The following is an interview with me conducted by Karlo Mongaya and Jervy Briones and published in UP Los Baños Journal, 22 no. 2.
- You discussed Trotskyism at length in the introduction of “The Drama of Dictatorship.” What is the essence of Trotskyism in contrast to other Marxist political currents? What do you think makes Trotskyism superior to other historical frameworks?
Trotskyism derives its name from Leon Trotsky, the Marxist revolutionary who along with Vladimir Lenin led the October revolution of 1917, and who organized the Left Opposition and the Fourth International to fight against the betrayals of that revolution by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy after Lenin’s death.
The political perspective of Trotskyism is based upon the theory of Permanent Revolution, which Trotsky first elaborated out of the experiences of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Lenin took up this perspective in his April Theses in 1917, directing the Bolshevik party toward the seizure of power, and it thus served as the guiding framework of the October revolution.
Permanent Revolution argued that global capitalism determined the shape of political tasks in all countries, regardless of how belated their particular economic development. The urgent national and democratic tasks, above all a solution to the agrarian problem, could no longer be solved by any national capitalist class, their interests in the final analysis tied to international finance capital and to vast landed estates. The leadership of this national democratic revolution fell to the working class. The seizure and retention of power by the working class in this revolution would require transgressing the boundaries of capitalist property relations. The contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class is decisive under capitalism. A joint government of capitalists and workers for mutual benefit is impossible, and a government of the working class cannot preside over capitalist property relations. The completion of the national and democratic revolution requires the implementation of socialist measures. Socialism, however, cannot be built in any single country. Socialism must build upon and transcend the great gains of capitalism, and paramount among these is the single integrated system of global production and distribution. This holds true of a revolution in the most advanced or the most belated economy in the world. A socialist revolution in any country is a fundamental rupture in global capitalist relations and a clarion call to the international working class. Such a revolution will only succeed if it encroaches on capitalist property relations and expands beyond its national boundaries, growing into world socialist revolution. The fate of revolution in any country rests with the international working class. Trotsky summarized this perspective, “the socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena.”
Socialist internationalism is thus the essence of Trotskyism. Any political current claiming to be Marxist opposed to this perspective is in one form or another engaged in nationalist politics, and – as a direct outgrowth of this – class collaboration. The stagist conception of the Mensheviks, taken up and given poisonous shape by Stalinism, argued that national and democratic tasks constituted a separate revolutionary stage from socialism and had to be completed first. This perspective in practice imposes an artificial limitation on the political struggles of the working class, telling workers “thus far and no farther.” Its effect is to truncate revolutionary struggles and to leave power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Often – and the history of the CPP is replete with examples, including support for Duterte – this class collaboration took the form of open alliances with capitalist parties and politicians.
The Trotskyist insistence that Marxist political strategy and tactics must be based on the program of Permanent Revolution is not doctrinaire. Certainly political tactics must be flexible and adapt to national particularities and conjunctural developments, but tactical flexibility can remain principled only if it is ultimately determined by programmatic ends. Tactics are formulated on the basis of strategy, and strategy is derived from program. Anything else results in pragmatism and opportunism. National particularities and specificities are not irrelevant, but they are subordinate to the determining dynamic of global capitalism. One will not find a country on the planet where the program of Permanent Revolution does not hold, anymore than one will discover a new species of animal or plant whose development was not determined by Natural Selection. Scientific understanding and revolutionary program proceed from totality to particularity, from the global to the national, and not the other way round.
- Why has the label “Trotskyism” become a form of pejorative in certain “leftwing” circles, particularly among the national democrats in the Philippines? Can you explain to us why no Trotskyist calls themselves “Trotskyite?”
No member of the Fourth International has ever used the term “Trotskyite” to describe themselves. I am a Trotskyist, not a Trotskyite. The difference may seem slight but a river of blood century-long flows between those two words.
The Drama of Dictatorship: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines (Cornell, 2023), 248-9. I document in my book, The Drama of Dictatorship, that the use of the term “Trotskyite” as a political slur has a long history in the Philippines. The PKP denounced Francisco Nemenzo for being “a Trotskyite” repeatedly when they tried to kill him and the Marxist-Leninist Group (MLG) he led in 1972. I wrote, “Nemenzo had nothing to do with Trotskyism. He himself had denounced [Jose Ma] Sison as a Trotskyite on numerous occasions, and Sison had used the same label against Nemenzo. ‘Trotskyite’ is the name that Stalinists use against an opponent they intend to murder.”
This is not hyperbole. Leon Trotsky was the central figure of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands, members of the Left Opposition and old Bolsheviks, were summarily executed in trials whose central fixation was support for Trotsky. Trotsky and the Fourth International were slandered with lies of breathtaking enormity including support for the Nazis and being in the employ of US imperialism. Similar murderous purges were conducted in China in the late 1930s by Wang Ming, who accused the ‘Trotskyites’ of being Japanese agents. There is some evidence, as yet limited, that the PKP conducted a purge of ‘Trotskyites’ in preparation for the PKP-SPP merger. James Allen, a leading member of the CPUSA, repeatedly noted in his letters of his inquiries in 1937 if this or that PKP member was “with Trotsky.” The culmination of this bloodshed and slander was the assassination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent with an icepick in 1940.
It is this grotesque history that lies behind the CPP’s attacks on me as a ‘Trotskyite.’ Sison commissioned artwork depicting Trotsky and me as rats being killed by an angry peasant. Such depiction of Trotsky as vermin has a long history, rooted in Stalin’s use of antisemitism to attack Leon Trotsky, a Jew. Sison charged me with being a ‘Trotskyite’ and – without a shred of evidence – a CIA agent. The CPP’s support for Rodrigo Duterte infected its online supporters with the vulgar, fascistic methods of the Diehard Duterte Supporters (DDS), and natdem trolls spewed a sewer of slander and murder at me. I received more death threats than I could count. The icepick became a widely circulated meme among CPP-supporting youth online. At the center of this shitstorm – there seems no other term – was that one historical slur, ‘Trotskyite.’
Bred of this Stalinist history, ‘Trotskyite’ clouds political discourse in the Philippines, a knee-jerk label which for most people lacks any concrete content. The emergence of a genuine political discussion on the left in the Philippines can start here: the term ‘Trotskyite’ should be driven from speech and anyone who uses it should be called out for the repetition of a bloody political slur.
- We know this is speculative but how might a Trotskyist party have conducted itself to prepare for Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law fight the dictatorship? Have there been efforts by Trotskyists to organize in the Philippines?
Such a counterfactual question is valuable but can only be answered with a certain degree of abstraction, as any alteration of history would have occasioned a somewhat modified outcome and thus event would no longer follow event as we know them. The question is not, however, purely speculative. The program of Trotskyism stood in diametric opposition to that of Stalinism and we can formulate with considerable precision the programmatic and strategic, if not specific tactical, perspectives it would have presented.
The absence of Trotskyism from the Philippine political landscape is a complex historical question that has not yet been answered by adequate scholarship. There are traces of it dating back to the late 1920s. There is international correspondence with the Fourth International by Filipino dockworkers in the 1930s and 40s, for example, in the archives at Hoover Institute. The question is further complicated by the abandonment of program of Permanent Revolution in the 1950s and 60s by a breakaway section of the Fourth International led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel that sought to liquidate Trotskyist parties into existing Stalinist and nationalist parties. A grouping oriented to this tendency, seeking to support and pressure the Stalinist CPP, formed in the Philippines in the early 1970s but died soon after, its cadre disappearing into the CPP. Stalinism repeatedly suppressed and prevented the emergence of a Trotskyist movement in the past. The public vitriol directed at my scholarship is calculated to insure the continuity of this suppression. Whether or not it will succeed is a political question.
It is important in my answer to be clear from the outset: the period of 1969-1972, the years immediately before martial law, were marked by an increasingly revolutionary situation, not simply in the Philippines but globally. This is a key argument of my work. Martial law was not the sinister personal plot of Ferdinand Marcos to remain in power, it expressed shift in the entire ruling class away from the forms of democracy. The very imposition of dictatorship was an admission by the bourgeoisie that they were confronting a revolutionary situation that they could not suppress by constitutional means. Military dictatorship was imposed as a measure calculated to suppress this anticipated revolution.
How did the Stalinist parties, the PKP and the CPP, respond? This is the subject of my entire book. In esssence, they pursued rival nationalist tactics, each designed to secure an alliance with a section of the ruling class. The PKP concluded an alliance with Ferdinand Marcos and facilitated his impostition of martial law. The CPP backed Ninoy Aquino and his cronies who were plotting their own seizure of power and dictatorship. There was a mass movement at the time opposed to the threat of martial law, but the PKP allied sections of the movement to Marcos, and the CPP tied the remainder to the bourgeois opposition. These policies insured, programmatically and organizationally, that now independent mass movement of the working class emerged. When dictatorship was imposed, the PKP directed its cadre to support Marcos; the CPP, its working class organizations shattered, directed its remaining cadre to go to the countryside.
What would Trotskyism have done differently? Allow me to answer with two passages from The Drama of Dicatorship. To begin with and most fundamentally, a Trotskyist program would have meant a different training of cadre. I wrote in my book
The Drama of Dictatorship, 221-2 On this point hinges the entirety of the failure of the CPP: they had not educated the working class in its political tasks and as a result the social layers around the party did not know how to fight dictatorship. The political and theoretical education of the most advanced layers of the working class and youth must be the paramount concern of a revolutionary party when preparing for repression.
What education had the CPP provided to the rank-and-file members of its front organizations and its broader periphery? Martial law will hasten revolution; a section of the bourgeoisie is our ally; it is not yet time for socialism, we must limit ourselves to national and democratic ends. It is impossible to educate a politically independent cadre on this basis. The program of Stalinism requires that the membership and periphery be dependent upon the leadership of the party, for at its core is an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie and how could anyone independently anticipate the vicissitudes of the party’s alliances? The political imperative, as Sison had repeatedly stressed, was to be prepared to zig and zag as ties with different sections of the bourgeoisie ebbed and flowed.
Accepting these alternating alliances required cultivating amnesia within the cadre, who received a systematic political miseducation which justified every abrupt turn in occluded and dishonest language. Training in the history and program of the revolutionary movement is the strongest preparation of the cadre for conditions of repression, because it allows each of them to act as a disciplined leader of political struggle. The shifting alliances of the party, however, were not the product of principles, but of haggling opportunism, serving interests alien to the revolutionary struggle against dictatorship. Macapagal is progressive, they cried; no, wait, he’s reactionary. Marcos is progressive, they declared; no, wait, he’s reactionary as well. Aquino is progressive, they claimed… No political education could prepare the cadre to adjudicate the progressive or reactionary character of sections of the bourgeoisie on their own, for this was assessed not on the basis of program, but on the pragmatic conjunctural ends mutually agreed upon by the leadership of the party and the bourgeoisie. The political education of the cadre was thus not to judge for themselves, but to accept thoughtlessly, to swallow whatever new alliance had been formed.
The CPP’s lack of preparation for martial law, so fundamental to Marcos’ successful imposition of dictatorship, was thus intrinsic to the program of Stalinism. e working class in its political tasks and as a result the social layers around the party did not know how to fight dictatorship. The political and theoretical education of the most advanced layers of the working class and youth must be the paramount concern of a revolutionary party when preparing for repression.
What education had the CPP provided to the rank-and-file members of its front organizations and its broader periphery? Martial law will hasten revolution; a section of the bourgeoisie is our ally; it is not yet time for socialism, we must limit ourselves to national and democratic ends. It is impossible to educate a politically independent cadre on this basis. The program of Stalinism requires that the membership and periphery be dependent upon the leadership of the party, for at its core is an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie and how could anyone independently anticipate the vicissitudes of the party’s alliances? The political imperative, as Sison had repeatedly stressed, was to be prepared to zig and zag as ties with different sections of the bourgeoisie ebbed and flowed.
Accepting these alternating alliances required cultivating amnesia within the cadre, who received a systematic political miseducation which justified every abrupt turn in occluded and dishonest language. Training in the history and program of the revolutionary movement is the strongest preparation of the cadre for conditions of repression, because it allows each of them to act as a disciplined leader of political struggle. The shifting alliances of the party, however, were not the product of principles, but of haggling opportunism, serving interests alien to the revolutionary struggle against dictatorship. Macapagal is progressive, they cried; no, wait, he’s reactionary. Marcos is progressive, they declared; no, wait, he’s reactionary as well. Aquino is progressive, they claimed… No political education could prepare the cadre to adjudicate the progressive or reactionary character of sections of the bourgeoisie on their own, for this was assessed not on the basis of program, but on the pragmatic conjunctural ends mutually agreed upon by the leadership of the party and the bourgeoisie. The political education of the cadre was thus not to judge for themselves, but to accept thoughtlessly, to swallow whatever new alliance had been formed.
The CPP’s lack of preparation for martial law, so fundamental to Marcos’ successful imposition of dictatorship, was thus intrinsic to the program of Stalinism.
Trotskyism would have oriented the training of a independently capable cadre – so markedly absent from Stalinism – to developing a mass movement in the working class, not to ties with a section of the bourgeoisie and the building of an armed struggle in the remotest reaches of the countryside. To give a sense of this, here is what I wrote regarding the First Quarter Storm:
The Drama of Dictatorship, 85-6 For an eruption of protests to survive and grow, it needs to become a political movement. This requires strategic conception and programmatic orientation. The movement must develop in a way that both keeps pace with and gives shape to the rapid development of mass consciousness. Repetition of practice is deadly as it quickly imparts a sense of stagnation and impotence. The initial stages of the FQS were a spontaneous explosion of social anger. The intervention of the CPP on 12 February allowed the mass movement to continue to grow. The leadership of the CPP, however, gave the subsequent development of protests the political shape of nationalism coupled with a strategic orientation to physical confrontations with the state as a means of provoking repression that would, they claimed, heighten resistance. The protest movement took fugal form, never growing beyond its initial theme of repression and resistance. Late February marked the height of its polyphony, but all of the various voices—MDP, KM, SDK—were counterpoint repetitions of the same notes.
This was by no means inevitable. Unresolved labor struggles simmered throughout the FQS. Workers at Northern Motors, the largest General Motors plant outside the United States, had been on strike since October 1969 and remained on strike until the middle of March. Workers at US Tobacco walked off the job in early 1970 and were on strike for the duration of the storm. The strop drawn taut between skyrocketing prices and stagnant wages honed class tensions to a razor edge. One would not know it from the literature of the student demonstrations, which were entirely silent on the matter, but the FQS was marked by a series of sharp but confused class explosions. On 3 March, as students marched to Plaza Lawton, over five thousand jeepney drivers throughout Manila went on strike, shutting down most public transit throughout the city. They blocked major intersections, overturned scab jeepneys, and set several taxis on fire. On 19 March, two days after the People’s Court in Moriones Plaza, over three thousand taxicab drivers went on strike. They waged fierce battles against both the police and other forms of public transit, which they saw as strikebreakers. “Two buses were torn to pieces and three jeepneys were set to the torch.” Rising oil prices fueled the drivers’ strikes, and the government responded by authorizing increases in bus, jeepney, and taxi fares. The unrest only heightened. Commuters took to the streets, hurling stones at taxis and buses when the fare hikes were announced. “The government itself had to dispatch troops to guard oil depots after receiving reports that an enraged public might blow them up.”
The class struggle strained forward, submerged and only partially conscious, its vast collective outrage diffused in squabbling over scraps. The ferocity of these pitched battles expressed the desperation of the working population, but their intensity contained as well an attempt to articulate a political vision that was larger and far grander than the meager ends to which they were constrained. A cabdriver’s hand-drawn placard, a minor detail in a photograph in Graphic Weekly, gives a sense of these subterranean aspirations: “Tsuper na nagugutom sa rebolusyon. Hindi uurong.” (A driver hungry for revolution. I will not move.)
The FQS was a rare political opportunity—a mass radicalization of youth, under the ideological leadership of a Communist party, aligned with a tremendous upsurge of working-class struggle. The paramount task was to give the emerging movement a strategic orientation to the social force capable of sustaining a fight against dictatorship, the working class. Here the difference between the national democratic and the socialist programs was sharpest. The orientation of national democracy—of Stalinism—was ultimately to securing an alliance with a section of the capitalist class. A turn to the working class amounted to a limited, tactical maneuver to bring greater mass weight behind this alliance. A socialist perspective, in contrast, orients itself to the working class, to developing its unity and independence as the revolutionary force capable of overthrowing capitalism. The CPP made no effort to unite the storm of the student protests with the growth of the class struggle. The party’s Stalinist program diffused the storm. The chanted slogans and newsprint manifestos of the FQS all directed the students to nothing but the escalation of their denunciations of Marcos and fascism, and ultimately appealed to them to join the armed struggle in the countryside. For all its fiery rhetoric and pitched battles in the street—and no matter how truly courageous and self-sacrificing many of the young people were who joined its ranks—the FQS was, in the end, merely a violent venting of steam. The political turbines through which this steam coursed were those of Lopez and Osmeña, with their scheming plots, and Marcos, who steadily readied the architecture of martial law.
My answer is constrained by the limitations of space, but these two passages highlight what I regard as the fundamental differences in a Trotskyist approach to the crisis of capitalist rule that culminated in martial law: the political education of the cadre on the basis of an internationalist, socialist program, and an orientation to the working class as the revolutionary force capable of preventing dictatorship and overthrowing capitalism.
Could such fundamental programmatic differences have prevented the imposition of dictatorship in 1972? We cannot know. My argument is this: the roots of the Marcos dictatorship rested in the crisis of global capitalism. It is impossible to resolve this crisis on the basis of the stagist, national democratic program of Stalinism. Stalinism proved a dead end. Trotskyism, the perspective of revolutionary international socialism, presented a way forward, and still does.