party (CCP) against the Maoist leadership of Jose Maria Sison. In particular the powerful Manila branch, known as the Manila-Rizal Regional Committee (MR), has declared independence from the Sison leadership. Here SONNY MELENCIO, a leader of the MAKABAYAN mass socialist organisation, TONY CABARDO a leader of the SANLAKAS front of mass organisations and RONALD LLAMAS of the BISIG socialist organisation talk to PHIL HEARSE of Socialist Outlook about the recomposition of the Philippines left. Melencio and Cabardo are associated with the MR CCP; BISIG is independent of any part of the CCP. The interview was conducted in Sydney at the International Green Left Conference organised by the Australian Democratic Socialist Party from March 31-4 April. * Can you explain the organisations you represent and their role in the struggle Sonny: MAKABAYAN has been called the new mass socialist formation of the Philippines. It used to be the MetroManila chapter of the BAYAN socialist federation.
We left BAYAN because of the attempts of the Sison leadership to bureaucratically control the organisation and founded MAKABAYAN.
In a sense it's the first mass socialist organisation, because before, when we worked in the Maoist framework, we believed that socialism was a very distant goal agenda and we worked purely within the political framework of 'national democracy'.
E STAGE Tony: SANKLAKAS is a federation of mass organisations which includes MAKAYBAYAN. It includes sectoral organisations like the federation of poor communities, the BNP which is the split from the KMU union federation, the federation of transport workers and women's, youth and church sector organisations. The basis of unity is for freedom and democracy; it wages struggles against corruption and in defence of the environment and on many other issues.
Ronald: BISIG is the Union for the Advancement of Socialist Thought and Action. It was formed in 1986 from people who had broken politically with the CCP 'national democrats'. A lot of people came into BISIG from the social democratic current, but others from the 'national democrats'. Also some from the 'old' pre-CPP Communist Party.
Our aim in forming BISIG was to articulate an open socialist line through an open socialist organisation. Our aim was to forge a socialist strategy for the Philippines, rather than to slavishly copy the Maoist model, as did the CPP. Our aim was also to form a real united front, knowing that no single force could alone change society.
To do all this we inacer on an analysis of the Philippines as a dependent capitalist country, against the Maoist dogma that it was semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism. It was also based on the assumption that the battle for socialism involves many sorts of struggle, and thus a rejection of the Maoist fetishisation of armed struggle. * A key turning point in the internal struggle in the CPP was the 1986 election where Marcos was defeated and Corrie Aquino elected. You opposed the boycott position of the CPP. How do you read that event and what is your assessment of the Aquino government?
Sonny: The CPP leadership saw the election as a cynical exercise between different factions of the ruling class and assumed that nothing could be got from We had the same argument in 1978, it wasn't a new debate. After the 1986 election when a mass mobilisation saw Marcos defeated, the CPP said it had made a tactical mistake. But they had not rooted speaks out out the source of the mistake. classes'. failure of a false schema. matic basis of the party. the masses.
Corrie Aquino (left) won 1986 election after the fall of Marcos. Military chiefs including General Ramos (below, left) were able to sustain the dominance of big landowners bourgeoisie ism there? Philippines.
What was at stake was the total record of the CPP in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Part of the problem is that the whole schema was part of the Maoist dogma of going through the 'national democratic' revolution, with the Maoist 'bloc of four This also involved the 'protracted peoples war' - rural guerrilla warfare - and the urban masses were in reality not part of the strategy. But 1986 showed the centrality of the urban areas and the urban working class. 1986 was all about the We started therefore to question the whole programTony: Even with a hard effort to correct strategy and tactics, the CPP Sison leadership would have been hidebound by its false ideological framework. The 1986 events also showed something basic about the relationship of the party with The 'national democrats' led by the CPP movement was well entrenched in bilise against Marcos. But when the mood of the masses collided with the false ideological schema of the party, the cadres were unable to make a correction. Sonny: The CPP through its mass 'national democratic' organisations had easily the most authority and links with the masses of anyone on the left. But still it was a bureaucratic leadership, it didn't allow any discussion. When the 1986 decision to boycott the elections was made it was made by five people, with no consultation. And it was made by a 3-2 vote. It speaks of an organisation which is thorTony: The irony is that the CPP was the single most important group which helped create the 1986 crisis. They should have seized the opportunity to participate in the anti-Marcos mobilisation and transform it into a pre-revolutionary opening to make a qualitative leap.
At the 1985 leadership plenum the CCP correctly analysed that the masses wanted to bring down Marcos, but they wrongly concluded that it meant that the CPP-led New Peoples Army should step up its offensive. They wanted the fall of the dictatorship to coincide with the victory of peoples' war in the countryside, and given the centrality of the urban masses, that was a totally false and arbi* How do you define the Philippines social formation? What's your balance sheet of the post 1986 Aquino and Ramos governments? Surely the Philippines is a dependent, oppressed country, not an imperialist country? Aren't there elements of semi-colonialSonny: Lenin thought that Russia was semi-feudal but he was referring to the vestiges of feudalism. But the key thing was the determinant mode of production was capitalist, it was a backward capitalist country. That's what we say of the As for the Aquino and Ramos governments, they're obviously governments of the landed big bourgeoisie. But a clarification has to be made here, because the Sison leadership says that our main enemy are the "landlords' and that we can form a progressive bloc against them.
But the landed nobility are also the bourgeoisie. They don't just own 80 per cent of the land, they also own the banks, the trading companies and so on. They are the big bourgeoisie.
Tony: The term semi-colonial doesn't refer to the mode of production, just to the fact of exploitation by the imperialist nations. The main point of our critique was not to deny that the Philippines is exploited by imperialism, but to insist that it is a capitalist social formation.
Some people use the numbers game -the small size of the urban working class compared with the peasantry. But that was also true in Russia where the working class in 1917 was just one per cent; in the Philippines it's 15 per cent. We should use the method of political economy, not the chop logic of statistics.
Sison instead of starting from the most developed parts of the economy in the cities, started from the countryside, the most backward part of the economy.
Ronald: Of course BISIG had this analysis a long time ago! Sison used terms like "semi-colonial' and 'semi-feudal' not because of scientific conviction, but to justify the strategy of "prolonged peoples war' and the 'bloc of four classes'. * Can you explain the situation of the mass movement? Has the CPP crisis disorganised and dis-articulated the mass movement, or do you think that political ciarification will help strengthen its unity and dynamism?
Sonny: The CPP was a big part of the Philippines left, but that doesn't mean that its internal crisis is going to weaken the left. The mass movement is gaining strength, as was shown by the defeat inflicted on the Ramos government over its attempt to raise oil prices.
Tony: The ideological split could in the short term weaken the revolutionary left. We have a difficult task because we have to carry forward this ideological struggle and build the mass movement at the same time, and that's a difficult task.
But so far we think we never let go our grip on ensuring that the mass movement developed. We think that the weakening effect of the ideological split has been compensated for by the effect of our new approach to alliances with other sections of the left like BISIG and other socialist groups. This has forced us to discover new arenas of struggle.
Ronald: In the past when we had ideological debate, it wasn't much of a debate with the CCP, but more charges and counter-charges of revisionism and betrava.
You can't get far with that, and now all that is going. Moreover, the Sison leadership always used the 'authority of sacrifices' argument - how many people in the CPP had been killed in the armed struggle.
We of course respect those who have lost their lives in the armed struggle, but you can't close a discussion by simply referring to how many have been killed from your party.
What's happening now on the whole left, as a result of the ideological split in the CCP, is that new alliances, new debates and new relationships will be formed at every level.
There are going to be new relationships between organisation, new attitudes to community struggles and even new gender relationships - as well as the opening of new forms and fronts of struggle.
We can position the left to contend with the bourgeoisie in new forms of struggle, not just one, the armed struggle, where the ruling class are the strongest.
Some of us will want to concentrate on the struggle in civil society, not just see the socialist movement as something allconcerned with the single moment of revolutionary transition.
We should stop seeing that revolutionary strategy as being counterposed with building bases of support in civil society which can bring about numerous changes on a micro-level and transform social relationships as a 'continuum'. This has all got to be part of a self-managing strategy.
Despite the new pluralistic attitudes of the left, there is a common trend of direction - towards democratic socialism. * How do you see the relationship of forces in the CPP and the mass movement between the Sison leadership and the democratic and Leninist oppositions?
Sonny: It's not an actual split in the CPP. Four national bureaus have declared independence from the CPP leadership; they are mainly based in the urban, working class areas. There is a class configuration to the ideological split. We think that something like half of the total membership of the CPP is aligned with the oppositions.
The Sison leadership is still based on the NPA guerrilla units in the mountains. But that is a dead end; the focus will move to the urban areas. Sison says that he is prioritising work in the peasantry, but that's not true. The peasantry are on the plains, not in the mountains where the guerrillas are. among the peasantry.
Tony: The real relationship of forces can't be measured by statistics, but by political impact in the mass struggle. Show of strength: Philippines armed forces May Day rally 1985: at that point the CCP turned towards New Peoples Army offensive impact. They are not organising SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.62, May 14 1994, Page 9 That's where you see the real strength of the opposition - the mass campaigns, in viet Union? the streets demonstrations and so on. We want to abandon the Maoist method of calculating politics according to statistics, but according to qualitative political Sonny: But even according to quantitative measures, you can see that the opposition can mobilise 40,000 sometimes, 100,000 sometimes. We are making big mobilisations among the workers. Our strength was shown during daily demonstrations against the oil price hikes.
Tony: The Sison leadership is more or less in control of the membership in the countryside. But they are now in real problems. They have adopted the position of 'passive military defence' for the NPA. That means avoiding military confrontation, avoiding military action of any kind. The logic being that they are turning towards organising the peasantry.
But the military is going to try to destroy all the NPA units. And with this kind of 'passive defence' policy, it will perience. lead either to destruction or demoralisaARMY tion of the military units. Comrades who talked to party secretaries in the countryside say that they consider the struggle has been pushed back by 14 or 16 years - to the position they were in the late 1970s. The interaction of the Sison leadership and the opposition is very clear. We have declared autonomy and demanded a party congress. Sison has expelled people and filed charges, which will be heard in absentia in a 'people's court'. If charges are proven, the penalty will be death - a typical Stalinist method. The opposition has a major task. It has to unite and get its act together. It has to unite and act on the basis of Leninism, and socialist democracy, not on the basis of any old unity. The Sison leadership should accept reality and get involved in the debate, but I don't think they Will. * Let me ask you about your own political rethinking. You've posed the debate as 'Leninism versus Stalinism' or 'socialist democracy versus Stalinism', and engaged in a critique of the whole Maoist tradition which you see as a specific form of Stalinism. Have you had more general discussions about Stalinism and its historical origins in the SoSonny: We have started the debate on Stalinism on the question of the party -namely democratic centralism versus bureaucratic centralism. We had some discussion on the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev period and were very critical about Sison's position that the problem was 'modern revisionism' - ie that the Soviet Union had degenerated since the death of Stalin.
This is the simplistic Chinese version which doesn't explain anything, and poses the existence of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Our study of Russian history shows that the opposition was rooted out and murdered, that Bolshevism was killed in the Soviet Union physically.
On the basis of that Stalinism erected ideological dogmas in the name of 'Leninism', not only in Russia but in the Communist International as well. This was a destruction of Leninism. Our basic position is that the problem of bureaucracy has been central to the Soviet Union exSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.62, May 14 1994, Page 10