Will the recent passing of Jose Ma. Sison, founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, lead to the demise of the mainstream Left?
Sison passed away from heart failure at age 83 after a two-week confinement in a hospital in Utrecht, Netherlands.
He had spent nearly four decades in exile in the Netherlands after his release from 10 years in prison in 1986 after the People Power Revolt that sent Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. and family escorted by Americans into exile in Hawaii.
But the CPP gives us an inkling on what it thinks of Sison’s demise: “The entire Communist Party of the Philippines gives the highest possible tribute to its founding chairman, great Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinker, patriot, internationalist, and revolutionary leader… Even as we mourn, we vow to continue to give all our strength and determination to carry the revolution forward guided by the memory and teachings of the people’s beloved Ka Joma.”
Sison established the Maoist CPP on December 26, 1968, or 54 years ago. Three months later, on March 29, 1969, he presided over the establishment of the New People’s Army that vowed to wage ‘people’s war’ against ‘American imperialism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.’
At its height in the late 1970s to the 1980s, the NPA, according to the Philippine military, reached a peak of 25,000 regular fighters.
But recently, the Armed Forces of the Philippines said NPA strength today has dwindled to no more than 2,100 guerrillas.
That means, it said, the rebel group can no longer launch large-scale attacks against government troops and military bases, and therefore the government has already achieved ‘strategic victory’ against the Red insurgents.
Sison was the leading theoretician of the insurgent movement and laid down its guiding principles and basic tasks from 1968 onwards.
Other CPP-NPA leaders may have emerged during Sison’s long incarceration and after his release, but no one in the underground movement could have reached or even surpassed his level of understanding of Marxist theory and practice.
Hence, other CPP-NPA-NDF leaders may have long experience in the both the urban underground and in the battlefield in the countryside, but perhaps lack the deep understanding and application of Marxism in the concrete Philippine situation.
What is clear at this point, however, is that the NPA remains a ragtag guerrilla force that can only launch limited ‘tactical offensives’ in certain areas but not really overrun big military camps.
In other words, the rebel army is not likely to achieve its goal of encircling the cities from the countryside as what Mao Zedong did in China in the 1940s, nor be able to seize political power through the barrel of the gun within the decade or the next, if at all.