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Reading this collection of essays underlined what a rare species was the man who permanently left our earthly company a few weeks ago.
Written at various points in his lifelong engagement with politics as a man of the Left, Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo made sure to bring them together in one volume before he passed on, doing one last favor for activists who derived inspiration from him and biographers and historians seeking to piece together his life story. (Editor’s note: The book will be launched on Saturday, February 8, at 2 pm at the UP Vargas Museum, Diliman, Quezon City.)
Most of the pieces were written in between the political and academic engagements of a very busy individual, but they go beyond the descriptive narratives or undigested diary entries usually associated with people on the move. They are gems that display two of Dodong’s gifts: a formidable capacity for analysis and lucid writing punctuated with droll humor.
The result is an absorbing account of more than nearly three quarters of a century of intimate engagement with the Philippine Left, from the prolonged death rattle of the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in the mid-1950s and early 1960’s to the deepening crisis of its successor, the Communist Party of the Philippines from the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s. This was a turbulent period marked by the rise and down spin of the reign of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the EDSA uprising that ousted Marcos, and the return of elite democracy under Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos. But this is more than a narrative. It comes across as an effort to draw up a rough balance sheet of the left’s engagement with Philippine society by one who played a central role in that process.
University days
If you were a natural born rebel hungry for change arriving in Manila from the provinces to attend the University of the Philippines in the mid-1950s, you could not help but be curious about why the government was so intent in purifying the student body of any influence of the PKP, which had wagered its fortunes on a military offensive against the state in the early 1950’s and lost. This curiosity, supplemented by independent reading, put the young Dodong’s mind on the track to Marxism and socialism, even as his heart was on a parallel track with his successful courtship of Ana Maria (“Princess”) Ronquillo whom he pirated from the UP Student Catholic Action to become his one and only partner, best friend, and closest political ally.
In Engels’ city
Had the US Embassy not banned him from doing graduate work at Columbia University, that bastion of American academic liberalism, Dodong might have been lost to the Left. His choice of an alternative, the University of Manchester in England, was partly inspired by the fact that it was located in the city that served as the laboratory of industrial capitalism that Friedrich Engels described in his classic Condition of the Working Class in England.
His stint at Manchester not only produced a doctoral degree but a deep grasp of Marxist theory and provided exposure to the clashing currents on the international left. Critically minded as always, he came to the conclusion that despite its distortions by the legacy of Stalinism, the Soviet Union represented the best check on aggressive US imperialism. Thus upon his return to Manila and UP in the mid-sixties, he was primed to accept the invitation of his friend Jose Maria Sison, a faculty colleague and member of the Central Committee of the PKP, to join the party.
Dodong rose quickly in the hierarchy of the party, but he became increasingly disenchanted with a leadership that appeared to be paralyzed by its defeat in the 1950’s. He became a close friend of “Joe,” his nickname for Sison, but did not join the latter when he broke with the PKP and founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in the late sixties, preferring to continue to work to change the PKP from the inside.
With the declaration of Martial Law in 1972, as a member of the Politburo, he enjoined the party to adopt a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare, but he was caught before his plans could be put into effect and spent the next two years in detention. While Sison’s CPP went from strength to strength as the only effective opposition to Marcos, Dodong’s time in jail, which included three months in solitary confinement, was the road to Damascus that revealed to him his real vocation: “Had the Marxist-Leninist Group carried out its plans, I reckoned, we would have committed suicide. The military was not as incompetent as we thought. I had to admit to myself that I was not cut out to be a professional revolutionary; I was ineffective as an organizer and a failure as a military tactician. I, therefore, decided that if I ever get out, I would do only what I was good at: academic work. UP is where I truly belong.”
Rejoining UP
Released around 1974, he maintained his distance from Marcos who was on the hunt for intellectuals to give him legitimacy, from the the PKP that had surrendered to Marcos, and from the CPP that had supplanted the PKP as the revolutionary vanguard, while building a enormously successful career within UP despite his well-known radical views. Dodong was exceptional in that he was able to “reconcile the seemngly irreconcilable,” as Randy David puts it in his preface to the book:
How could a man so fiercely critical of authority serve as an administrator within an institution steeped in hierarchy? And yet he did, with characteristic brilliance. As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences during the martial law years, Dodong transformed the college into a crucible of progressive thought and action. His leadership was grounded in principles of academic autonomy, collegiality, and participatory democracy—principles that were not just slogans but practices he actively fostered. Indeed, he sought to institutionalize these practices in a new university code.
Serving as an administrator did not prevent Dodong from exercising his analytical prowess on critical issues. A major preoccupation was the question of why the PKP degenerated from being a powerful actor after the Second World War to a fossil of its former self in the early seventies. The problem, he asserted, lay in the complex relationship between its peasant base in Central Luzon and the intellectuals that led it from Manila, the most prominent of whom were the Lava brothers.
Drawing on the burgeoning literature on peasant movements and the “weapons of the weak” pioneered by James C. Scott, Dodong asserted that millennarianism, or an outlook that salvation would come with an apocalyptic event, was a notable feature of the PKP’s mass base. However, he disputed the prominent scholar Ben Kerkvliet’s contention in his book The Huk Rebellion that the aspirations of the PKP’s peasant guerrillas did not go beyond millennarian hopes and that the PKP could not really be considered as “leading” them. The HMB (People’s Army), Nemenzo argued, had some rudimentary familiarity with Marxism and its leaders down to the village level were, in fact, members of the party. The problem was that they were not systematically socialized into Marxism.
The PKP intellectuals released highly theoretical declarations on the national and international situations but were very untheoretical in their relationship to their peasant comrades, employing the latter mainly to gain advantage in internecine leadership disputes. True, there were anti-intellectual tendencies among some, but for the most part, the party’s peasant cadres were open to theoretical learning. The neglect of theoretical work by the Manila-based intellectuals ultimately led to the peasant base’s becoming vulnerable to being hijacked by corrupt cadres within their ranks that turned their factions into criminal syndicates, like the infamous Kumander Sumulong. Not suprisingly, those who retained their radical edge, like the legendary Kumander Dante, joined Sison’s New People’s Army, where “book knowledge” was not dismissed but prized.
To the barricades
As the Marcos regime lurched into irrevesible crisis following the Aquino assassination in 1983, Nemenzo once again became active beyond the confines of UP. For the newly politicized middle class that joined street mobilizations in large numbers, he became a figure much sought after for political guidance as a respected academic, veteran of the left, and independent thinker.
Among those of the younger generation that sought his assistance to maneuver in an increasingly fluid situation were students from the University of Santo Tomas, which he had formerly excoriated as “the relic of medieval education and ancient bulwark of Dominican bigotry.” This unlikely ideological association gave birth to the pro-socialist organization BISIG (acronym for the unspeakably unpronounceable Bukluran sa Ikauunlad ng Sosyalistang Isip at Gawa) of which he became the national chairman.
BISIG was one of the forces jostling for position during the fluid “war of a maneuver” from the Aquino Assasination to the post-EDSA power struggles — the others being the elite or liberal democrats, military rebels, national democrats, social democrats, Church hierarchs, and the Makati Business Club. In this situation, Dodong’s familiarity with Lenin’s practice of the united front during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came in handy. Dodong became a vocal critic of left-wing sectarianism, a charge mainly directed at the forces of the CPP and NDF, which, smarting from their self-marginalization during the EDSA Uprising, spurned efforts to bring them to work in concert with other sectors of the left owing to their view that by the royal right of their two-decade-long struggle against Marcos, they owned the parliament of the streets.
He also became an advocate of the view of constructing the broadest united front possible to include all forces struggling to protect and expand democratic space from reactionary efforts to overturn the gains of EDSA. He became a widely recognized exponent of the strategy of seeking common ground among political actors who might have strategic differences but a short-term common interest.
In a fluid situation, even the military, without doubt a repressive agency of the bourgeois state, could split, and sections of it could be won over to a progressive coalition. \If his work with activists from the benighted font of religious reaction, UST, could produce BISIG, Dodong must have reasoned, surely he could find some common ground with military rebels like the naval officer Antonio Trillanes. He wrote:
Serious efforts should be directed at propagating the democratic movement inside the AFP. At no time in the past was this possible, but my social studies on the politics of the military have led me to believe that a significant section of the armed forces is open to progressive ideas if explained to them in a language they understand. But indiscriminate attacks on the military organization, whether in the form of propaganda blows or in the form of real military blows — such attacks only consolidate their ranks and make even those who are democratically inclined less responsive to new ideas.
The possibility of winning over what he considered idealistic military elements led him to to espouse the concept of a “Transitional Revolutionary Government,” which would include patriotic sections of the military, in the context of a popular insurrection. This led to his support of the Oakwood Mutiny in 2003, for which he was jailed. He was later to admit that he may have been too sanguine in his belief about splitting the military during Oakwood, but this, too, was a mark of Dodong: the capacity to admit mistakes and be self critical.
After the fall of the wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 and the collapse of the socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that followed registered profoundly in the consciousness of one whose commitment to the international socialist movement was expressed in, among other things, his denouncing the US’s economic blockade of Cuba and his co-founding and serving as president of the Philippine-Cuba Cultural and Friendship Association. Dodong was critical of the deformities of Soviet society brought about by the dual legacy of Stalinism and dogmatically implemented central planning, writing that “One lesson we derive from the fate of the Soviet Union is that dictatorship is a shaky ground on which to build socialism. This self-professed vanguard cannot simply presume that the people will always be on its side. The people’s support has to be won and deserved.”
Against the reactionaries, liberals, and ex-Marxists (among whom were former close comrades) who crowed about the “demise” of Marxism, he held that “For as long as capitalism continues to devastate the lives of working people, Marxism will always be relevant as a method of analysis.” As for socialism, he had no doubt as to its remaining a goal worth striving for:
Common ownership is essential for the working people to overcome the alienation of labor and thereby recover the sense of community they had lost with the rise of capitalism and the spread of its highly individualistic ethos. It is not the objective of socialism to obliterate individual identity or subordinate the individual to the state. Socialism should properly be a libertarian system. But it conceives liberty not in the manner bourgeois liberal philosophy conceives it: as the imposition of social constraints upon egoistic individuals. Socialism seeks to transcend the contradiction between community and individual so that individuals may find fulfilment in the community and the community may progress through the free activity of its individual members. Insofar as the system of private property sets individuals against each other and fosters the acquisitive spirit, it lies at the root of the problem of alienation.
Dodong may have had inner doubts about Marxism and socialism, but his acceptance of their shortcomings and limitations coupled with his outward projection of confidence about their contininuing relevance during the era of neoliberal ascendancy was a source of strength for many of his comrades, including myself. And how right he was, that neoliberalism would end in crisis and socialism would again catch the imagination of people by the end of the second decade of the 21st century!
He remained an activist into his last years, helping found the coalition Laban ng Masa II in 2017. At the time of his passing, on December 19, 2024, he had achieved a status that many aspire to but few become: a national institution.
Postscript: Our Zhou En Lai
When I embarked on this book review, I had just finished a draft of an article on the 70th anniversary of the fabled Afro-Asian solidarity conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. There were several larger-than-life personalities at that meeting, among them, Sukarno of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. But the star of the conference, the one most responsible for its success, owing to his skillful diplomacy to prevent Cold War enmities from derailing its goal of affirming and celebrating the unity of the then Third World against colonialism, was Zhou En Lai. Even the anti-communist Carlos P. Romulo that the Americans ordered to attend the meeting to isolate the People’s Republic of China was won over by Zhou, describing the latter as “affable of manner, moderate of speech.”
As I wrote this review, I could not help but compare Dodong to Zhou. He was not a raving radical but “affable of manner” and “moderate of speech,” to use Romulo’s words. He did not present himself as a guru, leaving that accolade to Joma Sison just as Zhou left it to Mao. Like Zhou, he was always seeking common ground among diverse political forces.
And he had a Zhouian sense of humor.
There are many conflicting interpretations of what Zhou meant when, asked by Henry Kissinger about his view of the historical impact of the French Revolution, he answered, “It’s too early to tell.” My favored interpretation is that Zhou meant his response as a double entendre—a joke that was also a dig at western ethnocentrism.
Unlike Kissinger and many others, Dodong, had he been Zhou’s interlocutor instead of the US Secretary of State, would have gotten Zhou’s meaning right away. And I can see him laughing and telling Zhou, in his trademark heavily accented Visayan English, “That’s great Comrade Zhou…Now allow me to tell you one about our common friend, Chairman Mao….” – Rappler.com
Walden Bello was representative of Akbayan in the House of Representatives from 2009 to 2015 and national chairperson of Laban ng Masa II. His controversial memoirs Global Battlefields: My Close Encounter with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press, makes its debut in the US in February of this year and in the Philippines in March.
