From the Old to the New Democratic Revolution
The Filipino people had the distinct honor of being the first Asian people to win a bourgeois democratic revolution by liberating themselves from Spanish colonialism in 1898. But unfortunately, the US intervened militarily by pretending to support the Philippine revolution. It landed military forces in Manila in order to prevent the Philippine revolutionary forces from capturing Intramuros, the walled final enclave of the Spanish colonizers.
The US provoked an incident on February 4, 1899 in order to ignite the Filipino-American War and to conquer and occupy the Philippines under the terms of the US-Spanish Treaty of Paris of December 10, 1898 whereby Spain had sold the Philippines to the US for USD 20 million. In carrying out its war of aggression, the US military forces killed at least 700,000 or ten per cent of the Filipino people from 1899 to 1902 and a total of 1.5 million Filipinos up to 1913. War of aggression is truly the worst kind of terrorism.
After defeating the old democratic revolution of the Filipino people, the US imposed its own colonial rule and started to shift the feudal economy to a semi-feudal one dominated by US monopoly capitalism with the collaboration of the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords. The US applied the so-called policy of benevolent assimilation to coopt the liberal bourgeoisie that led the revolution. Unlike the Spanish colonialists who had engaged in sheer plunder, the US colonialists made direct and indirect investments in order to extract more superprofits.
The Filipino working class steadily grew even as the peasantry remained the most numerous class in Philippine society in the persistently agrarian economy. The Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI) was established in 1930. Thus, the possibility of continuing the Philippine revolution emerged, this time led by the working class rather than by the liberal bourgeoisie. The revolutionary leadership of the working class based itself mainly on an alliance with the peasantry.
The US colonial regime outlawed the CPPI in 1931 by trumping up charges of sedition and imprisoning and exiling the leaders. But as a result of the global anti-fascist united front, the Commonwealth government of Quezon released the CPPI leaders in 1936. The CPPI immediately revived its mass strength, especially by merging with the Socialist Party. In 1942 the Communist-Socialist merger party (hereafter, merger party) organized the People´s Army Against Japan (Hukbalahap) in order to fight the Japanese fascist invaders.
The merger party gained revolutionary strength during World War II by building the people´s army, carrying out land reform and forming local organs of political power called the barrio united defense corps. But the revolutionary gains were limited by a Right opportunist line of passive defense, waiting for the return of the US, welcoming the US to fulfill its promise of granting independence and preparing for legal struggle supposedly under conditions of “peace and democracy”.
Despite the Right opportunist line of the leadership of the merger party, the US and its Filipino puppets used brute force to restore the power and wealth of the landlords in the countryside and to allow the US to continue its economic, political, cultural and military dominance over the Philippines after the grant of formal independence in 1946. Indeed, the US had its way through the semi-colonial agency of the political parties of the big compradors and landlords and through the neocolonial manipulation of the economy and finance of the semi-colony.
The exploited and oppressed masses demanded revolutionary armed struggle. Thus, a change of leadership in the merger party occurred in 1948. But a “Left” opportunist line was adopted. It was bound to fail as it aimed to win victory within two years by relying on popular hatred of the corrupt puppet regime of Quirino and without paying attention to the need for land reform and painstaking mass work. It succeeded in carrying out one big military offensive in August 1949 but failed to prevail over the counter-offensives of the US-trained and US-supplied army battalions of the enemy.
After the total defeat of the “Left” opportunist line by the reactionary government in the early 1950s, the leadership of the merger party swung back to Right opportunism. In 1954 it sought to liquidate the people´s army by ordering its conversion into organizational brigades. In 1957 it also sought to liquidate the merger party by reducing its membership to single files and thus in effect dissolving party branches and other collectives. Thus by the time that I joined the merger party in December 1962, it did not have any existing party branch and the general secretary was merely hiding himself in Manila.
Even after the defeat of the armed revolutionary movement, the reactionary state enacted in 1957 the bill of attainder, Anti-Subversion Law, punishing anyone for adhering to Marxism-Leninism and for merely associating with groups that could be considered communist. The Cold War policy of the US prevailed over the entire semicolonial and semi-feudal ruling system.