By ELLAINE ROSE ADRICULA BERONIO

In this so-called postmodern era, in Philippine academic and civil society circles, pundits and poseurs alike find it easy and chic to preach that communism is passe and Marxism dead, what with the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the late 1980s and China’s eventual reversion to capitalism. But the movement’s continuing struggle, more than three decades in the running, contends the validity of such theses.

The Background Information on Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations of the US Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report estimates the New People’s Army (NPA) strength to be “slowly growing” with 10,000 fighters. Meanwhile, according to its own tally, the New People’s Army now operates on 128 guerilla fronts in 8,500 barrios all over the country, and its membership has risen 222 percent from 1980 to 2001 and 53 percent from 1992 to 2001.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the NPA’s inclusion in the US list of terrorist organizations, which opens them to attacks from the world’s most formidable military power, points to this growing strength. The “terrorist” label, which equates the movement to the Abu Sayyaf and Pentagon Gang kidnap-for-ransom groups, now serves to justify the military and media offensives against the CPP-NPA and even legal organizations of the left.

Amid all this, no Philippine Marxist leader has been more vilified in the media than Jose Maria Sison, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) chief consultant, an easy target given his high-profile status as CPP founding chairman and staunch critic of the Marcos dictatorship and every putatively democratic regime after it.

Since being branded a terrorist by the US and Philippine governments in 2002, reports of his supposed orders to the NPA to attack cell sites and intensify offensives against the military have appeared in major newspapers and on television. At the US government’s behest, Dutch officials froze Sison’s and his wife Juliet de Lima-Sison’s bank accounts, which, according to Sison’s biographer, Ninotchka Rosca, contained only USD1,000, and stopped giving him social benefits as a political refugee in the Netherlands. Through his years of exile, the Philippine government, as well as the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has repeatedly attempted to either assassinate or capture him. As Sison puts it, “They think that destroying me politically or physically is a shortcut to destroying the movement.”

Jose Maria Sison: At Home in the World is a venue for Sison and, in effect, the national democratic movement to counter such attacks, something that mainstream media, constrained as they are by ideological bias and politicized interests, have failed to provide.

Apart from Rosca’s 35-page biographical sketch and several pages of photos and Sison’s poems, the rest of the book is in question-and-answer format where Sison talks about the movement’s history, Philippine society’s political and economic conditions, and the rectification campaign that has allowed the movement to expand and strengthen, once again, after its decline in the 1980s. In the book, he analyzes the US-led “war on terrorism,” explains the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations, and elucidates why the CPP and the NPA are revolutionary and not terrorist organizations.

The Other Terrifies

The book underscores the contamination of the personal by the political.

One finds Sison turning to discuss political work even while answering questions about relaxation and smoking, a behavior that prompted a certain reviewer of an earlier Sison biography/autobiography, Jose Ma. Sison and the Philippine Revolution: An Interface with Dr. Rainer Werning, to complain about not being given Sison’s “real human traits and frailties. At Home in the World indeed resists the impulse to psychologize and pull inward, to dwell on the person’s idiosyncrasies. After all, for a revolutionary, the struggle for revolution is inextricable from what it means to be human. The revolution’s history and struggle is thus also Sison’s own, and vice-versa.

Moreover, in contrast to Rosca’s prose, Sison has phrased his answers straightforwardly, with little metaphor and appeal to emotion. They are often riddled with phrases such as “imperialism,” “anti-communist hustlers,” “corporate greed,” and “puppet regime”—likely to turn off general readers and be deemed crude. For Sison’s diction, live everyone else’s, is class utterance, indicative of a worldview that is likely to be different from and even contradictory to the dominant. Thus, the book cannot promise comfortable and easy reading, though through it one may learn about the maligned Other that is, in this case, Marxism and revolution.

Rectification and Revolution

At Home in the World devotes a whole chapter to the discussion of the Second Great Rectification Movement (SGRM), a campaign within the revolutionary movement to assess and set right the ideological, political, and organizational errors that led to setbacks and so-called purges, cannon fodder for sensationalized media reports. This is the first time that the SGRM is discussed, out in the open, in a book on Sison.

Sison talks about the campaigns against deep-penetration agents that resulted in the massive arbitrary killings of suspected NPA fighters. “The barbarities … arose in the wake of frustrations due to ‘Left’ opportunist errors,” Sison says. Left opportunism is the “desire to… win a quick victory [that] overestimates the strength and capability of the revolutionary forces and underestimates those of the enemy.” In the 1980s, NPA units were prematurely enlarged, and urban hit squads were formed, moves that “made it easy for the enemy to attack the organs and units of the revolutionary forces.”

The movement recognizes the possibility of committing errors. “Marxist dialectics teaches us that every Party, even the most correct, united, and disciplined, will always have contradictory aspects. The CPP is not exempt from the law of contradiction and the law of uneven development,” Sison explained.

It is with this recognition that the movement launched the SGRM and is willing to launch a new one “when serious mistakes become deeply rooted and gain wide influence.”

Revolutionaries Are Not Terrorists

Sison’s discussion of the peace negotiations between the NDFP and the Philippine government stresses the two sides’ fundamental ideological and political differences. Recognizing the NDFP’s position, and how it informs the negotiating team’s actions and statements, is crucial to understanding the peace talk’s ebb and flow amid the allegations and counter-allegations presented by the media.

“The NDFP line of the peace negotiations is no different from that of the new democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. It is to seek the completion of the revolutionary struggle for national liberation and democracy,” Sison says. The present state is the engine of bourgeois and imperialist interests and must be overthrown to achieve national independence and implement qualitative reforms.

The NDFP’s aim in negotiating is to advance the struggle, in contrast to the government’s goal to make the movement surrender. This is why NPA’s tactical offensives continue while there are negotiations. The Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), which the NDF and the government signed off on in 1998, governs the conduct of both forces in the continuing war.

As the movement sees it, the armed conflict is between two opposing governments, one being the people’s democratic government, which has “a leading party, a disciplined army with a structure of command and [controls] a significant portion of the Philippine population and territory.” The CPP-NPA-NDF, therefore, is “not a mere rebellious or insurgent force,” Sison says, and they are not terrorists.

Revolution Against Terror

Sison relates the terrorist tagging to US imperialism’s current war on aggression aimed to gain control of oil sources and pipelines, establish bases in West Asia, and punish “rogue states”—nations assertive of their independence. The war is not between democracy and terrorism, but between monopoly capital and oppressed peoples and nations.

According to Sison, hatred for the US stems from the US government’s own doing—its aggressive promotion of its economic and political interests. Thus, “the best way for the people in the US to protect themselves is to fight US imperialism in its home ground and prevent its acts of terror overseas,” Sison says. He also stresses the role of proletarian revolutionaries, who grasp imperialism’s characteristics and contradictions, in a continuing anti-war movement.

Throughout the book, one senses the lucidity and fortitude of Sison and the revolutionary movement of which he is a part. The dialectic of contradiction is grasped and made an impetus to further struggle. “The proletariat and the people of the world have no other recourse but to intensify the struggle for national liberation, democracy and socialism against the unprecedented rapacity and terrorism of the imperialists and their puppets,” Sison says.

The movement’s pitch and message are not one of terrorism and disorder, but of hope. As Sison puts it, “We can look forward to a better world.” ●

Published in print in the Collegian’s August 20, 2004 issue, with the headline “Who’s Afraid of Jose Maria Sison?” 

Ellaine Rose A. Beronio was editor-in-chief of the Collegian, from 2002 to 2003. She graduated in 2003 with a degree in BA English Studies and went on to study MA Women and Development (class of 2015) and BS Applied Physics (class of 2019).