[PRWC Party Documents] Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade, April 22, 1972

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

A Work of Two Renegades

I. The World Outlook Of Taruc And Pomeroy

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

Revolutionary School of Mao Tse Tung Thought, Communist Party of the Philippines

I. The World Outlook Of Taruc And Pomeroy

Born of the People features personal anecdotes that reveal and play up the anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist viewpoint of both Taruc and Pomeroy. One of these runs as follows:

He [Lope de la Rosa] told me that workers and peasants would be the makers of the new society. "When you get power," I asked, "how will you achieve the new society?" I thought that his objective sounded good, but the man and his companions astounded me. They talked about building a new society, but they were mostly semi-literate men who could hardly read. They had one copy of Marx's Capital but none of them could read it, so they had buried it.

The two renegades, Taruc and Pomeroy, find so much delight in satirizing the workers and peasants and in "burying" Marxism. They disregard the fact that the Communist Party, composed of the most advanced elements of the proletariat, exists precisely to translate Marxism into the language of the masses and, more importantly, into concrete revolutionary practice. What are these two scoundrels really driving at? Pomeroy lets Taruc speak out:

I had not read Marx, or anything about Marxism, so I used quotations from the Bible to defend my arguments. Strip from the ideas and preachings of Christ the cloak of mysticism placed over them by the church, and you really have many of ideas of socialism.

Even during his "bona fide" days, Taruc was already a hidden agent of "Christian socialism" within the old merger party! He preferred to translate Marxism into the pious words of the Bible and of Christ. And he found in Pomeroy a good partner in promoting his poisonous ideas repugnant to Marxism-Leninism.

Regarding theory, Chairman Mao teaches us: "It is neccessary to master Marxist theory and apply it, master it for the sole purpose of applying it." Regarding attitude towards the masses, Chairman Mao also teaches us:

The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.

Trying to make the masses look absurd because they themselves cannot read Das Kapital is itself an absurdity of the most vulgar kind. This is a denial of the neccessity of revolutionary theory in a revolutionary movement and also neccessary role of the leadership exercised by the Party.

The bourgeois egocentrism of Luis Taruc is irrepressible. Pomeroy plays on it as he picks out for special mention the incedent when even as a small boy Luis Taruc wrote his name on a train only "so that it would ride across the country for every one to see". His desire is not for revolution but for fame.

Taruc has an inveterate contempt for the peasant masses. Though born of a peasant father, he has set his mind on leaving the ranks of the peasants and joining the bourgeoisie through school. He recounts: "I told my father that I did not have the temperament for a peasant,... and that I wanted to continue school." So, he prates: "The degree was the thing, the honor was the goal; it lifted a man above the sweaty mass." His childhood ambitions are apparently fulfilled now that he has become a well-paid touter of anti-communism. Even as he claim in his book to have already "the conviction that my class was all-important", he still harps on the theme of class concilliation in his narration of his love affairs that centers on his having married a rich girl despite his being a poor boy. Repeatedly he pours out the sickening line that there is such a thing as love that transcends class struggle and class hatred.

He is also extremely delighted to picture himself as a lady-killer. Thus, he narrates how he and Casto Alejandrino made a "midnight picnic" with two young girls young enough to be their children. Pomeroy presents this incident as a "relief" for his hero in a period of crisis--in a period of massacres perpetrated by the enemy. It is used as an occasion for Taruc to hanker for "holidays" -- "to relax among the natural beauties of my home".

Taruc prattles:

The ominous atmosphere that hung over Central Luzon produced another effect on me: it made me extremely sensitive to the peaceful beauties in the conntryside and in the lives of the people.

In the face of death in prison, Taruc considers his "love for wife" ahead of everything else. When it is his wife who dies of illness, he describes her death "a greater personal tragedy than the war with all its horrors and brought to me".

Taruc considers as praiseworthy "caution" the toadying behavior of Jesus Lava before his Japanese captors after the March raid of 1943 and for contrast he considers as "recklessness" the act of resistance shown by two heroic comrades who refused to kowtow to thier fascist captors. Taking pride in the philosophy of survival and the spirit of capitulations, he praises the alacrity which Lava showed in accepting the "regimentation course" of the Japanese fascists and in teaching a Japanese officer how to play the piano. Taruc cannot cite any other example to really prove how revolutionaries can outwit the enemy.

Born of the People denounces the pro-Japanese collaborators. But consistency is lost when Taruc finds pleasure in narrating how the HUKBALAHAP leader Casto Alejandrino enjoyed himself playing cards with the top pro-Japanese collaborators and winning so much money from them in the Iwahig Penal Colony. Does it help to develop a correct and resolute attitude towards the struggle to pick out such events for representation of the revolutionary mass movement?

Pomeroy builds up Taruc as a "hero" to the extent of slandering the masses. The latter boasts in connection with an enemy campaign of "encirclement and suppression" in Mount Arayat in 1947:

To the men who were desperate and almost ready to surrender I spoke passionately, myself burning with thirst and heat. I exhorted them to remember our principles. I promised them all the cold drinks if they could stick it out.

In the book, Taruc is so cocksure that his thirsty men would have surrendered had he not preached about principles and made the banal promise of cold drinks and a big meal.

Taruc takes pride in the style of oversuspiciousness in inner Party relations and in the style of always assuming that all other people are always lying. Thus, he praises Casto Alejandrino for introducing into the old merger party "his sway of probing for the motivations behind the an act or a position". Alejandrino is supposed to have always asked in the course of a criticism and self-criticism sessions; "I have heard your good reason, now what is your real reason?" This can be nothing but a method to put an honest fellow at a loss and make a liar insist on his lie. The tricks of the bourgeois psychiatrist are no substitute for the Marxist-Leninist method of getting to the facts and analyzing them. But Taruc triumphantly exclaims. "The good reason and the real reason became the measuring rod for the criticism and self-criticism which we developed in the Huk." The Lavas, Tarucs and Alejandrinos are so fond of deception, of making thier "propaganda line" at odds with their "true line', that they always suspect other in the old merger party of being guilty of deception.