Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
in the UP Philippine Collegian, Chapter 2 in Ang Malaya of the Philippine College of Commerce, and Chapter 3 in the Guidon of Ateneo de Manila. Sison used the nom de guerre “Amado Guerrero,” which he had adopted as chairman of the new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and which was also meant to indicate that the writings should be seen as a collective work. “PSR,” as Sison’s second book was commonly referred to, became the bible of the radical sector of the student movement. Those who aligned themselves with Sison’s analysis called themselves national democrats, NDs, or the NatDems.
Sison’s diagnosis of the Philippine condition as being that of a semicolonial and semifeudal state plagued by the three evils of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism rang true to the youth. The Philippines was a semicolony, no longer ruled directly by American imperialists but kept in a quasicolonial state through laws and trade agreements tying it to U.S. interests, through a government of “brown Americans” and through educational and cultural bonds. The existence of vast landholdings controlled by the local elite pointed to the country’s semifeudal condition. The best way to describe the elite and landlords running the government was to call them “bureaucrat capitalists,” a breed of people who used public office to milk government coffers or gain undue advantage over their business rivals. Sison presented a program for a national democratic revolution for the Philippines paralleling Mao’s successful program for China. It promised a radical cleansing of Philippine society from the three evils.
The self-proclaimed leadership of the National Democratic Movement was the new CPP, with Sison as its chairman. In his eyes, the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (dating back to 1930) under the leadership of Jose and Jesus Lava and Pedro Taruc no longer deserved to represent the working masses. The Lavas had thoroughly betrayed the ideals of the Communist Party through a series of grievous ideological, political, and military errors from the post-World War II period until the 1960s. On the one hand, in the late 1940s, they led the anti-Japanese people’s army (the Hukbalahap) to surrender its arms, allowed peasant organizations to be throttled by the local constabulary and landlord agents, and directed mass organizations to participate willingly in landlord politics. On the other hand, in the 1950s, they started a campaign of “adventurist” attacks on provincial capitals and cities, which decimated the people’s army, ending in surrender and renewed support for landlord politics and programs in the Magsaysay period. On December 26, 1968, some intellectuals and labor and peasant leaders met to repudiate the ideological, political, and military errors of the Lavas and re-establish the CPP “on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought.”
Describing Mao’s thought, Sison spoke of liberating the country from its semifeudal, semicolonial state by conducting a protracted people’s war. To be able to engage a people in such a war, a revolutionary party had to live with and be one with the suffering masses who were mainly peasants and workers. The NatDem organizations therefore exhorted their members “to integrate with the masses.” Students in Metro Manila took this to mean working in squatter colonies or venturing into nearby rural areas to learn about the life of the urban and rural poor. A preliminary step was to carry out “social investigation” or “SI” in student parlance. This involved a survey of each area to determine the social class distribution as a prelude to intelligent organizing and political work.
The student activists’ dream, at least for those aligned with the NatDems, was to forsake their lives in the city and to settle in remote rural areas—mamundok, to go to the mountains, a figure of speech that was literally correct because of the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Madre, Bicol, and the northern provinces where they were headed. They were to organize the peasants for self-sufficiency as well as to form their own army. The students spoke of going to Isabela. This remote province far to the northeast was, for city-bred activists, the ultimate destination. The New People’s Army (NPA), the armed force linked to the NatDems, had Isabela for its base of operations. The daunting challenge of leaving family and friends behind to embrace a life of hardship and constant danger working among the peasant masses took on the nature of a Grail Quest, because the writings of Mao and Sison imbued it with a heroic character.
FOR JAN, AS FOR most others in the student movement of the early 1970s, the reading of PSR and the discovery of Mao’s revolutionary theory brought about a kind of enlightenment. Here were the correct ideas and a surefire political formula for success in a revolutionary endeavor. All around me, I could see young people experiencing “illumination” upon reading SND, PSR, and Mao and being fired up with revolutionary zeal. If there was any way for Filipinos to break out of centuries of oppression and betrayal, the national democratic program was it.
I imagine that Jan and most of his classmates at the PSHS had previously aspired to become scientists or engineers. Jan’s ambition now was to become the person described by Mao as a “cadre,” a person totally dedicated to serving the masses in a revolutionary role. He could be compared to a missionary going off to some remote place to live with the natives and win converts to the faith.
Jan was happy visiting and spending time with the squatter families who lived on the future site of PSHS in North Triangle, the area bounded by EDSA (then still Highway 54), Quezon Avenue, and North Avenue. These families eked out a living quarrying blocks from soft volcanic deposits called adobe, which was ubiquitous in the area. They lived in jerry-built shacks with cast-off corrugated sheets for roofing.
Jan wanted to learn about living with the poor in the countryside by spending time with these people. He took me to the place once, and yes, it looked like a provincial area, a place overrun with cogon grass, with the dwellings still sparse, small vegetable plots near the shacks, and ponds where rainwater filled the quarries. He introduced me to a cute, healthy-looking toddler who was one of the attractions of the place for him. This patch of North Triangle (where a huge mall was later to sprout) was Jan’s “little Isabela” in the city. He described the people as really no different from poor families in the countryside. They subsisted on what the land could yield: adobe blocks sold for construction, camote (sweet potato), and fish that appeared in the adobe pits during the rainy season. Their marginal lives were further complicated by oppression by the authorities. Police would pay threatening visits to extract tong for “permission” to quarry. They learned to hide when they spotted policemen coming.
Police fire tear gas to disperse protesters in front of the UP administration building (1971). (Photo from the Lopez Memorial Museum Collection)
Jan told me about the characters living in this squatter colony. One could romanticize the poor, but Jan understood early on that criminals lived there too—the lumpen proletariat, the dregs of society of Marx’s writings. One of his friends was a tattooed Sigue-Sigue gang member who had spent time in the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa. The Sigue-Sigue and OXO gangs, the two major criminal groups of the time, drew their members from convicts and ex-convicts. This ex-convict would regale Jan with stories of his time inside prison. Once he told Jan, after Jan had napped on the floor of a squatter’s house, that he would have been raped by other convicts if he slept that way in prison. He was quite touched that Jan and his companions were engaged in a movement to uplift the poor, even people like him who had gone over the edge. He said he felt it was too late for someone like him, but he vowed to avoid victimizing other poor people.
How Jan carried on with his personal life was remarkable, but probably no different from hundreds of other young persons who were convinced they were enrolled in the right cause. You could see his self-imposed discipline and the spartan lifestyle of a revolutionary he adopted, as described in Mao’s little red book. I thought he was like a young man studying to become a priest. After returning from a heavy day of meetings or organizing work, he would read Mao or Lenin late into the night (one seldom saw teenagers doing this kind of serious reading) and fall asleep with the book he was reading. The volume would be one of a collection of revolutionary works painstakingly reproduced by the CPP education department. They were mimeographed, pressed between folder halves, stapled at the sides, and bound with masking tape. These books found their way into all the proliferating NatDem