Victory to the People of the Philippines!

Much of this was taken from our book.

54 years ago, a spark started the revolutionary fire of the masses that is destroying the old Philippines and creating a new one, one that empowers the workers, peasants, and their allies against the landlords, comprador capitalists, and their imperialist masters. We support the people’s war for New Democracy in their country, and we oppose American imperialism’s subjugation and exploitation of its resources and its people. For this 55th anniversary, we will explain how the people’s war in the Philippines came about, developed, and works today.

Despite nominally gaining independence from Japan after World War 2, the Philippines was never truly free. The US gained de facto control over the country, making a puppet state out of it; the Philippines was and is a semi-feudal country, so bureaucratic-comprador capitalism developed. The Filipino masses were exploited and enslaved. In the years following “independence”, whatever remained of the revolutionary movement was crushed. The document called “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as Guide to the Philippine Revolution” summarizes this:

After the crushing defeat of the revolutionary movement in 1950 and for nearly a decade afterwards, the revolutionary road had been enveloped in darkness both by the power of US imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords and by a long chain of unrectified grave errors and shortcomings.

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Jose Maria Canlas Sison (also known as “Joma”), the leader of the people’s war in the Philippines, wrote Specific Characteristics of our People’s War, and in it, he explains why the Philippines was a semi-colony of US imperialism:

The mastermind behind the fascist dictatorship is US imperialism. The fascist dictatorship has been set up to make sure that under a “new constitution” the privileges and interests of US imperialism under the 1935 Constitution, the Parity Amendment and the Laurel-Langley Agreement are not only preserved but even enlarged in the face of the growing anti-imperialist struggle of the broad masses of the people and furthermore to harden the Philippines as a base of US imperialism in the western rim of the Pacific and in Asia and in the face of the failed US war of aggression in Indochina. …

US imperialism maintained a firm grip on its Philippine colony. It continued to cultivate a retinue of reactionary politicians under its orders and further used the country as a forward base for its expansion in Asia. Only in 1930 was the Communist Party of the Philippines founded under conditions of world depression and local social unrest.

The world capitalist system continued to undergo a general crisis even as the first inter-imperialist war had just ended. Subsequently, fascist regimes emerged in a number of Western European countries and in Japan. The struggle for the redivision of the world among the imperialist powers further intensified. Inevitably World War II broke out. As it did in connection with the first inter-imperialist war, the United States made profits on loans and war production before and throughout the war and provided supplies to both warring sides until it was ready to join the war on the winning side and pick up the spoils.

The United States emerged from the war as the Number One imperialist power, having gained hegemony over the entire capitalist system and assuming the principal responsibility for retaining the colonies and semi-colonies throughout the world. It was in a strong position to reconquer the Philippines from the Japanese fascist and quell the revolutionary forces here.

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In 1968, Filipino communists, led by Sison, gained inspiration from their Chinese and Indian comrades and formed a new Communist Party of the Philippines (the old one, formed in the 1930s, had gone revisionist and electoralist) in the First Great Rectification. The movement corrected the errors of the reformist revisionists of the old party, and it created a genuine workers’ party. A year later, the communists began their insurgency with just 60 revolutionaries who were part of the New People’s Army (the army that the communist party leads, the NPA). When the fascist Ferdinand Marcos tried to suppress the rebellion through enacting martial law starting in 1972, the people’s war grew in size and popularity. At first, the government downplayed the strength of the CPP, but after martial law was declared, it started hyping up the formation, and this, combined with fascistic repression from the Marcos regime, and the support of the CPP from China and other countries and parties (even revisionist ones, like the DPRK’s “Workers’ Party of Korea” ). In 1973, the united front of this revolutionary movement, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, was founded.

The leader of the government was Ferdinand Marcos, and he was a fascist and puppet of the US. With regards to Marcos’s regime, Sison wrote this in his book on the country’s people’s war:

As a reward [for being a comprador capitalist], Marcos is allowed to remain in power indefinitely for as long as he can be useful to US imperialism and, of course, for as long as his ambition does not go beyond being the general representative of and even becoming the wealthiest by far of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the big landlord class.

The fascist dictator Marcos keeps on prating about his unjust regime being a “new society.” But in fact its monstrous abuses have only served to stress that it is but the worsening of the old semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. We are witness today to unbridled puppetry, brutality, corruption and bankruptcy. Among the local reactionaries, the fascist chieftain, his family and his closest subalterns in the military and civil bureaucracy are the most outstanding beneficiaries of the puppet, brutal, corrupt and bankrupt “new society.”

In essence, the fascist dictatorship is the open terrorist rule of a reactionary clique with big comprador and big landlord interests. The longer it continues in power the more fertile the ground becomes for our people’s war. By negative example, Marcos has stood as the best teacher of the people on the state and revolution. In this sense, he is our best propagandist. He has superbly exposed every evil in this semi-colonial and semi-feudal society by his own lies and misdeeds. His usurpation of all governmental powers; elimination of all legal political parties; monopolization of the press; and the brutal repression of all democratic liberties by such methods as massacre, assassination, zoning, forced mass evacuation, bombardment and arson, blackmail, extortion, illegal arrest, illegal detention and torture have proven beyond doubt the necessity and justness of armed revolution against armed counterrevolution.

All the fascist acts of the US-Marcos clique carried out with brute armed force are calculated to “stabilize” the rule of US imperialism and the local reactionary classes over the broad masses of the people.

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Marcos inadvertently caused the CPP and NPA to become more popular because of his brutality. As a blatant puppet of US imperialism and a representative of landlord and comprador-capitalist interests, he exposed the corrupt and rotten nature of his state, and his crimes against the people resulted in hundreds of workers, peasants, and students taking up arms, joining mass organizations, and working to build new power in the Philippines. Marcos’s fascistic rule also destroyed reformists’ illusions; the electoralist “communists” in the country and abroad had to face the fact that the comprador-bourgeois state and its imperialist backers, whenever faced with a powerful threat, will use the most brutal methods possible to suppress the people, forcing the people to use equal or even greater violence and authority over their enemies. That is why revolutionary violence was and is justified in the Philippine people’s war and in all protracted people’s wars!

In 1977, Sison was arrested under the reactionary Marcos regime. After being imprisoned for nine years, he was released and did not continue his military actions. He published numerous books, and he became a political consultant for the NDF. He moved to the Netherlands in 1988 after his passport was canceled; there, he got arrested in 2007 for being linked with certain assassinations that occurred in the Philippines, but the charges were dropped months later after no evidence was found to prove this. Sison has been living in the Netherlands since. Many Marxist-Leninist-Maoists today criticize him and have criticisms of the CPP, especially since he has not been in the Philippines to lead directly, but we will discuss these shortly.

In 1992, there was a split between “reaffirmists” and “rejectionists” in the CPP. The CPP, during its Second Great Rectification, published a document called “Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Carry the Revolution Forward”, and in it, they restated and defended the principles of their party; they defended their application of Mao Zedong Thought (not yet Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) and critically supported leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. However, certain members of the CPP rejected these principles, and they were labeled “rejectionists”; these people opposed Stalin and Mao while claiming to be “Marxist-Leninists”, and they were rightfully called counter-revolutionary. They formed the “Revolutionary Workers’ Party of the Philippines”, a party that “marks the final repudiation of the Maoist and Stalinist deviations” of the CPP; this is quite clearly a revisionist butchering of Marxism-Leninism, and the CPP recognized this. In addition to that split, there were many other splits that occurred due to ideological differences; opportunists ended up going against the people’s war by continually upholding incorrect ideas, surrendering to the state, and even killing CPP cadres, with over 1000 comrades murdered by the bastards. Nonetheless, the CPP remains to be the party leading the Philippine people’s war, and the people support it over the opportunists.

The bureaucratic-comprador government never stopped its criminal actions when trying to stamp out the people’s revolutionary fire. The Philippine state has frequently bombed areas full of civilians to try to suppress the people’s war, but all the bombings have done is disrupt innocents’ lives, if not end them. Specifically, the state targets the island of Mindanao in its bombings. Sison condemned these bombings back in 2000, in his article, “Condemn the Terror Bombings Perpetrated by the Estrada Gang”:

The Estrada ruling gang has done again what it did so many times in Metro Manila and Mindanao in the year 2000 to whip up anti-Moro hysteria and step up its all-out war policy in Mindanao and deflect attention from its corruption scandals.

Estrada and his minions are now putting the blame on others but themselves for the terror bombings. They are desperately trying to collect political profit from their own dastardly crime and to deck out Estrada as the victim rather than the criminal mastermind. …

Estrada is extremely desperate and fearful of losing power, facing criminal prosecution and giving up his ill-gotten wealth. He is therefore committing the most cowardly and most heinous crimes to keep himself in power. He is not only a shameless thief but also a mass murderer through Oplan Makabayan, his all-out war policy and the current bombings

But the broad united front and the people are more than ever determined to wage mass struggles to remove Estrada from power, precisely because of his unbridled corruption and murderous acts.

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Despite those crimes, the Philippine people are undaunted. They continue to build new power. The CPP has many connected organizations that all build the New-Democratic state in the Philippines. Within the party itself, there are now numerous party branches and committees, and the party is organized in a democratic-centralist manner; in the NPA, there are the regular, guerrilla, militia and self-defense, and armed city partisan forces, and all of these have different tactics and strategies in the people’s war [Source]; and in the united front, there are the various people’s parties and the Revolutionary Mass Organizations. With all of these organizations, the amount of support it has, and more, the Philippine people’s war is the strongest of all of the ongoing revolutions.

Around the time the people’s war began, conflict arose in the Mindanao (the second-largest island) region of the Philippines. The Bangsamoro people wanted self-determination from the fascist Philippine state, so the “Moro National Liberation Front” (MNLF) became prominent. In 1977, some members of that group left and created the “Moro Islamic Liberation Front” (MILF; yes, it is a funny abbreviation), an Islamist force; the two groups were allied, but different. Because these forces were national bourgeois and not led by the proletariat, they could not withstand pressure from the state, so they each surrendered in 1996 and 2014, respectively. While the MNLF was in decline, Jihadist groups became more powerful in the region, fighting both the state and the MNLF (and MILF). The Jihadists were simply reactionary opponents to expansionism, and they were never proletarian, so they did not become very popular; they are still fighting, though, and they have not surrendered. Instead, the Moro Resistance and Liberation Organization (MRLO), one of the organizations in the NDF, became the proletarian movement that led the Bangsamoro people to liberation. The CPP supports the MRLO against the Jihadists and the state.

Today, the CPP is tasked with fighting enemies of all stripes. They fight the Philippine state, but they also fight reactionary landlords and comprador capitalists, with the support of the Filipino workers and peasants. In addition to that, they fight reactionism within the people; they fight queerphobia, racism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism. The CPP and the Filipino people combat with Islamist and chauvinist forces in the Moro conflict. Simultaneously, they are able to organize Christians, Muslims, atheists, and others into their ranks, and that is impressive. In addition, LGBTQ+ people and women are safer under the CPP than they are under the reactionary state; they are empowered to take up arms to serve the people, and they are not beaten down and forced into submission like they are under the reactionary classes. The CPP is the most progressive force within the Philippines, and they are leading the masses to liberation and socialism.

Now, onto criticisms of the CPP. Communists tend to call it the rightmost of the rightist parties. This has been the case after Jose Maria Sison left the Philippines; the CPP does not recognize the theoretical contributions of Chairman Gonzalo, and for a long time, it had only considered itself to be following Mao Zedong Thought rather than Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (even after the latter had been synthesized!). The party, under Sison’s political guidance, tried various peace talks, only to have them end as the Philippine fascist state started attacks again. In addition, the CPP’s understanding of how the people’s three weapons are organized is more triangular than concentric; rather than having the vanguard party within the people’s army, which is within the united front, the CPP views these three weapons as separate but connected organizations; it sees them all as if they do not follow the same leaders, i.e. they do not surround the same center of the great leadership.

“Jose Maria Sison: From Marxist-Leninist to Revisionist”, as the title suggests, covers a lot of Sison’s errors; we do not completely support this article but we recognize that it has valid criticisms of Sison [Source]. In the polemic, the author criticizes Sison for many of his views. First, Sison began taking a revisionist, pro-Soviet stance in his ideology following his release from prison in 1987. The essay says:

Since 1992, Sison has continued, in somewhat more veiled forms, to claim that the “full capitalist restoration” in the Soviet Union took place in 1989–91, not 1957; justify the CPP’s support for the Soviet Union and its revisionist allies from 1983–1991; gut the Maoist politics behind the Cultural Revolution; and deny political support to the heroic efforts of Mao and his closest allies in the CCP Politburo to defend the achievements of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. (See Section 5 for a discussion of the class struggle in socialist China.)

In 1984, the organ of the CPP in charge of international relations claimed that the CPSU under the Brezhnev clique was no longer a revisionist party, but a “Marxist-Leninist party,” and that the CPSU “was proletarian internationalist rather than social-imperialist, having supported third world liberation movements.” In 1986, the Executive Committee of the CPP commissioned a study that concluded that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries were “socialist because their economies were still dominated by state-owned enterprises.” (“Stand for Socialism,” p.6)

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Not only did Sison praise the revisionist USSR and Eastern European “socialist” states, but he supported revisionist Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, and Nicaragua; all of these were semi-colonies of Soviet imperialism. As the essay states:

In “Stand for Socialism,” Liwanag/Sison stated that “among the Soviet Union’s good commitments was the assistance to the Vietnamese people in the Vietnam war, Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua,” without providing any factual argumentation or political basis. (p. 24) … [The author goes on to explain the revisionism of these countries.]

In “Philippine Revolution,” Sison claims that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is “an example of a state that is independent and democratic and that is building socialism in a sound and admirable way.” Based on a visit to the DPRK in 1987, Sison claimed that the ruling Korean Workers’ Party is a “Marxist-Leninist party that has victoriously led the Korean people and state in frustrating imperialist aggression and in achieving socialist revolution and construction.” (p. 191) This fulsome praise for North Korea under Kim Il Sung, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s, again, raises serious questions about the nature of the “socialism” that Sison envisions building in the Philippines.

The CPP continues to claim in its major statements that the DPRK is “socialist” and/or a model of “defending national independence.” An analysis of the political stands and social relations in North Korea refutes these claims. If socialism ever existed in North Korea, by the mid-1960s it had turned into a state capitalist militarized state based on a uniquely Korean neo-Confucian veneration of several generations of the Kim family. According to Bruce Cummings, the leading academic expert in the West on North Korea, as early as 1946 Kim Il Sung was described as “the Sun of the Nation” and “a beautiful new red star in the sky, wisely guiding everything with his brilliant, scientific methods.”

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The article does condemn Sison for being more pro-Stalin than the author, a view we disagree with. While Sison was incorrect in some ways, his overall view that Stalin’s merits outweigh his faults is correct. The author of the essay, on the other hand, is too much against Stalin, condemning Stalin for supposed “mistakes”. For example, he claims that dekulakization caused the Soviet famine of the 1930s; we explained the causes of the famine in the subsection on Soviet and European applications of Marxism-Leninism, and dekulakization was not one of the factors that caused famine. While collectivization did involve violence, this is inevitable during class conflict, and the violence often happened in response to crimes by kulaks. There were undoubtedly mistakes in Soviet collectivization, which is why we see China’s collectivization as a better example of socialist transition in agriculture. Nevertheless, collectivization under Stalin was not a bad example like the author claims it is.

The author condemns the Great Purge, and while there were many excesses during this period that were the fault of capitalist-roaders and fascist saboteurs, the overall purge was necessary to remove reactionaries from significant positions of power. The issue with the Great Purge is not that it killed so many people, but that quite a few of the victims were innocent, and many capitalist-roaders got away scot-free; the event is an example of a lack of proletarian supervision and control of the state, emphasizing the importance of mass supervision of the state and the leadership of the workers’ party. Again, we cover the issue of the Great Purge in the next section. The author makes other invalid as well as valid criticisms of Stalin, but this is not the appropriate section to analyze them.

The last example of Sison’s errors was his view on the Cultural Revolution:

Sison’s view of the Cultural Revolution is that… it should be entirely top-down and has to be managed carefully by the party. There is no hint of a Maoist mass-based revolution from below in socialist society that overthrows and seizes power from the capitalist-roaders in the party. Sison’s view has more in common with the reactionary efforts of capitalist-roaders such as Deng and Zhou to reverse the Cultural Revolution than the revolutionary political work of Mao and the Four to defend and further develop its historic achievements.

In “At Home in the World,” in reference to the Cultural Revolution, Sison claimed that “A major error was to let loose factional groups fighting each other and dividing the masses.” Sison characteristically did not identify who was responsible for this “major error.” What appeared to be “factionalism” was in some cases intense class struggle between revisionist party officials who formed conservative factions (including “loyalist” Red Guards) to protect their privileges, and revolutionary organizations of students, workers and peasants. This was an objective reflection of the class struggle, not because the Maoists “let loose” factional struggle. …

Sison does not see the need for such revolutionary mass upheavals from below to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, instead opting for “Cultural Revolutions” carefully staged by top party leaders to “pre-empt anarchy.” In addition, Sison’s political fixation on the “new petty bourgeoisie” points the spearhead of revolutionary class struggle downward instead of targeting the bourgeoisie/capitalist-roaders at the top levels of the communist party.

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Even with these mistakes, we support our Filipino comrades for their struggles and praxis, just as we support our Indian comrades. Their theory may not be perfect, but they do not take the capitalist road. They have done good work despite American and now Chinese imperialism in the Philippines. Keep in mind that there is line struggle within the CPP, and if the left line takes power, we may see errors getting rectified. Time can only tell. Until then, we remain optimistic for the Philippine people’s war, as we do for all people’s wars; the Philippine people’s war in particular seems to be very successful because the comrades hold significant power in 73 of 81 provinces of the Philippines. They have set up impressive forms of New-Democratic government in the liberated areas, and when they win against the Filipino state, they will have a new state already in the making, one of the people. We hope they can rectify errors, lead the people to the very end of the revolution, and have a successful socialist experiment in their country!