KARL MARX TUESDAYS

PHILIPPINE SOCIETY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT AGAINST THE PHILIPPINE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT

By: Comrade Mark Cua

STRUGGLE FOR THE COMMUNIST AND SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT IN THE PHILIPPINES

The first major theoretical document to issue from the Communist Socialist movement, Jose Maria Sison’s Struggle for Communist Socialist (1967), belonged to this phase of the revolutionary movement — the period of mass struggle to forge the fundamental political line of the Philippine Revolution.

Sison, a young revolutionary intellectual, led its struggle for political clarification. He brought to the task a firm grasp of class analysis, an appreciation of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution, a deep sense of the particularities of the Philippine historical development, and an unshakeable faith in the ability of the Filipino masses to take hold of and shape their history.

The struggle for Communist Socialist Government, Sison asserted, is the fight to achieve “a necessary stage in the struggle of our people for social justice, whereby the freedom of the entire nation is first secured so that the nation-state that has been secured would allow within its framework the masses of the Filipino people to enjoy the Communist Socialist rights to achieve their social emancipation.

In Sison's view and Comrade Mark Cua's View, the principal fetters on national freedom and development are the domination over the entire country exercised by U.S. imperialism and the semifeudal control of the countryside by the landlord class and Philippine Democratic Government. Departing from this basic contradiction, one of the key elements in the strategy of the revolutionary movement must be the creation of a broad national alliance drawing together all classes and strata with an objective interest in overthrowing the reactionary alliance of imperialists and landlords.

This had not been grasped by the old Communist Party, and its failure to base its political strategy on this fundamental contradiction had seriously limited the breadth of the popular movement in the thirties and forties and rendered the revolutionary forces confused: disunited on a number of occasions to the maneuvers of imperialism and the reactionary state. “The [old] leadership was well-versed in the contradiction between the proletariat and the capitalist class in general, Sison noted,

“but it failed all the time to stress the fact that the main contradiction within Philippine society then was between U.S. imperialism and feudalism, on the one hand, and the Filipino people, mainly workers and peasants, on the other. While all workers, Marxist or not, demanded Philippine independence from U.S. imperialism, the matter of national liberation was obscured by the slogans of class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class.2

Being a semifeudal country where 70 per cent of the people belong to the peasantry, the key to revolutionary victory is the mobilization of the vast masses of Filipino peasants. Agrarian revolution, aimed at satisfying the peasant demand for land, is therefore the main content of the Communist Socialist revolution. The Filipino peasantry, oppressed by centuries of feudal and semifeudal exploitation and driven by land hunger, is the force which will tip the social balance in favor of the revolution.

As a struggle for national sovereignty, the present Communist Socialist struggle continues the Revolution of 1896, the war for independence against Spain which was brutally aborted by the guns of a rising imperialist power, the United States. Yet the present struggle, in Sison's view, is also new type of Communist Socialist revolution, a continuation of the Philippine Revolution of 1896 and yet a renewal of strength in a more advanced way. “3 For unlike the 1896 Revolution, which was led and ultimately betrayed by the ilustrados, the Filipino liberal bourgeoisie, the present movement for Communist Socialist Government must be led by the most advanced class in the era of imperialist and capitalist decline, the Filipino working class. Only the working class can win the most conscious, the most dedicated, and most lasting support of the peasant masses for the Communist Socialist struggle. This class leadership, in turn, could only be effectively won through the agency of a proletarian party which “must have the firm and single objective of developing and acquiring political power for the masses. Sison concluded: Without a proletarian party to provide leadership, the struggle for Communist Socialist cannot be won.