A response to Sison

An email from Joma Sison, in response to my Jacobin article, Rodrigo Duterte’s One Man Revolution, according to J.V. Ayson:

« The article of CJ Chanco is a verbose piece of rubbish. It uses the stale Trotskyite tactics of making false claims against the CPP (like reducing it to being a mere tool and fool of Duterte and the Right) in order to make the false conclusion that the CPP is anti-Left. What Chanco considers as true Left, socialist and democratic is the Akbayan (a mix of crypto-Troskyites and liberal racketeers) who have acted as servants of the US-Aquino regime and are now mostly in the service of the Mar Roxas campaign machinery. Chanco is averse to the people’s democratic revolution through the people’s war and dismisses it as the object of his umay. Laging masarap sa kanya ang ibat ibang putahe ng pagsasamantala at pang-aapi ng imperyalismo, pyudalismo at burukrata kapitalismo. »

I confess I had some hopes for a mature response. A debate, not a character assassination. I honestly hope, for Joma Sison’s sake, that this email isn’t real, and that the chairman of the one, true and only representative of progressive/left politics in the Philippines has more things to say than what’s been said over and over for the past half century. And that he actually understood the article.

Because this only confirms my main point: that given the lack of a real, inspiring, and engaging, political movement, the most well-meaning of people succumb to the echo chambers of their own propaganda.

It’s worth breaking that bubble time and again to see just how far down the rabbit hole goes. Or to discover that the hole isn’t as deep or hopeless as it seems to be.

For my part, I refuse to see things so black and white. I support their campaigns. I support their calls for social justice. Even their candidates. I do not support their leadership, their political narratives, or their strategy, including a people’s war that seems to pit them against everybody but themselves. And trap people in between.

If this makes me a « Trotskyist Imperialist Petty-Bourgeois Reformist Dogmatist », then so be it. I would add « CIA-Mossad-Iran-China triple agent ».

I wrote that Jacobin article in December, after three years (barely enough time it seems) of study and immersion.

Having seen various versions, strands, and factions of what calls itself the « Left » in this country, I understand now precisely why people see the left as irrelevant, and precisely why people turn to figures like Duterte (or Binay or Roxas) given the sheer lack of sane alternatives. I saw division not solidarity. Manipulation not empowerment. Competition not cooperation. Personal intrigue, even NGO-style labour exploitation, not freedom. Dogmatism not democracy. Co-optation not principle.

I understand how this nation’s most fertile minds in progressive politics have been sucked into the dry spell of Mao’s Little Red Book.

In contrast to this, give me an honest, authentic liberal any day.