The Lost Vision The Philippine Left 1986-2010

Ken Fuller’s Forcing the Pace (UP Press, 2007) traced the progress of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) from its foundation in 1930 to the defeat of the Huk Rebellion in the mid-1950s. A Movement Divided (UP Press, 2011) took the story up to 1986, following the experiences of the PKP and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP, which split from the PKP in 1967) until the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos.The Lost Vision now gives an account of the Philippine left from 1986 to 2010, covering the events which have affected the movement in recent decades, such as the demise of the Soviet Union and the other European socialist regimes, and the splits in the CPP in the early 1990s which have led to a proliferation of both organizations and orientations. This third volume also examines the period in the late 1980s when cadres of the CPP, PKP, and others worked together at mass level in a number of progressive and anti-imperialist coalitions before disunity once again prevailed.The author argues that Philippine left parties appear to have lost sight (hence the title) of the intermediate aim they once shared: the economic development of the Philippines based on nationalist industrialization, free of the shackles of foreign domination. Only by resuscitating this vision and working to make it a reality, Fuller believes, will disunity be overcome, an alternative to armed struggle developed, and the country rescued from the poverty and underdevelopment which have plagued it for decades.

About the Author
Ken Fuller has held a number of “day jobs.” Most recently, he was for twenty years a trade union official in London. In his spare time, however, he has always written. In the 1970s, he published numerous articles on the Caribbean, which he first visited as a merchant seaman in 1969–1970.
In 1985 his labor history, Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1990s, was published in London by Lawrence and Wishart.
Since the late 1980s, Fuller’s journalism has concentrated on the Philippines, to which he eventually emigrated in 2003. In doing so, he parted company with the very concept of the “day job,” following which his literary productivity registered a steep increase. Since his arrival here, he has written two comic novels (as yet unpublished), contributed occasional articles to progressive journals in London, and for over six years wrote a weekly column to the Daily Tribune in Manila.
He has also completed his three-volume history of the Philippine left, of which The Lost Vision is the final installment. Previous volumes, also published by UP Press, were Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from Foundation to Armed Struggle (2007; a finalist in the history category of the 2008 National Book Awards, this was also published as an e-book by Flipside Publishing in 2011), and A Movement Divided: Philippine Communism, 1957–1986 (2011). His e-book The Long Crisis: Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Philippine Underdevelopment was published by Flipside Publishing in 2013.
Fuller has just completed a study of the American crime writer Dashiell Hammett and, while seeking a publisher for his two novels, is now at work on a similar volume on Raymond Chandler.