KARL MARX TUESDAYS

PHILIPPINE SOCIETY AND THE REVOLUTION AGAINST THE PHILIPPINE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT

By: Comrade Mark Cua

VI. THE COLONIAL RULE OF US IMPERIALSIM

The bestial conquest of the Filipino people by U.S. imperialism meant the continued status of the Philippines as a colony. U.S. imperialism came to frustrate the national and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people and to impose the will of the U.S. monopoly-capitalist class by force arms and double-talk. In the United States, the imperialist politicians and their capitalist masters boasted of their filthy work as a noble mission to “civilize” and Christianize” the Filipino people.

U.S. imperialism had been interested in the Philippines as a source of raw materials, a market for its surplus product and a field of investment for its surplus capital. Moreover, it needed the Philippines as a strategic foothold for carrying out its expansionist drive to convert the Pacific Ocean into an “American lake” and to increase its share of loot in the despoliation of China and Asia in general.

By the treaty of Paris in 1898, U.S. imperialism took over the role of Spanish colonialism as the colonial ruler of the Filipino people. The victor in the Spanish-American War acted as the rising capitalist power, capable of paying off the old colonial government and accommodating those property and business rights established previous to the treaty. Thus, feudalism was assimilated and retained for the imperialist purposes of the United States.

After the Filipino revolutionary forces had been defeated, U.S. imperialism drew from the country an increasing quantity of such commercial crops as sugar, coconut and hemp, aside from such other raw materials as logs and mineral ores. Sugar centrals, coconut oil refineries, rope factories and the like were built. The hacienda system of agriculture was further encouraged and reached its full development under the U.S. colonial regime. The purchase of a mere portion of the friar lands by the U.S. government in 1903 from the religious corporations was a token act which did not solve the land problem. Persons other than those who had little or no land, especially the top running dogs of the colonial government, were the ones who were able to take advantage for the land policy. Landlords in authority combined with American carpetbaggers in titling to themselves public lands of commercial, agricultural and speculatory value.

As a result of the more rapid growth of a commodity economy under the U.S. colonial regime, the peasantry became more impoverished and the owner-cultivators who became bankrupt sold off their lands to old-type and new-type landlord usurers, merchants and rich peasants. The evils of the Spanish colonial regime were carried over to the U.S. colonial regime. A new feature of the economy was an increase in the number of proletarians. Soon enough a huge reserve army of labor and a relative surplus of population, mainly emanating from the peasantry, arose.

In exchange for the Philippine raw materials, U.S. finished goods were imported free of tariff duties under the Payne-Aldrich Act of 1909. In 1913, quota limitations on Philippine raw materials exported to the United States were completely lifted. The free trade between these two types of commodities perpetuated the colonial and agrarian economy. The increasing avalanche of finished goods into the country crushed local handicrafts and manufacturers and furthermore compelled the people to buy these finished goods and to produce raw materials mainly.

U.S. surplus was invested in the Philippines both in the form of direct investments and loan capital. Direct investments went mainly into the production of raw materials and into trade in U.S. finished products and local raw materials. Minor processing of raw materials was also introduced. Mineral ores were extracted for the first time on a commercial basis. On the other hand, loan capital served to support foreign trade and cover trade deficits, convert pesos into dollars for profit remittances, pay salaries of American bureaucrats and business personnel, cover the needs of the colonial government for various equipment and the like. Every year, raw material production and, therefore, the exploitation of the people had to be intensified by the colonial regime in order to increase its rate of profit.

U.S. imperialism improved the system of transportation and communications as a means to tighten its political, economic, cultural and military control of the Philippines. U.S. corporations derived huge profits from public works contracts in the construction of more roads, bridges, ports and other transportation facilities. These public works in turn widened directly the market for U.S. motor vehicles, machinery and oil products. The colonial exchange of raw materials and finished products was accelerated. Troop movement for the suppression of the people also became faster.

The establishment of an extensive public school system and the adoption of English as the medium of instruction served not only to enhance the political indoctrination of the Filipinos into subservience to U.S. imperialism but also to encourage local taste for American commodities in general. It also opened the market directly for U.S. educational materials. The mass media was developed not only to spread imperialist propaganda but also to advertise all kinds of U.S. goods and, in particular, to sell various kinds of printing and communications equipment. Even the campaign for public sanitation and hygiene was a means to speed up the monopoly sales of U.S. drugs, chemicals and medical equipment. In the first place, the depredations of the U.S. aggressors troops in the Filipino-American War had resulted in various kinds of pestilence and epidemics, especially cholera, which threatened the health of the imperialist conquerors themselves.

On the basis of the economic conditions bred by U.S. imperialism, a certain social structure was built up in the Philippines. The U.S. imperialists merely adopted as their principal puppets those exploiting classes which had collaborated most with the Spanish colonial rulers in the 19th century and retained them at the top of the Philippine society. These were the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class. From the ranks of these exploiting classes, the U.S. imperialists chose their top political agents and trained them to become bureaucrat capitalists sharing in the spoils of the colonial government. At the base of the society were the toiling masses workers and peasants who comprised more than 90 per cent of the people. During the U.S. colonial rule, the proletariat increased in number to the extent that the semifeudal society became reinforced with the quantitative increase of raw material production, trade, transport and communications facilities and minor manufacturing. But the peasantry remained the majority class in the entire society.

In the middle section of Philippine society were such strata as the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The national bourgeoisie was an extremely tiny and hard-pressed stratum because of the enormous dumping of U.S. finished products and the concentration of financial power in the hands of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the imperialist firms. The petty bourgeoisie which had maintained its status by sheer property ownership that made it self-reliant increasingly took interest in formal education. Of the many small landlords and rich peasants who became bankrupt, some held on to a petty-bourgeois status by acquiring a college education and getting into salaried service in the colonial bureaucracy and in private companies and others fell to the status of the proletariat or the semiproletariat.

U.S. imperialism built up an educational system as a major instrument of colonial control. Its main content was directed against the Philippine Revolution and was intended to cultivate political subservience to U.S. imperialism. As soon as an area was conquered in the course of the Filipino-American War, the imperialist aggressor troops posed as teachers in order to spread the imperialist propaganda that they had come to bring “democracy” and to prepare the Filipinos for “self-government.” The first American teachers from the soldiery were soon reinforced by the Thomasites, hundreds of civilian teachers from the United States. They systematized the colonial public schools and put up teacher-training schools and agricultural schools. In addition, American Catholic and Protestant missionaries came to help in the colonial indoctrination of the people, especially in the hinterlands.

To make their propaganda pervade every field of culture, the aggressors never hesitated to employ force to suppress any attempt to express the national-democratic aspirations of the people. As late as 1907, the Flag Law was enacted to suppress any patriotic attempt of Filipinos to advocate independence or display the Philippine flag. Such newspapers as El Renacimiento and El Nuevo Dia, despite their basically compromising liberal-democratic views, were harassed by the U.S. colonial authorities. Patriotic literature and dramatic presentations were banned and their author were severely punished.

Reflecting the subordination of feudalism to U.S. imperialism at the material base of society, the new colonial culture and education were characterized by the superimposition of comprador ideology upon the feudal ideology within the superstructure. The Catholic Church shifted its loyalty from Spanish colonialism to U.S. imperialism. The homilies of the priest were bent to the slant of the U.S. press. The U.S. colonial regime established the University of the Philippines in 1908 to attract mainly the petty bourgeoisie, even as the University of Santo Tomas, together with the convent schools, continued to prefer teaching an exclusive clientele of students from the exploiting classes who could afford to pay exorbitant matriculation fees. U.S. imperialism was bent on recruiting a large number of intellectual agents from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in order to raise the level of scientific and technical competence for servitude in an expanding bureaucracy and in the proliferating imperialist corporations. To further establish its ideological hegemony in the Philippines, the U.S. colonial government also recruited from 1903 to 1914 a large number of students for training in the United States. These pensionados subsequently functioned as the most reliable puppets of U.S. imperialism inside and outside the colonial bureaucracy. They always mistook their indebtedness to U.S. imperialism as that of the entire Filipino people and they were blind to the fact that through them U.S. imperialism could oppress and exploit the broad masses of the Filipino people, especially the workers and peasants.

In establishing the colonial government in the Philippines, U.S. imperialism first relied on the most notorious betrayers of the Philippines Revolution. They were afforded the spoils of bureaucrat capitalism, which enlarged their comprador and landlord interests. Their political party, the Partido Federal, served to endorse the new colonial rule. Their leading representatives were accommodated in the Philippine Commission, the leading legislative and executive organ of the regime. This was headed by the American governor-general and included other American officials.

When in 1907 they declared the first national elections for the puppet Philippine Assembly in accordance with the Philippine Bill of 1902, the U.S. colonial officials allowed the Partido Nacionalista to compete with the Partido Federal in the elections. Realizing that the U.S. colonial officials themselves actually scorned the idea of making the Philippines a U.S. state and that the Filipino people were vigorously desirous of national independence and democracy, the barefaced traitors in the Partido Federal relabelled themselves as the Partido Progresista and advocated “eventual independence” after the people had supposedly shown their capacity for “self-government.” By adopting the slogan of “immediate, absolute and complete independence”, the Partido Nacionalista won overwhelmingly in the puppet elections over the Partido Progresista. Old puppets were replaced by new puppets led by Sergio Osmena and Manuel Quezon. Though their winning slogan sounded attractive, the new traitors were no different from the old ones in that they too accepted the treacherous notion that genuine independence could be peacefully and graciously granted by U.S. imperialism.

Osmena prevailed as top puppet chieftain from 1907 to 1922, first as president of the Philippine Assembly and then as speaker of the House of Representatives. He took orders from the American governor-general. The Philippine Assembly was subject to the Philippine Commission and was mainly an instrument for facilitating the collection of taxes from the people and the appropriation of government revenues for colonial administration. It was a glorified principalia with pretensions larger in scale than those of its antecedent. It was composed of the political representatives of the landlord class and the comprador big bourgeoisie.

One glaring example of Osmena’s puppetry was his campaign for the suspension of any kind of agitation for Philippine independence in 1917 when U.S. imperialism joint the first global inter-imperialist war. He also offered 25,000 Filipino mercenaries, a submarine and a destroyer to serve with the U.S. armed forces in Europe and maneuvered for the subsciption of $20 million worth of Liberty Bonds and the contribution of $500,000 to the American Red Cross by the impoverished Filipino people.

By the middle part of the second decade, the number of Filipino bureau chiefs had markedly increased. The U.S. imperialists prated about “Filipinization” of the colonial government. They had already trained a big number of puppets to assume administrative responsibility on behalf of U.S. monopoly capitalism in addition to the interest of the local exploitating classes. In 1916, the U.S. imperialists issued the Philippine Autonomy Law which dissolved the Philippine Commission and in its place created the Philippine Senate. The Philippine Assembly became the House of Representatives. The law further encouraged the U.S. bureaucrats to retire so that they could be replaced with Filipinos.

By being elected to the presidency of the Philippine Senate, Quezon gained a position from which he was to catapult himself to the top of the puppet bureaucracy. He claimed responsibility for the enactment of the autonomy law and, therefore, for the “Filipinization” of the colonial government. To boost his political capital, he posed as a champion of Philippine independence in the manner approved by his imperialist masters. He led the first mission to beg for “independence” in Washington in 1918. He slowly undermined the prestige of Osmena who was speaker of the House of Representatives until 1921 when he attacked the latter on his method of leadership but not on the substance of leadership. In 1922, both ran for the Philippine Senate and were elected on two separate wings of the Nacionalista Party. It was Quezon who was once more elected president of the Senate. Osmena was elected president protempore. From then on, Quezon became the top puppet chieftain.

Consistently, Quezon played the game of orating for the Philippine independence while obsequiously acting as the top puppet politician in the country. Feigning dissatisfaction with the result of the independence mission to the United States, he formed in 1926 the Supreme National Council and launched a national prayer day for “independence” on Washington’s birthday. These he used as a mere device for getting “non-partisan” support for his puppet leadership.

Like all the bureaucrat capitalists whom he headed, Quezon enriched himself through graft and corruption and was able to amass wealth in agricultural land, urban real estate and corporate stocks. During the third decade, when the U.S. capitalist crisis occurred and sharpened the suffering of the people all over the world, Quezon acted as an efficient instrument of colonial rule by raising the slogan of “social justice” while at the same time launching the most brutal attack against the people.

At the onset of the decade, the broad masses of the people were greatly agitated by the unremitting colonial and class oppression imposed on them by U.S. imperialism and its local lackeys — the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and the big puppet bureaucrats. The Communist Party of the Philippines was established on November 7, 1930 by Crisanto Evangelista in response to the growing demand for national and social liberation. It strived to integrate the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of Philippine society and raised the level of the Philippine Revolution to a new type of national-democratic revolution in the era of imperialism.

The ceaseless struggle of the proletarian and peasant masses against U.S. imperialism and feudalism reached a new high with the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Trade unions and peasant associations had emerged since the beginning of the century despite the efforts of the U.S. colonial regime to suppress them with outright force and sabotage them with tactics of infiltration and misrepresentation of the people’s interests. In the preceding decade, the discontent of the masses was frequently expressed by spontaneous violence as in industrial strikes in Manila and peasant strikes in Central Luzon, Southern Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Colorums waged a revolt in two provinces in Mindanao in 1923-24. On a lesser scale, they also rebelled in Negros, Rizal, Batangas, Laguna, Pampanga and Tarlac. In all cases of mass protest, the U.S. colonial government employed the most violent measures to attack the masses.

On May 1, 1931, a people’s march organized and led by the Party was ruthlessly attacked and dispersed by the puppet constabulary under the orders of the U.S. imperialists. Party leaders and members were arrested. In the following year, the puppet Supreme Court outlawed the Party and meted out sentences of imprisonment to Party leaders. Nevertheless, despite the banning of the Party, spontaneous peasant uprisings occurred like those of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931, and the Sakdals in 1935 over certain areas in Central Luzon and Southern Luzon.

U.S. imperialism was compelled by grave circumstances within the Philippines, in its own heartland and in the whole world to create the illusion that it was willing to grant “independence” to its Philippine colony. The crisis of imperialism heightened the national struggle for independence and the class struggle in the Philippines. In the United States, U.S. farm capitalists made an outcry against Philippine sugar and coconut oil; and the yellow labor leaders of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. denounced the immigration of Filipino workers to the United States. Under these circumstances, the U.S. Congress passed the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law in 1933 granting sham independence to the Philippines.

A mission led by Osmena and Roxas brought home this sham independence law. Afraid that the two puppet politicians would make political capital out of it, Quezon attacked it as inadequate and led another mission to Washington to ask for another sham independence law. In place of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law, the Tydings-McDuffie Law which was no different, except in minor rephrasing, was enacted in 1934 by the United States. This new colonial law would serve as Quezon’s credentials for becoming the first president of the puppet commonwealth government.

The Tydings-McDuffie Law paved the way for the framing of a constitution that was subject to the approval of the U.S. president and for the formation of the commonwealth government in 1935. It pledged to grant full “independence” to a bogus republic ten years after the ratification of this constitution. The law made sure that among so many imperialist privileges, U.S. citizens and corporations would retain their property rights in the Philippines, that the U.S. government would be able to station its troops and occupy large areas of Philippine territory as its military bases and that the United States and the Philippines would maintain free trade.

U.S. imperialism rigged up the Constitutional Convention of 1935. Delegates came overwhelmingly from the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class. Like all colonial documents, the constitution that they framed was adorned with high-sounding phrases to hide substantial provisions as well as meaningful omissions sustaining the political and economic power of U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in the Philippines. The constitution placed no restrictions on U.S. and other foreign investments, except in the areas of land ownership, natural resources and public utilities where the restrictions are nevertheless flimsy. It also contained special provisions (Art. XVII) in favor of U.S. imperialism. In 1939, the first ordinance would be appended in order to ensure further the all-round dominance of U.S. imperialism even after the proclamation of sham independence.

The National Defense Act was the very first legislative act of the puppet commonwealth government. This act conceived the organization of the reactionary armed forces and adopted the Filipino mercenaries of U.S. imperialism as the main component of the puppet state. The Philippine Constabulary became the First Regular Army under the U.S. Army in 1936. Quezon, the first president of the puppet commonwealth, designated Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur as “field marshal” of these mercenaries.

In the face of the rampaging fascism of Japan, Germany and Italy, Communists all over the world called for a popular front with all anti-fascist forces. Afraid of being isolated from the broad masses of the Filipino people, the U.S. imperialists and the puppet commonwealth government saw the necessity of putting out of prison the leaders of the Communist Party whom they had persecuted. As soon as these leaders were out of prison in 1936, the Party intensified the anti-fascist movement among workers and peasants under the banner of the Popular Front.

In an attempt to increase its membership and mass support rapidly, the Communist Party of the Philippines merged in 1938 with the Socialist Party to form the Communist Party of the Philippines (Merger of Socialist and Communist Parties). In the congress that ratified the merger, agents of the bourgeoisie who had crept into the Party and usurped authority therein while Party leaders were in prison succeeded in having themselves formally elected to responsible positions, especially in the so-called second line of leadership. These unremolded petty-bourgeois elements represented by Vicente Lava conspired with some anti-communist elements in the Civil Liberties Union2 and League for the Defense of Democracy in inserting into the 1938 constitution of the merger party counterrevolutionary provisions supporting the colonial constitution of the puppet commonwealth government.

These counterrevolutionaries who had crept into the Party consistently misrepresented the Popular Front policy as a policy of subservience to U.S. imperialism and the puppet commonwealth government. These anti-communists disguised as communists maneuvered the Party leadership into submitting a shameless memorandum to U.S. High Commissioner Sayre, Gen. MacArthur and Quezon in December 1941, pledging all-out support and loyalty to U.S. imperialism and the puppet commonwealth government. The three colonial officials relished this beggarly act firmly rebuffed the prayer for arms.