A Movement Divided: Philippine Communism, 1957-1986 9789715426626, 971542662X

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A M ovement D ivided

A M ovement D iv id ed Philippine Communism, 1957-1986

Ken Fuller

t The University of the Philippines Press Diliman, Quezon City

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 1101 Tel. Nos.: 9282558, 9253243 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.uppress.com.ph/

© 2011 by Ken Fuller All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and/or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author and the publisher.

The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data Recommended entry: Fuller, Ken. A movement divided: Philippine communism, 1957-1986 / Ken Fuller. — Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, c2011. p. ; cm. ISBN 978-971-542-662-6 1. Communist Party of the Philippines— History. 2. Communism— Philippines. 3. Philippines— Politics and government. I. Title. JQ1419.A53

324.2599075

2011

P220110610

Book Design by Nicole Victoria Printed in the Philippines by Aris Printhaus

C ontents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

Abbreviations

xv

Prologue

1

Part One

7

Chapter 1: Rebuilding

9

Part Two

37

Chapter 2: The Development of Maoism in China and the Philippines

39

Chapter 3: Party and Program

67

Chapter 4: The New People’s Army

86

Part Three

101

Chapter 5: Party against Party

103

Chapter 6: The Marxist-Leninist Group

122

Chapter 7: The Sixth PKP Congress

141

v

vi

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Chapter 8: Marcos and the “New Society"

161

Chapter 9: Political Settlement

182

Part Four

199

Chapter 10: “More a Mode of Expression . . . ”

201

Chapter 11: The Armalite and the Crucifix

223

Chapter 12: From the Barrel of a Gun - 1

257

Chapter 13: From the Barrel of a Gun - II

279

Chapter 14: Alliances

300

Part Five

325

Chapter 15: An Economic Prisoner of the “Free World”

327

Chapter 16: Marcos Refuses to Play

335

Chapter 17: From Critical Support to Constructive Opposition

363

Part Six

391

Chapter 18: Outside Influences

393

Chapter 19: Communists in a Time of “People Power”

404

Part Seven Chapter 20: The Aborted Process

425 427

Bibliography

447

Index

461

A cknow ledgm ents It is probably true to say that, like its predecessor Forcing the Pace, the idea for this volume was conceived in the front room of William and Celia Pomeroy’s house in Twickenham, during the course of the monthly discussions on Philippine affairs they hosted. As can be seen from the dates of some of the interviews, A Movement

Divided has had a twenty-year gestation, and during that time many people have been of great assistance. As with the previous volume, Bill Pomeroy was generous in his provision of documents. Back in 1989, the members of the staff at the Philippine Resource Centre in London were helpful in allowing me to photocopy huge portions of their collection of Ang Bayan and loaning me several books. Apart from the interviews with Jun Tera and Ed de la Torre, which took place in London in 1989, the remainder were conducted during visits to the Philippines in the 1990s and after I took up residence here in 2003. Thanks are due to the interviewees and to Edilberto Hao who, at what must have been great inconvenience to him, not only arranged several of the interviews but uncomplainingly conveyed me to them. He and Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo Jr. must also be thanked for their prompt replies to my e-mails concerning errant details of party life in the 1970s. On rare occasions, interviews simply did not take place due to (one assumes) understandable reticence or suspicion. In such situations, a mutual friend can make all the difference, and, thus, without the assistance of Vivencio Jose the interview with Nilo Tayag might not have happened. Sadly, several people are not in a position to receive the thanks due to them: Pedro Baguisa, 57, died of natural causes on May 29, 2009; Filemon

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

v iii

“Popoy" Lagman, 47, was assassinated on February 6, 2001; Jesus Lava, 88, died of natural causes on January 21, 2003; Bill Pomeroy, 92, died of natural causes on January 12, 2009 (followed by Celia, 94, on August 22, 2009). If any factual errors have crept into the work that follows, responsibility must be laid at my door. Hopefully, those who dispute the interpretations made or conclusions drawn will accept that these have come about as a result of a consideration of the evidence and that neither rancor nor malice has played a part.

Ken Fuller September 2009

I n t r o d u c t io n The work that follows continues the study of Philippine communism begun with the current writer’s Forcing the Pace,1 which traced the history of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) from its foundation in 1930 to the end of the Huk Rebellion in the mid-1950s. A Movement Divided takes up the story in the late 1950s and follows the twists and turns of the movement until the fall of Marcos in February 1986. One of the landmark events of that period was, of course, the formation of the Maoist breakaway, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) led by Jose Maria Sison, and thus the current volume is a study not just of the PKP but of the CPP as well. To date, there has been no serious study of both parties, and the fact that the PKP has been largely ignored has had a significant impact— overwhelmingly negative— on several of the studies that have dealt solely with the CPP. Too often, writers have exhibited an uncritical acceptance of assertions that the PKP “surrendered” to Marcos, or was “moribund,” and that the Soviet Union was “social-imperialist,” while making little attempt to research and analyze these questions. Similarly, while there may be widespread acknowledgement of Chinese influence in the formation and strategy of the CPP, there is rather less detailed examination of the extent and nature of this influence than might be expected. Surprisingly, these omissions are evident not just in works that take an essentially journalistic approach (whose authors might be accused of failing to seek the views of all parties in order to arrive at balanced view), but also in some of those that might claim to be Marxist and/or academic.

DC

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

“Dialectical thought,” explains a Marxist textbook published in the 1930s, “is the study of things in their relations and in [the] process of development and change.”2 It is precisely this approach that is absent in many studies of the CPP. While we are often told of the differences between Sison and “the Lavas” leading to the Maoist breakaway, we are usually kept in the dark on how the PKP had developed in the decade or so since the end of the Huk Rebellion, and to what stage it (and the broader mass movement it influenced) had reached when the split occurred. Such an investigation not only yields knowledge of the PKP, but also places the breakaway in context. That context is brought into sharper focus by a closer examination of the role played by the Communist Party of China. Rather than relying on the CPP’s characterization of the PKP’s political setdement with Marcos in 1974, it is surely more scientific to consider all the evidence, including the analysis upon which the decision to conclude the agreement was based. And while the Marcos regime may be correctly regarded as one of dictatorship, and it is indisputable that Washington continued to extend it official support after the declaration of martial law, was the “US-Marcos dictatorship” characterization used by the CPP actually accurate? For that matter, was the Marcos regime, while undeniably brutal and authoritarian, really “fascist,” a word that has a very particular meaning for traditional Marxism? Such questions are seldom asked. The current study commences with a brief prologue which, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with it, provides a synopsis of the history of the PKP until the defeat of the Huk Rebellion. Thereafter, it is divided into seven parts. Part 1 consists of a single chapter, tracing the development of the PKP as it emerged from the defeat of its armed struggle and undertook the painstaking task not just of rebuilding the party but of developing a number of mass, sectoral organizations and immersing itself in the tide of anti-imperialism then on the rise in the Philippines, as elsewhere. The development of Maoism in both the Philippines and China (a subject that has received little attention in literature concerning the CPP) is dealt with in part 2, followed by an examination of the new Maoist party

I n t r o d u c t io n

xi

and its program; in discussing the establishment of the New People’s Army, chapter 4 pays particular attention to the role played by Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. in bringing together the fledgling party and the armed group led by Bemabe Buscayno (Commander Dante). Part 3 is devoted to the PKP— its mutually antagonistic relations with the CPP in the wake of the latter’s formation, the development of ultraleftism within its own ranks (giving rise to another, albeit short-lived, breakaway), the process of ideological consolidation commenced at its sixth congress and, finally, its political settlement with Marcos in 1974. In part 4, the focus switches to the CPP, with five thematic chapters. The first of these examines the CPP’s characterization of the dominant mode of production in the Philippines as “semi-feudal,” an analysis which led the party to prescribe a lengthy period of capitalist development under a “national democratic regime,” compared to the path of “non-capitalist development” favored by the PKP, based on the work of Soviet scholars. The second chapter in this section deals with a subject which has hitherto attracted little critical examination by the left— the CPP’s relationship with radical Christians influenced by liberation theology. CPP practice is viewed in context of the traditional Marxist analysis of religion and its role in society, and is contrasted to the practice of an earlier practical revolutionary— Lenin. Chapters 12 and 13 turn to the various aspects of the “protracted people’s war” conducted by the NPA. Following a decidedly uncertain start until the mid-1970s, the publication of Sison’s Specific Characteristics

o f Our People’s War and the adoption of Our Urgent Tasks by the central committee led to a period, extending into the 1980s, of more consistent progress. However, the adoption of the new directions prescribed by these two documents heralded less of a break with undiluted Maoism than has sometimes been assumed. While CPP-NPA activity now tended to suggest that political power, rather than coming “from the barrel of a gun,” was to be achieved by the organization of the peasantry around concrete demands, those demands (e.g., the reduction of land rent and the elimination of usury) had been simply lifted from Mao and were not, in Philippine

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

circumstances, particularly tenable in the long term. Moreover, the strategy of “centralized leadership and decentralized operations” posited in Specific

Characteristics gave rise to an alternative, insurrectionary, model of revolution. This chapter also identifies the fact that many NPA members and supporters were not ideological converts but “grievance guerrillas,” and that many estimates of the size of the NPA were seriously inflated. Chapter 13 concludes with a survey of the undesirable results of “protracted people’s war”— the inevitable deaths on and off the battlefield, the militarization of Philippine society and, finally, the campaigns against purported “deeppenetration agents” in Mindanao and elsewhere. The final chapter in this part considers the question of alliances, the CPP’s approach to which was characterized by a desire to exercise hegemony over its allies on the one hand and, on the other (particularly following the assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. in August 1983), an inconsistency in circumstances where the anti-Marcos movement was rapidly developing outside of that hegemony. Both tendencies appeared to be present at the founding congress of BAYAN, where the potential allies, rejecting the CPP’s “vanguardism,” walked out. Part 5 turns to a consideration of how the PKP fared in its attempt, initially via its political settlement with Marcos, to pressure him to adopt a more consistent anti-imperialist position. This begins with a brief description of how foreign capital and the multilateral institutions that represented its interests had effectively reduced the room for maneuver available to Marcos. The following two chapters chronicle the PKP’s growing disenchantment with Marcos, while maintaining that the major obstacle to both development and democracy in the Philippines was imperialism. The party’s seventh and eighth congresses are dealt with in some detail. The sixth part is concerned with the “snap” election of February 1986 v

and the “people power” revolt. The external influences prior to and during these events are often downplayed and so, while charting the development of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, chapter 18 also provides an account of developments in Washington. Chapter 19 then describes the events and the roles played by both the PKP and the CPP.

I n t r o d u c t io n

x iii

A summary (and, in some cases, further development) of the major points covered in the book is given in the final chapter in part 7. As with Forcing the Pace, an attempt has been made to allow party documents to speak for themselves and some of these (particularly those concerning the three PKP congresses held during this period, which have been ignored outside of the party) are quoted extensively, but hopefully not tediously. Unlike Forcing the Pace, however, the current work also uses interviews, and these have been employed to either supplement party documents when these have been scanty, or to clarify, confirm or pin down a point.

N o tes 1.

2.

Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, From Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: University of the Philippine Press, 2007). Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, A Textbook o f Marxist Philosophy, English edition, ed. John Lewis, tr. A.C. Moseley (London: Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club Edition, 1937), 9.

\

A b b r e v ia t io n s AAFU

Asian-American Free Labor Institute

AFP

Armed Forces of the Philippines

AMA

Aniban ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (Union of Agricultural Workers)

APU BAYAN

Armed propaganda unit Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance)

BCC

Basic Christian Community

BIR

Bureau of Intelligence and Research (US State Department)

BRPF

Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

CAFA

Committee on Anti-Filipino Affairs

CC

Central Committee

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CLO

Congress of Labor Organizations

CNL

Christians for National Liberation

COF

Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (Labor Congress Philippines)

Comintern

Communist International

CPC

Communist Party of China

CPJ

Communist Party of Japan

CPP

Communist Party of the Philippines

CPUSA

Communist Party of the USA

CV

Cagayan Valley

DA

Democratic Alliance

XV

of the

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

EFF

Extended fund facility

FFW

Federation of Free Workers

GNP

Gross national product

GU

Guerrilla unit

HMB

Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (Army of National Liberation)

Hukbalahap

Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (People’s Anti-Japanese Army)

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IRA

Irish Republican Army

JUSMAG

Joint US Military Assistance Group

KBL

Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (New Society Movement)

KBP

Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina (Association of the New Filipina)

KILUSAN

Pambansang Kilusan ng Paggawa (National Workers Movement)

KM

Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth)

KMP

Katipunang Manggagawang Pilipino (Filipino Workers Association)

KMU

Kilusang Mayo Union (May First Movement)

KOMPIL

Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (Congress of the Filipino People)

KPMP

Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (National Association of Philippine Peasants)

LDC

Lesser developed country

LM

Lapiang Manggagawa (Labor Party)

LP

Liberal Party

MAN

Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism

MASAKA

Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (Free Union of Peasants)

MDP

Movement for a Democratic Philippines

MLG

Marxist Leninist Group

MPKP

Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (Free Union of Filipino Youth)

A b b r e v ia t io n s

x v ii

NAMFREL

National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections

NASSA

National Secretariat of Social Action, Justice and Peace

NATU

National Association of Trade Unions

NBI

National Bureau of Investigation

NCP

Nationalist Citizens Party

NDF

National Democratic Front

NEL

North Eastern Luzon

NP

Nacionalista Party

NPA

New People’s Army

NUSP

National Union of Students of the Philippines

NUC

National Unification Committee

PAFLU

Philippine Association of Free Labor Unions

PB

Political Bureau, or Politburo

PC

Philippine Constabulary

PD

Presidential Decree

PGEA

Philippine Government Employees Association

PKI

Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia)

PKP

Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Philippine Communist Party)

PMA

Philippine Military Academy

PPP

Progressive Party of the Philippines

PT

Political Transmission

PTUC

Philippine Trade Union Council

RA

Republic Act

RAM

Reform the Armed Forces Movement

SAL

Structural adjustment loan

SCAUP

Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines

SEATO

South East Asia Treaty Organization

SDK

Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan (League of Democratic Youth)

SIKAP

Samahan sa Ikauunlad ng Kabataang Pilipino (Union for the Advancement of Filipino Youth)

x v iii

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

SPKP

Samahan ng mga Progresibong Kababaihang Pilipino (Union of Progressive Women)

SKMP

Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino (Union of Philippine Working Women)

SPP

Socialist Party of the Philippines

TNC

Transnational corporation

UIF

Union de Impresores de Filipinas (Printers Union of the Philippines)

UNIDO

United Democratic Opposition

USAFFE

United States Army Forces in the Far East

USAID

US Agency for International Development

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

YCSP

Young Christian Socialists of the Philippines

P ro lo g ue The work that follows traces the development of Philippine communism from the end of the Huk Rebellion, led by the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, until the fall of the Marcos regime in February 1986. By way of introduction, the foundation of the PKP in 1930, and its activities up until the defeat of the postwar armed struggle, are summarized below. The foundation of the PKP came about as a result of two factors. First, the Philippine working class, although still small and largely confined to Manila, had developed to the point where trade unions had been formed and were functioning, and a handful of labor leaders had acquired an interest in Marxism. In the 1920s, these leaders founded the Partido Obrero (Labor Party, the name of which was later Filipinized to Lapiang Manggagawa, or LM), which put forward a socialist perspective. The LM rested upon the support of the left within the major trade union center, the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF, or Labor Congress of the Philippines) and a peasant organization, the Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KPMP, or National Association of Philippine Peasants), which was led by members of the same group. Second, the Russian Revolution of 1917 had hastened the formation of communist parties throughout the world, and from an early date the left-wing Filipino labor leaders were in contact with the Communist International (Comintern), usually via emissaries of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), as the Philippines was at this time a US colony. Throughout the second half of the 1920s, the LM leaders received regular advice and guidance from the Comintern, and this often took the form of

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

recommending the steps required to lay the basis for the formation of a communist party. Various errors were committed during these years: the leaders publicly proclaimed their communist credentials even before the formation of the PKP, thus attracting unnecessary opposition; attempts to capture control of the trade union organization amounted to what would today be called “vanguardism”; and an insensitive approach to the task of restructuring the labor movement along industrial (as opposed to craft or occupational) lines provoked opposition from the more conservative elements, which might otherwise have been avoided or minimized. In addition, the left failed to utilize the conflicts between Nacionalista party leader Manuel Quezon and Governor Leonard Wood to both broaden and sharpen the campaign for independence. The PKP was eventually formed in less than promising circumstances, being preceded by a split in the COF labor center after the moderate forces packed a congress. In addition, the groundwork recommended earlier by the Comintern had not been fully completed, but now the Comintern had itself entered into an ultraleftist phase and was .urging that the formation go ahead. A further problem lay in the fact that the entire leadership of the party was working class. While, m o th er circumstances, this may have been an admirable arrangement, very few of these leaders had more than a rudimentary grasp of Marxist theory, and the absence of revolutionary intellectuals or “organic” intellectuals (that is, workers educated by the movement to the point where they could conduct analyses and formulate appropriate policies) would have repercussions. Thus, the party was formed prematurely and, as a result, its first program was extremely confused. The initial phase of the PKP’s existence was characterized by ultraleftist sloganizing and activity, which inevitably attracted repression and led to the banning of the party and the jailing or internal exile of its leaders. Despite assistance from the Comintern, the young PKP continued to experience problems with even basic Marxist theory and failed to overcome its ultraleftist approach, and this, predictably, damaged its “mass work.” Membership during this period tended to be very volatile. However, in

P ro lo gu e

3

1935 the Comintern reversed its own ultraleftist approach and, thereafter, with the assistance of the CPUSA the PKP was gradually reoriented. With President Quezon’s adoption of his “Social Justice Program” during the Commonwealth period and the pursuit by the international communist movement of a “united front” approach to combat the growth of fascism, the CPUSA persuaded the PKP to drop its demand of immediate independence and to enter a critical alliance with Quezon. Much of the party’s sectarianism was overcome, and the documents of the 1938 PKP Congress, at which the reorientation was formalized and the merger with the Socialist Party of Pedro Abad Santos cemented, were, unlike its first program, extremely sophisticated. Even so, there were still problems in the party’s approach to alliances, leading to a complete split in the united front at the subsequent elections. In the 1940 municipal elections, however, many candidates (running under the Socialist Party banner) were successful in Pampanga. While, during World War II, an extremely effective guerrilla army— the Hukbalahap (Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or People’s Anti-Japanese Army)— was

developed,

and alternative local government structures

were erected in areas of Huk influence, mistakes continued to be made: overconfidence led to the arrest of leaders, and an overreaction to a major Japanese assault led to the adoption (at the policy level, although less so in practice) of “retreat for defense.” More fundamentally, the neglect of urban activity during this period meant that the PKP became overwhelmingly peasant in character. In September 1944, the PKP held a conference at which its attitude to the returning Americans and the exiled Commonwealth government was discussed. Vicente Lava, who had been removed as general secretary due to the “retreat for defense” policy (which was now acknowledged as a mistake), warned that the “compradors” and landlords were now turning against the Huks and that the Filipino USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far East) might try to crush the movement after the US landings. He therefore argued for the mobilization of allies in the anti-Japanese struggle and for the formation of provisional governments at national and

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

regional levels on a “united front” basis, with the aim of insisting that these send representatives to the returning national government. By and large, however, Lava’s arguments were not accepted, as others argued that the returning Americans would be benign. The Huks stepped up their liberation activity, mounting an all-out offensive on Japanese and collaborators after the American landing at Lingayen. However, they found the attitude of the US authorities to be hostile, with arrests and murders and a refusal to recognize their provincial governments. Despite a reign of terror, however, the PKP maintained its pro-US policy and was able to form a new peasant organization and a trade union center, both of which grew rapidly. The PKP also participated in the formation of the Democratic Alliance (DA), which fielded candidates in the national elections, electing six congressmen in Central Luzon. The party decided to support Sergio Osmena for president against Manuel Roxas, the US-sponsored candidate, although this was preceded by an exhaustive debate during which various ultraleftist arguments were advanced. The Hukbalahap was disbanded, although its arms were retained, but as the anticommunist terror continued it reassembled for reasons of self-defense. With Roxas elected president, the six DA congressmen were suspended, as the government wished to ensure endorsement of the constitutional amendment required to accommodate adoption of the Bell Trade Act, with its pro-US “parity” provisions, thus ensuring that US economic interests continued to be served in an independent Philippines. The most rational voice in the inner-party debate at this time was that of Vicente Lava, who warned that the USA looked upon the Philippines as part of its “inner zone of influence” and urged the forging of alliances and the adoption of a largely defensive (as opposed to aggressive) posture. But Lava found himself outvoted. The postwar armed struggle led by the PKP did, though, begin as a defensive struggle, as Huk areas were subjected to bombardment by government forces. However, a minority in the leadership of the party, led by Jose Lava (brother of Vicente, who died of natural causes in 1947) argued for the further development of the armed struggle, a line which gained the

P ro l o g u e

5

ascendancy in 1947 and was adopted as policy the following year. The name of the rebel army was now changed to the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB, or Army of National Liberation). Increasingly, sectarianism returned to the party, with the Nacionalista Party being viewed as a rival rather than a potential ally. Talks with the government of President Quirino (who came to office after the death of Roxas) failed and so, after a brief hiatus, the armed struggle resumed. In 1950, the party declared the existence of a revolutionary situation and proposed a two-year period as preparation for the seizure of power. Not only was there no revolutionary situation, but a grave mistake was made in thinking that the USA would abandon the Philippines. Widespread attacks were mounted in March 1950, and expansion missions were sent to other parts of the country (the PKP and the guerrilla army being largely confined to Central Luzon and parts of Southern Luzon). The same year, the PKP projected its leadership of the armed struggle, thus turning its back on the “united front” strategy it had pursued hitherto. A further wave of simultaneous raids was launched in August, with a third planned for November— and this was viewed as a “dress rehearsal” for the seizure of power. If there was a fundamental reason for the ultraleftist trajectory followed by the PKP in these postwar years, it lay in the fact that, in addition to an overwhelming peasant membership due to its concentration in the countryside, the party now had leaders who were generic intellectuals. The traditional response of the peasants to its oppressors was to seek to right the wrong with one swift blow, while the intellectual leaders— and particularly Jose Lava— had a grasp of Marxism but little appreciation of working-class (let alone peasant) realities. The one combined with the other constituted a recipe for adventurism. The “dress rehearsal” was cancelled when members of the leadership (including Lava) were arrested in the “Politburo raid” of 1950. Despite clear indications that the tide was now against the Huks, a PKP conference in 1951 decided that nothing had fundamentally changed. But life proved otherwise: the PKP-led trade union and peasant organizations were banned; “surrenderism” began to develop; an election

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

boycott called by the party failed dismally; and the government attacks took their terrible toll. Soon, the guerrilla army was but a shadow of its former self, and most of the PKP leaders were either dead, captured, or had surrendered.

PART ONE Too often, works dealing with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) tell us litde of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), the party from which the CPP leader split in the late 1960s. While readers may be allowed a glimpse of the PKP’s wartime role, when it led the Hukbalahap, we are rarely provided any information concerning that party in the period between defeat of the Huk Rebellion in the mid-1950s and the “reestablishment” of the CPP in 1968/1969— other than to emphasize the shattering impact of that defeat, advise us that the PKP was, under the leadership of “the Lavas,” virtually lifeless, its sparse membership kept inactive by something called the “single file" method of organization, and to describe (almost always from the viewpoint of CPP founder Jose Maria Sison) the circumstances in which the breakaway occurred. Not only are the interpretations of this period put forward by Sison and a few others not challenged or subjected to critical scrutiny, but readers are given no account of what the PKP actually did during this decade. If, in order to consider the appearance of the CPP dialectically, we need to study the phenomena associated with it “in their relations and in [the] process of development and change,” we surely must provide an account of the PKP in the period prior to that event, and if alternative interpretations of, say, “single file" exist we must submit them for the reader’s consideration. TJie single chapter that follows is an attempt to do this.

7

C h a pter 1 : R ebu ild in g i Following the defeat of the postwar armed struggle, the task of rebuilding the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP, Philippine Communist Party) proved a slow process. The decision to shift to legal forms of struggle was not easy to implement, as many underground cadres were both known to, and wanted by, the authorities. Even so, members were sent down to the barrios to reestablish the peasant organizations, while others were despatched to Manila to continue trade union work. Furthermore, it was now possible to reactivate a large number of members who had become passive during the period of armed struggle. The task was made more difficult than it might have been, however, by the fact that no campaign had been waged to secure the release of the imprisoned leaders. According to Jesus Lava, in 1958 there were “at most around 50 members in Manila and between 300 and 500 in the provinces.”1 During this period, Lava, then the PKP’s general secretary, decided that in the interests of security the “single-file” method of organization should be adopted, an arrangement that entailed each member being in contact with only two others. The membership, especially at leadership level, was so scattered at this stage that Lava took this decision on his own and only later obtained the agreement of Casto Alejandrino and other politburo (PB) members, but even then there was no actual meeting of this body.2 Lava says that practically “everyone knew what they were supposed to do in terms of organization, contacts, etc., and not to expect contact with us, the higher

9

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organ, until a certain period.”3 At this point, there was no central committee and even the three or four remaining members of the PB did not m eet regularly between 1958 and 1964.4 Nemenzo maintains that Lava urged all party members who were not facing criminal charges to “return to civilian life” and to conduct their political activity through “nationalist and reformist organizations.” He also ch aises that Lava freed members from any obligation to join party collectives and that the “return to civilian life” was a euphemism for surrender. Moreover, claims Nemenzo, there was no recruitment during this period as it was assumed that only infiltrators would wish to join the party.5 Sison, meanwhile, accuses Lava of “deciding all by himself to liquidate the Party with his ‘single­ file’ policy, a policy of destroying even the least semblance of democratic centralism within the Party.”6 When confronted by an interviewer in 1979 with a comparison with Spain and Portugal under fascism, where the communist parties had “somehow managed,” Jesus Lava replied that “the difference was precisely, from the start of the suppression, they started with the underground network. In our case, at the start of the suppression, we started with the armed struggle.”7 What Lava and a few others were now attempting to do was to keep some form of organization intact so that, when the time was ripe, the painstaking task of rebuilding the party could commence. Lava responds to Nemenzo by claiming that “single file” applied only in Manila, “where the problem of security was so acute and the problem of morale so critical,” and where it was a “structural necessity not only for survival but also for growth.” While the obligatory membership of collectives was relaxed for a while in the capital, “this was not true in other areas— Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, Quezon. Nuclei and section committees remained whenever there were cadres to man these organs of the Party.” Finally, while individual members may, whether through fear or some other reason, have stopped recruiting, this had not been, and “could never be a party policy.”8 Dizon confirms this in part by stating that “single-file” was “a national policy, but the situation in some areas permitted a looser structure. The place where it had to be done was Manila.”9 More recendy, Nemenzo has gone some way to agreeing that this was the case: “The only organized

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party organ that continued functioning was the one in Central Luzon. Commander Hizon refused to implement the single file and he tried to retain whatever was left of the party. He was recruiting new members. Dante [Bemabe Buscayno, later to lead the New People’s Army], for example, was recruited by Hizon (whose real name was Benjamin Cunanan). He tried to rebuild the HMB, but it was not very strong. So in a sense it’s true that the party was not totally liquidated. The party organization in Central Luzon, especially Pampanga, continued to function, but there was no distinction between the political and the military.”10 Jesus Lava in fact claims that membership grew during the “single-file" period and that by I960 the party was forming nuclei and various sections.11 It was with the formation of sections that collective leadership of a kind was resumed, with the section secretaries— Ignacio P. Lacsina (labor), Pedro Taruc (peasants), and Francisco Lava Jr. (youth)— taking collective decisions. Against the backdrop of resurgent nationalism whipped up by progressive intellectuals and even anti-imperialist business leaders, in the early 1960s the PKP embarked upon a program of building, along with its allies, open mass organizations by means of which the party’s work could be carried forward. Jose Maria Sison would play an influential role in several of these organizations. Although, reading some of Sison’s works, it is possible to form the impression that these organizations were formed solely on his own initiative,12 we will see that, while his initiative may have been a factor, each one was formed as a result of decisions by the PKP and that, in taking various leading roles in these organizations, Sison was fulfilling the tasks which the party assigned to him.

2 Jose Maria Sison rose to prominence through the student movement, joining a study circle in 1959 that would later develop into the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines (SCAUP). He says that because “I had been the most persistent in consolidating the organization, I would be acknowledged as [the] founding chairman . . . ” of SCAUP.13 In

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1961, SCAUP rallied thousands to a demonstration against the witch-hunting hearings of the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA, patterned on the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee). Sison makes the not unreasonable claim that this demonstration was “of signal importance. It marked the end of a long period of quiescence and stultifying reaction in the entire 1950s and the beginning of the resurgence of the progressive mass movement.”14 Also in 1961, Sison says that he “started to go deep into the workers’ m ovem ent.. . The secret discussion groups, which increasingly developed into groups of the proletarian revolutionary party, became the hard core of the mass movement.”15 The following year, he began work with Ignacio Lacsina’s National Association of Trade Unions, Felixberto Olalia’s National Federation of Labor Unions and others.16 In the meantime, late in 1961 he had visited Indonesia, where for four months he studied the Indonesian language and literature and “had time to read an enormous amount of Marxist-Leninist classics” and to develop “good relations with the Indonesian comrades in the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).”17 According to Sison’s own account, in 1961 Jesus Lava asked his nephew, Vicente Lava Jr., to contact him— obviously with a view to recruiting him into the PKP. However, the meeting did not take place until December of the following year, at which time Sison agreed to join the party. Jesus Lava then authorized the formation of an executive committee to lead the PKP “while he remained in the background as general secretary.” Francisco Lava Jr., a clerk in the Court of Appeals (and also known as “Paco”) and Lacsina were also members. “Paco” then invited “the circulation manager of a major daily newspaper” to join the committee.18 According to Dizon, this person was the son of a man who had been active in the Democratic Alliance, the united front organization in which the PKP had participated during the immediate postwar period. Sison complains that Jesus Lava made appointments without consulting the executive committee, and in this way Lacsina and Pedro Taruc (a distant cousin of Luis, the wartime Huk leader who was expelled before his surrender in 1954, and his brother Peregrino) were confirmed as the secretaries for labor and peasants, respectively, while “Paco” became the secretary for professionals and Sison was appointed as secretary for youth.19 There were sharp disagreements on the committee. Sison records

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that Lacsina objected to the co-option of two friends of Francisco Lava Jr. who “had no connection whatsoever with the mass movement and had unsavory reputations . . .,,2° Sison claims that at one stage Lacsina “refused to appear before the secretary for professionals. And when the latter issued an ultimatum the former got so angry that he challenged him to a duel.”21 It will be apparent that the Lava family occupied a number of positions in the PKP leadership at this stage— so much so that Sison has made mention of a “Lava dynasty.”22 Romeo Dizon, who joined the party during the period under discussion, attempts to place this in context, saying that Jesus Lava was a very suspicious fellow because he was being hunted. So what came out in Manila was that he recruited first his relatives . . . He felt that he could only rely on his brothers, his nephews. He was sure that these people would never betray him. Most of the old-time leaders were in prison at this time. I remember when I came in . . . I found these people already there— Sison, Lacsina, Francisco Jr. and Vicente Jr. (who worked for ColgatePalmolive). Horacio [Lava] was also there . . . It was only Sison who was not connected and later on Merlin [Magallona, who in 1986 would become general secretary] and I were not connected, and then Nemenzo. So Sison has not really put it in context. He [is] using it to substantiate an argument.23 In 1963, Jesus Lava issued Political Transmission 19. It was this document that communicated the policy of building mass organizations to the leading cadres of the party. Although, as already noted, Sison tends to downplay the role of the party in this work, and claims, for example, that MASAKA, the mass peasant organization, was formed “outside of the ken” of the PKP,24 Dizon maintains that it is clear to me that PT19 made provision for legal mass organizations. Jesus Lava placed emphasis on the youth, with the students being targeted .. . In the countryside, young and old [party members and supporters] were supposed to be put in a peasant organization. So there was MASAKA, where most of the old cadres of the party who came out of prison were assigned to lead . . . And the labor sector was also there—the Lapiang Manggagawa [Labor Party] was provided for.25

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We have seen that the PKP now had a secretary for each area of work. What PT19 did, in effect, was to put forward a program for the formation of a mass organization in each of these areas. We will now look at each o f these organizations in turn.

3 With regard to the labor sector, the emphasis of the PKP would be placed not so much on trade union work itself but on ensuring that the trade union movement was given a political voice. As far as trade unions themselves went, the situation was characterized by the absence of unity and the proliferation of organizations, although there were positive developments. The outlawing of the PKP-led Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO) during the HMB period had led to the formation of many “moderate” trade unions, some of which were prey to CLA influence. However, healthier organizations were also formed. As early as 1952, Cipriano Cid formed the Philippine Association of Free Labor Unions (PAFLU). By 1964, PAFLU was claiming 218 member-unions in some twenty provinces, with a total membership of 121,000.26 The Philippine Trade Union Council (PTUC) was formed in 1954. Lacsina’s National Association of Trade Unions (NATU) also saw the light of day in this year, after Lacsina left the Federation of Free Workers, where he had been first vice-president.27 In 1957, the Katipunang Manggagawang Pilipino (KMP, or Filipino Workers’ Association) was formed, taking part in the nationalist campaign led by Senator Claro M. Recto and supporting President Carlos Garcia’s “Filipino First” policy. In 1963, an attempt was made to form a Philippine Labor Center, this being, according to Progressive Review, “a gigantic merger of the two biggest labor federations in the country, the PTUC and KMP.”28 A few years later, however, Sison complained that this unity agreement “did not prosper beyond the paper agreement as if the hidden hand of

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the reactionaries had always been there to sabotage it and also as if the petty jealousies among the member labor federations could not at all be overcome.”29 The printers’ union, the UIF (Union de Impresores de Filipinas), which had been formed in 1902, was largely inactive during the height of the anticommunist suppression in the 1950s; in the 1960s, however, it revived and later in the decade would join with the Philippine Government Employees Association (PGEA) and dissatisfied member-unions within PAFLU to attempt the formation of yet another progressive trade union center— the PKP-led Pambansang Kilusan ng Paggawa (Kilusan, or National Workers’ Movement). But in the early and mid-1960s it was NATO which, more than any other labor organization, acted as the vehicle for the PKP’s industrial activity. In 1964, having significantly expanded its membership, NATO was transformed into a labor center, and was considered the largest trade union organization in the years preceding the declaration of martial law in 1972. Quite apart from his trade union activity, NATO leader Ignacio Lacsina had, even during the 1950s, always maintained a political profile. In 1957, he joined the Nationalist Citizens’ Party (NCP) of Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada, following which NATO supported NCP candidates (one of whom, running for the Senate, was Cipriano Cid). After a period in which Lacsina was “dissatisfied with the domination of the party by those whom he called bourgeois nationalists . . .,n3° he became secretary-general of the NCP following the reorganization of the party. After the death of Recto, however, the NCP began to founder. Thus, when the PKP was planning to launch a legal political party based on the labor movement, it was only natural that Lacsina would be given a leading role,* so when the Lapiang

Nemenzo does not think Lacsina was “a member of the party until the time Sison was brought in. I would not be surprised if Sison recruited him . . . Lacsina was much more politicized, more left, than Cid. Cid was a traditional labor leader, a lawyer. Aside from Cid, you had other labor leaders, all of them lawyers, whose concept was just to elect labor leaders to government, not really fighting for socialism. Cid was their rallying point, the most senior member of this group. So there was a rift.” Magallona points out, however, that Lacsina was working with the PKP before his recruitment into the party. It “might be that Sison formally recruited him. But, of course, Sison could not have acted alone. He had a party group that must have decided that."31

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Manggagawa (LM) was formed in February 1963 Lacsina was its general secretary, while Cipriano Cid sat as president. The new party’s platform was comprehensive: full employment; improved wages and conditions; a concrete program of land reform; a nationwide housing program; the reform of laws “which operate to the injury of the masses” (an obvious reference to the Anti-Subversion Law); a nationalist economic policy; the nationalization of “industries and institutions vital to the national interest”; Filipino ownership of the media; the purging of the education system “of its colonial content and orientation and the development of Pilipino as the national language”; major emphasis on basic industrialization (although, said the LM, agriculture should also be modernized and extended); foreign aid “payable on reasonable terms, and without strings”; the expansion of foreign trade and the development of an independent foreign policy; and the encouragement of trade unionism by the state, with the right to strike being protected. LM promised to “prosecute, vigorously and resolutely, the campaign against subversion, be it from the left or from the right,”32 an undertaking presumably given in order to reassure the authorities of the organization’s “respectability.” However, it must be said that there was an element of opportunism here, for it was not as if the undertaking applied only to arm ed subversion. Had it done so, this would have been perfectly innocuous, as there was no progressive or nationalist organization at that time calling for the armed overthrow of the government. As it was, however, the undertaking could have been interpreted as an endorsement of the Anti-Subversion Law and, for that matter, of the continued imprisonment of many PKP leaders and cadres. Also, it is rather striking that, although the document called for intergovernmental relationships to be based on the principle of equality, there was no specific mention of the unequal economic and military treaties forced on the Philippines by the USA. Somewhat ambitiously, the document from which we have quoted also read as if the LM was seen by its leaders as not merely a political vehicle for voicing the demands of the working class and mobilizing workers into political activity, but as a party which could be elected to government.

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Sison certainly had high hopes for the new party. Writing in the first issue of Progressive Review, he remarked: The advent of Lapiang Manggagawa should somehow assure effective replacement or reconstitution of institutions on the labor front that favor and protect certain vested interests, chiefly those of neo-colonialism. It is, however, already a fact that the prime cry of social justice is inseparably linked with the problem of national independence in the platform of Lapiang Manggagawa. There is much reason to expect the Lapiang Manggagawa to provide the Filipino working class with the proper political education, advancing positive alternatives, preferably of a revolutionary and democratic character, and exposing the ills of the nation as well as the tricks of its enemies.33 In the elections of 1963, the LM did not field its own candidates but supported President Diosdado Macapagal and the Liberal Party as the “party of change.”34 This followed an approach by Macapagal, who, responding to the upsurge of nationalism, was then calling for the completion of the “Unfinished Revolution” of 1896, which resulted in the president signing an “Instrument of Coalition” drafted by Lacsina. The terms of the coalition included pledges to root out corruption, the adoption of an independent foreign policy, land reform and a pro-labor stance.35 The LM was intended to act as the voice of labor within the emerging anti-imperialist coalition of classes which was thought to be emerging in the Philippines. Thus,

Progressive Review claimed in early 1964: The Lapiang Manggagawa can be an effective ally of the national entrepreneurial class. Our national entrepreneurs may be broad-minded enough to seek its cooperation. As long as an anti-imperialist platform is to be mutually propagated, the workers can more effectively put the heat on foreign competition in favor of nationalization. However, the working class should recognize the vacillating and opportunistic character of the national entrepreneurs, their susceptibility to joint ventures with foreign monopoly capital plus their mental lag deriving from a feudal background.36 Of the links with Macapagal, the journal commented:

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It is heartening to observe that President Macapagal has made a coalition with the lapiang Manggagawa. Today, Lapiang Manggagawa is the open political organization that can to a large extent claim to represent the working class in the Philippines. The cooperation between Lapiang Manggagawa and the Macapagal administration can be more fruitful if it surpasses the exigencies of conservative politics and its transient gimmicks and stimulates the activation of the working class which is the one class, other than the big property-owners, that can easily be integrated and directed into one massive political factor sustaining a progressive national solidarity. Despite Macapagal’s apparently progressive labor policies, the workers would certainly be happier if the cooperation between the Macapagal administration and the Lapiang Manggagawa is geared towards the development of certain political conditions that can stimulate the development of a well-otganized and well-oriented working class whose principal responsibility is to crush imperialism within our shores and help the national government change its neo-colonial foundations so that it can function as a democratic instrument.37 It can be argued that the open espousal of such a demand was quite unrealistic— and even dangerous— given the conditions prevailing in the Philippines in 1964. Certainly, the LM as a broad, loose organization would be incapable of persuading Macapagal to use his “coalition” with the party as a mechanism by which the working class might be mobilized to “crush imperialism.” The editorial from which the above passages are quoted bears the imprint of Jose Maria Sison, who appeared at this stage to be following the Indonesian “model,” a country of which he had some experience and where President Sukarno had entered into an anti-imperialist coalition with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). But the history and circumstances of Indonesia were not those of the Philippines. Along with other mass organizations (most of which were formed with PKP leadership as a result of PT19), the LM participated in a number of important campaigns and mass actions in the mid-1960s. In October 1964, along with the PKP-led student organization, Kabataang Makabayan

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(KM, or Nationalist Youth), the LM organized a demonstration of workers and students “against the state of economic subservience to American monopoly capital perpetuated by parity rights and preferential trade."38 For this occasion, the LM put forward a manifesto that boldly stated: “The clear and urgent task of the Unfinished Revolution . . . is to seek the immediate liquidation of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.”* Indicative of the LM’s growing disenchantment with its “coalition” partner, the manifesto insisted: Instead of joining the jockeying of presidential aspirants to be the “American boy” in the ensuing election campaign, President Macapagal is called upon, as the duly chosen leader of the nation, to step forward and offer a sustained and resolute leadership to the emerging forces of national freedom and progress.59 On January 25, 1965, a further demonstration was called upon the opening of Congress, although this actually took place outside the US Embassy, with a claimed 15,000 in attendance. A “January 25th Manifesto” was signed by the LM, the KM, the National Anti-Parity Council, MASAKA (the PKP-led peasants’ organization), AKSIUN (an unemployed workers’ organization, also led by the PKP), and other groups. This called for the abrogation of parity and the Laurel-Langley Agreement “without further delay,” the immediate abrogation of the military bases agreement, full implementation of the Retail Trade Nationalization Law and the passage of further legislation nationalizing wholesale trade (“nationalization” here should be taken to mean “Filipinization”),

the “decisive and

universal implementation of the Agrarian Land Reform Code without further ado,” abrogation of the Military Assistance Pact and the QuirinoFoster Agreement,* “full respect for civil liberties in the face of increasing

*

While, immediately after World War n, “parity rights” had been conceded to US investors in certain areas, such as utilities, the Laurel-Langley Agreement extended this arrangement to all areas of the economy; “parity” was now supposed to be reciprocal, although for obvious reasons it was US investors who benefited.

t

Under the Quirino-Foster Agreement of 1950, US officials were responsible for identifying projects upon which $250 million in US aid should be spent, with the Philippine government being obliged to provide counterpart funding.

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threats of alien-inspired repression and witch-hunting," a strategy for full employment and an increase in the minimum wage, “immediate action to relieve Filipino businessmen from a foreign-inspired credit squeeze,” and, finally, “the extension of our diplomatic and commercial relations with all countries willing to deal with us on the basis of equality and mutual respect in order to correct our narrow and neo-colonial ‘special relations’ with the United States.”40 As will be seen, the demands of this manifesto reflected the broad anti-imperialist movement under construction, and there were indications that the authorities were beginning to feel concern about the success with which this strategy was meeting. Before the demonstration, rumors were spread that it would be attended by men with bolos, that a riot would be provoked and that the US ambassador’s residence would be set ablaze; this made it necessary for the organizers to call a press conference two days beforehand to allay such fears.41 At the demonstration itself, leaflets bearing the hammer and sickle were distributed, but J.V. Cruz stated in the Manila Times that these had been printed on the press of the United States Information Service.42 By 1965 it was clear that Macapagal had no intention of implementing the understandings he had reached with the LM, and in an article in

Progressive Review Lacsina stated: “There is no real difference between the LP [Liberal Party] and the NP [Nacionalista Party]. On the level of policy, they are one and the same political party.” The LM, therefore, wanted “to offer the Filipino voter a real alternative: a distinct political party representing a distinct political program.” Lacsina recalled that in its early stages the Macapagal government had forced a land reform program through “a reluctant, landlord-heavy Congress” and had established an Emergency Employment Administration. For a time, the government had appeared “as a self-willed, creative force in the international scene, militant in the cause of peace, national self-determination, and human brotherhood.” Thus, the LM had allied itself with the administration. “Our purpose was to lend mass support and provide encouragement to the progressive trends visible during the early days of the Liberal

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administration.” But now the government was lukewarm toward land reform, while granting large areas of the public domain to Dole and United Fruit Also, the administration was making a “pathetic effort . . . to win back the patronage and good graces of the economic lords.” It had assumed “a mendicant and puppet attitude towards the United States at a time when the national forces of freedom and progress are awakening, growing and accelerating.” Lacsina concluded: From all indications, the bold, progressive and revolutionary Liberal administration with which the Lapiang Manggagawa had allied itself has effectively vanished, replaced by a servile, mendicant, retrogressive Liberal administration, whose policies and actions are completely repulsive to the platform of our Party. We can assure you the Lapiang Manggagawa is determined not to play any part in the ignoble role of the Liberal administration as the “American boy” in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia. The Lapiang Manggagawa will militandy forge ahead in its task of developing a dynamic and progressive leadership for the people, a leadership rising from the conscious ranks of the people themselves. There will be organizational drives all over the country. Efforts will not be spared to unfold all the truths and realities of our national condition, to raise the level of national and social consciousness, to spur the most forward national movement. There will be struggles everywhere. In all this, the Lapiang Manggagawa will resist the inevitable slanders, intrigues, enticements, and repressions which the enemies of Filipino freedom and progress will unleash upon us.43 Of the promised “organizational drives all over the country,” however, there is no record, and the implied intention to stand electoral candidates of its own never came to fruition. Nemenzo, in any case, says that the intention was to support Ferdinand Marcos and have LM candidates adopted as guest candidates by the Nacionalista Party. The PKP’s provisional central committee was, says the same source, divided on the issue, with Nemenzo and Sison aiguing for a boycott.44 A year after Lacsina’s article appeared, Sison was complaining that LM “is seriously faced with the clanger of disintegration from which it

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has suffered through four years of existence, apparendy because of the deleterious impact of colonial-bourgeois politics which wrack the leadership every election time and because of the right-wing opportunism of certain elements and also because of narrow inter-federation am or

propio. But in the most objective manner of party criticism, let me state that a party like the Lapiang Manggagawa, which assumes the role of proletarian leadership, will be strong only if it fulfils certain conditions in the field of ideology, organization and politics.” Sison then proceeded to enumerate these conditions, calling for what amounted to a program of indepth Marxist education, with “workers schools on all levels”* and “special conferences on theoretical problems affecting the working class”; such a party should have a newspaper “to serve as an ideological vehicle” and should be organized on the basis of individual membership from “members of all patriotic classes,” with “massive support from the peasantry.” With regard to political activity, the workers’ party must be able to make daily elaborations on the strategy of the national united front. It must respond promptly to the daily shifting demands of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle, independently and in cooperation with all other anti-imperialist and anti-feudal forces and organizations . . . It must have the firm and single objective of developing and acquiring political power for the masses. At the present stage, the workers’ party must stop choosing only the lesser evil from among the colonial-bourgeois parties.46 Here, Sison appeared to be arguing for the construction of a MarxistLeninist party. It is fairly obvious, however, that the LM had never been intended as such, but was meant to act as the vehicle by which, in circumstances where the PKP was illegal, PKP cadres could conduct mass work and ensure that workers had a legal political voice. Kimura agrees with Sison, however, that the “LM was plagued with ideological division

Nemenzo says that Sison really wanted the education program for the members of the more moderate trade unions, but as “Cid and the others were always scared of infiltration, scared of the Anti-Subversion Law,” in practice it was confined mainly to NATU.45

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and personal rivalry among its leaders from the beginning.”47 According to Jesus Lava (who by this time was in prison), the organization was “aborted because of dissensions from inside. There was a reported rift between Lacsina and Cid.”48

4 The Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (MASAKA, or Free Union of Peasants) was formed in 1964 with a group of former PKM (Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid, or National Peasants’ Union, the PKP-led peasant organization declared illegal in the HMB period) members at its core.49 This was to prove the most stable of the mass organizations formed by the PKP in this period, a reflection of the fact that since 1938 the mass base of the party had been among the peasantry of Central Luzon; now, the majority of its 1,000 members were peasants.50 Like the LM, MASAKA took part in most of the major mass actions of the period and was, for example, a signatory to the January 25th Manifesto referred to above. According to Jesus Lava, however, the peasant organization was “riding on Macapagal’s land reform, primarily to be able to gain legality.”51 This is an important point, for it goes some way to explaining the line taken by both the peasant organization and the LM during this period. With the PKP and the previous mass organizations it had led banned, it is no surprise that the nationalist revival witnessed in these years was bourgeoisled, reflecting the frustrations of the Filipino business community arising from the privileged position of US business interests within the economy of the Philippines. It was to accommodate these bourgeois nationalists that Macapagal initially adopted a progressive stance in so many policy areas, projecting himself as the leader of the “Unfinished Revolution." To a certain extent, then, the PKP leaders “tailed” these developments, forming new (and therefore legal) mass organizations which would offer critical support to potential allies (including the Macapagal administration) in the fulfilment of the remaining tasks of the “Unfinished Revolution.” In the circumstances

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of the time, this initial “tailism” was inevitable if the communists were n o t to suffer both illegality and isolation. It seems clear, however, that th e PKP’s intention was to first ensure that the mass organizations which it led achieved positions of influence and then use that influence to broaden the nationalist debate to encompass areas such as civil liberties (the sixth item in a list of ten demands contained within the January 25th Manifesto, fo r example) with the eventual aim of regaining legality for the PKP itself. Such a strategy is faidy evident from a careful reading of the first nine issues of Progressive Review. According to Sison, it was he who “organized the Progressive Review in 1962 and became its editor-in-chief and chairman of the editorial board upon its launching in 1963.”52 This is broadly factual— although the term “chairman” was not in fact used by the journal until its seventh issue, in 1965. But PKP sources insist that the organization and launch of Progressive Review was merely another task which Sison was undertaking on behalf of the party which he had joined toward the end of 1962.53 Nemenzo says of the journal, while “you can say it was a PKP project," it “was a special project of the group of Jom a [Sison]. . . I was still [studying] in Manchester when Jom a suggested Progressive Review. In fact, I wrote the first editorial . . . [which] was supposed to be the general line for PR.”54 The first issue, for May/June 1963, contained a mix of articles reflecting the broad coalition of forces which, the PKP believed, was necessary in order to carry the nationalist movement further forward. Fortunato de Leon, a corporation lawyer, ex-congressman, and former executive secretary to President Ramon Magsaysay, argued that the opening of trade relations with China would be a demonstration of the Philippines’ independence from the USA, would stimulate Philippine industries and lessen the country’s “dependence on the American market, American economic aid and military assistance . . . It will do away with the suspicion, perhaps unfounded, that we are America’s puppet.”55 The Dean of the College of Journalism at the Lyceum, Jose A. Lansang, criticized both “ultranationalistic capitalism” and communism, but concluded: A nation where civil liberties become weaker or are overtly suppressed, and therefore goes under severe tension, is bound to face an even more

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serious danger than subversion which after all may not always succeed. The greater danger is the weakening or loss of its democratic potentials and [it] thereby gets transformed into an arena of liability to the Free World instead of being a hopeful source of an increment of strength for the economic and political sinews of the non-communist camp.56 Such a viewpoint would have been acceptable to the PKP as it attempted to establish itself in the legal arena and to overcome the ban under the Anti-Subversion Law. The editorial in the first issue also made clear (to the careful reader) the ideological outlook of the journal. In a veiled reference to Marxism, this stated: In exporting to the colonies new modes of production and economic organization, Western imperialism has created in our country a semi­ capitalist social system. This explains the inevitable harmony of the theoretical efforts of Western radicalism and our own. Another explanation follows from the fact that our own capitalist system is part and parcel of a larger system: the capitalist world market. Since the rise of modem imperialism, radical thinkers in the West have been able to comprehend this larger system, both in its totality and historical motion. Since understanding the whole is essential to understanding a part, acquaintance with Western radical literature is indispensable for us.57 The third issue (after a major diversion in July/August 1963, when the whole of the second issue was devoted to Indonesia— presumably a result of Sison’s current interest in this model and, possibly, the influence of a PKI member then staying in the Philippines)58 followed the same pattern as the first, with a major analysis of Macapagal’s “Unfinished Revolution,” an article on Andres Bonifacio (thus restating the Philippine revolutionary tradition), a nationalist statement by students, and pieces by Foreign Secretary Salvador P. Lopez and Agustín Rodolfo (chair of natural sciences at the University of the Philippines and a former member of the Hukbalahap). With the fourth issue, the journal became somewhat bolder: not only were there articles by establishment figures (Congressman Felicísimo C. Ocampo on the lack of labor protection, Congresswoman Juanita L. Nepomuceno on

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the exploitation of Filipino labor in the US military bases and Congressman Miguel Cuenco on the military bases and land reform), but a major theme was civil liberties and the illegality of the PKP— and, as if testing the water, the journal ran an article by known communist William Pomeroy, who had been deported to the USA two years earlier after serving ten years in prison for his part in the Huk Rebellion. The Supreme Court ruling in the case of Amado V. Hernandez (that mere membership in a communist party or advocacy of communist theory should not be considered criminal acts in themselves) was reprinted, along with important articles by Reynato S. Puno (four decades later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and Justice Jesus G. Barrera. Puno argued that the Anti-Subversion Law (which outlawed membership of the PKP and its successors) was in fact a bill of attainder, the latter being a device which “convicts specific persons or an ascertainable class and punishes them for crimes without judicial trial.” Such bills, said Puno, were ruled out by the Philippine Constitution. Moreover, Congress had not oudawed all organizations seeking to overthrow the government by force and violence but had singled out the PKP.59 Barrera, an associate justice of the Supreme Court and formerly a member of the anti-Japanese Free Philippines and president of the postwar Democratic Alliance, argued: considering all conditions and in particular the form of political struggle which I think is most feasible, the struggle for individual freedom or liberties is not only on parity with that for national freedom, but is also a means for the enhancement of the latter. It is obvious that the particular form I have in mind is the peaceful, parliamentary, propagational, educational and organizational type, in which militancy can be achieved without coercion and without sacrifice of individual or civil freedoms. 1 repeat, that the struggle for civil liberties, particularly those of freedom of speech and of association are a must in the type of political struggle for liberation that I visualize.60 This could be interpreted to mean that, given a commitment to open, legal forms of struggle, the PKP should be allowed to function legally and that, moreover, this would aid the struggle for national liberation. He continued:

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Freedom to act or to express a thought presupposes knowledge and, hence, the former freedom implies the freedom to know. This, in turn, presupposes the freedom to learn and the freedom to seek information and knowledge from whatever source. Any attempt, therefore, to prevent people from learning or to prevent any particular matter from being learned makes the freedom of expression a mockery. Freedom to express based on ignorance or lack of knowledge is but the freedom to perpetuate ignorance and error and induces action based on ignorance.61 As the nationalist movement gained in strength, the editors of

Progressive Review grew more self-confident, and began to place their cards on the table, face up. The fifth issue editorialized on the formation of a broad national front. All classes and forces in Philippine society—with the clear exception of the compradores and landlords, allies of American imperialism—are now being forced by objective conditions to accomplish the tasks of the Philippine Revolution. The task of bringing about genuine national freedom and democratic reforms can be achieved only after the successful anti-imperialist and antifeudal union of the national bourgeoisie composed of Filipino industrialists and traders; the petty bourgeoisie composed of small property-owners, intellectuals, students and professionals; and the broad masses of the people composed of the working class and the peasantry. As a matter of democratic principle and with the most realistic] consideration of the situation, the union of these four major classes of Philippine society should be founded on the solid alliance of the working class and the peasantry, with the former assuming the leadership in this . industrializing era.62 The same editorial suggested that all nationalists “demand that socialists, scientific and non-scientific . . . be allowed the simple liberties that should be allowed by any state that has any claim to democracy . . . In a situation where different ideologies are permitted, the nation stands to choose the best.”63 The next four issues retained the pattern identified above, which was also reflected in the composition of the editorial board for the journal. From

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the very first issue, the editors were Jose Maria Sison, Francisco N em enzo Jr. (who was at Manchester University for part of the journal’s life, being recruited into the PKP during his stay in Britain by the Pomeroys), an d Luis V. Teodoro. Among the members of the editorial board and associate editors were those who would later become nationally known as members of the Maoist breakaway from the PKP, such as Satumino Ocampo and Fidel Agcaoili (actually a “business manager”). But alongside them were names like Hernando J. Abaya, Teodoro Agoncillo (the respected historian), and Antonio S. Araneta— all of whom were contributing editors from the fifth issue (following which Araneta’s name disappeared from the credits). The circulation of the journal was quite modest, with just 1,000 copies being printed each issue, half of which were sent to paid subscribers. The first issue invited readers to form Progressive Review Discussion Clubs, adding: “As soon as you form your discussion club, please contact us and we will gladly help you expand your membership.”64 As well as a method of expanding sales of the journal, this was presumably intended to be part of the organizing drive for the mass movements and, given the right caliber of reader, for the PKP. Modest though the circulation of Progressive Review was, however, there is little doubt that the journal was influential, especially among the middle strata. Like other creations of the PKP’s period of illegality, it was to fall victim to the split in the party brought about by Sison’s adoption of Maoism.

5 A mass organization in which Sison was to play an especially influential role was KM, the nationalist youth group. As we have seen, students first became organized in this period via the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines. In September 1963, the first College Student Conference on Nationalism, held at the University of the Philippines, passed a resolution embodying many of the policies then being put forward by the

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LM and Progressive Review, and which in turn would constitute the policies of the KM. The resolution bears the imprint of Sison and, indeed, of the PKP. “Our pledge to fight for nationalist industrialization,” it read, “will gain more sincerity and actuality if we actually cooperate with the largest section of the population, the peasants and the workers, in their struggle for social emancipation.”65 The founding congress of the KM took place on September 30, 1964. Its program portrayed the KM “as the vanguard of the Filipino youth in seeking full national freedom and democratic reforms and in combating imperialism and feudalism.” The organization was committed to “nationalist industrialization and state planning” and “the protection of Filipino industrialists and traders from foreign monopoly capital.” The program also called for land reform “which benefits all segments of the peasantry, especially the small independent farmers and the poor landless peasants, and which accelerates industrialization.” Further demands were for the abrogation of the Military Bases Agreement, the Military Assistance Pact and the Mutual Defense Treaty. Sison was elected chairman, while Senator Lorenzo M. Tañada was made an honorary member and consultant. The KM was to be Sison’s real power base. As a lecturer himself, he had direct access to the studentry and most of his colleagues on Progressive

Review were themselves academics. Quite often, the KM would go further than its sister-organizations in the nationalist alliance in the demands it made. While it may be tempting to explain this as but an expression of the excess of youth, one should recall that most of these organizations were under PKP leadership or influence, and so such disparities should not really have arisen. To a certain extent, the phenomenon may have been due to the PKP’s difficulty in supervising its creations from underground. But as chairman of the KM and a member of the PKP’s inner circle, Sison was in a position to ensure that the KM toed the line. An example of these disparities is to be found in the seventh issue of Progressive Review. The editorial, “The Progressive Stand on the National Elections,” put forward the view that no particular party should be supported, although “any candidate who opposes the formal and basic aspects of American control in the Philippines, and those who have

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committed themselves to the defense of civil liberties deserve explicit nationalist support.” Favored by the journal were Fernando Lopez (running mate of Ferdinand Marcos) for vice-president, Lorenzo Tañada in the Senate and Jovito Salonga. In the same issue, however, there appeared a statement entitled “The Stand of Filipino Youth,” which had been approved by the KM National Council and read by Sison to the general membership. This followed the same format and even, in large measure, used the same wording as the editorial. But there were significant differences in the KM statement, as, for example, it provided a far longer list of endorsements for both the Senate and the House of Representatives (including Sotero H. Laurel, the president of the Lyceum, where Sison lectured). We have already seen that the January 25th Manifesto was signed by a number of PKP-led organizations. On this occasion, the KM (itself a signatory to the document) issued a separate statement in which it went further than the Manifesto. For example, while the Manifesto had called for the daily minimum wage to be increased to F6, the “Twelve Demands of the KM” (the Manifesto had only ten demands, which the KM rephrased in its own document) demanded an increase of P8.66 Sotero H. Laurel mentioned in passing that a letter circulated to UP students a day or two before the demonstration in January 1965 had actually called for a PlO minimum wage.67 Apart from the two extra demands,* the KM document gave the impression that it alone had “decided to hold a mass demonstration before Congress . . .” Having stated its demands, it declared: Kabataang Makabayan believes that with the above demands it asserts what is genuine nationalism and implicitly exposes what is opportunism. In the light of these, it is clear that those who persist in avoiding them as One of the extra demands added by KM was that the "Filipino mercenaries paid by the US government to fight American wars in Southeast Asia, particularly in South Vietnam . . . should be investigated . . . " The PKP (or, rather, the legal organizations it led, participated in several actions in protest at the escalating war in Vietnam during this period. Leaflets and wall slogans campaigned against the recruitment of soldiers and medical workers for Marcos’s Philippine Civil Action Group, but possibly the largest action at the time was the protest rally outside the Manila Hotel on the occasion of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization summit, which was attended by US President Lyndon Johnson, in October 1966.

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concrete issues and in making an abstract distinction between “extreme” nationalism and moderate nationalism are opportunists and compromisers, if not outright traitors, and they in reality begrudge the development of a strong anti-imperialist and non-chauvinist nationalist movement that still has to succeed in breaking the chains that tie the Filipino nation and our sovereignty to American imperialism. The leftism of the KM might therefore be explained not by virtue of the natural excess of youth, but by Sison’s striving to be more “revolutionary” than his comrades in both the broad alliance and the PKP. Furthermore, it is logical to assume that Sison was at this stage already moving toward confrontation with the PKP leadership, although Nemenzo doubts that he was yet thinking of breaking with the party, rather seeing that organization as an alternative to the traditional labor leaders.68

6 Potentially the most far-reaching contribution to the

nationalist

cause came with the formation of the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism (MAN) on February 8, 1967. At its founding congress, MAN adopted basically the same list of fundamental nationalist demands as the LM, the KM, and MASAKA. The difference, however, lay in the breadth of support for MAN. Among the new organization’s charter members were 22 businessmen, 91 youth and students, 86 peasant leaders, 61 labor leaders, 21 women, 29 educators, 24 professionals, 6 scientists and technologists, 13 media workers, 17 writers, 7 political leaders, and 11 civic leaders. According to Perfecto Tera Jr., himself a charter member, such a broadbased organization had an immediate effect. MAN was able to air out certain issues like those of nationalism, of removing the American bases when the agreement expired in 1972. A lot of people who didn’t know of these issues before got to know about them. So it was a very, very positive effect it had. But it also had a negative effect in that people who otherwise would not have been labelled as

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communists were labelled communist, such as Senators Tañada and Diokno.69 The very breadth of the organization brought with it potential problems. For this reason the ubiquitous Jose Maria Sison, in his general report to the founding congress as general secretary, issued a note of caution. We are certain of our common principles and objectives. The various participants in this Congress may have their own individual minimum and maximum demands depending on their class or sectoral interests. To maintain firm unity among us, we must always strive to make the appropriate adjustments between our respective minimum and maximum demands and arrive at the most acceptable common position without any individual or organization betraying his principles. Nationalism provides us a wide ground for political agreement.70 MAN adopted very ambitious organizational plans. The highest decision-making body would be the national congress, to be held every two years. Below this, there would be a national council, an executive board and then committees at the regional, provincial, district, and municipal levels. In his general report, Sison was bold enough to boast that “it is a safe estimate that before the Second Congress of our Movement we shall have established a chapter in every municipality and city in the Philippines.” But these aims were never achieved. According to Tera: The organization was mainly Manila-based. It was always Manila-centered and in the provinces around Manila. The representation from the other parts of the Philippines was mainly skeletal. They didn’t have organizations there. They’d be represented by one or two people. That was one of the weaknesses of MAN—it didn’t really have a national grassroots following as yet because it was only starting, and a lot of people who participated were from Manila, from the university, from the Senate, and a lot of trade unions were based in Manila, like PAFLU and NATU. MASAKA and the other peasant organizations were mainly concentrated in Central Luzon, where the peasant unrest was in the ’30s and ’40s. So it was centered on the northern island, mainly.71

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But while this might go some way toward explaining the speed with which MAN effectively collapsed within a year or so (although it would struggle on until the declaration of martial law in 1972), the collapse itself was a direct result of the split which now occurred within the PKP.

N o tes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Interview with Jesus Lava, May 1979, identity of interviewer unknown. A copy of the typescript is in the papers of William Pomeroy. Ibid

13. 14.

Ibid. Ibid. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “Rectification Process in the Philippine Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim JooJock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 74. “Amado Guerrero,” Philippine Society and Revolution, 3rd ed. (n.p.: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1979), 46. Jesus Lava, interview, May 1979. Jesus Lava, “Setting the Record Straight,” PKP Courier, 1/1985, 14-15. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., interview by the author, January 2008. Interview with Jesus Lava, undated, identity of interviewer unknown, copy in the papers of William Pomeroy. See, for example, Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 32. Henceforth, this book is referred to as The Leader’s View. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid.,16. Ibid., 44. Sison, The Leader’s View, 45. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Ibid.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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23. Dizon interview. 24. Sison, The Leader’s View, 32. Similarly, in The Communist Party ofthe Philippines, 1968-1993: A Story o f Its Theory and Practice (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 29-30, Katherine Weekley quotes from an interview with Sison in which he claims that Kabataang Makabayan was established “no thanks to the Lavas," but she points out that the PKP provided the youth organization with its mass base in Central Luzon. Curiously, although Weekley claims that by 1968 “the PKP was a negligible force in Philippine political life” (28), she goes on to acknowledge that it was “at the forefront of [the] revived nationalist movement" from 1964 onward (29), and, quoting Nemenzo, that at “the first big anti-imperialist rallies in the mid-1960s, ‘the mass base was provided by the Lavas, by the PKP’ ” (30). 25. Dizon interview. 26. The Labor Monthly, January 1965. 27. Matsataka Kimura, “Philippine Peasant and Labor Organizations in Electoral Politics: Players of Transitional Politics,” Pilipinas: A Journal o f Philippine Studies 14 (1990): 45. 28. Progressive Review, no. 1,9 29. Jose Maria Sison, “Nationalism and the Labor Movement,” Progressive Review, no. 9, 51-52. 30. Kimura, “Philippine Peasant and Labor Organizations.” 31. Nemenzo and Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, March 2009. 32. “The Lapiang Manggagawa Platform," Progressive Review, no. 1, 58-63. Dante C. Simbulan mistakenly thinks that the “short-lived" LM “broke up" within five months of its launch, as Roberto Oca, its mayoral candidate in Manila went to the Nacionalistas and other leaders “coalesced with the Liberal Party." See his The Modem Principalia: The Historical Evolution o f the Philippine Ruling Oligarchy (Quezon City: UP Press, 2005), 170. We will see, however, that this was not the case. 33. Progressive Review, no. 1, 10-11. 34. Lapiang Manggagawa, “Where Labor Stands—The Issues Today,” 1963. 35. Kimura, “Philippine Peasant and Labor Organizations,” 46. 36. “Editorial: The Unfinished Revolution: Hard Facts and Some Possibilities,” Progressive Review, no. 3, 7. 37. Ibid., 8-9. 38. “Editorial: Towards a Broad, National Front," Progressive Review, no. 5, 2. 39. “Lapiang Manggagawa Manifesto on Laurel-Langley Agreement,” October 2, 1964, reprinted in Progressive Review, no. 5, 11-12. 40. Reprinted in Progressive Review, no. 6, 10-17.

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41. Emilio Espinosa Jr., “The January 25th Demonstration,” Progressive Review, no. 6, 2-9. 42. Teodoro Agoncillo, “The Development of Filipino Nationalism,” Progressive Review, no. 7, 40. 43. Ignacio P. Lacsina, “Lapiang Manggagawa and the Liberal Administration,” Progressive Review, no. 6, 26-31. 44. Nemenzo interview. 45. Ibid. 46. Jose Maria Sison, “Nationalism and the Labor Movement,” Progressive Review, 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 5354. 55.

no. 9, 39-53. Kimura, “Philippine Peasant and Labor Organizations.” Interview with Jesus Lava, June 1977, interviewer unknown, copy of typescript in the papers of William Pomeroy. Kimura, “Philippine Peasant and Labor Organizations.” Jesus Lava interview, June 1977. Ibid. Sison, The Leader’s View, 16. Dizon interview. Nemenzo interview. Fortunato de Leon, “The Need for a Re-appraisal of Our China Trade Policy,”

Progressive Review, no. 1, 33. 56. Jose A. Lansang, “Nationalism and Civil Liberties,” Progressive Review, no. 1, 32-33. 57. “Editorial: Theoretical and Practical Problems for Contemporary Radicalism,” Progressive Review, no. 1, 3-4. 58. According to Nemenzo (“Rectification Process," 74), this Indonesian communist was doing postgraduate studies at the University of the Philippines, where he contacted radicals, assuring the PKP that they “were ripe for recruitment.” 59. Reynato S. Puno, “The Anti-Subversion Law—A Bill of Attainder,” Progressive Review, no. 4, 9-22. 60. Jesus G. Barrera, “Individual Freedom and National Freedom,” Progressive Review, no. 4, 50. 61. Ibid., 52. 62. “Editorial: Towards a Broad, National Front,” Progressive Review, no. 5, 2. 63. Ibid., 4. 64. Progressive Review, no. 1, 15. 65. Progressive Review, no. 3, 42. 66. Progressive Review, no. 6, 18, 19, 25. 67. “Youth and the National Perspective,” Progressive Review, no. 6, 22.

36

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Nemenzo interview. Perfecto Tera Jr., interview by the author, May 1989. MAN, Basic Documents and Speeches of Founding Congress (Manila, 1967), 8. Tera interview.

PART TWO Splits in parties of the left were, of course, nothing new by the 1960s. Indeed, many communist parties came into being as a result of splits. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to which many left parties would for decades look, rightly or wrongly, for guidance, traced its own origins to the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) factions. Many of the communist parties formed after the Russian Revolution of 1917 were both influenced by that momentous event and disenchanted with the leaders of the socialdemocratic parties, from which many of them now split, due to their support of World War I. But many of the splits in the latter half of the 1960s were of a different character, being inspired by one particular communist party— that of China— and resulting in not merely the formation of mainly small ultraleft sects, but of parties with a distinctly different world oudook, particularly with regard to the national liberation movement. The dialectical approach means that we must look, however briefly, at the history of the Communist Party of China, tracing the development of Maoism to the point where Mao Zedong both attacked his own party and attempted to split the international communist movement. Only in this way can its importation into the Philippines be placed in context and fully understood. Two of the immediate results of the establishment of a Maoist party in the Philippines are discussed in chapters 3 and 4— a party program in which the working class is conspicuous by its absence and an embryonic guerrilla army conceived with the assistance of a most unlikely ally.

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Jose Maria Sison recalls that at a “rare Executive Committee meeting” of the PKP in 1965, he moved for the creation of a central committee and that this was unanimously approved, with Sison himself being asked to draft a general report on the party.1 According to Nemenzo, the PKP was actually preparing for a congress at this time, and it was the younger members who urged the drafting of a document on party history. The older leaders were “lukewarm,” however, fearing that this would cause demoralization. According to this account, Sison volunteered to write the draft and, having done so, found that the Lavas attempted to shelve it due to the fact that it was critical of them.2 As might be expected, Jesus Lava’ would tell a different story, saying that, rather than openly attacking the past leadership, Sison “did so behind the back of the Party,” and “still avoided confrontation and discussion of the matter within the Party.” Lava says that Sison’s document, “which he did not submit to the Party,” turned out to be an attempt to denigrate past struggles and to minimize the role of the PKP and the HMB during “this very significant period of Philippine history,”3 i.e., World War II and its aftermath.

Jesus Lava was not present at this meeting, having been captured in 1964.

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Matters did not com e to a head until 1967. Sison says that Francisco Lava Jr. called a meeting of seven people in April (Jesus Lava, as we will see, says it was March) of that year ostensibly to discuss the forthcoming local bourgeois elections. Of the seven, only he and I were members of the executive committee. When I showed up for the meeting, he arbitrarily called it a meeting of the provisional political bureau and asked those in attendance to elect a general secretary, secretaries for organization, education and the like. I objected to the nature of the meeting because it was approved neither by the executive committee nor by the four secretaries previously appointed by Jesus Lava.’ Nevertheless, Francisco Lava Jr. had himself “elected” as the general secretary, as if the position were a family heirloom. . . 4 Sison says that following this episode he decided to have nothing further to do with “any scion of the Lava dynasty.” This account omits several key details. Jesus Lava maintains that as early as November or December 1966 none other than Nemenzo warned the Manila group of the PKP that Sison was secretly forming a faction within the Party with the intention of capturing leadership through some sort of “coup” without any open ideological struggle. Nemenzo also informed the Manila Group that Amado Guerrero (Sison] did not want the “politburo” prisoners [i.e., those arrested in 1950] to be released yet as that would interfere with his “plans.”1

•

In fact, it would be normal procedure in a communist party for the politburo to elect the general secretary and department heads, subject to endorsement by the central committee. The approval o f an outgoing executive committee (essentially a subcommittee of the politburo) and previous department heads would not be required.

t

Nemenzo says he lias no recollection of this point, but he broadly confirms the rest o f Lava’s account. “At that time, I did not view it as a warning. We were having a meeting of the provisional central committee. Sison happened to be absent and I did mention his ideas on rejuvenation. I think Paco already had his suspicions of Sison, and his concept of rejuvenation was taken to mean the formation of a faction that would get rid of the old leadership.” The same source claims that at the formation of MAN, Sison “issued a slate while the conference was going on, and the Kabataang Makabayan people were instructed to vote for this slate. It excluded Paco and some others, and this is what alerted him to Sison.”5

C h a p t e r i : T h e D e v e lo p m e n t op M ao ism in C h in a a n d t h e P h iu p p in e s

Regarding the planned Congress, Amado Guerrero proposed the creation of separate workers’ group, peasants’ group and youth group, but the majority, including Nemenzo, preferred composite groups, if at all necessary, to avoid factionalism . . . It seemed, however, that Amado Guerrero was determined to split from the Party if he could not capture leadership by stealth. When his proposals and maneuvers did not gain acceptance, and after the formation of the provisional PB in March 1967 in which he was elected only to the post of head of the Youth Section, he forthwith formed his antiparty group on April 3, 1967. He launched vicious attacks against the “old” cadres and the past party leadership. Ironically, it was Nemenzo, a latter-day splittist, who sent a special courier to the leading cadres about Amado Guerrero’s vicious attacks on the Party behind its back. Even before the Provisional PB knew about Amado Guerrero’s antiparty group from Nemenzo, a confrontation meeting was held on April 8, 1967. It was at this meeting that Amado Guerrero proposed the dissolution of the Provisional PB; that a “commission” be formed to assess the capabilities of each Party cadre; and that such assessment be done through memoranda to be submitted by each member stating corresponding activities in revolutionary work since 1962 (which coincided with the time of Amado Guerrero’s entry into the Party). Such proposal was not accepted specially since those “memoranda” could be presented as incriminating evidence to the enemy. Amado Guerrero then challenged the Party itself. Another confrontation meeting was set, but he refused to attend, on the ground that he was in the minority anyway. He was accordingly suspended and told to stop his antiparty activities, but his response was that a split was alright; anyhow splits were fashionable all over the world. This led to his expulsion from the PKP.6 Dizon corroborates much of this. One suggestion of Sison’s was that each of us should have a self-appraisal of our activities in the revolutionary movement—but from 1962. I remember this very distinctly as I was taking minutes. So the old men like iFelicisimo] Macapagal were saying, “Why only from 1962? I have been there from even before the Japanese period, so why can’t I write about that7” Because 1962 was the time Sison entered the Party. So obviously he

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was tailoring everything to himself. And then he was insisting on packing the Central Committee with Nilo Tayag and his youth cadres. Naturally, the rest of the leadership was saying, “Let us have everybody and then have an election based on our records." So in short Sison’s proposal was not carried. Nemenzo was the harshest opponent [of Sison] at that time, and also Merlin {Magallona]. Paco was more diplomatic, but I know Paco, Nemenzo and Merlin were together at that time.7 At this stage, Sison’s adoption of Maoism became even more apparent. On March 6, 1967, while still a PKP member, he gave a lecture at th e University of the Philippines in which he openly criticized previous PKP errors and hailed the achievements of Mao, who had “inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism and has brought it to a higher and completely new stage. Mao Tse-tung Thought is Marxism-Leninism in the present era when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is marching toward world victory.”8 Two months later, the People’s World, a Maoist newspaper in New Zealand, carried an article which purported to represent the position of the PKP. “The outlawed situation of the Party,” this stated, “dictates clearly that there is no path to national and social liberation except armed struggle.” The PKP prompdy issued a disclaimer, pointing out: “The small but reckless anti-party group that issued the statement. . . in the hope of gaining international recognition, waves the banner of the thought of Mao Tse-tung in a vain attempt to achieve a semblance of authenticity.”9 It was not long before the split began to affect the mass organizations so painstakingly established over the previous five years. Sison had in fact been replaced as editor of Progressive Review in 1966 (thereby adding fuel to his revolt) by Nemenzo. When, in 1967, after a lengthy delay, the tenth issue finally appeared it carried an announcement from the editorial board to the effect that Nemenzo had been expelled from the board as, under the influence of “certain sinister elements,” he had “actively participated in a campaign of vilification against many of his fellow staffmembers,” had maintained “improper connections,” had failed to produce the magazine for over a year and that, finally, on the “instructions of some pseudo-left

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elements, he participated in a systematic campaign of vilification against major nationalist mass organizations and their dedicated leaders.”10 To the uninitiated, the “sinister elements” and “improper connections” could have been anyone— including, of course, the intelligence agencies. Such obfuscation may have been deliberate, but there can be little doubt that these were references to the PKP and its collective discipline, from which Sison had now escaped. With regard to the failure of the journal to appear for a year, Nemenzo says that Sison, unhappy that the party had told him to concentrate on KM while he, Nemenzo, edited the journal, would not agree that the funds, held by his wife, be released.11 The same issue saw the first appearance of anti-Sovietism in the journal, with the Soviet Union being accused of “the shameful direct betrayal” of the Arab people because of its attempts to negotiate a ceasefire in the 1967 Middle East war; Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was alleged to have “paid an obsequious pilgrimage” to “pay homage to his imperialist boss” President Lyndon Johnson.12 At the same time, Lapiang Manggagawa was renamed the Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP). Its program, the Socialist Manifesto, owed much to Sison’s thesis (actually modelled on tfye Chinese Communist Party’s analysis of prerevolutionary China) that the Philippines was “semifeudal and semi-colonial” rather than a dependent capitalist country.13 The manifesto concluded with a pledge to “demand the establishment of normal trade and diplomatic relations with all countries, especially those which are close to the Philippines and those willing to respect the sovereign rights and independence of our country”— a clear reference to China.14 Given that Sison viewed the Socialist Party as a party of “scientific socialism,”15 it would obviously not be able to play the role which the PKP had intended for its forerunner, the LM— that of a legal, open party through which the party could channel its demands. The SPP, says Nemenzo, “would get rid of the rightists and consolidate the Lacsina and Pedro Castro [a former PKP leader expelled during the HMB period] unions. It had a socialist orientation, so those who didn’t want to be associated with socialism left. So SPP was nanower than LM. But Joma was already thinking of armed struggle.”16 Despite the fact that

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he would later berate the wartime Huk leader Luis Taruc* as a traitor, Sison approached him with the request that he join the SP, but Taruc rejected th e proposal.17 The party itself, which would realign itself with the PKP after Lacsina fell out with Sison, did not survive martial law. Within the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, the tactics pursued b y Sison were, says Pomeroy, typical of his methods; he contacted a Filipino student friend in Belgium to cross to London and send a telegram falsely signed with the name of Bertrand Russell’s secretary claiming that one of Sison’s henchmen was the authorized BRPF head. This fraudulent effort at forgery and deception . . . was of course quickly exposed and Sison’s Maoists were ousted from the organization.18 MASAKA, the peasant organization, proved to be more resilient than most. Although its president, Felixberto Olalia (not then a PKP member, having been expelled some time earlier, although the party had then cultivated relations with him in the interests of broad unity— thus explaining his presidency of MASAKA) left to join Sison, the latter’s attempt to establish a rival organization came to naught as “angry peasants drove his henchmen out of the ‘founding convention’ and dissolved it on the spot with a unanimously-supported resolution.”19 The most serious casualty among the mass organizations was MAN. An editorial in Progressive Review, now under Sison’s control, emphasized the latter’s role in MAN and stressed: As a genuine alliance of various independent forces, the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism cannot and should not be considered as the private preserve of anyone or any organization or any clan that may have a hegemonic presumption over the anti-imperialist movement. The present leadership of the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism is the result of the interplay of large progressive forces.20

Upon his surrender to the authorities during the postwar Huk Rebellion, Taruc had not only renounced his former beliefs but denied that he had ever held them. Despite this, he received a twelve-year prison sentence.

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The “any organization” and “any clan” here obviously refer to the PKP and the Lavas, respectively, and Sison was in effect turning against the collective discipline of the organization which had projected him into so many leading positions— partly in an attempt to hold onto those very positions. Nemenzo recalls that, on the insistence of Lorenzo Tañada, the CPP remained with MAN, although Sison himself “stopped attending and sent a representative, and most of the time we had a shouting match. After martial law, this guy disappeared, but then he became famous because he was killed in Sulu. He was a colonel, the G2 of General Bautista.”21 MAN never recovered from the upheaval. According to one witness: I think the work of MAN was completely negatively affected by the split within the communist party. The intellectuals, the professionals and the patriotic businessmen got disenchanted about what was happening. The intellectuals are so difficult to keep within an alliance because they're basically individualistic. The intellectuals are always the first to bolt when the situation experiences a certain sea-change.22 Sison retained control of the Kabataang Makabayan, although on November 30, 1967, a rival organization, the Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP, or Free Union of Filipino Youth) was formed with PKP leadership. According to Pomeroy, the majority of KM members and chapters now joined the MPKP, especially the chapters in Central Luzon.23 Tera lends some support to this claim, agreeing that “students from the provinces who were mainly organized by the peasants made up the numbers for the MPKP and KM was more city-based.” Nemenzo qualifies this by stating that the KM “had a lot of student cadres who were sent to the rural areas to build a peasant base, and they were able to do it quite fast,” and that the MPKP’s success in Central Luzon was due to the fact that most of the members there “were the children of the MASAKA people.”24 However, the following year saw a split in the KM, leading to the formation of the Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK, or League of Democratic Youth). PKP sources allege that this was brought about by Sison’s “one-man leadership,” and that the leaders of the new SDK issued a statement attacking Sison for his “careerism, his cowardice for running

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away from demonstrations attacked by the police, and his plagiarism o f writings of others, passed off as his own.”25 One of the leaders of the SDK explains the split as follows: What happened was that there were very strong-minded people in the KM and during the elections for the executive committee certain views were expressed, certain lines were expressed, and this did not meet with the approval of half of the executive committee. As one side tried to impose its views it was inevitable that the other side would separate. There was a division between the writers, who were advising caution, and the ones who did the footwork in the organizations. Most of the writers and intellectuals went with the SDK, Rather than arbitrating when there was a debate within the executive committee, I think Sison took one side. With a disagreement between the two groups in the executive committee of the KM, one side was supported by the chairman [Sison] and that brought about the split.26 Vivencio Jose and Perfecto Tera Jr., the leaders of the SDK breakaway, were later expelled, and the organization and the KM would be reconciled, although the merger sought by the KM never materialized. Less than five years after the PKP had commenced building mass organizations, this process was thrown into disarray. The youth movement was split. The Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism would lapse into inactivity, as would the Socialist Party of the Philippines. Only MASAKA in Central Luzon, since 1938 the heartland of PKP support, remained intact, active, and under PKP leadership. The split obviously threw back the development of the PKP itself, and its planned congress would not now take place until 1973.

2 There can be litde doubt that Sison was the major architect of this disruption. But the PKP must shoulder some of the responsibility. Why, for example, did the party assign so many leading positions to Sison? Dizon offers the following explanation:

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First, we have to give it to him: he was very militant. He was also one of the [party’s] few university-trained cadres. When the regrouping started, only peasants were coming in and the few intellectuals were connected with professions, therefore to a certain extent they could not open up. Also, there was an attempt to avoid exposing the name of the Lava family. Sison, however, could easily assume an open position—not as a party member, but as editor of Progressive Review or leader of the KM. So that was one reason. He was militant and also he grabbed space for himself. Now, that was mistaken for initiative, and they just gave every assignment to him.27 Needless to say, from the PKP’s point of view, its excessive reliance on Sison proved to be a major mistake. Ironically, the “single-file” policy about which Sison was now so critical contributed to his own rise to prominence. It also facilitated his factional activity as, according to one source, Sison passed off his own ideas as PKP policy to some of the contacts he recruited into the party and, because of the single-file policy, the latter were hardly to know any better.28 A number of factors contributed to the split. Pomeroy has charged that Sison was “inordinately self-centered,* with an overweening desire to be the leader of everything on the Left.”30 Not only did he achieve leading positions in the mass organizations influenced by the PKP, but he obviously wished to occupy a more leading position within the party itself. Sison’s decision to have nothing further to do with “any scion of the Lava dynasty” was, after all, taken as a result of Francisco Lava Jr.’s election as general secretary. The decision itself, it must be said, is not one that would have been taken by many disciplined communists. And while the preponderance of the Lavas may well have been unhealthy, events in the next few years would demonstrate that this problem was, far from being insurmountable, capable of resolution within the organization.

In 1989, Sison would write that at the founding congress of the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (Congress of the Filipino People, or Kompil) he was “elected in absentia as one of the fifteen national council members . . . each one of whom was rated capable of replacing Marcos as president of the Philippines.”29

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For some years after the split, the PKP would allege that the CIA was involved (see also chapter 4), but there is no evidence of d irect involvement. It is certainly true, however, that as early as the 1950s th e rebirth of Philippine nationalism had given rise to concern in Washington.31 Now, moreover, it was quite apparent that communists held leadership positions in the nationalist mass organizations— in 1966 some congressm en were referring to the Lapiang Manggagawa and the Kabataang Makabayan as communist fronts, and Congressman Felix Amante had suggested that any organization with the same aims as the PKP should be prosecuted under the Anti-Subversion Law.32 And here, it must be noted, Sison w as hardly the soul of discretion. In a speech delivered to the Central Luzon conference of the KM on October 31, 1965, and again at the College o f Agriculture, UP, on March 23, 1966, he had quite openly said that “(i]n the present era only the peasant masses themselves can liberate themselves provided that they follow the correct leadership of the working class and its party,”33 a statement that only a communist would make. In such a climate, and given the large and sophisticated intelligence resources centered on the US Embassy, it would be surprising if the CIA, which ever since its formation had been highly active in the Philippines, was not in some way involved in attempts to derail the burgeoning nationalist movement. However, at least one PKP cadre of the time takes a fairly charitable view of the period immediately following the split, suggesting that the intelligence forces acted from the sidelines. When it came to the conflict between the PKP and the CPP, we are sure the agents of the state took advantage of it, fanning the fire. Maybe some of the statements we got were never written by the Maoists and some of the statements they got from us were never written by us.* The situation was taken over by the enemy. Even in demonstrations, the provocateurs weren’t necessarily from the ranks of the movement, from the ranks of the KM or from us, but maybe from the military or the CIA.35

For example, in 1971 the UP Chapter of the BRPF’s Philippine council issued a statement in which it claimed that a document circulated in its name entitled “Parliamentary Struggle Is the Answer” was in fact the work of “fascist agents.”34

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It is possible that the extent and form of the involvement of the CIA in the split— if it was involved at all— will never be known, although there is at least an indication that it was involved on the periphery. It would have been easier to accept that it was entirely coincidental that the second “autobiography” of Luis Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger, was published in 1967, the year of the split, had not his ghost-writer, Douglas Hyde, noted in the Foreword that when he had first visited Taruc in prison ten years earlier, “[t]he Philippine authorities, righdy or wrongly, considered the moment inopportune for its publication. Its lessons are urgendy needed today.”36 What influence, it might be asked, had the “Philippine authorities” over a book ghosted by a former British communist who had, like his subject, found God? The major “lesson” of the book, providing Hyde/Taruc with the tide was: “Any nationalist who makes an ally of the Communist is going for a ride on a tiger. We must leam our lessons from the past, and this is one that nationalists need to remember today, when once again the Communists are trying to.use them.”37 This might have been written with the PKP-led nationalist organizations (MAN in particular) in mind. When one considers that He Who Rides the Tiger was published by Praeger of New York, a publishing house that Sison himself would in later years identify as an outlet for CIA material,38 the case for CIA complicity in the publication would appear conclusive. However, while Sison’s Maoism was and is perfecdy open, some previous accounts of this period have placed insufficient emphasis upon the role of Maoism— and of the Communist Party of China— in the events of 1967. It is the current writer’s view that Maoism was the major factor in the breakaway from the PKP and the disruption of the mass organizations in which it played a leading role, and that Jose Maria Sison was merely its instrument.

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3 Essentially,

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revolutionary China, in which both the bourgeois class and the w orking class were weak and undeveloped. Mao himself was of petty-bourgeois origin, as were many other leaders of the Communist Party of China (C PC ). This combination of circumstances would give rise to the phenom enon which Lenin (although not referring here to China) termed “petty-bourgeois revolutionism.” In Left-Wing Communism—An Infantile Disorder, Lenin explained that [t]he petty proprietor, the small master . . . who, under capitalism, always suffers oppression and very frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline and steadfastness. A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another—all this is common knowledge.39 Elsewhere, Lenin wrote that “(i]n the land in which the small-proprietor population greatly predominates over the purely proletarian population, the difference between the proletarian revolutionary and petty-bourgeois revolutionary will inevitably make itself felt, and from time to time will make itself felt very sharply. The petty-bourgeois revolutionary wavers and vacillates at every turn of events . . .”40 Throughout his political life, Mao Zedong exhibited this vacillation, at one stage emphasizing the role of the bourgeoisie, at another that of the working class or peasantry. On occasion, Mao’s ego seemed to play a part in determining which position he adopted. In fact, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the history of the CPC’s first half-century is to a significant extent a history of the struggle against the ideas and “fads” of Mao Zedong, as will be clear from the following brief account.

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In 1923, the Comintern (the international center for communist parties formed after the Russian Revolution) urged the CPC to form a united front and suggested that, without curtailing the independence of the party, communists should join the nationalist Kuomintang (nowadays transliterated as “Guomindang”). Mao was one of those who unsuccessfully opposed this line— which is ironic, as at a later stage the concept of the united front was to loom large in Mao’s On New Democracy, which in turn would be adopted by Sison. Four years later, Mao denied the validity of the leading role of the working class; in the early 1930s, this was supplanted by his conception of the “encirclement of the town by the countryside.” For China itself, it must be said that this had a great deal of validity, but Mao would later extend the concept as a general principle, applicable first to all Third World revolutions regardless of local circumstances, and then as a description of the world revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus of this movement had, Mao would argue, shifted to the Third World, at the head of which stood China. This was the “countryside.” The “town” was taken to be the developed capitalist countries and those socialist countries led by “revisionists.” Even in 1930, Mao’s petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurism were evident, for in that year, in a letter to the central committee, he supported a scheme suggested by Li Li-san that called for China to be turned into the world center of revolution, and proposed that an uprising be organized in Manchuria in order to provoke a Japanese military offensive against the Soviet Union. Thus, the chauvinism which was to surface in later years, especially during the “Cultural Revolution,” had deep roots within the CPC and, more particularly, within the personality of Mao Zedong. These roots, moreover, were in a soil made fertile by the historical circumstances and legacy out of which Chinese communism developed— after all, during the seventeenth century, China had been considered by its Qing dynasty rulers to be the center of the universe. By 1935, Mao had been elevated to the leadership of the CPC. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern, nevertheless, for a while restrained the sectarian tendencies within the Chinese party by its call for a united anti­ imperialist front in the East. However, when in 1941 the Nazis invaded the

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Soviet Union Mao, having in the meantime built up a majority for his position within the central committee of the party, took advantage of the fact th a t the attention of the Comintern was elsewhere by mounting a “campaign f o r the rectification of style.” According to Wang Ming, Mao had com m en ced secret preparations for such a campaign as early as 1938.41 During th e campaign, which was broken down into five stages and lasted until 1 9 4 5 , party periodicals were suspended, party schools were closed or adapted, and Mao began to talk in terms of “Maoism,” which would play the role o f a Sinified Marxism, the theoretical basis for which would be his pamphlet, written in 1939, entitled On New Democracy. In this work, Mao discarded the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat* and the leading role of th e communist party. During the second stage of the campaign (February 1942 to July 1943) the “Commission for the Rectification of Style” announced that Mao’s works alone should be studied as a means of re-education, citing

On New Democracy as the “prime and capital Maoist theoretical work.”42 Intellectuals were expected to confess to the crime of “dogmatism,” while workers and peasants were to confess to the lesser crime of “empiricism.” All, however, had to promise that, having blindly followed “Russian Marxism” (i.e., Leninism), they would now apply themselves to Maoism or “Chinese Marxism.” Faced with continued opposition, Mao whipped up an atmosphere of suspicion and declared that most leading figures and cadres in the party (with the notable exceptions of himself, Liu Shaoqi, and a small group of others) were, if they had ever worked in areas controlled by the Guomindang, agents of that organization. The main targets were the “dogmatists,” those who maintained an internationalist position. According to Wang Ming, a minimum of 50,000 to 60,000 people were killed in the course of the campaign.43 With the Soviet Union poised to deliver the knockout blow to Nazi Germany, in the summer of 1944 Mao executed an extraordinary about-

This term has been widely misunderstood—and, possibly, misrepresented. It merely meant that, just as capitalist society is, in effect, subject to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (regardless of the level or extent of formal democracy), socialist society would be subject to the dictatorship of the working class.

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face and embarked upon the fourth stage of the campaign, during which all those who had been declared traitors or spies had only to “self-refute” their confessions to qualify for rehabilitation. In the spring and summer of 1945, the results of the previous four years were summed up and the history of the CPC was reassessed— amounting, says Wang Ming, to a falsification in which the “great role” of Mao was emphasized, along with that of “Mao’s thoughts.” For good measure, Mao had the seventh congress of the CPC amend the general principles of the party rules to read that the party “is guided in all its work by the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung.” But Mao did not have things all his own way. On New Democracy had foreseen two stages to the Chinese Revolution— the first, the stage of “new democracy,” in which no one class would exercise leadership (although in 1945 Mao was forced, in On Coalition Government, to talk in terms of “a united-front democratic alliance based on the overwhelming majority of the people, under the leadership of the working class”), was seen as existing for an extended period; the second, socialist, stage was banished to some distant future. This is an illustration of the vacillating character of “pettybourgeois revolutionism,” for whereas in 1930 Mao had championed the concept of China as the center of world revolution, nine years later he was emphasizing the role of the national bourgeoisie. In real life, however, things did not conform to Mao’s formula. After the defeat of Japan in Manchuria by the Soviet forces, the Chinese people found themselves in control of the entire area of formerly Japanese industry, transport, communications, banks, etc., and this was used as the basis for the state sector of the national economy. At the second plenum of the seventh central committee in 1949, the internationalists among the CPC leadership gained the upper hand and, rejecting Mao’s views, committed the party to constructing socialism by relying on the state sector and assistance from the Soviet Union. Over the following three years, the party worked out its policy for the transition to socialism. The CPC’s Theses fo r the Study and Propagation o f the Party's

General Line in the Period o f Transition amounted to a further rebuff to Mao, declaring at one stage: “Without the leadership of the Communist Party of China, armed with the Marxist-Leninist theory of the laws of social

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development and representing the interests of the working class . . .

in

our country it would be impossible to implement socialist industrialization and the socialist organization of agriculture, the handicraft industry and the trade and industrial enterprises owned by private capitalists.” Just to make matters absolutely clear, the theses pointed out: “Collective leadership is the highest organizational principle of our party . . . Unnecessary, excessive accentuation of the outstanding role of an individual, no matter who he may be, cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.”44 In 1956, the eighth congress of the CPC noted that a “decisive victory has already been won in the socialist transformation,” and that “the people’s democratic dictatorship, established after the nationwide victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat.” However, an indication that all was not well was given by the fact that note was made by the congress of “subjectivism,” the influence of “bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology,” and of “erroneous Great Hanist ideas.”45 Sure enough, soon after the congress Mao and the group around him began attacking the conclusions of that very congress. In 1958, he unleashed the “Great Leap Forward” upon the country. This was intended to enable the Chinese economy to outstrip those of the Soviet Union and developed capitalist countries such as Britain within a few years by means of the communization of the countryside, to be followed by the establishment of “people’s communes” in the towns; the urban centers were characterized by, among other things, “backyard” steel furnaces, much o f whose product was unusable. The policy was one of subjectivism, that is to say Mao thought that China could develop by an act of will, regardless of the objective circumstances. The policy was summed up by the slogan “Putting Politics in Command.” Once again, the healthier forces in the CPC came out in opposition to Mao’s reckless approach. At the eighth plenum of the eighth central committee in August 1959, Peng Dehuai, member of the political bureau and a Red Army leader during the anti-Japanese and revolutionary struggles, and a large group of provincial leaders censured the “Great Leap” and the experiment was quietly abandoned. Mao’s opponents found that

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their own position was now strengthened, as the “Great Leap” had cost the Maoists support in the party, the trade unions, among intellectuals, and in the Army. It was at this point, therefore, that Mao opened his campaign against the international communist movement, and in particular against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, charging its leaders with “revisionism.” His real target was revealed two years later when, in 1962, he swung his attack against “revisionists” within his own party— those, that is, who had opposed his ideas since the 1930s. In the years 1965-69 this campaign developed into the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” which in essence was open warfare against the CPC itself by Mao and his supporters. Thousands of CPC members, including former allies such as Liu Shaoqi and Chen Po-Ta (Mao’s “theorist”) were either murdered or “disgraced.” Elegant points out that this “Cultural Revolution” would “sweep away the existing structure of the Communist Party, crack its ideological foundations and, for a time, leave China without government or purpose.”46 It was during the period of the “Cultural Revolution” that the “thoughts of Mao Zedong” were presented to the world as a “system.” To a large extent, such “thoughts” amounted to the projection of the Chinese Revolution as the “classical type” to be followed in all Third World countries by means of armed struggle, with the peasantry as the leading force and with the “country revolutionizing the town.” As a Soviet commentator pointed out, however, even this amounted to a disregard for the actual history of China. The experience of the Chinese revolution does not bear out the Maoist thesis about the special role of the peasantry as the decisive strategic force of the revolution. Until 1927 China’s revolutionary forces grew and developed in the town, while the transfer of the Party organisations to the countryside after the counter-revolutionary coup of 1927 was, first, of a forced nature and, second, a process opposite to what the Maoists seek to give out. It meant not the conquest of the “counter-revolutionary town” by the “revolutionary village" but, on the contrary, the introduction of revolutionary consciousness from the town to the countryside and the revolutionization of the countryside, i.e. it marked the beginning of a realistic approach by the CPC to the solution of the peasant problem.47

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Second, the Third World was seen as the main revolutionary force on the world scene and the main struggle was therefore viewed as being between the developing countries and imperialism, not between imperialism and socialism. Indeed, the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries (with the exception of Albania, which fell in with Maoist ideology) were characterized as “social imperialist.” Moreover, the Maoists took the view that each Third World country should wage its struggle for national liberation by relying on its “own resources.” This was certainly something which China had not done and, indeed, the line was applied with no apparent consistency by the Maoists. In 1964 and 1965, they ignored proposals put forward by the Soviet Union for coordinated measures to assist the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in response to mounting aggression from the United States. In March 1966, the newspaper Jenm in Jihpao advised the Vietnamese: “A people should rely on itself alone to execute a revolution and wage a people’s war in the country, because it is its own cause.”48 This was in stark contrast to the Chinese assistance given to the right-wing movements in Angola. As early as December 1963, Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi met the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) leader Holden Roberto in Nairobi and promised every assistance; Roberto’s part of the transaction was to use his best endeavors to undermine the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), the Soviet-supported organization which finally liberated Angola from Portuguese colonialism. In June 1975, Roberto was to admit to Le Monde that his troops had been trained by the Chinese. Similarly, the Maoists also assisted UNTTA, the South Africanbacked organization led by Jonas Savimbi.49 It is clear from this that the Maoists’ outright opposition to all things Soviet (or Soviet-supported) led them into alliances which were directly contrary to the interests of those peoples struggling for national liberation. This is perhaps most graphically illustrated by Beijing’s immediate recognition of the Pinochet junta after the coup in Chile in 1973; at the United Nations, China during this period either abstained or did not attend when motions condemning Pinochet were voted upon.

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A further strand to Mao’s policy that came to the fore during the “Cultural Revolution” was his interference in the affairs of foreign communist parties, usually with the object of creating a separate organization based upon “Mao Zedong Thought.” The call for such splitting activity was issued as early as June 1963 in a letter from the central committee of the CPC: “If the leading group in any party adopt a non-revolutionary line and convert it into a reformist Party, then Marxist-Leninists inside and outside the Party will replace them and lead the people in making revolution.”50 Although the term “Marxist-Leninists” is employed here, Dutt outlines what this meant for a delegation of the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) which visited Beijing in 1966. The draft joint communiqué was rejected by Mao on the grounds that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not placed on a par with US imperialism. “As a result no communiqué was issued, and posters were put out in Beijing describing the Japanese Party as ‘revisionist.’” It later emerged that the CPJ’s journal, Akahata, had been expected to accept the contention that it was “the touchstone of MarxismLeninism or revisionism whether or not unconditionally to follow the word of Mao Zedong . . .”51 Subsequently, the Maoists organized thugs in Japan itself to beat up Japanese communists, attack the offices of the CPJ, and destroy the building housing the Society for Japanese-Chinese Friendship.52 Splits were attempted in communist parties all over the world, in both Third World countries and developed capitalist countries. (Not all were what they appeared to be. The Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands was, it was revealed in 2004, in fact a creation of the Dutch secret service, its aims being to “undermine the official Dutch Communist party, the KPN, by denouncing its deviant beliefs and unreliable conduct, and to gam er information on— and gain access to— the Maoist elite in Beijing.”) 53 Usually, the results were meager, small splinter groups calling themselves the “Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)” of whichever country they inhabited; sometimes, as in India, the breakaways were more substantial and in a few countries, such as the Philippines, the breakaway party was able to establish a dynamic of its own.

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4 Clearly, the appearance of Maoism in the Philippines, which previously had been host to no ultraleft organization (excepting the PKP’s own periodic lurches into ultraleftism), was linked to developments within China and formed part of Mao’s efforts to create an alternative international movement under his own leadership. Jose Maria Sison was merely the vehicle by which Maoism sought to enter the Philippines. The PKP’s case against Sison was that while still a member of the PKP he was “heeding the directives of other sources than the PKP, from Chinese Maoist connections he had made earlier as a student in Indonesia, from Maoists in the Chinese community in the Philippines and in Hongkong, and from Maoists in Beijing itself.”54 As we have seen, it was only after his stay in Indonesia that Sison joined the PKP. Nemenzo says that Sison “undertook training”55 in Indonesia, but Muhammad Abdul Hassan goes somewhat further, claiming that in Jakarta Sison, having been “spotted and recruited” by Chinese Maoists resident in the Philippines for the purpose of leading a new pro-Beijing communist party, was tutored in Maoism by a PKI member called Hotapea (also spelt Hutapea). While ostensibly in Indonesia to study the language, this was, according to Hassan, a cover arranged by PKI member Ilyas Bakri, then resident in the Philippines. Hassan claims that after Sison’s return to the Philippines he sent reports to Beijing via “Kramat 5, the PKI mail drop in Jakarta”; after the Suharto coup, “such arrangements were taken over by liaison men of the local Chinese Communist group.”56 The PKI, the third largest communist party in the world after those in the Soviet Union and China, despite having long ago adopted the line of peaceful struggle, supported the Communist Party of China in its dispute with its Soviet counterpart over “revisionism.” In October 1963, following a visit to China, D. N. Aidit, the PKI leader, issued a statement to the effect that, in response to “revisionism,” Marxist-Leninists “have the complete right to propagandize their views outside of the Party, and to form circles and associations and put out a magazine, and even to establish a new party.”57 Vivencio Jose says that the PKI’s emissaries in the Philippines “had very

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bad grammar, spoke very badly, but were very passionate . . . One of those fellows . . . was only known as a student— but an over-aged student enrolled in UP and another university. So we were wondering what he was doing here, over-aged and enrolled in two schools. Later on, when there was a big witch-hunt, all the pieces came together. Among certain people, they were influential.”58

,

Sison also visited China before the split. Nemenzo recalls that one of his own first assignments upon his return from Manchester University was to go to Indonesia and establish links with the PKI because the PKI man here was exposed and deported, so the link was cut. The PKI was already planning to seize power and they told me that the link will no longer be with Indonesia but with the Socialist Party of Japan, as there was a faction there that was very pro-China. We were all brought together at a so-called scientific conference in Indonesia. They said they would like one key member of the party to go to Japan, and from Japan to link up with the party in China. Sison volunteered. So he went. When he came back, he already had his plans. At first I could not understand him. This was at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He said the line was: “Bombard the headquarters!” He talked about rejuvenation. That was already one of his buzzwords. At that time, I simply thought it meant winning new elements, but this time, after his trip to China, it meant getting rid of the old leadership.59 But if Beijing was using Sison, it is probable that the reverse was also true. Sison seemed to have a predilection for “models.” Having first been partial to the Indonesian “model,” this was dropped in the wake of the Suharto coup and the slaughter of Indonesian communists that followed.* It

The PKI (or some of its leaders) may well, as Nemenzo claims, have been planning to seize power, but the situation in Indonesia was certainly more complex than this. John Pilger refers to Peter Dale Scott’s claim that “western politicians, diplomats, journalists and scholars, some with prominent western intelligence connections, propagated the myth that Suharto and the military had saved the nation’s honour from an attempted coup” by the PKI, while former CIA operative Ralph McGehee has written: “The documents, manufactured stories of communist plans and atrocities, and claims of communist arms shipments [from China] created an atmosphere of hysteria, resulting in the slaughter and the establishment” of the Suharto dictatorship. In addition, Pilger refers to evidence suggesting that, following the murder of six Indonesian generals, Suharto had “opportunistically exploited an internecine struggle within the army in order to seize

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is perhaps significant that Progressive Review published no Filipino analysis of these events.61 There are indications that Sison’s Maoism predated the collapse of the Sukarno regime in 1965. For example, in 1964 Nemenzo had written to Progressive Review from Manchester, calling for an alliance with the nonaligned nations and the other peace forces in the world, such as Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Although this was in line with the policy of most communist parties at the time, Sison saw fit to publish a long “addendum” arguing that nonalignment was “out-dated and ineffective,” and that to propagate this principle “only gives the US a chance to wear the mask of peace” and “only hides the ugly face o f US imperialism.”62 Such a pronouncement was more representative of the thinking of Mao Zedong than of contemporary PKP policy. Sison, who appeared somewhat uncertain in his use of Marxist terms in the early years of Progressive Review (in the third issue he put forward the curious proposition that “[capitalist appropriation of land is neo-feudalism . . .”),63 had by 1966 solved this problem by modelling his writings on Mao’s works (many of which had themselves been written by Chen Po-ta),64 employing the favorite terms of the “Great Helmsman.” Thus, by way of example, in a speech (closely resembling Mao’s On Coalition

Government) in which he explained the need for a united front strategy, Sison concluded: “Ideologically, it would be an error of dogmatism or sheer ignorance of the real conditions of our country to insist on making socialism our immediate goal. At the same time, it would be an error of

empiricism to stick to the minimum goal of national democracy . . .”65

power.” A CIA source told Pilger that the Indonesian operation served as a model for the 1973 coup in Chile, revealing that the “CIA foiged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders, (just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” Having shipped in a sophisticated US-supplied communications network from the Philippines to facilitate coordination of the anti-communist bloodbath, Suharto set about systematically murdering between 250,000 and a million PKI members. Decades later, it would be admitted that the CIA had handed the Indonesian military lists containing the names of thousands of PKI activists it had compiled over the previous two years. A former BBC Southeast Asia correspondent told Pilger: “There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”“

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Jones says that Sison returned from China in early 1967, bringing with him several volumes of Mao’s collected works, which he gave to his “most advanced cadres” for translation into Tagalog.66 Asked later about the role of the Communist Party of China in the “re-establishment” of the CPP, Sison stopped short of denying *he existence of such assistance. I would like to stress that the rebuilding of the CPP, the resurgence of the Philippine revolutionary movement, and my having been elected CPP central committee chairman came about essentially because of Philippine conditions and domestic factors, including the errors and incorrigibility of the Lava group and the rise of proletarian revolutionaries.67 According to one source, it was during Sison’s visit to China that the constitution of a new party was drafted.68 The same source suggests that members of the Chinese community in Manila also assisted Sison. We were meeting with Chinese newspapermen who were really undercover agents of the Chinese Communist Party. These were the people who would support Sison. The money that was channelled from China passed through these groups. It might have even come from these groups, with the authority being given by China. They were in business— import-export, newspapers . . . This source maintains that none other than Joaquin “Chino” Roces, publisher of the Manila Times, was also involved in a discussion of the constitution of the new party. Lazaro Cruz, previously expelled from the PKP and known by the nom de guerre of “Bull,” was apparently out of work and being financially supported by Roces. At a meeting in Roces’s office, “Bull” suffered a heart attack and was later found by a KM member (named by the source) to have been discussing the draft party constitution with Roces.* Similarly, Vivencio Jose maintains that Cruz was “the contact

Joseph Smith supplies another connection, identifying Roces as a friend of the CIA’s Gabe Kaplan and Jaime Ferrer in the early stages of the CIA operation to establish the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) as a de facto pro-Magsaysay campaign organization.69

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between Sison and Chino Roces.”70 Such a possibility is not as outlandish as it might appear. The mainland Maoists frequendy made use of Chinese businessmen in the diaspora, drawing on their strong sense of nationalism. In turn, some Chinese businessmen in the Philippines (Roces am ong them) were anti-Marcos and prepared to enter into alliances with other like-minded people. However, Nemenzo maintains that all that occurred here was that Roces was discovered to have obtained copies of the CPP foundation documents, and that it was this that necessitated a brief postponement of the breakaway party’s “re-establishment congress” from December 26, 1968 (the date on which its anniversary is still celebrated by the CPP), until early January 1969.71 Hitherto, Sison had been pursuing the construction of a broad united front, a concept he had adopted from the Mao of 1939-45. The Mao o f 1967, however, was the “Great Helmsman” of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” and this “model” demanded a pro-Beijing split in all “revisionist” communist parties. Thus, Sisoh’s adoption of the 1967 “m odel” resulted in the destruction of the most promising product of the work he had carried out while influenced by the 1939-45 “model”— the developing national united front as exemplified by the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism.

N o tes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 45. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “Rectification Process in the Philippine Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim JooJock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 75. Nemenzo (interview by the author, January 2008) says that Sison was also keen that a congress be held, and that the papers he drafted were later used as the draft documents of the CPP, “interspersed with anti-Lava assertions.” Jesus Lava, “Setting the Record Straight," PKP Courier, 1/1985, 17. Sison, The Leader’s View, 46. Nemenzo interview.

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6. 7. 8. 9.

of

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Jesus Lava, “Setting the Record Straight,” 16. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. Jose Maria Sison, “National Democracy and Socialism,” in On National Democracy (Quezon City: Aklatang Gising Na, n.d.), 45. Information Bulletin, no. 22, Prague, 1967.

10. “Apology and Announcement,” Progressive Review, no. 10, 45. 11. Nemenzo interview. In this interview, Nemenzo says that the “sinister elements” referred to by Sison were not just the Lavas but also William Pomeroy. “I was accused, even by the Lavas, of being Pomeroy’s man. The Lavas did not have a good opinion of Bill.” 12. “The Middle-East Crisis,” Progressive Review, no. 10, v. 13. Socialist Party of the Philippines, “The Socialist Manifesto,” reprinted in Progressive Review, no. 10., 47. 14. Ibid., 50. 15. “The Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism and the Socialist Party of the Philippines,” Progressive Review, no. 10, iii. 16. Nemenzo interview. 17. William Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 131. 18. William Pomeroy, “Maoist Disruption in the Philippines,” Political Affairs, April 1972, 31. 19. Ibid. 20. “The Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism and the Socialist Party of the Philippines,” Progressive Review, no. 10. 21. Pomeroy, “Maoist Disruption,” 31; Nemenzo interview. The recollection of Merlin Magallona (interview by the author, March 2009) is somewhat different: “Sison was general secretary of MAN, and he was there even after the split, working closely with Tañada. In fact, when we were preparing documents for the launching congress, the papers were submitted to Tañada, and Tañada would share these with Sison. Some of these papers were published by Sison in his name and on one occasion a paper I submitted was spirited away by him and published somewhere else. So we prepared an article denouncing him for plagiarism, which was published by the Philippine Collegian. At this time, Sison had already split, so he continued to be active in MAN.” It would seem likely, however, that Magallona’s memory is at fault, for MAN was launched in early February 1967, whereas we have seen that, according to Jesus Lava, Sison had not formed his “anti-party group” until April 3, and he had attended a PKP “confrontation meeting” on April 8. 22. Perfecto Tera Jr., interview by the author, May 1989.

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23. Pomeroy, “Maoist Disruption," 31. 24. Tera interview; Nemenzo interview. 25. Pomeroy, “Maoist Disruption," 31. Ernesto “Popoy” M. Valencia (“SDK Revisited 1,” in Soliman M. Santos Jr. and Paz Verdades M. Santos, Militant But Groovy: Stories o f the Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan [Pasig City: Anvil, 2008], 2) says that some of the reservations over Sison’s leadership of the KM concerned “commandism, violations of democracy, use of lies to manipulate members, adventurism and preoccupation with street action to the neglect of mass work.” 26. Tera interview. 27. Dizon interview. 28. Interview with PKP cadre, Metro Manila, January 1990, by the author. This source has requested anonymity. Vivencio Jose agrees that the single-file policy “could be used for manipulating the ones down the line. So Sison . . . manipulated our group using the [anti-] Lava slogan, which we didn’t know was directed against the entire party" (Vivencio Jose, interview by the author, January 2008). 29. Sison, The Leader’s View, 114-15. 30. Pomeroy, “Maoist Disruption," 30. 31. In the 1950s, the US National Security Council had been concerned by the rising popularity of Claro M. Recto. See Nick Cullather, Managing Nationalism: United States National Security Council Documents on the Philippines, 19531960 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1992). 32. “Silence Is Not the Answer,” Progressive Review, no. 9, 3-5. 33. Sison, “Land Reform and National Democracy," in On National Democracy. 34. Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Philippine Council, UP Chapter, “UP Students! Expose, Oppose, and Isolate the Fascist Agents Within Our Ranks!” September 1971. 35. Dizon interview. 36. Douglas Hyde, in Luis Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger (New York: Prae >er, 1967), xii. 37. Ibid., 21. 38. Jose Maria Sison, “Who Is Gregg Jones and What Is Westview Press?" National Midweek Magazine, March 28, 1990. 39. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 32. 40. V.I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," in Collected Works, vol. 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 276. 41. Wang Ming, Mao’s Betrayal (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 15. Agnes Smedley, in what was admittedly a subjective view, said of Mao that “his spirit dwelt within itself, isolating him.” She continued: “In him was none of the

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humility of Chu [Teh]. Despite that feminine quality in him, he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature. I had the impression that he would wait and watch for years, but eventually have his way” (Smedley, Battle Hymn o f China [London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., Left Book Club edition, 1944], 122). 42. Wang, Mao’s Betrayal, 56. 43. Ibid., 150. 44. M.I. Sladkovsky, “Lenin and China,” in Leninism and Modem China’s Problems (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 27. 45. Ibid., 28-29. 46. Robert Elegant, Mao’s Great Revolution (New York: World Publishing, 1971), 4-5. 47. G.V. Astafyev and M.V. Fomichova, “The Maoist Distortion of Lenin’s Theory of the National Liberation Movement,” in Leninism and Modem China’s Problems, 216-17. 48. L. Shurin, “Solidarity, Beijing Style: Pages of History,” in supplement to Socialism, Theory and Practice, Moscow, May 1979. 49. Jom al de Angola, reprinted in supplement to Socialism, Theory and Practice, Moscow, May 1976. 50. R. Palme Dutt, Whither China? (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

1967), 23. Ibid., 28. Wang Ming, China: Cultural Revolution or Counter-Revolutionary Coup? (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1969), 62-63. Jon Henley, “Dutch Math Teacher Admits Fake Communist Party Scam That Fooled Mao Zedong,” Guardian (London), December 4, 2004. Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy, 130. Nemenzo interview. Muhammad Abdul Hassan, “But Which Communist Party?” Daily Express, February 1985. If this account is correct, of course, the implication is that Sison was already planning a split when he joined the PKP. However, it should be noted that this piece appeared in a pro-Marcos newspaper. Sheldon W. Simon, The Broken Triangle: Peking, Djakarta and the PK1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 87. Jose interview. Nemenzo interview. See John Pilger, “Spoils of a Massacre,” The Guardian Weekend, July 14, 2001; Ralph McGehee, “The Indonesian Massacres and the CIA,” Philippine Currents, April 1991; and Kathy Kadane, “CIA Supplied Suharto with Death Lists in ’65,”

66

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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National Midweek Magazine, August 22, 1990 (this originally appeared in the San Francisco Examiner). The only coverage the Indonesian events received in Progressive Review was in an article by Eric Norden entitled “The Rightist Coup in Indonesia,” reprinted from the National Guardian. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “A Letter from Manchester. Non-Alignment Is Our Best Defense” and (presumably authored by Sison) “Addendum from Manila: National Freedom and Alignment against US Imperialism Is Our Primary Responsibility,” both in Progressive Review, no. 4, 104-7. Progressive Review, no. 3, 9. This formulation, which conflates two distinct modes of production, and is akin to referring to the socialist ownership of factories as “neo-capitalism,” is not one of which many Marxists would approve. See Elegant, Mao's Great Revolution, 21. “No political activist, Chen Pota, almost alone among the senior leadership, was truly an authority on the complex doctrine called Marxism-Leninism. Since he combined complaisance verging on sycophancy with that expertise, he was an ideal servant to the imperious Chairman who had never quite mastered the arcane intricacies of doctrine. He required a professional guide through the intellectual labyrinth. Like a brilliant lawyer who finds legal justification for his client’s desires rather than pointing out their essential illegality, Chen manipulated doctrine to suit Mao’s needs.” Khrushchev says that Stalin used to refer to Mao as a “margarine Marxist.” See Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (London: Sphere Books, 1971), 425. Sison, “National Democracy and Socialism,” 56. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 23. Sison, The Leader’s View, 50. This source, interviewed by the author in Metro Manila in November 1989, has requested anonymity. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait o f a Cold Warrior (Quezon City: Plaride! Books, 1987), 278. Jose interview. Nemenzo interview.

C h a pter 3 : P a r t y and P rogram i For a brief period after his departure from the PKP, Jose Maria Sison was without a party. This was remedied by implying that there had been no breakaway from the PKP and that Sison and his supporters had actually “expelled” the Lavas— that, in fact, the group around Sison was really the PKP shorn of its “revisionists,” its name translated into English and shortly to be “re-established.” Twenty years after these events, Sison would continue to claim that genuine “proletarian revolutionaries who had emerged independently of the old merger party from 1959 onward as well as elder party members agreed with my stand. We decided to expel the Lava group from the party . . .” Contrary to the notion spread by the Lavaites that only young Communists re-established the CPP, the oldest cadres and most tested veterans in the worker, peasant, youth and armed revolutionary movements—Max Gutierrez, Amado V. Hernandez, Felixberto Olalia, Simplicio Paraiso (a Lava relative), Samuel Rodriguez, and many others who as a matter of prudence cannot as yet be mentioned—supported the struggle to re­ establish the party.' /

Whether or not all of the people named by Sison actually joined the new organization is open to question; it should be noted that even Sison stops short of actually making such a claim, stating instead that they “supported the struggle to re-establish the party.” They may well have

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done so, for most of them had been expelled from the PKP some tím e earlier. According to Pomeroy, Sison’s first attempt to attract a following after his own expulsion consisted of trying “to bring together former PKP members expelled for Right opportunism in the past, but they would not accept his demand that they be organized under his sole leadership.”2 Dizon explains that Amado V. Hernandez had been expelled while in prison, where he had renounced Marxism and begun taking communion. With regard to Sison’s new party, Hernandez was “not a member, but he was a sympathizer. He was a very leftist fellow who knew Mao Zedong personally.”3 Sammy Rodriguez (whose first name was actually Simeon and not, as stated by Sison, “Samuel”) worked in the theater and had been arrested in the “Politburo raid” of 1950. It is thought that he and Angel Baking (arrested in the same raid) did in fact become members o f the new party. Olalia had been “expelled twice from the PKP for rightwing activities and ideas,” but then in the early 1960s, as the party w as regrouping, “we tried to be conciliatory to everyone who still wanted to contribute, even if only on a mass level,” and so Olalia was accepted by the PKP as president of MASAKA, the peasant organization.4 The two factors common to most of those named by Sison were, says Dizon, that “they had axes to grind against the Lavas” and that they had “refused, rightly or wrongly, to go underground, they refused the assignments.” That this was true of Hernandez was borne out by the Supreme Court decision in his case, which found that mere support for the ideas of communism did not contravene the Anti-Subversion Law. It was hardly likely, however, that former communists who had refused armed assignments would play a very enthusiastic role in a Maoist party bent on armed struggle. Given this, Sison was forced to rely very heavily on his student and middle-class following. Lachica tells us in his 1971 study that “[¿Initiators of the Maoist cult” were “within five college graduation classes from each other . . . Generally from middle-class backgrounds, they did not experience economic deprivation comparable to what the Luis Taruc-Jesus Lava generation went through.”5

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Sison’s next step was to hold a “re-establishment Congress” at which the “Communist Party of the Philippines-Mao Thought” would be launched. However, only eleven people attended this “Congress”— Sison and ten others;6 according to Jones a twelfth, Rodolfo Salas, “walked away in silent protest” at Sison’s attempt to form an alliance with Commander Sumulong, a former Huk who had turned to banditry.7 According to Nemenzo, “(f]our participants recalled . . . that Amado Guerrero iSison] alone was brimming with optimism; the rest nursed a sense of futility. They could hardly believe that their rag-tag army of student activists would grow into a serious guerrilla force.”8 The eleven in attendance elected themselves as a central committee (Salas would later rejoin the fold and rise to become a general secretary of the CPP) and adopted a program for the new party. Sison was elected as chairman, taking the nom de guerre “Amado Guerrero” ( “Beloved Warrior”). Later, Sison would proclaim: “I am proud to say that 25 percent of the Central Committee members in 1968 came from working class families.”9 Leaving aside the fact that this proportion represented only three people, it is noticeable that Sison does not claim that they were workers (and even less that they were active in the working-class movement) but that they “came from working class families.” Just as the wholly working-class composition of the leadership of the PKP upon its formation in 1930 had led to very real shortcomings in the work of the new organization, the overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois character of the leadership of the CPP in the late 1960s was to exact its own toll.

2 In the CPP’s Program fo ra People’s Democratic Revolution adopted by the “Re-establishment Congress,” the Philippines is characterized as a “semi­ colonial and semi-feudal country, dominated by the US imperialists, the comprador bourgeoisie, the landlords and the bureaucrat capitalists.”10 The main problems are identified as US imperialism and domestic feudalism.

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This “combined oppression of US imperialism and feudalism involves th e inequitable colonial exchange of cheap raw materials (sugar, cocon u t, abaca, logs and mineral ore) and finished products imported chiefly from the United States and the investment of United States surplus capital in the Philippines chiefly to foster the semi-colonial and semi-feudal type o f economy that exploits the toiling masses of workers and peasants.” Even at the time it was written, this description of Philippine conditions was not particularly accurate, as the dominant mode of production was not “semifeudal” but capitalist (see chapter 10). Forty years later, however, objective conditions have undergone even greater changes, while the CPP’s program has remained unchanged. This fact alone must cast doubt upon the wisdom of a communist party adopting a program embodying what is intended to be a precise analysis of conditions if the means to amend the program as conditions change do not exist. This would have entailed the convening o f further congresses, but so far the CPP has not held a single congress since the one in 1969.* For a party embarking upon a path of armed struggle, it might have been anticipated that the convening of future congresses would be difficult. The only way this problem could have been overcome would have been for the CPP to have had a substantial base in the urban areas and a central committee able to meet regularly and, at least as individuals, lead fairly normal lives “above ground.” Another consequence of the CPP’s failure to convene congresses would be the curtailment of innerparty democracy. Not only could strategy not be changed as a result o f democratic discussion and debate throughout the party, but neither could elections be held to replace those members of the central committee w ho were captured or killed; instead, replacements would be co-opted. The Program identifies the main allies of the working class and peasantry as being the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Of the latter, the document says that although

There have been two redrafts of the CPP program, but there has been no congress al which the latest might be adopted. There are, however, unconfirmed rumors that a congress was held in 2006, possibly in Northern Mindanao, and that no documents have been released because it was impossible to reach agreement on whether to prioritize the armed struggle or parliamentary struggle."

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it wishes to lead the patriotic and progressive classes through its entrepreneurship and its political actions, its kind of class leadership is already passed historically by the revolutionary class leadership of the working class. A proletarian revolutionary leadership, guided by MarxismLeninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought, is what makes the people’s democratic revolution a new type of national democratic revolution. This alliance the Program sees as being built during the course of “the protracted people’s war,” at the successful conclusion of which there will be a “coalition or united front government.” Such a government, while “building up the state and cooperative sectors of the economy as factors of proletarian leadership and socialism . . . shall encourage and support all private initiative in industry so long as this does not monopolize or adversely affect the people’s livelihood. The people’s democratic government shall exercise regulation of capital only to protect the people’s livelihood and guarantee a people’s democracy.”’ The Program's insistence that the national democratic revolution could only be achieved by a broad alliance led by the working class would be accepted by most Marxists. But to imply that the CPP provided a “proletarian revolutionary leadership” was, as we have seen, mere wishful thinking. Often, the CPP would talk in terms of “proletarian leadership” when what it really meant was leadership by the party— a practice also followed by the Lavas in the immediate postwar period. The

alliance

specified in the Program would also

meet with

widespread approval by Marxists; many, however, would insist that a document such as this should give some indication of the possibility of the national-democratic stage of the revolution developing into the socialist stage. But the CPP’s concept of the alliance had its origins in a mechanical

This passage has apparently been modeled on a similar paragraph in Mao’s On Coalition Government, where he quotes Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese nationalist leader, as follows: Enterprises, such as banks, railways and airlines, whether Chinese-owned or fbreign-owned, which are either monopolistic in character or too big for private management, shall be operated and administered by the state, so that private capital cannot dominate the livelihood of the people: this is the main principle of the regulation of capital.12

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application of Mao’s “new democratic” theory rather than in an analysis of Philippine reality. Mao had used the concept of a “new dem ocracy” to banish socialism to some unspecified future.’ So it must be noted that the CPP says nothing in its Program about the necessity to struggle against the national bourgeoisie within the broad framework of the proposed alliance. Without such a struggle, the national bourgeoisie and not the working class would almost certainly emeige as the leading force within the national democratic alliance. Even Mao (at least when pressed to do so by his political opponents within the CPC) called for a policy of unity with and struggle against the national bourgeoisie. The furthest that the Program o f the CPP goes is to sound a note of caution. The national bourgeoisie has a dual character, revolutionary and reactionary. To some extent, it can accept anti-imperialism and anti­ feudalism. But it still has a bourgeois class character to which the working class and its Party must always be alert . . . Because of this dual character, the Party has to adopt consistendy a revolutionary dual tactics towards it. The Party must be cautious towards it although concessions may be given to it without sacrificing the basic interests of workers and peasants. What would happen in practice during the Marcos years was that the

CPP would

attract varying degrees

of support— sometimes

de

facto, sometimes consciously— from individuals within the ruling elite (not merely members of the national bourgeoisie, but also comprador

As of this writing (2009), it might well be unrealistic for a Philippine communist or socialist party to think in terms of an eariy transition to socialism; but in 1968/69, when the CPP’s Program was adopted, such a proposition would have been far more realistic, as the Soviet bloc was still strong and, moreover, willing to advance assistance to Third World regimes intent upon eradicating the vestiges of feudalism and laying the basis for socialism. Indeed, Progress Publishers, Moscow, published a whole series of studies on the “non-capitalist path of development” (see chapter 10). It must be acknowledged, though, that once Marcos had opened up diplomatic relations with the USSR the latter would not have supported an attempt to supplant him. In practice, of course, the CPP would not (at this stage anyway) have sought assistance from this source, as the Soviet Union and its allies were branded as “revisionists” and “social imperialists.” It was only later, when the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe had crumbled, that Sison began to talk seriously—if not particularly realistically—o f a transition to socialism.

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capitalists and even landlords) who had been frozen out or even dispossessed by Marcos, and who merely wanted to regain their wealth and positions of influence by fair means or foul or— as was possible in the case of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.— to use the fledgling guerrilla army as a stepping-stone to greater political power. It is significant that nowhere in this document is the trade union movement mentioned. Thus, the economic form of struggle between the working class and all sections of the bourgeoisie is totally ignored. One might be forgiven for thinking that this constitutes “sacrificing the basic interests of the workers.” In fact, this omission possibly derives, at least in part, from the fact that the CPP had at this time very little influence in the trade union movement. The Program goes on to stress that the “clanger of cooperating with the national bourgeoisie always lies in tendencies toward urban political activity as the main political activity. However, if the Party should unduly cut itself off from the national bourgeoisie, it can easily make the error of ‘Left’ opportunism as its main error.” It would seem here that the question of whether the CPP would be politically active in the urban areas would be decided not by whether it had a program of activity for the working class (it did not) but by whether it had an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. It appears from this that the working class was only really required to satisfy the requirements of its theoretically necessary leading role: “If the working class and the Communist Party of the Philippines do not firmly uphold and advance proletarian revolutionary leadership, the national bourgeoisie, with the assistance of the petty-bourgeois leadership, misleads the peasantry and fosters directly or indirectly a Right opportunist or revisionist line within the Party.” So the working class is merely a social force which exists to provide the peasantry with correct leadership. Has it no interests of its own? One would hardly think so, as they are never mentioned in the Program. It is almost as if the new party did not “see” the working class— possibly due to the fact that the Maoist emphasis on the peasantry had blinded it to its existence. And the Program is, of course, quite unable to explain how the working class will come to exercise its

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leadership of the revolutionary alliance when the “principal instrument o f the working class” (i.e., the CPP) has no program of activity for it.* The Program's attitude to the national bourgeoisie is quite as utilitarian as that to the working class. But what certainly takes precedence over the question of cooperation with the national bourgeoisie is the development of the closest alliance between the working class and the peasantry through armed struggle conducted by the Communist Party of the Philippines. It is this alliance that can only be the true foundation of the national united front. Without this it is senseless to give decisive importance to a formal organization like the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism, consider it a united front and worry most of the time about the tolerance and attitudes of bourgeois allies for the sake of preserving some weak and artificial unity. Worrying “about the tolerance and attitudes” of allies, be they bourgeois or otherwise, is, surely, the very essence of alliances. Had not Sison himself, less than two years earlier, stressed at MAN’s founding congress that “[t]o maintain firm unity between us, we must always strive to make the appropriate adjustments between our respective minimum and maximum demands and arrive at the most acceptable common position without any individual or organization betraying his principles”? What could possibly have happened in the meantime to transform Sison’s correct and principled position of 1967 into the dismissive attitude of late 1968? Following his departure from the PKP, Sison had lost influence in MAN, following which he had withdrawn the KM from the organization.14 Without the benefit of Sison at the helm of MAN, the CPP Program tells us that it was “getting to be a vapid and ineffectual group . . .”

A quarter of a century later, the CPP’s Manila-Rizal committee, as it split away from the party, would make many of these same criticisms, charging that the party program was “the best proof of [Sison’s] abandonment or ignorance of the most basic principles of Marxism-Leninism—the class struggle and scientific socialism . . . He completely obscured and glossed over the struggle for socialism in his obsession for national democracy . . . It is a Party Program without the struggle for socialism and without a separate section on workers’ demands in the period of the democratic revolution

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The Program is predicated on the belief that “US imperialism is moving towards collapse and socialism is marching towards world triumph.” The document lists the national liberation struggles taking place in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, refers to the deepening crisis in the USA and other imperialist countries, and then points to the “Soviet revisionist renegade bloc” which is held to be “fast disintegrating” (while such disintegration was apparent in the late 1980s, it was hardly a reflection of objective reality twenty years earlier). On the other hand: While US imperialism and modem revisionism are in deep crisis, the People’s Republic of China has consolidated itself as an iron bastion of socialism and the world proletarian revolution by carrying out the epochal and great proletarian cultural revolution and by holding aloft Mao Tsetung’s thought to illumine the road of armed revolution throughout the world. Also, in the Eastern European heartland of modem revisionism, the People’s Republic of Albania stands forth as an advance post of the world proletarian revolution and Mao Tse-tung’s thought and is encouraging all the oppressed peoples and Marxist-Leninists there to rebel against the ruling revisionist renegade cliques. The most charitable interpretation one can place on this analysis is that, in common with that adopted by many communist parties from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, it was hopelessly optimistic in its prediction of the “collapse” of imperialism. Despite its impending defeat in Vietnam, US imperialism would prove to be flexible enough to not only survive but to thrive for several more decades. But of course the optimism of the CPP’s Program stems not from a realistic assessment of the world situation conducted by the CPP itself, but from the adoption— lock, stock, and barrel— of the “analysis” of the Communist Party of China.* As one can divine from the passage quoted above, the CPC “analysis” was more about the nationalistic self-aggrandizement of the Maoists than anything else. Many of the Maoist parties formed at around the same time as the

According to Alex Magno, Sison “plagiarized the work of an Indonesian Maoist [he probably has in mind D.N. Aidit] who, in turn, simplistically applied Mao’s elementary analysis of Chinese society to explain Indonesian society.”15

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CPP adopted precisely the same “analysis" and more often than not u sed precisely the same florid terminology. However, the “analysis” is of no little significance, as the belief in the impending collapse of imperialism must be seen as the basis for the C P P ’s assertion that the “rectified” CPP would be able to become the “invincible weapon at the core of the Revolutionary mass movement,” armed revolution being seen as the only road to “smash the armed counter-revolution that preserves foreign and feudal oppression in the Philippines.” In this arm ed struggle, “the peasantry is the main force of the people’s dem ocratic revolution” and the “peasant struggle for land is the main dem ocratic content of the present stage of the Philippine revolution.” The strategy put forward is one of encircling the cities. “It is in the countryside that the enemy forces are first lured in and then defeated before the capture of the cities from the hands of the exploiting classes.” That this would now be possible, whereas for the PKP-led Huk movement it had been impossible, was due to the fact that the “Philippine reactionary state is increasingly unable to rule in the old way.” The ruling classes “cannot prolong the present balance of forces indefinitely. As a matter of fact, armed opposition now will aggravate their difficulties and hasten the maturing of what is now discemable as a revolutionary mood among the people.” Central to this fact is that the “internal and external crisis of US imperialism is clearly depriving the Filipino reactionaries of a significantly great amount of imperialist protection and support.” Again, this analysis would prove to be hopelessly optimistic. Over the next two decades, the USA would in fact increase its support of the ruling elite in the Philippines, while imperialism as a whole would not only strengthen its grip on the country but also significantly restructure the economy in its own interests. The road of armed struggle upon which the CPP now embarked would have far-reaching consequences. First, of course, the hopes of the PKP to gradually build up a mass base and a broad, anti-imperialist alliance, eventually achieving a climate in which it could emerge into legality, were set back for some time. Second, the CPP was, despite Sison’s vituperative

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attacks on the PKP’s history, repeating the past mistakes of that party. For example, if the peasantry was to be the main force and if the countryside was to be host to armed struggle, it stood to reason that the CPP would be able (or, at first, inclined) to do precious little about building a mass base in the working class. The bulk of human resources would be concentrated in the countryside, as had been the case with the PKP in its postwar armed struggle, and the party would certainly be unable to lead an open existence in the urban areas— where, of course, the working class was to be found. Third, the strategy was litde more than a mechanical application of Chinese experience in totally different conditions. In China, it had been possible to “surround the cities from the countryside” because in that country there existed vast expanses where armies could be based, trained, and securely encamped. But the Philippines? Lachica points out: Since that last war, Central Luzon was shrunk by feeder roads to the remote barrios and by the expansion of the farm population. The “countryside” of the Mao-quoters is a tiny backyard compared to the broad reaches of northern and central China where the 4th and 8th Route Armies successfully outmaneuvered the [Guomindang] and the Japanese.16 Since Lachica was writing in 1971, of course, the countryside has been shrunk even further by the infrastructural projects implemented under the “aid” programs directed by the World Bank. Finally, it is difficult to see how the CPP could have conceived that the immediate unleashing of armed struggle could have positive results when the involvement, presence, and assistance of the USA had demonstrably increased since the height of the Huk Rebellion. Moreover, the existence of “communist guerrillas” would give a canny politician like Ferdinand Marcos a powerful bargaining counter in negotiations with the USA— and a pretext to declare martial law. The other side of this particular coin was that the USA would itself have a further excuse for retaining its military bases and continuing its interference in the affairs of the Philippines. 3beyond the national democratic stage of the revolution lies its socialist stagf. “In upholding proletarian revolutionary leadership, it should not

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mean, however, that socialism shall be achieved without passing th ro u g h the stage of national democracy . .

but that this “proletarian revolutionary

leadership is the most important link between the stage of the p eo p le's democratic revolution and the stage of socialist revolution." Moreover, it “is dishonest, demagogic and utopian to insist that socialism is the immediate goal under conditions that the people are still dominated and exploited b y US imperialism and domestic feudalism.” Only the vaguest outline is given in the Program , however, of the economic form which will be assumed by the “people’s democratic state.” Land will be distributed free to the landless and plantations “and estates already efficiently operated on a mechanised basis shall be converted into state farms where the agricultural workers shall establish proletarian power and provide themselves with better working and living conditions.” As for industry, there “shall be three sectors in the national economy: the state sector, the cooperative sector and the private sector. All major sources of raw materials and energy, all heavy and basic industries and all nationalized enterprises shall be run by the state sector.” This stops short o f stating unequivocally that the state sector will be the leading sector of the economy, a necessity if the national democratic stage of the revolution is to be used as the platform from which to advance to socialism. In fact, the list assigned to the state sector would not necessarily be incompatible with the capitalist system; until recent decades, the state sector of the British economy bore more than a passing resemblance to this description. And then, of course, the socialist stage is not described; nor are the prerequisites for advancing to that stage mentioned at all. In this respect, the Program is pure “1939-45 model” Maoism. With regard to time-scale, the Program is, like the PKP’s first program in 1930,17 little more than a confused jumble. For example, the second section consists of the CPP’s general program, listing the tasks as the destruction of US imperialist and feudal oppression, the establishment of a people’s democratic state, and then the more detailed tasks concerning culture, agriculture, the economy, foreign policy, etc. This general program will “remain unchanged during the entire stage of the people’s democratic

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revolution.” This is then followed in the third section by the specific program consisting of immediate demands. This follows the time-honored formula of projecting first a maximum and then a minimum program, except that in this case the CPP’s specific program contains demands which would be impossible to achieve immediately. For example, a list of political tasks is headed by the call to “[ajttack, isolate and destroy the bourgeois reactionary state, the US imperialists and all local tyrants until their doom in our country . . .” while lower down the list appear more modest demands to campaign for a people’s democratic constitution and to fight the rise of fascism. Why the movement should need to fight the rise of fascism and campaign for a people’s democratic constitution when the bourgeois state has already been destroyed is not made clear. Similarly, the economic tasks begin with the demand to render ineffective all the agreements favoring US imperialism, to encourage the “people and the national bourgeoisie to make a self-reliant economy” and to outlaw “bureaucrat capital and all property gained through corruption and criminal means.” Again, these are hardly immediate demands but tasks which could only be carried out by an anti-imperialist government. But then, within the same shopping list, we find the call to compel “the reduction of rent and interest rates in the guerrilla zone and abolish rent in the liberated areas . . .,” to “help the workers in the factories, mines, plantations, transportation lines and offices to conduct strikes successfully” and to expose the “deceptive and reactionary character” of the Marcos regime’s labor legislation and land reform program. All the latter might quite properly be considered immediate demands.

3 For the CPP itself, the Program prescribed a course of “rectification.” “In carrying out a rectification movement to weed out modem revisionism and all forms of opportunism, ideological building should be conducted at all levels with closest supervision of the Central Committee and the Higher

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Party School, the Revolutionary School of Mao Tse-tung’s T h ou gh t." It was, as we saw in chapter 2, by means of a “rectification m ovem en t" which commenced in 1942 that Mao Zedong imposed Maoism o n the Communist Party of China. At the conclusion of this m ovem ent, the whole process was capped by a falsification of the CPC’s history. The

rectification

movement of the CPP was

intended to

p ro ce e d

somewhat differently, but the principles appear to have been the sa m e . This movement (which, according to the document entitled The New

People’s Army adopted in March 1969, would, like Mao’s, last “a num ber of years”) 18 would begin with a falsification of the history of the PKP, but its aim would also be to ensure that the ideology of the CPP w as unswervingly Maoist. The basic document in this campaign, Rectify Errors

and Rebuild the Party, was put forward at the “Re-Establishment Congress.” Many of Sison’s “criticisms” of the PKP appear in his Philippine

Society and Revolution, which appeared in 1971 under the name “Amado Guerrero,” published by the “Chinese Maoist publishing house in Hong Kong, Ta Kuong Pao.”19 The author has discussed many of these “criticisms” in his Forcing the Pace. The following, however, may serve as an illustration of the quality of the arguments advanced (it should be remembered that the intended audience consisted largely of young people for whom this would be the only knowledge of the PKP’s history). The PKP is taken to task for failing, in the closing stages of World War II, to undertake “ideological and political preparation against the return of US imperialism and the reimposition of feudalism in the countryside”20 and for welcoming and fighting alongside US troops. According to Sison, the party “organized the Democratic Alliance so that it could help US imperialism put up a sham republic”21 and at least one motive behind this was the “desire to occupy high positions in the puppet reactionary government” of the “hidden traitors within the Party.” In fact, there was one major error in the PKP’s work in the latter stages of the war and in the immediate postwar period: a failure to appreciate fully the nature of US imperialism. This fundamental mistake was later fully acknowledged by the PKP. Moreover, while Luis Taruc, the wartime guerrilla leader, may well have harbored

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personal ambitions at this stage, it is obviously not true that the Democratic Alliance was a sham to “help US imperialism”: the DA was an historically necessary united front organization which aimed to be the voice of antilandlordism, anti-imperialism, and nationalist development within the new legislature. Moreover, it succeeded in electing a sufficient num ber

o f candidates to have blocked the pro-imperialist legislative proposals o f President Roxas, High Commissioner McNutt, etc. It was after the electoral success of the DA that the Roxas government stepped up military measures against the Huks and, of course, the Alliance congressmen were prevented from taking their seats. Sison makes mention of the fact that in 1947 Pedro Castro was removed as General Secretary and replaced by Jorge Frianeza, “who was even worse because he openly advocated all-round cooperation with the puppet regime notwithstanding the brazen acts of fascist terror against the Party, the army and the people.”22 Sison admits, however, that Frianeza was removed a year later. In fact, there was never any call for “all-round cooperation” with Roxas. What did happen was that the majority within the politburo insisted on supporting four Liberal candidates for the Senate on the grounds that there was no real difference between the Liberals and the Nacionalistas. This hardly amounts to all-round cooperation. Also unmentioned by Sison is the fact that the opposition to the politburo majority was led by the organization bureau headed byfose Lava. The peace talks of June 1948 with the Quirino government are represented by Sison as a “sell-out of the revolution.”23 This charge cannot be justified. In 1948 there was a pressing need to ensure the survival of the PKP-led forces. Being largely confined to the provinces of Central Luzon, it was recognized that there was no possibility of a revolutionary government being formed. Thus, apart from the survival of the veterans of the armed struggle against Japan, what was required was the opportunity to develop the PKP into a national organization, to reconstruct the trade union movement in the urban areas and the peasant movement in the countryside and then, by forging alliances with other progressive classes and strata, develop a united front against imperialism. Given the fact that

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the armed exchanges between the Huks and the government forces h a d been of a defensive nature on the part of the former, the PKP could h ard ly be criticized for seeking peace terms which would permit it to d e v e lo p along the aforesaid lines. When the amnesty broke down, the H u ks returned to the hills. The point made by the PKP at the time was that it could not afford to be seen to be refusing to negotiate; far better for th e government to appear in the popular perception as the unreasonable

p a rty .

This can hardly be called a “sell-out of the revolution.” The PKP’s support of Jose Laurel’s candidacy in the 1949 elections is represented as a “counterrevolutionary practice."24 Sison refers to Laurel’s collaboration with the Japanese during the occupation, but he makes n o mention of the fact that Laurel promised to join an armed revolt with the PKP if the election was lost due to fraud, or that the very decision to support his candidacy was only reached after fierce argument within the PKP. In fact, a more wholehearted support of his candidacy, accompanied by a determined attempt to thwart the government’s electoral fraud and terrorism, could well have resulted in a significantly changed political situation. It cannot be denied that the PKP made a number of mistakes since its formation in 1930. However, the CPP’s “rectification” movement made no attempt whatever to analyze these mistakes and the reasons for them; instead, every opportunity was taken to attack the PKP, and as we have seen such attacks would often involve the use of statements which were questionable. Moreover, on those occasions when the criticism was justified, no mention was made of the fact that the PKP had itself reached the same or similar conclusions on some of these. Of course, the breakaway from the PKP could not have been “justified” quite so facilely if the CPP admitted that the PKP was amenable to discussion of past errors. Significantly, years later members of Sison’s group would, while requesting anonymity, admit to Nemenzo that the 1967 split had been “avoidable.”25 An example of the libellous lengths to which Sison was prepared to go was provided by his attack on William Pomeroy, the US communist who joined the HMB in 1950 and, as a result, spent the years 1952 to late 1961 in Philippine prisons. In a series of six articles in the CPP’s journal,

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Ang Bayan, and published in booklet form by the “Revolutionary School of Mao Tse-tung Thought” in 1972, Sison describes Pomeroy as a “counter­ revolutionary renegade and scab” who “also exercises his role as a special agent of US imperialism.”26 Sison claims that the US Embassy “interceded” on behalf of Pomeroy and his wife Celia, securing their release from prison. “It was obvious then,” says Sison, that “Pomeroy had finished one more tour of duty for US imperialism.”27 These allegations are as absurd as they are distasteful. If they were true, why did Sison maintain friendly relations with Pomeroy prior to the split of 1967, sending him the early issues of

Progressive Review with a personal note, congratulating him on his release?28 Why did Sison, as editor, publish an article by Pomeroy in that journal? If the US Embassy had “interceded” on Pomeroy’s behalf, why was Celia Mariano Pomeroy, his wife, unable to gain entry into the USA? According to Nemenzo, Sison had arranged for Pomeroy’s poems to be published, and, when Nemenzo had been a little reticent in visiting Pomeroy after his own arrival in the UK, Sison had recommended him to the American. Then again, says Nemenzo, Celia Pomeroy, and Sison’s wife became close friends when Celia, after her release, would regularly use the University of the Philippines library, where Julieta de Lima Sison worked.29 Such behavior is, surely, inconsistent with a genuine belief that Pomeroy was a “counter­ revolutionary renegade.” We can only wonder at the motives for such an attack, although it is true that, following his release from prison, Pomeroy, began to publish a series of works on the Philippines which projected a view direcdy contrary to the line now being pursued by Sison; and the latter may have felt it even more important to single out Pomeroy for special treatment because he was producing more analytical and historical material on the Philippines than the PKP itself (a situation which did not, of course, reflect well on the PKP). Sison’s attack in fact took the form of a “critique” of these works. At this stage of its existence, however, the CPP (or at least its leadership) was not overly concerned with the truth. More important was the attempt to apply Maoist policies in the Philippines, and for this an army would be required.

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N otes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11 .

Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution; The L ea d er's View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 46. William Pomeroy, Political Affairs, April 1972, 32. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. Ibid. Quite possibly, it was this circumstance that gave Sison theimpression that MASAKA had been formed “outside of the ken" of the PKP. (See ch a p te r 1.) The Pomeroys say that Baking and Rodriguez turned against the party due to Jose Lava’s insistence in prison that no individual PKP prisoner (n ot even a twelve-year-old courier) should mount an individual appeal against his sentence (William and Celia Pomeroy, “The Conflict between Jose Lava and William and Celia Pomeroy,” internal PKP memo, circa 1982). Eduardo Lachica, Huk- Philippine Agrarian Society inRevolt (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House), 1971, 171. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla M ovem ent (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 17. Henceforth, this book is referred to as R ed Revolution. Ibid., 18. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “Rectification Process in the Philippine Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim JooJock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 80. Sison, The Leader's View, 57. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes in this section are from the CPP’s Program fo r a People's Democratic Revolution. This can be found as an appendix to Lachica, Huk.

Discussion with former CPP cadres, September 2009. 12. Quoted in Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 231. 13. Metro Manila Rizal Regional Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines, “PPDR: Class Line vs Mass Line,” February 22, 1994. 14. Jones, Red Revolution, 25. 15. Alex Magno, “Imposter,” Philippine Star, September 11, 2007. 16. Lachica, Huk, 195. 17. Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2007), chapter 2. 18. This document may also be found as an appendix to Lachica, Huk. 19. William Pomeroy, Political Affairs, April 1972, 35.

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20. “Amado Guerrero,” Philippine Society and Revolution (n.p.: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1979), 32. 21. Ibid., 3322. Ibid., 36. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Ibid., 37. Ibid. Nemenzo, Rectification, footnotes 13-14, 99. Amado Guerrero, Pomeroy’s Portrait: Revisionist Renegade (Revolutionary School of Mao Zedong Thought, 1972), vi.

27. Ibid., 39. 28. The author has seenSison’s note among Pomeroy’s papers. 29. FranciscoNemenzo Jr., interview by the author, January 2008.

C h a pter 4 : T h e N e w P e o p l e ’s A rm y i Some time before his capture in 1964, Jesus Lava arranged for Pedro Taruc, a distant cousin of Luis Taruc, wartime commander o f the Hukbalahap, to occupy the position of PKP general secretary, which he himself had vacated in order to take over the post of chairman.1 It is possible that the intention was that Taruc would put his name to party statements, deflecting attention from Lava. The plan backfired, however, as Taruc fell prey to Faustino del Mundo, better known as Commander Sumulong, a former Huk who, having degenerated into banditry, had been expelled by the PKP for “financial and sex opportunism.”2 Sumulong based himself in the Angeles area of Pampanga, where the nearby Clark airbase provided rich pickings for the guerrilla-tumedgangster. According to Felicisimo Macapagal (who would become general secretary of the PKP in 1970), Sumulong used the party name as a cover for his protection rackets and was responsible for the deaths of several PKP members. He also offered his services to establishment candidates at election time, working for those who offered most and killing “anyone who went against their way.”3 According to James Wilson, deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy, Sumulong’s income from Clark airbase was around PI million annually, although Lachica puts forward the more modest estimate of between P40,000 and P50.000 per month.4 Pomeroy claims that Sumulong enjoyed “a ‘security1 arrangement with the US military

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authorities, who allowed him to dominate the nightclub-brothel-gambling network in Angeles frequented by American troops.” The same author also relates that strike-breaking was another of Sumulong’s activities.5 Leonardo Guerrero recalls that Rex Nazareno, who founded the first union at Clark Air Base, rejected Sumulong’s demand for “50 percent of the union dues as ‘tax.’”6 In early 1967, a US military officer and an American civilian promised Nazareno $175,000 if he would dismantle the union. He refused, although rumors were spread that he was now rich. A few months later, Nazareno was tortured and killed, allegedly by four Angeles City policemen, followers of Sumulong, who demanded to know where the money was hidden.7 In 1965, Sumulong’s operation split into two warring factions, one coming under the leadership of Cesareo Manarang, otherwise known as Commander Alibasbas, who based himself in Concepcion, Tarlac. After the split, Alibasbas, his three sons, a daughter-in-law and five others were all killed as they slept. Two of Alibasbas’s bodyguards later confessed to the murders, but Lachica suggests that Sumulong was probably behind it, pointing out that when subordinates fell out with him they usually met “properly heroic deaths” after being cornered by the Philippine Constabulary (PC), the inference being that Sumulong would tip off the authorities.8 Thus a Commander Freddie, having fallen out with Sumulong over support of a mayoral candidate for Tarlac town, was killed by the PC, following which a young man called Bemabe Buscayno, whose nom de guerre was Commander Dante, split from Sumulong and established his own guerrilla group in Tarlac. According to Sumulong, “[o]ur platform was not to topple the government. Dante did not like this. So now we are fighting each other. We believe in the right, not in communism. That is why Tarlac separated from us.”9 Jones tells us that Dante had been reading “Mao’s Little Red Book, a gift from a Tarlac politician who had visited China.”10 According to Dizon, Pedro Taruc, although nominally general secretary o f the PKP was virtually a prisoner. He was in terms of party documents the secretary, but Sumulong did not recognize this. It was Sumulong and Alibasbas who were ruling there, not Pedro. Pedro became the excuse for the Sumulong

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group to claim the name PKP for themselves, and they said “Look, we have Pedro, he’s the secretary of the PKP." But he was a virtual prisoner. Sumulong had become an enemy and had killed many cadres by this time, so that the HMB' in Angeles was fighting against Sumulong. At one of the (party] meetings, I remember they assigned a peasant leader to go and rescue Pedro. But Sumulong got wind of this and Pedro was murdered— his own bodyguard stabbed him—before we could reach him.11 Pomeroy would appear to have little sympathy with the view that P e d ro Taruc was a prisoner of Sumulong, pointing out that both played along w ith those press reports presenting the Sumulong group as the continuation o f th e HMB “by holding press conferences in which they talked of revolution an d agrarian reform.”12 Sumulong either surrendered or was captured (Pom eroy takes the former view) in September 1970. A month later, Taruc was killed in Angeles City in what Lachica describes as “mysterious circumstances.”13 Pomeroy claims that “Sumulong betrayed Pedro Taruc to his death, to prevent his hidden loot from being confiscated by his lieutenant.”14 In a 1972 article, Pomeroy alleges that in 1969 Sison had attempted to persuade Sumulong to provide him with the basis for his guerrilla army but that the “gangster wanted to share his territory with no one.”15 Dizon finds this hard to accept, “because to be associated with Sumulong would have been very bad,” and thus he speculates that Sison may have been more interested in some of the commanders under him, who were “good elements . . . or the guns that Sumulong had, or the money.”16 In 1989, however, Jones confirmed that Sison had approached Sumulong and that this led to Rodolfo Salas walking away from the “Re-Establishment Congress” in disgust. Elsewhere in his book Jones relates that “[ylears later, ranking CPP associates of Sison recalled that the Party leader had on two occasions travelled to Central Luzon to meet Commander Sumulong to discuss a possible alliance, but the Huk overlord had not appeared.”17 Nilo Tayag confirms that “we were a party looking for an army, so we had to negotiate with Commander Sumulong, but unfortunately we were one hour late.” Later, in prison, Tayag asked Sumulong what would have happened

Although formally disbanded, some genuine former HMB forces remained under arms in Central Luzon.

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if the meeting had occurred as planned, and was told: “I would have buried all of you.”18 There is, then, no doubt that Sison made approaches to Sumulong. Weekley writes that, according to Rodolfo Salas, Sison had been motivated by the fact that Sumulong’s group “numbered about 300 and had ready access to arms.”19 An attempt to forge an alliance with Sumulong would have been consistent with Sison’s approach to Luis Taruc and other expelled members of the PKP (equally consistently, Sison would later point to these very people, despite the fact they had been expelled, as examples of the PKP’s degeneration).

2 Many have speculated on the role played by Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. in bringing together Sison, the revolutionary in search of an army, and Commander Dante, whose Tarlac group would eventually form the nucleus of the New People’s Army.20 Aquino himself admitted that he had cultivated relationships with remnants of the HMB. He was to boast that in the mid-1950s “I had terrific credentials among the Huks: the boy who befriended Luis Taruc.”21 Given the nature of Taruc’s surrender, it is rather doubtful whether genuine Huks would have been impressed by such credentials. It is apparent, however, that by “Huks,” Aquino had in mind the Sumulong group. Aquino admitted that he knew Sumulong, and that in 1965 he had asked the gangster not to intervene in the presidential campaign in Tarlac.22 At this stage, the army had promised Alibasbas an amnesty if he would act against Sumulong.23 Following the election, Aquino heard that he was caught in the cross fire: Alibasbas was now being promised an amnesty if he testified against Aquino while, on the other hand, Sumulong was after Aquino’s blood as he “thought I was in on the army’s plot to pit Alibasbas against him.”24 It was in these circumstances that Aquino came to rely on the services o f Commander Dante. Says Pomeroy: Dante entered into an alliance with Aquino typical of the corrupt landlorddominated Philippine rural politics, under which he delivered votes in

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the barrios and fended off encroachments by Sumulong (who formed an alliance with Aquino’s political enemies in the Marcos Nacionalista Party administration), in exchange for which Aquino gave paternal protection to Dante and his men” Dizon describes the Dante of this period as Aquino’s “bodyguard,”26 while Jones says that the two developed a friendship from the early 1960s. “As Aquino became more powerful, winning a seat in the Senate [in 1967] his friendship with Dante flourished. Dante was even a welcome guest at the Hacienda Luisita, coming around to visit Aquino and chat with his wife [future president Corazon Cojuangco Aquino].”27 After his arrest following the declaration of martial law in 1972, Aquino would be charged regarding a number of guerrilla-related matters: that he had been privy to the 1967 murder of Cecilio Sumat (leader of the Hacienda Luisita residents who were campaigning for the Cojuangcos to honor their undertaking to sell land to them) after Aquino had allegedly told Dante that Sumat was a Philippine Constabulary informer; that in 1965 he had led a guerrilla raid on the Hacienda Rodriguez owned by Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, Jr., the estranged cousin and political rival of Aquino’s brotherin-law; that he donated PI 5,000 to finance demonstrations in 1969; that he had provided the money for the hire of a car just before the New People’s Army (NPA) raid on the Philippine Military Academy in 1970; that he had provided shelter and medical attention to wounded NPA members; that he had allowed the use of Hacienda Luisita as “a sanctuary of the insurgents.” It was alleged that on two occasions he had given military equipment to NPA leaders. Between March and November 1969, he was alleged to have allowed the hacienda to be used as a “haven for the NPAs.” Finally, it was claimed that in March 1969 he allowed Sison, Arthur Garcia, and Nilo Tayag, all top CPP leaders, the use of his aircraft when they visited Tarlac to “lead” a strike against the Pantranco bus company.28 Although, after a trial lasting almost five years, Aquino was found guilty on all the main charges, it must be conceded that a decision by a Marcos court (in this case Military Commission No. 2) might be unsound. However, there are firm indications that Aquino played a role in the formation of the NPA. Even before martial law, there were rumors that Aquino was involved

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with the group. In his 1971 work, Lachica makes a number of allusions to these, pointing out, for example, that there “were important politicians to whom an independent Huk command in Tarlac would not be unwelcome. It could be used as a buffer against the ambitious Sumulong and as a form of leverage in dealing with rival politicians.”29 Dante could not have built up an army on ideology alone. He was getting material if not political support from somewhere. Commander Sumulong later denounced Dante’s “voluntary exile” from the HMB [sic] and named two prominent Tarlac politicians among those who had “poisoned” Dante’s mind so that they could “use him and his men in intimidating voters in the elections.” . . . Senator Aquino and his Cojuangco in-laws have been suspected by their political enemies of helping grubstake Dante for the reason that they are the only ones who could afford to do so.30 One of Aquino’s most persistent accusers was, of course, Ferdinand Marcos. When, in 1968, Aquino put forward a scheme for removing “guerrillas” from Central Luzon, Marcos scoffed: “I would like to have him tell us who were those who committed the killings in Concepcion lately. This I think would determine then how talented he is and how quick he is in helping us out in the peace and order problem.” Marcos alleged that under Aquino’s governorship Tarlac had become a “rest and recuperation area for the Huks.”31 Lachica suggests that the formation of the NPA was facilitated by Tarlac politicians: “In October, 1968, one of the China scholars was invited to talk with a group of progressive Liberal congressmen calling themselves the ‘Young Turks.’ A Central Luzon congressman invited the ‘professor’ to the hills to meet Dante. The ideologue took over from there.”32 A more specific charge which was to arise later was that the discussion between Dante and Sison concerning the establishment of the NPA had taken place at Aquino’s home on January 19, 1969; Aquino responded by demonstrating that he had been out of the country on that date— which is not to say, of course, that the meeting did not take place at his home. Not surprisingly, Sison appears to deny any involvement by Aquino: It was not necessary to have Aquino as go-between because there were so many possible reliable links. The Kabataang Makabayan was quite strong

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in Central Luzon. It was just a matter of firming up which link was to be used as soon as we heard of Commander Dante’s desire to meet- me.33 This explanation does not ring true. For example, in Central Luzon th e mass of KM members had in fact gone over to the PKP-led MPKP in 1967. Nilo Tayag concedes that the KM was “heavily weakened” as a result o f the split in the PKP, and that the chapters in Central Luzon (which he had organized) had seen most of their members withdraw from the KM and join the rival MPKP.34 Also, Sison’s statement stops short of denying that Aquino was involved and makes no mention of the “link” which was used. A PKP observer comments: Aquino was a young politician, very active in seeking support from the right, from the left, from the center. Sison, even when he was in the PKP, was projected as a youth leader, as a nationalist leader. He was known, his name was big in political circles. This attracted Aquino, and it was through Aquino that Buscayno iDante] was introduced to Sison. We had information that there were meetings in Luisita between Sison and Aquino. That’s where the allegation that the CIA had a participation in the formation of the CPP came about, because Aquino was greatly suspected of being a CIA operative . . . So he would use his helicopter to carry Sison and his trusted corporals to Luisita. There were meetings there and there was money contributed. Finally, when Buscayno was recruited the NPA was formed. Now, where would they have got their guns? Either they were given to them or they were given money to buy them.35 With regard to arms, Lachica points out that Dante had more guns than he had men, and that the former were 5.56 M-l6s which had not then even been issued to the Philippine Constabulary.36 Jones is rather more specific than the sources quoted so far, stating that in late 1968 Dante approached Congressman Jose Yap, whom he describes variously as Aquino’s “protege” and as the latter’s “chief south Tarlac lieutenant,” and requested that a meeting be arranged with Sison. This would tally with Lachica’s account of the arrangements for the meeting between Dante and “the professor” referred to above. However, Jones also relates that Aquino later claimed that “he personally drove Sison to the meeting . . .”37

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The matter would seem to be settled by the evidence of Nilo Tayag, the CPP’s first general secretary. Tayag, while denying the allegation that he had travelled to Tarlac in connection with the Pantranco bus strike with Sison and Arthur Garcia, or that he had ever travelled in Aquino’s aircraft, confirms that negotiations took place in Hacienda Luisita and that Aquino “was responsible for getting in touch with Commander Dante and arranging the meeting between Commander Dante and Jose Maria Sison.” He also says that Aquino allowed one of his houses “to be used as a sort of hospital for wounded NPAs, and of course he supplied firearms and probably information.”38 But what evidence is there that this was, in whole or in part, a CIA operation? The implications for the CPP of such an allegation are, of course, potentially devastating: this would mean that, rather than “the revolutionary army of the broad masses of the Filipino people against US imperialism,”39 the NPA was to a certain extent a creation of US imperialism. The CIA certainly did not enjoy the same cozy relationship with Marcos that it had fostered with some of his predecessors: just two years after the formation of the NPA Marcos would expel the CIA team from the Philippines on the grounds that it was plotting against him. According to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, speaking a year before the declaration of martial law, the CIA was expected to launch clandestine paramilitary operations in the Philippines and other countries. “One of the things the CIA clandestine people can do is start up wars. They can start up a private war in a country clandestinely and can make it look like it’s something that the local yokels have decided for themselves.”40 The Marcos government later alleged that while Aquino “was forging close ties with the CPP-NPA,” he “was ingratiating himself with a foreign intelligence agency whose goals are diametrically opposed to the communists.”41 There may well have been truth in this. But even if Aquino was acting on behalf of the CIA, there is of course no evidence that either Sison or Dante were aware of this. Presumably, their approach was essentially pragmatic: the NPA would need support and arms and a friendly base from which to operate. Aquino could supply all of these and, besides, he and his in-laws could well qualify for inclusion in the

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broad alliance which the CPP-NPA envisaged as necessary for the nationaldemocratic stage of the revolution. There is no doubt, however, that Aquino had CIA connections. Since his part, as a journalist, in the surrender of Luis Taruc in 1 9 5 4 , he had led an interesting life. At President Magsaysay’s suggestion he h ad spent four months in the USA, observing CIA training methods, following which he reported back to Magsaysay.42 By now he had married into th e wealthy Cojuangco family When the Spanish-owned Tabacalera com pany decided to sell the 7,000 hectare Hacienda Luisita, Magsaysay m entioned this to Aquino, as the former wished to avoid the property falling into the hands of the Lopez family. Aquino then approached his father-in-law, Jose Cojuangco, who purchased it.43After the death of Magsaysay, President Garcia asked Aquino if he would provide refuge for a group of anti-Sukarno colonels linked with the secessionist rebels of Sumatra. This was agreed, and a training camp was established on the hacienda which, according to Seagrave, was “[o]ne of the CIA’s favorite estates” as it “provided the Agency with facilities to train agents for conspiracies throughout Southeast Asia.”44 Kolko informs us that when the Sukarno loyalists stormed Sumatra to put down the rebellion, the CLA “assigned some three hundred to four hundred Americans and foreigners to supply the rebels with arms and supplies . . .”45 Amazingly, and by his own admission, one of these foreigners was Aquino, who was sent to Menado with two army radio technicians; he stayed a month and then returned to Manila to report.46 During his imprisonment in the 1970s, Aquino told military officials that he had received training in guerrilla tactics, intelligence gathering, propaganda, and agitation from the CIA. Marcos’s defense secretary, Juan Ponce Enrile, located Aquino’s intelligence files and, in correspondence with the latter, pointed out: These include a document on file as of 1967 to the effect that you were claiming to be a CIA agent and that you had been trained with the CIA in the United States. This document which I hereby attach indicates that although you offered to become a CIA agent, you were rejected.. . . The records contain a statement to the effect that you were utilizing these claims to advance your personal and political interests; at a time when identity with the CIA was considered an advantage in Philippine politics.

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In a further letter, however, Enrile admitted that he was now convinced (possibly because it suited his purposes, it must be said) that Aquino’s claims were true. It is now quite obvious that while you were working with the CIA, you actually were happy to be used by that agency for its purposes, even if it refused to be identified with you by rejecting your offer to train and work with the CIA. It is also quite obvious that you not only rendered service to a foreign government which could be classified under the nature of espionage, that you actually went out of your way to offer intelligence information to that foreign government.47 But if Sison viewed Aquino with pragmatic eyes, it is possible that Aquino’s motives were equally pragmatic. Relations with Marcos were sharp, to say the least, and Aquino had his own eye on the presidency. He therefore would have seen the benefit of using Sison and Dante to destabilize the Marcos regime. Equally, it is possible that any remaining links Aquino had with the CIA derived from his desire to become the USA’s candidate for the presidency. It is also true, however, that the form which Sison’s Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution envisaged for a future national-democratic regime would not have been repellent to Aquino, and this opens up a further possibility concerning the nature of the association between the two men. Certainly Aquino’s vision for the Philippines did not differ greatly from that of the CPP. While in prison, Aquino would write: economic independence must be restored under conditions set by the people themselves. It was this realization that prompted me to call for the nationalization of our basic and strategic industries during the late 1960s. I proposed then that all public utilities—for a start—should come under government ownership. In the area of mass transit, for example, I advocated a measure of subsidy to alleviate the difficulties of the working poor.48 Just as Aquino may have had no problem adjusting to a “new democratic” regime, it is also possible that Sison would have accepted the economic prescription quoted from Aquino. It is therefore probable that Sison viewed

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Aquino as rather more than a source of funds, arms, and a safe h av en . Indeed, Nilo Tayag recalls that while in prison, as a member of “a sp ecial branch of the Party, I heard that Ninoy Aquino was being invited to be so m e sort of president of the National Democratic Front. It could have b e e n a good combination, with Ninoy inspiring mass support. I heard that he w as invited to join them in the mountains but [laughter]. . . no agua diente . . .n49 This is confirmed by a recent account, according to which it was suggested at a meeting between Aquino and the CPP (Sison disagrees with Aquino’s version, saying that he was not in attendance, the party being represented by Julius Fortuna) on September 7, 1972, that Aquino lead a revolutionary government “in the hills.” Aquino declined the offer, saying it was premature. As far as the role of Sison is concerned, this was a far cry from the actions of an unblemished revolutionary anxious to “rectify” the party and establish an uncompromising alternative to the “Lavas and the Tarucs.” Given that suspicions concerning Aquino’s CIA connections were abroad even at the time of the foundation of the NPA, the formation of such a relationship must be considered, at the very least, somewhat reckless. Moreover, according to the account just referred to, five days after his meeting with the CPP on September 7 Aquino told the whole story to a political counselor from the US Embassy “and another Embassy political officer.” An airgram from the Manila Embassy to Washington reported that Aquino felt that “his ow n chances of becoming head of the government by legitimate means are slight. He thus may be willing at some point in the future to ally himself with the Communists as the leader of a revolution, if he is convinced that this is the best way for him to realize his ultimate political ambition.”50

3 The New People’s Army was “officially” launched on March 29, 1969— the anniversary of the foundation of the Hukbalahap. The Basic Rules o f the

New People’s Army adopted at this meeting envisaged three strategic stages in the “protracted people’s war”: strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, and strategic offensive. Although it would be subject to the leadership of the

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CPP, membership in an NPA fighting unit was open to any “able-bodied person, irrespective of age, sex, color, nationality or religious belief, who is capable of combat duties and who is ready to participate in a protracted armed struggle against the reactionary state power . . To cement the marriage, nine NPA members, including Dante, were “elected” to the central committee of the CPP. The NPA itself consisted at this stage of a “few score fighting men” according to an NPA leader.51 Sison admits to a figure of 65.52 But to begin with, the NPA did not pursue “protracted people’s war.” During the 1969 presidential election, one of Marcos’s cabinet officers allegedly contacted Sumulong for support because, as Marcos himself was later to explain: “We aren’t worried about him. We can destroy his people at any time. But Sumulong serves the purpose of being a buffer against Commander Dante. If we eliminate Sumulong, Dante would surely extend his influence to Pampanga, and that would be an extremely dangerous situation.”53 According to Pomeroy, during the same election the NPA resorted to the very practice which Sison had criticized earlier and “made a deal, through Aquino, to support the presidential candidacy of the Liberal Party Sergio Osmena, Jr.,” who “took a blatantly pro-imperialist line in his campaign. For this they were paid PI 0,000.”54 Initially, Nilo Tayag was assigned to negotiate with Osmena. “I tried to see Senator Osmena,” he recalls, “but he did not know me from Adam,” so the negotiations were “passed onto someone else.”55 At this stage, then, to a certain extent the NPA appeared to be operating in much the same way as the Sumulong group. According to Lachica, the political interests of the guerrillas appeared “to b e particularistic and short-term.” They exercised “some vested interests in the lower levels of municipal governments. For instance, some of their regulars or ‘combat support’ are employed as members of the municipal police forces or have key positions in the municipal staffs . . Z’56 The marriage between the Tarlac guerrillas and the Manila “theorists” proved stormy at first. Arthur Garcia, one of the leading KM activists and at the time the NPA’s “political commissar,” made the mistake of arrogantly referring to some of his peasant warriors as “no read, no write” and was killed as a result.57 Worse was to come, for only four months after the formation of

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the NPA the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Task Force Lawin set D ante on the run. Some of his men were pursued into Hacienda Luisita, w h ere a bloody confrontation was narrowly averted when government soldiers tried to frisk plantation employees.58 Lachica says that some members o f the fledgling guerrilla army retreated as far as the Zambales mountains and Dante was forced to disband “all but his elite guerrillas.”59 Nilo Tayag denies Lachica’s claim that this development served to completely sou r the relationship between Sison and Dante, although he admits that there were “heated discussions . . . We had to flee Tarlac because the central headquarters, including all the documents, were captured . . . including a roster of members.”60 According to AngKomunista, the PKP journal, this latest reverse was connected with the “landlord politicians” in Tarlac who, having first used the NPA as protection against Sumulong, providing the form er with its first “rural bases," now turned against the organization. After the A IT offensive, which was accompanied by the “killing, torturing and looting o f people in the barrios, the ‘revolutionary’ mayors got back what they gave the NPA on a silver platter*After sealing a secret deal at Malacaftang, they transformed the ‘rural bases’ into Barrio Self-Defense Units.”61 These BSDUs were antiguerrilla organizations encouraged by the AFP and modelled on similar organizations existing in South Vietnam’s “strategic hamlets.” All in all, the NPA hardly enjoyed a propitious beginning.

N otes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Interview with Jesus Lava, November 10,1976, interviewer unknown. A copy of the typescript of this interview is among the papers of William Pomeroy. Interview with Felicísimo Macapagal, date and interviewer unknown. A copy of the typescript of this interview is among the papers of William Pomeroy. Ibid. Eduardo Lachica, Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1971), 152. William Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines,” Political Affairs, May 1972, 39. Leonardo L. Guerrero and Jamil Maidan Flores, Where There Are No Slaves (Tokyo: Nomura International Publishing Co., 1990), 24. Ibid., 55-57.

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8. Lachica, Huk, 144. 9. Ibid, 149. 10. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside tbe Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 29. 11. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. 12. Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines,” 39. 13. Lachica, Huk, 203. 14. Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines," 40. 15. Ibid. 16. Dizon interview. 17. Jones, Red Revolution, 27. 18. Nilo Tayag, interview by the author, March 2009. 19. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993: A Story o f Its Theory and Practice (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 27. 20. Although it is usually claimed that Sison sought out Commander Dante, Quimpo says that in the end it was Dante’s group which “managed to link up with Sison.” See Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, Contested Democracy and tbe Left in tbe Philippines After Marcos (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), 58, 319 fn 7. 21. Nick Joaquin, Tbe Aquinos ofTarlac (Manila, 1988), 256. 22. Ibid, 300. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 301. 25. Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines,” 40. 26. Dizon interview. 27. Jones, Red Revolution, 28. 28. These details are taken from the “Decision of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council on the Application for Temporary Release by Benigno S. Aquino Jr.” issued as a result of Aquino’s request for release to campaign in the Election of 1978. The author viewed the document in the papers of William Pomeroy. 29. Lachica, Huk, l6l. 30. Ibid., 165. 31. Philippine Herald, October 30, 1968; Lachica, Huk, 211. Like many Filipinos at the time, Marcos was here using the word “Huks” in its generic sense. 32. Lachica, Huk, 182-83. 33. Sison, Tbe Leader's View, 59. 34. Nilo Tayag interview.

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35. This source, interviewed by the author in Manila in November 1989, has requested anonymity. 36. Lachica, Huk, 167. 37. Jones, Red Revolution, 27, 29. 38. Nilo Tayag interview. Tayag says that he and Dante discovered that they had been contemporaries at the same high school. 39. Basic Rules o f the New People 's Army. 40. “An Attack and a Reply,” USNews and World Report, October 11,1971, quoted by Merlin Magallona, “The Economic Content of Neo-Colonialism,” in M ortgaging the Future: The World Bank and IMF in the Philippines, ed. Vivencio R. Jose (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982), 75. 41. “Decision of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.'* 42. Nick Joaquin, Ihe Aquinos o f Tarlac (Manila, 1988), 249-52. 43. Ibid., 274. 44. Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 150. 45. Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1S>451980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 175. 46. Joaquin, The Aquinos o f Tarlac, 269. 47. This correspondence appears in “Decision of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.” 48. Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., Testament from a Prison Cell (Los Angeles: Philippine Journal, 1988), 42. 49. Nilo Tayag interview. 50. Lisandro Claudio, “Ninoy Networked with Everyone, Reds Included," GMANews, TV, August 18, 2010. 51. Servando Labrador, “On the Current State of the People’s Revolutionary War,” in The Filipino People Will Triumph (Central Publishing House, 1988), 11. 52. The Leader's View, 60. According to Our Urgent Tasks, the document issued by the CPP’s central committee in 1976, the NPA started life with 35 rifles and handguns. 53- Lachica, Huk, 151. 54. Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines,” 42. 55. Nilo Tayag interview. 56. Lachica. Huk, 208. 57. Pomeroy, “Maoism in the Philippines,” 41; Lachica, Huk, 191. 58. Lachica, Huk, 187. 59. Ibid., 189-90. 60. Nilo Tayag interview. 61. Mario Frunze, “Marxism-Leninism and ‘Revolutionary Quixotism,”’ Ang Komunista, February 1972.

PART THREE The PKP was not without its own problems during this period. Externally, of course, there was the CPP to contend with, and attempts to cooperate with the rank and file members of the new Maoist party came to naught at this stage as the CPP leadership engaged in what would become known as “vanguardism,” as evidenced by its role within the Movement for a Democratic Philippines. Internally, there were signs of instability, first as the PKP general secretary Francisco “Paco” Lava Jr. adopted an overcautious approach due to his fear that the party had been infiltrated, then as voices within the PKP sought to steer the party onto a A

path of outbidding the CPP in terms of militancy, a situation which gave rise to a second ultraleftist breakaway. The former problem was resolved peacefully, thereby demonstrating that the “Lava problem” of which Jose Maria Sison had made so much was soluble within the ranks of the party. The problem of the breakaway, on the other hand, was brought to a rather more sanguinary conclusion, and the reader will find that there are two different explanations as to why this was the case. That, so soon after the CPP breakaway, the PKP should be confronted with a further case of ultraleftism was almost certainly due to its failure to clarify its position on the use of violence and armed struggle, and its inability to hold a congress since 1946. It now proceeded to rectify this, and the Sixth Congress of 1973 is notable for the fact that it adopted what must be described as the first really up-to-date Marxist analysis of the economic situation in the Philippines; on the basis of this analysis, the PKP put forward a program in which it envisaged a path of noncapitalist development (a concept discussed in part 4, chapter 10).

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The part of the book which follows also deals with the controversial political setdement with the Marcos government concluded by the PKP in 1974. To understand this fully, chapter 8 examines Marcos’s evolution fro m his first term, when he behaved in the manner expected and encouraged b y Washington, to the early martial law period, by which time, no doubt partly due to his own material interests, he was exhibiting a marked tendency to behave more independently than his predecessors. Although, at its 1 9 7 3 congress, the PKP had been mistaken in its estimate of the role played by the USA in the declaration of martial law, the political settlement of th e following year, dealt with in chapter 9, was a logical step in light of th e strong anti-imperialist orientation provided by that congress.

C h a pter 5 : P a r t y against P a r t y i After the formation of the Maoist party, the PKP resumed its organizational work, but increasingly found it necessary to devote attention to the CPP. While on occasion it would attempt to work with CPP-led groups and rank and filers on an ad hoc basis, its relations with the breakaway soon deteriorated to the point of outright hostility. Following Lacsina’s temporary defection to Sison’s camp (and the loss, therefore, of NATU), PKP trade unionists formed a new labor federation, the Pambansang Kilitsan ng Paggawa (KILUSAN, National Workers’ Movement), which brought together the print-workers’ Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF) and others. In early 1969, using the Manila chapter of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation as a sponsor, the party launched a “National Campaign to Free All Political Prisoners”; the other PKP-led mass organizations provided the “foot soldiers" in this campaign, which collected 70,000 signatures and resulted in the release of Jose Lava,* Angel Baking, Sammy Rodriguez and others in February 1970 (although all three of the aforementioned had been captured in the “Politburo raid" of 1950,

Earlier, Jose Lava, leader of the imprisoned PKP members, had rejected all suggestions that a campaign should be launched for their release, so confident was he that victory was at hand.1 After his release, he went to Prague as the PKP's representative on the journal World Marxist Review, remaining there until the so-called velvet revolution of 1989.

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the latter two had in the meantime been won over to Sison).2The s e co n d congress of the new PKP-led youth organization, the MPKP, on January 2 5 , 1970, was attended by a claimed 800 delegates, some 80 percent of w h om were workers and peasants.3 The following year saw the formation o f a Young Communist League with the MPKP used as a recruitment base. While MASAKA, the PKP-led peasant organization, led a fairly healthy existence, growing to a claimed membership of 60,000, the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism was a shadow of the organization formed in 1967, although it would struggle on until the declaration of martial law in 1972. Thoroughly bewildered by the polemics between the PKP and th e CPP, many businessmen (with the exception of staunch anti-imperialists like Alejandro Lichauco) and professionals decamped, reducing the breadth o f the organization. Indeed, there are indications that MAN declined into little more than a PKP front. Certainly its journal Political Review, first published in March 1971, contained no news of MAN activities and ran articles and editorials that might have deterred many noncommunist potential allies and affiliates— analyses of the Sino-Soviet split and Maurice Dobb’s Lenin a n d

Imperialism Today, for example. In the meantime, the breach between the PKP and Ignacio Lacsina had been healed. Nemenzo recalls that after Lacsina’s NATU affiliated to the Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions, “the Russians were insisting we have talks with Lacsina. It was confirmed that there was a rift between Lacsina and Sison.” This led to an alliance between the PKP and the Lacsina-Ied (although much reduced) Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP), and the “SPP newspaper was going to be our common oigan. The newspaper only came out for one issue, and the SPP folded with martial law.”4 The second issue of MAN’S Political Review (the similarity of the tide to Progressive Review was probably not accidental) reprinted the SPP’s “Program for a People’s Democracy,” which called for socialist-oriented agrarian reform and nationalist industrialization, proposing a greater role for the state sector at the expense of the private sector, and promised that “the SPP will do all within its power to hasten the ripening of one stage to the

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next until the ultimate task of building a full socialist society is achieved.” As for its policy on alliances, the “SPP, from lessons of history and experience, does not believe in unprincipled, loose and insincere alliance with other organizations or groups. A united front to be serious, effective and lasting, must be based on the principle of a worker-peasant hegemony . . ”5 While the experience referred to might have been that of the LM’s “coalition” with Macapagal, the public announcement of the SPP’s long-term socialist aspirations in the MAN journal would have done litde to gam er support for MAN from those who, while opposing the domination of the Philippines by foreign interests, stopped short of desiring a socialist economy. Given such an approach, it was hardly surprising when, following the bombing of the Liberal Party rally in the Plaza Miranda in 1971, MAN was on the list of “subversive” organizations the solicitor general submitted to the Supreme Court in support of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Relations with Sison’s CPP were obviously tense, and in the countryside there were armed clashes between the two.* Weekley writes that “[mjemories of the PKP informing on national-democrat activists, kidnappings and even killings (in the late 1960s and early 1970s) remain fresh in older CPP members’ minds,”8 but there were two sides to this dispute. Claims Pedro Baguisa (PKP general secretary at the time of writing): “We were not the ones starting the violence against the CPP. In 1971 there were ambuscades against us . . . Rallies were attacked by them. Our comrades took revenge.” Baguisa argues that “our stand to other groups was principled. In fact, if the party had decided to annihilate all of them [the CPP] during the first year,

The situation in Central Luzon was further confused by what Lachica describes as “a rampage of terror and counter-terror” largely caused by a group of armed thugs dubbed the “Monkees" which was thought to have been organized by the government. In May 1969, for example, Monkees in eight jeeps drove through Angeles firing at civilians for the best part of an hour. According to city officials, the Philippine Constabulary had prior knowledge of the raid and it was rumored that the Monkees received their arms from military sources.6 Ranged against the Monkees were the followers of Commander Sumulong who, perhaps predictably, came to be known as the “Beatles.” Completing the triangle was a group of men under the leadership of Commander Diwa still referred to as the HMB; these had broken away from Sumulong when instructed by the PKP to do so, but had not joined Dante (who had, in fact, served under Diwa in the HMB) in the fledgling NPA.7

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it could have done it because they didn’t have the New People’s Army yet. We were hoping the differences could be reconciled.”9 Vivencio Jo se, o n e of the leaders of the SDK breakaway from KM, also has painful m em ories of the period, having spent time in hospital following an assassination attempt allegedly directed by Sison.10 In Manila, however, attempts were made to salvage some form of unity. One such attempt was represented by the formation in late 1969 of the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), following the violent and fraudulent elections in November that year in which Marcos was reckoned to have spent P200 million to secure his reelection.11 The MDP quickly developed into a united-front umbrella organization, albeit a fragile on e, in which the PKP-led mass organizations— the MPKP, MASAKA, KILUSAN, BRPF, and the unemployed workers’ group AKSIUN— were represented along with the CPP-led KM and SDK. According to the PKP, however, it soon became apparent that the CPP was attempting to “capture” the n ew organization. In preparation for a protest against the curtailment of the rights of students in private schools to organize protests, the committee established to draft the students’ manifesto was made up solely of SDK and KM activists; when published, it was noted that among the signatories to the document were separate chapters of the KM, whereas the MPKP and the BRPF were identified as single organizations. This same device w as then used to outvote the PKP-led affiliates. Nemenzo says that, despite its avowed purpose of fomenting unity, the MDP “became a debating society. I remember that Sison sent us a spokesman—Jose David Lapus— who had a very dirty mouth, so we put up to fight him somebody who also had a dirty mouth, and that was Haydee Yorac.” In time, Lacsina’s NATU becam e alienated by the CPP’s tactics and ceased participation in the MDP, and the PKP-led affiliates also left the organization.12 For many years

now, the organization of the series of mass

demonstrations during the first three months of 1970— dubbed, with a degree of romanticism, the “First Quarter Storm”— has been portrayed as solely the handiwork of Sison’s followers. According to the MPKP, however, the first actions were organized by the MDP while the PKP-

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led mass organizations were still active affiliates and, indeed, some 3,000 members of the MPKP and MASAKA took part in the demonstration of January 30-31.13 The PKP’s own characterization of the “Storm” appears to have changed, depending on the state of its relations with the CPP. Writing in December 1970, Jorge Maravilla (William Pomeroy) described it as “a mass forum, to demonstrate popular distrust of the corrupt bourgeois legislature and the need to bring issues for discussion and decision to the people.”14 By November 1971, however, “Francisco Balagtas” (Jose Lava, always more prone to discern the hand of foreign intelligence services than Pomeroy) was describing the CPP as enjoying “ample funds coming from dubious sources (including Filipino agents of the CIA and other oligarchs) and staging ‘militant’ mass demonstrations, projecting the slogans of anti­ imperialism and anti-feudalism,” but directing their attacks “not only on the Marcos administration, but also on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries and on the genuine Communist Party of the Philippines.” With some prescience, Lava continued: Whether or not this group is a genuine Marxist party, or is merely a CIA front, or a combination of the two, is still unresolved. What is more important, the American imperialists and their class collaborators may utilize the highly provocative words and actions of the “Maoist” group and its followers to justify the establishment of a military-fascist dictatorship for the suppression of the genuine revolutionary movement for national liberation.15 Lava went further when he later wrote in the same journal: “US agents instigated anti-imperialist parties and groups to stage mass demonstrations, hoping to use them to discredit the regime still further. Such demonstrations were launched in early 1970 by the Maoists and their Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP) organized to counterpose against the MAN.”16 Balagtas/Lava went on to explain that while the PKP had participated in the demonstrations, it had argued that they should be directed against US imperialism “in which the role of its puppets (open and concealed) would be linked and exposed,” whereas the CPP wished to concentrate its fire on Marcos. Relations between the parties reached a new low when

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the press reported that only 1,000 had attended the MDP demonstration o n May Day, 1970, while the PKP-led rally had attracted ten times that nu m b er (something which may in part have been explained by the fact that m any of the CPP’s youthful followers studying at Manila universities would have returned to their homes in the provinces for the summer break, although the UP chapter of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation also charged that this was a result of the KM’s “unnecessary polarization” of the national democratic movement).17 Following this, the CPP issued a leaflet exposing the identity of almost the entire central committee of the PKP, leading the latter to “re-examine its previously conciliatory, defensive policy, in favor of taking the offensive against the Filipino Maoists.”18* This policy decision would, therefore, explain the different slant thereafter placed on the “First Quarter Storm” by the PKP. The

“Storm” began

on January

26,

when

20,000

anti-Marcos

demonstrators rallied outside the Congress building. The demonstration w as attacked by police, and this led to a further rally protesting against police brutality in which, ironically, four students were shot dead in the “Battle o f Mendiola Bridge.” The situation then escalated, with 150,000 demonstrators in the streets of Manila and various provincial capitals.20 Over the next three months, a series of “people’s marches,” attracting between 30,000 and 60,000 each time, took place in Manila and elsewhere. The phenomenon became known as the “parliament of the streets.” Although the MDP may have planned the initial demonstrations, and Sison may have predictably claimed that CPP-led organizations “supervised” the “First Quarter Storm,” Jones interviewed a former member of the CPP’s central committee who admitted that “Party control over the protests was looser perhaps than Sison suggested,” while maintaining that the party was prominent “in secretly organizing and encouraging the radical upheaval.”21 In truth, it is likely that, given the numbers involved, some of the actions were spontaneous

In 1971 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation complained when, in similar fashion, a memo was published in the Philippine Collegian in which the author, claiming to be a member, alleged that Francisco Nemenzo Jr. and Ruben Torres had boasted to a BRPF gathering that they were high-ranking PKP members.19

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in nature, a possibility which would appear to be borne out by Goodno’s observation that the “Storm” passed because at “the end of March the students were packing their bags to return home for the summer.”22 Be that as it may, even Dizon (then a prominent young PKP member) admits that Sison’s followers in Manila were strongest at this time, even if some of us would not admit it. Of course, the situation agreed with them—the media was adventuristic, publishing statements by Dante, etc. All the demonstrations became violent and so they hit the newspaper headlines. So I must say that they were able to capture the initiative within the left at this point. The student ranks were almost closed to us. We were not able to penetrate because they were there. But then their adventuristic methods gave the push for the suspension of habeas corpus . . . Now, it appears that they were consciously aggravating the situation, inviting the declaration of martial law by the Plaza Miranda bombing, the provocation during demonstrations. We would all be demonstrating together and suddenly a group would come and hurt stones at us and a fight would ensue. In turn, that invited police action, so tear gas and all kinds of police violence were used.* They were really inviting this all the time. The Lyceum University used to be a base of the progressive movement—owned by Laurel, who was very helpful to the nationalist movement. One time, they destroyed all the windows so that the Lyceum was unrecognizable . . . At mass rallies they had placards calling for Dante to be president. There was no distinction between legal and armed struggle. They were trying to connect the two so that you would be forced to go underground . . . The result was a very messy situation, the political atmosphere so charged that Marcos declared martial law. It was capped by Plaza Miranda.24 In August 1971, a Liberal Party rally was bombed in Manila’s Plaza Miranda, leaving nine dead and ninety-eight (including the eight Liberal candidates

onstage)

injured.

Marcos

immediately blamed

the

NPA,

Benjamin Pimentel Jr. cites a claim by a former activist that “one out of about 20 members who joined the KM in 1970 turned out to be a government agent"23—something which may have explained some of the more counterproductive actions during the “Storm.”

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suspending the writ of habeas corpus and arresting political activists. M ost, however, accused President Marcos, or at the very least the Philippine military, of arranging the bombing. Years later, there were allegations that the atrocity had, after all, been the work of Jose Maria Sison.25 At the tim e, the bombing took the Philippines a step closer to the martial law regim e that would be declared a year later.

2 Ever since his break with the PKP, Sison has dubbed that party th e “Lava group.” In fact, no member of the Lava family has led the PKP sin ce 1970, the year that Francisco “Paco” Lava Jr. was removed from his position as general secretary and expelled. According to Nemenzo, Even early on, Paco behaved in a manner that Sison warned me about— that he took orders from his uncles in prison; that even party decisions would get reversed when he got the opinion of Peping [Jose Lava]. We noticed that it was a family council. . . MASAKA and the UIF [the PKP-led printers’ union] also noticed this and were unhappy—especially when he did not want to attend meetings any more.26 For Lava now claimed that the PKP had been infiltrated and that his life was in danger, writing a long memorandum to this effect. According to one PKP leader, Lava was probably influenced by a Fred Bautista who, recendy released from prison, considered that “everyone he didn’t know was suspect.”27 One possibility is that the paranoia concerning infiltration was being used as a ploy to rid the party of those who did not share Lava’s views and replace them with those who, like Bautista, were both close to and loyal to the Lavas.28 Lava, anyway, went deep underground. “What was funny was that he was going underground from the party. He was hiding not in the folds of the party but away from the party, saying that he could not rely on the party.”29 Lava’s memorandum and his behavior angered

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the politburo, and a delegation was sent to meet him. Brandishing a gun, he warned that they should not approach him closely. He maintained his refusal to emerge from hiding until the party was clear of “dangers,” and refused to attend meetings or be subject to democratic centralism. This led to his expulsion, coupled with a warning— which he heeded— that he should not attempt to form a faction. He was succeeded as general secretary by Felicisimo Macapagal, a veteran of the Huk period. The change of leadership was marked by an intensification of the struggle against the CPP. Before Sison broke away, the PKP had, ironically, not taken sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In fact, Romeo Dizon recalls that just prior to the split it was not unusual for articulate leading members such as him to be asked to lecture on Mao’s On New Democracy.** Nemenzo says that, although there was no official stance, most of the leaders, including the Lavas, were pro-China, and that it was only after the Sison split, when the central committee was reorganized and MASAKA members were brought on, that his own pro-Soviet stance was reinforced.31 This is an indication of the extent of the PKP’s isolation from the international communist movement and the state of its ideological work since the defeat of the HMB.* In January 1971 the party issued a sixteen-page statement on the CPP— although this appeared in the guise of a statement by the MPKP youth organization. Given the lurid title of “Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism of the Renegade Opportunist KM-Sison Gang,” the statement appeared in Struggle, the organ of the Philippine Council of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.* This explained the origin of the MDP (referred to earlier in this chapter) and was written in response to a heightened barrage of propaganda against the MPKP and other PKP-led organizations by the CPP’s

•

This isolation was ended when William and Celia Pomeroy, having been released from prison in 1962, made a lengthy visit to the Soviet Union between September 1966 and March 1967, during which time they rebuilt the links between the PKP and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; two years later, the PKP attended what was to be the last International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow. Thereafter, the PKP became identified with the Soviet camp.52

t

One can only wonder what Lord Russell, who had died on February 2, 1970, at the age of 97, would have made of this.

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own youth organization. To a certain extent, the statement revealed that th e PKP at this stage had more in common with the CPP than might have b e e n expected, for there were references to the “semi-colonial and sem i-feudal” character of the Philippines, and Marcos’s regime was described as “fascist” (and this even before the declaration of martial law). The statement criticized Sison for his plagiarism (recording that he had submitted an article to the Philippine Collegian which had in fact b een written by Francisco Lava Jr., Merlin MagaIlona, and Alejandro Lichauco for MAN) and castigated Sison’s followers for the acts of vandalism against the property of ordinary citizens during the “First Quarter Storm,” leading the authors to conclude “that KM leaders are acting consciously or unconsciously as agents of the ruling classes and are participating in the plot of the fascist state to defeat the aims of the Movement through vile means.” Scorn was poured upon the KM’s urgings to “Organize Rebel Committees!,” “Make Revolution in Neo-Colonial Schools!,” “Jo in the R e v o lu tio n !a n d “Create Urban Liberated Areas!” Their slogans o f

“Mabuhay si D anter (Long Live Dante!) and “Join the New People’s Army!” were viewed as even more wrongheaded: To declare in public allegiance to and support of armed groups engaged in illegal (armed) struggle is to invite intensification of state repression and infiltration which would eventually lead to the outlawing of your own group based on existing bourgeois laws. When a progressive mass organization is declared illegal, it loses its mass character, its leaders and most of its members are forced to go underground (which at this stage of the struggle would be most untimely), and it would be a hundred times more difficult to engage in politicization of the masses. Here, of course, the authors were drawing on the bitter experience of the PKP during the HMB period and issuing a well-intentioned warning to students apt to be seduced by the romantic imagery of the CPP. It would appear that the decision to issue the statement under the name of the MPKP was not taken haphazardly, for the document pointed out that “[t]he youth front of the struggle has been the most militant sector of the struggle and it is also on this front that the split within the Movement is

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most severely felt.” The warning was not heeded, however, and the KM was eventually banned by Marcos. In response to the KM’s claim that the MPKP was controlled by those in “physical and ideological affinity with the Lavas,” the document drew attention to the “physical affinities” of some leading KM and SDK personalities. One was related to an intelligence agent, the father of another was Judge Advocate General during the suppression of the movement in the 1950s, a third was the son of the head of the military intelligence service during the same period, yet another was the son of a National Bureau of Intelligence (NBI) agent. It was claimed that Sison himself had a brother who was currently an NBI agent and another who was with the presidential economic staff. Furthermore, one KM leader was the technical assistant of “CIA boy Senator Aquino” and— irony of ironies— none other than Vicente Lava Jr., formerly an executive with Colgate-Palmolive, was now a KM ally. One KM leader, the document claimed, was fond of brandishing a safe-conduct pass signed by the Manila police chief and two others were seen riding in a governmentowned jeep during an eight-day jeepney strike. Referring to a congressional report, the statement pointed to more sinister developments. A revealing document is the “Final Report on the Root Causes of Mass Demonstrations” submitted by the Agbayani Committee . . . of the Lower House of Congress. Pages 76-78 of the Report contain the testimony of the notorious clerico-fascist Fr. Jose Blanco who claims to have trained some 150 student activists since he arrived from Indonesia in 1966. According to Blanco, he was assigned to the student front by his superiors in the Jesuit Orders. A number of the 150 students trained were later instructed to return to their respective organizations like KM, NUSP [National Union of Students of the Philippines) and NSL [National Student League] as a tactic of infiltration. Perhaps this would explain why the KM and its fraternal groups now maintain a similarly purely anti-Marcos line with clericofascist organizations like Lakasdiwa, NUSP, etc. With regard to the “purely anti-Marcos line,” the MPKP statement pointed out that it served the interest of one faction of the ruling class,

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which had split into pro- and anti-Marcos camps. The latter group con sisted of “the Church establishment, the Jesuit ‘revolutionaries,’ the M anglapus group (these three are the clerico-fascists), a faction of the Nacionalista party, the Liberal Party, and the CIA faction in the state’s armed forces an d the Lopez ‘sugar bloc.’” Marcos, on the other hand, enjoyed the support of “the ‘political dynasties,’ the ‘private armies,’ his business partners and dummies, and the loyalist faction of the state’s armed forces.” As far as US imperialism was concerned, Marcos has been found sorely wanting. In the process of failing to carry out successfully American-sponsored programs of reform such as rural development and land reform because of the government bureaucracy and corruption he has woven, Marcos has thus failed to carry out the essential imperialist task of arresting the growth of the revolutionary movement of the masses led by the national democratic forces. And so Marcos is now a liability because his very corruption and bankruptcy obstructs the successful implementation of reform programs and hastens the revolutionary process aimed against American imperialism. The CIA was therefore backing the anti-Marcos camp with the aim o f further discrediting Marcos “in order to launch a CIA-sponsored coup d’état and install a new US puppet. Of course, a purely anti-Marcos line is w hat holds this group together.” Compared to that offered by the CPP, this was a sophisticated analysis and one which— albeit fifteen years later— was to be proved largely correct. But of rather more relevance for our present purposes was the position adopted by the PKP (although in the name of the MPKP) based upon this analysis. The present main task of the Movement therefore would be to expose this anti-Marcos camp of the ruling classes riding on the wave of popular discontent and posing as champions of genuine reform. Marcos would still be dealt with but essentially the job of completely discrediting him before the masses has been, for the most part, already accomplished. It would also be a secondary task of the Movement to expose pseudo-revolutionary groups now collaborating with the CIA-managed anti-Marcos camp like the “left” adventurist KM, the infantile SDK, the clerico-fascists Lakasdiwa

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[a moderate group based at the Jesuit-run Ateneo University], NUSP and YCSP [Young Christian Socialists of the Philippines], and that bunch of surrenderees—the NPA. As we will see, some three years later the PKP would dramatically revise its evaluation of Marcos, while retaining its jaundiced view of those adhering to the “purely anti-Marcos line.” Much sooner, it became less dismissive of the CPP-NPA. In February 1971, the party’s theoretical journal Ang Komunista was described in the issue of that month as having “resumed publication,” and while this issue was duplicated, later editions would be printed. The editorial pointed to the CPP’s apparently “inexhaustible financial resources” and access to the bourgeois media, and alleged that Ang Bayan, the CPP’s own journal, was printed in a Catholic convent. Far from adopting a totally anti-CPP position, however, the piece stated that, despite armed clashes which had taken place in 1970, “the PKP maintains good relations with the ordinary NPA partisans,” drawing a distinction between ordinary peasant members and “the intellectuals from the city who harbor intense hatred towards us.”33 Five months later, a much harder line* was taken in a Political

Transmission (PT) issued by the general secretary (although he was not named, Felicisimo Macapagal was by this time holding the position). This began by listing the recent actions of the CPP (claiming that the PKP was in alliance with Marcos and that its Commander Diwa was the leader of the Monkees, and issuing leaflets disclosing the identities of PKP leaders) and called for stepped-up activity against the Maoists. The document stated that for too long the CPP had been considered a minor nuisance and, indeed, the PKP had on occasion not even bothered to explain the differences between the two organizations; in the provinces, many PKP activists were simply unaware of the bitter rivalry in Greater Manila. Times had changed.

However, rather than a hardening of the line, this may have been symptomatic of the difference in the approaches taken by the general secretary and Nemenzo, who, in editing and writing most of Ang Komunista, did not, as we will see in the next chapter, always project official PKP policy.

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We must take bold and decisive steps to crush the Maoists. Let us discard the foolish idea that we can prove our political maturity by remaining silent or keeping our patience. Unless we counter-attack, demoralization will weaken the ranks and destroy the mass organizations under our leadership. The Maoists will then emerge as the real vanguard of the revolutionary movement.34 The PT laid down a number of steps to be followed. Ang Komunista would be converted from an internal bulletin into a weekly new spaper “for massive distribution.” The Young Communist League would issue manifestoes. A handbook for cadres would be produced and a special seminar for twenty “agitators” would be held on the subject of Maoism; each of these agitators would then be expected to speak at “pock et rallies” in various provinces. These proposed rallies were seen as p art of the preparation for a “Big Demonstration” sometime in September. Campaigning activity until then would have the theme “STRUGGLE FO R UNITY, CRUSH THE SPUTTERS AND TRAITORS.” Party cadres w ere instructed to cooperate with other progressive organizations like th e Socialist Party of the Philippines with the aim of ensuring that September’s demonstration in Manila was held in collaboration with the SPP and its affiliated trade unions. The seriousness with which the Maoists were now perceived may be gleaned from the instructions to cadres in this sam e document. All committees were to be informed that the party expected

“total mobilization o fforces'’ in the campaign against the Maoists. It should be emphasized that the Big Demonstration will be a critical show of force. Cadres and the masses should be made to understand that so much is at stake, and that they should not expect the national organ to subsidize their transport expenses. The Politburo hereby issues a warning that iron discipline will be imposed in connection with our dealings with the Maoists. The Party will not tolerate leniency, much less active collaboration with these people. PKP leaders were instructed that if Maoist cadres appeared in their areas they should advise the latter that their contact with the masses would be opposed unless they publicly renounced the CPP, the KM, and the SDK.

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“If they persist in doing mass work despite your warning, take immediate steps to stop them. But if you do not have the capacity to use force, contact the Politburo immediately . . . The Party will consider any negligence as a serious breach of discipline.” Another Political Transmission issued at around the same time, on this occasion in the name of the politburo, also referred to “iron discipline.” This pointed to the similarity of the Liberals and the Nacionalistas (something apparently overlooked in the previous decade, when, instead, the Liberal Party had been perceived as the “party of change”), and therefore instructed the party to call upon the masses “to express their rejection of the bourgeois electoral process” by boycotting the 1971 elections.35 This concluded with the ominous warning: “The Party is waging a relentless struggle against opportunism within our ranks. We must therefore enforce

iron discipline. Automatic expulsion is the MINIMUM penalty for anyone who violates this policy.” The policy itself was presumably aimed at firming up the PKP’s own identity and emphasizing its difference from the CPP— despite the fact that a previous boycott policy had failed. This is borne out by the November 1971 issue of Ang ¡Comunista, which criticized the Maoists for opposing only Marcos and for their critical support of Aquino’s Liberal Party which, in the 1950s, “butchered thousands of worker and peasant revolutionaries fighting for national liberation.”36 A more conciliatory line towards the CPP was evident in a document produced for discussion purposes at the same time.37 This talked of the launch of “an effective campaign against our twin enemies: the establishment and the super-revolutionaries,” and argued that attempts should be made to win over “the uncommitted masses and those alienated by the super-revolutionaries” and to “strengthen our own groups that are fast becoming demoralized or falling victim to the propaganda onslaught of the enemy.” The document suggested contacts with the CPP rank and file with the aim of exposing “the evils of careerism” and the lack of democratic centralism “experienced by those who tried to criticize [the leaders] and were consequently expelled from their ranks.” Interestingly, the author called upon the PKP to “Discredit the Leadership but not the Organization per se.” In order to strengthen the PKP’s own groups, the party should

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“study the errors of our style of work and adopt proven methods p racticed successfully in other organizations even if they happen to be not o u r own.” Finally, the document challenged the party to “(s)how the need for an indigenous system adaptable to the objective realities obtaining in the country taking into consideration the geographic condition, traditions and temperament of our people, instead of following blindly a foreign pattern say of Peking or Moscow.” Such a proposition may, however, have received short shrift at such a time, when the Sino-Soviet dispute was at its height and an openly Maoist party had captured the initiative. In line with the general secretary’s PT, the July 1971 issue of A ng

Komunista announced that it was now a widely circulated journal o n current affairs and that in due course a journal “bearing a different nam e will take over its original function as the Party’s theoretical organ.”38 This was somewhat contradicted by the fact that the contents of Ang Komunista continued to be more appropriate for a theoretical journal. In the July issue, for example, an article entitled “PKP Calls for Unity” referred to the Political Transmission issued that month— which would have b een received by cadres only. Interestingly, the article made it clear that unity o f the left could not be achieved on the basis of compromises on questions of principle, but that this did not constitute “an insurmountable obstacle to united action on specific issues and for goals that are common to all groups on the Left.” The January 1972 issue of the journal carried a ten-page printed supplement entided “Ideological Dispute between Maoism and the International Communist Movement.” This was written in response to a CPP document entided “On the Lavaite Misrepresentation of the Proletarian Foreign Policy of China,” itself a reply to an article on “ping pong diplomacy” which Ang Komunista had carried in July 1971. The supplement drew attention to the inconsistent approach demonstrated by Maoism to the concept of peaceful coexistence, the objectively pro-imperialist foreign policy of post-Cultuial Revolution China, the Soviet aid granted to China in earlier years and to developing countries currendy, the reasons for the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Beijing’s claims to world hegemony.

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This issue also ran a story satirically recounting how, after Vigan and neighboring towns had been raided by fifty armed men in December 1971, acting governor Villanueva of llocos Sur had urged Marcos to declare martial law Later, however, it transpired that the raids had been conducted by the Nacionalista Private Army (as contrasted to Ninoy’s Private Army, better known as the New People’s Army which was forced to deny any form of activity in the Marcos-controlled territory). The purpose, it seemed, was to give credence to the President’s overblown estimate of NPA strength, as well as to make things difficult for incoming Governor-Elect Singson who belongs to Ninoy’s opposition. In the light of events later that year, this would prove of some historical interest.

N o tes 1. See William J. Pomeroy, Bilanggo (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2009). 2. Struggle, vol. 3, no. 1, January 1971. 3. Ibid. 4. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., interview by the author, January 2008. 5. Ibid.; Socialist Party of the Philippines, “Program for a People’s Democracy,” Political Review, nos. 2-3, April-May 1971. 6. Eduardo Lachica, Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila: Solidaridad, 1971), 222-24. See also William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army and Its Strugglefo r Power (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987), 79; Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 36. 7. Mario Frunze, “Marxism-Leninism and Revolutionary Quixoticism,” Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1971. 8. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993: A Story o f Its Theory and Practice (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press), 27. Weekley does not appear to have sought the PKP view (other than interviewing former member “Dodong” Nemenzo) or to have consulted PKP materials on any of the issues under discussion.

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9. Pedro Baguisa, interview by the author, January 2008. 10. Vivencio Jose, interview by the author, January 2008. 11. Lachica, Huk, 192. Nemenzo says that the MDP was initially formed by people

16.

associated with neither the PKP nor the CPP and, having disappeared soon after its founding, was revived after the demonstration on January 30, 1970 (Francisco Nemenzo Jr., interview by the author, September 21, 2008). Struggle, January 1971; Nemenzo interview. Struggle, January 1971. Jorge Maravilla, “Philippines: Results, Difficulties, Prospects,” World M arxist Review, December 1970. Francisco Balagtas, “The Philippines at the Crossroads,” World Marxist Review, December 1970. Francisco Balagtas, “Maoists in the Philippines,” World Marxist Review, June

17. 18. 19. 20.

1973. Editorial, Struggle, July 1971. Francisco Balagtas, “Maoists in the Philippines.” Struggle, July 1971. Jorge Maravilla, “40 Years of Struggle,” Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 1, February

12. 1314. 15.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

1971. Jones, Red Revolution, 40. James B. Goodno, The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises (London: Zed Books, 1991), 61. Benjamin Pimentel Jr., Edjop: The Unusual Journey of Edgar Jopson (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1989), 74. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. See Jones, Red Revolution, chapter 5. This claim was later reinforced by former senator Jovito Salonga, one of the Plaza Miranda victims, in his A Journey o f Struggle and Hope (Quezon City: UP Center for Leadership, Citizenship and Democracy/Regina Publishers, 2001). Nemenzo interview.

27. Former PKP leader, interview by the author, January 1990. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Dizon interview. 31. Nemenzo interview. Jesus Lava confirms that “we were inclined to take more positions on various issues that coincided with the Chinese side." See Jesus Lava, Memoirs o f a Communist (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Corp., 2002), 322. 32. The Pomeroys played a continuing role on the international front. In 1971, at a meeting in Moscow between Jose Lava, the Pomeroys, and two others, it was

C h a p t e r 5: Pa r t y

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

a g a in st

Pa r t y

12 1

decided to establish an international committee outside of the Philippines as an arm of the party’s international department. (This account is based upon an internal party memo—William and Celia Pomeroy, “The Conflict between Jose Lava and William and Celia Pomeroy,” internal PKP memo, c. 1985.) This would consist of Lava, who would be the party’s representative on the Praguebased World Marxist Review, and the Pomeroys, but when general secretary Felicisimo Macapagal appointed Celia Pomeroy to lead the committee, Lava was bitter. The Pomeroys say that although the arrangement worked satisfactorily for the first few years, Lava “violated procedure” from the very start, failing to provide the annual reports on his work required by Celia and on one occasion, with no consultation, writing a conciliatory letter to the Communist Party of China (the Pomeroys learned of this from the Soviets and were able to stop its transmission). In prison, Lava had been consistendy hostile toward Pomeroy, primarily because he disagreed with the former’s assessment that victory in the Huk struggle was still possible, indeed inevitable, and eventually Pomeroy was accused of having cooperated with the military intelligence service (MIS). Now, although serving with the Pomeroys on the international committee, Lava began to warn party members not to visit them in London on “security grounds.” After the international committee was charged with the responsibility of preparing a history of the party, Lava responded to Pomeroy’s draft chapter on the postwar struggle (which took issue with the line pursued by Lava as general secretary) by reviving his “MIS” allegation. Matters came to a head at a meeting in Moscow in 1981 when, say the Pomeroys, they spent half the night berating Lava. Unable to reply to their criticisms, he then began circulating the allegation that William Pomeroy was working with the CIA. The Pomeroys wrote to general secretary Felicisimo Macapagal describing the problem and suggesting that the international committee be disbanded. This was agreed by the politburo. Editorial, Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1971. General Secretary, PKP, Political Transmission, July 1971. PKP Politburo, “Boycott the 1971 Elections,” Political Transmission, 1971. Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 5, November 1971. PKP, “Few Guidelines for the Propaganda Team ” date unknown. Editorial, Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 4, July 7, 1971. Although a more frequent version of Ang Komunista began to appear, the new theoretical journal failed to materialize, and thus confusingly this continued under the same name, volume 2, number 5, appearing in November 1971, i.e., after several issues of the shorter, more popular version.

C h a pter 6 : T h e M a rxist -L enin ist G r o u p i Although the PKP had decided in the 1950s to end its armed struggle in pursuit of state power, it had retained armed units. Whereas some remnants of the HMB had slid into banditry, others who resisted this temptation had found, in the mid-1960s, that they needed to defend themselves against Sumulong and other gangsters. Then in 1965-67 armed propaganda units were formed, and a little later armed activity was thought an appropriate response to attacks by the NPA. But a statement appearing in 1972 gave the impression that armed struggle was once more the order of the day and that the HMB had expanded into a national force. On March 29, 1972, the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Hukbalahap, a document entitled “Manifesto of the HMB” was purportedly issued by the “GHQ, National Staff’ of the HMB, and duly reprinted in Ang

Komunista} According to this document, the PKP had earlier ordered the remnants of the former HMB to fight the forces of Sumulong. “Failing to rectify the organization from within because of Sumulong’s deadly reprisals, they decided to break away in 1967 and form a real people’s army. The true HMB did not die and instead perseveres until final victory is achieved.” This “new HMB” had then liquidated Councilor Serrano, a politician on whose behalf Sumulong had broken strikes, “in a daring raid of the Angeles City Hall. They killed Sumulong’s men and cleared his hideouts.” Sumulong’s

122

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23

gang was then further weakened by the defection of those who joined Sison’s NPA. Meanwhile, the IIMB continued to scientifically launch a series of \ successful operations. They crushed the Soriamont landgrabbing squads in Quezon province. They liquidated known characters responsible for the murder of revolutionary leaders. They ambushed fascist units and convoys laden with supplies. In the cities, the former People’s Revolutionary Front bombed the main offices of ESSO and CALTEX during the height of the oil strikes in January 1971. They did the same to JUSMAG [Joint US Military Assistance Group] in Quezon City, the Thomas Jefferson Library, the Manila Hotel (site of the Constitutional Convention), and other tools and symbols of American imperialism. Their latest project was the bombing of the ARCA Building owned by Antonio Roxas-Chua, vice-chairman of the Philippine Statehood, USA and the biggest individual contributor to the recent World Anti-Communist League Conference held in Manila. The statement concluded by making rather dramatic claims for the “new HMB.” Since the revolutionary forces are rapidly spreading throughout the country, it was decided to place all PKP-led armed groups under one central command. In a meeting held in January of this year, the HMB under Commander Diwa [Mariano de Guzman], the PRF under Commander Maring [Romulo de Guzman, no relation] and a naval force based in Mindanao were united under the banner of the HMB. At present, the HMB again has hundreds of men and weapons. Its range of operations is no longer limited to Central Luzon but spreads to North and Southern Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. The true army of the people will surely win! Imperialism will surely be crushed! Those who lived off the blood and sweat of the working people will surely be wiped out! SUPPORT THE HMB AND THE STRUGGLE FOR PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY! There was, however, rather less to this document than met the eye. Magallona says that the People’s Revolutionary Front was not constituted by the PKP itself but by Francisco Nemenzo Jr. “After he was denied authority

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to maintain (an urban guerrilla] group, he asked official permission to organize a revolutionary front. That was denied . . . but he did follow his plan to maintain a guerrilla group. That was the major issue for his expulsion.”2 A cadre close to the leadership at the time claims that the “Manifesto" was the work of Commander Diwa and Nemenzo, and that some of the deeds claimed for the “new HMB” existed merely “in the imagination of Nemenzo.” There was no “naval force based in Mindanao.” Nemenzo, however, says that the document was the work of “a young cadre, a staffer of Ang Kom unista . . .” Conceding that the HMB at this time had no presence in Mindanao, he recalls: “Utterly frustrated by the complacency of the PKP leaders while the Maoist CPP was showing great dynamism, the young cadres in Manila indulged in daydreaming, confusing hopes with reality. I don’t remember authorizing the publication o f this draft Manifesto. If I did, it was a big mistake.”3 Dizon says that Nemenzo was one of the leading protagonists in th e inner-party struggle that was taking place in this period. “It was really between the intellectuals and the peasants— the peasant leaders, and th e intellectuals led by Nemenzo.”4 This struggle would result, shortly after th e declaration of martial law, in Nemenzo taking his increasing emphasis o n armed struggle to its logical conclusion.

2 The signs that a problem was in the offing had been there for over a year, particularly in the content of Ang Komunista, which Nemenzo edited. For example, the February 1971 issue ran an article on the “Diliman Commune.” A student occupation of the University of the Philippines’ Diliman campus had been marked by theft and vandalism and, once the students gained control of the radio transmitter, rival organizations w ere pilloried. Although the article5 drew attention to these negative aspects o f the occupation, it began by referring glowingly to “a few hundred students, armed with nothing but sheer courage and small explosives,” and drew the conclusion that “urban guerrilla warfare has not becom e altogether

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obsolete. Properly planned, skilfully executed and linked with broad mass action, it remains a potent form of struggle against the oppressive neo­ colonial system.” The article continued: Tailism is a cardinal offence in a Communist Party. Comrades know this well, and yet instances have been reported to the PKP Politburo, when local Party organs play the role of brakes rather than accelerators and steering wheels to the mass movement. They restrain the militancy and stifle the initiative of the resurgent youth . . . The current drive to weed out Rightopportunist attitudes in Party cadres must be pushed with greater vigor. This article represented an attempt to encourage the PKP to strive for greater militancy than the CPP. In the absence of an in-depth analysis and a program around which the party could unite, however, such an approach amounted to the very thing which the author inveighed against— tailism, albeit a leftist tailism for which the CPP set the pace. More than that, the article was a sign that all was not well in the party and that a further split was on the way, for the content of Ang Komunista did not always reflect party policy. (When asked if he recalled the real name of the “Aurora Evangelista” who had authored the Diliman Commune article, Nemenzo cheerfully replied this may have been one of his pen names at the time.)6 Nemenzo disagreed with the party’s assessment of the First Quarter Storm and, therefore, with the party line. They Ithe PKP] had this slogan, which was more Mao than Lenin, and which in English meant “The city is the cemetery of the revolution.” So [they thought] the First Quarter Storm was artificially fomented, masterminded by the US and intended to surface the genuine revolutionaries, meaning ourselves. I had a different view. I thought it was the city that was boiling and that we had to be part of this upheaval. Most of the more militant cadres we had came from the city. There was no growth in Central Luzon—they were just reactivating old cadres . . . 7 The same issue of Ang Komunista carried an article entided “MarxismLeninism and Revolutionary Quixoticism.” This was written by Nemenzo under the pen name “Mario Frunze” and recounted the manner in which

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Sison had broken away from the PKP and formed the CPP and NPA an d , in passing, stated: We uphold the principle of combining parliamentary and armed struggle: the exact combination depends, of course, on the prevailing political situation . . . Unluckily for those inveterate liars [Sison and the CPP], the present PKP leadership fully appreciates the necessity of continuing illegal work and the obligatory task of building a people’s army for a people’s war.8 Further on, while stressing that open legal struggle should be th e primary form in the current conditions, “Frunze” stated that “armed struggle must be waged even today, but it occupies a secondary and subsidiary role in relation to the parliamentary struggle.” The author concluded by warning that we ought not to be complacent ourselves. Dogmatism of another variety is manifest in some sections of our Party: the tendency to underrate the significance of the recent upsurge of activism and stick to the political line that we adopted in the late 1950s and early 1960s . . . There are comrades who, consciously or unconsciously, use our arguments against the Mao Thought Party to justify their fear of a political explosion, their reluctance to move forward, their dread of personal sacrifices, and their failure to overcome the hangover of defeat . . . If left unchecked, they will cause us to lag behind the swift flow of events and alienate ourselves from the awakened masses . . . At this stage of the struggle, the Party must discard obsolete forms and methods of work in order to take advantage of the rapidly developing revolutionary situation. At the same time, if we fail to take decisive actions to purge our own ranks of Rightist deviations, we shall not succeed in purging the entire movement of Left adventurist errors. To a certain extent, some of the views in this article may have been expressions of the author’s own “revolutionary quixotism,” but it would also appear that there was a distinct lack of clarity within the PKP concerning its line on armed struggle. While the party had abandoned its armed struggle for state power in the 1950s, it had more recently formed armed propaganda

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units and some of its members were clearly engaged in bombing activities in the capital. It certainly seemed that limited armed activity was now being encouraged, for in a further article in the issue of Ang Komunista to which we have just referred, William Pomeroy (usually no ultraleftist), writing under the name of “Jorge Maravilla,” listed the main tasks of the PKP in the current period as being the strengthening of the working-class core of the party while also expanding organization among the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the middle class, placing greater emphasis on ideological work among both members and the masses, extending and strengthening ties with the international communist movement and liberation movements and preparation and development of the most varied forms of struggle, legal and illegal, peaceful and armed, in order to involve the broadest possible masses of the people in the fight for genuine national freedom and to meet any eventuality forced on the people by a desperate imperialism . . . 9 Undoubtedly, the PKP was host to a certain degree of confusion arising from the fact that it had not held a congress since 1946, and because it was finding it difficult to impose collective discipline due to its illegal status. Furthermore, the impression was given that the PKP believed at this stage that fundamental— indeed, revolutionary— change was possible within a relatively short space of time. There can be little doubt that the positive characteristics in the current situation were being greatly exaggerated. This confused situation contributed to the development of what became known as the Marxist-Leninist Group.

3 According to Nemenzo, once Marcos had declared martial law in September 1972, the PKP leaders had scampered for safety without leaving a trace of their whereabouts. In this state of utter confusion, militant branches took the initiative and began acting on their own. Between September and early

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December 1972 there was a flurry of rank-and-file activities, which showed the enormous reserve of creativity and resourcefulness that the old party’s bureaucratic structure had stunted for years. Then, says Nemenzo, the party’s general secretary “emerged from hibernation” to issue a Political Transmission entided “New Situation, N ew Tasks,” which criticized the suspension of civil rights but supported positive features of the martial law regime such as land reform and the dismantling of private armies. The document identified the main targets of martial law as being the Maoists, “clerico-fascists,” and alleged CIA agents such as Aquino. With regard to the first of these, the PT stated: “We should even help them [the Marcos government] to annihilate the Maoists.”10 (Interviewed by the author, however, Nemenzo now says that document merely advised that “we should lie low and let the government thrash the Maoists.”11) Nemenzo has written that the “lie low” approach led to a further w ave of splits. “The internal debates became so acrimonious that the leadership reverted to the familiar Stalinist technique of conflict-resolution; namely, to kidnap, torture and execute the dissenters after forcing them to sign false confessions.” This type of “conflict resolution" involved, claims Nemenzo, the purging of a number of tendencies from the PKP: “anarcho-Trotskyites,” “Che G u e v a ris ts “Marighellaists,” “crypto-Maoists.”12 Elsewhere, Nemenzo refers to the PKP’s “brutal methods of handling internal disputes” and to “a series of defections.”13 In fact, the terms which Nemenzo employs to describe these puiged tendencies were used by the PKP to describe merely one faction— that led by himself; and while the issue would appear to have been resolved with a measure of brutality by the PKP, rather more than a mere “internal dispute” was involved. In 1975, the PKP would publish a detailed account of the split by the Marxist-Leninist Group (MLG) in an article in a party journal entitled Ang Buklod.H This does not refer to Nemenzo by name, referring instead to the leader of the MLG as having been head of the PKP’s education department— the position occupied by Nemenzo prior to his expulsion.

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According to this article, the MLG was initially composed of “a number of intellectual and lumpen elements. Failing to impose their adventurist policy of all-out armed struggle through foco guerrillaism, this grouping made elaborate plans to subvert the Party by splittist activities both from within and without, all of which were roundly repulsed.” The head of the party’s education department is described as having always been the strongest supporter of armed struggle within the leadership “and even favored the use of terrorist tactics,” having become “enamoured with the idea of using Guevarist urban and rural guerrilla tactics.” Shortly before martial law, he had obtained a book by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian communist expelled from the Brazilian CP in 1967 for “unqualified espousal of armed struggle and the creating of ‘revolutionary centers.’” Immediately after the declaration of martial law, it is alleged that Nemenzo relinquished his office as head of the education department “and embarked on the task of creating an independent military command in the city by assuming leadership of the urban guerrilla front then existing.” Copies of a chapter of Marighella’s book were circulated among the YCL (which Nemenzo effectively led) and this urban guerrilla force. “Because of communication difficulties at that time, the latter were led to believe that these actuations were all part of an official policy laid down by the Party.” Pastor Tabinas—who, as “Commander Soliman,” led the urban guerrilla force—confirms much of this: “Nemenzo was my close friend at that time. I had noticed he was somewhat adventurist, and he always adhered to guerrilla warfare. He gave me a book on Marighella. If you read it, it is terrorism.” Tabinas says that, as Nemenzo and Danilo Pascual were the only members of the politburo left in the capital, “I had no one else to talk with, as everyone else was already hiding.”15 Nemenzo and the group around him set about securing arms. Later, the account in Ang Buklod would accuse the group of having obtained these by the forging of “a dubious ‘united front’ with a notorious right-wing warlord family in the North,” but Magallona claims that arms were also received from a top executive of a foreign company.16 Nemenzo, denying any assistance from a foreign company or the existence of a “united front”

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with any warlord, puts a rather different complexion on his acquisition o f arms. We were able to raid the house of one of the warlords in Ilocos.’ An executive of the company owned by the family—this is the Crisologo family—was a friend of mine. After martial law was declared, I was the only one [PB member] left here [in Manila], so I had to take the initiative. I said we are going to form an army, so we have to procure arms. Everybody had to go out and collect arms. And then I visited this friend. I knew that he had weapons, his own personal collection. Marcos had issued a decree that all weapons, registered or unregistered, should be surrendered by a certain day, and that failure to do so was punishable by death by firing squad. People were scared, turning over their weapons. So I went to see him and said, “Presumably you’re going to give up those guns, so can you leave them with me?” He agreed, because he wanted to get them out of his house. Then he said, “Do you want some more?” He said, “You provide a vehicle and 1 will show you the armory of Crisologo, as he has instructed me to surrender all of them.” So I was able to get a PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone] van and he gave me a sketch of the house. He said there were only two people there, the caretaker and his wife, and they were old. His only request was that we did not harm them, and make it appear as a raid. So wef had to tie the couple up and put them in the toilet, and we collected all the arms. Some were very modem, taken from Vietnam. The PKP insisted that I turn them over to the party, but I thought, you have no intention of fighting, so why should I turn them over to you? And that became a problem. I thought, if we have more equipment than people, we might as well turn the surplus over to the NPA, because at least they are fighting.18 In October 1972, an enlarged meeting of the PKP secretariat, to which Nemenzo was invited, was called. Nemenzo is of the view that this cam e about because party leaders, having learned of his successful weapons-

•

Pastor Tabinas also recalls collecting arms from a house in Valenzuela. “Since we could not carry them all, and there were checkpoints everywhere in the city, we buried most o f them . . . In three days and three nights we buried about a thousand arms.”17

t

Nemenzo, who did not himself take part in the raid, is referring here to his MLG comrades.

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harvest, intended to relieve him of its fruits. Ang Buklod claims that at the secretariat meeting Nemenzo proposed the adoption of armed struggle as the main form of activity. Furthermore, the article alleges that he suggested that the Marcos reform program should be stopped and that Marcos should be prevented from consolidating his power by means of such reforms, as the people might be won over to him. His motion was defeated, the secretariat pointing out that “military adventures would only tend to isolate the Party from the largely unpoliticized masses.” Macapagal recalled the painstaking work of rebuilding the party which had taken place since the 1950s, activity which was now threatened “by the subjective and voluntarist decision to ‘seize the action and the initiative from the Maoists!’” Nemenzo was severely censured for his activities during the preceding months and for “unilaterally assuming tasks and interfering in the work of other comrades, participating in the military and organizational work of other departments. He supported the un-Marxist ‘old versus youth,’ ‘conservative versus radical’ dichotomy peddled by some elements in the Party, a clear resurrection of Jose Maria Sison’s thesis . . .” Nemenzo claims in fact, that this secretariat meeting never actually took place, but that he traveled to Aliaga, Nueva Ecija, with the intention of exploring “the possibility of reconciling our [the MLG’s] line with the rural warfare line to which the leaders continued giving lip service.” Upon arrival, general secretary Felicisimo Macapagal and organization secretary Federico Maclang advised him that the meeting would be held in a mountain area, whereupon Nemenzo began to suspect that the intention was to detain him in order to thwart the urban guerrilla project. “It was then,” he says, “that I decided to escape.” The PKP, however, insists that the meeting went ahead— in Aliaga rather than the mountains— and that when Nemenzo insisted on returning to Manila for Christmas he was warned by Macapagal that he risked arrest by the authorities; when Nemenzo could not be swayed, Macapagal provided him with an escort as far as Cabanatuan City.19 Back in Manila, the two MLG members who had accompanied Nemenzo to Aliaga, only to be disarmed and sent back to the capital, told

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him that they had been interrogated regarding the location of the MLG’s arms. “It was only at this point,” says Nemenzo, “that the MLG core g ro u p decided to secede from the PKP and form a separate organization.”

4 Regardless of disagreements over detail, it was clear that the leader of the MLG had been rebuffed by the PKP leadership, and he now set about attempting to mobilize support among the youth of Manila and among “Party members stationed in the South which the Party leadership had failed to contact due to the difficulties of the period.” In a docum ent entitled “Where to Begin?” the MLG leader argued: We are Leninists and Leninism implies struggle . . . Unlike the conservatives who have lost their revolutionary fervor, we are still full of drive and our will to fight is unbending. A revolutionary must be passionate or he will never have the strength to break the system . . . We have lost faith in the Party, but we will never lose faith in the Revolution. We get out of the Party precisely because we want to continue the fight for people’s democracy and socialism. The Party has turned its back at the Revolution, so we turn our back at the Party to be loyal to the Revolution. Breaking away from the Party is not a simple process of getting together a handful of revolutionary communists and forming a new organization that will seize the vanguard role by revolutionary action rather than by vapid references to historical continuity. Our most urgent tactical responsibility is to win to our side as many comrades as possible, and leave only the cowards and opportunists to pursue their capitulationist line. Here we must not be impulsive. We plan and struggle, we plan for struggle. And the first phase is to struggle prior to open separation Ifrom the PKP].20 Three stages were oudined with regard to the MLG’s struggle against the PKP leadership— struggle within, an open break, and, finally, the launching of a revolutionary war. With regard to the latter,

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[t]he expeditionary force, having undergone intensive re-education and military training, leaves for our strategic operational zone. There we open a new front. . . the new revolutionary army will declare war on the dictatorship with a series of daring but well-executed guerrilla assaults. The urban guerrilla force that stayls] in Manila will respond with a series of raids at well-calculated targets. After this will be the long drawn out phase of consolidating and gradually extending the revolutionary war. New strategic operational zones will be opened.21 In its assessment published two years later, the PKP pointed out that the document failed to make mention of the “alignment of class forces by which any revolution is shaped” or of the need for a vanguard party to base its tactics on the working class. Like the Maoists and the Guevarists in Latin America, the MLG saw revolution “being made through the sheer will of a group of armed fighters, not through the collective and organized action of the masses under specific objective conditions . . .” The PKP also drew attention to the irony contained in the fact that Lenin’s own article entitled “Where to Begin?” had argued against terrorist tactics. “Lenin, in fact, warned against ‘the dangers of rupturing the contact between revolutionary organizations and the disunited masses’ through misplaced ‘heroic blows,’ through ‘becoming infatuated with tenor.’” Within the PKP, the MLG’s aim was to whip up opposition to the leadership by a variety of means. The group’s adherents were urged to “arouse rank and file discontent with the capitulationist line of avoiding armed struggle,” to “distribute materials contrary to that line,” and to “operate secretly inside” the party, forming “a Revolutionary Communist Party (let’s think about the name later).” While there might be an open split with the PKP, MLG supporters were instructed to “see to it that some of our cadres will remain in the Party as our infiltrators,” while the MLG itself would “undertake an intensive re-education program emphasizing the armed struggle and train our own guerrilla force.” Secrecy was to be of paramount importance, with cadres being urged to cultivate “prospects” but to “never drop hints of an internal revolt to your prospect,” asking instead if “there is no limit to democratic centralism.” Those prospects who remained

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indecisive “should immediately be reported to the organizing com m ittee,” while “those who refuse to join should be reported” and “placed u n d e r close surveillance.” Should a prospect “express unflinching loyalty to th e Party,” cadres were instructed to “coerce him to keep his mouth shut.”22 In view of these instructions, the complaint regarding the PKP’s reversion to the “familiar Stalinist technique of conflict-resolution” can be seen in perspective. Nemenzo says that the first phase of the MLG’s arms-collection drive had “succeeded beyond our expectations” and “we were able to build up a big arsenal in a few weeks.” Collecting arms was one thing, however, and using them another. The planned attacks on key points in Manila did not occur “because most MLG comrades had no combat experience whatever. I was shocked to learn that many of them had never fired a gun. There had to be an intermediate stage: military training.” Between October and his arrest in December, Nemenzo devoured books— even novels— on military matters and began drafting a training manual on urban guerrilla warfare. “Col. Perez, my interrogator, was quite impressed by the manuscript. H e thought I learned the tricks from the KGB. He was disappointed when I gave the titles of the novels from where I got them.”23 It is clear from this that the enterprise was doomed to failure. The arms were discovered in raids by the military and Nemenzo and others were arrested. According to Magallona, some of our comrades were arrested and tortured and one of them, the head of our partisan committee, later admitted that the plan was hatched by Nemenzo . . . He involved our city partisan committee, representing that it was on the basis of a decision by the party. So he used his comrades to store arms, burying them. This was discovered by the military and the next day it hit the headlines: “PKP Arms Caches Unearthed Preparatory to Attack on City!”24

Ang Buklod alleged that even after his detention by the martial law authorities Nemenzo continued to direct “the activities of the elements he left in the city who blindly continued with his plans of splittism. The Party firmly rebuffed their violent designs and found out that some of their most

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active members were actually agents planted by the military.”24 (Nemenzo, however, says that while he may have wanted to direct the MLG from his prison cell, he was in solitary confinement, where the only visitor allowed was his sister, and it would have been “too dangerous to use her as a link with comrades outside.”)26 The same article stated that “honest ^members” who had genuinely been misled and who renounced their association with the “super-revolutionary” were readmitted to the party. Nemenzo himself was expelled. Ruben Torres says that, as “chairman of the urban committee,” he was in charge of resolving the “Nemenzo problem,” and he therefore “asked for troops.” These were from Bulacan, Pampanga and Laguna—brave young fighters but not as well-versed in guerrilla tactics as the cadets with Nemenzo.* However, the struggle between him and me ended with me recovering the armed cadres he had taken with him as well as the youth groups. I also won back the trade-unionists who had gone off with him. After all, I was the head of the trade union department. I even got back Commander Soliman [Pastor Tabinas] and his staff.271

The argument put forward by Torres was that armed struggle in the capital was futile, as there was no support in, and thus no possibility of retreat to, the countryside* because the party had adopted a strategy of parliamentary struggle and, with Marcos’s adoption of land reform, the peasantry could see no point in armed struggle.30

•

Nemenzo had, as we have seen, a different view of the abilities o f his troops.

t Nemenzo comments: “To some extent this is true. He ‘recovered’ a few o f the faint­ hearted after they murdered the best cadres of the Marxist Leninist Group. Most o f those who survived the Stalinist purge simply dropped out o f the m ovem ent. . .”28 $

“Looking back,” Nemenzo says, “I concede that our plan for urban guerrilla warfare (without a rural base) was adventurist. It even deviated from the strategy o f Carlos Marighella, which regarded the uiban areas merely as an arena for tactical operations but emphasized die need for rural bases where urban guerrillas could seek refijge after an operation. We were driven by a sense o f urgency. We thought (wrongly in retrospect) that the newborn dictatorship could be prevented from consolidating by scaring off the foreign investors and tourists. Doing nothing, just hiding or lying low would allow him [Marcos] to consolidate and we thought it was an urgent task to prevent it.”29

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

What of Nemenzo’s claims of the kidnap, torture, and murder o f MLG members by the PKP? In this, he is supported by Sison, who alleges that n o less than twenty-seven members of the MLG were “tortured and m urdered” and that in this task the PKP used “Danilo Pascual and Federico Maclang as chief butchers.”31 According to sources who were close to the leadership o f the PKP at the time, Pascual was actually in prison at this stage and M aclang was, as we have seen, head of the party’s Organizational Department.* O n e such source admits to at least some fatalities. Many of them were released and they’re now in the Party. But there was an encounter involving about four or five people in Bulacan. I think they [Nemenzo and Sison] are referring to the five who were armed and when there was a demand that they lay down their arms they would not. As a matter of fact, two used their firearms.33 However, a former activist whose loyalty to the party could not b e questioned admits that, in fact, a number of MLG members were shot a s they lay in their beds.34 If this were all there was to it, we would be forced to agree that this did, indeed, amount to a “Stalinist technique of conflict-resolution.” But brutal tactics were not confined to the PKP, as we have already seen that MLG cadres were instructed to use coercion against PKP loyalists. A PKP cadre who joined the party some years after the MLG split claims: “Their [the MLG’s] guns were pointed at us. They were trying to assassinate ou r leaders.”35 This is supported by another PKP source who says that after the anest of Nemenzo “his group carried on with their plan to split, to the extent of attempting to liquidate some Party leaders who would not join them.”36 According to Pastor Tabinas, “There was a plan to assassinate ‘all

Soon afier this, Maclang was removed from this position due to finance opportunism. “Also,” says a PKP source, “many resented his haughtiness, especially his warped idea about his being more revolutionary than others because he spent a long time as a political prisoner. A number of comrades also criticized his habit o f impressing upon lower organs that he would visit that everything he says has the full backing o f the Party General Secretary (he used to say, in Pilipino, that ‘I am wearing the shoes o f the General Secretary’).”52

C hapter 6: T he M arxist -L eninist G roup

13 7

these old people’ [i.e., veteran leaders] as they were said to be cowards . . . All those with an assignment to assassinate the leaders were annihilated.”37 Such situations are rarely black and white.

3 Following the MLG episode, the PKP clarified its position on violence and revolution in two documents, which appeared in the second and third issues of the journal Ang Organisador in 1973. The first of these, entitled “On Violence,” argued: Violence is a class issue and must be approached from the viewpoint of the class struggle. Will use, misuse or non-use of violence advance the cause of class struggle? A Marxist approaches the problem from all sides and takes into consideration the perspective of the whole struggle, i.e., the degree of class consciousness of the people inside and outside the movement, the degree of class organization of the working class, the strength of the enemy, the possibility of reaction and counter-revolution, and the overall balance of class forces inside and outside a given country.38

The document combated the anarchist idea that increased repression leads to increased militancy and political consciousness, pointing out that more often the result is a descent into hopelessness and despair and the isolation of the revolutionary movement. Revolutionary work is not the spontaneous, isolated acts of braggadocio or display of revolutionary enthusiasm only in seemingly dramatic and sensational projects or events. Revolutionary work is the slow, patient and difficult work with the masses in the firm belief that once the legions of oppressed but disunited masses become organized, they can execute an act more historic, more dramatic and more inspiring than all kinds of palabas the anarchists and adventurers in our midst have in mind . . .

The second document, “On Revolution,” developed this theme further,

«'3

pointing out that revolution

1 38

A M

o vem en t

D iv id e d

is not a product of the conspiracy of a small group of revolutionaries. A revolution, a working class revolution, if it must be worthy of the name revolution, must be an act of millions, of the numberless masses of the dispossessed and exploited classes in society. The role of the Communist Party is not to make the revolution for the masses but to lead them along the path of victory and socialism . . * Revolution was not a single act but “a prolonged historical p ro cess,” for which reason communist parties throughout the world adopted b oth maximum and minimum programs, dialectically developing these in the course of struggle. To Trotskyites and anarchists . . . momentary or day-to-day successes appear to be far more important than the ultimate goal. Bernstein, a European revisionist severely criticized by Lenin, once said, “The movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing" It is surprising to note that some comrades, particularly from the ranks of the city lumpenproletariat and the petty-bourgeois intellectuals, came out with a modified version of this Bemsteinian catch-phrase as follows: “We are nothing, the movement is everything." If we analyze this catch-phrase deeper, we will find the romantic but dangerous premise that lives of the Movement’s people can be sacrificed on the altar of struggles for momentary successes no matter how unnecessary or avoidable . . . The struggle against the MLG was not without its organizational casualties. For example the recently formed YCL fell by the wayside as its core was composed of those “who would go with Nemenzo, because he was really the rallying point. It revolved around Ang Komunista. The full-time writers were all young.”40 For presumably the same reason, Ang

Komunista failed to reappear. Nevertheless, despite and because of the damage done by first the split by Sison and now that by the MLG, the party had already embarked upon a process of ideological consolidation, a key component of which would be the party’s sixth congress, held clandestinely in Central Luzon in February 1973.41

C h ap ter 6 : The M arxist-L en in ist G roup

139

N otes 1.

Ang Komunista, vol. 3, no. 2, March-April 1972.

2.

Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, March 2009.

3. 4.

Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990.

5.

Aurora Evangelista, “The Positive and Negative Aspects of the ‘Diliman Commune,’” Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1971.

6.

Francisco Nemenzo Jr., interview by the author, January 2008.

7.

Ibid.

8.

Mario Frunze, “Marxism-Leninism and Revolutionary Quixoticism.”

9.

Jorge Maravilla, “Forty Years of Struggle.”

10. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “Rectification Process in the Philippine Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim JooJock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 84-85. 11. Nemenzo interview. 12. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., “Rectification Process in the Philippine Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim JooJock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 84-85. 13. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., in The Philippines After Marcos, ed. R.J. May and Francisco Nemenzo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 54. 14. PKP, “The Party’s Struggle against Ultra-Leftism under Martial Law,” Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1, February-March 1975. 15. Pastor Tabinas, interview by the author, March 2009. 16. Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, January 1990. 17. Tabinas interview. 18. Nemenzo interview. 19. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009, and Antonio Paris, in discussion with the author, December 2009. 20. Marxist-Leninist Group, “Where to Begin?” quoted in PKP, “The Party’s Struggle against Ultra-Leftism.” 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009. 24. Magallona interview, 1990. 25. Interviewed by the author, Nemenzo said he was unaware of this. 26. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009.

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

27. Nick Joaquin, A Kadre's Road to Damascus: The Ruben Torres Story (Quezon City: Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2003), 104-5. Torres, who left the PKP shortly after this, was executive secretary in the government of Fidel Ramos. 28. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 10, 2008. 29. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009. 30. Joaquin, A Kadre's Road to Damascus, 105. Torres says that his assignment to win back the Nemenzo supporters was in 1974. It is possible but doubtful that this is correct, for by this time the back of the MLG had already been broken, and Nemenzo had been arrested as early as Christmas 1972. 31. Jose Maria Sison, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader's View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 79. 32. Edilberto Hao to the author, December 15, 2008. 33- Former leading PKP member, interview by the author, November 1989. 34. PKP activist, interview by the author, November 1989. 35. PKP activist, interview by the author, January 1990. 36. Edilberto Hao to the author, December 15, 2008. 37. Tabinas interview. Nemenzo points out that both he and Tabinas were in prison “when the surviving MLG [members] allegedly planned these assassinations . . . I personally have always abhorred the use of assassination as a means of resolving principled difference[s]” (Francisco Nemenzo Jr. to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009). 38. Quoted in Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1. 39. Quoted in ibid. 40. Dizon interview. 41. At the time, this was erroneously dubbed the Fifth Congress. However, the next congress, held in 1977, was referred to as the seventh, thereby correcting the error.

C h a pter 7 : T h e S ix t h

PKP

C ongress

i Preparations for a congress had been underway before the MLG episode. Recalls one former leading PKP member: The preparation took more than one year. Even before martial law was declared there were discussions. The usual style of work is like this: the secretariat holds discussions and maybe they will come out with concept papers, working papers, and these are then submitted to the Politburo. Then the PB will really work these up into a semi-final form for adoption by the Central Committee. After the CC, the documents are brought down to all levels. After discussion down there, they are brought up again to see if there were comments and objections, etc. These are discussed, with some suggestions being incorporated, others not. This, then, is the document which will be presented at the Congress.1 Due to the fact that the party was still forced to operate in underground conditions, however, the representation at the congress itself was less full than it would otherwise have been. The congress proper started with that discussion downstairs—this was taken to be part of the congress because the congress could not be a big one as it was underground. Not everybody could attend, but we wanted as many members as possible to participate, so we counted the discussion

141

14 2

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

in the lower organs as constituting [part of] the congress. Then all this was discussed and ratified by a representative few—only about four from each organ would attend the Congress.2 The two major documents adopted by the congress were the fortysix-page political resolution and the program. It is no exaggeration to say that the first of these constituted the first thoroughgoing Marxist analysis of Philippine society and its economy,* and therefore this chapter will consider this at some length. In traditional Marxist fashion, the political resolution began with the general (an analysis of the international situation) and worked toward the particular (an analysis of the political situation within the Philippines). The program was then based on these analyses. Like most other communist parties at this time, the PKP took an optimistic view of the international situation, pointing to the growing strength of the socialist camp, the national liberation movement and the working-class movement in the major capitalist countries. As evidence of the fact that the balance now appeared to be tilted against imperialism, the party pointed to the growth of détente in Europe and the fact that US President Nixon had visited both Moscow and Beijing. Both the strength o f the socialist countries and inter-imperialist rivalry had led to a thawing o f the Cold War and the extension of trade relations with socialist countries; such factors had also resulted in disunity within NATO, while the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was now “virtually defunct.” As on e would expect, developments in China were not portrayed in a positive light. On the other hand, obstructing the advance of the world revolutionary movement are the destructive policies of the Mao Tse-tung leadership which are characterized by anti-Sovietism, petty-bourgeois revolutionism and great-power chauvinism. The Maoist hostility towards the international

The inadequacies of llie PKP’s first program (193U) have been discussed in some depth by this author in his Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, From Foundation to Armed Struggle, while the CPP’s Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution was an attempt to bend Philippine reality to the requirements of Maoist dogma.

C h a p te r

7: T h e S ix t h PKP C o n g r e s s

i 43

communist movement, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in particular, is of great value to imperialism and a crime against the wodd revolutionary movement. The support of the Maoist leadership to West Pakistan’s massacre of the Bangladesh people and the apparent sadistic glee of the Maoists in sending greetings to the Numeiry reactionary leadership while the latter was engaged in the slaughter of communist and working-class leaders in Sudan are enough demonstration of hypocrisy and demagogy that spring from a shameless revisionism of MarxistLeninist theory and practice. The attempt of the Maoist leaders to impose “the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung” on the national liberation movement has reaped so far the mass murder of more than 500,000 communists and patriots in Indonesia.3 The political resolution assigned considerable importance to the development

of

inter-imperialist

contradictions

within

the

changed

international setting; in the struggle between Western Europe, Japan, and the USA, the latter was seen as losing out in the “struggle for a redivision of markets among the imperialist powers.”4 These contradictions had led to a change from the previous form of their postwar relationship with developing countries, whereby each had enjoyed “special bilateral relations” with its former colonies, to one characterized by a collective neocolonialist approach using institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Bank. Indicative of the flexibility of US imperialism, however, was its vigorous support of transnational corporations in their drive to establish manufacturing strongholds abroad, thus easing the USA’s balance of payments crisis; at the same time, both in the USA and Japan, the relocation of branches of industry to low-wage economies like the Philippines was driven by rising trade union militancy at home. The national liberation process, which in the 1960s had led to more than forty colonies gaining formal, political independence, had now entered a new phase in which the emphasis was on gaining economic independence, with the newly independent countries facing a clear choice: “to follow the capitalist path of development or take the intermediate steps towards socialist development.”5 This in part explained why US imperialism in particular

14 4

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

supported the “export of capital to developing countries as a vehicle for structuring them along (the lines of] private-enterprise capitalism.”6 To a certain extent, this process represented economic progress, fo r the successful implanting or strengthening capitalist structures was d ep en d en t upon “the elimination of outmoded institutions built by colonialism o f old, insofar as they obstruct neocolonialism in the era of the new b a la n ce o f world forces.” But the development of capitalist relations was also necessary to imperialism to counteract the phase of national-liberation struggle that seeks the revolutionary transformation of outmoded social relations as a prerequisite to genuine progress. Such concessions to the new states do not therefore run counter to the main imperialist object of keeping them in a dependent status and retaining them as objects of exploitation, but under changed conditions.7 This same process of neocolonial industrialization was seen as part and parcel of “a new international division of labor in which the imperialist powers specialize in ‘research and development intensive, high skill and high technology dynamic industries,’ leaving to the developing countries the ‘labor-intensive industries of relatively small optimum size.’”8 Turning to the situation in the Philippines, the resolution gave a historical outline of the country’s economic development, remarking that while capitalist relations grew to a limited extent during the US colonial period, “on the whole US colonialism based itself on feudalism as the mechanics of exploitation.”9 This situation continued in the years immediately following World War II and the granting of formal independence. Free-trade arrangement of the colonial days was continued for 8 years by the Bell Trade Act. The trade agreement between the two countries expressly limited the benefits of the export quotas to processors, exporters, asenderos and compradors who were already supplying the US market in 1940. During the first year of the republic, the country was under treaty obligation to export its entire exportable production of abaca, copra and coconut oil exclusively to the US and impose no restriction on such export. These arrangements reinforced the economic position

C hapter 7: T he S ixth PKP C ongress

14 5

of the landlord-comprador oligarchy and ensured its subservience to US imperialist interests.10

Then, in the 1960s, the export-import trade between the Philippines and the USA went into decline, with the USA increasing its direct investment, and the basis of the relationship between the two countries was revised as the backwardness, inefficiency, and corruption in the economy “began to appear to US imperialism as inherited obstacles to its new schemes of neocolonialism. In brief, the colonial socioeconomic base and the political superstructure founded on it had become an impediment to the imperialist policy of accelerating capitalist construction . . ”n This necessitated “a martial law dictatorship . . . that would bring to fruition the reforms demanded by foreign monopoly capital in the making of a modernized neocolonial bourgeois society.”12 The situation was not entirely new for, as the resolution pointed out, US imperialism’s earlier suggestions for fundamental reform—embodied in the Hardie Report of 1952—had been shelved in favor of a tactical retreat in order to maintain a solid anticommunist front in the face of the Huk rebellion. The pressure for reform now, however, came from a whole number of imperialist countries. In the 1960s, large loans by the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, mainly for infrastructural purposes, had prepared the Philippines for large-scale foreign investment; by 1971 Japan’s direct investments totalled $73.7 million and by the following year the same country had a 22 percent share of the Philippines’ external debt, while West European capital was also active in the country. It should be clear from the above that the PKP had abandoned its earlier characterization of the Philippine mode of production as “semi­ colonial and semi-feudal” by conducting a fresh analysis. This is of some importance, for it constituted a further major difference between the PKP and the CPP. The PKP’s political resolution spelled out the new characterization most clearly in the opening paragraphs of the final section, subtided “The Present National Situation.” The Philippines is a neocolonial country of dynamic capitalist development. Its economy is in the main backward and deformed by colonial plunder.

146

A M ovem ent Divided

Its productive forces are largely underdeveloped. In the countryside, strong survivals of feudalism and other forms of precapitalist modes of production still predominate. In sugar haciendas and other big plantations where [the] wage system [has] been introduced, feudal outlook characterizes the personal relationship of employment. Under the hegemony of finance capital, spearheaded by US imperialism, the Philippines is vigorously being transformed from a predominantly feudal country into a modem capitalist economy. Today it is experiencing a tremendously rapid pace of capitalist buildup through the instrumentality of the martial-law dictatorship. The country is fast becoming the manufacturing base of labor-intensive products of US and Japanese monopoly companies. Political agents and economic partners of foreign monopoly capital, who are in control of the politicoeconomic processes of the country, are on the campaign to make the Philippines the base of financial imperialism in Asia. Ihe country’s economy is being closely integrated to the industrial system of world capitalism, particularly the industrial demands of US and Japanese imperialism.13 The document looked upon all government reforms, from land reform to education, as having one end— the facilitation of the exploitation o f the Philippines, its labor and natural resources, by foreign monopoly capitalism. “The martial-law regime is the dictatorship of foreign monopoly capital. It is the rule of imperialist finance capital that brings into fruition all the trends of new economic and political domination set into motion by the collective effort of the leading capitalist powers led by US imperialism.”14 This was part of an effort to restructure the Philippine economy. Thus, instead of providing only raw materials and semiprocessed agricultural products for the world capitalist market, as it was in the first stage of foreign investments, the Philippine economy, or specifically foreign monopoly capital in the Philippines, would also increasingly produce low-cost component products, textile, electronic and other technologically simple, labor-intensive manufactured goods, as well as processed food products for the major capitalist countries.15 Moreover, these initiatives in the Philippines were also part of an imperialist-fostered regional division of labor in Southeast Asia. “Neighboring

Chapter 7: The Sixth PKP Congress

147

countries are being fashioned into complementary units, forming an integral part of the industrial structure of the major capitalist powers, particularly the US and Japan.”16 Within the Philippines, this strategy “opens the way to limited expansion of the productive forces, changes the form of exploitation of the masses and realigns the position of social classes.”17 For one thing, albeit within limits, unemployed rural workers would be absorbed into the new industries, thereby accelerating the growth of the working class. At the same time, the “rise of a strong bourgeois class is being assiduously promoted by proimperialist policymakers.”18 The bourgeoisie was undergoing stratification, with the big bourgeoisie entering joint ventures with foreign capital, a development which was particularly strong in banking and finance, with Philippine investment banks being transformed “into a device for scooping up capital resources from savings of Filipino working people and as a conduit for funnelling those resources to selected investment projects designed in the interest of multinational corporations.”19 The role of the Filipino “junior partners,” in such joint ventures was “to provide political protection to foreign capital and to raise capital resources from the local capital market.”20 As a result, the middle strata of the bourgeoisie would be increasingly starved of foreign exchange and credit resources. The new imperialist strategy “advances the frontiers of capital in the rural areas and tears down the feudal obstacles along the way.”21 Martial law aimed, in overruling the opposition of the feudal oligarchy to reform, to defuse “the revolutionary potential of the peasantry” and to restructure agriculture along capitalist lines. The distribution of land to tenants “on onerous terms” would be followed by the creation of cooperatives (samahang nayori) which would be “the production unit of processing industries financed by foreign monopoly capital and its joint-venture partners among the big bourgeoisie.”22However, this transformation brought the former tenants “closer to the objective situation of the proletariat and thus more disposed to unity with the latter in the struggle for social emancipation. The rise of corporate farms and agricultural enterprises will generate conditions for their transformation into [proletarians].”23 As

148

A M ovem ent Divided

far as the beneficiaries of land reform were concerned, “[tjhrough lo n g ­ term amortization payment of family-sized farms, the labor of the pettylandholding tenants will continue to be a source of capital accum ulation for the landlords who are now turning to new capitalist horizons in partnership with foreign monopolies. The undisguised feudal yoke is being replaced by systematic capitalist bloodsucking.”24 The document saw in all of this imperialism’s aim “to steer the thirdworld countries away from the socialist path of development.” However, Philippine history had “left formidable human and institutional obstacles to rapid capitalist construction,” and even “proimperialist technocrats” estimated that 200 years or more would elapse if the task were to b e attempted by limited reforms, hence the imposition of martial law. This had two complementary aims. “The first is to suppress the growing political awareness of the masses and the second is to pave the way for a more accelerated capitalist development.”25 The regime’s reforms “for a while will blunt the edges of class contradictions and disorient the organized masses.” These reforms were instituted without the benefit of popular participation. Indeed it is the reactionary character of the martial-law government that it is ensuring the elimination of mass involvement in economic and political changes. While it gives boundless opportunities to foreign capital, it prohibits strikes, pickets, rallies and other forms of mass action. Newspapers, radio and television are subject to military censorship.26 The martial-law regime imposed by Marcos was also seen as a result of the USA’s fear of the political advantages that would accrue to the Philippines by its development of trade and diplomatic relations with the socialist countries.* Furthermore, the expiry of the Laurel-Langley Agreement

Quite why Marcos, who had taken the initiative in opening relations with the socialist countries, would then cooperate with the CIA to install a martial-law regime to deny himself the political fruits of those arrangements, is not explained. In emphasizing the role of the CIA and Marcos’s presumed cooperation with it, the PKP was, at this stage, possibly underestimating Marcos’s capacity for independent action. This would change the following year, when the PKP concluded a political settlement with him.

C hapter 7: T he S ixth PKP Congress

149

in 1974 necessitated a “new constitution tailored to the demands of foreign monopoly capital.”27 The CIA’s problem was how to create “conditions for the rise of a dictatorial government”; the “CIA forces” therefore used the “Maoist ‘communist’ vehicle” to break the unity of the anti-imperialist movement and to foment “an anti-communist hysteria by drumming up the imminent threat of a ‘communist’ seizure of state power by way of deliberately generating the conditions for the imposition of martial law In the making of the present crisis, Maoist subjectivism complements imperialist barbarism.”28 The PKP on the other hand saw, in the words of the political resolution’s closing paragraphs, its task as being to preserve and strengthen its ranks, and forge close links with the masses. It must combat terrorism that isolates the party from the people and must condemn opportunism that seeks unprincipled conciliation with the forces of reaction. The PKP cannot be dragged into a left-adventurist policy by infantile revolutionary phrasemongering. At this time there is no substitute for clarifying the causes of the crisis, for learning well the lessons it can teach with a selfcritical outlook, and for determining the immediate tasks of the struggle. Today we begin to work with the masses to prepare them for the next step in the revolution.29

2 Based on this analysis, the PKP then laid out its program. This set the task of completing the revolution of 1896, and like most communist parties in developing countries at this time it saw the development of a broad, national united front as the vehicle to achieve this. “Political power will be shared by parties representing the working class, the peasantry, the patriotic members of the national bourgeoisie, and the left and progressive elements among the youth, intellectuals, in the churches and in the armed forces.”30 However, within such a framework the interests of the working people would be to the fore. Thus, this national-democratic stage of the revolution

15 0

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

seeks maximum development of social and political democracy that will give the working classes full benefit of the fruits of their toil, their active participation in political life as well as in the management and control of productive enterprises, the enforcement and guarantee of democratic rights, and the upliftment of their political awareness and cultural level. It will strengthen the State sector of the economy by the nationalization of imperialist-owned enterprises and the consolidation of the people’s sovereignty in the key sectors of the economy. It will sever the country’s ties with imperialist-oriented international organizations that obstruct the full expression of the popular will for political and economic selfdetermination. It will maintain close relations with the socialist countries, friendship with Arab countries, and solidarity with other peoples’ struggles for their own national and social liberation.31 Although a national-democratic government would consist of a broad coalition of social forces, a change in the class nature of state power could only be achieved as a result of a change in the balance of class forces, something that would require the most intense struggle against the exploiting classes. This can only be ered in by the broadest mass involvement, by the strongest unity of eft» Patri°tic and democratic forces, and by the political maturity of a ers ip that is free from sectarianism and dogmatism and is intensely devoted only to the victory of the Filipino masses. Hence, the struggle o f all anti-imperialist and patriotic forces must rected against the main enemies o f the people. These are the forces f

^ ena^*Sm’ mem^ers o f the big bourgeoisie who collaborate with g monopoly capital, and the strong remnant o f thefeudal oligarchy. But theprincipal enemy is still US im perialism *

t p p

was sharply distinguished from that of the ; Marcos was certainly not viewed as the main enemy, and if feudalism P K P s

^ th

* Was in .

P ° s^ o n

fonn of a “strong remnant” only.

e8arc* to the various forms of struggle, the document stressed

bv th aS 3 cletermination to use all forms of struggle accepted All national unitedfront, uHth the leadership o f thePKP, will wage everyform o f open and legal struggle, including electoral struggle,

m&LAL C h a p te r

7: T h e S i x t h PKP C o n g r e s s

151

that will lead to a change in the balance o fforces and the setting up o f a national democratic government.*3 The PKP, the program continued, rejected all forms of adventurist activity “that attempts to split the masses from their vanguard party.”34 Whether or not the transfer of power from imperialism and its allies was peaceful would, however, be determined by imperialism itself, and the “PKP upholds the right of the people to use force against those who use force against the people.”35 The PKP placed the working class at the head of the projected national united front, explaining that lt]he working class is consistently the most revolutionary and has acquired considerable experience in militant mass struggles. It is equipped with class consciousness and the clearest understanding of its exploitation. Its ranks are imbued with the need for a high degree of oiganization and discipline as a weapon against capitalist exploitation. The strength of the working class also lies in its community erf interests with the other sectors of the working people, with the patriotic members of the national bourgeoisie, the left elements of the youth and the democratic forces among the intellectuals, in the struggle for national independence and democracy. Hence, the working class provides the leading force in the national democratic revolution.36

The program put forward a perspective for noncapitalist development, submitting ten sets of demands (summarized here) which, if realized, would achieve such an aim. 1. Martial law should be terminated and civil liberties restored, all political prisoners released, and a free and popular discussion of the new Constitution conducted. 2.

Genuine national independence was seen as being achieved by removing all US military bases, ending the armed forces’ dependence on US imperialism, abrogating all unequal treaties with the USA, severing relations with the World Bank and IMF and expelling all agents of the CIA, AID personnel, Peace Corps Volunteers and members of “other subversive imperialist agencies.”37

152

3.

A M ovem ent D ivided

The political system should be democratized by repealing the AntiSubversion Law and legalizing the PKP “and other parties dem anding revolutionary changes. . .n38 Similarly, mass organizations should be “guaranteed the widest scope of activities,” and mass political education “aimed at the people’s awareness of their social conditions and political rights” should be conducted.39 Universities and colleges should be state-owned and democratically run, with guarantees o f academic freedom; scientific socialism should be taught at all levels in general education. The management of state-owned com panies should be democratized by allocating seats on the boards to trad e union representatives and others. The media, meanwhile, would b e managed and controlled by “self-governing guilds composed o f practising journalists and newsmen.”40 Any restrictions on the right to strike should be removed. Members of the armed forces should be allowed to exercise full political rights and all restrictions on foreign travel should be removed.

4.

The theme of democratization was further pursued with regard to the economy. This set of demands included a minimum wage, adjusted periodically to fully compensate for inflation, for both industrial and agricultural workers, free housing for miners and agricultural workers, and cheap housing loans for all. With regard to land reform, the document demanded the redistribution of rice and com lands to tenants, with no compensation for landlords; all tenants’ debts should at the same time be cancelled, and lands grabbed from the Muslim and other national minority groups should be returned; all sugar haciendas and coconut and banana plantations in excess of 50 hectares should be turned into cooperatives under worker-management; the peasantry should enjoy free use of irrigation facilities; and, finally, the rural cooperatives should own half of the equity in the rural banks.

5.

Likewise, the social system should be democratized by the provision of free health care, the expansion of maternity benefits and medical facilities for working mothers and the establishment of kindergartens. Ail education up to high-school level should be free, with university

C hapter 7: T he S ixth PKP Congress

i 53

education being made accessible to all on the basis of merit by the creation of scholarships for students from working-class and peasant families. 6.

In order to place the Philippines on a path of noncapitalist development, the public sector of the economy should be expanded and managed in the interests of the whole society. The state should thus take over all US-owned enterprises and agricultural lands acquired under the “parity” agreement. A program of nationalization should cover banks and other financial institutions, the oil industry, the copper and nickel mining industries, the communications and electric power industries, foreign trade and all foreign-owned corporate farms and plantations. All government loans to monopoly corporations, whether Filipino- or foreign-owned, should be converted into equity participation with appropriate management rights. The future credit and investment policies of government institutions should be reoriented toward the state sector and workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives. The state and the Filipino big bourgeoisie should embark upon an integrated program of heavy industrialization on a joint-venture basis. Existing joint ventures between the Filipino big bourgeoisie and foreign monopoly capital should be wholly taken over by the former. Those foreign companies allowed to remain would be subject to strict control of the remittance of profits, dividends, interest, and royalties. Where foreign debt repayment involved the use of foreign exchange, a moratorium would be declared. Effective management of nationalized industries would be handed to “workers and employees.”41 The government would pursue a policy of full employment, introducing a system of unemployment compensation in the meantime. Finally, trade with the socialist countries would be on a nondiscriminatory basis.

7.

Within a framework of national unity, the cultural diversity of the Philippines would be given full expression. Pilipino, as “enriched by elements of various native languages or dialects,”42 would be the main national language, although the cultural expressions of national minority groups “shall be the subject of planned propagation by the State.”43

15 4

8.

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

The Muslim population would establish its own government “with exclusive legislative, executive and judicial powers over all interMuslim relations, such as family and property relations, and religious practices.”44 The policy of national unity would seek to preserve the Muslim way of life rather than “assimilating” it, and thus Muslim culture would be taught in all schools as a part of general education, w hile Pilipino would be taught in Muslim schools “as one of the media o f national unity.”45

9.

On religious matters, the program declared that the Catholic Church should concentrate on the “religious needs” of the Filipino m asses rather than “the material or financial interests of foreign religious orders or corporations.” A ban would be placed on the intervention o f foreign religious orders, with the state “preventing political subversion through religious conduits.”46 The Filipino clergy, meanwhile, would be persuaded to end foreign domination of the Church.

10. The foreign policy of the national united front would be characterized by anticolonialism and anti-imperialism. Thus, the Philippines would identify with the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; enjoy diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries; recognize the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam; enter friendly relations with the Arab countries (supporting the struggle against imperialist and Israeli aggression); and withdraw from the SEATO “and other aggressive security arrangements.”47 Instead, the government should attempt to negotiate an Asian security system based on self-determination, non­ intervention, the settlement of disputes by peaceful means, and a ban on the use of nuclear weapons. Support would be extended to working-class struggles, “particularly in major imperialist countries.”48 The program ended with a section entitled “The Philippine Road to Socialism.” This made it clear that the national democratic revolution w as merely a single stage in the revolutionary process and was dialectically linked to the next, socialist stage.

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It will strengthen the political position of the working class and develop its ability to organize and lead the other forces participating in the revolutionary struggle. Hence, the victory of the national democratic revolution will advance the development of the socialist factors, opening to the Filipino people the road to socialism in their own country.49

3 This congress was seen by the PKP as part of the process of ideological unification within the party. Certainly this was necessary, as the phenomenon of ultraleftism could not be laid wholly at the door of Nemenzo; we have seen that many of the leftist positions adopted prior to the congress actually predated Nemenzo’s break with the party. There did appear to be a desire to appear more “revolutionary” than the CPP, and this may be ascribed to the absence of an up-to-date analysis upon which a consistent political line might be based. With regard to Nemenzo himself, however, the party appears to have repeated the mistake it had first made with Sison, promoting him to a senior position with litde apparent ability to hold him accountable, or to exercise collective editorial control over Ang Komunista. This lesson did now appear to have been learned. Following the Congress, membership of the Party was renewed on the basis of loyalty, past performance, capability and willingness to fulfil revolutionary tasks and duties, and agreement with the ideological position of the Party as spelled out by the Congress. Side by side with the renewal campaign, a vigorous education program involving all Party members, from the highest to the lowest organs, was started.50

The party also adopted a more forthright approach to ideological differences within its ranks, having learned from the Nemenzo episode that to leave such differences unchallenged merely worsened the situation in the longer term. Therefore, right or left deviations would be opposed, regardless of the threat of division or the rank of the party members concerned. Those who showed signs of conducting factional activity

ij 6

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

“must be readily criticized, exposed, and if need be, isolated."51 In future, therefore, there would be regular criticism and self-criticism sessions, with ideological differences being tackled early and the adoption of an “organized and constructive” approach to “intra-Party criticism, based on Party procedures.”52 The party concluded that in order to strengthen its own class position it was necessary to not only intensify its ideological work but also to “make practical moves in attracting more workers to become members of the Party, developing leaders of working class origins and expanding the Party’s influence in the ranks of both the urban and rural proletariat.”53 It was also accepted that the party had suffered from its isolation from the international communist movement and that earlier study of the Maoist phenomenon would have prepared the PKP for its own struggle against it

4 The documents of the 1973 congress were more sophisticated and polished than those published by the CPP just over four years earlier. Of fundamental importance was the detailed analysis of developments within the Philippine economy that led the party to abandon the

“s e m i-c o lo n ia l

and semi-feudal characterization of the mode of production, enabling it to develop a program based on concrete reality. As we have seen, the program committed the party to struggle to place the Philippines on the path of “non-capitalist development.” Thus, it saw the possibility of rallying to this perspective a wide array of social forces opposed in one way or another to the neocolonial industrialization then taking place. At first glance, it might seem that the PKP was casting its net rather too widely in countenancing the possibility of including members of the armed forces in such a national united front. But there were grounds for this. For example, one former leading

m em ber

recalls that some PKP members who were

university lecturers had been invited to lecture at the National

D e fe n s e

College “and the rapport that we got when they knew who we were! Some

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i

57

of those we were lecturing to were very left. On land reform, some of them at colonel level advocated expanding the program to coconut, to fishing. . . Military intellectuals undertook research which reached us, and they were very, very good.”54 Similarly with the national bourgeoisie: The national bourgeoisie were all anti-martial law. They favored industrialization, as we did. On this basis it was possible to form a tactical alliance. And then the old-time sympathizers were still there, in the Civil Liberties Union, for example. The line of the nationalist bourgeoisie was “Let us relate to all countries, let us not be monopolized by the United States . . ." Around this time, many of the capitalist firms started probing socialist countries for possibilities—oil exploration, trade, putting up plants here . . . By this time, Marcos was exploring alternative energy sources. Instead of getting oil through the Middle East or through the United States he thought of heightening drilling activity here, and one of the countries he tapped was the Soviet Union.55

There is no doubt, moreover, that considerable support could have been mobilized in this sector due to the economic opportunities which the program would have afforded them at the expense of imperialism. Although there were similarities between the programs of the PKP and the CPP inasmuch as both recognized the current tasks as constituting the national democratic stage of the revolutionary process, the PKP’s was the more realistic in that it clearly implied that, following the break with imperialism, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries could be relied upon for material assistance; given its ideological position, the CPP was unable to offer such a perspective. Furthermore, whereas the CPP foresaw a lengthy period during which the national bourgeoisie would share power and thus retain its privileges, the PKP program quite clearly viewed the national democratic stage of the revolution as not just preceding the socialist stage but as being the springboard to it. It is true, of course, that the role of martial law turned out to be much as the PKP had predicted at this congress, holding down opposition while capitalist-oriented reforms were introduced. But this was the role the regime performed objectively. There is no evidence to indicate that Marcos

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A M ovem ent Divided

had colluded with the USA or any other of the imperialist powers to devise such a scheme for the benefit of the transnational corporations. As w e will see in the next chapter, Marcos had his own aims in introducing martial law. One of the most important demands in the PKP program was that for the legalization of the party. It is of interest, however, that this w as not posed as one of the party’s immediate demands. Did, then, the party at this stage rule out the possibility of legalization by the Marcos regime? This would appear likely, as the latter was characterized as “the dictatorship o f foreign monopoly capital. It is the rule of imperialist finance capital that brings into fruition all the trends of new economic and political domination set into motion by the collective effort of the leading capitalist powers led by US imperialism.”56 While the documents stopped short of labeling the Marcos government “fascist” (a label the PKP had previously used, and which the CPP would continue to employ until the toppling of the regime), it is difficult to imagine such a regime or its imperialist patrons even contemplating the legalization of a communist party. And yet, just over a year later, this is precisely what happened, even though the legalization was only partial in form. This would suggest that the view of the martiallaw regime adopted by the 1973 Congress was insufficiently dialectical.

N o tes 1. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. 2. Ibid. Even so, Torres says that the congress “was a very big meet, as I could judge even before it started just by looking at the campsite that had been levelled for it and the accommodations that had been built for the participants . . . Some 150 Party leaders were expected from all over the country.” See Nick Joaquin, A Kadre’s Road to Damascus: The Ruben Torres Story (Quezon City: Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2003), 92. 3. PKP, Fifth [Sixth] Congress, Political Resolution (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 2-3. 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Ibid., 8.

C hapter 7: T he S ixth PKP Congress

6.

Ibid, 9.

7.

Ibid, 10.

8.

Ibid, 11.

9.

Ibid, 16-17.

159

10. Ibid, 18-19. 11. Ibid, 24-26. 12. Ibid, 25. 13. Ibid, 29. 14. Ibid, 30. 15. Ibid, 32. 16. Ibid, 34. 17. Ibid, 35. 18. Ibid, 36. 19. Ibid, 36-37. 20. Ibid, 37. 21. Ibid, 38. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid, 38-39. 24. Ibid, 39. 25. Ibid, 42. 26. Ibid, 45. 27. Ibid, 44. 28. Ibid, 45-46. 29. Ibid, 46. 30. PKP, “Program Adopted by the Fifth [Sixth] Congress of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), February 11, 1973,” reprinted in William Pomeroy, An

American-Made Tragedy (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 166. 31. Ibid., 167. 32. Ibid., emphasis in the original. 33. Ibid., 168, emphasis in the original. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 173. 38. Ibid., 174. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid, 177. 42. Ibid.

16 0

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Ibid Ibid Ibid, 178. Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid, 179. PKP, “The Party’s Struggle against Ultra-Leftism Under Martial Law." Ibid. Ibid Ibid. Dizon interview. Ibid PKP, Political Resolution, 30.

C h a pter 8 : M arcos th e

and

“N ew S o c ie t y ” i

Once the helicopter taking Ferdinand Marcos from Malacafiang had cleared the horizon, the hand of the media would focus the attention of the public on the contents of Imelda’s wardrobes. Here, the television images suggested, was a clear indication that the Marcoses had been helping themselves and that this, along with the regime’s record of civil rights abuses, was why they had been toppled by “people power.” But Marcos was dumped not because he was corrupt or brutal but because, as far as the USA was concerned, he had by 1986 lost all credibility and there was an acceptable alternative waiting in the wings. Events were to demonstrate, moreover, that, without a program of genuine nationalist development, even the most apparently angelic of presidents would be powerless in the face of the inappropriate economic policies foisted on the country by the multilateral finance institutions, and that as long as a dysfunctional economic model was pursued the other major problems plaguing the Philippines would defy resolution. Herein lays the importance of a major theme that is emerging in this book: the contradiction between the anti-imperialism of the PKP and the antiMarcosism of the CPP.

i

6i

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A M ovem ent Divided

For all that has been written about him, there was som ething in Ferdinand Edralin Marcos that both gave US imperialism pause for thought and allowed the more thoughtful contingents of the national dem ocratic movement a glimpse of nationalist potential. Marcos began his presidency in 1965 as the obedient servant o f US imperialism, so much so that US President Lyndon Johnson dubbed him “my boy.” For much of his first term, while implementing some policies of benefit to the nation (and, it is true, to foreign capital) such as his energetic roads program, Marcos appeared content to be “America’s boy.” Shortly after his electoral victory, he was visited by US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who appealed for a sizeable contingent of Philippine troops— at least 10,000— to fight in Vietnam. Despite the fact that he had opposed the Philippine Civic Action Group expedition during the election campaign, Marcos sent 2,000 of these “technical troops,” although he would be forced by mass protests to withdraw them after a few years. But at first, Marcos toed the line on Vietnam just as Macapagal had done; in June 1966, the censors even went to the length of banning a film on North Vietnam that a member of the faculty at the University of the Philippines had wished to use for a class In September 1966, Marcos embarked upon a fifteen-day pilgrimage to Washington, telling the Manila Times before his departure that “the only acceptable power here in Asia right now which can be utilized as a shield against intransigent Red China is American power. I therefore feel that American power should be helped within the limits of our capacity.”1 Speaking before a joint session of the US Congress on September 16, Marcos distorted both history and contemporary reality by boldly declaring that the “United States has been a reluctant participant in the affairs of Asia,” and that it “can truthfully disavow any surviving imperial ambitions in Asia. The presence of American bases . . . could be justified as aiming solely to deter or repel any encroachments of Communist power in these areas.” With regard to Vietnam, he urged the Americans to “never tire of repeating” that their presence there was “for the purpose of assisting that nation in defense of its independence and territorial integrity . . . They

C hapter 8: M arcos and the “N ew Society*

i 63

are not in Vietnam, nor anywhere else in Asia, for the purpose of political hegemony or economic gain.”2 Small wonder that Hubert Humphrey was able to purr that Marcos’s visit had “exceeded our fondest expectations,” or that Time magazine on October 17 quoted a White House source as saying: “In less than a year he did well enough for us to decide that it was worthwhile to underwrite him a little more.” The acclaim within the Philippines was less than unanimous. Senator Jovito Salonga remarked caustically that “the moment we reach a point where people are led to believe—and so believe—that nothing can save us, we shall have lost even the desire to be genuinely free, the capacity to stand up and work for our freedom, and the ability to face the storms and stresses of independent nationhood.”3 In return for US economic “assistance,” Marcos was expected to deliver rather more than just a few pro-American speeches. The month after his Washington trip, he was assigned the leading role in arranging a summit in Manila, ostensibly with the aim of seeking a peaceful end to the war in Vietnam. In truth, the idea for a conference of the “allied” Asian nations came from the USA and, despite the fact that Marcos was proud to claim the credit, US secretary of state Dean Rusk admitted that it had been planned months before Marcos’s arrival in Washington. The real purpose of the conference was questioned by a number of observers in the region, the Indian Express predicting that it could “be expected to pay greater attention to the prosecution of the war than to the search for peace.”4Japan would not even send an observer. The doubters were proven correct. It was President Johnson’s show, as he demonstrated by referring to the assembled heads of state by their surnames. “Marcos, you are my boy. I will give you whatever you want. People who do not believe that had better sit up and listen.”5To his credit, however, Marcos made an attempt to talk peace, complaining of the draft communiqué: “This is not a peace proposal, this is an ultimatum.”6 It was true, for the communiqué pledged the signatories to “continue our military and all other efforts . . " The Philippines Free Press protested: “The Philippines is now at war, in gross violation of the constitutional provision

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A M ovem ent D ivided

renouncing war as an instrument of national policy— and without the benefit of the two-thirds majority vote of all members of the House and Senate required for a declaration of war.”7 Marcos’s reward for his subservience to Washington’s foreign policy was increased aid and, more particularly, international loans. However, such “aid” assisted US capital far more than it helped the Philippines. That this “assistance” was quickly forthcoming may be gauged from the fact that the Philippines’ foreign debt rose from $599 5 million at the end of 1965 to $1.9 billion a year later.8As previously, however, all the foreign loans did was to make good the loss of capital due to profit repatriation and the repayment of previous debts. By 1966 the net outflow of capital had reached $1 billion a year. The USA’s balance of payments problems occasioned by the Vietnam war had intensified an earlier tendency, for while many US companies had always raised much of their capital locally, they were now under “explirit instructions from no less than the US government” to do so, and to “remit to the US as much of their earnings as possible.”9 Bancom stated quite bluntly: [W]e continue to advise local borrowings as much as possible, as long as possible and at the earliest possible time.”10 The Manila Times published a study demonstrating that foreign companies were remitting $2.50 for every dollar invested; by 1969 this ratio had widened to $7.08 for every dollar invested.11 In 1966, while US companies invested $9.2

m illio n

abroad, the capital outflow from the USA was only $2.7 million, prompting one Filipino observer to quip that “where before we were fried in A m e r i c a n lard, we now fry in our own fat!”12 At the same time, the transnational corporations were learning how to cope with Third World resentment. In March 1966, David Rockefeller, president of Chase Manhattan, told a stockholders’ meeting in New York that “it has been our gratifying experience to observe that by affiliating with a local institution in a joint venture which retains its local name and management, we do not encounter the nationalistic resentment which is often directed toward a branch or sole ownership of a local bank.”13 The Philippine central bank fell into line, proposing that US banks be allowed to purchase a one-third interest in local banks.

Chapter 8: Marcos and th e “New Society*

165

Attention was also deflected from the true patterns of influence in the Philippine economy by the fact that such influence was increasingly wielded by avowedly “multilateral” institutions. Certainly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank strengthened their control of the Philippine economy as the years passed. In his state of the nation address to Congress in January 1967, Marcos recounted that the same time the previous year, shortly after he had taken office, the World Bank’s president had given notice by formal letter “of a loss of confidence in the ability of our Government to honor its loan obligations and to put to good use borrowings from abroad.” This constituted a shot across the new president’s bows, says Lichauco, indicating that the World Bank “wanted nothing less than the continuation of an economic program based on a foreign exchange system free from restrictions . . ”14 In the economic field, therefore, at this stage Marcos fulfilled the mandate given him by the USA. His Investment Incentives Law of 1967, for example, gave further privileges to foreign capital and paved the way for the extension of the substance of parity beyond its expiry date in 1974. This was done by means of dividing the economy into “pioneer” and “non­ pioneer” industries. In “pioneer” industries, foreign capital was permitted to own 100 percent of the equity in a company for twenty years, after which time 60 percent of the enterprise would have to revert to Philippine hands. However, the law allowed that “[sjuch period for attainment of 60 percent ratio of Filipino ownership may be extended for justifiable cause."15 In “non-pioneer” areas, foreign interests were restricted to a maximum of 40 percent ownership. A free trade zone was established in Bataan for industries manufacturing for export, and for such industries the Export Incentives Act of 1970 waived import duties on raw materials and granted generous tax concessions. In those rural areas most prone to armed dissent, Marcos instituted reforms of a kind, launching “Operation Central Luzon” in Pampanga province in 1966 as a pilot land reform measure. The operation, it was said, “starts as a civic action and community development but becomes one of land reforms.” In essence, this was nothing more than a variant of the

166

A M ovem en t D ivided

program implemented by Magsaysay in the 1950s and, like its predecessors, was more concerned with counterinsurgency than genuine reform .16 In Tarlac province, a hotbed of unrest, the US Agency for International Development (AID) implemented a Systematic Program for Rural Econom ic Assistance and Development between 1965 and 1968. Such measures w ere either entirely cosmetic or had the aim of assisting imperialist penetration of the economy. Meanwhile, spurred by the nationalism that had revived in the late 1950s, an alternative to foreign domination of the economy began to take shape in the unlikeliest of places— Congress. Speaker of the House Jo s e B. Laurel (son of Jose P. Laurel, president during the Japanese occupation) in late 1968 created a full-time economic staff for the House, directing them to draft a nationalist blueprint of socioeconomic policies. The staff duly got to work, holding public hearings with the aim of building a consensus in the private sector, and after eight weeks it delivered up the Report of the Special House Committee on Social and Economic Planning (almost inevitably, the document became known as the “Magna Carta”). Under Laurel’s sponsorship, the report received unanimous support in the House of Representatives; despite stiff resistance, Jose W. Diokno piloted it through the Senate. The document called for “restrictions on the operations and activities of multinationals, for the Filipinization of the econom y including domestic credit, and for the use of protective tariffs, import and exchange controls as the only effective means with which to promote industrialization.” Says Lichauco: “The policies enunciated by the Magna Carta embraced the entire range of the nation’s political economy, including its foreign relations; it demanded an end of parity, the Filipinization of the economy and called for an independent foreign policy.”17 A constitutional convention which, first mooted in the late 1960s as the nationalist movement regained strength and began to voice the dem and for a constitution less amenable to foreign economic domination, w as finally convened in July 1971. But the vast majority of the 316 delegates were establishment politicians and businessmen, many of whom w ere, in Pomeroy’s phrase, “wined, dined and womaned” in swank hotels by

various lobbyists.18 Marcos, of course, had his eye on a constitutional change which would allow him a third term as president. The minority of nationalists present as delegates were able to make a considerable impact, managing to get one committee to commit itself to a preamble to the new Constitution which would call for “an integrated, nationalistic and socially oriented economic plan.” As the convention ground away (having incurred costs of F50 million in its first year), in August 1972 the Philippine Supreme Court made two decisions that, given the opportunity, would have acted as an enormous fillip to the nationalist movement. First, the Court ruled that, come the end of parity in 1974, there could be no question of the lands and property acquired by US citizens under its provisions being retained by them; they would have to be handed over to Filipinos. Second, only Filipino citizens could in future hold executive and managerial posts in foreign firms located in the Philippines.

Like Macapagal before him, Marcos began to adopt nationalist positions. Late in his first term, he caused mounting dismay in imperialist circles by discussing the possibility of relations with the socialist countries and criticizing the manner in which US corporations raised their finances on the local market rather than importing their own capital, and in 1969 he signed into law the “Magna Carta.” Thus, in the election campaign of 1969 the USA decided that it could no longer trust Marcos, and switched its support to Sergio Osmefia Jr. Marcos, however, bought his way to victory— to such an extent, ironically, that the peso was rendered vulnerable, forcing Marcos to concede the World Bank demand for devaluation (which he had promised to resist prior to his reelection) and therefore for all practical purposes scuppering the “Magna Carta.” Even so, there were indications that US imperialism persisted in its opposition to Marcos and, equally, that he remained desirous of establishing

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

a degree of independence for himself, if not for his country, that none of his predecessors had been able to enjoy. Early in 1970 Bias Ople, Marcos’s Labor secretary, recommended that a $427,000 aid program by the American-Asian Free Labor Institute be scrapped in view of allegations that the organization was a CIA front aimed at “capturing” Philippine labor. The following year, amid rumors of an assassination bid, Marcos insisted that the entire CIA team in the Philippines be recalled, although the team that replaced it was no friendlier.* In his State of the Nation address in January 1971, Marcos spoke in terms of a “democratic revolution” and proposed several reforms. Among these were the establishment of a state trading corporation in order to stabilize the prices of prime commodities, the creation o f an oil commission to regulate the importation of crude oil and to produce and market gasoline and other oil products, the introduction of a tax on all foreign exchange transactions, with higher rates for nonessential goods, the encouragement of cottage industry, the introduction of a birth control program, a largely infrastructural “agricultural revolution,” an electrification program, and the introduction of a “comprehensive development plan” for education. Marcos’s thoughts on the “democratic revolution” were elaborated in a book appearing in the same year entitled Today's Revolution: Democracy. At the time, both the speech and the book were panned by the PKP and its allies. Of the speech, the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism (MAN) commented that Marcos has to build desperately an appearance of self-justification, in the face of the CIA-directed campaign to discredit him, to do away with him as a puppet who has outlived his usefulness in the service of his imperialist masters . . . In prattling about “revolution” and “restructuring the social order,” President Marcos is readily dismissed as a first-rate hypocrite, because his years in the presidency so far have plainly shown his office to

This makes the PKP’s assertion, expressed at its 1973 congress (see Chapter 7), that the CIA had collaborated in setting the scene for Marcos’s declaration of martial law seem somewhat unlikely.

C h a p t e r 8: M a r c o s

and th e

“ N ew S o c ie t y *

i

69

be merely the executive committee of US imperialism in perpetuating an exploitative social system upon the Filipino people. MAN’s journal recalled that Macapagal had also spoken of an “unfinished revolution.”19 The proposals put forward in Marcos’s speech were for the most part dismissed as World Bank-IMF prescriptions dressed up as independent initiatives. Marcos’s book, meanwhile, was laughed at by the PKP’s Ang Komunista: “Fashionable Ferdie has caught the fever of ‘revolution,’ plunging him into a state of frenzied delirium. His hallucinations have miraculously evolved into a ‘revolutionary theory,’ actually a confused hodge-podge of glittering platitudes, empty rhetoric, self-righteous rationalizations, well-worn cliches, assorted quotations and incredible assertions.” The journal advised: “Be sure . . . that the garbage can is near your favorite reading chair.”20 As, at this stage, Ang Komunista did not, as we have seen, always reflect party policy, and so it is possible that this article was a case in point; however, this appeared in 1971, over a year before the party’s sixth congress, and so it is equally possible that the piece did not mark a particularly radical divergence from the party’s view. The PKP’s approach (o r at least that of Ang Komunista') to Marcos at this stage was somewhat dogmatic, seeing him as merely fulfilling the role assigned by revolutionary theory to all “puppets.” Such an approach momentarily blinded the party (and/or the journal) to the positive potential in the situation. This blindness, moreover, was at times almost literal, as in February 1971 when an article in

Ang Komunista commented: “Our neocolonial government thinks, speaks and acts as if the Soviet Union does not exist, as if Chiang Kai-shek is still the sovereign ruler of the Chinese people ,”21 whereas, in fact, a spokesman for that very “neocolonial” government had as early as January 1967 stated that trade relations with “communist” countries was being considered, and this was echoed more firmly by Marcos himself the following year; earlier still, in September 1966, he had praised the Soviet Union for its role in helping to settle the conflict between India and Pakistan.22 Ang

Komunista also seemed to have forgotten the manner in which Marcos had been described after his first election by an editorial in Progressive Review:

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

“Unlike Raul Manglapus, the new President is not yet fully identified with the die-hard reactionary forces . . . As Congressman and, later, Senator, he skilfully leapt from nationalism to pro-Americanism and back again. In all likelihood Marcos will hold on to this ambiguity for as long as possible .”23 Now, as Marcos was obviously in a nationalist phase, it may have been more appropriate if Ang Komunista had seen its task as one of attempting to strengthen, rather than dismiss, such nationalism. And within the pages of Today’s Revolution there was much which should have struck (and eventually did strike) a sympathetic chord with the PKP. Revolutions begin when the political order must respond to economic and social change, when for example, it is challenged to integrate into the society the so-called oppressed groups who have a developed political consciousness. These groups are often dismissed as “radical minorities” but the base of their appeal may be wider than their numbers, for they may truly speak the sentiment of the peasants, the workers, the masses. They are the active agents of the revolution, although they cannot succeed without the support of millions. Challenged in this way, the political authority can accommodate the revolution or try to suppress it. There are those who think there is a third way: reforms. But reforms, to succeed, must be radical, and radical reforms are nothing less than revolutionary.24 And later: When the consciousness of the political authority coincides with the revolutionary demands of the masses a revolution initiated by government becomes a matter of necessity. It is a necessity that, moreover, dates back to the anti-colonial struggle of 1896 for a political authority that would be the instrument of national independence, a promoter of the Filipino’s moral and intellectual development, economic and social well-being. This demand continues up to this day . . ** One reading (that initially made by Ang Komunista) would find fault in the above formulations, seeing in Marcos’s proposals for reforms a device to forestall revolution. An alternative reading, however, might see radical

C hapter 8: M arcos and

th e

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17 1

reforms as a way forward, improving the lot of segments of the population, providing the opportunity to mobilize popular support for such reforms and, in so doing, building the mass movements as a springboard for further advance in the future. Such an approach would place the positions adopted by Marcos in the context of those economic developments in the Philippines as they affected Marcos and the group he led, principally Marcos’s own emergence as a capitalist with extensive and substantial holdings in companies in various sectors of the economy. This brought him into conflict with some of the older sections of the economic elite, gave him a vested interest in introducing capitalist methods into the backward countryside (thereby alienating the landlords) and, in that he was “acquiring the means to behave independently,”26heightened the fears of US imperialism.

3 In September 1972, Marcos used the NPA, the 1971 bombing of the Liberal Party rally in Plaza Miranda, and a number of other factors (such as a staged attempt on the life of defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile) as pretexts for the declaration of martial law. Observers have advanced a number of alternative motives for the declaration—that Marcos merely wished to enjoy a third term of office, that the constitutional convention was proving to be uncontrollable, that recent decisions of the Philippine Supreme Court needed to be negated in the interests of US imperialism, or (the theory put forward by the PKP at its 1973 Congress) that martial law was required by US imperialism so that the Philippine economy could be subjected to a thoroughgoing series of capitalist-based reforms without opposition. Marcos’s motives were, however, surely more complex. Yes, he wished to remain in power, thwarting US-backed attempts to unseat him (and the USA, it must be said, was using the excuse not only that he had become unreliable, but that popular protests against corruption were mounting).

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Marcos was of course aware that constitutionally he would have been barred from running for a third term in 1973 (and even the h e a d of the CIA team that had replaced the one he had sent packing had attempted to dissuade him from running again). Another reason for martial law can be found in the workings of the Philippine party political system. In the Philippines, there had (and has) never been a situation in which one of the major parties has tended to represent the interests of capital while another represented those of labor and the peasantry. Both the Liberal and Nacionalista parties had, instead, represented different groups among the ruling elite. Thus, when one party was in, its supporters within the elite were awarded the spoils; equally, then, the elite supporters of the opposition party needed to secure the defeat of the government if they were to be allowed any of the richer pickings. Warning against this syndrome toward the end of the Marcos regime, Constantino wrote that opposition leaders who concentrated their attacks on the excesses of the Marcos government, conveniently ignoring the role of foreign capital and the need to seek a nationalist alternative, are liable to the charge that they just want to be “in” because they are “out” at the moment, and that they are just waiting for the right signal from Washington to take over the captive throne. Worse, they may be accused of manipulating genuine mass discontent merely to serve their own personal ambitions and not to provide a real alternative to the system that Marcos has served so well.27 Thus the Marcos supporters now made use of the martial law umbrella to wrest even greater economic power from the Liberal supporters, and some of the latter now found their companies being virtually confiscated by the government. As is well-known by now, the one person who probably benefited from this process more than any other was Marcos himself, constructing a maze of hidden economic interests. Pomeroy has described the martial law declaration in the following terms: The martial law step was, in essence, a decisive strategic move by a sector of the Filipino national bourgeoisie aimed at transforming the

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backward semi-feudal features of the economy and at advancing capitalist industrialization. President Marcos was the spokesman, leader and an active participant of this sector, and his “new society" was a bourgeois state form that acted to curtail the political and economic power of the semi-feudal landlords and to bring them more fully into the capitalist system of relations.28

Of course, martial law also gave Marcos the opportunity to clamp down on the popular dissent which had shown signs of becoming increasingly vociferous. The schools were closed for three weeks while a purge was undertaken of students and faculty members engaged in “subversion, insurgency and other similar activities, or are known to be active members of subversive organizations, or are active participants or supporters of such subversive organizations.” A list of offenses, including crimes against national security and violations of the Anti-Subversion Law would be dealt with by a military tribunal, while those “resisting authority with a firearm” could expect a mandatory sentence of death by firing squad, and those merely possessing a firearm would face from twenty years to life. Needless to say, of the varying estimates of between 8,000 and 20,000 who were arrested in the first three months of martial law,29 many were trade union and peasant activists. Strikes and picketing in a large number of “vital” industries were banned. The question now arises, given the fact that the CIA appeared to have been intent on ditching Marcos, as to why the USA was not boiling over with moral indignation at the host of civil rights violations now taking place and, exerting the many forms of pressure open to it, taking this opportunity to unseat him. The situation was rather more complex than that. The CIA represented merely one strand of opinion within US circles. US Ambassador Henry Byroade certainly gave the impression that he had rather more time for Marcos. The day before the imposition of martial law, Marcos met Byroade and notified him of his intentions, seeking the USA’s approval in return for a promise that US economic interests would be protected. Pomeroy takes the view that, as “no statement of disapproval came from the Nixon administration,” such a deal was indeed struck.30 This

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is rather different from the analysis adopted at the PKP’s sixth congress, according to which US imperialism had devised martial law so that the reforms it required could be implemented. The US state departm ent’s official account of these years, in summarizing US relations with Marcos al this time, has this to say: The Nixon administration recognized the Philippines as a special friend, but the culture of corruption, the imposition of martial law in 1972, and the dictatorial tendencies of the Marcos government worried some U.S. officials. The Embassy highlighted these problems and U.S. officials tried to encourage Marcos to reform his government’s practices and move back toward democracy . . . Although the Nixon administration neither encouraged nor approved of the imposition of martial law, it chose to continue working with Marcos as his support for the Vietnam war and the Philippine role in the Pacific overshadowed doubts about the country’s internal policies. Yet, while the Nixon administration appeared to support Marcos, the U.S. Embassy in Manila maintained a low-level dialogue with Senators Benigno Aquino and Sergio Osmefta and other prominent Marcos opponents.31 There would seem to be little doubt that the motivation behind the imposition of martial law was domestic.

4 The signals sent out during the early part of the martial law period were highly contradictory. As we have seen already, there were numerous arrests and certain civil liberties were curtailed, but within the authoritarian climate following Proclamation 1081 there were initiatives which were, at least potentially, progressive. A month after martial law was imposed, Marcos issued Presidential Decree 27, which in theory gave 715,000 tenant farmers “the option to acquire a family-size farm" of up to five hectares if not irrigated or up to three hectares if irrigated. Existing landowners might retain no more than seven hectares. The cost was limited to 250 percent of the

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average harvest o f the three years preceding the decree, and tenants were given fifteen years to p ay Such a decree, described by a M arcos critic as “the m ost significant agrarian reform program ever to b e introduced as law in the Philippines,”32 appeared to strike at the very heart o f the traditional pow er base o f Philippine politics.’ In

D ecem ber

1972,

Presidential

D ecree

86

provided

for

the

establishm ent o f citizens’ assem blies in each barrio o f a certain size in every tow n and city district in order to “increase the participation o f the citizen in national affairs.” M embership o f such assem blies was o p en to all over the age o f 15 resident in the barrio, district or ward for six months, w ho w ere citizens o f the Philippines and registered as assem bly m em bers. In January 1973, Marcos ordered the formation o f barangay assem blies in Manila, each o f w hich was intended to consist o f around 1,000 m em bers drawn from the two main parties and all other civic and religious groups and associations. This obviously opened up the possibility o f breaking the two-party stranglehold. Tw o w eeks later, Marcos announced the formation o f the P eop le’s Revolutionary Congress consisting o f 1,000 local barangay leaders, 100 tow n mayors, 30 city mayors, 11 governors, 1,500 local councilors, and som e 2,000 representatives o f other groups. T h e purported functions o f the congress were to transmit the opinions o f the local people, to forge policies based upon the results o f referenda o r other forms o f direct consultation, agree on guidelines for action at local level, and to prepare future plans for the Citizens’ Assemblies. Next, Marcos put the Constitution ham m ered out by the constitutional convention (after, it must b e said, he had taken steps to ensure that the finished product was to his liking) to a referendum. In fact, there were several questions put in the referendum, by

However, the decree was followed by intense activity by the landowners potentially affected, who took various actions in order to ensure that they retained their holdings— subdivision among dependents and relatives, hastily bringing idle land under cultivation, etc. By O ctober 1986, only 13,590 tenants would have received titles to a total of 11,087 hectares o f land.33 Even this is a more optimistic picture than that painted by Constantino who, writing in 1984, reported that “only about 2,000 have received their Emancipation Patents or titles o f actual ownership. Only 70,000 are remitting amortization payments to the Land Bank, and of this number, less than 20 percent are able to keep up their remittances. Many are behind by a few years, meaning that they may eventually lose their rights to their lands. Others have taken what seemed to be the only way out: selling their rights and giving up farming altogether."34

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means of which it was decided that the citizens’ assemblies were approved as a means of popular government, the new Constitution was approved without the need for a separate plebiscite, elections due in November 1973 were postponed for seven years, and martial law would continue. The new Constitution was itself a contradictory document. On the one hand, the state was charged to “promote social justice to ensure the dignity, welfare and security of all the people. Toward this end, the State shall regulate the acquisition, ownership, use, enjoyment, and disposition of private property, and equitably diffuse property ownership and profits.” It would also afford protection to labor, promote full employment and equality in employment, ensure equal work opportunities regardless of sex, race, or creed, and regulate the relations between workers and employers. The State shall assure the rights of workers to self-organization, collective bargaining, security of tenure, and just and humane conditions of work. The sting in the tail of this particular section came with: “The State may provide for compulsory arbitration.” The new Constitution abolished the House of Representatives and the Senate, replacing these with a National Assembly and creating the post of prime minister. A Commission on Elections (Comelec) was created which would, among other things, be responsible for accrediting political parties. However, a political party would be barred from accreditation if it “seeks to achieve its goals through violence or subversion,” a condition open to wide interpretation. With regard to control of the economy, the Constitution represented (at least on paper) a step forward in nationalist terms. The National Assembly was empowered, upon the recommendation of the National Economic and Development Authority, to reserve “certain traditional areas” of investment to Filipinos or corporations wholly owned by them “when the national interest so dictates.” As previously, utilities were required to be subject to 60 percent Filipino ownership. This same requirement applied to the “disposition, exploration, or utilization of any of the natural resources of the Philippines,” although the National Assembly was empowered to allow corporations to “enter into service contracts for financial, technical,

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management or other forms of assistance with any foreign person or entity. . Ownership and management of the mass media was limited to Filipino citizens or corporations wholly owned and managed by them. Finally, the state “may, in the interest of national welfare or defense, establish and operate industries and means of transportation and communication, and upon payment of just compensation, transfer to public ownership utilities and other private enterprises to be operated by the Government.” The Constitution allowed for the convening of an interim National Assembly until such time as elections had been conducted. However, armed with the result of the recent referendum, Marcos now proclaimed that the interim National Assembly would not be convened. Thus, for the next seven years the president and prime minister (Marcos assumed the latter post as well) would conduct his relations with the people via the citizens’ assemblies. Firmly on the debit side was General Order 5, which banned strikes in “vital” industries. This was followed on November 13, 1972, by an order banning all strikes and picketing, along with collections for strike funds by trade unions. The Labor Code was amended to make unfair labor practices “violations of the civil rights of both labor and management and . . . also criminal offences against the State.” Trade union rights were further curtailed by the removal of the right of workers in government and government-owned corporations, security guards, managerial employees, and employees of nonprofit charitable, medical, and religious institutions to organize or join trade unions. Given the outcry, both national and international, against the order banning strikes, a further presidential decree allowed strikes in “nonvital” industries, although the concession was considered virtually meaningless in view of the breadth of discretion allowed in determining whether an industry was “vital.”35 The picture was much the same in education. On September 29, 1972, Marcos promulgated the Educational Development Decree, laying down the guiding principles for a ten-year education program. Eventually put in place for 1978-87, the main aims of the Educational Development Plan were to place a growing emphasis on “work and production activities. . . From third grade in the elementary level and extending up to the fourth

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year in secondary level, students are provided with such work-oriented curriculum programs that in case they drop out of school, they can still be useful, productive and economically self-sufficient citizens.”36 One of the main victims of the reorganization of education was the University of the Philippines which, says Jose, was reorganized and reoriented to serve, through financial, organizational and institutional means the goals of national development as they were fostered by imperialism . . . While the UP Presidency was declared a managerial post and less a position of intellectual leadership, various units of the institution itself were transformed into technological resource centers with the help of funding from the Wodd Bank, the Asian Development Bank, United States and Japanese governments, etc. so that it can serve better the interests of the various state agencies, the TNCs and their local affiliates—or in some cases, certain community-oriented projects.57 To quell the opposition which greeted the educational reforms, Marcos issued various orders allowing the expulsion of students, staff or faculty members who supported “subversive” organizations and banning student organizations, publications, demonstrations, etc. However, the international position adopted by the Marcos martial law regime must have convinced many of the anti-Marcos elements in Washington and the CLA that they had been right all along. Gone were the days, apparendy, when the Filipino delegate to the United Nations would glance across at his US counterpart in order to see how he was supposed to vote. Now, the Philippines was adopting a position of solidarity with the rest of the Third World in its efforts to usher in a New International Economic Order. Hosting the Group of 77 meeting in Manila in February 1976, the Philippines supported the Manila Declaration, which called for a world conference to discuss a debt moratorium, for various measures aimed at stabilizing commodity prices and for strict controls on transnational corporations in their dealings with the Third World. Furthermore, Marcos then applied for membership of the Non-Aligned Movement, although this attempt failed because of the presence of US bases on Philippine soil and the Philippines’ membership of SEATO. Most dramatically of all,

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Marcos opened up diplomatic relations with Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Cuba, Mongolia, the People’s Republic of China, Cambodia (or Kampuchea as it was called at the time), the Soviet Union, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Between 1974 and 1976, trade between the Philippines and the socialist countries increased by some 70 percent. So just what were the intentions of Ferdinand Marcos? What kind of social organism was his “New Society” (the name he gave to the martial law regime) intended to be? Was he, as would be surmised from the media assessments made after his fall from power, motivated purely by personal acquisitiveness and ego? Was the man whom President Lyndon Johnson had called his “boy” reacting on a purely personal level, eager to demonstrate that he would never again be anyone’s boy? Or was the New Society intended to be his attempt to both achieve a greater measure of real independence for the Philippines and to develop it economically by placing constraints on both capital and labor, subordinating both to his own vision of the future, a future to be achieved by, at least initially, assigning a leading role to the state? Kolko is of the view that Marcos was totally devoid of ideology in the true sense. Marcos always pursued several economic strategies in tandem quite eclectically, amassing the immediate advantages and long-run liabilities of all of them. He welcomed World Bank intervention insofar as it provided funds and helped obtain private loans to advance his crony capitalist strategy, and when the destructive consequences of bank policies and his own corruption demanded remedial measures, he accepted yet greater bank control. At the same time, he never wholly abandoned earlier protective legislation.38 Kolko’s assertion, a criticism that would also be made by the PKP in due course, is undoubtedly correct; however, it is likely that Marcos’s eclecticism was partly the result of the fact that he was subject to pressures from a number of directions, and that policy was determined according to which pressure— that from imperialism, his group of crony capitalists, the

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Filipino people and, whenever it was possible, his own acquisitiveness— was greatest at any one time. It is likely, too, that there was a litde more to Marcos than this, and that besides personal wealth and power he craved political greatness. As such a distinction is never conferred on mere puppets, he obviously needed to challenge, or at least to attempt to limit, imperialist domination of the economy. It can be seen that several of the steps he took in the early stages of martial law conformed to the vision he had advanced in Today’s Revolution: Democracy. If his New Society was intended to be the vehicle which would carry him to greatness, however, he should have realized that its success or failure would depend not on the “support of millions” which he had posited for the success of a revolution, but on the

participation of millions in actively challenging the neocolonial status quo.

N o tes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Hernando J. Abaya, The Untold Philippine Story (Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1967), 308. Quoted in ibid., 309. Philippines Free Press, September 24, 1966, quoted in ibid., 308. Quoted in ibid., 312. Manila Daily Bulletin, October 28, 1966, quoted in ibid., 314. Ibid., 316. Philippines Free Press, November 12, 1966, quoted in ibid., 319. Alejandro Lichauco, “The International Economic Order and the Philippine Experience,” in Mortgaging the Future: The World Bank and IMF in the Philippines, ed. Vivencio R. Jose (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982), 39. Ibid., 40. Manila Times, February 24, 1968. Manila Times, October 18,1969, and May 4, 1971. Abaya, The Untold Philippine Story, 352. Quoted in ibid., 350. In “The International Economic Order and the Philippine Experience," Mortgaging the Future, 41. William Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 97.

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16. Abaya, The Untold Philippine Story, 274. 17. Lichauco, “The International Economic Order and the Philippine Experience,” 44. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy, 99. Political Review, vol. 1, no. 1, March 1971. Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 5, November 1971. Domingo Rojo, “Relations with Socialist Countries,” Ang Komunista, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1971. William Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 269. “The Defeat of Macapagal and the Victory of Marcos,” Progressive Review, no. 8 , 1966, 1. Ferdinand Marcos, Today’s Revolution: Democracy (Manila: n.p., 1971), 20. Ibid., 77. Pomeroy, The Philippines, 262. Renato Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1990), 92. Pomeroy, The Philippines, 265-66. Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy, 145. Ibid., 141. US State Department, Foreign Relations o f the United States, 1969-1976, Vol. 20, Southeast Asia, 1969-1972. See http://www.state.gov/documents/

organizatiorv78432.pdf. 32. James Putzel, “Prospects for Agrarian Reform under the Aquino Government,” in Mamerto Canlas, Mariano Miranda Jr., and James Putzel, Land, Poverty and Politics in the Philippines (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1988), 52. 33. Ibid. 34. Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative, 64. 35. Rene E. Ofreneo and Amelita M. King, “Labor Relations in the Marcos Era: Implications for the Aquino Government,” in Labor’s Vision o f the Economic Recovery, ed. Sofronio Amante (Quezon City: Institute of Industrial Relations, UP, 1986), 9. 36. Philippine Yearbook, 1979, 224, quoted in Vivencio R. Jose, “Reorienting Philippine Education,” in Mortgaging the Future, 144. 37. Ibid., 145. 38. Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: US Foreign Policy 1945-1980 (Quezon City: KARREL, Inc., 1988), 262.

C h a pt er 9 : P o litica l S ettlem en t i In December 1972, a few months after the declaration of martial law, Jesus Lava, the imprisoned former general secretary of the PKP, penned a “Memorandum on the ‘Democratic Revolution’ and Our Struggle.” In this document, Lava stated: The moment has arrived, it would seem to us, when leading Filipino officials have taken a very significant qualitative leap; have started the country on the road towards meaningful national independence and people’s social and economic well-being. It is significant that this qualitative leap is the product and practical expression of the theoretical formulation set forth by President Marcos in his Today’s Revolution: Democracy} Lava noted that revolutions initiated by government were extremely rare due to the danger of coups and assassinations, but that Marcos was in the process of initiating just such a revolution. However, noted Lava, it was ironic that although the nationalist tasks in 1972 were essentially the same as they had been in 1896 or 1946, Huk veterans remained in jail for having attempted to complete those very tasks. “It is ironic, because while so many of those who cling to the coattails of the New Society are free to inflict injury to the avowed goals and objectives of this society, many who would be valuable assets to the attainment of aforesaid objectives remain in prison.”

i8 z

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The document then entered into a discussion of means and ends that concluded by approving Marcos’s acknowledgement of the permissability of the use of violence by modem “Jacobin” revolutionaries, and thus endorsing martial law. “Violence thus becomes legitimate, just and humane when it is used as a last resort against an oppressive regime that imposes a system of exploitation, deception and corruption; an oppressive regime that perpetuates and intensifies mass misery and suffering.” Finally, Lava proceeded to discuss the various stages of the revolutionary process, noting that where leadership was in the hands of the working class at the bourgeois-democratic stage, the goals set forth in the struggle for state power go beyond the limits set by the classical bourgeois-democratic revolution. While retaining the fundamental demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the new democratic revolution aims at nationalization of certain basic means of production, not only as a spur to economic and social development, not only as a safeguard to its state power, but as a preparatory step towards the eventual transition to socialism. However, said Lava, where the stability of the successful bourgeoisdemocratic revolution depended upon the alliance and mutual assistance of all nationalist forces, a “compromise state” is necessary; moreover, it would be possible to extend that compromise state, with the main parties agreeing “to develop the full potentialities of industrial capitalism parallel with the development of key industries as public enterprises and cooperatively pave the way towards the peaceful, orderly transition to social ownership when developing conditions so necessitate.” As will be seen, with regard to the lengthy period of capitalist development he seemed to prescribe Lava came close to the position adopted by Maoism. The importance of this memorandum for our present purposes, however, lies in the fact that Lava had noted the progressive potential in Marcos’s reforms and was already advocating cooperation with him. Curiously, Lava sent his memorandum not to the party for approval, but direcdy to Marcos.2 It is quite possible that it was this document that led to Marcos approaching the party shortly after its 1973 congress. And

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such a move was, of course, entirely consistent with the approach taken by Marcos in Today's Revolution, where he had spoken of the challenge “to integrate into the society the so-called oppressed groups who have a developed political consciousness.” Lava's interpretation was not reflected by the decisions of the 1973 congress which, as we have seen, took the view that Marcos’s reforms were mere sops and that the martial law regime represented “the dictatorship of foreign monopoly capital.” Thus, Pomeroy is possibly mistaken when he suggests that the Marcos government’s approach to the PKP later that year to propose talks was “conceivably in reaction to a study of the party’s program . . .”3 Nevertheless, such an approach was made ,4 and this led to an internal debate within the PKP which lasted for several months .5 The transformation in the PKP’s position on the Marcos government occurred relatively swiftly. Ofreneo explains this in terms of the “big impact on the peasant base” of the party made by Marcos’s land reform,* the fact that Marcos began supporting the movement for a New International Economic Order and that, although the Philippines had previously been the “anti-communist leader in the region,” he opened relations with the socialist countries. The concept of noncapitalist development also made a contribution to the change of line— without which, says Ofreneo, the PKP would have been committing political suicide.6 According to Magallona, the party was influenced by indications that Marcos was amenable to legalization of the party, and thus a central committee meeting called to discuss the party’s stand on martial law had decided to explore precisely that possibility. Like Ofreneo, he also cites the sharpening of PhilippineUS relations consequent upon Marcos’s diplomatic forays into Eastern Europe, following which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had asked the PKP whether Soviet assistance to Marcos should be increased .7 Pedro Baguisa, PKP general secretary at the time of writing, who joined the party in 1971, says that there had been fairly uneventful informal talks even

Interestingly, Ofreneo says that his research revealed that the expansion of the CPP-led New People’s Army had, in the years 1978-1985, occurred largely in areas not covered by the Marcos land reform.

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before the 1973 congress, with the party represented by Federico Maclang, and that this process had been revived after the congress. The possibility o f a legal existence had a major impact. “The overwhelming majority of the party wanted it legalized,” says Baguisa, “considering the changing balance of forces in the world. From feudalism, some countries could go straight to socialism— the non-capitalist path. That consideration convinced comrades one way or another that the negotiations should go ahead .”8 The PKP insisted that Romeo Dizon, then in prison, should be on its panel and he was therefore released to attend conferences .9 Throughout the negotiations, the only public manifestation was a national unity call issued by Marcos; when the negotiations were concluded, the PKP was for public purposes portrayed as having responded to this call. In the early exchange of communications between the government and the PKP, the former had objected to the party’s commitment to armed struggle and internationalism. The party, however, refused to renounce the latter. We resolutely declared that no negotiations could be held if the martial law government insisted on this condition. They gave in to this; they revised their conditions and limited it to the scope of membership; they opined that since our Party is a Filipino Party our membership should not anymore include foreigners. They did not mention internationalism anymore.10 Even so, this revised condition leads one to believe that Marcos, or at least his advisors, had a keen appreciation of the PKP’s history and the contribution made by non-Filipinos such as James Allen and William Pomeroy (although only Pomeroy had actually been a member oT the P^P). The party also agreed to renounce armed struggle and to support those reforms which benefited the masses. For its part, the PKP demanded four conditions, which were conceded: 1.

no person would be detained by virtue of membership of the PKP or the armed group or mass organizations it led;

2.

all members of the PKP, its armed group and mass organizations, who were in prison would be released;

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3.

a general amnesty would be declared for all members of the party and its mass organizations;

4.

the PKP would be fully legalized when conditions warranted this.

The negotiations were capped by a publicized meeting between Marcos and twenty-seven PKP members at Malacañang Palace on October 11,1974. Felicísimo Macapagal, the party’s general secretary, explained that the party had responded to the call for national unity because “for the first time in the political history of our country, genuine reforms are being directed and carried out in a determined manner by no less than the President; reforms that are meant to advance the frontiers of social justice and open opportunities for a better life for all our people .”11 Among the PKP leaders present were Alejandro Briones (described by the press as the “top commander”) and Mariano de Guzman, better known as “Commander Diwa.” As a symbol of the party’s renunciation of the armed struggle, the delegation handed over nineteen firearms, pledging that all the arms held by the party’s military units would be turned in to the government. Marcos then directed the Department of National Defense to grant safe-conduct passes to all politburo members, enabling them to travel throughout Luzon, convincing the membership to participate in the amnesty. He also directed the military to cooperate with PKP officials in preparing a joint study of areas in which the PKP could participate in the various programs of the government.12 Medical and welfare assistance would be made available to all PKP “returnees,” while longerterm measures would include the establishment of relocation centers where “returnees” could be trained in cottage industry skills.13 Immediately, there were attempts to misrepresent the political settlement as “sunender.” The Marcos-controlled Philippine Sunday Express not only ran an editorial on October 13 entitled “Surrender of Rebel Chiefs Strengthens National Unity,” but claimed that at the meeting two days earlier the PKP “had ended its 44 years of existence”; this line was echoed in the journal’s front-page story by Primitivo Mijares. The following day, Teodoro F. Valencia’s column in the Bulletin Today also referred to “sunender,” predicting that “this will no doubt be hailed by Maoists around the world [as] a victory against the revisionist faction of the communist party." The

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Daily Express on the same day claimed that the party had “put an end to its 44-year illegal existence” (which was, unintentionally, technically true, as the PKP’s existence was now legal), while Mijares’s column in the same edition referred to the “voluntary dismantling” of the party; the same phrase was repeated in his column two days later. In the Times Journal, Vicente M. Tanedo used his “Malacaftan roundup” column to set the record straight, pointing out that “they were aware that theirs was not a capitulation. It was more of a rediscovery or, let us say, a reassessment of position .”14 The PKP itself called a press conference at Camp Crame on October 16 in order to stress that there had been no surrender. Felicisimo Macapagal and Merlin Magallona explained that the party had closely monitored developments in the “New Society,” reading Marcos’s books and speeches on the reforms and comparing these with the government’s actions. Once they were convinced that his actions matched his words, the party leaders had held a series of conferences to reassess the PKP’s position and then had conducted a partywide consultation before the final meeting with Marcos on October 11. Macapagal pointed out that the PKP’s offer to the government of cooperation and active participation would have been totally ineffective if the organization had, as some wished to believe, been dismantled. Moreover, military officers present at the press conference indicated that a study was underway concerning the amendment of the Anti-Subversion Law. Accurate reports of this press conference were published by both the TimesJournal and Bulletin Today}5 Throughout November and December a number of public ceremonies were held at which members of the PKP and its mass organizations handed in their weapons and claimed amnesty. The first of these took place in Aliaga, Nueva Ecija, and was attended by 3,000 “rebels” and 50,000 spectators from five provinces. Here, Marcos declared: “As President of the Republic, I accept the offer to unite and cooperate with the people by the PKP under SecretaryGeneral Macapagal and Commander Briones and enlist them in the New Republic of the Poor, under the New Society.” He then publicly signed a letter of instruction to the secretary of Agrarian Reform to immediately implement land reform for rice and com lands down to seven hectares, a reduction from the previous twenty-four hectares. He also issued two decrees, the

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first of which promised dismissal and perpetual disqualification from public office of all government personnel, including judges and members of the armed forces, who caused tenants to be evicted from their farms, while “[ejrring landlords will themselves be subjected to punishment”; the second required rural banks to open themselves to equity participation by tenant farmers to the extent of 40 percent of total voting stock .16Interestingly, when reporters at the ceremony made reference to “surrender,” none other than Fidel Ramos, then head of the Philippine Constabulary, responded: “They are not surrendered rebels. They came to pledge their cooperation to the Government.”17On December 22, a total of 1,200 members and supporters were granted amnesty at ceremonies in San Jose City and Talavera, Nueva Ecija.18 Finally, on December 31, the last day of the amnesty, a total of 3,789 members of the PKP, HMB, and MASAKA from Laguna, Quezon, Rizal, and Batangas attended a ceremony at Victoria, Laguna.19 In mid-December, the government ordered that all 622 PKP detainees be released. The 291 released in the Greater Manila area included Jesus Lava who, along with others, attended a ceremony at Camp Crame. Later in the month, Marcos ordered the armed forces and the defense department to establish a resetdement town in San Miguel, Bulacan, for PKP members, stating: “Let us show them that because they fought for the right to a decent piece of land, a place of shelter to live and work in, their new faith and new loyalties can provide them with that decent piece of land and shelter for themselves and their families.”20 In all, a total of 9,000 hectares was provided at Kawit-Corona, Kalawakan, Talbah, and Kamatching.21 Finally, a year later Marcos rectified a thirty-year-old injustice by extending recognition to the Huk veterans “as comrades in the last war and as war veterans,” placing them on pensions. Needless to say, it was not only sections of the Philippine press which characterized the political setdement as “surrender.” According to Pomeroy, the claim was made by Marcos himself (certainly the Daily Express was little more than Marcos’s mouthpiece) but he speculates that “Marcos may have been trying to protect himself from US charges of being ‘soft on communism . . Z”22 More predictably, the charge was also made by the CPP and Francisco Nemenzo Jr .23 The latter goes further than this, however,

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alleging that “Obedient party members then queued at the PC headquarters to be photographed and fingerprinted like common criminals.”24 In fact, however, there was rather more behind the well-publicized amnesty rallies than met the eye. Not only did the PKP secretly retain some of its arms, but hundreds of those “handed in” at the ceremonies were provided by the Army in order to impress the newspaper photographers .25 Moreover, the PKP insists that there was no registration of individual party members .26 The political settlement could only have been correctly characterized as surrender if the PKP had abandoned its commitment to anti-imperialism and to the longer-term objective of socialism, embracing all the policies of the Marcos government. But this it did not do. So what precisely was the party seeking from the arrangement9 First, it sought a legalized existence. In order to fully understand this, it would be wise to consider the relevant resolution of the 1973 Congress: One of the major obstacles to the spreading of Party influence among the masses is its underground status. This situation did not arise out of its own deliberate choice. It was driven underground as a result of state repression, intending to check and thwart any effective work of the Party in organizing and leading the working masses into a force for independence, democracy and economic liberation. This alone clarifies the point that the fight for legalization of the Party meets the main tactics of the enemy. The Party exists only is an advanced unit of the working people. It is inseparable from the Filipino working people, and its objectives are indistinguishable from the interests of the working people. The fight for legalization therefore embodies the most basic right of the working masses to full consciousness of its [sic] present exploited and oppressed condition. It expresses the highest demand of the people to be free from imperialist domination, to shed their feudal bondages and to build a new life of social liberation. The declared policy to struggle for the right of the Party to work legally and openly among the masses is not merely a tactical maneuver but a firm principled position.27 Thus, it did not desire legality for its own sake, but in order to perform more effectively those tasks that were seen as being the responsibility of communist parties. At a series of seminars held at the University of

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the Philippines in 1983 on “Marxism in the Philippines,” a speaker from the floor (later identified to the author as Romeo Dizon) responded to Nemenzo’s charge of “surrender” as follows. It was a decision stemming from a desire to be able to approach organization work in a different way—a much more efficient and convenient way. However you look at it, there is a difference between operating in the open and operating underground. There is more opportunity to propagate and disseminate your ideas as a party Mien you are in the open. Things like these should be weighed. The 1974 settlement was an attempt to transform the PKP into a legal party. It was premised on the desire to rally and organize more. The party believes that not only the intellectuals are important in a revolution. Although we recognize their importance, the larger masses of the people are far more important and more decisive in the movement.28 Second, the PKP sought not only to support those policies of Marcos which it deemed to be progressive in nature, but also to push him to go further if possible. Less than six months after the settlement, the press published a letter from Felicísimo Macapagal, who explained: “We are fighting against US imperialism. But we believe that at this stage, this should be done by ideologically arming the Filipino people and leading them to support the government in certain foreign programs which more than hurt US imperialist interests in our country.”29 This is hardly the tone of someone who has surrendered. And far from supporting martial law (another charge hurled at the PKP), it was the desire to effectively organize the masses that led Macapagal, as early as January 1975 (i.e., just three months after the political setdement), to write an open letter to Marcos urging him to “restore the organization rights of the working people” as “a concrete step toward the lifting of martial law” Having underlined the positive nature of the government’s reforms, the letter continued: But as it has been the task of the New Society to articulate the urgent demands of the broad ranks of the working masses and to give such demands their normative form, so must it be its greater responsibility now to arouse mass enthusiasm, to give full expression to all means by which

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the masses can mobilize themselves behind these reforms . . . Only the direct participation of the masses in organizing themselves for the defense and advancement of the reforms which you, Mr. President, are boldly asserting, will insure the full development of these positive changes . . . Now that we have the reforms, who will advance them but the masses themselves? As things stand now, the people are losing confidence, because they feel intimidated. They cannot speak of their rights, because they fear arbitrary arrest. Their enthusiasm for reforms is intermixed with the feeling of gloom generated by fear.30 The aspects of “New Society” policy which were supported by the PKP were land reform, Marcos’s proposal for the restructuring of the labor movement, with one union for each industry,* the newly independent departure in foreign relations, the formation of worker and peasant cooperatives, and “all other measures which clearly redound to the improvement of the lot of the Filipino people .”31 Among these “other measures” were the creation of barangays and samahang nayons which “hold the potential of a much broadened popular participation in the political process as well as in the more democratic direction of the rural economy .”32 But the party had no illusions about such reforms, acknowledging for example that land reform was an “imperialist scheme [forj dissolving the vestiges of feudalism and laying the foundations for the rise o f capitalism,” but recognizing at the same time that this provided “the conditions for the emergence of agricultural workers and the increase in the ranks of the Filipino proletariat.”33 It was further estimated that Marcos was forced to adopt many of his progressive policies by the changed balance of world forces. Thus, the quickened pace of capitalist construction in neocolonial countries like the Philippines was an attempt to forestall noncapitalist development and defuse anti-feudal unrest. This could not take place without a thoroughgoing land reform. In order to make such capitalist development more attractive, and therefore more viable, however, “we hear of cooperatives and profit-sharing

This was one uf ihe aims of Crisanlo Evangelism, the PKP’s first general secretary, even before the foundation of the party. However, support for this initiative was withdrawn when it was realized that Marcos had in mind a top-down restructuring.

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schemes which distribute limited economic benefits to wider segments of the populace, but which nevertheless remain part and parcel of the overall exploitative capitalist structure .”34 The Philippines’ newly asserted independence at the United Nations, where it adopted an anti-Israeli position in the October War of 1973 and voted for the return of all territories seized in 1967 and for recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was certainly progressive but was equally certainly “dictated by economic exigency ,”35 as the Philippines relied exclusively on the Middle East for oil. Similarly, the development of relations with the socialist countries was driven by economic exigency, providing an alternative market for traditional Philippine products. The new PKP journal Arig Buklod revealed, moreover, that none other than the Japanese ambassador in Manila had urged the Philippines to establish ties with China so that textiles manufactured by Japanese companies in the Philippines could be exported there !36 Nor were the reforms seen as an end in themselves. Instead, the party recognized the requirement to struggle against those “who wanted to confine the people’s struggle to purely economic objectives,” drawing attention to Lenin’s views on the two-sided nature of reforms, with reformists seeking to divide and deceive workers while others, “having seen through the falsity of reformism, utilize reforms to develop and broaden their class struggle.”37 The party summarized its views on the reforms as follows: Those economic, social and political reforms which are favorable to the interests of the Filipino working masses, instituted under the martial-law government, limited (though] they may be at this stage, have the support of the PKP. PKP considers these changes as a step forward, which have to be pushed vigorously to fuller radical transformations until economic liberation from foreign monopoly capitalism and social emancipation of the Filipino working people are achieved.38 Just as there were areas of agreement between the PKP and the martial-law government, so too there were areas of disagreement, and the party openly voiced its opinion regarding these. Needless to say, the party objected to martial law itself “insofar as it curtails and restricts the

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democratic rights of the people ,”39 and in particular to the ban on strikes. It also opposed neocolonial industrialization “as anathema to genuine national development.”40 The “PKP strongly opposes and will actively struggle against imperialist-controlled industrialization. PKP views the heavy inflow of multinational capital as detrimental to the national interest. PKP as ever advocates the intermediate stages of nationalist industrialization and non­ capitalist development which is set forth in detail in its program .”41 With regard to land reform, the party undertook to continue the fight to reduce the prices being charged for family-sized farms. In summary: As it has consistently done since its founding, PKP will continue to attack, oppose, expose and condemn every policy or program of government that, in whatever form of disguise, strengthens the strangulation of the economy by foreign monopoly capital, perpetuates the economic misery of the people, continues to serve imperialist interest or worsen hardship, oppression and exploitation of the working people.42

2 Despite all of the foregoing, is it not curious and even unseemly that a communist party could arrive at a political settlement with a regime as brutal and corrupt as that of Ferdinand Marcos? It should first be stated that although martial law had been in place for two years when the settlement was concluded, Marcos’s reputation had not at that stage reached the depths it was later to plumb. This is largely due to the fact that the US-led clamor concerning human rights violations did not really intensify until the late 1970s; and this was due not so much to any worsening in Marcos’s behavior but to the fact that US imperialism was by then seeking to have him replaced by Benigno Aquino Jr. (the candidate it had selected for the 1973 elections prior to their cancellation by the martial-law regime). Pomeroy has pointed out that the protests over civil rights abuses had, in fact, a class coloration. The abuses, he says, were but the extension of measures used to deal with the Maoist-led guerrilla armed struggle launched in 1969, long before martial law. They

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were little different from the suppressive policies of the Roxas-QuirinoMagsaysay regimes against the PKP-led Huk Movement. The principal difference between these two uses of suppressive violence was the type of people on whom it was applied. Resistance to Marcos came not just from peasants and workers but from opponents in the middle class and elite and from religious groups, especially in the Catholic Church. The arrest and maltreatment of priests, nuns, seminary students and foreign missionaries attracted more attention than the arrest and brutal treatment of ordinary working people. The detention of the elite politician Benigno Aquino drew protests that were never aroused over the jailing in the 1950s erf PKP trade union leaders. In particular, the Catholic Church became an active center of antiMarcos activities. Much erf this was due to Marcos policies that sought to bring the Church’s semi-feudal and privileged status into line with the capitalist orientaUon of the regime. Marcos proposed to tax the extensive Church properties which extended increasingly to banking and business, and in particular the numerous private schools in the Church’s nationwide education system. A Marcos policy of population control that involved the dissemination of family planning birth control methods, advanced to contend with the effect of a high 3-6 percent population growth rate on worsening poverty, ran counter to Catholic doctrine. The more conservative sectors of the Church opposed Marcos because of these policies, but they did so indirectly, on human rights grounds.43 As late as 1984 Renato Constantino made an oblique reference to this when he warned against opposition based solely on civil rights. Violations of civil liberties and physical violence against citizens by agents of the state should be condemned but they should not constitute the principal focus of protest while the laiger question of the people’s right to self-determination has not been resolved. For when a big power controls a small nation economically and imposes its political and military influence to the point where the latter loses its right to determine its own goals and ensure the welfare of its people, human rights are violated on a mass scale.44 In the mid-1970s, moreover, it was not uncommon in developing countries for authoritarian leaders to embark upon progressive reforms, gaining the support of left-wing forces, as in Syria, Algeria, Panama, and

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Peru; often, such regimes not only employed martial law but the army actually constituted the ruling body. At precisely this time, moreover, communist theoreticians in a number of countries, particularly the Soviet Union, were summarizing these developments and drawing the distinction between reactionary and progressive authoritarian regimes; this was closely allied with the considerable body of work produced by Soviet scholars in the 1970s on the noncapitalist path of development discussed in chapter 10 .“15 Such works commonly made the point that in a developing country where the ruling body was of an authoritarian character, it was not that character which was of overriding importance; far more important was the need to determine which forces that authoritarian power was wielded against and, if it could be shown that imperialist or local elite forces were on the receiving end, whether there existed the potential to deepen the reforms being undertaken and to strengthen the political positions of the working class and peasantry. In some countries, whether or not the regime was authoritarian, communist and socialist parties entered into a relationship of “critical support” with the ruling party. For example, the fledgling Workers’ Party of Jamaica was forced to modify its opposition to the People’s National Party government of Michael Manley, despite the authoritarian tenor of some of its earlier policies, when the latter began to adopt an anti-imperialist stance, challenging the IMF and deepening relations with neighboring Cuba. Even in Guyana, where the People’s National Congress of Forbes Burnham had a long history of retaining office by vote-rigging and brutality against the People’s Progressive Party led by Cheddi Jagan, the latter moderated its opposition when, like Manley, Burnham struck a limited anti-imperialist pose. Thus, Marxists adopted a class approach to these developments, paying due regard to the balance of class forces both within their own countries and internationally. Having ended its isolation from the international communist movement in 1969, the PKP was both privy to these developments and able to avail itself of the theoretical generalizations of such experience being produced in some quantity by Marxist scholars. That this was so is evident from the sophistication of the analysis developed at its 1973 congress and the

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perspective of noncapitalist development put forward in its program . Thus, the authoritarian nature of the Marcos regime, or even Marcos’s o w n corruption, while not overlooked would not have been uppermost in its mind. Instead, it adopted a class approach to the government’s reform program, as demonstrated in a statement entitled “The PKP as a Filipino Party,” issued in 1976. In all its policies, decisions and actions, the guiding principle that has consistently served as the PKP’s beacon has been: Would it be in the interest—short or long-term— of the Filipino people, particularly the working masses? And the bases for determining these interests are: Would it mean greater independence and sovereignty for the Filipino people? Would there be greater participation of the masses of Filipinos in the policy-making and implementation? Would there be a progressive raising of the well-being of the masses? Would there eventually result the complete liberation of the Filipino people from imperialist domination and influence? Would it finally end man’s exploitation of his fellowmen? It would remain to be seen, however, whether the potential which the PKP identified in Marcos would be realized over the next few years.

N o tes 1. Jesus Lava, “Memorandum on the ‘Democratic Revolution,’” typescript, 1972. 2. Jesus Lava, interview by the author, January 1996. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

William Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 296. Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, January 1990. Pomeroy, The Philippines, 296. Rene Ofreneo, interview by the author, July 2008. Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, July 2008. Pedro Baguisa, interview by the author, January 2008. According to Jose Dalisay’s study of the Lava family, Jesus Lava was concerned that, unlike Dizon, neither he nor his brother was consulted, and he was convinced that “deep penetration agents (DPAs) had taken over” the party. This is a somewhat curious assertion in view of the fact that Jesus Lava had

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submitted his own paper in which he virtually called for a political settlement not to the PKP but to Marcos. Similarly, both brothers were convinced, says Dalisay, that Jose’s long sojourn in Prague as PKP representative on World Marxist Review was “engineered by people they believed to be deep penetration agents." See Jose Y. Dalisay, The Lavas: A Filipino Family (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Corp., 1999), 155,159. The DPA allegations should not be taken too seriously. Sison’s charge that the Lavas looked upon party leadership as a “family heirloom” was not entirely without foundation, and they seemed to share with him the practice of labeling political opponents within the movement as “agents.” (The author visited the Lava household in Mandaluyong in January 1996 specifically to interview Jesus about his “Memorandum on the Democratic Revolution” of 1972. However, both brothers insisted on giving their views on the PKP leadership, Jose finding sinister implications in the fact that, although one leader had been urged not to travel to the Soviet Union via Bangkok, where the CIA was said to be very active, he had ignored the advice. This sort of allegation is seen in its proper perspective when it is realized that foreign travel arrangements for party leaders were in fact the responsibility of Jose’s daughter, Aida.) By the time these allegations appeared in print (1999), Jesus had been expelled from the PKP a decade earlier, and so it would not be unreasonable to suppose that his motives contained an element of sour grapes. The allegations would be repeated in his 2002 autobiography. See Jesus Lava, Memoirs o f a Communist (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2002), 335. 10. Interview with Felicisimo Macapagal, September 28, 1976, interviewer unknown, copy of transcript in the papers of William Pomeroy. 11. 12. 1314. 15. 16. 17.

Bulletin Today, October 13, 1974. Ibid. Bulletin Today, October 14, 1975. TimesJournal, October 16,1974. TimesJournal and Bulletin Today, October 17, 1974. Ibid. Vicente M. Tanedo, “Malacaftan Roundup,” TimesJournal, November 20, 1974.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Daily Express, December 23, 1974. Daily Express, December 31, 1974. Daily Express, December 22, 1974. Daily Express, February 18, 1975. Pomeroy, The Philippines, 297. See Marxism in the Philippines (Quezon City: Third World Studies Center, University of the Philippines, 1984) and “Rectification Process in the Philippine

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Communist Movement,” in Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia, ed. Lim Joo-Jock and S. Vani (Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984), 54. 24. Nemenzo, “Rectification Process,” 85. 25. PKP member (a high-level cadre in 1974), interview by the author, November 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

1989. William Pomeroy to Benedict J. Kerkvliet, November 23/December 15, 1974. Quoted in “National Unity: Reforms in the Philippines,” Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1, February 1975. Marxism in the Philippines, 29. Daily Express, April 17, 1975. This was written in response to a speech by US Congressman Larry McDonald. Felicisimo Macapagal, open letter to Ferdinand Marcos, Ang Buklod, February

1975. 31. “The Party’s Legalization Drive: Realities and Challenges,” Ang Buklod, February 1975. 32. Ibid. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Ibid. “The Philippines: An International Perspective,” Ang Buklod, February 1975. Ibid. Ibid. “The Party’s Legalization Drive.” “The Philippines: An International Perspective.”

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pomeroy, The Philippines, 275. Renato Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1990), 91. 45. In addition to those works cited in chapter 10, see, for example, Yevgeny Dolgopolov, The Army and the Revolutionary Transformation o f Society (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981); I. Andreyev, The Non-Capitalist Way (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1974); Rostislav Ulyanovsky, National Liberation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978).

PART FOUR The following five chapters are thematic in nature, dealing with four aspects of the CPP’s theory and practice. The vexed and much-debated question of whether the semifeudal or capitalist mode of production dominates in the Philippines is given a further airing in chapter 10. Hopefully, this is distinguished by an approach different from that usually adopted, outlining the method adopted by traditional Marxism in distinguishing one mode of production from another, examining the “non-capitalist path” as an alternative strategy to the CPP’s “new democratic” line adopted from Mao, and putting forward a view of the Soviet Union (the assistance of which would have been crucial in the implementation of the “non-capitalist path”) that challenges Maoism’s view of it as “social-imperialist.” While the mode of production has been hotly debated in the past, the CPP’s relationship with radical elements in the Catholic Church, the subject of chapter 11, has attracted little comment or analysis. This is surprising in view of the materialist ,approach of Marxism and the idealism (both words are used here in their philosophical sense) of religion. Chapters 12 and 13 deal with the “protracted people’s war” that com menced in 1969 and has continued, as of this writing, for forty years. Here, particular attention is paid to the tactics employed in the countryside, for while these resulted in swelling the ranks of both the CPP and the NPA at the time, they were based on a Maoist prescription which would prove unsustainable in Philippine circumstances. At the same time, the “centralized leadership, decentralized operations” approach pursued from the mid-1970s led to a situation in which, in the absence of a policy-making

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congress at which the party’s program could be updated and strategy subjected to discussion, alternative approaches developed in Mindanao and Manila. Also discussed are the probable size of the NPA, the effects o f “protracted people’s war” on Philippine society, and the “anti-DPA” purges of the mid-1980s. Chapter 14 deals with the question of the CPP’s approach to alliances, and while some previous studies of the CPP have chosen to focus o n the sectarianism and “vanguardism” of the CPP leadership in this regard, the cunent work takes the view that such studies have missed the point, which is that the alliances attempted by the CPP were anti-Marcos when it would have been more appropriate to forge a united front against foreign domination, particularly of the economy. This part of the book might usefully have included a chapter on the CPP’s activity within the labor movement; indeed, as the author has argued that one of the deficiencies of the CPP’s program lay in its failure to mention the trade union movement, the absence of such a chapter may tempt some readers to conclude that he is taned with his own brush. It seems to make sense, however, to leave an account of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, May First Movement) for a further volume, and for two reasons. The KMU was, after all, founded toward the end of the period covered by the cunent work, and its most active period was, for obvious reasons, in the years following 1986. And then there are considerations of space . . .

C h a pter 1 0 : “M o re a M o d e o f E xp ressio n . . i In chapter 7, we saw that at its sixth congress the PKP discarded the characterization of the Philippine mode of production as semifeudal, having conducted a fresh analysis. This was, in fact, a major theoretical difference between the PKP and the CPP, and has been thoroughly discussed in the national democratic movement (in its broadest sense)’ ever since— so much so that, in early 1996, Filemon “Popoy” Lagman jokingly dismissed the “semifeudal” concept in the Philippine context as “more a mode of expression than a mode of production .”1 This chapter will examine first the semifeudal characterization, and then the concept of “non-capitalist development,” which during the period under discussion occupied a central role in the PKP’s program. Although in practice the CPP would, as we have seen, emphasize its opposition to Marcos, its Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution identified US imperialism and domestic feudalism as the “main problems afflicting the whole nation and from which the masses of the people aspire to be liberated . . . US imperialism has made use of feudalism as its social

In the Philippines, the term “national-democratic" has come to be identified solely with the CPP-led movement. However, it has long been used within the international communist movement to refer to the anti-imperialist stage of revolutions in the Third World and is, in fact, also employed by the PKP for this purpose.

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base in the Philippines.” That was in 1968; but the party would cling to its “semifeudal” analysis for decades. In its “Urgent Message to the Filipino People” issued after the assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. in August 1983, the CPP explained that the Philippines was semifeudal because its economy has been deliberately kept backward, remaining a supplier of raw materials to capitalist countries and an importer of industrial goods and consumer products; because feudal and semicolonial relations of production continue to be prevalent in the vast countryside; and because US imperialism has continually blocked national industrialization, allowing capitalism to develop only to a limited extent and making it a mere adjunct of the imperialist system.2 The nature of the mode of production in the Philippines was discussed in an article entitled “Our Party’s Economic Program: Change the Production Relations,” which appeared in Ang Bayan in March 1985. The basic development of the economy comes with the development of the forces of production. This means the smashing of the old relations of production which impede their progress, and the setting up of new relations appropriate to their level of development. The main obstacle to this development are the semifeudal and semicolonial relations, not the limited capitalist relations in the country. Our revolution at the present time is national-democratic in character, not yet a socialist one, because it aims to smash the former, not the latter. In his 1989 book, Jose Maria Sison reiterated the “semifeudal” characterization, explaining: “As an economic term, semifeudal refers to an economy whose internal forces of production are mainly and essentially agrarian and preindustrial and whose relations of production are dominated by the combination of the comprador big bourgeoisie in the cities and the landlord class in the countryside.”3*

Sison then exhibited an imprecise use of Marxist terminology by continuing: “The principal means of production is still agriculture.”4 Agriculture may be described as a form of economic activity cm* as a branch of production, but it cannot be called a m eans of production, as the latter term means machinery, buildings, raw materials or, as is presumably intended here, land.

C h apter

io :

“ M o re

a

M ode

of

E x p r e s s io n . . 2 0 3

Armando Malay Jr. expressed his opposition to the “semifeudal” characterization by commenting that “history has proven that ‘feudalism’ is basically a hindrance to the further growth of capitalism” and therefore would hardly be the “social base” of imperialism.5 He characterized the CPP line as follows: Do not depend on bourgeois land reform. It will not happen in the first place since American imperialism for its part has no intention in liquidating feudalism. It is rather interested in preserving i t . . . I think this line stems from the Chinese influence and from the fact that the party has not yet updated its reading of the objective needs of American imperialism in the Philippines.6 Indeed, Malay was too generous, for it was clear long before the appearance of the Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution in 1968 that Washington wished to see the demise of feudalism in the Philippines: the Hardie Report of 1952 stated quite clearly that retention of the existing land tenure system was not in the interest of the USA and that it encouraged the growth of communism; this produced an anguished outcry from the Filipino landed elite and, as the US government wished to maintain a united front against the Huk Rebellion, Hardie was recalled to Washington in 1953.

2 Before we examine the CPP’s “semifeudal” characterization, it would be useful if we clarified what, according to traditional Marxism, distinguishes one mode of production from another. In the process of production, the

forces of production are a.

the instruments of production, i.e., tools, machinery, etc.

b.

the people carrying out the process of production on the basis of a certain degree of production experience.

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At a certain stage in the development of the productive forces, the basic means of production are separated from the direct producers and becom e concentrated in the hands of a relatively few members of society. Thereafter, there can be no production unless the producers and the owners of the means of production enter into relations— the relations o f

production . The character of the relations of production is determined by the level of development and character of the productive forces. Thus, the relations of production appropriate for one stage of society could not apply at an earlier stage. For example, the relations of production under slavery could not apply under primitive communism, as under the latter the instruments of production (the stone axe, the club, etc.) could be produced by anyone and the level of productivity was so low that there was no surplus and, thus, no opportunity for exploitation. Therefore, the mode of production is determined by the unity of the

forces of production and the relations of production. However, it is possible for the relations of production appropriate to one mode to appear within a later mode. For example, the relations o f production appropriate to slavery could be found in the southern states of the USA until 1865. But that clearly did not mean that the mode o f production in the USA was the slavery mode, for the forces of production had developed to the capitalist stage and in most of the country, including among most southern whites, capitalist relations of production obtained. Or let us take the case of Jamaica where, Munroe tells us: capitalism in its early development and in its middle stage did have colonial empires and Jamaica was a part of the British colonial empire. In that time . . . capitalism through these colonial empires made use of every kind of pre-capitalist mode of production to assist in its own development . . . In China, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Laos, in India, in Africa, in Latin America, all over the world, capitalism in its development prior to imperialism, used the feudal system that existed in those places, the semi-feudal system and the slave system. It used them all whenever it was convenient to develop the system of capitalism and whenever it was convenient, it discarded and threw away those systems.7

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Just as it could not be said that the slavery mode prevailed in the southern USA, neither could it be said to have existed in Jamaica, for although the vast majority of the population were subject to the relations of production of slavery, the instruments of production— the sugar mills, boiling-houses, distilleries, etc.— simply would not have been possible under the slavery mode. Is it not possible, then, for part of the population in the Philippines to be subject to the relations of production of feudalism without the mode of production being feudal or semifeudal? Let us hear from Marx: lln] all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which materializes within it.8 Less poetically, a country may contain different kinds of production, each with its own relations of production, but one of those will prevail over the others, and in so doing will determine the society’s dominant mode of production. So do “semifeudal” production relations predominate in the Philippines? We will begin by enquiring into the stage reached by the forces of production.

3 Agriculture has not been the main source of exports for some time. The export of primary products as a share of the total exports of merchandise declined from 83 percent in 1966 to 47 percent in 1983 .9 During the Marcos years, the economy was transformed, largely due to the neocolonial industrialization and the agrarian reform which took place under martial law. The dramatic effects of the World Bank-IMF program of industrialization were apparent in every aspect of the Filipino’s life. When he got up in the morning, he would brush his teeth with toothpaste

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manufactured by a transnational corporation (TNC), take a wash, bath, o r shower with TNC soap and wash his hair with TNC shampoo. The toilet paper he used would probably be manufactured by a TNC. If he used a deodorant, it too would be made by a TNC. His coffee would be a TNC brand and if he could afford breakfast it would be prepared with TNC margarine or cooking oil. If he fell ill, he would be treated with TNC drugs. If he owned a car or drove a vehicle at work, it would be a TNC model. If he worked in a factory, his machine would have been produced by a TNC; if he worked on a farm large enough to employ machinery, that machinery also would have been produced by a TNC. The gasoline he used in his car or motorcycle would probably be the product of Shell or Caltex. If he ate any processed food during his lunch break, it would be TNC fare. If he worked in an office, a TNC would have made the electrical appliances; the same would be true of those in his home. Even more astonishingly, though, with the exceptions of the farm o r factory machinery, most of these products would have been manufactured in the Philippines by local branches of the TNCs in question (or even, to a more limited but increasing extent, by companies owned by martial law beneficiaries like Eduardo Cojuangco). Equally, all of them would have been made by workers subject to wage relations, and none of the instruments of production used in their manufacture could possibly have been developed within the feudal mode of production. Abinales describes the advance of capitalist production relations during the martial-law period as follows: This changing political economy was evident in many regions, but was most discernible in the major periphery—Mindanao. In this last of the country's land frontiers, corporate capital, with considerable support from the dictatorship, led the way in a major alteration of the Mindanao landscape. By the 1980s, there were 751 major corporations (with an

This is something of an oversimplification. Companies operating in export processing zones, or “ecozones” as they are now called, are usually unable to market their products in the Philippines. Thus, a TNC manufacturing or assembling desktop printers in a Philippine ecozone must export these, while Philippine consumers purchase printers manufactured by a TNC in an Indonesian ecozone (which cannot be sold in Indonesia).

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average of 10 million pesos capitalization) operating in Mindanao, of which 89 were foreign or subsidiary firms.10

And what of the countryside? Even before the changes ushered in by the World Bank-IMF programs during Marcos’s martial law regime, capitalism was making headway in the rural areas. Ofreneo points out that, although the abolition of tenancy favored by the Magsaysay and Macapagal governments was blocked by the landed interests in Congress, agitation by the peasant organizations had led to a significant number of conversions to leasehold. “The more forwardlooking landowners did not offer any resistance to the changes, assured as they were of relatively high rent in the fonn of a definite percentage of every crop harvest."11 This, in turn, led to a rise in the number of absentee landlords; when martial law was declared in 1972, there were 10,832 landlords of whom 9,600 were absentee.12 Ofreneo continues: To a great extent, both the emergence of the landless rural poor working for wages system and the further growth of absentee landlordism that was dependent on the katiwala (whereby the land was managed by the landlord’s agent or steward] are clear indications of a maturing capitalist development in the post-war countryside. A direct offshoot of this development was the decline of the traditional paternalistic relation between landlords and tenants, giving way to a more impersonal moneyoriented contractural relationship.13

The view of the martial law period taken by the CPP was somewhat different. Under martial law, Philippine society’s semifeudal character has become even more pronounced. There has been no genuine land reform, whatever the lies of the dictatorship. And feudal and semifeudal exploitation has not only been intensified. It has been aggravated by massive landgrabbing to accommodate giant US agro-corporations, government corporations, and private corporations owned by the Marcos clique.14

In fact, the Marcos land reform program was, despite its limitations, the most ambitious to date in the Philippines, as a result of which the

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“centuries-old, feudalistic system of sharecropping was dealt m ortal blows . . .”15 This transformed “feudal bondage into a capitalist yoke for the majority of the rural population,”16 replacing traditional tenant indebtedness with “a new and complicated pattern of indebtedness by the . . . farm er to a host of public and private lending institutions.”17 Indicative o f this development was the fact that between 1971 and 1978 the number of rural banks increased from 500 to 900.18 As a result of this process, the character of the landlord class underwent changes. In general, many landlords end up in the growing and newly-emerging class of rural-based industrialists and businessmen. They find new roles for themselves in the new scheme of things as rural bankers, as tractor lenders, as handicraft entrepreneurs-exporters, as fertilizer dealers, as land speculators and most likely, as allies of big foreign capitalists whose tentacles are now reaching all comers of the countryside.19

The peasantry, on the other hand, was stratified into “small ownercultivators, amortizing landowners and tenants not covered by the [Marcos] land reform.”20 The CPP’s proposition that feudalism provides the social base o f imperialism would again be shown to be mistaken when, in May 1987, the World Bank put forward land reform proposals which went far beyond those of the Aquino government. Commented Ofreneo: This is not surprising. The World Bank is acutely aware of the restlessness among the rural masses. Without a more comprehensive land reform program in place, the World Bank sees a prolongation of the “state of instability and uncertainty currently affecting large parts of the rural areas” which “is not conducive to investment in agriculture.”21

Transnational agribusiness corporations were making deep inroads into Philippine agriculture throughout the 1970s. Between 1974 and 1980, the corporate farms increased their lands by no less than 32 times the total acreage received by the beneficiaries of the Marcos land reform.22 On Mindanao, Del Monte and Dole expanded from pineapple cultivation into coffee, tomato, and banana, then into feedlots, using pineapple waste, and

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finally into producing their own cans and establishing their own transport systems. The Philippine countryside became host to the production of feedgrain and processing and even ranching and meat processing. An Australian subsidiary of King Ranch established a joint venture with the Yulo group to set up a 40,000 hectare ranch on Palawan. Other internationally known brands followed suit. In all of these developments, capitalist relations of production prevailed. And on Negros, where such production relations had existed for some time, mechanization of the sugar industry threatened, according to one estimate, to eliminate 90 percent of the cunent labor requirement.23 Best known of the World Bank programs for Philippine agriculture was the so-called Green Revolution, which introduced the cultivation of highyielding varieties of rice. A study by H. Myint for the Asian Development Bank made no secret of the fact that the aim of the Green Revolution was to “spur growth of rural banking and agribusiness, to release part of the land and farm labor for other agricultural and industrial purposes, to generate a steady flow of raw materials for industry, to create a market for farm inputs and other capital goods, to provide cheap food for urban workers, and to develop a market for mass consumption in the rural areas.”24 Not only could the inputs and technology used in the Green Revolution not have been developed in the feudal mode of production, but the program itself was designed to further stimulate the development of capitalism. Nor was the development of capitalism in the Philippine countryside confined to agriculture. Through the system of subcontracting, many thousands of rural farm families were drawn into the service of transnational capital. For example, as long ago as 1975 the publication Philippine Trade

& Development stated that “the greater bulk of the labor force engaged in garments are cottage industry workers paid on a piecework basis” and that such income constituted “70 or 90 percent of the total income of some farm families.”25 What was the composition of the Philippine labor force as a result of these developments? In his 1989 book, Sison claimed that 75 percent of the “basic exploited classes” in the Philippines was made up of the peasantry.26 Needless to say, such an estimate would, if accurate, lend credence to the CPP characterization of the mode of production. However, this figure

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leaves out of account service workers, who account for 30 percent of the workforce, and it conceals the fact that there are more agricultural workers (i.e., landless laborers) than actual peasants. According to Constantino, the peasantry itself in 1976 numbered no more than 2.5 million, while the landless rural poor numbered 3.26 million.27 Interestingly, the figure given by Constantino for the peasantry coincides precisely with Sison’s estimate, based on official figures for 1979, for the industrial working class.28 In other words, not only were these two groups now roughly equal in size at the end of the 1970s, but the working class taken as a whole (industrial workers, service workers, and agricultural workers) was by far the laigest class in the workforce. This, it must be said, is hardly characteristic of a semifeudal mode of production. We are forced to conclude from the foregoing that the Philippines does not have a feudal, or even a semifeudal, mode of production. It has an economy in which the capitalist mode of production reigns. It may be a dependent capitalism, an underdeveloped capitalism, a neocolonial capitalism, a capitalism within which some feudal practices persist, but it is capitalism nevertheless.

4 But why should it matter what name is given to the mode of production which holds sway in a society at a given time? The importance of this whole issue lies in the implications it has for the correct identification by the progressive movement of the stage to which the society should next develop, and the forces and alliances which will be necessary to achieve this. It may be instructive to briefly consider the position adopted by Ricardo D. Ferrer, as his thesis provided a most vivid illustration of the consequences of an incorrect characterization of the mode of production. In 1983, Ferrer argued that the growth of a “revolutionary bourgeois class” had been stunted and that what was needed for those who took the national-democratic line was

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a system that will exploit all the potentialities of a capitalist system without necessarily putting the capitalists as the rulers of the system . . . [W]hatever system you introduce will have to contend with the fact that there is still enough room for the development of the productive forces which has to be left to the initiative of the capitalists . . . [T]he development of the productive forces will determine the type of production relations and the superstructure that will have to be dominant.29 Ferrer was saying that capitalism could not exist in the Philippines, as imperialism made it impossible for the forces of production to develop to such a stage. The capital accumulation which would be needed to develop heavy industry instead went abroad in the form of repatriated profits. Yes, agricultural products could be exchanged for capital goods on the international market, but the unequal terms of trade would mean that the Philippines would have to export more and more sugar, say, for less and less capital goods. Thus, a revolution was required. However, as those who should have constituted the revolutionary bourgeois class had been co­ opted by imperialism, there was obviously little chance of them playing a leading revolutionary role. Therefore, that revolution would have to be led by the workers and peasants. Moreover, the upshot of the revolution would be a system in which capitalism developed to its full potential. As Ferrer maintained that the superstructure would be determined by the level of development of the forces of production, we must assume that the institutions of society at this stage would be of a bourgeois nature. This would appear somewhat strange if, as Ferrer maintained, Filipino capitalists would not necessarily be the rulers of the system; however, he saw his revolutionary bourgeois class in the farms and “other smaller sectors of the economy.” Socialism was relegated to some far-off future “when productive forces have developed to such a level that the wage relation can be abolished.” In other words, before it ever saw socialism the Philippines must first pass through the full development of capitalism. In March 1985, the CPP restated its own, slightly different, position in its journal, Ang Bayan.

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What is appropriate for the present level of development of the productive forces are national-democratic relations; these will hasten their development. In fact, through this revolution, the main obstacles to the development of local capitalism will be smashed, and this will develop to a certain level. This is needed for the development of the forces of production, towards the setting of the material conditions for the socialist revolution.30 Absent from this recipe, of course, was any notion of the dialectical link between the national-democratic and the socialist stages of the revolution. For example, what were the forces which would ensure that capitalism would only develop to “a certain extent”? And what, precisely, w ere “national-democratic relations” of production? Ang Bayan answered this one as follows: “For the prevailing relations of production to be drastically changed, the means of production now in the hands of the imperialists, the big bourgeois compradors and the big landlords must be transferred to the hands of the entire Filipino people and to the democratic classes that comprise the people . . .”31 The “democratic classes” meant, presumably, everyone except those from whom ownership of the means of production was being transferred. But who, in the national-democratic order, would own what? This was somewhat vague. The “semifeudal” analysis gave rise to a peasant orientation, evidence of which was to be found in the same article. We will give primary attention to the land question as the principal means of production in our society today. The principal problem of the peasant masses and farm workers who constitute the majority of the people revolvels] around the land problem. This principal problem of theirs or, more precisely, its solution, is the principal concern of the people’s democratic revolution . . . . . . Industry must fulfil the needs of agricultural development to serve as the leading factor in the economy,’ and ensure the general balance of development. Agricultural development is dependent upon

This proposition, of course, had its reflection in the CPP’s approach to working-class and urban struggle as a means of supporting the “struggle in the countryside.”

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industrial development. Agriculture, on the other hand, must be firmed up as the base of the national economy. If this foundation is weak, it will not be able to fulfil the needs of industry and of development in general. In short, industrial development also depends upon agricultural development.32

If, however, it was accepted (which it was not, of course) that the working class was the most numerous productive class and that even within the rural population the peasantry was in a minority, the relative importance of this task, and the manner in which it might be resolved, was called into question. The point is made by Rivera, for example: The rapidly growing mass of the agricultural wage workers and the rural landless workers who now constitute more than half of the total agricultural labor force have to be seriously considered since their immediate and long-term interests do not necessarily^coincide with those of the share tenants, leaseholders, and amortizing landowners. . . . a truly progressive agrarian program must go beyond the demand of simply giving land to tillers of the soil in the tenanted areas. It must be able to provide for immediate transitional forms for the collective and social control of the land.53

Similarly, Ernesto M. Valencia has pointed out that one can see that land reform in the sense of a land-to-the-tiller program can only partially solve the problem. As food prices go up and the number of the rural proletariat goes up, the recrudescence of rent-taking may occur in the form of a black market for tenancy rights. Other partial solutions such as land price and rent control, zoning, incentives for land development and limitations on the concept of private property of land do have their positive effects but in the long run the essential question that poses itself is the conflict between social and private claims to land. It always becomes a question of whether it is necessary to finally socialize land ownership.34

The nature of the revolution itself was discussed in an article entitled “National United Front to Build People’s Coalition Government” in the

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issue of Ang Bayan refesred to above. This stated unequivocally that the “people’s democratic revolution-is a bourgeois democratic revolution” but “under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat” and thus has “a clear socialist perspective.” The state to be established upon the victory of the national democratic revolution “would not be a proletarian state, it would not be a bourgeois state either, since it will be ruled jointly by the democratic classes and strata.”35 “Depending on the class composition of the revolutionary coalition,” the Ang iBfiyan article pointed out, “it could lead towards socialism o r towards capitalism. It also depends upon which class force will effectively lead the democfatic coalition and the entire people.” Now this is interesting. Earlier, the CPP had said that the democratic coalition government would be under the leadership or dictatorship of no single class; now the path of •

*

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development of Philippine society would depend “upon which class will

effectively lead the democratic coalition and the entire people.” The latter formulation would be accepted as correct by most Marxists. Past practice would tend to indicate, however, that what the CPP meant by “which class force” was “which political party or force.” Would the CPP enter such a coalition if conditions were such that it could not be guaranteed the leading role? On past form, the answer to the question would be in the negative. The CPP, then, saw the triumph of the national democratic stage of the revolution being followed by a period of capitalist development. Few would doubt this, as Philippine capitalism was— and is— underdeveloped, and its export sector is totally divorced from the domestic economy, but the CPP surely overstated the case. Its adherence to Maoism blinded it to both the reality that the Philippines already had a capitalist economy, and to the assistance that would have been available from the socialist states, were it not for its dogmatic anti-Sovietism. One consequence of this was that, as in Mao’s On New Democracy, socialism was banished to the distant future.*

In the context of present-day realities, this might well be considered realistic. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the east European bloc of socialist states, the era of socialist-oriented revolutions in the Third World for the time being (or until the appearance of the resource-based socialism of a Hugo Chavez) came to an end. But such was not the situation in the 1970s and early 1980s.

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5 When Marx and Engels spoke of the development of modes of production they were describing a historical process. They did not say that

all countries had of necessity to pass through all stages of development. Once capital became dominant on the world stage it became possible for capitalism to be introduced anywhere on that stage. Once m ankind had developed the instruments of production appropriate to the capitalist mode, it became possible for that mode to develop anywhere that these instruments of production could be married up with the other requisite forces of production— for example, the international reserve army of labor, people who had been or who could be separated from their means of production, usually the land. And the more communications improved, the more the world shrank, the more this process was facilitated. Hence, for example, imperialism’s new international division of labor which has transformed the Philippine economy since the late 1960s. Just as it is possible for capitalism to bring within its orbit countries which could not yet have achieved the capitalist mode had they developed in isolation, so it was possible, with the existence, until recently, of a community of socialist countries, for nations to break away from imperialism and take the path of noncapitalist development or socialist orientation, bypassing capitalism— or at least its full development. This possibility was noted by Marx and Engels. Similarly Lenin, addressing the Second Congress o f the Comintern, stated: The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of development is inevitable for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative . . . With the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.36

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development. The North European peoples passed from the communaltribal system, bypassing slavery, to feudalism. “However, only on one condition: it was necessary that the formation which was to be bypassed in one or another country had exhausted its progressive possibilities from the standpoint of world social development and that a higher social system was already in existence in the world.”37 This, then, allowed for a reversal of the Marxist formula referred to by Ferrer. Instead of the economic base determining the social superstructure, it was possible, by means of a political revolution in a country where capitalism was only partially developed if at all, for the progressive forces to erect their own socialist-oriented superstructure and for that superstructure to construct the base, to lay the material basis for socialism— in other words, to develop the forces of production appropriate to the socialist mode of production with the assistance of the socialist countries. The Soviet scholar K. N. Brutents identified two possibilities in the anti­ imperialist stage of the liberation struggle: What are the distinctive features of national-democratic revolutions? These are revolutions which lead to the elimination of colonial and semi-colonial oppression and are also latent with an anti-capitalist tendency, instead of paving the way for the establishment of the capitalist formation in the country concerned. They not only weaken the imperialist system at that point . . . but also pave the way for a breakthrough at that point. When leadership comes from the political forces representing the interests of the proletariat, these revolutions are popular, develop like popular-democratic revolutions and grow directly into socialist revolutions. When leadership comes from nonproletarian democratic forces taking a socialist orientation and frequently with the participation of forces representing the interests of the working class or starting from Marxist ideology, these revolutions produce, alongside important anti-imperialist and anti-feudal changes, anti-capitalist transformations, paving the way for transition to socialist construction.38 In present-day national liberation revolutions, the national-democratic (and popular-democratic) orientation is present only as a possibility, even if a real one, as a tendency making headway— or suffering defeat— in

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conflict with the other, contending tendency backed by domestic and external class forces seeking to confine these revolutions to a bourgeois or bourgeois-democratic framework. It is only in struggle that the ultimate line of development of every national liberation revolution and its character are determined.59 Brutents posed the question of whether it was justified in the current epoch to consider the elimination of national and colonial oppression and the gaining of economic independence as bourgeois tasks merely on the basis that in the past such tasks were usually realized under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. He concluded that it was more correct to label them as democratic tasks. “The substance of the problem is, therefore, that one and the same democratic task acquires a different character, depending on

which class, which power implements it.”40 The solution to the problem of capital accumulation posed by Ferrer would, then, depend upon which forces were able to seize national leadership. If these forces were of a bourgeois of pro-bourgeois character, then Brutents saw no escape: the problem of capitalist accumulation can, in practice, be solved to this or that extent only through cooperation with international finance capital, and this leads to an entrenchment of the unequal ties between the newly independent countries and the economic and political system of imperialism, helping to consolidate the social forces which are prepared to do a deal with the imperialists, so as to obtain their help in preventing a switch to the path of social progress and to keep the masses in check.41 If the national democratic revolution was successfully concluded under the leadership of those representing the interests of the working class, however, then the state may be used as the vehicle for accumulation. Without the expropriation of the property of exploiting classes, without the nationalization or the establishment of strict state control over foreign capital, without radical agrarian reforms, the expansion and strengthening of the state’s economic and social functions, without drawing on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses—without all of this, attainment

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of the necessary level of accumulation is either impossible or is for the people an extremely agonizing, slow and contradictory process. Accordingly, for solving the problem of accumulation, distinctions in the political superstructure are more important than those in the basis.42

We see from this, therefore, that the problem of accumulation would not be solved by allowing capitalism to develop fully, as the role of the state is crucial to the question of accumulation and it can only fulfil that role at the expense of the private sector of the economy. The analysis that the mode of production in the Philippines is “semifeudal” is, then, incorrect. In itself, this would be innocuous. However, this analysis led to the conclusion that there must be a further lengthy development of capitalism in the Philippines before embarking upon socialism. We are of the view that this would not have been necessary, and that the proposal stemmed from an ahistorical, mechanical application of Marxism (or, rather, Maoism). Rather than a lengthy development of capitalism, it was possible— in certain circumstances— for that development to be interrupted by states led by the working class or its representatives, placing the economy on a path of socialist orientation and laying the basis for the development of socialism. Finally, it should be underlined that the possibilities for noncapitalist development at this historical juncture were conditioned by international factors, the chances of a country successfully embarking on this road being much greater if the assistance of sympathetic countries (especially with regard to capital goods) was assured. Ironically, the Soviet works quoted in this and the previous chapter were all written in the so-called stagnation period. During this time, however, the Soviet Union certainly fulfilled its internationalist obligations, both materially and politically. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies now means that this internationalist assistance is no longer available. This was not the case, however, when the CPP strategy was first elaborated. The CPP conducted no analysis of the Soviet Union but, instead, merely adopted the “analysis” of the Communist Party of China, and thus in Our

Urgent Tasks it noted that “Soviet social-imperialism is trying to penetrate

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even such a country like the Philippines which U.S. imperialism considers a permanent preserve in this part of the world. Soviet social-imperialism calculates that it must make diplomatic and trade inroads to weaken U.S. imperialism in as many places as possible and push hard its new-tsarist ambitions of world hegemony.” Leaving aside the latter slur, would it not have been in the interest of a party in pursuit of national liberation in what had hitherto been not just a US neocolony but the USA’s anticommunist base in Southeast Asia, for Soviet trade and diplomacy to “weaken US imperialism”? In 1979, Albert Szymanski, a non-aligned US Marxist, decided to investigate the “social-imperialist” claim. The result was his book Is the

Red Flag Flying? in which the chapter on “Soviet Relations with the NonSocialist Third World” concluded: We have been able to find no evidence that the Soviet Union exploits the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America through unequal trade, economic assistance, or any analog of Western style foreign investments. Soviet trade and assistance is more generous than that of the West and is, unlike the latter’s, designed to encourage industrialization and independence. The absence of anything like Soviet ownership rights in local productive property means that, unlike such countries as the United States, France and Britain, the Soviet state has no stake in preserving the local class structure which guarantees existing property relations. In summary, the Soviet Union cannot be considered to be a social imperialist in relation to the non-socialist Third World since the fundamental characteristic of imperialism (economic exploitation) is absent in the relationship between the U.S.S.R. and the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.43

Szymanski examined the political role of the Soviet Union in the non-socialist countries of the Third World by looking at Soviet military assistance and the actions of the Soviet Union in the creation of Bangladesh, the Cambodian and Angolan civil wars, and in the Horn of Africa. Here we have seen that the Soviets consistently played a progressive role in support of the various national liberation and left movements without attempting to gain special advantages for themselves or unduly directing the course of events. In

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other words the Soviet Union cannot be considered even hegemonic in its relations with the Third World.4,1 Unlike Szymanski, it seems that the CPP, rather than conducting an analysis of its own, was simply following a line— that of the Maoist leadership in Beijing— with regard to the Soviet Union.

N o tes 1. Filemon “Popoy” Lagman, interview by the author, January 1996 2. Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader's View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 22 3. Ibid. 4. Ang Bayan, October 1983. 5. Armando Malay, Jr., “Some Random Reflections on Maoism in the Philippines,” in Marxism in the Philippines (Quezon City: Third World Studies Center, 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

University of the Philippines, 1984), 49-50. Ibid., 77. Trevor Munroe, ABC o f Scientific Socialistn (Kingston: Workers’ Party of Jamaica, 1980), 86-87. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (M. Nicolaus translation) (1973), 105, quoted in Medin Magallona, “A Contribution to the Study of Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines,” in Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982), 14. European Companies in the Philippines (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1987), 2. Patricio N. Abinales, “Filipino Communism and the Spectre of The Communist Manifesto ” in Fellow Traveler (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 239. Rene Ofreneo, Capitalism in Philippine Agriculture (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1987), 51. Ofreneo, Capitalism in Philippine Agriculture, 54.

13. Ibid. 14. Ang Bayan, October 1983. Kerkvliet tells us that at this very time, “the CPP top leadership instructed local activists to survey rural conditions in their areas. The results showed what many activists knew from experience: that

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class relations, modes of production, and other conditions were far more complicated than the party’s official view of the country’s political economy. For fear, however, of being openly at odds with official doctrine—especially since Jose Maria Sison and other party officials at the highest level had recently restated that the Philippines remained a semi-feudal society—subordinate party officials did not release the results of their studies.” See Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Contemporary Philippine Leftist Politics in Historical Perspective,” in The Revolution Falters: The Left in Philippine Politics After 1986, ed. Patricio N. Abinales (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1996), 13. 15. Ofreneo, Capitalism in Philippine Agriculture, 6 l. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 88. Renato Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1984), 98-99. Ofreneo, Capitalism in Philippine Agriculture, 174. Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative, 67. Alfred W. McCoy, “Rural Philippines: Technology and Change in the Sugar Industry,” in The Philippines After Marcos, ed. R. J. May and Francisco Nemenzo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). Rene Ofreneo, “Modernizing the Agricultural Sector,” in Mortgaging the Future: The World Bank and IMF in the Philippines, ed. Vivencio R. Jose (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982), 100. Magallona, “A Contribution to the Study of Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines," 36. Sison, The Leader’s View, 22. Renato Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1984), 98. Jose Maria Sison, Philippine Crisis and Revolution (Quezon City: Lagda Publications, 1986), 11. Ricardo D. Ferrer, “On the Mode of Production in the Philippines: Some OldFashioned Questions on Marxism,” in Marxism in the Philippines, 187-240. “Our Party’s Economic Program: Change the Production Relations,” Ang Bayan, March 1985.

31. Ibid. 32. Ibid.

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33. In Feudalism and Capitalism in The Philippines, 11. 34. “Philippine Land Reform from 1972 to 1980: Scope, Process and Resultsin Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines, 71. 35. “National United Front to Build People’s CoaliUon Government,” Ang Bayan, March 1985. 36. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 244. 37. V. Solodovnikov and V. Bogoslovsky, Non-Capitalist Development: An Historical Outline (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 19-20. 38. K.N. Brutents, National Liberation Revolutions Today, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 148. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 183. V.F. Stannis, G.B. Khromushin, and V.P. Mozolin, eds., The Role o f the State in Socio-Economic Reforms in Developing Countries (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 156-57. 43. Albert Szymanski, Is the Red Flag Flying? (London: Zed Press, 1979), 178-79. While, at a later stage, the CPP did briefly drop its characterization of the Soviet Union as “social imperialist,” this falls outside the period covered by the current work and must therefore await discussion in a further volume. 44. Ibid., 179.

C h a pter 1 1 : T h e A rm alite and th e C rucifex 1 From the 1960s onward, the image of the gun-toting priest, committed to the liberation of the oppressed, became increasingly familiar. This was a result of the development of “liberation theology,” encouraged by the progressive encyclicals of Pope John XXIII issued by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Arising first in Latin America, liberation theology took hold in the Philippines in the 1970s, with some adherents forming an alliance with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and some priests joining the New People’s Army (NPA), the party’s armed wing, or even the party itself. This chapter will outline the development of the radical tendency within the Catholic Church in the Philippines and examine the approach of the CPP to this phenomenon, considering this in the context of classical Marxism’s view of religion and Lenin’s balanced approach to the involvement of believers in the mass movement and the communist party.

2 The evolution of the radicalized clergy in the Philippines is perhaps best exemplified by the former priest Edicio de la Torre. At the time De la

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Torre became politically conscious, the involvement of the Catholic Church in the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) and the Federation of Free Workers (FFW) was aimed at providing a specifically anticommunist alternative within the peasant and labor movements. De la Torre recalls: For a whole generation of middle class Christian activists, church people and lay, the FFF offered just the right political and ideological stance we could identify with . . . Its leaders were reassuringly reformist (many of them were middle class like us), although we would also satisfy our need to be called radicals by telling each other we were dealing with the root problems of the grassroots.1

Tensions between radicals and conservatives within the FFF sharpened from the late 1960s onward. After radicals led a fifty-eight-day vigil outside the Bureau of Agriculture in 1969, the leadership expelled leading militants and imposed “ideological censorship.” The FFF leadership supported Marcos’s declaration of martial law in September 1972.2 De la Torre sees “one of my roots” emerging from this background, where the guiding rule was to “do reforms to prevent revolution” and “do reforms to undercut the communists.”3 His “other hair he identifies as coming from a second tendency which started to develop in the 1960s among a section of the Church which didn’t start with a coherent world-view, like papal encyclicals and so on. You know: “Let’s work with the poor and we’ll see what comes out of it,” sometimes to the point of romanticising, saying only the poor have wisdom and ideas, especially if they were peasants.4

This mixture of reformism and revolutionary romanticism is certainly evident in De la Torre’s earlier writings. In the late 1960s, for example, while recognizing the class distinctions within the Church, he was of the view that the hierarchy could be persuaded to combat injustice. 'Hie Church’s first task is “to denounce the unjust structures, not as one who judges from without, but one who acknowledges her own share

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of the responsibility and the blame.” These brave words of Archbishop Helder Camara (Recife, Brazil) refer to the whole people of God, the whole Church. But the Church we believe in is also a hierarchical Church, with consequent distinction of roles between laity and clergy. Although the whole Church, all Christians, have the prophetic task of denouncing injustice, the bishops speak with official voiccs. Hence it is not enough that laymen and priests speak out. They also appeal to the bishops to exercise official moral leadership.5

Even at this stage, however, it was apparent that his revolutionary romanticism was beginning to triumph over his reformism, for just two paragraphs later De la Torre laid stress on the clergy’s role in the mobilization of the poor. When churchmen speak of preaching the social doctrines of the Church, they usually mean telling the rich that they are doing injustice to the poor. But to tell the poor that they are being unjusdy treated—this they consider agitation, not preaching. It is against this attitude that Archbishop Camara warns us: “if we omit this—the expression recalls the sin of omission— then tomorrow their eyes will be opened without us and against us.”6

This argument is obviously shot through with a vein of clerical selfinterest. Twenty years later, however, De la Torre explained that he had used this “to challenge and to call people to get involved,” while admitting the existence of self-interest. You would have . . . people who really got mad at Marcos and the military precisely for this reason—that they were creating conditions for people to rebel and the rebellion was not just going to be against Marcos and the military but even the bishops would have to go. There was very clearly enlightened self-interest of a section of the elite—from the middle class and the middle clergy.7

Present in the ranks of the radicalized clergy in the earlier period were “m any people . . . who wanted to be martyrs as a kind of expiation . . .” and for whom the notion of sacrifice was important. “It’s very easy,” said De la Torre, “to reinforce a lot of Christian images.”8 This theme was present

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in De la T one’s writing at the time. “The central theme of our faith,” he wrote in 1969, “is the paschal mystery; and for all the present stress on the resurrection, it still starts with suffering and crucifixion.”9 The concept of crucifixion as the necessary first step to resurrection* may well, of course, explain why some priests gravitated toward the armed struggle. Another theme found in the writings of De la Tone and others is that of the identification of the Marxist concept of historical necessity with the religious notion of the “will of God.” In a pamphlet published in 1986, de la Tone commented: But I think, theologically, many of us are not Christians. We refuse to accept a concept, a God, a living God, who is thoroughly bound up in history. Or we have a concept of history that is not history because it is not concrete, it is not dynamic, it is not specific, it is not rooted. That is what I would like to stress because that is the key link; because once you accept incarnation seriously, wittingly or unwittingly, you are plunged into politics.12

In the same year Louie G. Hechanova (a cousin of Luis Jalandoni, a former priest who became the international spokesman for the National Democratic Front— ostensibly an umbrella organization but in effect the CPP’s diplomatic arm) wrote: Even the Nicaraguan bishops could say: “Our people fought heroically to defend their right to live in dignity, in peace and in justice . . . We believe that the present revolutionary movement is an opportune time to truly implement the Church’s option for the poor.” In a word, they were inviting Christians to find the working of the Holy Spirit in

This was not a new phenomenon in the Philippines. Reynaldo C. Ileto tells us: “In its narration o f Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, and of the Day of Judgment [the pasyon] provides powerful images of transition from one state or era to another, e.g., darkness to light, despair to hope, misery to salvation, death to life, ignorance to knowledge, dishonor to purity, and so forth.”10 Writing of revolts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ileto maintains: “What can be safely concluded is that because of their familiarity with such images, the peasant masses were culturally prepared to enact analogous scenarios in real life in response to economic pressure and the appearance of charismatic leaders.”11

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the revolutionary process, and this possibility remains valid even if the Nicaraguan bishops may seem to have changed their minds about the Sandinista-led revolution.13

As Hill points out, in the English Revolution God was also looked upon as the “principle of change.” The protestant principle of the priesthood of all believers, carried to its extreme limit in the inner light, together with scholarly protestant textual criticism, destroyed the authority of the Bible. But what should take its place? “All comes by nature” is not a creed for those who wish to turn the world upside down. Until men had worked out a much stronger sense of history, of evolution, atheism could only be a negative, epicurean creed in a static universe. Atheists could hardly work for a transformation of society: for the revolutionaries God was the principle of change. If they lost belief in God, what remained7 This is what made Milton insist on human freedom and responsibility, in his desperate attempt to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men. The backwardness of history and natural science made it impossible to break through to a theory of evolution in which God would become an unnecessary hypothesis.14

In another work, Hill illustrates the revolutionary uses for which the texts of the Bible were utilized. The Bible could be put to endless destructive use. Its text was inspired; it contained all that was necessary to salvation; therefore anything not specifically mentioned in it was at best indifferent, at worst sinful. The Presbyterians found no Bishops in the Bible. Milton wrote, “Let them chant while they will of prerogatives, we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of acts and statutes, still of Scripture.” Colonel Rainsborough remarked at Putney, “I do not find anything in the law of God, that a lord shall choose twenty burgesses, and a gentleman but two, o r a poor man shall choose none." Therefore, he concluded, God wanted an extension of the franchise. It was in the Bible that Milton found the arguments which led him to justify the execution of Charles I.15

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But as will be evident from the first of the above quotations, revolutionaries in seventeenth-century England only needed to maintain the notion of God because scientific thought had not yet evolved the means of explaining social change rationally This could hardly be said of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. The objective value of a Christian presentation of the case for a social transformation in the Philippines can be appreciated only by making a comparison with another aspect of the English revolutionary period, again utilizing the services of Hill, the recognized expert on the period. The Church . . . defended the existing order, and it was important for the Government to maintain its control over this publicity and propaganda agency. For the same reason, those who wanted to overthrow the feudal state had to attack and seize control of the Church. That is why political theories tended to get wrapped up in religious language. It was not that our seventeenth-century forefathers were much more conscientious and saindy men than we are. Whatever may be true of Ireland or Spain, we in England today can see our problems in secular terms just because our ancestors put an end to the use of the Church as an exclusive and persecuting instrument of political power. We can be sceptical and tolerant in religious matters, not because we are wiser and better, but because Cromwell, stabling in cathedrals the horses of the most disciplined and most democratic cavalry the world had yet seen, won a victory which for ever stopped men being flogged and branded for having unorthodox views about the Communion service. As long as the power of the State was weak and uncentralised, the Church with its parson in every parish, the parson with honoured access to every household, could tell people what to believe and how to behave; and behind the threats and censures of the Church were all the terrors of hell fire. Under these circumstances social conflicts inevitably became religious conflicts.16

The situation in seventeenth-century England, “with its parson in every parish,” was very comparable to that in the Spanish period in the Philippines, when most of the country was virtually administered by priests. That period, moreover, drew to a close little more than a century ago and, although the government of the Philippines has been secularized,

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the power of the Catholic Church is still considerable, with over 80 percent of the population claiming to be adherents. Thus, while a revolution might be possible without first gaining control of the Church, there is little doubt that it would be rendered impossible without the support of very many Christians. De la Torre is quite open about his tactics here. Since we are waging a cultural revolution, we have to start with the existing consciousness of Filipinos. They consider themselves Christians; to them, revolution and Maoism equal atheism equals loss of freedom to worship equals anything is better than that. Hence it is objectively advantageous to the national democratic movement if revolution is seen as a Christian imperative.17

Unlike revolutionaries in seventeenth-century England, De la Torre and other radicalized priests recognized that their Christianity alone was insufficient. I propose that we Christians adopt as our title: SERVANT OF THE REVOLUTION. This is, first of all, a recognition of our inadequacy and our duty to learn not only from the masses but also from the Marxists. For our Christianity does not give us political and economic categories and other scientific tools to correctly analyse and solve the contradictions in our society. It is also the recognition that others have “mastered” this task ahead of us and have the wisdom that only direct and organized experience in the struggle can give.18

Thus, sections of the radicalized clergy in the Philippines began to conduct a Marxist analysis not only of their society but also of the Church within it, with De la Torre urging that the “Church institution must be analysed scientifically and should be expected to carry the same contradictions as the society it serves. Hence the presence of neo-colonial, feudal and capitalist features in the Church.”19 Understandably— given the fact that, at the time, he w as a priest— De la Torre curtails the discussion by setting it within these parameters, whereas a more thoroughgoing enquiry would ask how and why the Catholic Church came to be present in the Philippines. This

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would demonstrate that, rather than merely reproducing Philippine society’s contradictions within its own ranks, the institution was an instrument of the Spanish conquest and a means of achieving social control. De la Torre’s analysis led him to conclude that “(s]ince existing social structures prevent social development, then the Christian must work to change these structures; with violence if necessary,”20 although a year after writing this sentence he was still “personally committed at present to the belief that reforms can be achieved by socio-political organizations of farmers (tenants, setders), workers (agricultural and industrial), ‘squatters’ and youth. Other serious-minded people in the Philippines disagree and claim that those in power are too inflexible and will resist change. They have therefore opted for direct destruction of the power structure by violence.”21 It was at this stage, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that the reformist and the romantic within De la Torre began to produce a synthesis. While admitting that the clergy within the FFF came to be perceived in some quarters as “communist,” even though the organization itself was “partly motivated by anti-communism,” he recalls: As the FFF reached out for support among the student youth, it even used Mao Zedong’s writings as a kind of left-handed confirmation of its work, citing Mao’s emphasis on peasants as the main force in the new democratic revolution, while downplaying his recognition [as, in practice, did Mao himself] of the proletariat as the leading force.22 The romanticism of clergy like De la Torre was given further encouragement by the “First Quarter Storm,” the series of largely studentled demonstrations in 1970, which “scattered seeds across the land, and by 1971, we realized that these seeds had lodged themselves deep in our consciousness and had struck roots in Our practice.”23 However, there was a fundamental problem to be overcome in that the Church purported to be “a mother of all”— rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed— whose role was seen as one of building bridges, of reconciliation. The romantic within De la Torre dealt with this contradiction by taking these metaphors at their face value.

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And the farmer, the voice of the oppressed, voice of wisdom, said, “OK, granted that you’re a mother of us all, when a younger, weaker child is being bullied by an older child, doesn’t the mother take sides with the younger against the older? Even if she still eventually loves the other and will reconcile them, at a certain moment she takes sides.” . . . The farmer again said, “Fine enough, you should build bridges, but try building bridges starting from the middle!" You start with one bank and you can still reach out, but first take sides.24 However, for some clergy and laity this taking of sides involved rather more than merely defending the poor and opposing the oppressors. We have seen above that it was recognized that there was a “duty to learn not only from the masses but also from the Marxists.” In practice, though, for De la Torre and others this meant first the adoption of the Maoist outlook and second their integration into the CPP-led mass movements and, for some, even into the CPP itself. By 1971, De la Torre was using the pulpit to popularize Maoist ideology, his Lenten Lecture of that year being entided “The Challenge of Maoism and the Filipino Christian.” In this, he pointed out that “Marxism-Leninism had to become Chinese in order to transform China. Similarly, Maoism must become Filipino if it is to be effective in the Philippines.”25 The lecture went on to enumerate three “significant results” of the Maoist doctrine: the enhanced role of the peasantry in the “new democratic revolution,” the “longer lasting role” of the national bourgeoisie in socialist construction, and the importance of the “mass line.”26 One must assume that the second of these would have been reassuring to some members of De la Torre’s audience (or congregation); moreover this particular “result” ties in neatly with the aforementioned aim of the Church to “build bridges.” De la Torre’s romanticism is evident in his endorsement of the third “result”: “This ‘mass line’ is part of Mao’s tendency to trust the creative enthusiasm of the masses over organizational skill and technical knowledge. This enthusiasm was the major factor behind the recent revolutionary movement within China against bureaucratization.”27 This is part and parcel of the romantic notion that the peasant is the “voice of wisdom.” The “recent revolutionary movement” is of course a

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reference to the Cultural Revolution, which consisted of a direct assault by Mao on the structures of the Communist Party of China, using politically immature youths as the “main force.” In practice, this preference for “creative enthusiasm over organizational skill and technical knowledge” amounted to little more than Mao’s fear of the working class due to its organizing ability and political maturity, for these very qualities placed it in direct opposition to his own egocentric tendencies. De la Torre rationalizes this by accepting at face value Mao’s “poor and blank” theory: Mao’s experience as a guerrilla leader and his basic nationalism led him to make poverty and blankness virtues. Peasants are the most revolutionary precisely because they are blank, and therefore malleable; rural bases should be the first targets because they offer the best chances of building a radically new society; the seizure of cities is the last stage of the revolution. Internationally, China leads as the “poor and blank” socialist nation.28 It is admitted by De la Torre, however, that this very theory had led at least one writer to remark that it “reveals the strange mixture of humanist and totalitarian impulses in Mao.”29 Quite so, because for Mao the vast majority of the Chinese people constituted a blank sheet of paper upon which he would inscribe “the most beautiful words . . Z’30 It is somewhat surprising that De la Torre, who was obviously in possession of a developed intellect, was willing to adopt the Maoist doctrine quite so wholeheartedly (although, along with others, he would later break with the CPP). It is even more surprising that he should have embraced its Filipino version; for his proposition that “Maoism must becom e Filipino” appeared in practice to amount to little more than an acceptance of Jose Maria Sison’s view of the world. The Lenten Lecture of 1971 quotes approvingly from the CPP’s Program fo r a People’s Democratic

Revolution, and a year later De la Torre went so far as to claim that we cannot deny that as of now, the systematic categories and historical outlook of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought have been responsible for clarifying the problems and prospects of liberation in the Philippines. There is no need to summarize here Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society

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and Revolution, which is right now the only systematic guide for further analysis of Philippine society.31 Having both identified the need to choose sides and adopted the Maoist doctrine, the one remaining question to be addressed by priests like De la Torre was that of violence. Was it permissible for Christians to take— or, if they were not to join the NPA themselves, to condone the taking of—human life in the cause of national liberation? This problem was confronted by Hechanova, who pointed out that a blanket condemnation of violence would mean condemnation of the revolution against Spain and the resistance to the US invasion which followed. He argued that official church moral theology apparently has no problem in supporting the violence of “the established power, even if it is unjust, oppressive, and tyrannical . . .”32 He concluded that for those of the poor and oppressed, there is an acceptable option. The option is to undertake a revolution for justice’s sake, even in the name of Christian love, in which the risks of giving one’s life for others could become the highest expression of Christian love. There is, therefore, room for “responsible violence" which is motivated not by hate but love, which is careful not to implicate the innocent, as far as possible, which is not fanatical or adventuristic, and which is calculated to usher in a new era of justice, truth, freedom, love and peace.33 Intellectually, the way was now clear for radical church people to join or, to one degree or another, support the armed struggle led by the CPP. The Student Christian Movement embraced the national democratic line and in May 1971 affiliated to the Movement for a Democratic Philippines which, once a broad organization, had been taken over by the CPP. Seven months later, De la Torre and others formed Christians for National Liberation (CNL), which soon thereafter cooperated with the CPP in the formation of the National Democratic Front. Some priests now began to join the NPA itself. Nick Ruiz, a priest on the island of Bohol, joined as early as 1972 and rose to become a member of the CPP’s central committee. Interestingly Ruiz, like De la Torre, had been a chaplain in the anticommunist Federation

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of Free Farmers.34 In July 1981, the CPP journal Ang Bayan reported that Vicente Pelobello, a priest in Negros Occidental, had joined the NPA; in April the following year it reported that the “people of Northwestern Luzon and the entire country welcome with profound joy” the fact that a further four priests (Conrado Balweg, Nilo Valerio, Bruno Ortega, and Cirilo Ortega) had taken to the hills in Abra province.35 Nemenzo points out, however, that many Christian reformers were impelled to go underground by the “indiscriminate repressiveness of martial law,” seeking refuge in areas controlled by the NPA. Once underground, some moved under the umbrella of the NDF alongside the CPP while others founded the Philippine Democratic Socialist Party (PDSP) in 1973, offering a perspective which, according to Nemenzo, was revolutionary but noncommunist, rejecting dialectical materialism as “incompatible with Christian doctrines” while borrowing “liberally the Marxist analyses of secular problems as well as some Leninist organizational principles.” The CPP viewed this development as unwelcome competition, launching “a strident propaganda campaign against the PDSP, stigmatizing it as an ‘imperialist trojan horse’ and tracing its origins to the Jesuits and Jesuit-trained intellectuals in the 1950s who played an active part in the counterinsurgency operations. Seven years after its foundation, the PDSP suffered a split over the question of collaboration with the CPP, with one faction advocating affiliation to the NDF while the furthest the opponents of this proposal would go was to suggest a softening of its anti-CPP propaganda.”36 Obviously impressed by the social impact which the presence of priests within its own ranks and the broader movement could have, in 1985 the CPP formed a new legal front aimed at recruiting Christians, establishing similar organizations at regional level.

3 More often than not, communists favor the construction of alliances, realizing (at least since 1935, when the Comintern’s sectarian— and disastrously

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overturned) that they alone are incapable of removing the current capitalist or pro-imperialist regimes from power. Therefore, disregarding the party’s Maoism for one moment, few communists would fail to applaud the efforts of the CPP in mobilizing the breadth of Church support which is apparent from the foregoing, particularly in view of the role played by that institution in Philippine society. Alliances are one thing, but the CPP went further than this, accepting priests into the ranks of the party itself and even promoting them to its higher echelons. Membership of a communist party has traditionally been conditional upon the acceptance of the Marxist philosophical oudook. This is no small matter, for this outlook informs practical and theoretical activity, determining how the world is analyzed and acted upon. Can, therefore, those Christians who joined the CPP be described as Marxist? It is difficult to see how the answer to this question can be anything but negative, for while the philosophy developed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin was materialist, religions are idealist. A textbook published in the 1960s gives a simple outline of this contradiction. Materialist philosophy is based on recognition of the existence of nature— the stars, the sun, the earth with its mountains and valleys, seas and forests, animals, and human beings endowed with consciousness, with the ability to think. There are no supernatural phenomena or forces, nor can there be. Man is only a particle of multiform nature, and consciousness is a property, a faculty, of man. Nature exists objectively, that is, outside and independent of the human mind. The question of the relation of the human mind to material being is the fundamental question of all varieties of philosophy, including the most recent. Which is primary—being or thinking? Philosophers are divided into two great camps according to how they answer this question. Those who consider that the material basis—nature—is primary and regard thought, spirit, as a property of matter, belong to the camp of materialism. Those who maintain that thought, spirit or idea existed before nature and that nature is, in one way or another, the creation of spirit and dependent upon it, comprise the camp of idealism. That is the only philosophical meaning of the terms “idealism” and “materialism."37

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Thus, religion falls into the camp of idealism because it maintains that nature— matter—was created by God, that his idea of matter preceded matter itself. Marxists, on the other hand, argue that matter existed first and that the human mind (in which all ideas are formed) is merely the highest organization of matter. Ideas, then, arise through the interaction of the human mind with matter, i.e., with the concrete conditions existing at the time. Therefore, the set of ideas which predominate in a society at any one time will be conditioned by the social and economic conditions in that society and the level of development of its productive forces. Thus, the philosophy of Marxist-Leninists is not materialism plain and simple but dialectical materialism, a materialism which takes full account of the interplay between the highest organization of matter (the human mind), the world outside of it, and the concrete conditions existing at the time. And according to this approach, the notion of a god or gods is exactly that—a notion, an idea. Engels explained this proposition as follows. All religion . . . is nothing but the* fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were first so reflected, and which in the course of further evolution underwent the most manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples.38 In other words, primitive man, whose productive forces had not developed to the stage where the natural sciences could arise, was at the mercy of the elements— flood, wind, earthquake, drought— and, lacking a scientific understanding of these phenomena, could not but look upon them as resulting from the actions of supernatural forces. Thus, in various parts of the world a whole panoply of “gods” arose in the mind of man: of rain, wind, thunder, etc. But this state of scientific ignorance did not persist and neither, therefore, did polytheism. Engels continues as follows. But it is not long before, side by side with the forces of nature, social forces begin to be active—forces which confront man as equally alien

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and at first equally inexplicable, dominating him with the same apparent natural necessity as the forces of nature themselves. 'lTie fantastic figures, which at first only reflected the mysterious forces of nature, at this point acquire social attributes, become representatives of the forces of history. At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who is but a reflection of the abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism, which was historically the last product of the vulgarised philosophy of the later Greeks and found its incarnation in the exclusively national god of the Jews, Jehova. In this convenient, handy and universally adaptable form, religion can continue to exist as the immediate, that is, the sentimental form of men’s relation to the alien, natural and social, forces which dominate them, so long as men remain under the control of these forces.59 Here, Engels is referring first of all to the evolution of classes in society as the forces of production are developed to the point where a surplus over day-to-day needs is produced. It is the production of this surplus which allows society to proceed from “primitive communism” to the lower stages of class society, usually some form of slavery, wherein an exploiter class is able to live off the surplus produced by the majority. This development is accompanied by acts of aggression by one community on its neighbors, either for territory or slaves, and thus deities like the “god of war” are bom. It is in this way that such gods “become the representatives of the forces of history.” Human society then progresses through feudalism and onto capitalism. Here again, economic crises (increasingly international in their effects) confront mankind as an alien force, a force which people do not understand and therefore are unable to control.

The actual basis of the reflective activity that gives rise to religion therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself. And although bourgeois political economy has given a certain insight into the causal connection of this alien domination, this makes no essential difference. Bourgeois economics can neither prevent crises in general, nor protect the individual capitalists from losses, bad debts and bankruptcy, nor secure

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the individual workers against unemployment and destitution. It is still true that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination of the capitalist mode of production) disposes.40 But religion is more than a mere reflection of apparently “alien” forces in class society. It can also be, as it was during the Spanish period in the Philippines, a tool employed by the exploiter classes to subdue the urge to revolt in the exploited. Lenin takes up the argument. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, overburdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven.41 So how, in the long run, is this matter to be resolved? We return to Engels. Mere knowledge, even if it went much further and deeper than that of bourgeois economic science, is not enough to bring social forces under the domination of society. What is above all necessary for this, is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force; when therefore man no longer merely proposes but also disposes—only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that there will be nothing left to reflect.42

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Of course, the “social act” to which Engels refers is that of socialist revolution. Only by such an act, with the formerly exploited classes taking power and then taking the means of production into common ownership and planning production for the whole of society, will “alien forces” disappear and, with them, religion.’ For a Christian to fully embrace Marxism, he or she would have to renounce Christianity as the two— at least in the ideological, philosophical sense—are clearly incompatible. For this reason alone, those priests who joined the CPP cannot be considered Marxists. Thus, as we have seen, De la Torre’s “class analysis” of the Church reveals in that body “the presence of neo-colonial and capitalist features,” rather than disclosing that the Church was very much a part of the feudal order in the Philippines. De la Torre’s “class analysis” is not dialectical. And while some priests claim to have adopted a dialectical-materialist approach, this really must be questioned. Goodno introduces us to Father Frank Navarro, an NPA leader in Mindanao who still, on occasion, celebrates mass. Navarro, says Goodno,

It may be objected that, if this were the case, religion should have disappeared from the former Soviet Union, given that a socialist revolution had taken place in 1917. O ne response lo this would be lo point out that Engels specified no timetable for the disappearance o f the “religious reflection." Such a response would be valid as far as it went, for it has long been recognized by Marxism that ideas tend to persist long after the material conditions which gave rise to them have been superseded. But there are other factors which can be attributed to the persistence o f religion in the Soviet Union: the fact that the excesses o f the Stalin period cannot but have appeared to many people as an “alien force.” Then again, the thesis put forward by Engels merely outlines the conditions required for the removal o f the objective basis o f religion; the timetable for the removal o f the religious reflection itself depends lo a very great extent upon the degree and quality o f the ideological work carried out by the party or parties in power. In the Soviet Union, it also depended upon the extent to which the appearance o f “alien forces” actually had been eradicated. For what was the experience o f that country since 1917? First, the turmoil o f the revolution itself, followed by a war o f intervention by the imperialist powers and a bloody civil war. Then the experience o f socialist construction in a hothouse atmosphere, accom panied by the excesses associated with Stalin’s leadership. Before they had time to draw breath, the people were subjected to Hider’s invasion, as a result o f which 20 million were killed and much o f what they had built was levelled to the ground. And even after Stalin, it is widely accepted that bureaucracy persisted and that socialist democracy was far from perfect, that the period o f Brezhnev’s leadership developed into one o f “stagnation.” Is it not likely that many if not all o f these p henom ena will have appeared as “alien forces” to sections o f a people imbued with a thousand years o f Russian Orthodoxy, thereby acting as the objective basis for the persistence o f the “religious reflection”? 'lhus, Engels’s thesis is no way negated by the experience o f the Soviet Union.

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sees no conflict between dialectical-materialism and his belief in God. As he argues: “Science has not proven that there is a God. But neither has it proven that there is no God. Some key goals of Marxism and Christianity are similar. Both aspire to total liberation. The only difference is that Marxism is more scientific, this-worldly, while Christianity is other-worldly and idealistic.”43 Like de la Torre, Navarro exhibits the same revolutionary romanticism which brings a Christian concept of “service” (and, more tacitly, crucifixion) to the prospect of armed struggle: I was never really contented with my parish work. The people were poor, but I was not involved in truly solving the causes of their poverty. Armed struggle is the highest form of service. One offers not only his time, money or effort. He offers his life. If lay people can offer their lives, how much more a priest who has been trained to give his total being to service?44 Another major attraction of Maoism (as opposed to Marxism) to these priests may well lie in the fact that it, like Christianity, is thoroughly idealist Both Mao and Sison exhibit strong voluntarist tendencies, i.e., the belief that, regardless of objective circumstances, a goal can be achieved by an act of will or by the “revolutionary enthusiasm” of the masses. It was such an approach which underlay Mao’s catastrophic “Great Leap Forward” and which still underpins Sison’s line of armed struggle. This is evident in the writings of De la Torre. For example, he enthusiastically quotes Fidel Castro as follows: “We don’t feel that the communist man can be developed by encouraging man’s ambition, man’s individualism, man’s individual desires. If we are going to fail because we believe in man’s ability, in man’s ability to improve, then we will fail; but we will never renounce our faith in mankind.”45 At the time Castro uttered these words, the young revolutionary regime in Cuba had set its face against the use of materialist incentives to encourage greater effort by its industrial and agrarian workers. Proclaimed Castro: “We must use political awareness to create wealth. To offer a man more for doing more than his duty is to buy his conscience with money.”46 Such a naively idealistic (in both senses of the word) approach ignored the

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Marxist prescription for distribution during the socialist stage of society: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” And it failed. Following a disastrous sugar harvest (not unlike, in its essence, the result of Mao’s “Great Leap”) a wiser and more mature Castro resorted to the use of material incentives. There is also in De la Torre a tendency to stand Marxism on its head as when, in deriding “loose talk about ‘Christian-Maoists,’” he states: “It is more precise to say that many of us wanted to be “proletarian Christian,” having accepted the insight that as a social class, the proletariat’s interests were more selfless than those of the middle class.47 Marx made the distinction between a “class in itself* (where a class has an objective existence) and a “class for itself’ (where a social class is subjectively aware of both its own existence and its interests as a class). The proletariat, once it becomes a “class for itself” is anything but selfless, aspiring to the leadership of society and the dispossession and abolition of its main class rival, the bourgeoisie. (Such a view might seem a little fanciful at the moment, in the wake of the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, but we must recognize that De la Torre was writing of the proletariat’s “selfless” nature in 1971, when most communist parties still held out the prospect of working-class rule in the not-too-distant future.)

4 How does the approach of the CPP to radical Christians compare to that of classical Marxism? The most obvious authority to turn to is Lenin, for it was he who not only further developed and applied the theory first formulated by Marx and Engels but also led a successful revolution and, in so doing, was required to work out a response to many problems, including the religious question, in practice. “Marxism,” Lenin wrote in The Attitude of the Workers’Party to Religion, “has always regarded all modem religions and churches, and each and every religious organization, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve

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to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”48 This particularly blunt formulation might give the impression that Lenin was of the view that the atheistic legions of the workers’ party should at all times and in all circumstances wage unrelenting war on religion in all its shapes and forms. In fact, this was far from the case. His approach was far more subtlemore dialectical—than this. Broadly, there are in his writings four areas of discussion concerning the party’s attitude to religion: state policy, the need for antireligious propaganda, the attitude to Christians in the movements for social change and, finally, the presence of people with religious beliefs in the communist party itself. We will touch on each of these in turn. The first area is by far the most straightforward.' Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e. to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations independent of the state.49 Such a demand has a dual character. It is democratic in that it puts forward the notion of religious freedom; and it is a blow against the thenexisting (1905) status quo in Russia in that it calls for the removal of all privileges from the established church which had proved to be such a dependable ally of reaction. But, continues Lenin, this does not mean that religion is considered to be a “private” affair by the workers’ party. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by

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word of mouth. But we founded our association . . . precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.50 Thus, a call for absolute religious freedom and the disestablishment o f the Church is accompanied by ideological work aimed at the “religious reflection” which “bamboozles” workers. But throughout his active political life Lenin was against a mechanical application of atheist dogma, feeling that this could easily become a diversion away from the main questions facing the working class. He makes this point in the article, written in 1905, from which we have already quoted. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our party. We shall always preach the scientific worldoutlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various “Christians.” But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced in the first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.51 Just a month earlier, in an article entided “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” Lenin had put forward a similar argument. To be sure, those workers who remain Christians, who believe in God, and those intellectuals who defend mysticism (fie upon them!), are inconsistent too; but we shall not expel them from the Soviet or even from the Party, for it is our firm conviction that the actual struggle, and work within our ranks, will convince elements possessing vitality that Marxism is the truth, and will cast aside all who lack vitality.52

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Note here that Lenin is not saying that Christians should be targeted for recruitment into the party. Moreover, while he is against expelling those who remain Christians, this is based on the belief that they will eventually discard their religion as a result of “work within our ranks”; otherwise, such work or “the actual struggle” will “cast aside all who lack vitality." It is very clear, then, that where he advises caution he is referring to the party’s public stance on religion. Within the party it is a different matter, as we shall see more fully in a moment. With regard to the dangers inherent in a too vociferous public attack on religion, Lenin refers to Bismark’s struggle against the German Catholic party in the 1870s which “only

stimulated militant clericalism of the Catholics, and only injured the work of real culture, because he gave prominence to religious divisions rather than political divisions, and diverted the attention of some sections of the working class and of other democratic elements away from the urgent tasks of the class and revolutionary struggle to the most superficial and false bourgeois anti-clericalism.”53 Later in the same article, Lenin expands on this theme. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion . . . No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labor, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way. Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task— the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters.54

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As an example of this dialectical approach to religion, in the same article Lenin puts forward the hypothesis of a strike developing in a particular region in an industry where the workers are divided into class­ conscious socialists and backward Christians under the influence of the local priest, who is organizing a trade union. Should the socialists preach atheism at such a time? No, says Lenin, for “it is the duty of a Marxist to place the success of the strike movement above everything else, vigorously to counteract the division of the workers in this struggle into atheists and Christians, vigorously to oppose any such division.” Even after the October Revolution, Lenin urged tact when dealing with the religious question. At the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women in November 1918, he counselled his audience to be extremely careful in fighting religious prejudices; some people cause a lot of harm in this struggle by offending religious feelings. We must use propaganda and education. By lending too sharp an edge to the struggle we only arouse popular resentment; such methods of struggle tend to perpetuate the division of people along religious lines, whereas our strength lies in unity. The deepest source of religious prejudice is poverty and ignorance; that is the evil we have to combat.55 Again, in the Draft Program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), a document which was largely the work of Lenin, it is argued that while destroying the “connection between the exploiting classes—the landowners and capitalists—and the organisation of religious propaganda as something which keeps the masses in ignorance,” attempts should be made to erase these religious prejudices from the minds of the masses by propaganda “and by raising the political consciousness of the masses but carefully avoiding anything that may hurt the feelings of the religious section of the population and serve to increase religious fanaticism.”56 Similarly, Lenin was alarmed by a proposal within the party to use May Day 1921 to “expose the falsehood” of religion, as the occasion coincided with the Easter holiday. Writing to Molotov in April, Lenin urged the Politbureau to “recommend something quite differenf and “absolutely to avoid any

affront to religion.”57

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It should be noted that, over a lengthy period, Lenin maintained a consistent line on this question. Yes, religion was a form of false consciousness, the social basis of which lay in capitalist relations of production. Therefore, while antireligious propaganda and education should take place, they must be subordinated to the main task of working for the demise of the capitalist system and conducted, moreover, in a way that did not prove divisive. Thus, Lenin’s concern for the feelings of the religious had very little to do with his concern for them as individuals: he preferred them to be among the forces fighting against capitalism rather than, as a result of tactless antireligious propaganda work, being forced to join the defenders of capitalism. It is interesting to note that, five months after Lenin expressed alarm at the aforementioned May Day proposal, he drafted a decision, which was subsequendy adopted, calling for all pornography and “books on religious subjects” in the Moscow warehouses to be turned over to the Paper Industry Board as waste paper.58 So much for Lenin’s attitude to religion outside the party. What about the possibility of Christians— even priests—joining the party? Lenin was of the view that conditions in Russia were somewhat different than those pertaining in western Europe, where it was argued with some regularity that priests should be allowed to join socialist parties. However: It cannot be asserted once and for all that priests cannot be members of the Social-Democratic Party;* but neither can the reverse rule be laid down. If a priest comes to us to take part in our common political work and conscientiously performs Party duties, without opposing the program of the Party, he may be allowed to join the ranks of the Social-Democrats; for the contradiction between the spirit and principles of our program and the religious convictions of the priest would in such circumstances be something that concerned him alone, his own private contradiction; and a

At this time (1909), Lenin’s party was still called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The term “Social Democrat” was applied to people who would later call themselves communists. The term “social democracy” came to be applied solely to the right wing of the international socialist movement when, confronted with World War I, the left wing opposed the war as a purely inler-imperialisl conflict while those on the right supported “their” capitalists against those of the opposing side.

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political organization cannot put its members through an examination to see if there is no contradiction between their views and the Party program. Lenin was of the view that such a case would be “altogether improbable” in Russia. But what of Christians intent on disseminating their religious views within the party? And if, for example, a priest joined the Social-Democratic party and made it his chief and almost sole work actively to propagate religious views within the Party, it would unquestionably have to expel him from its ranks. We must not only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit them; we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions, but we recruit them in order to educate them in the spirit of our program, and not in order to allow an active struggle against it. We allow freedom of opinion within the Party, but to certain limits, determined by freedom of grouping; we are not obliged to go hand in hand with active preachers of views that are repudiated by the majority of the Party.59 Ten years after this, when asked for his views by the organizing bureau of the central committee concerning party members who took part in religious ceremonies, Lenin replied that he would recommend expulsion.60 We see from the above that Lenin favored a rigorous separation of church and state. While maintaining that religious ideas should be firmly combated, he took the view that this should be subordinated to the cause of unity within the popular movement. Within the party, however, he argued that while no one should be expelled on account of their religion, party members retaining religious beliefs should not be allowed to propagate them, and that they should be recruited with the aim of weaning them away from such beliefs. Moreover, the admission of priests to the party (which, due to Russian circumstances, he regarded as unlikely) would be conditional upon their accepting the party program, and those participating in religious ceremonies should be expelled.

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5 The CPP’s cultivation of an alliance with progressive Christians was a valid exercise in broadening support for the anti-imperialist stage of the Philippine revolution. In so doing, it seemed to share the belief of Christians for National Liberation’s 1983 program: “The key question facing us is not atheism or theism. It is revolution or counter-revolution.”61 The CPP approach would appear, at least in this regard, to have conformed to Lenin’s advice that the revolutionary forces should not “be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas . . .” The party’s Program for a People's Democratic Revolution certainly makes reference to religion. On the one hand, section 2 guarantees free education to all “irrespective of class, religion, creed, sex or colour.” On the other, it declares: “Illiteracy and superstition among the masses shall be wiped out and the scientific spirit of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong’s thought shall prevail.” Section 3 promises to campaign “against imperialism and feudalist or church control and influence over the educational system and mass media” and to respect “the freedom of thought and religious belief and use patient persuasion in gathering support for the people’s democratic revolution.” What is lacking in the CPP approach is any attempt to combat religion ideologically, even along the lines suggested by Lenin at his most cautious. Instead, the party appears to have soft-pedalled Marxism in an attempt to woo Christians into the broader movement and the party itself. Although one cadre assured Jones that the CPP’s approach to Christians it had recruited was, due to their vacillation and petty-bourgeois origins, to “constantly sustain their political education and expose them to the masses,”62 most evidence would tend to support the view that religious belief is, in the main, left unchallenged. For example, Goodno recalls visiting a CPP-controlled barrio where the men assembled to sing a religious pasyon,63 Jones found that CPP oiganization in the Church sector was usually left to members of the clergy, who established national-democratic cells within churches and seminaries and avoided discussing communism when recruiting “because of the equation of atheism with communism.”64

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This failure to get to grips with the religious question in the ideological sense tends to indicate that the CPP’s approach in this field was aimed at securing a short-term increase in support with little regard for the long-term consequences. With the promotion of De la Torre, Jalandoni, and other priests and former priests to leadership positions within the CPP, the party was obviously running the risk of ideological “subversion” in that these figures made no secret of the fact that they were still Christians. Indeed, De la Torre in 1980 argued: I want to help set up genuine pluralism in the movement, especially among Christians. Some Christians in the movement can be members of parties but they must also be able to meet as Christians with others to develop their faith. Other Christians can share the goals of parties, but will not be linked organizationally, while others can have some loose organizational connection. All these people who value their Christian faith must be able to share with one another in order to strengthen each other and understand each other. If we don’t, our Christian life will be lost. For our purposes the bond will be Christ, not ideology. One of the things we can do, for example, is study Marx and others as Christians.65 It is one thing to read the Bible as a Marxist, quite another to study Marx as a Christian. Nor should the influence of practising Christians within the CPP be underestimated. Chapman was told by a former national front leader: “CNL is very powerful within the party. They have resources and that is very important. They are skilled and professional and political work comes easy to them. They have lots of influence for their numbers.”66 In a sense, as we argued previously, the marriage of Maoism and radical Christianity was not as outlandish as it might have appeared at first sight, as both are profoundly idealist. What the marriage probably did for the CPP, however, was to reinforce its idealist outlook and to confirm it in its dogmatic tendencies. If a significant number of members and supporters, in addition to viewing the writings of Mao as unalterable truth, believed themselves to be engaged in a process that conformed to God’s will, this did not bode well for the democratic consideration of alternative policies or strategy.

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Moreover, the penetration of Christian ideology (some of which would, without an attempt to combat it, have been absorbed from the society anyway) had practical consequences. Rutten refers to the work of Blum and Geiger, which identifies one “point of friction” between CPPNPA cadres and highland indigenous groups as being “‘interference with internal affairs,’ including cadre efforts to abolish local cultural practices (polygamy, divorce) that run counter to lowland morality . . .”67 Yes, a drive against polygamy might, if handled tactfully, be justified on the grounds of women’s rights, but an effort to abolish divorce? This can, surely, only be explained by the presence of Catholic dogma. Similarly, McKenna finds that the CPP made little headway in its attempt to forge unity with Muslim groups in Mindanao for three reasons: “an overreliance on liberation theology; an overemphasis on ‘educating’ Muslims in controlled settings rather than providing them much-needed organizational resources; and, fundamentally, an unacknowledged Christian chauvinism on the part of National Democratic organizers.”68 (He also says that any question of an alliance between the NPA and the Moro National Liberation Front would have jeopardized the financial assistance the latter received from Islamic nations.)69 The recklessness with which the party embraced the radical cleigy derived from the fact that it lacked a consistent and clearly thought-out ideology, itself a result of its predilection for “models” and Sison’s extensive “borrowing” from Mao. Had this not been so, the party might have been able to see that its relationship with radical Christians should have been on the basis of a principled alliance, recognizing not only the sincerity of liberation theology’s opposition to imperialism and the excesses of the domestic elite classes, but also the fact that their committed adherence to the Christian oudook meant that they should never have been recruited into the party and promoted quite so unquestioningly. A more analytical approach would also have enabled the CPP to see that the situation within the Catholic Church was in certain respects only temporary. Initially, the Church hierarchy supported the martial law (declared in 1972) regime of Ferdinand Marcos. This began to change as the excesses

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of the regime became apparent and large segments of the population (and, therefore, of the church’s "flock") became alienated, the military turned its attention to rebellious priests and, moreover, the hierarchy found its material interests threatened. The first priests were jailed as a result of their antigovemment activity as early as 1970, two years before martial law, and in November of that year the government published a paper in which the church was described as “the single biggest obstacle to progress.”70 Youngblood71 lists 22 military raids on church establishments between July 1973 and October 1984. Interestingly, a study written in 1975 for Bias Ople, the labor minister, “discussed the potential for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Communist manipulation of a ‘Church-led “liberation” movement.’”72 On the economic front, in 1978 Marcos crony Herminio Disini attempted a takeover of the Philippine Trust in which the Catholic Church had a controlling interest. Then again, Marcos threatened to tax church-owned property. As the church hierarchy became increasingly hostile, warning bells began to ring, and by 1983 a government report was recommending that the church should be accommodated by guaranteeing its central interests, ending attacks on the church in the governmentcontrolled media, and muting ideological differences between church and state while playing up those within the church itself.73 Although some bishops remained strident in their anticommunism, the evidence points to the likelihood that, as the government and cronies of Marcos came to be identified as threats to the church, much of the hierarchy muted their opposition to even those members of the clergy who had joined the armed struggle, on the basis that they were at least fighting Marcos. There is little doubt that the CPP benefited, at least in the short term, from the presence of “rebel priests” in its ranks. This was so in terms of social impact, organizationally and financially. The 1970s saw the growth of Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) which, to use Chapman’s phrase, “gave organizational form to the new theology of liberation.” Their mission was to awaken parishioners to the causes of poverty and to encourage them in the belief that their lives could be changed through

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social action. Some were conservative and ventured little more than discussions of the relation between Christian faith and social crises. But others became bastions of radicalism whose leaders preached a primitive Marxism, encouraged demonstrations and sought confrontation with the authorities. 'ITiey spread the doctrine of the “social sin” which defined such practices as low wages, land-grabbing, and usury as evils to be fought with the same righteous conviction as drunkenness and adultery. Jesus Christ became an apostle of land reform.74 The military viewed the growth of the BCCs with alarm. In the late 1970s, Colonel Galileo C. Kintanar, a Ministry of Defense specialist on “religious agitation,” warned: “What is now emerging as the most dangerous form of threat from the religious radicals is their creation of the so-called Basic Christian Communities in both rural and urban areas. They are practically building an infrastructure of political power in the entire country.”75 Jones claims, however, that “Communist influence in the BCCs was uneven and varied from province to province and even barrio to barrio.” Indeed, Goodno mentions a demonstration mounted by members of a BCC in Negros in 1987 to protest against the excesses of the NPA.76 Bishop Francisco Claver told Goodno: The more conservative bishops would think [BCCs] are a front for the underground, precisely because the underground has tried to use them, but the fact is the vast majority of the Basic Christian Communities are not under the thumb of the left, they are just going on by themselves, you know, very slowly. As far as I can see, the Basic Christian Community is more of a structure whereby you can make choices, like joining the NDF or joining the government, but doing so in a critical, effective way.77 However, it is widely believed that a significant number of BCCs provided support to the CPP-NPA to one extent or another. It is also accepted that some church organizations provided the party organizations with funds, often channeled from abroad. In addition, many of the people who came from the religious sector assisted the party by virtue of their considerable organizing abilities.

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This would not last forever. While all along there was certainly concern by conservative bishops that some of those involved in church-led social justice activity had fallen under the spell of the CPP, little action was taken. For example, in 1982 the bishops of Mindanao and Sulu, suspecting that the lay secretariat of the Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference had links to the underground and that funds were making their way to the NPA, merely disowned the organization, leaving the National Secretariat of Social Action, Justice and Peace (NASSA) untouched. This, says Goodno, “was safe as long as Marcos remained in power. But as soon as he fled, conservatives within the Church, including Cardinal Sin [the Archbishop of Manila, head of the Catholic Church within the Philippines!, began a steady attack on it.”78 Moreover, reassertion of control by the conservative hierarchy would be accompanied by the fact that the support of many members of the religious sector, who had been won to an alliance with the CPP on the basis of its opposition to Marcos (thus reinforcing the party’s anti-Marcos emphasis), would now melt away.

N o tes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Edicio de la Torre, Touching Ground, Taking Root (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1986), 39. See Robert L. Youngblood, Marcos against the Church (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1993), 80-81. Edicio de la Torre, interview by the author, June 1, 1989. Ibid. Edicio de la Torre, “Some Notes for a Theology of Social Reform,” in Touching Ground, 20. Ibid., 21. De la Torre interview. Ibid.

9. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 25. 10. Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 14.

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11. Ibid., 19. 12. Edicio de la Torre, The Philippines: Christians and the Politics o f Liberation (London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1986), 7. 13. Louie G. Hechanova, The Gospel and the Struggle (London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1987), 24. 14. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1975), 182-83. 15. Christopher Hill, The Century o f Revolution, 1603-1714 (London: Sphere Books, 1972), 154. 16. Christopher Hill, The English Revolution, 1640 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), 11-12. 17. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 92. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid., 85. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 30.

22. Ibid., 39. 23. Ibid., 52. 24. De la Torre, The Philippines: Christians and the Politics o f Liberation, 9. 25. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 67. 26. Ibid., 68. 27. Ibid., 68-69. 28. Ibid., 70. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Ibid., 71. Mao Zedong, Peking Review, no. 15, June 10, 1958, quoted in ibid., 70. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 100. Hechanova, The Gospel and the Struggle, 23. Ibid., 24. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 203. Ang Bayan, April 30, 1981. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., in Ihe Philippines After Marcos, ed. R.J. May and F. Nemenzo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 54-55. Otto Kuusinen, Fundamentals o fMarxism-Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 24-25. F. Engels, Anti-Duhring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 435. Ibid., 435-36. Ibid., 436.

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41. V.l. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” Collected Works, vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 83. 42. F. Engels, Anti-Dubring, 436-37. 43. Pen Guerrero (pseudonym), “Ministry in the Mountains,” Liberation, AprilMay 1987, 8-10, quoted in James B. Goodno, The Philippines: Land o f Broken Promises (London: Zed Books, 1991), 232. 44. Ibid., 233. 45. Fidel Castro Speaks (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 278, quoted in De la Torre, Touching Ground, 71. 46. In L. Huberman and P. Sweezey, Socialism in Cuba (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 153. 47. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 56. 48. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, 403. 49. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” Collected Works, vol. 10, 84. 50. Ibid., 85-86. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Ibid., 87. Ibid., 23. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, 403. Ibid., 405-406. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 28,181. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, 110-11. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 45, 120, emphasis in original. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 42, 343. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, 408-9. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 44, 239. Program o f Christians fo r National Liberation (Manila, 1984), quoted in E. San Juan, Crisis in the Philippines (Massachusetts: Beigin & Garvey Publishers, Inc., 1986), 38. Jones, Red Revolution, 211. Goodno, The Philippines: Land o f Broken Promises, 238. Jones, Red Revolution, 211. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 168-69. William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People ’s Army and Its Strugglefo r Power (New York: Norton, 1987), 207. Rosanne Rutten, “Introduction: Cadres in Action, Cadres in Context,” in Brokering a Revolution: Cadres in a Philippine Insurgency, ed. Rosanne Rutten (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), 22. Rutten cites (all too briefly on this particular topic) Heike Blum and Daniel Geiger, Between

256

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a Rock and a Hard Place: 7he Contemporary Indigenous Movement, the State and the Left in the Philippines. Manuscript. Thomas M. McKenna, “‘Mindanao Peoples Unite!’—Failed Attempts at MuslimChristian Unity,” in Brokering a Revolution, 124. Ibid., 128. Youngblood, Marcos against the Church, 80. Ibid., 115.

Ibid., 93. Ibid., 94. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 202. Colonel Galileo C. Kintanar, “Contemporary Religious Radicalism in the Philippines,” undated mimeograph, Quarterly National Security Review of the National Defense College of the Philippines, quoted in Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 203. 76. Goodno, The Philippines: Land o f Broken Promises, 231. 77. Ibid. 78. Goodno, The Philippines: Land o f Broken Promises, 237.

C h a pter 1 2 : F rom t h e B arrel o f a G un - I i In December 1980, the CPP identified two “distinct periods” of NPA activity following the declaration of martial law. The first of these lasted until the mid-1970s, during which the people’s army experienced a lot of difficulties and sustained heavy casualties . . . The enemy repeatedly assaulted our initial guerrilla fronts with the result that almost all of these were reduced in size, and there were even a few we had to completely leave temporarily. In more extensive parts of the countryside, we were just starting to open guerrilla zones under extremely difficult conditions. Propaganda units, which besides being small also lacked firearms and experience, were assigned to this task, mostly in places where the peasant movement still had to be revived. Wherever their presence was discovered, these units were immediately pursued by much bigger and stronger enemy forces. Quite a few of our guerrilla units were wiped out. We were able to acquire many rifles, but many were also lost; there was no significant change in our rifle strength as a result. Nevertheless, we were gradually able to gain a foothold in many areas, including Mindanao.1 Another statement claimed that fifteen guerrilla fronts were established between 1973 and 1975, although it was admitted that “intense enemy attacks forced us to withdraw from a few guerrilla zones in 1972-1975 . . ”2

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It is clear from these statements, then, that the development of the NPA did not progress smoothly in this early period. It may prove instructive at this point to quote from the CPP’s own account of the NPA’s early development, taking North-Eastern Luzon as an example. The NPA began its activity in this region (referred to as “NEL” by the CPP) in the province of Isabela. From the few people that our cadres initially contacted in Isabela, the revolutionary movement was later to encompass hundreds of thousands in that province and in Cagayan, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, Kalinga-Apayao and Ifugao. Now and in the future, North-Eastern Luzon and other parts of Northern Luzon will play a most important role in the advancement of the people’s war throughout the land. In fact, this is why as the Party was established in 1968, it immediately took steps to develop NEL, which became more popularly known as Cagayan Valley or just plain “CV.”3 One of the attractions of the region according to the CPP was that “in the whole of Luzon, NEL is farthest from the enemy’s center of power, and its political institutions are thereby unstable.” It was in NEL that the CPP began conducting what later came to be called “social investigations”— indepth surveys that allowed the CPP and the NPA to draw up a program of activity for a province or area based on an objective picture of the social structure, balance of class forces, etc. In the case of NEL, the result was Sison’s Preliminary Report on Northern Luzon. In 1972, according to Ang

Bayan, the party’s journal, NEL had three guerrilla companies, five guerrilla platoons and local militias, at the time the largest NPA force anywhere in the archipelago. The companies and platoons would, assuming that these were counted separately, have amounted to anywhere between 120 and 420 guerrillas.4 The NPA set about establishing a mass base in the region by means of “agrarian revolution,” involving the free distribution of land, the lowering of ground rent and the establishment of marketing cooperatives. Ang Bayan admits, however, that these “were not extensive . . . and the influence of the gun often had to be invoked to make the landlords lessen the rate of exploitation.” It is claimed that by 1972 the mass base consisted of tens of

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thousands in Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and Ifugao. Then, following offensives by the NPA, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) launched its own offensive in 1971-1972 in which 7,000 troops were involved. This was followed by another from September 1972 to March 1973 and a third from December 1975 to March 1976. During the first of these the AFP, by the CPP’s own account, drove more than 50,000 people from the mountain areas of Isabela. The CPP admits that due to lack of experience and the strength of the AFP assaults, “our forces committed major errors which resulted in the loss of a large part of the revolutionary forces. The most serious of these errors was that they allowed themselves to remain confined within the enemy encirclement for a number of years.”5 But it was not just AFP offensives that produced setbacks. In Ifugao province in the early 1970s, for example, the apparendy rapid progress of the NPA proved to be illusory. The small 1971 expansion team contacted the Mondiguing family, to which one of its members was related, and as the family was politically prominent, villagers, having no knowledge o f the NPA or CPP, were swift to lend “support for activities that they presumed

would

advance

[Mayor]

Mondiguing’s

political

interests.”6

Some of Mondiguing’s bodyguards were sent for military training by the NPA in Isabela, and the growing band of local NPAs became involved, in turn, in the Mondiguing family’s political feud with the Lumauigs. This involvement in traditional politics meant, as Finin puts it, that “revolutionary principles were compromised for the sake of survival.”7 Nevertheless, NPA membership and support seemed to be growing rapidly until Mayor Alipip Mondiguing was arrested for his alleged responsibility for an ambush on Governor Gualberto Lumauig; this, along with the capture of a number of NPA units, reduced the number of barrios the NPA thought it controlled from forty-two to seven, and its total manpower in Ifugao to fall to “less than twenty-five.”8 The mass base which had been thought to be pro-NPA turned out, in short, to be merely pro-Mondiguing. Surprisingly, the NPA operated for eight years in NEL without a formal regional party leadership. This was only corrected in August 1977, when the First Regional Party Conference established a regional committee, following

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which, Ang Bayan tells us, work in NEL was guided by the lessons of the previous eight years and by the central committee’s Our Urgent Tasks. “A turning point was the belated implementation of the long-standing order from the Central Committee to leave the confines of Isabela’s forest region and expand toward Cagayan. Thus did our forces not only break out o f the enemy encirclement but widened the territory encompassed by the revolution.” A far starker account of this period can be found in Jones’s study, according to which “a misguided attempt in the northern Luzon province of Isabela to replicate Mao’s self-contained Shensi province stronghold resulted in heavy losses and the dispersal of the few hundred guerrillas and supporters who survived.”9 Within a short space of time, the offensive launched by Marcos “had wiped out the base areas and sympathetic villages the rebels had spent nearly two years developing.”10 “By 1974, the southern Isabela campaign, the pride of the New People’s Army, had been reduced to a pitiful collection of about thirty scrawny and sickly men and women hiding fearfully in the forest.”11 In Aurora province, the Third Red Company split into two and in March 1975 began to retreat, fifty-five guerrillas moving westward while the group left behind was killed, along with one hundred civilian supporters.* Jones estimates that the “effective strength” of the NPA in the region never exceeded 500 guerrillas and political cadres and that between 1970 and 1978 some 300 of these were killed.13 The NPA’s fortunes in the Cordillera took a turn for the better with the logging and pulp production project by the Cellophil Resources Corporation, headed by Marcos crony Herminio Disini and licensed for 200,000 hectares, and the huge hydroelectric project in Kalinga Apayao and Mountain Province. Whereas previously CPP-NPA cadres had experienced difficulty in identifying issues which would engage the attention of highlanders, these two projects did the job for them, and by the late 1970s, “based primarily on people’s fear of losing their land, highlanders in larger numbers than ever before joined the CPP-NPA.”14 Finin makes the point, however, that armed

*

Jones reveals that, according to one veteran of this campaign, communications with the central committee had been broken in 1972 and were not restored until 1975.12

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struggle in the Cordillera was effective primarily in the areas affected by the Cellophil and Chico dam projects, and even here the CPP-NPA was unable to claim sole credit for mobilizing and leading the resistance. Moreover, he suggests that had these two projects not threatened people’s land (AFP abuses also led to support of the CPP-NPA) there may have been negligible opposition to the Marcos government in these areas.15 And, as in the Ifugao experience, there was a sting in the tail, for the upsurge of popular unrest which threw up local leaders like Macliing Dulag* and effectively stalled these projects also contributed to the development of a form of nationalism more localized than that to which the CPP subscribed, and in the mid-1980s the CPP-NPA forces would be split as the Cordilleran nationalists broke away to form the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army. Elsewhere in the country, the NPA’s early attempts to generate “protracted people’s war” were hardly more successful. By December 1973, the NPA in Camarines Sur province had been reduced to nine surviving guerrillas, seven rifles and just over one peso in funds.16 Early attempts to launch guerrilla warfare on Negros failed due to the fact that the NPA went straight onto the offensive in 1969 and 1970 without first building a political base on the island. (Here, perhaps significantly, in view of the voluntarist nature of the religious impulse discussed in chapter 11, the NPA was led by a priest.) After the declaration of martial law, the guerrillas on Negros were easily crushed with, according to Jones, only five CPP activists escaping the military dragnet.17 In Mindanao, later a success story and later still a selfinflicted disaster, by 1973 only two of the five guerrilla fronts which had been opened remained. Over twenty cadres from Manila were assigned to Mindanao in 1974, but by the following year only four NPA squads remained on the whole island.18 In Sorsogon, recklessness and dogma contributed to early failure. By early 1974, CPP strength in the province was up to 250, well over half of them armed. When small landowners offered the NPA 80 percent of their harvests, the latter refused to accept less than 90 percent. This effectively put paid to any grudging support

Dulag, a Kalinga chieftain, was shot down by government troops in 1980; twenty years laler, the NPA assassinated the officer it claimed was responsible.

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which such landlords might have extended to the rebels; instead, they banded together to support the local militia units. When a series of reckless NPA raids provoked a large military counterattack, the NPA was decimated, and by late 1975 a mere ten CPP cadres remained in the province.19 Throughout this first period, the primacy of armed struggle was stressed to the extent that it was the NPA, rather than the CPP, which was assigned responsibility for political work in the countryside. Possibly, this partly explains why, as noted above, there was no regional CPP leadership in North Eastern Luzon until 1977, a phenomenon deriving from a central committee directive issued shortly after the declaration of martial law. According to this, the “People’s Army is the Party’s principal form of organization and should be built as such . . .”20 Van der Kroef remarks that this was a formulation so categorical as to suggest that the NPA was replacing the regular CPP-ML Party organization. Moreover, according to this directive, the Party is required to “assign more cadres of workers’ as well as petty bourgeois background to the New People’s Army.” Particularly those no longer able to carry forward legal or even underground work in cities and towns “should be dispatched to the people’s army through the various regional Party committees.” The directive also stresses again the pivotal role of the NPA in carrying on land reform. (“Wherever the guerrilla units of the New People’s Army are, the least that should be done for the welfare of the peasant masses is to reduce land rent, eliminate usury, and initiate mutual aid and exchange of labor.”) By comparison, the regular Party organization seems almost confined to a back-up and supplementary function, the real burden of political and military struggle falling on the NPA, particularly in the rural areas.21 As is evident from the serious reverses referred to above, such an approach tended to demonstrate that the Maoist dictum “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” (a formulation that had been inserted word for word into the CPP’s Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution)71 left a lot to be desired when an attempt was made to put it into practice. It also implied an inevitable lack of political direction. Furthermore, with no party body firmly in control of the military arm, the NPA would potentially be host to any number of undesirable elements— a factor which possibly

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contributed to the rebels’ extortionate demands on farmers in Sorsogon. Armed bands have been commonplace throughout much of Philippine history, and there is little reason to suppose that, in the absence of strict political criteria, the same kind of people who would have found their way into millenarian or bandit gangs would not have found a home in the NPA.* The prescription that the NPA should be the party’s “principal form of organization” failed to significantly expand the number of guerrillas; in the mid-1970s, Van der Kroef reported that “most authoritative estimates” put the strength of the NPA at around a thousand.24 Perhaps the most tragicomic episode in this period of the NPA’s history concerned its attempts to secure arms from China. In 1971, a nine-strong CPP delegation traveled clandestinely to China where, as the Communist Party of China had already agreed, they would arrange for arms shipments to be delivered to the Philippines. The delegation swiftly found itself divided over the Plaza Miranda bombing, as some of its members had been privy to the plans, and relations became bitter as, by Jones’s account, the “disputes would lead to violent confrontations and to a mutiny by some of the delegates against Sison’s leadership.”25 As the Chinese refused to provide transport for the arms, a former trawler was purchased in Japan and renamed the Karagatan. Three activists were sent from Manila to undergo training, and in mid-1972 the vessel set sail for Fukien, where it took on the arms. On July 4, the arms were offloaded onto small boats off Digoyo Point, Isabela province, but then, as it prepared to embark upon its return journey, the Karagatan ran aground and, says Jones, most of the arms and ammunition were captured by government troops over the next few days. Some ten weeks later, Marcos declared martial law and the China

And in the party itself, the conduct of some members was not always what might be expected to be found in a communist party, let alone one leading an armed struggle. Pimentel gives examples of what might be termed the two extremes of inappropriate behavior. “After a few months in the UG [underground],” one source told him, “I found out that some of my comrades sometimes went home to have their laundry done or to have lunch or dinner with their families." Another describes the nature of meetings in Mindanao before the arrival of Edgar Jopson: “The gatherings were usually very informal. Comrades, even those in the leading committees, lolled in their seats and cracked jokes . . . It was more like a barkadaban, a gang meeting, than an underground meeting. . . There were rarely any prepared documents and very few took down notes.”25

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delegation found itself stranded, with no easy way of communicating with the party leadership back home. In 1973, Sison came up with a project, even more ambitious than the

Karagatan scheme, whereby a small vessel would drop automatic rifles, bazookas, and ammunition in vacuum-packed tubes off the northwestern coast of Luzon. The Andrea therefore left the Philippines for China in January 1974, captained by a former engineering student who was prone to seasickness and crewed by three former student activists and eight peasants from Central Luzon who had never been to sea before. Less than a day later, the vessel ran aground. Rescued by a salvage ship, the twelve would-be gunrunners wound up not in mainland China but in Hong Kong, where they were held by the immigration authorities.26 Jones advises us that the failure of the expedition triggered a series of critical letters from the China delegation. As before, Sison was held responsible for the outcome of this latest nautical adventure, but added to this were a number of other complaints— that the CPP leadership was “leading” the guerrilla struggle from the city (a charge often leveled at the Lavas by Sison) and, in a letter from Ibarra Tubianosa, that Sison was a “mad killer” for ordering the Plaza Miranda bombing.27 Eventually, the crew of the Andrea was granted political asylum in China where, along with China’s other CPP “guests,” they stayed until 1981, when most of them slipped back into the Philippines and the original China delegation departed for sanctuary in Holland. For some of this latter group, it would be another five years before they and their families would be able to return to the Philippines.

In the latter half of the 1970s, the NPA saw an improvement in its fortunes. Dealing with this period, Ang Bayan claims: The seeds we planted in the early years grew larger and stronger; we regained our losses and quickly-surpassed in quantity and quality the

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initial forces we had deployed. Our full-time guerrilla force more than doubled in number, our high-powered rifles increased more than four­ fold; and the total area of our guerrilla fronts increased many times over. We have launched more tactical offensives with more fruitful results. We have speeded up the formation of guerrilla squads and platoons equipped with better arms. The dictatorship has been shifting an increasingly laige part of its armed forces to our guerrilla zones, but we have managed to keep our losses down while continuing to make progress in our work.28 With some justification, the CPP claimed that the turning point in the mid-1970s was due to the summing up by the third plenum of the central committee and the publication of Sison’s Specific Characteristics o f Our

People’s War. The latter document ostensibly marked the CPP’s break with the mechanical application of Chinese experience to Philippine conditions. Whereas previously the aim had been to achieve “liberated areas,” now the armed struggle was adapted to take account of the fact that the geographical peculiarities of the Philippines really did not lend themselves to “liberated areas” at all. The weakest link of enemy rule lies in the countryside. The worst of oppression and exploitation is carried out among the peasant masses by the reactionaries. And yet the countryside is so vast that enemy armed forces cannot but be spread thinly or cannot but abandon vast areas when concentrated at certain points. The countryside is therefore the fertile ground for the emergence and growth of Red political power—the people’s army, organs of democratic political power, mass organizations and the Party. There can be no wider and better area for maneuver for our people’s army and for our type of warfare.29 Thus, the geographical features of the Philippines provided the basis for a specific organizational approach to “people’s war”: Since the central leadership has to position itself in some remote area in Luzon, there is no alternative now and even for a long time but to adopt and carry out the policy of centralized leadership and decentralized operations. We must distribute and develop throughout the country cadres who are of sufficiently high quality to find their own bearing and maintain

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initiative not only within periods as short as one or two months, periods of regular reporting, but also within periods as long as two or more years, in case the enemy chooses to concentrate on an island or a specific fighting front and blockade it.30 It will be apparent from the above that, while Specific Characteristics jettisoned the concept of “liberated areas,” the arguments it put forward did not contradict the Maoist notion of “surrounding the cities from the countryside.” The policy of “centralized leadership and decentralized operations” would, moreover, facilitate the rise of political and military differences within the organization, although there is no doubt that it contributed to a qualitative and quantitative enhancement of the insurgency. This latter process was assisted by the publication in 1976 of Our

Urgent Tasks, which criticized a number of failings in the party’s work. Most of the errors were, said the document, of the “dogmatist” variety, as often no attempt was made to investigate concrete conditions. Criticism was leveled at the hitherto “haphazard” formation of barrio organizing committees in the countryside, often with no attempt to consolidate or to form mass organizations. Therefore, relying on “a mere committee dominated by unreliable but prestigious personalities [often the first contacts made in the barrio] has also spawned commandism.” It was therefore proposed that barrio liaison groups, with no automatic rights to leadership, should be the first step, followed by the entry of the “guerrilla squad, propaganda team or cadres,” and the formation of organizing groups. Particular criticism was aimed at those who “fail to recognize that to support and ensure the success of any important action, military or otherwise, requires painstaking mass work.”31 The importance of this lesson should not be underestimated, for the new prescription came close to questioning the validity of Sison’s previous insistence on the primacy of armed struggle, even though this was restated in the document.* If

*

Slson (as Amado Guerrero) is usually credited with the authorship of Our Urgent Tasks, but according to two former CPP cadres in discussion with the author, one of whom recalled having seen Bernabe Buscayno (Commander Dante) drafting a section of it, a number of leaders worked on the document.32

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“painstaking mass work" was a necessary prerequisite for the successful expansion of military operations, this amounted to a shift of emphasis onto political work— and, in fact, from this point onward the attempt was made to ensure that CPP organizations were placed in control of all aspects of work, including military work. The document had opened by arguing that in order to achieve “the most profound, most wide-ranging and most forward results in the antifascist movement, we must deliberately and clearly link it to the antifeudal and anti-imperialist movements,” as to do otherwise would b e “merely calling for the restoration of formal democratic rights and wornout processes of the ruling system.” Now it proposed a number of forms that the “antifeudal” struggle might take— land reform, reduced land rent or nonpayment, etc.— and, acknowledging the stratification of the peasantry, called for its organization along class lines, isolating the rich peasants. The party itself had not grown sufficiently, said Our Urgent Tasks, and so it was still, in effect, a cadre party, with the possible exception of the Manila-Rizal region, which, although it had sent cadres elsewhere in the archipelago, had continued to grow. Slow growth resulted from sectarianism, “poor tasking and check-ups, irregular and ponderous study courses and lack of recruitment planning.” The “outstanding reason” for the situation outside of Manila-Rizal was “the failure to build the mass organizations and the mass movement in the localities.” Consequently, there were few leaders available to take on “large tasks,” there were difficulties in bringing together the leading comrades at the various levels, and thus “there is always the danger that single Party leaders decide matters that should be taken up in a committee.” Therefore, “there are conditions for the phenomenon of one-m an monopoly of affairs to arise. Indeed it has arisen in the Party and w e have been combating this for a long time.” Significantly, the document called for a large number of workers and peasants to be recruited into the party.

Our Urgent Tasks also filled in some of the blanks in Program fo r a People’s Democratic Revolution. Thus: “The socialist revolution must begin upon the completion [admittedly a word that was open to interpretation] of the people’s democratic revolution, as we shall no longer pass through

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a full stage of capitalist development as in the case of the old democratic revolutions before the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution.” Perhaps more significantly, in this document the CPP finally paid considerable attention to the working class. The revolutionaiy mass movement in the cities, prescribed Our Urgent

Tasks, should be built via the trade unions and other organizations, “engaging them in a broad democratic movement that is distincdy antifascist and anti­ imperialist, a movement sympathetic to and supportive of the distinctly antifeudal movement in the countryside.” Having gone into some detail on the strike movement, the document called for the big bourgeoisie and the foreign monopoly capitalists (and the comprador big bourgeoisie) to be hit the hardest, given the fact that the rate of exploitation was “highest in their enterprises.”’ As with rural barrios, an organizing strategy was set out for urban workplaces. Interestingly, the document did not promote the aim of having one national-democratic labor center, but observed that, although there would be party-led independent unions, “when [they are] members of different labor federations, our unions have the advantage of enjoying close relations with other unions which the Party can gradually get into.” From there, the document went on to discuss urban community organizing activity, with workers and the urban poor taking the lead and the previous practice of sending in student activists consigned to a “secondary position.” There was, therefore, much in Our Urgent Tasks that would contribute to the future growth of the CPP and the NPA. However, despite its initial insistence that “anti-fascism” must also be anti-imperialist, it proposed no anti-imperialist activity. While it ended with several anti-imperialist (and anti-Soviet) pronouncements, the two paragraphs devoted to the US

It may be thought that, as wages are usually higher in foreign-owned workplaces, the rate of exploitation would be lower. However, the Marxist term “rate of exploitation" refers not to the wage-level of the worker but the amount of surplus value he creates, or the time in which he takes to create it, which Marx called “surplus labor,” as opposed to the time taken to recreate the value of his labor-power, which Marx called “necessary labor.” For example, in a poorly equipped enterprise a worker’s day may be divided into five hours necessary labor and three hours surplus labor (giving an exploitation rale of 60 percent), while in a more modem workplace the proportions may be reversed, giving an exploitation rate of 166 percent.33

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military bases stopped short of calling for their ouster, the closest it came to this being the observation: “The question of sovereignty over the U.S. military bases has long been resolved; the point has always been to assert such sovereignty by deeds.”34 While the document’s opening insistence that antifascism be linked to the antifeudal and anti-imperialist movements may well have been designed to absolve the CPP from the charge that it was pursuing a “purely anti-Marcos line,” in Mindanao the leadership initially resisted the “anti­ feudal line,”35 and the failure to flesh out the anti-imperialist line (this may have been due to the fact that China, to which the CPP was still close, favored the retention of the US bases) would mean that the CPP would still, in practice, be primarily anti-Marcos— with negative consequences for the party after Marcos’s fall. Indeed, activity such as propaganda and education aimed at inculcating an anti-imperialist consciousness among the masses was effectively ruled out by the CPP’s emphasis on armed struggle and its illegal status. And while in practice the party would place increasing emphasis on political work, including that of a legal nature, it would often rationalize this by maintaining that such activity was aimed at winning support for the armed struggle. Armando Malay Jr. referred to this conundrum in 1983, pointing out that “the admission of the importance of the legal struggle will question the very basis for the formation of the CPPML in the first place. After all, the new party’s formation was premised on its separation from the path taken by the PKP.”36

3 The CPP-NPA now turned to the construction of political bases, usually by means of campaigns conducted within its guerrilla fronts— even if this entailed suspending military activity for protracted periods. In 1980, Ang

Bayan reported that in many barrios land rent had been reduced by 50 percent, often initially achieved by simply hiding part of the harvest from the landlord and only later organizing the peasantry to openly demand rent

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reductions. There were also campaigns against usury and low wages, and in “political education, literacy, health and culture.”37 On Samar, the journal claimed that an “anti-feudal” campaign launched in four barrios during the harvest season of 1980 had spread to 166 barrios and 70 sitios in six towns by the end of the year, by which time 11,000 poor and lower-middle peasants and agricultural laborers had taken action to lower land rent and other charges, and increase wages.38 By Jones’s reckoning, however, Samar had even by 1979 “boasted the strongest communist organization, military and political, of all the islands,”39 and in the mid-1980s, the CPP attributed the success of its operations there to the comprehensive evaluation of previous experience and the systematic development and organization of its mass base. Although the formation of full-time guerrilla units and the intensification of guerrilla warfare in 1979 was a further factor, at the end of 1981 operations were slowed down “to enable cadres and fighters on Samar to assist in the Visayas and even on Mindanao . . .” because “the heavy enemy presence made it difficult to sustain the previous rate of tactical operations and campaigns.”40 It is evident from this that the growth in the size and influence of the CPP on Samar predated the heightening of its military activity and was the result of prior political and organizational work. And even the intensification of the NPA’s military operations seems, according to the Ang

Bayan article from which this information is taken, to have amounted to a mere seven operations in twenty-one months. Moreover, we see that the very success of these operations then appear, having attracted the attention of the AFP, to have resulted in their own reduction. In 1982, Ang Bayan reported similar developments in North-Eastern Luzon, where “10,600 peasants (or approximately 40,000 including their families) benefited from the agrarian revolution in one year alone. Mass organizations are in the forefront of the campaign to confront the landlords. Organizing committees and full-fledged mass organizations on the barrio level are being formed to lay the groundwork for associations on the town level.” Land rent had been dramatically reduced, while in Isabela many peasants refused to pay rent at all, and many land reform beneficiaries were

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n o longer making amortization payments to the Land Bank. The peasant associations and mass organizations had been reorganized or formed along class lines, with poor peasants and agricultural laborers playing the leading role.41 Again, there is no doubt that the growth of the NPA here would not have been possible without such prior politico-economic activity. As Jones remarks: “What made the rebel army a challenge to be taken seriously was the rapidly expanding communist political organization sinking deep roots in the countryside.”42 Chapman gives the following example of an “advanced area” in Mindanao. In early 1986, Punta Dumalag was a model communist village, a kind of Philippine commune where under the party’s protection and guidance the dispossessed had taken possession. The killing days were over, for no longer did the government’s army attempt to interfere and the NPA contingent had moved on to other batdes. The revolution had come and conquered and then marched on, leaving behind this quiet self-contained enclave of outwardly satisfied converts. There were other communities like it scattered around the country, outposts where the Manila government’s writ no longer ran, but none fit as neatly the CPP’s definition of success. And so when journalists came to this far comer of Mindanao, it was there that the party delighted in displaying its handiwork.43 After his release from prison in 1986, Jose Maria Sison would claim, in what might be considered a progress report on such developments, that the “agrarian revolution depends on the armed strength of the NPA . . .”44 As we have seen, the relationship between the “agrarian revolution,” or politico-economic activity, and the armed struggle was more dialectical than this, with the former laying the basis for the latter. What was true, however, was that the safeguarding o f politico-economic gains in the

countryside was dependent upon the strength of the NPA, and there was a sizeable problem here, for the demands around which the peasants were organized were lifted straight from Mao, who had formulated them for Chinese circumstances. As the geography of the Philippines ruled out the development of “liberated areas,” any gains which arose were, therefore,

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precarious and, in many cases, short term— as the CPP-NPA should have known from its experience in North-Eastern Luzon in the first half of the 1970s.’

4 By the end of the 1970s, CPP-NPA statements gave the impression that steady progress was being made. Nationally, by March 1980 the CPP-NPA was claiming that it had established twenty-six guerrilla fronts in eleven regions outside Manila-Rizal, covering 4,000 barrios in forty provinces. Moreover, all fronts “have passed through and withstood enemy campaigns and operations. Many had withstood two or more large enemy campaigns involving one thousand up to seven thousand fascist troops and lasting several months and even years.”45 It was further claimed that its forces had reached company strength (anything from twenty to ninety guerrillas, based on the formula provided in the “Basic Rules of the New People’s Army”) in most fronts and that in “advanced fronts, if we so desire, we can concentrate up to two companies of full-time guerrillas.” Ang Bayan went on to point out, though, that in “relatively weak fronts, our forces make up at least one guerrilla platoon (between ten and thirty guerrillas) in each front. In general, however, our guerrilla forces are usually spread out in squads and platoons.” Between 1976 and 1980, full-time guerrillas were claimed to have doubled in number, while the number of high-powered rifles had increased by 200 percent. Apart from full-time guerrillas, the “people’s militia” was made up of “part-time fighters” who carried “indigenous and home-made weapons” and who outnumbered the full-timers by five to one.46 In 1980, the NPA claimed that its guerrilla fronts had a combined population of ten million. “We effectively reach more than half the people here, and they support the revolutionary movement in various ways. The core of this mass base consists of some forty thousand (40,000) mass

See chapter 20 for a fuller discussion of this point.

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activists and some eight hundred thousand (800,000) active members of the revolutionary mass organizations.”47 There can be little doubt that these are grossly inflated estimates, for this would mean that in all areas designated as guerrilla fronts no less than one in twelve of the entire population (and therefore a much higher proportion of the adult population) were active members of the “revolutionary mass organizations.” It was presumably on the basis of such estimates that the CPP judged that its military arm was “rapidly leaving behind the early sub-stage of the strategic defensive of our people’s war and surging forward towards the advanced sub-stage.”48 In the period ahead, the party foresaw the need to remedy “in a step-by-step but rapid manner, the condition where a single Party organization takes care of both the local work and the army work.” The development of local party organizations would then allow the gradual release of full-time guerrillas to b e gradually released for solely military work. Within the guerrilla fronts, the call was to “persist in popularizing and strengthening mass campaigns, especially the anti-feudal and anti-fascist campaigns. We should not be content with secret forms of mass mobilization.* As soon as possible, we should accelerate open mass actions of different types.”50 By the end of 1980, the CPP was boasting that “from the stage where our main task was to spread guerrilla warfare throughout the land, we are entering the stage where our main task is to intensify it.” In 1982, Ang Bayan found it necessary to reissue the call for the intensification of guerrilla warfare, “carrying out sustained, more frequent, increasingly bigger and coordinated tactical offensives in the various guerrilla fronts. Aside from these, small units will step up military operations outside the limits of guerrilla fronts, even up to the town centers and cities.”51 Despite the call issued in 1980 for the party organizations to take over political work within the guerrilla fronts, “armed propaganda units (APUs) continue to be maintained even while GUs are being formed. The

No explanation is offered of this rather curious concept. Lagman was scornful of the very notion: “In 1974, when I assumed leadership of the Metro Manila Committee, I abolished all these underground mass organizations. It was reviewed in 1977 because Joma and Dante insisted."'”

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APUs’ main task is to conduct propaganda work among the masses and build revolutionary mass organizations. Military work is a secondary task. At present, APUs are still needed to do expansion work and to recover areas that had been temporarily abandoned.” Over a year later, the situation appeared to have improved little. In the districts where the territorial Party organization has not yet been fully established, many Red fighters continued to be tied up in mass work. As soon as possible, the work of supervising mass organizations should be taken over by the territorial Party organization, from the district committees to the section committees and down to the branch committees. In many cases, however, Red fighters continue to assume the task of building and supervising mass organizations.52 In October 1982, Ang Bayan reported that in the previous two years the AFP had intensified its own campaigns against the NPA, launching battalion-sized operations where formerly “these enemy drives were carried out by platoons and companies.” In response, the NPA had established “full-fledged guerrilla units” which “are the main combat formations of the people’s army in the advanced substage of the strategic defensive. They are the precursors of the regular mobile forces that will emerge in time.” “Front guerrilla units (FGUs),” this article continued, “and district guerrilla units (DGUs) are coordinated and combined to launch mediumscale operations, or to carry out a series of operations against definite targets within a definite time. Throughout the guerrilla fronts, mediumscale offensives can now be carried out in combination with many small ones.” A study of the operations in the first half of the 1980s shows, in fact, that such “medium-scale operations” were few and far between. It is clear, then, that the organization and development of the NPA had not proceeded as far as the leadership would have liked by the early 1980s. Nevertheless, the CPP maintained that the struggle had reached the “advanced substage of the strategic defensive,” pointing out that tactical offensives were being launched at the rate of one a week in Mindanao and two a week in North-Western and Southern Luzon. From May 1979 to May 1980, forty tactical offensives were launched in Samar.53 In the very same

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issue that lamented the fact that “many Red fighters continue to be tied up in mass work,” Ang Bayan stressed the geographical sweep of the NPA’s presence. The NPA’s guerrilla fronts and guerrilla zones cover almost all provinces and major islands in the country. The people’s army is now in all provinces of Northern Luzon except Batanes; in all provinces and major islands of Southern Luzon; in all major islands of the Visayas; and in 15 out of 18 provinces in the mainland of Mindanao . . . Our bigger and more advanced fronts are the size of a province and the NPA’s operational areas now extend to cities which adjoin or are within our guerrilla fronts.54 By late 1984, the NPA was claiming fifty-nine guerrilla fronts in as many provinces. Within these fronts, a third of the basic mass organizations had reached the level of organizing committees, whereas in areas of the interior “full-fledged mass organizations are already prevalent.”55 It is possible that the CPP was exaggerating the size and influence of the NPA at this stage. Such exaggeration may have been aimed at increasing the political influence of the CPP in the period following the assassination o f Benigno Aquino Jr., when mass political opposition to Marcos increased dramatically. If the days of Marcos were numbered, the CPP would have wanted to create the impression that its military arm was nearing the stage o f “strategic stalemate” with the AFP, and that in the countryside it was creating the conditions for the development of alternative centers of power. During this very same period, however, NPA leaders in Mindanao were considering alternatives to the scenario prescribed in the 1968 program.

N o tes 1.

2. 3.

“Statement of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee on the Twelfth Anniversary of the Re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines,” Ang Bayan, December 26,1980. “Statement on the Eleventh Anniversary of the New People’s Army,” Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980. Ang Bayan, January 1985.

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The Basic Rules o f The New People's Army (this appears as an appendix to Eduardo Lachica, H uk Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt [Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1971], 317-25), adopted upon the formation of the NPA on March 29, 1969, provided for four forms of fighting unit: a. Regular mobile forces consisting of: i. the squad—five to ten troops ii. the platoon—two to three squads iii. the company—two to three platoons iv. the battalion—two to three companies v. the regiment—two to three battalions vi. the division—two to three regiments vii. the corps—two to three divisions viii. the army—two to three corps. b. Guerrilla units of between five and fifteen troops. c. Militia and self-defense corps consisting of those “who continue with their daily productive life. They shall play a mainly defensive role but they shall serve as the vast reserve and support for the regular mobile forces and the guerrilla units.” d.

Armed city partisans, each unit consisting of at least three combat members to participate in “city operations, in disrupting the enemy rule, in raising the fighting morale of workers and the urban petty bourgeoisie and in preparing in a long-term way for a general city uprising upon the instructions of the Military Commission.” 5. Ang Bayan, January 1985. 6. Gerard A. Finin, “‘Igorotism,’ Rebellion, and Regional Autonomy in the Cordillera,” in Brokering a Revolution: Cadres in a Philippine Insurgency, ed. Rosanne Rutten (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), 93. 7. Ibid, 94. 8. Ibid, 95. 9. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 6. 10. Ibid., 54. 11. Ibid., 55. 12. Ibid., 56. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Ibid, 57. Finin, “‘Igorotism,’ Rebellion," 99. Ibid., 117. Jones, Red Revolution, 89. Ibid, 92.

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18. Benjamin Pimentel Jr., Edjop: The Unusual Journey o f Edgar Jopson (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1989), 247. 19. Jones, Red Revolution, 100. 20. Ang Bayan, December 10, 1972. 21. Justus van der Kroef, “Philippine Communist Party Theory and Strategy: A New Departure?" Pacific Affairs, date uncertain, probably 1975, 184. 22. See Lachica, Huk, Annex B, 297. 23. Benjamin Pimentel Jr., Edjop, 184, 251. 24. Van der Kroef, “Philippine Communist Theory and Strategy,” 184. 25. Jones, Red Revolution, 73. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid, 78-79. Ibid. Ang Bayan, December 26, 1980. “Amado Guerrero," “Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War,” in Philippine Society and Revolution (n.p.: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1979), 183-84. Ibid., 186-87. Quoted in William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army and Its Strugglefo r Power (New York: Norton, 1987), 130. Two former CPP cadres in discussion withthe author, September 2009. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), Chapter X, “The Rate of Surplus-Value.” Central Committee, CPP, Our Urgent Tasks, 1976. This and other CPP documents are available on www.philippinerevolution.net. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 89. “Some Random Reflections on Marxism and Maoism in thePhilippines,” in Marxism in the Philippines (Quezon City:Third World Studies Center, University of the Philippines, 1984), 79. Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980. Ang Bayan, April 30, 1980. Jones, Red Revolution, 101. Ang Bayan, August 1984. Ang Bayan, March 31,1982. Jones, Red Revolution, 131. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 144. Jose Maria Sison, Philippine Crisis and Revolution (Quezon City: Lagda Publications, 1986), 36 Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980.

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46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. “Statement of the Executive Committee,” Ang Bayan, December 26, 1980. 49. Filemon Lagman, interview by the author, January 1996. 50. Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Ang Bayan, March 31, 1982. Ang Bayan, October 1983Ang Bayan, October 1982. Ang Bayan, October 1983. Ang Bayan, November 1984.

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i One of the NPA’s greatest success stories (until it turned poisonous) was represented by its growth in Mindanao. By 1984, according to Jones, the NPA had platoon-sized units in sixteen provinces on the island. The work of “sparrow units”— used to conduct individual assassinations in urban areas, later to form a prominent part of the NPA’s activity in Metro Manila— began as early as 1977 in Davao.1 By 1983, this activity had expanded to warfare by “armed city partisans” (ACPs). Chapman says that the first ACP unit was established in Davao in 1982, describing it as “a secretive clan whose members both liquidated chosen enemies and set to work organizing cells of supporters in the poorest communities.”2 One fairly predictable result of such activity was, as Jones points out, that the military response tended to focus on the legal fronts, as by definition the sparrow units and the ACPs were so elusive, and often legal activists w ho may or may not have been CPP members were summarily executed by the military.5 Chapman quotes a Davao CPP member as saying that most of the “sparrow killings are by young boys who have had no training . . . It’s sort of an ‘on the job training.’ We select unknowns for sparrow duty because they can move about easily without being noticed. Some of the people they kill are guilty of committing crimes against the people, but

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they also kill just to get guns.” Some sparrows in Negros, Chapman was told, were not even NPA members as such, but “mere free-lancers eager to help.”4 Of the sparrow killings in Davao, Chapman says that the early arms-gathering or revenge missions had in the course of time evolved into “rational, even productive” tactics of violence. “Selective killings triggered elephantine responses from the government and brought more and more sympathizers to the rebel side. There was a kind of flowering amid the gore. Political mobilization in the squatter communities progressed more swiftly in Davao than anywhere else.”5 There were early signs that the situation would spiral out of control, particularly when one considers that, as Chapman points out, many policemen “were killed on the streets by sparrow units coveting their service revolvers. It was difficult to square the supposed policy of painstaking discrimination with what happened in Davao in the early 1980s when dozens of policemen, including traffic cops, were slain for their guns.”6 More and more, the CPP-NPA in Mindanao began to concentrate on activity— both legal and illegal— in the urban areas. In December 1983, the members of the Mindanao Commission of the party— Benjamin de Vera, the political chief, Romulo Kintanar, the military commander, and Lucas Fernandez, the urban strategist— met in Agusan del Norte and decided to focus on urban insurrection, looking to cut years off the revolutionary process. It might be argued that this had been sanctioned by the central leadership of the party, as Our Urgent Tasks had predicted: “In the future, popular uprisings or insurrections will arise over extensive areas.” Then again, in 1980 the eighth plenum of the central committee had discussed the proposal of Edgar Jopson concerning “three strategic combinations” (the military and political struggles; urban and rural struggles; national and international struggles), and although there is disagreement regarding what degree of agreement this attracted, it did, says Weekley, “form at least part of the basis for a new emphasis on urban struggles, including ‘people’s strikes’ and urban guerrilla warfare." (The same plenum, while confirming its view that the revolution was about to enter the “advanced substage of the strategic defensive,” then lowered expectations by indicating that this would

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be followed by the “strategic counteroffensive” before the stage of “strategic stalemate” was reached.)7 In 1984, the Mindanao leadership adopted a “polmil” strategy that, influenced by the revolutions in Vietnam and Nicaragua, stressed the building of the mass movement in the urban areas, and the use of insurrectionary violence in both the cities and the countryside. Thus, in August 1984 Davao experienced its first welgang bayan (people’s strike). The approach adopted in the mid-1970s of “centralized leadership and decentralized operations” was now giving rise to differences in strategy; and in due course this also occurred in Metro Manila. Much later, Sison would condemn the “insurrectionist school” as an aberration, but there are indications that the model was widely supported within the CPP-NPA. According to Chapman’s interviews with leaders of the National Democratic Front in Mindanao and the Visayas, this would take the form of simultaneous strikes in major cities, the severing of power cables, mass demonstrations choking the streets to block the advance of government troops, seizure of media outlets, and the announcement that a provisional revolutionary government had been formed. Chapman reports that the welgang bayan was, rather than a straightforward labor tactic employed by the CPP-influenced trade unions, in fact developed by the NDF as “a model to be used in urban insurrection,”8 and as “the tactic preparing people for insurrection.”9 A Visayan NDF leader told Chapman: Our initial discussion calls not for destroying the symbols of government but simply forcing the government to stop functioning. We would force government officials just to resign and go away. It would be like what happened in Nicaragua. There would be barricades and attacks by the people using stones, bolos, slingshots and homemade bombs. The people would run into the streets when they heard of the confrontations on the radio. Our NPA would deal with the military. In many cities we are close to this stage of mass uprisings already [in late 19851; 1986 and 1987 are the years to watch.10 This quote lays bare the hopelessly romantic and optimistic nature of the whole scenario, which, of course, relied on yet another “model” rather than a thoroughgoing analysis of Philippine conditions.

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In the meantime, the sparrows and ACPs were taking their toll. In 1984 alone, there were 854 murders in Davao.11 In the following year, writes Jones: The atmosphere in Davao . . . was so politically charged that Mindanao’s CPP leaders had begun to worry that the movement’s supporters would rise up in a spontaneous insurrection and attempt to overthrow the local government. Party leaders were exuberant that the insurrection strategy appeared to be succeeding beyond their most ambitious calculations, but their sense of triumph was tempered by fears that they might not be able to control the rebellion.12 As we will see in due course, however, Mindanao was all too soon to witness not a CPP-led— or even spontaneous— insurrection, but a ruthless and lethally effective counteroffensive; and in this the greatest ally of the AFP would be the NPA itself. Meanwhile, the CPP at national level was placing increasing emphasis on urban activity. By March 1985, Ang Bayan was announcing that the progress of the armed struggle was “now geared towards the possibility of attaining decisive victory earlier than had been previously believed.” This should be interpreted carefully, for there would certainly appear to be cause for believing that the CPP was by this time struggling to keep pace with the mass movement which had developed at an accelerated pace since the Aquino assassination in August 1983. Somewhat optimistically, Ang Bayan stated: Today we are assiduously studying the transitional developments of our guerrilla warfare towards regular mobile warfare, of our guerrilla fronts towards guerrilla bases, of the advanced substage towards the next higher substage, thence the strategic stalemate. At the same time, we are striving to develop concepts for advancing the revolutionary mass movement towards its intensification and the launching of armed uprisings and insurrections with the intensification of the armed struggle in the countrysides.

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There was clearly a debate in the ranks of the CPP-NPA concerning the direction of the armed struggle at this stage, for the same issue of Ang

Bayan also carried an article entitled “Urban Areas Have Important Role to Play in Armed Struggle” in which work in these areas was stressed as never before. The article argued that the line of “encircling the cities from the countryside does not assign to urban areas a passive role . . .” and that “we are presently honing our theory and practice with regard to its strategic role in advancing people’s war and in winning decisive victory.” The article continued, however, by talking in terms of a coordinated and complementary advance in two battlefronts— the cities and the countryside— which “involved the excellent combination, coordination and complementation of armed and unarmed forms of struggle, with the former as the main form and the latter supplementing it.” The “thrust” of the armed struggle was described as being “towards besieging the cities from the countrysides,” while “we pound the urban areas from within mainly with open political struggles culminating in armed uprisings and insurrections in conjunction with the overall development of the armed struggle in the countrysides.” Here was evidence that the “pol-mil” model adopted in Mindanao was putting down roots in the wider party. The article proceeded somewhat opportunistically to the conclusion that a “strong urban revolutionary movement has the capacity of dispersing the concentration of the enemy’s attacks and defenses against the armed struggle in the countrysides.” The urban revolutionary movement was therefore viewed merely as “a basis for systematic, sustained and solid direct support for armed struggle in the countrysides.” Developing this argument, the article pointed out that the importance of the urban areas lay in their capacity to provide widespread propaganda for the armed struggle, to conduct “political struggle supportive of the countryside” (for example against military atrocities and forced evacuations), to act as transportation and communications centers, to provide “cadre and material support” in fields such as medicine and military research, to pin down enemy troops needed to “contain and suppress the urban revolutionary forces” and, finally, for the conduct of “partisan warfare” in the cities geared to

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“sharpening the mass movement and supporting the armed struggle in the countrysides.” The article concluded by reiterating Maoist dogma. At all times, the revolutionary struggle in the cities and countrysides should be well-coordinated and must complement each other. But we should firmly grasp the central fact that in accomplishing the central task of the people’s democratic revolution, what is principal and decisive is the armed struggle in the countrysides. It is the central point in the relationship between these two battlefronts. We should, therefore, develop an urban revolutionary movement that is consciously linked to, directly supportive and fully in the service of, the armed struggle in the countrysides. In September the same year, Ang Bayan reported NPA activity in Cebu City, where partisan units launched fourteen operations, resulting in ten confiscated firearms and nineteen “enemies of the people” being “punished,” a sign that the line regarding military work in the urban areas was being implemented.

2 A number of writers have questioned the extent to which members of the NPA in these years were really committed to thoroughgoing social change. Rosanne Rutten has, for example, recorded that NPA organizers in Negros were silent on its connection to the CPP because “the masses are against communism.”13 Lachica views the early NPA as “the Pampango version of a continuing agrarian demonstration in various parts of the Philippines. History has brought out other agrarian movements differing from the Huks [Lachica uses this word in its generic sense, referring not merely to remnants of the HMB but to the NPA as well] only in locality, degree of political sophistication, and longevity.”14 He goes on to predict that the NPA would be confined to the Pampango-speaking areas because other groups “can only superficially identify with its objectives.”15 The succeeding decades have proven Lachica wrong, although he might appear to be on firmer ground when he argues that the “major

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weakness of the CPP-NPA gospel is that it is beyond a simple peasant’s comprehension. The average farmer doesn’t care about the Maoist ‘world view’; neither can he be stirred up against ‘US imperialism.’ What moves him are things directly affecting his own welfare and that of his family and neighbors.”16 Such an approach is, however, essentially shallow. Although Vietnamese peasants were stirred up against US imperialism, we must assume that Lachica would not argue that all members of the Vietcong were intellectuals. Moreover, as we have seen, it was precisely those things “affecting his own welfare” to which the NPA addressed itself from the mid1970s onward, increasing its support as a result. In order to consolidate its own membership and mass base, however, a Marxist party usually uses these parochial concerns ( “the particular”) as a starting point and, by linking them to the larger economic and political questions within its own society and internationally ( “the general”), introduces its “world view” to its members and supporters. Ang Bayan quoted an NPA instructor as saying “We will hardly make progress in the revolutionary movement if all we do is fight, without organizing the masses. And vice versa.” The journal reported that this instructor “criticized the idea that the masses can learn about revolution by waging armed struggle alone, without giving them any political education.”17 The fact that it was necessary to state this, however, indicates the presence of a problem. Filemon “Popoy” Lagman, who would lead the Manila-Rizal breakaway in the early 1990s, was certainly critical of the lack of political education, remarking that “you don’t need it if all you’re doing is ambushing the enemy.”18 The level of commitment and understanding of some of those who joined the NPA is open to question. One member told Jones: “I didn’t know what the underground movement was when martial law was declared. My going into the movement was totally because of martial law. It wasn’t anything ideological. It was out of protest.”19 Chapman also gives several examples of people who joined the armed movement for distinctly nonideological motives. One young man came from a family which “fell from the national bourgeoisie to the petty bourgeoisie”; as a student, he joined

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Marxist discussion groups but only joined the SDK, and later the CPP, after being beaten up by police during the First Quarter Storm. “I was so infuriated, all I could think of was getting back at the police. It was then that I perceived the importance of organizations. I joined the SDK . . .”20 Chapman quotes a leading party member in the Visayas as saying, “We have had trouble before with people who just want to avenge a death in the family. We tell them they need training to understand why it was their brothers were killed.”21 Such people are usually referred to as “grievance guerrillas.” But people become communists and socialists from a host of starting points. If intellectual conviction were to be the only basis of acceptance into a Marxist party, such parties would be deprived of many of their working-class and peasant members. Having said that, it was to become painfully clear after the fall of Marcos that not all CPP-NPA members had absorbed the political education they had received, for a considerable number of surrenderees actually transformed themselves (or allowed themselves to be transformed) into anticommunist vigilantes— and in some cases into leaders of such groups. This is probably accounted for by a number of factors. Some may have been intelligence plants, but the NPA bore the birthmarks of the society from which it sprang, possibly containing its fair share of people who would otherwise have been bandits or other kinds of desperado, possibly of a religious bent; it was Lagman’s view, however, that the phenomenon of the guerrilla-turned-vigilante was largely a result of the CPP’s campaign against supposed “deep penetration agents.”22 (See later in this chapter.) Chapman cites a number of examples to indicate that Marxism was the last thing on NPA members’ minds even after they joined the organization (although it is granted that the NPA does not claim to be comprised solely of CPP members, merely to be CPP-led). He talks, for example, of the president of a local parent-teachers’ association in Panay whose village was cleansed of carabao thieves. Impressed, the man joined the movement and rose to local party office. Even so, says Chapman, he “cared little for the NPA’s lectures; he was not even sure that they were communists.”23 On the same island, a woman whose husband was salvaged by the Philippine

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Constabulary decided on the spot to “send her son far away for safety and to devote the rest of her life to revenge through the NPA.”24 Chapman quotes Bishop Antonio Fortich of Negros as saying: A farmer is taken away and never seen again and what happens? The next day his son is up in the hills with the NPA. What would you expectf But it is not always like that. In this province [Negros Occidental], you have more than 200,000 in their mass base and it is through their gifts that the guerrillas survive. But not all of them are hardcore Marxists, of course. Many are in the mass base because they are afraid. If you do not give, you become a marked man. The NPA marks them as ‘anti’ and sometimes they just disappear.25 The phenomenon we have been discussing— members who, having joined an armed group for a variety of reasons, do not share the ideology of that group’s leaders— was not confined to the NPA, even in the Philippines during this period. In his study of the Moro National Liberation Front in Cotabato City, McKenna found it “striking to note how rarely any of the insurgents, in expressing their motivations for taking up arms or fighting on against great odds, made spontaneous mention of either the Moro nation (Bangsamoro) or Islamic renewal, the two central components of Muslim nationalist ideology.”26 McKenna quotes Sluka, to whom the major reason given by rank-and-file members of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland for joining the armed struggle was “that repression and state terror drove them to it. That is, when asked how they came to join the IRA, they do not usually refer to Republican ideology and goals, but rather they tell personal histories of their experience with repression and state terror.”27

3 Throughout the life of the New People’s Army (NPA), there have been various estimates, often inflated, of its numerical strength. In the final stages o f the Marcos regime, for example, such estimates, which appeared in both the Philippine and Western media, gauged the numerical strength of the

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guerrillas at between 20,000 and 30,000. Often, these media assessments appear to have been based on public estimates by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the interests of which were served by inflating the figures. In the 1980s, US emissaries would regularly report back to Washington with an inflated estimate of NPA strength, the aim being to convey the impression that a “communist" takeover was a likely outcome of Ferdinand Marcos’s prolonged stay in office. There were indications in the first half of the 1980s that the CPP was concerned about the slower-than-expected growth of its army. In its issue of March 31, 1982, Ang Bayan complained: The people’s army must gain strength more quickly. The revolutionary movement is now in a position to pay close attention to this. The truth is that the NPA has not been growing as quickly as the movement’s other components which have been advancing vigorously. The rapid growth of the people’s army will be decisive in taking full advantage of the great opportunities for promoting the revolution that are present in the current situation. Three years later the arms harvest reported by Ang Bayan for 1984 totalled 786, and only 234 of this total were M16S.28 Furthermore, the previous month’s issue had reported that NPA operations in Mindanao in the months of October and November alone had accounted for 184 arms, i.e., almost a quarter of the national total for the whole year. Significantly, of the nine examples of “major tactical offensives” in 1984 reported in the March 1985 issue of the journal, four took place in Mindanao— and none of these were in October or November. The inescapable conclusion is that a hugely disproportionate number of tactical offensives were taking place in Mindanao; the full significance of this will become apparent in due course. The same report states that in 1984, 521 “of the enemy’s military and paramilitary men” were killed in “more than 218 tactical offensives in 35 provinces.” By this stage, however, the NPA was claiming to have guerrilla fronts in sixty-odd provinces.29 So what was the true size of the NPA in the years before the fall of Marcos?

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Writing in 1983, Nemenzo claimed that the NPA had “at least 12,000 full-time guerrillas and 35,000 part-time guerrillas. It is operating in 56 out o f 72 provinces, and in 400 out of 1,500 municipalities.”50 Four years later, Chapman reported that by the 1980s “the NPA had grown to about 20,000 full-time and part-time guerrillas sharing about 12,000 modem weapons, the party said."31 This would equate to Nemenzo’s estimate with regard to full­ time guerrillas, as the NPA’s usual formula equated one full-time guerrilla to one high-powered rifle. These figures would appear to be overestimates, however. Sison admits that full-time and part-time guerrillas totaled 25,000, arms of all kinds numbered 14,000 and that automatic rifles accounted for precisely half of these.32 Thus, using the aforementioned formula, there should have been 7,000 full-time guerrillas. This is exactly the number given by “Servando Labrador,” an NPA leader, in an Ang Bayan interview in 1987.33 It is true, of course, that there was a decline in the number of full-time guerrillas after Marcos was toppled in 1986, but even this figure o f 7,000 should be treated with a degree of caution as an estimate for pre1986 years. A study of NPA operations reported in Ang Bayan, starting with the issue of May 31, 1981, and ending with that of August 1985, reveals that in this whole period a total of around 3,000 weapons were captured from the AFP. Of these, only 1,673 are specified as Ml6s or described as “highpowered rifles.” In view of the fact that Ang Bayan was in this period dutifully reporting even the most minor NPA action, we can assume that this figure is substantially correct. (It would therefore appear that the claim which appeared in the CPP’s “Urgent Message to the Filipino People” in October 1983— that a total of 3,000 high-powered rifles had been seized in the previous thirty months— was false.) To our total, we must add those acquired before 1981. Precise figures are not available, but Sison tells us that by 1970 there were only 200 automatic rifles.34 We have seen that the total number of arms rose only slowly during 1973 to 1976 due to a number of military reverses and arms losses. From 1976 to 1980, the number of highpowered rifles was claimed to have increased, as we saw earlier, by 200 percent. But it would appear that there were, in fact, no large arms harvests

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in the four years prior to 1981, as the issue of Ang Bayan for September of that year tells us that the August raids in Nueva Ecija which netted 30 firearms “was the biggest arms confiscation conducted by the New People’s Army anywhere in the country since 1976 . . Thus, even the total o f 7,000 high-powered rifles claimed by Sison and “Labrador” could only have been achieved if the arms were coming from alternative sources. Chapman speaks of a “shipment” purchased from the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1981.35 And, again, some were actually bought from members of the AFP, a practice also followed by the HMB in earlier decades. In fact, Chapman claims that black-market deals “were the second largest source of military hardware for the guerrillas (the first being weapons captured in battle).” He continues: These were not isolated deals consummated by a few corrupt soldiers. In several provinces, they were well-organized operations involving entire units which provided a permanent undercover market. In Panay, party officers told me that the NPA could purchase almost any type of AFP armaments if it could raise the money and that Armalite rifles were in steady supply, the cost of each being 18,000 pesos (about $1,000). One party member expressed irritation that recendy this price had been raised from 15,000 pesos. The reason, it seemed, was that AFP black-marketeers had discovered other clandestine customers in the ranks of rich landlords who began forming private armies when the Marcos regime was displaced in Manila.36 Given such prices, it is unlikely that many high-powered rifles would have been acquired in this way; and if this was the “second largest source of military hardware,” even less would have come from overseas. All of these factors make it difficult to justify the figure of 7,000 highpowered rifles (and, thus, 7,000 full-time guerrillas). Perhaps a more realistic assessment is that given in 1982 by the Makati Business Club, which estimated the number o f armed guerrillas at between 3,000 and 5,000.37 More recently, the CPP itself has provided a far more realistic figure, stating in its 40th anniversary statement that the NPA’s “peak strength” in the 1980s “was only 6,100 [riflemen], without any clear accounting of firearms lost in

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Mindanao”38 as a result of the large-scale purge conducted in that decade (see section 4 below).*

4 The “protracted people’s war” of the CPP-NPA had a number of undesirable results. Not least of these were its effects on the people of the Philippines. Even Sison, when talking of the casualties of the martial law period, admits that six million people were displaced, around 150,000 were killed, and another 100,000 injured and 70,000 detained for at least a month.39 The armed struggle of the NPA was counterproductive in the further sense that it often triggered counterattacks from the security forces which rarely paused to distinguish whether their victims were actually members of the CPP or NPA— a phenomenon made almost inevitable by the CPP’s claim that legal forms of mass action were often inspired by, and objectively in support of, the armed struggle. This is borne out by Chapman who, speaking of the rise of vigilante groups in Davao City, points out that the “victims were usually not NPA members at all but local activists who had achieved prominence in community campaigns.”40 And while so many people in the guerrilla zones were said to support the NPA because of the simple fact that it was able to provide the only form of law, order, and justice that many localities had ever known, Bishop Francisco Claver pointed to the long-term flaw in such reasoning: The chain of events is most predictable: Since the military are everywhere, their abuses are everywhere too—there is a direct ratio between the size of military groups in any given area and the number of crimes committed. These abuses help to make the NPA option all the more attractive to the people . . . So the NPA make capital of them. But where the NPA are in

It may well be that there is a motive behind this remarkable candor, for if full-time guerrillas numbered only 6,100 at the high point of the 1980s, the decline to the present 5,000-odd (the military estimate) does not appear quite so precipitate.

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strength, there the military presence increases and their abuses proliferate even more. In all this, it is the people who bear the brunt of the conflict.41 This leads us onto yet another undesirable result of “protracted people’s war"— the militarization of Philippine society. While one of the arguments contained in Sison’s Specific Characteristics was that guerrilla operations throughout the archipelago would force the regime to either spread its military resources thinly or to concentrate them in a few provinces, thereby freeing the NPA to operate relatively freely in others, in reality the spread of the war merely led to the growth of the AFP. Between 1971 and 1980, the defense budget of the Philippines increased by 279 percent in real terms; over the same period, gross national product increased by only 75 percent.42 Needless to say, social spending suffered. In 1971, the AFP consisted of around 58,000 men; by 1982, this number had mushroomed to 113,000 (although this growth was, of course, partly explained by the operations against the Moro National Liberation Front in the 1970s), with the Philippine Constabulary and the paramilitary Civilian Home Defense Force accounting for a further 108,500. And then there was the self-inflicted disaster of the campaigns against suspected deep penetration agents (DPAs) that would leave hundreds dead and drive thousands more from the movement. The first of the anti-DPA purges took place in the early 1980s in Bicol. In 1983, the NPA’s Melito Glor Command released a document entided “Mga Aral Mula sa Naganap na Impiltrasyon sa Hangganang Quezon-Bicol" ( “Lessons from the Infiltration Incident in the Quezon-Bicol Zone”) that stated in part: The Quezon-Bicol zone has become a target for a broad and abundant infiltration from the last quarter of 1979 to the first quarter of 1982. In the history of the region’s revolutionary movement, this has been the broadest, deepest, and most systematic ploy of the enemy to infiltrate and destroy the Party, the army, and the revolutionary mass organizations.43 A campaign was conducted against the suspected DPAs which, says Garcia,44 was celebrated as a success. Far worse was to com e in 1985. While

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members of the party’s Mindanao Commission were attending a plenum of the central committee in the capital, a three-person caretaker committee w as left in charge of Mindanao affairs. Following the apprehension of suspected DPAs in North Central Mindanao, this committee declared a “state o f emergency” covering the whole island. After the Mindanao Commission had had the opportunity to assess the situation, it launched Kampanyang

Abos (abas is garlic, used to deter demonyos, demons) which lasted until early 1986 and, says Garcia, “left an estimated 600 to 900 persons dead.”45 Weekley also puts the death toll at “up to 900,w46 and Sison would later write that “close to a thousand people (including cadres and mass activists) becam e victims of civil rights violations and severe punishment.”47 Weekley follows Sison in saying that party membership in Mindanao was reduced from 9,000 to d.OOO.48* At the completion of the campaign, the Mindanao Commission judged it to have been a success, despite some excesses. Garcia is of the view that this made it inevitable that the mistake would be repeated, and it was (although these events lie outside of the time frame o f this work)— in Cagayan, Southern Tagalog (for the second time, when Garcia was himself a victim), Central Luzon, the Cordillera region, Leyte, Cebu, and the National Capital Region.49 How did the CPP itself evaluate or characterize this ghasdy development? With regard to the events in Mindanao, in December 1991 Sison, in the document which was to lead to formal splits within the CPP, referred to the AFP attacks on the movement, saying that in “conditions of setbacks and extreme difficulties due to effective enemy operations in the cities and the countryside, those members of the Mindanao Commission who were left behind were prone to oversuspiciousness and panic” regarding the possibility of infiltration by DPAs. He stated that reports regarding the presence of “large numbers of enemy DPAs in the Party, the people’s army, and the mass organizations and institutions” were received from

Given the fact that, as we have seen, Mindanao had made a disproportionately large contribution to NPA military activity and arms harvests, the negative effects of the antiDPA purge would obviously have an equally disproportionate impact on the whole organization, added to which would be the consequences of the bad publicity.

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“certain political detainees in early 1985 ” Sison, however, laid the blame at the door of the strategy developed by the local CPP-NPA leaders, which concentrated on urban mass work with an insurrectionary perspective, and the deterioration of mass work in the countryside as a result of the formation of larger military formations. These latter were “forced into a purely military situation” as the enemy forces built up, whereupon the AFP “could use to their advantage their military superior forces.” In the cities of Mindanao, meanwhile, cadres found themselves pursued in a manhunt as a result of them “displaying themselves in mass actions rather than effecting and guiding solid oiganizational work.” Believing in the correctness of the “insurrectionary” and “quick military victory line” which they had developed, the Mindanao leadership, said Sison, was convinced that this could “be fouled up only by the enemy agents within the Party and the m ovem ent. . -”50 Thus, Sison used the Mindanao purge as an opportunity to attack the “deviations” from the line of “protracted people’s war.” Perhaps significantly, Sison complained that those responsible for the Mindanao purges had, instead of being called to account, “been promoted to national positions in the Party and allowed to spread their wrong line at the further and bigger expense of the Party and the revolutionary movement.”51 Joel Rocamora, who became a leading member in the “third group,” or “Democratic bloc” after the splits within the CPP in the early 1990s, points out that, despite the use of these arguments by Sison after the event, it is a fact that “successive meetings of the Politburo disregarded the problem or, as in 1988, considered the anti-DPA campaign ‘essentially correct’ albeit with ‘excesses.’” Moreover, “the Party center never acknowledged its own responsibility in calling for mass campaigns instead of conducting careful, controlled investigations.”52 Thus, the problem was allowed to reappear in 1988, and Rocamora mentions anti-DPA “mass campaigns” launched in a number of areas as a result of a memo issued by the executive committee of the central committee. In Leyte and the Cagayan Valley, says Rocamora, these campaigns “resulted in mass hysteria with many cadres tortured and killed.”53 Filemon “Popoy” Lagman, who would head the “second group”

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after the CPP split, verifies Rocamora’s views but also points to Sison’s complicity. The Central Committee assessment by [Benito] Tiamzon in 1986 was that the Mindanao campaign was a success, although there were many excesses. On the basis of these two campaigns [Mindanao and the'earlier, less bloody campaign in Bicol in the early 1980s], the southern Tagalog and the Metro Manila anti-infiltration campaigns were announced—also headed by Tiamzon. All throughout this period, Joma Sison agreed with all these anti-infiltration campaigns. In fact, he ordered the surveillance of three Central Committee members. So Joma Sison was part of all these campaigns, even when he was in prison. [The Mindanao campaign began in 1985, while Sison was not released from prison until the following year.] Tiamzon headed the review committee regarding Mindanao and the anti­ infiltration campaigns in southern Tagalog and Metro Manila were led by Tiamzon. Now they’re trying to put all the blame on the Mindanao leaders. Definitely they were responsible, hut not [Romulo] Kintanar because he was head of the General Command.54 Sison made no mention of an EC memo regarding the 1988 hysteria, merely saying that “anti-informer hysteria emerged” in several regions and that this “threatened the very life of the Party until the central leadership of the Party took firm steps to check and rectify the madness with clear guidelines on correct principles and methods of investigation, trial and evaluation of evidence.”55 In fact, in 1989 a meeting of the politburo reviewed the 1985-86 and 1988 anti-infiltration campaigns, pointing out that there was a need to review the overall conduct of investigation, prosecution and punishment of informers and criminals and continued refinement of the guidelines and rules governing the revolutionary system of justice. The importance of widescale education among the cadres and members on the principles of humane treatment of captives, respect for individual rights and continued refinement of the guidelines and rules governing the revolutionary system of justice was stressed.56 What was obviously not open to discussion was the basic strategy of the CPP-NPA-NDF, which continued to view armed struggle as the main

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form of activity, regardless of the various permutations within this. Such a movement is, says Garcia, “clandestine, illegal, a prime target of the state. Such intrinsic vulnerability makes paranoia a lingering state of mind inside the organization, a veritable given. The one crucial thing going for it is the fabric of trust that glues everyone to a common cause. When this delicate fabric is tom, vulnerability increases and paranoia wreaks havoc.”57

N o tes 1.

34.

Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 133William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People's Army and Its Strugglefo r Power (New York: Norton, 1987), 167-68. Jones, Red Revolution, 135. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 117.

5. 6.

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 186.

2.

7.

Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 93-95. 8. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 230. 9. Ibid., 232. 10. Ibid., 231-32. 11. Jones, Red Revolution, 139. 12. Ibid, 141-42. 13. In Patricio Abinales, ed., The Revolution Falters: The Left in Philippine Politics After 1986 (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1996), 125. 14. Eduardo Lachica, Huk- Philippine Agrarian Society in Remit (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1971), 201. 15. Ibid., 202. 16. Ibid., 199. 17. Ang Bayan, January 1983. 18. Filemon Lagman, interview by the author, January 1996. 19. Jones, Red Revolution, 108. 20. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 97-98. 21. Ibid., 113. 22. legman interview. Abinales identifies another factor, describing the Mindanao

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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of the 1980s as an unstable frontier, host to a variety of armed groups, where violence came to be viewed by many as a “normal way of life." In this situation, while the CPP was able to recruit with relative ease, the loyalty the party “hoped to cultivate in its mass base would ultimately be as fragile as the other social ties and identifications found in unstable frontiers.” Given the “constant state of war, accompanied by the widespread availability of coercive resources, and the shifting population,” the party was unable to “consolidate and stabilize its influence” due to the high rate of turnover, thus explaining in part “why the same ‘slum’ community that was in the early 1980s the stronghold of communist urban guerrillas in Davao, became, after 1986, the stronghold of the anti-communist vigilante group, Alsa Masa (People Arise).” See Patricio N. Abinales, “When the Revolution Devours Its Children before Victory: Operasyong Kampanyang Abos and the Tragedy of Mindanao Communism,” in Fellow Traveler Essays on Filipino Communism (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press), 175. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 180. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 184. Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2002), 186. Jeffery A. Sluka, “Domination, Resistance, and Political Culture in Northern Ireland’s Catholic-Nationalist Ghettos,” Critique o f Anthropology, no. 151, 85, quoted in McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels, 355, fn 9. Ang Bayan, March 1985. Sison claims fifty-nine fronts in sixty-three provinces by March 1986. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., in The Philippines After Marcos, ed. R.J. May and Francisco Nemenzo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 57. Azama’s estimate in 1985 was that the “NPA can probably now field some 10,000 to 12,500 full­ time guerrillas, and an additional 10,000 part-time militia soldiers." However he also cites Marcos’s estimate of May 1984 of “at least 6,800 armed guerrillas," and this, we will see, was far more accurate. See Major Rodney S. Azama, The Huks and the New People's Army: Comparing Two Postwar Filipino Insurgencies (Quantico: Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1985). This document is available on www.globalsecurity.org. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 110. Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 104. Servando Labrador, “On the Current State of the People’s Revolutionary War," in The Filipino People Will Triumph (Central Publishing House, 1988), 3- Labrador

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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is described as being a member of the Political Department of the NPA General Command. Sison, The Leader's View, 61. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 114. Ibid., 190. Quoted in Felipe B. Miranda, “The Military," in The Philippines After Marcos, 96. CPP central committee, “Strengthen the Party and Intensify People’s Struggle in Celebrating the 40th Founding Anniversary,” Ang Bayan, December 26, 2008. Jose Maria Sison, Philippine Crisis and Revolution (Quezon City: Lagda Publications, 1986), 20. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 173. Ibid., 182. Miranda in The Philippines After Marcos, 95. Quoted in Robert Francis Garcia, To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated Its Own (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2003), 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993, 102. "Armando Liwanag" (Jose Maria Sison), “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors,” Kasarinlan 8 (1): 100. Ibid.; Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 103. Garcia, To Suffer Thy Comrades, 57, 39, 41. “Liwanag,” “Reaffinn Our Basic Principles,” 99-100. Abinales cites a Mindanao cadre’s view that the party lacked a “systematic education campaign,” and the fact that cadres had “limited familiarity with Marxist tools for assessment and summing up.” He also says that the regional committee had become “increasingly alarmed” by the increasing number of recruits with a lumpen background. See “When the Revolution Devours Its Children,” in Fellow Traveler, 177. In another essay, the same author reminds us that the CPP had supported those guilty of genocide in Cambodia (then called Kampuchea) after, in Hobsbawm’s words, “good Vietnamese communists had put a stop to Pol Pot’s killing fields.” See Abinales, “Jose Maria Sison and the Philippine Revolution: A Critique of an Interface,” in Fellow Traveler, 42, and Eric Hobsbawm, in Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 259. Rather than any commitment to indiscriminate slaughter, however, this was more likely due to the irresponsible “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” approach followed by Filipino Maoists and their mentors in Beijing.

51. Ibid., 101. 52. Joel Rocamora, Breaking Through: The Struggle within the Communist Party o f

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the Philippines (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1995), 92. 53. Ibid. 54. Lagman interview. 55. “Liwanag," “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles," 115-16. 56. CPP Central Committee, “General Review of Important Events and Decisions from 1980 to 1991," Debate, date uncertain, probably 1993, 93. 57. Garcia, To Suffer Thy Comrades, 84.

C h a p t e r 1 4 : A l l ia n c e s i Although it might have appeared that the CPP’s approach to united front work received its first organizational expression in 1973 with the formation of the National Democratic Front (NDF), this was only true to a limited extent. The “Manifesto of the Preparatory Committee of the NDF” stated that a “full-blown fascist dictatorship has emerged for the first time in the Philippines upon the instigation of US imperialism.” The aim of this dictatorship was “to maintain and promote the extraordinary privileges of US imperialism and its puppets in the Philippines.” Furthermore, the “economic scheme of the US-Marcos dictatorship involves essentially the preservation of the semicolonial and semifeudal economy.” The document advanced the prescription that “only the armed revolution of the broad masses of the people can defeat and eliminate the armed counter­ revolution of the Marcos oligarchy.” Although armed struggle, based on an alliance of the workers and peasants, was seen as the main form of struggle, the manifesto called for the unity of all revolutionary, democratic, and progressive forces under “a broad united front.”1 This was essentially an updated summary of the CPP’s own program, containing just the kind of formula which had characterized the latter, and it was clear that acceptance of this would be a condition of NDF membership. The manifesto was revamped in 1977, with some of the

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jargon being toned down or even dropped. The basic analysis had not changed, however. According to the first article of the redrafted document, Upon the overthrow of the US-Marcos dictatorship, there should be a coalition government,’ a provisional revolutionary government with a united front character, to remove the anti-national and anti-democratic causes and results of the fascist dictatorship . . . . . . The coalition government should recognize all the national and democratic forces that shall have caused the downfall of the fascist dictatorship and give them ample opportunity to participate in legal and peaceful political activities. There should be no monopoly of political power by any class, party or group. The degree of participation in the government by any political force should be based on its effective role and record in the revolutionary struggle and on the people’s approbation . .. . . . A committee of civilian leaders highly respected by the people for their patriotism, civil libertarian stand and consistent opposition to fascism and puppetry should assume the reins of government. The committee should pave the way for genuinely popular, free and honest elections within a year’s time from the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship . . . 3 Before we proceed to a consideration of the CPP’s united front practice, it is necessary to question its basic analysis of the Marcos regime contained in the above. We have already seen (chapter 8) that while US imperialism might well have benefited from some of the measures (prescribed by the World Bank and the IMF) adopted by the Marcos regime, the USA did not “instigate” the declaration of martial law. Neither was the USA or the Marcos regime concerned with the “preservation of the semicolonial and semifeudal economy”— quite the reverse, in fact. But was it even true that, as claimed by the CPP-NDF, the martial law regime amounted to a “full-blown fascist dictatorship’? If it was, then it would be

Chapman points approvingly to the provision for a coalition government, citing this as “new” and likely to appeal to non-communists,2 but such a prescription lay at the heart of Mao’s On New Democracy, on which Sison had modeled his approach, and, of course, it appears in the CPP program.

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appropriate to view that dictatorship as the number one enemy and build the broadest possible alliance to topple it. But what if the characterization was incorrect? What do most Marxists mean when they use the word “fascism”? In 1928, the program of the Communist International defined it as follows: The principal aim of Fascism is to destroy the revolutionary labour vanguard, i.e. the Communist sections and leading units of the proletariat. The combination of social demagogy, corruption and active White terror, in conjunction with extreme imperialist aggression in the sphere of foreign politics, are the characteristic features of Fascism. In periods of acute crisis for the bourgeoisie, Fascism resorts to anti-capitalist phraseology, but, after it has established itself at the helm of the State, it casts aside its anti-capitalist ratde, and discloses itself as a terrorist dictatorship of big capital.4 Unless defined in this manner, with particular attention paid to its

class content, “fascism” becomes an almost meaningless generic term used to cover various forms of authoritarian rule. As defined by Marxists, then, fascism is a phenomenon found in developed (and crisis-ridden) capitalist societies and thus would not be expected to be found in the Third World; indeed, it is surprising that the CPP could envisage a “fascist dictatorship” in what it claimed was a society with a “semifeudal” mode of production. That Marcos’s regime was authoritarian is beyond dispute, but it was not— and could not be— fascist in the sense understood by most Marxists. Rather than being a “dictatorship of big capital,” it represented the interests of'a faction of Filipino capital— the faction of which Marcos was himself a member. Moreover, rather than the martial-law regime having either the inclination or the ability to undertake “extreme imperialist aggression,” this ruling faction contained capitalists like Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco who were keen to progress at the expense of imperialism. By its mistaken analysis, the CPP-NDF cast in tablets of stone its view of the “US-Marcos dictatorship,” glossing over the real role of imperialism in the Philippines, blinding itself to the possibility of alternative strategies, and conditioning its approach to alliances, the subject of this chapter.

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2

Both Weekley and Jones assign major importance to the sharp conflict which arose in the CPP over the question of participation in the elections of 1978, seeing this as a watershed, foreshadowing the unsuccessful boycott policy of 1986 and (in the case of Weekley) the splits of the early 1990s. Shortly after the declaration of martial law, the CPP in Manila offered to form an anti-Marcos front with some of the Liberals who were on the receiving end of the martial law regime’s actions. To this end, a joint campaign aimed at the restoration of the suspended constitution of 1935 was agreed. In early 1974, however, Julius Fortuna, head of the Manila-Rizal Committee of the CPP, was called before Sison and told that such a campaign with bourgeois liberals should be avoided. Jones quotes a person who at that time had been in the Manila leadership of the CPP as follows: “Had w e been allowed to raise the issue of the 1935 constitution . . . we could have dictated the entire anti-fascist, anti-Marcos civil liberties movement during the early stages of martial law.”5 The position adopted by the CPP leadership, on the other hand, amounted to what Weekley describes as a desire to build the urban mass movement in ways “suitable to the protracted people’s war strategy.”6 In 1975, Manila-Rizal proposed participating in a campaign for elections, and again the party leadership rejected this on the grounds that it would “undermine revolutionary campaigns.”7 The Manila party cam e in for criticism two years later with the publication of Our

Urgent Tasks, in which the Manila leadership was accused of erring on the side of bourgeois reformism and “Right opportunism.”8 It was becoming clear that the leadership would tolerate nothing that could not be shoe-horned into conforming to the 1968 program, with its emphasis on armed struggle. In 1977, Jones tells us, the leading members of the Manila CPP were ecstatic about the plans for reviving the “parliament of the streets,” which after five frustrating years of martial law, would again put them in the thick of the revolution. But the planning sessions resurrected a long unresolved issue: what role should urban areas play in the struggle?

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The guerrilla war seemed to be unfolding all too slowly, and Manila Party leaders became convinced that they could advance the struggle on their own. “We came to the conclusion,” one Manila-Rizal leader told Jones, “that you need not wait for developments in the countryside to launch major political events in the city.”9 The Manila-Rizal party therefore decided, without instructions from the central committee, that its members should take part in the 1978 election campaign for seats in the Interim Batasang Pambansa (Interim National Assembly). This, it thought, would deepen the rift in the ruling class along pro- and anti-Marcos lines, afford the CPP an opportunity to conduct propaganda on a scale not possible since the declaration of martial law, and allow the development of alliances, thereby strengthening financial and other support for the armed movement. However, the central committee ordered the Manila cadres to pull out and to campaign, instead, for a boycott. But the Manila party went ahead with its plans. All the opposition candidates were defeated, at least partly due to fraud. Even worse for the Manila cadres, there were no significant protests. The central committee installed Edgar Jopson as secretary of the ManilaRizal party and commenced an investigation. Eventually, Filemon “Popoy” Lagman, secretary of the Manila-Rizal committee, and his two deputies were suspended from the party for three and two years, respectively; a further eight members of the committee were suspended for six months. The central committee imposed a new committee on Manila-Rizal and a “rectification campaign" ensued. Pimentel quotes a source as recalling that a “lot of comrades remained bitter about what had happened. A lot of them lay low, others resigned. The organization was practically a shambles.”10 Shortly afterward, the new committee was captured by the security forces, along with biographical data and the underground names of 80 percent of the Manila CPP membership and the legal organizations to which they belonged. Weekley’s

2001

study throws

important light on

developments

following the confrontation with Manila-Rizal when, as it was conceded that fresh strategies were required for the metropolis, top party intellectuals

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led by central committee member Isagani Serrano formed Le Monde group. Weekley says this is of singular importance in the story of the Party’s theoretical development because it generated some of the most interesting ideas for CPP engagement in the legal political arenas. The proposals signalled the emergence of post-Leninist, post-Maoist thought within the CPP which, however, was not really to blossom until after February 1986 and most of the former Le Monde cadres had moved quietly away from the Party. One of the two major splits in 1992-93 can be attributed in part at least to the refusal of the Party leadership to address major theoretical questions first raised or alluded to by the Le Monde group.11 Led by Horacio Morales, one of the two groups established under Le Monde targeted (in the words of Serrano) “the nationalist opposition, the anti-Marcos oppositionists, the bourgeois liberals (so-called), and the various wings of the social democrats.” Concluding that a structure broader than the NDF would be required in order to attract those groups and individuals unwilling to be mobilized behind the CPP line, Le Monde proposed the formation of Ang Bagong Katipunan (the New Katipunan), to which the central committee responded by suggesting a narrower National Revolutionary Council. The debate about how broad this should be never resolved the question of whether it should encompass the “antiMarcos reactionaries,” and the National Alliance for Justice, Freedom and Democracy formed in 1983 was, says Weekley, a compromise.12 Despite the convulsive policy differences of 1978 (Jones says that the electoral boycott was also ignored in Bicol, where the party committee received a reprimand), the actual pros and cons of the boycott policy were never discussed. “Seven years later,” writes Jones, “the failure to address the deeper questions underlying the rebellion would result in another decision to boycott an election and a disastrous CPP setback.”13 Such a conclusion not only overstates the importance of the issue but misses the real point. The striking thing about this whole debate was that both sides (and, apparendy, most foreign observers who have written about it) accepted the party analysis of the Marcos regime as “fascist,” characterizing it as a “US-

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Marcos dictatorship.” This being the case, the only alliance discussed was an anti-Marcos alliance, and the only issues debated was ho\y broad this should be and whether the urban activity of such an alliance would detract from the armed struggle.* In this, we must assume that both sides were guided by Our Urgent Tasks of 1976, which had prescribed: “The door continues to be open widely for cooperation with those who are against the Marcos fascist dictatorship who may vary in degree of anti-imperialism and antifeudalism.” If the primary contradiction were between the people of the Philippines and imperialism, would it not have been more correct to offer an alliance to those who were anti-imperialist but “who may vary in degree” in their opposition to Marcos? In which case, would it not have been necessary to ensure the inclusion in such an alliance of the indisputably anti-imperialist PKP? Instead, Our Urgent Tasks pronounced: The Lava revisionist renegades have long excluded themselves from the united front. By surrendering to the Marcos fascist dictatorship and actively participating in vicious counterrevolutionary actions, this handful of revisionist fascist criminals have become totally discredited even in the few small areas which they once boasted of as their bailiwicks.1 There was at least one central committee member who questioned whether the party might have mistaken priorities. Weekley

reveals

that

Isagani Serrano had “tinker(ed] with the idea of a two-step resolution of the struggle” involving “uniting with Marcos against the U.S., to setde the national problem.” Serrano suggested that an offer by armed forces chief Gen. Fabian Ver for political negotiations be taken up, but this, says Weekley, “was rejected without discussion.” As, in effect, Serrano came

*

Filemon Lagman, apparently not having noticed that anti-imperialism had fallen by the wayside some time ago, seems to have been more anti-Marcos than Sison, saying that “anti-fascism" should have been primary, with antifeudalism and anti-imperialism secondary. “If this had been the case, the outcome of the Marcos period would have been different, but by 1983 it was already too late.”14

t

Here again, the word “fascist" is robbed of all real meaning, and while it is commonly used as a derogatory epithet with little degree of precision, such usage is not usually encountered in an important policy statement by the central committee of a communist party.

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close to suggesting that the CPP adopt a strategy strikingly similar to that of the PKP, which would have called into question the whole raison d’etre of the CPP, it is somewhat disappointing that Weekley offers no further discussion.15 Imperialism was let off the hook. In these years, there was no call for an anti-imperialist alliance, whether against the US military bases, against the onerous terms of the IMF-World Bank programs, let alone in support o f Marcos’s 1979 industrialization program. Ironically, this led to the greater isolation of Marcos, even when he struck a credibly nationalist note.

3 The period between 1980 and the fall of Marcos in early 1986 was, of course, punctuated by the assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. in August 1983. Before that event, the CPP showed the usual signs of wishing to safeguard its “vanguard” role, but after the assassination there were clear indications of desperation— and opportunism— as it became evident that the party would have difficulty in keeping pace with the anti-Marcos movement that developed outside of its control. Its previous characterization of Aquino was hastily cast aside. On the occasion of the formation of BAYAN in 1985, the CPP’s vanguardist approach led to its own isolation, and thus it found itself unable to influence the events of February

1986. In December 1980, the central committee statement on the twelfth anniversary of the foundation of the CPP16 announced that the “formation of a national united front organization is an immediate and important task of the Party.” However, it was clear that the CPP intended to call the tune. Thus, with regard to other revolutionary organizations and groups,

“we will create the necessary machinery to improve coordination.” In the countryside, “we will now develop, step by step, the organs of democratic power,” while at “the town, district and provincial levels, we will form organizations with a united front character. In urban areas, aside

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from forming clandestine organizations of the united front, we will also continue developing different kinds of alliances to embrace the various organizations, groups and individuals who are prepared to advance the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggles” (emphases added). It seemed from this that all non-CPP organizations and groups were required to do was follow the party’s lead. And despite the statement’s brief mention of anti-imperialism in this regard, anti-imperialism was hardly a feature of the CPP’s united front work prior to February 1986. In 1981, the party was involved in the boycott campaign surrounding the plebiscite on April 7 to amend the Constitution and call a presidential election, and the presidential election itself on June 16. Ang Bayan claimed17 that “the broadest possible boycott movement” was facilitated by the call issued by the CPP.18 This, of course, followed the formal lifting of martial law by Marcos. The CPP stated that such a boycott movement would “surely help to create conditions for the faster advance of the revolutionary mass movement, for the swifter development of the national united front and the armed democratic revolution which will in time deal the death blow to the US-Marcos dictatorship.”19 In this campaign, the CPP-led forces were joined by mainstream opposition groups and politicians such as the United Democratic Opposition party (UNIDO) of Salvador Laurel and Benigno Aquino Jr. On May 10-11, groups and leading opposition politicians opposed to the presidential election met in Baguio City in order to formalize their pact. Represented were the People’s Opposition to the Plebiscite-Election (PEOPLE), UNIDO, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement) trade union center, Pagkakaisa ng Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP, or Solidarity of Filipino Workers), the League of Filipino Students, the Central Implementing Task Force of the Association of Major Religious Superiors of Women of the Philippines, the Free Legal Assistance Group, the Philippine Trial Lawyers Association, Protestants Opposed to the Presidential Election, Task Force Detainees, the University of the Philippines Student Council and others.20 The boycott was successful in that, according to the People’s Movement for Independence, Nationalities and Democracy (MIND), 60 percent of voters in the capital region boycotted; the Commission on Elections,

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however, maintained that nationwide over 50 percent had voted. The CPP claimed that central to its purported success was the fact that, between May 1 and June 15, marches and rallies were held in twelve cities and thirtysix towns throughout the country, drawing on the participation of 260,000 people.21* Weekley records that for the presidential election, “Marcos had to provide his own opponent,” and quotes Rocamora as describing Alejo S. Santos, the man who agreed to play this role, as a “political non-entity . . . whom people barely remember today.”231 Marcos claimed an overwhelming victory. Two months prior to the assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino in 1983, Ang Bayan published a carefully argued statement entitled “Bourgeois Reformists: Facing a Crossroad.” This characterized bourgeois reformists as “occupying the middle ground between the US Marcos dictatorship and the revolutionary forces led by the Party” and of comprising “opposition political parties (national and regional), oppositionist politicians’ groups, ‘social democrats,’ and groups and individuals influenced by them in business, academic institutions, mass media, the church and the professions.” Further, these bourgeois reformists had been “riding on the coat-tails of the nationaldemocratic mass movement” but had become “apprehensive of the Party’s growing strength, so that anti-communism became a conspicuous feature in their pronouncements.” This had continued until the 1978 elections for the Interim Batasang Pambansa, when they participated in a mass campaign with the CPP-NDF forces. Following this, different tendencies appeared— those which attempted to launch urban armed struggle; those who still saw the possibility of bargaining with Marcos and “continued to court US imperialism”; and, finally, those who were staunchly against Marcos but

•

Chapman quotes an NDF official who lold him lhat the 1981 boycott campaign was “a key development” for the NDF and that “by our count, about a half-million people at 47 different places joined in the boycott demonstrations in 1981 . . ”22 (emphasis added).

t

Although there is no doubt that Santos marred his political record by allowing himself to be used in this way, Weekley and Rocamora are unkind to him. Far from being a nonentity, Santos had been a guerrilla leader in Bulacan during the Japanese occupation; having originally adopted an anti-Huk stance, he was won over and allied with them;24 he was a congressman until 1949, served as governor of Bulacan from 1951 to 1957, and became defense secretary in the Garcia administration.

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who wished to distance themselves from the NDF, who thus proposed a “third alternative.” From late 1980 onward, the statement continued, “the left wing of the bourgeois reformists has been drawn nearer to the national-democratic movement and it has exerted a dominant influence on the whole b lo c .. . ,” especially since many participated in the 1981 boycott campaign. “The leaders of the bloc, if not representing the section of the big comprador bourgeoisie and the landlord class who lost out to the monopolization of power by the Marcos clique, are from the middle and small bourgeoisie who adhere to bourgeois liberalism.” The CPP then put forward the perspective of winning over the left and middle forces of the bourgeois reformists “while exposing and isolating the capitulationists and diehard reactionaries of the right wing.” However, jealously guarding its “leadership” role, the CPP warned: “There is no place in contemporary politics for a ‘third force’ independent of both the national-democratic revolution and the US-Marcos dictatorship, and there is no reason why it should grow strong as a bloc capable of drawing a considerable number of people away from the revolution.”25 Events in the very near future were to prove this estimate to have been mistaken, although the tactics employed by the CPP would contribute gready to the success of the bourgeois reformists.

4 The CPP’s approach to other political forces and classes in the post­ assassination period is best illustrated by its approach to Aquino himself.* In December 1980, the CPP had identified two trends within Marcos’s political opponents. “First, there is the capitulationist trend now represented by Aquino’s proposal for ‘national reconciliation and unity.’” The party went

By 1980, the CPP’s view of Aquino had obviously soured since he had facilitated the meeting between Dante and Sison eleven years earlier. The fact that Sison, Dante, and Tayag were all in prison by this time may have had a bearing cm this.

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on to say that the “other leaders among Marcos’s rivals were correct in rejecting the Aquino proposal. If the proposal peddled by Aquino for active collaboration with the fascist regime were followed, the present regime and its oppression of the people would only last longer.”26 Just over a year later, Ang Bayan portrayed Aquino unsympathetically as one of the UNIDO politicians who “had been maneuvering to be chosen as UNIDO’s presidential bet” in the election called by Marcos for June 1981; moreover, the journal implied, UNIDO had only joined the boycott campaign when the regime refused to extend the campaign period, grant equal media time, cleanse the voters’ lists and revamp the Commission on Elections.27 After the election, Ang Bayan characterized Aquino in the following terms: “Although petulant, Aquino remains imperialism’s principal ‘horse in reserve’ to replace Marcos should it decide to discard the incumbent dictator.”28 Following his assassination in August 1983, there was a remarkable transformation in the CPP’s assessment of him. Aquino, the foremost leader of the bourgeois liberal opposition in the country, had suffered almost eight years of solitary confinement in the regime’s prisons and three years of exile in the United States. Despite grave risks and the heavy odds, he was finally coming home for the avowed purpose of rallying, reorganizing and unifying the fragmented forces of the legal opposition to fight the Marcos regime. The people deeply grieved the death of Aquino and their long pentup anger that had accumulated over the years exploded in a massive display of outrage and solidarity against the regime. In their hundreds of thousands, they patiently lined up to view Aquino’s martyred body. Turning to the bourgeois opposition, Ang Bayan charged, conveniently forgetting its previous criticism of Aquino’s “capitulationist” trend: It is to be noted that this small group of politicians started making noises about elections even before Aquino had been buried, and even as they hypocritically mouthed the late senator’s resolute words that there can be no deal with a dictator, no compromise with dictatorship.29

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Almost a year later, the CPP’s florid praise of Aquino still struggled to keep pace with the protest movement that was developing independently of the party. For all his faults—and even his family says he had quite a few—Aquino was perceived by many people as a steadfast and uncompromising fighter against the fascist dictator. All he had to do was capitulate [precisely the tendency of which the CPP had accused him less than four years earlier] to his old political enemy, Marcos, and the doors to power and privilege would have been opened to him.30 With the second anniversary of his death, the CPP proclaimed that Aquino’s “valorous death will be enshrined in the memory of the people as a historic symbol in the struggle against the fascist dictatorship.” He had “attained national renown as a symbol of steadfast and valiant resistance to the regime.”31 The effect that this had on the broad m em bership of the CPP can only be wondered at, for it should be remembered that these eulogies appeared not in a journal intended for mass distribution but in Artg Bay a n , the organ of the central committee. Thus, they were aim ed at CPP members. It is hardly any wonder, then, that when the Aquino’s widow became a presidential candidate many CPP members, including some senior figures, were in favor of not only participating in the election, but of doing so in support of Corazon Aquino— and, in the event, they actually did this is contravention of party policy.

5 One month after the Aquino assassination, the CPP was claiming in its “Urgent Message to the Filipino People,” published in the October 1983 issue of A ng Bay a n , that “[t]he formal organization of the revolutionary united front, the National Democratic Front, is consolidating and expanding its ranks, with more and more organizations rallying to its banner.” This, however, is open to question; Armando Malay, Jr., writing at almost

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precisely this time, was of the view that the very sectarianism of the CPP was tending to “shut out” other forces from the united front.32 Having said that, it would certainly appear to be true that the organizations already under the CPP umbrella were strengthened during these years. For example, the Kabataang Makabayan (KM, or Nationalist Youth), having dissolved all but its local structures in 1975, was reestablished in 1977 and in 1984 had recovered sufficiently to hold its Fourth Congress. However, the message of the CPP central committee to this gathering made it perfectly clear that the KM was hardly an independent organization, ending with the exhortation: Today, it is right that the Kabataang Makabayan should give greater attention and effort to tasks in the open and underground movement in the urban areas. Nevertheless, it must also give more attention to the development of links and mutual support with the revolutionary organizations of the youth in the countrysides, including the continuing efforts to invigorate the campaign to recruit cadres and warriors, and the solicitation of various forms of support for the people’s army and the peasant movement.33 Thus, the unity of the CPP and the KM appeared to boil down to the latter tendering support to the military arm of the former. With regard to wider forms of unity, Jones provides adequate testimony that the old sectarian ways persisted. He quotes Mila Aguilar, who in 1980 became leader of the CPP’s United Front Commission, as saying that she had been shocked by the “rigid and narrow-minded” concept of the united front shared by both the CPP national leadership and the Manila cadres.34 A “veteran Party cadre” to whom Jones spoke “blamed the narrow united front views of the top officials for the collapse of a series of united front organizations.”35 Jones is referring here to the period following the assassination of Aquino, when protests and demonstrations had developed outside of the control of the CPP. Jones errs in asserting that the October 1983 statement “applauded the Marcos Resign movement launched by Aquino’s supporters and forces of the middle and upper classes,” which he describes as a “jarring aboutface.”36 Significantly, this section of the CPP statement was entitled “Cast

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Away Illusions and Oppose all Capitulationists and Collaborationists.” It pointed out that “some bourgeois-liberal oppositionists” had “hastily put together a ‘third alternative’ program with ‘Marcos resign’ as its slogan.” This position, the statement said, looked for the replacement of Marcos by a caretaker government, following which the latter would investigate the assassination, extend an amnesty to all political prisoners, draft a new constitution and call elections for “president, vice-president, members of the Batasang Pambansa as well as local officials, and ensure that such elections would be free, orderly and honest.” (It will be noted that this was almost exactly the course subsequently taken by the government led by Aquino’s widow.) The CPP dismissed the first two demands as “window dressing to attract popular support” and went on to indicate that the call for elections was “the meat of the question for them” and that such politicians “simply want to be in Malacanang themselves instead of Marcos and abandon the people’s struggle if it is no longer useful to them. Dem anding M arcos’

resignation, furtherm ore, is an impractical and futile exercise. Marcos himself has already said that he will never resign, underscoring his resolve to stay in power by ordering the AFP to shoot at peaceful demonstrators” (emphasis added). The statement continued: Their indecent haste to make political hay out of the Aquino assassination became more apparent by their own subsequent actions. Their “third alternative” program and their use of the slogan “Marcos resign” are nothing but a skimpy cover for the attempt to curry favor with the US, and advance their own personal ambitions and big bourgeois-landlord interests . . . They are trying to ride the crest of the current mass movement merely to be able to bargain for a share of power in the reactionary state, either through bogus elections or through secret deals. However, the statement then went on to point out that democratic organizations and groups had also raised the “Marcos Resign” slogan, but in order to “thoroughly expose and weaken the regime.” Thus, the CPP hardly gave its “approval” to the campaign, but merely pointed out which proponents of the slogan were worthy of support and which should be shunned.

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In May 1984, when elections were held for the Batasang Pambansa, the CPP once again pursued the boycott line. In this, it was joined by a number of opposition groups, as had happened in the plebiscite and election of 1981 and the January 1984 plebiscite (when, according to the CPP, only 40 percent of the electorate had participated).37 The organizational expression of the boycott campaign was the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (Congress of the Filipino People, or KOMPIL). Jones, discussing the post-assassination period, tells us that Rodolfo Salas, in two 1988 interviews, disclosed extraordinary details of the interaction between the CPP and legal opposition forces during the period. Salas said that Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. prior to his return to Manila, had initiated an exchange of messages between them to discuss some form of alliance. But Salas’ most startling revelation was the CPP’s role in the formation of KOMPIL. According to Salas, Agapito “Butz" Aquino (brother of Benigno] turned to the CPP when plans for founding KOMPIL were sputtering.38 This is borne out by Sison, who gives the following version: Agapito “Butz” Aquino took the initiative in organizing the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino . . . and invited the progressive forces to send delegates and myself to send a major address to the founding congress. I made a long address detailing how the broadest antifascist alliance could be forged to topple the dictator .. Prior to the May elections, KOMPIL put forward sue demands: the removal of Marcos’s law-making powers; the immediate repeal of repressive legislation; that the declaration of martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus should require a two-thirds vote in the Batasang Pambansa; the amendment of the 1973 Constitution to provide that all top government appointments be subject to confirmation by the Batasang Pambansa; a general amnesty and the release of all political prisoners and detainees; and electoral reform. Of course, this marked a shift in the CPP’s position stated a few months earlier. This apparent contradiction was rationalized by arguing, perfectly

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logically, that although the above demands “do not direcdy express the long-term and basic objectives of the people’s democratic revolution” it had to be realized that “in fighting for these, the people learn precious lessons from their experience, through the correct guidance of the revolutionary line.”40 Just two months later, however (and still prior to the elections), the party appeared to contradict itself yet again by returning to the proposition that the “central task now confronting the revolutionary movement and the broad masses of the people is the overthrow of the US-Marcos dictatorship which thoroughly embodies the semicolonial and semifeudal order in the Philippines.”41 Possibly bewildered by the rate at which the anti-Marcos movement was growing, the party appeared to be vacillating between a desire to draw closer to the bourgeois opposition and an attempt to distinguish itself from it. The CPP claimed that the 1984 boycott was a success and that the reactionaries were being isolated from the progressives. This latter claim was based on the fact that the conservatives had participated in the election, but, as a third of the seats fell to the opposition, and as the majority voted, Marcos won a degree of legitimacy.

6 The more the anti-Marcos movement grew, the more the CPP’s approach to alliances became marked by confusion, inconsistency, and opportunism. CPP members may have been surprised when, turning to the fourth page of the January 1985 issue of Ang Bayan, they spotted the headline: “Entire National Bourgeoisie Now Open to Revolution.” Stressing the effects of the economic crisis that had intensified since the Aquino assassination, the article estimated: “As more and more of them go bankrupt, the national bourgeoisie generally has become more receptive to revolutionary change.” Although Weekley is correct when she describes this as an “overly optimistic view,”42 it should be understood that the journal was not referring here to the whole bourgeoisie. Ang Bayan obliged with an explanation:

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The investments of the national bourgeoisie are rather dispersed, and these are mostly in non-strategic areas of the economy. They are spread out in small industries such as food, garments, furniture and footwear; intermediate industries such as textiles and rubber; and in service and commercial establishments such as transport (both land and sea), restaurants and schools. A big part of their production relies principally on local sources of capital and raw materials, and serves the needs of the local market; another part relies on imported machinery and raw materials. The formula of “unity and struggle” which the CPP had employed on other occasions when talking of bourgeois allies, while present in this article, was given a rather curious slant: Let us convince them to allow genuine trade unionism among their workers, and patiently explain to them the need for unions to develop to strengthen the forces fighting the principal enemy. Let us foster revolutionary unity between them and the working class. On the other hand, the workers must struggle with them on just grounds and with restraint, that is, not push them to bankruptcy. The first point to be made regarding this remarkable passage is that it may have been penned by a CPP cadre or leader with limited firsthand experience of “genuine trade unionism.”’ Secondly, the influence of Mao is evident here, as in 1953 (four years after the triumph of the nationaldemocratic stage of the Chinese Revolution) he complained that “some workers are advancing too fast and won’t allow the capitalists to make any profit at all."43 But let us analyze the passage itself. What was it really saying? It argued that the national bourgeoisie should be persuaded to allow genuine trade unionism among “their” workers. It strikes one that if a member of the national bourgeoisie did not “allow” trade unionism already, he would be unlikely to do so as a result of argument alone.

“Genuine trade unionism," which, commonly known as simply “GTU,” was in the later 1980s characterized by “ultra-militancy," is the credo of the Kilusang Mayo Uno, formed under CPP guidance in 1980. The term is used ironically here.

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Recognition and bargaining rights are all too often conceded by a capitalist

only if confronted by pressure, actual or potential, on the part of his employees, who will have previously organized in a trade union for this purpose. It must be conceded, however, that such capitalists could be open to persuasion of the kind implied in the above passage, i.e., that his employees would “struggle . . . with restraint.” Such “genuine trade unionism” is usually known by another name. For Ang Bayan appeared to be saying to the national bourgeoisie: join our national united front and we will ensure that the workers under our influence will not unduly undermine your profitability, even if this means that they are forced to accept lower wages than those to which they might feel entitled. By 1985, as other class forces were becoming more and more active in the anti-Marcos struggle for their own ends, the CPP appeared ready to stop at nothing in order to win allies from outside of the working class and peasantry. “The call for the formation of a democratic coalition government,” proclaimed Ang Bayan in March of that year, “is fast becoming a practical slogan.” The journal then described the “people’s democratic revolution” as “the unified action of the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie and other anti-imperialist and antifeudal forces, in waging revolutionary struggle and in organizing state power.” Moreover, the journal went on to assert that in order to “solve the existing basic problems and the fundamental contradiction in our society, what is needed is the full, not just formal, participation of all four revolutionary classes in the establishment and wielding of democratic political power. The exclusion o f any o f the classes will result in the

revolution’s failu re .” The CPP was pulling out all the stops in an attempt to persuade the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie that their place was within the united front. An important part of the united front, and of the democratic coalition government that will be set up, are the liberal-democratic organizations and personages. Although for now they do not completely uphold the armed struggle, they have been active in advancing the people’s militant actions against the enemy. The decisive shift of the liberal democrats

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and the middle forces to the side of the revolution is a very important factor in the formation of the national united front and the victory of our revolution. Those in the comprador bourgeoisie or landlord class may also be included in this government provided they are active and consistent in upholding the basic national and democratic demands o f the people. (Emphasis added.) The CPP was now opening its arms to those whom it had formerly regarded as its enemies. It might be argued that the proviso in the above “invitation” effectively ruled out the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlord class, for the comprador bourgeoisie is by its very nature in a close relationship with imperialism, i.e., it is “a social class deemed to be compliant with foreign interests, and uninterested in developing the national economy.”44 However, in its statement of June 1983 (see page 310), the CPP had referred to the compradors among the “bourgeois reformists” as being those “who lost out to the monopolization of power by the Marcos clique.” We must therefore assume that they were now being courted because they were anti-Marcos, not due to any anti-imperialist potential.* This position was then contradicted by the following article (“Our Party’s Economic Program: Change the Production Relations”), which proposed the smashing of the remaining feudal relations in order to permit the development of capitalism, which “will develop to a certain level.” For this, “the means of production now in the hands of the big bourgeois compradors and the big landlords must now be transferred to the hands of the entire Filipino people and to the democratic classes that comprise the people.” Just to ensure that there could be no dubiety, the article stated quite categorically that the “confiscation of the capital of the overthrown classes . . . will be a basic step in the general development in the production of society . .

Most Marxists would find nothing wrong

with this if the situation was such that this step could be taken without the risk of a massive counterrevolutionary backlash, but the previous

As we will see in chapter 17, as early as 1980 the PKP also took a softer line on the compradors, but on llie basis of an analysis which identified their differences with imperialism.

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invitation to members of the classes who would have their productive property confiscated was now translated as: “You may be represented in the democratic coalition government as long as you allow us to confiscate your land and capital.” There would, it is obvious, be no takers. Potentially, the most promising development in the CPP’s united front work was the formation in May 1985 of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN, or New Patriotic Alliance). At the founding congress some 500 organizations were represented by over a thousand delegates. The leaders elected by the congress included former senators Lorenzo Tañada and Jose Diokno (chairman and president, respectively), Rolando Olalia (KMU chairman), Agapito “Butz” Aquino, Joker Arroyo (later to be a member of the Aquino cabinet), Joaquin “Chino” Roces (publisher of the Manila

Times'), and former Justice J.B.L. Reyes. The congress declared, Ang Bayan reported, that its urgent task is to end the Marcos dictatorship and US and other foreign interference in the internal affairs of the Philippines. Its ultimate aim is to establish popular democracy in the country . . . Although significant differences remain among these organizations, they forged a principled unity for the sake of the anti-dictatorship struggle.45 Sison also makes reference to certain “differences”: When BAYAN was being organized in May 1985, with the full participation and support of the progressive forces, these pro-US elements wanted to have a disproportionately large share of the organs of leadership and take control of BAYAN. Failing to grab BAYAN, they bolted out and formed BANDILA—a very small group. But they were also able to mislead and carry away two small influential human rights groups of lawyers, the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) and the Movement of Attorneys for Brotherhood, Integrity, Nationalism and Independence (MABINI).46 Chapman tells a different story, explaining that there appeared to have been an initial, tacit agreement to grant each of BAYAN’s “three major factions” equal votes, but that the NDF had then demanded a greater share. Jose Diokno, one of those who “bolted,” told Chapman later:

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It was not entirely the left’s fault, there was much mistrust on all sides . . . But it showed that we can never deal with the underground left on a permanent basis. Until the underground learns how to work with the concept of shared powers, you cannot work with them.47 Chapman goes on to allege that many NDF leaders were “furious with the ideological purists who had wrecked the new front.” One dissident is quoted as follows: The breakup of BAYAN, especially the walkout of businessmen like Ongpin—it was not over big principles, but just over how many seats each group would get. It was not over the (US military] bases, for example. Some of our people now realize the nature of this problem and will teach more flexibility. 1 think there is this lingering influence of the Chinese approach to the united front. I think eventually that there will be a more realistic united front structure.48 Jones corroborates this version, terming the founding congress of BAYAN a “disaster.” By August 1985, the protest movement that had once seemed capable of forcing Marcos from power had all but collapsed, a victim of the bickering between the NDF forces and the rest of the anti-Marcos elements . . . A showdown with Marcos was looming, yet the CPP, by missing its finest opportunity to forge a broad united front, had played itself out of a position to influence the decisive events.49 In September 1985 an article appeared in Ang Bayan ( “Unite the Many, Defeat the Few”) which, somewhat belatedly, urged corrective action. “The national united front,” it stated, “is a real magic weapon [a curious echo of millenarianism] if wielded firmly by the revolutionary proletariat skilled in the creative application of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism in uniting with the many and defeating the few.” This latter aim “means mobilizing all positive forces that can be won over at different levels of unity to defeat the principal enemy or gain victory in particular struggles.” More to the point, in view of the recent debacle at the BAYAN congress,

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the solidarity of the united front could be achieved not by discarding the independence of the constituent organizations, “but by conducting a healthy struggle of opposing views and arriving at a consensus based

on principles and not primarily on organizational superiority' (emphasis added). But even here, the main lesson was missed. There can be little doubt that the term “the principal enemy” in the above referred to Marcos. Far from BAYAN being seriously concerned with ending “US and other foreign interference in the internal affairs of the Philippines” as claimed by Ang

Bayan, we have it from Sison himself that “pro-US elements” were involved in its organization. Thus, in 1985 BAYAN could only have been conceived as an anti-Marcos alliance. This was a logical extension of the CPP’s characterization of the Marcos regime as “fascist” and of its practice since at least 1976, when Our Urgent Tasks had extended a welcome to “those who are against the Marcos fascist dictatorship who may vary in degree of anti-imperialism and antifeudalism.” More recendy, Ang Bayan had made clear that this welcome extended to the comprador bourgeoisie, which by its very nature could not be other than pro-imperialist. By neglecting anti-imperialism, the CPP would find itself in a situation analogous to that of the PKP in 1944-45 when, with an inadequate appreciation of the nature of US imperialism, the latter party was unprepared for the ruthless manner in which the returning US forces under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur ensured that the postwar Philippines would, even with formal independence, serve US economic and geopolitical ambitions. Now, having characterized Marcos as the representative of imperialism, and as someone who had created his “New Society” at its behest, the CPP would be unable to explain why, after his fall, foreign capital would be able to tighten its economic grip on the Philippines. N o tes 1. 2.

Manifesto of the Preparatory Committee of the NDF: “Unite to Overthrow the US-Marcos Dictatorship,” April 24, 1973See William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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and Its Strugglefo r Power (New York: Norton, 1987), 221-22. Quoted in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1987), 209-10. Quoted in R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (London: Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1934), 89. Gregg R. Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder. Westview Press, 1989), 110. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 115. Weekley takes the view that relations between the CPP leadership and the Manila-Rizal committee were complicated by “territorial and personal differences,” including the “personality and leadership style of Filemon Lagman.” Ibid. Ibid., 116. Central Committee, CPP, Our Urgent Tasks, 1976. This and other CPP documents are available on www.philippinerevolution.net. See also Jones, Red Revolution, 111. Jones, Red Revolution, 113Benjamin Pimentel Jr., Edjop: The Unusual Journey o f Edgar Jopson (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1989), 219. Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines, 1968-1993, 119-20. Here, Weekley is referring to the “third group” or “Democratic Bloc” that would organize the short-lived Siglaya-, after the demise of this organization, many of those involved would link up with BISIG (Bukluran sa Ikauunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa, or Movement for the Advancement of Socialist Thought and Action) and others to form Akbayan (Citizens’ Action Party). Ibid., 121-22. The same author suggests that the proposal for a National Democratic (Coalition Government was due to Ije Monde influence, but as we have already seen this featured in the 1977 program of the NDF. Prior to this, it had appeared in the CPP program and had its roots in Mao. For a detailed examination of the “Manila Rebellion,” see Jones, Red Revolution, 113 - 22 .

14. Filemon Lagman, interview by the author, January 1996. 15. Indeed, the revelation is confined to a footnote: Weekley, The Communist Party of the Philippines, 1968-1993, 141, fn 49. 16. Ang Bayan, December 26, 1980. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Ibid., April 30, 1981. Ibid., March 31,1981. Ibid., April 30, 1981. Ibid., May 31, 1981.

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21. Ibid., July 15, 1981. 22. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 240. 23. Weekley, The Philippine Communist Party. 1968-1993, 125; Joel Rocamora, Breaking Through: The Struggle Within the Communist Party o f the Philippines (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1995), 26. 24. See Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace. The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas. From Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: UP Press, 2007), 188-89. 25. Ang Bayan, June 1983. 26. Central Committee of the CPP, “Statement on the 11th Anniversary of the New People’s Army,” Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980. 27. Ang Bayan, April 30, 1981. 28. Ibid., July 15, 1981. 29. Ibid., October 1983. 30. Ibid., August 1984. 31. Ibid., August 1985. 32. “Some Random Reflections on Marxism and Maoism in the Philippines,” in Marxism in the Philippines (Quezon City: Third World Studies Center, 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

University of the Philippines, 1984), 79. Ang Bayan, November 1984. Jones, Red Revolution, 147. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 148. Ang Bayan, February 1984. Jones, Red Revolution, 148. Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (New York: Crane Russak, 1989), 114-15. Ang Bayan, February 1984. Ang Bayan, April 1984. Weekley, The Communist Party o f the Philippines,1968-1993, 133Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 5 (Beijing:ForeignLanguages Publishing House, 1977), 113John Scott and Gordon Marshall, A Dictionary o f Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford Paperback Reference, 2009). Ang Bayan, May 1985. Sison, The Leader’s View, 116. Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution, 223. Ibid., 224. Jones, Red Revolution, 152.

PART FIVE In chapters 16 and 17, we will examine how the PKP fared in the decade following its conclusion of the political settlement in 1974. As will be recalled, the PKP’s intention in entering this agreement was to support those policies of Marcos it deemed progressive and to attempt to push his regime in the direction of a more consistently anti-imperialist position. It is important to understand, however, that Marcos’s freedom of action was severely constrained by the extent to which— and the manner in which— control of his country’s destiny had been removed from his hands (and, indeed, those of any rival or successor) by foreign capital and the multilateral financial institutions. Chapter 15, therefore, sketches this economic background.

3*5

C h a p te r 1 5 : A n E c o n o m ic P r i s o n e r o f t h e “F r e e W o r l d ” To a very large extent, at least from the mid-1970s, Marcos never exercised control of the development process in the Philippines, and therefore did not have the room to maneuver he would have needed to pursue an independent economic strategy aimed at satisfying Filipino, as opposed to TNC, needs. This was due to two main factors: first, largely as a result of the operations of the IMF and the World Bank, the development within the Philippines of an “export-oriented” capitalism characterized by chronic indebtedness and almost total dependency; second, a stealthy operation by the World Bank that ensured Marcos was sidestepped in its plan to see that the Philippines was securely tied into the new international division of labor required by the TNCs and banks. By the early 1980s, the Philippines would be, in effect, an economic prisoner of the “free world.” Until 1980, the dictation of economic policy was the province of the IMF. After a serious trade deficit in 1975, the Philippines applied to the Fund under its extended fund facility (EFF), drawing down $117 million in 1976 and $141.37 million in 1977. In order to make the first drawing, the Marcos government was required to give a letter of intent, outlining a three-year economic program that would be subject to review by the IMF on a six-monthly basis. The undertakings given consisted of a shift of export emphasis onto manufactured, agricultural processed products and mineral products, continuation of heavy capital investment in infrastructure

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financed by borrowing from external sources, and higher taxes to finance government deficits. These were incorporated into the National Economic and Development Authority’s plans for 1974-77 and 1978-82.1 The World Bank and the IMF jointly ensured that every requirement of the TNCs was catered for by the “host” government— the credit facilities, the infrastructure, the rural development, and the government economic policies. The World Bank even saw that future generations of the cheap labor supply received the “appropriate” education, deciding for 19761980 that it (and therefore the Philippine government) would “increase the relevance of the [education] system to national needs by improving facilities for industrial and agricultural training.”2 Significantly, in view of the increasing penetration of the Philippines by Japanese capital, Japan entered the educational restructuring program in 1980, with a grant of $12.7 million for the establishment of a Technical University of the Philippines.3 Minds successfully molded in the manner desired by foreign capital were, of course, effectively lost to nationalism. A noteworthy facet of the Philippines’ new industrialization (which to a large extent took place in export processing zones virtually unconnected with the domestic economy) lay in the fact that the TNCs now controlling so much of the economy did not always find it necessary to purchase or build fixed capital in order to exercise that control. In many industries, it was exercised through subcontracting. According to Constantino, this was practiced in the manufacture of car parts, refrigeration and air-conditioning parts, leather goods, furniture, toys, processed food, paper, metal, wood, plastics, and rubber products. “In agriculture,” says the same author, “it is known as contract growing, which exists in the following areas: bananas, rubber, cotton, feedgrains, poultry, piggery and beef catde.” The garment sector started as a “basically sub-contracting, re-exporting industry where raw materials are shipped from abroad for processing . . . and then re­ exported.” The same characteristics were noted in the US- and Japaneseowned electronics industry “wherein only the most labor-intensive process (semi-conductor assembly) is done here by tens of thousands of women workers in the export processing zones and elsewhere.”4

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The advantages for the TNCs of this arrangement were obvious: they did not need to commit resources to direct investment, they could avoid labor problems by having subcontractors employ the workers and, of course, they could evacuate with little or no risk of financial loss. Third World nationalism and possible nationalization held no fears for them under such a regime. What was good for TNCs, however, was almost by definition bad for the Filipino business sector producing for the domestic market. Magallona asserts that the World Bank policy was quite simply to eliminate this sector. “The only way they can stay in business is to reorganize themselves for export by making themselves as sub-contractors of TNCs or joint-venture partners of foreign investors.”5 In the late 1970s, Marcos had still not abandoned all hope of nationalist industrialization, and in 1979 the government announced a $6 billion program for, in effect, developing backward linkages that were intended to “anchor” the export-oriented industries in a heavy industrial base. Eleven industrial projects were announced— an integrated steel mill, a copper smelter, an expanded cement industry, a project for heavy machinery, a diesel engine plant, a phosphate fertilizer plant, a project for obtaining fuel from sugarcane, a coconut chemicals plant, an integrated pulp and paper miller, and a petrochemicals complex. Given the potential that such a program would impart to a nationalist industrialization program, the World Bank did not approve and, anyway, the crisis following the Aquino assassination in 1983 killed most of the projects. However, the copper smelter com menced operations in May 1983 (with 32 percent of the company owned by Japanese interests), the fertilizer complex began production in 1985 and the coconut chemicals plant, owned by Unichem, part of the empire of Eduardo Cojuangco, started up in 1984.6 Although the Philippines had already embarked upon the “exportoriented” road, this received far greater emphasis as the new international division of labor moved into its second stage. Briefly, this saw the newly industrializing countries (NICs) such as Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, etc. moving into the higher stages of production, having embarked upon industrialization by concentrating on the labor-intensive

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stages of production for the TNCs. As the economies of these countries developed, so their wage-costs began to increase, whereupon the TNCs began to switch the labor-intensive stages of their production cycles to lesser developed countries (LDCs), where labor costs were appreciably lower. To enable this to occur, however, the economies of the LDCs would need to be “restructured.” The vehicle used to accomplish this was the structural adjustment loan (SAL), and the Philippines was chosen as a guinea pig. According to Broad and Cavanagh, “restructuring” required adherence to one basic tenet— “submit your economies to international market forces. And that means privatize, open up, liberalize, offer more incentives to private foreign investment— in short: inject Reaganomics into the Third World.”7 In the Philippines, the process would see light manufacturing, electronics, and garments emerge as the country’s leading export industries. By and large, the TNCs would transfer to the LDCs those parts of their production cycles that were labor intensive and that required only low technology. The advantages to the TNCs were not confined to cost— the “host” country would be responsible for just one stage in the production cycle and thus there would be little danger of a competitive product being developed locally, while any threat of a nationalist takeover of foreign interests could be countered by simply transferring this stage of production to an alternative site. The fundamental disadvantage to the host country was, of course, that the nature of the Philippine economy would be dictated even less by the needs of the local people and even more by those of the TNCs. Before long, it would become obvious that this new orientation would not only solve none of the basic problems of the Philippines, but that it spelled disaster for the economy and even deeper privation for the people. Constantino has described such a “development” strategy as a “one­ way ticket to a debtors’ prison” due to the fact that substantial sums are required for infrastructural improvement to attract the TNCs in the first place. Additionally, loans for such improvements advanced by the World Bank must be accompanied by “counterpart” funds from the recipient. The

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TNC products for export have a high import content and so, ironically, this “export-oriented” economy would hardly ever enjoy a favorable trade balance. In addition, the TNCs require the ability to remit profits to their home base without hindrance, and, the terms of trade between a Third World country like the Philippines and the developed capitalist countries are, anyway, inherently unequal, being dictated by the latter.8 Until the World Bank’s experiment in the Philippines, the enforcement of the required conditions would have been the task of the IMF. It had considerable experience in the Philippines, and by 1980 it had already ensured that the country was the most indebted LDC in the world. Despite the fact that, under the EFF administered by the Fund over the years 1976-78, the vast majority of targets set for the Philippine economy (GNP growth, inflation, balance of payments, the ratio of tax to GNP, interest rates, domestic and foreign borrowing, foreign currency reserves, and devaluation) were simply unmet, the IMF boldly dubbed the EFF a “successful exercise,”9 because, as Broad says, “the country was moving in the desired direction . . .”10 But the IMF was confronted with two problems, the first of which was its own image as an oppressive institution that constandy made belttightening demands of the hapless mendicants who shuffled to its door. Second, its prescriptions were resisted where nationalists held key positions in the government and economy. Most significantly, such people held sway at the Central Bank, the governor of which, Gregorio Licaros, had refused to implement policies detrimental to producers for the domestic market. To force the medicine down the patient’s throat would have meant doing batde with Marcos himself, as he supported the protection of domestic industry. It was in these circumstances that the Fund handed over the leading role to its sister-organization, the World Bank. With its more benign image, the Bank was successful in persuading the Philippines to sign for its first SAL in September 1980, whereas the IMF had failed to secure acceptance of a similar loan. The virtual surrender of any meaningful national sovereignty was underlined by the fact that a representative of the World Bank’s Consultative

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Group for the Philippines (consisting of those nations advancing loans to the Philippines via World Bank programs) occupied an office at the Central Bank and reportedly saw “reports and analyses from government agencies and . . . probably [had] access to more documents than some high Central Bank officials.”11 The Philippines’ earlier dependence upon the IMF and the World Bank had meant that to an increasing extent the direction of the economy had been effectively handed over to the group of economists referred to as “technocrats,” many of whom had been trained in the USA at the World Bank and IMF Institutes before being inserted into sensitive positions back home. While the negotiations over the SAL were nearing completion, a Bank report was drafted, analyzing the political risks within the Philippine situation. Written by William Ascher, this emphasized the need to protect the technocrats as they, and not Marcos, would constitute the most important factor in determining the “success” or otherwise of the World Bank’s program. Ascher feared that as domestic producers began to suffer as a result of the program, Marcos might ditch, or at least ignore, the technocrats. The Bank took heed and so, following the established practice of the IMF, doled out its C

cash in tranches only when strict criteria had been met. Ascher was proved correct in his estimate of Marcos, for in late 1980 he yielded to nationalist pressure and eased the pace of tariff reform. When, early the following year, he threatened to renege on the next phase of that reform, the World Bank refused to sanction the second tranche of its loan. The government was then prevailed upon to launch a “consultation” with the private sector, dissipating opposition, before the second tranche was released. The technocrats, having internalized the World Bank-IMF ideology, already formed what Broad describes as “a powerful, but not yet hegemonic, transnationalist faction of the Marcos government.” Their assistance was crucial to overcoming the resistance to the Bank’s desired policy changes that was apparent at the higher levels, particularly in the Central Bank, and by 1981 the technocrats in fact achieved hegemony in even that institution. The nationalists in the Central Bank were challenged not by the World Bank directly but by a coalition comprising “transnationalist” ministers and

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technocrats in the “interagency committee” formed to draw up the industrial reforms, using the World Bank’s industrial-sector report as a guide. By January 1981, this coalition had secured the resignation of Central Bank Governor Licaros, who was succeeded by Jaime Laya, a pro-World Bank technocrat. According to Broad, the Bank “injected a tight cell of technocratic transnationalists” into the Central Bank which “expanded its domain until it was able to push the entire Central Bank in a transnationalist direction.”12 The structural adjustment program failed in its declared aim of setting the Philippines on the road to export-oriented recovery, with the value of the peso plummeting (by 1985 it had fallen to 20 to the dollar), exports of electronics and clothing falling sharply after initial surges, employment in export-oriented manufacturing actually declining between 1980 and 1985 (as did employment in the Bataan export processing zone), over 150 financial institutions failing between 1984 and 1986, and hundreds of domestic firms being wiped out.13 On the other hand, the TNCs increased their hold on the economy, occupying 230 places in the list of the top 1,000 companies by October, 1987; and while TNC assets in 1986 accounted for only 35 percent of the total, their income accounted for a massive 85 percent of the total— P6.81 billion as opposed to the P i . 11 billion earned by the 770 Filipino companies in the top 1,000.14 The four transnational banks with fully owned Philippine branches increased their net income by 72 percent in 1982, and by a further 60 percent in 1983.15 The Philippines had been taken prisoner. At the policy level, those institutions that, like the Central Bank, had once adopted nationalist positions were now dominated by technocrats, enabling the World BankIMF Group to tighten its control of economic policy. In the economy itself, the TNCs had strengthened their grip in terms of ownership and control. Those Filipino entrepreneurs who had at one stage formed the class base of bourgeois nationalism had been severely weakened by the results of the restructuring program and thus were in no position to offer political leadership. Indeed, some businessmen who had once taken a nationalist stance had abandoned such positions at a relatively early stage. One such

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figure, Hilarion Henares, had reluctantly adopted the new credo of “export or perish” as early as 1980.16 Others had, as Broad points out, always had a foot in both camps anyway.17 Marcos was, therefore, hemmed in, with little room for maneuver unless he was willing to risk a dramatic break with Washington. This was the size of the challenge facing the PKP.

N o tes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Edilberto M. Villegas, “Debt Peonage and the New Society,” in Mortgaging the Future: The World Bank and IMF in the Philippines, ed. Vivencio R. Jose (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982), 56-58. Vivencio R. Jose, “Reorienting Philippine Education,” in Mortgaging the Future, 137. Ibid., 139. Renato Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1990), 14. Merlin Magallona, “The Economic Context of Neo-Colonialism,” in Mortgaging the Future, 86. Catholic Institute for International Relations, European Companies in the Philippines (London: CIIR, 1987), 119. Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance 1979-1986: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), xvii. The preface and conclusion of this work are coauthored with John Cavanagh. Constantino, The Nationalist Alternative, 18. Ibid., 59-61. Ibid., 60. Jose, “New Perspectives," in Mortgaging the Future, 216, citing Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1979. Broad, Unequal Alliance, 1979-1986, 128. Drawn from Broad, Unequal Alliance, 1979-1986, 222-26. Philippine Currents, July 15, 1988. Broad, Unequal Alliance, 1979-1986, 167. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 106-7.

C h a pter 1 6 : M arcos R efu ses to P lay i Immediately following the conclusion of the political settlement with Marcos, the PKP launched an information campaign among its members, explaining the reasons for the agreement and its perceptions of the “New Society.” Just a few months later, however, the party was complaining: There are, in place of the old leftist errors, the rightist clangers of complacency, false sense of security, and timidity in pointing out certain shortcomings in President Marcos’s administration. There is also the failure to be more conscious of long-range goals, introduce innovative styles of work, and consolidate organizational gains. All this demands from each member of the Party an unremitting struggle to study and leam further from each new problem and development, from each decision we make, from the historical experiences of each fraternal party and from the whole international revolutionary movement.' Complacency, coupled with unevenness in the ideological development of party members led to a further danger. Unless promptly combated there is always the possibility that the relative freedom [of the PKP’s amnestied status] may be interpreted as an end to the class struggle. The PKP’s amnestied status may also be taken to mean that the politico-economic interests of the reactionary classes are now subsumed to the interests of the working masses.2

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In response, the party upgraded its Marxist-Leninist schools, intensified its propaganda work and issued documents “on every aspect of Party life.” But the legacy of over forty years of illegal existence and underground methods was difficult to shake off in the rural areas, where some cadres emerging from the armed struggle simply did not know how to work openly.3 Despite the fact that party committees in the provinces were working under instruction to campaign on the basis of legality, this “never worked due to the conservatism within the peasantry . . . Even when we instructed Party organs: ‘Look, discuss with the masses!’ they replied: ‘The masses would not like to discuss with us. Remember, we’re under martial law!’ And some refused to discuss openly.”4 Furthermore, at least one of Marcos’s programs— land reform— had repercussions within the PKP, as those rural members who had received plots of land under the program began to develop differences with those who were still landless. These differences developed to such an extent that the party established separate organizations for the beneficiaries of land reform and the landless.5 Despite the initial problems, the PKP succeeded in one of its aims in concluding the political settlement, working openly and establishing a whole range of mass organizations. The year following the settlement saw the creation of a women’s organization, the Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina (KBP, Association of New Filipinas). This traced its origins to the League of Filipino Women established in the 1930s, some of the founders of which were now members of the KBP, and the Philippine Women’s Society formed in 1947.6 The KBP began its existence as a partner of an organization established earlier in the rural areas— the Samahan ng mga Progresibong Kababaihang Pilipino— Union of Progressive Women, SPKP.7 In January 1976, an organizing committee of seven was established with the aim of forming a nationwide youth organization. Preparations for the founding congress were extensive; forty-six delegates from Central Luzon laid the broad plans for the congress at a meeting in March, with more detailed plans being worked out at a further meeting in May. Such preparation paid off, for by the time of the founding congress of the Samahan sa Ikauunlad ng Kabataang Pilipino (SIKAP, or Union

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for the Advancement of Philippine Youth) on June 27, the organization boasted 4,000 members, and this would increase to 10,000 a year later.8 SIKAP’s aims were the “pursuit of equality, progress and peace, within the framework of the New Society.” Links were established with government and private institutions concerned with development and the

new

organization participated in a number of seminars and conferences, as well as conducting its own membership seminars with the aim of “inculcating a sense of nationalist consciousness among the youth.”9 An indication of the relative freedom which PKP cadres now enjoyed was the fact that SIKAP’s first congress was attended by various government functionaries and the guest of honor was none other than Marcos’s mother. By mid-1977, the new youth organization had groups in nineteen provinces throughout Luzon and the Visayas, the largest being in Nueva Ecija where

4,000

members were divided between

eighteen barrio

chapters. Provincial conventions were held in Nueva Ecija in September 1976, and in Bulacan in March 1977.* SIKAP established its own journal—

Bukang Liwayway (Dawn)— and, later, regional journals were established. A cultural group was formed “to develop songs, plays and poems to reflect the national situation.” Fundamentally, though, the main aim of SIKAP was to attempt to ensure that the reforms of Marcos were implemented in a thoroughgoing manner, and it therefore sought to “cooperate with institutions and individuals which translate these laws into action, into actual programs benefiting the masses of the Filipino people.”11 Internationally, SIKAP opened relations with the International Union of Students, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Youth (the head of whose International Department, Karel Lukas, visited the Philippines in April 1977). SIKAP gained access to the mass media, where it received sympathetic coverage, as illustrated by a full-page article in Expressweek, which profiled the organization’s president, Pedro Baguisa, and detailed the growth and aims of the organization.12

According to Pedro Baguisa, SIKAP’s president between 1976 and 1982, apart from in Luzon there were also provincial chapters in Cebu, Negros, Silliman University, Samar and Sultan Kudarat.10

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The KBP and SIKAP cooperated in the formation of a third organization in 1977. This was Bagong Sibol (New Growth), which was open to children between the ages of six and fifteen. Each of the “parent” organizations provided three delegates to form a committee, chaired by one of the SIKAP delegates, to assist the organization in the first year of its existence. The aim of reaching 10,000 members was set and this would be achieved before the year was out. The constitution of the new organization stated the belief “that the welfare and future of the young can only be enhanced if they themselves participate in the quest for equality, development and peace,” and put forward the slogan Kabataang para sa Kapantayan, Kaunlaran at

Kapayapaan (Youth for Equality, Progress and Freedom). The month after the founding congress, three Bagong Sibol members, accompanied by a SIKAP leader, attended the International Children’s Festival in Moscow. We saw above that Marcos’s land reform, in leading to the stratification of the peasantry, also affected the perceptions of the PKP’s rural membership. Therefore, in late 1975 a preparatory committee was given the task of forming a mass organization of agricultural workers, i.e., those landless peasants who had not benefited from land refonn and who were now becoming increasingly proletarianized by the development of capitalism in the countryside. The founding conference of the Aniban ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (AMA, Union of Agricultural Workers) took place in January 1976. Such was the growth of the new organization that a year later its first national congress in Bulacan was attended by a claimed 14,000 rural workers drawn from provinces from Cebu to Northern Luzon. The president of AMA, Romulo de Guzman, stated at the congress that the organization’s most urgent objective was to achieve greater representation and participation in the planning and implementation of socioeconomic reforms. Marcos appeared to welcome this when, in a speech read to the congress on his behalf, he declared: “The farmers are our frontline soldiers in our fight against hunger. Hence, I am confident to succeed in any reform measure I undertake whenever the laborers join in the vision and the struggle.”13 In early 1978 the Union de Impresores de Filipinas, the PKP-led printers’ union, took the initiative in establishing another women’s organization, this time aimed at women in the trade union movement. Commencing

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with fifty members, seven months later the Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino (SKMP, or Union of Philippine Working Women) claimed a membership of 1,000 as it prepared for its first congress. The organization held education seminars for working women on such subjects as the history of the Philippine labor movement, the theory and practice of trade unionism, union administration, political economy ( “with the emphasis on surplus value”), the present national and international labor situation, and practical labor relations. Through press releases, leaflets, radio interviews, rallies, and other mass actions, it conducted activity on social, cultural, and political affairs. The aims of the organization were stated as being the development of an understanding of “the right concept of unionism” and promotion of peace, independence, equality, and national development. A further aim was to “move and support progressive reforms being undertaken by the government; and to suggest/recommend laws which will benefit working women." More specifically, the SKMP sought the removal of US military bases from Philippine soil, the introduction of laws to improve the protection of working women, improved wages for both male and female workers, and the Filipinization or nationalization of strategic industries controlled by foreign investors.14 According to Pomeroy, at least sixteen such mass organizations linked to the PKP were formed during this period.15 As will be evident from the foregoing, in part their aims were to push for a more thoroughgoing implementation of Marcos’s reforms, and in this manner to impart a more consistently anti-imperialist character to the government itself. At the PKP’s Seventh Congress in 1977, however, the indications were that these aims were not being met.

2 The political settlement meant that the party’s congress in July 1977 was able to be held openly. Moreover, the preparations were more thorough and democratic than had previously been the case. “For the first time,” recalls Magallona, “the Party Congress documents were widely

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disseminated. We had the broadest discussion because we were able to translate the documents, mimeograph and distribute them.”16 The result of the congress was a 122-page document entitled For

an Independent and Democratic Philippines consisting of a detailed and comprehensive political resolution and a revised program. The latter followed the same lines as that adopted at the 1973 congress, but now appeared in a more detailed form, as many of the demands were specifically aimed at the Marcos government. Both documents achieved an impressive level of sophistication, once again revealing as mistaken the claim by Nemenzo that the PKP “adopted hook, line and sinker the Soviet analysis and only substantiated this with Philippine examples.”17 Rather than “tailing” Marcos or adopting a subservient or sycophantic tone toward his government, the political resolution constituted a sober assessment of his regime and a detailed analysis of the forces influencing it. The more progressive foreign policy pursued by Marcos was explained not in terms of Marcos’s own characteristics but by virtue of the shift in the balance of world forces. The chief expression of this new balance of forces was détente, the process in which developed capitalist states seemingly settled for peaceful coexistence with the socialist countries and the Cold War underwent a rapid thaw. Although not yet fully understood in the Philippines, détente has helped to a great extent in creating a more favorable political atmosphere in the country. Because of détente, for example, the anti-communist propaganda assiduously nurtured by American imperialism through the decades is gradually being eroded. Instead, the truth about socialist life continues to filter into the consciousness of Filipinos. . . . The greatest impact of détente is on Philippine foreign policy. Détente has not only made it possible but also imperative for the Marcos administration to establish diplomatic relations with socialist states as well as with militant countries of the Third World. This could not have happened ten or twenty years ago when American Cold War propaganda was riding high in this country . . . . . . This change must not be underestimated. The Party must exert every effort allowed by its present state of oiganization to support this progressive foreign-policy trend. It is our task to contribute to the

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strengthening of this trend that holds the prospect of ranging the Philippines with other anti-imperialist forces in the world.18 The role of Marcos in striking a more independent stance than his predecessors was recognized. He had called for a comprehensive re­ examination of the US military presence, and in the current negotiations over the military agreements had declared that Philippine sovereignty over the bases was “non-negotiable.” Following the Nairobi meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, he had announced a policy of “non-alliance,” which he explained as “a foreign policy of independence and a domestic policy of self-reliance.”19 The government had announced its intention to join the Non-Aligned Movement (although in fact Vietnam opposed the Philippines’ admission at the movement’s Lima conference due to the presence of US bases on its soil). Consistently, the Philippines now voted “for all the measures aimed at strengthening the NIEO [New International Economic Order] movement ” The previous year, Manila had hosted a ministerial conference of the Group of 77 (the poor countries within the UN) at which Marcos had submitted a key proposal for the creation of a commodity fund for developing countries which, despite US opposition, was adopted. It was acknowledged, however, that while there were shifts in a progressive direction at the level of policy pronouncement, in practice imperialism was achieving its aims with regard to the neocolonial restructuring of the Philippine economy. Thus, the Maoist characterization of imperialism as a “paper tiger” was erroneous. While the martial law regime had opened areas of flexibility and independence in Philippine politics and foreign policy, the “basic character of Philippine society as a neocolonial enclave of the world imperialist system” was unchanged and, moreover, “the trend towards political independence has not yet taken an irreversible course. All indications, in fact, point to renewed efforts on the part of imperialist forces to halt and contain the trend of national independence and social progress to ensure their hegemony in this part of the world.”20 Thus,

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it is clear that imperialism remains the number one enemy of the Filipino people. The main contradiction at the present stage of national development is between the narrow interest for profit and domination by the imperialist countries led by the United States and the patriotic and democratic aspirations of the broad ranks of the Filipino masses for political and economic independence, peace, progress and equality. It is primarily on this basis that the class alignment and the relation of forces in the Philippine society must be correctly assessed.21 On the domestic front, although the colonial influence was still dominant in education and the media, it was recognized that the government had made attempts, albeit limited, to minimize this. The creation of new political structures— the barangays and the sangguniang bayan— was seen as having “the potential of developing into real instruments of people’s power. If they do, by virtue of the organized strength of the masses themselves, then democracy will have genuine substance, not only the hollow shell or form as was the case before martial law.”22 With regard to the US military bases, the political resolution noted that while the Marcos government wished to assert Philippine sovereignty over them, it stopped short of demanding their complete withdrawal. The government’s main weakness in this regard was seen as its “failure to communicate with the broad masses of the people as to the necessity of removal of US military bases, and mobilize their support behind this position.”23 The congress observed that the martial law regime, while embarking on an objectively progressive direction in some areas, had taken a “contradictory position” in others, particularly the economy. Its heavy dependence on foreign capital and loans, like its labor policies, favored the transnational corporations— to the extent that such policies were incompatible with the requirements of the New International Economic Order. The officially sanctioned domination by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund is a glaring departure from the general movement for economic independence in the Third World. It contradicts the official claim of the martial law administration that self-reliance is the key to independence.24

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The advantages of the central planning approach adopted by the government had been rendered null and void by the fact that the main beneficiary was foreign monopoly capital which, despite the expansion of the public sector, remained the dominant sector of the economy. While the expansion of the public sector had given rise to hopes that the Philippines was moving toward a mixed economy, a “closer examination, however, would reveal that this trend is not being consciously pursued as a component of economic independence but as a form of pragmatic adjustment to objective problems as well as a response to the pressures of foreign monopoly capital.”25The congress therefore concluded that: the government’s role in the economy has no definite rationale. It varies from crisis to crisis and shows vulnerability to monopoly designs and pressures. Progressive developments in the oil industry and sugar export trade contrast sharply with wasteful investments in tourism projects and existing policies of government financing institutions. This in turn reflects the continued dominance of monopoly forces in state planning as well as the weakness of the nationalist forces in pushing for economic independence.26 Against these developments, the PKP counterposed the perspective of nationalist industrialization in which, if only due to the inability of the local bourgeoisie to provide the requisite levels of investment, the state sector would be required to assume a leading role. Unlike the documents of the 1973 congress, however, the political resolution and program adopted in 1977 stopped short of projecting the noncapitalist path of development and, indeed, the program’s prescription for the state sector could be described as social-democratic in that it recommended public ownership in utilities, infrastructure and energy, and joint ventures between the public and private sectors in other industries.27 Magallona explains that pursuit of the noncapitalist path “lost emphasis” at this congress, and that “at the end of the 1970s the martial law regime became much more controversial. . . There was a deterioration in the prospects for the noncapitalist path, and I think there was much more emphasis on the democratic platform.”28 Therefore, the party contented itself by repeating the long-term aim of

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socialism used at the end of the 1973 program and using the following “coded” formulation to outline the possibilities during the anti-imperialist stage. The strength and role of the state sector in any economy . . . are dependent on the relation of political forces. If the masses are united, organized and supported by the progressive intellectuals and capitalists, if they have a decisive influence on how the powers of government are wielded, then the state sector will consistently pursue an anti-imperialist direction and create new conditions for real democratization of wealth and popular participation in economic planning and development. If, on the other hand, the masses and their allies are weak, and the forces of monopoly capital are strong, the state sector will play a subordinate role which is often limited to facilitating the profit-making activities of the wealthy few. The government will not have the political will to consistently gear the economy towards nationalist industrialization, real independence, social justice, and popular participation in the planning and implementation of economic programs.29 On the labor front, the party welcomed the fact that the labor force had grown by two million due to the agrarian reform measures and the encouragement of small- and medium-sized businesses, but noted that the conditions of the working class had deteriorated. While government statistics showed a decline in the level of unemployment, “Party research reveals that unemployment and underemployment taken together actually ran between 30-45 percent.”30 There was a steady erosion of real wages due to inflation and inadequate increases in the minimum wage; moreover, 80 percent of workers (the unorganized) received less than the legal minimum. Official figures showed that in Manila 61.8 percent of families were below the “adequate food threshold,” just over 28 percent were at starvation level, while 83 percent fell below the “adequate total threshold” (a combination of food, housing, clothing indices, etc.).31 The party concluded that labor had benefited least of all from the government’s reform programs, due to the “inherently anti-labor bias” of labor legislation and the capitalist orientation of the economy. Although strikes in “non-vital” industries were in theory now permitted, disputes were

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so strictly regulated that the “right” was virtually meaningless. The new system of arbitration under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Committee was a recipe for bureaucratization and delay and the annual average of 15,000 cases was indicative not of the growth of workers’ confidence but of an increase in management abuses which would have been checked in the past by strike action. Increasingly, the CIA-influenced Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI), organizations supported by the Christian Democrats of West Germany such as the Friedrich Eburt Stiftung and foreign missionaries were influencing the larger trade union federations; the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines in particular was closely allied with the AAFU and was discrediting itself in the eyes of workers. The PKP’s political resolution paid considerable attention to the agrarian reform program— the “cornerstone” of Marcos’s “New Society.” While it was true that this was liquidating the old semifeudal relationships in the countryside, these were being transformed into increasingly oppressive capitalist relations. The operations of large-scale plantations and corporate farms are extending the wage system to thousands of agricultural workers. The extensive penetration of capital into the countryside is likewise vividly seen in the proliferation of rural banks, the widespread reign of cash or money economy, and the intensive promotion of modem methods of farming which entail the use of commodities being produced or marketed by transnational firms—e.g., fertilizer, tractors, pesticides, etc. In this, the role of foreign monopoly capital is exemplified in the activities of the World Bank whose loans are heavily financing the whole rural credit system through the Philippine National Bank, Development Bank of the Philippines and the national network of rural banks.32 Furthermore, the implementation of the program itself was suffering from the “weak and vacillating character of the implementing bourgeois leadership,”33 by the absence of meaningful participation by the peasantry and

the tendency of the bureaucracy to

impose

policies without

consultation. The shortcomings of the agrarian reform program were seen to be its limited scope, the slowness of its implementation, and the fact that tenants of land below the seven-hectare retention limit were not covered

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(a condition of retention, said the congress, should be that these lands be farmed cooperatively, employing the labor of their former tenants). While the landless had grown in number but were left to fend for themselves, the peasantry was forced to shoulder an onerous financial burden due to the fact that transnational corporations were supplying equipment and inputs at high prices (the congress suggested the creation of state enterprises to provide these requirements at low cost), and the samahang nayons were slow to be formed and were plagued by “the absence of concrete understanding by and meaningful participation of the masses.”34 These problems, said the congress, only serve to heighten the need to organize and struggle for the complete and just implementation of agrarian reform. It is necessary to strengthen and expand the organization of small peasants and workers that will protect and advance their common class interests. Links with already existing groups and agencies, both public and private, should be forged. Now is the time to act because the landlords are organized and peasant associations with dubious objectives are cropping up. Furthermore, the Maoists and some Church elements, in collusion with the landlords, are out to sabotage the agrarian reform program.35* The question of organizing the masses to exert pressure on the regime was seen as crucial by the PKP as, while it recognized that Marcos had adopted reactionary stances in many fields, it was not yet ready to write him off completely, considering that it was still possible to force him to adopt a more consistently anti-imperialist position. The party’s view of the Marcos regime is best expressed by the following passage from the political resolution. But why has the government failed to be consistently on the side of the objective interests of the masses? The answer lies in the weakness of the forces of the working people who must apply organized pressure and mobilize mass participation in order to protect and advance their own interests . . .

'lTiis is a reference to the CPP-NPA’s policy of dissuading agrarian reform beneficiaries from remitting their amortization payments to the Land Bank. See chapter 12.

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The ruling regime is continuously caught in the act of balancing between the pressures and counter-pressures of the Filipino masses, on the one hand, and the imperialist, oligarchic and reactionary interests, on the other. It attempts at some independent course but at the same time it succumbs to imperialist pressure on specific issues. It sets up the posture of being independent and self-reliant in politics but cannot extend this to economics. It wants to make a name in history but it cannot get out of the imperialist-defined perspective. It cannot see its way clear through an anti-imperialist position and in the absence of mass pressure, it pursues its own interests.36 To a certain extent, the PKP’s decision as to whether it should maintain its position of critical support for the government was influenced by an evaluation of the alternatives to Marcos. Obviously, as it had not yet been possible to rally the masses to exert sufficient pressure on Marcos to force him to act in a more consistently independent manner, it was even less of a possibility that a more radical anti-imperialist government would arise if he was deposed. A guide to the character of possible successors was given by the party’s analysis of the political opposition. The litmus test which the PKP applied to any domestic grouping was the way in which it was regarded by the USA. With regard to Marcos himself, the political resolution noted that the US attitude had swung from one of cautious support in his first term to growing hostility, especially once martial law had been declared. What the USA required were puppets in the “classical mould” to protect its political and economic interests. To this end, the US administration had been pressuring Marcos to lift martial law and hold elections, using President Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” crusade as a battering ram. Many of the opposition groups, on the other hand, enjoyed US support. While the church now opposed the martial-law regime, some church officials arrived at such a position through self-interest, being both “feudal and pro-imperialist in outlook.”37 The radical Church elements on the other hand, while “sincere and well-meaning,” had an insufficient understanding of the nature and role of imperialism and shared the Maoists’ inability to differentiate between anti-Marcos and anti-imperialist struggles.

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On the right were Marcos’s political and economic rivals, some of whom had formed a loose alliance with the church and the Maoists. Of the few who were sincerely motivated and genuinely desirous of a return to democracy, the PKP commented: “If they expand their narrow anti-Marcos political line into an anti-imperialist one and broaden their call for ‘restoration of democracy’ to include mass participation in all levels of government, then they can truly be part of the movement for progressive change.”38 The feudal landlords, on the other hand, were the “bulwark of reaction.” The Maoists were seen as clinging to survival through alliances with feudal landlords, Church elements, and anti-Marcos politicians “with direct and indirect imperialist support.”39 Even so, many were young and sincere and it was in the interests of the anti-imperialist movement that they be “won back and shown the correct path of struggle.”40 The Muslim secessionists in the south were regarded with considerable understanding by the PKP. The party frowned on the movement’s links with Libya but recognized that the operations of the TNCs had been one of the direct causes of the large-scale armed confrontation that had occurred during the martial-law period; neither was Marcos totally blameless, for his pre-martial law record on this issue had been largely negative, although his government was now responding positively by promoting Muslim culture and granting a semblance of autonomy. The PKP disagreed with the demand for secession, calling instead for Muslim autonomy in those areas where they were in the majority and for the development of ChristianMuslim unity in the struggle for national and popular democracy. Given this analysis of the opposition to Marcos, the PKP decided that the best way to develop the anti-imperialist movement was to continue to attempt to influence those of Marcos’s policies which were deemed progressive and, in so doing, to attempt to impart a greater measure of consistency to his anti-imperialist positions.

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3 The

extent

of Marcos’s own

commitment to

genuine

national

independence was judged by his position on the US military bases, and from the earliest days of the political settlement the PKP sought to influence him on this issue. In May 1975 the central committee sent him an open letter in which, in view of the forthcoming negotiations with the USA (which would last four years!) the party “thought it appropriate to inform you of our stand regarding this matter, in the hope that it will help you in some way in making the very important decisions close at hand.”41 The party’s ow n position was for total abrogation of the Mutual Defense Treaty and the Military Assistance Pact, but it was recognized that acceptance of this by the regime “might involve certain risks that the country may not yet be able to cope with in the present situation.” If, therefore, immediate abrogation could not be realized, “initial phases” could be implemented, including joint command, protection of the rights of Filipino base employees, prohibition of nuclear weapons, the termination of the US military advisory group, and the payment of appropriate rent. If it took decisive steps, the government might v eil be subjected to “tremendous US pressure and harassment in the form of tightening of credit, adverse propaganda in the Western press, and support of subversive forces seeking to overthrow it.” However, the Philippines could obtain loans from Arab countries, and the socialist countries would provide moral support.”Most of all, the force of the people united behind your progressive efforts will deter any attempt at sabotage.” During this period, Marcos provided scope for some optimism on this issue— at least by his public pronouncements. During a speech on Independence Day, 1976, he defined the four fundamental aspects of struggle for national independence as “the struggle to attain a dignified place in the family of nations; the struggle to maintain national peace and security; the struggle to attain full economic independence; and the struggle to attain social, political and social progress.”42 Earlier, in a speech to the AFP command and general staff college, he had identified the need to “create our own independent image as a nation that makes

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its own decisions and assumes the primary responsibility for its growth and progress.” Until recently, he said, the Filipino people had been “mere adjuncts in a Cold War coalition” but the Philippines would now “cease to be mere pawns in conflicts involving the Great Powers” and “shall refuse to be drawn into the quarrels of the great.”43 In a letter to Marcos, the PKP observed that these comments have placed in a much sharper focus the fact that those military bases constitute the most glaring blight to our national independence . . . The real reason for the maintenance of US military bases in the Philippines as well as other parts of Asia is to safeguard the security of foreign investments, particularly US investments, from the assertion of economic independence on the part of Third World countries.44 There was thus a contradiction, the party pointed out, between Marcos’s stated desire for economic independence and the continued presence of the bases. Moreover, they isolated the Philippines from the Third World and had resulted in the country being denied observer status at the Ministerial Meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Lima the previous year. Due to the anticipated repercussions of a demand for immediate withdrawal, the PKP suggested an extension of the bases agreement of short duration with new conditions “that will progressively remove US presence from those bases, until complete removal is . . . achieved in the shortest time possible.”45 In the referendum held in December 1977 to decide whether Marcos should continue as both president and prime minister, the PKP urged voters to use the “remarks” column on the voting papers to insert a number of demands, one being the immediate withdrawal of the US bases.46 As the negotiations dragged on, tension grew between the martial-law regime and the USA, with the latter intervening in the elections to the Interim Batasang Pambansa in 1978. It was at this stage that, responding to a US suggestion that the Philippines should share the “burden” of maintaining the bases, Marcos’s Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile snapped that the USA needed them more than did the Philippines.47 Earlier in the

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year, a visit by US Vice-President Walter Mondale was seen as aiming to strengthen the US bargaining position in the negotiations, leading thirtyfour trade union organizations influenced by the PKP to demand “that the government BE FIRM IN PURSUING AND STRUGGLING FOR NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY. The Filipino people wholeheartedly stand behind the present administration in all its efforts to stop foreign meddling in our national affairs, to uphold national dignity and to struggle for complete political and economic independence."48 The bases negotiations were finally completed in 1979. While Marcos obtained some “concessions”— notably that the bases would henceforth be recognized as Philippine property— these fell well short of the PKP’s hopes. The politburo issued a statement49 in which it charged that the amendments merely reflected “the adjustments in the strategic interests of US imperialism in the region,” consistent with the Nixon Doctrine of “Asianizing” US imperialism’s regional security system. The statement deplored the fact that the Philippine people were kept in the dark regarding their government’s position, let alone consulted over the proposals, and that the transaction was on the basis of secret agreements between the two governments. The party now called for a “united stand of all patriotic and anti-imperialist forces— including those in active military service— ” to remove the US military presence, suggesting that genuine Philippine control of the installations and weaponry should be achieved by the AFP taking them over by 1984 (at which time the agreements were due for their first comprehensive review). In order for the Marcos government to adopt such a position, there would be required the most intense struggle . . . waged by a broad united front of anti­ imperialist forces in the form of education campaigns among the vast ranks of the people, in the form of agitation and propaganda and varied forms of mass mobilization and actions. This massive drive should involve the military personnel as well as all levels of civilian government personnel. In the same statement, the PKP also sent a message to the CPP by condemning the “Chinese collusion with US imperialism, specifically with respect to the continued presence of US military bases in the Philippines.”

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4 As with the US bases, so with the other issues on which Marcos initially adopted a progressive stand. The PKP found that he would issue finesounding declarations of his intention to forge an independent path or to lift the people from their impoverishment, only to retreat in the face of US pressure, while martial-law conditions prevented the kind of mobilization of popular forces that would have been necessary to effectively counter such pressure. The PKP made use of every possible opportunity to argue for the lifting of martial law. However, rather than issuing blunt demands that would be ignored, the party chose to put forward reasoned arguments which at least held out the possibility of being acknowledged. Thus, three days before the plebiscite called in October 1976 to determine whether martial law should continue, Felicísimo Macapagal wrote to Marcos to indicate that the PKP viewed the event as an opportunity for stocktaking.* He acknowledged that the government had “in some respects veered away from the influence of imperialism and responded to the interest of the people.”51 The PKP leader listed what the party considered to be positive and negative aspects of Marcos’s administration, examples of the latter being its heavy dependence on foreign “aid” and capital, the capitalist orientation of the land reform program, and the “resurgence of widespread corruption in many government offices and the unrestricted profiteering of many companies amidst growing inflation and greater impoverishment of the workers.” Macapagal openly stated that the PKP would “make or break alliance with any political group or government or will support or oppose any government program” as dictated by the interests of the Filipino working people. While the government had launched some positive measures, “it has also set in motion certain countervailing measures that

Pedro Baguisa recalls that “some comrades, including the Lavas, wanted to support martial law, but in the central committee most level-headed comrades argued that supporting this kind of regime would lead history to condemn us . . . Our line was critical support, so we would tirelessly condemn the regime’s violations of human rights and civil liberties.””

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tend to offset the projected gains from these reforms.” This, said Macapagal, w as a direct result of the absence of mass participation in the formulation and implementation of the reforms. In this light, the PKP feels that it is about time that Martial Law be lifted in order to pave the way for greater mass involvement in governmental affairs. As it is, the masses cannot organize fully, despite their enthusiasm for reforms, because of the climate of fear generated by Martial Law. Macapagal then proposed the following specific measures: •

safeguarding of the rights to strike and organize

•

development

of

an

independent

economy,

free

from

the

domination of foreign capitalists •

extension of agrarian reform to all agricultural lands, with the plantations being organized into cooperatives

•

workers and peasants to be represented at all levels of government, proportionate to their number

•

positions in the barangay and sangguniang bayan to be made elective

The tone adopted by Macapagal in this letter was maintained when he sent Marcos copies of the documents adopted by the PKP’s seventh congress, pointing out that “we have at times outlined the role of your Administration in a critical light. You must know that this is done with all honesty of purpose and in the objective interest of the Filipino working masses.”52 The referendum on December 17, 1977, was called to determine whether Marcos should continue as both president and prime minister after the convening of the Interim Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) in 1978. While the PKP recommended a “Yes” vote, it saw the whole exercise as an opportunity for public discussion of the government’s programs. In a party statement, Macapagal gave the now familiar analysis of the contradictory trends within the government, quoting passages from

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the political resolution of the seventh congress and pointing out that the masses still did not understand the role of imperialism; added to this was the emergence of groups representing sections of the economic elite, whose political platforms are based not on a clearly-drawn anti-imperialist line but on a simplistic basis of being for or against Marcos. This explains why the anti-Marcos camp drawls] membership from the extreme right and ultra-left while the purely pro-Marcos group tends to rally elements from the right and apologists for the status quo. Given this reality, the only correct position is to expose the hand of imperialism in the negative programs of the martial-law administration and to mobilize the people behind the progressive trends toward national independence and social progress. This can only be done through mass education, mass organization and mass struggle.53 The party suggested the insertion of several demands on the “remarks” sheet of the ballot paper, including the lifting of martial law; restoration of the right to strike; the extension of agrarian reform; strict control of transnational corporations and the nationalization of key industries; immediate withdrawal of the US bases; and the strengthening of relations with the socialist countries, the Third World, and the Non-Aligned Movement. In late 1977 and early 1978, relations between the USA and the Marcos regime soured as the former began to bring pressure to bear on Marcos regarding the “succession” question, suggesting that an election be called to determine this. Marcos was quite willing to hold elections— and these were called for the Interim Batasang Pambansa in April 1978— but he had no intention of relinquishing office himself. Quite apart from this, the USA saw the election period as an opportunity to exert pressure on the Philippine government in the ongoing negotiations on the bases and for a new economic treaty. The PKP on the other hand saw in this situation “good openings for specific forms of propaganda and agitation along anti-imperialist themes Central to the party’s tactics in this period was its understanding of Marcos’s position. This saw

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opportunism or pragmatism as the main formula in foreign policy, whereby utmost benefits are expected from whichever side can offer the best bargain that might objectively contribute to the viability of the political leadership of President Marcos . . . Hence, the developments in the Marcos Administration that take on a [pro-] imperialist character [do] not have the character of a world view or a comprehensive position. It is more useful for the Party therefore to take a close watch of specific events that can be exploited by our correct tactical policies on anti-imperialism in order to broaden the understanding of the Party’s anti-imperialist line among the masses. An example of such a specific event was the collapse of the US preferential sugar market and the successful lobbying by Hawaiian and Texan planters for tariff protection, in addition to which the Carter administration had slapped a further surcharge on sugar imports. This opened up the possibility of pushing Marcos into closer relations with the socialist countries. Furthermore, it was believed in government circles that the USA had been behind attempts on Marcos’s life. Even less open to doubt was the fact that the USA was “coddling” and giving direct assistance to those well-heeled opponents of Marcos known as “steak commandos” who had sought refuge in the USA, and openly supporting “Ninoy” Aquino (at the time still imprisoned in the Philippines). The US media, in the meantime, was stepping up its attacks on Marcos, his wife and the “crony capitalists.” All of this could also push Marcos further toward the socialist camp, and so the PKP counselled against discounting the possibility that Marcos’s “posture of opportunism” toward the socialist countries could develop into a “posture of principle” as a result of struggle. During the election period, the party therefore committed itself to an attempt to open “various united-front links with the Marcos Administration on the basis of an anti-imperialist line . . . The Party should not hesitate in projecting these united-front links in terms of publicity calculated to the exacerbation of the contradictions between the Marcos Administration and the US.”55 In other words, the party sought to provoke further US pressure against Marcos in the hope that this would push him closer to the socialist countries. It was fully realized, however, that Marcos could succumb to

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US pressure, and thus the party stressed the need to strongly counter such tendencies, warning at the same time of “the danger of opportunism in [our] own ranks, which becomes more real as the united front tactics develop in practice.” During the election campaign, Marcos’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL, or New Society Movement, the party he had formed after the declaration of martial law) at first campaigned on the basis of its past performance, but halfway through it shifted emphasis to the issue of foreign interference, accusing the opposition party in Metro Manila of receiving foreign support. Marcos himself charged that both the USA and Japan, anxious to protect their political and economic interests, were meddling in the political affairs of the Philippines; he cited the several occasions on which the US government had attempted to intercede on behalf of “Ninoy” Aquino as an example of this. In a twelve-page paper signed by Macapagal,56 the PKP pointed out that this was the first time in the postwar history of the country that a government had “initiated a discussion on American intervention and exposed foreign machinations to subvert the political independence of the country.” Thus, the electoral exercise was considered “a major advance for the Philippine anti-imperialist movement . .

The party pointed

out, moreover, that this was but the latest development arising from the “intensifying contradictions” between the Marcos regime and the US government. In the month of January alone, Marcos had a bitter exchange with US assistant secretary of state Pat Derian on the issue of human rights; his finance secretary had revealed that the US side in the negotiations on a new economic treaty were seeking the return of parity rights; defense secretary Enrile had indicated that the USA needed the military bases more than did the host country; and Marcos had approved amendments to the Patent Law aimed at ensuring the transfer of technology by foreign investors and to tackle abuses by TNCs, especially transfer pricing and outrageous profits in the drugs industry. The PKP document also made the point that Marcos’s opportunism (referred to on this occasion more politely as a “pragmatic, centrist

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position”) was in actual fact a step forward compared to the “sheer puppetry” of previous administrations. It was this very pragmatism, the party explained, that, due to its unpredictability, had led the imperialists to conclude that Marcos must be destabilized in order to “hasten the resolution o f the succession in their favor.” The document quoted a Japanese businessman as typical: “This uncertainty, together with the present global crisis, makes it difficult to formulate any long-range programs in a five-year perspective, such as improvement and perfection of facilities, consolidation of personnel-employees, and market forecasts.” Thus, the elections had led to “massive support” by imperialist forces to the anti-Marcos camp, with “over a hundred foreign correspondents, mostly American journalists and CIA paid hacks”57 reporting all opposition statements. The united-front tactics pursued by the PKP bore fruit, as this period saw the youth arm of the government, led by Marcos’s own daughter Imee, taking part in anti-imperialist marches and demonstrations outside the US Embassy. There was no denying, however, that the elections also exposed the martial-law regime’s “vulnerable points”— the poverty of the masses, corruption, and the failure of the reform programs. The opposition, however, advanced no solutions to these problems and so were merely out to destabilize the regime to their own advantage. The “noise barrage” conducted in Metro Manila during this period almost succeeded in doing so, but the PKP pointed out that this was a tactic imported from Chile. Indeed, the morning after the “barrage” some US newspapers had run headlines about a “revolution” in the Philippines and this, the PKP said, indicated that there had been a plan to bring down the government in the closing stages of the campaign. Throughout the campaign, the PKP itself had conducted a “massive educational campaign on the issue of imperialism and its role in Philippine society.” Now the elections were over, that task had to be continued, strengthening the “present trends for national independence” by “the collective might of the Filipino people.”58 Despite the positive signs, however, the PKP was unable to muster enough pressure to push Marcos into a more consistent anti-imperialist

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position. Even in the run-up to the 1978 elections there was a strong indication that Marcos was not willing to take such a step anyway. This w as provided by the decision of the National Security Council (NSC) to deny the PKP the right to register and therefore participate in the elections. In February, Macapagal wrote to Marcos to express the party’s “great dismay and disappointment,” pointing out that the NSC decision appeared to have been based on a press campaign which had alleged that the PKP had still not fully abandoned the aim of overthrowing the government. Macapagal expressed the belief that the decision “confirmed that the roots of national disunity direcdy traceable to our colonial past are still well entrenched in our society, as evidenced by the Cold War-type misreading of the motives and objectives of the PKP as a political party by certain quarters in government.”59 Even before the NSC decision, there had been difficulties in registering as an electoral party anyway, as the Commission on Elections had insisted that in order to register as a national party the head office would have to be specified. An attempt to find office space, however, met with resistance from property owners. Magallona recalls: We examined a lot of possibilities. We could have registered at an office where we would be a mass organization as far as the owner was concerned. That could have been done very conveniently. But the possibilities were, considering the activities that would take place in that office, that the owner (if the building would most likely know and we would be booted out. It turned out to be very complicated.60 In this same period, Marcos himself—possibly in order to assure the Americans that, despite his present differences with Washington, he was not “soft on communism”— made a mischievous reference to the PKP’s “surrender en masse” in 1974 in his report Five Years o f the New Society. An indignant Macapagal reminded him: We insisted, and your representatives agreed, that our decision to forge a National Unity Agreement with your government should not be interpreted as “surrender." Consequently, throughout the year-long negotiations, in the meetings with your Excellency and in PD 571 granting amnesty to the

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PKP and its mass organizations, there was never any reference to any “surrender . . In the interest of truth and fairness, therefore, we are registering our protest over this inaccurate portrayal of the PKP’s decision to enter into [the] National Unity Agreement with your government.61 Later the same year, an editorial in the Philippine Daily Express lumped the PKP together with the CPP, prompting a letter from a retired AFP colonel, Greg R. Perez, which, although ostensibly an attempt to set the record straight, actually constituted further mischief-making. Perez, who had participated in the negotiation of the unity agreement, while praising the PKP for the thoroughness with which it had explained the 1974 settlement to its members and followers, and arguing that the party should no longer be considered a threat to national security, both described its past “subversion and violent pursuits” as “bygone adventures” and claimed that, despite its failure to gain legal status as an electoral party, it had supported all of Marcos’s KBL candidates.62 Macapagal replied that the PKP valued its record of struggle despite “massacre, torture and long-term imprisonment,” and that to term this “the ways of subversion and violent pursuits” was both a “subversion of historical truth” and “simpleminded.” The PKP, said Macapagal, had a different interpretation of the term “national security,” defining this as the interests of the working people. National security, therefore, was threatened by TNCs and the agencies of US imperialism. For the record, the PKP leader pointed out that the party had supported only selected KBL candidates in the recent elections.63 Of course, the political setdement was easily caricatured as “surrender” or “alliance.” This is precisely what the CPP did, and by the late 1970s it was joined by those liberal human rights activists and foreign journalists whose interest in the Philippines grew as Marcos’s relations with Washington deteriorated and President Carter began to emphasize the Philippine government’s record in this respect; and, of course, that record became progressively worse as the NPA began to recover from its earlier reverses, giving rise to increased abuses by the military. By the end of the decade, the PKP was coming under considerable pressure regarding its relationship

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with Marcos. On the one hand, there appeared to be less and less prospect of its policy succeeding, while on the other the party was being attacked for that very policy. According to Magallona, due to the efforts of the Catholic Church Marcos became really so unpopular that no one would touch any of his policies. There, we came under attack, and while we developed our opposition to be with the human rights movement and the democratic forces, the political setdement became at that time a bad memory. While we were working with democratic organizations, some of them were attacking us for being pro-Marcos. That was a difficult situation.64 Eventually, the party concluded that the potential which had given rise to the political setdement of 1974 was not going to be realized and, at its Eighth Congress in 1980, it withdrew its qualified support for Marcos.

N o tes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 1314.

Editorial, “Consolidate Ideological Gains!” Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1, FebruaryMarch, 1975. “The Party’s Legalization Drive: Realities and Challenges,” Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1, February-March 1975. Romeo Dizon, interview by the author, January 1990. Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, January 1990. Ibid. Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina, “Feminism and Filipino Rural Women: Looking Towards the Future,” March 1991. Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina, “KaBaPa’s Indigenous Training System,” undated. SIKAP, First Annual Report, June 27, 1977. Ibid. Pedro Baguisa, interview by the author, January 2008. SIKAP, First Annual Report. Expressiveek, May 19, 1977. Daily Tribune, January 13, 1977. SKMP, “Brief Report of the Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino,” September 25, 1978.

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15. William Pomeroy, The Philippines. Colonialism, Collaboration and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 298. 16. Magallona interview, 1990. 17. Francisco Nemenzo Jr. in Marxism in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, Third World Studies Center, 1984), 11. When interviewed by the author in January 2008, Nemenzo very disarmingly acknowledged: “Maybe that was self-criticism, because most of those I wrote myself. It was an uncritical acceptance of the Soviet line.” 18. Quoted in PKP, For an Independent and Democratic Philippines, 1977, 26-27. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Ibid., Ibid, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

11-12, 67. 78-79. 79. 30-31. 71. 27. 40. 41.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

See ibid., I ll, Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, March 2009. PKP, For an Independent and Democratic Philippines, 42. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 44-45. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 61-62.

35. Ibid., 63. 36. Ibid., 87-88. 37. Ibid., 91. 38. Ibid., 93. 39. Ibid., 94. 40. Ibid., 95. 41. Felicisimo Macapagal, on behalf of the PKP Central Committee, “Open Letter to President Ferdinand Marcos,” May 15, 1975. 42. PKP Central Committee to President Ferdinand Marcos, June 14, 1976. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Ibid. Ibid PKP Central Committee to President Ferdinand Marcos, March 15, 1977. Felicisimo Macapagal, “On the December 17 Referendum,” PKP circular, December 1977.

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47. Felicísimo Macapagal, “US Imperialism and Philippine Independence: The Main Issue in the Parliamentary Election,” twelve-page document issued by the PKP, 1978. 48. “Let Us Fight against American Pressure," circular issued in the name of thirtyfour trade union organizations, mostly from Metro Manila, 1978. 49. PKP, “Statement of the Politburo of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) on the New Amendments to the US Bases Agreement,” Central Luzon, 1979. 50. Baguisa interview. 51. Felicísimo Macapagal to President Ferdinand Marcos, October 13, 1976. 52. Felicísimo Macapagal to President Ferdinand Marcos, February 1, 1978. 53- Felicísimo Macapagal, “On the December 17 Referendum.” 54. PKP, “Developments in the Contradictions between the Marcos Administration and the United States,” internal document, February 5, 1978. 55. Ibid 56. “US Imperialism and Philippine Independence.” 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Felicísimo Macapagal to President Ferdinand Marcos, February 19, 1978. 60. Magallona interview, 1990. 61. Felicísimo Macapagal to President Ferdinand Marcos, March 14,1978. 62. Greg R. Perez, “PKP No Longer a Threat to National Security,” Philippines Daily Express, September 19, 1978. Pomeroy encountered Perez while in prison, describing him as “one who studies and assesses the ideology and documentary files of our movement, and who listens for nuances and contradictions. An opponent to take seriously, while laughing at jokes.” See William J. Pomeroy, Bilanggo (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2009), 117. 63. Felicísimo Macapagal to Philippines Daily Express, September 23, 1978. 64. Magallona interview, 1990.

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i In view of the fact that the Marcos regime had clearly not realized its nationalist potential, the PKP’s eighth congress was held in December 1980, less than four years after its predecessor. Although the documents agreed by the congress were once again professionally produced, the actual arrangements would appear to have been somewhat hasty, as Magallona recalls that the leadership was criticized for the fact that the discussion process ieft much to be desired.1 In many respects, the political resolution echoed that adopted at the seventh congress, although there were important differences. Thus, a fairly positive assessment of the international situation was tempered by the recognition that the USA and its allies had revived the Cold War, a development that saw the USA resorting to “direct military intervention as an instrument of national policy in order to maintain access to, if not control of, strategic areas as well as to prevent the forces of socialism and liberation from advancing and consolidating their gains.” Furthermore, the election of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency would see a return to the aim of “strategic superiority” over the USSR.2 The rise of Japan as not just an economic, but also a military, power gave rise to concern. On the other hand, the progress

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of the developing countries in their quest for a New International Economic Order was painfully slow due to the links of dependency which many such countries maintained with the imperialist powers. With regard to the impact on the Philippines of the measures taken by the imperialist countries in adjusting to crisis, there was no ambiguity in the PKP’s analysis. Since the declaration of martial law, the economy had been restructured in favor of foreign capital, while the “transnational economic stranglehold leads to political developments which strengthen the repressive character of the state and aligns it even further with the forces of imperialism.”3 Not only had the regime’s economic policies failed to alleviate unemployment, social inequality and poverty, but, “far from helping solve the crisis and defending our national interests against colonial onslaughts, [they! are only aggravating the crisis still further and weakening the cause of economic independence and national self-reliance.”4 The resolution recounted the role of the World Bank-IMF Group in these developments, with the consequent disastrous impact on the Philippine business community and the country’s descent into debt slavery. In a clear break with the recent past, the document continued: The notable exceptions to the group of Filipino business losers are the partners and sub-contractors of TNCs. These consist mainly of the wellpublicized economic cronies of President Marcos and the not-so-well publicized Filipino-Chinese business groups. Based on the available data, most of the joint ventures set up by the TNCs under martial law have these local and emergent business groups as partners, apparently as a consequence of the TNCs’ calculations that the best way to conduct business is to deal with the friends of the regime.5 The political role of imperialism was underscored in the political resolution by the incorporation of a new section pointing out that there was no inconsistency between the extension of new loans by the USA and those lending agencies under its influence and President Carter’s “human rights” campaign: the loans simply consolidated imperialism’s economic control of the Philippines, while allowing the USA to apply political pressure on issues such as the military bases, and the drive for “political normalization”

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was aimed at establishing a political succession which would ensure that this economic control was not endangered in the future. Thus, links had been forged with opposition forces. In fact, the USA had “become the headquarters of some anti-martial law groups which are actively lobbying in the State Department and US Congress and which are even raising funds and arms to topple the Marcos regime.” In this, the USA was attempting to learn from past mistakes such as in Nicaragua and Iran, where it had failed to groom alternative governments.6 The party noted that in foreign policy the Marcos government had since the late 1970s tended once more to shadow the USA. “The advance and retreat of the present regime’s foreign policy inevitably result from its attempt to adjust to the new balance of forces in the world, on the one hand, and its vulnerability to imperialist pressure, on the other.” The Marcos regime’s professed adherence to nonalignment, said the PKP, was “merely an exercise in rhetoric,”7 as this had not been accompanied by any serious attempt to remove the US military bases. Earlier in the year, Marcos had even called for a strong US military presence in order to preserve the “balance of forces” in Southeast Asia. Bowing to US pressure, Marcos had refused to allow Soviet warships to dock in the Philippines and the country’s team had been pulled out of the Moscow Olympics, supporting Carter’s boycott, called in response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Not only had the World Bank programs led to crisis and the extension and even intensification of poverty, but the “entire bureaucracy is still full of undesirables and corruption reaches the highest levels o f administration. The spoils system predominates in the national as well as local government. The new Parliament, the Interim Batasang Pambansa, is beginning to look like a second edition of the old Congress.”8 This was much stronger language than had been used at the seventh congress in 1977. Furthermore, while the party had previously taken the view that martial law might legitimately be used to suppress reactionary opposition while progressive reforms were implemented, the failure to deliver meaningful reform nieant that the prolongation of martial law, or the retention of its essential features, amounted to nothing more than “selfish moves on the part of the Marcoses to simply perpetuate themselves in power.”9 The political survival of the

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regime, said the party, was mainly due to the low level of oiganization by the masses, the divided nature of the opposition, and Marcos’s control of the media and the military. The hopes which the party had once expressed for the barangays and samahang nayons as potential vehicles for popular participation had not been realized, as these had been hijacked by the economic elite in each locality, acting as a transmission belt for the policies of national government rather than providing a forum for the upward transmission of ideas and suggestions. The principle of election had been ignored in many areas, with officials being appointed. Against these developments, the PKP posed the perspective of a program of nationalist industrialization consisting of the following elements: • the nationalization and/or Filipinization of “vital and strategic industries” • control of the TNCs • the “intensification of the anti-monopoly struggle through cooperatives and other people’s organizations” • an expansion of economic ties with other developing countries and the socialist bloc. The role of the state sector was delineated more carefully than in previous congress documents and was characterized by a more cautious approach. At one stage, for example, the document spoke of the

“eventual nationalization or government ownership and control of the key industries.”10 Again, mass pressure was called for in order to ensure that the government was compelled to “redirect” the state sector’s “assistance away from the TNCs and towards Filipino entrepreneurs.”11 It is likely that the PKP softened its approach to state ownership for a number of reasons. First, as we shall see, the congress issued a very clear call for the broadening and increased unity of the anti-imperialist forces, and it obviously wished to win the national bourgeoisie to such a position— something which would have been much more difficult if the party had projected the state sector primarily as the basis for a future socialist economy. Second, it is possible that, given the tighter “stranglehold”

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in which the Philippines was now gripped by the TNCs and the World Bank-IMF Group, the party took the view that the national-democratic stage of the revolution would take a lengthy period to complete, let alone the socialist stage. Finally, as Magallona admitted a decade later, the party had realized that the whole issue of state ownership had becom e more sensitive than hitherto, due to the corrupt uses to which it was being put by Marcos and his cronies.12 Therefore, rather than demanding that the state sector be assigned the leading role in the economy, the political resolution reiterated the view put forward at the 1977 congress that its role would be determined by the balance of forces. It was implied that the state sector was viewed as a force for assisting Filipino capitalists as much as anything else. Although it was also implied that a program of nationalist industrialization was still possible under the Marcos regime, Magallona explains that the party’s program for economic independence was “more an advocacy of the objective needs of the country.” Even so, the party felt that there still existed some possibilities under Marcos, based on the party’s observation that tension was mounting between the TNCs and the Marcos cronies and the fact that in 1979 Marcos had announced his eleven ambitious industrial projects.13 (See chapter 15.) The document made it clear that the adoption of a program of nationalist industrialization would be contingent upon a number of factors. Most fundamentally, anti-imperialism would need to become part of the consciousness of the broadest possible range of class forces, including the petty bourgeoisie and the “patriotically-inclined segments of the national bourgeoisie.” With this end in mind, the PKP set itself the task of “the building up of the widest unity of patriotic and democratic forces, eventually raising it to such a political level as to influence the correlation of internal forces in favor of the anti-imperialist movement and the working people.”14 Also, support would be required from other developing countries and the socialist bloc, from the former in the form of “preferential trade agreements, soft-term loans, raw-material cartels, joint enterprises, etc.,” while the latter could provide the “real transfer of technology, the building of heavy industry, and the provision of a steady, alternative market for traditional and nontraditional exports.”15 Indeed, the intensification of diplomatic activity which

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was taking place between the Philippines and the socialist countries was one of the factors which led the party to the view that there still remained

some possibility of progress while Marcos was still in power.16 At this congress, the PKP effectively broke free from its political settlement with Marcos. But it did this without actually declaring as much. Instead, it reiterated the statement it had made at the time of the settlement in 1974— that the party “will make or break alliance with any political group or government or will support or oppose any government program” as dictated by the interests of the Filipino people. The political resolution pointed out that the PKP had been true to its word, supporting the positive reforms of the Marcos regime while criticizing the continuation of martial law, the restrictions of civil liberties, and the limitations of the reforms and the manner of their implementation. “The PKP,” the document declared, “has become increasingly critical of government policies and actuations that have led to the failure of the reforms, the growth of corruption and the increased dependence of the country on foreign monopoly capital.”17 As with the previous Filipino administrations the PKP never hesitated to demonstrate its support for any government measures, no matter how limited, that tend to boost the country’s political independence just as it is always prepared to denounce and expose, as it is doing now, those measures that perpetuate the country’s dependence on foreign powers.18 The clear implication in the document, therefore, was that while the PKP would continue to oppose the Marcos government if its present course was maintained, its support would once again be forthcoming if an anti­ imperialist position was adopted. Thus, the door was left open. In the meantime, however, the PKP indicated that it was not prepared to place all its eggs in this particular basket. “Today, the PKP is ready to work with any and all groups in all aspects of the struggle against imperialism and for the removal of all barriers to the realization of a democratic political life which is essential to national independence and social progress.”19 The party took the view that radical transformation of Philippine society could not be achieved either by “a narrow group of government technocrats or a small group of armed revolutionaries,” or by “anarchism and terrorism,

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which only sow fear and confusion among the masses.” Instead, the masses needed to be mobilized behind the cause of anti-imperialism. Along this line, the (PKP] seeks frank and constructive dialogue with all anti-imperialist groups and elements honestly seeking meaningful changes in society—workers, peasants, landless rural poor, Christians, Muslims, social democrats, national democrats, intellectuals, women, youth, students, Filipino industrialists. It lays bare its historical record and its present political position in order to seek common ground with all progressive forces.20 This increased emphasis on the need for a much higher degree of unity o f the anti-imperialist forces was so strong that it could be said to constitute a new, major theme in the political resolution of the eighth congress. Evidence that the party, having weighed the objective situation and balance of forces, was taking a more cautious approach and viewing the liberation process as more protracted than had hitherto been the case, was to be found in the manner in which the congress viewed the big domestic capitalists. Whereas previously these had been dismissed as “compradors” and usually consigned to the enemy camp, now it was noted that, although they had “extensive interlocking interests with foreign capitalists,” some had “come into conflict with their foreign partners, especially in the areas of technology control and foreign trading.”21 In a similar vein, the political resolution also adopted a more conciliatory line with some of the opposition groups. For example, although referring to radical Church elements as “a motley group who tend to be eclectic and even anarchistic in their ideas and actions,” and pointing out that one such group supported the CPP, some of its members even joining the NPA, other groups were characterized more positively. One such had established its own party, the Nagkakaisang Partido Demokratiko Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (NPDSP, or United Social Democratic Party of the Philippines), was reported to have armed bands and links with the supporters of Aquino and Raul Manglapus and, while proclaiming an anti-imperialist and anti­ bureaucrat capitalist position, also professed to be anticommunist. Even so, the PKP viewed many of its members as “sincere mass organizers and anti-imperialists.” Yet other church radicals were affiliated to no political

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organization. “Independent-minded and not dogmatic, they tend to be more advanced in their analysis of the ills of Philippine society compared to many of the Maoists who are easily taken in by sheer revolutionary phrase-mongering.” Generally, the political resolution concluded, many of the moderate and radical elements in the Church are genuine activists who are moved by the suffering of their countrymen. Some have even done a splendid job in taking up the cause of the oppressed minorities. While it cannot be denied that some Church elements are being used by the Central Intelligence Agency and other imperialist institutions, majority of the Church activists, moderates as well as radicals, have the potentials of becoming staunch anti-imperialist fighters provided they will have a better exposure to the true nature of imperialism and what is the right path to take in combating it.22 The party went on to note that within the ranks of the CPP, discussion was taking place regarding the correctness of some of that party’s basic principles, i.e., the Maoist analysis of Philippine society and the strategy of “protracted people’s war.” The fact that these issues were being discussed, said the political resolution, indicated that both members and leaders of the CPP could “still be won back to the correct path of struggle.” Then again, while “Maoist mouthpieces” still slandered the PKP, such attacks had abated since the early 1970s. These developments led the PKP to state its willingness to “conduct a frank discussion with the sincere elements of the CPP on issues that will lead to the strengthening of the anti-imperialist movement in the country.”23 Even among the ranks of the traditional politicians, the PKP noted that a number had “strongly come out against the imperialist stranglehold on the economy,” and that “some basic issues” were being raised in position papers and caucuses. As an example, UNIDO, the recently formed opposition grouping led by Salvador Laurel, had “an alternative program of government which contains anti-imperialist and other progressive measures, which certainly deserves the support of the masses.”24 It was apparent, however, that the effectiveness of this anti-imperialist alliance would be impaired by the very real problems encountered in the two classes which were viewed as the bedrock of the movement—

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the working class and the peasantry. While stopping short of stating the dilemma quite so dramatically as this, the political resolution certainly did not romanticize these classes, either. There were a number of problems. The ban on strikes had only been partially lifted and government employees were still prohibited from joining trade unions. Furthermore, Marcos had raised minimum wage levels by presidential decree several times in the previous three years. By so doing, the President has practically assumed the role of a national negotiator for the workers so far as economic benefits are concerned. This practice has negatively affected the unionization work among unorganized workers, who tend to rely on increases in wages and allowances decreed by the government rather than struggle for such benefits through their collective effort.25 Even more fundamentally, less than ten percent of the eight million wage workers were “effectively unionized” in that they were covered by collective bargaining agreements,26 and even these were dispersed among hundreds of competing federations. In a self-critical tone, the document attributed this low union density and dispersion to “the failure of progressive organizations to conduct a comprehensive and systematic program of educating and organizing workers . . .n27 Other factors responsible for the poor state of health enjoyed by the labor movement included the encouragement of “business unionism” since the suppression of the Congress of Labour Organisations in the early 1950s, regional differences arising from “ethnolinguistic” variations, and the uneven development of the economy. Although the political resolution noted a growth in militancy despite the continued existence of maniai law, the presence of the problems mentioned above constituted a major stumbling block to progressive change, especially as the working class was viewed as being “the most potent force for change, particularly in the struggle for economic and social liberation,” haVing the “primary role in the anti-imperialist struggle.”28 If, as the PKP prescribed, a broad anti-imperialist alliance was necessary in order to open the way to economic independence, that alliance would obviously suffer from the fundamental problems besetting the working class.

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In the rural areas, the situation was even more serious, with less than five percent of the peasantry and landless poor being organized.29 Land reform, projected by Marcos as the cornerstone of his “New Society,” had been successful “only in enhancing capitalist growth.”30 Paradoxically, those most opposed to land reform were the small landowners, for the larger landlords were better able to adapt to the situation, moving into rural banking and agribusiness. The party therefore shifted its position and urged that the retention limit should not be lowered beneath seven hectares (subject to the landlord entering a cooperative arrangement with his former tenants), as the small owners “must become part of the united front against imperialism and monopoly capital”; it was therefore “important not to alienate them, but to bring them back to the revolutionary movement.”31 In the meantime, it was noted that many among the rural masses were confused about the real roots of their continuing poverty and some have even accepted it as natural. Only a few understand the commanding role of agribusiness TNCs in the countryside and how these international leeches are siphoning off the wealth produced by the land. Many are still unprepared to accept and help execute cooperative solutions to what are essentially problems affecting all.32 Thus, in 1980 the sobering truth was that the majority of Filipino workers had yet to attain trade union consciousness, while the rural masses remained entangled in the traditional conservatism of the countryside. While such a truth augured ill for the kind of revolutionary program still being doggedly pursued by the CPP, it also raised questions about the more realistic perspective advanced by the PKP.

2 The PKP’s hopes that Marcos would find it within himself to challenge transnational capital on anything more than tactical grounds were not realized.

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As w e saw in chapter 15, for example, the eleven industrial projects m ooted by him came to practically naught. Three months after the projects w ere announced, Industry Minister Roberto Ongpin had attended a meeting of the Philippines’ creditors (the “Consultative Group”) and, at the request of the World Bank, “clarified” the thinking behind the projects by announcing that as far as possible they would be foreign-owned. The Bank continued to apply pressure, arguing that plans for the steel mill and the petrochemical com p lex should not proceed— as, of course, these would provide precisely the kind of backward linkages which would achieve a measure of economic independence for the Philippines and therefore jeopardize imperialist control of the economy. Further “clarification” was to come in January 1981, w hen the Ministry of Industry’s liaison to the World Bank for the structural adjustment loan explained that all that had been agreed was that feasibility studies would be undertaken— despite the fact that earlier reports had indicated that these had already been conducted.33 Similarly, the regime’s announcement that martial law would be lifted by the end of January 1981 was not seen by the PKP as an occasion for rejoicing. To declare the lifting of martial law and at the same time empower the President/Prime Minister under the Public Order Act (PD 1737) to order preventative detention, to restrict the “movement and other activities of persons and entities with a view of preventing them from acting in a manner prejudicial to the national security," to close “subversive publications or other media of mass communications,” to control admissions to educational institutions “whose operations are found prejudicial to the national security” and to take any measure “to prevent any damage to the viability of the economic system"—is not to terminate martial law but to perpetuate i t . . . The proposals, declared the party, represented a continuation of the martial law conditions which had “obstructed the people’s path in their struggle for national liberation from imperialist control,” and thus the mass organizations were called upon to “campaign relentlessly for a genuine restoration of civil liberties and the repeal of all laws and decrees preventing the realization of a democratic political life.”34

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From this point on, the PKP viewed Marcos as a victim of his own failure to challenge imperialism and thereby win popular support. Thus, he was forced to bow to the demands of the USA and the international financial institutions and follow the path of “political normalization.” In line with this, a plebiscite in April 1981 rubber-stamped constitutional amendments providing for the creation of an executive committee, laying the groundwork for the restoration of the two-party electoral system, and allowing Marcos to legitimize his continued rule through a presidential election two months later. The whole exercise, said the PKP, illustrated the fact that it was “the tragic fate of the Philippines that the direction of her political and economic life is shaped and determined not by the independent and collective will of the people but by imperialism and the local forces subservient to it.” Given the absence of Marcos’s will to confront imperialism, and the consequent absence of popular support, the rules of “political normalization” were “manipulated to suit the narrow requirements of political survival, within the framework set up by foreign monopoly capital.” Featured in this framework was a very short campaign period and a system of accreditation favoring “only the well-financed parties subservient to imperialism.” The PKP therefore urged that all progressive forces should unite in a campaign to expose not only the anti-democratic nature of the forthcoming presidential election but also and above all the “invisible” role of imperialism in the polls. The anti­ democratic amendments in the Constitution which are now being put into operation should be exposed and opposed, especially the setting up of the Executive Committee whose members may not even be elected by the people but who may be chosen on the basis of closeness to the World Bank. The party also called for a campaign for the right of the masses to set up their own political parties, with provision for full and active participation in political life. Furthermore, a constitutional convention should be called in order to frame “a fundamental law embodying the patriotic and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people as well as nationalist safeguards against the demands of foreign monopoly capital over the national patrimony, and

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providing for the accreditation of political parties representing the interest o f the working masses.”35 However, the PKP’s new emphasis on the unity of the anti-imperialist forces, a high degree of which would have been necessary to achieve the above demands, did not yet bear fruit. Magallona relates that many individuals within the CPP-NDF were approached after the eighth congress. “Some said ‘We didn’t know about your policy.’ We told them: *We distributed this and mailed it to some of your people.’ But there was n o immediate response. It was not until the late 1980s that we made some progress in that direction.”36 As the 1980s unfolded, the PKP became more and more critical of the Marcos regime, while at the same time avoiding the error of the CPP, which projected a line which was effectively “anti-Marcos above all" (rather like the PKP’s wartime line, much-criticized by Sison, of “anti-Japanese above all"). Instead, in all of its statements the PKP was at pains to point out that the root of the Philippines’ problems lay in the country’s relationship with imperialism. For example, a central committee statement released in August 1982 portrayed Marcos as a “beleaguered President” as the USA and the World Bank-IMF Group increased the pressure on him to step down, the weakness of his position revealed by the fact that, although he was by this time alleging that “foreigners” were plotting against him, he failed to name those responsible. Although US state department officials were alleged to have released a confidential memo by a US consul in Cebu regarding the worsening economic and political situation in Mindanao to an anti-Marcos group in the USA, Marcos failed to even issue a note of protest. At the same time, it was known that US Ambassador Michael Armacost and other embassy officials were consulting with Marcos’s opponents. By this stage, a full year before the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the economy was in dire straits. Both inflation and unemployment exceeded 20 percent, and the first half of 1982 had witnessed a budget deficit of P10 billion and a trade deficit of $500 million, while the foreign debt had reached $16 billion. Marcos’s only hope, said the PKP, lay in persuading the World Bank and the IMF to restructure old loans, but such a process would be made conditional on “more stringent measures and tax laws” and “policies which

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will further aggravate unemployment and the crisis of the local industries” The crisis facing the Marcos regime was, said the statement, “directly traceable to its blind and unquestioning adherence to the World B an kIMF-imposed program of labor-intensive, export-oriented industrialization that is so dependent on transnational corporations.” Interestingly, on this occasion the PKP did not, as it had done in similar statements in the past, call upon Marcos to allow the mobilization of the anti-imperialist forces, possibly an indication that the party had effectively written him off for such purposes. Instead, it accepted that Marcos could not “hang onto power indefinitely,” but warned: Whatever is the outcome of the US-directed campaign for a new president who can once again give the Filipino people fresh hopes and illusions, it is clear that the basic ills of Philippine society will not disappear unless the pro-imperialist socio-economic program is dismantled. Whoever succeeds President Marcos has to contend with this reality.37 This theme was continued in a central committee statement issued in June of the following year. Interestingly, this began as a discussion of individual liberty, an issue to which the party had not in the past assigned a high priority; but its approach differed from that adopted by most of the human rights organizations (many of which were led by the church) in that it related the issue to imperialist control and, in so doing, exposed the hypocrisy of the US calls for respect of human rights. Of particular concern was the fact that Presidential Proclamation 2045, which had lifted martial law, had provided for the continued suspension of the writ of habeas corpus for all detained for “the crime of insurrection or rebellion, subversion, conspiracy or proposal to commit such crimes, and for all other crimes and offences committed by them in furtherance or on the occasion thereto, or in connection therewith.” Also, the Public Order Decree left it entirely to the judgement of the president whether there existed “a grave emergency or a threat or imminence thereof,” in which case Marcos could issue orders for preventative detention, the closure of publications, etc. Furthermore, the power given to the presidency had led to “secret legislation,” for although PD 1834 (imposing “penalties of unprecedented

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harshness on political crimes”) and PD 1835 (which enacted a revised AntiSubversion Law) were both executed in January 1981 with the intention that they take immediate effect, they had not come to public notice until May 1983. These developments indicated, said the PKP, that a “deep crisis o f individual freedom now infects the whole political system.” Moreover, practices whereby victims were branded as “subversive” merely to justify repression, and labor leaders and journalists were “invited” to attend interrogation by the military authorities, were not merely the result of abuse of power but had “become an integral feature of a system of national oppression, operating in the service of foreign monopoly capitalism in order to prevent fundamental changes in the interest of the broad majority of the people.” It was a fact, admitted by US politicians and generals in numerous congressional hearings, said the PKP, that US military assistance to the Philippines was intended to provide the Philippine armed forces with the means to safeguard US interests. “Its objective is to deceptively hide the American instrument of suppressing our movement for national independence by means of a Filipino clothing.” And, in fact, despite the US clamor for human rights, the amendments to the Military Bases Agreement had provided for an increase in such military assistance. By this means, the Filipino people were encouraged to blame Filipino leaders, and not US imperialism, for human rights abuses. For its part, the PKP avoided a nonclass, “moral” approach to human rights, pointing out that the movement for independence needed freedom to organize, access to information, and a free press. “National independence is a movement against politically repressive laws. As political repression is an instrument of imperialist control, the struggle for national independence is a struggle for individual freedom.”38 When, just over a week after this statement was released, Marcos bowed to the dictates of the IMF and devalued the peso to the rate of eleven to the US dollar, the PKP pointed out that, although the measure was imposed on the government as a condition for further loans, the devaluation would itself make further loans inevitable as the World Bank projects in the country involved “heavy importation of raw materials, consultants and technology." The party drew attention to the fact that every devaluation

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since 1962 had been demanded by the IMF and that now, as previously, the beneficiaries would be the TNCs in the manufacturing sector, due to the enhanced exchange power of their dollar holdings. In passing, it was noted that, quite apart from pressure from the World Bank-IMF Group, most of Marcos’s eleven industrial projects had fallen by the wayside due to the higher cost of imports arising from the devaluation. The program for economic independence and national sovereignty adopted at the eighth congress had now taken on, said the party, “added relevance and urgency in the light of the present economic crisis.”39

3 It was now perfectly clear that there was no way out for Marcos. On all major questions, he was bowing to the wishes of the World Bank-IMF Group and, in that the policies of those institutions tended to worsen rather than improve the economic situation of the Philippines, the regime found itself politically isolated. The USA’s campaign for an orderly political succession moved into a higher gear with the planned return to the Philippines in August 1983 of its preferred candidate, Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Aquino’s candidacy ended, however, as he disembarked from the aircraft at Manila. The mass demonstrations, largely organized by the church and the bourgeois opposition, which followed the assassination, increased Marcos’s isolation. Unlike the CPP which now portrayed Aquino as a principled martyr in an attempt to ingratiate itself with the burgeoning protest movement, the PKP assessed developments rather more soberly. A statement issued a month after the assassination observed that, frustrated by the regime’s failure to introduce meaningful democratic reforms, many people, justified or not, regarded the fallen opposition leader as a bearer of hope for urgent political changes . . . In the context of the country’s fundamental problems . . . the people are inclined to seize every opportunity for an alternative political leadership, in their desire to escape from the oppressive political practices and economic policies.

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At the same time, however, popular reaction to the event was also “a tremendous upsurge of mass protest against the present dispensation for its repressive measures against democratic practices, abuse of power, and manipulation of the electoral process to perpetuate its rule." The PKP expressed the view that the government could still regain the confidence of the people by conducting an honest investigation of the assassination and by belatedly introducing an array of democratic measures— the restoration of the writ of habeas corpus and the curtailment of presidential powers, the removal of the restriction on the accreditation of political parties, the release of all political prisoners, strengthened legal protection for mass organizations, the removal of the restrictions on workers’ rights, the suspension of increased tuition fees in all schools and the shifting of expenditure from military to educational purposes, the provision of interest-free amortization payments for family-sized farms, the halting of further expansion of corporate farming and the creation of cooperatives for landless rural workers, the improvement of squatters’ sites and a halt to the eviction of squatters, the introduction of price controls and the reduction of water and power rates. The central committee concluded by underlining the fact that there was no substitute for the masses organizing themselves in order to “bring about decisive political action to realize these minimum demands.”40 Almost immediately, the government demonstrated that it had little interest in regaining popular confidence by such means, for in October the peso was devalued yet again (to a rate of fourteen to the US dollar). This was accompanied by further IMF impositions, including tight credit, an upward flotation of interest rates, cuts in government expenditure, and extra taxes. Commented the PKP: The regime is aware that the devaluation will have a negative impact on the economic life of the nation and will add fuel to the growing political unrest, and yet it could not do anything but succumb to the pressures of the World Bank-IMF Group. The devaluation shows how weak the government is and who really are the policy-makers in this country. The Marcos regime is now reaping the bitter fruits of its own pro­ imperialist orientation. The more it subscribes or is forced to follow the

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IMF economic recipe, the more it becomes isolated from the people as a result of the deepening economic crisis. It was in such circumstances, said the party, that the regime resorted to the “mailed fist.” While the government was guilty of a “virtual surrender to foreign dictation,” however, it was “not enough to merely demand an end to the Marcos regime without instituting fundamental changes in the economic and political life of the nation.” The party reiterated some of the democratic demands it had put forward a month earlier, while emphasizing that the most urgent task of the organized working masses, however, is to expose the role of imperialism in the present crisis and to stress the necessity of a broad anti-imperialist unity in the present democratic movement. The present crisis calls for a broad anti-imperialist unity of all patriotic and democratic professionals, military men, women and students with the working masses.41 One of the difficulties encountered in attempting to forge such unity— the perception by other left groups and the opposition that the PKP was a pro-Marcos party— was briefly discussed at a meeting of the PKP’s united front commission in January 1984. It was the view of Edilberto Hao that some of Jose Lava’s writings may have contributed to this perception, and as a result he wrote a long memo to Lava, drawing attention to the fact that his articles for World Marxist Review and the Moscow publication New

Times sometimes departed from the PKP’s official position. Hao questioned why Lava should have given a positive review to two books by Marcos (which had, moreover, been published a year and two years earlier) at a time “when the more reactionary concessions of Marcos to imperialism have become more pronounced,” thereby making the PKP “vulnerable to charges of being pro-Marcos, and you personally of being an apologist for Marcos.” Lava had, wrote Hao, “always pinned too much hope on Marcos’ ‘nationalism,’ as may be gleaned from your earlier articles on the national situation.” Not only were Lava’s assessments of Marcos far more positive than those of the party, but Hao also found himself unable to “understand the undue haste with which you brushed

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off the Marcos regime s responsibility for the Aquino assassination, and for your immediate conclusion about CIA operatives having done it, which analysis was met with polite sarcasm among some people you met here in your recent homecoming.”42 A further example of difficulties encountered on the unity front can be found in the pages of the Philippine Collegian during this period. To commemorate the centenary of Marx’s death, a series of seminars was held at the University of the Philippines on the theme “Marxism in the Philippines.” One of the key speakers was former leading PKP member Francisco Nemenzo Jr. and, “in the hope that he would com e out with a fair assessment,” the PKP provided him with documents. In the event, however, Nemenzo claimed that the PKP lacked a Marxist ideology. When this was reported in the Philippine Collegian, PKP general secretary Felicisimo Macapagal wrote to point out that Nemenzo had been head of the party’s education department and the “fact that he did not concentrate on his job is the best proof that he himself is not a real Marxist, which was precisely one among many reasons . . . why he was expelled from the Party in 1972.”43 Of course, neither Nemenzo’s contribution nor the retort by Macapagal did anything to foster unity and in fact the exchange merely illustrated that broad unity at the grassroots level of the movement, which may have acted as a restraining influence, was almost entirely absent. Much more constructive was a document issued by the PKP in March 1984 entitled “A Suggested Program towards National Unity and Reconciliation.” This was a contribution to the discussion which, since the onset of the political and economic crisis gripping the Philippines, had commenced concerning the kind of political program that might command broad support. The party made clear that the document had in mind “the urgent need for broadening the patriotic, democratic movement for national liberation against imperialist domination and exploitation.” Furthermore, our critical situation demands the highest type of patriotism, statesmanship, critical intelligence, maturity, understanding, spirit of accommodation in dealing with minor conflicting interests, and subordination of individual to national interests, coupled with feasible alternative solutions, however difficult they may be. There is no time for petty rivalries, name-calling,

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fault-finding, personal insults, sectarianism, narrow-mindedness, and know-it-all arrogance. The document put forward a number of immediate demands, which the PKP saw as commencing the process of national unity and reconciliation. These consisted of the political and economic demands expressed in the party’s statements of September and October 1983, along with an amnesty for those still engaged in rebellion, strict measures against hoarding and profiteering, a more “vigorous and systematic campaign against graft and corruption,” the declaration of a unilateral moratorium on debt repayments during which the debts should be renegotiated, and the mobilization o f the people to oppose any imposition by the lending agencies or creditors detrimental to the national interest or the living standards of low-income families. In the longer term, the PKP suggested the convening of a constituent assembly, with delegates from all classes and strata of society, to prepare for constitutional reform. The Philippines should strive to be self-reliant as a nation; as this would involve sacrifices by high- and middle-income groups, such sacrifices should be minimized by a system of regional selfreliance among the countries of Southeast Asia (whether members of ASEAN or not) and a series of measures aimed at collective self-reliance among Third World countries striving for the New International Economic Order. A program of nationalist industrialization should be accompanied by regulation of the TNCs, the aim being to “loosen and eventually eliminate their stranglehold over the strategic sectors of our national economy.” Land reform should be revamped in “scope, design and implementing mechanism.” The rights of workers to organize, bargain collectively, and to strike should be guaranteed while incomes, prices, and profits should be regulated “to enable the working people’s standards of living and quality of life to be raised gradually, even while allowing reasonable profits for private enterprises.” The program suggested improvements in the fields of education and culture, health care, and the guarantee o f full cultural autonomy for Muslims and other ethnic communities. Finally, the document called for a foreign policy based on nonalignment, the establishment of

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diplomatic relations with all countries, disarmament and the adoption of a “definite schedule" for the phasing out of the US military bases.44 The PKP utilized this program during the campaign for the parliamentary elections of May 1984, in which it withheld endorsement from all parties but supported selected candidates “displaying nationalist or anti-imperialist inclinations” and “conducted an educational campaign for the broadest possible anti-imperialist national democratic front.”45 In a preelection statement, the party pointed out that it “would be foolish for anyone to go to the election precinct on May 14 thinking that if the candidates of his choice win and assume their seats in the Batasan, the root causes of the present crisis would disappear or its harsh consequences would lessen.” Imperialist forces were active in both the administration and opposition camps, “manipulating the forthcoming election with funds, agents and all forms of political influences,” and it was therefore expected that the result would “merely serve to stabilize the position of imperialist forces and further advance their interests.” The Filipino people had, however, not yet achieved the level of political consciousness required to bring about national liberation from imperialist domination and thus every means— including the forthcoming election— should be used to reach the people. PKP would consider the results of the forthcoming election to be some success if the people would emerge more politically conscious of the concrete interests, aims, allies and other manifestations of imperialism and if they would be more aware of the necessity for the unity of the broadest sectors of the masses as a requisite for a broad-based democracy and for liberation from imperialist domination.46 This approach, differing from that of the CPP, which called for a boycott, was based on the view that, although the power of the 200-member Assembly was limited while Marcos retained supreme authority, “success for the opposition in the election would be a major step toward dismantling the president’s powers.”47 Of the 183 elected seats in the Assembly, 62 were won by opposition candidates, although the party acknowledged that their success was due less to their own attributes and more to the “growing contempt” for Marcos’s party.48

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4 By the mid-1980s, the base of Marcos’s political support among the elite had narrowed considerably, for while the tight credit of the 1980s drew the “crony capitalists” closer to him, the “noncrony” supporters of export-orientation joined the opposition. Then, in 1984, the World B an k IMF Group and the Philippines’ creditor-banks opened an attack on the cronies, singling out Eduardo Cojuangco and Roberto Benedicto for particular attention.49 There were two major reasons for this attack. First, Marcos was becoming increasingly defiant as opposition to his regime mounted, and by attacking the “crony capitalists,” the USA was seeking to undermine the one remaining pillar of Marcos’s political base. Second, some of the “cronies” were becoming so powerful economically that they had begun to encroach on territory that the TNCs regarded as their own. Eduardo Cojuangco, for example, now enjoyed a monopoly position in the coconut industry, having taken over milling companies previously owned by TNCs, including Procter & Gamble. The pragmatic approach adopted by Marcos, attempting to walk a line between nationalism and the interests of imperialism, led in the end to his political isolation. When the attack against his “cronies” commenced, the writing was on the wall. The only way in which he could have fought free of the web of neocolonial arrangements in which the multilateral financial institutions had ensnared the Philippines would have been to move into a much closer relationship with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, with the latter serving as major destinations for Philippine exports and sources of the capital goods required for nationalist industrialization. That, it seems, would have been a step too far for Marcos and by 1985 it would, anyway, be too late, as Mikhail Gorbachev, elected as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that year, would turn his back on many of his party’s international commitments, in effect confirming the lengthy sentence of imperialism’s economic prisoner in Southeast Asia. In his analysis of the national situation following the 1984 elections, the PKP’s general secretary expressed the party’s reservations concerning

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the nature of many members of the opposition, pointing out that leaders of the national bourgeoisie and the moderate church had brought to the anti-Marcos movement much greater resources, funding, and international contacts and that, despite the adoption of some anti-imperialist slogans, iheir main aim appeared to be to replace Marcos with a more “acceptable” leader. Strategically and objectively, the main bulk of the opposition and US imperialism are united in the desire to frustrate any capability on the part of Marcos and his cronies to continue in power, to preserve the illusion that the root of the crisis is Marcos and not the neocolonial system, and keep the people hoping for solutions to their miseries through the election of a new demagogue and not through the complex process of struggling against imperialist exploitation. In view of the imperialist influence over mass media in the Philippines, including the so-called “alternative press” of the opposition, the people have generally lx.*en affected by the simplified version that the present economic and political crisis was a result of the Aquino assassination, and that the way to overcome this is by replacing Marcos with another leader who can regain the confidence of foreign capital and the World Bank-IMF group. Imperialism having up to now succeeded in deflecting the blame for the crisis away from itself.

There was, said Macapagal, a number of key questions on which the interests of imperialism and the bourgeois opposition to Marcos coincided. One such question was that of the privatization of the state sector of the economy. The program drawn up by the World Bank and the IMF saw privatization as a means of reducing the government’s budgetary deficit, while the bourgeois opposition would benefit from the privatization of those government corporations which were profitable or rehabilitated. Similarly, Marcos was so politically discredited that the Filipino people would take a jaundiced view of any apparent agreement concluded by him. It was therefore in the interest of imperialism that negotiations with the World Bank-IMF Group and on key issues such as the Military Bases Agreement should be concluded by “an attractive new face,” and here the USA could “count on the services of the anti-Marcos oppositionists.”

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Moreover, continued Macapagal, the anti-Marcos opposition was divided. With the announcement that a presidential election would be held in 1987, even the leaders of the boycott movement expressed a keen interest, forming a “Convenors’ Group” to groom a replacement for Marcos in the event that his health did not hold out until 1987. This led to immediate problems, however, “because nobody would give in to anybody else’s personal ambition.” On the other hand, the parliamentary opposition, still angry at the boycotters, formed the National Unification Committee (NUC) along with opposition groups outside of parliament. The boycotters themselves joined with the “Church-sponsored ‘cause-oriented groups’ (particularly those led by relatives of the slain Benigno Aquino Jr.)” and declared “that they would not be bound by the restrictions o f the NUC, and have formed the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), or ‘new patriotic alliance’. .

Furthermore, it was the view of Macapagal

that the role of groups identified with the CPP-NPA-NDF active within the anti-Marcos umbrella was merely to confer a measure of anti-imperialist credibility upon the opposition, which could hardly afford to be too openly pro-American.50 The political parties forming the NUC in 1984 proposed that this body should organize a convention at which a presidential candidate would be chosen. The word “Unification,” however, turned out to be something of a jnisnom er as the egos and ambitions of some NUC members made it appear that a presidential candidate would be selected only with great difficulty. The Convenors’ Group, meanwhile, formed by former senator Lorenzo Tañada, Benguet Consolidated president Jaime Ongpin, and Corazon Aquino, met at Aquino’s house on December 26, 1984, where a statement was agreed and signed. This document, amounting to the group’s public platform, seemed to disprove the PKP assessment and was sharply nationalist in tone, asserting that “the object of socio-economic development is human development and no one will be excluded from active participation in the life of the nation because of one’s beliefs.” The development of the “fullness of our nationhood” and the “supremacy of national interest" meant that

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in no ease should national interest be sacrificed to foreign interests and that the Filipino must be the sole determinant of the nation’s political, economic and cultural life and the principal beneficiary of the national patrimony. Thus, the freedom of the nation from any form of economic, cultural and political domination or interference by the government of any foreign power or by any international organisation or group will be safeguarded. A self-determined and self-reliant course of economic, cultural, social, technological, and political development will be pursued in order to enhance higher income for all, an expanding domestic market, appropriate basic industries, effective technology . . .

All economic and financial

agreements will be periodically and openly reviewed to the end that the welfare of our people will not be sacrificed to satisfy economic and financial interests whether they be governmental entities or transnational corporations.

Quite clearly, this signalled the kind of break with the World BankIMF model of export-oriented “development” for which the PKP had been calling. And there was more. The CPP would be legalized and a negotiated end to the insurgency would be sought. A program of effective land reform would be pursued. Free trade unionism, including the right to strike, would be “vigorously protected.” There would be equitable ownership of the principal means of production and “[s]ocial structures that perpetuate the oppression of the poor and the dispossessed will be eliminated.” The Philippines would seek to ensure that ASEAN and Southeast Asia in general became “a zone of freedom and peace, free of all nuclear weapons and free from the domination of all foreign powers. As a consequence, foreign military bases on Philippine territory must be removed.”51 Among the statement’s signatories were former senator Jose Diokno (according to Goodno, the moving spirit behind the document),52 Raul Manglapus, Ambrosio Padilla, Ramon Mitra, Jovito Salonga, Rafael Salas, Aquilino Pimentel Jr., Teofisto Guingona, and Agapito “Butz” Aquino (the late Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino’s brother). Refusing to sign were Salvador Laurel and Eva Estrada Kalaw of UNIDO. Laurel, of course, had presidential ambitions of his own.

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Attempts were being made— by Cory Aquino and Cecilia Mufioz Palma, a member of the Marcos parliament and of the NUC— to effect a compromise between the Convenors’ Group and the NUC when, in November 1985, Marcos announced a “snap” election. Already, by this time, a Cory for President Movement had been formed. Aquino’s public position at this time was that she would run for president if one million signatures were collected, urging her to do so. This was accomplished in November, and in the same month she received the endorsement of both the Convenors’ Group and the newly formed Lakas ng Bayan (Strength of the People, or Laban) coalition. On December 3, Aquino announced her candidacy and, in so doing, dropped one of the demands of the Convenors’ Group, stating that she would postpone a decision on the US bases until the expiry of the current agreement in 1991. Laurel, at this stage, still stood aloof. Jose Concepcion, a wealthy businessman and chairman of the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), asked Archbishop Sin to intervene. Sin met Aquino on December 10, convincing her to run on the UNIDO ticket, and then persuaded Laurel to run for vice president, telling him bluntly that he would not win if he ran against Aquino.53 With Corazon Aquino adopted as the opposition candidate, the progressive Convenors’ Group statement in her pocket, did nationalists have cause to celebrate? Further disappointment was, unfortunately, about to descend upon them.

N o tes 1.

Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, January 1990.

2.

PKP, Documents of the Eighth Congress o f the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, 5.

3.

Ibid., 12.

4.

Ibid., 13.

5.

Ibid., 16.

6.

Ibid., 42.

7.

Ibid, 34.

8.

Ibid., 43, emphasis added.

C

910. 11. 12. 13.

h a p t e r 17 :

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Ibid. Ibid., 20, emphasis added. Ibid., 21. Ma g al Iona interview. Ibid.

14. PKP, Documents of the Eighth Congress, 20.

15. Ibid., 21-22. 16. Magallona interview. 17. PKP, Documents of the Eighth Congress, 50. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 49. 21.

Ibid., 39.

22. Ibid., 46. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. Ibid., 48. 25. Ibid., 26. 26. Ibid., 49. 27. Ibid., 27. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Ibid., 49. 30. Ibid, 31. 31.

Ibid., 32.

32. Ibid., 33. 33. Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance 1979-1986: The World Bank, the International

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Monetary Fund, and the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), 109-10. PKP Central Committee, “Only the Power of the People Can Lift Martial Law,” undated, but obviously January 1981. PKP Central Committee, “Presidential Election for Whom?” May 1981. Magallona interview. PKP Central Committee, “US Imperialism and the Politics of the Marcos Succession,” August 1982. PKP Central Committee, “The State of Freedom and the Struggle for National Independence and Progress,” June 14, 1983. PKP Central Committee, “From Instability to Disaster: Implications of the Devaluation of the Peso,” July 10, 1983PKP Central Committee, “The Aquino Assassination: Implications and Immediate Tasks," September 15, 1983.

390

A M ovement D ivided

41. PKP Central Committee, “In the Present Crisis, Mobilize for Economic Sovereignty and Popular Democracy,” October 1983. 42. Edilberto Hao to Jose Lava, “Comments on Some of Your Articles on the National Situation,” undated, but 1984. 43- Felicisimo Macapagal to Editor, Philippine Collegian, October 2, 1983. The author has seen a copy of the original of this letter but is unsure whether it was actually published. 44. PKP Central Committee, “A Suggested Program towards National Unity and Reconciliation,” March 1984. 45. William Pomeroy, “The Crisis of Neocolonialism in the Philippines (19721984),” PKP Courier, no. 2, 1985, 15. 46. PKP Politburo, “Electoral Statement No. 1: The Fundamental Issue in the Election,” March 20, 1984. 47. William Pomeroy, “The Crisis of Neocolonialism,” 15. 48. Felicisimo Macapagal, “Alignment of Political Forces,” PKP Courier, no. 2, 1985,

1. 49. Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance, 1979-1986: The World Bank, the International

Monetary Fund, and the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), 229. 50. Macapagal, “Alignment of Political Forces." 51. “The Convenors’ Statement," reprinted in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader: A History o f Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1987), 306-8. 52. James B. Goodno, The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises (London: Zed Books, 1991), 87. 53. Ibid., 90.

PART SIX T h e mainstream opposition and the Catholic Church were preparing to d o electo ral battle with Marcos. Throughout Philippine history, however, the o u tc o m e s of landmark events have rarely been decided by solely domestic fo rce s, let alone the people, and this one would be no different. Before we are in a position to fully comprehend the “snap” election of February 1986 an d th e “people power" exercise that followed, we must therefore make a b rief detour in order to consider developments in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Washington.

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i Since the appointment of Fabian Ver as chief of staff in 1981, dissent had becom e rife in the AFP due to the festering corruption, perceived incom petence, the retention of a large number of generals beyond their due retirement dates (thereby blocking promotion opportunities), and declining morale due to lack of effective progress in the prosecution of the w ar against the NPA. What later became known as the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) began life in 1983 with the establishment of a clandestine study group of intelligence officers at the Philippine Constabulary (PC) headquarters at Camp Crame, where a founding member was intelligence analyst Victor Batac. The following year, Batac’s staff at the PC’s intelligence unit were lectured by Nilo Tayag, the former general secretary of the CPP who, upon his release from prison in 1981, had, having already renounced Maoism, entered the Marcos camp. According to Coronel, Tayag now believed that the system could be subverted from within, which was dubbed his “termite” theory. Having convinced Marcos that his own “Filipino ideology” should be systematically propagated, Tayag was given free rein to do precisely that in government offices and military bases. “His logic,” says Coronel, “was simple: the only way to defeat the communist ideology is to confront it with another ideology and build a committed cadre corps to counter the communists.”1

393

394

A M ovement D ivided

Following Ver’s appointment as chief of staff, Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile had been advised of alleged plots to assassinate him— by, it was assumed, Ver. It was also rumored that Enrile saw Ver as trespassing on his own territory within the government, and that he had fallen out with both Ver and the First Lady. As soon as the assassination rumors surfaced, Enrile’s chief security officer recruited 300 soldiers for the defense secretary’s security unit and commenced stockpiling weapons; eventually, one thousand assault rifles and machine guns were amassed.2 The chief security officer in question was Lt. Col. Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan, later to become the most colorful military rebel during the Aquino administration. It may be of significance that Honasan’s father had himself been a military intelligence officer whose career had suffered as a result of his involvement in an attempt to secure the reelection of the nationalist President Garcia; an uncle was former intelligence officer (and later congressman) Bonifacio Gillego, who claims that his conversion to the nationalist cause was aided by his interrogation of leading PKP members William and Celia Pomeroy in the 1950s.3 From

the PC’s intelligence unit and the defense

ministry, the

fledgling movement reached out to commanders of active service units, constructing a national network. To a laige extent, this network was built upon the foundation of the group loyalty established at the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), especially among members of the class of 1971. Interestingly, the methods of organizing officers were akin to those of communists, with leading cadres traveling around military camps throughout the country, conscientizing officers about the state of the nation and the Armed Forces. Like communist cadres, these officers organized an open movement with a reform agenda that was attractive to a wide section of the AFP officer corps and to a public that was becoming increasingly cynical about the military.4

In February 1985, calling itself Concerned Officers of the AFP, the embryonic RAM issued a Preliminary Statement o f Aspirations in which it condemned a system “which rewards boot-licking incompetence and

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banishes independent-minded professionals and achievers.”5 The following m onth, the group went public, unveiling protest banners at the PMA’s graduation parade. February’s document was now refined into a Statement

o f Aspirations, which spoke of the need to cleanse the AFP of “undesirables,” ensure the maintenance of high standards of discipline, enforce the merit system for promotions, and to reorient training and education in order to p ro d u ce “professional soldiers imbued with a high standard of discipline and social awareness that extends beyond the realm of academic exercise and reaches out to day-to-day practice.” The statement concluded: “These aspirations necessitate intellectual capability to internalize theory and co n cep ts of the Constitution and the Filipino ideology; the current situation; and, the internal as well as the external problems facing the AFP and the country.”6 The

group,

now

calling

itself

R.E.F.O.R.M.

(Restore

Ethics,

Fairmindedness, Order, Righteousness and Morale), soon to be shortened to RAM, issued its next major statement in May 1985. This spoke of the “inspiring pace” of the movement’s expansion which, in turn, had led to som e concern, as the core leaders in other regions needed to be educated in order that a uniform stance and direction might be adopted. The document therefore called for the enhancement of “our ideological capability,” employing a quotation from Marcos’s The Filipino Ideology: Internalization of the democratic revolution starts at the base of the nation— with the common people— inspiring and compelling those in the upper ranks to do likewise, so that a symbiotic relationship, as it were, occurs among the various levels of society making the task of nationbuilding truly a national concern.

Thus, change must be led from below— and if anyone thought that the expression of such a sentiment was mutinous or revolutionary, they had better realize that such was the sentiment of the President himself! “This exhortation,” the statement continued, “is what inspired each and every member of the Movement to assume the vanguard role in the reformation of the AFP and to influence the entirety of the AFP officer corps.” With

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mounting boldness, the document claimed that both the AFP and the

government had become isolated from the people and was now “right o f center.” The aim of the reform movement was therefore to move the AFP “to the center of the political spectrum to jusdy perform its role as arbiter and active participant in the Democratic Revolution . .

The movement

stressed that “all these reforms are' aimed at serving the best interests o f our people” and that “we realize our limitations . . . We alone, could not provide the salvation of our country’s woes.”7 Anxious to proclaim the innocence of their intentions, RAM leaders met with Acting Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos on April 2 0 ,1 9 8 5 , in order to put forward its reform demands and Ramos, in return, promised action. In turn, Ramos and Enrile discussed RAM with Marcos, Enrile issuing an assurance that the group “does not intend to undermine society, government or presidency.”8 Soon, however, this was no longer the case, for plans for a coup began to be laid shortly after RAM went public. Coronel records that the coup was first suggested to Enrile in August 1985 and that later in that year he was “deeply involved in the conspiracy.” Originally, the coup was to have taken place in December, but Marcos’s announcement of the “snap” election caused its postponement. The original plan entailed the announcement by Enrile of the formation of a government by a national reconciliation council containing himself, Ramos, Corazon Aquino, and various technocrats and businessmen. When, during the election campaign, Aquino’s brother Jose “Peping” Cojuangco was approached regarding her participation in such a government, he rejected RAM’s advances.9

2 Many of those who have commented on the events of February 1986, (including, ironically, the CPP— at least prior to the “snap revolution”)— put forward the view that the USA supported Marcos right up to the last moment. While this may have been true of Reagan, opinion within US ruling circles was divided on Marcos, and had been so for some time.

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39 7

Geoige D. Moffett III of the Christian Science Monitor hit the nail on the head w hen, a few days before the “snap revolution,” he pointed out that even before the Aquino assassination “mid-level policy analysts at the State and Defence Departments and in the intelligence communities . . . became concerned about the durability of the Marcos regime.”10 Mark Malloch Brown, then a British journalist who worked for Aquino’s campaign team, also asserts that by the end of 1985 a number of state department officials had decided that Marcos’s “time as president should end, and that it was essential to prepare for the transfer of power . .

In fact, the USA’s

pressure on Marcos to put in place the machinery for a transition to his successor had commenced well before the Aquino assassination, although it is true that this pressure was stepped up after Aquino’s death. And, in the words of a senior state department official, the main consideration was “not whether he’s corrupt or not. The question is whether he has political control of the country.”12 The campaign of US officials in the anti-Marcos camp took the form first of exaggerated claims regarding the danger posed by the NPA, creating the impression that the CPP-NPA-NDF would be in a position to take power if Marcos was deposed before an orderly succession had been arranged; at the same time, links were established with both RAM and the civilian opposition, with funds being channelled to the latter; and, finally, when the “snap revolution” occurred assistance was given to both these groups even before Reagan had broken with Marcos. Alarmist presentations of the NPA threat had, of course, been used to justify the imposition of martial law by Marcos in 1972. Now, they were to be used in an attempt to topple him. An early salvo in this campaign came in mid-1984 when James Nach of the US Embassy’s political section sent a seventy-six-page cable to Washington tracing the development of the CPPNPA and concluding: “There is little optimism that the Marcos Government is capable of turning the situation around. Without new directions from the top, the prospects are for continued deterioration with the eventual outcome— ultimate defeat and a communist takeover of the Philippines— a very possible scenario." A year later, this analysis received “confirmation”

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from Pacific commander-in-chief Admiral William J. Crowe, to which he added the hardly startling revelation that the AFP was both corrupt and demoralized.13 In October of the same year assistant defense secretary Richard Armitage appeared before congress calling for reform in the AFP in view of its failure to effectively combat the NPA. He went on to say that he was aware of “a solid cadre of competent, patriotic officers in the AFP who have the determination to institute the necessary reform.”14 This is of great interest because Armitage’s statement predates RAM’s first public appearance by several months, lending credence to claims by Seagrave, Pimentel, and others that RAM received encouragement from the Pentagon and the CIA from the very earliest stages of its existence.15 A month after Armitage’s statement, Washington’s national security council issued a study directive which argued that US policies should be linked to the “high priority changes” identified by the NSC— electoral reform, adherence to the IMF program, a curtailing of the role of the public sector and of the crony capitalists, and reform of the AFP. The directive stopped short of calling for the immediate ousting of Marcos, seeing him as “part of the problem,” although also necessarily part of the solution. We need to be able to work with him and to try to influence him through a well-orchestrated policy of incentives and disincentives to set the stage for peaceful and eventual transition to a successor government whenever that takes place. Marcos, for his part, will try to use us to remain in power indefinitely.

Denying that the intention was to either remove Marcos or to destabilize his government, the directive proclaimed: “Rather, we are urging revitalization of democratic institutions, dismantling ‘crony’ monopoly capitalism and allowing the economy to respond to free market forces, and restoring professional, apolitical leadership to the Philippine military to deal with the growing communist insurgency.” Of vital importance, in view of the turn which events would eventually take in the Philippines, was the directive’s urging that “we cannot take the lead in reforming the Philippine political system; the Filipinos must do this themselves. Our

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influence is most effective when it is exercised in support of efforts that have already developed within the Philippines.”16 It is of some note that the directive does not specify by whom these “efforts" should be made in order to qualify for US “influence” and “support," thus leaving open the question of whether assistance should be given to the opposition (whether legal or otherwise). As we will see, such assistance took the form of direct encouragement to the military rebels and, for the legal opposition, considerable “support" combined with “influence” aimed at toning down its political program. At the same time, Washington was expanding the number of personnel working on— and

in— the

Philippines. At the defense

department’s

intelligence agency, a new group was created to concentrate exclusively on the Philippines, while the CIA doubled the number of analysts focusing on the Philippines. The State Department, meanwhile, beefed up its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (BIR), with Philippine expert Marjorie Niehaw being transferred from the Congressional Research Service. According to Bonner, both Niehaw and Morton Abramowitz, the head of BIR, took the view that “the longer Marcos was in power, the worse it would be for the United States,” although they could wield “only limited influence.”17 In August 1985 (this is according to Bonner; Seagrave places the event in October)18 a sixty-strong conference took place at Washington’s National War College in an attempt to get to grips with the Philippine problem. Opened by none other than Edward Lansdale, creator of President Magsaysay, the conference was attended by experts representing the CIA, the state department, the national security council and the defense department’s intelligence agency. Also attending were William H. Overholt, a vice president of Bankers Trust, and Stanford professor Claude Buss, both of whom had experience in the Philippines. Bonner says for two days the conference debated the various ways in which Marcos might be handled, with some suggesting the launching of a covert operation to oust him (an option then being given consideration by the Pentagon) while others counselled against this by pointing out that Marcos and Ver controlled the armed forces.19 Seagrave has it that the conference deliberations

4oo

AM

o vem en t

D i v id e d

all boiled down to two elementary questions. Should the United States keep its military bases in the Philippines and risk becoming involved in “another Vietnam” or create alternative bases in Guam and the Yap islands? If the US bases were going to remain in the Philippines, how could control of the Filipino armed forces be shifted from General Ver and his loyalists to the Reform the Armed Forces Movement?20 In May 1985, apparently acting on the advice contained in the national security council directive, CIA Director William Casey traveled to Manila to urge upon Marcos the importance of holding a presidential election. When this bore no fruit, Senator Paul Laxalt, a personal friend of Reagan, was despatched to the Philippines. Bearing a handwritten letter from Reagan, Laxalt’s job, says Bonner, was simple: to convince Ferdinand Marcos that it wasn’t just the bureaucracy that was talking to him about reforms, that his good friend Ronald Reagan was also concerned, also wanted the economic, political, and military reforms. Laxalt carried Reagan’s imprimatur. . . . In response, Marcos wrote his own letter in longhand, a much longer one. It was filled with the same fantasies that he fed all Americans: The insurgency wasn’t growing; he was in control; yes, he’d break up the monopolies; it wasn’t true there was no political freedom; martial law had been necessary in 1972; Filipinos were better off materially than they had been when Marcos became president.21 According to Bonner, Laxalt was actually impressed by Marcos and reported back positively, thereby effectively granting Marcos more time and converting the mission into a “disaster for the State Department.”22 A more balanced way of describing the episode, however, would be to say that the White House, faced with a choice between the “fantasies” contained in Marcos’s handwritten reply and those manufactured by the state department and others, decided to give Marcos the benefit of the doubt. One example of the misleading information being fed to the politicians in Washington is provided by a report made to the senate select committee on intelligence in November 1985. This claimed that US interests were “imperilled by a rapidly growing Communist insurgency that threatens the

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20-y ear rule of Ferdinand Marcos . .." The report estimated that the NPA had 3 0 ,0 0 0 armed regular and irregular soldiers, that the insurgents controlled o r w ere contesting control in areas inhabited by at least 10 million people in sixty fronts and that they maintained the military initiative. “Some level o f NPA activity now exists in almost all of the country’s 73 provinces,” the report continued, while the CPP had grown to 30,000 members. “In the first five months of 1985, the NPA captured more [arms] than in all o f 1984 . . .” and the CPP-led insurgency “has already become a far more formidable force than the Huks ever were.”23 Similarly, a few months earlier a report compiled by the CIA, the defense intelligence agency and the state department claimed that if the growth of the NPA continued at the current rate it would be in a position to take power within three and five years.24 As we saw in chapter 13 of the current work, however, such claims were overblown. Earlier in 1985, Senator John Kerry of Massachussetts had visited the Philippines, returning with the same alarmist message. In the report he gave to the senate in August, Kerry stated that one US official (a “specialist on the insurgency”) to whom he had spoken agreed with assistant secretary of state Armitage that the NPA “could be as strong as the government militarily within three to five years but thought it might happen even sooner.” Interestingly, Kerry reported that Enrile (who might have been expected to inflate the threat posed by the insurgency) took the view that the NPA w as manageable without any major organizational or policy changes within the AFP and that the latter would only become alarmed if the NPA started using artillery.25 Such reports usually had a dual function of firstly inflating the estimates of NPA strength and secondly of stressing the need for reform within the AFP. Kerry’s report went further than most in indicating that the US Embassy had been able to conduct “realistic discussions” with Ramos and Enrile (both denied that military abuse of the population was a serious problem ).26 Both, he said, were supportive of military reform, leading Schirmer and Shalom to interpret his report as suggesting “US connections with these two military leaders.”27 It is now clear that Washington (with the

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apparent exception of the White House) was keeping its options open, and in stressing the strength of the NPA and the poor state of the AFP was laying the basis for eventual support for RAM, should a coup be considered necessary. Most observers now concede that the USA had contacts with RAM from its earliest days and, indeed, the fact that 1985 witnessed a substantial increase in the number of US military advisors assigned to the AFP28 may— at least in part— have been as a result of a decision to foster such links. The end of the Marcos era was in sight.

N otes 1.

Sheila S. Coronel, “RAM: From Reform to Revolution,” in Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Kudeta: The Challenge to Philippine Democracy (Makati: Bookmark, 1990), 55.

2.

Ibid., 56.

3.

The author witnessed then congressman Gillego make this claim to the Pomeroys after addressing a public meeting in London in the late 1980s.

4.

Coronel, “RAM,” 51.

5.

Concerned Officers of the Philippines, “Preliminary Statement of Aspirations,” reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta, 167-68.

6.

Concerned Officers of the Philippines, “Statement of Aspirations,” reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta, 170-72.

7.

R.E.F.O.R.M., “Greater Tasks Ahead, Development of the REFORM AFP Movement,” reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta, 173-80.

8.

Marites Danguilan-Vitug, “Young Philippine Officers Press for Reform in the Military,” reprinted in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The

Philippines Reader: A History o f Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1987), 313-14. 9. Coronel, “RAM,” 66, 67. 10. Christian Science Monitor, February 18,1986. 11. Mark Malloch Brown, “Aquino, Marcos and the White House,” Granta 18, 160. 12. Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (New York: New York Times Books, 1987), 355. 13. Ibid., 356, 357. 14. Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader, 277-78.

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15. See Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 394, Benjamin Pimentel Jr.. The United States: Savior or Intruder?” in PCIJ, Kudeta, 146. 16. Reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, ’¡he Philippines Reader, 322-23. 17. Bonner, Waltzing, 374. 18. Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, 394. 19. Bonner, Waltzing, 374-75. 20. Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, 394. 21. Bonner, Waltzing, 382. 22. Ibid., 383. 23- Staff Report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “The Philippines: A Situation Report,” November 1, 1985, quoted in Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader, 315-18. 24. Far Eastern Economic Review, October 31, 1985. The special national intelligence estimate in question was completed in July 1985. 25. Congressional Record, US Senate, 99th Congress, August 1, 1985, reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, 7he Philippines Reader, 328. 26. Ibid., 328, 329. 27. Ibid., 278. 28. Ibid.

C h a p te r 1 9 : Com m unists in a Time o f “People P o w e r” i The Marcos regime was toppled in February 1986 by the convergence of three forces— the elite opposition and its allies in the Catholic Church, the reform movement in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and those elements in the US state department and the intelligence community which had viewed Marcos as being dispensable since the early 1980s. During the course of her election campaign, Corazon Aquino, standard-bearer for the mainstream opposition and the Catholic Church, promised action on labor rights, housing, health, education, the rights of women and the Muslims and cultural minorities. But of the “big” issues there were pledges only on land reform and the insurgency. On the former, she promised in passing that “although sugar land is not covered by the land reform law, I shall sit down with my family to explore how the twin goals of maximum productivity and dispersal of ownership and benefits can be exemplified for the rest of the nation in Hacienda Luisita [the massive property in Tarlac owned by her family, the Tarlac branch of the Cojuangcos].”1 This revealed a rather curious approach to the issue, indicating that she considered ownership of Luisita to be a matter for her family rather than a subject for future legislation. With regard to the insurgency, Aquino undertook to declare an immediate ceasefire, release all

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T im e

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political prisoners, and enter negotiations for peace; the pledge to legalize the CPP appeared to have been dropped. Gone, too, was the notion o f nationalist industrialization; instead, she announced that she would “stimulate investments primarily in labor-intensive, rural-based, and smalland medium-scale agricultural enterprises," and that she would “postpone capital-intensive, urban-based industrial projects.”2 Thus the Aquino candidacy evolved in a moderate direction, carefully distancing itself from the radical demands put forward by even the more nationalist of the traditional politicians. In Ofreneo’s view, her candidacy w as, in fact, “launched precisely to unite the moderate forces so they could d o more effective battle against the seemingly impregnable Marcos rule and prevent the leftward lurch of the country."3 But, as we shall see, the rightward drift of Aquino’s candidacy was not exactly unaided. Complementing the USA’s alarmist estimates and predictions on the strength of the NPA (which also gave the impression that Marcos was losing control) and its links with RAM was its intervention with the civilian opposition. Of some note is the fact that William Overholt, the banker w ho had participated in the two-day conference at Washington’s national w ar college in 1985, now emerged as an advisor to Aquino’s campaign policy committee,4 reporting to the US Embassy on his activities. At the recommendation of no less than Michael Armacost, former US Ambassador to Manila and now third-ranking officer in the state department, the US public relations firm of D. H. Sawyer & Associates was hired for Aquino’s campaign— waiving a fee which, according to Bonner’s estimate, would have been in the area of $250,000. (The Marcos campaign also used a US firm: Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.) Some months after the February “snap revolution,” Armacost would freely admit that the US government had provided funds to the opposition, stating that “Radio Veritas enjoyed our financial support and that of the Asia Foundation, among others.”5 (Radio Veritas, the Catholic Church’s broadcasting arm, would play a crucial role in the February events, while the Asia Foundation had a history as a conduit for CIA funds.)6 Meanwhile, according to Goodno, the National Endowment for Democracy, “a government-funded organization that channels money

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to private (generally conservative) organizations abroad, had quiedy sent an estimated $3 million to the Philippines to fight communism and cultivate political leaders.”7 Some of this money went to fund NAMFREL, the electoral organization first established by the CIA in the 1950s and now revived. Publicly, NAMFREL would deny receiving US funding, claiming that an offer had been made but rejected. Bonner, however, says that the organization actually initiated at least one request for finance. Much of the overseas funding was coursed through NAMFREL’s member-organizations, such as the Bishops’ Businessmen’s Conference for Human Development. Some $300,000 from US Agency for International Development found its way to NAMFREL via these organizations. In all, NAMFREL is thought to have received just under $1 million from US sources. Japan acted as a source of further funds. According to Bonner, some of NAMFREL’s funding went not on electoral activity but to support RAM.8 US assistance for the Aquino campaign was not confined to funding but extended to policy direction. We have already seen that the US banker Overholt sat as advisor to Aquino’s campaign policy committee. But rather more direct intervention took place on November 6, 1985, when Philip Kaplan, the US Embassy’s charge, hosted a breakfast for Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state for the region, and a group of Filipino opposition leaders including Aquino, Concepcion, and two of Laurel’s supporters. Constantino tells us that a “classified State Department summary of the meeting reveals that its purpose was to give the Filipino opposition its marching orders.” Kaplan “emphasized the need for the opposition to get its act together.” The USA was opposed to “their position favoring legalization of the communist party . .

and both Kaplan and

Holbrooke “underlined the importance of avoiding being portrayed as anti­ bases and soft on communism as US support for free and fair elections would only be forthcoming if the bases were kept out of the campaign.”9 Here, then, is a possible explanation for Aquino’s change of tack on the bases when, just under a month later, she announced her candidacy. Thus, having cultivated links with RAM and the moderate civilian opposition the USA placed its stamp on the government which would

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su cceed Marcos. Just days before the “snap" election, Renato Constantino neatly summed up the situation in his newspaper column with the words: “My fearless forecast: another American victory."10

2 Neither the PKP nor the CPP participated directly in the election campaign

or

the

subsequent

“people

power” exercise.

The

latter

campaigned for an outright boycott, while the former issued a call to “Participate in the Election to Expose Imperialist Deception.” The PKP’s position was based on a perception that the election had been prompted by the USA in pursuit of its own interests. As far as the party was concerned, therefore, the “snap” election was seen as an opportunity to campaign for anti-imperialist unity. The election, the PKP stated in a resolution adopted at an enlarged politburo meeting, should be viewed in the context of the deep crisis gripping the country. The economy was completely controlled by foreign capital, but the next five years were crucial to the USA, as the Military Bases Agreement would expire in 1991.11 The extent to which the party dismissed the election as essentially meaningless can be gauged by an article and editorial published in the first edition of Philippine Currents, a new party-influenced monthly magazine launched in January 1986. The journal took the editorial view that “in the present situation a presidential election is a falsity, dictated as it is by the Reagan administration and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are the leaders of foreign capital dominating this country.” Thus, the actual outcome was meaningless: “The Marcos or Aquino government may come and go but the IMF and US colonialists will go on forever unless the people gather enough collective political will to take us away from the electoral zarzuela.”12 An article by Ofreneo in the same issue characterized the electoral contest as a “close and fierce battle between two factions of the country’s political elite,” but went on to comment that an Aquino victory could prove

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“more problematic as she might indeed turn into a ‘new Magsaysay’ w ho will give fresh hopes to the Filipino people and who might get substantial support from the Americans in rehabilitating the ailing economy and checking the insurgency problem.” At the same time, the PKP issued a statement entitled “A Call for Unity and an End to Violence," obviously aimed at defusing the tensions existing between itself, the CPP, and their respective mass organizations. Of the presidential candidates, this statement noted in passing: Instead of clarifying issues in the right perspective and offering a real solution to the problems that make the Filipino people suffer, they pretend to he deaf. They are busy polishing their images and issuing statements intended to gain foreign support. Instead of promoting positive programs and concrete objectives which will save our country from crisis and lead to our progress, the recipe being offered focuses only on personalistic propaganda, confusing speculations, and nonsensical promises. Of the US interests, the statement said: In the snap election which they themselves proposed, they are openly intervening, thus sharpening the disunity among the people, and even among the progressive people. This matter is alarming, portentous of things to come. If we follow an antagonistic direction, and each group which loses a member will exact revenge, violence will escalate. 'Hus will just favor the divide-and-rule tactics of imperialism . . . Due to this, a sincere effort to promote understanding among all patriotic, progressive and democratic forces is necessary. LET US UNITE! NO PHYSICAL ATTACKS. NO ASSASSINATIONS! NO KILLINGS within progressive groups that are not yet united. . . . the unjust and intentional killing of a potential ally, who belongs to a different group which nevertheless aims and struggles just the same for national democracy and social emancipation, cannot be justified. This statement ended with a call for a popular front against imperialism, pointing out that the main contradiction was between US imperialism and the Filipino people, all other contradictions being secondary to this. “Let

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u s range our forces against the true enemy of national democracy and social emancipation."’3 The tone here was conciliatory. Such was not the case, however, in the statement adopted by the enlarged politburo meeting mentioned above, which stated that the activities of some left or left-ofcenter organizations were serving imperialism as they “sow dissension and resist unity of left forces.” Terrorism, the statement continued, was rampant— by both government forces “and those who take the posture of [a] revolutionary movement."14 A month before the election, the PKP issued a Prim er on the Snap

Election in which it continued to emphasize the anti-imperialist theme, pointing out that in neocolonial countries like the Philippines elections “have been mere instruments wielded by the imperialist power to entrench and further perpetuate its domination of our political, economic and cultural life.” On the other hand, elections can also be used by the broad masses of the people in their struggle for freedom and social progress. Given a strong and militant unity of all patriotic forces of society, elections may be employed in choosing the proper representatives of the masses to sit in government. In this light, the PKP considers elections generally as weapons in a parliamentary struggle. They can be a means by which the masses can be mobilized against a common enemy; and also a means by which the demands of the people may be realized. The “snap” election, however, was “being held for US interests and not ours.” In the exercise, all parties had clear aims: the USA sought to legitimize its control, whoever the winner, while Marcos wished to perpetuate his rule and the opposition aimed to attain political power without changing the relationship with imperialism. The masses, therefore, “will gain absolutely nothing.” The party therefore put forward an “alternative program of government” consisting of •

the Filipinization or nationalization of key industries

•

the expansion of the public sector

•

strict regulation of foreign capital

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• agrarian reform, with cooperatives as the main vehicle • a reexamination of debt policies •

the further development of trade and other relations with socialist countries

•

the adoption of nonalignment as a fundamental principle of foreign policy

• the termination of all military agreements with the USA • guarantees for the freedom to organize and participate in political life without discrimination based on ideology •

a living wage for all working people and full restoration of the right to strike.

The PKP called for the widest dissemination of its analysis of the election, characterizing the latter as “imperialist deception,” the writing of chain letters, the use of graffiti and the mass media and, finally, attending the polls in order to write in anti-imperialist slogans and key demands on the voting papers.15

3 The CPP went somewhat further than the PKP and, by virtue of a decision by its executive committee, decided on a complete boycott of the “snap” election, characterizing this as a “noisy and empty political battle” among competing factions of the economic and political elite. The largest mass organization influenced by the CPP— BAYAN— also adopted a boycott policy. Initially divided on the issue, BAYAN called a congress and declared that it would support Aquino only if she adopted a range of anti-imperialist policies. With her refusal to do so, BAYAN campaigned for a boycott, whereupon several of the organization's leaders who were not influenced by the CPP simply took leave of absence in order to campaign for Aquino. As the eventual position adopted by BAYAN obviously reflected that of the CPP, it is worth examining the former in some detail.

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In a policy statement entitled “Persevere in Correct Struggles, Boycott the Sham Snap Election,” BAYAN argued that although the defeat of Marcos formed a part of the popular struggle “for genuine freedom and democracy," and that an honest election would indeed lead to his defeat, participation in the election was not justified due to a number of factors. First, the election would not be fair, and (here BAYAN and the CPP got it hopelessly wrong) as the USA “badly needs the tested fascist hand of Marcos to continually protect its strategic interests . . . the US cannot afford to dislodge the well-entrenched Marcos clique at a time when it must intensify its ‘counter-insurgency’ program in the country . .

Second,

the document pointed out that the opposition platform “does not even reflect the people’s aspiration for social changes which will deliver them from poverty and oppression . . . ” Like the PKP, BAYAN had put forward a list of nationalist demands, attempting to negotiate their inclusion in the opposition platform. These were •

the removal of all US installations

•

the abrogation of “all unequal treaties and agreements, laws and decrees that impair the nation’s sovereignty”

•

a dramatic change in debt policy

• the nationalization of all basic and strategic industries • genuine land reform “in accordance with the principle of land to the tillers” •

the dismantling of all private monopolies, whether foreign or Filipino

•

repudiation of the 1973 Constitution and antipopular laws and decrees

• “the establishment of a democratic coalition government that is truly representative of all sectors and classes of Philippine society”

Of the CPP executive committee decision, Ricardo Reyes, who had been elected to the CPP Politburo at the recently concluded central committee plenum, says that the assumption was that the alliance between the USA and Marcos remained “fairly solid," but it was also perceived that “at the helm of the opposition, participating in this exercise, was a section of the big bourgeoisie and the landlords who were anti-Marcos, so the party would be at the losing end afterward.”16

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•

the release of all political prisoners

•

the investigation of human rights violations, with prosecution of the guilty parties

•

promotion of the rights to self-determination of the Bangsa Moro and Cordillera peoples

•

recognition of all political groups “which have been struggling against the US-backed Marcos dictatorship.”

As the opposition had refused to adopt these policies, BAYAN viewed the election as “a total exercise in futility.” As significant numbers of CPP cadres, members, and supporters ignored the boycott line, it might be said that the party was reaping the harvest of its anti-Marcos emphasis. Sison, who disagreed with the boycott decision (indeed, he more than any other had been responsible for the party’s primarily anti-Marcos focus), now suggested that the legal partyinfluenced organizations conduct only a “minimal” boycott campaign, and that opposition candidates should be allowed to campaign for votes from the CPP-NPA’s “organized mass base.”17 The penultimate sentence in BAYAN’s policy statement had read: “If we have to go against the tide in this particular struggle, so be it. But the course of history shall eventually vindicate our principled position.” To a certain extent, in that the events of February 1986 resulted in the return of rule by the traditional elite and the strengthening of foreign domination, that vindication might be said to have been achieved (although, of course, the CPP-BAYAN position had been based on a presumption that Marcos could not lose). Sison’s attempt to dilute this “principled decision” was, like the self-critical reassessment the party would issue later, little more than a damage-limitation exercise. The final sentence in the BAYAN statement provided a clue to the rationale for the boycott decision: “Freedom and democracy are won not through sham electoral contests but through actual battles between the mighty force of a united people and the forces of oppression.”18 This is not inconsistent with the explanation an antiboycott source gave Weekley, i.e., that the leadership felt that participation in the

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parliamentary exercise would be a diversion from the “imperatives of the Strategic Counter Offensive,” at a time when the situation was “developing towards an insurrectionary moment.”19

4 Two days after the ballot, Aquino declared herself the winner. That sam e day, twenty-nine Commission on Elections computer operators walked out, claiming that the results thus far posted differed from their own calculations.* It was not until a week later, however, on February 15, that the Batasang Pambansa declared Marcos the winner, with 10,807,197 votes to Aquino’s 9,291,716. NAMFREL, based on 69 percent of the vote, gave the election to Aquino by a margin of 7.5 million to 6.8 million. Aquino responded, at a rally of a claimed 500,000 supporters (Macaraya claims that “over a million" attended this rally, an estimate which, as w e shall see, was improbably high)21 in Rizal Park, by announcing a campaign of civil disobedience, a boycott of goods and services provided by “crony” companies, and a one-day strike called for February 26. Of critical importance was the fact that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (although attended by only a third of the bishops) now issued a statement entitled “Now Is the Time to Speak Up,” saying that “in our considered judgement, the polls were unparalleled in the fraudulence of their conduct . . .” Read from pulpits across the length and breadth of the archipelago, the statement continued: “If such a government does not of itself freely correct the evil it has inflicted on the people, then it is our serious moral obligation to make it do so.”22 According to Douglas J. Elwood, a US priest in Manila at the time, this “probably more than any other single factor, not only helped to trigger the February uprising but contributed decisively to its nonviolent character.”23

According to Manila Times columnist Tony Lopez, who witnessed the event, foreign correspondents were given notice of the walkout, which was led by the wife of a RAM major, the day before. He also says that a recount by NAMFREL after Aquino had taken office revealed that Marcos had won by 8(H),(XX) votes.20

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At this stage, Ronald Reagan despatched veteran diplomat Philip Habib to Manila. According to Bonner, Habib’s mission led to further demoralization at the US Embassy as it was clear that the president distrusted its officers and that it was being alleged that “it was the Carter administration running the Reagan administration’s Philippine policy.”24 According to Brown, Habib took with him a set of instructions calling for Aquino to concede defeat.25 That Habib did not proceed with this was due to the heightened media profile which was by then being given to the allegations of electoral fraud, and Habib arrived at the view that further support for Marcos would not serve US interests. This assessment appears to have been arrived at as a result of discussions with US residents and veteran observers— the American Chamber of Commerce, the New Yorker correspondent Robert Shaplen, Guy Parker of the Rand Corporation (of which, until his death, Douglas MacArthur had been a director), and Claude Buss.26 Even before Habib’s return, however, Reagan, having originally claimed that there had been electoral fraud by both camps, was forced by the reaction to this to issue a further statement conceding that the “widespread fraud and violence” had been “perpetrated largely by the ruling party.”27 According to Seagrave, while in Manila Habib also met secretly with Ramos and Enrile. He claims: There was a hidden agenda. It had been debated by the country team at the US Embassy and in Washington for many months—whether or not to give the green light to RAM’s coup plot. The indications are that a very preliminary American signal was given to Enrile and RAM on Thursday, February 20, two days before Habib left.28 It was on that day that RAM decided to go ahead with its assault on Malacanang in the early hours of Sunday, February 23. On that Thursday, Ver began repositioning his forces around the capital and, although Habib was still negotiating, Seagrave says that “someone at the CIA station (nobody is sure who) gave RAM the nod.”29

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Opinion is divided on whether official US agencies were in fact instrumental in the RAM rebellion. Mark Malloch Brown claims that there is no “basis in fact” to the assumption that Habib gave Enrile and Ramos the go-ahead.30 Pimentel, on the other hand, reports that a RAM colonel approached a CIA officer in Manila in an attempt to procure heavy weapons, and although these were not forthcoming it was thought that the rebels met with US intelligence officers, including Manilas CIA station chief. The same source quotes one US intelligence operative, however, as saying: “The ingredients were there to let the locals do it themselves. The US didn’t have to dirty its hands, the Filipinos had all the right instincts.”31 Bonner points out that all the evidence either way is circumstantial, and that the strongest argument against the possibility of US involvement is that support of Marcos was still official policy of the US government. We have seen, though— and Bonner makes it abundantly clear in his own work— that there was a clear division in Washington, and that Reagan himself constituted the largest obstacle to the ditching of Marcos. This is not so very different from Seagrave’s contention that the “RAM plot was actively encouraged by US intelligence officers, but it was almost stymied by President Reagan’s stubborn conviction that Ferdinand Marcos must remain in power.”32 Bonner goes on to state that CIA participation would have meant that William Casey, its director, was working without the approval of the President. “That,” Bonner boldly states, “he would not have done.”33 Bonner exhibits a surprising degree of naivete with such an argument, for if the history of the previous fifteen years had demonstrated anything, it was that the US intelligence services sometimes acted as a law unto themselves. Similarly, Brown misses the point when he argues against the possibility of authorization of the military rebellion emanating from Habib. Although the timing of events (the rebellion commenced just two hours after the diplomat’s departure) may well have given the impression that Habib had given the green light, such a possibility is unlikely in the extreme given that Habib was the personal emissary of Reagan, who at

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this stage still supported Marcos. In fact, if the timing of Habib’s mission suggests anything it is that the nod for the rebellion probably came from one of the dissident factions in the CIA or the state department. Knowing that Habib would be returning with an unfavorable report on Marcos’s chances, knowing that the Catholic Church was supporting the campaign of civil disobedience, it may well have been felt that a revolt by RAM would tip the balance— if not in Manila, then certainly in Washington. It should never be forgotten that Marcos conceded defeat not when RAM o r “people power” made it impossible for him to remain in power (although this was probably true in strictly political terms), but when Washington indicated that it had withdrawn its support. After the election, the PKP had continued to remain aloof from the process which was unfolding. An editorial in the second issue of Philippine

Currents, written while Habib was still in the country, speculated that the US envoy was in fact seeking further concessions from Marcos— possibly the réintroduction of parity rights for US investors— in return for US support in the face of Aquino’s civil disobedience campaign. “The American perception is,” said the journal, “which side can offer the highest bid in the service of US interests at the cost of national sovereignty.”34 The USA, therefore, was still viewed as the sole arbiter. In the same issue, an article by Ofreneo cast doubt on the claims of victory for Aquino being advanced by NAMFREL (which, as the PKP had earlier pointed out, had been accredited as a result of US pressure on Marcos). It seems that the opposition strategy is to show Aquino leading Marcos by a wide margin through a quick count by NAMFREL of the results coming from the urban areas and other pro-Aquino regions. Then, if the results from the provinces are overwhelmingly pro-Marcos and the electoral trend is reversed in favor of Marcos towards the end of the counting, it will be easy to cry foul and denounce KBL cheating, real or not.35 In neither the editorial nor the Ofreneo article was there any suggestion that the civil disobedience campaign called by Aquino should be supported.

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5 In RAM’s planned assault on Malacanang Palace on February 23, th e intention was that General Ver would be killed and Marcos forced to resign.36 The day prior to the planned assault, however, Ver arrested three of the plotters and began to move stealthily against troops whose loyalty was in question. It was as a result of this that Enrile and the RAM leaders moved to Camp Aguinaldo, the Army headquarters on EDSA, and Ramos, having received a call from Enrile to tell him that the game was up, established a second base across the street at Camp Crame, the Philippine Constabulary headquarters. At this stage, the military rebels numbered just a few hundred. Left to itself, the military rebellion would thus have been doomed to failure which, in turn, would have sealed the fate of the civilian opposition. But support was to hand. From this point onward, as even Bonner concedes, “there was no doubt whom (the USA] wanted to win.”37 The church-run, US-subsidized Radio Veritas* took to the air, with Cardinal Sin calling upon the faithful to defend the rebellion; the station became, according to Ofreneo, “the center of communication and mobilization during the crucial first two days of the rebellion.”38 Throughout the rebellion, the rebels were supplied information on the positions of the Marcos forces by US officials, while Clark Air Base permitted rebel helicopters to refuel and stay overnight.39 Despite the call by Radio Veritas, however, initially only a few thousand people responded, leading Goodno to describe the beginning of “people power” as “a rather pathetic sight that first night.”40 Unaccountably (or perhaps merely displaying the incompetence for which he was so thoroughly resented), Ver had agreed a ceasefire with Enrile on that very night, despite the fact that by this stage the military rebels were so few. Thereafter, any armed clash between rebels and loyalists would only be possible at the risk of extensive civilian casualties.

A moving force behind the establishment of Radio Veritas was, in fact, the US Jesuit and longtime Philippine resident Fr. James B. Reuter.

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On the second day, the number of demonstrators began to increase. Goodno, plugging into the mythology, speaks of “thousands upon thousands of Filipinos” who “flocked to EDSA, thereby creating w hat Ramos called a revolution of the people.”41 Ellwood more cautiously says that by that second morning “some 40,000” had gathered at EDSA, of which 7,000 were nuns and 5,000 priests and seminarians.42 While it cannot be disputed that many thousands did eventually participate in the “people power” exercise, Constantino rather lightheartedly (although in some detail) demonstrated that some of the claims for the number o f participants in the various events were wildly exaggerated. Enlisting the assistance of his granddaughter, a student of architecture, Constantino showed that, even making no allowance for physical obstacles, the capacity of Luneta (Rizal Park) is between 584,563 and 733,957 and that even if participants were tightly packed, having room only to breathe, the capacity would increase to only 1,648,000— “a very far cry from the five to six million that has been accepted as fact by most elements of the victorious opposition.” Furthermore, the number of participants at EDSA during the peak twenty-four hours (on the basis of a six-hour stint per person) would have been between two and two-and-a-half million.43 With Aquino’s call for civil disobedience after the election, there seemed at first to have been a minor change of tack within one of the CPP-influenced organizations; for in his study of trade union responses to the events of February 1986, Macaraya notes that Aquino’s call was supported by the traditionally pro-Marcos Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), the left-leaning TUPAS, and the CPP-influenced Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, or May First Movement).44 While the TUCP and TUPAS claimed to have called upon their members to participate, however, the KMU admitted that it took no initiative and that its members participated of their own accord.45 Several years after the event, Sison would claim that it was “untrue as claimed by certain elements that BAYAN was not in the people’s uprising of February 22 to 25”46 and that “BAYAN was the largest of the antifascist organizations at the core of the people’s uprising . . .”‘7 He continues: “There can be no denying that more

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than 90 percent of the people who surrounded Malacaftang Palace and the Malacafiang Park came from the member-organizations of BAYAN, especially the Kilusang Mayo Uno, League of Filipino Students, KADENA and so on.”48 At the very least, Sison is misleading here. It might well be true that a large number of individual members of BAYAN and its constituent organizations

took

part

in “people

power.” The

fact remains

that

they would have done so as individuals and not as either directed or encouraged by any policy announcement or call by BAYAN or any other CPP-influenced organization. Indeed, we have already seen that the KMU, specifically singled out for mention by Sison, admitted to Macaraya that this was the case. It is also significant in this respect that the CPP’s politburo itself admitted in its self-citical assessment of the boycott policy that when the aroused and militant people moved spontaneously but resolutely to oust the haled regime last February 22-25, the Party was not there to lead them. In urge measure the Party and its forces were on the sidelines, unable to lead or influence the hundreds of thousands of people who moved with a ( lazing speed and decisiveness to overthrow the regime.49 It is also worth pointing oui the BAYAN membership during this period was of a more heterogeneous nature than would later be the case, and thus it should not be assumed that individual members who took part in the February events were necessanly either members of, or influenced by, the CPP. At the time of the rebellion, BAYAN had reached its peak, its ranks swelled by forces which were merely anti-Marcos, and thus more likely to have participated in “people power.” After February, it was these very forces which drifted away from BAYAN, leading to a dwindling of provincial chapters and concentration of leadership and control in the hands of the CPP.V) Feeling that the military resources did not exist to successfully defend two rebel bases, Enrile led his forces across EDSA, joining Ramos at Camp Crame. That afternoon, loyalist marines in tanks and armored personnel

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carriers advanced on Crame but were halted by the demonstrating civilians a kilometer short of their destination. After dark, the marines were ordered to withdraw. That same evening, however, the opposition forces were dealt a blow when armed men destroyed the Radio Veritas transmitter. Meanwhile, at the home of secretary of state Shultz in Maryland, Habib was briefing Shultz, Defense Secretary Weinberger, Deputy CIA Director Gates, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, Chairman o f the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Crowe and Armacost on the findings o f his mission to Manila. Marcos, Habib stated, “has had it.” With regard to Aquino’s position on Clark and Subic: “I talked to her about the bases. She is going to respect the treaty.”51 It is more than a possibility that concern for the US bases was the major factor in the thinking of the proAquino forces in Washington. Six months later, for example, the Aquino government would disclose that Marcos had written to leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement in India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt to indicate that the Military Bases Agreement would not be renewed after 1991, thereby clearing the way for Philippine membership of the movement, first applied for in 1975 but blocked by Vietnam due to the presence of the bases.52 That afternoon, Habib was in Washington, joining forces with Shultz in an attempt to persuade Reagan that the time had com e to ditch Marcos. Eventually they succeeded, and the White House announced that any attack on the military rebels would lead to a cessation of US military aid.53 On the morning of Monday, February 24, pro-Marcos forces occupied Camp Aguinaldo and trained artillery on their opponents across the street, although at 9 a.m. Marcos went on television to say that troops would use only small arms against the military rebels and civilians. Rebel helicopters then struck at Villamor airbase, also firing six rockets at Malacafiang. That same day, having intercepted a radio message giving orders to attack the rebels, the White House called for a “peaceful transition to a new government.” Efforts were made to contact Marcos, offering him asylum in the USA.54 Marcos’s troops were ordered to withdraw from Aguinaldo. The RAM forces, meanwhile, made up for the loss of Radio Veritas by

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peacefully taking control of the Channel 4 television station while Marcos w as on the air, the rebel Col. Mariano Santiago calling upon the group loyalty of the defending officer, a fellow PMA alumnus.” As events moved to their inevitable conclusion, a pathetic Marcos telephoned Enrile to propose that the election result be set aside and a military government be established by Enrile with Marcos acting as honorary president until the expiry of his term in 1987. Enrile refused. Increasingly isolated and desperate, Marcos vowed on Monday night to fight to “the last drop of our blood."56 But it was all over. The following day, Aquino and Marcos were sworn in at rival ceremonies, but hours later Marcos was advised over the telephone by Reagan’s friend Senator Paul Laxalt to “cut and cut cleanly.” That night, Marcos and his family, accompanied by Eduardo Cojuangco, w ere taken by US helicopter (in what Marcos would later describe as a “kidnap”) to Clark, and thence to Hawaii. The Marcos era was over and the Americans, although not quite in the m anner predicted by Constantino, had scored another victory.

N o tes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader. A History o f Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1987), 339. Ibid. Rene Ofreneo, “The ‘Snap’ Revolution: What Now?" in 'The February Revolution: Three Views (Quezon City: Karrel, Inc., 1987), 19. Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (New York: New York Times Books, 1987), 397. Renato Constantino, “The Guiding Hand,” Malaya, July 30, 1986, reprinted in Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch (Quezon City: Karrel Inc., 1987), 10-12. This column drew upon an article by Walden Bello appearing in the July 1986 issue of AfricAsia. Following the discovery of the Asia Foundation’s CIA links by Ramparts magazine, the CIA on June 22, 1966, acknowledged in a memorandum to the

422

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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303 Committee (an interdepartmental body established in December 1955 to review and authorize covert operations) that the foundation was “a Central Intelligence Agency proprietary . . . established in 1954 to undertake cultural and educational activities on behalf of the United States Government in ways not open to official U.S. agencies.” 'ilie memorandum expressed the view that the foundation’s “vulnerability to press attack can be reduced and its viability as an instrument of US foreign policy in Asia can be assured by relieving it of its total dependence upon covert funding support from this Agency." (See www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9062.htm.) The CIA terminated its funding the following year, recommending that the Asia Foundation continue in existence “as a private institution, partially supported by overt U.S. Government grants” (memorandum from the CIA to the 303 Committee, April 12, 1967; see www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9098.htm). James B. Goodno, The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises (London: Zed Books, 1991), 88. Bonner, Waltzing, 408-9. Renato Constantino, “Footnote to Recent History,” Malaya, March 26, 1986; reprinted in Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch, 9-10. Renato Constantino, “Insight,” WEForum, February 4,1986; reprinted in Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch, 2-3. PKP politburo, “Build a Mass Political Movement for National Sovereignty, Economic Independence and Broad Democracy!” 1985. Philippine Currents, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1986. Felicisimo Macapagal for the PKP central committee, “A Call for Unity and an End to Violence,” December 30, 1985. PKP politburo, “Build a Mass Political Movement.” PKP, Primer on the Snap Election, January 1986. Ricardo Reyes, interview by the author, June 2010. Katherine Weekley, The Communist Party of the Philippines 1968-1993•*A Story of Its Theory and Practice (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 137. BAYAN, “Persevere in Correct Struggles, Boycott the Sham Election," reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader, 344-46. Weekley, The Communist Party of the Philippines 1968-1993, 137. Tony Lopez, “My Edsa 1 Story (Part 2),” March 3, 2010, lopezbiznewsasia. blogspot.com. Bach M. Macaraya, Workers’ Participation in the Philippine People Power Revolution (Manila: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1988), 49.

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22. Quoted in Douglas J. Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 1986: A Model o f Non­ violent Change (Quezon City. New Day Publishers, 1986), 4. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Ibid., 5. Bonner, Waltzing, 427. Mark Malloch Brown, “Aquino, Marcos and the White House,” Granta 18, 166. Bonner, Waltzing, 430.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 431. Sterling Seagrave, Ihe Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 407. Ibid, 410. Brown, “Aquino, Marcos and the White House,” 167. Benjamin Pimentel Jr., “The United States: Savior or Intruder?” in Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Kudeta. The Challenge to Philippine

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Democracy (Makati: Bookmark, 1990), 146. Seagrave, Ihe Marcos Dynasty, 398. Bonner, Waltzing, 436. Philippine Currents, February 1986, vol. 1, no. 2. Ibid Goodno, Ihe Philippines: Land of Broken Promises, 98. Bonner, Waltzing, 436. Ofreneo, “The ‘Snap’ Revolution,” 20. Ibid., 21. Goodno, The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises, 99.

41. Ibid. 42. Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 1986, 8. 43- Renato Constantino, “Political Arithmetic,” Malaya, April 30, 1986; reprinted in Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch, 21-24. 44. Macaraya, Workers ' Participation, 50. 45. Ibid., 51. 46. Jose María Sison with Rainer Weming, The Philippine Revolution: 7he Leader’s Vfett'CNew York: Crane Russak, 1989), 118. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid, 119. Ibid., 122. CPP central committee, “Party ConductsAssessment, SaysBoycott Policy Was Wrong,”Ang Bayan, May 1986;reprinted inSchirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader, 383-86. 50. Merlin Magallona, interview by the author, January 1990. 51. Bonner, Waltzing, 437. 52. PKP Information, no. 1, September 12, 1988.

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53. Bonner, Waltzing, 438. 54. Ibid., 439. 55. Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 1986, 9- Sison (77be Leader’s View, 122) credits the Quezon City chapter of BAYAN with the “storming” of Channel, although Goodno (7he Philippines: Land o f Broken Promises, 101), like Elwood, has it that the station was seized by RAM forces. 56. Bonner, Waltzing, 439.

PART SEVEN This study has attempted to view Philippine communism between the late 1950s and 1986 dialectically, looking at the PKP and the CPP not in isolation but in their relationship to each other and to the cause of Filipino nationalism, placing them in the context of the concrete economic and political situation of the Philippines during this period. In turn, Marcos and the Philippine economy can only be understood by relating one to the other and placing them in the context of the stage of development reached by transnational capital and the demands this placed on the Philippines. The present cannot be comprehended without an understanding of w hat preceded it. And to understand the past— even the fairly recent past, as is the case here— there is no substitute for collecting the various items o f evidence, sifting through them and attempting to assemble them into a coherent whole, for no single strand of history, be it an individual life or the activity of a political party, can be fully understood in isolation. It is time to attempt a summary.

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C h a pter 2 0 : T h e A b o r t ed P rocess i Even though it was unable to match the size of the CPP,1 it is perhaps surprising that, having suffered a crushing defeat in the Huk Rebellion, the PKP was able to rebuild, survive the two splits of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and emerge intact from the long Marcos period. Sison’s charge that, in adopting the “single-file" method of organization, Jesus Lava was liquidating the party, does not withstand serious scrutiny. The government had, for the time being, effectively shattered the party already by its defeat of the HMB. The vast majority of its leaders were either dead or in prison, and the party itself was illegal. Democratic centralism implies the existence of leading organs that are able to function as such and lower organs with the capacity to contribute to democratic debate and thereby influence the policy-making process. None of these conditions existed in 1957-58. The name of the PKP remained but as a functioning party the organization had effectively ceased to exist. In one sense, then, the party had already been— almost— “liquidated.” It was in these circumstances that the tendency of Jesus and Francisco “Paco" Lava Jr. (the third and fourth Lavas to hold the post of general secretary) to involve members of their own family in the affairs of the party came to the fore, and while this must be viewed in context and has, as we have seen, been defended on security grounds, it cannot be denied that this was an unhealthy practice— even

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more so in the context of the Philippines, where it is common for political dynasties to conflate the interests of society with those of their own families.’ However, the relative ease (albeit in decidedly dramatic circumstances) with which the Lavas’ leadership of the party was effectively ended in 1970 demonstrated that the problem was not insurmountable. Gradually, the PKP revived, constructing mass organizations in several sectors (a model it would retain for decades), and attempting to build the broadest possible nationalist movement. The party’s alliance with President Diosdado Macapagal’s government (albeit via Lapiang Manggagawa as its proxy), may be considered, in retrospect, as a dry run for the party’s later political setdement with Ferdinand Marcos. Extending Macapagal critical support while he was in nationalist mode, the LM withdrew from the arrangement as he once more succumbed to US pressure, having in the meantime built support for its own pursuit of the “Unfinished Revolution.” This compares favorably to the failure of the original Lapiang Manggagawa in 1923-19244 to adopt a similar tactic with regard to Manuel Quezon, whose differences with the hard-nosed Governor Leonard Wood were then at their sharpest, and when the cause of independence might have been advanced by a more forthright involvement by the left. Quite obviously, the PKP made a major mistake in assigning so many leading positions to Jose Maria Sison— he was editor of Progressive Review, chairman of Kabataang Makabayan, and general secretary of the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism. Underlying this, however, was the questionable practice of assigning leading roles to new members on the basis of their apparent intellectual ability and enthusiasm. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., recruited to the PKP in Britain by William Pomeroy, had no previous experience or membership of left-wing organizations apart from a brief period in the Communist Party of Great Britain during which, he jokingly recalls, he “stuffed envelopes in King Street.”5 But it is also true that, as members employed by state institutions could not for obvious

In his autobiography, Jesus Lava would write of his regret that the Maoists “became antagonistic to the Lavas,”2 thereby conflating his family with the PKP. II was peri laps no accident that Dalisay used the subtitle A Filipino Family for his account of the Lavas.'

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reasons be publicly exposed, there were few at this stage available to fill th e more public leading positions. For a few years following the CPP breakaway, the PKP appeared to be stumbling and unsure of itself as the Maoist party gained strength, an uncertainty witnessed by the Political Transmission of July 1971, which called for a firmer line against the Maoists and warned that the CPP could “emerge as the real vanguard of the revolutionary movement.” This assertion is alarming because if, as the PKP claimed, the CPP was led by petty-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionaries whose ultraleftism played into the hands of reacUon, how would it be possible for such a party to “emerge as the real vanguard of the revolutionary movement”? One could argue that the author of the document had merely been guilty of loose terminology, but such a fault is rare in communist party general secretaries. One conclusion would be that the shift in tactics was born of desperation and that the CPP had— by fair means or foul— captured the initiative to such an extent that the PKP leaders feared that their own party would be marginalized unless appropriate action was taken. It is also possible, however, that this bout of desperation was largely due to the fact that at this stage the party was without an up-to-date analysis and a clear program, so that it found itself from time to time buffeted off-course by CPP-induced “storms.” A further indication of problems during this period lay in the fact that Nemenzo, editing Ang Komunista, was able to depart from the party line. Thus, it seemed that the PKP was having difficulty holding its units accountable in conditions of illegality. In addition, the party’s position on armed struggle must have appeared confusing to some members, for while it was in the main following a path of legal struggle, the existence of armed propaganda units in Central Luzon sent a different signal, so if an armed unit appeared in Manila, bombing selected targets, who was to say that this was not a result of party policy? This was, after all, the sort of activity called for by some of the contributions to Ang Komunista. It was in these circumstances that the Marxist-Leninist Group was able to arise. Obviously, the whole question of violence required clarification,

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and this was supplied by the documents entitled “On Violence” and “On Revolution,” and at the party’s 1973 congress. The PKP’s sixth congress put forward the first comprehensive Marxist analysis of the Philippine economy and society of the period, stressing the role of foreign capital and its representatives in restructuring the economy along capitalist lines, rejecting the “semifeudal” analysis and pointing out that it was, in fact, the aim of neocolonialism to do away with feudalism and semifeudalism. However, even though martial law would objectively serve the interests of foreign capital, the PKP erred (in this view) in assigning the latter the role of motivating force in its imposition. Nevertheless, at this congress the party identified imperialism as the main enemy and called for “the struggle of all anti-imperialist and patriotic forces” against imperialism, collaborationist members of the big bourgeoisie, and the strong feudal remnants, and putting forward the perspective of noncapitalist development. Should the PKP, with the memory of Lapiang Manggagawa’s brief alliance with Macapagal fresh in its memory, have been more wary in the approach to its political settlement with Marcos? Was it a mistake to enter into it? It is impossible to understand the political setdement without relating it to the circumstances pertaining at the time. The world in the mid-1970s was a different place to that of the early 1960s. A wave of anti-imperialism was sweeping the globe. The Vietnamese people were nearing the end of their long struggle against first French colonialism, then US imperialism. In April 1974, just months before the conclusion of the political settlement, the revolution in Portugal, to which the liberation movements in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique had made a significant contribution, would signal the end of that country’s colonial presence in Africa. In 1973, the nonaligned nations had put forward their demand for a basically anti­ imperialist New International Economic Order. The Third World was on the march. Furthermore, Marcos craved greatness, and he would have been aware that this would never be conferred on America’s “boy.” Given the circumstances at the time, it was not particularly far-fetched to believe that it was possible for Marcos to evolve into an effective anti-imperialist. It is

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also necessary to understand the difficult choices facing those w ho seek a path that will eliminate mass poverty in a country such as the Philippines by the process of genuine economic development. If it is agreed that foreign economic domination is the largest single obstacle on that path, all else becomes secondary. We have seen, however, that the political settlement was far from being an enthusiastic embracing of the whole “New Society” package. The PKP offered critical support, and that support was confined to those reforms and positions it deemed progressive. The party was not slow to criticize Marcos’s shortcomings. In the conditions of martial law, however, it encountered problems in attempting to mobilize its members and supporters to exert the kind of pressure that would have been necessary to shift Marcos to a firmer and more consistent anti-imperialist position— and this was one of the reasons the PKP called for the lifting of martial law. It was also the case that, emerging from a lengthy period of illegality, some members simply did not know how to operate legally, a problem also encountered in the late 1930s. Even so, the PKP embarked upon an ambitious program of developing mass organizations, although these were less broad, perhaps, than those formed in the 1960s, being more obviously under party leadership. Marcos, hemmed in by a combination of the changed economic circumstances of the Philippines, the World Bank-IMF dominance of econom ic policy making, and his own cupidity, failed to perform the role the PKP had in mind for him. (It may be worthy of note, however, that as late as February 1986 Marcos, thinking he had won the “snap” election, told Nilo Tayag of his plans to form a Ministry of Ideology and overhaul the school textbooks, giving them a more nationalist orientation.)6 Even then, however, the party did not become “anti-Marcos above all” but held to the analysis it had conducted, seeking to rally forces around its anti-imperialist line. Given the strength and consistency of that line, it was only logical that the PKP should have adopted a position on the “snap” election of February 1986 that stopped just short of a call for a boycott, estimating that the poll was “being held for US interests and not ours,” and that the masses would “gain absolutely nothing.”

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One of the reasons the PKP’s anti-imperialist drive was not as effective as it might have been, however, was that the party was still largely confined to the capital region and Central Luzon. A field for further research might consist of an examination of the extent to which PKP rural members during these years were bound to Central Luzon by ties to the land, some as land reform beneficiaries. It is not suggested that it would have been necessary for rural PKP members to permanently migrate in order to build the ranks of the party in other regions, but the seasonal requirements of planting and harvesting may have ruled out periods away from home measured in months. Then again, even after the political settlement the conditions under martial law may not have been considered congenial for such activity, and the presence of the CPP-NPA would have barred the PKP from some areas. Even so, it is perhaps surprising that there seems to have been little attempt during the Marcos years for the party’s mass organizations to seek unity of action with other legal organizations in, for example, the labor and peasant sectors elsewhere in the country. Apart from when dealing with the Marcos government or issuing statements, the PKP seems to have acted through the mass organizations under its leadership, with the party itself taking a backseat. It would not be until the Aquino years that members would attend rallies behind a PKP banner. There may have been several reasons for this— the conviction that anti-imperialist unity was more important than promotion of the party, or perhaps an acknowledgement of the prevalent anticommunist culture within the society. Either way, this could explain why the mass organizations grew at a faster rate than the party itself. Ironically, the two splits suffered by the party, in 1967 and 1972-73, seem to have had a beneficial effect (leaving aside for a moment the decidedly negative effect on the nationalist movement as a whole) on the PKP in the longer term. Forced to confront its own weaknesses and the confusion within its ranks, the party conducted a fresh analysis of Philippine society upon which it based its strategy, emerging ideologically stronger and more confident. From 1973 onward, in the most trying of circumstances, it never wavered in explaining to all who would listen that

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the roots of many of the problems plaguing the Philippines could be traced to the country’s relationship with foreign capital and its various agencies. And while it might be tempting, in view of the constraints upon Marcos outlined in chapter 15, to conclude that the PKP was pursuing a lost cause in attempting to push him into adopting a more consistently independent course, the very existence of those constraints (the influence of foreign capital in the economy, the operations of the World Bank, etc.) actually underlined the correctness of the PKP’s basic analysis. It could be argued, in fact, that the PKP gave up on Marcos prematurely, perhaps being rather too influenced by those anti-Marcos forces which, at least publicly, based their opposition on the issue of human rights. It was not until 1979, after all, that Marcos came forward with his ambitious proposal for eleven major industrial projects. Had the objections of the World Bank been overridden or ignored and the projects implemented with the state playing a leading role, the Philippine economy would have taken a significant step along the road to real independence and development. It must be realized that such a dramatic proposal had never before been made by a Philippine president. Had Marcos been persuaded to push ahead with industrialization at that stage, this would have had a serious impact on relations with the World Bank— to the extent that the structural adjustment loan locking the Philippines further into “export orientation” would have been off the agenda. It was at that stage, therefore, that “critical support” was needed more than ever. But this is hindsight.

2 In Forcing the Pace, this author asked the extent to which the PKP might be considered a “surrogate of Moscow” rather than a legitimate Philippine party, concluding that advanced Filipino workers had come to Marxism based on their own experience, and that the international dimension in the process of the party’s formation had come later, as a result of such prior domestic developments. The CPP, on the other hand, rather than developing

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organically from within Philippine society was initially a Chinese project, and the role of Maoism and the Communist Party of China was paramount. Moreover, the party’s strategy was based upon the writings of Mao Zedong, which, while they may have been relevant to the circumstances of China, were demonstrably less appropriate for the Philippines. The membership of the new Maoist party was, to begin with, largely petty bourgeois, and the numbers of such members would soon be expanded as a result of the party’s activity in the student sector, while its work in the countryside would bring in significant numbers of peasant members. The membership profile of the CPP therefore came to bear more than a passing resemblance to that of the PKP in the 1940s and early 1950s, i.e., overwhelmingly peasant, but led by “generic intellectuals.” In Forcing

the Pace, the author argues: With the effective isolation of the working class within the party, the PKP leadership could be considered to be an alliance of middle-class and peasant elements. The former, certainly in the person of Jose Lava, was characterized by an almost romantic attachment to the language and forms imported from the international communist movement. When such a tendency found itself in the leadership of a party and an army that were both peasant in composition, the Jose Lava characteristics of impatience and haughty disdain for those who could not be “made” to fulfill their historical roles (i.e., the workers] would combine with the “burning desire” of the Filipino peasant to “put an end to ail evil once and for all through a coup.”7 These characteristics partly explain the PKP’s periodic attempts to “force the pace” of history, and this same tendency can be observed at various times throughout the history of the CPP. As with the PKP, the class composition of the party and its leadership almost certainly has a direct bearing on this. The First Quarter Storm was, of course, a student revolt with neither coherent program nor significant support from the working class and peasant sectors, but it is in the Plaza Miranda bombing (if we accept the evidence that this was planned and executed by the CPP) that we see the clearest sign of a desire to “force the pace” of history, for the

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alleged purpose of the atrocity was, on the assumption that Marcos would be blamed, to deepen the rift between the Liberal and Nacionalista parties and further erode support for Marcos. As with most terrorist acts, the masses had no part to play. Aside from the Chinese/Maoist influence, there was of course Sison’s need to justify his split from the PKP with his claims of the impossibility of working with “the Lavas,” and his distortion of PKP history. It is therefore not surprising that the initial attempts at securing support bore the mark of opportunism, as in the approach to Luis Taruc for membership of the Socialist Party of the Philippines and the attempt to link up with Sumulong in order to provide the fledgling party with an army. The desire to work for the presidential campaign of Sergio Osmefta Jr. (whether realized or not) must also be described as opportunist, for while he was anti-Marcos he would certainly not have qualified for the description of “anti-imperialist.” But, of course, it would soon become apparent that the CPP itself was far more anti-Marcos than it was anti-imperialist, despite occasional lip service to the latter. Then there was the party’s use, which seems to have extended far beyond facilitating the first meeting between Dante and Sison, of “Ninoy” Aquino, who in 1967 had claimed to be a CIA agent. As we have seen, not only was the People’s Program fo r a Democratic

Revolution modelled on an Indonesian document, which was itself based on an analysis of conditions in prerevolutionary China, but the party program also contained not a single mention of the trade union movement and no programmatic demands for the working class. Sison’s whole approach was based upon Mao’s On New Democracy, with socialism pushed down the agenda; and while it is possible to argue that this was due primarily to the “semifeudal” characterization of the mode of production, this “analysis” was itself lifted from Mao. A further influence was that of the Catholic religion and while, as argued in chapter 11, an alliance with radical Christians would have been a valid exercise in broadening support for anti-imperialism, what occurred was rather more— and less— than that, as priests and former priests moved into

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leadership positions within the party and the NPA and were in a position to influence policy. The effects would have been twofold— a tendency to revolutionary romanticism and voluntarism on the one hand, while on the other anti-Marcosism was reinforced at the expense of anti-imperialism, with the result that a great deal of support would simply evaporate once Marcos was no longer there.

3 Given the somewhat forced nature of the CPP’s creation, it is perhaps impressive that it managed to gather as much support as it did, although it shouldjbe clear from this study that it did so by, while never acknowledging as much, moving away from some Maoist dicta that were supposed to give it direction (“political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” for example) while simply applying other Maoist policies in circumstances far different from those for which they had been formulated. We have seen that “protracted people’s war” came with a heavy price in terms of the inevitable deaths in battle and elsewhere, the forced evacuations of the civilian population, the militarization (and to a certain extent, the brutalization) of Philippine society. While this undoubtedly created many “grievance guerrillas,” it produced substantially less ideological converts, and eventually led to the carnage entailed in the anti-DPA campaigns, which produced not grievance guerrillas but anticommunist vigilantes. The excesses of the anti-DPA campaigns were, it can be argued, more likely to occur where “protracted people’s war” was waged in inappropriate circumstances— and it is the contention of this work that the circumstances were, indeed, inappropriate. For although it had been concluded by the mid-1970s that the geographical nature of the Philippines did not lend itself to “liberated areas,” the rural activity subsequently conducted by the CPPNPA seemed to contradict this conclusion. For Specific Characteristics did not signal a complete break from pursuit of the strategy formulated by Mao Zedong for China.

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While Our Urgent Tasks led to a shift of emphasis onto political and organizational work in the countryside, the fruits of this work were extremely vulnerable, because the demands around which the peasants were organized were, as we have seen, the reduction of land rent, combating usury and, in certain circumstances, land reform. These were the very issues utilized by the Communist Party of China, the central committee of which issued a directive in November 1945 (i.e., after the defeat of Japan) that there should be movements for the reduction of rent and interest in all newly lilxfrated areas in 1946.* In May 1948, Mao advised as follows: It is necessary to give over-all consideration to the tactical problem of rural work in the new Liberated Areas. In these areas we must make full use of the experience gained in the period of the War of Resistance Against Japan; for a considerable period after their liberation we should apply the social policy of reducing rent and interest and properly adjusting the supplies of seed and food grains and the financial policy of reasonable distribution of burdens . . . After one, two or even three years, when the Kuomintang reactionaries have been wiped out in extensive base areas, when conditions have become stable, when the masses have awakened and organized themselves and when the war has moved far away, we can enter the stage of land reform—the distribution of movable property and land as in northern China.9 It will be apparent from this that in China land rent and interest rates were reduced in the liberated areas. This made sense in the vast expanses of China, in areas the Kuomintang (nowadays transliterated as “Guomindang”) was unlikely to recapture. It is also apparent, then, that the CPP, under Sison’s guidance, was still attempting to apply the Chinese “model” to the Philippines, but was doing so in a haphazard fashion. The Chinese communists had been able to rally huge numbers to their cause during the course of the long and bitter resistance to the Japanese forces, which had invaded Manchuria as early as 1931. (Following the defeat of the Japanese, the national united front splintered, with Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang attacking the communists.)

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The CPP, on the other hand, had found that by simply launching guerrilla warfare in an area, it ended up isolating itself, and that it needed to first win the allegiance of the peasantry and organize it. In the absence of a foreign invader, it adopted the Chinese communists’ recipe for newly liberated areas. In so doing, of course, it was demonstrating that power, rather than issuing from the barrel of a gun, lay in the organization of the masses.10 But while the reduction of land rent and interest may have been appropriate in the liberated areas of China during the course of a civil war, this cannot be said of the Philippines, which, the CPP had just concluded, could not by its very nature be host to liberated areas. And why? Because in the circumstances of the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s, territory lost by the government forces could be reclaimed,* in which case the power o f the landlords and the usurers would be restored, and the beneficiaries of the ground-rent and interest-rate reductions punished, perhaps severely. And what worked for the NPA in Sison’s Specific Characteristics could also work for the AFP, which could easily switch resources from one guerrilla front to another and, when operations against the Moro National Liberation Front were scaled down, transfer troops from Mindanao. This approach obviously arose from an attempt to apply Mao’s tactics without taking due account of the very different circumstances. The only other possibility, not necessarily mutually exclusive with this, is that, despite all of Sison’s criticism of the PKP and the CPP’s “insurrectionists” for their “quick military victory line,” the CPP had just such a victory in prospect. Why would beneficiaries of the Marcos land reform be encouraged to withhold amortization payments to the Land Bank, thereby risking repossession, unless victory was thought to be around the corner? Similarly, how could Chapman have been given the impression that “the Manila government’s writ no longer ran” in Punta Dumalag unless it was thought that victory was in prospect? This possibility is strengthened by the fact that, as we have seen, various statements were issued in these years to the effect that, the “advanced substage of the strategic defensive” having

“That,” a former CPP cadre told the author, “is exactly what happened."11

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been entered in 1981, the course of the revolution was proceeding more swiftly than anticipated. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, as there was no possibility of achieving “liberated areas,” and as the CPP-NPA could only mobilize the peasantry’s support by means of achievements that might swiftly be swept away, the “protracted people’s war” model was inappropriate for the circumstances of the Philippines. Indeed, the very concept was lifted from Mao, as was the three-stage strategy. Since the Sino-Japanese war is a protracted one and final victory will belong to China, it can reasonably be assumed that this protracted war will pass through three stages The first stage covers the period of the enemy’s strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy’s strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counteroffensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counteroffensive and the enemy's strategic retreat. This is Mao, writing in On Protracted War. He then clarifies: “The second stage may be termed one of strategic stalemate.”12 Not only is he writing about the war against a foreign invader (as opposed to a domestic revolution), but there is in this work no indication that Mao intended that the concept of protracted war and its three-stage corollary should have universal application.

4 In the urban areas, meanwhile, although the level of legal mass struggles had risen considerably by the mid-1980s, an article in the August 1984 issue of Ang Bayan is sobering in this regard. In many ways, today’s generation of mass activists have surpassed the level achieved by their predecessors during the storm of 1970-72. Specially in terms of discipline, depth of experience, grasp of the Party’s basic line and tactics, tempering and perseverance. But still, the phenomenal storm

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of revolutionary initiative and creativity unleashed by the mass activists and their organizations in that historical upheaval remains unequalled up to now. This is an admission of some significance, for if the armed struggle was meant to inspire the masses to ever-greater heights of activity, what conclusion are we forced to draw if, by the CPP’s own admission, that mass activity had not equaled the levels of 1970-72, a time when the NPA’s armed struggle was still in its infancy? A more challenging question would be: What would the level of mass activity have been if Sison had never split from the PKP in the first place and Marcos had been deprived of the NPA’s activity as an excuse to declare martial law?* Rather than stimulating and inspiring mass activity, it is worth remembering that it was the CPP split and the armed struggle line that divided the nationalist movement and drove away allies who had linked up with the left within the Movement for the Advancement for Nationalism. Thus, the ambitious organizational plans of MAN were never fulfilled as a result of the adoption of armed struggle. Before the split, broad anti-imperialist unity was developing; after the split alliances concluded or attempted by the CPP tended to be anti-Marcos rather than anti-imperialist. On the eve of Marcos’s fall, therefore, the CPP-NPA was pursuing an inappropriate strategy in the countryside, and rationalizing its urban activity in order to conform to the Maoist model and the CPP program. The Maoist straitjacket was bursting at the seams, reflecting the need for a congress at which the program adopted in January 1969 might be amended and updated. But there was no congress, and so it is hardly surprising that “centralized leadership and decentralized operations” led to the emergence of what were, in effect, alternative models in Davao and Manila-Rizal that were at the time tolerated but would later be castigated by the founding chairman of the CPP. There is a sense in which it could be argued that the CPP-NPA had, sixteen years after its formation, learned from one of the mistakes of the

A similar, even more intriguing, “what iP question could be posed concerning Mao’s break with the rest of the international communist movement.

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PKP-led Huks— that isolation from the urban centers spelled political isolation also. But to rationalize its urban strategy as support for the armed struggle meant that the CPP was ignoring the other lessons of that period. The PKP had also made this mistake, making willingness to take armed assignments a criterion for membership and encouraging the legal mass organizations to both establish armed groups in the cities and provide political and material support for the armed struggle in the countryside. Then, the result had been the banning of the PKP-led trade union center, and now, by openly linking its urban political activity to the armed struggle, the CPP practically invited the repression of the urban mass movement. In a sense, CPP cadres could hardly be held responsible for their inability to learn from the previous mistakes of the PKP, because for many of them their only knowledge of the earlier period would have been that provided in the writings of Sison, which distorted PKP history in order to serve the needs of the new Maoist orthodoxy, and Sison’s feud with the Lavas.

5 It must be said that if the CPP seriously believed that its call for boycott of the 1986 election would be successful, it was in a position to know better. It could have looked to the experience of its call to boycott the 1984 elections for the Batasang Pambansa. This also failed, for as Goodno points out: “The left could mobilise the most active and reliable core of the opposition, but by far the largest number of anti-Marcos activists saw the election as a chance to express their sentiments and did not want to boycott it.”13 He recalls that, during the boycott rallies of 1984, political activists, labour leaders and peasant organizers would speak about economic injustice, US imperialism, human rights violations, militarism and elite domination. Many of those who were standing in the sun listening to them would agree with what they had to say, but would still vote for the opposition because they simply wanted to use whatever means were at hand to bring about a change.14

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One would have thought, therefore, that it would have been perfectly obvious that if this was indeed the sentiment of a sizeable proportion of those who agreed with the left on the major issues, its determination to register its views at the polling station would be even more pronounced when Marcos himself was seeking reelection— and even more so if they had been influenced by the CPP’s anti-Marcos focus. This of course proved to be the case. Even at boycott rallies, it was clear that the policy would fail, for according to Macaraya KMU members participating in such events sponsored by their own organization “invariably distributed leaflets urging the people to vote for Corazon Aquino.”15 As several observers of the February events are anxious to stress, the 1986 “revolution” was anything but revolutionary. Conrado de Quiros makes the distinction between a class-based revolution and Marcos’s ouster by pointing out that “while ‘people’s power’ postulates a system of relations between specific classes and the structure of authority emanating from it, ‘people power’ opens itself to all classes and, at least at face value, to all kinds of authority.” The very constitution of “people power"—priests and nuns, businessmen and professionals, students, workers, military officials and sympathetic foreign observers—is certainly catholic, if not incongruous. From the standpoint of “people’s power,” this represents not only sectoral but class differences as well, with the peasantry and the comprador bourgeoisie occupying the opposite ends of this “coalition.”16 Ellwood concurs with this, stating: “Far from being a class war, it was what we might call a ‘classless revolution . . .’”17 What this type of analysis leaves out of consideration, however, is that while workers who participated in “people power” may not have done so with conscious class aims, the same could probably not be said of many businessmen or, indeed, members of the church hierarchy. As Ofreneo points out, far from challenging the neocolonial status quo, “‘people power’ installed the Aquino political coalition as the ruling power and provided a grand occasion for the renewal of the people’s faith in two major pillars of Philippine society: the military and the Church.”18

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Given all of this, one is forced to the conclusion that the CPP was half­ right in its original abstentionist policy. However, it was, of course, led to this policy by the mistaken analysis of the relationship between Marcos and the USA, leading to the equally mistaken conclusion that the USA would ensure that the “US-Marcos dictatorship” remained in power. The PKP, on the other hand, saw the electoral exercise as being solely for the benefit of imperialist interests; a victory for either candidate would serve the interests of neither the people in general nor nationalists in particular, and so the party used the occasion in an attempt to foster greater anti­ imperialist awareness and unity. This is not to suggest that the PKP policy met any greater degree of success than that of the CPP, for Pomeroy admits that “Only the loyal PKP supporters . . . heeded the call” to spoil the ballot papers by writing in nationalist slogans.19 What alternatives were open to the CPP? As its programmatic demands had been rejected, it had ruled out support for Aquino. A leading legal activist interviewed in late 1995 says, however, that support for Aquino was the alternative, although this was subject to “shades of interpretation.” While those in the underground opposed to the boycott favored a de facto alliance, their counterparts in the legal organizations argued for a formal, albeit tactical, alliance. Sison’s position, says this source, was that the movement should take advantage of the crisis to “further erode the political support of the Marcos dictatorship.” In reality, says the activist, participation by the movement would have made no difference to the post-EDSA regime, the elite nature of which differed little from that of the regimes preceding Marcos. Even if there had been a pact with Aquino, the left, which would not have been given key positions, would have been unable to affect the character of the regime, as even bourgeois oppositionists like Rene Saguisag and Joker Arroyo were ousted from their cabinet positions after coup threats were issued by the military right.20 This being the case, it can be argued that the logical alternative would have been for the CPP to adopt the same approach as the PKP— preferably in tandem with it— in ensuring that the major demands of the nationalist movement, and the role of imperialism in the election, were

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placed before the public. While this would not have altered the immediate course of events, it would have ensured that the anti-imperialist viewpoint was digested by many more Filipinos. A nationalist mass consciousness was surely the key factor to be developed, often slowly and painstakingly, sometimes more rapidly in crisis conditions, if the Philippines was ever to embark upon the road of genuine development. Given the striking similarity of the minimum demands put forward by both the PKP and the CPP, and of the electoral tactics pursued by the two parties, it is curious that there appears to have been no attempt by either to liaise with the other. If there was a major obstacle to such tactical unity at this stage (it would, briefly, become a reality later in the decade), it was probably not the twenty years of mutual enmity that characterized the relationship between the parties but the fact that even now (illustrated by Sison’s position noted in the previous paragraph) the CPP was more anti-Marcos than it was anti­ imperialist. Writing a few days after the fall of Marcos, Constantino lamented: It must be recalled that prior to the announcement of the snap election, there was a burgeoning debate on the roots of the present crisis. Establishment and alternative media, government and opposition intellectuals as well as academic and sectoral groups discussed extensively the role played by American and other external forces and institutions in our national life. A new perception regarding American aims and policies and how these affected the Philippines’ economic, political and cultural life was developing. It seemed that at last the Filipinos were becoming aware of their neocolonial status. This process was aborted by the electoral exercise, by the protagonists, and by the events that transpired in the last few days.21 That dawning awareness, that process had, moreover, just made its first real appearance since the events of 1967-1969 had divided the postwar nationalist movement and thrown it off course.

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N o tes 1.

2.

By the time of its ninth congress in December 1986, the PKP had 6,000 members, whereas, according to Filemon “Popoy” Lagman, the high point of the CPP’s membership came in 1985, when it had 35,000 members (Edilberto Hao to Ken Fuller, June 12, 2009; Filemon Lagman, interview by the author, January 1996). Although by 1986 the PKP had members in Cebu and a smattering elsewhere, the bulk of the membership was still concentrated in Metro Manila and Central Luzon. Jesus Lava, Memoirs of a Communist (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2002),

3.

323. Jose Y. Dalisay, 7he Lavas: A Filipino Family (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Inc.,

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

1999). Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: Ihe Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, From Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: UP Press, 2007), 55-56. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., interview by the author, January 2008. The head office of the CPGB was at 16 King Street in London’s Covent Garden. Nilo Tayag, interview by the author, March 2009. Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 342-43. See Mao Zedong, “Policy for Work in Liberated Areas for 1946,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 4 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), 76. Mao Zedong, “Tactical Problems of Rural Work in the New Liberated Areas,” in Selected Works, 251-52. Agnes Smedley wrote little on the political differences within the Communist Party of China, but in Battle Hymn of China she found it difficult to believe that a town and valley she had visited could have been overrun by the Japanese had it not been weakened within by antipopular elements within the Kuomintang. “Men,” she concluded, possibly without realizing that she was about to contradict one of Mao’s key dicta, “cannot triumph by guns alone.” Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., Left Book Club edition, 1944), 260. Former CPP cadre in discussion with the author, September 2009. Mao Zedong, “On Protracted War,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 137.

13. James Goodno, The Philippines: Land ofBroken Promises (London: Zed Books, 1991), 84-85. 14. Ibid., 85.

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15. Bach M. Macaraya, Workers' Participation in the Philippine People Power Revolution (Manila: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1988), 48. 16. Conrado de Quiros, “‘People Power’ and the Paradigm of Salvation,” in The February Revolution: Three Views (Quezon City: Karrel, Inc., 1987) 13-14. 17. Douglas J. Elwood, Philippine Revolution, 1986: A Model ofNon-violent Change (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1986), 14. 18. Rene Ofreneo, “The ‘Snap’ Revolution,” in The February Revolution. 19. William Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 306. 20. Carol Araullo, interview by the author, November 1995. 21. Renato Constantino, “The Abortion,” Malaya, March 3, 1986; reprinted in Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch (Quezon City: Karrel Inc., 1987), 6-7.

B

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C orrespondence Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee, June 22, 1966. See www.state. gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9062.htm. --------- to the 303 Committee, April 12, 1967. See www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/ johnson 1b/x/9098.him. Hao, Edilberto, to Jose Lava. “Comments on some of your articles on the national situation," undated, 1984. --------- to Ken Fuller, December 15, 2008. --------- to Ken Fuller, June 12, 2009. Macapagal, Felicisimo, on behalf of the PKP Central Committee, “Open Letter to President Ferdinand Marcos,” May 15, 1975. --------- to President Ferdinand Marcos, October 13, 1976. --------- to President Ferdinand Marcos, February 1, 1978. --------- to President Ferdinand Marcos, February 19, 1978. ---------to President Ferdinand Marcos, March 14, 1978. ---------to Philippine Daily Express, September 23, 1978. ---------to Editor, Philippine Collegian, October 2, 1983. Nemenzo, Francisco Jr., to Ken Fuller, September 21, 2008. ---------to Ken Fuller, October 10, 2008. ---------to Ken Fuller, October 21, 2009. PKP Central Committee to President Ferdinand Marcos, June 14, 1976. PKP Central Committee to President Ferdinand Marcos, March 15, 1977. Pomeroy, William, to Benedict J. Kerkvliet, November 23/December 15, 1974.

447

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Leaflets, P amphlets , P osition P apers , R eports BAYAN. “Persevere in Correct Struggles, Boycott the Sham Election." Reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader. See under “Books.” Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Philippine Council, UP Chapter. “UP Students! Expose, Oppose, and Isolate the Fascist Agents Within Our Ranks!” September 1971. Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). “National United Front to Build People’s Coalition Government,” Ang Bayan, March 1985. ---------. “Our Party’s Economic Program: Change the Production Relations,” Ang Bayan, March 1985. --------- . Program fora People’s Democratic Revolution, 1968. CPP Central Committee. “General Review of Important Events and Decisions from 1980 to 1991,” Debate, date uncertain, probably 1993. --------- . Our Urgent Tasks, 1976. --------- . “Party Conducts Assessment, Says Boycott Policy Was Wrong," Ang Bayan, May 1986. ---------. “Statement of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee on the Twelfth Anniversary of the Re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines,” Ang Bayan, December 26,1980. ---------. “Statement on the Eleventh Anniversary of the New People’s Army," Ang Bayan, March 29, 1980. ---------. “Strengthen the Party and Intensify People’s Struggle in Celebrating the 40th Founding Anniversary,” Ang Bayan, December 26, 2008. Concerned Officers of the Philippines. “Preliminary Statement of Aspirations.” Reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta. See under “Books.” ---------. “Statement of Aspirations.” Reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta. See under “Books.” Convenors’ Group. “The Convenors’ Statement." Reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader. See under “Books.” De la Torre, Edicio. The Philippines: Christians and the Politics of Liberation. London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1986. Dutt, R. Palme. Whither China? London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1967. General Secretary, PKP. Political Transmission, July 1971. Guerrero, Amado. “Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War." Hechanova, Louie G. The Gospel and the Struggle. London: Catholic Institute of International Relations, 1987. Hukbalahap Veterans. “Manifesto of the Hukbalahap Veterans,” 1975. Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina (KaBaPa). “Feminism and Filipino Rural Women:

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Looking Towards the Future,” March 1991. --------- . “KaBaPa’s Indigenous Training System,” undated. Lapiang Manggagawa (LM). “The Lapiang Manggagawa Platform.” Reprinted in Progressive Review, no. 1. --------- . “Manifesto on Laurel-Langley Agreement,” October 2, 1964. Reprinted in Progressive Retiew, no. 5, 11-12. --------- . “Where Labor Stands—The Issues Today," 1963. Lava, Jesus. “Memorandum on the ‘Democratic Revolution,’” typescript, 1972. Liwanag, Armando. “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors,” Kasarinlan, vol. 8, no. 1. Macapagal, Felicisimo. “A Call for Unity and an End to Violence,” December 30, 1985. --------- . “On the December 17 Referendum," PKP circular, December 1977. --------- . “US Imperialism and Philippine Independence: The Main Issue in the Parliamentary Election.” Twelve-page document issued by the PKP, 1978. Mao Zedong. “On Protracted War.” In Selected Works ofMao Tse-tung. Vol. 2, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967. --------- . “Policy for Work in Liberated Areas for 1946.” In Selected Works ofMao Tsetung. Vol. 4. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969. --------- . “Tactical Problems of Rural Work in the New Liberated Areas ” In Selected Works ofMao Tse-tung. Vol. 4. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969Marxist-Leninist Group. “Where to Begin?” Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism. Basic Documents and Speeches of Founding Congress (Manila, 1967), 8. National Democratic Front (NDF). Manifesto of the Preparatory Committee of the NDF: “Unite to Overthrow the US-Marcos Dictatorship,” April 24, 1973. National Security Council. “Decision of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council on the Application for Temporary Release by Benigno S. Aquino Jr.” New People’s Army (NPA). Basic Rules of the New People's Army. Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). “Developments in the Contradictions between the Marcos Administration and the United States,” internal document, February 5, 1978. --------- . Documents of the Eighth Congress of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, 1980. ---------. “Few Guidelines for the Propaganda Team,” date unknown. ---------. Fifth [Sixth] Congress, Political Resolution. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973 ---------. For an Independent and Democratic Philippines (political resolution and

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program, Seventh Congress), 1977. ---------. “The Party’s Legalization Drive: Realities and Challenges,” Ang Buklod, February-March 1975. ---------. “The Party’s Struggle against Ultra-Leftism under Martial Law,” Ang Buklod, vol. 1, no. 1, February-March 1975. ---------. “The Philippines: An International Perspective,” Ang Buklod, FebruaryMarch 1975. ---------. “Program Adopted by the Fifth [Sixth] Congress of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), February 11, 1973 ” Reprinted in William Pomeroy, An American-Made Tragedy. See below. PKP Central Committee. “The Aquino Assassination: Implications and Immediate Tasks,” September 15, 1983. ---------. “From Instability to Disaster: Implications of the Devaluation of the Peso,” July 10, 1983. ---------. “Only the Power of the People Can Lift Martial Law," undated, but obviously January 1981. ---------. “In the Present Crisis, Mobilize for Economic Sovereignty and Popular Democracy,” October 1983. ---------. “Presidential Election for Whom?” May 1981. ---------. “The State of Freedom and the Struggle for National Independence and Progress,” June 14, 1983. ---------. “A Suggested Program Towards National Unity and Reconciliation,” March 1984. ---------. “US Imperialism and the Politics of the Marcos Succession,” August 1982. PKP Politburo. “Boycott the 1971 Elections,” Political Transmission, 1971. ---------. “Build a Mass Political Movement for National Sovereignty, Economic Independence and Broad Democracy!” 1985. ---------. “Electoral Statement No. 1: The Fundamental Issue in the Election,” March 20, 1984. ---------. “Statement of the Politburo of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) on the New Amendments to the US Bases Agreement,” Central Luzon, 1979. Pomeroy, William, and Celia Pomeroy. “The Conflict between Jose Lava and William and Celia Pomeroy.” Internal PKP memo, circa 1982. R.E.F.O.R.M. “Greater Tasks Ahead, Development of the REFORM AFP Movement.” Reproduced in PCIJ, Kudeta. See under “Books.” Samahan sa Ikauunlad ng Kabataang Pilipino (SIKAP). First Annual Report, June 27, 1977. Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino (SKMP). “Brief Report of the Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino,” September 25, 1978. Socialist Party of the Philippines. “Program for a People’s Democracy.” In Political

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Review, nos. 2-3, April-May 1971. --------- . “The Socialist Manifesto." Reprinted in Progressive Review, no. 10, 47. Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF) et al. “Let Us Fight against American Pressure." Circular issued in the name of thirty-four trade union organizations, mostly from Metro Manila, 1978. US Senate. Congressional Record, US Senate, 99th Congress, August 1, 1985. Reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader. See under “Books.” --------- . Staff Report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “The Philippines: A Situation Report,” November 1, 1985, quoted in Schirmer and Shalom, Ihe Philippines Reader. See under “Books.”

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Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1996. Andreyev, I. The Non-capitalist Way. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974. Aquino, Benigno S. Jr. Testamentfrom a Prison Cell. Los Angeles: Philippine Journal, 1988. Azama, Major Rodney S. 7he Huks and the New People’s Army: Comparing Two Postwar Filipino Insurgencies. Quantico: Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1985. This document is available on www.globalsecurity.orgi Bonner, Raymond. Waltzing unth a Dictator. New York: New York Times Books, 1987. Broad, Robin. Unequal Alliance 1979-1S)86: 7he World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988. Brutents, K.N. National Liberation Revolutions Today. Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977 Catholic Institute for International Relations. European Companies in the Philippines. London: CIIR, 1987 Chapman, William. Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army and Its Strugglefor Power. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987. Constantino, Renato. Ihe Nationalist Alternative. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1990. --------- . Renato Constantino and the Aquino Watch. Quezon City: Karrel Inc., 1987. Corpus, Victor N. Silent War. Quezon City: VNC Enterprises, 1989. Cullather, Nick. Managing Nationalism: United States National Security Council Documents on the Philippines, 1953-1960. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1992. Dalisay, Jose Y. The Lavas: A Filipino Family. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Corp., 1999. De la Torre, Edicio. Touching Ground, Taking Root. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1986. Dolgopolov, Yevgeny. The Army and the Revolutionary Transformation of Society. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981. Dutt, R. Palme. Fascism and Social Revolution. London: Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1934. Elegant, Robert. Mao’s Great Revolution. New York: World Publishing, 1971. Elwood, Douglas J. Philippine Revolution 1986: A Model of Non-violent Change. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1986. Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Duhring. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. Fuller, Ken. Forcing the Pace. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2007. Garcia, Robert Francis. To Suffer Thy Comrades. How the Revolution Decimated Its Own. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2003.

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Goodno, James B. The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises. London: Zed Books, 1991. Guerrero, Amado. Philippine Society and Revolution. 3rd ed. N.p.: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1979. --------- . Pomeroy’s Portrait: Revisionist Renegade. Revolutionary School of Mao Zedong Thought, 1972. Guerrero, Leonardo L., and Jamil Maidan Flores. Where There Are No Slaves. Tokyo: Nomura International Publishing Co., 1990. Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. London: Sphere Books, 1972. ---------. The English Revolution, 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972. ---------. The World Turned Upside Down. London: Penguin, 1975. Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Huberman, Leo, and Paul Sweezey. Socialism in Cuba. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. Ileto, Reynaldo C. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Manila: Ateneo University Press, 1979Joaquin, Nick. The Aquinos ofTarlac. Manila: Solar Publishing, 1988. ---------. A Kadre’s Road to Damascus: The Ruben Torres Story. Quezon City: Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2003. Jones, Gregg R. Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. Joo-Jock, Lim, and S. Vani, eds. Armed Communist Movements in Southeast Asia. Hampshire, England: Gower, 1984. Jose, Vivencio R., ed. Mortgaging the Future: The World Bank and IMF in the Philippines. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982. Kolko, Gabriel. Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 19451980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. Translated by Strobe Talbot. London: Sphere Books, 1971. Kuusinen, Otto. Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961. Lachica, Eduardo. Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1971. Lava, Jesus. Memoirs of a Communist. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2002. Lenin, V.I. Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974. Macaraya, Bach M. Workers’Participation in the Philippine People Power Revolution. Manila: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1988.

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McKenna, Thomas M. Muslim Rulers and Rebels. Pasig City; Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2002 . Mao Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Vol. 2. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967. --------- . Selected Works. Vol. 3- Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. ---------. Selected Works. Vol. 4. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969. --------- . Selected Works. Vol. 5. Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977. Marcos, Ferdinand. Today's Revolution: Democracy. Manila: n.p., 1971. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974. May, R. J., and Francisco Nemenzo Jr., eds. The Philippines After Marcos. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985 Ming, Wang. China.- Cultural Revolution or Counter-Revolutionary Coup? Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1969. --------- . Mao’s Betrayal. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979. Munroe, Trevor ABC of Scientific Socialism. Kingston: Workers’ Party of Jamaica, 1980. Ofreneo, Rene. Capitalism in Philippine Agriculture. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1987. Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). Kudeta: The Challenge to Philippine Democracy. Makati: Bookmark, 1990. Pimentel, Benjamin Jr. Edjop: \Ihe Unusual Journey of Edgar Jopson. Quezon City: KEN Incorporated, 1989. Pomeroy, William. An American-Made Tragedy. New York: International Publishers, 1974. --------- . Bilanggo: Life as a Political Prisoner in the Philippines, 1952-1962. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2009. --------- . The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration and Resistance! New York: International Publishers, 1992. Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. Contested Democracy and the Left in the Philippines After Marcos. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008. Rivera, Temario C. et al. Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982. Rocamora, Joel. Breaking Ihrough: Ihe Struggle Within the Communist Party of the Philippines. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1995. Rutten, Rosanne, ed. Brokering a Revolution: Cadres in a Philippine Insurgency. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008. Salonga, Jovito. A Journey of Struggle and Hope. Quezon City: UP Center for Leadership, Citizenship and Democracy/Regina Publishers, 2001. San Juan, E. Crisis in the Philippines. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers,

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I nterviews The following interviews were conducted by the author. Carol Araullo, November 1995. Pedro Baguisa, January 2008. Ed de la Torre, June 1989. Former CPP cadres, September 2009. Romeo Dizon, January 1990. Vivencio Jose, January 2008. Filemon Lagman, January 1996. Jesus Lava, January 1996. Merlin Magallona, January 1990, July 2008, March 2009. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., January 2008. Rene Ofreneo, July 2008. Ricardo Reyes, June 2010. Pastor Tabinas, March 2009. Nilo Tayag, March 2009 Perfecto Tera Jr., May, 1989. Various former PKP activists, cadres, and leaders, November 1989-January 1990. Typescripts of the following interviews are among the papers of William Pomeroy.The interviewers are unknown. Jesus Lava, November 1976 Jesus Lava, June 1977 Jesus Lava, May 1979 Jesus Lava, undated Felicisimo Macapagal, undated Felicisimo Macapagal, September 28, 1976.

N ewspapers , P eriodicals Asiaweek Ang Bayan Ang Buklod Bulletin Today Christian Science Monitor Daily Express

460

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o vem en t

D iv id e d

Debate Expressweek Far Eastern Economic Review Guardian (London) Information Bulletin (Prague) Ang Komunista The Labor Monthly Manila Daily Bulletin Manila Times Midiveek National Midweek Magazine Ang Organisador Peking Review Philippine Currents The Philippines Free Press The Philippine Star PKP Information Political Affairs (USA) Political Review Progressive Review Socialism, Theory and Practice (Moscow) Struggle TimesJournal World Marxist Review

I ndex Abaya, Hernando J., 28 Abinales, Patricio N.f 206, 296n22, 298n50 Abramowitz, Morton, 399 Agoncillo, Teodoro, 28 Aguilar, Mila, 313 Aidit, D.N., 58, 75n Akabata, 57 AKSIUN, 19, 106 Alejandrino, Casto, 9 Alibasbas, Commander, 87, 89

202, 275, 282, 307, 308, 313, 314, 315, 316, 329, 355, 356, 375, 378, 381, 385, 386, 397, 435; CPP view of, before and after assassination, 309-12; and formation of NPA, 89-96 Aquino, Corazon Cojuangco, 312, 313, 314, 320, 360, 386, 388, 394, 396, 397, 404, 405, 406, 407, 410, 413, 414, 416, 418, 420, 421, 432, 442, 443 Araneta, Antonio S., 28 Armacost, Michael, 375, 405, 420 Armitage, Richard, 398, 401 Arroyo, Joker, 320, 443 Ascher, William, 332 Asia Foundation, 405, 421-22n6 Asian-American Free Labor Institute,

Allen, James, 185 Amante, Felix, 48 Andrea (ship), 264 Ang Bayan, vii, 83, 115, 202, 211, 212, 214, 234, 258, 260, 264, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275,282, 283, 284, 285, 288, 289, 290,308, 309, 311, 316, 318, 320, 321,322, 439 Ang Buklod, 128, 129, 131, 134, 192 Ang Komunista, 98, 115, 116, 117, 118, 122, 124, 125, 127, 138, 155, 169, 170, 429 Ang Organisador, 137 Aniban ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, 338 Anti-Subversion Law, 16, 22n, 25, 26, 48, 68, 152, 173, 187, 377 Aquino, Agapito “Butz,” 315, 320, 387 Aquino, Benigno “Ninoy,” xi, xii, 73,

345 Asian Development Bank, 143, 145, 178, 209, 342 Association of Major Religious Superiors of Women in the Philippines, 308 Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), 382, 387 Azama, Maj. Rodney S., 297n30 Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), xii, 307, 320-22, 386, 410-12, 418, 419, 424n55

97, 113, 117, 128, 174, 193, 194, 461

462

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Bagong Sibol, 338 Baguisa, Pedro, vii, 105, 184, 185, 337, 354n Baking, Angel, 68, 84n4, 103 Bakri, Ilyas, 58 Balagtas, Francisco (Jose Lava), 107 Balweg, Conrado, 234 BANDILA, 320 Bankers’ Trust, 399 Barrera, Jesus G., 26 Basic Christian Communities, 251-52

Basic Rules of the New People’s Army, 96, 272, 276n4 Batac, Victor, 393 Bautista, Fred, 110 Bautista, Gen., 45 Beatles, 105n Bell Trade Act, 4, 144 Benedicto, Roberto, 384 Benguet Consolidated, 386 Bernstein, Eduard, 138 Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 44, 48n, 103, 106, 108, 111 Blanco, Fr. Jose, 113 Blum, Heike, 250 Bonifacio, Andres, 25 Bonner, Raymond, 399, 400, 405, 406, 414, 415, 417 Briones, Alejandro, 186, 187 Broad, Robin, 330-34 Brown, Mark Malloch, 397, 415 Brutents, K.N., 216-17 Bukang Liwayway, 337 Bukluran sa Ikauunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa (BISIG), 323nll Bulletin Today, 186, 187 Burnham, Forbes, 195 Buscayno, Bernabe (Commander Dante), xi, 11, 87, 89-90, 91, 92,

93, 95, 99n20, 100n38, 105n, 109, 112, 266n, 273n, 310n, 435 Buss, Claude, 399, 414 Camara, Archbishop Helder, 225 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK), 60 Carter, Jimmy, 347, 355, 359, 364, 365, 414 Casey, William, 400, 415 Castro, Fidel, 240-41 Castro, Pedro, 43, 81 Catholic Church, 154, 194,199, 223, 224, 229, 250, 251, 253, 360, 391, 404, 405, 416 Cavanagh, John, 330 Cellophil Resources Corp., 260, 261 Central Intelligence Agency (CLA), 14, 48, 49, 59n, 6ln, 92, 93, 107, 113, 114, 121n32, 128, 148n, 149, 151, 168, 172, 173, 178, 197, 251, 345, 357, 370, 381, 398, 399, 400, 401, 405, 406, 414, 415, 416, 420, 42122n6, 435; and “Ninoy” Aquino, 94-96 Chapman, William, 249, 251, 271, 279, 280, 281, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291, 301n, 309n, 320-21, 438 Charles I, 227 Chavez, Hugo, 214n Chen Po-ta, 55, 60, 66n64 Chen Yi, 56 Chiang Kai-shek, 169, 437 Chico dam project, 261

Christian Science Monitor, 397 Christians for National Liberation (CNL), 233, 248, 249 Chu Teh, 65n41 Cid, Cipriano, 14, 15, 16, 22n, 23

In d ex

Civil Liberties Union, 157 Citizens’ Assemblies, 175, 176, 177 Claver, Bishop Francisco, 252, 291 Cojuangco, Jose “Peping," 94, 110, 396 Cojuangco, Eduardo “Danding," 90, 206, 302, 329, 384, 421 Commission on Elections (Comelec), 176, 308, 311,358,413 Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities, 12

Communist International (Comintern), 1, 2, 3, 51, 52, 215, 234, 302 Communist Party of China (CPC), x, 49, 58, 61, 72, 75, 80, 121, 218, 232, 263, 434, 437, 445nlO; development of Maoism within, 50-57 Communist Party of Great Britain, 428 Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), 12, 18, 25, 58, 59, 60n Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), ix, x, xi, xii, 7, 48, 61, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 124, 125, 126, 142n, 145, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 184n, 188, 199, 200, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 346, 351, 359, 369, 370, 372, 375, 378, 383, 386, 387, 393, 396, 397, 401, 405, 407, 425, 427, 429, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445nl; and 1986 election, 410-13, 418-19; and antiDPA campaigns, 293-96, 297n22, 298n50; and armed struggle (1975-1984), 264-75; and armed struggle in Mindanao, 279-84; and arms from China, 263-64, and first period of armed struggle (19691975), 257-63; and First Quarter

463

Storm, 108-9; and formation of NPA, 86-98; foundation of, 67-69; and liberation theology, 223-26, 229-35, 239-41, 248-50, 252-53; and mode of production, 201-3, 208-14, 218, 220, 222n43; PKP’s early view of, 111-19; program of, 69-83; and united front work, 300-322 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 37, 55, 57, llln , 143, 184,384 Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), 1 ,3 Concepcion, Jose, 388 Concerned Officers of the AFP, 394 Congreso de Obrero de Filipinas, 1 Congress of Labor Organizations, 3 Constantino, Renato, 172, 175n, 194, 210, 328, 330, 406, 407, 418, 421, 444 Convenors’ Group, 386, 388 Cordillera People’s Liberation Army, 261 Coronel, Sheila S., 393, 396 Cory for President Movement, 388 Cromwell, Oliver, 228 Crowe, Admiral William J., 398, 420 Cruz, J.V., 20 Cruz, Lazaro, 6l Cuenco, Miguel, 26 Cunanan, Benjamin (Commander Hizon), 11 Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Youth, 337

Daily Express, 187, 188, 359 Dalisay, Jose Y., 196n9, 428n Del Monte, 208 Democratic Alliance, 4, 12, 26, 80, 81

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A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Democratic Bloc, 294, 323nll Diokno, Jose W., 32, 166, 320, 387 Disini, Herminio, 251, 260 Diwa, Commander (Mariano de Guzman), 105n, 115,123, 124, 186 Dizon, Romeo, 10, 12, 13, 41, 46, 68, 87, 88, 90, 109, 111, 124, 185,190, 196n9 Dobb, Maurice, 104 Dole, 21, 208 Dulag, Macliing, 261 Educational Development Decree, 177 Elwood, Douglas J., 413, 424n55 Emergency Employment Administration, 20 Engels, Friedrich, 215, 235; on religion, 236-39 Enrile, Juan Ponce, 94, 95, 171, 350, 356, 394, 396, 401, 414, 415, 417, 419, 421 Export Incentives Act, 1970, 165 Expressweek, 337 Evangelista, Aurora, 125 Evangelista, Crisanto, 191n Federation of Free Farmers (FFF), 224, 230 Federation of Free Workers (FFW), 14, 224 Fernandez, Lucas, 280 Ferrer, Jaime, 6ln Ferrer, Ricardo D., 210, 211, 216, 217 Filipino Ideology, The, 395 Finin, Gerard A., 259, 260 Five Years of the New Society, 358 Fortich, Bishop Antonio, 287 Fortuna, Julius, 96, 303 Freddie, Commander, 87

Free Legal Assistance Group, 308, 320 Free Philippines, 26 Frente Nacional de Libertacäo de Angola, 56 Frianeza, Jorge, 81 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 345 Frunze, Mario (Francisco Nemenzo Jr.), 125, 126 Garcia, Arthur, 90, 93, 97 Garcia, Carlos P., 14, 94, 309n, 394 Garcia, Robert Francis, 292, 293, 296 Geiger, Daniel, 250 General Order No. 5, 177 Gillego, Bonifacio, 394, 402n3 Goodno, James, 109, 239, 248, 252, 253, 387, 405, 417, 418, 441 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 384 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 51, 55, 57, 59, 62, 75, 118, 232 Green Revolution, 209 Group of 77,178, 341 Guerrero, Amado, 40, 41, 69, 80, 87, 232, 266n. See also Sison, Jo6e Maria Guerrero, Leonardo, 87 (iuingona, Teofisto, 387 Gutierrez, Max, 67 Habib, Philip, 414, 415, 416, 420 Hardie Report, 145, 203 Hardie, Robert, 203 Hao, Edilberto, vii, 380 Hassan, Muhammad Abdul, 58 Hechanova, Louie G., 226, 233 Henares, Hilarion, 334 Hernandez, Amado V., 26, 67, 68 He Who Rides the Tiger, 49 Hill, Christopher, 227, 228

In d ex

Hobsbawm, Eric, 298n50 Holbrooke, Richard, 406 Honasan, Gregorio “Gringo," 394 Hotapea, 58 Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon

465

106 , 178

Kabataang Makabayan (KM), 19, 28, 29, 30, 31, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 61, 64n25, 74, 92, 97, 106, 108, 111, 112,113,114,116, 313 (Hukbalahap), 3, 4, 7, 25, 86, 96, 122 KADENA, 419 Kalaw, Eva Estrada, 387 Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga (HMB), 5, 11, 14, 23, 39, 43, 82, 88, Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KPMP), 91, 105n, 111, 112, 122, 123, 188, 284, 290, 427 1 Humphrey, Hubert, 162, 163 Kaplan, Gabe, 61 Kaplan, Philip, 406 Hyde, Douglas, 49 Karagatan (ship), 263-64 Katipunan ng mga Bagong Pilipina Ileto, Reynaldo C., 226n (KaBaPa), 336, 338 Indian Express, 163 Interim Batasang Pambansa, 177, 304, Katipunang Manggagawang Pilipino (KMP), 14 309, 350, 353, 354, 365 Kerry, John, 401 International Children’s Festival, 338 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 60n, Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL), 356, 143, 145, 151, 165, 169/195, 205, 207, 301, 327, 328, 331, 332, 333, 342, 364, 367, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 384, 385, 387, 398, 407, 431 Investment Incentives Law, 1967, 165 Irish Republican Army, 287 Jalandoni, Luis, 226, 249 January 25th Manifesto, 19-20, 23, 24, 30 Jenmin Jihpao, 56 Johnson, Lyndon B., 30n, 43, 162, 163, 179 Jones, Gregg R., 61, 69, 87, 88, 90, 92, 108, 248, 252, 260, 261, 263, 264, 270, 271, 279, 282, 285, 303, 304, 305, 313, 315, 321 Jopson, Edgar, 263n, 280, 304 Jose, Vivencio, vii, 46, 58, 61, 64n28,

359, 416 Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), 200, 308, 317n, 320, 418, 419, 442 Kimura, Matsataka, 22 King Ranch, 209 Kintanar, Col. Galileo C., 252 Kintanar, Romulo, 280, 295 Kolko, Gabriel, 94, 179 Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (Kompil), 47, 315 Kroef, Justus van der, 262, 263 Kuomintang (Guomindang), 51, 52, 77, 437, 445nl0 Kosygin, Alexei, 43 Khrushchev, Nikita, 66n64 Labor Code, 177 Labrador, Servando, 289, 290 Lachica, Eduardo, 68, 77, 86, 87, 88, 91,

466

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Le Monde group, 305, 323nl2 92, 97, 98, 105n, 284, 285 Lenin and Imperialism Today, 104 Lacsina, Ignacio, 11,12, 13, 14, 15,16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 43, 44,103, 104,106Lenin, V.I., xi, 50, 125, 133,138, Lagman, Filemon “Popoy,” viii, 201, 192, 215, 223, 235, 238, 248; on religion, 241-47 273n, 285, 286, 294, 304, 306n, Leon, Fortunato de, 24 323n6, 445nl Uberai Party, 17, 20, 21, 34n32, 81, 91, Lakasdiwa, 113, 114 Lakas ng Bayan (Laban), 388 105,109, 114, 117, 171, 172, 303, Land Bank, 175n, 271, 346n, 438 435 Licaros, Gregorio, 331, 333 Lansang, Jose A., 24 Lichauco, Alejandro, 104, 112, 165, 166 Lansdale, Edward, 399 Li Li-san, 51 Lapiang Manggagawa (1920s), 1 Liu Shaoqi, 52, 55 Lapiang Manggagawa (LM, 1960s), 13, Lopez, Fernando, 30 15, 16, 17, 18-23, 29, 31, 34n32, Lopez, Salvador P., 25 43, 48, 105, 428, 430 Lopez, Tony, 4l3n Lapus, Jose David, 106 Lukas, Karel, 337 Laurel, Jose B., 166 Laurel, Jose P., 82, 166 Laurel, Salvador, 308, 370, 387, 388, 406 Laurel, Sotero H., 30, 109 Laurel-Langley Agreement, 19, 148 Lava, Francisco “Paco,” 11, 12, 13, 40, 42, 47, 101; removed as general secretary, 110-11, 112, 427, 428n Lava, Horacio, 13 Lava, Jesus, viii, 9,10, 11, 12,13, 23, 39, 40, 63n21, 68, 86, 120n31, 182, 184, 188, 196-97n9, 427 Lava, Jose, 4, 5, 81, 84n4, 103, 107, 110, 120n32, 380, 434 Lava, Vicente, 3, 4 Lava, Vicente, Jr., 12, 113 Laxalt, Paul, 400, 421 Laya, Jaime, 333 League of Filipino Students, 308, 419

Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, 50 Le Monde (newspaper), 56

Lumauig, Gualberto, 259 Macapagal, Diosdado, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 105, 162, 167,169, 207, 428, 430 Macapagal, Felicisimo, 41, 86, 111, 115, 121, 131, 186, 187, 190, 352-53, 356, 358, 359, 385-86 Macaraya, Bach M., 413, 418, 419, 442 Maclang, Federico, 131, 136, 185 Magàllona, Merlin, 13, 15n, 42, 63n21, 112, 123, 129, 134, 184, 187, 329, 339, 343, 358, 360, 363, 367, 375 Magno, Alex, 75n Magsaysay, Ramon, 24, 6ln, 94, 166, 194, 207, 399, 408 Malay, Armando, Jr., 203, 269, 312 Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP), 45, 92, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112,113, 114 Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (MASAKA), 13, 19, 23, 31, 32, 44,

In d ex

45, 46, 68, 85n4, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 188 Manarang, Cesareo, 87 Manglapus, Raul, 114, 170, 369, 387 Manila-Rizal Committee/Region (of CPP), 74n, 267, 285, 303, 304, 323n6, 440 Manila Times, 20, 61, 115, 162, 164, 320, 4l3n Manley, Michael, 195 Maoism, x, xi, 28, 37, 42, 49, 58, 60, 78, 80, 116, 118, 183, 199, 214, 218, 229, 231, 232, 235, 240, 249, 393, 434; development of, in China, 50-57 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), 37, 42, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 68, 71, 75, 80, 83, 142, 143, 230, 232, 248, 434, 436 MacArthur, Douglas, 322, 414 Maravilla, Jorge (William Pomeroy), 107, 127 Marcos, Ferdinand, ix, x, xi, xii, 1, 21, 30, 47n, 62, 72, 73, 77, 79, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99n31, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113,114, 115,117, 119, 127, 128, 130,131, 135,148, 150, 157, 158, 194,196, 197n9, 200, 201, 205, 207, 208, 224, 225, 250, 251, 253, 260, 261, 263, 269, 275, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 297n30, 300, 301, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 314, 315, 316, 321, 322, 325, 335, 336, 337, 338, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386, 388, 391, 393, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 425, 427, 428,

467

430, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436, 438, 440, 442, 443, 444; and declaration of martial law, 171-80; economic restrictions upon, 327-34; failure to realize nationalist potential, 33V-60; first term of, 162-66; nationalist stance of, 167-71; ouster of, by “people power," 40421; PKP’s political settlement with, 182-93 Marcos, Imee, 357 Marcos, Imelda, l6l Marighella, Carlos, 129, 135n Maring, Commander (Romulo de Guzman), 123, 338 Marx, Karl, 205, 215, 235, 241, 249, 268n, 381 Marxist-Leninist Group (MLG), 127-37, 138, 140n30, I40n37, 141, 429 Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, 57 McGehee, Ralph, 59n McKenna, Thomas M., 250, 287 McNutt, Paul, 81 Military Assistance Pact, 19, 29, 349 Military Bases Agreement, 19, 29, 377, 385, 407, 420 Mijares, Primitivo, 186, 187 Milton, John, 227 Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference, 253 Mitra, Ramon, 387 Moffett, George D. Ill, 397 Mondiguing, Alipip, 259 Monkees, 105n, 115 Morales, Horacio, 305 Moro National Liberation Front, 250, 287, 292, 438 Movement of Attorneys for

468

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

Brotherhood, Integrity, Nationalism and Independence (MABINI), 320 Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), 101, 106, 107, 108, 111, 120nll, 233 Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism (MAN), 31-33, 40n, 44, 45, 49, 63n21, 74, 104, 105,107, 112, 168, 169, 440 Movimento Popular de Libertadio de Angola, 56 Munroe, Trevor, 204 Mutual Defense Treaty, 29, 349 Myint, H., 209 Nach, James, 397 Nacionalista Party, 2, 5, 20, 21, 32n32, 81,90, 114, 117, 172, 435 Nagkakaisang Partido Demokratiko Sosyalistang Pilipinas, 369 National Alliance for Justice, Freedom and Democracy, 305 National Anti-Parity Council, 19 National Association of Trade Unions (NATU), 12, 14, 15, 22n, 32, 103, 104, 106 National Bureau of Investigation, 113 National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), 388, 406, 413, 416 National Democratic Front (NDF), 96, 226, 233, 234, 252, 281, 295, 305, 309, 310, 312, 321, 323nl2, 375, 386, 397; formation of, 300-302 National Economic Development Authority, 176, 328 National Endowment for Democracy, 405 National Federation of Labor Unions

(NAFLU), 12 Nationalist Citizens’ Party, 15 National Labor Relations Committee, 345 National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), 6ln National Secretariat of Social Action, Justice and Peace, 253 National Students League, 113 National Unification Committee, 386 National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), 113, 115 NATO, 142 Navarro, Frank, 239-40 Nazareno, Rex, 87 Nemenzo, Francisco “Dodong,”Jr., vii, 10, 13, 15n, 21, 22n, 24, 28, 31, 34n24, 35n58, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63nll, 69, 82, 83, 104, 106, 108n, 110, 111, 115, 119n8, 120nll, 138, I40n30, I40n37, 155, 188, 190, 234, 289, 340, 36lnl7, 381, 428, 429; and the Marxist-Leninist Group, 123-37 Nepomuceno, Juanita L., 25 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 178, 184, 341, 342, 364, 382, 430 New People’s Army (NPA), xi, xii, 11, 80, 94, 96, 97, 100n52,105n, 106, 112, 115, 119, 122, 123, 126, 130, 184, 199, 200, 223, 250, 252, 253, 283, 284, 346n, 359, 369, 386, 393, 397, 398, 401, 402, 405, 412, 432, 436, 438, 439, 440; and anti-DPA campaigns, 292-96; armed struggle, 1969-1975, 257-63; armed struggle, 1976-1984, 26482; and arms from China, 263-64;

In d e x

early activity of, 97-98; extent of members’ political commitment and understanding, 284-87; formation of, 86-93; negative results of its “protracted people’s war," 291-92; numerical strength of, 287-91, 297n30; and Plaza Miranda bombing, 109-10, 171, 264; priests joining, 233-34, 239 New Society, 171-80, 182, 187, 190, 191, 322, 335, 337, 345, 358, 373, 431

New Times, 380 New Yorker, 414 Niehaw, Marjorie, 399 Nixon, Richard M., 142, 173, 174, 351 Non-Aligned Movement, 178, 341, 350, 354, 420 non-capitalist development, xi, 72, 156, 185, 199, 201, 215-20 Oca, Roberto, 34n32 Ocampo, Felicísimo C, 25 Ocampo, Saturnino, 28 Ofreneo, Rene, 184, 207, 208, 405, 416, 417, 442 Olalia, Felixberto, 12, 44, 67, 68 Olalia, Rolando, 320 On Coalition Government, 53, 60, 71n Ongpin, Jaime, 321, 386 Ongpin, Roberto, 373 On New Democracy, 51, 52, 53, 111, 214, 301n, 435 Ople, Bias, 168, 251 Ortega, Bruno, 234 Ortega, Cirilo, 234 Osmeña, Sergio, 4 Osmeña, Sergio, Jr., 97, 167, 174, 435 Our Urgent Tasks, xi, 100n52, 218, 260,

469

266-69, 280, 303, 306, 322, 437 Overholt, William H., 399, 405, 406 Padilla, Ambrosio, 387 Palestine Liberation Organization, 192, 290 Palma, Cecilia Muftoz, 388 Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid (PKM), 23 Pambansang Kilusan ng Paggawa (KILUSAN), 15, 103, 106 Pagkakaisa ng Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP), 308 Paraiso, Simplicio, 67 Parker, Guy, 414 Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), be, x, xi, xii, xiii, 34n24, 35n58, 58, 60, 61, 63n21, 65n56, 67, 68, 69, 74, 77, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 98, 101, 102, 120nll, 161, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 179, 201, 269, 306, 307, 319n, 322, 325, 334, 387, 394, 411, 416, 425, 427-33, 434, 435, 438, 440, 441, 443, 444, 445nl; 1930-1957, 1-6; 1957-1967, 9-33; and the 1986 election, 407-10; activity 1981-1985, 372-86; and US bases, 349-51; eighth congress (1980) of, 363-72; its activity immediately following the political settlement, 335-39; its growing disenchantment with Marcos, 352-60; its political settlement with Marcos, 182-96, 197n9; its struggle against the CPP, 111-19; Jose Maria Sison’s break with, 39-49; and the Marxist-Leninist Group, 122-38, 140n27; problems of, following the CPP split, 103-8;

470

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

removal of Francisco Lava Jr. as general secretary, 110-11; seventh congress (1977) of, 339-48; Sison’s criticisms of, 80-83, 84n4; sixth congress (1973) of, 141-58 Partido Obrero, 1 Pascual, Danilo, 129, 136 Peace Corps, 151 Pelobello, Vicente, 234 Peng Dehuai, 54 People’s Movement for Independence, Nationalities and Democracy, 308 People’s National Congress (Guyana), 195 People’s Opposition to the Presidential Plebiscite-Election (PEOPLE), 308 People’s Progressive Party (Guyana), 195 People’s Revolutionary Congress, 175 People’s World, 42 Perez, Col. Greg R, 134, 359, 362n62 Philippine Association of Free Labor Unions (PAFLU), 14, 15, 32 Philippine Civic Action Group, 162 Philippine Collegian, 63, 108n, 112, 381 Philippine Currents, 407, 416 Philippine Democratic Socialist Party (PDSP), 234 Philippine Military Academy (PMA), 90, 394, 395, 421 Philippine Sunday Express, 186 Philippines Free Press, 163 Philippine Trade &Development, 209 Philippine Trade Union Council, 14 Philippine Trial Lawyers Association, 308 Philippine Women’s Society, 336 Pilger, John, 59-60n Pimentel, Aquilino, Jr., 387

Pimentel, Benjamin, Jr., 109n, 263, 304, 398, 415 Pinochet, Augusto, 56 Political Transmission, 13, 115, 117, 118, 128, 429 Pomeroy, Celia Mariano, vii, viii, 83, 84n4, llln , 120-21n32, 394 Pomeroy, William, vii, viii, 26, 28, 44, 45, 47, 63nll, 68, 82, 83, 84n4, 86, 88, 97, 107, llln , 120-21 n32, 127, 166, 172, 173, 184, 185,188, 193, 339, 362n62, 394, 402n3, 428, 443 Praeger, 49 Presidential Decree No. 27, 174 Presidential Decree No. 86, 175 Presidential Decree No. 1834, 376 Presidential Decree No. 1835, 377 Presidential Proclamation No. 2045, 376 Procter & Gamble, 384

Programfor a People’s Democratic Revolution, 69-80, 9 5 ,142n, 201, 203,

232, 248, 262, 267, 435 Progressive Review, 14, 17, 20, 24-28, 29, 42, 44, 47, 60, 66n6l, 83, 104, 169, 428 Protestants Opposed to the Presidential Election, 308 Public Order Act, 373 Puno, Reynato S., 26 Quezon, Manuel, 2, 3, 10 Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert, 99n20 Quirino, Elpidio, 5, 19, 81, 194 Quirino-Foster Agreement, 19 Quiros, Conrado de, 442 Radio Veritas, 405, 417, 420 Rainsborough, Col. Thomas, 227 Ramos, Fidel V., 140n27, 188, 396, 401,

Ind ex

414, 415, 417, 418, 419 Rand Corporation, 414

Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party, 80 Recto, Claro M., 14, 15, 64n31 Reagan, Ronald, 363, 396, 397, 400, 407, 414, 415, 420, 421 R E FO R M., 395 Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM\ 393-96, 397, 398, 402, 405, 406, 4l3n, 414, 415, 4l6, 417, 420, 424n55 Retail Trade Nationalization Law, 19 Reuter, Fr. James B., 417 Revolutionary School of Mao Tse-tung Thought, 80, 83 Reyes, J.B L., 320 Reyes, Ricardo, 41 In Rivera, Temario C.. 213 Roberto, Holden, 56 Rocamora, Joel, 294, 295, 309 Roces, Joaquin “Chino,” 61-62 Rockefeller, David, 164 Rodolfo, Agustin, 25 Rodriguez, Simeon, 67, 68, 84n4, 103 Roxas, Manuel, 4, 5, 81, 194 Ruiz, Nick, 233 Rusk, Dean, 163 Russell, Lord Bertrand, 44, 111 Russian Revolution, 1, 37, 51 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, 37, 246n Rutten, Rosanne, 250, 255n67, 284

471

286 Samahan ng Kababaihang Manggagawang Pilipino (SKMP), 339 Samahan ng mga Progresibong Kababaihang Pilipino (SPKP), 336 Samahan sa lkauunlad ng Kabataang Pilipino (SIKAP), 336-38 Santiago, Col. Mariano, 421 Santos, Alejo S., 309 Santos, Pedro Abad, 3 Savimbi, Jonas, 56 Shalom, Stephen Rosskamm, 401 Shaplen, Robert, 414 Schirmer, Daniel B. 401 Seagrave, Sterling, 94, 398, 399, 414, 415 Serrano, Isagani, 305, 306 Shultz, George P., 420 Sin, Cardinal Jaime, 253, 417 Singson, Luis, 119 Sison, Jose Maria, ix, x, xi, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15n, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34n24, 51, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63nll, 63n21, 64n25, 64n28, 65n56, 72n, 74, 75n, 76, 84n4, 90, 97, 98, 99n20, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111,

Saguisag, Rene, 443 Salas, Rafael, 387 Salas, Rodolfo, 69, 88, 89, 315

112, 155, 232, 266, 293, 303, 375, 437,

113, 123, 126, 131, 136, 138, 197, 202, 209, 210, 221nl4, 240, 250, 258, 263, 264, 265, 271, 281, 289, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297n29, 301n, 306n, 31 On, 315, 320, 322, 412, 418, 419, 427, 428, 435, 438, 440, 441, 443, 444; and

Salonga, Jovito, 30, 120n25, 163, 387 Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK), 45-46, 106, 113, 114, 116,

fonnation of the CPP, 67-69; and formation of the NPA, 88-89; his criticisms of the PKP, 80-83; and

47i

A M o v e m e n t D iv id e d

“Ninoy” Aquino, 91-96; reasons for his split from the PKP, 46-49; rise to prominence of, 11-12; and the SDK, 45-46; split from the PKP of, 39-45 Sison, Juliet de Lima, 83 Sluka, Jeffery A., 287 Smedley, Agnes, 64-65n4l, 445nl0 Smith, Joseph, 6ln Socialist Party, 3 Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP), 43, 46, 104, 105, 116, 435 South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 30n, 142, 154, 178

Specific Characteristics of Our People s War, xi, xii, 265-66, 292, 436, 438 Stalin, Josef, 66n64, 239n Student Cultural Association of the Philippines, 11-12 Suharto, Mohammed, 58, 59-60n Sukarno, Ahmed, 18, 60, 94 Sumat, Cecilio, 90 Sumulong, Commander (Faustino del Mundo), 69, 86-89, 90, 91, 97, 98, 105n, 122, 435 Sun Yat-sen, 71n Szymanski, Albert, 219-20 Tabinas, Pastor, 129, 130n, 135, 136, I40n37 Taftada, Lorenzo, 15, 29, 30, 63n21, 320,386 Tanedo, Vicente M., 187 Taruc, Luis, 44, 49, 68, 80, 86, 89, 94, 96, 435 Taruc, Pedro, 11, 12, 86, 87-88 Taruc, Peregrino, 12 Task Force Detainees, 308 Tayag, Nilo, vii, 42, 88, 90, 92, 93, 96,

97, 98, 100n38, 310n, 393, 431 Teodoro, Luis V., 28 Tera, Perfecto, Jr., vii, 31, 32, 45, 46

Thesesfor the Study and Propagation of the Party's General Line in the Period of Transition, 53 Tiamzon, Benito, 295 TimesJournal, 187

Today's Revolution: Democracy. 168, 170, 180, 182, 184 Torre, Edicio de la, vii, 223-26, 229-33, 239, 240, 241, 249 Torres, Ruben, 108n, I40n27, 158n2 Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, 345, 418 Trade Unions of the Philippines and Allied Services (TUPAS), 418 Tubianosa, Ibarra, 264 UN Conference on Trade and Development, 341 Unichem, 329 Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF), 15, 103, 110, 338 UNITA (Angola), 56 United Democratic Opposition Party (UNIDO), 308, 311, 370, 387, 388 United Fruit Company, 21 United States Army Forces in the Far East, 3 United States Information Service, 20 University of the Philippines, 11, 25, 28, 35n58, 42, 83, 124, 162, 178, 308, 381 US Agency for International Development, 406 US National Security Council, 64n31, 398, 399, 400

Valencia, Ernesto M., 213 Valencia, Teodoro F., 186 Valerio, Nilo, 234 Ver, Gen. Fabian, 306, 393, 400, 417 Vera, Benjamin de, 280 Villanueva, Governor (acting), 119 Wang Ming, 52, 53 Weekley, Katherine, 32n24, 89, 105, 119n8, 280, 293, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309, 316, 323n6, 323nll, 412 Weinberger, Caspar, 420 Wilson, James, 86 Wood, Leonard, 2, 428 Workers’ Party of Jamaica, 195 World Federation of Trade Unions, 104

Worid Marxist Review, 103n, 121 n33, 197, 380 Yap, Jose, 92 Yorac, llaydee, 106, Youngblood, Robert L., 251 Young Christian Socialists of the Philippines, 115 Young Communist League, 104, 116 Yulo Group, 209

T he A uthor Ken Fuller is a former trade union official from London. He has published many articles on the Caribbean and the Philippines. His trade union history of London busworkers, Radical Aristocrats, was published by Lawrence & Wishart (London, 1985) and republished in 2011 by Ishi Press (New York). In 2003, he moved to the Philippines, from where he contributes articles on Philippine affairs to publications in London and writes a weekly column for Manila’s Daily Tribune. His Forcing the Pace:

The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, From Foundation to Arm ed Struggle, was published by the UP Press in 2007.

475

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h i l i p p i n e s

In Forcing the Pace (UP Press, 2007, a National Book Award finalist in 2008), Ken Fuller followed the progress of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) from its foundation in 1930 to the defeat of the Huk Rebellion in the mid-1950s. InA Movement D ivided, he continues the story until the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The author traces the PKP’s painstaking attempts to rebuild, its conclusion of a political settlement with Marcos in 1974, and the development of the increasingly anti-imperialist stance which informed its approach to Marcos. The three congresses held by the PKP during this period are considered in detail, as are the two splits which occurred—that leading to the formation of the Communist Part) of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968, and the “Marxist-Leninist Group” split in 1972. The current volume considers the CPP’s “semifeudal” characterization of the mode of production, its approaches to religion and alliances, and its “protracted peoples’ war.” The book differs from most other studies on this subject, discussing the growth of Maoism in China and the manner of its introduction to the Philippines, and arguing that it is impossible to achieve an accurate view of the CPP’s impact unless it is considered alongside the PKP and the developments in which that party was involved when the split occurred. Cover Design: Tony D. Igcalinos Front Cover Photos Top: G en. See. Felicisimo Macapagal speaking at the P K P ’s 9th Congress. Cabiao Coliseum , Cabiao, Nueva Kcija (P K P archives) Bottom : M embers o f the New People’s Arm)