Dodong Nemenzo: The last Filipino Marxist

The Father of Visayan Marxism. That was the monicker with which we activists used to describe Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo. We had nothing substantively critical in the description, even though, as young hardline Maoists, we thought Nemenzo’s pro-Soviet leanings were revisionists. It was because we loved listening to him explaining Marx and Lenin with his thick Visayan accent. 

He taught us Marxist philosophy and praxis well, and, in due time, we sought his counsel and advice, to the chagrin of some of our political officers. My good friend Lean Alejandro was censured and suspended for his political dalliances with Nemenzo. Lean accepted it with delight because he now could spend all his time at UP’s Third World Studies Center (which Nemenzo founded when he was dean of the defunct College of Arts and Sciences) reading Lenin, Trotsky, and New Left intellectuals. His “break” from the movement also enabled him to set up a campaign team that included faculty members like Nemenzo, who won the first UP Student Council elections since the declaration of martial law. 

As a young student in Cebu, Nemenzo challenged and angered the custodians of the Catholic schools he attended. “Henceforth,” Nemenzo wrote in a long letter to his grandchildren, “my instinct was to go against what is fashionable.” It was an anti-Marxist that led him to Marxism. Nemenzo wrote in the first chapter of his upcoming book, Notes from the Philippine Underground, “about this forbidden ideology” from an abridged version of RN Carew Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism that the US Information Service gave out for free. Nemenzo recalls: “Of course, it was an anti-communist rant, but the chapter on exploiting European workers that gave rise to the communist movement caught my attention.”

His penchant for “turning a bad thing into a good thing” (discovering Marxism in Hunt) would soon be followed by a proclivity for finding himself enamored and immersed in contrarianism. To illustrate:

He was already an ardent atheist and socialist when he and Homobono Adaza decided to help the UP Student Catholic Association defeat the fraternities in the student council elections. Along the way, the probinsiyano from Sugbu fell in love with the Swiss-schooled intelligent cosmopolitan beauty Anna Marie Ronquillo, helped by a nudge from his English professor, the deeply Catholic JD Constantino, who thought that the way to bring her favorite student back to the Faith was through the UPSCAn Ronquillo’s heart. It did not work as planned (Ronquillo went to the Marxian dark side), but the three remained close friends.

After meeting Wiliam Pomeroy, Nemenzo wondered, “What makes an American fight his country’s puppet in a land that is not his own?” This led him to ask: “What drives a UP student to become a communist? I wanted to know more about communism from the communists themselves.” He began reading the works of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, but admitted that he could in the UP library. He even tried reading Das Kapital but could “not go beyond the first few pages.” Engel’s more simplified  Socialism: Utopian and Scientific sufficed. He would enrich his Marxist education in England in the company of Trotskyites (he did spurn them later for being hardliners) and comrades of the British Communist Party. 

Joining the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) inevitably followed, and Nemenzo was elevated to the Provisional Central Committee along with his good friend, Jose Maria Sison. His first assignment was to reconnect with the Partai Komunis Indonesia and, together with Sison, build the Kabataang Makabayan, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (Philippine Council), and the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism.

Nemenzo was a good cadre, but also challenged its leaders. He belonged to a faction that wanted the PKP to abandon its pro-China position and ally with the Soviet Union. Sison’s breakaway immensely helped sway the party to Nemenzo’s position. When the PKP showed signs of accommodating Marcos, he began exploring the possibility of breaking away. He also started toying with the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella’s urban revolutionary warfare. 

The PKP made peace with the dictatorship in 1974, and Nemenzo and several of his comrades split to form the Marxist-Leninist Group. The PKP retaliated by executing his comrades, and Nemenzo avoided that fate by being arrested. In one of those ironies of a revolutionary’s history, his class enemies saved him from his former comrades.

Upon his release, Nemenzo returned to UP and was unanimously recommended by the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) faculty to become their new dean. Marcos technocrat and UP president Onofre D. Corpuz pushed back pressures from UP reactionaries and appointed his former student to the position.  

Here was a Marxist appointed to a position of a key “ideological structure” of the reactionary state. Instead of turning it into an apparatus to spread Marxist ideas — a goal still pursued by national democrats inside academia today — he vowed to make it a free, liberal market of ideas, where the best of the Left, the Center, and the Right clash to sway students to their side.

Instead of rising the ranks in UP Diliman, the prime campus, Nemenzo went lateral, accepting the position of chancellor of UP Visayas. He did well as an administrator, but his enthusiasm was also muted when the “world socialist system” collapsed, leaving him “utterly confused and depressed.” But he made Miag-ao, Iloilo, a place of ideological refuge, spending time rereading Das Kapital and the Selected Works of Marx and Engels and articles that welcomed the fall of the Soviet Union and those that declared that “Marx was dead!” He remained steadfast in his Marxist beliefs.

UP Visayas was followed by a visiting professorial position at a Japanese university, where he finally laid out his position on the post-Soviet world and the challenges Marxists faced. The 1994 Mexican crisis and the 1997 Asian financial crisis confirmed his belief in Karl Marx’s predictions of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system.  

President Joseph Estrada appointed Nemenzo the 18th UP president. Many in the university community assailed him for refusing to side with them in the People Power 2 ouster of Erap, but his “compromise” — yet another illustration of his contrarianism — was critical in preparing UP for the technological revolutions of the early 21st century.

In his post-academic life, he continued his political conversations with the Maoists, even if he had little regard for Mao Tse Tung thought. He dispensed political advice to Oakwood plotters, perhaps seeing in them the precursors of the Philippine edition of Marighella’s urban revolutionaries. Nemenzo co-founded Laban ng Masa, a coalition of the different and smaller non-CPP leftwing groups, while keeping Bisig, the other socialist federation, alive. 

Illness limited his political activities, and being disallowed his usual two packs of British cigs and a bottle of whiskey by his doctors was extremely disappointing. But even in his weakened state, he was sought by different political groups, former students, and good friends for his counsel.

I reconnected with my mentor and fellow Bisayang Daku a year ago after over a decade of losing track of each other. It felt like I just left the table briefly to refill the coffee thermos or take out another Johnny Walker scotch from his cupboard while Ma’am Princess shook her head disapprovingly. And it was back to listening to him reminisce about his days with the PKP, his unusual friendship with the late CPP chairman, State University politics, the colleagues he admired the most (JD Constantino!), UP’s heretics and crackpots, and the many exciting, scary, and funny times when he was our dean.

The Father of Visayan Marxism passed away last December 19, and, as JB Baylon posted on my Facebook page, “We are all ‘poorer’ without him.” I will miss him a lot. – Rappler.com

Patricio N. Abinales worked closely with an ailing Francisco Nemenzo on Notes from the Philippine Underground, which the University of the Philippines Press will publish in early 2025. This essay’s quotes are from Chapter 1 of the book, “Turning Left.”