Library: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.

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.

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 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. He brought to the task a firm grasp of class analysis, an appreciation of the lessons of the Chinese Revolution, a deep sense of the particularities of the Philippine historical development, and an unshakeable faith in the ability of the Filipino masses to take hold of and shape their history.

The Struggle for National Democracy, Sison asserted, is the fight to achieve “a necessary stage in the struggle of our people for social justice, whereby the freedom of the entire nation is first secured so that the nation-state that has been secured would allow within its framework the masses of the Filipino people to enjoy the democratic rights to achieve their social emancipation.”

In Sison’s view, the principal fetters on national freedom and development are the domination over the entire country exercised by U.S. imperialism and the semifeudal control of the countryside by the landlord class. Departing from this basic contradiction, one of the key elements in the strategy of the revolutionary movement must be the creation of a broad national alliance drawing together all classes and strata with an objective interest in overthrowing the reactionary alliance of imperialists and landlords.

This had not been grasped by the old Communist Party, and its failure to base its political strategy on this fundamental contradiction had seriously limited the breadth of the popular movement in the thirties and forties and rendered the revolutionary forces confused: disunited on a number of occasions to the maneuvers of imperialism and the reactionary state. “The [old] leadership was well-versed in the contradiction between the proletariat and the capitalist class in general,” Sison noted, “but it failed all the time to stress the fact that the main contradiction within Philippine society then was between U.S. imperialism and feudalism, on the one hand, and the Filipino people, mainly workers and peasants, on the other. While all workers, Marxist or not, demanded Philippine independence from U.S. imperialism, the matter of national liberation was obscured by the slogans of class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class.

Being a semifeudal country where 70 per cent of the people belong to the peasantry, the key to revolutionary victory is the mobilization of the vast masses of Filipino peasants. Agrarian revolution, aimed at satisfying the peasant demand for land, is therefore the main content of the national-democratic revolution. The Filipino peasantry, oppressed by centuries of feudal and semifeudal exploitation and driven by land hunger, is the force which will tip the social balance in favor of the revolution.

As a struggle for national sovereignty, the present national-democratic struggle continues the Revolution of 1896, the war for independence against Spain which was brutally aborted by the guns of a rising imperialist power, the United States. Yet the present struggle, in Sison’s view, is also “a new type of national-democratic revolution, a continuation of the Philippine Revolution of 1896 and yet a renewal of strength in a more advanced way.” For unlike the 1896 Revolution, which was led and ultimately betrayed by the ilustrados, the Filipino liberal bourgeoisie, the present movement for national democracy must be led by the most advanced class in the era of imperialist and capitalist decline, the Filipino working class. “Only the working class can win the most conscious, the most dedicated, and most lasting support of the peasant masses for the national-democratic struggle.” This class leadership, in turn, could only be effectively won through the agency of a proletarian party which “must have the firm and single objective of developing and acquiring political power for the masses.” Sison concluded: “Without a proletarian party to provide leadership, the struggle for national democracy cannot be won.”

Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party

Though less visible and public, the effort to build a proletarian revolutionary party was unfolding side by side with the mass struggles of the sixties. The need to reestablish a revolutionary vanguard had become critical by the mid-sixties. For not only had the entrenched leadership of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Communist Party of the Philippines) failed for more than 30 years to provide strategic theoretical and political guidance, it had degenerated as a revolutionary party. This was marked by its sharp swing to the right after its disastrous failure to seize power in a swift armed uprising in the late forties. In 1955, the Party begun to preach “the parliamentary road to socialism.”

This abandonment of fundamental Leninist principles on the inevitability of violence in the destruction of the bourgeois state machine by the leadership of Jesus Lava was paralleled organizationally by the degeneration of democratic centralism in Party ranks and the disintegration of the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan or Huks, the former people’s army, into a number of roving rebel bands specializing in extortion and protection rackets in the red-light districts surrounding U.S. military bases in Luzon. Seldom in the history of Marxist-Leninist parties had a revolutionary organization decayed so rapidly and completely.

Rectification was initially launched as a struggle within the Party. However, the process became antagonistic as the entrenched leadership — a tight nepotistic clique of Lava kinsmen and close friends — systematically tried to kill democratic discussion of its shortcomings. By 1968, there remained no other way to assert the revolutionary alternative than by forging a new Party. This process culminated on Dec. 26, 1968, the anniversary of the birth of Mao Tsetung, when the revolutionary wing headed by Amado Guerrero reestablished the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Serving as the foundation stone of the reestablished Party was a detailed summation document, Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party, which could now be considered the second major work to spring from the national-democratic movement. By all counts, Rectify is a remarkable document. It synthesizes a process which, though protracted and bitter, thoroughly and systematically examined the 38-year experience of the Communist Party of the purpose of recementing its weakening proletarian foundations. Representing one of the few successful attempts to retrieve a proletarian party by means of a thoroughgoing ideological rectification in the history of communist movements, Rectify dwells on the ideological, political and organizational dimensions of Party degeneration, draws out their interrelationships, and traces them to their roots.

The fundamental cause of the Party’s many serious errors, according to the document, was the subjectivist, non-materialist and non-dialectical philosophical outlook of the unremolded petty-bourgeois cadres who had established themselves in Party leadership in the late thirties and forties. Subjectivism had two principal ideological manifestations: empiricism and dogmatism. Dogmatism, the rigid application of the general theories of Marxism-Leninism without specifying them to concrete conditions, led to “Left” opportunist political policies in the period 1948-55 when the Party overestimated the strength of the people’s forces and then threw them into a foolhardy attempt to seize political power through a swift, armed uprising. However by far the more dominant subjectivist trend in the Party was empiricism, or the tendency to separate political practice from theoretical guidance. In the concrete, the documents states,

“Empiricism grows on static underestimation of the people’s democratic forces and on a static overestimation of the enemy strength…. Party work becomes dictated by the actions of the enemy instead of by a dialectical comprehension of the situation and balance of forces. Revolutionary initiative becomes lost because of a static, one-sided fragmented and narrow view of the requirements of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-fascist struggle.”

Right opportunist and revisionist political lines took firm control of the Party’s practice. It manifested itself in a reliance on parliamentary work as the principal form of struggle, overconcentration on urban political work, and underestimation of the importance of mass work in the countryside, resulted in the loss of strategic initiative and a reduction of Left “strategy” into a series of tactical shifts to meet the strategic initiatives of imperialism and the local ruling class.

Such practice characterized the Party in its first two decades of existence (1930-48) and reemerged again in the period 1955-68, when it was reinforced by the revisionist line on the priority of the parliamentary struggle adopted by the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. To this day, the Soviet Party and state extend support to the by now thoroughly isolated Lava clique, which has for all intents and purposes, become the Soviet Union’s “hot line” to the Marcos regime.

The experience of the old Party further revealed that empiricism and dogmatism were, however, only superficially ideological opposites. In reality, they were “two sides of the same petty-bourgeois coin.” In a masterful example of dialectical analysis, the document goes on:

“Reversals from empiricism to dogmatism and from dogmatism to empiricism are peculiarly common to those who still retain the petty-bourgeois world outlook. Nevertheless, when one is the principal aspect of a subjectivist stand, the other is bound to be the principal at another moment. That is the dialectical relationship of empiricism and dogmatism… Comrades should not wonder why a leadership with the same petty-bourgeois orientation should swing from empiricism to dogmatism and back to empiricism, and so on and so forth. All subjectivists fail to grasp the laws of dialectical development and so they are volatile and erratic.”

After this all-sided criticism of the practice of the old Party, Rectify sets out the three strategic tasks of the reestablished Party: building the Party, initiating armed struggle, and forging the national united front.

Building the Party consisted of the manifold task of setting the Party securely on the revolutionary heritage of the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tsetung, sinking Party roots deep among the Filipino masses, and spreading them throughout the country. “The ultimate test,” states the document, lies in the revolutionary practice and further revolutionary practice… Our cadres must go deep among the masses of workers and peasants. They must be well-distributed on a national scale in order to build up a nationwide party.”

Forging the national united front meant gathering together all patriotic classes and strata with an objective interest in overthrowing imperialism and feudalism into a powerful social and political force. In contrast to the old Party, whose handling of class alliances was so confused and erratic that it failed to tap the anti-imperialist energies of the peasantry, national bourgeoisie, and petty bourgeoisie, and ended up dangerously isolating the working-class vanguard, the Party’s special task was to “win over the middle forces and elements in order to isolate the die-hards.” To this end, class analysis and the policy of class alliances had to continually match shifting political conditions:

“…. the Party must make clear and repeated class analysis which can distinguish the middle forces and elements from the diehard reactionaries, the principal enemies from the secondary enemies, the enemies of today from the enemies of tomorrow, and among friends, the reliable from the unreliable.”

The united front was one of the key weapons of the national-democratic movement; the other, and principal weapon, was the armed struggle. Unlike the PKP’s adventurist strategy of attempting to seize power in the period 1948-55 by means of a swift armed uprising carried out by no more than 3,000 Red fighters, Rectify established protracted people’s war as the strategic form of struggle in a semicolonial, semifeudal country like the Philippines. And in opposition to the urban military focus of the PKP, the countryside would be the center of gravity of the armed struggle, with popular power being steadily built up through the creation of rural base areas by armed fighters winning over the peasantry with measures of revolutionary land reform. From such bases, the revolutionary movement would advance “wave upon wave,” encircling the urban centers like Manila, which constituted the bastions of bourgeois state power.

The resolution on the armed struggle was not to be postponed to the indefinite future. The old Communist Party’s military arm, the Huks, had decayed into an incorrigibly lumpen-proletarian gang. Thus, three months after the reestablishment conference, on March 29, 1969, the CPP founded the New People’s Army (NPA), incorporating into it honest and uncorrupted peasant guerrilla leaders from the old Huks, like the legendary Commander Dante, as well as “defectors” from the reactionary army like Lt. Victor Corpuz.

Under the guidance of the Party, the NPA immediately went about the task of establishing rural bases in Central and Northern Luzon, from which it was soon launching a number of tactical offensives against a reactionary army.

Though the reactionary state, presided over by Marcos, threw all of its resources at immediately crushing the purified Party, it became the leading subjective factor which unleashed the objective revolutionary potential of the masses, not only in the Philippine countryside but also in the cities. Under Party guidance, the anti-imperialist student movement grew by leaps and bounds, until it finally exploded in what came to be known as the “First Quarter Storm” in early 1970, after Marcos’ security forces slaughtered a number of students and youth demonstrating in front of the presidential palace. The student movement, in turn, helped radicalize the struggles of workers and the urban poor. By late 1972, while NPA squads were engaging government troops in battle in a number of provinces, Manila was being constantly rocked by massive demonstrations and strikes, which linked together demands of higher wages, land reform, withdrawal of Philippine and U.S. troops from Vietnam, and an end to all unequal treaties imposed by the United States. “The protest movement breaking out in the cities is starkly unprecedented in the entire national history in terms of significance and magnitude.” Sison evaluated the situation in December 1971. “The problem is no longer how to start a revolution. It is how to extend and intensify it.”

Philippine Society and Revolution

Hundreds of thousands of youth were stepping into activist ranks, “turning the whole country,” as Sison put it, into one gigantic classroom.” The overwhelming need of the moment was for an educational tool which would channel this crackling energy into the correct theory and practice of the national-democratic revolution. Philippine Society and Revolution, by Amado Guerrero, Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, appeared in July 1970 to fill this need.

PSR, as the book came to be called, was immediately recognized for what it was: a work that culminated the cultural revolution which had been sweeping Philippine society and thinking since the mid-sixties. Though Guerrero cautioned that it was only a first step in the application of historical-materialist analysis to Philippine history, PSR was a bold, brilliant, and sweeping theoretical enterprise which drew out the concrete dynamics of the laws of contradiction in Philippine social and national development from the pre-Hispanic period to the present. Deepening the ideas first presented by Sison’s Struggle for National Democracy, Guerrero showed how the laws of autonomous social development had been disrupted and distorted in the Philippines by the intrusion, first of Spanish colonialism, then of U.S. imperialism. The engine of historical motion thus became the contradiction between the people and imperialism and the parasitic domestic classes that constituted its social base. Revolt and rebellion against colonialism and imperialism, Guerrero demonstrated, was a constant in Philippine history. But until the masses appropriated the science of social liberation, Marxism-Leninism, and followed the leadership of the most advanced social class in the era of imperialist and capitalist decline, the working class, no effort at genuine national liberation could succeed. From the perspective of historical materialism, then, the present revolutionary movement is simply the subjective, conscious, and scientific expression of the objective laws of development which were pushing the Filipino nation up to a higher level of social development — national democracy.

With its masterful and consistent use of class theory to synthesize a whole range of empirical and historical data, PSR revolutionized Philippine history and social science, field that previously had been dominated by colonial development theories, superficial nationalistic analyses, or bloodless expositions of empirical facts. Academics were forced to take note, and even the Hong Kong-based international business organ, Far Eastern Economic Review, had to pay PSR the backhanded tribute of being a “work of flawed brilliance.”

PSR, however, was not written to be principally an academic work (nor was its circulation confined to the salons frequented by the limousine radicals that Guerrero despised so much). It was, first and foremost, a popular educational tool, a basic primer for national-democratic activists. Mass-distributed in mimeographed form and coming out in both English and Pilipino, PSR immediately became the indispensable workbook of thousands of “dg’s” (discussion groups) conducted among students, professionals, workers, peasants, and urban poor in the feverish two years before martial law. As such, its role in recruiting and consolidating thousands of national-democratic activists was immense.

PSR was written in a period of deepening crisis of the system of bourgeois political control. It in fact warned that sooner or later the ruling class would be forced to shift its class dictatorship from the parliamentary, formal democratic form to the openly repressive fascist type. Two years later, on September 22, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law, with the aim, as he put it, of “saving the Republic from the Communist Rebellion.”

While the fascist dictator undoubtedly exaggerated the immediate threat posed by the national-democratic movement to the system of imperialist control, it was nevertheless significant that by 1972, the Left had already reemerged as a principal actor in Philippine politics and was already recognized as the most critical long-term threat to the neocolonial machinery. Led by a party equipped with a correct political line, uncompromising revolutionary commitment and creative methods of organizing, it had taken the Left merely eight years since the founding of Kabataang Makabayan in 1964 to purge itself of revisionist influence and emerge once again a viable alternative for the Filipino masses to rally around.

Martial law proved the correctness of the priority which the national-democratic movement, led by the Party, had assigned to armed struggle and clandestine organization. With the destruction of most forms of legal, bourgeois-democratic opposition, the CPP and the NPA emerged as the only organizations capable of organizing a nationwide resistance to martial law. This was not easy. In the cities, national-democratic mass organizations like KM and the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP) were in disarray, with thousands of activists either jailed or in hiding. In the countryside, the reactionary army launched fierce encirclement-and-suppression campaigns against NPA bases in the farnorthern Cagayan Valley and in the Bicol region, uprooting some 50,000 peasants in an effort to drain these areas of the masses and convert them into free-fire zones in the Vietnam manner.

Supported by the firm but resilient organizational structures of the Party and the NPA, the movement survived the regime’s hammerblows in the period 1972-73. In order to advance, however, political practice needed to be guided by theoretical and political understandings which matched the new conditions of struggle. To this challenge, Amado Guerrero and the leadership of the Party responded swiftly and evolved a bold political and military strategy to propel the national-democratic revolution forward in the context of all-out fascist and imperialist repression. This strategy, the product of deep knowledge of the experience of people’s war, was synthesized in Amado Guerrero’s Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War, which appeared on December 1, 1974.

Specific Characteristics of Our People's War

Specific is a rich, multifaceted document. At the same time that it deepened the process of rooting Marxism-Leninism in the particularities of the Philippines, it offered lessons of revolutionary practice for movements in other archipelagic countries.

Its main contribution lies in its exciting application of the general lessons of protracted people’s war to Philippine conditions. On the surface, according to Guerrero, it might seem that because of its fragmented island character and the absence of contiguous borders with friendly countries which might serve as rearguard areas, waging people’s war might seem to be an impossible task in the Philippines. However, this fatalistic notion which had been advanced by the old revisionist leadership of the PKP in order to justify its embrace of the “parliamentary route to socialism,” could be overcome if the country’s island character and other apparent geographical constraints on people’s war were turned into its strengths. In masterful dialectical fashion, Guerrero showed that by adopting to, rather than resisting, the archipelagic character of the country and creating a number of guerrilla fronts on major islands, the NPA could force the enemy to disperse its forces and prevent it from concentrating them on one central base area. Moreover, “the mountainous character of the country countervails its archipelagic character from the start.” The mountain ranges which crisscrossed the major islands could be turned into a great advantage by converting them into bases from which guerrilla units could maintain political and military influence on a number of provinces bordering its range. Especially when populated by sympathetic mountainfolk, mountainous areas offered singularly difficult fighting terrain for regular enemy troops.

Armed with these and other path-breaking theoretical insights, CPP and NPA cadres have been able to rapidly fan out to nine regions and twenty fighting fronts throughout the country, covering especially the major islands of Luzon, Samar, Panay, Negros, and the key island of Mindanao, where the NPA and the fraternal Bangsa Moro Army of the National Liberation Front have forced the reactionary army to divide its forces in a debilitating two-front war. To overcome the constraints imposed by geographical dispersion, the CPP and the NPA have evolved the organizational principle of “decentralized operations and centralized political leadership.” Regional bodies, in other words, are expected to exercise a great deal of self-reliance and local initiative, while subject to general political guidelines issued by the center on Luzon island.

While emphasizing the priority of armed struggle in the countryside, the “weakest link” of the enemy, Guerrero did not neglect to underline the importance of building up a broad and effective urban resistance movement:

“We should excel in combining legal, illegal, and semilegal activities through a widespread and stable underground. A revolutionary underground developing beneath democratic and legal or semilegal activities should promote the well-rounded growth of revolutionary forces, serve to link otherwise isolated parts of the Party and the people’s army at every level and prepare the ground for popular uprisings in the future and for the advance of the people’s army.”

National-democratic activists swiftly rebounded from the initial blows of martial law and, since 1973, they have led in the effort to forge or strengthen semilegal or illegal human rights monitoring bodies, slumdwellers’ protective associations, labor unions, and student organizations. The power of this underground network first surfaced in late 1975, when workers in Manila launched a one-year long wave of over 400 strikes, with the open support of a varied movement of students, religious and urban poor. At the same time, a string of huge demonstrations unfolded in the period 1976-78, hitting the regime every time it tried to launch a major initiative to legitimize its repressive rule and progressively incorporating more and more people in spite of the savage repression-and-dispersal operations mounted by the Marcos security police. When the dictator relaxed martial-law restrictions on the freedom of assembly and called “elections” to the National Assembly on April 7, 1978 in order to touch up his tattered international image, the sight of the 200,000-person rallies that the anti-fascist movement was able to mount threw him into such panic that he totally undermined his propaganda objectives by violently beating down the people and even imprisoning the anti-fascist candidates.

In 1966, Jose Maria Sison asserted that the challenge to his generation was “to have the idea of the national-democratic revolution transformed into a material force.” Thirteen years later, the idea of national democracy has become an overwhelming reality. The creative and bold use of revolutionary theory combined with courageous and determined practice has made the National Democratic Front a material force cutting across all progressive social classes and extending from the far northern province of Cagayan to the far southern province of Davao del Sur. The fact that the repression of martial law has spurred the geometric growth of the movement since 1972 assures us that revolutionary theory has indeed become an invincible force rooted in increasing numbers of the Filipino masses.

To conclude, the consistent employment of theory to guide practice and practice to enrich revolutionary theory has been one of the principal strengths of the Philippine Revolution. Perhaps, no documents illustrates this dialectical relationship more clearly than Philippine Society and Revolution and Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War. We in the International Association of Filipino Patriots are proud in offering to the international public these two major works from the theoretical arsenal of the Philippine Revolution.

Author's Introduction

Philippine Society and Revolution is an attempt to present in a comprehensive way from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought the main strands of Philippine history, the basic problem of the Filipino people, the prevailing social structure and the strategy and tactics and class logic of the revolutionary solution — which is the people’s democratic revolution.

This book serves to explain why the Communist Party of the Philippines has been reestablished to arouse and mobilize the broad masses of the people, chiefly the oppressed and exploited workers and peasants, against U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism now regnant in the present semicolonial and semifeudal society.

Philippine Society and Revolution can be used as a primer and can be studied in three consecutive or separate days by those interested in knowing the truth about the Philippines and in fighting for the genuine national and democratic interests of the entire Filipino people. The author offers this book as a starting point for every patriot in the land to make further class analysis and social investigation as the basis for concrete and sustained revolutionary action.

Amado Guerrero
Chairman, Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines

July 30, 1970

Chapter One: A Review of Philippine History

Changes in society, are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supercesion of the old society by the new. —MAO TSETUNG

I. The Philippines and the People

The Philippines is an archipelago with a tropical climate and a mountainous terrain. It is located a little above the equator and bounded by the Pacific Ocean, the China Sea and the Celebes Sea. It lies some 600 miles southeast of the coast of mainland Asia and is strung on the north-south axis, bounded by China to the north and Indonesia and North Kalimantan to the south.

The geographic position of the Philippines makes the Filipino people literally close to the center of the world proletarian revolution and part of a gigantic wave of a powerful revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia. Though the Philippines seems surrounded by a moat and is at the outer rim of Asia directly facing U.S. imperialism, the Number One enemy of the world’s peoples, the Filipino people can rely on a great invincible political rear made up of the People’s Republic of China and all revolutionary peoples of Asia.

The Philippines consists of 7,100 islands and islets with a total land area of 115,000 square miles. The two largest islands which are at the same time principal regions are Luzon and Mindanao. The former has a total land area of 54,000 square miles and the latter has 37,000 square miles. The third principal region is the group of islands and islets called the Visayas in the central part of the archipelago. The irregular coastline of the whole country extends to a little less than 11,000 miles. All the islands are seasonally inundated by river systems flowing from mountains. The plains and valleys are well-populated.

The mountains, many of which are volcanic in origin, the extensive river systems and the tropical climate endow the Philippines with extremely fertile agricultural lands suitable for a wide variety of crops for food and industrial use. It has vast forest, mineral, marine and power resources. Its forests cover a little over one-third of the land. Its mineral resources include iron, gold, copper, nickel, oil, coal, chrome, and so many others. Its principal rivers can be controlled to irrigate fields continuously and also to provide electricity to every part of the country. It has rich inland and sea fishing grounds. Numerous fine harbors and landlocked straits are available for building up the maritime industry.

If the natural wealth of the Philippines were to be tapped and developed by the Filipino people themselves for their own benefit, it would be more than enough to sustain a population that is several times bigger than the present one. However, U.S. imperialism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism prevent the Filipino people from making use of their natural resources to their own advantage. As of now, U.S. imperialism and all of its lackeys exploit these natural resources for their own selfish profit and according to their narrow schemes at the expense of the toiling masses.

Based on the 1970 Census, the Filipino now number about 37 million and they are increasing at the annual rate of 3.5 per cent. Seventy-five per cent of them live in the countryside under backward and feudal conditions. If the population were not subjected to foreign and feudal exploitation, not only could it become self-reliant economically but it could also excel in all fields of social endeavor. It could be a massive force for progress instead of being a “problem” interpreted in the Malthusian way by reactionaries who constantly prate about “overpopulation” to cover up the basic problems that are U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

The Filipino people have been generated by several racial stocks. The main racial stock is Malay, which accounts for more than 85 per cent. Other significant factors in the racial composition of the people are Indonesian and Chinese. The Arab, Indian, Spanish, American and Negrito factors are present, but only to a marginal degree.

There are many theories on the peopling of the archipelago in prehistoric times. We can cite what are currently the most accepted ones.

The aboriginal inhabitants of the Philippines were the Aetas or Negritoes, small black people, who first came to the Philippines on land bridges about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago in the Pleistocene era. They were followed by the first Indonesian wave of immigrants who came bringing with them an early stone age culture from Southeast Asia about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. The second Indonesian wave came about 1,500 B.C. from Indochina and south China bringing with them a late neolithic or bronze-copper culture.

What would later compose the main racial stock of the Filipino people, the Malay, came in three major waves. The first wave of the Malays came from a southern direction between 300 and 200 B.C. bringing with them Indian cultural influences. The second wave came between the first century and the 13th century and became the main ancestors of the Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Pampangos, Visayans and Bicolanos. As they were equipped with a system of writing, they were the first to leave historical records. The third wave of Malays who came between the latter half of the 14th century and the 15th century came the Arab traders and religious teachers who laid the foundation of Islam in Sulu and in mainland Mindanao.

The national minorities of today comprise at least 10 per cent of the population. They inhabited the greater part of the archipelago until a few decades ago when landgrabbers started to dispossess and oppress them. They have been set apart from the rest of the people principally by Christian chauvinism employed by Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism, as in the case of the Muslims in Mindanao and the non-Christian mountain tribes all over the country. There is also Malay racism bred by foreign and feudal exploiters of the people. This is often directed against the Chinese and the Aetas.

To this day, there are more than 100 languages and dialects. The nine most widely spoken are Tagalog, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Sugbuhanon, Bicol, Pampango, Pangasinan, Samarnon, and Maguindanao. Tagalog is the principal base of the national language which can now be spoken by the majority of the people in varying degrees of fluency.

II. The People upon the Coming of the Spanish Colonialists

Before the coming of Spanish colonialists, the people of the Philippine archipelago had already attained a semicommunal and semislave social system in many parts and also a feudal system in certain parts, especially in Mindanao and Sulu, where such a feudal faith as Islam had already taken roots. The Aetas had the lowest form of social organization, which was primitive communal.

The barangay was the typical community in the whole archipelago. It was the basic political and economic unit independent of similar others. Each embraced a few hundreds of people and a small territory. Each was headed by a chieftain called the rajah or datu.

The social structure comprised a petty nobility, the ruling class which had started to accumulate land that it owned privately or administered in the name of the clan or community; an intermediate class of freemen called the maharlikas who had enough land for their livelihood or who rendered special service to the rulers and who did not have to work in the fields; and the ruled classes that included the timawas, the serfs who shared the crops with the petty nobility, and also the slaves and semislaves who worked without having any definite share in the harvest. There were two kinds of slaves then: those who had their own quarters, the aliping namamahay, and those who lived in their master’s house, the aliping sagigilid. One acquired the status of a serf or a slave by inheritance, failure to pay debts and tribute, commission of crimes and captivity in wars between barangays.

The Islamic sultanates of Sulu and mainland Mindanao represented a higher stage of political and economic development than the barangay. These had a feudal form of social organization. Each of them encompassed more people and wider territory than the barangay. The sultan reigned supreme over several datus and was conscious of his privilege to rule as a matter of hereditary “divine right.”

Though they presented themselves mainly as administrators of communal lands, apart from being direct owners of certain lands, the sultans, datus and the nobility exacted land rent in the form of religious tribute and lived off the toiling masses. They constituted a landlord class attended by a retinue of religious teachers, scribes and leading warriors.

The sultanates emerged in the two centuries precedent to the coming of Spanish colonialists. They were built up among the so-called third wave of Malay migrants whose rulers either tried to convert to Islam, bought out, enslaved or drove away the original non-Muslim inhabitants of the areas that they chose to settle in. Serfs and slaves alike were used to till the fields and to make more clearings from the forest.

Throughout the archipelago, the scope of barangays could be enlarged either through the expansion of agriculture by the toil of the slaves or serfs, through conquests in war and through interbarangay marriages of the nobility. The confederations of barangays was usually the result of a peace pact, a barter agreement or an alliance to fight common internal and external enemies.

As evident from the forms of social organization already attained, the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago had an internal basis for further social development. In either barangay or sultanate, there was a certain mode of production which was bound to develop further until it would wear out and be replaced with a new one. There were definite classes whose struggle was bound to bring about social development. As a matter of fact, the class struggle within the barangay was already getting extended into interbarangay wars. The barangay was akin to the Greek city-state in many respects and the sultanate to the feudal commonwealth of other countries.

The people had developed extensive agricultural fields. In the plains or in the mountains, the people had developed irrigation systems. The Ifugao rice terraces were the product of the engineering genius of the people; a marvel of 12,000 miles if strung end-to-end. There were livestock-raising, fishing and brewing of beverages. Also there were mining, the manufacture of metal implements, weapons and ornaments, lumbering, shipbuilding and weaving. The handicrafts were developing fast. Gunpowder had also come into use in warfare. As far north as Manila, when the Spaniards came, there was already a Muslim community which had cannons in its weaponry.

The ruling classes made use of arms to maintain the social system, to assert their independence from other barangays or to repel foreign invaders. Their jurisprudence would still be borne out today by the so-called Code of Kalantiyaw and the Muslim laws. These were touchstones of their culture. There was a written literature which included epics, ballads, riddles and verse-sayings; various forms and instruments of music and dances; and art works that included well-designed bells, drums, gongs, shields, weapons, tools, utensils, boats, combs, smoking pipes, lime tubes and baskets. The people sculpted images from wood, bone, ivory, horn or metals. In areas where anito worship and polytheism prevailed, the images of flora and fauna were imitated, and in the areas where the Muslim faith prevailed, geometric and arabesque designs were made. Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, a record of what the Spanish conquistadores came upon, would later be used by Dr. Jose Rizal as testimony to the achievement of the indios in precolonial times.

There was interisland commerce ranging from Luzon to Mindanao and vice-versa. There were extensive trade relations with neighboring countries like China, Indochina, North Borneo, Indonesia, Malaya, Japan and Thailand. Traders from as far as India and the Middle East vied for commerce with the precolonial inhabitants of the archipelago. As early as the 9th century, Sulu was an important trading emporium where trading ships from Cambodia, China and Indonesia converged. Arab traders brought goods from Sulu to the Chinese mainland through the port of Canton. In the 14th century, a large fleet of 60 vessels from China anchored at Manila Bay, Mindoro and Sulu. Previous to this, Chinese trading junks had been intermittently sailing into various points of the Philippine shoreline. The barter system was employed or gold and metal gongs were used as medium of exchange.

III. Spanish Colonialism and Feudalism

The absence of a political unity involving all or the majority of the people of the archipelago allowed the Spanish conquistadores to impose their will on the people step by step even with a few hundreds of colonial troops at the start. Magellan employed the standard tactic of divide-and-rule when in 1521 he sided with Humabon against Lapu-lapu. He started a pattern of inveigling certain barangays to adopt the Christian faith and then employing them against other barangays which resisted colonial domination. However, it was Legazpi who in 1565 and thereafter succeeded in hoodwinking a large number of barangay chieftains typified by Sikatuna in quelling recalcitrant barangays with the sword and in establishing under the cross the first colonial settlements in Visayas and subsequently in Luzon.

The kind of society that developed in more than three centuries of Spanish rule was colonial and feudal. It was a society basically ruled by the landlord class, which included the Spanish colonial officials. The Catholic religious orders and the local puppet chiefs. The masses of the people were kept to the status of serfs and even the freemen became dispossessed.

It was in 1570 that the Spanish colonialists started to integrate the barangays that they had subjugated into larger administrative and economic units called the encomiendas. Wide areas of land, the encomiendas were awarded as royal grants to the colonial officials and Catholic religious orders in exchange for their “meritorious services” in the conquest of the native people. The encomienda system of local administration would be phased out in the 17th century when the organization of regular provinces was already possible and after it had served to establish the large-scale private landownership of the colonialists.

Under the guise of looking after the spiritual welfare of the people, the encomenderos collected tribute, enforced corvee labor and conscripted native soldiers. They arbitrarily extended the territorial scope of their royal grants, usurped ownership over the lands previously developed by the people and put more land to cultivation by employing corvee labor. It was convenient for the colonialists to convert into agricultural lands the clearing made from the forests as a result of the timber-cutting necessitated by various construction projects.

Public building, private houses, churches, fortifications, roads, bridges and ships for the galleon trade and for military expeditions were built. These entailed the mass conscription of labor for quarrying, timber-cutting, hauling, lumbering, brickmaking and construction work in nearby or faraway places.

The central government was set up in Manila to run the affairs of the colony. Its head was the Spanish governor-general who saw to it that the Filipino people were compelled to pay taxes, render free labor and produce an agricultural surplus sufficient to feed the parasitic colonial officials, friars and soldiery. On the one hand, the governor-general had the soldiery to enforce the colonial order. On the other, he had the collaboration of the friars to keep the people in spiritual and economic enslavement. He enriched himself fast within his short stay in office by being the chief shipper on the Manila-Acapulco trade galleons and by being the dispenser of shipping permits to merchants.

The Manila-Acapulco trade in certain goods coming from China and other neighboring countries yielded high revenues for the central government and the business-minded religious orders from the late 16th century to the early 19th century. It eventually declined and was replaced by the more profitable export of sugar, hemp, copra, tobacco, indigo and others on various foreign ships after the first half of the 18th century and all throughout the 19th century. The large-scale cultivation of these export crops was imposed on the toiling masses to provide more profits for Spanish colonialism.

At the provincial level was the alcalde-mayor as the colonial chieftain. He exercised both executive and judicial powers, collected tributes from the town and enjoyed the privilege of monopolizing commerce in the province and engaged in usury. He manipulated government funds as well as drew loans from the obras pias, the friars’ chest for “charities,” to engage in nefarious commerce and usury.

At the town level was the gobernadorcillo, the top puppet official formally elected by the principalia. The principalia was composed of the incumbent and past gobernadorcillos and the barrio chieftains called the cabezas de barangay. It essentially reflected the assimilation of the old barangay leadership into the Spanish colonial system. Membership in the principalia was qualified by property, literacy, heredity and, of course, puppetry to the foreign tyrants.

The most important regular duties of the gobernadorcillo and the cabezas de barangay under him were the collection of tribute and the enforcement of corvee labor. Their property was answerable for any deficiency in their performance. However, the gobernadorcillo usually made the cabezas de barangay his scapegoat. To avoid bankruptcy and keep themselves in the good graces of their colonial masters, these puppet officials also made sure that the main burden of colonial oppression was borne by the peasant masses.

In the classic fashion of feudalism, the union of church and state suffused the entire colonial structure. All colonial subjects fell under friar control from birth until death. The pulpit and the confessional box were expertly used for colonial propaganda and espionage, respectively. The catechetical schools were used to poison the minds of the children against their own country. The Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas was established as early as 1611 but its enrolment was limited to Spaniards and creoles until the second half of the 19th century. The colonial bureaucracy did not find any need for natives in the higher professions. Among the masses, the friars propagated a bigoted culture that was obsessed with novenas, prayerbooks, hagiographies, scapularies, the passion play, the anti-Muslim moro-moro and pompous religious feasts and processions. The friars had burned and destroyed the artifacts of precolonial culture as the handiwork of the devil and assimilated only those things of the indigenous culture which they could use to facilitate colonial and medieval indoctrination.

In the material base as well as in the superstructure, friar control was total and most oppressive in the towns situated in vast landed estates owned by the religious orders. In the colonial center as well as in every province, the friars exercised vast political powers. They supervised such diverse affairs as taxation, census, statistics, primary schools, health, public works and charities. They certified the correctness of residence certificates, the condition of men chosen for military service, the municipal budget, the election of municipal officials and police officers and the examination of pupils in the parochial schools.

They intervened in the election of municipal officials. As a matter of fact, they were so powerful that they could instigate the transfer, suspension or removal from office of colonial officials, from the highest to the lowest, including the governor-general. In line with their feudal interests, they could even murder the governor-general with impunity as they did to Salcedo in 1668 and Bustamante in 1719. As they could be that vicious within their own official ranks, they were more so in witch-hunting and suppressing native rebels whom they condemned as “ heretics” and “subversives.”

Throughout the Spanish colonial regime, revolts broke out sporadically all over the archipelago against the tribute, corvee labor, commercial monopolies, excessive land rent, landgrabbing, imposition of the Catholic faith, arbitrary rules and other cruel practices of the colonial rulers, both lay and clerical. There were at least 200 revolts of uneven scope and duration. These grew with cumulative strength to create a great revolutionary tradition among the Filipino people.

The most outstanding revolts in the first century of colonial rule were those led by Sulayman in 1564 and Magat Salamat in 1587-88 in Manila and by Magalat in 1596 in Cagayan. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Igorots in the central highlands of Northern Luzon rebelled against attempts to colonize them and used the favorable terrain of their homeland to maintain their independence. Almost simultaneously in 1621-22, Tamblot in Bohol and Bankaw in Leyte raised the flag of revolt. Revolts also broke out in Nueva Vizcaya and Cagayan in 1621 and 1625-27, respectively.

The most widespread revolts that occurred in the 17th century were those inspired by Sumuroy in the southern provinces and Maniago, Malong and Almazan in the northern provinces of the archipelago. The Sumuroy revolt started in Samar in 1649 and spread northward to Albay and Camarines Sur and southward to Masbate, Cebu, Camiguin, Zamboanga and Northern Mindanao. The parallel revolts of Maniago, Malong and Almazan started in 1660 in Pampanga, Pangasinan and Ilocos, respectively. Malong extended his revolt to Pampanga, Ilocos and Cagayan. A localized revolt also broke out in 1663 under Tapar in Oton, Panay.

All throughout the Spanish colonial rule, the Muslims of Mindanao as well as the mountain people in practically every island, especially the Igorots in Northern Luzon, kept up their resistance. Aside from these consistent anti-colonial fighters, the people of Bohol fought the foreign tyrants for 85 years from 1774 to 1829. They were first led by Dagohoy and subsequently by his successors. At the peak of their strength, they were 20,000 strong and had their own government in their mountain bases.

Despite previous defeats, the people of Pangasinan and the Ilocos provinces repeatedly rose up against the colonial rule. The revolt led by Palaris in 1762-64 spread throughout the large province of Pangasinan and the one led by Diego Silang in 1762-63 (and later by his wife, Gabriela, after his treacherous assassination) spread from the Ilocos to as far as Cagayan Valley northward and Pangasinan southward. These revolts tried to take advantage of the British seizure of Manila and the Spanish defeat in the Seven Years’ War.

In the 18th century, the anti-colonial revolts of the people increasingly took the character of conscious opposition to feudalism. Previously, the hardships and torment of corvee labor were the frequent causes of revolt. The arbitrary expansion of friar estates through fraudulent surveys and also the arbitrary raising of land rent inflamed the people, especially in Central Luzon and Southern Luzon. Matienza led a revolt outrightly against the agrarian abuses of the Jesuits who had rampantly grabbed land from the people. This revolt spread from Lian and Nasugbu, Batangas to the neighboring provinces of Laguna, Cavite and Rizal. In other provinces of the archipelago outside of Central Luzon and Southern Luzon, revolt came to be more often sparked by the monopolistic and confiscatory practices of the colonial government towards the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century. In 1807, the Ilocanos revolted against the wine monopoly. Once more they rose up in 1814 in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte and killed several landlords.

In quelling all the revolts precedent to the Philippine Revolution of 1896, the Spanish colonialist conscripted large numbers of peasants to fight their own brothers. Military conscription thus became a major form of oppression as the development of revolts became rapid and widespread.

IV. The Philippine Revolution of 1896

The 19th century saw the intensification and ripening of the colonial and feudal system of exploitation. The Spanish colonial government was compelled to draw more profits from its feudal base in the Philippines to make up for the decline of the galleon trade and to adjust to the increasing pressures and demands of capitalist countries. The British victory in the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic wars and French occupation of Spain, the expansionist maneuvers of the United States and the rise of national independence movements in Latin America, and the sharp struggle between the “liberal republicans” and “absolute monarchists” in Spain had the total effect of goading colonial Spain to exploit the Filipino people further.

Under the strain of increasing exploitation, the national and democratic aspirations of the broad masses of the people rose. As oppression was stepped up, the spirit of resistance among the ruled, especially the peasant masses, became heightened until the Philippine Revolution of 1896 broke out.

The fullest development of feudalism under Spanish colonial rule was made. The peasant masses were compelled not only to continue producing a surplus in staple crops to feed and keep the colonial and feudal parasites in comfort but also produce an ever-increasing amount of raw material crops for export to various capitalist countries. The large-scale cultivation of sugar, hemp, tobacco, coconut and the like in some areas in turn required the production of a bigger surplus in staple food crops in other areas in order to sustain the large numbers of people concentrated in the production of export crops. Rice was imported whenever a general shortage occurred.

Thus, the expansion of foreign trade made by the Spanish colonialists entailed the acceleration of domestic trade and the wearing-out of a self-sufficient natural economy towards a commodity economy. The exchange of agricultural products within the archipelago as well as the delivery of export crops to Manila and other trading ports and the provincial distribution of imported goods that served the wealthy, necessitated the improvement of transportation and communications.

The intensification of feudal exploitation included the adoption of the hated hacienda system, the rampant seizure of cultivated lands, the arbitrary raising of land rent and levies by both landlords and bureaucrats. The practice of monopoly, which meant dictated prices for the crops, further impoverished the peasants and enriched the bureaucrats. Landowning peasants either found themselves bankrupt or their lands arbitrarily included in the legal boundaries of large landlord estates. From 1803 to 1892, eighty-eight decrees were issued ostensibly to make landownership orderly but these merely legalized massive landgrabbing by the feudalists.

The improvement of transportation and communications aggravated by feudal exploitation of the people. Exercising their colonial powers, the Spaniards ordered the people in increasing numbers to build roads, bridges and ports and paid them extremely low nominal wages. Big gangs of men were taken to distant places to work. At the same time, the improvement of transportation and communications paved the way for wider contacts among the exploited and oppressed people despite the rulers’ subjective wish to use these only for their own profit. Also the introduction of the steamship and the railroad in connection with foreign and domestic trade contribute a great deal to the formation of the Filipino proletariat.

It was in the 19th century that the embryo of the Filipino proletariat became distinct. It was composed of the workers at the railroad, ships, docks, sugar mills, tobacco and cigar and cigarette factories, printing shops, breweries, foundries, merchandising firms and the like. They emerged in the transition from a feudal to a semifeudal economy.

The economic prosperity enjoyed mainly by the colonial rulers was shared to some extent by the principalia, especially the gobernadorcillo. The local puppet chieftains either had landholdings of their own or become big leaseholders on the landed estates of friars or lay Spanish officials. They engaged in trade and bought more lands with their profits in order to engage further in trade. In Manila and other principal trading ports, a local comprador class emerged correspondent to the shipping, commercial and banking houses put up by foreign capitalist firms including American, British, German and French ones.

A nascent Filipino bourgeoisie became more and more distinct as agricultural production rose and as the volume of exports likewise did. The port of Manila was formally opened to non-Spanish foreign ships in 1834 although foreign trade with capitalist countries was actually started much earlier. From 1855 to 1873, six other ports throughout the archipelago were opened. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the distance between the Philippines and Europe and thus accelerated economic and political contracts between the two.

In the second half of the 19th century, the entry of native students into the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas and other colonial-clerical colleges became conspicuously large. Though these natives could afford college education, they were still the object of racial discrimination by their Spanish classmates and friar mentors. They had to suffer the epithet of “monkey” as their parents were refered to as “beasts loaded with gold.” The creoles or mestizos were caught in the middle of a situation charged with the racial antagonism between the indios and the Spaniards. This racial antagonism was nothing but a manifestation of the colonial relationship. Even among the Spaniards, there was the foolish distinction made between the Philippine-born Spaniards and the Spanish-born Spaniards, with the former being derisively called Filipinos by the latter.

As more and more indios joined the ranks of the educated or the ilustrados, there came a point when the colonial authorities were alarmed and they entertained fears that they would be taken to task on the basis of the colonial laws whose idealist rhetoric they did not all practice. What appeared to the colonial rulers as the first systematized movement among the native ilustrados to attack the social and political supremacy of the Spaniards was the secularization movement within the clergy. The overwhelming majority of those who participated in this movement were indios and creoles and they demanded taking over the parishes held by the religious orders whose members were overwhelmingly Spanish.

When the Cavite Mutiny of 1872 occurred, Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora who were the most outspoken leaders of the secularization movement were accused of conspiring to overthrow the Spanish colonial regime and they were garrotted. The mutiny was essentially an act of rebellion of the oppressed masses initiated by workers at the Cavite naval stockyard who were subjected to low wages and various forms of cruelty. Many of the rebellious workers and their genuine supporters were tortured and murdered. The three clerics who were condemned by the Spanish governor-general and the friars pleaded their innocence until their end. The style of pleading political innocence characterized the ilustrados from then on.

Nevertheless, even as the yoke of colonial oppression was carried mainly by the toiling masses, the principalia also suffered political and economic oppression at the hands of the colonial tyrants. The principalia joined in the exploitation of the toiling masses but in turn it was subjected to certain oppressive demands made by the governor-general, the provincial governor and the friars who increasingly reduced its share of exploitation. These colonial tyrants arbitrarily increased the quota in tribute collection, the taxes for the privilege of engaging in commerce, the land rent on leaseholdings, the quota in agricultural production and interest on loans. Failure to keep up with ever-increasing levies resulted in bankruptcy especially among the cabezas de barangay. The employment of civil guards for the confiscation of property and the enforcement of colonial laws became a common sight. Towards the end of the 19th century, the principalia became most offended when it was forcibly ejected from its leaseholds on friar lands because the friars preferred to turn over the management of their lands to various foreign corporations.

The extremely frequent change of governors-general in the Philippines during the 19th century reflected the sharp struggle between the “liberal republicans” and the “absolute monarchists” in Spain. This had the general effect of aggravating the Filipino people’s suffering. Every governor-general had to make the most of his average short term of a little over a year to enlarge the official as well as his personal treasury.

The ilustrados became increasingly dissatisfied with the colonial regime and some of them fled to Spain where they hoped to get higher education and get more sympathy from Spanish liberal circles for their limited cause of changing the colonial status of the Philippines to the status of a regular province of Spain. They were desirous of representation in the Spanish parliament and the enjoyment of civil rights under the Spanish Constitution. In carrying out their reform movement, they established the newspaper La Solidaridad. It was the focus of activity for what would be called the Propaganda Movement, of which the chief propagandists were Dr. Jose Rizal, M.H. del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena and Antonio Luna.

The Propaganda Movement failed and was condemned as “subversive” and “heretical” by the colonial authorities. Trying to carry out propaganda work in the Philippines itself, Rizal organized the short-lived La Liga Filipina which called on the Filipino people to become a national community and yet failed to state categorically the need for revolutionary armed struggle to effect separation from Spain. Putting his trust in the enemy, he was subsequently arrested and exiled to Dapitan in 1892. When the Philippine Revolution of 1896 broke out, he was held culpable for it by the colonial tyrants and yet he betrayed it by calling on the people to lay down their arms a few days before his execution.

The clear revolutionary call for separation from Spain was made by the Kataastaasang Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan. It was secretly founded in the proletarian district of Tondo by its leader Andres Bonifacio immediately after Rizal’s arrest in 1892. In its first year, it was composed of only 200 members coming mainly from the toiling masses. In the next few years, it consciously recruited members who could start revolutionary struggle in various parts of the country so as to be able to wage a war of national liberation. At the same time, it recruited its members mainly from the ranks of the oppressed masses to ensure the democratic character of the revolution. After its Cry of Pugad Lawin on August 23, 1896, signaling the start of armed warfare against the colonialists, its ranks swelled to several tens of thousands and rallied the entire Filipino people to rise in revolt.

The Philippine Revolution of 1896 was a national-democratic revolution of the old type. Though Bonifacio came from the working class, he was in possession of proletarian ideology. The guiding ideology of the revolution was that of the liberal bourgeoisie. Its classic model was the French Revolution and Bonifacio himself was inspired mainly by its ideas. At any rate, the revolution asserted the sovereignty of the Filipino people, the protection and promotion of civil liberties, the confiscation of the friar estates and the elimination of theocratic rule.

At the Tejeros Convention of 1897, the ilustrados who were mostly from Cavite decided to form the revolutionary government to replace the Katipunan and elected Emilio Aguinaldo president, thus replacing Bonifacio as the leader of the revolution. When an ilustrado strongly objected to Bonifacio’s election as minister of interior on the ground that he was of lowly origin and had no education as a lawyer, the latter declared the convention null and void in accordance with a previous agreement requiring respect for every decision made by the convention. The convention manifested the class leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie and likewise the divisive effect of regionalism. The attempt of Bonifacio to form another revolutionary council led to his arrest and execution by the Aguinaldo leadership.

Within 1897, the revolutionary government suffered defeat after defeat. The ilustrados showed their inability to lead the revolution. The liberal-bourgeois leadership finally succumbed to the offers of general amnesty by the colonial government through the mediation of the scoundrel Pedro Paterno. The Pact of Biak-na-Bato was signed to consummate the surrender of Aguinaldo and the payment of P400,000 as first installment to his council of leaders.

While Aguinaldo was in exile in Hongkong, U.S. agents approached him and proposed to him to take advantage of the imminent outbreak of the Spanish-American War. They pretended to help the Filipino people liberate themselves from the Spanish colonial rule. The U.S. imperialists schemed to make use of Aguinaldo to facilitate their own seizure of the Philippines. Thus was Aguinaldo brought back to Cavite aboard an American cutter after Dewey’s naval squadron had sailed to Manila Bay to destroy the Spanish fleet.

Taking advantage of the Spanish-American War, the Filipino people intensified their revolutionary armed struggle against the Spanish colonial rule. Spanish power collapsed throughout the archipelago except in Intramuros and a few negligible garrisons. Even the Filipino soldiers in the Spanish military service took the side of the Philippine Revolution. A situation in May 1898 emerged in which the Filipino revolutionary forces encircled on land the colonial seat of power, Intramuros, and the U.S. naval fleet stood guard in Manila Bay. The Filipino revolutionaries took the policy of laying siege to starve the enemy into surrender while the imperialist navy waited for troop reinforcements from the United States.

On June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo made the Kawit proclamation of independence which carried the unfortunate qualification, “under the protection of the Mighty and Humane North American nation.” Unwittingly, he declared the so-called First Philippines Republic to be a mere protectorate of U.S. imperialism.

U.S. troop reinforcements started to arrive at the end of June. They were landed to take over under various pretexts positions occupied by the Filipino revolutionary forces in the encirclement of Intramuros. Position after position was relinquished to the U.S. imperialists by the weakling Aguinaldo until all the revolutionary forces were relegated to the background.

V. The Filipino-American War

When Intramuros was already completely surrounded by the U.S. naval and land troops, diplomatic negotiations were secretly conducted by Admiral Dewey and the Spanish governor-general through the Belgian consul. These negotiations led to the agreement of stating a mock battle to justify the turnover of Manila to the U.S. imperialists by the Spanish colonialists and were parallel to negotiations being held abroad towards the general settlement of the Spanish-American War through the mediation of the French government.

On August 13, 1898, the mock battle of Manila was staged by the U.S. imperialists and the Spanish colonialists. After a few token shots were fired, the latter surrendered to the former. The U.S. imperialists made it a point to prevent Filipino troops from entering Intramuros. It was thus that the Filipino revolutionary forces were conclusively deprived of the victory that was rightfully theirs. From then on, however, hatred of the U.S. imperialism became more widespread among the Filipino masses and their patriotic troops.

The Philippine revolutionary government shifted its headquarters from Cavite to Malolos, Bulacan in September in anticipation of further U.S. imperialist aggression. Here the Malolos Congress was held to put out a constitution that had for its models bourgeois-democratic constitutions. During the same period, the U.S. imperialists kept on insisting in diplomatic terms that Filipino troops withdraw further from where they had been pushed. The U.S. aggressors maneuvered to occupy more territory around Manila.

Attempts of the Aguinaldo government at diplomacy abroad to assert the sovereign rights of the Filipino people proved to be futile. On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the United States and Spain ceding the entire Philippines to the former at the price of $20 million and guaranteeing the property and business rights of Spanish citizens in the archipelago. On December 21, U.S. President McKinley issued the “Proclamation of Benevolent Assimilation” to declare in sugar-coated terms a war of aggression against the Filipino people.

On February 4, 1899, the U.S. troops made a surprise attack on the Filipino revolutionary forces in the vicinity of Manila. In the ensuing battles in the city, at least 3,000 Filipino were butchered while only 250 U.S. troops fell. Thus, armed hostilities between U.S. imperialism and the Filipino people began. The Filipino people heroically stood up to wage a revolutionary war of national liberation.

Before the Filipino-American War was decisively won by U.S. imperialism in 1902, 126,468 U.S. troops had been unleashed against the 7,000,000 Filipino people. These foreign aggressors suffered a casualty of at least 4,000 killed and almost 3,000 wounded. Close to 200,000 Filipino combatants and noncombatants were slain. In short, for every U.S. trooper killed, 50 Filipinos were in turn killed. More than a quarter of a million Filipinos died as a direct and indirect result of hostilities. However, an estimate of a U.S. general would even put the Filipino death casualty to as high as 600,00 or one-sixth of the population in Luzon then.

The U.S. imperialist aggressors practised genocide of monstrous proportions. They committed various forms of atrocities such as the massacres of captured troops and innocent civilians; pillage on women, homes and property; and ruthless employment of torture, such as dismemberment, the water cure and the rope torture. Zoning and concentration camps were resorted to in order to put civilians and combatants at their mercy.

As U.S. imperialism forced the Aguinaldo government to retreat, it played on the weaknesses in the ranks of the ilustrado leadership of the revolution. The imperialist chieftain McKinley dispatched the Schurman Commission in 1899 and then the Taft Commission in 1900 and issued to them instructions for the “pacification” of the country and cajolement of capitulationist traitors.

The liberal-bourgeois leadership of the old democratic revolution once more proved to be inadequate, flabby and compromising. Aguinaldo failed to lead the revolution effectively. He turned against such anti-imperialists as Mabini and Luna and increasingly relied on such capitulationists as Paterno and Buencamino. These two traitors who in previous years were notorious for their puppetry to Spanish colonialism had sneaked into the revolutionary government and usurped authority therein. They headed a pack of traitors who were deeply attracted to the siren song of “peace,” “autonomy” and “benevolent assimilation” which the U.S. imperialists sang as they butchered the people.

In every town occupied by the U.S. imperialist troops, puppet municipal elections were held and dominated by the old principalia. These puppet elections excluded the masses who could not comply with the property and literacy requirements. These sham elections were used mainly to break off the principalia from the revolution and to attract its members into becoming running dogs in the same way that the Spanish colonialists had done.

As soon as traitors led by Paterno and Buencamino were in the hands of the U.S. imperialists, they were used to serve imperialist propaganda, chiefly to call on the people to lay down their arms. Under the instigation of the aggressors, particularly the U.S. army intelligence, Trinidad Pardo de Tavera organized the Partido Federal in 1900 to advocate the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. At the same time, the imperialists promulgated laws to punish those who would advocate independence.

The people and their revolutionary leaders who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S. flag were persecuted, imprisoned or banished to Guam. Mass organizations, especially among the workers and peasants, were suppressed every time they surfaced.

In 1901, Aguinaldo himself was captured by the imperialists with the help of Filipino mercenaries. From then on, the treacherous counterrevolutionary forefathers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines were systematically organized and employed to help complete the imperialist conquest of the Filipino people. The first puppet constabularymen were used extensively in “mopping up” operations against persistent revolutionary fighters in Luzon and Visayas as well as in the subjugation of Mindanao.

Even when the main detachments of the Aguinaldo government had been defeated, armed resistance against U.S. imperialism still persisted in practically every town of the entire archipelago. The people of Bicol continued to wage armed struggle until 1903 when their leader Simeon Ola betrayed them by surrendering. In the Visayas, particularly Cebu, Samar, Leyte and Panay, the Pulahanes fought fierce battles against the U.S. aggressor troops and the puppet constabulary. So did the masses of Cavite, Batangas, Laguna and Quezon even after a general amnesty was issued. In Central Luzon, a religious organization, the Santa Iglesia, also waged armed resistance. In the Ilocos, associations that proclaimed themselves as the New Katipunan conducted a guerrilla war for national independence against U.S. imperialism. As late as 1907, puppet elections could not be held in Isabela because of the people’s resistance. The most prominent of the final efforts to continue the revolutionary struggle in Luzon was led by Macario Sakay, from 1902 to 1906 in Bulacan, Pampanga, Laguna, Nueva Ecija and Rizal. It was only in 1911 that guerrilla war completely ceased in Luzon. However, the fiercest armed resistance after 1902 was waged by the people of Mindanao until as late as 1916.

For some time, U.S. imperialists succeeded in deceiving the Sultan of Sulu that his feudal sovereignty would be respected under the Bates Treaty of 1899 which he signed. When the foreign aggressors begun to put what they called the “Moro Province” under their administrative control, they had to contend with the Hassan uprising of 1903-1904; Usap rebellion of 1905; Pala revolt of 1905; Bud Dajo uprising of 1906; Bud Bagsak battle of 1913 and many others. This heroic resistance of the people was quelled with extreme atrocity.

The Sedition Law of 1901, the Brigandage Act of 1902 and the Reconcentration Act of 1903 were passed by U.S. imperialism to sanction military operations against the people as mere police operations against “common criminals.” Patriots were called bandits. People in extensive areas were herded into military camps in order to separate them from the patriotic guerrillas.

The war expenditures of U.S. imperialism in the conquest of the Philippines were paid for by the Filipino people themselves. They were compelled to pay taxes to the U.S. colonial regime to defray a major part of the expenditures and the interest on bonds floated in the name of the Philippine government through the Wall Street banking houses. Of course, the superprofits derived from the protracted exploitation of the Filipino people would constitute the basic gains of U.S. imperialism.

VI. The Colonial Rule of U.S. Imperialism

The bestial conquest of the Filipino people by U.S. imperialism meant the continued status of the Philippines as a colony. U.S. imperialism came to frustrate the national and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people and to impose the will of the U.S. monopoly-capitalist class by force arms and double-talk. In the United States, the imperialist politicians and their capitalist masters boasted of their filthy work as a noble mission to “civilize” and Christianize” the Filipino people.

U.S. imperialism had been interested in the Philippines as a source of raw materials, a market for its surplus product and a field of investment for its surplus capital. Moreover, it needed the Philippines as a strategic foothold for carrying out its expansionist drive to convert the Pacific Ocean into an “American lake” and to increase its share of loot in the despoliation of China and Asia in general.

By the treaty of Paris in 1898, U.S. imperialism took over the role of Spanish colonialism as the colonial ruler of the Filipino people. The victor in the Spanish-American War acted as the rising capitalist power, capable of paying off the old colonial government and accommodating those property and business rights established previous to the treaty. Thus, feudalism was assimilated and retained for the imperialist purposes of the United States.

After the Filipino revolutionary forces had been defeated, U.S. imperialism drew from the country an increasing quantity of such commercial crops as sugar, coconut and hemp, aside from such other raw materials as logs and mineral ores. Sugar centrals, coconut oil refineries, rope factories and the like were built. The hacienda system of agriculture was further encouraged and reached its full development under the U.S. colonial regime. The purchase of a mere portion of the friar lands by the U.S. government in 1903 from the religious corporations was a token act which did not solve the land problem. Persons other than those who had little or no land, especially the top running dogs of the colonial government, were the ones who were able to take advantage for the land policy. Landlords in authority combined with American carpetbaggers in titling to themselves public lands of commercial, agricultural and speculatory value.

As a result of the more rapid growth of a commodity economy under the U.S. colonial regime, the peasantry became more impoverished and the owner-cultivators who became bankrupt sold off their lands to old-type and new-type landlord usurers, merchants and rich peasants. The evils of the Spanish colonial regime were carried over to the U.S. colonial regime. A new feature of the economy was an increase in the number of proletarians. Soon enough a huge reserve army of labor and a relative surplus of population, mainly emanating from the peasantry, arose.

In exchange for the Philippine raw materials, U.S. finished goods were imported free of tariff duties under the Payne-Aldrich Act of 1909. In 1913, quota limitations on Philippine raw materials exported to the United States were completely lifted. The free trade between these two types of commodities perpetuated the colonial and agrarian economy. The increasing avalanche of finished goods into the country crushed local handicrafts and manufacturers and furthermore compelled the people to buy these finished goods and to produce raw materials mainly.

U.S. surplus was invested in the Philippines both in the form of direct investments and loan capital. Direct investments went mainly into the production of raw materials and into trade in U.S. finished products and local raw materials. Minor processing of raw materials was also introduced. Mineral ores were extracted for the first time on a commercial basis. On the other hand, loan capital served to support foreign trade and cover trade deficits, convert pesos into dollars for profit remittances, pay salaries of American bureaucrats and business personnel, cover the needs of the colonial government for various equipment and the like. Every year, raw material production and, therefore, the exploitation of the people had to be intensified by the colonial regime in order to increase its rate of profit.

U.S. imperialism improved the system of transportation and communications as a means to tighten its political, economic, cultural and military control of the Philippines. U.S. corporations derived huge profits from public works contracts in the construction of more roads, bridges, ports and other transportation facilities. These public works in turn widened directly the market for U.S. motor vehicles, machinery and oil products. The colonial exchange of raw materials and finished products was accelerated. Troop movement for the suppression of the people also became faster.

The establishment of an extensive public school system and the adoption of English as the medium of instruction served not only to enhance the political indoctrination of the Filipinos into subservience to U.S. imperialism but also to encourage local taste for American commodities in general. It also opened the market directly for U.S. educational materials. The mass media was developed not only to spread imperialist propaganda but also to advertise all kinds of U.S. goods and, in particular, to sell various kinds of printing and communications equipment. Even the campaign for public sanitation and hygiene was a means to speed up the monopoly sales of U.S. drugs, chemicals and medical equipment. In the first place, the depredations of the U.S. aggressors troops in the Filipino-American War had resulted in various kinds of pestilence and epidemics, especially cholera, which threatened the health of the imperialist conquerors themselves.

On the basis of the economic conditions bred by U.S. imperialism, a certain social structure was built up in the Philippines. The U.S. imperialists merely adopted as their principal puppets those exploiting classes which had collaborated most with the Spanish colonial rulers in the 19th century and retained them at the top of the Philippine society. These were the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class. From the ranks of these exploiting classes, the U.S. imperialists chose their top political agents and trained them to become bureaucrat capitalists sharing in the spoils of the colonial government. At the base of the society were the toiling masses workers and peasants who comprised more than 90 per cent of the people. During the U.S. colonial rule, the proletariat increased in number to the extent that the semifeudal society became reinforced with the quantitative increase of raw material production, trade, transport and communications facilities and minor manufacturing. But the peasantry remained the majority class in the entire society.

In the middle section of Philippine society were such strata as the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The national bourgeoisie was an extremely tiny and hard-pressed stratum because of the enormous dumping of U.S. finished products and the concentration of financial power in the hands of the comprador big bourgeoisie and the imperialist firms. The petty bourgeoisie which had maintained its status by sheer property ownership that made it self-reliant increasingly took interest in formal education. Of the many small landlords and rich peasants who became bankrupt, some held on to a petty-bourgeois status by acquiring a college education and getting into salaried service in the colonial bureaucracy and in private companies and others fell to the status of the proletariat or the semiproletariat.

U.S. imperialism built up an educational system as a major instrument of colonial control. Its main content was directed against the Philippine Revolution and was intended to cultivate political subservience to U.S. imperialism. As soon as an area was conquered in the course of the Filipino-American War, the imperialist aggressor troops posed as teachers in order to spread the imperialist propaganda that they had come to bring “democracy” and to prepare the Filipinos for “self-government.” The first American teachers from the soldiery were soon reinforced by the Thomasites, hundreds of civilian teachers from the United States. They systematized the colonial public schools and put up teacher-training schools and agricultural schools. In addition, American Catholic and Protestant missionaries came to help in the colonial indoctrination of the people, especially in the hinterlands.

To make their propaganda pervade every field of culture, the aggressors never hesitated to employ force to suppress any attempt to express the national-democratic aspirations of the people. As late as 1907, the Flag Law was enacted to suppress any patriotic attempt of Filipinos to advocate independence or display the Philippine flag. Such newspapers as El Renacimiento and El Nuevo Dia, despite their basically compromising liberal-democratic views, were harassed by the U.S. colonial authorities. Patriotic literature and dramatic presentations were banned and their author were severely punished.

Reflecting the subordination of feudalism to U.S. imperialism at the material base of society, the new colonial culture and education were characterized by the superimposition of comprador ideology upon the feudal ideology within the superstructure. The Catholic Church shifted its loyalty from Spanish colonialism to U.S. imperialism. The homilies of the priest were bent to the slant of the U.S. press. The U.S. colonial regime established the University of the Philippines in 1908 to attract mainly the petty bourgeoisie, even as the University of Santo Tomas, together with the convent schools, continued to prefer teaching an exclusive clientele of students from the exploiting classes who could afford to pay exorbitant matriculation fees. U.S. imperialism was bent on recruiting a large number of intellectual agents from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in order to raise the level of scientific and technical competence for servitude in an expanding bureaucracy and in the proliferating imperialist corporations. To further establish its ideological hegemony in the Philippines, the U.S. colonial government also recruited from 1903 to 1914 a large number of students for training in the United States. These pensionados subsequently functioned as the most reliable puppets of U.S. imperialism inside and outside the colonial bureaucracy. They always mistook their indebtedness to U.S. imperialism as that of the entire Filipino people and they were blind to the fact that through them U.S. imperialism could oppress and exploit the broad masses of the Filipino people, especially the workers and peasants.

In establishing the colonial government in the Philippines, U.S. imperialism first relied on the most notorious betrayers of the Philippines Revolution. They were afforded the spoils of bureaucrat capitalism, which enlarged their comprador and landlord interests. Their political party, the Partido Federal, served to endorse the new colonial rule. Their leading representatives were accommodated in the Philippine Commission, the leading legislative and executive organ of the regime. This was headed by the American governor-general and included other American officials.

When in 1907 they declared the first national elections for the puppet Philippine Assembly in accordance with the Philippine Bill of 1902, the U.S. colonial officials allowed the Partido Nacionalista to compete with the Partido Federal in the elections. Realizing that the U.S. colonial officials themselves actually scorned the idea of making the Philippines a U.S. state and that the Filipino people were vigorously desirous of national independence and democracy, the barefaced traitors in the Partido Federal relabelled themselves as the Partido Progresista and advocated “eventual independence” after the people had supposedly shown their capacity for “self-government.” By adopting the slogan of “immediate, absolute and complete independence”, the Partido Nacionalista won overwhelmingly in the puppet elections over the Partido Progresista. Old puppets were replaced by new puppets led by Sergio Osmena and Manuel Quezon. Though their winning slogan sounded attractive, the new traitors were no different from the old ones in that they too accepted the treacherous notion that genuine independence could be peacefully and graciously granted by U.S. imperialism.

Osmena prevailed as top puppet chieftain from 1907 to 1922, first as president of the Philippine Assembly and then as speaker of the House of Representatives. He took orders from the American governor-general. The Philippine Assembly was subject to the Philippine Commission and was mainly an instrument for facilitating the collection of taxes from the people and the appropriation of government revenues for colonial administration. It was a glorified principalia with pretensions larger in scale than those of its antecedent. It was composed of the political representatives of the landlord class and the comprador big bourgeoisie.

One glaring example of Osmena’s puppetry was his campaign for the suspension of any kind of agitation for Philippine independence in 1917 when U.S. imperialism joint the first global inter-imperialist war. He also offered 25,000 Filipino mercenaries, a submarine and a destroyer to serve with the U.S. armed forces in Europe and maneuvered for the subsciption of $20 million worth of Liberty Bonds and the contribution of $500,000 to the American Red Cross by the impoverished Filipino people.

By the middle part of the second decade, the number of Filipino bureau chiefs had markedly increased. The U.S. imperialists prated about “Filipinization” of the colonial government. They had already trained a big number of puppets to assume administrative responsibility on behalf of U.S. monopoly capitalism in addition to the interest of the local exploitating classes. In 1916, the U.S. imperialists issued the Philippine Autonomy Law which dissolved the Philippine Commission and in its place created the Philippine Senate. The Philippine Assembly became the House of Representatives. The law further encouraged the U.S. bureaucrats to retire so that they could be replaced with Filipinos.

By being elected to the presidency of the Philippine Senate, Quezon gained a position from which he was to catapult himself to the top of the puppet bureaucracy. He claimed responsibility for the enactment of the autonomy law and, therefore, for the “Filipinization” of the colonial government. To boost his political capital, he posed as a champion of Philippine independence in the manner approved by his imperialist masters. He led the first mission to beg for “independence” in Washington in 1918. He slowly undermined the prestige of Osmena who was speaker of the House of Representatives until 1921 when he attacked the latter on his method of leadership but not on the substance of leadership. In 1922, both ran for the Philippine Senate and were elected on two separate wings of the Nacionalista Party. It was Quezon who was once more elected president of the Senate. Osmena was elected president protempore. From then on, Quezon became the top puppet chieftain.

Consistently, Quezon played the game of orating for the Philippine independence while obsequiously acting as the top puppet politician in the country. Feigning dissatisfaction with the result of the independence mission to the United States, he formed in 1926 the Supreme National Council and launched a national prayer day for “independence” on Washington’s birthday. These he used as a mere device for getting “non-partisan” support for his puppet leadership.

Like all the bureaucrat capitalists whom he headed, Quezon enriched himself through graft and corruption and was able to amass wealth in agricultural land, urban real estate and corporate stocks. During the third decade, when the U.S. capitalist crisis occurred and sharpened the suffering of the people all over the world, Quezon acted as an efficient instrument of colonial rule by raising the slogan of “social justice” while at the same time launching the most brutal attack against the people.

At the onset of the decade, the broad masses of the people were greatly agitated by the unremitting colonial and class oppression imposed on them by U.S. imperialism and its local lackeys — the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and the big puppet bureaucrats. The Communist Party of the Philippines was established on November 7, 1930 by Crisanto Evangelista in response to the growing demand for national and social liberation. It strived to integrate the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of Philippine society and raised the level of the Philippine Revolution to a new type of national-democratic revolution in the era of imperialism.

The ceaseless struggle of the proletarian and peasant masses against U.S. imperialism and feudalism reached a new high with the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Trade unions and peasant associations had emerged since the beginning of the century despite the efforts of the U.S. colonial regime to suppress them with outright force and sabotage them with tactics of infiltration and misrepresentation of the people’s interests. In the preceding decade, the discontent of the masses was frequently expressed by spontaneous violence as in industrial strikes in Manila and peasant strikes in Central Luzon, Southern Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Colorums waged a revolt in two provinces in Mindanao in 1923-24. On a lesser scale, they also rebelled in Negros, Rizal, Batangas, Laguna, Pampanga and Tarlac. In all cases of mass protest, the U.S. colonial government employed the most violent measures to attack the masses.

On May 1, 1931, a people’s march organized and led by the Party was ruthlessly attacked and dispersed by the puppet constabulary under the orders of the U.S. imperialists. Party leaders and members were arrested. In the following year, the puppet Supreme Court outlawed the Party and meted out sentences of imprisonment to Party leaders. Nevertheless, despite the banning of the Party, spontaneous peasant uprisings occurred like those of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931, and the Sakdals in 1935 over certain areas in Central Luzon and Southern Luzon.

U.S. imperialism was compelled by grave circumstances within the Philippines, in its own heartland and in the whole world to create the illusion that it was willing to grant “independence” to its Philippine colony. The crisis of imperialism heightened the national struggle for independence and the class struggle in the Philippines. In the United States, U.S. farm capitalists made an outcry against Philippine sugar and coconut oil; and the yellow labor leaders of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. denounced the immigration of Filipino workers to the United States. Under these circumstances, the U.S. Congress passed the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law in 1933 granting sham independence to the Philippines.

A mission led by Osmena and Roxas brought home this sham independence law. Afraid that the two puppet politicians would make political capital out of it, Quezon attacked it as inadequate and led another mission to Washington to ask for another sham independence law. In place of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law, the Tydings-McDuffie Law which was no different, except in minor rephrasing, was enacted in 1934 by the United States. This new colonial law would serve as Quezon’s credentials for becoming the first president of the puppet commonwealth government.

The Tydings-McDuffie Law paved the way for the framing of a constitution that was subject to the approval of the U.S. president and for the formation of the commonwealth government in 1935. It pledged to grant full “independence” to a bogus republic ten years after the ratification of this constitution. The law made sure that among so many imperialist privileges, U.S. citizens and corporations would retain their property rights in the Philippines, that the U.S. government would be able to station its troops and occupy large areas of Philippine territory as its military bases and that the United States and the Philippines would maintain free trade.

U.S. imperialism rigged up the Constitutional Convention of 1935. Delegates came overwhelmingly from the comprador big bourgeoisie and the landlord class. Like all colonial documents, the constitution that they framed was adorned with high-sounding phrases to hide substantial provisions as well as meaningful omissions sustaining the political and economic power of U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism in the Philippines. The constitution placed no restrictions on U.S. and other foreign investments, except in the areas of land ownership, natural resources and public utilities where the restrictions are nevertheless flimsy. It also contained special provisions (Art. XVII) in favor of U.S. imperialism. In 1939, the first ordinance would be appended in order to ensure further the all-round dominance of U.S. imperialism even after the proclamation of sham independence.

The National Defense Act was the very first legislative act of the puppet commonwealth government. This act conceived the organization of the reactionary armed forces and adopted the Filipino mercenaries of U.S. imperialism as the main component of the puppet state. The Philippine Constabulary became the First Regular Army under the U.S. Army in 1936. Quezon, the first president of the puppet commonwealth, designated Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur as “field marshal” of these mercenaries.

In the face of the rampaging fascism of Japan, Germany and Italy, Communists all over the world called for a popular front with all anti-fascist forces. Afraid of being isolated from the broad masses of the Filipino people, the U.S. imperialists and the puppet commonwealth government saw the necessity of putting out of prison the leaders of the Communist Party whom they had persecuted. As soon as these leaders were out of prison in 1936, the Party intensified the anti-fascist movement among workers and peasants under the banner of the Popular Front.

In an attempt to increase its membership and mass support rapidly, the Communist Party of the Philippines merged in 1938 with the Socialist Party to form the Communist Party of the Philippines (Merger of Socialist and Communist Parties). In the congress that ratified the merger, agents of the bourgeoisie who had crept into the Party and usurped authority therein while Party leaders were in prison succeeded in having themselves formally elected to responsible positions, especially in the so-called second line of leadership. These unremolded petty-bourgeois elements represented by Vicente Lava conspired with some anti-communist elements in the Civil Liberties Union and League for the Defense of Democracy in inserting into the 1938 constitution of the merger party counterrevolutionary provisions supporting the colonial constitution of the puppet commonwealth government.

These counterrevolutionaries who had crept into the Party consistently misrepresented the Popular Front policy as a policy of subservience to U.S. imperialism and the puppet commonwealth government. These anti-communists disguised as communists maneuvered the Party leadership into submitting a shameless memorandum to U.S. High Commissioner Sayre, Gen. MacArthur and Quezon in December 1941, pledging all-out support and loyalty to U.S. imperialism and the puppet commonwealth government. The three colonial officials relished this beggarly act firmly rebuffed the prayer for arms.

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Body Footnotes