rectification in 1992. Although the Second Rectification was successful in defeating left opportunism, several party leaders over the years may have slid into right opportunism. Guerrero argued that "Complacency within the Party, Joma explained, stems from a sense of satisfaction with minimal achievements—maintaining organizational stability, limited mass influence, or legal presence—while avoiding the more dangerous and dynamic aspects of revolutionary struggle. This desire to 'keep things as they are' reflects a bourgeois-conservative mindset, one that fundamentally contradicts the dialectical materialist view that reality is constantly changing and that revolutionary forces must constantly adjust and intensify their engagement with class contradictions."

Following the death of Professor Sison, the Communist Party continued the Third Rectification, stressing Party education on the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Philippine society through a review and discussion of Sison's writings. The Third Rectification came to mean an intensification of organizing and broadening of the mass base, taking "seriously the task to expand and consolidate its ranks across the entire world."

Sison's Unfinished Tasks

For some Party members, The Third Great Rectification Movement has also come to mean that the Party should fulfill the tasks that Professor Sison had promoted before his passing, particularly in the area of urban partisan teams to protect social justic activists who faced terror and assassination by the government. Sison stated in 2017: "When there is impunity in the killing of revolutionaries, and the killing of people without arms, the armed revolutionary movement can launch punitive actions... Urban partisans can take action against those who are notorious for extrajudicial killings and human rights violations."

In 2021, Professor Sison said: "The CPP and the NPA have published their stand that there is just cause for the revival of armed city partisans to render justice to the victims of the fascist terrorism of the Duterte regime, punish the notorious human rights violators as well as the corrupt officials of the regime and respond promptly to Duterte’s scheme to wipe out all kinds of legal opposition and democratic organizations."

In Jose Maria Sison's Unfinished Tasks, Maybelle Guerrero argues that the Communist Party of the Philippines' progress toward reviving the urban partisan teams has been slow or non-existent in recent years. Even Sison himself called the New People's Army progress as "dormant or too slow until now probably because the regional and central organs of leadership have been unable to provide the command to coordinate the rural-based and urban-based regional leaderships."