In a recent military operation against New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas in Abra de Ilog, Occidental Mindoro, authorities denounced the death of a 24-year-old student from Pamantasan ng Maynila, Jerlyn Rose Doydora, as proof that the NPA systematically grooms young people to bolster its shrinking fighting force as its bases of support diminish across the country.

The NPA does post online enlistment “ads” much like a job recruiter plugging a career choice. Some young people, even from the diaspora, sign up for consciousness-raising “exposure tours” or “immersion” that could include stops in guerrilla areas. 

Still in military custody is Filipino American Chantal Anicoche from the University of Maryland, who was found unhurt at the site of the Mindoro military operation. But overblown claims and indiscriminate red-baiting often strain the credibility of the anti-Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) pronouncements of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).

By contrast, an unsparing critique of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its late founder, Jose Maria Sison, by two former ranking members carries more veracity, coming as it does from the left of the political spectrum — from inside the Left, to be precise. 

Unmasking the Myths of the CPP and Its Leader Joma Sison, self-published by spouses Carlo and Maya Butalid, is clearly addressed to “many of today’s youth who are searching for a better Philippines (and) will find their way to the Party, as we did when we were their age.”

The Butalids are convinced that the CPP’s core ideological, political, and organizational defects — and its “cult-forming around Joma Sison” — are “standing in the way” of building a better society. They also decry signs of myth-building: the establishment of a Jose Ma. Sison Legacy Foundation with the slogan “Joma Lives,” a JMS Book Club to study Sison’s revolutionary theory and practice, and the opening of the JMS Legacy Museum in Utrecht. (READ: Joma Sison: Mao in Utrecht)

Cautionary account

Unmasking the Myths is a cautionary account of the couple’s disenchantment with the party and its founder. 

They spent 16 years in the national democratic underground starting in 1977, most of that time as leading CPP cadres, first among youth and students in Metro Manila. They were then deployed to the Netherlands in 1983 to muster international political and financial support for the movement, rising to party leadership in Western Europe. They left the CPP together with droves of members abroad and at home during the “great split” in 1993 over serious differences regarding strategy and criticisms of undemocratic policy-making processes.

In the Netherlands, internal tensions began percolating when party founder Sison went into self-exile in 1987. The Butalids, along with National Democratic Front (NDF) activists who had been successfully raising political and financial support for the underground, were disturbed by his and his close “Barrio Utrecht” adjutants’ style of work, as well as often unseemly personal conduct.

Among Unmasking the Myths’ major criticisms is how the party follows the principle of democratic centralism in decision-making; in practice, this means all centralism, no democracy. The top leadership’s arbitrariness and lack of transparency ultimately darkened the Butalids’ view of the organization they had devoted their lives to serving.

No-questions-asked directives

Cadres chafed at no-questions-asked directives handed down from the top. “Security” in the face of Philippine government hostility was invoked as the justification. Functioning in the liberal democratic Netherlands, the Butalids believe the leadership could have given more room for democratic input from the rank-and-file in order to unleash creativity and initiative.

Looking back at their experience prior to being deployed overseas, the Butalids say the party’s style was mirrored in how it worked with non-party organizations: it sought to take over those groups’ leadership, even orchestrating the election of some hapless party members over obviously more competent non-party contenders. The groups ended up as literal fronts or facades, rather than united fronts of independent organizations.

By contrast, NDF activists in the Netherlands “actually voted democratically to set up a leadership and organization structure distinct from that of the CPP — what NDF should actually be as a united front that includes the CPP, not as front of the Party, which it was in the Philippines.” This was anathema to the “Barrio Utrecht” leaders’ circle. 

Unmasking the Myths says the physical liquidation of cadres in the Philippines who deviated from the party’s official lines is of a piece with its undemocratic governing ethos. “The CPP is inherently undemocratic. So how can it build a democratic Philippines?” the authors ask rhetorically.

Wearying strategy

The NPA’s strength has arguably diminished in the face of the government’s “all-nation” counterinsurgency program combining prolonged military operations and a systemic hearts-and-minds effort to deplete the guerrillas’ rural bases of popular support.

Some online testimonies of former NPA fighters, wearied of the grueling, existential demands of guerrilla life, now question the effectiveness of the CPP’s strategy of protracted people’s war to seize power by surrounding the cities from the countryside. The strategy gives “priority to military matters,” write the Butalids — or, in leftist parlance, it puts the military, not politics, in command.

Although some NPA leaders profess a willingness to fight for “a hundred years,” critics of the people’s war strategy emphasize the futility of attempting to defeat a modern military with small arms. Compounding this disadvantage is the country’s lack of a land border with a neighboring state through which the heavier logistical support required to sustain a protracted stalemate — let alone advance to the strategic offensive — could be channeled, assuming any friendly states would even be willing to provide such assistance.

Why does it have to be a military-based strategy at all times, ask the Butalids: “There are alternative paths; e.g., through the building up of strong and militant social movements that could eventually topple the government in a relatively non-violent uprising,” they note, without needing to directly cite the People Power overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship as proof.

Sison, a towering intellectual?

Chatter about the CPP-NPA’s corrosive flaws has long circulated among disgruntled ex-members. However, the Butalids’ “unmasking” of Sison, aka Amado Guerrero, is particularly trenchant.

Sison, founder of the new CPP and its military arm, endured torture and long imprisonment at the hands of the Marcos dictatorship. But the foundation of his legendary status is his 1970 book Philippine Society and Revolution. It is hailed as the product of an “intensive study of Philippine society,” writes Carlo Butalid. It inspired generations of new revolutionaries and contributed to his reputation as a towering revolutionary leader and intellectual.

But a tip from a comrade led Carlo to the 1963 work of Dipa Nasuntara Aidit (head of the Communist Party of Indonesia), Indonesian Society and Indonesian Revolution, which adopted Mao Zedong’s “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” analysis of Chinese society while adding historical references particular to Indonesia.

“Joma Sison indeed did a lot of ‘copying and pasting’ when he wrote PSR,” writes Carlo. PSR, he charges, is essentially an adaptation of Mao’s 1939 book and Aidit’s 1963 paper. “(T)he main difference(s) between these works were the references to Philippine history.”

Carlo’s disappointment notwithstanding, PSR — absent competing alternatives — did offer a rousing framework for analyzing the roots of the country’s problems, calling for the overthrow of the imperialist-coddled state as a prelude to a two-stage establishment of socialism.

Moreover, the work’s galvanizing impact on Filipinos hungry for social change was greatly enhanced by the inspirational power of the revolutionary flow — national liberation struggles, notably the Vietnamese war of national liberation — engulfing the world at the time of the book’s release.

The Butalids also found that rather than a towering intellectual, Sison was an often absent-minded pedant given to long monologues. They recall that once, volunteers from a non-government group that supports refugees were supposed to brief him on what to do in case he decided to file for asylum. “It turned out that he was the one ‘briefing’ them, even though he had just arrived and didn’t know a thing about the Netherlands’ refugee procedures.”

The couple found Sison dogmatic and unwilling to entertain other comrades’ views. They tried to share lessons of “Stalinist distortions” they had learned from a lengthy study tour of former Eastern European socialist states, but Sison insisted in a monologue that the collapse “is all a case of economic revisionism,” or adjusting central planning to make room for market mechanisms and trying to integrate into the world economy.

Aside from his blindness to historical lessons, the incident unwittingly revealed Sison’s vision of Philippine socialism as a supposedly self-reliant command economy with central planning by a one-party state, inoculated from the influences of the global economy. It is a goal that would only replicate the Stalinist Soviet collapse — or worse, lead to an autarchic social formation akin to North Korea.

Sexual opportunist

Equally deflating for the Butalids was Sison’s alleged sexual opportunism. The Butalids say he was known to frequent discotheques where, posing as “a businessman from Hong Kong,” he tried to pick up women. Dutch supporters of the NDF were also targets, earning him a reputation as a predator. A 1990 meeting of the Dutch Filippijnengroep Nederland solidarity group in Utrecht ended abruptly “when a woman rushed in and said that the creep (‘dat enge man’) was coming.” The young women left. Sison was entering the building.

Sison was by no means alone in exhibiting unenlightened behavior toward women. Some underground leaders in the Philippines were known to have kept extramarital relationships to their wives’ dismay. This is reflective, perhaps, of the CPP’s utilitarian approach to the “woman question.” The party, states Unmasking the Myths, “prioritizes the class struggle” and national liberation over women’s issues and “endorsed the women’s movement” mainly to bolster its force and activities.

Maya Butalid recalls that Sison’s wife Julie, also a top party leader, “readily commented that there is no need to take action towards (women’s empowerment and emancipation), because once socialism is achieved the women will automatically be empowered and emancipated. This was a let-down for me,” says Maya, who believes patriarchal and sexist views are deeply embedded in Philippine society as well as in the party and must be confronted.

Unmasking the Myths of the CPP and Joma Sison is written simply, in a conversational style. It could use improved construction to foreground the most important lessons and criticisms amid the many incidents that illustrate them. The authors try to alleviate possible confusion by ending chapters with summary paragraphs in boldface.

The Butalids are based in the Netherlands and have built a life there. Maya, retired from work with social welfare agencies, is active in the Dutch Labor Party and even served a seven-year stint on the city council of Tilburg. Carlo is a director of a remittance firm he helped found. They expect to be condemned by CPP loyalists for their book and spurned even by some fellow “Rejectionists” who now mainly wish to keep friendship ties within and without the CPP.

Still loyal to the cause of radically improving the lives of Filipinos, they appeal to fellow progressives to “undertake a (really) intense study of the situation of the Philippines” that recognizes the changes in the country’s economy, demographics, social structure, and relationship to the world—in order to show the way forward. “Sticking to dogmas like what the CPP has been doing for over 57 years now since its founding in 1968, will get us nowhere,” they warn. – Rappler.com

(Unmasking the Myths of the CPP and Joma Sison is available in the Philippines in the webshop of 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing and in Lazada. It will soon be available in Popular Bookstore and Lost Books Cebu. Overseas, its e-book version is in Gumroad.)