{UAH} A MARXIST UNDERSTANDING OF "TERRORISM": VIEWS OR FILIPINO COMMUNISTS

My friends,

People have always wondered what the attitude of Marxists or National
Democrats ( Communists) like myself should have towards "Terrorism".
Occasionally there have been a few snide remarks by the likes of
Robert Atuhairwe, Makakasiri and the incorrigible pillock Edward
Mulundwa, questioning my attitude towards political violence and
support for armed struggle as being the highest form of struggle under
certain historical and political contexts. Here is a very well written
theoretical analysis by my Filipino comrades, a lot of whose
conclusions I agree with.

George Okello


Terrorism and Revolution:
The Struggle for National Democracy and Socialism in the Philippines


E. San Juan, Jr.








Members of the National People's Army of the Philippines
Photo by Froilan Gallardo




The "War on Terror" is undermining many years of human struggle for
self-determination; human rights, civil liberties and democracy will
be lost in the U.S. quest for peace and security. . . . The U.S. armed
forces must leave the Philippines immediately. This presence and
activity in the Philippines violates national sovereignty and
territorial integrity, aggravates armed conflicts and gives rise to
social and cultural degradation.

-- from the Final Declaration of the International Ecumenical
Conference on Terrorism in a Globalized World, Sept. 21-26, 2002,
Manila, Philippines





A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. . . .
[It is] the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will
upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon --
authoritarian means if ever there were any; and if the victorious
party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule
by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.

-- Friedrich Engels, "On Authority" (1874)





1. From 1899 to 1903, in a period designated in some history
texts as the Philippine "insurrection" or the "Filipino-American War,"
the United States military forces killed directly or indirectly
1,400,000 Filipinos and (up to 1916) Filipino Muslims (called Moros)
in the campaign to destroy the first Philippine Republic and annex the
islands as a "dependency." In one campaign, General Jacob Smith
ordered his troops to "kill and burn," shoot everything over ten years
old, "since it was no time to take prisoners, and [. . .] he was to
make Samar a howling wilderness" (Schirmer 1971, 20). Howard Zinn
notes that it took the U.S. seventy thousand troops -- four times as
many as were landed in Cuba -- to crush the rebellion (1980, 306).
Mark Twain succinctly characterized the end of the intervention:
"Thirty thousand killed a million. It seems a pity that the historian
let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance"
(1992, 62). Gabriel Kolko described the "protracted conquest of the
Philippines" as "an orgy of slaughter that evoked much congratulation
and approval from the eminent journals and men of the era" (1976, 287;
cited in San Juan 2000, 71).

2. In the bloody pacification drives against the Moros after the
official close of the War, the United States government committed
horrors of genocidal proportions. Two of the most unforgettable are
the incident at Bud Dajo, Jolo, on March 9, 1906, where over 600 Moro
men, women and children were massacred; and the other at Mt. Bagsak on
June 13, 1913, where at least 2000 Moros were killed (other estimates
put the figure at 3,000), with 340 Americans slain. The lawyer
Moorfield Storey compared these atrocities to the lynching of black
men: "the spirit which slaughters brown men in Jolo is the spirit
which lynches black men in the South" (Storey 1906).

3. Recently, not far from the sites of those now ancient battles,
in Basilan Island, a bandit gang of separatist Moros named the Abu
Sayyaf became the object of an aggressive manhunt by a force of at
least a thousand U.S. soldiers (of which 660 are Special Forces) and
about 5,000 Filipino soldiers (Kristof 2002; Jalandoni 2002). The
pretext or fig leaf for U.S. military intervention in the Philippines
came in the form of "joint military exercise" to train local troops
also engaged in fighting ongoing insurgencies, one led by the New
People's Army (NPA; estimated to number at least 10,000 guerillas) and
the other led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) (San
Francisco Chronicle 2002). The 25,000 strong MILF, which has been
engaged for 23 years in fighting for an independent Islamic state in
the south, also operates in Basilan and carefully guards its
territories against government attacks.

4. Composed of less than a hundred men, the Abu Sayyaf (which was
holding hostage an American couple and a Filipino nurse) has been
linked to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda on tenuous grounds. All the
same, despite the Abu Sayyaf's existence as a local criminal problem
and a product of a complex linkage of official corruption, military
brutality, and ethnic impoverishment, the Philippines has been
declared "the second front after Afghanistan" (International Peace
Mission 2002). The Arroyo government has endorsed Bush's endless war
on terrorism, with the Philippines soon to be declared by the European
community as a haven of terrorists, together with Pakistan, Indonesia
and Malaysia.

The Indictment

5. With this background, I want to focus on the Colin Powell
doctrine announced last August 9, 2002, designating the Communist
Party of the Philippines/the New People's Army as a "Foreign Terrorist
Organization"-- a double-headed monster, as it were. Powell does not
separate the party and its military component. According to Powell:
"The CPP, a Maoist group, was founded in 1969 with the aim of
overthrowing the Philippine government through guerilla warfare. The
CPP's military wing, the New People's Army, strongly opposes any US
presence in the Philippines and has killed US citizens there. The
group has also killed, injured, or kidnapped numerous Philippine
citizens, including government officials." Now the term "terrorist
activity" under the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 212,
refers to any activity which is unlawful under the laws of the place
where it is committed, involving among others: the hijacking or
sabotage of any conveyance; the seizing or detaining, and threatening
to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to
compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or
abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for
the release of the individual seized or detained; an assassination,
the use of any biological agent, chemical agent, or nuclear weapon or
device; and so on. What proof Powell has to substantiate his judgment,
cannot be divulged -- such administrative records "contain
intelligence information and are therefore classified." In fact, when
Ramsey Clark argued before a court to have those records made public
on behalf of similarly proscribed organizations, the court deferred to
the wisdom of the executive branch and denied Clark's request. There
is no way to publicly contest Powell's pronouncement.

6. Now, the U.S. government itself knows that no person or group
connected with the CPP/NPA has engaged in any such activities labelled
"terrorist" in the United States ever since the Philippines was
annexed by force as a colonial territory in 1898. Jose Maria Sison,
the NDFP Chief Political Consultant, commented the day after Powell's
indictment: "Anyone who knows the principles and policies of the CPP
is aware that it does not send its members or Red fighters of the NPA
abroad to attack any US entity. The CPP has also repeatedly pointed
out that Americans can enjoy the basic rights and freedoms of the
foreign guest in the Philippines, unless they are deployed for combat
operations against the revolutionary forces and people." (In
connection with the exception, one may cite here the case of Col. Nick
Rowe, a CIA agent in the Philippines, who was gunned down by suspected
NPA agents -- more on this later.) Sison observes further that "the US
is whipping up the line of preemptive first strike on the basis of
mere suspicion at the level of the state relations with private
organizations and individuals within or outside its jurisdiction and
likewise at the level of state-to-state relations. . . . Under the
guise of combating terrorism, the Bush administration is generating
fascism in the US and the entire world. . . . The US is promoting
wholesale state terrorism to suppress the growing social discontent
and resurgent revolutionary resistance, amidst the rapidly worsening
crisis of the US and world capitalist system" (2002).

7. Immediately thereafter, a mainstream Filipino journalist,
Amando Doronila, editorialized on the US State Department's
intervention:

In broadening the scope of the definition of global terrorism, the
Powell Doctrine brings together the US enemies during the Cold War
(the communists) and those held responsible for the September 11
attacks (the terrorists linked to al-Qaida networks and Osama bin
Laden) in the all-embracing demonology of "global terrorists." In one
fell swoop, the United States reintroduced the political vocabulary of
the Cold War and incorporated it in the struggle against a new form of
borderless terrorism. Never mind if there is no evidence linking the
CPP-NPA to the al-Qaeda network or even the Abu Sayyaf. The linkage of
the old and new foes in a new rubric where the United States, as the
lone superpower of the post-Cold War era, is imposing a new hegemony
aligning the security policies of its allies behind hers. . . . Along
the same vein, the Powell doctrine is a restriction of Philippine
foreign policy, as well as its domestic policy, given that, first, the
doctrine would staunch the growth of the parliamentary tendency in the
Philippine communist movement; and secondly, it hampers the
flexibility of the Philippine government in resuming peace talks with
even the externally based communist leadership (2002).

What followed Powell's intervention in Philippine affairs demonstrates
the magical power of the word "terrorism" and its almost fatalistic
seductiveness: the Dutch government followed suit and categorized the
CPP/NPA, including Sison, as "terrorists." Sison has been living for
14 years in the Netherlands as a political refugee under the
protection of the Refugee Convention and the European Convention for
the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. On October
28, 2002, the European Council toed the line of the Powell doctrine
without due process, without any democratic discussion, just as the
Powell doctrine was hatched in secrecy with the collusion of the
Arroyo administration in the Philippines.

Neocolonial Mimicry

8. The U.S. government and the European Council have thus
criminalized and repressed the revolutionary movement in the
Philippines. Opposed to thousands of individuals and organizations in
the Philippines calling for the resumption of peace talks, the Powell
doctrine effectively dismantled the ongoing negotiations between the
National Democratic Front (which includes the CPP/NPA) and the
Philippine government (GRP) which have been going on since 1990 under
the sponsorship of Holland, Belgium and Norway, with the endorsement
of the European Parliament in its 1997 and 1999 resolutions. By
campaigning in Europe for the blacklisting of the CPP/NPA and Sison as
terrorists, the Arroyo government has in effect placed the other side
under duress, and laid down as a precondition the surrender of the
revolutionary forces. In effect the GRP has nullified the documents it
has signed with the NDF: the Hague Joint Declaration, the Joint
Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees, and in particular the
Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and the
International Humanitarian Law.1

9. It appears that the U.S. and European states, by classifying
the CPP/NPA and Sison as terrorists, have rejected any logical or
semantic criteria, as well as international norms, for distinguishing
between terrorists who employ violence with criminal intent and
organizations or individuals waging armed struggle for openly declared
political goals, especially those involving national liberation,
social reforms, and political democratization. Ignoring universally
applied criteria and norms, the GRP has thereby demonized political
organizations and individuals critical of its policies and program.

10. The CPP/NPA has a long tradition of fighting against U.S.
imperialist domination of the Philippines, together with its allies,
the bureaucrats, landlords and compradors. It denounces the
exploitative and oppressive system of neocolonialism and oligarchic
rule in the Philippines. Its political objectives, strategies and
principles are openly broadcast and disseminated; its publications,
manifestoes, and analyses are accessible to the whole world. There is
nothing secret in what they are struggling for: all their actions are
geared to arousing the Filipino masses to exercise their freedoms and
think critically, understand the causes of their oppression, and carry
out organized and reasonably planned actions to change the iniquitous,
unjust system. Following Marxist-Leninist principles, the stigmatized
CPP/NPA have never arbitrarily engaged in kidnapping civilians,
robbery, indiscriminate bombings or firing on civilians, and other
random acts, unlike the Philippine military whose record of torture
and murder of political activists and innocent civilians has been
condemned by Amnesty International and other international bodies.

11. It is generally agreed that the Arroyo government's
subsequent demand that the CPP/NPA lay down their arms and accept a
"final peace agreement" drafted by militarist advisers is a violation
of the Hague Joint Declaration signed by both parties on September 1,
1992. The charge of "state terrorism" committed by the GRP, its
atrocities and depredations, its gross violations of human rights on a
wide scale, appears to preclude any quick return to the negotiating
table. It signals a resumption of decades-long GRP policy (beginning
with the Roxas administration in 1946) of an all-out war against its
citizens, an unconscionable military solution to deep-rooted
structural problems of society, and unconcealed contempt at the
profound grievances and persistent suffering of millions of Filipinos.

International Consensus

12. Before reviewing some ideas on the revolutionary application
of force in the Marxist tradition in which I want to reinscribe the
CPP/NPA predicament, let me just call your attention to the fact that
the United Nations passed a major resolution on the matter of
international terrorism in December 1987. The UN condemned this
phenomenon and called on all nations to act in order to prevent it.
Except for Honduras, which abstained, 153 countries approved the
resolution against the objections of two states: the U.S. and Israel.
Why? Here is the passage that offended these two, as Chomsky (2001)
underscores it: nothing in the present resolution could in any way
prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence,
as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly
deprived of that right . . . , particularly peoples under colonial and
racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial
domination, nor . . . the right of these peoples to struggle to this
end and to seek and receive support [in accordance with the Charter
and other principles of international law]." Let me quote further from
the Preamble and the conclusion of this historic UN document:

Terrorism originates from the statist system of structural violence
and domination that denies the right of self-determination to peoples
(e.g., in Namibia, Palestine, South Africa, the Western Sahara); that
inflicts a gross and consistent pattern of violations of fundamental
human rights upon its own citizens (e.g, in Chile, El Salvador,
Guatemala, South Africa); or that perpetrates military aggression and
overt or covert intervention directed against the territorial
integrity or political independence of other states (e.g, Afghanistan,
Angola, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua). . . .

The principles of the United Nations Charter -- if applied in all of
their ramifications -- constitute an effective instrument for
reshaping the actual policies of power and hegemony among sovereign
states into those of mutual respect. Conversely, the real
international terrorism is founded in the imposition of the will of
the powerful states upon the weak by means of economic, political,
cultural and military domination. We declare that the key to ending
all forms of terrorism is the development of new relations among
nations and peoples based on unfailing respect for the right to
self-determination of peoples, and on a greater measure of economic,
political and social equality on a world scale (1987).

13. Noam Chomsky reminds us that both the U.S. and Israel refused
to accept those rights. When Nicaragua succeeded in having the US
judged guilty by the World Court which ordered the US to end its
international terrorist campaign and pay substantial reparations, the
US State Department officially approved attacks on health clinics and
agricultural cooperatives by the army of Contras that it organized and
supported. For the U.S., the African National Congress was a terrorist
organization, whereas South Africa was not a terrorist state like
Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and others. Aside from the literal
meaning of terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of
violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological
in nature" via intimidation, coercion or instilling fear, Chomsky
notes a virtually universal propagandistic use of terrorism in its
usage of referring "to terrorist acts committed by enemies against us
or our allies. . . . Everyone 'condemns terrorism ' in this sense of
the term. Even the Nazis harshly condemned terrorism and carried out
what they called 'counter-terrorism' against the terrorist partisans"
(2001, 90). Such counter-terrorism includes the Greek and Indonesian
massacres of communists and their suspected allies, as well as the
genocidal war in East Timor and elsewhere.

14. In discussions over just and unjust war, a distinction is
usually made between the war waged by the oppressed against the
oppressor -- the "lawful struggle for justice," and for "liberation
from colonialism and the threat of enslavement," as the Soviet
philosopher F.N. Fedoseev has stated (1977, 73). However, the means or
tactics used in this just war, and their relevance to the pursuit of
the objectives, requires separate elucidation. E. J. Hobsbawm also
urged that violence as a social phenomenon, like war, "exists only in
the plural" and that "there are degrees of necessary or desirable
violence within society" incomprehensible to liberals who believe that
"all violence is worse than non-violence, other things being equal
(which they are not)" (1973, 214).

15. Another construal of terrorism follows the model set up by
the UK Prevention of Terrorism Act 1976, s.14. It defines terrorism as
"the use of violence for political ends [including] any use of
violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the
public in fear." Roger Scruton observes that that definition confuses
two ideas or purposes of violence, one to achieve political goals and
the other to induce fear in the public for narrow interests or
purposes. What seems primary is the application of random and
arbitrary violence to create widespread fear and dismay. Scruton also
cites Robespierre's famous defense of state terrorism: "They say that
terrorism is the resort of despotic government. Is our government then
like despotism? Yes, as the sword that flashes in the hand of the hero
of liberty is like that with which the satellites of tyranny are
armed. . . . The governmentof the Revolution is the despotism of
liberty against tyranny" (Scruton 1982, 460).

16. If acts of terrorism are then justified by their results, we
have a case of consequentialism, a species of utilitarianism. What are
the consequences? The notion of "structural violence" -- the
insidiously concealed inequalities within the seemingly peaceful
institutions of the capitalist economic order -- is invoked in order
to justify the response of violence on the part of those struggling
for freedom against those who employ state-sanctioned violence to
suppress the people. Here the crucial term is the meaning or nature of
the violence as a means to an end. The issue of consequentialism leads
us to the classic topic of inquiry, the relations of means to ends,
around which the controversy over Marxist politics and ethics often
gravitates.

From the Marxist Archive

17. Let us review what the Marxist tradition has to offer in its
critique of terrorism. Both Marx and Engels rejected individualist
terror in conceptualizing the process of revolutionary social
transformation. They dismissed the early anarchist John Most as a
half-educated charlatan and attacked Bakunin (see their Report of the
Hague Congress of the International, July 1873). They condemned the
terrorist actions of the Fenians (Engels himself believed that the
bombs of the Irish dynamiters and the French anarchists were
counterproductive), though in their attitude to the Russian Narodniki,
they sympathized with them in their defense against the incredible
atrocities and unheard-of despotism of the government agents. Studying
the peculiarity of Russian conditions, Marx praised the assassins of
Alexander II in 1881 as "sterling people," while Engels speculated in
a letter to Vera Zasulich that Blanqui's conspiratorial fantasies
might be appropriate for Russia at that time. Engels thought that
"This way of struggle has been dictated to the Russian revolutionaries
by dire necessity, by the action of their enemies. They are
responsible to their people and to history for the means they apply,"
whereas for the anarchists who bombed London on January 24, 1885, for
Engels, they harmed not only policemen and bourgeois but also workers,
their wives and children -- such weapons were directed not against the
real enemies but "against the public in general" (1978, 207). Engels
always took into account the specifically differentiated historical
conjuncture, the manifold economic and social forces surrounding the
events, the "thickness" of circumstances. The rationale of any
political act hinges on the nature of the ideological milieu rooted in
determinate relations of production (Marx and Engels 1994). By 1894,
Engels lamented that anarchist terrorism, "the time of the chosen
people," had gone forever.

18. For his part, Lenin reaffirmed the need to calculate the
value of force or violence in terms of 1) the time and place, and 2)
the sentiments and attitudes of the masses. It was philistine to
reject violence in the abstract. Both Lenin and Trotsky criticized the
Socialist Revolutionaries for their indiscriminate use of terrorism
even though the latter claimed that it coincided with the people's
demands. Such "easy tactics" satisfied the intelligentsia and spread
harmful illusions that the autocracy can easily be overthrown by
assassinations. What is primary is patient and systematic
organization, agitation and propaganda that constitute all-round
political work among the masses. And what is above all fundamental is
the grasp of the totality of social and political forces in a
revolutionary situation with its dialectical mediations.

19. A few quotes from Lenin would convey the approach used by the
Filipino revolutionary forces toward the use of violence as a means of
self-defense and protection of popular democratic gains in certain
liberated zones and elsewhere.

20. Socialist revolution is always conceived as a series of
actions by the masses for democratic change. Lenin always emphasized
the imperative of mass mobilization, political education of the
masses, and acting in concert with the masses in the process of
organizing the revolutionary workers' party -- the chief task that
requires economizing one's forces by deliberate planning:

. . . the Socialist Revolutionaries, by including terrorism in their
program and advocating it in its present-day form as a means of
political struggle, are thereby doing the most serious harm to the
movement, destroying the indissoluble ties between socialist work and
the mass of the revolultionary class. . . ; that in practice the
terrorism of the Socialist Revolutionaries is nothing else than single
combat, a method that has been wholly condemned by the experience of
history. . . . Among the masses of the Russian workers this advocacy
simply sows harmful illusions, such as the idea that terrorism
"compels people to think politically, even against their will," or
that "more effectively than months of verbal propaganda it is capable
of changing the views . . . of thousands of people. . . ." These
harmful illusions can only bring about early disappointment and weaken
the work of preparing the masses for the onslaught upon the autocracy
(1978, 209-210).

21. Uncompromisingly, Lenin criticized the revolutionary
adventurism of those who would resort to terrorism as a means of
either political mobilization or winning battles against the
bourgeoisie. Lenin pointedly asserted that "without the working people
all bombs are powerless, patently powerless" in replacing the State
power of the bourgeoisie: ". . . we know from the past and see in the
present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of
new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a
spirit of struggle and courage in all. Single combat however, inasmuch
as it remains single combat waged by the Balmashovs, has the immediate
effect of simply creating a short-lived sensation, while indirectly it
even leads to apathy and passive waiting for the next bout'" (1987,
213).

22. What Lenin demands is a kind of mass heroism, not individual
exhibitionism, no matter how self-sacrificing such individual heroes
were. Lenin writes on the eve of the 1905 insurrection: "Now, however,
when demonstrations develop into acts of open resistance to the
government . . . the old terrorism ceases to be an exceptionally
daring method of struggle. . . . Heroism has now come out into the
open; the true heroes of our time are now the revolutionaries who lead
the popular masses, which are rising against their oppressors. . . .
The terrorism of the great French revolution . . . began on July 14,
1789, with the storming of the Bastille. Its great strength was the
strength of the revolutionary movement of the people" (1987, 215). In
formulating the tactical platform for the Unity Congress of the Social
Democratic Party, Lenin continued to stress the need to always act in
accordance with the interests of the people, not necessarily tailing
behind the average conformist view but exercising responsible
leadership, learning from the people but also teaching them. This is
epitomized by this passage: "that fighting guerilla operations must be
conducted under the control of the party and, furthermore, in such a
way as to prevent the forces of the proletariat from being frittered
away and to ensure that the state of the working class movement and
the mood of the broad masses of the given locality are taken into
account" (1978, 216).

23. Hobsbawm recounts how Lenin, in 1916, expressed reservations
to the secretary of the Austrian social democrats who assassinated the
Austrian prime minister as a gesture of protest against the war. Lenin
wondered why he did not use his position to take the less dramatic
step of circulating an anti-war appeal -- a boring but effective
non-violent action, which was preferable to a romantic but ineffective
one. Hobsbawm notes that this did not stop Lenin from recommending
armed insurrection when necessary: "Rational revolutionaries have
always measured violence entirely by its purpose and likely
achievement" (1973, 214).

Trotsky's Intervention

24. Trotsky applied a historical materialist optic to the
spectacle of terrorism. He analyzed the peculiar Russian form of
terrorism as a method intelligible in a time when the "bureaucratic
hierarchy of absolutism" could only evoke its own mirror-image. He
believed that the coercive technological apparatus of the Czarist
state had lagged behind the economic condition of society; conversely,
the intelligentsia "was spiritually revolutionized before the economic
development of the country could give birth to revolutionary classes
on which it could have counted for support" (1978, 217). Trotsky, it
seems, ignored the proximity of the Socialist Revolutionaries to the
peasantry and the pettybourgeoisie. Trotsky distinguished Marxists as
"theoreticians of the mass struggle" from the anarchists, "ideologists
of terror," who capitalized on personal heroism and the "hermetic
secrecy" of conspiracy, thus psychologically and absolultely excluding
"agitation and organization among the masses." For Trotsky, the
terrorist could only see two forces in the political field: the
government and his own organization. This field was a Manichean
construct which vacated any revolutionary rationale for the class
struggle: "Conceived in the absence of a revolutionary class, born as
a consequence of lack of faith in the revolutionary masses, terrorism
can best support its own existence only by exploiting the weakness and
disorganized state of the masses by belittling their achievements and
magnifying their defeats" (1978, 218-19).

25. Trotsky concentrated on the character of the social struggle
whose "ways and means" are dependent on the analysis of the ruling
social order. Such ways and means cannot simply be mechanical --
murder, explosions, etc. -- without any social or political resonance.
While a minor strike can produce tremendous social consequences (such
as strengthening trade unions, workers' confidence, etc.), the murder
of a factory owner does not eliminate the private ownership of
factories but only results in police action, in fact more brutal and
shameless repression, and disillusionment and apathy of the workers.
Everything depends on the concrete political circumstances: "The
existence of the capitalist state does not depend on its ministers and
cannot be destroyed with them. The classes which it serves can always
find new people; the mechanism will remain whole and will continue to
function." (Recall the assassination of McKinley who justified the
violent annexation of the Philippines; the successors continued the
policy of brutalizing their enemies.) Trotsky asked in light of the
goal of radical social transformation: if one can achieve the
revolutionary goal by shooting the enemy, what need is there for class
organization, self-education, for a disciplined militant party, for
meetings, mass agitation when it is easy to intimidate high officials
with a few individuals throwing bombs here and there?

26. Like Marx and Engels, Trotsky also took into account
individual sentiments and responses. There is a dialectic of
individual or personal anger and desire for revenge and the movement
of the masses whenever repression and government atrocities reach a
certain level beyond tolerance. Trotsky invented a social imaginary
which, embedded in Russian popular memory and populist tradition,
dialectically reconciled individual motivation with organized
collective rationality that approximated some realization of justice
or fairness:

The reason why individual terrorism is, in our view, not permissible
is precisely because it lowers the political consciousness of the
masses, causes them to acquiesce in their own lack of strength, and
directs their gaze and hopes to a great avenger and liberator who may
come one day to do their work for them. . . .

Whatever moral eunuchs and pharisees may say, the feeling of
revenge has its right. The working class has greater moral probity
because it does not look with dull indifferene at what is happening in
this, the best of all worlds [unlike the hypocritical bourgeoisie who
moralize about the value of individual life while exploiting them or
pushing them to war]. The proletariat's unsatisfied feeling of revenge
should not be extinguished; on the contrary, it should be aroused
again and again; it should be deepened and directed against genuine
examples of every kind of wrong and human baseness. This is the task
of the Social Democrat. If we rise against terrorist acts, it is only
because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account that we
must settle with the capitalist status quo is too great to present to
an official calling himself a minister. We must learn to see the
monstrous evidence of the class structure in all crimes against the
individual, in every attempt to maim or stifle a human being, body and
soul, so that we may direct all our strength toward a collective
struggle against this class structure. This, then, is the method by
which the burning desire for revenge can achieve its greatest moral
satisfaction (1978, 222-23).

27. In a pamphlet on Marxism versus Neo-Anarchist Terrorism,
George Novack of the Socialist Workers Party reiterates the Marxist
repudiation of terrorist adventurism as antithetical to the primacy of
mass actions, the opposite of "reliance upon the independent and
revolutionary organization and activity of the working masses which is
the essence of Marxist politics" (1970, 12). He condemns terrorism as
"petty ­bourgeois liberalism temporarily gone berserk," and urges
genuine revolutionists "to learn how to release the creative energy
and revolutionary potential of the masses" to carry out a
revolutionary program of mobilizing tens of thousands against U.S.
imperialism. Novack recapitulates the classic Marxist thesis against
terrorism removed from the mass revolutionary process led by an
organized, class-conscious political party.

Grassroots Justice

28. Within this framework, I would now like to examine a key
incident that can articulate the Marxist principle of revolutionary
mass action as the antithesis to the essentially
anarchist/individualist version of terrorism condemned by the United
Nations.

29. In regular press releases, the GRP states that it terminated
peace negotiations for the reason that the New People's Army, a member
of the NDF, killed a government official, a member of Congress, Col.
Rodolfo Aguinaldo, one of the military officials of the Marcos
dictatorship named by many political prisoners as the most notorious
human-rights violators of that regime. Since 1975, he was listed by
Amnesty International as one of the leading torturers -- he not only
personally supervised the torture of well-known intellectuals and
dissidents from all sectors, but also participated in the abduction
and summary exection of suspected fighters in the NPA. Even within
military circles, Aguinaldo was considered to be extraordinarily
brutal: he would throw out suspects from helicopters, and sexually
abused female captives.

30. The NPA guerillas of the Fortunato Camus Command rendered
this verdict on June 13, 2001: "Sa kanyang mga krimen laban sa
mamamayan at sa rebolusyon, marapat lamang na igawad kay Co. Rodolfo
Aguinaldo ang parusang kamatayan." ("Owing to his crimes against the
citizens and against the revolution, it is only just that we impose
the punishment of death on Col. Rodolfo Aquinaldo." My translation.)
In a press release in the NDF Website of June 14, 2001, NDF
Chairperson Luis Jalandoni characterized the ambush-slaying of Col.
Aguinaldo as "just punishment." He congratulated the NPA for
successfully carrying out the demands for justice of the relatives and
survivors of Aguinaldo's murderous tenure as a member of the corrupt
Philippine Constabulary and the military intelligence agency. So far,
not one of the numerous officials who committed unspeakable atrocities
has been punished in court after the downfall of the Marcos regime.
What is truly scandalous, if a humdrum fact, is that the government
has been historically unable to punish or stop military violators of
human rights and international humanitarian law. By failing to do so,
it has rehabilitated and protected these criminal officials, even to
the point of allowing them to run for office and use the Philippine
Congress as a sanctuary to continue their activities as human rights
violators, economic plunderers and coup-plotters. I quote Jalandoni:

Aguinaldo was a legitimate target for revolutionary justice.
Despite his pretensions to being a civilian government official, he
remained active in the military. He had extensive blood debts to the
people of the Philippines and he manipulated the system to create an
immunity for himself. His punishment comes at an opportune time since
we are discussing the implementation of the Comprehensive Agreement on
Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law [one of
the documents signed by the NDF and GRP]. We extend our heartfelt
congratulations to the Fortunato Camus Command of the New People's
Army for successfully dealing with the armed and dangerous criminal
Aguinaldo. And we assure the people of the Philippines that the
implementation of justice and the establishment of mechanisms for the
protection of the people's human rights are a priority for us in this
peace negotiations.

31. It is clear that Jalandoni's explanation for the application
of "revolutionary justice" rests on the following grounds: 1)
Aguinaldo was an armed and dangerous criminal, 2) he was a military
combatant still, despite his civilian position, and 3) he had "blood
debts to the people." To my knowledge, this is the first time the NPA
has executed a military official who was also an elected congressman
-- others who have been similarly punished were either renegades or
minor provincial officials of which there have been no public
announcement like this one. There may seem to be an invocation of
bourgeois moralism here when Jalandoni ascribes "blood debts to the
people." But I think that is conceived within the humanitarian law of
prohibiting torture of civilians. Of course the program of the
Communist Party of the Philippines (of which the NPA is the military
arm) envisions a transitional society where genuine national
independence is achieved and where a more democratic order insures
justice for ordinary citizens, including the elimination of barbaric
abuses such as those committed by Aguinaldo. Moreover, the Marcos
regime and its military instruments, like Aguinaldo, were considered
agents of imperialism, betrayers of national sovereignty and even the
liberal norms of justice; hence the standard of justice invokes a
quasi-liberal Kantian ideal of respecting humans as ends in themselves
without being blind to their class position. Nonetheless, this justice
is not completely premised on that abstract norm, because it also
assumes a precise historical situation. That situation involves the
oppressed masses -- persons victimized by a neocolonial structure of
which Aguinaldo's office was an important instrumentality.

32. Unlike the liberal bourgeois view, revolutionary justice --
in Jalandoni's construal -- does not consider Aguinaldo as simply a
pure subject of law, but a person embedded within concrete,
determinate circumstances. Moral or ethical acts cannot be understood,
in the Marxist perspective, as independent of such valorized
historical circumstances. We cannot appeal to abstract notions of
right in a Kingdom of Ends. What is key to this socialist insurgency
is a concrete and historical aim, the destruction of the foundations
of class oppression, neocolonial subordination, and unjust social
institutions, and the realization of a national democratic order with
the overthrow of the neocolonial comprador-landlord system. In this
process of constructing a new society, we find -- to use Sartre's
terminology -- "a concrete play of negations and affirmations." I
quote Sartre's concept of dialectics written in the context of his
response to Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours:

One forges the destructive instrument by making it destroy. But
precisely by giving the mass, so that it may destroy, that discipline,
that cohesion, that self-denial, that self-confidence and that
understanding that makes of it the most formidable destructive
instrument, one prepares it by this very fact for its positive role
which is to become by itself the Kingdom of Ends; for the destructive
instrument and the positive end are one and the same thing. Thus it is
the means, at present, which makes concrete the end, which gives it,
in some sense, body and individuality, or, if one prefers, it is
within the means (the instrument) that one finds the end (preparation
of the consciousness of the masses of the socialist society). (quoted
in Lukes 1987, 128)

33. In this dialectical interpretation of means and ends, the
concrete goal of a society is the elimination of class oppression and
injustice as the whole (the future already contained in the present)
acts on the part, on singular events, on the present situation. The
whole or totality of history is an ideal but it does not necessarily
dictate a necessary future -- the future depends on what we do at
present to realize it. In another formulation suggested by James
Hansen: "The revolutionary manifests the latent necessities of the
past-present," and through a unity of theory and practice acts "in the
present through what has been given in the past in order to explode
the present for the future" (1977, 108).

34. Lest this strike one as a mystification, I think the idea is
simple: as Marx said, communists only carry out to fulfillment what is
already contained in what is happening, in other words, the actuality
of the revolutionary process fuses theory and practice, consciousness
and action, motive and deed. And though there might be ambiguity and
contingency in envisaging that future, the goal is always concrete and
infused with values since it is always dialectically linked to the
rational choices we make in opting for revolutionary violence to
counter counter-revolutionary resistance to change. The popular masses
must be involved in these choices, as has been done whenever the NPA
carries out a serious action as the punishment of well-known
torturers. As Merleau Ponty wrote in Humanism and Terror: Marxism must
aim at "extrapolating, specifying and redirecting the spontanous
praxis of the proletariat along its proper path" (1947, 127). This
accords with Lenin's and Mao's injunction to always situate the
political action within the "mass line," neither tailing behind nor
leading too far ahead in solitary elitist fashion.

Neither Subjectivist nor Objectivist

35. I think that Jalandoni applies a broad Marxist standard that
Lenin and Trotsky have outlined. It does not privilege a prefigured
future of socialism or national democracy that embodies ideal criteria
of judgment analogous to the Kantian categorical imperative; rather,
it assumes the moral sentiments and feelings of citizens living in a
class society, oppressed workers and peasants whose thinking and
attitudes are products of class society and necessarily incorporating
the features of class society. After all, the revolution itself is a
product of class society, though its project is to cancel or negate
the foundations of that society -- to release potential forces of
transformation that are being repressed.

36. The philosopher John Dewey agreed in part with Trotsky's
consequentialism. Dewey held that "the end [not the intention or
subjective will] in the sense of consequences provides the only basis
for moral ideas and action, and therefore provides the only
justification that can be found for the means employed" (1938, 52).
This accords with the pragmatic rejection of deontological Kantian
ethics. But Dewey distinguished between an end-in-view and actual
objective consequences that will calculate and judge the nature of the
instrumentalities employed (1969, 53). All means need to be carefully
examined without preconceptions to determine whether the end -- the
liberation of the masses from class oppression and exploitation --
would be promoted and attained. Nothing is prejudged; correction can
be made in mid-stream. Means of whatever kind cannot be justified a
priori by the end-in-view; they cannot be arbitrarily chosen nor
validated by an abstract law of history, the law of social development
or the Hegelian Reason. Every means would be weighed and judged on the
basis of the consequences (in terms of mobilizing the masses for
critical consciousness and collective action) they are likely to
produce; the question is how objective the grounds are for judgement.
I would agree with Dewey that the class struggle in the abstract alone
does not specify the particular ways in which it is to be carried out,
and that class struggle as the law of historical chance "makes all
moral questions, that is, all questions of the end to be finally
attained, meaningless (Lukes 1985, 122). That is the reason that
organic intellectuals are needed.

Third World Perspective

37. In the sixties, the work of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevarra
brought into the foreground the question of the use of violence in the
world-wide struggle against Western imperialism in general, and US
military aggression in particular. Eduardo Mondlane, president of the
Fremte de Liberacion Mozambigue, expressed the consensus that violence
cannot be made intelligible by itself but only in its embeddedness in
the historical process. Violence in many parts of the world, including
the U.S., is a way of life, Mondlane observed. Violence is used to
control and exploit people, but the question before the people is
"what kind of violence will enable us to be free. Violence does not
solve the problems of the world, but it is often a necessary
precondition for solutions to be possible" (1968, 38). Like Hobsbawm,
Mondlane speculates on different kinds of violence, and its function
as a "necessary precondition" since he considers its presence as a
constituent element of a society divided into oppressed and oppressor
to be an ingredient of a conflicted situation, where things are
definitely not equal.

38. The thinking of Filipino revolutionaries reflects the same
imperative of trying to grasp the total situation in the light of the
direction of the complicated revolutionary process. From the point of
view of Jose Maria Sison, the founding chairman of the Communist Party
of the Philippines, and currently branded as a "terrorist" by the
Powell doctrine, the use of revolutionary violence is legitimate from
a historical perspective. In any exploitative society, the state is
used by the dominant exploiting class to coerce other classes into
submission. In the history of civilization, the dominant class always
unleashes counterrevolutionary violence against the newly rising
progressive class and the people. In the case of the Philippines,
Sison writes, the reactionary neocolonial state "would rather use
counterrevolutionary violence than undertake basic reforms to meet the
basic revolutionary demands of the people. A state that violently
reacts to the revolutionary demands of the people is ripe for
overthrow by armed revolution" (1993, 2). Again, this is traditional
Marxist lesson.

39. In his role as witness in the McCarthy trials of the U.S.
Communist Party in the fifties, the philosopher John Somerville
rehearsed again and again the basic principle of the dialectics of a
revolutionary situation, as Marx, Engels and Lenin conceived it:
revolutionary violence acquired legitimacy when the existing bourgeois
state was "unwilling or unable to carry out the will of the majority
in vital matters," and where an armed revolution "had the support of
the majority and represented the will of the majority" (2000, 26).
Counter-revolutionary violence comes from the resistance of the
minority (the ruling elite) "opposed to some radical change which
represents the will of the majority, and that that resistance is what
precipitates the violence" (2000, 58). Against counter-revolutionary
violence, the NPA mounts self-defensive measures, such as the
punishment of Aguinaldo, or the assassination of imperialist advisers
to the reactionary state.

40. Sison located the role of revolutionary violence as part of
the Communist Party's strategy of "protracted people's war made
possible by the chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal
system" which allows the establishment of revolutionary organs of
political power in the countrysides. This is part of a two-stage
struggle from national-democratic to a socialist one, given the actual
class composition of the revolutionary forces -- a peasantry and petty
bourgeois stratrum led by the Filipino working class and its advanced
elements in the party. In addition, Sison counterposes the strategy of
people's war (derived and modified from Mao Zedong) to the U.S.
imperialism's "low-intensity war" that combined frontal military
campaigns with the terrorism of special operations teams, paramilitary
forces, death squads, armed religious cults, renegades and splittists
-- all of which we are familiar with in the Contras of Nicaragua, the
death squads in El Salvador, Chile and other contested regions.

41. Sison's historicizing argument in the context of the world
crisis of imperialism bears affinities with Georg Lukacs' conviction
that the ultimate objective of socialist liberation is not an ideal
abstracted and imposed on reality but is "a reality which has to be
achieved," a goal immanent in the process of class struggle pursued by
the class-conscious proletariat (1972, 3-4). Tactics can be grasped by
class conscious activists while the measure of judging what tactics
are required by the ultimate objective at moments of world crisis can
be discerned by understanding and putting into practice "the
world-historical mission of the proletariat's class struggle" (Lukes
1985, 115)

Deep Penetration and Its Aftermath

42. In 1996, Jalandoni made a public declaration asserting the
"status of belligerency" in which the NDF and its members vowed to
adhere to Geneva Conventions on the conduct of civil war. This
obligates both parties in the war to "protect the civilian population
and the combatants hors de combat. The combatants captured from either
side must also be assured of their rights as prisoners of war and may
become the subjects of negotiations for the exchange of prisoners of
war" (Jalandoni 1996).This is the juncture where we might
contextualize the killing of the American CIA agent Col. Nick Rowe on
April 21, 1989.

43. I am not aware of the NPA or CPP acknowledging that they had
a hand in this incident, but two persons -- Donato Continente and
Juanito Itaas -- have been imprisoned now for several years, virtually
charged with the deed without due process. Who is Col. Rowe? According
to James Neilson's article in the U.S. Veteran News and Report, "A
highly decorated Green Beret and Vietnam veteran who survived five
years of captivity in a Viet Cong prison camp, Rowe was chief of the
army division of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) since
1987 and was providing counter-insurgency training for the Philippine
military. In this capacity, he worked closely with the CIA, and was
involved in its nearly decade-old program to penetrate the NPA and its
parent communist party in conjunction with Philippine's own
intelligence organizations." Before he was killed by unknown
assailants, according to the cited article, Col. Rowe had already
warned the U.S. State Department that he was targetted to be hit by
the enemy; however, the Defense Intelligence Agency did not do
anything because they did not want Rowe, the control officer and
trainer of agents, to withdraw any of the agents they had infiltrated
into the NPA, who was relaying information about "possible growing
Cuban involvement with the NPA." Neilson writes: "Six months before
Rowe's murder, the CIA had learned that Cuban advisors appeared to be
assisting the NPA in the South-Central Luzon province, one of the two
provinces where the NPA was focusing on ferreting out CIA agents
within its ranks." It appears that Col. Rowe died as a combatant in
the war against what the U.S. called "terrorists," whether it was the
NPA or some other group.

44. Two years ago, the NDF had taken two prisoners of war, a
police chief inspector and a Philippine Army intelligence officer, who
were under the custody of the New People Army for a period of time
(see NDF Press Statement of 17 May 2000). The NDF was trying to
negotiate with the Estrada administration for their release, but in
the attempt of the government to rescue them, one was killed, and the
other was later released. Why Col. Rowe was killed or executed, and
not captured -- assuming the NPA was involved -- has not yet been
clarified. Given the state of belligerency existing between the
government allied with the U.S. and the revolutionary forces, Col.
Rowe would properly be considered a casualty of war, not a victim of
terrorism.

45. After the Powell declaration, there was some speculation that
Sison might be kidnapped and brought to the United States for trial in
the slaying of Col. Rowe, just like those captured Taliban soldiers
and Al Qaeda followers now interred in the Guantanamo Bay prison. Or
he might be summarily executed by agents of the U.S. and the GRP. We
need to mention here that both Sison and Jalandoni have denounced
Powell's stigmatization. Sison made the following response, part of
which reads:

US imperialism is the biggest terrorist force that has ever afflicted
the Filipino people. And yet it has all the malice and temerity to
misrepresent as terrorist every revolutionary force that arouses,
organizes and mobilizes the Filipino people in a resolute struggle for
national liberation and democracy against US imperialism, domestic
feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. . . . Anyone who knows the
principles and policies of the CPP is aware that it does not send its
members or Red fighters of the NPA abroad to attack any US entity. The
CPP has also repeatedly pointed out that Americans can enjoy the basic
rights and freedoms of the foreign guest in the Philippines, unless
they are deployed for combat operations against the revolutionary
forces and people. (2002)

In this connection, it is obvious that Rowe was not a tourist or guest
on a business errand in the Philippines.

46. Jalandoni for his part refuted Powell's declaration by
stating that both the CPP and NPA, as member organizations of the
NDFP, are guided by their own codes of discipline, that they uphold
human rights and humanitarian law in conformity with the NDFP National
Council Declaration of Undertaking to Apply the Geneva Conventions of
1949 and Protocol I of 1977. He poses the contradiction sharply:

Since their respective founding days in 1968 and 1969, the CPP and NPA
have been dedicated to uphold, defend and advance the national and
democratic rights and interests of the people. In this connection, as
a matter of revolutionary principle and practice, they are necessarily
against terrorism. It is of decisive importance that they maintain and
develop the participation and support of the people in the revolution
and that they use their limited weapons judiciously and precisely
against the enemies of the people. In stark contrast to the CPP, NPA
and other revolutionary forces, the GRP and all its armed forces like
the AFP, PNP, CAFGU, deputized private armies and death squads commit
gross human rights violations on a wide scale against the people,
especially the workers and peasants. The records of Amnesty
International and other human rights organizations show such rampant
human rights violations under the auspices of state terrorism,
overshadowing the claims of the GRP against the CPP and NPA (2002).

47. Finally, I want to mention that Jalandoni has also condemned
the Abu Sayyaf in a statement released last May 26, 2000. Jalandoni
traced the genealogy of the Abu Sayyaf as a creation of the GRP
military to split the Moro National Liberation Front in 1991. From
1995 the group "has turned into a Frankenstein's monster, engaging in
hostage-taking for ransom and attacking civilian communities. . . .
Both the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) and the NDFFP have
condemned the hostage-taking by the Abu Sayyaf and its other acts
endangering the lives of civilians." In sum, such terrorism that
victimizes ordinary civilians, unable to distinguish between the
oppressor and the oppressed, is anathema to Marxist revolutionaries
fighting imperialism and all forms of exploitation.2




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Notes

1 Groups in the Philippines like the Volunteers Against Crime and
Corruption, BAYAN, and others have criticized the Arroyo government
for arbitrarily labelling individuals and groups opposed to her
policies as "terrorists" without due process or any serious public
investigation. Such arbitrary lumping of the NDF, the CPP/NPA
(together with the political adviser Jose Maria Sison) with the Abu
Sayyaf and Osama bin Laden, or with criminals in the government police
and military, reflects a mindless aping of the US and the European
states in their unilateral proclamations. It used to be that the
stigmatizing brand of "communists" was applied to people sowing fear
to intimidate civilians to extract ransom or frighten law-enforcers.
Who has benefitted from this but criminals engaged in drug trafficing,
kidnapping, money laundering, extortion, not to mention the torturers
and human-rights violators who are still employed in government and
the military. The terror unleashed by powerful drug and crime
syndicates joined by the official state terror inflicted by the
military and police can only drive home the lesson that the masses of
people have to defend themselves with their own army, such as the New
People's Army or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

2 For a recent statement of the position of the Communist Party of the
Philippines on the current situation, see "Peace does not come from
the silencing of guns" (February 2, 2005)
<http://home.wanadoo.nl/ndf/statements/2005/statement0010.html>.





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Contents copyright © 2005 by E. San Juan, Jr.
Format copyright © 2005 by Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087.

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