The following is drawn from my 2018 doctoral dissertation, Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership, and citations and sources for quotations can be found in it.

Nineteen sixty-nine opened with an explosion of student strikes in Manila, a bellwether of the brief, heady epoch of storm and dictatorship that followed. The strikes originated among working class youth in the university belt district, outraged by exorbitant tuition rates and decrepit facilities; by February, the majority of Manila’s universities had been shut down. Some members of the newly founded Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the Kabataang Makabayan [Nationalist Youth] (KM) participated in the strike wave, but they did not inspire it nor did they lead. Jose Ma. Sison, the KM, and the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan [Federation of Democratic Youth] (SDK) sought to stymie the protests and used the slogan of “Student Power” to redirect emerging social anger behind the banners of nationalism.

The preponderance of higher education in the Philippines was concentrated in Manila and disseminated from privately owned, profit-driven institutions. Their facilities stood clustered along Recto on the northern bank of the Pasig, and within the squat stone walls of Intramuros on its south. Most were crowded, multi-story affairs to which entrance was afforded by a single roadside gate under the watchful eye of armed security guards, who inspected the entering students’ uniforms and identification cards. There were in 1969 over half a million college students in the Philippines, one of the highest college enrollment per capita figures in the world. The majority of these students came from working class and peasant families, and were working their way through school — they were janitors on the night shift, stringers for newspapers, secretarial assistants for the university administration, and sales clerks on Escolta.

From Recto, traverse the length of Quezon Boulevard past the circumferential Highway 54 — now renamed de los Santos, but the name had yet to take — and you would arrive in Diliman on the outskirts of Quezon City. There the state university — UP — sat in seeming rural isolation, its expansive facilities still spreading outward into fields of cogon and talahib. At its southern and eastern fringes were the impoverished communities of Cruz na Ligas and Balara, pushing towards Marikina. Twenty-five centavos and a thirty minute jeepney ride could get you from Diliman to Recto, but a lifetime of labor would not have gotten most students in the university belt into the state university. UP provided an education to the children of the elite and the upper middle class, but also to the most outstanding scholars throughout the nation. The valedictorian of an impoverished provincial high school could be expected to attend the state university, and on a full scholarship. For the rest of the students, they would work their way through school downtown. Finally, there were the elite religious schools — Ateneo, La Salle, San Beda. These were the enclaves of the extremely wealthy, their corridors of power reserved to cassocks and caciques. They were entirely quiescent in 1969. It was the class divide between Recto and Diliman that shaped the course of the protests.

Student Strikes

The global climate of student unrest in the summer of 1968 provided the initial impetus to the protests that began in the Lyceum and set fire to the fuel of student grievances throughout downtown Manila. Nick Joaquin, writing in the Philippines Free Press in September 1968, anticipated that the events in Paris would be emulated by the “anarchs of academe” in the Philippines, but he had his eye on the “groves of Diliman” not the pavement of Recto. The government, too, anticipated a surge of student protests. Aquino, in an attempt to channel and win the support of the emerging unrest, drafted a Magna Carta of Student Rights, which codified a set of limited rights and obligations for students, asserting, for example, the students’ right to free assembly on campus. He did not, however, address the skyrocketing tuition rates and crumbling infrastructure that set off the 1969 explosion.

Writing in November 1968, in direct response to Nick Joaquin’s article of two months prior, Jose Ma. Sison, about to found the CPP, attempted to subordinate the anticipated protests to the national democratic movement. He held up the Red Guard in China as the model for such struggles, and derided the “ultra-revisionist youth” of Eastern Europe. To succeed, he wrote, “the growing ferment manifested often by student action” needed to adopt the program of national democratic revolution articulated by the KM, by demanding “the national-democratic reorientation of our educational system.” What this amounted to, as we will see, was the demand that universities appoint members and allies of the KM and SDK to faculty positions.

Sison’s perspective was in keeping with the immediate class interests of the leadership of the Communist Party which was founded in the month prior to the eruption of the protests. The heads of several of the institutions in the university belt were key political allies of the newly formed CPP. Nemesio Prudente, the president of the Philippine College of Commerce (PCC) [later renamed Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP)], had studied at the University of Southern California (USC) where he had been heavily influenced by Herbert Marcuse in the early 1960s and espoused the ideas of the New Left. His campus was a political haven for the KM. Carlos del Rosario, the head of the PCC Political Science department, was Sison’s brother-in-law, and, in 1969, a member of the Party’s central committee. The Lyceum, owned by the Laurel family, was likewise a base of operations for Sison’s group. Sotero Laurel happily hired the leadership of KM to serve as faculty members at Lyceum, including Joma Sison, Jose David Lapuz — who chaired the Political Science department, Art Garcia, and Jose Luneta.

Lyceum student Rene Alejandro wrote a regular column in the campus student paper — The Lyceum — during the 1967-68 school year in which he detailed a number of grievances that students were routinely expressing regarding the school, largely having to do with school fees and the general disrepair of the facilities. The Laurel administration responded in the first semester of 1968, suspending Alejandro from the school for one year, and suspending the publication of The Lyceum for the majority of the first semester. The journalism students at Lyceum responded by publishing their own paper, The Reporter. Students circulated a petition in defense of Alejandro, calling for his reinstatement, but the school administration refused. In December, at the opening of the second semester, an additional three members of The Lyceum staff were expelled and all four students physically barred by security from entering the campus. The cause of the suspended students and their advocacy of improved school facilities and reduced tuition fees found broad sympathy among students throughout the University Belt in downtown Manila.

Jose Lacaba wrote that

On January 13 [1969], the Guilder, official publication of the College Editors Guild, reported: “The case of the three dismissed Lyceum scribes appears to have stirred a tempest of student unrest as sympathizing students plan to stage a protest demonstration soon if no justice is done them by the proper authorities.”

On January 22, striking students formed a picket line at Lyceum but initially only drew about thirty students to their ranks. The picketers formed the Lyceum Student Reform Movement and circulated a leaflet that concluded: “Let us raise the banner of student power!” The Laurel administration responded to the picket by suspending classes at Lyceum for one week, hoping that the protests would disappear in the interim. Far from disappearing, they spread.

The next day students at Far Eastern University (FEU) formed the FEU Student Reform Movement and likewise went on strike, demanding a “reduction and itemization of tuition fees.” They also “objected to the security guards’ uniform, which is combat fatigue, and their arms, which include carbines, Armalites, and riot guns.” On January 24, three thousand demonstrating students at FEU “broke decorative pots along the streets that border the university, hurled stones at the school buildings and burned placards.” Morayta was closed to traffic. On the same day a group calling itself the Movement of Students for Reforms (MOSTURE) at FEATI distributed a manifesto demanding improved conditions and academic freedom.

On January 27 the police arrested two of the Lyceum student leaders “for their belligerent attitude.” Denouncing the arrests, the striking students attacked the squad car, causing serious damage to the vehicle. Sotero Laurel, head of the Lyceum, refused to meet with the protesters and issued a statement that he was determined to expel the three students. He stated that “a school has the right to defend itself against or rid itself of those who would seek to harm it.” The next day the protest at Lyceum again turned violent as striking students were being prevented by security guards from exiting university buildings. A crowd of students gathered, angrily demanding that the guards allow the students to leave. One of the guards fired a warning shot with his shotgun. Students began throwing rocks. The guards beat some of the students, and at least one student was shot. A fire truck arrived and attempted to disperse the students with water; the students stoned the fire truck. Laurel finally agreed that he would meet with the students on the next day, provided they dispersed. Lacaba wrote at the time that “what happened at the Lyceum that night was by far the most vehement expression of dissent in recent history of the Filipino youth.”

On January 29, students at the University of the East (UE) walked out of classes to protest “exorbitant and unreasonable fees,” and four thousand students from Manila Central University started a boycott of classes protesting “the deplorable conditions of the university” and demanding a reduction in fees. On January 30, ten thousand students at FEATI violently demonstrated, hurling rocks and classroom furniture. On the same day University of Manila students went on strike and classes did not resume until February 20. On January 31, the Student Movement for a Better Mapua at the Mapua Institute of Technology (MIT) led a demonstration of two thousand students demanding a reduction of fees and the improvement of facilities “which turned violent;” no other details are available. Also in the last week of January, students at the Philippine College of Criminology went on strike. On February 3, a group calling itself the Thomasians for Reforms Movement (TRM) launched protests at the University of Santo Tomas (UST), and stones were thrown. On the Fourth, the students at Manuel L. Quezon University (MLQU) went on strike.

By the first week of February all of the universities in the university belt had been shut down by student strikes, many of which had responded forcefully against violent suppression. These included the Philippine Maritime Institute, February 1; St. Catherine’s School of Nursing, February 3; Araneta University, February 6; Arellano University, February 7. The strikes began to spread beyond Manila. Students at universities in Bacolod, Cabanatuan, Laguna, Laoag, and Cebu all began to go on strike as well.

And at Diliman …

At the end of January the UP Student Council worked to get involved in the explosion of student protests. As one strike followed another downtown, Diliman was being left in the wake of political developments and the majority of the council blamed Student Council Chair Antonio Pastelero for poor leadership. Council representative of the Partisans, the UP campus party of the SDK, Jerry Barican threatened Pastelero with impeachment, but Pastelero vowed to resign if requested. The council passed a resolution, by a vote of twenty-four out of twenty-nine councilors, calling on Pastelero to resign. He refused.

On February 4, UP students launched a strike. They presented twelve demands to the administration, of a very different nature from those articulated in Recto. They included the resignations of Iluminada Panlilio and Damiana Eugenio (Eugenio had refused to extend tenure to Vivencio Jose, a leader of the SDK, on the grounds that his “interest in nationalism … made him sacrifice the goals of the courses he was asked to teach”); the security of tenure for faculty members; and the termination of UP’s contracts with the Asia Foundation. The KM, Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines (SCAUP) “and other activist groups” initiated the Diliman strike by “stopping vehicles from passing through the University Avenue and asking students to alight from them.” Five activists were arrested. UP Los Baños students likewise went on strike. The students demanded the “the resignation of Dean Dioscoro Umali from all but one of the four positions he is reportedly occupying, security of the tenure of faculty members and workers, and investigation of the American supported SEAMEC and Cornell University grants.” The demand for security of tenure at both Diliman and Los Baños responded to the University’s refusal to renew the contracts of Hilario Lim and Vivencio Jose. On the Diliman campus, newly installed President Salvador Lopez met with the striking students to review their list of demands. The SDK wrote that “On the demands, the students were assured of the administration’s substantial compliance,” including the termination of contracts with the Asia Foundation.

It was not sufficient, the SDK stressed in its February publication, to protest locally. Many of the demands on some of the striking campuses “are too petty, local and limited to cause lasting changes in the servile institutions where the educational system is rooted … Concerted political action in an intra-university basis can change this system … we therefore enjoin the students of Diliman to strike in solidarity with Los Baños and other units.” This expanded vision did not embrace outreach to the ten of thousands of striking students downtown, but even at its broadest reaches it remained within the various units — Diliman, Los Baños, Baguio — of the University of the Philippines. The SDK’s political vision remained intensely parochial and self-interested.

This tactic paid off for the leaders of the SDK. At the end of the 1968-69 school year, the UP Student Council reported that “One of the few February strike demands that have been substantially fulfilled has been the English department change of regime … Nationally known writers like Vivencio Jose, Gelacio Guillermo, Luis Teodoro, Petronilo Bn. Daroy, and Mila Aguilar have been added once more to the department roster.” These incoming and reinstated faculty members were the leadership of the SDK.

Sison intervenes

In late January or early February 1969, between the founding of the CPP and the founding of the New People’s Army (NPA), Joma Sison wrote an article for the Hong Kong based Eastern Horizon, entitled “Student Power.” Sison was at pains to establish three points in the article. First, according to Sison, the student strikes in the Philippines were entirely petty bourgeois in origin; second, they were now developing under the leadership, and inspired by the program, of the Kabataang Makabayan; and third, it was imperative for students to take up the “ideology of the working class,” which Sison claimed was national democracy.

Sison began, “the social basis of college and high school students is the petty bourgeoisie, although a little minority of them come from exploiting classes.” As petty bourgeois, the student is thus “principally concerned with his selfish ambition of pursuing a career within the established system.” However, “in time of developing social crisis, the students largely supported by their petty bourgeois parents can easily become agitated when the meager and fixed incomes of their parents can hardly suffice to keep them enrolled in school with the proper board and lodging or with enough allowances.” Sison may have been aptly characterizing the student milieu with which he was himself familiar at UP, largely selfish but easily agitated over their declining allowances. His description, however, was grossly incongruous with the character of the majority of the student population. In Sison’s depiction none of the students — not even the high school students — were from working class or peasant backgrounds, and none were working their way through school.

Sison was not alone in this thinking; it characterized the attitude of the KM and SDK leadership generally. Christine Ebro, a Partisan representative and a leader of the SDK, wrote in September 1968 to describe the “situation of almost every college girl in the country.”

Born into a set of conventions, and social restrictions … the only activities legitimately open to her, in the traditional viewpoint, are the trivial — cocktail parties, balls, discotheques, picnics, soirées, etc. As a result, she remains isolated from the harsh realities of life; protected from the plight of the “dirty” masses.
Her flighty little brain remains untapped like our rich natural resources, as she attends to petty concerns: confined to the latest dance craze, powdering her pert nose, going to novenas regularly, fingering the rosary, thinking of her next dress and gewgaw to wear.

Sison, and his entire cohort, had a manifest contempt for the students striking in downtown Manila.

Sison’s conception of the students’ class background and political goals stands in stark contrast to the actual literature being produced by the striking students themselves. On September 17 1969, a group calling itself the “Progressive Youth of MLQU / Progresibong Kabataan ng MLQU,” issued an appeal to the Manuel L. Quezon University student body to support their strike, which had begun on September 11, when students in the College of Business walked out of their classes and were followed by students in the Colleges of Engineering and Education. The striking students stated that they were opposed to University President Monzon who was seeking to turn a profit out of the exploitation of the students, the staff and the faculty. The leaflet cited the raising of fees and the cutting of the wages of the faculty and staff and concluded:

If we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of and place our hope in promises, not only will we be victims, not only will our brothers and sisters who will study and follow after us [be victims], but also our parents who have with great difficulty worked day and night in the fields and factories to pay for our education. Remember our poor parents … rise up!
This fight is not just for students, this is for everyone! Professors, workers, and students.

A footnote among the many stories coming out of the First Quarter Storm was that of Francisco Opao, a working student at FEATI, whose foot was shot on January 30. He had not seen his provincial parents in years because he could not afford to go home, yet he had nowhere to stay in Greater Manila and was commuting a great distance each day to school. His story was representative of the majority of the student population.

Sison insisted in his article over the space of two and half pages that the “student power” movement was the work of the KM. Sison claimed that “the Kabataang Makabayan has been able to anticipate and plan the development of the national student protest movement in the Philippines.” He could not provide a single concrete example of this, precisely because none existed.

Sison turned to the question of the political orientation of the student protest movement. He wrote “we have always advocated the achievement of real national democracy as the goal of our struggle.” He directed students to “a comprehensive presentation of this goal … the Programme of Action of Kabataang Makabayan.” Sison referred to the struggle for this program as a “cultural revolution … It is the phase of creating the public opinion necessary for a comprehensive national democratic revolution. The struggle for national democracy cannot be won without this cultural revolution.” Sison characterized the struggle for national democracy, to be carried out by “the broad national front for national democracy among workers, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie,” as “the unifying ideology of the working class,” the “justest [sic] and most progressive class.” (56)

Rather than expand the protests of the students to a directly political struggle for free universal public education through the university level, a transitional demand responding to the immediate objective situation of the students and yet requiring socialist measures to be fully implemented, Sison presented ‘national democracy’, rather than socialism, as the ideology of the working class. His perspective was that of the petty bourgeois and he saw the striking students as such and insisted that only in an alliance with the capitalist class on the basis of nationalism could they achieve their ends.

Sison’s characterization of the student movement was mirrored in the program of the Nationalist Corps, the UP funded public outreach arm of the SDK which carried out summer community service projects as a means of implementing Mao’s ‘mass line’. They outlined their program in an April 1969 article entitled, “The Nationalist Corps and the Apathetic Student,”

The Nationalist Corps is an organization which struggles to shock the masses of apathetic and complacent students out of their smugness. …
As students we do not fully comprehend the problems of the masses because we never experience the problems the way they do. The fact that students come from a different class that is quite a departure from the class of the worker and the peasant prevents them from going through the very same experience.

Sison, the KM, and the SDK displayed the extraordinary class gulf between their perspective and program and the needs and struggles of the working class. As tens of thousands of students shut down their campuses in strikes motivated by poverty and exploitation, Sison and his co-thinkers decried the students for their “apathy” and “petty bourgeois” smugness and selfishness. They used the energy of the strikes to secure tenured positions for their allies on the UP campus and instructed the striking students downtown to redirect their protests behind the banner of nationalism.

Alarmed by the political exposure, Jose Maria Sison, founder and ideological leader of the CPP, launched a campaign of lies and slander. Over the course of more than a month he has repeatedly denounced me, without a shred of evidence, as a “paid agent of the CIA” and a “wild informer for the Duterte death squads.” He has posted doctored images of me as a clown and a particularly vile caricature of Leon Trotsky and me depicted as rats about to be murdered by an angry Filipino peasant.

It is in this context that Teo Marasigan, a pseudonymous intellectual commentator with a regular “Kapirasong Kritika” column at Pinoy Weekly, published an extended criticism of my recent lecture. Marasigan entitled his response, “Scalice Come, Scalice Go,” deemed my scholarship to be “trivia,” and concluded that “it fails as an intellectual effort, but would surely please the powers that be and their butchers in the country.”

In the final analysis, Marasigan’s argument amounts to the claim that Joseph Stalin was right, and the CPP is correct in continuing his political legacy.   

In making this argument, Marasigan is playing the same political role that he has adopted for over a decade. He has long been known for his ability to dress up the political line of the CPP, which he terms “the Philippine Left,” with quotes in his column from the likes of Lukács, Gramsci, Žižek, Althusser, and Frederic Jameson. If you look back through his writing, you will find that it closely follows the zigs and zags in the political alignment of the CPP, and provides it with a certain academic window dressing.

Thus, in mid-2016, as both the CPP and the national democratic movement enthusiastically welcomed Duterte’s rise to power, Marasigan published columns hailing the supposedly progressive aspects of Duterte’s policies. He wrote “Pero maraming pahayag at hakbangin si Duterte na para sa masang anakpawis at sambayanang Pilipino” [Duterte has many statements and measures on behalf of the oppressed masses and the Filipino people]. Joma Sison made similar statements, and publicly declared that he was “proud of Duterte.”

Marasigan gave these claims a pseudo-intellectual veneer. He wrote the statement above beneath a passage drawn, without explanation, from Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, speaking of Marxism as “aspirations toward society in its totality,” and depicting the recognition of Duterte’s progressive policies as part of this “Marxist” “totalizing.”

Marasigan’s function is to provide the trappings of academia and intellectual discourse to the political line of the CPP. He delivers a jargon-laden rendition of their shifting alliances and slanderous attacks. His citations do not clarify his arguments but serve a fundamentally performative function. “Kapirasong Kritika” makes for generally unedifying reading and, like the political line of the party itself, it ages poorly.

Behind all of his slanders against me, Joma Sison is doubling down on his Stalinism. Marasigan is tail-ending this and providing it with a footnote or two.

A blundering, dishonest approach

A serious response to my scholarship cannot base itself exclusively on my public lecture, which was aimed at a popular audience. I have dedicated a decade to the study of the Communist Party of the Philippines and have written a publicly available doctoral dissertation of nearly one thousand pages on the subject.

Marasigan flagrantly ignored this. He never examined my bibliography or footnotes, yet he presented a criticism of my use of sources. He dismisses my scholarship as “trivia,” yet he never, in fact, read anything that I wrote. There is no innocent explanation for this; it is a fundamentally dishonest approach.

Marasigan claims that my source material, the contemporary written record, consisted exclusively of pamphlets and fliers and similar ephemera but did not include the more significant works of the party. He writes: “The ‘contemporary written record’ definitely has its uses, but must be counterposed with the more important documents.”

This is completely false. I read and examined, in excruciating detail, every extant work published by both the CPP and the PKP in the 1960s and 1970s. I dedicated an entire chapter, more than any prior scholar, to a close reading of Philippine Society and Revolution, situating this core document of the party in its historical context. I engaged in a similar fashion with Specific Characteristics of our People’s War and Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party, and other comparable works.

I read every extant edition of every text for I discovered very quickly that in later printings the party repeatedly and dishonestly redacted its own writings to hide their earlier political perspective.

For all of Marasigan’s talk of the “more important documents” of the party, it appears that he himself has not read them. Marasigan dismisses my citation of a passage from a 1967 speech, in which Joma Sison focused on the imperative of establishing ties with the “national bourgeoisie,” as “an obscure Sison essay.” It was nothing of the sort. The quote is from the “Nationalist as Political Activist,” a central reading in the 1967 volume, Struggle for National Democracy, which was the mandatory text assigned to the entire national democratic movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The crowning falsehood of this blundering and dishonest examination of my scholarship is Marasigan’s claim that I am “leery of going into details about the history of the Philippine Left.” No prior scholar has ever gone with such meticulous care into the “details” of the history of the Communist Parties of the Philippines.

The defense of Stalinism

Marasigan’s misrepresentations serve a particular end and the heart of Marasigan’s essay is the defense of the political legacy of Stalinism.

I opened my lecture by addressing Sison’s slanderous attacks against me, and concluded with an impassioned appeal “in defense of civil discourse, of democratic and public discussion, of verifiable evidence, of logical arguments and defence of democracy and historical truth.” Marasigan writes that he too “seeks to uphold these very principles.” He declares this without making any effort to distance himself from Sison’s depictions of me as a rat, a wild informer for the death squads, a clown, and a CIA agent. The banner of civil discourse cannot be so cheaply claimed.

More importantly, while Marasigan states that he desires to defend “democracy and historical truth,” he dedicates his essay to defending the politics of Joseph Stalin as correct and the murder of political dissent as historically justified.

In his defense of the CPP’s historical legacy, Marasigan does not claim that the party was not Stalinist, but asserts rather that Stalin was right. He approvingly quotes from the 1992 CPP document, Stand for Socialism against Modern Revisionism, “Stalin’s merits within his own period of leadership are principal and his demerits are secondary. He stood on the correct side and won all the great struggles to defend socialism such as those against the Left opposition headed by Trotsky…”

This is an endorsement of mass murder. Stalin systematically annihilated the Left Opposition, which was headed by Leon Trotsky and which defended the Marxist perspective of world socialist revolution against its Stalinist betrayal, Socialism in One Country. By 1937 a majority of the old Bolsheviks who had carried out the 1917 revolution had been murdered.   

Marasigan’s essay included a photograph taken during the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in February 1919. Like so many photographs of the time it is evidence of the political crimes of Stalin, and it is worth examining.

In the bottom row, from left to right, we find: Ivar Smilga, a member of the Left Opposition, he was executed in February 1938 by a Stalinist show trial with a bullet to the back of the head; Vasily Schmidt, executed January 28 1938; Sergey Zorin, Left Opposition, shot September 10 1937.

In the middle row, again from left to right: Grigory Yevdokimov, United Opposition, shot August 25 1936; Stalin, the author of these crimes; Lenin, whose death in 1924 was seized upon by Stalin in his consolidation of power; Mikhail Kalinin, who famously survived the purges, but whose wife, Ekaterina Kalinina, was arrested and tortured as a “Trotskyite” in 1938 and sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp; Pyotr Smorodin, executed February 25 1939.

And in the upper row, left to right: Pavel Malkov, he survived the purges; Eino Rahja, died of illness; Sultan-Galiev, executed January 28 1940; Pyotr Zalutsky, a member of the United Opposition, executed January 10 1937; Yakov Drobnis, Left Opposition, executed February 1 1937; Mikhail Tomsky, committed suicide in the face of the first Moscow Trial. He was posthumously charged with high treason by the show trials of 1938. Moisie Kharitonov, Left Opposition, died in a prison camp in 1948; Adolf Joffe, Left Opposition, he committed suicide when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; David Riazanov, founder of the Marx-Engels Institute, executed January 21 1938 as a “Trotskyite”; Aleksei Badayev, he survived the purges; Leonid Serebryakov, Left Opposition, executed February 1 1937; Mikhail Lashevich, Left Opposition, committed suicide, August 30 1928.

Of the eighteen men in the photograph, excluding Lenin and Stalin, ten were executed on the orders of Stalin, one died in a prison camp, and three more committed suicide in the face of Stalinist persecution. A majority of the men in the picture opposed Stalin, and seven were members of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky. Many of the murdered were truly great men. More knowledge of the writings of Marx and Engels died with Riazanov than was known by any other individual in history. Looking at these faces, I recall a line from a 1935 poem by Victor Serge, “O rain of stars in the darkness / constellation of dead brothers!”

This is the legacy that Sison and the CPP uphold with their claims that Stalin “stood on the correct side.” Whatever scholastic niceties there may be to his formulations, Marasigan is unequivocally defending this legacy as well.

Defenders of the Menshevik two-stage theory

The two-stage theory of revolution, the perspective of the old Menshevik party, was rehabilitated in service to the privileged interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Using this theory, the Stalinist Communist Parties around the globe instructed workers that the tasks of the revolution were not socialist, but remained national and democratic in character. There was thus, they argued, a progressive section of the capitalist class, the “national bourgeoisie,” with which the workers should ally. Just as he upholds the CPP’s defense of the murder of the Left Opposition, Marasigan follows the CPP in defending the perspective of a two-stage revolution.

On the basis of this program, Sison, then in the leadership of the PKP, publicly endorsed President Diosdado Macapagal as a “revolutionary.” He instructed the Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth), Lapiang Manggagawa (Workers Party), and Malayang Samahan ng mga Magsasaka (Free Federation of Peasants) to support Ferdinand Marcos in the 1965 presidential election. When Sison was expelled from the PKP in 1967, he founded a new party, the CPP, and used it to ally the growing mass movement with the ruling class politicians of the Liberal Party. The PKP, meanwhile, on the basis of the same two-stage theory, supported Marcos’ imposition of martial law. It was on the basis of this perspective that the CPP gave its support to Duterte in 2016.

Marasigan writes of my historical exposure of the alliances formed by the CPP that “the Philippine Left’s relations with the said politicians are nothing new for activists and even observers of Philippine politics, Scalice’s elan of dropping bombshells notwithstanding.” This is both dishonest and an extraordinary admission. It is dishonest to claim that “activists and observers of Philippine politics” know of Sison’s support for Macapagal and Marcos. Most would not know. More important than this lie, however, is the truth contained in Marasigan’s statement: the CPP and the national democratic movement engage in “relations” with ruling class politicians with a predictable regularity. It is, in fact, nothing new.

Having stated that the party routinely establishes relations with elite politicians, Marasigan contradicts himself elsewhere in his essay when he claims that the party’s support for the “national bourgeoisie” is extended only to “small businessmen,” and not to the so-called big comprador bourgeoisie closely tied to foreign capital. This distinction is a longstanding claim of Stalinism to which Trotsky responded in May 1927:

It would further be profound naiveté to believe that an abyss lies between the so-called comprador bourgeoisie, that is, the economic and political agency of foreign capital in China, and the so-called national bourgeoisie. No, these two sections stand incomparably closer to each other than the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants.

Leon Trotsky on China, Pathfinder Press, 1976, p. 177

In truth there is almost no permanent, concrete content in the writings of the CPP to these ostensible divisions in the bourgeoisie. The party has at different historical junctures allied with almost every faction of the ruling elite in the country in the name of the “progressive section of the national bourgeoisie.” The label justified the support of the national democratic movement for real estate tycoon Manny Villar just as easily as it did Duterte. It is only when relations break down that these erstwhile allies become once again “compradors,” and perhaps even “fascists.”

Sison and Marasigan both claim that the party’s relations with factions of the ruling elite entail both “unity” and “struggle.” The national democratic movement united with Duterte, campaigned for him, proclaimed him progressive, pledged their “full support,” and the CPP committed itself to assisting with his war on drugs, but they also “struggled” with him, attempting to pressure him to the left.

This was an unmitigated betrayal of the working class. The task of a revolutionary leadership was to insistently warn of the imminent danger posed by the fascistic Duterte, and to organize an independent movement of workers for their own, socialist interests.

The CPP is fundamentally opposed to the political independence of the working class and sought to secure concessions from the Duterte administration by means of “unity and struggle.” In the process they peddled the lie that the right-wing populist president was someone who could genuinely defend the interests of the working class and peasantry. The fundamental task of the party to educate the working class was, to Sison and the party leadership, irrelevant. The real goal of the CPP was the negotiation and exacting concessions.

None of this is unique to the Philippines; it is the legacy of Stalinism around the globe. Marasigan in his defense of the Stalinist two-stage theory would have joined the Mensheviks in supporting the bourgeois Cadet party in 1905–6. His perspective aligns with that of Stalin and Kamenev who, in March 1917, gave support to the bourgeois provisional government and were castigated severely by Lenin in April. Marasigan’s arguments are the same as those deployed by Stalin in his insistence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1925–27 ally with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, as the representatives of the national bourgeoisie. Chiang used this support to turn his troops on the Chinese working class, slaughtering them in Shanghai and elsewhere.

Each of these alliances with the capitalist class, and the hundreds of similar deals concluded by Stalinist parties over the course of the twentieth century, were a betrayal of the working class.

The falsification of Marxism

Marasigan attempts to depict this perspective as Marxist with a handful of quotations from Marx and Lenin which he has torn out of context. The historical record, however, is clear. Marxists have always viewed the safeguarding and nurturing of the political independence of the working class as the paramount revolutionary task. Only in this way can workers become aware of their strength as a class and develop socialist consciousness.

Marx and Engels in their 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, insisted on the political independence of the working class in opposition to the calls of the “democratic petty bourgeoisie” using “social democratic phrases” for “general unity.” Lenin and Trotsky, despite their political differences in 1905–6, were unanimous in their opposition to an alliance with the bourgeois Cadet party.

Marasigan attempts to justify the CPP’s alliances with representatives of the political elite as a means of exploiting divisions in the ruling class. Marxists have always paid careful attention to divisions within the ruling class as a means of consolidating and advancing the interests of the working class.

While Lenin was in hiding in August 1917, Trotsky was alert to the divisions in the Russian ruling class and directed the Bolshevik party and the Petrograd Soviet against the coup threat from General Kornilov before turning to the removal of Prime Minister Kerensky. At no point, however, did they unite with Kerensky or endorse his political legitimacy.

Stalinists, in contrast, exploit contradictions in the ruling class as a means of securing an alliance with one of the contending sections of the elite. Marasigan claims that the writings of Mao Zedong are “informed by the Chinese revolution’s wealth of experiences in building united fronts.”

For a Marxist, the united front is a critical strategy for uniting the working class, in its various parties, against a common enemy, without any mingling of organizations or mixing of banners. Trotsky urgently called for a united front of the German working class, organized in the Communist Party (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the early 1930s, against the imminent of danger of Nazism. The Stalinist KPD opposed this call, denounced the social democrats as “social fascists,” and claimed that the KPD would rise to power after Hitler. They split the working class and allowed Hitler and the Nazis to take power without a shot.

In opposition to the Marxist strategy presented by Trotsky, the “united fronts” of Mao were alliances with the capitalist class and with US imperialism based on Stalin’s Popular Front policy that subordinated the working class to sections of the bourgeoisie with devastating consequences in Spain and France in the 1930s.

In 1937, after the disastrous results of the support for Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT a decade earlier, Mao arranged a new alliance with the KMT in opposition to the Japanese invasion. Chiang repeatedly attacked the CCP forces, but Mao insisted on maintaining the “united front.” In the wake of World War II, Mao led the CCP to attempt to form a united government with the KMT. It was not until 1947, as Chiang’s forces were collapsing in the face of economic upheaval and workers’ strikes, that Mao gave up on this strategy.

In 1971, as the Stalinist bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing doubled down on their nationalist program of Socialism in One Country, Mao turned to Nixon and Kissinger to establish a de-facto alliance with Washington against the threat of a possible Soviet invasion. Having opened relations with US imperialism, he established friendly ties with the Marcos dictatorship and with Pinochet. Chilean President Salvador Allende had been supported by the Communist Party of Chile, which had close ties to Moscow, and thus Mao and the CCP immediately welcomed Pinochet’s brutal coup and the murder of the Chilean Communist Party.

Marasigan sets up a straw man claiming that I argue that Sison and the CPP are simply flunkies of the Beijing bureaucracy. In fact, its unprincipled relations with various factions of the Philippine bourgeoisie have been paralleled by its equally unprincipled relations on the world stage. As it sought to maneuver and extract benefits from the Stalinist bureaucracies in Beijing and Moscow, it has endorsed monstrous betrayals of the working class.

During this phase of Maoism from 1965 to 1971, as the CCP exported arms and ideology throughout the region, it served the interests of Sison and the CPP to echo every shift of the political line of Beijing in the pages of the party paper, Ang Bayan. As Mao embraced Nixon and Kissinger and established friendly ties with the martial law regime of Marcos, the CPP hailed these betrayals as “revolutionary victories” of Mao Zedong’s “proletarian foreign policy.”

Despite this rhetoric, the CPP was left utterly isolated by the changed political line of Beijing. The party turned inward, accentuating its nationalism. Sison continued to look for international allies. In the mid-1980s he dropped his accusations of revisionism against the Soviet bureaucracy and hailed the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. Nothing came of this effort, however. In 1989, the CPP, still hoping for ties with Beijing, supported the CCP’s brutal attack on Chinese workers and youth at Tiananmen claiming it was a necessary struggle against revisionism.

For Sison and the CPP leadership, the working class exists as a bargaining chip to use in negotiations with various sections of the capitalist elite. The anti-Marxist theories of Stalinism serve the dual function of assisting the party in retaining control over the working class, and justifying its long history of class collaboration and betrayal.

Like Sison, Marasigan uses the term “Philippine Left” with a proprietary sensibility. There is no left but the CPP, and Sison is its prophet. This is why my historical exposure of the party’s role stung Sison so badly, for it demonstrated that neither he nor his party merited the name.

Genuine left politics are predicated upon the independence of the working class fighting for its own interests. These interests are international and not national in character. The allies of the Filipino working class are the Chinese and American working class and not Filipino capitalists.

Marasigan concluded by repeating Sison’s claim that my scholarship will be welcomed “in military indoctrination seminars” and will “surely please the powers that be and their butchers in the country.” This is a slander. The historical defense of the independence of the working class serves no interests other than those of the working class itself.

As for support from the military, it is Sison himself who is publicly reaching out to coup-plotting layers in the military brass, both its “patriotic and pro-US” sections, in the hopes of getting them to withdraw support from Duterte. Should Sison succeed in this, Marasigan will no doubt be on hand to write an article dressing up the policy in the trappings of intellectual charlatanry.

Before the end of the year, the serialized chapters were compiled into a single volume, now entitled Philippine Society and Revolution, and were being circulated in mimeographed form under the imprint “Revolutionary School of Mao Tse-Tung Thought.” In 1971 it was published as a little red book by Pulang Tala Publications. According to Sison, the book was sold “mainly in the lobbies at UP Diliman.” PSR, as it came to be known, has served as the core text of the CPP for the past fifty years.

In his brief introduction to PSR, Sison wrote, “The author offers this book as a starting point for every patriot in the land.” PSR was divided into three parts, in keeping with its initial serialized division: a Review of Philippine history, Basic Problems of the Filipino People, and The People’s Democratic Revolution.

Those interested in a careful reading of PSR with citations and page numbers are encouraged to access my doctoral dissertation, Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership, which is freely available online.

PSR‘s impact on Philippine politics cannot be overstated. It shaped not only the program and perspective of the party itself, but also the language and orientation of emerging mass movements over the course of five decades. In countless incalculable ways it molded the discourse of the humanities and social sciences in the Philippines and gave form and content to art and literature. At times this influence was a conscious one, but it often had a more subtle, diffusive effect. The language of PSR regarding the goal of national democracy and the political tasks which this goal entailed spread widely, in certain periods becoming nearly ubiquitous.

A parochial, nationalist document

The text was written as a polemic against Jesus Lava and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), not as an abstract summary of timeless political principles. That a polemic with a political adversary should become the central text of a movement was in keeping with the history of Marxism and Communism, many of the core writings of which originated in an argumentative grappling with a rival thinker over the significance of key historical developments and the programmatic conclusions to be derived from them.

PSR, however, made no effort to situate itself in this Marxist tradition. At no point did it present itself as a development in the history of Marxism; there is not a single line dedicated to the political or theoretical continuity of Marxist thought. Its history and its outlook sharply circumscribed, PSR is, to its core, a nationalist document. This is why Sison inscribed the book to “all patriots” and not to the international working class.

Pause for a moment to reflect on what is not included in this text and you begin to get a sense of just how parochial it is, how unwilling to gaze beyond the archipelago.

PSR, a text dedicated to revolution, makes no mention of the 1789 French Revolution nor does it include a word on 1848 and the revolutions that rocked Europe. What was their class character? What lessons should be derived for future struggles?

It gets worse. Stunningly absent is 1917. Neither February nor October merit even passing mention. PSR is entirely silent on the seizure of power by the Russian working class and the role of the Bolshevik party. The CPP, a party that bore the name Communist, had nothing to say about the central event of the twentieth century, the event without which they would not exist. What was the significance of this event for the world’s working class? For the Filipino masses?

Again, what of the 1926-27 Chinese Revolution and its betrayal and crushing by the KMT? These were events of immediate relevance to the political questions confronting workers in countries of belated capitalist development around the globe. PSR was silent.

Scan the pages of PSR and try to find mention of the Communist Manifesto. It is absent. So too is Capital. Marx himself is absent, except as a header in the phrase “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.” Engels, Plekhanov, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Kautsky — it is as if they never existed. PSR apparently regarded their disputes and ideas as irrelevant to the struggles of the Filipino masses.

The history of Marxism is not the only glaring lacuna. This work was written in 1970 yet the critical problems and revolutionary struggles gripping the globe were similarly treated as irrelevant. The Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) was slaughtered in 1965-66, but neither the PKI nor its massacre merited mention. Suharto, now ruling as dictator in Indonesia, was similarly absent. An analysis of his rise was critical to an understanding of the trajectory of Marcos, but PSR had nothing to say on this point.

Ho Chi Minh, the Vietminh, the Vietcong — the Vietnam war was the foremost political crisis in the world, but PSR was silent.

Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi — while the text heralded “Mao Zedong Thought,” it made no examination of the crisis gripping the Chinese Communist Party. PSR was silent.

The Cuban revolution was mentioned once, but here the parochialism of PSR is even more striking, for it was mentioned only for the impact which it had on Philippine sugar production. Its class character, its outcome, the attitude which Filipino workers should take towards it? PSR was silent.

These glaring silences did not express a want of space but rather a lack of interest. When it appeared in 1971, PSR was nearly three hundred pages long and it dedicated paragraphs to what “racial stocks” made up the “Filipino people,” but none to the history or theoretical heritage of Marxism, and none to the broader world.

If PSR was concerned with neither the history of Marxism nor of global developments, what was its core conception?

Stalinist Polemics

Sison and a group of co-thinkers were expelled from the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in April 1967. In early 1969 the expelled cohort founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The PKP and the CPP shared a political program, the program of Stalinism, but they were divided sharply over how to achieve its ends.

Stalinism was the programmatic expression of the political interests of privileged layers of the ruling party bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing. Seeking to defend and expand the social basis of their positions, the bureaucrats put forward the nationalist perspective of building socialism in one country as the paramount political task. World socialist revolution was subordinate to this end.

Looking to secure diplomatic and trade relations in service to the construction of the national economy, the Stalinist bureaucracies sought political capital with which to negotiate with the ruling class in countries around the world. To this end they rehabilitated the old Menshevik line of a two-stage revolution. They instructed Communist parties around the globe that the tasks of the revolution in which they were engaged were not yet socialist in character but national and democratic only. A section of the capitalist class, they claimed, would play a progressive role in this necessary first stage. The function of the Communist party leadership was thus to secure an alliance with this progressive section of the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie,’ and to bring the pressure and support of a mass movement behind it. In this way, the Stalinist bureaucracies could bargain with the ruling elite around the globe, calling off strikes and supplying mass electoral support in exchange for favorable diplomacy and trade deals.

Many of the leading political operatives at the helm of Communist parties were drawn to the program of Stalinism because it was seen as a means of implementing nationalist reforms. Sison and Lava shared this enthusiasm. It allowed them to deploy the banner of Marxism and use it to win mass support for the industrialization of the economy under native capitalist ownership, in opposition to the control of major foreign corporations. Loans from and trade with the Soviet bloc were seen as an additional measure in furtherance of this end. When he was still a leading member of the PKP, Sison had organized mass support for Ferdinand Marcos on this basis and endorsed his election in 1965.

Moscow and Beijing, both committed to the construction of socialism within their own borders, never merged their economies. Their divergent national interests inevitably conflicted, giving rise to rivalry, then open split and armed conflict. The uneven economic development of the two countries and their starkly different geopolitical circumstances fueled the tensions between them. Situated behind the buffer zone of Eastern Europe and resting on a fairly stable industrial base, Moscow articulated a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Washington and established friendly ties with autocrats.

Beijing, in contrast, found itself in the mid-1960s threatened on all sides, facing the imminent threat posed by the US invasion of Vietnam and the loss of its largest international ally, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), which was slaughtered in Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965-66. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to whip up armed struggle throughout the region to diffuse the threat of US imperialism from China’s immense imperiled borders. While Moscow embraced the Shah, Lin Biao articulated the line of protracted people’s war, armed uprisings throughout the ‘countryside of the world’ backed by China, the ‘Yan’an of world revolution.’

By the end of the decade the ideas of Lin Biao had combined in the popular imagination of a generation of youth with images of Mao’s Little Red Book and cultural revolution, and the amalgam was seen as the embodiment of true revolutionary politics, in opposition to the conservative bureaucratism of Brezhnev. Parties split along these lines. The breakaway leaderships did not oppose the Stalinist perspective of an alliance with a section of the capitalist class, but they sought to secure this alliance not with loans from Moscow but with the radical cachet of the political line of Beijing, which gave them a grip on the imagination of the burgeoning protest movement.

This then was Sison’s concern: to use the strategy of protracted people’s war to secure hold over the growing social unrest of the time and then to use this mass base to form an alliance with a section of the capitalist class. From 1970-72, the CPP and its front organizations, for all their talk of protracted people’s war, were in an intimate alliance with the elite opposition to Marcos, which was organized in the Liberal Party. The CPP allied with the sugar barons and their political representatives; the PKP, meanwhile, allied with Marcos.

PSR thus needed to establish that the failures of the PKP in the past were the result of its leadership, the Lavas, and not of its program, Stalinism. PSR sought to demonstrate that Stalinism was in fact correct: the conditions in the Philippines precluded any struggle for socialism at present, a section of the capitalist class was necessarily progressive, and it was the task of workers and peasants to ally with and support it.

Publication

In the first week of July, Joma Sison wrote an open letter, which he signed with his actual name and sent to Vicente Clemente, secretary general of the Movement for a Democratic Philippines. Clemente had the letter published in a number of newspapers, including the Collegian. In his letter, Sison declared

The more the Marcos fascist clique resorts to the use of the army, police, courts and prisons to oppress the people the more shall it bring infamy unto itself and spell clearer the utter bankruptcy of the present reactionary state that is the puppet of US imperialism and class instrument of the compradors and landlords. The Marcos fascist clique has emerged as an unmitigated enemy of Filipino independence and democracy….

But fascism will only cast more fuel to the flames of the revolutionary mass movement.

I call upon the people of every patriotic class and group to close ranks and oppose the campaign of fascist terror being waged by the Marcos puppet clique. I believe the people will never waver in fighting for and depending [sic] their own sovereignty and democratic rights.

Sison was repeating a rhetorical staple of the CPP: fascism aided the growth of revolution for “repression breeds resistance.” He stated that “I shall soon issue another book which I have been researching on and writing since last year.” This was a remarkable slip on Sison’s part, for the book which he was about to publish was Philippine Society and Revolution, which appeared under the name Amado Guerrero. Sison, at the time, vehemently denied that he was Guerrero, and the CPP denounced anyone who made the identification.

PSR, as it rapidly came to be known, was first published in installments in college newspapers beginning in late July 1970. At the time of its serialized publication the work was entitled The Philippine Crisis. The first chapter was published as “Review of Philippine History” in the Collegian; the second chapter was published as “Basic Problems of the Filipino People” in Ang Malaya, the student paper of the PCC; and the third in Guidon at Ateneo. Each chapter was serialized in installments across multiple issues of the student paper, and thus each week a new chunk of Sison’s work appeared on campus.

In the July 23 issue, which published the first installment of The Philippine Crisis, Popoy Valencia, member of the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) and editor of the Collegian, included an editorial statement: “This week we print the first part of an intriguing document mailed to the Collegian and purports [sic] to be a chapter of a book by one Amado Guerrero. We have no way of verifying whether the author is the same Amado Guerrero labeled by the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines] as central committee chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines.”

The second chapter appeared in the September 21 and subsequent issues of Ang Malaya. The editor — Jaime FlorCruz — included a note, “This article was sent to Ang Malaya by mail by we-don’t-know-who. We cannot ascertain whether or not this is a continuation of the article published in some school papers recently. Nor can we ascertain whether this was written by the same Amado Guerrero as there was no by-line in the copy sent. Nevertheless because of its social, political, and economic significance — and because of its literary merit — we are serializing this article to become a part of our readings.”

Precedents

The structure of PSR followed a pattern established by Mao Zedong. Writing in Yan’an in the winter of 1939, Mao published a work entitled The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, which was divided into two chapters — “Chinese Society” and “The Chinese Revolution.” In the first chapter, Mao established that imperialism had made China a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country, in which “[t]he contradiction between imperialism and the Chinese nation and the contradiction between feudalism and the great masses of the people are the basic contradictions in modern Chinese society.” On this basis, Mao argued in the second chapter that “[u]nquestionably, the main tasks are to strike at these two enemies, to carry out a national revolution to overthrow foreign imperialist oppression and a democratic revolution to overthrow feudal landlord oppression.” Mao then analyzed each of the classes in Chinese society — landlords, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat, drawing a sharp distinction between the “comprador big bourgeoisie” and the “national bourgeoisie,” for the latter “can become a revolutionary force.” Mao concluded that the Chinese revolution was a “two-fold task” — “[t]o complete China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution (the new-democratic revolution) and to transform it into a socialist revolution when all the necessary conditions are ripe.”

Modeling himself on Mao, D.N. Aidit, head of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), published a similar work in 1957, “Indonesian Society and the Indonesian Revolution.” The work was divided into two chapters. The first chapter on Indonesian Society, established that because of imperialism, Indonesia was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country. Aidit expanded upon Mao’s opening chapter, incorporating historical material to justify the party’s relationship with Sukarno and to blame Vice President Hatta for the country’s political ills, including the violent suppression of the PKI at Madiun in 1948. Like Mao, Aidit concluded that the tasks of the Indonesian revolution were national and democratic in character and not yet socialist, and like Mao, he examined each of the classes in Indonesian society and drew a distinction between the comprador and national bourgeoisie.

By the time, Sison wrote PSR the Maoist crib sheet for writing the programmatic text for the movement was already well-worn. He followed Aidit’s innovation of including polemical historical material in the first chapter and reached the same conclusions as his predecessors: the Philippines was semi-colonial and semi-feudal and, as a result, the tasks of the revolution were not socialist and the national bourgeoisie should be treated as an ally.

I feel compelled to include an aside at this point. Because Sison modelled his work on Mao and Aidit, and drew inspiration from them, he has been accused on several occasions by reactionary figures in the press and academia of plagiarizing PSR. The accusation is absurd. It is a charge that is employed by those who will not, or perhaps cannot, engage in a coherent criticism of Sison’s ideas and so they grasp for whatever mud they can find to throw at him.

March 3: People’s Anti-Fascist March

Denied access to Plaza Miranda, the MDP adopted a new strategy — “People’s Marches” — and on March 2 they circulated a leaflet announcing a “People’s Anti-Fascist March” to be held the next day.

The leaflet cited the raid on the PCC as evidence of the fascism of the state and insisted that despite this fascism the movement would continue. It called on everyone to join the march, which was to begin at one in the afternoon at the Welcome Rotonda. The MDP was able to promote the march on national television, as at the beginning of the month, Lopez had provided the MDP with a weekly television program which broadcast from nine-thirty to ten-thirty on Thursday nights on ABS-CBN. The SDK, KM, and MDP were given extensive access to radio as well, where the Lopez family and others in the media industry supplied them with regular free airtime. The MDP ran a daily two hour program, Impressions of the Nation, hosted by SDK member and future NPA leader Rafael Baylosis, with the explicit intent of broadcasting material regarding imperialism, feudalism, and fascism and the program of national democracy. The KM and SDK were provided with their own separate radio broadcasts as well.

The KM issued a leaflet, calling as always for the “continuation of the struggle for national democracy.” The developing struggle, they claimed, was evidence of the “growing revolutionary consciousness of the Filipino people who are fighting to destroy the evil forces of exploitation and suppression.” Fascism, the leaflet claimed, was the last weapon of American imperialism and was being deployed to hide the weakness of their puppet Marcos, who had lost the trust of the masses, something a government needed in order to succeed, as a result of the unceasing struggle of the forces of national democracy.

The MPKP published their own leaflet for the march, responding to charges of violence which were being raised against the protest movement. It stressed that the root of violence was the “fascist repression and brutality” of the “neocolonial bourgeois state,” and “an oppressed and exploited people have a right to meet force with force.” Seeking, however, to blame the KM as well, the MPKP continued

The national democratic forces do not plan or participate in or condone acts of ‘vandalism’ or violent acts on the persons and properties of individuals who are not their violent enemies. These are the isolated deeds of provocateurs, looters, and thrill-seekers, or of emotional and extremist elements whose wrath is understandable but whose leaders are duty bound to guide them into a recognition of the distinction between enemies and friends.

Provocateurs must be identified and exposed as mercenary tools of the imperialist-fascist puppet factions now intensely engaged in their own fierce competition for neocolonial power and authority. Extremist and anarchistic elements must be led into the correct revolutionary line, or consciously isolated should they prove to be intractable …

Expose Mercenary Provocateurs! Struggle Against Anarchists!

A highly sympathetic account in the Collegian reported that as the march past through Binondo “the Chinese have boarded up. The marchers scream at them before them [sic] are calmed by their leaders and their fury redirected at police brutality and colonialism.”

At the end of a circuitous route through Manila, approximately twenty thousand marchers converged on Plaza Lawton, where they were violently dispersed by police who set upon them with truncheons. Fleeing to Intramuros, Enrique Sta. Brigida, a freshman in Commerce at Lyceum and a member of the Lyceum Student Reform Movement, was killed by a blow to the skull. The CPP published a statement on the March 3 People’s March in the June 1 issue of Ang Bayan, which hailed Enrique Sta. Brigida for “adding one more to the list of heroes who have sacrificed their lives.” “However,” the article continued, “the bloody suppression of the March 3 People’s March failed to intimidate the masses of workers, student [sic] and youth who joined the historic mass action. It only goaded them more to wage a resolute struggle for national democracy.”

On March 10, three thousand students marched from Lyceum to South Cemetery in a funeral procession for Sta. Brigida that was at the same time a protest rally. Renato Constantino, Amado Hernandez, Jesus Barrera, Voltaire Garcia,and Crispin Aranda spoke at the funeral, and Lyceum President Sotero Laurel led the procession. It was Hernandez last political act, as he died two weeks later.

March 17: Anti-Poverty March

The MDP held a meeting on Saturday March 14 to finalize plans for another march, to be held on Tuesday the seventeenth and to be called “an anti-poverty march.” The event became known in Tagalog as the Martsa ng Mahihirap,” or the Poor People’s March. Olivar told the press that the MDP “takes the uncompromising position that poverty is historically a mere consequence of the exploitative semi-feudal and semi-colonial character of our society.” In the early morning of the sixteenth, the ROTC and armory buildings on the UP campus burned to the ground. The Collegian wrote, “On the eve of final exams, dormers scampered out in night clothes to watch the DMST [Department of Military Science and Tactics] giant hut, seen by many as sanctuary of local fascist authority, burn down as dormer-activists shouted ‘Maki-BAKA, huwag MA-TA-kot.'” A leaflet, put out under the name Ang Tutol [The Protest], hailed the burning of the DMST building as a victory of the national democratic movement over the fascist state.

The day before the anti-poverty march, the MPKP published a leaflet proclaiming that the organization adhered to four basic principles.

The first was people’s power, a formulation which they opposed to “student power,” writing, “MPKP rejects the slogan of Student Power.” The second basic principle was integration with the masses, which they asserted was not merely “philanthropy,” targeting with this remark the SDK controlled campus organization, the Nationalist Corps. True integration with the masses, the MPKP wrote, was reflected in the fact that seventy percent of the six thousand members of the MPKP were workers and peasants. The third principle was “revolution from below,” stating that the “MPKP rejects Marcos’ concept of ‘revolution at the top’ … revolutionary change can only be brought about by democratic action from below. It cannot come as concessions from the oppressors and exploiters.” The final principle was “Internationalism.” By this, the MPKP did not mean the international struggle of the working class for socialism, but rather referred to the need to promote the interests of the Soviet Union, writing that “MPKP deplores the current efforts of reactionaries to inculcate chauvinist emotions in the anti-imperialist movement.” With these principles, the MPKP attempted to distinguish itself from the SDK (first principle), the NC (second), the Marcos administration (third), and the KM (fourth).

On Tuesday, March 17, the MDP launched its anti-poverty march. The march began at nine in the morning at three locations and converged on Plaza Moriones in Tondo to stage what they termed a People’s Court [Hukuman ng Bayan]. The speakers at the rally accused Marcos and his cohort of a list of crimes “against the Filipino people,” pronounced a death sentence, and publicly hanged their effigies.

The College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), which was increasingly entering the camp of the KM, issued a statement, “We call for egalitarianism, which diffuses socio-economic and political powers from the few to the many, from the present ruling oligarchy to the people at large … The CEGP sees two valid and realistic means: one peaceful, the other violent … [which means are used] is highly dependent on how the forces of reaction — the beneficiaries of this highly exploitative system — will react.” Either, the CEGP claimed, the elites would allow “an authentic Constitutional Convention … [of] delegates without vested interests and unbrainwashed,” or they would face violent revolution. The statement concluded: “Ours is a democracy for the elite, a bourgeois democracy, and must be replaced by a genuine national democracy of, for and by the Filipino people.” Because this was a march against poverty, the leaflet mentioned socialism twice and even mentioned the 1917 Russian Revolution. Its political conclusions, however, were strictly limited to pressuring the elite — with the threat of violence — to carry out national democratic measures.

The KM distributed a leaflet which developed its analysis somewhat. While it pointed to the “mounting fascism” of the Marcos administration, this was no longer depicted as its subjective response to the mass protests, but was rooted in the larger crisis of US imperialism. In its attempts to resolve this crisis, the United States was compelled to increase its exploitation of its semi-colonies and this required the growing use of the repressive apparatus of the state. In this aspect of their analysis, the KM was correct. The architecture of dictatorship being erected in the Philippines paralleled the rise of dictatorship around the globe beginning in the mid-1960s and was an expression of the crisis of US imperialism. The international character of this threat highlighted the bankruptcy of local, nationalist solutions to the crisis. Only the coordinated international struggle of the working class for socialism could respond to the international drive to military dictatorship from Chile to Greece and from Indonesia to the Philippines. The KM drew no new political conclusions from this analysis however, and still called for a broad united front in the struggle for national democracy. The solution to the problems of poverty and the threat of dictatorship in the Philippines, they asserted, was national industrialization and agrarian revolution under a national democratic government. What is more, in their subsequent analyses and leaflets, the KM reverted to their older conception, claiming again that the ‘fascism’ of the Marcos administration was rooted simply in the subjective response of Marcos to the protest movement.

The MPKP also circulated a leaflet at the March 17 rally, which stated that “One of the many questions of people regarding the issues raised by the demonstrators is what is meant by imperialism, feudalism and fascism.” The key, the MPKP argued, to ending poverty was national industrialist development of the “basic industries,” in particular, the creation of complex machinery using metal from Philippine mines. However, “because the prevailing system is bad, it needs to be changed and not merely the people. Even if we get good leaders if the system itself is rotten, they will still not succeed because they themselves will become its victims.” The MPKP made no reference to any specific political event or person, and Marcos was never mentioned. The logic of their leaflet however, could easily be interpreted to argue that Marcos himself was a good leader but the rotten system was corrupting him. It was not a stretch of logic to assume that if the system could be repaired then Marcos could be rescued to be the good leader that he had always intended to be.

Ang Bayan claimed that “hundreds of thousands of people” participated in the anti-poverty march. The numerical estimates of revolutionary strength being issued by the CPP were increasingly out of keeping with reality. In the same issue of Ang Bayan, they asserted that “more than 90 per cent of the masses … are on the side of the revolution.” These figures were not merely dishonest, they were absurd. If ninety per cent of the masses were on the side of the revolution in any meaningful sense of the word, the party would have already taken power.

The Storm Subsides

The First Quarter Storm was a student protest movement, and while the majority of these students were intimately connected to the working class and peasantry, the FQS never moved beyond its social base in the student population. At no point did the leadership of this movement, which rested largely with the CPP, fight for its independence from the bourgeoisie and the traditional political elite. On the contrary, it consciously and secretly pursued the interests of a faction of the ruling class and profited out of the relationship.

At the same time, the CPP did not orient the protesting students to broader layers of the working class. The chanted slogans and newsprint manifestos all directed the students merely to escalate their denunciations of Marcos and “fascism,” and ultimately to join the armed struggle in the countryside.

For all its fiery rhetoric and pitched battles in the street — and no matter how truly courageous and self-sacrificing many of the young people were who joined its ranks — the First Quarter Storm was, in the end, but a violent venting of steam. The political turbines through which this steam coursed were those of Lopez and Osmeña, with their scheming plots, and Marcos, who steadily readied the architecture of martial law.

On April 5, the MDP and an organization calling itself Crusaders for Democracy held a rally of five thousand people at Plaza Miranda. Nonie Villanueva spoke for the KM, telling the crowd that People’s War was the answer to the “threat of martial law.” The crowd moved from Miranda to the Embassy, but the police attempted to divert the demonstration with tear gas as it neared Manila City Hall. The protesters responded with Molotov cocktails and pillboxes, and the Metrocom fired their guns to disperse the crowd. It was the last gasp of the First Quarter Storm.

As a movement composed almost exclusively of students the storm’s life was necessarily a short one. Graduation rites succeeded final examinations, and the second week of April saw the majority of students returning home to the province or taking up full-time summer work. As the semester ended and Lopez temporarily reconciled with Marcos, the storm subsided as rapidly as it had started. On March 22, Marcos addressed the graduation rites at the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), vowing to impose martial law “in case the communist threat becomes a positive danger that would imperil the security of the country.”

Examiner and Graphic editorials in March on the imminence of martial law.

On April 11, UP staged its graduation rites and the MDP produced a leaflet which it distributed to the class of 1970. It expressed its “firmest fraternal support for the planned protest actions at this year’s UP commencement exercises by graduating national democratic activists,” and denounced US imperialism and their Filipino and Chinese accomplices in the Philippines. The denunciation of the local Chinese accomplices of US imperialism was a striking addition to the rhetoric of the national democratic movement and it would develop rapidly into explicitly racist attacks on the kumintang intsik [Guomindang Chinese], playing an increasingly prominent and noxious role in the propaganda of the KM, SDK, and their allies over the next year.

The First Quarter Storm was over.

In the wake of the violent January 30 Battle of Mendiola, the forces of the protesters and the state regrouped. Four dead youths were buried. Marcos arranged to meet with the leaders of the developing storm, including the SDK and KM, and secured a commitment to call off the next major demonstration. Communist Party leader Joma Sison intervened, instructing the KM to demand that the previously announced People’s Congress at Plaza Miranda go ahead as planned. The First Quarter Storm regained momentum, but where was it heading?

Aftermath

The day after the Battle of Mendiola, Marcos delivered a nationally televised address, denouncing the demonstrators as “Communists” and warning that he would respond to such demonstrations with the force of military arms.

To the insurrectionary elements, I have a message. My message is: any attempt at the forcible overthrow of the government will be put down immediately. I will not tolerate nor allow communists to take over … The Republic will defend itself with all the force at its command until your armed elements are annihilated. And I shall lead them.

Everyone began to speak of martial law. E.L Victoriano, wrote in the Philippine Herald on February 1, “Widespread disturbances throughout the country would give [Marcos] the excuse to declare martial law with all its unlimited executive powers.” A wave of fear swept through the better-off layers of society; Saturday morning saw panic buying in the supermarkets and military patrols in the streets.

Government troops made no effort to be inconspicuous: though supposedly no longer on red alert, they roamed the city in rumbling trucks from which carbines and Armalites stuck out like sore thumbs, and occasionally made forays into the universities. Banks and stores started boarding up their glass facades with plywood or steel sheets. The stock market didn’t crash, but the prices of stock took a sharp plunge that brought about an orgy of short selling. Refugees from Forbes Park nervously paced the carpeted floors of the Hotel Inter-Continental, filled to capacity for the first time since its inauguration. Classes in Greater Manila were suspended for a whole week, and for a whole week the mayors of Manila and Makati refused to grant permits to demonstrate.

A series of recriminations, threats and demands filled the daily papers. Commander Dante sent a letter to Marcos warning that “the New People’s Army would exact reprisals from senior Government agents for incidents of this type.” Jopson and Ilagan issued a statement, on behalf of the NUSP and NSL, demanding the ouster — “not mere retirement,” they insisted — of Gen. Vicente Raval, head of the PC. Manuel Alabado, Executive Vice President of the US Tobacco Corporation Labor Union testified before Tañada’s joint congressional committee that he had been kidnapped on January 26 by five soldiers and made to assert that he was a Huk and that the Huks were behind the demonstrations. He claimed to have escaped and to have sought refuge with Ignacio Lacsina.

Immediately after the events of January 30, the CPP published a statement in Ang Bayan — “On the January 30-31 Demonstration” — hailing the “four student heroes” who had been killed. The CPP argued that the violence of January 26 and 30 indicated that the entire Filipino people are increasingly awakened to the need for armed revolutionary struggle in the face of armed counter-revolution.” (40) The demonstrations “have served as a rich source of activists for the national democratic revolution and, therefore, of prospective members and fighters of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army.” (44) Ang Bayan saw in the violent suppression of the students — who had gathered behind a confused array of political banners — the ideal scenario for recruitment to the armed struggle, and concluded excitedly, “The revolutionary situation has never been so excellent!” (45)

Four youths, ages 16 to 21, had been shot dead by the police on January 30. Clockwise from upper left: funeral of Ricardo Alcantara; family of Alcantara; parents of Bernardo Tausa looking at his photograph; the family of Fernando Catabay; Felicismo Singh Roldan and his family; flowers from the SDK.

The funeral rites for the four who had been killed on January 30 saw a massive turnout of students. Jerry Barican and Dick Gordon — political rivals on the UP campus — served as Alcantara’s pallbearers. The peaceful cooperation lasted for the duration of the funeral, as a group of UP students, led by Manuel Ortega and Dick Gordon, issued a manifesto and a declaration of principles on February 2 denouncing both police brutality and what it called “student brutality.” It condemned the “violent,” “rabble-rousing,” “vociferous minority” among the students who were responsible for the violence of the protests. The phrase “student brutality” would become a mantra of right-wing elements on the UP campus over the next two years, particularly under the leadership of Ortega.

Marcos began claiming that his political rivals were acting in cahoots with the “Maoists” to overthrow him, and on February 2, the KM published a response. Marcos was “going berserk and so fearful of popular criticism that he imagines at every turn that his political opponents are out to destroy him. He has even started to voice out the fear that his own vice president is interested in his assassination or his political failure.” Marcos’ fears were not mere paranoia; there was in fact a conspiracy between Lopez and the CPP and the KM leadership knew it. The KM was receiving financial support from Lopez to prepare and mount their demonstrations.

Marcos, the KM continued, “having been given the go-signal by his imperialist masters” had entered into relations with “the Russian ‘communists.'” At the same time, however, he was denouncing the “Maoists” in the Philippines, who were, he claimed, attempting to seize power on January 30. In this Marcos revealed his “appalling ignorance,” the KM claimed. First, they insisted “the theory of protracted people’s war that applies to a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country like the Philippines does not permit that a mass action as that of January 30 would suffice to overthrow the present reactionary state.” What is more, the KM was at pains to be clear that “the issue is not yet communism. We are clearly fighting for a national democratic revolution.”

Determined to dispel the claim that they were fighting for socialism, the CPP published a statement, “Turn Grief into Revolutionary Courage,” signed by both Guerrero [Sison] and Dante on February 8. To Marcos’ claim that the demonstrations were led by “Maoists” who were “raising the issue of communism,” they responded, “We communists recognize that the nature of Philippine society is semicolonial and semifeudal and that the pressing issue is national democracy. The issue now in the Philippines is neither socialism nor communism.” What is more they were not fighting for an uprising of workers, but insisted rather that:

The Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army are not putschists. They firmly adhere to Chairman Mao’s strategic principle of encircling the cities from the countryside. All counterrevolutionaries should rest assured that the day will surely come when the people’s armed forces shall have defeated the reactionary armed forces in the countryside and are ready to act in concert with general uprisings by workers and students in the final seizure of power in the city.

The CPP was not fighting for socialism, and it would not act in concert with an uprising of workers until the people’s war had won victory in the countryside. While this people’s war would be of a protracted character, Sison and Dante insisted that “fascism” hastened its success, for “the use of counterrevolutionary violence, restrictive procedures and doubletalk will only result in more intensified revolutionary violence.” Sison and Dante gave direct political instructions to the student protesters. The Party would distribute to “militant demonstrators” three works for their political education: Guide for Cadres and Members of the CPP, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong Students should form “propaganda teams (of at least three members).” Such a team

assumes the specific task of arousing and mobilizing the students and workers in a well-defined area in the city; or the students, peasants, farm workers, national minorities and fishermen in a well-defined area in the provinces.
The mass work of student propaganda teams in urban areas and in provinces close to Manila will result in bigger and more articulate demonstrations and more powerful general strikes. The mass work of student propaganda teams in the provinces will create the best conditions for getting hold of a gun and fighting the armed counterrevolution successfully.

Sison and Dante concluded by assuring students that “they shall certainly be approached by the Party for recruitment or for cooperation on the basis of what they have already contributed to the national democratic revolution.”

Negotiations

On February 9, classes resumed across Manila, and the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), which was emerging as the umbrella organization of the protests, secured a permit to stage a rally at Plaza Miranda on the twelfth. Looking to negotiate a commitment to call off the demonstration, Marcos held a five hour long meeting in Malacañang with the MDP leadership. Representing the MDP and NATU were Ignacio Lacsina, who — undisclosed to the others — was working as a regular informant for Malacañang; PCC President Nemesio Prudente; Teodosio Lansang; Felixberto Olalia; Carlos del Rosario; Jerry Barican; and Ramon Sanchez, “among others.” The SDK had at least two representatives in the room; the KM at least one.

The MDP presented thirteen concrete demands to Marcos, “among them the dissolution of the Special Forces, the disbandment of the Monkees, the dropping of charges against the Dumaguete Times newsmen,” and five long-term demands, “nationalization or transfer to public ownership of oil, mining, communications, and other vital industries; nationalization of all educational institutions to thwart commercialization and sectarianism; abrogation of all inequitous treaties with the United States; promotion of trade and cultural relations with all countries, whatever their political color; implementation of land reform by expropriating big landed estates.”

Marcos warned the MDP representatives of the danger that the protests and instability would be used as a pretext for a right-wing coup. Rotea reported that Prudente responded “If that is your only fear, Mr. President … then arm us, lead us, and we will fight and rally behind you! We are ready to die for you if you are sincere in helping the Filipino people!” The Collegian wrote

Representatives of the Nationalist-Progressive sector met with President Marcos at Malacañang for a five hour conference on the issues and developments that arose from the January 30 bloody demonstrations. …
They [the representatives] also deplored the overt attempts of some sectors in the ruling oligarchy to convert student activism into a Hate Marcos campaign to conceal its own share of the guilt for American domination and local feudalism afflicting Philippine society They reiterated their position that the Marcos administration is only a small segment of the ruling oligarchy and its downfall by right-wing conceptation [sic] and agitation can only bring about a military and repressive government.

Marcos declared his intention to “grant what he could, to study what he could not,” and in return the MDP representatives agreed to call off the Plaza Miranda rally and to hold small “localized demonstrations” to discuss issues. They stated that “this move would entail minimum security risks since smaller groups would be easier to control.” Tera wrote on this: “Out of fear of a coup d’etat by the extreme Right [meaning the concerns of Marcos about the plottings of the Lopez-Osmeña bloc] Marcos immediately called for a dialogue with the leaders of the nationalist groups, including the MDK [sic], SDK, MASAKA, NATU, KM, Molabe and others. In a closed door meeting at the palace … Marcos acceeded [sic] to 13 of their demands.”

Sison immediately responded, instructing the KM to distribute a leaflet which denounced fears that Marcos might face a military coup d’etat if the protests continued. The KM put forward the simple-minded argument that “Events have shown that Marcos is rightist and bad enough to deserve the denunciation of the Filipino people … We must always bear in mind that Marcos stands as the chief agent of US imperialism and domestic feudalism in our society.” Sison later stated that “I consider as my most important contribution to the First Quarter Storm of 1970 the reversal and undoing of the agreement entered into with Marcos by leaders of major mass organizations calling off the mass action scheduled for February 12 in protest against the outrageous killing of six students and other barbarities on January 30-31, 1970.”

February 12: the First People’s Congress

Headlines on the morning of the twelfth announced that the Miranda rally had been called off and that separate rallies were to be held on individual campuses. There was widespread speculation that the MDP leaders had been “bought off.” The Collegian, for example, ran the headline “Demonstration goes on tomorrow in UP: Plaza Miranda plan put off due to ‘risk.'”

The MDP held an emergency meeting that morning and the perspective of the KM won over the majority. The umbrella group reached a compromise: they would hold simultaneous separate rallies — largely to save face over the reversal — and then converge on Plaza Miranda for “a People’s Congress.” An estimated fifty thousand participated, the largest attendance of any rally during the First Quarter Storm as subsequent events saw fewer and fewer people turn up.

The KM and the SDK were now clearly in the leadership of the storm, and the NUSP and NSL were not to be seen in the plaza. Their rivalry was rapidly disappearing, but the KM was under direct instructions from the CPP and the SDK was not. At the first People’s Congress and at subsequent rallies throughout the storm, the KM sought to provoke the crowd to violence, while SDK sought to calm it. As the SDK continued its rectification process and as the CPP recruited its leadership to its ranks, this tactical division gradually disappeared and by the opening of 1971 the two organizations proceeded in lockstep in response to the instructions of party leadership.

February 12 People’s Congress, Plaza Miranda

A speech delivered by the KM’s Nonie Villanueva, full of irreverent profanity, established the tone which would dominate the rostrums of the storm going forward, with putang ina and hindot standing in for political analysis and program.

Lacaba recounted that “[e]ach time a small group right in front of the speakers got up calling for a march to Malacañang, other demonstrators surrounding the group — suspected to be one led by an LP hatchetman — persuaded or ordered them to sit down.” It is significant that the “hatchetmen” of the Liberal Party were known to be present at the First Quarter Storm rallies and were suspected of attempting to instigate violent protest. The fact that Lopez and the LP benefited from these rallies was a poorly kept secret. To calm the crowd, the SDK repeatedly led them in the singing of the national anthem as a means of defusing tension. As the rally drew to a close, they sung the national anthem one last time and then announced that the MDP would be holding a meeting on Valentine’s day at Vinzons Hall, UP.

Ang Bayan hailed the February 12 demonstration, which it claimed one hundred thousand people had attended. They blamed the PKP for negotiating with Marcos to call off the protests, asserting that the “Lava revisionist renegades took the initiative of peddling through the MPKP spokesman as early as February 4 the erroneous line that ‘Marcos is only a small, although significant part’ of ‘the neocolonial-bourgeois political system’ (whatever that means) and to complain about a ‘purely anti-Marcos line.'” Using this language the MPKP had sought to call off the protests, and according to Ang Bayan, a BRPF statement declared that dialogues with Marcos could be used to “further intensify the national democratic struggle,” while an MPKP press release “announced that they were in a quandary whether or not to join the February 12 demonstration.” This defense of Marcos, Ang Bayan claimed was made in exchange for a set of promises from the President that “trade and cultural ties will be instituted with Eastern European countries immediately with the sending of officially accredited representatives. The possibility of securing loans or aid from said countries shall be explored.” Ang Bayan observed,

This is obviously the booty being dangled before the Lava revisionist running dogs of Soviet social-imperialism for their cooperation with the Marcos fascist puppet regime. … Relations with Soviet social-imperialism … will only add to the intensification of the exploitation of the Filipino people. The Soviet Union is no longer a socialist country; it has become capitalist, social-fascist and social-imperialist. Soviet social-imperialist “loans” and “aid” are no different from US imperialist “loans” and “aid”…

The CPP again insisted on its claim that dictatorship facilitated revolutionary struggle, openly expressing their hope that Marcos would suspend democratic processes: “How much nicer it would be if the US imperialists and reactionaries in the Philippines can no longer boast of their regular election! That would be a striking manifestation of how strong the revolutionary mass movement has become.”

The party, Ang Bayan claimed, had no responsibility for the emergence of “fascism,” stating “It is stupid to blame revolutionaries for the rise of fascism and the supposed possibility of a rightist coup.” The CPP rejected the revolutionary task of fighting against the rise of dictatorship, which can be waged neither by passive abstention nor anarchistic violence, both of which facilitate its emergence, but rather through the conscious organizing of the masses in an independent struggle for power. Thus, while the MPKP looked to defuse protests, the KM sought to provoke repression; both facilitated the declaration of martial law.

On February 14, fifty representatives from various student and labor organizations met to plan the next steps of the protest movement. They resolved that the February 18 rally, which had already been scheduled, would be a second people’s congress. The KM circulated a leaflet at the meeting calling for the “intensification of the struggle against the fascist puppet government of Marcos.” Following the political line of Ang Bayan, they denounced the “opportunist line” of the MPKP that “Marcos is a small but important part of the political system.” Countering that “the fascist puppet Marcos is the primary political agent of the native exploiting and oppressing classes and of American imperialism in our country,” they called for continued and strengthened anti-Marcos protests, and concluded by expanding the tripartite “Down with Fascism! Down with Imperialism! Down with Feudalism!” to include a final slogan: “Down with Soviet Social Imperialism!”

The remaining conservative layers of the MDP were being edged out and were looking to pull the umbrella group back from the clutches of the KM. On the same day that the majority of the organization agreed to hold a second people’s congress, the spokesperson of the MDP, Nelson Navarro, met with Justice Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile, at the Butterfly Restaurant where he was celebrating his forty-sixth birthday. Miriam Defensor and Violeta Calvo were both now employed in his office and they had arranged his meeting with the MDP spokesperson.

February 18: the Second People’s Congress

An estimated twenty thousand students — and “a sprinkling of workers and farmers” — assembled in Plaza Miranda on February 18 for the Second People’s Congress. The MPKP was reeling from the criticisms of the KM; they produced two leaflets for the demonstration, each written in a petulant and defensive tone. The first hailed the assembly as the development of their perspective of building “parliament in the streets,” and declared that

MPKP views Marcos as an agent of American Imperialism. However, it does not equate the system as a whole with the person of Marcos. MPKP is well aware of the contradictions within the ruling class (and these contradictions tend to grow sharper in periods of crisis like the present). It therefore warns against a possible plan of rival factions of the same ruling class to seize power and create the illusion of change. The goal of the national democratic movement is to abolish neo-colonialism, not just to replace the man who presides over the operation of the same exploitative system.

The MPKP stated that the “only real alternative … is people’s power — the collective might of the workers, peasants, students, and all other anti-imperialist forces,” mobilized to build “national democracy.” The language of this leaflet expressed the dilemma of the MPKP during the First Quarter Storm. They could not endorse Marcos and would not endorse his bourgeois opponents. The only alternative was an independent fight of the working class leading the students and peasantry in opposition to the entire capitalist class, but the Stalinism of the PKP and its front organizations was intrinsically hostile to this perspective. The MPKP thus warned against both Marcos as well as the rival factions of the ruling class, while at the same time calling for a united front of “people’s power” with all “anti-imperialist forces” for national democracy. The MPKP unwaveringly insisted that a section of the national bourgeoisie was a component part of these progressive forces, and a necessary element of “people’s power,” yet they could not during the FQS publicly identify which section of the capitalist class was in their opinion progressive. This was precisely because their allegiances lay with Marcos and to say as much in early 1970 was political suicide.

Later the same day the MPKP released a second leaflet defending themselves against charges made by the KM that they were diffusing anger against Marcos. They accused the KM of the “unwarranted resort to slanderous phrase-mongering” and distorting the MPKP political line. (One wonders what resort to “slanderous phrase-mongering” would be warranted.) Protesting overmuch, they stated,

MPKP never advocated shifting the people’s revolutionary actions against Marcos to “dissipated attacks” against various forces. MPKP did not exculpate the blood debts of Marcos by branding the revolutionary actions of the youth as a purely anti-Marcos line. MPKP has not fallen for the Marcos “nationalist” line at all, and it does not becloud the issue of puppetry and fascism of the Marcos regime. MPKP is not disarmed by the rhetorics [sic] of Marcos. MPKP does not underestimate the role of Marcos in the neocolonial-bourgeois system. MPKP does not consider Marcos as only a “victim”of this system.

The demonstrators marched to the Embassy, despite attempts by some of the organizers of the event to prevent them from doing so. Gary Olivar of the SDK told the crowd that there would be a rally at the Washington Day Ball at the Embassy on Saturday the twenty-first and that they should wait to demonstrate at the Embassy then. He led the crowd in repeated renditions of the national anthem in an attempt to defuse the mounting anger of the demonstrators.

While the SDK was carefully attempting to limit the protests and prevent violence the KM was seeking to provoke it. Ang Bayan celebrated how the demonstrators “brilliantly” feinted to Malacañang, “completely outwitted practically all the fascist brutes” who deployed to the presidential palace, and then marched on the Embassy. At nine thirty at night, violence erupted at the Embassy.

Nelson Navarro, spokesperson for the MDP, stated that the organization peacefully finished its rally, and “the events that transpired afterwards it was unable to prevent or control,” as demonstrating students broke into the Embassy compound with “sticks, stones and homemade bombs.” Ang Bayan hailed the demonstrators who left the Embassy and “broke up into several groups and attacked such alien establishments as Caltex, Esso, Philamlife and other imperialist enterprises. They carefully avoided doing harm to petty bourgeois and middle bourgeois establishments.”

February 21: Devaluation

The economic crisis continued to worsen, and on February 21, upon the insistence of the IMF, Marcos devalued the peso and adopted the floating rate. The peso declined from $1:P4 to $1:5.90, falling 47.5% almost overnight. Gradually the conception emerged that the collapse of the peso had been the product of Marcos’ profligate election spending.

[Marcos] it is generally concluded, so debauched the Philippine peso — he is said to have spent no less than 800 million during his campaign — that the Government could not but devalue under the pressure of the International Monetary Fund, thus aggravating further the widespread poverty that characterizes Philippine society.
As a result of the IMF-imposed “floating-rate”, the prices of all prime commodities soared by nearly 40 per cent while wages inched up by 10-15 per cent … In an attempt to give the people the impression that his government is not powerless to halt spiraling costs, Marcos created in mid-1970 a Price Control Council which proved to be more than ready to grant official approval to price increases, especially when these were “requested” by American oil companies.

Rodrigo writes

The devaluation slowed the economy and stoked even more the public discontent. The peso wobbled further to $1:P6.50 in 1971. As a result of the rise in the cost of imports, the Philippine economy slowed to a crawl. GNP growth dropped to 2.74%, the worst level since 1960 and the second worst since 1946. Public discontent, already high, soared even further. Inflation rose to 15%, compared to the average of 4.5% in previous years. By 1971, nearly half the population were not earning enough to buy their minimum food needs.

As late as December 9 1969, in a speech at the Asian Institute of Management Marcos had declared, in the presence of Eugenio Lopez, that he would not devalue the peso. “The devaluation’s impact on Meralco was direct and considerable. Meralco got many dollar denominated loans during 1962-70. Its old financial projections were now obsolete and unless rates were hiked, the company was in danger of defaulting on some loans.” Tensions between Marcos and Lopez persisted and deepened.

February 26: Sunken Garden and the Raid on PCC

The MDP called off its promised Washington Day demonstration at the last moment but the front groups of the PKP it seems did not receive notification of the cancellation. Approximately fifty demonstrators, all associated with the PKP showed up in front of the embassy, which was surrounded by nearly one thousand police officers. The attention of the MDP was turned to the staging of a “Third People’s Congress” at Plaza Miranda on February 26.

Manila Mayor Villegas announced on the twenty-third that he would not grant a permit for a rally at Plaza Miranda, but would issue one for the use of the Sunken Gardens instead. The Sunken Gardens were part of the old moat outside the southern walls of Intramuros, and now served as a hazard in the nine hole municipal golf course circling the ancient city bulwarks. While it was but a stroll away from Agrifina Circle and Congress, it was nonetheless isolated and, from the perspective of law-enforcement, easily controlled.

On February 24, in a meeting of the MDP leadership at UP, spokesperson Nelson Navarro announced that the MDP would appeal Villegas decision before the Supreme Court. The appeal was filed by E. Voltaire Garcia, now employed in the offices of Senator Salvador Laurel, the next day. On February 26, at four in the afternoon on the day of the rally, the court upheld Villegas denial of a permit for a gathering in Miranda by a vote 8-2. The forces of the MDP gathered outside Plaza Miranda, waiting for the Supreme Court ruling, and there was a tense stand-off as they were blocked by anti-riot police “in full combat gear” from entering. On word of the decision, they moved to the Sunken Gardens. From the rally at the Sunken Garden the MDP proceeded to the Embassy.

Late that night — at two-thirty in the morning on February 27 — the Manila Police Department (MPD) raided the Philippine College of Commerce (PCC) [later PUP] with a warrant issued by Judge Hilarion Jarencio, arresting thirty-nine people, including Teodosio Lansang, and claiming to have confiscated several weapons.

The demonstrators regrouped on January 30, a split emerging in their ranks. The majority, shocked by the violence of the twenty-sixth, rallied in front of Congress behind the banners of the KM and SDK denouncing the “fascism” of Marcos; the moderate student groups, clinging to the theme of a non-partisan convention, sent a delegation to meet with the president at Malacañang. Tensions were high. Ang Bayan declared that the January 26 protest “was merely the opening salvo for bigger mass actions of the near future. It is a blow against the reactionaries to be followed by more and bigger blows.” On the morning of the thirtieth, UP Student Catholic Action (UPSCA) circulated forged leaflets purporting to be from the UP Student Council, claiming that the demonstration did not have the sanction of the Council and warning students, “Don’t blame anyone if you get hurt!”

Finding that neither camp expressed its interests, and unable to articulate an independent position, the MPKP tagged along to the KM and SDK rally. They circulated a leaflet grossly incongruous with the mood of the assembled masses, calling for a partisan constitutional convention. The MPKP, they wrote, “did not and does not support the slogan of ‘non-partisan constitutional convention.’ … [This slogan] is deliberately designed to create illusion [sic] about the convention and to conceal the truth that the convention, whether openly partisan or not, will reflect the bankruptcy of the present political system.” The leaflet continued,

We must therefore rally the masses in a relentless struggle against neo-colonialism. The election of delegates and the convention itself may, however, be good opportunities to accomplish this principal task; but this could only be accomplished if we dispel all illusions in the minds of the masses …
MPKP calls for a People’s Constitution that will declare illegal and obsolete the power of imperialism, feudalism and capitalism, and project the concept of people’s power. The People’s Constitution should be a rallying program of the struggle for national democracy.

By rejecting the call for a non-partisan constitutional convention, the MPKP kept voting open to the two major political parties, while with its demand for a People’s Constitution it promoted the idea that by voting for delegates — including representatives from the Liberal Party (LP) and Nacionalista Party (NP) — the ‘people’ could secure representatives who would by legislative fiat make imperialism, feudalism and capitalism illegal. The reformist illusions which the MPKP were attempting to promote are staggering. As Marcos’ forces trained their guns on the protesters and fired, the MPKP activists had this leaflet in their hands. It made no mention — none — of the violence of January 26, and it claimed that the central task was to elect representatives to the constitutional convention who would simply declare capitalism illegal. The events of January 30 and the public outcry that they produced, compelled the MPKP to begin speaking of “fascism” while attempting to deflect the focus of public ire away from Marcos.

In the afternoon, Edgar Jopson, Portia Ilagan and others of the NSL and NUSP held a meeting with Marcos. Jopson demanded that Marcos put his commitment not to run for another presidential term in writing, and Marcos, irritated by Jopson’s demand, famously denounced him as the mere “son of a grocer.” As they were leaving, at shortly after six in the evening, violence broke out at the entrance to the presidential palace. The demonstrators had moved from Congress to Malacañang and as Marcos emerged from his meeting with Jopson they had gathered at Gate Four. Col. Fabian Ver and Major Fidel Ramos were “waiting for the President to give the order to shoot and the President did order: ‘Shoot them with water and tear gas.'”

As security forces launched their assault, Gary Olivar issued instructions to the protesters by means of an ABS-CBN soundtruck, which Eugenio Lopez had apparently supplied to the protesters. Olivar used the vehicle to direct the ensuing Battle of Mendiola. A firetruck arrived to blast the protesters with water, but members of the SDKM (Mendiola) commandeered the vehicle, which they crashed through the palace gates. A series of explosions followed and the protesters retreated, constructing barricades on Mendiola bridge as they fell back from Malacañang. They briefly held this position and then fell back again.

For several hours police and protesters waged a battle for the bridge. The police and military repeatedly fired on the student protesters, who responded with pillboxes, molotov cocktails and rocks, setting fire to vehicles in the street to slow the passage of the military. The barricades on Mendiola fell at around midnight. “There was nonstop hail of bullets, deafening gunfire as we scrambled on the sidewalk on the left side of Recto Avenue towards Lepanto and Morayta.” As they retreated the protesters overturned the concrete flower beds set up by Villegas along Recto, and some “abandoned vehicles were cannibalized, their tires turned into bonfires that gave off the pungent smell of burning rubber and the unmistakable look of an insurrection.”

Radio news reports initially announced that five or six protesters had been killed, but four were eventually named: Ricardo Alcantara, a student from UP; Fernando Catabay, MLQU; Bernardo Tausa, Mapa High School; and Felicisimo Singh Roldan, of UE. The dead ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-one; each had been shot by the police. One hundred seven students were injured on January 30, seventy-four of them from gunshot wounds, among them a boy from Roosevelt Academy in Cubao whose leg had to be amputated. Hundreds of students were arrested. They were detained in Camp Crame long past the legal maximum of six hours without charges. When protests were raised over the illegality of the mass detention, the PC charged the students with sedition, holding them for eighteen hours without food and then dismissing all charges for lack of evidence.

Marcos promoted the commander of the Metrocom, Colonel Ordoñez, who had directly overseen the assault on the students, to General on the spot. In 1972, the AFP admitted that a number of “government penetration agents” had participated in the “violent demonstration,” including Sgt. Elnora Estrada.

January 26

As 1970 opened Ferdinand Marcos had just secured re-election, becoming the only President in Philippine history to do so. The election was likely the bloodiest and most corrupt the country had yet seen. Entire towns had been burned to the ground in a manner that was being compared in the press to the massacre carried out by American soldiers at My Lai, an event which had just come to public awareness. Sergio Osmeña Jr., the defeated rival candidate, famously remarked, “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold,” although it might be said, that it was not for want of trying.

Monday, January 26, was the newly re-elected President’s State of the Nation Address. Anticipating unrest, Metrocom, the unit of the Philippine Constabulary operating in Metro Manila, made preparations to suppress it. Two organizations were granted permits to rally in front of Congress, the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP) and Ang Magigiting [The Brave], the political vehicle of radio personality Roger Arienda, while the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) youth organ, Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP), was able to secure a permit to stage a protest behind Congress. Neither of the youth organizations affiliated with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) were able to obtain a permit at all. As late as January 22, there was still discussion in these organizations as to how best to protest during the State of the Nation address. The University of the Philippines Student Council (UPSC) chaired by Jerry Barican of the SDK stated that it intended to demonstrate to “clarify its stand on the Constitutional Convention and to bid for public support.” They weighed holding a separate rally at Plaza Miranda, where, Tagamolila reported, the Kamanyang Players would perform, “reinforcing the issues with dance and drama.” This proposal wound up being rejected and the UPSC, KM and SDK all decided to join the NUSP rally in front of Congress.

Opening the first session of the Seventh Congress, on Monday, January 26, Fr. Pacifico Ortiz — the president of Ateneo University — delivered an invocation. The country was standing, he intoned, “on the trembling edge of revolution.” Marcos delivered his State of the Nation speech, which he entitled “National Discipline: the Key to our Future.” Marcos had ordered speakers to be set up in front of Congress to broadcast his speech, overpowering the public address system of the protesters, whose “lone amplifier was … drowned out by four loudspeakers set up by the Army Signals Corps.” The protesters dispatched a representative who quickly met with Senator Aquino to request that Marcos’ speakers be taken down, but they were not removed. Newspapers estimated that forty thousand people rallied outside of the halls of Congress, while “the number of security forces mustered for the occasion was estimated at 7,000” Arienda’s group had brought a mock coffin which they said symbolized the death of democracy, while a separate group of demonstrators from UP carried a papier-mâché crocodile with a dollar sign on its belly and they set the crocodile on top of the coffin.

In a manner unintentionally symbolic of their increasing political isolation, the MPKP distributed their leaflet, The Sad State of the Nation, behind the house of Congress. The statement stressed that the organization had no illusion that “Mr. Marcos will take advantage of his position as the first reelected president to pull the country out of the disastrous path of neocolonial development … Change can only come from the people themselves, particularly those who are most oppressed.” The MPKP called for “a mighty wave of mass action to deal with the following problems: The Fascist Menace … ” In this section the MPKP charged the military with “recruiting student leaders to intelligence agencies and using them to infiltrate progressive youth organizations … to push these organizations along a disastrous adventurist line and to sow dissensions in the ranks of the genuine anti-imperialist groups. Just the other day they again circulated a slanderous leaflet against MPKP, charging it of subversion and denigrating its leaders.” While denouncing ‘fascism,’ the MPKP rooted this political danger not in capitalism, but in the KM and SDK who, infiltrated by the military, were pursuing a “disastrous adventurist line.” The other problems which mass action needed to solve were “Economic Sabotage” on behalf of US imperialism; “Bogus land reform;” and the worsening economic conditions of the masses. They put forward no concrete program to solve any of these problems but simply issued a repeated call for mass action. Action to what end? This was never addressed. The MPKP’s call for mass action was subsumed under the slogan: “Build Parliament in the Streets!” Given the political line articulated by the MPKP it was logical to assume that mass action should be mobilized to pressure Marcos to “take advantage of his position.”

Arriving at four in the afternoon, just as Marcos was about to speak, “the KM members surged forward through the crowd in a diamond formation until they positioned themselves in the forefront of the demonstration site, their huge red streamer very noticeable and overshadowing all the other placards.” They distributed a “position paper” to the crowd entitled “A Neo-colony in Crisis” which began, “As the Seventh Congress of the Philippines opens today, the Kabataang Makabayan presents to the Filipino people the real state of the nation. In the interest of exposing to the people the conditions in the country so that they may act to change them, the KM joins today’s demonstration in unity with progressive and national democratic organizations and individuals.” The “reactionary Marcos administration,” they stated, “has strengthened and deepened its commitments to the neo-colonial schemes of the imperialist United States and Japan and social-imperialist Soviet Union in Asia.” The KM denounced Marcos’ “plan to open trade relations with pseudo-socialist countries, specifically the Soviet Union.” Marcos’ plan was “in consonance with the US-Soviet policy of dividing the world between themselves. … the Soviet Union has been transformed into a neo-capitalist state that exploits and oppresses not only the Soviet people but also the peoples of its colonies in the same fashion as the United States does.” The KM repeated Sison’s recent denunciation of the Constitutional Convention, and warned that “resurging fascism … emphatically characterizes the Marcos administration.” This was evidenced by violence against “the people” carried out by “Hitler-worshippers in the reactionary armed forces.” The KM drew this conclusion:

But one thing is sure. As the ruling class can not rule anymore in the old way, more violent repressions are bound to unfold. Yet, it is a truism that in any society, as the ruling class becomes more violent, the resistance of the oppressed is increased tenfold. The revolutionary movement emerges to destroy the inequities of the old order.

This was the standard line of the CPP: fascism and repression only cause the revolutionary movement to grow.

An array of speakers addressed the crowd, struggling to be heard over Marcos. When Luis Taruc was given the microphone the demonstrators loudly booed him and shouted, “We want Dante!,” referring to Bernabe Buscayno, Kumander Dante, head of the New People’s Army (NPA). Lacaba reported that “There were two mikes, taped together; and this may sound frivolous, but I think the mikes were the immediate cause of the trouble that ensued. … Now, at about half past five, Jopson, who was in polo barong and sported a red armband with the inscription “J26M,” announced that the next speaker would be Gary Olivar of the SDK.” Jopson then hesitated, reluctant to give the mic to Olivar. He led the crowd in singing the national anthem. When the singing finished, he continued to clutch the microphones, and then announced that the NUSP rally was over and called on students to disperse. “It was at this point that one of the militants grabbed the mikes from Jopson,” and passed them to “a labor union leader” — most likely Rodolfo del Rosario. He “attacked the ‘counter-revolutionaries who want to end this demonstration,’ going on from there to attack fascists and imperialists in general. By the time he was through his audience had a new, a more insistent chant: ‘Rebolusyon! Rebolusyon! Rebolusyon!'”

Marcos emerged from Congress. “No less than Col. Fabian Ver, chief of the presidential security force, and Col. James Barbers, Manila deputy chief of police [and Joma Sison’s maternal uncle], personally led the heavy escort. Brig. Gen. Hans Menzi, [publisher of the Manila Bulletin] the inseparable chief presidential aide, trotted behind.” The protesters set Marcos’ effigy on fire, hurling the crocodile and coffin at his entourage; the police charged the protesters and “flailed away, the demonstrators scattered.” The President and his wife safely drove away. The protesters quickly regrouped and began throwing rocks and soft-drink bottles at the police, who arrested some of the demonstrators on the spot. Rotea wrote that “[t]hey continued hitting demonstrators they had just caught even if they were not resisting at all, or were pleading for mercy, or were already down.” The police violence was indiscriminate and a number of reporters were beaten alongside the demonstrators. The police then “retreated into Congress with hostages. The demonstrators re-occupied the area they had vacated in their panic. The majority of NUSP members must have been safe in their buses by then, on their way home, but the militants were still in possession of the mikes.”

About two thousand demonstrators remained in front of Congress. They began chanting “Makibaka! Huwag matakot!” and then sang the Internationale. Senator, and former Vice President, Emmanuel Pelaez emerged from the Congressional building to address the crowd and the SDK supplied him the microphone. The crowd chanted for the arrested protesters being held inside by the police to be released, but the KM and SDK leaders silenced the crowd so that Pelaez could speak. Pelaez made a lengthy speech in an attempt to calm the crowd, while the police regrouped, moving around to the north side of the building. As Pelaez completed his speech, they charged the demonstrators. Lacaba recounted that

The demonstrators fled in all directions … Three cops cornered one demonstrator against a traffic sign and clubbed him until the signpost gave way and fell with a crash. … The demonstrators who had fled regrouped, on the Luneta side of Congress, and with holler and whoop, they charged. The cops slowly retreated before this surging mass, then ran, ran for their lives, pursued by rage, rocks and burning placard handles. … In the next two hours, the pattern of battle would be set. The cops would charge, the demonstrators would retreat; the demonstrators would regroup and come forward again, the coups would back off to their former position. … There were about seven waves of attack and retreat by both sides, each attack preceded by a tense noisy lull, during which there would be sporadic stoning, by both cops and demonstrators.

The demonstrators had hired a jeepney and some crowded into it for shelter. The police “swooped down on the jeepney with their rattan sticks, striking out at the students who surrounded it until they fled, then venting their rage some more on those inside the jeepney who could not get out to run. The shrill screams of women inside the jeepney rent the air. The driver, bloody all over, managed to stagger out; the cops quickly grabbed him.” The police began firing shots in the air and the demonstrators fled.

By eight in the evening, less than two hours after it had started, the battle in front of Congress had ended. Among those injured were members of both the NUSP and the KM. Rotea reported that “initial official reports showed that about 300 youths were injured while 72 law enforcers were wounded in the Congress riot.” A great many demonstrators were arrested — “thrown into and packed like sardines at the city detention jail.” Salvador Laurel and John Osmeña, along with a handful of other politicians, “personally spent the night there and helped expedite their release.” Of those arrested, nineteen were charged but were released without bail.

Aftermath

The next three days saw a relentless stream of recriminations and posturing with regard to the violence of January 26. Nemesio Prudente, President of the PCC, who had been beaten by the police alongside students, told the press, “I will support a nationwide revolutionary movement of students to protest the brutalities of the state.” James Barbers, Deputy Chief of the MPD, who had for years received the support of the KM, issued a statement that “We maintain that the police acted swiftly at a particular time when the life of the President of the Republic — and that of the First Lady — was being endangered by the vicious and unscrupulous elements among the student demonstrators. One can just imagine what would have resulted had something happened to the First Lady!” Mayor Villegas defended “the police action and said they acted on his orders to protect the President.” Edgar Jopson published a statement washing his hands of the event, claiming that the riot started when he attempted to end the demonstration. Ruben Torres, chair of the MPKP, issued a brief statement, which concluded, “Police brutality, blatantly displayed in the January 26th demonstration will not dampen the surging activism of the youth. All the more, this even increases the enthusiasm and determination of the youth in their struggle for national democracy.” The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (BRPF), which, like the MPKP, was allied to the PKP, issued a similar statement denouncing the “the use of naked force” by “the power holders.” Neither the MPKP nor the BRPF mentioned Marcos at all, for he was their political ally.

Marcos released a press statement regarding the events.

Reports received by me on the demonstration tend to show that the students were not responsible for the riot that ensued during the demonstration.
I accept the veracity of these reports and I accept the statement of responsible student leaders present at the demonstration that they were not responsible for the riots.
Initial reports from police and intelligence indicate that the riot was instigated by non-student provocateurs who had infiltrated the ranks of the legitimate demonstrators. This is being investigated.

Marcos was looking to blame the riots on the CPP — whom he labeled provocateurs infiltrating the ranks of the demonstrators — yet he was well aware that part of the responsibility for the riot rested with police agent provocateurs who had infiltrated the ranks of the students, a number of whom played leading roles in the January 26 events and in the subsequent development of the FQS. Lacaba related how a young woman denounced the police during the riot — “Those sons of bitches, their day is coming. [Putangna nila, me araw din sila.]” She was Elnora ‘Babette’ Estrada, a member of the National Council of the KM, and an undercover police agent with the rank of sergeant.

On Tuesday, the day after the violence, Jerry Barican announced that students at UP would be staging a week-long boycott of classes to express the students’ “vehement denunciation of police brutality and of other terroristic means being perpetrated by the Marcos administration.” Student leaders held a meeting at Far Eastern University (FEU) where they resolved to stage a demonstration on January 30.

On Wednesday, January 28, the KM issued a leaflet in which they claimed that the “students dramatically exposed to the people the deteriorating conditions in the country” and called for the continuation of the “anti-fascist” struggle. A Senate and House joint committee, chaired by Lorenzo Tañada, was formed to investigate the “root causes of demonstrations in general.” Five hundred UP Faculty members gathered on the same day and drafted a declaration, adopted unanimously, which stated that they

strongly denounce the use of brutal force by state authorities against student demonstrators on January 26 1970 … We strongly urge that congressional and other investigations be so conducted and concluded as to reaffirm democratic principles … The Faculty holds the present administration accountable and responsible for the pattern of repression and the violation of rights.

On Thursday, January 29, the UP Faculty, including President Salvador Lopez, marched to Malacañang where they held a rally and then met with Marcos and presented him their declaration.

The events of the next day, January 30, would come to be known as the Battle of Mendiola, an explosion far larger, and more violently suppressed, than that of January 26. The First Quarter Storm had begun.

What follows is the first of a series dealing with the critical events of the First Quarter Storm, a revolutionary moment in Philippine history. This initial post deals with the political themes which emerged to give shape to the storm during the first rumbling signs of its onset. More detailed development of these ideas, as well as citations for the quotations and facts included here, can be found in my doctoral dissertation. I would encourage interested readers to find a copy of Jose Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, a compilation of articles originally written for the Philippines Free Press, which stands preeminent among the firsthand accounts documenting the events of the FQS. The slim volume transcends reportage and embodies in its prose both the shock and anger of the storm and ranks among the better works of Philippine literature in English.

… the blood-spattered truncheons, the fires in the night, the staccato of Armalites, the thunder of home-made bombs, the tear gas crawling down streets and alleys, the flag carried with the red field up, the fists in the air, the tramp of tired but resolute feet, and most of all the faces of an awakened nation, the dusty, sweaty, exultant faces of militant young men and women on the march, signing the vivid air with their courage. It was a glorious time, a time of terror and of wrath, but also a time for hope. The signs of change were on the horizon. A powerful storm was sweeping the land, a storm whose inexorable advance no earthly force could stop, and the name of the storm was history.

Jose F. Lacaba, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage

The new decade dawned to protests and repression in the streets of Manila, and Marcos, who had been re-elected president in November 1969 at the end of a campaign marked by immense corruption and violence, readied the apparatus of martial law. In January 1970, in the thick of demonstrations, “Marcos sent a large military convoy racing north to the Mansion House in Baguio, filled with money, guns, ammunition and government papers in crates, to set up an alternative seat of government.” Amando Doronila, then writing for the Daily Mirror, “exposed a Department of Foreign Affairs circular asking all Philippine embassies and missions abroad to conduct research on cases where martial law had been imposed in other countries.” According to Rodrigo, Marcos wrote in his diary in 1970

“The disorders must now be induced into a crisis so that stricter measures can be taken … A little more destruction and vandalism, and I can do anything.” He also wrote: “we should allow the communists to gather strength, but not such strength that we cannot overcome them.” On February 12, 1970, he rued that a noisy student demo had ended peacefully: “I secretly hoped that the demonstration would attack the Palace so we could employ the total solution.” His end goal was plain: “I have that feeling of certainty that I will end up with dictatorial powers.”

As Marcos wound up the spiral spring of state repression, his rivals funded the protests; but when his leading opponents, the Lopez brothers, reached a temporary truce with Marcos in March, the FQS dissipated. The social anger of the masses marching in the streets was fueled by the skyrocketing prices of basic necessaries, massive social inequality and state repression in defense of it. They were organized, however, behind banners which denounced Marcos alone, citing his ‘puppetry’ and calling for his ouster. At no point did the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) or its front organizations, which came to play the leading role in the development of the storm, address the root of the social ills confronting the working class — capitalism.

From 1970 to 1972, in the midst of a devastating economic crisis which saw the price of basic goods move beyond the reach of the working class and peasantry, the CPP and its front organizations were in an alliance with leading representatives of the old landed oligarchy. The wealth of Lopez and Aquino was based in sugar, Laurel in coffee, and their sugar and coffee money provided financial and political support to the CPP. The Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK), closely tied to the party, received favorable press coverage, television and radio slots to broadcast their ideas, and funding. Famed director and activist Behn Cervantes remarked, “Since this was the crest of the First Quarter Storm, it was relatively easy to get contributions [for the KM and SDK] from big business tycoons.” This funding did not create the unrest, which arose from an explosive outrage at the political and economic crisis, but it did assist those responsible for directing it behind a specific set of elite interests.

The CPP used its forces among the youth, peasantry and working class to direct protests and strikes exclusively against Marcos on behalf of their allies, channeling all of the immense social anger of the time behind the interests of a section of the ruling class. The CPP entered alliances with the right-wing Social Democrat (SocDem) forces, whose roots lay in the ouster of Sukarno and the genocide of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) and whose political orientation in the Philippines was to agitating for a military coup. Thus, the CPP not only provided Marcos with a pretext for martial law, they disarmed the only genuine opposition to military rule. None of the ruling class allies of the CPP were opposed to martial law; many, including Aquino, favored it, but desired to be sitting in Malacañang when the curtain of dictatorship rung down. Successful opposition to dictatorship rested in securing the independence of the working class from the entirety of the bourgeoisie, with its coup plotting and assassination schemes and machinations toward military rule. The CPP, in keeping with its Stalinist program, labored to thwart this independence, working at every turn to subordinate the class struggle of workers to the interests of the bourgeoisie. That the explosion of massive anger from the working class, confronting crisis and near starvation, was directed behind the interests of the ruling class rivals of Marcos was almost entirely the work of the CPP.

Marcos, meanwhile, plotting the imposition of dictatorship and laying the blame for the vast social unrest at the feet of the CPP, was secretly allied to the CPP’s rival, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). The PKP, over the course of the next two years, assisted Marcos in his declaration of martial law, ghostwriting his justification for dictatorship and entering his cabinet. For all his denunciations of Communism, Marcos established his dictatorship with the complete support of one of the country’s two Stalinist parties.

A series of protests, held in front of Malacañang on January 7, 16 and 22, saw tensions mount in the lead-up to the State of Nation Address on the twenty-sixth. Over the first weeks of January, the language of the protests shifted from the Kabataang Makabayan’s (KM) initial rhetoric of “student reform” to the denunciation of Marcos as a “fascist.”

The KM and SDK launched the first demonstration of 1970 narrowly focused on the issue of student reform. They envisioned protests proceeding along similar lines to those of early 1969, which had been marked by a series of university strikes demanding campus reforms, but sought this time to be at their head. Assembling in front of Malacañang on January 7, they described themselves to the press as the “student reform movement,” and the Collegian reported that “Close to a thousand students from the University and other schools rallied before the Malacañang Palace yesterday [Jan 7] … Workers who were on strike at Northern Motors joined the students.” The rally turned, however, from the question of student reform to that of police brutality and the ‘fascism’ of the Marcos administration. This cantus firmus, adopted by group after group in counterpoint, served as the theme of the political fugue that was the FQS.

Rene Ciria-Cruz and Gary Olivar were among those who addressed the crowd. They explained that “the real enemies of the police are not the students, nor the workers and farmers but the American imperialists and the hacendero-comprador class who exploit them indirectly.” In arguing that the police were somehow really the class allies of the students, workers and peasants, Ciria-Cruz and Olivar were repeating the perspective of Joma Sison, head of the KM, in his 1966 speech at Ateneo, “Nationalism and Youth,” when he had referred to the “good elements” of the police force, “sympathetic to the cause of nationalism,” as the spiritual offspring of Gregorio Del Pilar. With a flippancy of political rhetoric, these spokesmen of the SDK argued to a rally which was in part dedicated to denouncing ‘fascism’ and police brutality, that the police were in truth the allies of the assembled workers and students.

Demonstrations followed on January 16 and 22; the theme of student reform — still audible — was fading, while the staves on fascism augmented. According to the Samahang Pangkaunlaran ng Kaisipan (SPK), students gathered outside Malacañang on both the sixteenth and the twenty-second to request from the government the disbursement of funds which had been promised for public education. The placards and slogans of the assembled demonstrators, however, revealed that the political logic of the emerging movement was tending toward a far sharper conclusion. Over a thousand workers and students from a range of organizations, including KM, SDK, and SPK, rallied on the sixteenth; their signboards read “Justice is a slow process, revolution is faster,” “PC–MPD–military arm of the ruling class,” and “Ibagsak ang pasismo. [Down with fascism]” The assembled demonstrators denounced “the alliance between alien capitalists and the armed forces and the rise of fascism under the Marcos administration.” Rodolfo del Rosario, the Vice President of the National Association of Trade Unions (NATU), and a member of KM, addressed the crowd, denouncing the conspiracy of foreign capitalists [kapitalistang kayuhan (sic)] and the police in suppressing the ongoing strike at Northern Motors — at the time the largest General Motors assembly plant outside the United States — and arresting workers without cause. The union leaders who spoke at the rally “revealed the increasing unrest in the labor sector as they spoke against the exploitative relationship perpetuated by American capitalists in collusion with their Filipino puppets in the business and government sectors.” The demonstrators — workers and students — were violently dispersed by the police.

A new theme — neither student reform nor fascism, but a non-partisan Constitutional Convention — was briefly heard during the protests outside of the legislature during Marcos’ State of the Nation Address as moderate student groups initially held the stage — the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), National Student League (NSL) and the Young Christian Socialists of the Philippines (YCSP), a group tied to Raul Manglapus. Edgar Jopson, head of the NUSP, produced a statement entitled “A Call for a Constitutional Convention Without Interference from Political Parties.” Sison responded with a statement, “The Correct Orientation on the Constitutional Convention,” in which he argued that the “essential nature of the Philippine Constitution since the very start has been its being an instrument of national and class oppression and exploitation.” It was “patently a colonial document on incontrovertible grounds.” The 1971 Convention was thus being formed to raise “false hopes” that it could serve as “a possible means of ‘revolutionary’ change to head off a real armed revolution of the broad masses of oppressed and exploited people.”

Sison hid the fact that the KM had placed working within the Convention at the center of its program in 1967 and that, as late as July 1969, it had remained the core focus of both the KM and SCAUP and had served as the basis of their common campus election platform in the Young Philippines. He now claimed that “the main task of all proletarian revolutionaries and all those who adhere to the people’s democratic revolution is to expose and oppose the 1971 constitutional convention as a farce.” The convention was “another swindle perpetrated on the people.” Both the immediate political orientation of the bourgeois opposition and the mood of the masses had shifted, and the tactic of participation in the Convention was no longer politically viable. The bourgeois allies of the CPP desired an explosion in the streets against Marcos. In a partially articulated but nonetheless palpable fashion, the masses of workers, students and peasants sought a solution to the stranglehold of economic crisis through increasingly drastic political means. The task of the CPP was to subordinate the latter to the former and this required burying, at least for the present, the question of the convention.

A leaflet which the KM produced for the initial January 7 rally concluded with a formulation that encapsulated the fundamental political logic of the CPP and its front organizations in the critical period between the storm and the onset of military dictatorship: “the intensification of the fascistic suppression of the national democratic aspirations of the people by the Marcos military regime only serves to enlist more adherents to the struggle for genuine emancipation from US imperialism and local feudalism.” Fascism, they argued, only causes the movement to grow.

This was the basic logic underpinning all of the mimeographed leaflets circulated by the KM during the First Quarter Storm. Marcos was a fascist puppet, the main representative of US imperialism and local feudalism, and as such he should be the primary target of all protests. The people would rise up to demand national democracy and they would be violently suppressed. This suppression would expose the character of the fascist Marcos regime to even more people, who would then rise up and be suppressed. The people would never be cowed by fascism. The more that Marcos was “fascist” and violent, the more people would rise up. But rise up to what end?

At no point were workers and students educated in the need for an independent struggle of the working class for the seizure of power, or that in order to implement national democratic tasks, socialist measures must be taken. Rather the students were instructed to demand, to request — stridently, but nonetheless to ask — of the ruling class that national democratic measures be carried out. In fact, no political program at all was presented. None beyond the need for what became the clichéd slogan of the movement, “Makibaka, huwag matakot! / Struggle, don’t be afraid!” The act of struggling, of making demands to the state, would precipitate state violence, which would, in turn, cause the movement to grow. This was the entire perspective of the KM during this period.

Whose political interests did the First Quarter Storm wind up serving? Not workers or students. They fought courageously and were bloodied in the affair, but the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its rival, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), worked to ensure that they did not draw independent political conclusions from the experience, and that workers did not organize themselves separately from the bourgeoisie for their own class interests.

The PKP lost out as a result of the FQS. They fought a rearguard battle to simultaneously negotiate ties with Marcos and maintain support among the youth. This was an impossible task, and they lost a good deal of their political credibility in the process.

The CPP and its front organizations benefited immensely from the FQS. Both the shared barricades of Mendiola and the exposure of the Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP), youth wing of the PKP, served to heal many of the wounds which had been caused during the 1967 breach between the KM and the SDK. A generation of students were radicalized by the FQS — some only briefly, but for others it was a life-changing experience — and many found their way into the ranks of the CPP.

The greatest short-term beneficiaries of the storm sat in the board rooms of Meralco and the political headquarters of the Liberal Party. For Lopez and Aquino and their allies, the protesting students were an ideal proxy in their fight against Marcos. These forces aspired to destabilize and overthrow him, and the blood in the streets served this purpose. They did not succeed in this, however.

In the end, the events which began on January 26 1970 set in motion a countdown to martial law. Marcos recognized in the violent demonstrations a pretext for dictatorship. He fomented violence through agents provocateur and began preparing the architecture of a police state.

Thus, by the final week of January, the forces who would decide the fate of the First Quarter Storm were all in place: Marcos, aspiring for a pretext for dictatorship, his bourgeois opponents for violent destabilization; a restive youth and working class; and two Communist Parties, one subordinate to each faction of the ruling class. The storm that burst on 26 January 1970 and the events that transpired over the next three months were among the most explosive in the country’s history.

November 30 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the radical Filipino youth organization, Kabataang Makabayan [Nationalist Youth] (KM), in 1964. While it had only thirty-four charter members, the KM grew rapidly and came to play an instrumental role in the upheavals that shook the country less than a decade later.

Jose Maria Sison, a member of the Executive Committee of the Stalinist Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), had over the course of the preceeding two years organized support for then President Diosdado Macapagal. Working with Ignacio Lacsina, another leading member of the PKP, Sison arranged for the newly formed Lapiang Manggagawa [Workers’ Party] (LM) to enter into an alliance with the Macapagal administration in mid-1963, merging the LM with the ruling Liberal Party (LP). He orchestrated the founding of the party’s peasant wing, Malayang Samahan ng mga Magsasaka [Free Federation of Peasants] (MASAKA), with funding from Malacañang, and wrote the handbook supporting Macapagal’s land reform program which was published and distributed to the peasantry. In the opening pages of the handbook, Sison praised Macapagal for carrying out the “unfinished revolution” of Bonifacio. The land reform program he was promoting had in fact been crafted by the Ford Foundation.

The party lacked a functioning youth wing and Sison was tasked with creating one, a project which culminated in the founding of KM. By late 1964, however, the PKP’s relations with Macapagal had soured. As the Philippines entered the election year of 1965, the party began looking to establish ties with Macapagal’s rival, Ferdinand Marcos, the presidential candidate of the Nacionalista Party (NP). Sison orchestrated the support which the LM, MASAKA and KM gave to the NP, and in November 1965, one year after its founding, the KM backed Ferdinand Marcos for president, hailing him, in the language of Stalinism, as a representative of the “progressive section” of the “national bourgeoisie.”

What follows are edited portions of my doctoral dissertation, Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1957-1974, on the founding of the KM. For notes and references, please consult the original work.

The need for a new youth organization

While the PKP by 1963 had a substantial hold over the labor movement through the Lapiang Manggagawa, and a growing presence in the peasantry through MASAKA, the weakest aspect of its organizational expansion was its work among youth. Despite Sison’s political origins in the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines (SCAUP), the influence of the PKP among youth and students from 1962 until mid-1964 was negligible and stagnant. While Sison traveled to Indonesia, formally became a Stalinist, and rose to leadership in the PKP, SCAUP had carried on with its old mixture of anti-clericalism, nationalism, and the cult of Claro M. Recto.

The leadership of SCAUP was turned over to Jose David Lapuz, who proved incapable of developing it into a viable political organization in the wake of the departure of Sison. Lapuz seemed fixated far more on his own reputation than the building of a youth movement. When Lapuz wrote his own biographical by-line in the Collegian, he described himself as “one of the few nurtured on the civilization of Europe,” and he was forever attempting to demonstrate his superior level of culture. On February 26, 1964, Lapuz ran an announcement in the Collegian which read: “L’Association Culturelle de Etudiante de L’Universite de Philippines (SCAUP) will tender a reception today … Those desiring to attend the reception may do so upon payment of P3.00 to Jose David Lapuz.” The only interest advanced by the poorly formatted French was Lapuz’ own ego. The conclusion to an article he wrote on Recto, entitled “Claro M. Recto: the parfait knight of Filipino Nationalism,” is sadly representative of his writing: “The last time I saw [Recto] … it was as though his person fumigated with incense whenever he walked by … He is gone now and I am sure he will have no replacement in this our country, or in this my heart. For he left me, even though defeated, a hope, a promise, a symbol, a fragment from out his heart to serve for one who will come after. And, by God! I promise to preserve, to continue.”

In May 1964, Lapuz involved SCAUP and Joma Sison in the filing of criminal charges with the police. Sison testified on behalf of Lapuz that Leonardo Quisumbing, then UP Student Council chair, had slapped Lapuz in response to one of Lapuz’ articles. The police charges were the culmination of a lengthy series of petty squabbles between the two. Lapuz had passed to the Collegian for publication a resolution which had not been signed by Quisumbing, and Quisumbing compelled Lapuz to formally apologize. Lapuz wrote an article accusing Quisumbing of corrupt leadership, and in response, Lapuz claimed, Quisumbing slapped him. In addition to the filing of criminal charges with the police, Lapuz wrote an open letter to University President Carlos P. Romulo, “Permit me, I implore you, to be concerned with the just glory of our University and to tell you that its good reputation is now threatened with the most abominable, unutterable slur.” Quisumbing was ordered to apologize.

Just how far SCAUP had degenerated by mid-1963 was made clear in a column in the Collegian written by SCAUP member, Rene Navarro, in which he decried “progressives” for pursuing “lost causes,” and characterized the editorial statement of the Progressive Review — a journal edited by Sison and closely tied to the PKP — as using “communist jargon … which will no doubt arouse the indignant sensibilities of decent men.” SCAUP had over the course of three years degenerated from protesting against the red-baiting of the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA) to seeing one of its leading representatives use the pages of the Collegian to denounce the Progressive Review for “communist jargon.”

Despite SCAUP’s organizational struggles, by the beginning of 1964 it was affiliated with the same circle of people as the PKP, and, like the party, was supporting Macapagal. Lapuz, at the head of SCAUP, promoted Macapagal in the same manner as the LM, although in a style that was only his. In a letter to the Collegian in response to a speech delivered by Macapagal on January 9 to the Rotary Club, Lapuz wrote “As one who may be likened to a keen-eyed eagle perched on the highest house-top in matters pertaining to international diplomacy and foreign, external politics, I viewed with great and curious interest this latest development in our foreign policy … President Macapagal in this revolutionary address before the Rotarians broke with the past … The Filipino — what a beautiful man is the Filipino now! in foreign policy, how express and admirable! in action how like an Asian!”

SCAUP, based exclusively at UP and under the leadership of Lapuz, ‘full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse,’ was not a viable youth front for the PKP. A new organization needed to be founded. In June 1964, Sison was given employment teaching social sciences at the Lyceum, an institution owned by the Laurel family who had longstanding ties to the aboveground elements of the PKP. The Lyceum would serve as the base of operations for the creation of the party’s new youth organization, the Kabataang Makabayan (KM).

The founding congress of the KM

On November 30 1964 — Bonifacio Day — the KM was founded, marking the culmination of two years of struggle by the PKP to create a functioning youth organization. The founding congress was held at the YMCA Youth Forum Hall with thirty-four charter members in attendance, most of whom had participated in a rally staged on October 2 outside Malacañang. The elected leadership of the new organization was largely drawn from SCAUP and were personally close to Sison. The KM later recorded that “student members came mostly from the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Lyceum of the Philippines. … The young worker members came from Lapiang Manggagawa, particularly the trade unions affiliated to the National Association of Trade Unions.” As the KM grew, however, the majority of its formal membership was drawn from “the children of peasants organized under the Malayang Samahan ng Magsasaka (MASAKA).” The fault-lines which would split the party between Moscow and Marcos, on the one hand, and Aquino and Beijing, on the other, ran between these class constituencies. The ranks of peasant youth, brought into the KM as by levy upon MASAKA, shared the conservative political education of their parents; what to them were the radical phrases of the Red Book? Small land-ownership was the solution to the country’s social ills, and the PKP leadership had assured them that the president — first Macapagal and then Marcos — could through patient, legal means be pressured to implement land reform to the advantage of the peasantry. The working class and university based youth, radicalized by social crisis and global political ferment, needed more than the pap which the party proferred to the peasantry and as Sison held up Mao as the radical alternative to the conservative Moscow bureaucracy, the majority of them followed.

Joma Sison was elected chair of the new organization; Sen. Lorenzo Tañada was made an honorary member and consultant of the KM, and delivered the closing address of the founding congress. Tañada, who had taken up the mantle of Claro M. Recto, would be integral to the development of the front organizations of the Communist Party over the next six years. The KM National Committee established the ambitious goal of expanding the youth organization’s membership to five thousand within the next six months. The founding congress produced a forty-one page handbook. Reading and agreeing with the content of this handbook was a required step for joining the KM and the basic educational work of the KM was structured around the documents it contained.

The first document in the handbook was Joma Sison’s speech to the founding congress. Sison opened with a brief history of the Philippines, highlighting Spanish colonialism, American imperialism and the uninterrupted struggles of the “Filipino people” in opposition to conquest and occupation. His speech was devoid of an international perspective. He traced the roots of the KM to Bonifacio and to Rizal, making no mention of the struggles of workers in other countries or of Marxism. He deployed Marxist phrases in an incoherent fashion, but disguised their origins. He attributed, for example, the discovery of the historical roots of imperialism not to Lenin but to Rizal, who “noticed that it was a necessity of a capitalist system, reaching its final stage of development — monopoly-capital, to seek colonies.” Sison was clearly attempting to use Rizal as a cover for Lenin’s ideas, but it is noteworthy that he gets Lenin wrong. Colonialism predated imperialism by centuries. The imperative of monopoly capitalism was not fundamentally to “seek colonies,” but for the imperialist powers to divide and re-divide the world into rival spheres of influence and control.

Sison continued, “There is only one nationalism that we know. It is that which refers to the national-democratic revolution, the Philippine revolution, whose main tasks now are the liquidation of imperialism and feudalism in order to achieve full national freedom and democratic reforms.” Sison expanded on this: “The youth today face two basic problems: imperialism and feudalism. These two are the principal causes of poverty, unemployment, inadequate education, ill-health, crime and immorality which afflict the entire nation and the youth.” According to Sison, capitalism was not responsible for these social ills, and he claimed rather that an independent national capitalism was their solution. He wrote,

It is the task of the Filipino youth to study carefully the large confrontation between the forces of imperialism and feudalism on the one side and the forces of national democracy on the other side …
On the side of imperialism are the compradores and the big landlords. On the side of national democracy are the national bourgeoisie, composed of Filipino entrepreneurs and traders; the petty bourgeoisie, composed of small-property owners, students, intellectuals and professionals; and the broad masses of our people, composed of the working class and the peasantry to which the vast majority of the Filipino youth of today belong.

He called on KM to “assist in the achievement of an invincible unity of all national classes … against the single main enemy, American imperialism.” What Sison presented in his speech was the undiluted program of Stalinism — not a socialist but a national democratic revolution, which would be carried out by a bloc of four classes, an alliance of capitalists and workers.

The program of the KM took Sison’s formulation of achieving an invincible unity of all national classes and presented this as the KM’s “chief task.” It then concretely presented how the KM would struggle to fulfill this task in four “fields”: economic, political, cultural and security. In the economic field, the KM called for state planning to protect “Filipino industrialists and traders;” “asked” the state for “genuine land reform;” and called on the state to open diplomatic ties with the socialist bloc with whom it could negotiate trade and loans in support of Filipino capitalists. The single concrete task specified in the political field was to seek the annulment of the Anti-Subversion Law. In the cultural field, KM called for removing the cultural instruments of American imperialism — the Peace Corps, USIS, AID, VOA, etc., and also demanded wider use of “Pilipino in our educational and governmental system.” Finally, as a means of counteracting “decadence, delinquency and immorality” KM proposed to direct civic work projects, “such as relief work and community improvement projects, and other self-improvement projects.” In the field of security, the KM called on youth to undergo “ROTC and other forms of military training with the clear intention of developing our own security forces independent of American indoctrination.” This was a bizarre conception; the ROTC had been designed from the ground up by the US military. The primary role of the “security forces” in the Philippines had always been the suppression of dissent, and ROTC training was crafted towards this end. The program concluded by calling for the abrogation of the basing treaties.

The next document in the handbook was the constitution, which opened membership to any “Filipino citizen between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five.” Every member was required to pay a one peso application fee, and membership dues of two pesos a year. The handbook concluded with the closing speech of Lorenzo Tañada, in which he called on the youth to make their voices heard. “Here is perhaps the most significant task that the youth can undertake towards building the nation. You are not yet decision-makers. The direction of national affairs is not yet in your hands. But you can speak forth as often and as publicly as you can on national issues of the day. When your elders prove stubborn or recalcitrant, dramatize your stand, demonstrate, march and rally in support of a cause.”

In sum, the founding documents of the Kabataang Makabayan made clear the political character of the organization. There was no mention within its program of a single measure in the interests of the working class, as somehow support for national capitalists would cause benefits to trickle down to workers. The KM was founded as a reformist youth organization to carry out pressure politics in the interests of the national bourgeoisie. Immense social struggles would, in less than six years, thrust this small group to the center of the country’s political life, transforming it from a bit player into a decisive factor in the life-and-death struggle over dictatorship.

Less than a year after its founding, the KM, under Sison’s leadership, endorsed and supported the candidacy of Ferdinand Marcos for president on the grounds that he would keep the Philippines out of America’s war in Vietnam. Within two weeks of his election, Marcos told the Washington Post in an interview with Stanley Karnow that he would be deploying a contingent of Filipino troops in support of Washington’s war efforts.

An odd, unpleasant photograph was taken forty-five years ago today. Imelda Marcos, the conjugal head of a two year old military dictatorship, intimately greeted the aged Chairman Mao who openly ogled the straightcut neckline of her terno. The martial law regime of the Marcoses, imposed on the Philippines in September 1972, was systematically brutalizing the country’s working class and peasantry. Mao recognized the legitimacy of the Marcos dictatorship and pledged that the Communist Party of China (CCP) would not interfere in the internal affairs of the country. The Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) hailed Imelda’s visit as a revolutionary victory.

In September 1974, Imelda Marcos led a diplomatic mission to China to open formal ties between Beijing and Manila. She was fêted throughout the country, and met on several occasions with Zhou Enlai and once with Mao Zedong. Marcos was able to secure a deal for the purchase of Chinese oil, which in the midst of the OPEC crisis was desperately sought, and China committed to purchase Philippine exports. Arrangements were made for a state visit by Ferdinand Marcos to China in 1975. The visit of Imelda Marcos to Beijing entailed the recognition by the CCP of the legitimacy of the Marcos’ martial law regime. It also, in keeping with the CCP’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, meant that Beijing was committing to a policy of non-interference in the internal matters of the Philippines, something Ferdinand Marcos publicly announced, informing the press that “certain Lin Biao elements were training cadre for Philippine rebel movements but added he was satisfied with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s assurances that this would not continue.”

José Ma. Sison, head of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), in an article published in the party’s newspaper, Ang Bayan, on October 20 1974, hailed Imelda Marcos’ visit to China as “A Diplomatic Victory of the People’s Republic of China, A Victory of the Philippine Revolutionary Struggle.” He wrote that there were “three types of people” in the Philippines who were “disturbed in one way or another about the developing relations between China and the Philippines:” “those who wish to live in the past and fail to recognize that even the United States has already pronounced her policy to move towards the normalization of relations with China;” “the local revisionist renegades who accuse the Communist Party of the Philippines of being inconsistent in opposing Soviet relations with the Philippines and yet endorsing China’s relations with the Philippines;” and “well-meaning people who fear that China’s friendly relations now with the Philippines would serve to help the fascist puppet dictatorship and adversely affect the Philippine revolutionary struggle.” It was this last group, that is to say, the members and supporters of the CPP who were troubled by Marcos being welcomed in Beijing, that Sison was most concerned to persuade.

Why did the CPP support relations between Manila and Beijing and oppose relations with Moscow? Sison answered that the Soviet Union was one of the world’s two superpowers and was looking to exploit and plunder the Philippines. The USSR was, according to Sison, a graver danger than Washington. He wrote “given a longer leash in the country, this superpower will not only be one more imperialist power on the back of the Filipino people but will possibly turn out to be the principal foreign power exploiting and oppressing the people.” Did not Mao’s welcome to Imelda Marcos and her entourage entail Beijing’s recognition of the legitimacy of Marcos’ anti-democratic dictatorship? Sison responded with a question: “who should represent the Philippine reactionary government now in dealing with China? More than two years have passed since the Marcos rightist coup but we do not yet see other reactionaries deposing Marcos.” From Sison’s perspective either Marcos or some other reactionary were the only legitimate representatives with whom Mao should deal. As no other reactionary figures were available, Beijing needed to deal with Marcos. He continued, “We simply have to recognize the fact that Marcos remains the chieftain of the reactionary government and that there is no way for China to develop country-to-country relations with the Philippines except by dealing with his government.”

In a labored and dishonest argument, Sison depicted the ties between Beijing and Manila as a brilliant strategic maneuver on the part of China. Beijing was exploiting contradictions between the United States and the Soviet Union by opening up ties with Marcos. He held up Stalin’s pact with Hitler as a positive example of such strategic diplomacy, claiming that Stalin had “defeated the maneuver of the other imperialist powers” through his deal with Nazi Germany. Sison acknowledged that Beijing’s ties with Manila were negotiated on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the third principle of which was “noninterference in each other’s internal affairs.” The significance of this clause was immense. It meant that the CCP would not fund or supply the CPP in any way, and it further meant that Marcos could continue martial law and have the military suppress the CPP, and the working class and peasantry generally, and Beijing would not interfere. China would no longer serve as the Yan’an of world revolution.

Sison did not acknowledge these implications. He insisted that “China has never bargained away principles with any superpower and has always courageously fought for her principles.” He passed over in silence the fact that China had agreed with Marcos that it would not in any way support the CPP or oppose his regime. Sison was aware of this, however, and his next paragraph addressed the isolation of the Philippine revolution. He depicted this isolation as a nationalist necessity and not the result of Stalinist betrayal, writing that “Revolution cannot be exported to the Philippines via Sino-Philippine relations. … Though Sino-Philippine relations can shed some favorable influence, the Philippine revolution must be the creation of the millions upon millions of the Filipino people and must be carried out according to Philippine conditions.”

Beijing had struck a bargain with Marcos, opening trade and diplomatic relations with the dictatorship, and Mao had agreed that China would not in any way interfere in Marcos dictatorship, which was an internal matter. Sison heralded this betrayal as “A Diplomatic Victory of the People’s Republic of China, A Victory of the Philippine Revolutionary Struggle.” The CPP was now completely isolated, and the Philippine revolution, Sison stated, needed to be conducted “according to Philippine conditions.” It was to this proposition that Sison would turn in his next significant statement, Specific Characteristics of our People’s War.

[Further details and citations can be found in my doctoral dissertation.]