D. The Party Upon the Return of US Imperialism
It was in the course of conducting a people's war during the Japanese occupation that the Communist Party of the Philippines gained real political power in certain areas, thus proving the great thesis of Comrade Mao Tsetung that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".
Nevertheless, an erroneous position was taken with regard to the central question of keeping the people's armed power in the face of the return of US imperialism and the concomitant reinstatement of landlordism in those areas where the people had asserted their own armed power. Among Party members and their mass following, the aggressive nature of US imperialism was not thoroughly exposed. Neither was the armed peasantry under the leadership of the Party mobilized on the basis of the new democratic stage of the Philippine revolution of which the peasantry is the main force. In areas where the leadership of the Party had been established, the anti-national and anti-democratic links between US imperialism and feudalism were not exposed and denounced for the guidance of the people.
Aside from deficiency in ideological mobilization and in grasping the mass line with regard to US imperialism and the agrarian revolution, the Communist Party of the Philippines did not succeed in developing a Party organization and armed force of a national scale even while developing its main force in Central Luzon. To a much lesser extent, it was only in the Southern Tagalog region where Party units and armed units outside of Central Luzon were established towards the end of the anti-Japanese war.
At the end of World War II, the Party leadership decided to shift its headquarters and the center of its political activity from the countryside to the city. Relying on the word of US military agents, Party leaders took the Rightist line that the main form of struggle had changed into the parliamentary form, that the people were tired of war, that they could participate in bourgeois elections under conditions of "democratic peace". Thus, the central organs and newspapers of the Communist Party of Philippines were shifted to the city.
In the countryside, the Huk Veterans League and the Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid (National Peasant Union) were set up as legal mass organizations to supplant the Hukbalahap and the BUDC (Barrio United Defense Corps). In the city, the Congress of Labor Organizations and other urban organizations were established. The Party and these mass organizations were to engage in legal and parliamentary struggle through the Democratic Alliance. Within the Democratic Alliance, the Party itself was merely one of the organizations subordinate to the bourgeois personalities leading the alliance.
The policy of disarming and disbanding armed units of the people's army was adopted and implemented. The political power that had been gained by the people's armed forces was, therefore, broken when arms became separated from the men who had wielded them. The Party leadership, however, nurtured the illusion that whereas the "democratic peace" line of making a token surrender of arms to the Military Police was merely a "propaganda line", the "true line" was that the Party was actually keeping caches of arms. Little was it realized that the enemy would not be fooled by a token surrender of arms and that the gap between the "propaganda line" and the "true line" merely confused the massses more than it misled the enemy. The basic fact was that armed units were disarmed and disbanded even as the enemy massacred entire "squadrons" of the Hukbalahap (like "Squadrons 77 and 99) and took other forms of repressive measures against the masses and the Hukbalahap.
Under the direction of US imperialism, the Military Police and civilian guards gave armed protection to the landlords to enable them to recover control over their lands in Central Luzon and even to exact excessive demand, such as the collection of arrears on land rent, on the past years of the Japanese occupation. These subsequent developments proved the bankruptcy of the counter-revolutionary line of welcoming the US imperialists and abandoning the armed struggle.
During the period that the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Comrade Mao Tsetung was setting the example of heightening its armed struggle and capability at a time that the US imperialists were maneuvering a Kuomintang-controlled "coalition" government, the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines nurtured the illusion that it could engage in bourgeois parliamentary struggle through the Democratic Alliance and it did field its own candidates in the few areas where it held great political influence. Soon after the Party had taken the legal forefront in fighting against the Bell Trade Act and Parity Amendment and other imperialist-landlord measures, Party-supported members of Congress who had been elected in the 1946 elections were unjustly ousted from Congress, thus exposing once more the bankruptcy of the policy of relying mainly on bourgeois parliamentarism.
During the early post-war period, the Right opportunist trend dominated the Party. Vicente Lava was most articulate and active in providing ideological support to this trend within the Party Central Committee. However, the Party general secretaryship was left to Pedro Castro who wanted to develop a mass open party for purposes of bourgeois parliamentary struggle, and then to Jorge Frianeza who advocated a united front with the reactionary Roxas administration. The 1946 Constitution of the Party, like the 1938 merger Constitution, advocated parliamentary struggle as the main form of struggle. The counter-revolutionary revisionist line within the Party was aggravated by petty-bourgeois careerism, regionalism and by individual acts of flightism which seriously undermined the Party.
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