“The Party did not have a concept of civil society”: An interview with Joel Rocamora
Daniel Rudin
Platypus Review 179 | September 2025
On January 13 and 22, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society member Daniel Rudin interviewed Joel Rocamora, formerly a candidate member of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Rocamora was expelled after raising criticisms that were subsequently published in Breaking Through: The Struggle Within the Communist Party of the Philippines (1994).1 More recently, he has written Impossible Is Not So Easy: A Life in Politics (2019) and Retrieving the Past: A Memoir (2024).2 An edited transcript follows.
Daniel Rudin: How and when did you join the Left and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CCP)?3
Joel Rocamora: I had left the Philippines to learn the Indonesian language, before going to Cornell. Upon my return I began teaching at the University of the Philippines. I wanted to join a Leftist group, but people thought it a bad idea to let someone join with an American wife who was probably a CIA agent. I’m told that Joma Sison said this was foolish, and allowed me to join.4 We put out a journal called Progressive Review. I was jailed for three and a half months after martial law was declared. When I got out, I decided that I might as well do something to deserve getting jailed, so I joined the Party as a candidate member in 1973. In 1975 one of the members of my group got arrested, tortured, and revealed my membership, so I had to go underground. Then I left the country and was deployed by the Party to the West Coast in San Francisco.
DR: What were the main debates in the international cadre community at that time?
JR: In the 1980s in the U.S., the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP),5 was made up of Fil-Ams, Filipinos born and raised in the United States, who had joined the CPP. They were influenced by trends in the Left in the U.S., and they disagreed with the strict Maoist stance of the Party. This coincided with Gorbachev and the changes that he was introducing to the Soviet Union. The KDP created an intellectual journal called Line of March that operated for a few years. Their ambition was to refound the Communist Party of the USA. But they didn’t succeed.
DR: Did the developments in the Soviet Union affect what was happening in the Philippines?
JR: Attempts were made to contact elements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Chinese hadn’t supported the CPP since the 1970s, and there was an effort to break away from the Left part of the Sino-Soviet split.
Although I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the Party’s Maoism, I decided to stay. Walden Bello and I created a group called the Philippine Support Committee. In 1986 I was invited to attend a conference in Amsterdam on the Marcos dictatorship. Joma, who was in Holland at that time, encouraged me to stay. It also happened that I fell in love with a Dutch woman and moved to Utrecht in 1987.
I was never made a full member of the Party. I probably hold the record as the longest-standing candidate member who never got promoted. But in Utrecht, that didn’t bother people; I was fully part of the organization there called the Central Committee Members Abroad (CCMA). As I recall, I wrote a paper in response to the whole controversy over the founding of the National Democratic Front (NDF). In June 1990 the NDF held its founding congress and the document that it produced was disavowed by the Party. In my paper, I argued for accepting the NDF’s statement. Joma arranged discussions with the CCMA regarding my response. I remember it took about six hours to persuade me to move away from some of the conclusions that I had taken.
DR: In your book Breaking Through: The Struggle Within the Communist Party of the Philippines (1994) you mention two key figures in the NDF’s founding — Nathan Quimpo and Ed Dela Torre — who were supposed to consolidate the various non-party organizations into a united front.
JR: Prior to that, the NDF was really nothing more than a 10-point program. Attempts were made to create mass organizations, but it didn’t gel until it held a congress. I think Joma vetoed the NDF congress because at that stage he was fighting a battle with Nathan Quimpo and others, mostly from Mindanao, who were pushing a different strategy. The NDF became a victim of the battle between Joma and the people who supported him, and Nathan Quimpo, who defined the new paradigm and strategy better than anybody else — as a political-military (pol-mil) strategy.6
DR: Can you explain further what the pol-mil strategy was? Was Quimpo just copying from the Nicaraguan example?
JR: Quimpo was saying, pay attention to developments in the Party in urban areas. Shift the Party strategy so that at specific points more attention is given to urban mass movements instead of the emphasis on strict adherence to People’s War.
DR: What was your objective when setting up the journal Debate: Philippine Left Review,7 and how did it factor in the Reaffirm debate?
JR: By 1991 Nathan Quimpo, Ed Dela Torre, and I put out the journal Debate, which was okay with the Party. We even published an article by Joma in the first issue, but the following year Joma wrote his paper Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors.8 In December 1991, prior to publication, there was an internal discussion over Joma’s Reaffirm. Almost all the people at that meeting disagreed, except the few closest to Joma. Soon after, in January 1992, I left for the Philippines. When I arrived, Joma’s paper hadn’t officially reached the Philippines. I provided a copy to Party leaders who were in jail. I was even invited to go to a guerilla zone in March to defend my own response. But what was an open debate soon became an attack. By then, Debate had come out with its second or third issue, where I laid out a position that was opposed to Joma’s Reaffirm paper. In December Joma sent a fax to the Philippine Daily Inquirer openly attacking the people in the Mindanao-based leadership of the Party, and me.
DR: It sounds like orthodoxy wasn’t important to the Party until the Reaffirm dispute broke out. You even say in your book that the Left does not make distinctions between communists and national democrats, except when people are forced to do so. Why not?
JR: Probably because the CPP did not emphasize strict Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought in its education. Furthermore, what drew most members of the Party to the movement was not ideology but because it was the most effective anti-Marcos organization. When I wrote my critique of the Party — subsequently published as Breaking Through — I remember reading the Party program for the first time. Nobody really took it seriously. That’s why the stance of the NDF on any given issue probably represented the bulk of the Party’s sentiment.
DR: Did people take earlier foundational documents like Joma’s Philippine Society and Revolution (1968)9 more seriously than the Party program, which was written much later?
JR: I’ve been thinking about Joma because he died recently. He was a member of the old Party (PKP). He must have been aghast at its opportunism, which is why he turned to its opposite — Maoism. The CPP would not have existed if not for the old Party. The CPP was not pro-Soviet or pro-China. It’s simply because the PKP made deals with and supported Marcos. Maoism provided an ideological instrument and justification for Joma and his people moving away from the PKP, which had brilliant leaders but was exhausted.
Joma set himself up as the CPP’s theoretician with three specific documents: Philippine Society and Revolution — after D.N. Aidit’s Indonesian Society and Revolution (1957)10 — Our Urgent Tasks (1975),11 and Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War (1974).12 It’s almost like, up to 1978–79, those were the main things people paid attention to. But after that there were other ideas, whereupon Joma’s earlier writing ceased to be relevant. You are right to call them the foundational documents, but people thought, “the Party is set up; the foundations are laid; now let’s talk about something else.” Nathan Quimpo’s nom de guerre was Marty Villalobos. It’s not accidental that he called himself that, because of the Central American reference.
DR: What was the argument of Reaffirm?
JR: Reaffirm asserted the Maoist idea of the countryside surrounding the cities: armed-struggle life. But in fact, the Party had succeeded in open political struggle. It had six or seven members in the House of Representatives. They would have insisted that they’re not Party organizations, but the Makabayan bloc is a collection of open organizations at a time when a lot of the underground mass organizations were decimated.13 This was the direct opposite of the Reaffirm line.
DR: Its success was opposite to what the theory supposedly espoused. But wasn’t the Party beholden to factors beyond its control from the beginning? In Breaking Through you say that Marcos’s revolutionizing of Philippine society created the preconditions for the CPP’s growth. I assume you mean the structural changes, as well as the political shift that Marcos represented.
JR: The most important thing that Marcos presided over and followed through on by subsequent governments was the hyper-growth of the Philippine educational system, which created the social conditions for the Party, as well as for the Philippine economy at this stage, the export of warm bodies. The Philippines does not follow a standard Marxist analysis of manufacturing creating the conditions for the proletariat, pulling labor away from the countryside. For decades, the most important development in the Philippine economy has been the growth of the third sector, the service sector. The Philippine economy, as in other Third-World countries, is plugged into the world economy.
DR: Could you then say Marcos was more revolutionary than the CPP, which merely tailed after changes in capitalist politics?
JR: No. The Party succeeded and grew because it set itself up as the main force in direct opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. By contrast, it wasn’t until the later years that the elite opposition got its shit together. That the Party was underground was also the antithesis of Marcos’s dictatorial methods. When Marcos fell and Cory Aquino established elite democracy, the Party had a hard time dealing with that; it was one of the reasons for its failure. In 1985–86, the New People’s Army (NPA)14 was 25,000 strong. Starting in 1986, the Party ceased to grow. From then on, it’s been a steady decline. The military says it’s 2,000 now — 10% percent of its peak. There are facts, there are events, there are developments internal to the Party, but the main thing is, at this point the armed struggle is at its lowest point. And then you contrast that with the Makabayan bloc of parties, that in any election gathers up to 3.5 million votes.
The other major development and problem of the Party in the late 1980s and early 90s was the anti-infiltration campaigns. Instead of dealing with it as a counter-intelligence operation, which demands secrecy, they made it a mass movement. This led to, as the Party itself finally characterized it, kahibangan, craziness, paranoia. Party membership is based on trust, and trust in underground conditions, in a people’s war, means trusting comrades with your life. And you reverse that with the anti-infiltration campaign. You don’t trust your comrades because they might be infiltrators. That’s the problem.
DR: Bobby Garcia says there were limitations to the Party’s notion of people’s justice, that the tribunals that they set up to try the suspects were hardly impartial.15 Do you have an analysis of what the root problem of the peoples’ tribunals might have been?
JR: In my collection of articles Impossible is Not So Easy, I analyzed “people’s justice”— it is a lot of chaff down the elementary canal.
DR: There were no first principles or a notion of impartiality?
JR: No, only “the Party above all.” How can you have a people’s justice system with a statement like that? If you look at the experience of people’s liberation movements in Latin America, you’ll find that the favored organizational form is that of the national democratic front. The party was set up in Cuba after they won. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua. By contrast, in the Philippines and in neighboring countries such as Indonesia, the form was the party. The Chinese had a role in that, and maybe also Vietnam, which influenced the movements here. In contrast to the Asian Left and the Latin American way, the Philippines has had difficulties locating itself in Asia. The cultural influence of the Latin American experience may have unconsciously influenced the Party’s development.
DR: In what way?
JR: The Party did not pay attention to the NDF. And when it asserted itself, the Party cancelled the effort. But in the provinces, in Cordillera, in Mindanao, the effective organizational form was the Latin American form; it was the front. Even today, what is the Makabayan bloc of parties except a united front?
DR: In your book you mention that the line between the Party and the united front was blurred as the cadre began building alliances through the NDF in the 1980s. There’s a “dialectic of reform and revolution” — what they’re doing creates new potentials and possibilities, but they can’t figure out the strategy. From a Marxist perspective, were people in the NDF thinking about this problem of alliance-building potentially drawing away from the Marxist program of organizing an independent party for the working class?
JR: Certainly Joma was thinking of that. The so-called Latin Front — including Mindanao-based Party leaders like Quimpo — was a serious challenge to the Party.16 When Joma died, the military and its supporters said the hard line in the Party was gone, and that the Party would collapse. Actually, I think there are indications that Joma wanted these talks and a negotiated political settlement. In other words he was laying the groundwork for him to come home.17 Of course, that’s not said publicly, but the fact that he’s gone weakens the part of the movement that is pushing for peace, for political sentiment. And if peace can be achieved, it opens the way for a front-type organization. Too bad he’s dead — it’s sad. Personally, he was always fair to me except when he attacked me on the Reaffirm issue. But he was right; if you are going to have a Marxist-Leninist party you need control. What’s sad is the conditions for a successful Marxist-Leninist party do not exist anymore.
DR: You say that the NDF’s program is uncertain about economic issues, which reflects the difficulty of formulating a “national democratic alternative with the socialist perspective.” You also highlight the NDF’s perspective that democracy can only be achieved upon the victory of the national democratic revolution. In what sense is this a problem for the NDF and the CPP alike?
JR: I don’t know if I should say the NDF had difficulty formulating economic policy. There were whole books put out by people like Noel de Dios, Butch Montes — these were professional economists who were sympathetic to the National Democrat line. They laid out a fairly sophisticated set of ideas on how to run an economy. As to the second point, the theory is that genuine democracy is possible only when you have a class structure that is not dominated by a narrow elite. Presumably included is a kind of economic reform that deprives that elite of its economic power.
DR: Did the Party believe that democracy would be possible only after the establishment of a people’s republic?
JR: Yes, after the NPA defeats the Armed Forces of the Philippines. And that never happened. The Party has been on a “strategic defensive” for almost 35 years.
DR: Why couldn’t the CPP just revise its strategic perspective? Why was the Party unable to think, to assess what impact its actions were having, or to learn from its mistakes? What prevented it from doing so?
JR: The Party was preoccupied with the countryside and an armed struggle. And in the meantime, the urban mass movement was building up. Reaffirm targeted the Mindanao-based Party leaders because they were the ones pushing for what Nathan Quimpo calls “combined political new theory.” Joma didn’t think that made sense. Having been in Holland since 1987, he wasn’t chairman of the Party, but he was given two crucial tasks: ideology and peace negotiations. I suppose if Joma had agreed with Nathan, he would have won the tide.
DR: Insofar as the Party failed to define the alternative society, it was left up to the NDF to offer its own version. If the line between the NDF and CPP had become blurry, what were the consequences?
JR: Because the CPP believed that this stage of the revolution is not a socialist stage, but a national democratic stage, it lacked a more precise definition of what the national democratic society, much less a socialist society, would look like. The biggest problem was the belief that nothing significant could be achieved without the success of people’s war. It’s interesting that national democratic organizations like Makibaka, and for the Montañosa people, the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), all defined what an alternative society would be, but when somebody attempted to put these together in a congress, the Party said no.18 The congress was held, they produced a document, and Joma said “no, that’s not allowed.”
DR: You say that the NDF had what they called “organs of political power,” which you describe as “shadow government.” Does the idea of a shadow government presuppose that the function of the government is not debate or public reason?
JR: The idea of a shadow government comes about under conditions of warfare. My understanding of the theory is you organize in small groups, and then when you’ve reached a level of organization in the barrio such that you’ve won the support of the people, that’s when you set up a shadow government. But a shadow government is a tactic; it’s a way of winning support under conditions of warfare.
DR: In The Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx says revolutions in the periphery can’t put into question bourgeois life conditions but can only touch upon their conditions. In other words, revolutions must happen in the core capitalist countries. Did anyone in the Philippines see the failure of the Left as having to do with the limited national scope and perspective of the Party?
JR: No. The successes of the Party in Samar, Mindanao, and Negros Island led them to think that it was national in scope. And the scope of political action, the organizational work, was also national.
DR: How can the revolution be under the leadership of the proletariat if what the party identifies as the proletariat does not advocate socialism, internationally, according to Marx?
JR: Come on — you are raising details. For Maoism, the party is based on the alliance of the peasant and the proletariat. That’s why the program is a national program. In reality, the Party depended on fictions. One of the fictions was that the proletariat determined policies of the Party. There was no such proletariat — it was petit-bourgeois, like Joma. In fact, most of the other leaders of the Party were also bourgeois. They considered themselves Maoist not only because they wanted the support of the Chinese government, but because the Chinese Revolution faced the same problem — to have a proletarian party determine policy in a society that is not proletarianized.
DR: Why did the CPP see the elections as an illusion of democracy?
JR: Because elections are dominated by the oligarchy, because money-politics controls elections. But that doesn’t mean that you boycott those elections — as the Party discovered to its dismay. Elections offer avenues of reform. Unfortunately the Right-wing populists have been better at occupying those spaces.
DR: You contrast the Party’s people’s-war approach towards national democracy with creating “popular institutions of control and organizations of popular initiative and will,” which strengthen civil society. Is the safeguarding of civil society alone an adequate program for the Left?
JR: The Party did not have a concept of civil society because the idea of civil society conjures images of popular organizations that are independent from parties and have the capacities to act independently. The Party did not recognize the relevance of organizations outside of its control.
DR: Couldn’t a party with voluntary membership be considered a civil-society organization? Wouldn’t it be outside the sphere of the state?
JR: No. The idea of civil society is outside of the state. Civil society’s institutions have political power of action to influence the state, but are outside of the state’s control. The Party is not outside the sphere of the state because it wants to control the state. Whereas civil society does not want to control the state; it wants to be independent and to influence what the state does.
DR: Does the Maoist preoccupation with inequality and hierarchy express a suspicion of intellectuals, that they might hold within themselves the germ of reproducing capitalism under conditions of socialist construction?
JR: I’m not sure that one could say the Party did not trust intellectuals, because from the 1970s through the first half of the 80s the relevant intellectuals were National Democrats, including — although one would think not — economists. In my case, I didn’t feel like I was mistrusted. I didn’t get promoted to full membership, but nobody ever raised the issue.
DR: Some, like Jojo Abinales, have compared the Party to the Church. Why?
JR: The Communist Party came up with rules on courtship and marriage. It hewed closely to the Catholic Church on these things; the Party was pretty much like a religious order. When you joined, you were deprived of a future, a career, a family — being a member was like being a Franciscan monk, only you didn’t wear a habit. Premarital or extramarital sex was prohibited, the attitude towards women was backwards. But it advanced women’s liberation in that women could initiate divorce, and courtship. That’s as far as it went.
DR: Towards the end of Breaking Through you suggest that a progressive movement can prevent leaders from resorting to autocratic government. But isn’t a strong state needed to ensure, as Paul Hutchcroft, following Max Weber, argued, the rationalization of the state for capitalism to function?
JR: No. I still believe that we need a strong state that is capable of not being manipulated by the oligarchy. The only way that can exist is a social democratic government that has the backing of society and works against the control of the oligarchy. While it is crucial for the Party to fight against autocracy, it is also crucial for it to work for social reform, which will take away the oligarchy’s power, or at least chip away at it. Things like land reform, etc.
DR: You write how on the one hand, economic justice is required to change undemocratic power relations. On the other hand, democracy itself reflects the reality where there is no such equality. This seems to describe the paradox of democracy: power is needed to pursue a redistributionist program, yet the anti-Marcos united front under Cory Aquino became internally divided between the popular organizations and the elite families. Why was it expected that a redistributionist program could be carried out against the wishes of the coalition, as it were?
JR: Cory initially made concessions to the Party in her appointments to the cabinet in lower positions, but they didn’t last long. The Party caved and did a critique of the boycott strategy, agreeing to “critical collaboration” with the Cory Aquino government, but that ended quickly, after not even a year.
Any kind of redistributive justice would have to start with land reform. I don’t know if Cory knew it, but even before she decided to leave it to the House of Representatives, the whole idea of land reform was destroyed with the Mendiola Massacre.19 The people who were killed there were peasants. The coup attempts against Cory failed, but they succeeded in reversing the thrust of the government in opposing land reform, as well as the Party. In the second Aquino cabinet, under Cory’s son Nonoy, I remember a discussion about land reform.20 Nonoy was hoping for something that would enable the Aquino-Cojuangco families to retain their Hacienda Luisita in some form.21 And I must give it to him that he changed his mind because the whole Akbayan22 leadership told him that was not possible, and the man he appointed as secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform, Gil de los Reyes, also told him that.
DR: In your book you talk about the stagnation and decline of the Party under Cory Aquino and you bring up the popular democrats who say the Party got anti-fascism wrong; the theory didn’t conform to the new historical development of fascism. How is repurposing anti-fascism a more timely framework than the Maoist anti-fascism, which would date back to the 1930s Popular Front?
JR: The pop-dems represented the open form of united-front politics. They wanted to persuade the Party to use that form, but they failed and were kicked out. Ironically, the pop-dem idea of the united front has taken shape in the Makabayan bloc.
DR: Were the pop-dems working with the Aquino administration at all?
JR: They weren’t, because Ed Dela Torre was in Europe, and Boy Morales was busy with the Rural Reconstruction Movement. They went into the government in a big way under Joseph Estrada — he used Morales and Dela Torre to build his campaign machinery, which got him elected.
DR: I assume that they then completely disavowed their former idea of anti-fascism? If they’re working directly with the President, how could they be engaged in anti-fascist politics?
JR: They didn’t ask themselves that question.
DR: In closing: according to Dodong Nemenzo, the only contribution that Filipino Marxists made was in the field of military tactics. Is this fair?
JR: That’s not fair. Joma’s foundational documents are a contribution, and so are the criticisms. Nathan Quimpo’s contributions are also significant. |P
Transcribed by Michael McClelland and Daniel Rudin
1 Joel Rocamora, Breaking Through: The Struggle Within the Communist Party of the Philippines (Pasig City: Anvil, 1994).
2 Both published by Bughaw in Quezon City.
3 The Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Kommunista ng Pilipinas) split in 1968 from the party of the same name, Partido Kommunista ng Pilipinas, which was founded in 1930, and which now distinguishes itself by adding the “-1930” suffix to its name. We will abbreviate the party founded in 1930 as “PKP,” and the party formed in 1968 as “CPP.”
4 Joma Sison (the nickname for Jose Maria Sison) was the founder of the CPP.
5 Known as the Union of Democratic Filipinos in English, it was active in the U.S. from 1973 to 86, not to be confused with the similarly named Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino, which is a nationalist party in the Philippines, founded in 2018.
6 See also Daniel Rudin, “Deep underground in the Philippines: An interview with Nathan Quimpo,” Platypus Review 147 (June 2022), <https://platypus1917.org/2022/05/31/deep-underground-in-the-philippines-an-interview-with-nathan-quimpo/>.
7 The journal has since been digitized at <https://twsc.upd.edu.ph/debate-philippine-left-review/>.
8 Armando Liwanag (Jose Maria Sison), Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Carry the Revolution Forward (1991), <https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/liwanag/1991/reaffirm.htm>.
9 Amado Guerrero (Jose Maria Sison), Philippine Society and Revolution (1968), <https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/guerrero/1970/psr.htm>.
10 D.N. Aidit, Indonesian Society and Revolution (Basic Problems of the Indonesian Revolution) (1957), <https://www.marxists.org/history/indonesia/1957-IndonesianSociety.htm>.
11 Amado Guerrero (Jose Maria Sison), Our Urgent Tasks (1975), <https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/guerrero/1975/urgent-tasks.htm>.
12 Simoun Riple (Jose Maria Sison), Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War (1974), <https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/riple/1975/specific-characteristics.htm>.
13 Makabayan is a block of Left parties asserting the CPP’s Maoist line.
14 The NPA is the armed wing of the CPP.
15 See Robert Francis B. Garcia, To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated its Own(Pasig City: Anvil, 2001), <https://libcom.org/article/suffer-thy-comrades-how-revolution-decimated-its-own-robert-francis-b-garcia>.
16 By “Latin Front,” Rocamora means the Latin American conception of the united front, such as in Nicaragua, wherein civil-society organizations worked alongside the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), rather than directly under its control.
17 Sison had been living in exile in the Netherlands since 1987.
18 The CPLA was an organization set up by the people in the North, the Igarots, while Makibaka was a women’s organization.
19 The Mendiola Massacre occurred during a 1987 farmers’ protest in which 13 were killed. It is usually seen as the end of efforts to reform the Aquino administration in a progressive direction.
20 Rocamora here refers to the administration of Nonoy Aquino (Cory Aquino’s son), from 2012 to 2016, where he served as the Secretary of the National Anti-Poverty Commission.
21 The Hacienda Luisita is a large sugar plantation in the province of Tarlac. It was acquired by the family of José Cojuangco in the 1950s.
22 Akbayan is a progressive, non-Maoist party that typically votes with the Liberal Party.
