Peace talks still best CPP option

Gregorio Rosal is back with a vengeance. For a while there, friends and foes alike were writing off the Communist Party spokesman as dying of exhaustion, just as his revolution was. But the man known more by his nom de guerre Ka Roger not only has recovered, he also is resuming press trysts in his stronghold "somewhere in the Sierra Madres." His New People’s Army has rebounded too. The military is monitoring NPA tactical offensives in all regions. As an Army division chief puts it, "They are recruiting more than we can capture or kill." And on the eve of the CPP’s 34th anniversary last week, Rosal vigorously waved the banner of his cause: "Macapagal-Arroyo and her fascists in the AFP are daydreaming when they think they can crush the CPP and the armed revolutionary movement. The CPP will certainly outlast them all and prove victorious in the end."

Rosal was being a true Marxist. Anybody who goes by the teachings of the 19th-century thinker cherishes the dream that capitalism inevitably will collapse and that socialism and, by consequence, communism would take its place. Karl Marx’s theory of change is that its own colossal, global productivity would bring capitalism to its knees. Oppressed workers of the world will unite to set up a new order. And so will prevail in the end the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the Communist Party.

That the CPP has withstood the superior might of the AFP for three decades is taken by Rosal and comrades as testament of inevitable victory. Marx never said when or how communists will win, just that they will. But the same long decades of guerrilla war without gaining territory or parity with the AFP’s strength, much more political power, also nixes Marxism. If at all, it has only proven that there will be many adherents willing to take up arms and lay down their lives for the communist dream.

To be sure, it’s not capitalism but Soviet communism that fell apart a hundred years after Marx prodded Russia to lead the way. And it’s not for lack of trying. Lenin and Stalin had strived to build strong proletarian rule and even exported the revolution to neighboring countries. In the process, however, they tyrannized their subjects, slaughtered tens of millions of them, and impoverished hundreds of millions more. The inevitability theory was proven not in a world victory of communism but in the similar heavy-handed ways of the Parties in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In those lands, Marx’s doctrine of equality, freedom from exploitation and true justice under communist regimes only provoke bitter laughter. And such laughter in turn provokes more clampdowns.

This is not to say that Marx was all wrong. Even The Economist, the magazine bastion of conservatism, aknowledges in its latest issue (21 Dec. 2002-3 Jan. 2003) that Marx was on the mark with many of his analyses. About the business cycle, for instance, or globalization and international markets, or the way economics shapes ideas. Comparing him with other social thinkers of his time, The Economist said: "Marx was much more original in envisioning the awesome productive power of capitalism. He saw that capitalism would spur innovation to a hitherto-unimagined degree. He was right that giant corporations would come to dominate the world’s industries."

The writer(s) – The Economist never carries bylines – opined that Marx had a better understanding of capitalism than Adam Smith. A whole day’s Internet browsing on economics amazingly cranked up more books and articles - 10-to-1 - quoting or expounding on Marx than Smith. Yet Marx was not an economist. Most of all, the article suggested that Soviet communism failed for being a fluke. It leapfrogged from Tsarist feudal rule to Leninist socialism. It did not follow Marx’s prescription of step-by-step development from feudalism to capitalism to socialism and ultimately to communist utopia.

Local communists decry Philippine society as "semi-colonial, semi-feudal,"a takeoff from Mao Tse-tung’s own rating of China when he was starting revolution. Will they commit the same mistake as the Soviets? Or will they follow Mao’s more cautious route, one that took into account the importance of Cultural Revolution, but sacrificed millions of lives just the same in the Great Leap Forward? The 34-year CPP war does not mean that the end is in sight. That the NPA has no Ho Chi Minh Trail through which to sneak in tanks and rockets to match the government’s military might could even mean its doom.

If that is not insurmountable burden enough, 34 years of insurgency has not endeared the CPP-NPA to the populace. Rosal dismisses it as "military psywar," but a recent Pulse Asia survey shows that 62 percent of Filipinos do not trust the communists.

Again, this is not to say that the local communists have no reason to repudiate the system. Poverty and injustice abound because a few families that control economic and political power thrive on it, and government is simply too corrupt and inept to change it.

But Marxists and their permutations, the social democrats, Christian socialists and moderate reformists have ascended high enough in many institutions to prod change, slow as it may be, without recourse to arms. It’s the same as in Europe, America and many parts of Asia and Africa. They have risen to influential positions in government, the media and the professions, the arts and the academe, the Church and the businesses. From there, they are able to give capitalism a heart, work for healthier environment, and constantly hammer away at injustice, inequality and ignorance. Their moderate route proves that a peace settlement, followed by parliamentary and mainstream social participation, are the best options left for the CPP-NPA. Seventy percent of Filipinos, in the same Pulse Asia survey, would want the peace talks to go on. They can’t all be wrong.

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