In the late 1960s, the hardened yet forbearing image of Mao Zedong was a sundering signifier for social change, moral valence, ideological purity, and “permanent revolution.” The emanating aura of the “Great Helmsman” as Mao was lionized, certainly fit the spirit of what would be known as the age of Counterculturalism.
Probably the global force that was most amenable to Mao’s thought and teachings was the younger generation. That generation---consisting to a considerable degree of disaffected teenagers and vicenarians---raised serious doubts and questions about what they saw as the appalling proliferation of an insufferably conformist and consumerist existence.
In the Philippines, one Jose Maria Sison played a considerable role in setting the terms of the debate between the power establishment that deracinated the democratic credo of a fair and just society; and the dissenting, socio-economically downscaled multitudes that had had enough of the intractably corrupt, monopolistic, and materialistic value systems that they felt were out of balance with moral and egalitarian ideals.
A professor at the University of the Philippines (UP), a campus known for its history of activism and protest, Sison was already immersed in the politics of left-wing radicalism prior to his transformative decision to form the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on the birthdate in 1968 of Mao Zedong.
As far back as 1964, Sison launched the Kabataan Makabayan (KM), a crusading, highly politically-conscious organization made up of disillusioned students. Among these students, Sison (under his pseudonym “Amado Guerrero”) sought out sworn enemies of capitalist exploitation by the upper classes of the lower ones. The mission of the KM and its ranks were to help engineer the rule of the proletariat over the ruling elites. One of the ways they would achieve this goal was to deeply examine the doctrines of Mao Zedong.
SISON AND THE PKP
In 1967, Sison and other radicals found themselves at odds with a leftover relic from the pre-World War Two period, the Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas or PKP). Sison had been incorporated into the PKP in 1962. It was a decision that the latter would come to regret.
The PKP was headed by its Secretary-General Jesus Lava at the time of Sison’s banding with the group. Jesus, along with his brothers Vicente and Jose, would become eminent figures during the rise of the PKP in the tumultuous 1930s in the Philippines. The Great Depression years were certainly interesting times as the country was beset by civil disorder, rural uprisings, and worker agitation. The Lava brothers---influenced as they were by Marxist thought and the principles of the 1896 Philippine anti-imperialist struggle---thrived as political actors in this context as they initiated workers, farmers, and middle-class into radical politics.
After years of victorious endeavor against Imperial Japan during World War Two, but followed by rapidly dwindling military returns and untenable casualties in its ensuing campaign with the Hukbalahap fighters against the central government in Manila, the PKP was largely a spent and, its critics would say, obsolete resistance organization. As a result, it began to distance itself from violent struggle.
As the PKP’s fortunes began to wane, Sison’s rose dramatically among its cadres. Indeed, the power and gravitas of the PKP were contracting before the Lava brothers’ very eyes. With Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket and with China’s volatile Cultural Revolution serving as a source of inspiration, Sison boldly challenged the PKP hierarchy, accusing its members of giving up on armed engagement and of being lackeys to the Philippine capitalist class. His dissent would bring about his, along with his equally-minded apostates, banishment from the group in 1967.
The expulsion from the PKP was something of a superfluous act for Sison by this point was so discontented with the Lava brothers that he was chafing at the bit to no longer be absorbed into their group. The breakup would be swift and apodictic.
Sison had set in motion what was called the “First Great Rectification Movement.” It was initially intended to expose the major failures and shortcomings that in Sison’s view, damaged the Lava brothers’ credibility as revolutionary leaders and emasculated the PKP’s ability to triumph over the Philippine government.
SISON LAUNCHES THE CPP
To borrow from Erich Fromm’s contrast between “freedom from” (a negative freedom based on a liberation from repressive authority or codes) and “freedom to” (positive freedom to take on the independence to make one’s own way into the future), Sison went beyond the constraints imposed on him by the PKP and on the day after Christmas 1968 (the birthday of Mao Zedong) autonomously launched the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
It was during this time that Sison made the fateful acquaintance of an activist-turned-Hukbalahap fighter Bernabe Buscayno. The latter’s experience in insurrectionist warfare made him the leading candidate to command the military extension of the CPP. This would be called the New People’s Army (NPA).
With personnel only numbering about 60, the NPA was officially introduced on March 29,1969. Thanks to the organizational coordination that it shared with the CPP, the NPA would expand exponentially as both itself and the CPP fed on the acrimony and corrosive socio-political atmosphere that was generated by the perpetually greed-driven, predatory, and extractive dynamic of elite landlords who, as in Adam Smith’s words, “love to reap where they never sowed.”
The CPP’s and NPA’s stature ascended exceptionally with the declaration of martial law by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.
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