Socialist Party of Labour Reihana Mohideen
Two smaller socialist organisations, the Socialist League (LS) and the Revolutionary Proletarian Party (RPP), fused on 30 November 1998.
The new Socialist Party of Labour (SPP) will hold its founding congress in May 1999.
Like the Revolutionary Workers' Party (see separate article), the Socialist League was previously part of the pro-Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
Until early 1998, the LS was part of the Manila-Rizal Revolutionary Committe (KRMR). They split over the refusal of the leadership to call a party congress, and what the LS considers to be a right-wing political trajectory of the organisation, and the clique method of its leader, Popoy Lagman.
Led by Sony Melencio, the LS has a base in the student movement through the Young Socialist League (LSK). It has recruited the leaders of two large urban poor communities in the north and south of Manila and is rapidly building its base in these areas.
The RPP comes from the formerly Moscow-aligned Communist Party (PKP), formed in 1930. The PKP discredited itself during the period of the Marcos dictatorship by agreeing to a "political settlement" to lay down its arms in exchange for release of leaders who were imprisoned by the regime. 12 International Viewpoint #307 January 1999
While the PKP participated in the subsequent anti-dictatorship movement it was never able to recover fully. The activists of the youth radicalisation of the '70s and '80s joined the Maoist CPP, which had split from the PKP in the late 60s.
The RPP forces split from the PKP in 1993. The split, led by youth leader Rodolfo Javellana, revolved around the lack of democracy in the party, the PKP's class collaborationist politics and its sectarianism.
The RPP won over the rural workers mass organisation of the PKP. This Federation of Agricultural Workers is the oldest poor peasants' organisation in the Philippines, It claims 10,000 members.
The two organisations reaffirm "Marxism-Leninism... democratic centralism... The need to establish an open revolutionary socialist party... The principle of uninterrupted revolution, from nationaldemocratic to socialism... the leading role of the working class in the struggle ... where the first step will be the establishment of a revolutionary state of the workers together with their allies."
"It is also our task to defend nations and governments, like Cuba and Vietnam, which advance socialism but are continuously harassed violated by imperialist nations..." * Source: Green Left Weekly #344, 9 December 1998 for the moment.
But the Sangh combine is already putting this new philosophy into practice. More than 1.2 million children attend RSS-run schools, in virtually every Indian state. Their curricula, text-books and teachers all propagate RSS values and the Hindutva [Hindu nationalist] view off History. [BS] Achin Vanaik Let no one be in any doubt. The Sangh Combine today are out to transform popular understandings of Indian history by changing the content and manner of history teaching at the level of schools and colleges so as to accord with their own Hindutva version of that history.
Unfortunately, not only the Sangh, but disturbingly large sections of the Indian elite think they are justified in doing so.
In this context a crucial question is raised. Can history writing, research, understanding and teaching be separated from the passions of politics? This can only be answered by both a yes and a no.