SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Unlike communist parties elsewhere in Asia, the Partido Komunista sa Pilipinas (PKP) was constituted almost entirely by activists from the working class. Radical intellectuals, professionals and other middle class elements were conspicuously absent. More particularly, the PKP was rooted in the Manila labour movement and, to a lesser extent, in the peasant movement of Central Luzon. This study explores these origins and then examines the character, outlook and performance of the Party in the first three years of its existence (1930-33). Socialist ideas began to circulate during the early 1900s, but were not given durable organisational expression until 1922, when a Workers' Party was formed. Led by cadres from the country's principal labour federation, the Congreso Obrero, this party aligned its policies increasingly with those of the Comintern. The struggle for independence, it asserted, had been betrayed by the Filipino elite and should be spearheaded instead by the toiling masses. Between 1925 and 1928 the influence of the Workers' Party within the Congreso Obrero grew steadily, resulting most notably in the affiliation of the federation to a subsidiary of the Profintern. As the Workers' Party adopted the ultra-leftist and sectarian positions which characterised the Comintern's "third period", however, it attracted mounting hostility from moderate and conservative labourites, and in 1929 the Congreso Obrero split apart. The radical faction thereupon formed a "red" trade union centre which the following year was instrumental in establishing the PKP on the foundations the Workers' Party had laid. Highly belligerent in its stance, the PKP was quickly subjected to government persecution, and for this and other reasons was unable to make much headway during the depression years in either city or countryside.