Philippines

[Bruce Cronin <b.cronin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ken Howley writes:
>The deposition of Marcos was not a
>defeat for imperialism or the launching of a "democratic" revolution,.
>During the 1986 electoral campaign the Philipine Communist Party >boycotted.
>In the emergence of "people power" it was disabled and played no role. The
>toppling of Marcos was certainly fuelled by "people power" but the engine
>was the Philipine ruling class and imperialism who could no longer tolerate
>the embarrassment of Marcos's excesses and saw that the emergence of a
>geniuine mass movement was probable unless he was deposed. It was now
>dictator Ramos who was instrumental in shuffling the marcoses off and
>defusing the mass movement.So successfull was imperialism that conditions
>in the Philipines are far worse now then they ever were under Marcos and
>the "peoples war' has all but been decimated.

You have asserted this a number of times as some sort of evidence about the 
failure of the Maoist strategy.

In fact, the Communist Party of the Philippines is very critical of the actions 
of its leadership in the 1980s, precisely because they departed >from the 
Maoist line of protracted peoples war, in favour of a trotskist-influenced 
insurrectionary strategy.

In the mid-980s the CPP leadership developed the view that the Philippines was 
no longer semi-colonial and semi-feudal, but had become capitalist. The 
appropriate revolutionary strategy, they argued, was therefore city-based 
insurrection and all efforts were put into developing large regular armies near 
the cities, armed units in the cities and mounting mass mobilisations in the 
cities. 

The 1986 election boycott error was a result of that strategy, as by 
overestimating the strength of the working class, the party undervalued 
alliances with the middle class. The strategy also led to the party's isolation 
in the cities in the late 80s because workers and urban poor communities were 
not strong enough to withstand the military repression which followed armed 
partisan actions and incidents such as bus burning during mass mobilisations. 

The strategy also severely weakened the party because the emphasis on 
developing large armed units, ready for the expected insurrection, drained the 
party financially, led it to relate to its supporters increasingly only to 
raise funds, and led to undemocratic practices within the organisation. In 
particular the miliarised atmosphere was a breeding ground for the paranoia 
that led to more than 800 party members being executed in a bloody purge in 
Mindinao in 1985, when a military intelligence officer was discovered in the 
regional leadership there. 

In 1992 the Central Committee of the CPP launched an internal rectification 
campaign to analyse the errors of the 1980s and rebuild the party. The party 
rejected the view of the Philippines as capitalist and the insurrectionist 
line, seeing this reflecting the urban-based leadership at the time, in favour 
of the Maoist line that it had expanded rapidly with in the 1970s and early 80s.

In the course of the rectification campaign, much of the Manila-Rizal group, 
the largest regional unit of the party (about 20%) split away and now 
effectively operates as a separate party. It continues to see the Philippines 
as capitalist, but vacillates between an insurrectionist position and a 
no-strike accord with the government to facilitate the development of 
capitalism in the Philippines(!). It has developed close relations with 
overseas Trotskyist organisations.

The bulk of the CPP however has reaffirmed the Maoist line.The Party claims 
that around 95% of former membership levels have been recovered. The New 
Peoples Army has fronts in 60 of the 90 provinces, as strong as it was before 
the deviation in the 1980s. In regional areas, like Negros, the CPP has led 
mobilisations as large as 200,000 in 1994 and 1995.

In Manila, the Manila-Rizal group (with most of the former party members in the 
city) initially appeared to have more mass support than the CPP, and much of 
the international publicity about the split in the CPP occurred then, leading 
most people to overestimate the decline of the CPP. But the Manila-Rizal group 
does not have a clear ideology and seems to have lost its way.
Since 1994, CPP mobilisations in Manila (around 40,000) have been consistently 
much larger than those of the Manila-Rizal group.

So it is not at all true to say that the peoples war in the Philippines has 
been defeated. True there were major opportunities lost in the late 1980s, but 
the revolutionary forces are as strong as they were before the fall of Marcos, 
and a lot of valuable lessons have been learnt that will make similar mistakes 
unlikely again.



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