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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

A Work of Two Renegades

II. The "Military Leadership" Of Luis Taruc

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

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

A certain circumstance is strikingly reflected by the writing of Born of the People. At the time that the U.S. imperialists and the local reactionaries were systematically trumpeting Luis Taruc as the "supremo" (supreme leader) in their press, William Pomeroy crept into the old merger party in order to promote the sinister idea that it was Taruc who led and represented the revolutionary mass movement. In the book, the role of the Party is obscured and comes in only as some kind of afterthought secondary to the personality of the "military leader". Posing as a theoretician at that, Pomeroy was quite effective in spreading the imperialist intrigue and bourgeois idea that the political leadership of a proletarian revolutionary party is secondary to "military leadership".

Putting the gun in command of the Party, Pomeroy states: "the core of the people's resistance was the people's army..." This runs counter to Chairman Mao's teaching that "the force at the core leading our cause forward is the Communist Party".

Yet on the conduct of armed struggle, Taruc cannot offer anything tp prove his "military leadership". What he does is to cast doubts on the universal value of Chairman Mao's teachings of people's war which are based on vast revolutionary experience under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism. Pomeroy's straw figure prates:

We wanted to fight, but the question of how to go about it was at first obscure. The Chinese guerrilla movement, we knew, had been enormously successful, but in China the country was better adapted to guerrilla warfare. China had vast distances to hide an army and to provide space for maneuvering. There, large-scale fighting could be undertaken, towns and whole regions liberated; in our case we had a tiny area, easily reached by overwhelming Japanese reinforcements. In China there was an established base, from which guerrilla forces radiated; we did not even have a base.

In saying that China because of its vastness is better suited to guerrilla warfare, Taruc actually means to say that the Philippines because of its smallness is less suited to guerrilla warfare. Thus, he rails against the fact that the HUKBALAHAP had a tiny area to maneuver in against larger Japanese military forces. He narrates the successful converging attack on the small area of Mount Arayat by Japanese troops only with the view of presenting how "hopeless and desperate" is guerrilla warfare in the Philippines. His attention is not to show the peculiarities or different tactics of guerrilla warfare in the Philippines but to obfuscate the basic principles tested and proven correct in the Chinese revolutionary experience.

Taruc has no right to complain at all that the Philippines is too tiny a place for the revolutionary forces to fight a militarily far superior enemy because he and his cohorts in the first place did not care to dispose cadres and fighters beyond a limited part of Southern Luzon in order to lead and build the nationwide guerrilla warfare that did develop during the war of resistance. By default of the Lavas and Tarucs, guerrilla warfare outside Central Luzon came under the counter-revolutionary command of the USAFFE. In a semi-feudal country like the Philippines, there is no choice for revolutionaries in initiating armed struggle against the far superior enemy force but to wage guerrilla warfare. At the inception of people's war, positional regular warfare or strategically decisive engagements in which the stake of the entire revolutionary movement is involved or city uprisings without rural base areas to rely on is the fool's choice. Nowhere else but in the countryside can guerrilla warfare be developed and the people's army be built by stages and have sufficient area for maneuver while gathering strength. The fact that the country is small, archipelagic, narrow and detached by sea from friendly countries only supports the line that guerrilla warfare has to be developed and expanded on a nationwide scale.

Contrary to Taruc's idealist assumption that the Red army and the base areas in China dropped from the sky or grew spontaneously from the wide expanses of China, these grew from small to big and were tempered through a long period of struggle under the correct leadership of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. At the beginning of the war of resistance against the Japanese fascists, the Red army was always several times outnumbered by well-equipped millions of enemy troops and the Red base areas were always far smaller than the White areas. One must have the correct class standpoint and also an acute sense of proportion to see the applicability of the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of the Philippines. The strength and maneuverability of the Red army in the countryside always depend basically on how well the proletarian revolutionary party has aroused and mobilized the peasant masses. It must be well kept in mind at no time before or during the war of resistance was the old merger party ever able to carry out agrarian revolution or a land reform programme on a broad scale and in a profound manner in order to get the closest support of the peasant masses. The consideration of geographic characteristics is secondary to the all-important question of revolutionary politics. In the course of enemy campaigns of "encirclement and suppression", the intensity of armed struggle in a small country like the Philippines is comparable to that in a specific part of a big country like China. At the same time, it is always difficult even for a large enemy force to saturate the countryside of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country.

Taruc admits that he and his cohorts had the outlook of the roving rebel band when he brags: "We did not even have a base." Mount Arayat was really some kind of a "base" but it was dated before the Japanese March raid of 1943. After the March raid, the entire idea of developing base areas was lost among the Lavas and Tarucs. They split up the "squadrons" (each numbering 100 men or more) of the HUKBALAHAP into tiny groups of three to five men and ordered their absolute dispersal; it would turn out later in late 1944 that only the fighting units which did not follow the order managed to survive. Even today, both the Lavas and Tarucs still insist that it impossible to develop base areas in the Philippines, Then, what is the point in the first place or trying and hoping to liberate the entire country from the reactionaries and consolidate it as revolutionaries are determined to make the entire country no less a base of the revolution. In preparation for nationwide victory, we have no recourse but to develop rural base areas as the embryo of the political power that we shall exercise on a nationwide scale. At this stage, we cannot open guerrilla zones and fight well in them without developing guerrilla base areas. What we simply mean is that we cannot last long in unreliable and unconsolidated areas. Guerrilla bases are the reliable rears for guerrilla zones. The former and the latter interact with each other in the same manner that consolidation and expansion interact with each other.

On the basis of the quotation that we have just made from the joint book of Pomeroy and Taruc, we can easily see why the Tarucs and Lavas failed to really develop the people's armed strength on a sound foundation during the war of resistance and why they continuously pinned their hopes on the U.S invasionary forces for the "liberation" of the Filipino people from the Japanese fascists. We can easily see why in a period following World War II the Lavas and Tarucs went on to dissolve the people's army under the black banner of Rightism only to resort to a "Left" line when their bourgeois political ambitions were frustrated. Then, under conditions of military defeat, the Lavas and Tarucs would shift back to capitulationism and liquidationism and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique would emerge as a Lavaite by-product to carry out roving rebel activities and gangsterism.