THE EXCERPT

There is an ominous feeling one gets when reading through Philippine newspapers from the late 1960s and early 1970s. No other period in Philippine journalism quite compares to it. A wide range of dailies and weeklies were in circulation, some of a very high caliber; the quality of their writing and the breadth of their opinions are striking. And then suddenly, abruptly—silence.

The date 22 September 1972 marks the last day of effectively every Filipino newspaper in the archives. Martial law had been declared, and the extraordinary ferment of the preceding period was over. The papers, as well as the radio and television stations, all ceased under executive fiat only to reemerge later, a quiescent media operated by the cronies of the dictator. It was not just the media, however, that were silenced. The streets fell silent as well. On 21 September, fifty thousand people had gathered in Plaza Miranda to denounce the threat of martial law. The day after it was declared, no one assembled and no one rallied; the nation seemingly acquiesced. Alfred McCoy wrote, “In declaring martial law . . . the president would ask the Filipino people to trade their democracy for stability. By their silence and compliance, the majority would tacitly accept his Faustian bargain.”1 That there was silence is irrefutable, but what was its origin? Was it truly tacit consent and the trading of democracy for stability?

Martial law came as a surprise to no one. It was easily the most anticipated event of the decade. People had been warning of it, advocating it, and denouncing it in the daily press and in mass protests since before the First Quarter Storm of January to March 1970, and yet the opposition to martial law, which had a mass following among workers and youths, was utterly unprepared. It was, above all, this lack of political preparation that allowed Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law. The responsibility for this rests squarely with the Communist parties of the Philippines, which tied the mass opposition to dictatorship to the interests of rival sections of the ruling elite, all of whom were vying to impose military rule.

The historian Donald Berlin details how “the roots of martial law lay in the Philippines’ long colonial experience and in the first decades of independence” and describes it as “a natur al part of the fabric of the Philippine past.”2 The 1935 Philippine constitution clothed the exigencies of US colonial rule in the gaudy, scanty trappings of democracy. The spirit of the country’s democr atic traditions, hard-won in mass anticolonial strug gles, never touched parchment. The Americans ensured that military dictatorship was written into the legal code and that trial by jury was not. Article VII, Section 10, granted the executive branch the power to “suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines or any part thereof under Mar tial Law.” The most basic democratic rights, including that of habeas corpus, the right to challenge unlawful detention, could be stripped away by presidential fiat. Berlin argues that martial law under Marcos was a return to the normal character of civilian-militar y relations that had been established during the colonial period. In this he errs. While the seed of military rule had been planted by the office of the US governor general, the Marcos dictatorship was not the atavistic reemergence of a prior mode of rule. Martial law in 1972 was something qualitatively new and was an expression of global developments.

The impulse to impose military rule had existed within the ruling class since the formal granting of independence in 1946. Plots to that end had been dr awn up by Elpidio Quirino, Carlos Garcia, and Diosdado Macapagal during their terms of office, but none of them succeeded. What distinguished Marcos’s machinations from those of his predecessors was neither his cleverness nor his will to power, but rather the international situation of social and economic crisis. Explosive class strug gles erupted around the globe from the middle of the 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, and the First Quarter Storm of Manila was presaged in the streets of Paris and followed in those of Athens. It is in this context that we see the rise of dictatorship as the preferred mode of bourgeois rule. Suharto and Marcos, Pinochet and Park shared a common geopolitical DNA. Washington facilitated and propped up these br utal regimes. Moscow and Beijing, looking to secure advantage against each other, followed suit. Moscow supported Suharto; Beijing, Pinochet.

The postwar order was collapsing. The restabilization of capitalism in the wake of the Second World War, funded by Washington and carried out on terms that it dictated, had established a temporary equilibrium that rested above all on the unprecedented level of global economic dominance exercised by one nation—the United States. This equilibrium could not be sustained. The economies of Europe and Japan, so necessary as buffers against both the Communist bloc and working-class unrest, had to be rebuilt, and the buffers rapidly became rivals. The hegemony of Washington was built on an economic superiority that, as the 1950s aged, eroded and was sustained by the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which toppled, installed, and propped up leaders around the globe. The massive export of US capital, in conjunction with the establishment of the gold-backed US dollar as the world currency, gave a monetary expression to the relative decline of American capitalism in the early 1960s. Washington’s shrinking stake in the global economy could be assayed in gold at the rate of thirty-five dollars to the ounce and measured by its inability to pay. A crisis was in the offing, and the palace intrigues and little wars of US intelligence could no longer sustain its rule. The year 1965 was the tipping point. Economic dominance had eroded under US hegemony, and the entire edifice threatened to collapse. New forms of rule were required, a mass deployment of the military and a vast apparatus of social repression— war and dictatorship, Vietnam and Indonesia.

At stake in this violent rebalancing were not simply US interests. Capitalism around the globe, from the financial speculations in London to the sugar plantations on Negros, had been rebuilt out of the ashes of the war on the scaffolding of Bretton Woods. The sharp balance of payments crisis in Washington expressed the rot pervading the entire structure; the scaffolding groaned ominously. The British pound sterling was devalued in 1967, and in March of the next year, banks closed in the face of the gold crisis. A two-tier fiction was established by an emergency summit of world banks on 17 March: central banks would honor the thirty-five dollar convertibility; all other dealings would follow the free market price of gold. The transoms and braces had been removed. Massive inflation and a mad scramble to secure profits followed; the living standards of the working class around the globe were slashed to the bone. In August 1971, US president Richard Nixon ended dollar convertibility, and the framework of the postwar order collapsed.3

A component of the postwar hegemony of Washington was the entirely subservient and dependent economy that it chartered of its former colony, the Philippines. Under the ter ms established in par ticular by the Bell Trade Act (1946) and the Laurel-Langley Agreement (1955), the Philippine economy was tied to the United States as a source of cheap raw materials and a market for finished goods. As the undisputed dominance of the US dollar declined and then spiraled into crisis, Filipino capitalists scr ambled to secure their interests, seeking new markets and the renegotiation of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.

Crisis entailed unrest. Profits were imperiled and needed to be secured through the increased exploitation of workers. The ghetto uprisings in the United States of 1964–65, brutally suppressed, presaged a threatening f uture for world capitalism. Antiwar demonstrations followed. By 1968, the French working class had shut down the country in the largest general strike in history. As the new decade opened, these tensions compounded as the cost of basic necessaries soared; the price of rent and food expanded beyond the reach of an average worker’s pay.4 Immense social strug gles returned to the fore, and the question of revolution was in the air. This was sharply expressed in the Philippines. Mass anger at the brutality of the US war in Vietnam combined with rapidly worsening living conditions to produce a palpable sense that an explosion was imminent.5 In August 1967, Marshall Wright of the National Security Council wrote to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, “It would be nearly impossible to overestimate the gravity of the problems with which our next ambassador to Manila must deal. It has become common-place for people knowledgeable on the Philippines to predict a vast social upheaval in the near f uture. There is widespread talk that the current president will be the last popularly elected Philippine chief executive. Many high-level American officials consider the Philippines to be the most serious and the most bleak threat that we face in Asia.”6

The rival sections of the ruling class, and their leading political representatives, agreed on the need for authoritarian rule, but they could not peaceably select the permanent occupant of the presidential palace of Malacañang. As Marcos took office as president in 1966, the quiet measured steps toward dictatorship commenced. The more astute observers, particularly the young opposition senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, noted this and began preparations of their own. By 1967, the imminent end of popular elections was “widespread talk” among the bourgeoisie. In August 1969, the economic crisis broke: an irremediable balance of payments deficit, massive inflation, and a devastating rice shortage. Months later, Marcos secured reelection, trouncing his opponent and becoming the first incumbent president to retain office in the postcolonial period. With their profits and political offices at stake, the opposition tur ned murderous. Social crisis and political crisis aligned; the cur tain lifted on the drama of dictatorship.

Nixon took office deeply concerned that the United States had overextended itself in Vietnam; neither the bud get nor public opinion would sustain the United States’ current presence in Asia. The Nixon Doctrine, announced in

July 1969, sought to uphold Washington’s interests in the region while reducing its overhead by using targeted aid that “deliberately facilitated the construction and consolidation of repressive, exclusionary regimes in Southeast Asia.”7 Thus, when Marcos imposed martial law, the United States tripled its military aid to the Philippines.8 The mantr a of modernization theory that economic development is the foundation of political stability, Camelot’s vision for the Third World, was upended. Political stability—authoritarian r ule—was the bedrock to which existing economic interests would anchor. The United States boarded up the showcase of democracy in Asia.

Here the tale twists. The Soviet Union and China, in open conflict with each other, shifted policy in the same period in a manner akin to Nixon. Moscow began to promote the Non-Capitalist Path of Development, and Beijing the Three Worlds Theory. These were marketing pitches, theory as ad copy. They touted the geopolitical reorientations of the national bureaucracies in their pursuit of friendly relations with autocrats. The incentives they offered were extended through rival national Communist parties—in the Philippines, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). These parties proved instrumental in the imposition of dictatorship.

It was a profoundly contradictory affair, bitterly ironic in its development and tragic in its denouement. Communist Party leaders and anti-Communist politicos allied; US imperialism and the Soviet bloc aligned, hostile forces drawn together in plots against democracy. The Moscow-oriented PKP terrorized Manila with bombings, secretly coordinated with Marcos’s military, to justify the imposition of dictatorship. The Beijing-aligned CPP worked with forces tied to the CIA in an attempt to install a rival faction of the capitalist class—similarly bent on dictatorship—by coup d’état. The central pretext for martial law, cited by both Washington and Marcos, was the danger of Communism, and yet martial law was imposed with the support of a Communist party and with the backing of the Soviet Union. How does one untangle this snarl of contradictions?

The opportunism and duplicity of individual leaders doubtless played a role, but it possessed an accidental character, flotsam on the deeper currents of history. A satisfying explanation must account for why there were two Communist parties and not one. It must be rooted in concrete social developments in the Philippines and yet establish why diverging political tendencies in the country found their interests aligned with the positions articulated in the geopolitical rivalry of Moscow and Beijing. Finally, the explanation must, in a logical, causal fashion, demonstrate why these supposedly Marxist tendencies, when refracted through the prism of social upheaval and dictatorship, illuminated the interests of rival factions of the ruling elite. The answer lies in the program of Stalinism. A historical explanation is necessary.

Stalinism

The 1917 October revolution created the world’s first workers state—a transitional form, no longer capitalist but not yet socialist. The questions posed and ideas raised by this revolution gripped the political imag ination of the twentieth century. Russian Social Democracy—both its Menshevik and Bolshevik wings— g rappled with the relationship between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions.9 Georgii Plekhanov, head of the Mensheviks, argued as far back as the 1880s that Russian capitalism’s belated development would necessarily limit a revolution to measures deemed bourgeois and democratic in character, including the overthrow of the czar, the creation of the institutions of democracy, and the ending of feudal relations in agriculture. The objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution did not yet exist in Russia. Only when capitalism had adequately advanced could this second stage of revolution begin. The historically circumscribed character of the first stage assigned a progressive role to a section of the capitalist class; this was, after all, their revolution. The task of the working class in this first stage was to give critical support to the capitalists in their progressive strug gles.10

Plekhanov’s formulas, for all their clarity of thought, remained of an abstract and schematic character. The defeated revolution of 1905 tested his conceptions and showed them wanting. Confronted by a militant general strike of the working class and the formation of soviets, the bourgeoisie retreated; its right wing (the Oktobrists) supported the government crackdown, and its left wing (the Cadets) abandoned the call for a constituent assembly.11 That year, in the thick of developments, Vladimir Lenin elaborated what became the guiding principle of the Bolsheviks until April 1917. The agrarian question, to be resolved through the seizure and nationalization of the estates, was the central problem of the democr atic revolution. These were bourgeois and not socialist measures, Lenin insisted, and yet the capitalist class, tied to landed property and threatened by the growing force of the working class, would oppose all measures of expropriation. History had moved on; the bourgeoisie would no longer play any progressive role. What was needed was the “democr atic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”12 Lenin’s phrase possessed a certain ambivalence, a half step between worlds. The bourgeoisie were excluded, but their separate stage remained.

Leon Trotsky, head of the Petersburg Soviet in 1905, imprisoned in 1906, brought the question to its logical conclusion in his article “The Results of the Revolution and Its Prospects.”13 The insistence on the exclusively democr atic character of the revolution artificially constrained the organically developing strug g les of the working class within the limits of a historically