On the League of Filipino Students in the United States

By Mario Santos January 30, 2007

San Francisco-- Friends and comrades mentioned to me that the League of Filipino Students in the US was commemorating its “tenth” anniversary. Colleagues who knew me from my LFS days and were also active during the struggle to bring down the US-Marcos dictatorship would chide me: weren’t you already active in the ‘seventies, and wasn’t the LFS around even longer than that?

I would tell them, yes, of course. In fact, the LFS first came into being in the US in September 1983, not September 1997 as some have been quick to claim erroneously.

For the benefit of comrades especially in the youth-student sector now playing an active role organizing for the national-democratic cause, I am contributing the following recollection to set the record straight:

Historical Background

Organizing has been going on among Filipino youth and students as early as 1969 in the belly of the imperialist beast in response to the resumption of the national-democratic revolution in the homeland.

Filipino youth and students radicalized by the civil rights and anti-war movements in the ‘sixties established organizations like the Kalayaan International Collective in San Francisco, the Support Committee for a Democratic Philippines (SCDP) in New York and other cities. The ranks of US-born Filipinos were augmented by members of the Kabataang Makabayan (KM), the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK), the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP) and other national-democratic organizations that found their way to the US in the aftermath of the First Quarter Storm (FQS) in 1970.

Filipino youth and students have played and continue to play an important role in developing the work in the US. The imposition of martial rule by the US-Marcos clique in the homeland in 1972 was perhaps the single biggest impetus at the time to further organizing among compatriots throughout the US and solidarity work among the US public along anti-fascist and anti-imperialist lines.

The National Committee to Restore Civil Liberties in the Philippines (NCRCLP) sprung up in as many as 15 cities throughout North America in December 1972. By April 1973, the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) was established and counted among its members such anti-imperialist fighters as the late Daniel Boone Schirmer.

In July 1973, the Union of Democratic Filipinos (Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino – KDP) was founded, bringing together national-democratic adherents throughout the US. An Anti-Martial Law Coalition (AMLC) was formed in late 1974 to coordinate the campaigns of the different organizations. In November 1976, the International Association of Filipino Patriots (IAFP) was formed, bringing together the US-based national democrats and those in the Canadian cities of Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver.

From 1969 to 1977, Filipino national democrats throughout North America, by and large, worked together to advance organizing among compatriots and solidarity work among the host peoples for the Filipino people’s national-democratic cause.

By 1978, however, a revisionist current which advanced the line of “Support armed struggle, drop Mao and seek aid from the Soviet Union” developed within the leadership of the main national-democratic organization, KDP and eventually split the ranks. The revisionists hijacked the KDP and diverted its members away from the national-democratic mainstream to pursue their sinister agenda.

The undercurrents of the rectification movement in the U.S.

Increasingly, from 1978 to the mid-‘eighties, elements loyal to the foundational principles went up against these revisionist elements and persisted in advancing the organizing of compatriots and solidarity work in North America. New organizations sprung up to continue the work for the national-democratic struggle in effect abandoned by the KDP and IAFP.

The Ugnayan para sa Pambansang Demokrasya (Ugnayan) emerged in 1981 to continue the work throughout the US and Canada. Under the auspices of Ugnayan and with the support of organizations in the homeland, new sectoral and multi-sectoral organizations began to emerge in the different cities.

An ecumenical conference was convened in Stonypoint, New York to bring the sectoral and multi-sectoral concerns of the Filipino people to the US in August 1983. The unexpected brutal assassination of oppositionist Sen. Benigno Aquino on August 21, 1983 fueled an upsurge of resistance and protest among Filipinos not only in the homeland but throughout Filipino communities in North America as well.

The secretary-general of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) at the time met with myself and other concerned Filipino youth and students during his visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, and the first chapter of the LFS outside of the Philippines, the LFS chapter in the University of California in Berkeley (UCB), was formed on September 11, 1983 with newly politicized students eager to become involved and the support of other Ugnayan-based organizations that allowed some of its youth members to join the campus-based group.

In 1984, two other chapters of the LFS were also set up in the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) and the University of Michigan in Detroit (UMD). Collectively, these chapters constituted what would be known throughout the US and internationally as LFS – USA. Along with the organizations in the other sectors, LFS would subsequently play an important role in eventually tilting the balance away from KDP.

The upsurge in organizing from 1983 to 1986 allowed the LFS and other sectoral organizations to contribute to the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist cause in the homeland. In late 1985, another LFS chapter would be formed in City College of San Francisco (CCSF).

The period after the so-called February Revolution of 1986 made consolidation along national-democratic lines very difficult especially because of conflicting and contradictory internal leadership directions. By then, bourgeois-liberal ideas and lines began to seep into the ranks of LFS. By 1989, so-called “popdems” and other anti-ND manifestations prevailed on the leading activists and members to dissolve LFS and divert the organizing to other community concerns.

Soon, it became increasingly clear that the bourgeois-liberal elements that held sway in the US not only wanted to cast doubt on the correctness of the analysis of Philippine society being semi-colonial and semi-feudal, but also on the necessity for the Filipino people led by the working class to wage a national-democratic revolution through a protracted people’s war.

To this end, these bourgeois-liberal rejectionists subsequently put up the Forum on Philippine Alternatives (FOPA) as a counter center to attack the proletarian revolutionary leadership of the national- democratic movement.

The disorientation of the national-democratic movement became evident in a myriad of ways and it would take the launching of the Second Great Rectification Movement (SGRM) to recover many adherents lost in the aftermath of grave errors being committed in the homeland as well as abroad.
Youth/student organizing within the rectification movement (1993-1998)

By 1992, only the national-democratic groups in Southern California remained more or less intact. During this time, Gabriela Network also continued to hold its ground against being swayed by the bourgeois liberals. But most other national-democratic organizations noticeably declined and became dormant in the cities where the bourgeois liberals held temporary sway.

When the rectification movement unfolded in 1993, groups of cadres and activists throughout the US slowly began to discern right from wrong, reactivate, and reaffirm the basic foundational principles. For the next five years, recovery from the damage wrought by the bourgeois liberals was painstaking and slow.

During this time, the person who was tasked to organize the youth sector in Southern California decided to lie low.

Nevertheless, youth and student organizing persisted with the setting up of the Kilusan ng Progresibong Kabataan (KPK) in the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) campus in the mid-‘nineties.

It would take a little longer – about eight years – from the time of the LFS’s demise in the San Francisco Bay Area before youth and student organizing would resume again in earnest with the support of elements who were no longer in their youth but nevertheless loyal to the foundational principles of the national-democratic movement.

The League of Filipino Students (LFS) would again be reconstituted in 1997. One of those youth who organized it was
a former member of Pesante, a peasant advocacy organization, who had left Los Angeles and moved up to the Bay Area. A chapter would soon emerge in San Francisco State University (SFSU) in that year. The KPK would follow in its footsteps and reconstitute itself into an LFS chapter in UCLA in that same year.
In San Francisco, where there were still no mass organizations, the LFS prospered.

But in Los Angeles, problems arose because the LFS that evolved out of the KPK produced unnecessary friction between immigrant Filipinos who hailed from the Philippines and Fil-Ams who were prominently students and professionals. Later, the immigrant youth would fall out and the LFS-LA would be transformed or would transition into organizations other than youth groups.

Subsequently, the Kabataang maka-Bayan (KmB – Pro-People Youth), a comprehensive ND youth organization, was formed in November 1999 after more than a year of outreach, contact-building and through studies to build and go beyond what the LFS was unable
to do.

Implications of LFS or youth/student organizing in the U.S.

The problems in the Philippines with the LFS organizing were carried over to the U.S. The LFS essentially concentrated on campus youth and students and was not able to organize community youth and involve them into the both the community issues and the national issues. In the U.S., it concentrated on political issues and appeared too left for some students and youth in the campuses.

But the greater problem that arose was the lack of respect for history and elders. There were instances when LFS activists grappled with senior citizens on issues like the veterans’ pro-Americanism, the handling of the VFA debates and lack of community work among immigrant youths. Some of the LFS activists were saddled with “imperial arrogance” especially those who had merely gone for a limited integration in the Philippines.

Many of these activists felt that they were now an “authority” on the issues in the Philippines and began spewing hot air. They would question old-time activists and later made unprincipled organizational maneuvers to ease them out of the organizations that the latter had built painstakingly. They would attack these comrades by saying they had a “veteran mentality”: and would even go as far as to say; “They (old comrades) should go back to the Philippines to remold their thinking.”

These problems compounded the existing situation in the United States. And great friction between old activists and the new emerging leadership of youth activists ensued and continues to be a big problem at present.

There exists a tendency to disregard and obliterate the positive role and contributions of the older activists in the United States and to present history disingenuously as starting from the part where these younger activists came in. The worst tendency is to depreciate older activists one-sidedly and to equate them hastily and unfairly with some KDP revisionist leadership and the later born-again social-democratic rejectionists like Walden Bello and others.

There is also a propensity to propel and flash flagship organizations and make an image of a big youth organizations where there were still only small fledging organizations in some areas and project them already as national organizations. This is a type of propaganda getting ahead of their actual organizational capacity. Beating the drums to scare the crows!

They don’t even distinguish between who are really RJs and not, between who are the real revisionists and who are not. They simply lump everyone that they think do not conform to their subjective, arbitrary commands and immediately dismiss them as “RJs.” But look closely at those who are actually working with the rejectionist forces?

Who are the ones that are rallying together with known RJ’s or RJ-influenced organizations like the Filipinos for Affirmative Action (FAA), the Veterans’ Equity Center (VEC) and the Bayanihan Pilipino Resource Center (PBRC)? Who are those working with the Trotskyite organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Spartacists and the Uhuru organization and other anti-white narrow nationalist and essentially racist organizations?

There remains a need to deepen the rectification process in order to unite all forces genuinely committed to advance the people’s national-democratic cause. It is only right and just to expound and discuss the twists and turns and intricacies and nuisances in the history of the youth organizing in the U.S so as to set the record straight.

Then and only then can we speak about who are the real RJ’s, and who are treading the road towards revisionism by playing God, obliterating the revolutionary past, and rewriting history according to their shallow whims and caprices!

Persevere in advancing a thoroughgoing rectification of errors!

To contribute meaningfully to the eventual victory of our people’s struggle for national freedom, democracy and ultimately socialism, we must heed the watchwords of the African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, who once remarked: “Unmask all difficulties, tell no lies, and claim no easy victories.” After all, as the great teacher Mao said, “Revolution is not a dinner party…” The road ahead for our people is arduous indeed and strewn with all sorts of obstacles, externally and internally.

It is indeed tragic that errors and weaknesses continue to linger and bog down the important work in the U.S. We must have the humility to acknowledge errors and learn from the bitter lessons of the past to instruct and temper our present practice.

We must continue on the road set ablaze by the SGRM and realize a thoroughgoing rectification of the errors that continue to split the ranks and hold back the effective advance of the work in the U.S. To deny them, to pretend as though they did not and do not exist, is to negate the need to draw the necessary key lessons including bitter ones, to guide present efforts, and to court repeating errors of the past in a farcical way. #

Mario Santos IMDP 1980-83 Founding Secretary, LFS-UCB 1983-86

The author is a member of the First Quarter Storm Network (FQSN)-USA and is currently the National Coordinator of the Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines (AJLPP)

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