The World Socialist Web Site is publishing messages of support for Dr. Joseph Scalice from throughout the world. Dr. Scalice who has come under attack from the Philippine Stalinists for his powerful lecture, “First as Tragedy, Second as Farce: Marcos, Duterte and the Communist Parties of the Philippines,” which examined the support given by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the various organizations that follow its political line, to authoritarian Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.
Acutely sensitive to the criticism of the CPP, its founder Jose Maria Sison, without a shred of evidence, has denounced Dr. Scalice as a paid CIA agent and an informer for Duterte. Dr. Scalice, through the establishment of the historical record about the betrayals of the CPP, has done a service to the working class in the Philippines and internationally.
We urge our readers to come to the defence of Dr. Scalice, including by sending statements of support to the WSWS opposing the slanderous attack on him by the CPP and sharing his lecture widely.
Harry Antony, Australian postal worker
I write to add my support for Dr. Joseph Scalice against the slander from the founder and leader of the proudly Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison. Dr. Scalice has produced a body of work that will become the handbook of liberation for the Filipino working class and rural poor. It will serve as part of the theoretical arsenal for the oppressed in nations of belated capitalist development basing their struggle on Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.
Sison accuses Scalice of being a CIA agent and “wild informer for the benefit of the Duterte death squads” and “Trotskyites” as “special agents of US imperialism”. This gaslighting from the Stalinist book of historical falsification is a desperate invitation for violent counter measures against truths Sison cannot answer.
Behind the public pantomime the dirty secret of Filipino politics is the two-headed monster that emerged out of the yoke of colonial oppression. An utterly reactionary ruling elite elevated at every turn as being the beacon for the squalid oppression of the Filipino masses by the CPP. Better a domestic slave master than a foreign one—the Stalinist two-stage theory of revolution.
Of course, one never gets to the second stage as the CPP hopes to warm the seats of a parliamentary or dictatorial alliance. Sison feigns a virtuous blush when the mirror is held to his face, yet it is the CPP, as Scalice meticulously documents, that has played a central role in maintaining bourgeois rule in the Philippines.
The betrayal of SYRIZA in Greece directly led to the growth of Golden Dawn, and in the Philippines the CPP has actively cradled the growth of Duterte and fascistic forces. Facts are a stubborn thing, Lenin said, for they have a relentless logic. The defence of Dr Scalice is the defence of historical truth and without this not even the first step toward liberation can be made.
Jenny, a worker from Brisbane
The very fact that the CPP arranged a 40,000-strong rally and invited the police chief to speak during Dictator Duterte’s first State of the Nation event is a damning enough example of the politics of CPP leadership under Jose Marie Sison. But Joseph Scalice has laid bare the entire political history of Sison and the history of Stalinism in the Philippines using verifiable historical documents. This is very powerful because anyone interested in the truth of matters would naturally be more attracted to factual analysis than vicious vitriol.
Sison knows he is betraying the principles of Communism and Socialism as formulated and acted on by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. He would also be keenly aware of the revolutionary implications of Covid-19’s exposure of gross inequality, the acceleration of which burns deeper than ever within the working class. Sison’s hysterical response to Joseph Scalice’s sharp analysis is that of a disrobed emperor. He fears political clarity in the Filipino working class more than anything, which makes defending Joseph Scalice a revolutionary act, just as it is defending Julian Assange.
A Philippines woman, originally from Davao said she had despised Duterte as a murderous thug since he was the city’s mayor, and despised Sison and the CPP for supporting Duterte. She had demonstrated against the dictator Marcos, who was president from 1965 to 1986, but was unaware of the Stalinists’ support for Marcos. She made the following statement: “I fully support Joseph Scalice for his well-founded attack on Sison and I condemn Sison for his threats and his betrayal of Filipinos.”