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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Counter-guerrilla views

II.On The Jose-Jesus Lava Leadership

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

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

The chapter on the "The Philippine Model" occupies a central position in Pomeroy's nine-chapter book. Here, he makes certain self-damning admissions which confirm facts cited by the document of rectification, "Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party", of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

It is our task to debunk Pomeroy's muddle-headed apologia for the basic errors of the Lavas. The method of doing so is simply to expose the contradicting statement; the confusion in the posing of problems; the failure to distinguish strategy from tactics; and the placing of principal stress on secondary matters.

What makes Pomeroy's writings dangerous to the revolutionary movement in the present period is that these use the "Left" opportunism of the Jose Lava leadership to justify Right opportunism. At present, the Lavaites appear to be too willing to repudiate the errors of the Jose Lava leadership but only to endorse the Right opportunism and modern revisionism of Jesus Lava and William J. Pomeroy. They deliberately confuse the meaning of the "Left" opportunism to exculpate the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership from it and to attack through the method of misrepresentation the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army on the Question of armed struggle.

The revisionist Pomeroy states that after World War II "there was no organized insurrectionary effort with the clearest strategic and tactical aims in the Philippines, as did occur elsewhere in Asia". He confirms that the HUKBALAHAP that had fought a guerrilla war against Japanese occupation was disbanded after the war and its cadres and members shifted to "legal forms of parliamentary and economic struggle".

But to apologize for the craven desire of the Tarucs and Lavas to gain official ranks in the puppet reactionary government during that time, Pomeroy declares:

The Huk movement had to take into account the fact that its organization was limited to half a dozen provinces on the island of Luzon while American-influenced guerrilla forces existed elsewhere. Furthermore, there had been a legislated promise of independence by the United States to occur in 1946, and a strong puppet political organization was ready to reassume control of the country backed by U.S. troops and American controlled Filipino armed forces.

Pomeroy blames the masses, not the Lavas and Tarucs for the "movement" becoming unprepared against the return of U.S. imperialism to the Philippines. Such unpreparedness is presented as the excuse for the disbanding of the HUKBALAHAP and the immersion of the Lavas and Tarucs in the business of bourgeois parliamentarism. Pomeroy completely obscures the fact that these scoundrels failed to pursue correctly the policy of unity and struggle in the wartime anti-fascist alliance; promoted the erroneous "retreat for defense"; neglected to forewarn the people of the return of U.S.imperialism and the feudal exploiters; and failed to build up a firm democratic basis for resisting the return of these monsters.

Pomeroy arrogantly states that the "Huk masses" had "a tendency of illusion to regard the American army as an ally". This revisionist scoundrel needs to be reminded that before, during and after the anti-fascist war of resistance it was the Lavas and Tarucs who took the stand that U.S. imperialism would truly grant independence to the Filipino people. (Pomeroy would even now speak approvingly of the Anti-Imperialist League" in the United States "for helping to secure legislation in the American congress that put the Philippines on the road of self-rule". What "self-rule" is he talking about?)

Pomeroy contradicts himself by admitting that in the face of mailed-fist blows the Huk armed forces regrouped and fought, spontaneously and virtually without central guidance; and that the Communist Party was at this time disorganized, without unity on strategy and tactics and with no clear perspective for the period ahead. During a period of constant and spreading armed struggle from mid-1948, the leaders of the "movement" were blazenly assisting the counter-revolutionary puppet state in its campaign of "pacification" and begging for the "restoration of the former state of democratic rights, such as they were".

In an attempt to prettify the Jose Lava leadership, Pomeroy claims that "a more clearly-oriented leadership" was chosen in May 1948 and that a program of struggle with "definite liberation aims" was adopted. Again contradicting himself, Pomeroy admits that "the effort was made to employ the expanding strength of the Huks as a lever to attain a democratic peace, for the resumption of parliamentary struggle". The Lavas and Tarucs preoccupied themselves with begging the reactionary government to adopt a "pro-nationalist, anti-imperialist line", instead of clarifying and promoting the correct strategy and tactics of people's war.

Thus, in June 1948 the more-clearly-oriented leadership" permitted Luis Taruc to haggle publicly with the Quirino puppet regime over the sale of the revolution. Pomeroy acclaims this treachery towards the revolutionary masses as the victory for the Huk movement. He is elated that the Huk movement maneuvered for accepted an amnesty from the new preisdent".

Pomeroy admits further that although "an armed struggle and an expansion policy" was pursued by the Huk leadership throughout 1948 and 1949, it still did not give up the "the possibility of a democratic settlement". According to him, it had hoped that its support for the Nacionalista Party and its candidate Jose P.Laurel in the 1949 elections would result in a "peaceful nationalist- oriented agreement".

It is obvious by Pomeroy's own words that the Lavas and Tarucs consistently acted as the political representatives of the bourgeoisie within the revolutionary movement and within the old merger party no less. Only after being frustrated in their own bourgeois political ambitions did they seize formal leadership in the old merger party from more barefaced Rightists like Pedro Castro and Jorge Frianeza. They consistently tried to use the revolutionary mass movement in maneuvering for concessions from an enemy far more clever that they were in the game of duplicity.

Pomeroy confesses:

At anytime up to this point [1948] the American imperialists and their landlord-comprador allies in the Philippines could have attained peace without a radical change in the social system and without a tremendouse waste of more lives and resources, merely by lifting the policies of suppressions.

Unwittingly, Pomeroy is hereby revealing that had the enemy been willing to grant concessions to the Lavas and Tarucs and allowed them to enjoy these in peace, the revolutionary armed struggle could have been cut short and the enemy colud have had his peace too.

Pomeroy states that in January 1950, after three years of suppression and resistance, the Huk movement declared the existence of a "revolutionary situation". He puts forward the muddle-headed view that "the Huk movement passed over from defensive tactics and the tactics of reconciliation to tactics of the offensive". Here we notice that Pomeroy either does not know what he is talking about or he is deliberately trying to confuse his readers.

What is meant by "revolutionary situation" coming about only in 1950? Obviously, Pomeroy has some quaint definition of this term, a definition that denies the concrete conditions of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country where the oppressed masses had started to do battle with the reactionaries even before 1950. At any rate, he uses the term to mean that in 1950 upon the formal declaration of a "revolutionary situation" by the Lavas and Tarucs the situation was already ripe enough for a people's army of no more than five thousand troops to go on a "strategic offensive" in order to achieve the strategic aim of seizing political power on a nationwide scale within the exteremly short period of two years. What he means by passing from "defensive tactics and the tactics of reconciliation" to "tactics of the offensive" is leaping from conducting parliamentary struggle as the principal form of struggle and engaging in Right opportunist capitulationist activity to taking the "Left" opprtunist line of doing away with a protracted people's war and immediately launching a "strategic offensive" to liberate the country in a jiffy. The impetuousity of the Lavas and Tarucs is characteristic of unremoulded petty bourgeois who sneak into a proletarian party. Bourgeois or petty-bourgeois subjectivism gives rise to sudden shifts from Right opportunism and "Left" opportunism.

We have numbskulls pretending to be Marxist-Leninists before us. There was no basis yet for a strategic offensive in 1950. The balance of forces then was such that the revolutionary movement was still in the stage of strategic defensive and of tactical offensives as it was before 1950. To wage guerilla warfare and fight on exterior lines within interior lines is to fight in the best possible way we can in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, destroy the militarily superior enemy piece by piece in the expanses of the countryside and gain the protracted time necessary for arousing and mobilizing the broad masses of the people on a nationwide scale, deepening the agrarian revolution and the anti-imperialist struggle and buliding all the basic weapons of the revolution. If only these pretenders to being revolutionaries had studied the works of Chairman Mao and the concrete conditions of the Philippines, they would have known what to do and would not have gambled away the small armed strngth of the revolutionary movement.

Pomeroy makes two clashing statements that are both calculated to minimize and obscure the strategic and tactical responsibilities of the Jose Lava leadership:

1) The principal factor in the setback of the Huk movement was the ruthless military suppression, carried out in with vast quantities of U.S. military aid, by an army equipped, trained and supervised by an American military advisory group.

2) The Huk movement suffered its setback, in the main, because of its own tactical faults; it was due less to the strength and policies of the forces of suppression.

Like any other liar, Pomeroy is bound to be caught with his own words.

The Jose Lava leadership was responsible for strategic errors, not merely tactical errors. These strategic errors played into the hands of an enemy with superior military force. It is futile for Pomeroy to insist that armed struggle of an "insurrectionary nature" was "unavoidable". It is more futile for him to put in the qualification that such should have been coupled with "phases of legal struggle". He gives a distorted interpretation of protracted people's war by suggesting that it should have been carried out as a minor adjunct of legal struggle.

It should be made clear to all that based on the given strength of the revolutionary armed forces and the entire revolutionary movement in the period following World War II, the policy of strategic defensive and tactical offensive, with annihilation taking the principal role, should have been carried out before and after 1950. At all times, legal mass struggle in cities and towns should have been carried out to support the revolutionary armed struggle. The policy of the united front should have been applied in the conduct of the armed and legal forms of struggle and it should have been used to serve the armed struggle.

It is petty-minded of Pomeroy to claim that the errors in theory and strategy of the Lava leadership were caused "to a great extent" by the "comparative isolation" (geographic) of the Philippine national liberation movement. He prates that only one or two of its leaders (that includes him, the pompous ass, of course) had ever been outside of the Philippines to share the experiences and lessons of other struggles in other countries. Instead of admitting that the theoretical works of Chairman Mao had reached the Philippines and had been arrogantly dismissed by the Lavas and Tarucs as inapplicable, Pomeroy prefers to make an outrageous lie and says that "not a single theoretical work by any Marxist or non-Marxist authority on guerrilla struggle was in the possession of the Huk movement."

The truth is the theoretical works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tsetung had reached the Philippines even before the outbreak of World War II. Furthermore, after World War II, there was already the military experience of the Filipino people and the HUKBALAHAP to analyze and sum up. Instead, the Lavas and Tarucs were bent on welcoming the U.S. imperialists and, therefore also the landlords, as early as September 1944 even as the "retreat for defense" policy was being repudiated. When armed struggle by the revolutioanry masses grew irresistibly, the Jose Lava leadership sabotaged it by using the 90-week Master Training Schedule of the U.S. Army and Pomeroy's G.I. wisdom as the principal guide.

It is utterly ludicrous to dimiss the debacle of October 1950, the capture of the entire principal leadership of the old merger party in Manila as nothing but the result of "overconfidence, carelessness and faulty security measures of the national liberation movement". All the local revisionist renegades must be sharply told that such a debacle was the result of the colossal and stupid error, the deliberate opposition to Marxism-Leninism by the general representatives of the bourgeoisie within the old merger party. Even now, this kind of stupidity is being repeated by the revisionist renegades. That the Jose Lava leadership maintained itself in a location (Manila) where it was least able to protect itself was the result of errors in theory and strategy.

Obsessed with the business of emphasizing the secondary to obscure the principal causes of the failure of the Jose Lava leadership and subsequently of the Jesus Lava leadership, Pomeroy claims that there was "not even one leader with anything approaching a grasp of over-all military theory of the elements of strategy and tactics affecting the Philippine situation"; that the "lack of military leadership was equalled by the poor quality of arms in the hands of the Huks and of guerrilla techonology"; and that "no aid of any kind, whether in the form of arms funds or training facilities, were available from outside the Philippines".

Pomeroy is really dead set on misleading the Filipino people and all revolutionaries. He is in search of outstanding generals schools in bourgeois military academies and fails to see how a truly revolutionary party of the proletariat gets the best out of its Marxist-Leninist theory and practice and produces its own leaders in the course of revolutionary struggle. He deprecates the "poor quality" of arms that had been seized during the anti-fascist war of resistance and that could be seized further from enemy. He is greatly dissatisfied that the people's army was armed with machine guns and Browning automatic rifles. What does he want? Planes and tanks for the people's army right away? Perhaps, he also wants to have atomic bombs inasmuch as he makes the hyperbolic lie that the people's army did not have even grenades (which it had).

Pomeroy feels sorry that the workers and peasants were armed chiefly with courage. Was that not a fine thing? If this political power were handled well, it could have produced the technicians of skill, the radio system, the means of communications, the explosives and all the rest that Pomeroy merely prayed for. The principal error of the Lavas and Tarucs was their purely military viewpoint and putschism.

Pomeroy bewails the fact that no foreign aid came for the Philippine national liberation movement. He writes that there were no groups of committees to inform the world of what was happening or to rally international support. Pomeroy has an utterly distorted view of the great principle of the proletarian internationalism. The revolutionary mass movement of the Philippines then as now continues to be assisted with more than the handouts he asks for. The universal theory of Marxism-Leninism is certainly of great assistance to a trulu revolutionary movement. The revolutionary struggles of other peoples against U.S. imperialism are always of great assistance to the Filipino people.

Pomeroy was the "foreign adviser" not only to the Jose Lava leadership but also to the Jesus Lava leadership. He provided "theoretical support" for the policy of "protracted war with the elements of attrition" adopted by the Jesus Lava leadership in the February-March 1951 emergency Central Committee conference. Nothing came out of this policy as it failed to rectify and as a matter of fact prolonged the "Left" opportunism of the Jose Lava leadership. According to Pomeroy, Jesus Lava leadership eventually had to make "a shift of tactics" in 1955 "that finally recognized the necessity of armed struggle and legal struggle tactics". What is actually meant here is the promotion of the line of protracted legal struggle and roving rebel outlook among the remnants of the people's army that later degenerated to become the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique.

Pomeroy keeps on using the term "tactics" to refer to every stage of revolutionary mass movement under the Lavas. It appears that the leadership of the Lavaites was always bereft of any definite strategic line. Certainly they always had some kind of strategic line and strategic errors, too. As a matter of fact, the strategic line and errors of the Lavas and the Lavaites were more than enough to consign them to the garbage heap of the history.

As if the Lavaite bourgeois leadership is something invincible, Pomeroy makes believe that the resurgence of the revolutionary movement in the 1960s was the result of the protracted legal struggle led by Jesus Lava. Everyone knows that by 1960, there was not a single Party branch under the one-man leadership of Jesus Lava. The persistent armed struggle in the countryside and the revolutionary mass movement in the city were carried out without his leadership. Between 1955 and 1964, Jesus Lava performed the followings "feats" of protracted legal struggle: flight from the countryside, political isolation in his room, his policy of liquidating the Party and finally his surrender to the reactionary government. In 1963-64, the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique brazenly started to impose its own kind of counter-revolutionary leadership over the people's guerrillas in Central Luzon without Jesus Lava raising any kind of protest.