Volume 1, No. 6, August 2000

Sison: Up to the age of 12, I observed the difficult life of peasants in my hometown in Northern Luzon. I listened to their positive stories about the communists and Huks, the peasant army, in another region, Central Luzon (my mother’s home region). Those stories impressed and made me sympathetic to the armed peasant movement.

When I came to Manila for secondary school education, I had a barber who told me more stories about the Huks. I observed the life of the workers in the slum areas close to where I resided. I had a stint at selling a workers’ weekly newspaper. When my Jesuit teachers called the brilliant anti-imperialist Senator Recto a crazy communist, I disagreed and this sparked my interest in looking for communist literature. I could find only an anti-communist book on Christian philosophy that made plenty of quotations from Marx and Engels. These quotations made more sense than the author’s critique.

When I took my Bachelor of Arts from 1956 to 1959, I found the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and read these avidly. I organized in 1959 the Student Cultural Association of the University of the Philippines (SCAUP) for the study of the Philippine revolution at the open level and Marxism-Leninism at the secret level. This association became the incubator of student activists for the national democratic movement as well as those advanced elements who studied Marxism-Leninism seriously. We conducted protest mass actions of students in combination with workers and peasants, from 1961 onward.

Sison: Anti-communist hysteria was running high. The religious institutions and their agents in the university were whipping up McCarthyism. The US imperialists, the Catholic Church and the reactionary politicians were vociferously anticommunist. An anti-subversion law banned communist and so-called communist front organizations and imposed the death penalty on their officers. The imperialists and reactionaries wished to suppress any trace of the communist movement, after the defeat in the early 1950s of the armed revolution led by the old merger party of the Communist and Socialist parties.

From 1959 to 1961, we the student activists in the SCAUP strove to break the stifling atmosphere of anti-communism. Our efforts bore fruit when we were able to organize a mass protest action of 5000 students in 1961 against the witchhunt launched against progressive teachers and students by a congressional committee called the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA). The witchhunters wanted to ferret out the identities of the authors of progressive and revolutionary articles written under pseudonyms, including mine. The mass action signalled the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal movement in the whole country.

Sison: We formed study circles on current affairs and the Philippine revolution. We brought together students who were writers, scholars and leaders of established campus organizations. We recruited the writers for gaining control over the student publication, the scholars for having impressive candidates in campus elections and the leaders of student organizations for developing a broad front and an organized machinery as soon as possible.

We generated the intellectual and political ferment among the students. We took the secular, patriotic and progressive stand against the dominant pro-imperialist and religio-sectarian organizations. As more of us studied Marxism-Leninism, we brought to the fore the struggle between the Left and the Right. We propagated the line that the Philippine revolution was unfinished and could be completed only with the revolutionary leadership of the working class, and that the new-democratic revolution could lead to the socialist revolution.

I was both a graduate student and an instructor at the University of the Philippines in 1961, when we organized the anti-CAFA demonstration, which stormed and literally broke up the congressional hearing on so-called anti-Filipino activities. As a result of this protest action, I lost my teaching job. But I gained the time to work in the trade union movement and link the student movement to the workers’ movement.

Sison: I joined the old merger party in December 1962. It was close to nothing. Not a single party branch existed because the general secretary Jesus Lava had liquidated the party in 1957. He thought in 1962 that he could ride on the workers and youth movement that had developed independently of the party. So, he invited me to join the old merger party through an intermediary.

At the age of 23, I became a member of a five-man executive committee entrusted by the general secretary with the task of reviving the old merger party. I was made responsible for the youth movement as well as the refresher courses for senior worker and peasant cadres who had come out of prison and who wished to revive the revolutionary mass movement.

By 1965, there was already a sharp ideological struggle within the old merger party as we the proletarian cadres raised issues and demanded a summing up, criticism and rectification of the errors that had devastated the party and the revolutionary movement up to 1962.

By April 1967, there was a clear-cut division between the Marxist-Leninists and the Lava revisionist renegades on all basic questions of ideology, politics and organization. The proletarian revolutionaries repudiated the revisionists and undertook the rectification movement to prepare the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Sison : A provisional political bureau of proletarian revolutionaries was formed in April 1967 to lead the rectification movement and prepare for the congress. The Congress of Reestablishment was held on December 26, 1969. It adopted Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as the theoretical guide of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The rectification document, the Party Program and Constitution were ratified. The first Central Committee was elected. I was elected chairman of the Central Committee.

Sison: In broad strokes, the Party’s growth can be divided into three periods: the first, from 1968 to 1979, the second, from 1980 to 1991 and the third, from 1992 to the present.

The ideological, political and organizational foundation of the Party was laid in the first period. The mass organizations grew rapidly in both urban and rural areas before the US-Marcos regime imposed a fascist dictatorship in 1972. The New People’s Army was established on March 29, 1969, three months after the reestablishment of the Party. Cadres were systematically deployed to strategic points in most regions of the country. The NPA grew from 65 men and 36 firearms (9 m-16 rifles and the rest inferior firearms) in only one guerrilla front to around 1500 fighters armed with automatic rifles, excluding single-shot rifles and handguns. The mass base grew from 100,000 to more than one million. Organs of political power were established wherever the NPA operated. Party membership grew from a few scores in 1968 to at least 5000 in 1979. The National Democratic Front was the underground united front against the fascist

dictatorship from 1973 onward.

In the second period, from 1980 to 1991, the Party grew to the peak level of 35,000 in 1987. The rural and urban mass base went up to ten million in 1986. The guerrilla fronts of the NPA rose to 65, covering some 63 provinces out of a total of 74 provinces then. The advances of the Party were due to the good foundation, the continuing hard work and struggle of the proletarian revolutionaries and the rapidly worsening crisis of the ruling system that led to the overthrow in 1986 of the Marcos fascist dictatorship, with the revolutionary movement playing the decisive role. But serious errors of "Left" and Right opportunism undermined the Party and the revolutionary movement in various regions at various times. The worst forms of "Left" opportunism occurred in the first half of the 1980s. And the worst forms of Right opportunism would arise in the latter half of the 1980s. The mass base started to decline sharply. By 1991, it had declined by 60 percent. A rectification movement was urgently needed and was demanded by the Party rank and file.

The third period involves the Second Great Rectification Movement, rebuilding the revolutionary forces and consolidating the mass base.

Sison: I was captured by the enemy on November 10, 1977, in a transit house for my movement from one region to another. Enemy spotters pinpointed me driving a motorcycle along the highway just before midnight. From then, until after the fall of Marcos I was under maximum security detention. On March 5, 1986, I was released.

While under military detention, I was subjected to various forms of physical and psychological torture. The most physical kind of torture were fist blows and water poured into my nostrils while being interrogated during the first week of my detention. Of all the tortures inflicted on me over the long term, the worst one was psychological. I was chained to a cot in a small cell, without knowing when the chain would be removed. I was in chains for more than 18 months and I was in solitary confinement for a total of more than five years.

Sison: The "Left" opportunist and Right opportunist errors that inflicted serious damage to the Party and the revolutionary movement were similarly rooted in the subjectivist denial of the semi-feudal character of the Philippine economy. Both types of opportunists ran counter to the strategic line of protracted people’s war and tried to deny that the peasants composed the majority of the people and main force of the revolution.

"Left" opportunism had two variants. One paid lip service to the people’s war but was in a hurry to arrive at the strategic counteroffensive, albeit it reduced this to being a mere substage of the strategic defensive. The other variant brazenly opposed the strategic line of protracted people’s war and considered urban uprising by the spontaneous masses as the politico-military lead factor and the people’s army as a purely military adjunct of the urban uprising.

Both variants whipped up impetuosity, created unnecessary bureaucratic layers, encouraged the premature formation of larger army units and divorced these formations from mass work under the pretext of having to be ever ready for battle. In the worst cases, 75 percent of the fighters were in absolute concentration as centers of gravity and 25 percent were turned into mere service units of the prematurely enlarged units. All became divorced from the masses. The so-called urban insurrectionists recklessly exposed underground cadres in the cities as they tried to openly superimpose themselves on the legal mass movement.

Right opportunism pushed the notion that the united front should be built to liquidate the leadership of the Party and the working class. It also interpreted the united front as exclusively or mainly for the legal struggle for reforms. The Right opportunists wished to subordinate the Party to the post-Marcos regimes along the line of reformism. They echoed Gorbachovism in the late 1980s.

The "Left" opportunists swung to the Right during the late 1980s and joined up with the long-running Right opportunists. Together, they pushed barefaced revisionism and liquidationism and wished to imitate the disintegration of the revisionist parties abroad. These counter-revolutionary revisionists were only a handful but they had crept into high positions because of the lack or dearth of ideological work in many Party units during the 1980s. The neglect of ideological work had undermined the apparently big political and organizational successes.

The Party Central Committee reaffirmed the Party’s basic revolutionary principles and summed up revolutionary experience from 1980 to 1991, identified the major errors, criticized and repudiated them and set forth the ideological, political and organizational tasks.

The Party Central Committee based itself on the reports and recommendations of the lower Party organs and organizations. The Party rank-and-file made an overwhelming demand for the rectification movement in face of the growing passivity and isolation of the prematurely enlarged units of the New People’s Army and the decline of Party membership and the urban and rural mass base. All these became more conspicuous from year to year, starting in 1988.

The proletarian revolutionaries stood up against the handful of incorrigible opportunists and revisionist renegades. They upheld Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the ideological line, the general political line of new-democratic revolution through protracted people’s war and the organizational principle of democratic centralism.

Ideological and political studies were vigorously carried out. The Party members were encouraged to adhere to the mass line and do painstaking mass work. With the Party core, mass organizations were expanded and consolidated. The NPA was reoriented, reorganized and redeployed for mass work and for extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base.

Sison: The united front policy of the CPP carries its revolutionary class line. There are six points to take into account.

1. A revolutionary united front can exist only with the class leadership of the working class through the Party.

2. The foundation of the united front is the alliance of the working class and the peasantry.

3. The toiling masses of workers and peasants conjoin with the urban petty bourgeoisie to form the alliance of progressive forces.

4. The progressive forces must further conjoin with the middle bourgeoisie to form the alliance of patriotic forces.

5. It is permissible to have unstable and unreliable allies from among the reactionaries by way of taking advantage of the contradictions among the reactionaries or confronting a foreign aggressor.

6. To build the echelon of alliances, such as the foregoing, and have the broadest range of united front to isolate and destroy the enemy, which is the most reactionary force, or a foreign aggressor, in case US imperialism launches a war or aggression.

Since the reestablishment of the Party in 1968, the worker-peasant alliance has been developed with the work of the Party, the New People’s Army, the peasant movement and the trade union movement. The National Democratic Front of the Philippines is in charge of developing the alliance of progressive forces for revolutionary armed struggle. It also maintains patriotic allies and unreliable and unstable allies among the reactionaries.

Sison: The guerrilla fronts consist of guerrilla bases and guerrilla zones. The guerrilla bases are politically more consolidated and carry the main guerrilla unit, which is usually a platoon in relative concentration. The guerrilla zones are less consolidated but more expansive and carry six or more squads subdivisible into armed propaganda teams of three to five guerrilla fighters, doing mass work on a wide scale.

Expansion entails contact work, social investigation, appointment of the members of the village organizing committee as the provisional organ of political power and the formation of organizing groups to lay the ground for establishing the mass organizations for peasants, women, youth, children and cultural activists.

Consolidation means the fullest possible development of the mass organizations, the election of the village revolutionary committee as regular organ of political power either by representatives of the mass organizations or by the entire village community and the establishment of the local Party branch.

In the early years, guerrilla zones first arose at the strategic points in the country, usually interprovincial and interregional border areas with favorable terrain for guerrilla warfare. Next, distinctions could be made between well-consolidated guerrilla zones and the new guerrilla zones. Further on, the well-consolidated guerrilla zones became the guerrilla bases, distinguishable from the guerilla zones. Eventually, the guerrilla fronts were configured as a combination of guerrilla bases and guerrilla zones.

The Party is still building more guerrilla fronts in order to link the existing ones. It hopes to conjoin the guerrilla fronts to create stable base areas and then liberated areas until the whole country is liberated.

Sison: The future of the Philippine revolution is bright. The Filipino people and revolutionary forces will complete the new-democratic revolution and proceed to the building of socialism until imperialism is defeated on a global scale and communism becomes possible.

The imperialists and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords are doomed. Under conditions of higher technology and more rapacious monopoly greed masquerading as free market, the concentration of capital in the imperialist countries is being accelerated and it results in the devastation of productive forces and the intensification of oppression and exploitation in countries like the Philippines and India.

The local reactionary ruling system is actually weakened economically and financially by the imperialists. At the same time, the imperialists push the local reactionaries to posture as strong politically and to act harshly against the broad masses of the people. Escalating oppression and exploitation brings about social unrest and incites the people to rise up in arms.

The Filipino communists and masses are confident of winning revolutionary victory because of the ever-worsening crisis of the domestic ruling system as well as that of the world capitalist system. They consider the Philippine revolution as part of the world proletarian revolution and hope that in the coming years and decades the revolutionary struggles will spread and intensify on an unprecedented scale in all continents.

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