THE DRAMA OF DICTATORSHIP: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines | By Joseph Scalice

Joseph Scalice’s boldly revisionist The Drama of Dictatorship is set amid the tumult leading from the fraudulent and violent 1969 elections, to the imposition of martial law and its immediate aftermath. The author is specifically concerned about the history of two communist parties and the alliances around them: the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas(PKP) and the emergent Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). He seeks to contextualize these parties’ actions in response to the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing, on the one hand, and between Stalinism and Trotskyism as competing ideological orientations, on the other hand.

The first chapter frames the author’s analysis, arguing that both the PKP and CPP leaders were Stalinist in orientation (regardless of their subjective view on their own ideological position). Moreover, Stalinism justified their alliances with elite factions: the CPP with the opposition Liberal Party and Senator Benigno Aquino, on one side, and—less robustly substantiated by Scalice—the PKP with President Ferdinand Marcos, on the other. Stalinism, moreover, explains the CPP tactic of provoking violent repression from the state, in the belief that repression would then spark revolutionary energies and radicalize moderate groups.

The second chapter focuses on growing student unrest. The third chapter is an account of the First Quarter Storm, a culmination of street protests and marches in the first three months of 1970. The fourth chapter, “Barricades,” expands on an understanding of the Diliman Commune as a broader and more coordinated phenomenon. These chapters contain the book’s most significant contribution to the scholarship: a richly detailed examination of the written record from the parties of their protests, positions, and other activities. Scalice introduces the main elite factions split between Marcos’s Nacionalista and Aquino’s Liberal Party, as well as the two communist parties and their followers, particularly among university students and labour groups. The book focuses on the movement’s leaders, to an extent that there is an inertness in his portrayal of their followers. The author’s analysis also suffers from a sort of counterfactual reasoning. For example, he reasons that the First Quarter Storm never moved beyond its social base in the student population: “(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” (86). He points out similar tendencies throughout the book, holding the communist parties up to a socialist ideal that they keep failing to meet. The author’s counterfactual reasoning does not sustain insights into the actions and motivations of the parties better than when he is arguing from actual evidence.

The narrative voice of the book is strong, however, and Scalice sustains a tension that peaks with chapter 5’s account of the Plaza Miranda bombing on August 21, 1971. While he does not seriously evaluate the evidence supporting the dominant view that Marcos instigated the attack on an opposition campaign rally, he assesses mainly secondary sources and some primary ones that support the rival contention that the CPP founder, Jose Maria Sison, ordered the bombing. The brief chapter reconstructs how the attack was plotted, identifies three men who lobbed grenades at the Liberal Party stage, and dwells on the fate of one of them, Danny Cordero, who was executed by a CPP military tribunal for claiming the party had been responsible for the bombing. Scalice offers no new evidence but puts forth a scholarly evaluation that it was plausible it was Sison and not Marcos who ordered the attack. Scalice shows a pattern in the CPP’s behaviour and in Sison’s reasoning that supplies a motive: violent repression mobilizes participation into the Communist movement and radicalizes moderates. However, this theory of the crime raises other unanswered questions: Why would the CPP attack the Liberal Party in so risky a manner as to kill off their elite allies? Why would Aquino be complicit or condone a lethal attack on his own party? The argued Stalinism of the CPP is not a sufficient explanation.

The final substantive part, the declaration of martial law covered in chapter 5, is written as the drama’s denouement. Marcos announced the imposition of martial law on September 23, 1972. The author portrays the CPP as disoriented, and their primary ally in the elite opposition, Aquino, as bewildered that neither the revolution from the Left nor a coup from the Right had come to pass. The resistance that had been building against the inexorable weight of one-man rule just crumbled. The chapter chronicles the purported collusion of the PKP with Marcos coming to its logical conclusion: final demobilization and avowed support for martial law, in 1974. China’s Premier Mao Zedong embraced Marcos diplomatically, leaving the CPP completely isolated, their youth wing channeled into the NPA, and their leaders arrested by 1977. Scalice concludes the book by arguing that the CPP had been unprepared for the inevitability of dictatorship, reasoning counterfactually that the absence of better preparation—say, to maintain their ability for publication and propaganda—demonstrates the Stalinist folly of their stratagems and overreliance on their bourgeois co-conspirators. In making his argument about the failings of the CPP and its allies, the author underestimates the force of violent state repression. Revolutions are historically rare and, as Theda Skocpol shows us, their success is contingent on state capacity, the nature of the crisis, and, under some conditions, mobilization of the peasantry by urban radicals. Scalice’s sometimes scathing account of the history of the communist parties during these dangerous times fails to recognize a power in the Philippine Left’s ability to exploit a fractured national elite and mobilize its support. This may explain the CPP’s survival as the dictatorship collapsed, in a region that otherwise saw the bloody annihilation of communist movements in Indonesia and Malaya during the Cold War.                               

Sol Iglesias

University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City