The Nightmare Of The Philippine Left: The History Of All Dead Generations

As Asia experienced the massive underwater earthquake yesterday, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) – the longest running armed guerrilla ‘revolutionary’ movement in Asia guided under the ideologies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism – marked the 36th anniversary of its re-establishment. But the Party needs the kind of jolt that hit Asia yesterday to wake it up from complacency and the nightmare of the past.

In its anniversary statement, the Central Committee of the CPP calls on its force to ‘avail of the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system and the domestic ruling system of big compradors and landlords’ as well as to ‘intensify the guerrilla offensives to advance the new democratic revolution’. Read the statement released yesterday (December 26) here. But how can the Party exploit the crisis and contradictions of the world capitalist system if it is burdened with its own crises and contradictions?

On 7 December, the Party released a diagram entitled ‘Kaugnayan ng mga Kontrarebolusyonaryong grupo sa mga Trotskyista at Sosyal-Demokrata’ (‘Connections of the Counter-revolutionary Groups with the Trotskyites and Social Democrats’), showing the connections with various Trotskyites factions abroad of several ‘pseudo-revolutionary petty bourgeois grouplets in the Philippines’. These groups include the party list Akbayan, the socialist organization Bukluran sa Ikauunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa (BISIG), and the democratic think-tank Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD), among others. Several key personalities in the Philippine social movements are also named ‘counter-revolutionaries’ including my former professor Walden Bello and Akbayan Representative Etta Rosales. Bello is a respected scholar in the Philippine academe and a recipient of the ‘alternative nobel prize’ for his advocacy against neo-liberal, corporate-driven globalization. In my work in the Philippine House of Representatives in the 12th Congress, Rosales is regarded as the most esteemed and credible progressive, left legislator in the chamber. Click here to see said diagram.

The Party, being the only left movement in the Philippines that has the monopoly of the use of force with the New People’s Army (NPA) as its armed wing, is historically notorious for subjecting to assassination those people it labels as ‘pseudo-revolutionaries’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Just recently, two former leaders who have defected the Party, Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara, have been punished to death. Read a statement on this issue from the founder of the Party himself, Jose Maria Sison, here.

The CPP has its gloomy and horrible past. In the early 1990s, it was on a ‘state of war’ - comrades killing one another. It was a tragic moment for the Philippine Left, leading to its division between those who re-affirm the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism ideology of struggle and those who reject it. Several progressive social movements have also emerged.

While it is true that the world capitalist system is, as ever, in crisis as well as the ruling domestic class in the Philippines, the Philippine Left is also in crisis. As the capitalist social structure limits - but not uniquely determines - the social formation and the social struggle; the kind of social struggle we could advance ultimately depends on the kind of social formation we have. At the moment, the progressive social formation in the Philippines is beleaguered with conflicts among one another, and with crises of their respective institutional and ideological capacities. Hence, the prospects are dim for a social struggle that could transform both the capitalist social structure and the capitalist-dominated social formation into a truly democratic, socialist one. Antonio Gramsci aptly puts it, ‘the old is dying, but the new cannot be born’.

The Central Committee of the CPP asserts in their anniversary statement - ‘As always, we pay our highest respects to our revolutionary martyrs and heroes who have made the supreme sacrifice in the service of the people’. Let the Communist Party of the Philippines be guided then with the true revolutionary ideals of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Che – who are among the revolutionary martyrs and heroes to whom the Party pays its highest respects. It must save itself from further alienation, and from suffering what Mao calls as the ‘contradictions of the onions’ (that is, people who are red in the surface but counter-revolutionary inside). Most often, progressive movements become alienated because they have forgotten the cause and objective of their very existence. It is then necessary to remind the Party of the ideals of the revolution.

Mao and Lenin have preached the ideals of ‘democracy’. Mao once said ‘let a hundred flowers bloom; and a hundred schools of thought contend’. Lenin reminded the people that nobody has the monopoly of ideas. This is what is to be a revolutionary – someone who upholds the democratic ideals of free articulation and thought. Too, Che Guevarra, one of the greatest romantic guerrilla revolutionary leaders in history, reminded the people in one of his letters to his children that the heart of a true revolutionary is one that is able to feel deeply any injustice committed against anyone in this world.

When will the CPP ever learn? While the state and capital continue to celebrate their orgies, the Party is still traumatized with the nightmare of the depressive past of the Stalin-Trotsky conflict, the rectifiable errors of Stalin, Mao, the Soviet Union, and other revolutionary personalities in history, and the failures of the Party itself. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote about the dialectics between agency and structure in the making of history, which could also be said in the case of the Communist Party of the Philippines in particular and the Philippine Left in general:

People make history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves; but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The history of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Let this reminder of Marx serve as a learning to be lived with by all revolutionaries. To the extent that the radical potentials of all exploited groups are coordinated at the domestic, regional, and global levels in advancing unified struggle against the undemocratic neo-liberal system, a truly democratic change could be realized. Hence, without a credible, humane, democratic, and unified counter-hegemonic force, the progressive movement cannot sustain the revolutionary momentum and become a force for structural change.