Lapiang Manggagawa Mark III?

Last week, we saw that there have been two parties called Lapiang Manggagawa (LM, Labor Party) — one formed in the 1920s which acted as a stepping-stone to the formation of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in 1930, and the second founded on the initiative of the PKP in 1963 as a legal means of organizing labor behind nationalist demands.

The latter lasted until 1967, when general secretary Ignacio Lacsina was won over to the camp of Jose Maria Sison after his split from the PKP, as a result of which the LM was converted into the Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP). At this stage, the more conservative labor leaders like Cipriano Cid, who had been president of the LM, cashed in their chips and walked away.

Is either of these parties the Lapiang Manggagawa which, until a few days ago, was supporting Hermogenes Ebdane Jr., former secretary at the Department of Public Works and Highways, national security advisor and national police chief, in his declared bid to win the presidency in 2010?

At first, as an early report claimed that the LM was the second oldest party in the country, the 1920s-version LM seemed to fit the description. But this could hardly be the case, as the same people who had populated that party founded the PKP. As they had no further use for the LM, it was consigned to history.

Later reports, however, claimed that Ebdane’s LM (the name of which has recently been changed to the Philippine Labor and Peasants’ Party) was the third oldest party. Couple this with the fact that the declaration of Ebdane’s candidacy on Nov. 8 was preceded by a celebration of the 46th anniversary of the party and it seems clear that his LM must be one and the same as that of Ignacio Lacsina.

But is it? Is there evidence of continuity between 1967 and the present day? To be fair, there are some.

Current president of the LM is Jose Malvar Villegas Jr., grandson of Gen. Miguel Malvar, the last of Aguinaldo’s military leaders to surrender to the Americans. In a paper by Masataka Kimura published in a 1989 issue of South East Asian Studies, Villegas, having recently supported Marcos and Tolentino in the snap election, is described as one of those behind the formation of BISIG ng Batangas in 1986, at which time he was also, says Kimura, secretary-general of the LM. He was also a founder-member of Ramon Mitra Jr.’s Lakas ng Bansa, where he was deputy secretary-general. He left this party before the elections of 1987 (the following year, Laban ng Bansa merged with the Jose Cojuangco Jr. wing of PDP-Laban into the Laban Demokratikong Pilipino).

In 1998, the LM allied with Partido ng Demokratikong Reporma, Renato de Villa’s electoral vehicle. Villegas was a member of De Villa’s senate slate, placing 33rd, with 608,000 votes.

In 2006, Villegas, who is also national chairman of Citizens’ Crime Watch, supported abolition of the Senate and a switch to a parliamentary system.

Before Ebdane’s declaration, the most recent mention of the LM was in March this year when, along with the Asian Center for the Study of Democracy (University of Asia and the Pacific, where Villegas’s brother Bernardo is senior vice-president), it organized a conference on “Christian-Muslim Solidarity in Aid of Development through Social Justice.” Here, while Chief Justice Reynato Puno gave sound advice about the need to understand the roots of the Mindanao crisis, Bernardo Villegas spoke on the social doctrine of the church and the representative of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung lectured on the social market economy.

Again, the question presents itself. Is this really the party formed in 1963? Would that party have engaged in any of the activities, or adopted any of the positions, mentioned above? Support for Cha-cha in 2006? Cooperation with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, which is allied not to a German socialist party but to the Christian Democratic Union? It seems unlikely.

One possibility occurred to this outsider. Maybe, just maybe, some of the conservative labor leaders who balked at the prospect of SPP membership in 1967 had kept alive the LM identity, handing the reins of leadership over Mr. Villegas sometime in the 1980s. This would certainly explain the somewhat different policy-trajectory followed by the current LM.

One veteran associated with the old LM would, however, have none of this. “There is no historical continuity whatsoever,” he thundered in reply to my enquiry. “Lapiang Manggagawa metamorphosed into SPP. Even Cid and others who refused to join SPP stopped using the name.” According to this source, the name of the LM was, therefore, “appropriated.”

There can be no dispute that there is an existing party called Lapiang Manggagawa. In 2007, it elected four councillors in three cities in the National Capital Region. According to an article on party-list organizations in Kasarinlan in 1997 (which obviously relied on Comelec data), LM was “founded/registered” in 1993. In the party-list elections in 2004, however, it only managed to garner 31,386 votes — just 0.2467 percent of the party-list total. This must cast a little doubt on Villegas’s claim that LM has three million members.

And, apart from the celebration of an anniversary, the links to the LM of 1963-1967 seem a little tenuous. So maybe the current party is Lapiang Manggagawa Mark III. –Ken Fuller, Daily Tribune

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