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

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Anti-Marxism and Eclectism

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

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

(This essay originally appeared in the Ang Bayan special issue of June 15, 1971 under the title "The Anti-Marxism and Eclecticism of the Revisionist Pomeroy".)

Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism is mainly a collection of excerpts from diverse authors. It is edited by William J. Pomeroy who avows as the central aim of the book:

... to make clear Marxist-Leninist principles and attitudes in regard to armed struggle, showing how they have emerged in the course of over a ceuntury of extremely varied circumstances, and showing how, in the light of a new experiences, they may be used to define the issues of controversy that have arisen out of contemporary armed struggles.

A quick look at the table of contents, at the authors' names and number fo pages endowed upon each would immediately show that the bool title and the avowed central aim of the editor are misleading and that the editor is utterly dishonest, without any sense of proportion and antagonostic to Marxism and revolutionary guerrilla warfare. By the eclectic chioce and arrangement of excerpts, which include so many outrightly anti-communist ones, Pomeroy presents a distorted picture of Marxism and all revolutionary armed struggle.

Decking himself out as some kind of a Marxist arbiter and a revolutionary veteran, Pomeroy endows himself with an unduly great amount of space in the book. He gives a long general introductiona and some section introductions, all of which spell out his anti-Marxist standpoint and principal interest of attacking Comrade Mao Tsetung and his Marxist-Leninist theory of people's war. Having no regret for serving once as the hack of the anti-communist traitors Luis Taruc, he includes in his collection an excerpt from the counter-revolutionary and egocentric Born of the Peole and boastfully acknowledges authorship of it. He also includes an excerpt from Jorge Maravilla (Pomeroy himself) on the Philippine revolutionary struggle, particularly on the 1950 debacle of the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership.

Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao combined have less space than Pomeroy's ramblings. Pomeroy and his fellow writers for the revisionist World Marxist Review (like Enrique Lister of Spain, Zizis Zografos of Greece, Bashir Hadj Ali of Algeria, Juan Rodrigues of Venezuela, Alberto Gomez of Colombia, Jose Manuel Fortuny of Guatemala, Jose Cuello and Asdrubal Dominguez of the Dominican Republic and Luis Corvalan of Chile) hog the way and have more to say than all of Marx, Engels,Lenin, Mao Tsetung and Ho Chi Minh combined. To Pomeroy, Stalin has absolutely nothing to say about the Civil War and the anti-fascist Great Patriotic War although Tito and some lesser personalities like I. Minz and A. Fyodorov are allowed some say on armed struggle in the Soviet Union. Definitely, the revisionist Pomeroy is an ideological swindler who would use a few pages from the great communist leaders only as wrappings for rotten goods. All throughout his compilation, he preoccupies himself with the central aim of brazenly or slyzy impugning the universal value of Comrade Mao Tsetung's theory and practice of people's war. Unlike his other counter-revisionist book, Guerrilla and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare, Pomeroy frequently mentions Comrade Mao Tsetung, the Lenin of the present era, but only to picture him as merely as one among a motley of personalities, which include Kwame Nkrumah, Regis Debray, Ernesto "Che" Guevarra, Pomeroy himself and his revisionist confreres.

Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism is peace of ersats. It suffecis for the time being to have this critique concentrate on Pomeroy's counter-revolutionary revisionist statements to expose the general character of the book and the counter-revolutionary purpose of Pomeroy in making the compilation. However, all comrades are enjoined to study critically every excerpt incorporated and also to get into its theoritical and historical context.