II. THE GESTATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE PHILIPPINES, 1959-68

It is quite easy for anyone with a high degree of book learning to read Marxist-Leninist works; but to absorb the revolutionary ideas and apply them on the concrete conditions of the Philippines is another matter. The proletarian revolutionary cadres who studied Marxist-Leninist works sought from the very beginning to initiate the revolutionary mass movement. They knew that it was the only way that the revolutionary ideas could become a material force in the Philippines.

The period of 1959-68 may be described as that of rekindling the anti-imperialist and antifeudal mass movement and gestating a new communist party. These had been destroyed in the 1950s. In the absence of the revolutionary mass movement, the U.S. imperialists and the local reactionaries were unchallenged in promoting all sorts of organizations to preempt its resurgence.

The single event that broke the long period of reaction and began to inspire the resurgence of the mass movement was the demonstration of 5000 students, mostly from the state university, to oppose and stop the anticommunist witchhunt in 1961. The witchhunt was an attempt to enforce the antisubversion law which had been enacted in 1957 to threaten with the death penalty anyone who dared to propagate Marxism-Leninism and resume any communist activity. Ironically, the law challenged and incited the youth to rise up in protest and to take interest in what would emerge as the national democratic movement.

The young proletarian revolutionaries initiated the mass protest action, without direction from the underground remnant of the old merger CP-SP party. Following their success, they expanded their study and organizing activities from the University of the Philippines to other Manila universities and proceeded to take leadership over student governments and campus publications. While openly promoting the general line of the national democratic revolution they also secretly organized Marxist-Leninist study groups.

Taking notice of the militant progressive movement and the initial efforts of the youth militants to link up with the progressive workers' and peasants' organizations, the general secretary of the CP-SP merger party, Jesus Lava, invited the representative of the youth militants and the representative of the progressive trade unions to become members of the old CP-SP merger party and also to become members of the executive committee which he formed in late 1962. Following the Lava's dynastic tradition, he also appointed to the five-person committee two of his nephews who were not at all linked to any kind of mass movement.

The young proletarian revolutionaries linked up in earnest with the veteran cadres and masses in the progressive trade unions and peasant associations. The mass movement of the youth, the workers and peasants, grew steadily. The Kabataang Makabayan was formed in 1964 as a comprehensive mass organization of students, young workers, young peasants and young professionals. Two legal labor federations and several unions became militated under the banner of the Workers' Party in 1963 (renamed Socialist Party in 1964). The peasant movement reemerged under the name of Masaka in 1963.

The young proletarian revolutionary cadres were the most active in promoting the study of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and in creating Party groups within the mass organizations and Party branches in localities to serve as the revolutionary core of the mass movement. They were also the most militant in launching workers' strikes and mass actions to expose and oppose the antinational and antidemocratic policies of the reactionary government.

The Progressive Review started to be published in 1963 and had a circulation of only 1000 to 2000 copies; but it was the most important periodical in clarifying economic, political and cultural issues along the national democratic line. As separate speeches in pamphlet form or in the 1967 book form, Struggle for National Democracy, using the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, became the most important material for propagating the national democratic line. Also of great significance in reflecting the mass struggles in the 1960s were the leaflets and pamphlets issued for various mass actions. A compilation of these will show comprehensively the march of progressive events along the national democratic line.

Despite the estrangement of the Lava clique in the old CP-SP merger party from the remnants of the people's army that disobeyed Jesus Lava's 1955 policy of liquidating the people's army, the young proletarian revolutionaries developed relations with the cadres and commanders of the remnant people's army by supplying them with revolutionary propaganda and with Marxist-Leninist works, especially of Comrade Mao Zedong. The strongest Kabataang Makabayan chapters outside Manila in the 1960s were in Central Luzon. Thus, it was possible for the young proletarian revolutionaries to keep in touch with the remnants of the people's army, despite the Lavas' aversion to them.

In the old merger party, the young proletarian revolutionary cadres who studied and acted according to the teachings of Comrade Mao Zedong succeeded in taking the ideological, political and organizational initiative. They created Party branches and caused the revolutionary mass movement to resurge. For a time, the scions of the Lava dynasty pretended to go along with the revolutionary line. But in December 1965, inner Party struggle began to simmer over fundamental issues when the representative of the young proletarian cadres presented the general report which the executive committee had assigned him to draft.

The general report appropriately sought to present and analyze the history of the old merger party and to explain the major errors and shortcomings that had led to the debacle of the revolutionary movement in the 1950s. Its main thrust was to rectify the serious errors and shortcomings and point to the necessity of resuming the armed revolution. Although the report was openly and honestly presented in accordance with the assignment, the scions of the Lava dynasty reacted bitterly and one of them made a motion to make the report a mere memorandum supposedly to assist him in making a new draft which he would never do. And worse, he proceeded to spread intrigues against the drafter of the report and against the revolutionary line.

The inner-Party struggle revolved around the issues of Lavaite subjectivism and opportunism, and Soviet-centered modern revisionism. Inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the proletarian revolutionary cadres held their ground even more firmly and upheld the line of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It became inevitable that in April-May 1967 the proletarian revolutionary cadres decided to leave the old CP-SP merger party and to start preparing for the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

At this juncture, it is helpful to review certain points in the history of the original Communist Party which was established in 1930 and which became the CP-SP merger party in 1938. The reestablished CPP highly respects Comrade Crisanto Evangelista, the founder of the original CPP. He was the most formidable leader of the trade union movement in his time. Credit must be accorded to him for having had the wisdom and courage to pioneer the formation of the revolutionary party of the proletariat and for seeking to integrate the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism with concrete Philippine conditions.

However, he had limited opportunities and therefore limited achievements in building the CPP ideologically, politically and organizationally. Soon after its establishment, the Party was outlawed and came under severe repression. Evangelista wrote propaganda about the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in general terms, about the factories as command posts of the revolution, and about the "communist paradise" to come but he was not able to define clearly the line of the new-democratic revolution and to build a nationwide revolutionary party of the proletariat. He tended to concede that the struggle for national independence was already being satisfied by the decolonization process being undertaken by the U.S. and the local reactionaries. He saw the peasant struggle as a struggle for reforms but did not yet see the peasant masses as the main force for carrying out a new-democratic revolution through people's war under the leadership of the proletariat.

In 1935, the underground Communist Party was joined by Dr. Vicente Lava who had learned his Marxism from the Browderite Communist Party of the USA. He eventually became the leader of the second line of leadership which was supposed to replace the first line led by Crisanto Evangelista in case this would be wiped out by the enemy. The notion that the struggle for national liberation could be accomplished through parliamentary struggle was reinforced. So was the notion that the struggle for democracy was one of demanding civil liberties and had nothing or little to do with the substantive democratic question of land.

In 1937, the CPP was legalized, as a result of domestic and international calls by communist and bourgeois-democratic forces for a Popular Front against fascism and also as a result of the pretense of the Commonwealth government for a program of social justice amidst the grave economic crisis generated by the Great Depression. The CPUSA played a key role in pressing for the legalization of the CPP and the release of its leaders from domestic exile. In 1938, the CPP merged with the Socialist Party of the Philippines, which had arisen in 1932 and had continuously remained legal, essentially as an agrarian party. This merger was fraught with problems as it automatically incorporated into the CPP so many peasant militants who had not undergone any study of Marxism-Leninism.

The CP-SP leaders who constituted the first line of leadership were all arrested by the Japanese fascists in Manila in February 1942. They suffered martyrdom after refusing to call on Party members to capitulate to and register with the enemy. Thus, Vicente Lava, the first of a series of three brothers who became general secretaries, assumed the position of general secretary in March 1942. He conceived of the barrio united defense corps and presided over the formation of the people's army against Japan on March 29, 1942.

But Vicente Lava was basically a Right opportunist. After the Japanese military onslaught on Mt. Arayat in whose vicinity the squadrons (companies) of the people's army were concentrated, he pursued the "retreat-for-defense" policy, which concretely meant the excessive fragmentation of the Huk squadrons into small teams of three to five armed members and merely echoed the "wait-and-see" policy dictated by the United States on pro-U.S. Filipino guerrillas to serve merely as the eyes and ears of the U.S. military intelligence and not to actively wage armed struggle far ahead of the return of the U.S. military forces.

Until September 1944, the most successful fighting Huk units were the platoons that disobeyed the "retreat-for-defense" policy. The Central Committee of the CP-SP merger party corrected this wrong policy but only when the U.S. military forces were about to land in the Philippines. The Huk squadrons were re-formed to take advantage of the retreat of the Japanese troops to the mountain provinces of Northern Luzon and to seize power at the municipal and provincial levels in Central Luzon just before the arrival of the U.S. troops.

Lava admitted his error and agreed to its correction. But he pushed another Right opportunist policy -- that of welcoming the U.S. military forces, the formal grant of national independence, the installation of a neocolonial puppet republic; and preparing for the conversion of the people's army and armed peasant movement into a veterans' organization and a legal peasant organization for the purpose of waging parliamentary struggle.

Lava pushed the line of "peace and democracy" and Right opportunist leaders of the CP-SP merger party and the Hukbalahap ran for positions in the big comprador-bourgeois and landlord congress under the banner of the Democratic Alliance in 1946 when the United States shifted from direct colonial to semicolonial rule. But even as they genuinely won their seats in Congress, these known leaders of the CP-SP merger party and their allies were kicked out from their seats in Congress on trumped-up charges of fraud and terrorism.

In the countryside, the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps, the Philippine Constabulary and the civilian guards perpetrated massacres in order to wrest back political power and put the land back under landlord control in Central Luzon. Right opportunists worse than Lava (Pedro Castro and Jorge Frianeza) gained the upper hand in the leadership of the CP-SP merger party, pushed the line of collaborating with the Roxas puppet regime and agreed to the registration of Hukbalahap fighters.

Under these conditions, Jose Lava, the second of the Lava brothers to become the secretary general of the CP-SP merger party, took the initiative of fighting the Right opportunists and called for the resumption of the revolutionary armed struggle in 1948. But he failed to clarify the strategy and tactics. Inconsistently in 1948 and 1949, the Huk commander-in-chief Luis Taruc was allowed to negotiate for general amnesty. Following the discovery of the scheme of the reactionary regime to murder the undergr ound leaders who surfaced under the amnesty agreement, Jose Lava pushed the line of "all-out armed struggle" against the Quirino puppet regime in 1950. He spelled out his line of achieving military victory within two years, imagining a geometric progression of spontaneous popular support and banking on armed uprisings promised by the Nacionalista Party politicians -- the former Japanese puppet president Jose Laurel and Eulogio Rodriguez.

The battalions and companies of the people's army were renamed People's Liberation Army in 1950. They added up to some 3000 fighters with rifles. Two thousand of these were concentrated in military camps in the unpopulated forests of the Sierra Madre mountain range. In August 1950, they launched coordinated attacks on enemy forces on a wide scale. But in October 1950, the entire Political Bureau led by Jose Lava was captured in Manila. The second coordinated offensive slated for November 1950 could no t be carried out. Instead, the 30 army battalions newly equipped and trained by the United States were taking both strategic and tactical offensives against the forest military camps of the people's army in a purely military situation favorable to the enemy.

The "Left" opportunist Jose Lava leadership never bothered to work out the line of the new-democratic revolution and the integration of revolutionary armed struggle, land reform and painstaking mass work for a protracted people's war. After the 1950 debacle, Jesus Lava (brother of Vicente and Jose) became the Party general secretary. He also failed to consider and work out the requirements of a protracted people's war. Both Jose and Jesus Lava suffered from the petty-bourgeois mentality of wishing for an easy way to seize political power without fully and seriously studying the realities and weighing all the necessary factors in the revolutionary struggle.

In the case of Jesus Lava, he briefly wished to continue armed struggle and then took a Right opportunist line and proceeded to adopt policies seeking to liquidate the people's army and subsequently the CP-SP merger party. He tried to liquidate the remnants of the old people's army in 1955 by calling on them to turn themselves into "organizational brigades" for parliamentary struggle and, subsequently, the Party itself by devising in 1957 what he called the "single-file" policy of dissolving every Party collective and ordering Party members to form single files and receive his political transmissions from his isolated Manila hideout.

The old merger party practically ceased to exist in late 1950s. There was not a single existing Party branch in late 1962. The general secretary Jesus Lava was completely isolated from any mass movement. He had been drafting his political transmissions from 1955 to 1962 on the basis of clippings from the bourgeois press. He had no significant connections with any mass movement or with the remnants of the people's army which continued to exist as roving rebel bands in the plains of some provinces in Central Luzon.

Meanwhile, among the remnants of the people's army, there were the cadres and commanders who persevered in serving the peasant masses and there were also others who degenerated into banditry and running protection rackets in Angeles City adjoining the U.S. Clark Air Force Base and compromising with the landlords in the class struggle between landlords and peasants. This latter type of the remnants of the people's army, most represented by the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique, also became the target of criticism and repudiation by the proletarian revolutionaries and by the New People's Army.

There was the crying need to reestablish the Communist Party of the Philippines and the people's army. This was realizable only because the proletarian revolutionaries had already grasped the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought through which they could make the correct analysis of Philippine history and society and the criticism and repudiation of previous grave errors of the Lava brothers and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique and proceed to wage the new-democratic revolution.

Introduction
I II III IV V VI
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