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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

A Work of Two Renegades

III. Taruc As A Major Representative Of The Old Merger Party

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

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

Luis M. Taruc was a major representative of the old merger party of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Socialist Party. Next only to the Lavas, he represented most the wholescale entry of unremoulded petty-bourgeois elements into the old merger party; he had succeeded in raising himself from the status of a poor peasant's son to that of a college student and then an independent tailor. After Pedro Abad Santos, he also represented most the motley members of the Socialist Party. For a certain period, from 1938 to 1954, he would compete with the Lavas for the distinctions of being the worst saboteur of the revolutionary mass movement.

The creation of the old merger party in 1938 was directly mastermind by the now-notorious anti-communist Earl Browder who was then general secretary of a Communist Party of the U.S.A. Vicente Lava was the principal local agent who promoted the Browderite revisionist slogan "Communism is twentieth century Americanism". The influence of this slogan runs through Born of the People. There is not single word of a praise for Comrade Stalin written in the book. But Taruc and Pomeroy are ecstatic about Roosevelt's leadership. They babble:

We had always referred to the Americans as our allies, and had sincerely believed that under the leadership of Roosevelt the American nation would help usher in a new era of world peace and democracy.

Taruc and Pomeroy proudly recount the fact that immediately prior to the war of anti-Japanese resistance, the old merger party kowtowed to the puppet chieftain Quezon and the U.S. High Commissioner Sayre by submitting a memorandum which stated the following: "The Communist Party pledges loyalty to the governments of the Philippines and the United States."

The book of national betrayal goes further self-righteously: "In all matters and all forms of public relations the Huk was free to conduct itself as it wished on the basis of loyalty to the Constitution and to the allied cause." This is puppetry to U.S. imperialism no different from Quezon's. It shuns the principle of unity and struggle in the anti-fascist united front and surrenders without compunction the independence and initiative of the proletariat and its party.

During the anti-Japanese war of resistance, the slogans of anti-Japanese above all" and "Everything for the anti-Japanese struggle" were adopted by the old merger party to mean all-alliance and no struggle with U.S. imperialism and the anti-Japanese reactionaries. Taruc reveals:

In the interest of the broadest kind of unity, we adopted the slogan: "Anti-Japanese above all". That meant exactly what it said. We would forego an independent struggle for separate working class demands. To show our good faith we dissolved the AMT and KPMP,* the peasant organizations.

To pursue the national struggle is not to forego the class struggle; to do otherwise is to betray the proletariat and the people. To dissolve peasant organizations under the pretext of "the broadest kind of unity" is to fawn in the most treacherous manner on the U.S. imperialists and their reactionary stooges.

The "promise of independence" by U.S. imperialism was never questioned but on the contrary accepted and supported blindly by the old merger party. Even as units of the People's army and the Barrio United Defense Corps ("government" at the village level) were established in the course of the war of resistance, the Lavas and Tarucs whipped up an orientation of subservience to their colonial masters. Taruc states:

Our objective in setting up a people's democratic government was not designed to contradict the government-in-exile in Washington. We looked upon Quezon, Osmena and their cabinet as our government.

There is too much panegyric for the ghost of the U.S. military officer Thorpe who during the early part of the war had merely promised to give arms to the HUKBALAHAP in Central Luzon. Taruc moans:

We felt the loss of Thorpe very deeply. He was that rare type of American officer who was not entirely blinded by the glitter of his brass. If he lived he might have been a deterrent to the reactionary policies that developed later in the guerrilla forces under American influence.

Anderson, another U.S. military officer, also receives lavish praise for "tolerating" HUKBALAHAP units in Southern Luzon. To him goes the credit of sponsoring an aborted trip of Jesus Lava to Australia via a U.S. submarine. Taruc and Pomeroy rail that had Lava been able to take the submarine (which did not actually wait for him) he would have been able to report to the U.S. Command and to MacArthur himself and thus improve the chances of the treacherous policy of all-alliance and no-struggle towards U.S. imperialism.

In the book, Taruc and Pomeroy cannot fathom the counter-revolutionary dual policy of U.S. imperialism and cannot see through the "good" American officers whose work merely complemented the more brazen work of the "bad" American officers. Thorpe and Anderson essentially acted as military agents of U.S. imperialism during the war despite their pretensions of sympathy for the HUKBALAHAP.

Taruc and Pomeroy obscure the fact that it is in the nature of U.S. imperialism and the local reactionaries to raise hell for the people's army whenever they have a chance to. Even as they reveal anti-communist onslaughts by USAFFE units during the war, the two scoundrels refuse to clarify the relationship between unity and struggle in a united front in the concrete conditions of World War II which required temporary alliance with U.S. imperialism and the reactionaries who opposed Japanese imperialism. Passing comment on a bloody act of betrayal perpetrated against a HUKBALAHAP unit by a combined force of the USAFFE and pro-Japanese Philippine Constabulary, they babble: "That encounter stripped bare an ugly cancer that had begun to grow in the anti-Japanese struggle, the cancer of partisan politics." It is silly to prate about the "cancer of partisan politics" as if it were possible for the reactionaries or the revolutionaries to "transcend" partisanship and politics; the point is for revolutionaries to be sure about their own partisanship and politics.

Taruc and Pomeroy deliberately refuse to draw obvious lessons from the experience of carrying out a united front policy during the war of resistance. Among these lessons should be a recognition of the need to build a strong Marxist-Leninist party, a strong people's army that the party leads and a people's government based in the countryside and having a united front character,altogether capable of confronting the return of U.S. imperialism and the Commonwealth government at a new and higher stage of the revolutionary sttruggle. In carrying out the united front policy, we make it a point as Chairman Mao teaches us to "make use of contradictions, win over the many, oppose the few and crush the enemies one by one" rather than be confused by the dual nature of certain temporary allies or surrender our independence and initiative to them.

The wartime "retreat for defense" policy gave away initiative to the USAFFE forces all over the country and weakened the revolutionary movement from within. This was a policy of disintegration and passive defense and was no different from the "lie-low" policy of the USAFFE which banked on the return of U.S. imperialism. After the defeat of the Japanese fascists and their puppets, the old merger party would not be prepared to oppose the aggressive return of U.S. imperialism and the Commonwealth gaovernment.

While the book reports that the Central Committee conference of September 1944 did away with the "retreat for defense" policy, it does not report that this same conference presumed that U.S. imperialism would grant real independence, decided to wage parliamentary struggle as the principal form of struggle and designed the Democratic Alliance as the principal form of organization for bourgeois parliamentarism. Thus, upon the return of U.S. imperialism and the puppet Commonwealth government, the old merger party would raise the slogan "Long live our American allies and long live the Commonwealth government!" Taruc raves:

The invasion of Leyte by the American army on October 20 [1944] struck the first gong of doom for the Japanese in the Philippines. We were jubilant. We issued special editions of the Hukbalahap and the Katubusan ng Bayan to celebrate the occasion.

The joint authors actually insist that the "all-out offensive" carried out by the HUKBALAHAP in late October 1944 was made possible not by the preceding years of people's struggle but by the impending return of U.S. imperialism.

The old merger party relied so much on Roosevelt. Taruc describes Roosevelt's death in the following shameless manner:

It was the bitterest blow that our hopes for a democratic peace had received. We were certain that Roosevelt, proponent of the Four Freedom had not sanctioned the MacArthur brand of fascism in the Philippines.

What obsequiousness to U.S. imperialism! During the war of resistance, however, even MacArthur was someone to rely on for the Tarucs and Lavas. Was not Jesus Lava all set to take a submarine bound for Australia in order to report "everything" to MacArthur?

When after the war MacArthur and Macnutt kept on harping on a "re-examination" of the U.S. pledge to "grant independence" to the Philippines, Taruc and his kind could only have the ability wish that Roosevelt should have lived forever as their final resort. They would not be satisfied with having Harold Ickes for a "defender"; they wished to have a bigger Yankee brother and they wasted a lot of tears on the name of Roosevelt. Taruc and his kind in the old merger party were alien to Chairman Mao's principle of "maintaining independence and keeping the initiative in our own hands and relying on our own efforts".