Philippine
Society &

The fourth edition preface frames PSR within a trilogy of CPP documents: alongside Specific Characteristics of Our People's War (1974) and Our Urgent Tasks (1976). Each text addressed a distinct phase of the revolutionary project PSR laid the historical and class-analytic foundation; Specific Characteristics theorized the strategy of protracted people's war in an archipelagic country; Our Urgent Tasks responded to the conditions imposed by Marcos's martial law.

The preface summarizes the seven imperatives identified in Our Urgent Tasks: directing struggle against the US-Marcos dictatorship as the primary counterrevolutionary force; strengthening the Party through rectification; building peasant-based revolutionary mass organizations in the countryside; advancing armed struggle as the primary form of resistance; building anti-fascist urban movements in solidarity with the rural struggle; consolidating a broad united front across workers, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie; and connecting the Philippine revolution to international revolutionary movements.

The preface emphasizes the Marxist-Leninist principle of concrete analysis of concrete conditions as the living core of the Party's survival and growth under repression, the methodological thread connecting all three documents.

Written by the International Association of Filipino Patriots for the third edition, this preface is itself a substantial intellectual history of the national democratic movement from the early 1960s through martial law. It situates PSR within a sequence of foundational CPP texts and traces the political and theoretical arc that produced them.

The preface identifies the recurring failure of Philippine mass uprisings, no matter how heroic, as rooted in the absence of revolutionary theory capable of guiding spontaneous militancy into strategic direction. The founding of the old PKP in 1930 represented a partial break, but the party's inability to correctly analyze the principal contradiction in Philippine society: between imperialism and feudalism on one side, and the Filipino people on the other, left the movement strategically disoriented for decades.

It chronicles the theoretical work of Jose Maria Sison from the founding of Kabataang Makabayan in 1964 through Struggle for National Democracy (1967), the rectification process and reestablishment of the CPP in December 1968, and the founding of the New People's Army in March 1969. It describes the mass radicalization of the First Quarter Storm of 1970, the context into which PSR appeared, and the movement's survival and adaptation under Marcos's martial law imposed in September 1972.

The preface also includes extended treatments of two companion texts: Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party, with its dialectical analysis of how empiricism and dogmatism function as two expressions of the same petty-bourgeois subjectivism; and Specific Characteristics of Our People's War, which showed how the archipelagic geography of the Philippines, often cited as an obstacle to protracted people's war, could in fact be turned into a strategic asset by dispersing guerrilla fronts across major islands and using mountainous terrain to anchor base areas.

Guerrero opens by situating PSR as a first systematic attempt to apply historical materialism to Philippine society, provisional rather than exhaustive. He frames the project as one of integrating Marxist-Leninist theory with the concrete particularities of Philippine history and class structure, rejecting both mechanical importation of foreign frameworks and the empiricism of purely fact-gathering nationalism.

He states the book's central purpose clearly: to provide a Marxist-Leninist analysis of Philippine society as the theoretical foundation for correct revolutionary practice, and to make that analysis accessible as a popular educational tool for the national democratic movement, not an academic exercise.

This is the longest and most sweeping chapter, a historical materialist survey of Philippine society from pre-colonial times through the Marcos period. Guerrero organizes the history as a sequence of contradictions: between the Filipino people and successive colonial powers, between the nascent national bourgeoisie and imperialist domination, between the peasantry and the landlord class.

He opens by describing the geography and people of the archipelago, then reconstructs pre-colonial Philippine society: its barangay structure, communal land relations, and the nascent class differentiation beginning to emerge before Spanish arrival, to establish that Philippine feudalism was primarily an imposition of colonial rule, not an internal development of Philippine social forces.

The chapter traces Spanish colonialism's transformation of land tenure, the reducción system, forced labor, the friar haciendas, and the way these institutions created the landlord-tenant structure that would persist into the twentieth century. The Revolution of 1896 is analyzed as a genuine bourgeois democratic revolution, cut short first by ilustrado vacillation and betrayal, then by U.S. military intervention. The Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 is characterized as an imperialist war of conquest, costing hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives, its atrocities largely suppressed in colonial historiography.

U.S. colonial rule is examined through its economic, political, and cultural mechanisms: the systematic restructuring of Philippine agriculture toward export crops serving American capital; the Americanization of education as ideological apparatus; the creation of a Filipino comprador class integrated into U.S. commercial networks; and the political institutions of "tutelage democracy" that served to legitimate U.S. control while foreclosing genuine self-determination.

The chapter then surveys each post-independence puppet regime, Roxas through Marcos, analyzing each in terms of its relationship to U.S. capital, its suppression of the peasant and labor movements, and its intensification of bureaucrat capitalism. The Huk Rebellion and its defeat, the counterinsurgency innovations of the Magsaysay period, and the accelerating social crisis under Marcos are all treated as expressions of the deepening structural contradictions of semicolonial, semifeudal society.

The chapter closes with the reestablishment of the CPP in December 1968 as the subjective expression of the objective conditions that had been accumulating through this entire history.

This is the structural-analytic core of PSR. Having established the historical record, Guerrero turns to a systematic class analysis of contemporary Philippine society, organized around three interlocking structures of domination: U.S. imperialism, domestic feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism.

Semicolonial and semifeudal society. Guerrero opens with the defining theoretical concept of the text. The Philippines is neither a full colony; it has nominal independence and formal sovereignty, nor a fully capitalist society. It is semicolonial: politically independent but economically and militarily subordinated to U.S. imperialism through unequal treaties, military bases, and monopoly control of key industries. It is semifeudal: the agrarian sector remains dominated by landlord-tenant relations and hacienda systems inherited from Spanish colonialism, not transformed by genuine capitalist development. These two structures reinforce each other and together constitute the material basis of Philippine underdevelopment.

U.S. imperialism. Guerrero provides a detailed account of the mechanisms of U.S. economic control: the Bell Trade Act, the Parity Amendment, the Military Bases Agreement, and the web of unequal treaties that locked the Philippines into a position of structural dependency. He traces U.S. monopoly penetration across banking, utilities, trade, and the export crop economy, by which mechanisms by which surplus is systematically extracted from the Philippine economy and repatriated to American capital. He also analyzes the ideological and political dimensions of U.S. control, including the cultivation of a comprador ruling class, the maintenance of a puppet state through aid conditionality and direct military support, and the systematic suppression of any movement that threatens U.S. strategic or economic interests.

Feudalism. The land question is analyzed in careful empirical and structural terms. Guerrero documents the hacienda system, the concentration of agricultural land in the hands of a small landlord class, the various forms of tenancy and share-cropping arrangements, the debt bondage that binds peasants across generations, and the failure of every post-independence land reform initiative to meaningfully alter these relations. The Magsaysay-era programs, resettlement schemes, and the rhetoric of land redistribution are each shown to have served to defuse peasant militancy without addressing the structural roots of feudal exploitation. The extent of landlessness and the severity of feudal extraction are documented with statistical detail.

Bureaucrat capitalism. The third structure of domination is the use of state power by the ruling comprador-landlord class to enrich itself through control of the bureaucratic apparatus, not through productive investment but through graft, contract manipulation, public resource extraction, and state-backed monopoly. Guerrero traces bureaucrat capitalism as the economic expression of the political alliance between the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlord class, mediated through the state. He also addresses fascism, analyzing the trend toward authoritarian rule not as a deviation from the system but as its logical response to deepening social contradictions, and critiques both reformism and modern revisionism as ideological obstacles to revolutionary clarity.

The third chapter moves from analysis to strategy, drawing out the political and military implications of the preceding historical and structural analysis. If Chapter I established what happened and Chapter II established why the current structures persist, Chapter III argues what must be done and by whom.

Basic character of the revolution. The Philippine revolution is characterized as a national democratic revolution of a new type. New in that, unlike the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of an earlier era, it is led by the working class and its party rather than by the national bourgeoisie. Its anti-imperialist and anti-feudal character distinguishes it from a socialist revolution, which belongs to a subsequent stage; its proletarian leadership distinguishes it from the aborted Revolution of 1896. The immediate program is the destruction of U.S. imperialist domination, the landlord class, and bureaucrat capitalism, not yet socialism, but the necessary precondition for it.

Class analysis. Guerrero conducts a detailed survey of all classes and strata in Philippine society, analyzing each in terms of its relationship to the means of production, its objective interests relative to the revolution, and its likely political stance. The landlord class and comprador big bourgeoisie are identified as the principal enemies. The middle bourgeoisie is a vacillating force that can be won over under correct united front policy. The petty bourgeoisie, including students, intellectuals, and small proprietors, is a key ally, prone to radicalism but susceptible to wavering. The peasantry is the main force of the revolution, the vast majority of the population, with the poor peasants and farm laborers constituting its most reliable and militant core. The proletariat, though a minority, is the leading class by virtue of its position in production, its collective discipline, and its historical role as the bearer of scientific socialism.

Strategy and tactics. The class analysis generates the strategic line: the worker-peasant alliance as the revolutionary foundation, the united front as the means of aggregating social forces across class lines, and armed struggle as the primary form of struggle. The CPP leads the united front and the armed struggle through the NPA. The basic strategy is protracted people's war: building rural base areas, encircling the cities from the countryside, advancing through strategic defensive and strategic stalemate toward strategic offensive as the balance of forces shifts.

Basic tasks. The chapter concludes with a programmatic statement across five fields: political (destruction of the puppet state and construction of people's democratic power), military (building and expanding the NPA and the revolutionary base areas), economic (agrarian revolution and the development of a self-reliant revolutionary economy), cultural (national, scientific, and mass culture against colonial and feudal ideology), and foreign relations (international solidarity against imperialism, support for other national liberation movements).

Perspective. Guerrero closes with a statement on the historical perspective of the Philippine revolution, its place within the world revolutionary process, its relationship to socialist construction after the completion of the national democratic stage, and the integrating conviction that Marxist-Leninist theory applied to Philippine conditions is both the foundation and the guarantee of eventual victory.