COMMUNISM IN THE HERE-AND-NOW
By Mauro Gia Samonte
FOREWORD
At the infancy of my involvement in
proletarian politics, it had become common among activists to talk about
communism as a social system to be brought about only through the establishment
of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was preached that this dictatorship,
being ruled by the selfless working class, would bring about the abolition of
private property, hence the abolition of classes. And when there would be no
more classes, there would no longer be a need for the state as an instrument of
class oppression. The state would then wither away, thus bringing about the
establishment of communism, a social system of self-governing humanity moved by
pure love, justice, peace and brotherhood in their interrelationship with one
another and with nature.
And
so it was that in 1971, after an initial hands-on learning of capitalist
oppression and exploitation and then meeting up with its instrumentality of
state fascism in the strike of our newly-organized union, I immersed myself
deeply into the proletarian sector of the so-called national democratic
movement in the Philippines, taking up armed struggle. As to the legal fight of
the union, it became completely subsumed to the classic admonition by Karl
Marx: “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” By
this it was taught that the class antagonism between the workers and
capitalists was irreconcilable and therefore their dispute cannot be resolved
except through force. Besides, as Marx would be quoted endlessly, “The
proletariat can no longer liberate itself without at the same time liberating
the whole of society.” That liberation cannot be a function of one union’s
legal strike but of, in the Philippines in that period, the national democratic
revolution struggling to overthrow “US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat
capitalism.”
It
was good while it lasted. From the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 all the
way to the upheavals of 1986, the movement had evidently grown so that on the eve
of the so-called EDSA People Power Revolt, the national democratic revolution
was boasting of a revolutionary party, the Communist Party of the Philippines
(CPP), spread across the nation on commission level; an army, the New People’s
Army (NPA), of 25,000 regulars all in company formations; guerrilla fronts
nationwide many of which already priding in having developed into cells called
“armed independent regimes” of the National Democratic Front (NDF); and
people’s militia numbering hundreds of thousands.
On the scale of
war, the revolution had gone beyond strategic stalemate, having reached what
the CPP Military Commission described as an advance sub-stage called the
strategic counter offensive (SCO). From that sub-stage, the NPA General Command
was now embarking on a grand design to finally push the strategic offensive to
victory.
But
then suddenly came the snap presidential election of 1985, the culmination of
the Justice for Aquino, Justice for All
movement ignited by the Ninoy Aquino assassination in 1983 and made to rage all
over the country. Marcos won the count, but Cory cried “Cheat!” and at the tail
of her civil disobedience campaign got the military staging a mutiny that led
to the ouster of the dictator.
The
national democratic revolution, having boycotted the snap polls and thereby
getting no credit at all for the downfall of Marcos, fell flat on its face
while Cory soared to power.
Not
long after, the CPP was splintering into factions, each faction tugging along a
section of the NPA. The army regulars were broken up into guerrilla formations
again, as they were in the beginning.
Now
the CPP/NPA/NDF as well as their splinter groups, Revolutionary Proletarian
Army (RPA), Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB), and the Cordillera People’s Liberation
Army) CPLA are pursuing a line of political settlement with the Philippine
government. Political settlement, of
course, is a discreet term for, at worst, surrender to, or at best,
accommodation into, bourgeois rule.
Where
does that put the proletariat?
Back
to where just dreaming about communism is better than not having to dream at
all.
Walang komento:
Mag-post ng isang Komento