The Philippines Communist Party is best known for leading a heroic and successful armed struggle against Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945 and an equally heroic but ultimately unsuccessful armed resistance to the new US-backed government from 1946.
Ken Fuller's history of the party is important for three reasons.
It is the first comprehensive study covering the years from the party's formation to the end of the armed resistance movement in 1958 and documents a crucial stage in the post-war development of US tactics for anti-Communist intervention.
It reminds us of the long and bloody legacy of US imperialism and raises important issues about the role of Marxist theory in the development of Communist parties.
The Philippines had been a Spanish colonial possession from the 1520s. It was invaded by the US in 1898 and remained its colony until the Japanese occupation.
Its trade union movement was concentrated in the capital Manila. At its strongest in 1921, it had no more than 43,000 members out of the capital's working population of 160,000 and it was from this small base that the Communist Party was formed in 1930.
Fuller's main argument is that the party's formation was premature, lacked cadres with a firm grounding in the use of Marxist theory and consequently sought to "force the pace" by adopting strategies that were not based on a concrete analysis of national class forces.
At least one of the party's leaders in the 1930s and '40s, Vicente Lava, did indeed possess great theoretical ability. But such leaders were few.
Death and imprisonment repeatedly robbed the party of effective leadership, resulting in a series of sectarian lurches in policy.
This makes the party's achievements all the more notable.
In the 1930s, it broke out of its base within the Manila working class to create a mass movement among the sharecroppers in the country's central Luzon "rice bowl."
It also developed a popular front that exploited divisions within the comprador elite and recruited to the party a range of professional workers and intellectuals.
It was this base that enabled the party to lead armed resistance to the Japanese, create a peasant army of up to 20,000, liberate areas covering over half a million people and deny the invaders the country's coveted rice harvest.
Fuller sheds important light on the motives and tactics of the returning US forces under General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur himself had significant investments in the country and was closely associated with other US business interests.
Although the local landlords in the Philippines had collaborated with the Japanese, MacArthur had no problem basing his new administration directly on these forces. He selected as his new president the man who had signed the previous Japanese puppet government's declaration of war on the US.
Before reoccupation, US military commanders were provided with an intelligence briefing effectively identifying the Communists and associated armed forces as the main enemy.
Part of the tragedy of the post-war period was that the party initially had illusions about the US and welcomed the return of its forces. In the first encounters, unwitting units of the resistance were surrounded and massacred by US-backed elements of the collaboratist militias.
It was in these circumstances, after abortive attempts to negotiate a political concordat, that the party relaunched armed struggle against the "independent" government established by the US in 1946.
By 1948-49, these resistance forces had come close to repeating their achievements against the Japanese. But then the tide turned.
Operating without a friendly border and with only captured weapons, they were confronted by the full weight of US counterinsurgency - aerial surveillance and bombardment, clearances of villages and unending military watchtowers.
The US based its strategy on the military tactics that it had developed in Greece in order to defeat the democratic movement there after 1945. In the Philippines, the US refined the psychological warfare techniques that it would later use in Vietnam.
Fuller considers the "hegemonic" stance adopted by the party in 1950 as unrealistic given the balance of forces. But the experience of the Philippines Communist Party remains an invaluable one for all anti-imperialists.
Its telling is made all the more gripping here as a result of Fuller's collaboration with two leading party members who actively participated in these struggles, Celia and Bill Pomeroy.
This book can be purchased direct from the publisher in the Philippines by contacting
jcb.guerrero@gmail.com
