Philippine Society and Revolution By Amado Guerrero [Jose Maria Sison] [July 30, 1970] PHILIPPINE SOCIETY AND REVOLUTION “Integrating Marxist-Leninist theory with Philippine practice is a two-way process. We do not merely take advantage of the victories achieved abroad so that we may succeed in our own revolution. But we also hope to add our own victory to those of others and make some worthwhile contribution to the advancement of Marxism-Leninism and the world proletarian revolution so that in the end mankind will be freed from the scourge of imperialism and enter the era of communism. — Amado Guerrero PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION This edition of Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution includes, in addition to his Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War, the long essay entitled Our Urgent Tasks which was prepared by him for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Our Urgent Tasks first appeared in the first issue of the Party’s theoretical publication, Rebolusyon (Revolution), on July 1, 1976. If Philippine Society and Revolution, with its class analysis of Philippine history, provided the foundations for a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Philippine society and its basis in the past; and if Specific Characteristics of our People’s War is a brilliant contribution to the understanding of the particularities of the Philippine revolution and therefore of great significance in the development of the strategy and tactics suited to the waging of a revolutionary war in an archipelagic country like the Philippines, Our Urgent Tasks identifies the specific tasks of Filipino revolutionaries in overthrowing the US-Marcos dictatorship — the most violent expression of neo-colonial rule — towards the realization of the people’s democratic revolution and the achievement of socialism. These three works, being the most clearly indicative of the Philippine revolutionary leadership’s continuing efforts to grasp the particularities of the Philippine revolution, therefore belong together. 1 Our Urgent Tasks sums up the vital lessons of the Philippine revolutionary experience under conditions of fascist repression by the US-Marcos dictatorship, and identifies seven imperatives to win the life and death struggle against it. These are: 1. To carry forward the anti-fascist, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist movement by directing the main blow against the US-Marcos dictatorship as the main force of the armed counterrevolution against the Filipino people; 2. To further strengthen the Party and to rectify errors so that it may continue to lead the Philippine revolution and keep it on the correct course; 3. To build the revolutionary mass movement in the countryside by arousing and organizing the peasant masses and carrying out the agrarian revolution; 4. To strengthen the people’s army and carry forward the armed struggle as the main form of the Filipino people’s struggle against reaction; 5. To build the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist revolutionary mass movement in the cities in support of the anti-feudal movement in the countryside; 6. To realize a broad anti-fascist, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist united front which will win over the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie to the ranks of the basic alliance of workers and peasants; and 7. To relate the Philippine revolution to the world revolution in recognition of the internationalist character of the struggle of the Filipino people and proletariat. These tasks have been carried out by Party members since Our Urgent Tasks was issued. They have been carried out with success primarily because Party members have taken to heart the need to study the fluid situation in Philippine society, the particularities of the needs, tendencies, and objective standpoints of its various classes and sectors, the appropriate strategy and tactics called for in city and countryside, in each community, district and village, and among different sectors and classes. Indeed the most striking thing about Our Urgent Tasks is its detailed specificity, its being a brilliant example — as practice has borne out in the last eight years — of the need to constantly undertake concrete analyses of concrete conditions. This Marxist-Leninist principle is at the heart of the survival and growth of the Filipino revolutionary forces even in conditions of the most brutal repression. It is a principle already well-understood and practised — and it is a principle Our Urgent Tasks firmly establishes as fundamental to the waging of revolution. PREFACE It is with great pride that the International Association of Filipino Patriots offers this third edition of Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution and the first edition of his Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War. Without doubt, these are two towering theoretical works to emerge from the current revolutionary struggle in the Philippines. Since the significance of these two works may not be immediately evident to the reader it would be worthwhile to situate them in the political and intellectual history of the ongoing national- democratic movement. Hopefully, these introductory notes will serve this purpose. 2 The last decade has witnessed the swift transformation of the Philippine political arena. On the one side, U.S. imperialism and the local ruling class, in response to sharpening social contradictions, have banished any pretense of democratic rule and foisted direct fascist control on the restive masses in the form of the Marcos martial-law dictatorship. On the other side, a national democratic people’s movement has rapidly and steadily grown in strength, so that today, at the very height of the Filipino people’s oppression by U.S.-backed repression, they are also closer to national liberation than at any other point in their recent history. The contemporary national-democratic movement is successfully mobilizing the latent revolutionary energy of the Filipino masses, and a major part of the explanation is undoubtedly that it rests on a firm foundation of theory. Thus, while the movement arose on the material basis of class exploitation, of the masses’ spontaneously felt experiences of oppression, it was also guided from the beginning by the conviction that in order to succeed, it had to get beyond spontaneity. For Philippine history is marked by hundreds of spontaneous revolts against oppressive classes and authorities — by uprisings of the people against foreign invaders, peasants against landlords, workers against capitalists. But no matter how heroic, these insurrections often ended tragically, in bloody massacres by vengeful imperialists and counterrevolutionaries. The first break with spontaneity came with the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1930. But it was neither complete nor thoroughgoing. For the old Party proved incapable of charting the strategic direction of the Philippine Revolution. This poverty of theory reduced the mass movement to making merely tactical responses to the strategic counterrevolutionary moves of the imperialists and the local ruling class. “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” This Leninist dictum was the painful lesson absorbed by the leaders of the present day national-democratic movement who grew up literally groping for a revolutionary alternative in the fifties and early sixties — the dark age of the Philippine Left, when a combination of strategic confusion, organizational degeneration, and counterrevolutionary repression had practically dismantled the people’s movement. The fundamental strategic line of fighting for national democracy as the first stage in the longer-term struggle for socialism had still to be firmly grasped by the Philippine Left, almost fifteen years after the 1949 victory of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao had overwhelmingly reaffirmed the universal validity of Lenin’s revolutionary strategy for semicolonial, semifeudal societies. The forging of the strategic line in the mid-sixties was not accomplished in an academic setting but in the thick of day-to-day political struggle, not only against the reactionary classes and the U.S. Embassy but also opportunists of every shape and color — reformist, Christian Socialist, Social Democratic, and, of course, revisionist — who were scrambling to exploit the irrepressible mass discontent cracking the McCarthyite political and cultural superstructure in the early sixties. Political and theoretical contention was, moreover, accompanied by mass organizing. With the founding of Kabataang Makabayan (KM, or Nationalist Youth) in November 1964 by Jose Maria Sison, national democracy began for the first time to be translated into a material, organized force. Launching a wide range of agitational activities, from university 3 teach-ins to militant demonstrations at the presidential palace and U.S. Embassy, KM spearheaded the radicalization of thousands of students and youth in the mid-sixties and provided a fertile training ground for people who would later be the mature leading cadres of the National Democratic Front and the anti-fascist resistance. Struggle for National Democracy The first major theoretical document to issue from the national-democratic movement, Jose Maria Sison’s Struggle for National Democracy (1967), belonged to this phase of the revolutionary movement — the period of mass struggle to forge the fundamental political line of the Philippine Revolution. Sison, a young revolutionary intellectual, led its struggle for political clarification.