The Left in the Philippines: A century of counterrevolution

Daniel Rudin

Platypus Review 172 | December 2024 – January 2025

On May 4, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society chapters at UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz hosted an introductory workshop on the Philippines and the Left, which included this teach-in by member Daniel Rudin. An edited, revised version follows.^[1]

MARX’S “THESES ON FEUERBACH” (1845) states that while hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.^[2] The Philippine Left was able to do so but not according to plan. As a colony of the United States, the Philippines was positioned to extend the socialist movement into Asia. Instead, both the American and Philippine Left hypostatized “self-determination” well past the ripeness for world revolution that Lenin hoped for, into the rottenness of postcolonial, then neoliberal “independence.” In so doing, their politics remained progressive, a sort of reformism with guns.^[3]

This essay begins with Social Democracy’s revolution and the post-Bolshevik or Old Left’s (1923–40) regression, with which the New Left (1968–69) grappled and eventually succumbed.^[4] It then shows how by the 1990s the Left’s accumulated failures were expressed through an antinomy between anti-imperialism and anti-fascism, leaving it in a crippled, post-political state. It concludes by relating the Leninist party in the democratic revolution to the regression that obtains today.

Social Democracy: progress and regress

The 20^th century’s counterrevolutionary arc can be traced to a year marked by the Left’s failure — 1923. The Communist Party’s “German October” was crushed, Lenin entered his final convalescence, and Stalin consolidated control. The same year, the Communist Party of America formally dissolved, becoming the Workers Party of America. Meanwhile, the Philippines’ own Partido Obrero (Workers Party) did nothing in the face of the “campaign for independence [which] demanded national unity.”^[5] The events of 1923 were returned with compound interest: a botched 1925–27 Chinese Revolution, an ultra-Left turn adopted in 1930 by the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas^[6] (PKP), and the latter’s ill-fated rebellion of the 1940s–50s.

Post-Bolshevik Marxism’s failures are associated with its philosophy of history. Likened by Walter Benjamin to a religion, dialectical materialism was ostensibly progressive, yet had regressed below Social Democracy’s theoretical disputes. The Old Left’s regression became a lacuna for the New Left, whose dismissal of Second International thinkers like Karl Kautsky “impoverished Marxism.”^[7] Joma Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), evinced this problem in mistaking Kautsky for a revisionist, rather than the orthodox Marxist that he was.^[8]

Kautsky and his cohort of Second International Marxists had little influence over the Philippines, which was still a rural backwater when the Social Democratic movement emerged from the discontents and potentials of the late 19^th century. The dynamism of this Belle Époque — which Mark Twain sardonically called the Gilded Age — was also a crisis in liberalism driven by workers demanding their right to labor. Technologically, the struggle led to the rationalization of production — automation replaced labor with machinery and consolidated markets into monopolies. As the workers’ movement swelled Marxian parties, a broader political crisis arose, necessitating state management and imperialist expansion — including America’s conquest of the Philippines.

The success of Social Democracy led Eduard Bernstein to announce that the goal (revolution) was nothing, the movement everything. Looking to England’s trade unionism, he argued that “the capitalist interests could be subordinated to a political majority” through the working class’s struggle for socialism within liberal democracy.^[9] Rosa Luxemburg countered that socialism heightened capitalism’s contradictions, while workers’ mass organizations exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, democracy’s crisis. Progress was also regressive since origin was the goal.^[10] By this she meant that the conditions of revolution within democracy confronted by Marx in 1848 had been successfully reproduced by Marxist mass parties. They had, in other words, advanced through defeat.

As predicted, reform and revolution commingled in a dialectic that by 1914 split the global workers’ movement into warring camps. In 1917, her comrade Lenin saw the split as a precondition for revolution. Germany followed suit one year later. The Social Democratic Party of Germany fractured, leading Luxemburg to warn that the emerging Communist Party had “unlearned how to learn” — and would, therefore, fail to master a transformed field of struggle.^[11] Her murder inaugurated a static expanse of history where the Left unwittingly fixated on the past — what Lukács called reification. Benjamin analogized this condition to a waiting room in which the Left was not only unable to learn from experience but actively repressed it.^[12]

The Old Left bequeathed to the New Left two stunted ideologies — anti-imperialism and anti-fascism — that buried Social Democracy’s global ambition in the narrowness of national revolution and resistance. For Sison, America was an empire, “the Number One enemy of the world’s peoples.”^[13] By contrast, Lenin believed that America was the country where “freedom . . . is most complete,” a condition which left bourgeois reformism in advance of socialism.^[14] In the 1912 election, Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party had to compete with two liberal alternatives: Republican Party “big-capitalist liberalism” and Democratic Party “middle-class conservatism.”^[15] Teddy Roosevelt, running on the Progressive Party ticket, outmaneuvered and assimilated planks from Debs’s platform, splitting the vote and handing the victory to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The latter argued that freedom’s meaning had changed, requiring a shift from the Founding Fathers’ notion of checks and balances. His “New Freedom” meant politically impartial and rational government administration in the service of progress. The slogan allowed him to cater to the liberal attitudes of trade unionists, while supporting another important constituency, the Anti-Imperialist League, in its demands for liberating the Philippines from American aggression.

Imperialism and progressivism were bound up in the Philippines, which, if it had not been colonized, would have “fractured into three weak, caudillo-ridden states.”^[16] By making anti-imperialism the basis for his 1900 campaign, William Jennings Bryan led the Populists into the Democratic Party and inspired Emilio Aguinaldo to harass American troops — in order to influence the American elections. The 1916 Jones Act — for whose passage Bryan, then Secretary of State, congratulated the Anti-Imperialist League — was a means of extending the war between the Democrats and Republicans abroad. It “accelerated the Filipinization of the civil service” as well as the colonial government’s growing involvement in industry and banking.^[17]

Another Anti-Imperialist League leader, Samuel Gompers, established affiliated (and segregated) unions in the Philippines with Governor Taft’s benediction.^[18] According to Gompers, the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas^[19] (COF), formed in 1913, “naturally turned to the [American Federation of Labor (AFL)]” for help in drafting its constitution and program.^[20] Gompers, a self-trained utopian socialist, believed himself to be in service of a “new civilization, which is the international brotherhood of man.”^[21] It was in light of this ideal, as well as nominal protection for the AFL from antitrust injunctions, that he became a member of Wilson’s wartime Council of National Defense, guaranteeing labor peace. Just weeks after the 1917 Revolution, Wilson echoed Gompers in front of the AFL’s national convention. Against the socialist “mob spirit” he argued for another democratic project — in his words, “to release the spirits of the world from bondage.”^[22] Yet bondage, rather than peace, was in store for thousands of socialists like Eugene Debs who were thrown into prison after police raids carried out by Wilson’s Department of Justice.

While Wilson sought to subordinate big business to the authority of a progressive administration under the guise of restoring petit-bourgeois autonomy, Debs considered the Democratic Party to represent “the wail and cry of the perishing middle class.”^[23] In this, he followed Lenin who recognized the monopolies as a “higher socio-economic order,” the potential and possibility for communism.^[24] While 1917 presented the world with peace on the basis of either Lenin or Wilson’s vision, it was the latter’s call for national self-determination that put the question of Philippine independence, rather than socialism, squarely on the agenda.^[25]

However, the progressives’ agenda was stymied by the Republican sweep of the 1920 elections. Contrary to Wilson’s claims that “the end was almost in sight,” the Republican-backed Woods-Forbes mission found Filipinization had damaged the civil service, and that the government’s banking and commercial ventures resulted in “responsibility without authority.” Leonard Wood — companion of Roosevelt, famous for both abolishing slavery in the country and authorizing the Bud Dajo massacre (1906) — became the governor and tapped the brakes on independence.

Old Left: 1923–40

Along with Wilson’s collapsed government came a thaw in the Red Scare, creating space for two different Communist Parties of America to emerge from clandestine existence. The Comintern^[26] forced a merger, and an above-ground organization, the Workers Party of America, was established. In 1924 they sent Alfred Wagenknecht to the Philippines to organize the Comintern’s forthcoming labor conference in Canton. One Filipino delegate that he had rounded up later admitted, “We were pro-Russian only to the extent that if America would not grant independence to the Philippines, Russia’s help would be sought.”^[27] The labor leaders were, according to Wagenknecht, “the usual American Federation of Labor type,” opposed to Bolshevism, engaged in scabbing against rival unions, and discriminatory against Chinese workers.^[28] Worse, they were “wedded to the Nacionalista Party and a campaign for independence that was opportunistic, compromised, and steeped in ‘a morass of bourgeois ideology.’”^[29]

Despite Wagenknecht’s contempt, the communists attempted to instrumentalize nationalism. Dormant for two years, the Partido Obrero was reactivated in 1924 with the eventual aim of forming “both a communist party and a ‘national-revolutionary’ party.” Historian Ken Fuller describes the revolutionary strategy as a coalition between communists and nationalists. After fighting for independence in the first stage, a second would be reached where “the differences within the nationalist coalition . . . sharpen, leading to the struggle to bring about the socialist stage of the revolutionary process.” ^[30]

This stage theory of revolution was confounded, however, not only by its base in craft unionism, but, more importantly, by party politics. The prevailing political balance was upended with the 1924 Fairfield Bill, in which the American Congress proposed the Philippines transition to Commonwealth status, then full autonomy. But the ruling Nacionalista Party^[31] was unprepared to actually inherit power. Manuel Quezon, head of the colonial administration, struck a secret deal with Washington to delay independence — something discovered by the opposition Democrata Party’s^[32] delegate, Claro Recto, and revealed to great public scandal.

Ironically, the controversy “played a crucial role in bringing the [Partido Obrero] properly to life.”^[33] Many Nacionalistas joined, infusing the Party with contradictory agendas.^[34] Problems were compounded after Chinese workers radicalized by the 1925–27 Chinese Revolution were denied entry to the COF. In 1929 the Partido Obrero made a bid for industrial restructuring and “radicalizing” the labor congress — a measure opposed by Nacionalista and Democrata delegates. This precipitated a split, with the communists in a rump position when they formally founded the PKP in 1930.^[35]

The Old Left’s failure is received in the present via New Left historians like Ken Fuller. His three-volume history of the Philippine Left maintained that the Comintern’s 1928 shift to opposing “social fascism” stopped the PKP from forming an anti-imperialist front. By contrast, social historian Francisco Nemenzo argued that the Party’s principles were sound until 1938, when “Chinese and American Comintern” agents forced a merger with the millenarian, peasant-based Socialist Party of the Philippines.^[36] Nemenzo traced the communists’ botched uprising a decade later to the merger, which violated the “cardinal principle of Leninism” — that the party be non-identical to the mass organization. Petit-bourgeois radicalism was but one expression of “a syndrome — an inventory of symptoms” that persisted on the New Left. Others were dogmatism, “symbolic gestures,” and “quotation mongering [which] becomes counterproductive as the revolutionary process ascends to higher stages, inducing sudden shifts in the adversary’s responses.”^[37]

By arguing that the syndrome could only be overcome by a dialectical process of open debate, Nemenzo came close to the concept of regression — albeit without abandoning the notion of historical progress. But was post-Bolshevik Marxism truly capable of advance? During the so-called Third Period, capitalist collapse was believed imminent, the Nazis were considered temporary anti-imperialist allies, and the Social Democrats “social fascists.” Following suit, the Philippine communists stigmatized their former nationalist allies as fascist and formed an alliance with actual pro-Japanese fascists intent on replacing American hegemony with an “Asia for Asians.”^[38]

However, after Hitler’s 1933 coup the Comintern called for a Popular Front against fascism. Fearing that the Americans would dump the Philippines to appease Japan, and largely under the guidance of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) — by then backing the Roosevelt administration — the PKP reoriented to an anti-fascism that was “Anti-Japanese Above All.”^[39] Their 1938 platform, ”Independence, Democracy and Peace,” dropped anti-imperialist demands to support Quezon’s Commonwealth government.^[40] After mounting a resistance movement during the Second World War, the PKP again veered back towards opposing the nationalist bourgeoisie. This, at least, was the ideological gloss given to the Huk rebellion, a revolt of disenfranchised farmers and war veterans.^[41] The Sergio Osmeña regime, installed as Quezon’s successor by the Americans, was propped up, the rebellion quelled, and the PKP utterly decimated.

The periodic alteration of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism had no clear historical trajectory of advancing to higher stages (as Nemenzo claims); one followed the other at historical junctures of unclear cause and from failed political judgment. They described zigzags, historical circumstances for which the Left’s ideology provided a fig leaf of justification. Strategy was reduced to tactics; anti-fascism was layered on top of anti-imperialism as debris covering up earlier mistakes. The Left made history, but not in the manner of its own choosing. In justifying its politics through national revolution, Stalinist parties like the PKP led not to socialism but developmental state formation and national economies of scale, paving the way for the Third World’s integration into a broader Fordist regime of accumulation.^[42]

New Left to the fall of Communism: 1968–89

Historian Joseph Scalice considers the Philippine Old Left’s failure a tragedy, and the New Left’s a farce. He documents how in the 1960s the PKP was reconstituted, only to ally with Ferdinand Marcos on an anti-imperialist basis.^[43] If the Old Left had both a negative (through its rebellion and 1950s defeat) and positive (by playing junior partner to Marcos) role in the constitution of the Philippine post-war nation-state, this process was repeated by the New Left. Leaders of the PKP revitalized the Party by recruiting “self-taught Marxists” at the University of the Philippines — including Nemenzo and the future founder of the CPP, Sison. Yet their politicization was not through Communism but rather Claro Recto’s nationalist crusade.

Recto, having exposed the Nacionalistas’ betrayal during the 1924 Fairfield fiasco, emerged as the most militant nationalist during the Philippines’ post-war boom. He famously called for national industrial development: “by Filipino capitalists, and not simply the prevention of industrialization by foreign capitalists; exploitation of our natural resources by Filipino capital; development and strengthening of Filipino capitalism, not of a foreign capitalism; increase of the national income, but not allowing it to go mostly for the benefit of non-Filipinos.”^[44]

Recto here describes Fordism — which “simply means the need for rationalized state planning.”^[45] His crusade was part of a broader post-war movement to establish Fordist nation-states in the former colonies. Postcolonialism, while inspired by the American Civil Rights Movement, itself exemplified the extent to which the global order anchored by the New Deal coalition was unraveling. On the heels of civil unrest including the anti-war movement, the Black Power turn, the strike wave of the late 1960s and the 1968 Prague Spring, the Filipino New Left replicated, “somewhat belatedly, their counterparts in France, Japan, and the United States.”^[46] Filipino students were also politicized by “the Cuban Revolution . . . the deepening of the US involvement in Vietnam, the leftward swing of Sukarno’s government in Indonesia, and the 1966 Chinese Cultural Revolution.”^[47]

The contours of 1960s radicalism were largely defined by a split within the global communist movement. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, the Soviets and the Chinese accused one another of revisionism — a dispute that rippled out to parties in other countries. At that time the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), with whom the PKP was developing ties, was in the orbit of Beijing. After the PKI’s failed coup and the resultant 1965 massacre, the PKP was pushed into the arms of Moscow — with whom Marcos had restored diplomatic relations. Meanwhile, Sison’s faction aligned, ideologically and politically, with Beijing. His “national democracy,” extensively borrowing from Mao’s “new democracy,” argued that imperialism blocked the flowering of civil society that would be achieved “only after national sovereignty has been fully secured and incorporated into a genuinely free national state.”^[48]

Sison’s faction was expelled in 1967. Nemenzo — whose own Marxist-Leninist group was violently suppressed — believed that the Maoists were able to demarcate their line of march through a critique of the PKP. ^[49] The CPP opposed America, the comprador bourgeoisie, and the landlord class through anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and anti-bureaucratic capitalism. In so doing, they claimed to stitch together the radicalism of three historical stages: the 1896 Revolution (itself supposedly contiguous with the French Revolution), the resistance during the Philippine–American War,^[50] and Maoist revolution. This complex of “isms” is better encapsulated as “anti-fascism,” since opposition to Marcos distinguished the CPP from the PKP.

For Sison, the Philippine revolution possessed three magic weapons: the party, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF),^[51] and the New People’s Army (NPA).^[52] The NDF was viewed as a shield for the Party and the NPA which was to surround the city from the countryside. Their “prolonged people’s war” was to pass from strategic defensive to stalemate, and then an offensive stage. The latter needed a standing army with artillery, a strategy China foreswore after winding down the Cultural Revolution.^[53] The guerilla force had to instead rely on its Operation Agos (Operation Arms), ambushing and massacring regular troops in order to steal their high-powered rifles.

The CPP’s theory symptomized an undigested crisis in the global New Left, which crested in 1968. Much like the radicals in the Socialist Party of America failed to grasp the emergence of Fordism forty years prior, the New Left’s largest American organization, the Students for a Democratic Society, was blindsided by a crisis in the New Deal coalition.^[54] Its disorientation metastasized into a politics of defeat in the Maoist-inspired 1970s Weather Underground. Similarly, Nixon’s spectacular normalization of relations with China caught the Philippine Left by surprise. The CPP’s “line of march” was a cipher for the Cultural Revolution, itself a by-product of Chinese inter-bureaucratic dispute. As the latter wound down, the CPP was neglected and militarily wiped out, but staged a comeback as the Marcosian state began to petrify. The high-Fordist developmentalism mirrored in Sison’s national democracy began to waver like a dissipating mirage. Reflecting a wider crisis that would soon sweep away rotten communist regimes and rigidified postcolonial states alike, the Maoists fractured in the 1980s.

At the beginning of the split, Nemenzo warned that, just like the Socialist Party of the Philippines merger three decades prior, the CPP’s popular front blurred the boundaries between party and mass organization. If the Old Left’s alliance with Marcos prioritized anti-imperialism, the New Left emphasized anti-fascist resistance. Maoism was a species of anti-fascism, that is, opposition to Japanese imperialism. Unlike China during its war against Japan, the civil war in the Philippines was largely contained to the southern island of Mindanao. Even after the 1972 declaration of martial law the government generally operated within the bounds of legitimacy. Civil society, while greatly curtailed, continued to exist, as evidenced by clerical labor organizing and the student movement, itself the progeny of the Marcosian university system. By 1981, martial law was lifted, allowing a greater degree of debate and protest — giving birth to a burgeoning anti-Marcos alliance led by the Catholic Church, the Liberals,^[55] social democrats, and the CPP’s NDF.

In practice, the growth engendered by the anti-fascist movement raised questions about the CPP’s adherence to Maoist orthodoxy — largely from NDF members and leadership who recognized the importance of the urban sphere of operation. By the early 1980s, figures in the movement like Edgar Jopson called for a shift from the prolonged peasant war to a more nuanced balancing of “three strategic combinations” — the military struggle and the political struggle, the struggles in the countryside and in the cities, and the struggles on the domestic and international fronts.

Nathan Quimpo, an important player in the Mindanao theater, went beyond Jopson in pushing the idea of a political-military framework.^[56] Initially based on the Vietnamese and Nicaraguan experience, Quimpo’s idea was to prioritize the electoral struggle, to which the guerilla force would play a support role. He correctly predicted that by boycotting the elections — most crucially, the 1985 snap elections that triggered a coup and the People Power uprising the next year — the Left would be outmaneuvered by other forces and left behind. To the extent that military tactics predominated, Quimpo argued, the Left didn’t even follow Mao in their “prolonged peasant war.” Instead of pursuing a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” they abstracted Mao’s teachings from China and attempted to apply them to the Philippines.

Although his prediction was borne out, Quimpo underestimated the extent of the Left’s regression. The Vietnam War that so inflamed the New Left had wound down a decade prior. The postcolonial militarism inspired by the 1952–59 Cuban Revolution was a dead end, as evinced by Nicaragua’s devolution into civil war. As with the Old Left during the Sino-Soviet split, the collapse of the Soviet Union divided the New Left into those who rejected the Maoist-Leninist party and those who adopted an utterly rigid dogmatism cut adrift from reality.

For Nemenzo, this was symptomized by accusations of “revisionism,” an insult adopted by the Philippine New Left to shame their opponents. Treating the latter as pure dogma, however, neglected the origins of the revisionist dispute in the Second International — the substance of which was lost on the Old Left, whose thought taboos were inherited and compoundedby the CPP. This layering of unrecognized defeat produced a slew of symptoms, but not from any single recognizable disease. Rather, the Left was dead. Unable to grasp the change it was affecting in the world, it wallowed in an antinomian swamp of petrified discourse.

While the 1986 People Power uprising dealt the fatal blow, it is more accurate to say that the CPP was a victim of its own success. The Party’s substantial growth in the 1980s generated an ideological-strategic crisis. Members of its leadership, including Sison, were captured, sparking succession disputes. Fearing infiltration by the government, the Party initiated an internal torture campaign, massacring one thousand members. After People Power the NDF began to fragment. The Communists’ efforts to reassert control laid bare their opportunism and contradicted their promise of democracy.

As these crises came to a head, Sison prosecuted a split from exile in Europe. A significant minority of the membership, dubbed Rejectionists (RJs), were expelled. The greater part of the Left, calling itself the Reaffirmists (RAs), doubled down on guerilla war. Defeated politically, the RAs downplayed their anti-fascism to shadowbox at imperialism, while the RJs focused on grassroots organizing, electoral campaigns, or the academe. The painstaking work done by the New Left, despite its oppositionality, contributed to mass democracy’s reconstitution under post-Fordist conditions. Hence, Quimpo’s notion of contested democracy (derived from Laclau and Mouffe) described not so much the deepening of democracy as its reconfiguration as a crisis-ridden nation state under neoliberal accumulation.

The post-political Left: 90s–present

It has been argued that the Left’s decline was not merely entropic, but the product of an antinomy between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Generations of trauma have accumulated, leaving the failure of the Old and New Left repressed. The Left is dead, the political aspirations of its youth forgotten. It is post-political. What remains, lingers on, is a rotten ideological blockage, plugging up the pores by which the Left, were it alive, would use to excrete utopias. The absence is not a type of ideology which can be grasped dialectically, false consciousness in the Marxian sense, but only negatively — in terms of what is missing. The Left is dead, but actively expresses symptoms that trend and repeat in a seemingly endless interregnum.^[57]

The post-political Left is not, in other words, simply dogmatic, but antinomian — historical shards are taken up and brandished by different disciples of Marx at one another, as in an exchange between historian Joseph Scalice and CPP founder Joma Sison just prior to the latter’s death.^[58] Scalice, whose dissertation research was the occasion for several lectures and articles published by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), claimed that the Philippine Left practiced class-collaborationism under a Stalinist program of socialism in one country, the two-stage revolution, and a bloc of four classes.^[59] Neither party could lead the working class since both Old and New Left programs were compromised, justifying alliances with sections of the ruling class. Both vacillated, zig-zagging from one position to another, repeating mistakes rather than learning from experience.

Scalice’s main “proof” was that the CPP and its NDF groups came to emulate the PKP’s attitude of support towards Ferdinand Marcos — only now, in relation to Duterte.^[60] Yet their support was on the basis not only of Duterte’s links to the anti-Marcos movement in the 1980, and his relatively convivial relationship with their guerilla groups in the Davao area, but perhaps most significantly, his anti-imperialist attitude. In attempting to foment political and economic ties with China, Duterte stated that he had “crossed the Rubicon.” This political orientation was welcomed by the RAs — at least, until the peace talks broke down.

This was spelled out in RA columnist Teo S. Marisiagan’s response to Scalice. He argued that the Left deals with the “national bourgeoisie” through a “combination of unity and struggle.” So long as the alliance with Duterte was “serving the national and democratic rights and interests of the Filipino people,” any contradictions between national groups — such as between the comprador bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie — could be strategically leveraged by appealing to progressive patriotism.^[61]

Sison’s own rejoinder to Scalice spelled out the instrumentalism behind the popular front: in alliance with the middle class, the working class takes “advantage of the splits among the reactionaries in order to isolate [the Right wing] and destroy the enemy one after the other.” For Sison, Leninism meant “the people’s democratic revolution with a socialist perspective, under the leadership of the working class.”^[62] As with the Russian and Chinese models, the Philippine revolution was to inaugurate a socialist stage.

Sison contrasted socialism in one country to Scalice’s “Trotskyite” view of permanent revolution — a sort of magical thinking, “spontaneous and seamless world revolution,” akin to “wanting to reach a mountain summit without any arduous climb.”^[63] By contrast, Lenin wrote in his 1922 “Notes of a Publicist”^[64] that the communist movement needed to climb down the mountain in search of another path up. In effect, it was an admission that the revolution had reached a dead end — a failure that Stalinism’s function is to hide.

Sison’s anti-imperialist front with Duterte was decried by Scalice, who argued for a type of revolutionary leadership that would “insistently warn of the imminent danger posed by the fascistic Duterte, and to organize an independent movement of workers for their own, socialist interests.”^[65] But the Maoists, who had already broken with Duterte, were doing just that. They folded into the opposition led by the Liberal Party, becoming the shrillest anti-fascists while blessing the Liberals with progressive aspirations in the name of “resistance.”^[66] As such, Marxism was used as a theory to justify whichever side they wanted to take in capitalist politics.^[67]

The Left’s resistance has recalled almost to the letter the CPP’s anti-fascism of the 1980s. While attempting to lead Noynoy Aquino’s Liberals, the CPP was absorbed as a pressure group. The same, of course, can be said of Scalice’s anti-fascism. Under the guise of appealing to the workers’ “socialist interests” — many of which were quite cogently articulated by Duterte — Scalice promoted the “progressive” opposition. Yet neither the unemployed victims of the drug war (along with their handlers, the “pushers”) nor the workers’ interests are a priori socialistic. They are necessarily a function of capital, which, Marx says, tends on the one hand “to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour.”^[68] Both the workers and their antithesis, the reserve army of labor, are dialectical halves that don’t add up, due less to the failure of political leadership than to the absence of a historically conscious political party for socialism — in the face of the failure to account for regression.

If Sison’s Maoism neglected a concrete analysis of the concrete situation, Scalice similarly applied Trotsky’s ideas to the present abstractly — Stalinism’s incorrect “program” could, with the proper revolutionary leadership, be turned around. But Trotsky’s Fourth International, and the immediate pre-war context in which it was founded, are as long gone as the political organizations of Stalinism. Like Sison’s outfit, the CPP, Scalice’s Socialist Equality Party (which runs the WSWS) is but a rump of a rump.

Regression and democratic revolution

Scalice’s idea of the correct program, Nemeno’s discussion of dogmatism, and Fuller’s call for a united front with the nationalists look back to the Old Left in terms of a crisis of revolutionary leadership, an influx of petit-bourgeois utopian socialists into the Marxist party, or the failure of the party to unite around anti-imperialism. Each thinker sees the New Left as a failed attempt to transcend the Old. But what if the Old Left were, from at least 1923, already dead?

In framing the Old Left (1923–40) as post-Bolshevik Marxism, regression has been specified in terms of the liquidation of the Leninist party. Nemenzo argued the latter must be distinct from its social base, but why? For Trotsky, the Bolsheviks were never identical with the working class, the masses, the soviets, or the nation. This was because Bolshevism not merely organized the working class in terms of organic “socialist interests” but as the “conscious factor in history.” A revolutionary situation inevitably precipitates crisis and division within the party “in the transition from preparatory revolutionary activity to the immediate struggle for power.”^[69] In Germany in 1923, the political destabilization meant a rapid shift in methods of work and strategic orientation by some, at the same time leading others to double down on tried-and-true tactics. The communists’ thought was not merely dogmatic but reified, unable to take stock of conditions that it had, in part, brought about.

Unlike Nemenzo’s idea of petit-bourgeois radicalism infecting the party from without, for Trotsky, 1914–17 was a crisis arising from within. In this view, the party was not merely a site of rational debate but of a division within rationality, an elevated locus or prism of crisis in tension with its success in transforming the world around it. Trotsky here followed Lenin’s idea of a “vanguard party,” by contrast with Kautsky’s Second International “party of the whole class” — an organization encompassing all socialists.

Kautsky’s students — Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky — had followed the revisionist dispute to its ultimate conclusion. While the revisionists envisioned Social Democracy leading the rest of society to socialism, the orthodox wing saw the movement as extending and exacerbating capitalism. Elaborating on this premise amidst what he called the age of imperialism, Lenin believed that a split in the workers’ movement for socialism was a precondition for revolution.^[70] Rather than exploitation by the core of the periphery, around which a progressive coalition could gather, imperialism was a historical epoch involving the “transformation of competition into monopoly.” Capitalists were forced, kicking and screaming, “into a new . . . transitional social order from complete free competition to complete socialisation.”^[71] Yet the means of production remained private property — an explosive contradiction for which socialism was both cause and solution.

It was not merely the 1917 October Revolution, but the revolution in Germany that Lenin counted on to guarantee the scope and historic significance of imperialism. Social Democracy was a global shadow government in waiting, yet it was splitting. In 1917 the Mensheviks — a minority faction in Russian Social Democracy — argued against the taking of power in favor of “defending the gains of the revolution.” Reconciling with non-working-class leadership required theoretical justification, and the Mensheviks turned to Marx’s dictum that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” They concluded that Russian socialism should follow the path of development taken in England, France, and Germany, with the bourgeoisie in power, and the social democrats in opposition.

Consequently, the Mensheviks considered the 1917 February Revolution led by the Socialist Revolutionaries a “bourgeois revolution.” Along with many “old Bolsheviks” they defended the gains of the revolution, leading Lenin to repudiate the old “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” slogan.^[72] Lenin — adopting Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution — argued that February was a bourgeois revolution that came too late. In the imperialist epoch, bourgeois revolutions do not simply extend in an unbroken chain from one country to another. While 1776 and 1789 gathered the nation together like a lion preparing to spring, the February Revolution was torn apart by internal contradictions. Under imperialism, it was not the bourgeois nation against feudalism, but the “proletariat in opposition to the bourgeois nation.” In Russia democracy was, rather than bourgeois liberation, simply “the masses” — the industrial and commercial petite bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and the peasantry. The direction of the changes in these relations of production in the democratic revolution were disintegrating, rather than unifying.^[73]

Trotsky, like Lenin, was well aware that the revolution had affected the “transition to the commune” only in the most backward corner of the world. In this they followed Marx and Engels, who stated that communism “presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with [the dominant peoples].”^[74] Classes would be eliminated “only by eliminating want, scarcity.”^[75] While the dictatorship of the proletariat — imagined only as a very brief interlude — might be established in an isolated and backward country, socialism could occur only through the joint efforts of multiple advanced countries. With the establishment of socialism, the state was to begin withering away immediately, its parasitic bureaucracy gutted, the army to consist of the armed working class, the party giving way to the self-governing activity of the masses.

Instead, a single party dominated, serving as “the juridical point of departure for the Stalinist totalitarian regime.” This was not due to any innate qualities in Bolshevism, but rather in “the number of defeats of the proletariat in Europe and Asia.”^[76]By contrast with Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky’s view of the historical necessity and impossibility of democracy and liberalism, Philippine Maoists believed that a “people’s revolution” would produce a state that abolished semi-colonial and semi-feudal conditions, laying the ground for socialism. Like the CPUSA and the PKP in the 1930s–40s, they repeated the Menshevik argument for supporting the national-democratic, progressive party.^[77]

The fate of the Philippine Left was bound up with the American Old Left. If the Socialist Party of America, rather than the Progressives, had successfully appealed to Gilded Age populism while navigating the split within Marxism in the age of imperialism, Stalinism might not have existed for the Philippine Left to emulate. Instead, what the Left latched onto as fixed in the firmament of history — anti-imperialism, anti-fascism — capitalism ruthlessly and dynamically transformed. Today, neither the conditions of World War nor of the revisionist dispute obtain. Further, the Philippines hardly claims the economic abundance socialism requires. If not for the regressive Left, the position of Filipino workers within the global economy might have contributed — and may yet — to socialism. For the time being, after a century of counterrevolution, an account of the Left in the Philippines must emphasize the regression of the Old Left, its repetition in the New, and the antinomian post-political situation. A symptomology of the death of the Left — an “inventory of symptoms” — is needed. |P

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[1] Video of the teach-in is available at <https://youtu.be/SnraF-4_WEI>.

[2] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 143–45, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm>.

[3] Jorge Ramirez used this colorful turn of phrase in “From Mexico to Peru: Guerrilla Struggle—Reformism with Guns,” Workers Vanguard 661 (February 7, 1997), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/1997/0661_07_02_1997.pdf>.

[4] Chris Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis: A response to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis,’” Platypus Review 29 (November 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/11/06/the-marxist-hypothesis-a-response-to-alain-badous-communist-hypothesis/>. A proviso: communism is not, as the Maoist Badiou argued, the logic of the oppressed — what he calls “the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class . . . since Antiquity.”

[5] Jim Richardson, Komunista: The Genesis of the Philippine Communist Party, 1902-1935 (Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2011), 74.

[6] Communist Party of the Philippines-1930, founded in 1930. The Party uses the “1930” suffix to distinguish itself from a split under the same name, which was formed by Jose Maria (Joma) Sison in December 1968. Rather than abbreviating the two parties as “PKP-1930” and “PKP,” we abbreviate the party founded in 1930 as “PKP,” and the party formed in 1968 as “CPP.”

[7] Francisco Nemenzo, “Questioning Marx, Critiquing Marxism: Reflections on the Ideological Crisis on the Left,” Kasarinlan: A. Philippine Quarterly of Third World Studies 8, no. 2 (September 2007): 8, <https://www.journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/kasarinlan/article/view/306>. Maoists like Badiou dismiss this period as an interval in which “the communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable . . . with the adversary in the ascendant.” See Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (January–February 2008): 36–37, <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii49/articles/alain-badiou-the-communist-hypothesis>.

[8] Jose Maria Sison, “Continuing Validity and Vitality of Marxism,” keynote address at the Marx@2000 Global Launch, PRISMM (May 5, 2018), <https://www.prismm.net/2018/05/12/joma-marx200-global-launch/>.

[9] Chris Cutrone, “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” Platypus Review 102 (December 2017 – January 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>.

[10] Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, vol. 1, second ed.(Leipzig, 1919), 69, cited in Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395.

[11] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Crisis of German Social Democracy” (the “Junius Pamphlet”) (1915), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm>.

[12] Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” and “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 389–411.

[13] Jose Maria Sison (under the name Amado Guerrero), Philippine Society and Revolution, third ed. (Oakland: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1979), 1, <https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/guerrero/1970/psr.htm>.

[14] V. I. Lenin, “The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections” (November 9, 1912), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 18 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 402–04, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/09.htm>.

[15] Cutrone, “The end of the Gilded Age.”

[16] Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review I, no. 169 (May–June 1988): 9–10.

[17] Richardson, Komunista, 75.

[18] Antonio S. Araneta, “The Communist Party of the Philippines and the Comintern, 1919-1930,” PhD diss., (Oxford: University of Oxford, 1966), 56.

[19] Labor Congress of the Philippines.

[20] Richardson, Komunista, 34.

[21] W. D. Mahon, “Freedom the Goal,” American Federationist V (August 1898): 107.

[22] Woodrow Wilson, “Labor Must be Free,” Address to the American Federation of Labor Convention, Buffalo, New York (November 12, 1917), <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-american-federation-labor-convention-buffalo-new-york-labor-must-be-free>.

[23] Cutrone, “The end of the Gilded Age.”

[24] V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 123, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/>.

[25] See Araneta, “The Communist Party,” 63. The 1919 Independence Mission included the founder of the PKP, Crisanto Evangelista, who was profoundly impacted by the mission’s failure.

[26] The Communist International, also known as the Third International.

[27] Richardson, Komunista, 83.

[28] Ibid., 64. A 1920 meeting of the COF rejected Bolshevism because it was “against a democratic form of government [and] in favor of . . . compulsory or forced labor, which is against the eight-hour demand of the Filipino laborers, and because Bolshevism requires obligatory military service.”

[29] Ibid., 81.

[30] Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 2007), 25.

[31] The Nationalist Party, founded in 1907 by Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña.

[32] Also known as the Partido Democrata Nacional (National Democratic Party), it was founded in 1917 and dissolved in 1941.

[33] Richardson, Komunista, 119.

[34] Ibid., 121. Richardson writes, “In denouncing the Nacionalistas and Democratas for the weakness of their anti-imperialist commitment, the [Workers Party] leaders were taking a significantly more negative view of ‘the bourgeoisie class and its tools’ than were communists elsewhere in Asia. The Comintern line at this time held that the primary task in colonial countries was to unite all ‘national revolutionary’ elements—proletarian, peasant, and bourgeois alike—in the broadest possible anti-imperialist bloc.”

[35] Ibid., 146. The Old Left or the PKP was formed during the Third Period, when the predominant political ideology was against social-fascism. In colonial countries, the Comintern maintained that “parties in the colonies should work for a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” The “nationalist reformists” were taken to be the barrier to this revolution and considered the primary enemy, the corollary to the social democrats in the West.

[36] Francisco Nemenzo, “The Millenarian-Populist Aspects of Filipino Marxism,” in Marxism in the Philippines: Marx Centennial Lectures (Quezon City: Third World Studies Center, University of the Philippines, 1984), 5, <https://pssc.org.ph/wp-content/pssc-archives/Works/Francisco%20Nemenzo/The%20Millenarian-Populist%20Aspects%20of%20Filipino%20Marxism.pdf>. The Socialist Party (Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas) was founded by Abad Santos in 1932.

[37] Nemenzo, “Questioning Marx,” 7.

[38] Richardson, Komunista, 146, and Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 107.

[39] Nemenzo, “The Millenarian-Populist,” 19.

[40] Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 120.

[41] Also known as the Hukbalahap rebellion, 1942–54.

[42] Moishe Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism,” Social Research 45, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 754. Postone goes so far as to consider “traditional Marxism’s” principal achievement the industrialization of the underdeveloped world; rather than achieving socialism they fomented a “capital revolution.”

[43] Joseph Scalice, The Drama of Dictatorship: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

[44] Renato Constantino, The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City: The Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1978), 292.

[45] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 127.

[46] Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 78–79.

[47] Francisco Nemenzo, “An Irrepressible Revolution: The Decline and Resurgence of the Philippines Communist Movement,” presented at the Work in Progress Seminar, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra: Australia National University, 1984), 74.

[48] Jose M. Sison, The Struggle for National Democracy, third ed. (2013), 12, <https://aklatangbayan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/stuggle_for_national_democracy_third_ed_-_book.pdf>.

[49] Nemenzo, “The Millenarian-Populist,” 11.

[50] 1899–1902.

[51] Pambansang Demokratikong Prente ng Pilipinas, founded in 1973.

[52] Bagong Hukbong Bayan; it is the armed wing of the CPP.

[53] Filipino cadre visited Mao, and garnered several arms shipments from China, none of which reached their destination. They were later stranded in China by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

[54] Chris Cutrone, “When was the crisis of capitalism? Moishe Postone and the legacy of the 1960s New Left,” Platypus Review 70 (October 2014), <https://platypus1917.org/2014/10/18/crisis-capitalism-moishe-postone-legacy-1960s-new-left/>.

[55] Partido Liberal ng Pilipinas (Liberal Party of the Philippines), founded in 1946 after splitting from the Nacionalista Party.

[56] These debates were later published in the pages of Debate: Philippine Left Review. A complete archive of the journal is available at <https://twsc.upd.edu.ph/debate-philippine-left-review/>.

[57] Chris Cutrone, “The ‘anti-fascist’ vs. ‘anti-imperialist’ Left: some genealogies and prospects,” Platypus 2011 President’s report, presented at the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (May 1, 2011), <https://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=1203>.

[58] Chris Cutrone, “Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today,” Platypus Review 1 (November 2007), <https://platypus1917.org/2007/11/01/vicissitudes-of-historical-consciousness-and-possibilities-for-emancipatory-social-politics-today/>.

[59] Joseph Scalice, “Jose Ma. Sison, founder of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, dies aged 83,” World Socialist Web Site (December 28, 2022), <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/29/olfp-d29.html>. According to Scalice, “Workers and young people in the Philippines, looking for a revolutionary alternative to the decades of Stalinist betrayal under the leadership of Sison, will find a way forward only by breaking with all forms of nationalism and class collaboration. This requires the careful study of Trotsky’s program of Permanent Revolution and the history of the world Trotskyist movement.” Conveniently, one can sign up for the WSWS newsletter after reading these words.

[60] Several long-term activists were culled from its ranks for his cabinet, and peace talks with the NPA were carried on for some time.

[61] Teo S. Marasigan, “Scalice Come, Scalice Go,” Pinoy Weekly (September 28, 2020), available online at <https://pinoyweekly.org/2020/09/scalice-come-scalice-go/>.

[62] Jose Maria Sison, “Celebrate the 50-year achievements and sacrifices of the Filipino people’s struggle,” Fighting Words: Journal of the Communist Workers League (December 26, 2018), <https://fighting-words.net/2018/12/26/celebrate-the-50-year-achievements-and-sacrifices-of-the-filipino-peoples-struggle/>.

[63] Jose Maria Sison, “Critique of the Trotskyite Attacks on the CPP and the Philippine revolution,” Jose Maria Sison (August 25, 2020), <https://www.josemariasison.eu/critique-of-the-trotskyite-attacks-on-the-cpp-and-the-philippine-revolution/>.

[64] V. I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain; the Harm of Despondency; the Utility of Trade; Attitude towards the Mensheviks, etc.,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 33, second ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 204–11, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm>.

[65] Joseph Scalice, “Stalinist apologetics and intellectual charlatanry: a response to Teo Marasigan,” Joseph Scalice (October 15, 2020), <https://www.josephscalice.com/2020/10/stalinist-apologetics-and-intellectual-charlatanry-a-response-to-teo-marasigan/>.

[66] See James Heartfield, Spencer Leonard, Anthony Monteiro, and Benjamin Studebaker, “Marxism and liberalism,” Platypus Review 150 (October 2022), <https://platypus1917.org/2022/10/01/marxism-and-liberalism-2/>.

[67] Cliff Slaughter, “What is Revolutionary Leadership?,” Labour Review 5, no. 3 (October–November 1960): 93–96 and 105–11, <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1960/10/leadership.html>. Setting aside the fact that this model has failed in the Philippines for the last century, it is important to recall that Sison presumes that countries “find their ‘own’ roads to Socialism, learning from the USSR but adapting to their particular national characteristics.” But as Cliff Slaughter notes, “[t]he connection between the struggles of the working class for Socialism in [different countries] is not at all in the greater or lesser degree of similarity of social structure of those countries, but in the organic interdependence of their struggles.”

[68] Karl Marx, The Grundrisse (1857–58), in The Marx-Engels Reader, 287, italicized in the original.

[69] Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October, trans. John G. Wright (Marxists Internet Archive, 2002), 4, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/1924-les.pdf>.

[70] Joseph Seymour, Lenin and the Vanguard Party (New York: Spartacists Publishing Co., 1997).

[71] Lenin, Imperialism, 25.

[72] V. I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics” (1917), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm>: “A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defensist, internationalist, ‘Communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements.”

[73] Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp-index.htm>. Here, Trotsky uses “democracy” interchangeably with “bourgeoisie.”

[74]  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846), in The Marx-Engels Reader, 162, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/>.

[75] “The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited: Reply to the Guardian,” Workers Vanguard 23–30 (1973), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/misc/wv.htm>.

[76] Leon Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism,” Socialist Appeal 1, no. 7 (September 25, 1937): 4–5, and Socialist Appeal 1, no. 8 (October 2, 1937): 4–5, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/08/stalinism.htm>. See also V. I. Lenin, “A Strong Revolutionary Government” (1917), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 24, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 360–61, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/06b.htm>: “We are for a strong revolutionary government. . . . The question is—what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?”

[77] “But half-half is not the basis for a dialectical formulation.” Randy David (Professor of Sociology, University of the Philippines, Diliman), in discussion with the author (October 2019).