Resurgence of the National Democratic Mass Movement
We who were in the University of the Philippines in the late 1950s and who considered ourselves patriotic and progressive were not at all intimidated by the Anti-Subversion Law. Instead, we were challenged to fight back as a result of recurrent efforts of the reactionary state and the dominant church to use the said law in carrying out ideological and political witch hunts in violation of the fundamental rights of free speech and assembly and the liberal democratic principle of separation of church and state.
We formed the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines in 1959 in order to defy the Anti-Subversion Law and to propagate openly the line of people´s struggle for national liberation and democracy against US imperialism and the local exploiting classes and to promote the clandestine study of Marxism-Leninism.
We countered the congressional investigations of so-called subversive articles written by professors and students, including your speaker who had written an internationalist piece, “Requiem for Lumumba”, under a pseudonym. We called for mass action in defense of academic freedom and we succeeded in mobilizing 5000 students for a demonstration against such investigations. This event opened the series of mass actions against the ruling system in the 1960s.
I was the chairman of the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines. We linked up with student governments and organizations on a national scale and formed new national student organizations that were patriotic and progressive. We further linked up with the labor and peasant organizations from late 1962 onwards. And some of us joined the remnants of the underground merger party of communists and socialists.
We were active in the aboveground Workers´ Party, particularly in the work of social research, publications and seminars in this party and in its affiliate trade union federations. On the basis of this work, I became the vice chairman for education. We were also active in providing refresher courses to the peasant cadres who were beginning to revive the peasant movement under the cover of the bogus land reform program of the reactionary state.
Our work with the organizations of workers and peasants helped us greatly in founding in 1964 the comprehensive youth organization, Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth), consisting of students, young workers, young peasants and young professionals. I was elected chairman of this youth organization. This became the most militant organization in arousing, organizing and mobilizing the masses on the domestic issues against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and on international issues, especially the US war of aggression in Vietnam and the whole of Indochina.
The Kabataang Makabayan became the principal proponent for the organization of a broad united front of patriotic and progressive forces in 1966. And I was elected the general secretary of this formation. My book, Struggle for National Democracy, became the basic reading material of the mass activists from 1966 onwards. In the entire 1960s, I was publicly accused of being the key link of the anti-imperialist and democratic forces and as the aboveground representative of the underground revolutionary party.