Annotations on the Anti-CPP attacks of the so-called PKP-1930

8 November 2005

Below are extracts from an article of the so-called PKP-30. This group was a flunkey of the erstwhile ruling Soviet revisionist party and collaborated with the Marcos fascist dictatorship secretly since 1972 and openly since 1974. Since 1972, key leaders of the PKP-30 (starting with Federico Maclang, former member of the 1950 PKP Politburo) have been hired as intelligence agents of the Manila government against the Communist Party of the Philippines. The current PKP-30 general secretary Pedro Baguisa and his other colleagues continue to be handled and covered by Col. Ernesto Macahiya, who was himself a Central Committee member of the 1972 direct Lavaite antecedent of PKP-30. The article of PKP-30 is published by Political Affairs online in its October 31 - November 6, 2005 issue. The Political Affairs describes itself as "a publication of the Communist Party, USA", a revisionist party long discredited not only as flunkey of the former Soviet ruling party but also as a group heavily infiltrated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. It occasionally publishes materials coming from the PKP-30. Further annotations in bold follow the particular extracts which carry grave errors of fact or outright lies and thus require correction and explanation.

PHILIPPINE COMMUNIST PARTY (PKP-1930) TO CELEBRATE 75TH ANNIVERSARY ON NOVEMBER 7, 2005 The PARTIDO KOMUNISTA NG PILIPINAS (PKP-1930, or Philippine Communist Party) will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its public proclamation on November 7, 2005, which will coincide with the 88th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Annotation: The lead paragraph of the article is kept intact. Ten paragraphs that follow are deleted. They are fairly correct even as they carry some historical inaccuracies. However the propositions are used merely to pave the way for anti-CPP attacks. The Communist Party of the Philippines (also Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas in Tagalog), which was reestablished in 1968 under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, traces and respects its origin from the 1930 founding of the PKP by Comrade Crisanto Evangelista. As a matter of fact, the most senior members of the reestablished CPP were close to Evangelista since the early 1930s. These included Comrades Max Gutierrez and Felixberto Olalia. They were more senior than the Lavas and the Lavaite followers who were not in the PKP earlier than 1935.

Why the reestablishment of the CPP or PKP in 1968? It was to rectify the errors in merging the CPP and the Socialist Party in 1938 (when the PKP became the merger party of CPP and SP) and the still graver errors committed by the dynastic series of Lava brothers (Vicente, Jose and Jesus) who generated opportunism, from Right to "Left" and from "Left" to Right and caused serious damage to the PKP and the revolutionary cause of the people. The reestablishment benefited from Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and the Marxist-Leninist struggle against modern revisionism on a global scale.

Undaunted, the PKP organized and led the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (HUKBALAHAP, or the People's Anti-Japanese Army) which grew to become the country's main guerrilla army which fought the Japanese occupation forces. HUKBALAHAP squadrons fought 1,200 engagements with Japanese and puppet forces from March 1942 up to mid-1945, and inflicted around 25,000 enemy casualties (mostly local puppets). By war's end, the HUKBALAHAP had a strength of 20,000 armed regulars and 50,000 reservists, supported by mass base of more than half a million people in the Central and Southern Luzon towns and provinces where former feudal estates have been redistributed and where Provisional Revolutionary Local Governments had been set up.

Annotation: The main guerrilla army against Japan belonged to the USAFFE which ultimately wiped out 100,000 of the 150,000 Japanese troops commanded by General Yamashita in his Cordillera holdout. The maximum rifle strength of the HUKBALAHAP, from the end of World War II to its renaming as the HUKBONG MAPAGPALAYA NG BAYAN (People's Liberation Army) was only 3,500 (including single shots). This small figure was a consequence of the Right opportunist "retreat for defense" policy of the leadership of Vicente Lava, which disintegrated the armed squadrons of the HUKBALAHAP into small teams of three to five fighters and stunted the growth of the people's army from the latter half of 1942 to the early part of 1944 (most of the period of the Japanese Occupation). The mass base of the armed revolution was far more than half a million in both Central and Southern Tagalog regions.

Deteriorating events under the neocolonial conditions in 1949 led to an erroneous assessment of a "revolutionary situation" by the Jose Lava leadership of the PKP, which proceeded to organize the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB, or the People's Liberation Army), and to launch an armed bid for power. The armed uprising was crushed by the mid-1950s, at a loss of around 10,000 revolutionaries, mostly HUKBALAHAP veterans.

Annotation: The "Left" opportunism of the Jose Lava leadership was not in recognizing the crisis conditions in the Philippines in 1949 but in aiming to seize political power within two years through "all-out armed struggle", without paying attention to developing the people's war in stages, agrarian revolution and mass base building. In the two years following the capture of the Jose Lava leadership in October 1950, the backbone or main units of the HMB were broken. Subsequently, the Jesus Lava leadership adopted the line of Right opportunism, seeking to convert the people's army into an "organizational brigade" in 1955 and liquidate the PKP with the "single file" policy in 1957. PKP-30 glosses over these facts of history.

By the early 1960s, the PKP had to be rebuilt, and had to shift from the underground armed struggle to an open political path of struggle. Party rebuilding was done alongside the rebuilding of mass organizations --- the Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (MASAKA, or the Independent Federation of Peasants), the Congress of Trade Unions of the Philippines (CTUP) and some other labor federations, the Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth), and the multi-sectoral Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism (MAN). However, the rebuilding of the PKP and its mass organizations was hampered by the rise of maoism in 1966, and by the ensuing Sino-Soviet conflict. Under the influence of the so-called "great proletarian cultural revolution" in China, a youth-based Maoist group was nurtured within the PKP by Political Bureau member Jose Maria Sison. Sison wanted to continue with an adventurist armed struggle on the basis of Mao's "world revolutionary situation" thesis, while the veterans who comprised the majority of the PKP leaders were convinced that there was no revolutionary situation in the country, and that the armed struggle was then already a futile road to gaining political power in the Philippines.

Annotation: Before 1960 not a single branch was left of the PKP (more precisely the old merger party of the communist and socialist parties). The general secretary Jesus Lava was simply hiding himself in one safehouse after another in Manila, disconnected from the masses and from the remnants of the people's army. Comrade Jose Maria Sison developed the clandestine Marxist study circles and aboveground democratic organizations of students in several universities from 1959 to 1961. After he was fired from his teaching job in 1961, he became full time organizer of theoretical, political and trade union seminars in three major labor federations (PAFLU, NATU and NAFLU) and several major independent unions.

In late 1962 Comrade Sison was invited by Jesus Lava to become a member of the PKP and immediately a member of the Executive Committee of the PKP or OMP (old merger party). This would eventually become the Political Bureau. In 1963 Sison connected MASAKA (then led by Felixberto Olalia) to the PKP and was assigned to give refresher courses on Marxism-Leninism to the MASAKA leaders in order to revalidate them as PKP members. He founded Kabataang Makabayan in 1964 on the basis of his continuous work among the youth since 1959. The CTUP was a small federation consisting mostly of small unions of printing, and lumberyard workers.

Long before he met any member of the Lava dynasty, Sison had been close to several senior comrades who were critical of Lavaite opportunism but could not outrank Jesus Lava as the source of authority to be able to rebuild the PKP. Through his serious study and hard work, Sison gained the trust of veteran and young comrades. He got elected as chairman of Kabataang Makabayan, as general secretary and then as vice chairman of the Workers' Party (later renamed the Socialist Party of the Philippines) and as general secretary of the Movement for the Advance of Nationalism.

Inside the PKP or OMP, Sison had always been open and aboveboard on the ideological, political and organizational questions since the beginning. He succeeded in setting the Marxist-Leninist position as main current in the Executive Committee against modern revisionism in the years 1963 to 1965. The Lavaites did not dare to oppose him openly because of the force of his reasoning and his pivotal role in clandestine party building and the open mass movement.

From year to year, he vigorously demanded a serious study of party history and the current domestic and world situation. He advocated dealing with the opportunisms of the past in the PKP by looking at them in the light of the Chinese revolution, especially with regard to building the proletarian party, the people's army and united front as the weapons of the Philippine revolution. He took a firm stand for Marxism-Leninism against modern revisionism on a comprehensive range of issues.

The Lavaites started to seek connections with the Soviet revisionist party and wage a whispering campaign against him in 1965 after he wrote a party history and general report, sharply critical of the opportunist swings of the Lavaite line and policies, from Right through "Left" to Right. He had been assigned by the Executive Committee to do the writing. The final break between the Marxist-Leninists and the Lava revisionists occurred in April 1967. This would lead to the First Great Rectification Movement, ushering the reestablishment of the CPP. Details regarding these events are found in the basic documents of the CPP reestablishment and more recently in such books as The Philippine Revolution: The Leader's View and At Home in the World: Portrait of a Revolutionary.

On Mao's birthday (December 26) in 1968, Sison and a handful of his followers formalized their split from the PKP by holding a "congress" to form the maoist "Communist Party of the Philippines" (CPP). The formation of the CPP, and later of its "New People's Army" (NPA), had the covert support of then-Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino and media magnate Don Chino Roces, both known agents of the US CIA. Among the first major actions of the CPP-NPA to "accelerate" the supposed "revolutionary situation" was the terrorist bombing of the electoral campaign meeting in Manila of the opposition Liberal Party in 1971. That bombing was blamed on Marcos, who in turn used it as the reason for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Succeeding adventurist actions by the CPP-NPA, including two (2) bungled landings of shiploads of arms from then-maoist China, became the convenient pretext for Marcos' declaration of martial law in September 1972. The CPP-NPA's boast of launching a "people's war", in response to a declaration of martial law, came to naught. While martial law saw the grave curtailment of civil and political rights, this period also featured some positive developments which were to later be of serious concern to imperialism � the building up of the state sector in vital areas of the economy, particularly in industry; the opening of diplomatic, trade and other relations with the USSR and other socialist countries; and closer Philippine identification with the Non-Aligned Movement. In October 1974, as a result of negotiations initiated by Marcos, the PKP entered into a political settlement under which the PKP renounced the armed struggle, while Marcos in turn recognized the legal existence of the PKP, extended government recognition to HUKBALAHAP veterans, expanded agrarian reforms in PKP-influenced areas, and granted amnesty to remaining PKP and HMB political prisoners. Aside from formalizing its renunciation of the armed struggle (which even a decade earlier was already deemed futile as a way of gaining political power), the political settlement of 1974 did not prevent or stop the PKP from criticizing the pro-imperialist positions of Marcos.

Annotation: The article rises to a high pitch of viciousness in the above kilometric paragraph. It suddenly puts forward the patent lie that the anti-communists Senator Benigno Aquino and Chino Roces covertly supported the reestablishment of the CPP, if only to insinuate an imaginary CIA hand, in the reestablishment of the CPP and to deflect attention from the real CIA hand that supported Marcos to impose fascist dictatorship on the Filipino people.

The article of PKP-30 shamelessly blames the CPP for the colossal crimes of Marcos and proceeds to justify the fascist dictatorship. It echoes the false charge of Marcos that the CPP and Aquino were responsible for the Plaza Miranda bombing. Then, it proceeds to praise the fascist Marcos as having been responsible for "positive developments which were of later concern to imperialism." It sticks to the old PKP-30 lie that Marcos was a representative of an industrializing national bourgeoisie and not a big bureaucrat capitalist representative of the comprador big bourgeosie and the landlord class servile to US imperialism. It exaggerates the relations of the Marcos fascist regime with Soviet social imperialism in order to make Marcos appear as more of a bourgeois nationalist than a truly rabid puppet of US imperialism.

It makes the utterly false claim that the people's war waged by the CPP, the NPA and the people came to naught and the equally false but boastful claim that the PKP-30 gained so much more by capitulating to and becoming a psywar and intelligence tool of the Marcos fascist regime. The truth is that the revolutionary forces of the people, the CPP, NPA, NDFP, the organs of political power and the mass organizations, grew strong by fighting the fascist dictatorship. The PKP-30 became totally discredited as collaborators of the fascist regime and were reduced to an inconsequential pack of agents in the isolated areas where they still existed and where they were used by the fascist Marcos in sowing bloody intrigue against the forces and mass base of the CPP and NPA.

In the period of 1972 to 1974, when they were still trying to "persuade" the anti-Marcos leaders and members to take the line of surrender to Marcos, the pro-Marcos leaders of PKP-30 tortured and murdered most of the leaders and members of the "Marxist-Leninist Group" headed by PKP Politburo member Dr. Francisco Nemenzo. Marcos and his top intelligence officers knew all about the butchery through their double agents, Federico Maclang and Ernesto Macahiya.

The political settlement left the PKP free to organize among the masses, and by 1975, new sectoral mass organizations have been formed to take the place of those declared illegal with the imposition of martial law. Throughout the Marcos period, among the main demands consistently raised by the PKP were the removal of US military bases and the realization of a nuclear-weapon-free Philippines; respect for human rights; control of transnational corporations; opposition to the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF; nationalist industrialization and economic protectionism; and closer cooperation with socialist countries and the non-aligned movement for better terms of trade, for safeguarding world peace, for the ending of racist regimes, and for the independence of all remaining colonies. These were the same demands raised by the PKP with the end of the Marcos regime; however, aside from lifting the Marcos curbs on civil rights, the Cory Aquino and other succeeding regimes proved to be just as pliant to imperialist dictates. The present Arroyo regime is even tending to curtail civil and political rights, even without the formal proclamation of martial law or emergency rule.

Annotation: PKP-30 is insinuating in the first sentence of the above paragraph that the "political settlement" with the Marcos fascist regime allowed it to build mass organizations to replace those that had been forced underground. It also insinuates that it is now at the head of the mass organizations which continue to fight the post-Marcos regimes. To deceive its so-called fraternal revisionist parties abroad, it has been claiming to have created and to control the robust legal mass organizations of the national democratic movement. In fact, PKP-30 has become inconsequential since 1974, except as a pack of spies and propaganda agents of the Marcos fascist regime up to 1986. Since 1986, it has offered to sell its political services to one regime after another. But it has not been given much political importance by the post-Marcos regimes because it has become politically impotent even as a tool of counterrevolution. It continues merely as a psywar and intelligence asset of the reactionary armed forces and national police.

In the international field, the PKP consistently denounced maoism and "new left" adventurism as special tools of imperialism to divide the international communist movement, the socialist community, the international working class movement and national liberation movements. At the same time, the PKP criticized the rightist trends within some "Euro-communist" parties which made anti-Sovietism and the denunciation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as their main platforms in the 1980s. The PKP strongly supported Vietnam's internationalist assistance for the liberation of Cambodia, even while the maoist CPP consistently supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Later, concerned about the growing non-class concepts in the period of "perestroika", the PKP criticized Gorbachyov's pronouncements which tended to accept the continuation of US military bases in the Philippines, even while the masses of our people were agitating for their immediate dismantling. Sadly, the PKP failed to criticize more forcefully the rightist trends within the CPSU which led to the demolition of the USSR and the socialist community by the imperialist-applauded Gorbachov-Yeltsin-Shevardnadze gang.

Annotation: The above paragraph may be described as big words of a small toad, blaming Maoists and not the revisionists for splitting the international communist movement and belatedly saying that it could have done more to criticize "rightist trends" in the CPSU. If it had done any criticizing, it would have lost all the free plane tickets and hotel accommodations provided by the Soviet bloc of revisionist parties for attending so many congresses and conferences.

Right now, PKP-30 is trying to toady up to a party in Southern Europe that still invites it to gatherings and pays for its plane tickets and hotel accomodations. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist CPP is clear-headed about the revisionist line from Khruschov through Brezhnev to Gorbachov that ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union. The Soviet revisionists and their criminal collaborators ultimately went for barefaced and full-blast restoration of capitalism in 1989-91 to fully legalize their loot and further privatize public assets. For a comprehensive critique of the collapse of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, we invite readers to study the CPP Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism.

Unfortunately for the PKP, many of those who became disillusioned with those 1989-1991 events left the PKP, especially those from intellectual backgrounds, and the PKP's membership fell by half to only 2,000 in the last decade. In the same period within the maoist CPP, questions about the validity of a "revolutionary situation", about the need to continue with the armed struggle and "to surround the cities from the countryside", and about the need to hold a 2nd Congress to revise the CPP's 1968 maoist documents, led to bloody purges. A series of splits from the maoist CPP saw the formation of 4 other ("rejectionist") parties with outlooks ranging from social-democratic to trotskyite, and with 2 of those break-away parties maintaining their own armed groups in opposition to the CPP's NPA. In effect, the maoist CPP and its break-away groups are still fighting over the same strategic issues that have been resolved within the PKP in the 1960s.

Annotation: PKP-30 reports in the above paragraph that its membership dropped by half to only 2000 in the last decade, as a result of disillusionment with the 1989-91 events (which the CPP regards as the fall of the revisionist regimes that previously killed socialism through revisionism). After all the boasting of having become strong because of its collaboration with the Marcos fascist regime, because of its pro-Soviet revisionist line and because of its antagonism towards the armed revolution of the Filipino people, the PKP-30 can only claim to have peaked to 4000 members in the past, despite the chronic and ever worsening crisis conditions of the semicolonial and semi-feudal ruling system, which are fertile grounds for revolutionary work.

At the same time, the PKP-30 tries to misrepresent the Second Great Rectification Movement as having made the CPP so much weaker. This movement is an educational movement that rectified the grave political errors and crimes of only a few who have gone astray from the revolutionary road. PKP-30 is utterly bankrupt in trying to misrepresent and mix up the rectification movement and the bloody crimes committed by the worst renegades.

The rectification movement has enabled the CPP to grow far stronger than at anytime in the past. It has members in the tens of thousands and these will soon pass the 100,000 mark. It leads a comprehensive range of mass organizations and has a mass base in the millions. The NPA operates in more than 130 guerrilla fronts. Its full-time fighters with automatic rifles run into thousands, not to mention many more who are in the militia and self-defense units. The CPP leads the organs of political power in extensive areas in the countryside. The National Democratic Front of the Philippines continues to develop the united front.

(Note : Since the late 1980s, the PKP has been appending the year "1930" to its initials, i.e., PKP-1930, to distinguish it from the maoist CPP which split from the PKP in 1968. This was particularly necessary due to the rise of maoist terrorist activities starting that period --- the bombing of bridges and the sabotage of railway lines in Southern Luzon, the burning of transport and communication facilities in several parts of the country, the kidnapping of Japanese and other businessmen for ransom, the extortion of so-called "revolutionary taxes" and periodic "election campaign permit fees", attacks on civilian religious congregations in the Davao provinces, the torture and massacre of internal dissenters within the CPP-NPA [code-named "Oplan Missing Link" and "Kampanyang Ahos"], and the assassination of those who led the different splits from the CPP/NPA�which are being presented in the media as "communist" activities in order to denigrate the true essence of communist advocacy.)

Annotation: The PKP-30 acts as a special agent of US imperialism in misrepresenting the armed revolution for national liberation and democracy as nothing but terrorism. It echoes the foulest and most stupid attacks of the reactionary armed forces and police of the Manila government against the CPP. At the same time, it is silent about the gross human rights violations now being perpetrated against those suspected of belonging to the revolutionary movement as well as legal patriotic and progressive forces and elements in the Philippines. The false accusations of PKP-30 above have been answered in so many CPP publications. Readers are invited to visit the Philippine Revolution Web Central for accurate data on the CPP, NPA and NDFP.

We have sufficiently exposed the anti-communist, anti-people and counterrevolutionary character of the article and its author, PKP-30. The main thrust of the article is to attack the CPP and the Philippine revolution rather than to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the CPP by Crisanto Evangelista and other comrades in 1930. There is no need to annotate the rest of the article. The remaining paragraphs are all hypocritical and baseless bombast and balderdash or, in brief, basically pure hogwash.

Reference:
Anne Buenaventura
Media Officer
Cellphone Number: +63910-240-3553

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