Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
colonial rule. In 1930, some 34 years after the start of the Philippine Revolution and 13 years after the Russian Revolution, the first Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI) was founded. It later changed its name to the Communist Party of the Philippines (after its merger with the Socialist Party in 1938) and became more commonly referred to by its Tagalog name, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). It was first led by a printer, Crisanto Evangelista. Flourishing in the Commonwealth era in the midst of the Great Depression, the prewar PKP was nurtured by the Communist Party of the U.S.A. and was linked to the Third International, or Comintern, based in Moscow.
In 1968, on the 55th birthday of Mao Zedong, in the same year as the Prague spring, the general strike in Paris, the student uprisings in New York, and the Cultural Revolution in China, a new communist party emerged, often referred to by its English name, the Communist Party of the Philippines. Where the old PKP was founded in one of the oldest sections of Manila, the new CPP was established in a remote rural area of Northern Luzon. Influenced by Maoism, which the new Party regarded as the culmination of Marxist-Leninist thought, it was and continues to be led by former PKP member and UP English instructor Jose Maria Sison, who has lived in exile in Utrecht since 1988.
Without doubt, both the old and new communist parties have played important roles in the political and cultural history of the Philippines. The PKP was active in shaping labor and peasant unions though never quite able to control them. It sought to radicalize the issue of independence by linking national sovereignty to anti-imperialism and forged international affiliations with the communist parties of the U.S., Indonesia, Japan, and China, sending party members to attend meetings and universities in Moscow and demonstrating on behalf of Republican Spain. Following a Comintern directive, it formed a Popular Front aimed at containing the spread of Japanese fascism, though it failed to unite the front’s different elements. It lagged behind the peasant-led Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB) in resisting the Japanese during the war but fielded candidates, as part of a left-wing alliance, for local and national offices in the postwar period. The PKP’s leadership under the Lava brothers at first denounced, then promoted, then gave up on the HMB or Huk Rebellion just as it initially resisted then capitulated to Marcos and martial law.
The new CPP began small, breaking away from the old PKP over ideological and strategic differences that reflected the global rift between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. But in the 1970s, it was quickly growing to be the most organized and militant alternative to the repressive Marcos regime. It benefited from the intellectual and organizational skills of committed cadres recruited from the university-educated, multilingual middle classes. By the early 1980s, the CPP and its military wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), had succeeded in controlling significant parts of the country while forging an international solidarity movement, under its legal face, the National Democratic Front (NDF), that included overseas Filipinos, Filipino-Americans, U.S. congressmen and Western Europeans to put pressure on Marcos.
In time, it was plagued with internal debates brought about by its growth, leading to ideological rifts, horrific purges, bitter recriminations and strategic blunders, culminating in the party’s marginalization from the EDSA uprising that led to the ouster of the Marcoses in 1986. Fierce efforts at reform and rectification followed, along with internal dissent and expulsions, and attempted and actual assassinations of former cadres deemed counterrevolutionary. Its armed insurgency waned, then experienced a resurgence by the late 1990s, punctuated by on-again, off-again negotiations with the Philippine government along with open participation in national elections. Combining ideological rigidity with political opportunism, the CPP has been surprisingly resilient, surviving internal turmoil, repeated splits, state violence and international marginalization.
Communism has thus been part of Philippine modernity for over a century. It has supplied nationalism with its anti-imperialist outlook, mass movements with much of their organizational structure, aesthetic vocabulary and political strategies, and even civil society with the ideological ballast of “national democracy.” But unable to seize state power, communism has also been relegated to the margins of Filipino historical consciousness. It is as if it exists and doesn’t exist at the same time, much like the spectral presence invoked in the Communist Manifesto.
This is perhaps why there are no monuments to communism. Monuments act as tombs that bury and so keep in place the ghosts of the past. They allow those in the present to commemorate the dead and thereby overcome their absence. The fact that there are no monuments to communism as such means that there is something about it that defies commemoration and mourning. Though it has figured prominently in anticolonial struggles, its history remains unassimilated into the dominant narrative of how these struggles have culminated in national sovereignty. For this reason, communism seems peripheral to nationalist consciousness and so defines its limits. It haunts the nation in ways that cannot be fully accounted for, much less entombed by the historical narrative of nationalism. As nationalism’s uncanny other, it is bound to return in ways both unexpected and unsettling.
Symptomatic of communism’s recurring visitations is the recent spate of memoirs and biographies of those who were part of the revolutionary movement and the party, both old and new. Most of these tend (and largely fail) to be hagiographic: books on (and at least one by) the Lava brothers, or on Jose Maria Sison, or on martyred activists such as Edgar Jopson, Lean Alejandro, Lorena Barros and Emmanuel Lacaba. A few merge personal reflections with wide ranging policy critiques of the party, such as the books of Joel Rocamora and Bobby Garcia, whereas others offer intense personal reminiscences of youthful involvement in the movement, as in the essays in Militant but Groovy on the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK).
Subversive Lives encompasses these tendencies but adds something more. Written as a family history, it also furnishes us with powerful testimonies on the era of Ferdinand Marcos and Jose Maria Sison, along with narrative on the vicissitudes of the revolutionary movement. Each Quimpo sibling (even those who had nothing to do with the movement) bears witness to the events they and others did so much to shape. From aborted attempts to smuggle weapons for the NPA, to heady times organizing “spontaneous uprisings” and general strikes in Mindanao, from the cruel discovery of the cause of one brother’s death at the hands of a kasama (comrade), to the near hallucinatory tales of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the military, these stories remind us of the personal costs and the daily heroism of those who joined the movement. But they also bring forth its messy and unresolved legacies: of sons alienated from their father; daughters abused and victimized by the military and deluded by a religious cult; brothers lost to the war; friends betrayed, comrades purged, and revolutionary affection soured and then destroyed by intractable ideological differences. Such stories are much less about an unfinished revolution as they are about an inconclusive one.
To read these accounts, each so rich and distinctive in its tone, is to hear the rhythm of the revolution. There is the blast of pillboxes so omnipresent in the early days of student activism, bursting on streets and hollowing out heads; the sound of fists pounding faces and body parts shocked with electrical wires to the hiss of the interrogators’ demands for more information that one either did not have or did not want to give up; the chants of demonstrators as masses of bodies fill up streets, waving banners, defying cops, escaping tear gas; the quiet routines and rituals of prison life; the songs of solidarity and poems of militant resolve; the sigh of a guerrilla husband writing from a red zone in Bicol lamenting the absence of his wife forced to live underground in the city.
As with the great majority of memoirs about the revolution, Subversive Lives is written in English, indicating the university-educated, middle class nature both of its authors and its presumed readership. This is not surprising given the fact that communism has historically drawn to its ranks the more progressive elements of the nationalist bourgeoisie, especially their daughters and sons. Poised between the conservative remains of a prewar colonial order and the emergent possibilities of a postcolonial society, Filipino youth were particularly responsive to militant calls for change. As with the youth of other countries in the 1960s, they saw themselves occupying a liminal position, at once agents of and traitors to their parents’ class interests. They thus came to embody the familial tensions characteristic of the revolution. They searched for new sources of authority and alternative bases for legitimacy. Drawn out of their homes and schools into the streets, factories and countryside,