Introduction
Jose Maria Sison, founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), provided the ideological backbone of the communist insurgency in the country. His writings, anchored in "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought", laid down the framework for “national-democratic revolution” as the only valid path to Philippine liberation.
For a time, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, his ideas galvanized cadres and mobilized thousands. Yet over the decades, the movement has declined, fragmented, and stagnated, and is arguably headed to an ignominous end. While state repression played its part, much of the blame also lies in theoretical errors and Sison’s failure to understand the Philippine context in all its complexity.
Sison’s writings reveal a striking rigidity that ignores the evolving realities of Philippine society. He often insisted on a fixed narrative of unending systemic crisis, while the political system repeatedly showed its capacity to absorb shocks through reforms, elections, and elite realignments. This disconnect between his predictions and lived reality gradually eroded the credibility of his ideological framework.
Moreover, the communist movement under his leadership became increasingly isolated from the everyday aspirations of Filipinos, who sought stability and upward mobility in pragmatic, legal, and economic avenues rather than revolution.
The introduction of new industries, the opportunities of overseas work, and the cultural resilience of the people highlighted the widening gap between theoretical expectation and social reality. This gap ultimately set the stage for the movement’s decline.
1. Misreading the “Ruling System”
Sison argued that the “ruling system” in the Philippines was in a state of “chronic and ever-worsening crisis” that could only end through revolutionary overthrow. This prediction turned out to be flawed:
- The Philippine state, though weak and plagued with corruption, was never in an unresolvable crisis. It proved resilient, adapting through reforms, elections, elite realignments, and international support.
- Institutions bent without breaking; transitions of power (from Marcos to Aquino, then to subsequent administrations) showed that the system could absorb shocks rather than collapse outright.
- This misdiagnosis blinded the movement to the reality that the state’s survival mechanisms were more robust than Sison’s theory allowed.
2. Underestimating Filipino Resilience
Sison’s framework assumed that worsening economic hardship would automatically radicalize the masses and drive them into revolution. He underestimated the cultural and historical resiliency of the Filipino people:
- Filipinos developed creative ways to survive economic downturns — from "diskarte" and informal side jobs and "rackets", to migration abroad, to "ukay-ukay" clothes, to "pagpag" food, to community sharing, and to extended family support.
- Rather than collapsing into revolutionary desperation, many found ways to adapt. While Sison’s framework assumed hardship would radicalize the masses, in practice these adaptive strategies — which some Marxist analyses might label as distractions from class struggle — functioned as genuine survival mechanisms that prevented widespread revolutionary ferment.
3. Failure to Anticipate Structural Economic Shifts
Sison’s writings treated the Philippine economy as permanently “semi-feudal, semi-colonial,” destined to decay. But this analysis failed to anticipate major structural shifts:
- Rise of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs): Labor migration provided millions of families with incomes that softened the blows of local poverty, diffusing revolutionary discontent.
- Boom of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry: From the early 2000s, BPO became a multi-billion-dollar sector, employing hundreds of thousands and providing upward mobility for educated youth.
These developments undercut Sison’s insistence that Philippine society was trapped in semi-feudal stagnation. They revealed a dynamic economy capable of producing new opportunities — an element his static framework did not account for.
4. Disconnection from the Filipino Psyche
Perhaps the most serious flaw was Sison’s estrangement from his own people’s mindset:
- His expectation that Filipinos would embrace the rigors of a protracted people’s war overlooked the fact that many preferred nonviolent, legal, and pragmatic routes to change.
- He underestimated the Filipino capacity to endure hardship with hope, humor, and pragmatism. What he read as passivity was, in reality, a form of resilience and optimism that blunted revolutionary fervor.
- By not truly understanding the Filipino character—adaptive, inventive, and often more interested in improving life through migration, education, or entrepreneurship—Sison overestimated the mass appeal of armed struggle.
5. Consequences of Theoretical Rigidity
Because of these blind spots, the CPP under Sison’s guidance:
- Continued to wage armed struggle even when it had lost strategic resonance.
- Boycotted the 1986 Snap Election, a blunder that forever cast the CPP as a pathetic spectator to the nation’s greatest democratic triumph.
- Grew increasingly irrelevant to younger generations who saw opportunities in education, overseas work, and BPOs rather than revolution.
Conclusion
Jose Maria Sison’s genius was in crystallizing discontent into a revolutionary framework in 1968, but his tragedy was in failing to update that framework to match Philippine realities. By misjudging the ruling system’s adaptability, underestimating Filipino resilience, ignoring structural economic shifts like OFWs and BPOs, and misunderstanding the Filipino psyche itself, Sison locked the movement into a strategy that no longer fit its terrain. The result was fragmentation, irrelevance, and decline.
The lessons from this failure extend beyond the CPP. They underscore the importance of grounding political theory in a nuanced understanding of national culture, economy, and historical trajectory. Revolutions cannot succeed if they impose borrowed frameworks that misread the people’s actual conditions and capacities.
Ultimately, Sison’s story highlights the limitations of ideological rigidity in a rapidly changing world. While his contributions to Philippine radical thought remain undeniable, his inability to evolve left the movement trapped in outdated strategies. A truly transformative politics must remain open, adaptive, and attuned to the resilience and ingenuity of the Filipino people.
In the end, Sison knew Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but he did not know the Filipino people — their creativity, endurance, and pragmatic pursuit of survival and progress. It was this gap, more than any government counterinsurgency program, that has ensured the defeat of the communist movement in the Philippines.
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