All over the world, mass movements against worsening poverty, social inequality and government budget cuts for education and social services are unfolding daily.

These popular uprisings have risen up against dictatorial regimes and the dominant economic system that has concentrated the world’s wealth to the top one percent while the remaining 99 percent remains mired in exploitation and oppression.

President Noynoy Aquino’s “matuwid na daan” has turned out to be no different from the path taken by Arroyo, Marcos, and other presidents before him by prioritizing the foreign banks and monopolies of this one percent over the needs of the Filipino people.

Anti-People Budget

P735.6 billion or 40% of the proposed P1.8 trillion 2012 budget is allotted for interest and principal payments for foreign debts instead of providing for the meager funds for education, health, and other social services.

Cash dole-outs like the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) that are borrowed from foreign banks like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank are meanwhile presented as the solution to poverty instead of long-term programs like land reform, national industrialization and higher social services spending.

The Aquino government is reducing subsidy to State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), in President Aquino’s own words, “to push them toward becoming self-sufficient and financially independent, given their ability to raise their income and to utilize it for their programs and projects.”

Meanwhile, the P238 billion for basic education is short of P115 billion needed to address shortages of teachers, classrooms, chairs, desks, and textbooks. The combined spending for education will only total 2.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP), less than half the requirement by the United Nations of 6% GDP spending for education.

Education Crisis

Aquino’s budget cuts will only worsen the commercialization of education by forcing SUCs to resort to income-generating schemes including tuition and other fees like the P1,000 computer fee in the WVSU and the P1,500 student development fee in the WVCST.

UP Visayas is the most expensive school in the Visayas. Under its socialized tuition system, a student is assumed to be capable of paying the P1,000 per unit tuition. S/he must first undergo a tedious process to avail lower tuition rates. Hence, only 13.65% of the student population avail of free tuition while at least 55.98% of UPV students pay P600 to P1,000 per unit tuition.

The fight for a higher education budget is therefore not limited to the youth sector. The poor peasants, workers, professionals, and small businessmen – the 99% of Philippine society – will find it more difficult to send their children to school amidst the worsening hunger, joblessness and rising cost of basic goods.

Education under the present setup has become a business. It is no longer a right but a commodity available only for those who can afford, with only 1 college graduate for every 10 students who enter grade 1. It moreover continues to cater to the needs of foreign powers. Education produces cheap laborers to multinational corporations and promotes blind praise and subservience to anything foreign. Students are trained to become passive and indifferent to social injustices while their rights to organize and freedom of expression are repressed.

As long as Philippine society remains shackled by foreign powers and the ruling elites, the Philippine educational system will remain commercialized, colonial, and reactionary. The fight for a truly nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education must hence be anchored on the struggle of the entire Filipino people for greater social transformation.

December 8 Day of Action

Realizing this commitment to advance the interests of the Filipino people, Iskolars ng Bayan united for a higher budget for social services in the past months, culminating in the State of the Youth protest last July 19 and September 23.

Joined by thousands of students, faculty, university administrators and other sectors, our unity and solidarity resulted in the realignment of P200 million for SUCs in the Senate version of the 2012 budget.

Starting December 6, thousands of youth and students will “Occupy Mendiola” to call attention to the worsening crisis of Philippine education and society. We Iskolars ng Bayan of Panay and Guimaras are called on to show our solidarity to these calls by joining a region-wide “Day of Action” on December 8.

Intensify the struggle against Aquino’s Anti-People Budget!

DEFEND THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION, HEALTH, AND SOCIAL SERVICES!

Kabataan Partylist | Anakbayan | League of Filipino Students | College Editors Guild of the Philippines | National Union of Students of the Philippines | Student Christian Movement of the Philippines

Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.

Pierre Nora,
“Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire“

In these times of national crisis and global upheavals, there is a need for an active youth that can unite with the oppressed in struggle against injustice and tyranny.

But if one looks at popular portrayals of the Filipino youth, it would seem that our concept of social involvement has been reduced to liking facebook causes or volunteering for some charity drive.

Nationalism itself has been diminished to being dutiful citizens, graduating on time and finding work in some call center, or sending remittances from abroad.

Collective politics, mass actions, and revolutionary causes, it is said, are already a thing of the past. But is this the only horizon for the contemporary youth?

Our nation’s own history shows how the younger generations of every epoch are confronted by two choices: either to side with the oppressors and exploiters or to struggle side by side with the toiling masses for social transformation.

Revolutionary Beginnings

It was the younger generations who formed the core of the Katipunan, the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of the late 19th Century. These patriotic youth led the liberation of the country from 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. The young revolutionary leaders of this period envisioned the establishment of a truly independent Filipino nation.

But the American colonizers came and stole the country’s independence after a genocidal war that the cost the lives of more than a million Filipinos. The colonizers installed local puppets from the ranks of ilustrado families whose sons and daughters would come to dominate the country’s political scene up to the present.

This did not prevent the rise of a new generation of young Filipinos, however, who would take up the struggle left by their forebears.

Young workers, peasants, and intellectuals would have a big role in the rise of the Philippine labor movement, the founding of the old Partido Komunista Pilipinas, and the revival of armed anti-colonial struggles against the American and Japanese occupations.

Indeed, many of those who became anti-Japanese guerrillas during the Second World War were mere teenagers when they took up arms.

A Gathering Storm

Defiant students clench their fist in the 1971 Diliman Commune.

Formal independence was finally declared on July 4, 1946. But the indirect control of the former colonizers over the country’s politics, economy, and culture persisted.

The American colonizers may have departed, but they left behind a whole generation of loyal puppets from the same haciendero classes to run the new republic. Various unequal agreements, the U.S. military bases, and an acquiescent government became the hallmarks of the country’s new semi-colonial status.

It did not take long for the youth of this period to begin questioning the prevailing social order that continued to concentrate the country’s wealth to the ruling elites and foreign powers while the masses remain mired in poverty.

A rejuvenated nationalism and a strong conviction to correct historical injustices pushed a generation to go beyond the confines of their classrooms and integrate with the peasant, workers, and urban poor communities in pursuit of genuine freedom and social justice.

As the whole world rose up in the 60s and 70s from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American and European anti-war movement, to the Third World national liberation struggles, the Filipino youth also led massive weekly protest actions that are now collectively famous as the First Quarter Storm of the 1970s.

These empowered youth pointed out the need for their sector to unite with the country’s exploited masses in struggle to root out the three basic problems afflicting the country:

• Imperialism that subordinated the country to the interests of foreign powers,
• Feudalism or the persistence of land monopoly amidst grave landlessness and rural poverty, and
• Bureaucrat Capitalism or the use of government as a business enterprise.

Going Underground

A company of New People's Army guerrillas in Eastern Visayas.

But President Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in the year 1972 to contain this unprecedented upsurge of the mass movement and ultimately protect the interests of his own clique and class.

Marcos had student councils and publications closed. He had both radical organizations and the traditional opposition parties suppressed and their known leaders, members, and supporters imprisoned, killed, and tortured.

Human rights organizations have recorded 70,000 political prisoners, 35,000 victims of torture, and 3,257 extrajudicial killings. [2] The cases of tens of thousands of other victims have not been fortunate enough to be documented.

This only stoked the fires of defiance all the more. All democratic spaces for resistance may have been curtailed but this only push thousands of youth of this time to go underground and join the armed struggle in the countryside. The tyranny of the Marcos dictatorship did not prevent these young revolutionaries from risking their lives for the Filipino people.

The reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary movement emerged as the most dedicated, unswerving, and respected opposition to Marcos. It attracted some of the most talented and idealistic youth, who with their boundless energy, commitment, and creativity, became the core of a broad anti-dictatorship struggle.

The Radical Tide Ebbs

A portion of the mammoth EDSA 1 mobilization that toppled the Marcos dictatorship.

The fall of Marcos in 1986, however, signaled a shifting interest among the youth. Many who grew up under the dictatorship believed that Marcos is the root of all evil and his removal would already usher in genuine social change. With Marcos gone, many in the post-EDSA generations would thus become less inclined to be socially involved.

Grave errors and internal weaknesses in the revolutionary movement also led many activists to become disillusioned. Some would form NGOs that seek to institute minute changes within the system instead of endeavoring for far-reaching social change.

A whole generation was fed with the mistaken belief that the time of collective struggles is long past and a world centered entirely on the self and an ever expanding consumer culture has no alternative.

But the basic problems afflicting Philippine society did not go away with the deposed dictatorship. Peasants marching to Malacanang to demand genuine land reform would be shot by Cory Aquino’s soldiers in the infamous 1987 Mendiola Massacre.

Seven of ten farmers do not own their land. Poverty remains widespread as the price of basic commodities and unemployment continue to rise. Around 4.5 million workers are jobless [3] while 4,030 Filipinos go abroad to find work daily. [4]

Marcos left behind $26 billion of debt, a figure that has now ballooned to more than $100 billion after a few successive administrations. The economy remains backward agrarian, and dependent on foreign capital.

The social divide remains as deep as ever, with the 25 wealthiest Filipinos possessing a net worth equal to the combined earnings of the poorest 55.4 million, [5] and political repression continues to be used by those in power to promote and protect their interests.

Current Challenges

Jubilant crowds during the 2001 EDSA 2 popular uprising.

It is the force of persistent social realities that continue to inspire significant sections of today’s youth to reaffirm our commitment to serve the people.

Using new technologies alongside classical modes of political organizing and mobilization, youth activists were at the forefront of the popular uprising that removed Joseph Estrada from Malacanang in 2001.

However, because the same social order persisted despite the change of leadership, the next president only continued the rotten policies of the past administrations. Gloria Arroyo would even overtake the rapaciousness and brutality of the regime that it replaced.

Her regime would be hounded by mammoth corruption cases, electoral fraud, and human rights violations as epitomized by the brutal Ampatuan and Hacienda Luisita massacres. There are over 1,206 victims of extrajudicial killings under Arroyo. [6]

The Arroyo regime outraged the people, but the mechanical attempts at repeating the EDSA-formula failed to draw millions into the streets like in 1986 and 2001. Arroyo would stay in power until 2010 when another landlord would be elected into office.

Noynoy Aquino would handily win by playing with the people’s anti-Arroyo sentiments and getting the support of foreign powers and local elites.

Underneath Aquino’s flimsy anti-corruption and reformist rhetoric is the continuation of long-discredited policies from budget cuts for social services, disdain for genuine land reform, to subservience to foreign powers.

The most serious crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s is now wreaking havoc on the lives of millions worldwide. This global catastrophe will further worsen the domestic crisis in the Philippines.

Budget cuts on social services, pushing down of workers’ wages, massive unemployment, and rising costs of living in the US, Europe, and Japan is breaking the Hollywood-manufactured delusion that life is getting better under the present system.

These sorry conditions are once more reaffirming the truth that our collective action is our most potent weapon against social injustice and oppression.

Reaffirming the Struggle

Thousands join protest actions against Aquino's budget cuts for education and social services in recent months.

There are popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, massive anti-austerity strikes in Greece, Spain, and other parts of Europe, months-long campus shutdowns in Chile, and a now global Occupy movement.

The systemic nature of the problems facing the nation show that simply swapping leaders every few years cannot meet the genuine aspirations of the Filipino people. Without fundamental change in the system, there is no bright future for the youth of today.

We are hence confronted with the challenge to partake in the collective struggle to transform an unjust social order that benefits a few while reducing the majority to poverty. Only by winning the people’s national democratic struggle can we attain this.

The youth should stand with the Filipino people in asserting our national sovereignty against foreign control over our politics, economy, and culture. We should push for genuine land reform, national industrialization, and the democratic rights of peasants, workers, and all marginalized sectors of society.

The present generation must overcome the apathy, indifference, and individualism promoted by the dominant system to do this.

Being at the prime of our physical condition and possessing a strong sense of justice, boundless optimism, creativity, idealism, and openness to new and radical ideas, the youth are the most ready to serve the people and fight for a better world.

If we can prevail over our weaknesses and integrate ourselves with the toiling masses, then we can become a most vital force for social transformation.

Only with the participation of thousands of young men and women can the struggle for national liberation and genuine democracy achieve victory.

Notes

1. I presented different variations of this piece in the first-ever 26 November 2011 Panay and Guimaras State Universities and Colleges Student Summit, and other occasions. This discussion is indebted to the “State of the Youth” primer being prepared by the Kabataan Partylist National Office for much of its points.

2. Alfred McCoy, “Dark Legacy: Human Rights under Marcos Regime,” Hartford Web Publishing, 18 October 1999. Retrieved 15 March 2011 from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html

3. Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Matuwid na Landas ng Pakikibaka (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., July 2011), 6.

4. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration in Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Matuwid na Landas ng Pakikibaka (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., July 2011), 6.

5. Forbes Asia in Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Mga Pangakong Napako (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., January 2011), 4.

6.2010 Year-End Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines (Quezon City: KARAPATAN Alliance for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2010), 16.

Education is generally described as “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction.”[2] It is a basic human right because it is considered one of the fundamental guarantees that enable an individual to live his full potential as a human being.

Various international agreements entered into by the Philippines, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, state that the state has a responsibility to guarantee the people’s right to education.

Our 1987 Constitution itself explicitly provides for government to “protect and promote the right of all citizens to quality education at all levels” and “take appropriate steps to make such education accessible to all.”[3] The constitution also states that “the highest budgetary priority” shall be assigned to education.[4]

Reactionary or liberatory

Education is given a high value in the country because it is perceived by the masses as a stepping stone out of poverty, it is imagined by the middle classes as a way to climb to a higher social status, and is used by the ruling classes to reinforce their influence over the populace.

Education, more importantly, is of great importance for nation-building because it can mold the consciousness of the youth and the people and direct them towards particular purposes. Education, in this sense, can be either reactionary or liberatory.[5]

It is reactionary if it functions to defend an exploitative and oppressive social order by “prevent[ing] the people from gaining critical awareness, from ‘reading’ critically their reality.”[6] Education can be liberating if it seeks the opposite and works for social transformation.[7]

The Philippine educational system has been plagued by a severe and chronic crisis that leaves it incapable of pushing for national progress. It has instead been molded “according to the interests of those who have power”[8] and has reinforced worsening social inequality.

Rather than being treated as an investment with a crucial role in nation-building, education has become perpetually hostage to grave shortages, wrong priorities, and the demands of foreign powers. Instead of being conferred to the people as a basic right, it has become a privilege for a few.

A colonial education

The sorry state of affairs of Philippine education can be traced back to the country’s colonial period when the educational system was designed to mold loyal colonial subjects who valued the interests of their foreign masters above their own needs and aspirations.

This was clearly the case under 300 years of Spanish colonial rule when all the schools were under the control and the direction of the Catholic Church. After all, “the most effective means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds.”[9]

The arrival of the Americans did little to change this. Having waged a genocidal war that murdered over a million Filipinos in order to subdue the Filipino revolutionaries, the new colonizers realized the need for establishing a public school system in order to make the new regime acceptable.

Filipinos were forced to speak in the colonizers’ tongue. They sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” They were told that the colonizers came to liberate them and teach them democracy. They were inculcated with the new rulers’ consumerist values. They were transformed into “little brown Americans.”

Schools like the University of the Philippines and the Philippine Normal University were established to produce a new generation of Filipino clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, teachers, and other professionals who are trained in the ways of the colonizers and beholden to foreign interests.

Ultimately, education was fashioned to suit the colonial project of making the country dependent on the U.S. economically, politically, and culturally even after it was “granted” freedom.

Under a neocolonial state

The formal declaration of independence finally came on 1946, but the policies of the new government would remain bound to U.S. designs through various unequal treaties and agreements. Philippine education became and continues to be a testament of this new neocolonial status.

Fashioned to serve the aims of foreign powers and the demands of the international market, the Philippine educational system became a regular testing ground for World Bank and International Monetary Fund prescriptions and impositions.[10]

This assumed a more brazen form under President Ferdinand Marcos who would subsequently assume dictatorial powers. His regime would reconfigure the educational system to focus on technical and vocational training “to provide the manpower required by foreign investors and their local partners.”[11]

The Marcos-era Education Act of 1982 allowed unregulated tuition increases while his regime’s New Elementary School Curriculum (NESC)of 1983 used World Bank funded textbooks. Marcos revised foreign borrowing rules “for a more extensive funding of educational projects from foreign and external sources.”[12]

The removal of the dictatorship from power did not bode any change for the prevailing orientation of Philippine education. The new president would promise the U.S. government to pay the $26 billion debt accumulated under Marcos never mind that much of it went to the dictator and his cronies’ pockets.[13]

Cory Aquino remained subservient to the dictates of foreign banks and powers, which would attain larger roles in crafting the country’s educational policies. Her regime’s New Secondary Education Curriculumof 1989, for instance, would simply serve as the high school version of Marcos’ NESC.

Philippines 2000 and beyond

The same pattern would continue under Fidel Ramos whose Education 2000 program would direct the reduction of government funding for state universities and colleges (SUCs) in order to make way for higher allocations for foreign debt servicing.

The short-lived Estrada regime would meanwhile form the Philippine Commission on Educational Reform (PCER) which recommended that the “use of large allocations of the government budget for public higher education is perceived to be inefficient and inequitable.”[14]

Some of the proposals of the study, in the main, included the raising of tuition to “realistic levels,” the use of SUCs’ idle assets for commercial purposes, and intensified fund-raising from the private sector.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Long Term Higher Education Development Plan (LTHEDP) would put this direction to its logical conclusion by directing:

• The decrease of SUCs by 20 percent,
• Transforming 20 percent of SUCs into semi-corporatized entities,
• Making 20 percent self-sufficient by selling intellectual products and grants,
• Requiring 50 percent of SUCs to engage in active income generating projects,
• Having 70 percent of SUCs charge tuition comparable to private universities, and
• Involving 60 percent of SUCs into collaborations with big business.

In order to produce a “globally competitive” labor force, the Arroyo government also introduced the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank-recommended “Millennium Curriculum” which emphasized English, Math and Science at the expense of history, humanities and social sciences.

The same perverted logic would form the core of the education policies of the Aquino regime. His Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016 would aim to “Harness private-sector resources in the delivery and monitoring of, social marketing and advocacy for education, especially higher education.”

The implementation of K to 12 would meanwhile take-off where the “Millennium Curriculum” left by creating a new generation of cheap semi-skilled workers who are employable by transnational corporations or qualified for labor exports immediately after high school graduation.

Globally competitive

What has become clear after the end of every administration and the passing of each decade is the way the educational system has been structured to benefit the profit-oriented political and economic interests of foreign and local elites.

Under this setup, the “global competitive workforce” which the educational system seeks to mass produce becomes another fancy name for cheap and docile labor, a youth that can be easily disposed of in transnational corporations in the country or abroad.

Thus, Philippine education is directed towards whatever is the demand in the international market: it was engineering in the 1960s, medicine in the 1970s, computer science and information technology in the 1980s and 1990s, and nursing and caregiving courses in the first decade of the 21^st century.

What the government euphemistically terms “job-skills mismatch” is actually a result of its very own labor export policy and the lack of national industries that can essentially provide job opportunities at home. It is a symptom of an economy that has become overly dependent on foreign economies.

The predominance of the English language in the Philippines is closely linked to the country’s foreign-dominated economy. English, after all, is essential if one pursues a career in call centers or goes abroad. The use of the foreign language is therefore strongly campaigned by the present educational system.

The fining of students speaking in the native tongue in order to promote English has become a common practice in several schools. English is prescribed as the favored medium of instruction even if using native languages is more effective than the use of a foreign one.

Commercialization

One of the clearest manifestations of the Philippine educational system’s colonial orientation is the government’s abandonment of its financial responsibility for education to the public sector through drastic cuts for SUCs and the commercialization of various facets of public education.

This is in line with the dominant neoliberal dogma perpetuated by the U.S. and other world powers, which seeks to reduce government’s role in providing social services and regulating national economies in favor of the free reign of the market. Under the neoliberal doctrine, the only role for government in the economy is the facilitating of the smooth functioning of a market dominated by big business and foreign powers.

In the year 2010, the education budget comprised no more than 11.35 percent of the entire national budget from 30.78 percent at its peak in 1955. The P738 billion principal and interest debt payments in the 2012 budget is three-folds larger than the P224.9 billion education budget.

The results are predictable. Grave shortages of classrooms, desks, teachers, and textbooks persist in both primary and secondary levels while tertiary state school students and their families are increasingly bearing the burden of paying for the cost of education.

From 87.74 percent in 2000, the share of the government in the budget of SUC’s has steadily gone down to 65.58 percent in 2012, forcing school administrations to engage in various income generating projects. This is legitimized by the passage of the Higher Education Modernization Act of 1997 which

• authorizes the Boards of Regents of SUCs to fix tuition and other fee increases,
• directs SUCs to enter into joint ventures with private corporations, and
• mandates the privatization of services such as health, food, security, etc.

The University of the Philippines Visayas, for example, became the most expensive tertiary school in the whole Visayas with P1,000 per unit tuition. Only 13.225% of the student population availed of free tuition for the First Semester of this Academic Year while a combined 55.98% pay P600-P1,000 per unit tuition.

Deregulated private schooling

The situation is, of course, worse in private tertiary schools. After the Education Act of 1982 effectively gave these institutions free reign to increase tuition rates, a series of government guidelines only reinforced this setup where families are held hostage to yearly tuition and other fee hikes.

Under the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) Memorandum 13 Series of 1998, for instance, student consultations for fee increases practically amount to information dissemination by school administrations while miscellaneous fees are not covered under the memo.

Without regulation from government, the average tuition rates in private schools at the national level have increased from P257.41 per unit in 2001 to P501.22 per unit in 2010. Many private colleges and universities have been charging creative and even out-of-this world exorbitant fees such as follows:

• Land Infrastructure Maintenance and Development Fee (University of Cordilleras-Baguio)
• Installment Fee (University of the East)
• Power Charge Fee (Trinity University of Asia)
• Power Plant Development Fee (Miriam College)
• Spiritual Development Fee (St. Paul’s College)

Not surprisingly, private higher educational institutions have made it to the list of top 1,000 corporations in the country, including the Centro Escolar University, Far Eastern University, Manila Central University, Mapua Institute of Technology, and the University of the East.

The top 5 school earners in the country have earned P15.43 billion in gross revenues and P3.45 billion in net income in the past six years. But the experience of the past decades has proven the saying that “one must be willing to pay a high price to attain quality education” to be a fallacy.

The commercialization of tertiary education has not lead to an improvement in its quality. Data from CHEd itself admits that only 100 from among the 1,831 colleges and universities nationwide have adequate facilities. The performance in licensure exams also shows a low 34% average passing rate.

More importantly, because of the higher cost of education, many students at all levels are forced to stop schooling and forgo a brighter future. According to CHEd, for every 100 Grade 1 students only 23 enter college, while only 14 graduate. 

Instrument of reaction

In order for the educational system to reproduce the injustices of the present social order and reinforce the power of the dominant classes in society, education becomes an instrument of reaction. Opposition to the colonial and commercialized orientation of education is met with repression.

The existence of student councils and other kinds of student organizations are prohibited by many school administrations to let their students focus on their “studies.” Fraternities, sororities and especially activist groups are not recognized in many schools.

In other universities and colleges, student councils and other groups are co-opted to become mere satellite-belts that obey every whim of the school administration. Harsh school regulations are put in place to “discipline” students and organizations that are critical of school or government policies. Student publications are meanwhile expected to toe the line or are subjected to

• Harassment,
• Meddling of editorial policies,
• Censorship of editorial content,
• Withholding of publication funds,
• Padlocking of publication offices,
• Abolition of its very existence,
• Suspension and expulsion of student writers, or
• Filing of libel charges against them.

The College Editors Guild of the Philippines has documented 187 such cases of campus press freedom violations in the past year.[15]

Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transsexuals are widely discriminated against and victimized by school rules that repress their sexual orientation and identity – including the holding of “masculinity tests” for male school applicants, the prohibition of cross-dressing, etc.

Some schools are no different from prison houses with heavy police presence that aim to prevent critics of school policies from holding protests. Surveillance cameras are put in place to monitor and control the movement of their students. Student rallies are violently dispersed.

The state itself regularly intrudes in academic spaces with its iron hand through the direct and indirect presence of military forces in the campuses. Actual military detachments are even setup inside the premises of some school campuses, like in UP Mindanao.

Student Intelligence Networks are setup in campuses for the surveillance of student leaders and organizations that are vocal against school and government policies. Witch-hunting is rampant with progressives maliciously maligned as armed communist rebels and subversives.

Ruling classes and ruling ideas

This is, of course, not at all surprising for “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production…” and ultimately “the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”[16]

The interests of this ruling class – the maintenance of the social divide in its favor – are represented through various apparatuses like the educational system “as the common interest of all the members of society… the only rational, universally valid ones.”[17]

Education in this way becomes “the exercise of domination” that aims to indoctrinate its subjects “to adapt to the world of oppression.”[18] Social realities are obscured from the minds of the students. At the same time their capacity for critical thinking is blunted. They are forced to believe that learning is confined to the four walls of the classroom or the limits defined by authorities. Those who propose alternatives are suppressed in various ways.

It is in this way that the Philippine educational system has become colonial, commercialized, and repressive. It is designed to cater to the needs of foreign powers over our very own national development. It has become profit-oriented institutions that sell education as a commodity instead of providing it as a right. The students themselves become commodities that are disposed of according to the needs of the global market. Critical thinking and basic freedoms are curtailed to suppress opposition to this kind of setup.

Education reforms

What we need is a liberatory education that can serve the genuine aspirations of the people. At the very minimum, basic reforms can and must be instituted in the educational system:[19]

• The combined spending for education at all levels must be equal to 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product as mandated by the UNESCO,
• Universal basic education should be provided by doubling the number of the country’s high schools and making preschool free,
• Shortages in the school system should be addressed by rechannelling P115 billion to education from debt servicing, conditional cash transfers, and other questionable allocations,
• Strengthen the teaching of history, society, and culture and  promote the national and regional languages, and
• Explore alternative modes and methods of learning.

The Kabataan Partylist has a legislative agenda that aims to address the  longstanding  ills  of  the  Philippine  educational system while mobilizing the youth in the campuses and  the  streets  to  put  more  pressure  on  government vis-à-vis these issues. Some of our House Bills in Congress include:

• HB 4791: The Anti-No Permit, No Exam Bill, which seeks to end the no permit, no exam policy,
• HB 1962: 6% GDP for Education Bill, which mandates education spending equal to 6 percent of the GDP,
• HB 3708: Tuition Moratorium Bill, which seeks to stop all tuition increases in the next 3 years,
• HB 4287: Tuition Regulation Bill, which seeks to regulate tuition and other fee increases,
• HB 4332: Campus Press Freedom Bill, which seeks to defend campus press freedom, and
• HB 4842: Students Rights Bill, which seeks to institute a genuine Magna Carta of Students.

But piecemeal reforms are not enough. With society continued to be dominated by foreign powers and their local big landlord and comprador partners, Philippine education would remain a commercialized enterprise geared towards exporting cheap labor to the demands of the international market.

Change the system

The struggle for education reforms therefore goes side by side with the task of creating bigger social changes. It is anchored on the struggle to transform an unjust social system. In the long-run, we would like an educational system that is nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented.[20]

Education is nationalist if it is “based on the needs of the nation and the goals of the nation.”[21] As eloquently said by Renato Constantino:

The object is not merely to produce men and women who can read and write or who can add and subtract. The primary object is to produce a citizenry that appreciates and is conscious of its nationhood and has national goals for the betterment of the community.[22]

Education is scientific if it propagates scientific thinking against superstition and subjectivism, integrates theory and practice, facilitates the free exchange and sharing of critical discourses, and contributes to national industrialization and the revival of domestic industries.

Education is mass-oriented if it is valued as a universal right for all. This means free and accessible quality education for all. This also means an end to discrimination on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity, race, among others, and the promotion of a truly democratic culture.

History has proven that our collective action remains our most potent weapon for effecting change. Recent events from the Arab Spring, the European strikes, the campus shutdowns in Chile, to the now global Occupy movement are testaments to its continuing validity.

We can attain a more empowering education for the people only if we overhaul the rotten system and change society itself.

Notes

Mensahe ng Anakbayan para sa Pandaigdigang Araw ng Kababaihan
Marso 2012

Isinilang ang Marso 8, Pandaigdigang Araw ng mga Kababaihan, ng militanteng paglaban ng mga kababaihang manggagawa sa panahon ng matinding krisis at pagsasamantala dulot ng rebolusyong industriyal—ang pagkapanganak ng sistemang kapitalista.

Marso 8 noong unang nagmartsa ang mga kababaihang manggagawa mula sa mga pabrika ng damit sa Europa at Estados Unidos. Kakambal ng mabilis na pag-usad ng teknolohiya upang pabilisin ang produksyon at paglobo ng kapital o supertubo ang sistematikong pagsasamantala sa uring manggagawa. Nagprotesta sila laban sa mababang sahod, 12-oras at ‘di makataong kundisyon sa paggawa, child labor at maging ang kanilang karapatan bumoto, lumahok sa pulitika. Sila’y nag-organisa’t nagtayo ng mga unyon at nagwelga laban sa mga kapitalista.

Read Kababaihan, isabuhay ang diwa ng Marso 8! Makibaka para sa pambansang demokrasya’t kalayaan!

For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be shot.

Transport

The corporal saluted smartly and replied ‘Wieviel Stück’ The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty ‘pieces’ and that all was in order.

Good wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom.

The doors had been closed at once, but the trains did not move until evening. We had learnt of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it at least implied some place on this earth.

Arrival

They did not interrogate everybody, only a few: ‘How old? Healthy or ill?’ And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply.

We had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

Survival

To old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationalist. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos.

On the back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each other.

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months this way.

Primo Levi,
Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity

The English translation of My Father’s Notebook is the only book by Kader Abdolah that I’ve read. The novel is also my first and only encounter with the exiled Iranian writer who now lives in the Netherlands. But the issues Abdolah’s book highlight on life in Iran under the Shah, the heroic struggles of the leftist resistance movement, and the eventual ascendancy of the Islamist mullahs in the power struggle following the revolution of 1979, are all relevant and makes My Father’s Notebook a rewarding read.

The history of Iran, like the history of all hitherto human societies, is a history of the struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited, the dominator and the dominated. Nowhere is this as clear as in that brief period called the 20^th Century when Iran fell in the hands of successive authoritarian regimes – from the British colonizing power to the two Shahs and eventually the Islamist dictatorship. My Father’s Notebook is an attempt at coming to terms with this history.

The narrator Ishmael shifts between an account of a life of melancholia and nostalgia in the Netherlands and memories of his own life and that of his deaf-mute father, Aga Akbar, back in Iran. Ishmael makes use of his father’s indecipherable notebook, which is written in cuneiform, in retracing the past. Being deaf-mute, Aga Akbar developed his own unique system of writing from the ancient cuneiform of the first king of Persia carved on the cave walls of Saffron Mountain which he first visited with his uncle as a child.

Ishmael thus grapples with the recollections of a deaf-mute father who he assisted as personal guide and translator since his childhood – but he never completely understood. His accounts of his father’s notes give the reader a peek of life in the Iranian countryside. Aga Akbar is the illegitimate son of a noble. He serves as a guide to archaeologists visiting the caves of Saffron Mountain for the cuneiforms. He trains to become a carpet mender and becomes the most renowned of menders in his province.

Aga Akbar personally encounters the first Shah, who rides into his village to personally oversee the building of train tracks through the countryside, and for which Aga Akbar and his entire village volunteered. He marries the strong-willed countrywoman Tina, sires 4 children, and eventually moves from the village by Saffron Mountain to the city where his handicrafts skills are rendered useless as he becomes absorbed into factory work. Aga Akbar’s life story eventually intertwines with that of the younger narrator.

Ishmael goes on to study at the University of Tehran but subsequently dropout to pursue full time work as a professional leftwing revolutionary. His party agitates against the Shah, organize a clandestine movement, and wage a guerrilla war with the Cuban Revolution as their model. Of course, they were eventually outmaneuvered by the Imams. But more than the standard academic postcolonial valorization of exile, My Father’s Notebook gives us a glimpse into the lost promise held by the possibility of a genuine revolution in Iran.

This is the tragedy of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After the mobilization of masses of Iranians toppled the authoritarian regime of the Shah, the Islamists led by Khomeini outmaneuvered other democratic, secular, leftwing forces and seized power. The mullahs initiated a counter-revolution that pushed the country in a regressive direction, back towards the restoration of a feudal theocratic rule of which the only thing new is it’s being propped up by the worst modern instruments of state repression.

The outcome of the Iranian struggle thus presents a strong warning about what a defeat for revolutionary left forces could mean. As in Germany and Spain in the 1930s or Chile in the 1970s, where the fascists won the hearts and minds of the petty bourgeois, the Islamists of Iran were able to win over large sections of the rising urban masses and a feudal landlord class that feared the prospects of genuine social revolution and the consequential redistribution of their rural estates.

The novel ends with the escape of one of Ishmael’s comrades from the Imam’s jails, an escape that symbolizes the militancy and indomitable spirit of the Iranian people. The spirit of resistance is still in the air in Iran even under the most repressive conditions, as the frequent outbreak of youth and workers protests in recent years have shown. It is the specter of this rising up of the Iranian people, and not US and Israeli war of aggression against Iranian sovereignty that spells the hope for real liberation of the people of Iran.

This was recovered from some of my old notebooks when I was still a lousy student of literature in the University of the Philippines Visayas.

1. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is often compared to contemporary human sufferings and social ills as embodied by intensifying inequality, exploitation, wars of aggression, economic crisis, political repression, and socio-political chaos. This comes as no surprise. The Inferno, after all, is about those who are excluded from the angelic community by virtue of their sins against the Roman Catholic Church, against the characters who cannot occupy the space reserved for those who people the two other books of Dante’s, The Divine Comedy: the Paradiso and Purgatorio.

2. Inferno begins with Dante entering the outskirts of Hell or the Ante-Inferno where the souls of those who in life became fence sitters in the epic struggle between good and evil are bitten by hornets and attacked by worms as they vainly run against a blank banner. In the lower depths of hell are all the other sinners and evil doers who are punished according to the weight of their wrongdoing. The litany of sins and corresponding punishments goes on to become more gruesome as Dante goes deeper and deeper in hell.

Those who are lustful are swirled in a terrible storm where they commit sexual intercourse forever without the sexual satisfaction. The gluttonous are made to lie in mud and are rained with filth and excrement. The violent are boiled in a river of blood for eternity. The seducers are lashed with whips. The flatterers are dipped in a river of human feces. Those who accept bribes are torn apart by demons. Thieves are placed in a pit of vipers. Falsifiers are infected with diseases. And in the lowest and coldest depths are the betrayers who are subjected to freezing temperatures.

3. But unlike the people supposed to be found in Dante’s hell, not all who are in the inferno of the real world are sinful. Many are in fact innocent. Many are simply hapless victims of the cruel machinations of man-made institutions and natural catastrophes. Those who are abducted by government forces, for example, do not disappear because of any wrongdoing but because of their vocal opposition to the wrongdoings of the government itself. Those who die of natural disasters do not do so because of the sins they’ve committed in their past or present lives. They are simply there when an Earthquake, typhoon, or whatever catastrophic phenomenon strikes.

4. On the other hand, it would seem that even Dante’s own inferno do not only accept sinners. Minos, it seems, also marks those who we would consider innocent from the contemporary point of view. The First Circle of Dante’s inferno, for instance, houses ancient writers and great thinkers who died without being converted to Christianity. Of course, it would be foolhardy to expect Aristotle or Virgil to praise Christ when Jesus has yet to be born during their times. Dante also has a penchant for placing his enemies, like Filippo Argenti for example, in his literary hell.

5. The contemporary quality of Dante’s Inferno can be discerned in the way it is referenced not only in religious or popular cultural discourses but also in artistic literary endeavors and even political causes. The late Russian novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, renowned for his three-volume Gulag Archipelago about life in the labor camps of the former Soviet Union, combines both a literary and political bent in a novel directly alluding to Dante’s Inferno.

Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle is a reference to the first circle of Dante’s hell where the pagan philosophers and writer who did not know Christ were kept. In his novel, Solzhenitsyn compared the situation of arrested technicians and academics in the former Soviet Union to the inhabitants of Dante’s first circle.

Unlike the usual prisoner who is sent to labor camps in the Siberian wilderness, these technicians and academics are made to work on state technical projects, are adequately fed, and enjoy relatively good working conditions. They are relatively better off than the regular prisoner, just like the inhabitants of the first circle who are, despite staying in hell, still more privileged than those trapped in the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno.

6. The geographical division of the world in the last Century into the First, Second, and Third Worlds seems to imitate the religious division of the afterlife as envisioned by Christian discourse and as graphically expounded by Dante into paradise, purgatory, and hell. The First World, of course, must be heaven as the few countries found in this category enjoy economic prosperity and cultural refinement. The world’s billionaires increased number from 793 to 1,011 according to the latest list of billionaires published by Forbes. Of this number, 403 come from the United States. The Second World, those countries found in between the extremes of wealth and poverty, must be purgatory while the Third World cannot be anything else but hell.

Indeed, life in the Third World is hell with the extent of poverty and inequality experienced by the peoples of this part of the world. One only has to look at the Philippines where more than 59 million Filipinos live on less than $2 a day. This is why 10 million Filipinos work outside of the country, why 4,000 Filipinos still leave the country daily to work abroad. And lest we forget, the Filipino migrant workers are but a fraction of more than 200 million migrant workers from the Third World working in the more affluent countries to support their families.

But then again, is it not also that certain portions of the so-called First World and the Second World are also infernos to begin with? Urban ghettos and slum areas are not exclusive to countries from the Third World. Life in the First World is not all that perfect as Hollywood and MTV projects. The experience of Filipino compatriots pursuing the American dream abroad points to the enduring problem of second-class citizenship. Far from being representatives of hell, purgatory, and paradise, it would seem more appropriate to designate the Third, Second, and First Worlds as instances of the different circles of hell as envisioned by Dante.

7. Closer to home, this division among nations between those in the center of the global capitalist system and those in the peripheries is also reproduced in the stratification of the nation’s peoples into those who benefit from the status quo and those who do not. If the more advanced industrialized capitalist nations of the First World exploit those in Third World, then the peoples in the Philippines also experience the same dynamic of the domination of the majority by a few ruling classes. This reality replicates the literary depiction of hell by Dante in terms of suffering.

The peasant class, composing 75 to 80 percent of the population, occupies the bottom of the social pyramid. They might as well occupy the lowest ring of Dante’s inferno with the extent of their sufferings from landlessness, landlord oppression, bogus government agrarian reform programs, and militarization. The working class, with 10 to 15 percent of the population, comes next. Most cannot even avail of a living wage which will allow them to sustain their families. Many do not earn the minimum wage. Workers in export processing zones catering to foreign multinationals are not allowed to organize unions or hold strikes and pickets to advance their rights and welfare.

The professional and intellectual classes, composing the next 8 percent of the population, are not given opportunities in the country and are the first to go abroad for greener pastures. While a negligible local small and medium-scale industrial class cannot compete with large foreign businesses and compradors that have links with transnational corporations. These classes of Philippine society can be said to suffer in the different rings of Dante’s hell while the remaining one percent, the landlords, compradors, and traditional politicians that have linkages with foreign powers are enjoying paradise.

Life for the lower classes is akin to the sinners of Dante’s Inferno while the life of the landlords, bureaucrats, and compradors can be likened to the inhabitants in Paradiso. The only irony is that in the Philippines those in hell are not necessarily sinful while those in heaven are not necessarily angelic. The continuing reality of oppression and exploitation confront us with one thread that unites human societies from the distant past to the present. These very realities convey to us the reality of the dispossessed as the occupants of the real hell of human history.

A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.

The first chapter of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is entitled “I Am A Corpse” and begins with the dead man talking about how he was murdered and thrown to the bottom of the well:

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. Though I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what’s happened to me.

This is the kind of introduction that immediately draws you into the novel’s ensuing narrative. Is it your usual mystery novel in the vein of Sherlock Holmes? Or just another “postmodern” treatise on the inaccessibility of the truth?

It is the year 1591 in Istanbul, Turkey. The Ottoman Empire Sultan Murat III commissions artists to make a book glorifying his life illustrated in the style of the western artists. Unfortunately, one of the artist becomes the corpse that greets us in the first chapter and it is up to the hero Black to uncover the mystery behind the murder, while also pursuing the heart of his master artisan uncle’s widowed daughter Shekure.

We jump from one narrator to another in each chapter from the protagonist Black, his love interest Shekure, his uncle Enishte, the other artists in the workshop, the anonymous murderer himself, a tree, a gold coin, and even a dog. What they reveal is limited by their own vantage point, thus it is only halfway through the narrative before we can make a good guess at the murderer’s identity.

Who among them killed our corpse whose sorrowful missive opened the novel? Our murderer whose identity would not be explicitly revealed until the climax taunts us readers: “Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.”

While the conventions of the 19th century classic mystery are coupled with contemporary metafictional playfulness, there is an altogether different agenda in the novel.

Sultan Murad II at Archery Practice. Huner-nama (‘Book of Skills’). Istanbul, 1584. Hazine 1523.

It is the discussion on art in West Asian Islamic states, that stands out as another function of the novel’s structure of presenting each chapter from a different perspective. For parallel to the build up of suspense are the lengthy and elaborate textual descriptions of visual images, of artworks. Here is the tree speaking:

I was meant to be among the pages of this illustrated manuscript that I sadly heard was completed today. Unfortunately, on a cold winter’s day, the Tatar courier who was carrying me as he crossed the mountain pass was ambushed by thieves. First they beat the poor Tatar, then they robbed him and raped him in a manner befitting thieves before mercilessly killing him. As a result, I know nothing about the page I’ve fallen from.

Thus, alongside the simple interruption of the narrative by intricate verbal depictions of art, the novel also treats us with chapters wherein the subjects themselves – from the dog, the gold coin, the color red, to the horse – speaks to us in one of the many chapters where they serve as the narrator.

Not only is the discourse on art limited to such minutiae. There is also a rich and multifarious discussions on the philosophy of artistic production and the distinctions of artistic practices in medieval Islamic states and the Renaissance-era European fiefdoms.

The best thing about the novel is how the discussion adheres to the truism of how a society’s cultural artifice necessarily arises from the prevailing socio-political setup and ultimately the dominant mode of economic production. Here we are told how artists are tied to specific workshops and how their fortunes are dependent on fierce compeitition and the sponsorship of a lord under the feudal order of the West Asian Islamic states.

In Black’s own testimony, we are enlightened that art then did not simply arose out of the dedication of individual artists for artistic endeavor but is a product of material conditions:

What I did then was to use the money advanced by clients who’d placed manuscript orders in Istanbul to locate miniaturists and calligraphers who were frustrated by the wars and the presence of Ottoman soldiers, but hadn’t yet left for Kazvin or another Persian city, and it was these masters – complaining of poverty and neglect – whom I commissioned to inscribe, illustrate and bind pages of the manuscripts I would then send back to Istanbul.

A miniature from the Walters Art Gallery attributed to the 14th-century workshop of the master Bizhad.

The role of religion as a preserver of feudal relations is put to the fore as we are shown how it adapts artistic paintings, and thereby limits its scope, to some nonindividualistic spiritual paradigm. Art in this context primarily served religious ritual and the artists create exact reproduction of older artworks.. This tradition eschews the concept of style as a way to show off the abilities of the individual artist, which were beginning to emerge in West Europe, particularly in France and in Italy.

The individual style, which marked off a given work from that of others through the signature of the artist, was demonstrated primarily on the portraiture form which glorified the individual subject by painting him in terms of his earthly riches:

In all Venice, rich and influential men wanted their portraits painted as a symbol, a memento of their lives and a sign of their riches, power and influence – so they might always be there, standing before us, announcing their existence, nay, their individuality and distinction.

The emergence of an individual style in Europe was reflective of the beginning of the process of the atomization of the bourgeois class as a result of the inroads of commodity exchange under mercantilism. As Walter Benjamin points out, the Renaissance marked the decline of the ritualistic basis of art.

The more ancient pre-capitalist traditions based on a more collective life gradually make way for the isolated individual, and thus the rise of style and its more personal and individual content. For the artists of the Ottoman court, the paintings of the European Renaissance are viewed with awe or terror:

it isn’t enough that we be in awe of the authority and money of these men who commission the works, they also want us to know that simply existing in this world is a very special, very mysterious event. They’re attempting to terrify us with their unique faces, eyes, bearing and with their clothing whose every fold is defined by shadow.

It is the contradiction between adopting individual style or preserving the age-old traditions that the philosophical debates in the novel basically revolve and upon which the pulse that drives the narrative resides. A mystery, love story, historical novel, and treatise on art all in one book, Pamuk’s My Name is Red is a feast for the imagination. Highly recommended.

In the spring of 1847 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels agreed to join the so-called League of the Just [Bund der Gerechten], an offshoot of the earlier League of the Outlaws [Bund der Geächteten], a revolutionary secret society formed in Paris in the 1830s under French Revolutionary influence by German journeymen – mostly tailors and woodworkers – and still mainly composed of such expatriate artisan radicals. The League, convinced by their ‘critical communism’, offered to publish a Manifesto drafted by Marx and Engels as its policy document, and also to modernize its organization along their lines. Indeed, it was so reorganized in the summer of 1847, renamed League of the Communists [Bund der Kommunisten], and committed to the object of ‘the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the ending of the old society which rests on class contradiction [Klassengegensätzen] and the establishment of a new society without classes or private property’. A second congress of the League, also held in London in November–December 1847, formally accepted the objects and new statutes, and invited Marx and Engels to draft the new Manifesto expounding the League’s aims and policies.

Although both Marx and Engels prepared drafts, and the document clearly represents the joint views of both, the final text was almost certainly written by Marx – after a stiff reminder by the Executive, for Marx, then as later, found it hard to complete his texts except under the pressure of a firm deadline. The virtual absence of early drafts might suggest that it was written rapidly.[i] The resulting document of twenty-three pages, entitled Manifesto of the Communist Party (more generally known since 1872 as The Communist Manifesto), was ‘published in February 1848’, printed in the office of the Workers’ Educational Association (better known as the Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein, which survived until 1914), at 46 Liverpool Street in the City of London.

This small pamphlet is by far the most influential single piece of political writing since the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. By good luck it hit the streets only a week or two before the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, which spread like a forest fire from Paris across the continent of Europe. Although its horizon was firmly international – the first edition hopefully, but wrongly, announced the impending publication of the Manifesto in English, French, Italian, Flemish and Danish – its initial impact was exclusively German. Small though the Communist League was, it played a not insignificant part in the German Revolution, not least through the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–49), which Karl Marx edited. The first edition of the Manifesto was reprinted three times in a few months, serialized in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, corrected and reset in thirty pages in April or May 1848, but dropped out of sight with the failure of the 1848 revolutions. By the time Marx settled down to his lifelong exile in England in 1849, the Manifesto had become sufficiently scarce for him to think it worth reprinting Section III (‘Socialistische und kommunis- tische Literatur’) in the last issue of his London magazine Neue Rheinische Zeitung, politisch-ökonomische Revue (November 1850), which had hardly any readers.

Nobody would have predicted a remarkable future for the Manifesto in the 1850s and early 1860s. A small new edition was privately issued in London by a German émigré printer, probably in 1864, and another small edition in Berlin in 1866 – the first ever actually published in Germany. Between 1848 and 1868 there seem to have been no translations apart from a Swedish version, probably published at the end of 1848, and an English one in 1850, significant in the bibliographical history of the Manifesto only because the translator seems to have consulted Marx – or (since she lived in Lancashire) more probably Engels. Both versions sank without trace. By the mid-1860s virtually nothing that Marx had written in the past was any longer in print.

Marx’s prominence in the International Working Men’s Association (the so-called ‘First International’, 1864–72) and the emergence, in Germany, of two important working-class parties, both founded by former members of the Communist League who held him in high esteem, led to a revival of interest in the Manifesto, as in his other writings. In particular, his eloquent defence of the Paris Commune of 1871 (commonly known as The Civil War in France) gave him considerable notoriety in the press as a dangerous leader of international subversion, feared by governments. More specifically, the treason trial of the German Social-Democratic leaders, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and Adolf Hepner in March 1872 gave the document unexpected publicity. The prosecution read the text of the Manifesto into the court record, and thus gave the Social-Democrats their first chance of publish- ing it legally, and in a large print run, as part of the court proceedings. As it was clear that a document published before the 1848 Revolution might need some updating and explanatory commentary, Marx and Engels produced the first of the series of prefaces which have since usually accompanied new editions of the Manifesto.[ii] For legal reasons the preface could not be widely distributed at the time, but in fact the 1872 edition (based on the 1866 edition) became the foundation of all subsequent editions. Meanwhile, between 1871 and 1873, at least nine editions of the Manifesto appeared in six languages.

Over the next forty years the Manifesto conquered the world, carried forward by the rise of the new (socialist) labour parties, in which the Marxist influence rapidly increased in the 1880s. None of these chose to be known as a Communist Party until the Russian Bolsheviks returned to the original title after the October Revolution, but the title Manifesto of the Communist Party remained unchanged. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917 it had been issued in several hundred editions in some thirty languages, including three editions in Japanese and one in Chinese. Nevertheless, its main region of influence was the central belt of Europe, stretching from France in the West to Russia in the East. Not surprisingly, the largest number of editions were in the Russian language (70) plus 35 more in the languages of the Tsarist empire – 11 in Polish, 7 in Yiddish, 6 in Finnish, 5 in Ukrainian, 4 in Georgian, 2 in Armenian. There were 55 editions in German plus, for the Habsburg Empire, another 9 in Hungarian and 8 in Czech (but only 3 in Croat and one each in Slovak and Slovene), 34 in English (covering the USA also, where the first translation appeared in 1871), 26 in French and 11 in Italian – the first not until 1889.[iii] Its impact in southwestern Europe was small – 6 editions in Spanish (including the Latin American ones); one in Portuguese. So was its impact in southeastern Europe (7 editions in Bulgarian, 4 in Serb, 4 in Romanian, and a single edition in Ladino, presumably published in Salonica). Northern Europe was moderately well represented, with 6 editions in Danish, 5 in Swedish and 2 in Norwegian.[iv]

This uneven geographical distribution did not only reflect the uneven development of the socialist movement, and of Marx’s own influence, as distinct from other revolutionary ideologies such as anarchism. It should also remind us that there was no strong correlation between the size and power of social-democratic and labour parties and the circulation of the Manifesto. Thus until 1905 the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), with its hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters, published new editions of the Manifesto in print runs of not more than 2,000–3,000 copies. The party’s Erfurt Programme of 1891 was published in 120,000 copies, while it appears to have published not many more than 16,000 copies of the Manifesto in the eleven years 1895 to 1905, the year in which the circulation of its theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, was 6,400.[v] The average member of a mass Marxist social-democratic party was not expected to pass examinations in theory. Conversely, the 70 pre-Revolutionary Russian editions represented a combination of organizations, illegal for most of the time, whose total membership cannot have exceeded a few thousand. Similarly, the 34 English editions were published by and for the scattering of Marxist sects in the Anglo-Saxon world, operating on the left flank of such labour and socialist parties as existed. This was the milieu in which ‘the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto’.[vi] In short, the readers of the Manifesto, though they were part of the new and rising socialist labour parties and movements, were almost certainly not a representative sample of their membership. They were men and women with a special interest in the theory that underlay such movements. This is probably still the case.

This situation changed after the October Revolution – at all events, in the Communist Parties. Unlike the mass parties of the Second International (1889–1914), those of the Third (1919–43) expected all their members to understand – or at least to show some knowledge of – Marxist theory. The dichotomy between effective political leaders, uninterested in writing books, and the ‘theorists’ like Karl Kautsky – known and respected as such, but not as practical political decision-makers – faded away. Following Lenin, all leaders were now supposed to be important theorists, since all political decisions were justified on grounds of Marxist analysis – or, more probably, by reference to the textual authority of ‘the classics’: Marx, Engels, Lenin and, in due course, Stalin. The publication and popular distribution of Marx’s and Engels’s texts therefore became far more central to the movement than they had been in the days of the Second International. They ranged from series of the shorter writings, probably pioneered by the German Elementarbücher des Kommunismus during the Weimar Republic, and suitably selected compendia of read- ings, such as the invaluable Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels, to Selected Works of Marx and Engels in two – later three – volumes, and the preparation of their Collected Works [Gesamtausgabe]; all backed by the – for these purposes – unlimited resources of the Soviet Communist Party, and often printed in the Soviet Union in a variety of foreign languages.

The Communist Manifesto benefited from this new situation in three ways. Its circulation undoubtedly grew. The cheap edition published in 1932 by the official publishing houses of the American and British Communist Parties in ‘hundreds of thousands’ of copies has been described as ‘probably the largest mass edition ever issued in English’.[vii] Its title was no longer a historical survival, but now linked it directly to current politics. Since a major state now claimed to represent Marxist ideology, the Manifesto’s standing as a text in political science was reinforced, and it accordingly entered the teaching programme of universities, destined to expand rapidly after the Second World War, where the Marxism of intellectual readers was to find its most enthusiastic public in the 1960s and 1970s.

The USSR emerged from the Second World War as one of the two superpowers, heading a vast region of Communist states and dependencies. Western Communist Parties (with the notable exception of the German Party) emerged from it stronger than they had ever been or were likely to be. Although the Cold War had begun, in the year of its centenary the Manifesto was no longer published simply by communist or other Marxist editors, but in large editions by non-political publishers with introductions by prominent academics. In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document – it had become a political classic tout court.

It remains one, even after the end of Soviet communism and the decline of Marxist parties and movements in many parts of the world. In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly within reach of a good library, can have access to it. The object of a new edition is therefore not so much to make the text of this astonishing masterpiece available, and still less to revisit a century of doctrinal debates about the ‘correct’ interpretation of this fundamental document of Marxism. It is to remind ourselves that the Manifesto still has plenty to say to the world in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Eric Hobsbawm,
Introduction to the 2012 Edition of Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto

Notes

[i] Only two items of such material have been discovered – a plan for Section III and one draft page. Karl Marx–Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (London 1976), pp. 576–7.

[ii] In the lifetime of the founders they were: (1) Preface to the (second) German edition, 1872; (2) Preface to the (second) Russian edition, 1882 – the first Russian translation, by Bakunin, had appeared in 1869, understandably without Marx’s and Engels’s blessing; (3) Preface to the (third) German edition, 1883; (4) Preface to the English edition, 1888; (5) Preface to the (fourth) German edition, 1890; (6) Preface to the Polish edition, 1892; and (7) Preface ‘To Italian Readers’, 1893.

[iii] Paolo Favilli, Storia del marxismo italiano. Dalle origini alla grande guerra (Milan 1996), pp. 252–4.

[iv] I rely on the figures in the invaluable Bert Andréas, Le Manifeste Communiste de Marx et Engels. Histoire et Bibliographie 1848–1918 (Milan 1963).

[v] Data from the annual reports of the SPD Parteitage. However, no numerical data about theoretical publications are given for 1899 and 1900.

[vi] Robert R. LaMonte, ‘The New Intellectuals’, New Review II, 1914; cited in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day (London 1987), p. 56.

[vii] Hal Draper, The Annotated Communist Manifesto (Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, CA 1984), p. 64.

Left to Right: Etta Rosales (Former Akbayan Rep. and Present Commission on Human Rights Director), Mar Roxas (Department of Interior and Local Gov Director and Liberal Party Chief), Risa Hontiveros (Former Akbayan Rep. and Senatorial Candidate under Liberal Party Coalition), President Noynoy Aquino.

The petition filed by youth activist group Anakbayan at the Commission on Elections against Akbayan! Citizen’s Action Party’s participation in the party-list elections and the series of spectacles arising therefrom has helped much to place Akbayan’s so-called progressive credentials into public scrutiny.

Anakbayan asserts that Akbayan should be disqualified from the party-list race because several of its officers and congressional nominees have been appointed in high-level positions in the Aquino regime, thus belying Akbayan’s claim of being marginalized and underrepresented[i] and making a mockery of a system established to empower the voiceless in the elite-dominated Congress.

But instead of replying squarely to this valid questions, Akbayan instead resorted to ad hominem attacks against its critics, calling them “KSP” or attention seekers and “inggit lang” or envious of Akbayan. This came to a head when an October 16 Akbayan press conference ended in the forcible manhandling by Akbayan personalities of Anakbayan members who were simply protesting Akbayan official’s recourse to malicious red-baiting against their critics rather than answering the questions about their being an administration-backed party-list.

According to Akbayan and its allies, their critics do not know its history and track record “of championing the marginalized and underrepresented within and outside the halls of congress.” Anakbayan, they further said, was giving the Left a “bad name” for engaging in “sloganeering” and “hooliganism.” But the critical-minded know all too well the real role played by Akbayan in leading the oppressed and exploited masses astray from the path of militant struggles by peddling the illusion of changing the bankrupt social system from within.

Akbayan’s Progressive Pretensions

The terms leftist and rightist arose as categories in the political spectrum when the victorious French Revolution that overthrew the abusive feudal monarchy established a national assembly. Seated on the left side of this assembly were the peasants, workers and intellectuals who pushed for more radical social transformations.[ii]

Seated on the right were the royalists who opposed more changes to secure their wealth and power. Nostalgic for their lost privileges, they dreamt of restoring the old order. In short, leftists are for social transformation while rightists are for the defense of a rotten social system. Based on this elementary distinction, it becomes clear that Akbayan cannot be anywhere on the left.

Akbayan has only managed to sustain its progressive pretensions by using reformist rhetoric and by issuing customary press statements feigning opposition to some government actions while remaining utterly subservient to its Malacanang backers. Its party platform talks of fighting corruption, pushing for decent work and sustainable livelihood, agrarian reform, more market-labor regulations, education for all, housing for all, and calling for greater State responsibility over the healthcare system to ensure health as a right, among many others.

But the track record of Akbayan would show a complete absence of spine and strong opposition whenever these platforms they purport to advocate are threatened by the anti-people policies of the Aquino regime. For a so-called “leftwing” party, it is exceptional for its deafening silence on the standard issues of the day from the almost weekly demolitions of urban poor families to make way for big business establishments, the intensifying U.S. military intervention, and the rising oil prices, basic commodities, and tuition and other school fees.

This is not surprising considering Akbayan’s virtual endorsement of the Aquino regime’s neoliberal Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016, its anti-globalization rhetoric notwithstanding. Akbayan has become the government’s adjunct in implementing programs that temporarily allay the people’s suffering but without addressing the roots of their poverty. It vigorously pushed for the dole-out Conditional Cash Transfers which gives out short change to poor families using funds loaned from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Not only is the program prone to corruption and patronage, it does not affect any qualitative change in beneficiaries who remain poor and jobless.

Parroting the Aquino regime, Akbayan also promotes the so-called “sin tax” that aims to raise revenues by further burdening the masses with new taxes in the guise of going against tobacco corporations. With debt servicing getting the lion’s share of the national budget, there is no assurance that this tax measure will proceed to the improvement of health services. Its reproductive health advocacy is anchored on a population control agenda which echoes the government line of blaming population growth for its own failure to address the people’s needs. Like the watered down cheaper medicines act that Akbayan also supported, this plays to the hands of pharmaceutical companies salivating for superprofits from contraceptives.

Meanwhile, the strong posturing against former Chief Justice Renato Corona and Chinese intrusion in South China Sea was meanwhile calculated to assuage growing criticisms against “noynoying” or President Aquino’s inaction on gut issues like oil price hikes, rising hunger, and intensifying poverty.

To the pleasure of big landlords, Akbayan even pushed for the extension of the bogus Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program with reforms, which in its four years of implementation which has not only completely failed to dismantle the land monopoly in the countryside but further strengthened it.

Even Hacienda Luisita, owned by the president’s own family, is still not redistributed despite a Supreme Court order and decades of militant peasant struggle. The Aquino regime, with Akbayan as its main partner in pushing for agrarian development, has the worst record in the post-Marcos era in terms of land distribution.

And when Akbayan tried to ride along the strong public opposition of the Cybercrime law, President Aquino’s defense of the inclusion of online libel in the legislation was enough to tone down their criticism to that of just “frowning” followed by a token “encouragement” of the President to change his stand.

Akbayan’s Historical Revisionism

Akbayan Representative Walden Bello continues to cry wolf, wildly claiming that the move to have Akbayan disqualified is a sequel to the alleged threat to his life stemming from a diagram (misrepresented by Akbayan as a hit-list) on the disposition of former leftists who bolted out of the revolutionary movement published in the official paper of the Communist Party of the Philippines in December 2004.

But the opposite is in fact the case. With former Akbayan Rep. Etta Rosales as Commission on Human Rights Chief, the number of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights violations continue to rise as they join other repressive state apparatuses in maliciously labeling government critics as communist rebels to be “neutralized.” By red-baiting its critics, Akbayan has become a willing tool of the Aquino regime’s counterinsurgency campaign Oplan Bayanihan which does not make any distinctions between red fighters of the Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary movement and civilian activists of the legal Left mass movement.

This propensity for distortion and its pseudo-progressive credentials makes Akbayan the most perfect accomplice in the government’s dirty war against its critics. This is not the only time that we see the deceptive disregard of Akbayan for historical facts and the truth for the sake of scoring propaganda points.

Akbayan boasts of being the first progressive group to participate in the first party-list election in 1998 while condemning the left (which it deridingly tags as extreme to paint itself as moderate) for allegedly failing to do the same because of its “clinging to its ‘boycott election’ policy.” This demagogic line is pursued to tie down together two revisionist accounts of the Philippine left’s history. Firstly, that the left missed out of the final push against the Marcos dictatorship (the 1986 EDSA popular uprising) because of its boycott policy during the mid-80s snap elections. Secondly, the dogmatism of the left alleged to have caused this error” still persists in the present.

The Philippine left already repudiated the ‘boycott error’ as a tactical blunder as early as 1987 and even fielded eight senatorial candidates under the erstwhile Partido ng Bayan in that year’s elections. Far from missing the EDSA uprising that drove the dictator Marcos out of power, the left formed a significant chunk of the critical mass in EDSA and the main force that marched to Malacanang from EDSA. The left also organized the mass actions in the cities and towns outside of Metro Manila that neutralized pro-Marcos forces in the regions.

The left may have entered the party-list arena after Akbayan did in 1998. But this is because it had to reconsolidate itself after the schemes of former leftists (who would bolt out of the left to form Akbayan) failed to wreck the movement from within by spreading the line that electoral participation is the only way for the left to remain relevant in the post-Marcos period. It is exactly this mindset of quick gains and easy spoils that denigrated the importance of solid organizing, arousing, and mobilizing of the people for social change rather than piecemeal reforms that easily end in an unprincipled collaboration with the ruling classes.

Following this logic, militant struggles are displaced by a politics of pushing for minuscule reforms in the existing system that all-too-often becomes a thinly disguised veneer for the begging for crumbs from the corrupt order – a trend proven in practice starting with the Ramos regime which they harped would industrialize the country[iii], up to the Estrada and Arroyo regimes which they only abandoned after public outrage swelled. This opportunist line led these former leftists to team up with various stripes of social democrats, NGO racketeers, and opportunists hungry for positions in government to form Akbayan.

The New Labor Aristocrats

Akbayan talks of advancing “participatory socialism and participatory democracy” and changes that are “humanist, socialist, democratic, pluralist and gender sensitive.” But whoever speaks of supporting the oppressed and exploited people in words but serves their class enemies in deeds can never be considered a genuine progressive.

Back in the 1920s, the Russian revolutionary leader V.I Lenin described the phenomenon of how union leaders and “socialist” members of parliament in the European and American capitalist powers have become a “labor aristocracy” who are bribed by their ruling classes out of the super-profits plundered from the colonies and semi-colonies. These co-opted labor leaders “who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook” became “real  agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism.”

In the same way, Akbayan’s leaders has served to function as present-day “labor aristocrats” who hunger for positions in government as well as rackets and projects from foreign NGOs on the backs of their marginalized mass base. By merely aiming to get positions in government for the purpose of instituting “reforms” without transforming the fundamental economic and political relations that underlie the rotten social order, Akbayan has become a favorite of those in power who give it favors to prettify their oppressive rule and displace critical dissenters from the mainstream.

It boasts of achieving concrete and immediate gains that have “beneficial results for consolidating the people’s strength, weakening elite rule and advancing the people’s welfare.” They blame the left for lengthening the people’s sufferings because of its alleged dogmatic fixation with an oppositional stance that could have been better spent dealing with the class enemy.

But how can Akbayan “establish building blocks of radical reforms” if it avoids confronting head on US imperial domination over the country’s politics, economy, and culture? If it is silent on the unequal agreements that continue to keep the country import-dependent, export-oriented economic, notwithstanding lip service to sustainable development? If its notion of agrarian reform is within the framework of maintaining a backward and foreign-dominated economy? If its congressmen joins in rubber stamping a budget that prioritizes foreign debt servicing and military spending over education and other social services? If it apologizes for the government’s neoliberal policies while professing to be against it?

Some pundits have mistakenly depicted the debate between Akbayan and Anakbayan as a conflict within a fractious Philippine left. Because of the presence of some former leftists in the Akbayan camp, the current dispute is sometimes perceived as a spin-off of the reaffirm versus rejectionist split of the 90s. However, a deeper look would show that the Philippine left has gone beyond the narrow terms of that era with both the underground and legal left successfully rectifying various errors while the other factions of the rejectionists further splitting into smaller and smaller sects or getting co-opted by the state, thus slipping into irrelevancy as real agencies for social change.

We no longer have the clash of contradicting modes of analyses of Philippine society and the corollary opposing methodologies as to how to change it; the Akbayan versus Anakbayan standoff has become part of the larger struggle between the broad national democratic movement on the left and the reactionary state on the right, with Akbayan acting as the latter’s special arm to confuse the people.

Social Democratic or Social Fascist?

Part of Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s Manifesto of the Communist Manifesto includes a survey of the various socialist and communist literatures of their day that served to put blinders on the workers instead of illuminating them in their militant and revolutionary struggles.

The conservative socialists push for the improvement of the material conditions of existence of the working classes through reforms “that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.” Believing that socialism no longer “express the struggle of one class against another,” the ‘true’ socialists strove to represent “not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class… who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”

These two pseudo-progressive strands of Marx and Engel’s own era seems to be echoed by today’s self-proclaimed “moderate leftists,” thereby upholding the cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s observation of how every move to go beyond Marxism typically regresses to pre-Marxist positions. Consumed by disgust for the “reductionism” of the class struggle, they eulogize the figure of the good citizen who goes beyond the “vulgar” material interests and advocates the inclusion of the marginalized to the political arena by appealing to the “citizen action, and community cooperation for the common good.”

But action speaks louder than words. While Akbayan’s ruling “social democratic” counterparts in Europe use the entire machinery of the state to repress the mounting mass struggles against austerity cuts and unemployment, Akbayan is satisfied with red-baiting that sets the stage for the illegal arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of critics of the Aquino regime.

The social democratic workers movement at the turn of the 20th century still had Marxist pretensions of following a peaceful road to socialism through participation in the parliamentary elections under the tutelage of the Second International and the ideological guidance of the likes of Bernstein and Kautksy. [iv]

Fast-forward to the post-World War period, the social democrats became contented with the management of a social welfare state. Dropping the explicit demand for the replacement of capitalism with a socialist alternative, they enjoyed the comforts of simply hiding the reactionary order behind a more human face.

In more recent years, social democratic parties in Western Europe have become the main exponents of neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and deregulation including budget cuts, austerity measures, bailouts of big corporations and other anti-people measures.

The name social democratic that these bogus reformers have claimed for themselves thus becomes a misnomer in the face of a fascist streak garbed in socialist rhetoric. In this sense, the term social fascist should be a better description for Akbayan and its social democratic ilk. As the crisis of the world capitalist system and the domestic ruling order pushes the masses to militant resistance, Akbayan’s reactionary essence and social fascism will become even more difficult to conceal. [v]

Notes

I was able to watch the film Chakravyuh, but minus the subtitles. Without the dialogue, I did not understand the minute details and nuances. But the scenes and the action were enough to give you an idea of what it is all about in general. I have to give the people behind the film the credit for the attempt at portraying one of the most important revolutionary movements in the world today, the Indian Maoists. More popularly known by the name Naxalites from the town Naxalbari in West Bengal where the first Maoist-inspired peasant revolt flared up in1967, they have been declared by the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the single most serious internal threat to national security.

Applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete conditions of the Indian social condition, they contend that the Indian people has no choice but to wage a new democratic revolution with the strategic line of protracted people’s war. This is in response to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Indian society, which is ruled over by several imperialist powers through the conduit of the big comprador, landlord and bureaucrat capitalist classes. Because the ruling 1 percent use repressive violence to preserve their wealth and power, the masses must wield revolutionary violence against them.

There are over 30 groups that have been waging people’s war in various parts of India. In 2004, two of the largest Maoist groups, the Maoist Communist Centre of India and the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) [People’s War Group] merged to become the CPI (Maoist). They are said to be active in over 200 districts in ten states of India. Called the “red corridor,” this region in the east of India with significant Maoist presence includes parts of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

Unlike most other stories where the socio-historical element simply occupies the backdrop to the main family drama, romance, or personal vendetta, in Chakravyuh social reality is directly intertwined to the focal narrative of its protagonists.

In broad strokes, the plot centers on the friendship of Adil and Kabir. Adil is a police officer assigned to an outlying province where the Maoists are active. He launches search and destroy operations against the revolutionaries but ends up getting ambushed and almost dead. Then Kabir comes and promises to help Adil by infiltrating the Maoists for intelligence. He gets the trust and confidence of the revolutionaries, but just as he was already succeeding, reaching the top hierarchy of the movement, he gets a change of heart.

The brutality of the Indian state against the peasants and avidasis, who are forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for large-scale mines and export processing zones of foreign corporations, leads him to decide to fully embrace the revolution. The film concludes with a dramatic confrontation between Adil and Kabir and ends with a note on the continuing armed struggle of the Indian Maoists.

The usual melodrama, as expressed in the typical Cain versus Abel best friend fights best friend plot, in this mainstream Indian film is expected. But the twist in Chakravyuh is its providing the perfect example of class love trumping over personal friendship for in the end Kabir chose to serve the masses rather than be subservient to a friend who is a tool of the class enemies.

But despite the stark presentation of Indian realities, from the viciousness of the fighting, the plight of the adivasis and the rural poor, the doing of government officials and the police forces of the bidding of big business, and so on, there are significant misconceptions of the internal dynamics and organizational principles of the Indian Maoists that seriously hamper the film’s realism.

We see this in the way, for example, the Naxalites immediately recruited Kabir to their group, without adequate background check. This disregards the discipline of revolutionary groups that throughout history have been particularly strict about letting in undesirable elements. But strictly following real life would have made the film’s story in its present form simply untenable. A more realistic version would have been to make Kabir a radical from the very beginning. Then again, that would pose the problem of why would a revolutionary cooperate with the police chief, even if he were his childhood best friend?

Anyhow, it is interesting to note how reactionary governments have always used this method of infiltration to try to sow confusion and defeat revolutionaries. One amusing case for example is that of Roman Malinkovsky who joined Lenin’s inner circle and represented the Bolsheviks in the Duma while at the same time receiving pay checks from the Czar as a government spy.

Another problem in the film is its sensational depiction of revolutionary violence. An informer captured by the guerrillas has his ear cut off before being chopped off with an axe. A Maoist official who is caught pilfering the movement’s finances is executed by firing squad using excessive rounds of AK-47 fire. Excesses are bound to happen in any revolutionary mass movement whose constituents have been the victims of centuries of accumulated structural violence. But revolutionaries are also bound by rules of conduct in their waging of armed struggle, and this is expressed in the following of the rules of war and international humanitarian law and respect for human rights.

This is a given in a just war waged for the oppressed and downtrodden masses as is reflected in Mao’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention which govern the bearing of revolutionary soldiers. The Three Main Rules of Discipline are as follows: “(1) Obey orders in all your actions.(2) Don’t take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses. (3) Turn in everything captured.” The Eight Points for Attention are as follows: “(1) Speak politely. (2) Pay fairly for what you buy. (3) Return everything you borrow. (4) Pay for anything you damage. (5) Don’t hit or swear at people. (6) Don’t damage crops. (7) Don’t take liberties with women. (8) Don’t ill-treat captives.”

One more amusing part appears near the end when police suddenly appeared in a village where Juhi and her comrades were hiding. When the police started to take the children hostage, Juhi surrendered herself to them in exchange for the children’s freedom. Even more comical is Kabir’s reaction when he learned of Juhi’s arrest, running madly across forests from the village to the police station and single-handedly killing the police guards and freeing her. What is so ludicrous in these scenes is the individualist solution shown by revolutionaries steeled in the guerrilla struggle. Mao’s injunction against unnecessary sacrifices, exhortation for militant collective solution to people’s problems, and the strategy of letting a stronger enemy force punch into thin air (retreating as the enemy advances and harassing them when they rest) are forgotten.

Nevertheless, all in all, Chakravyuh is a very good film. I wonder why Filipino mainstream or indie film makers can’t produce something similar with the Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary armed struggle as the primary context? While there are Filipino films that touch on the matter, they either focus on legal mass struggles (Sister Stella L), human rights abuses (Orapronobis, Dukot), or the Martial Law experience (Dekada 70, Ka Oryang, Sigwa). Being a Bollywood film, Chakravyuh has the added come on of having all those singing and dancing. It’s refreshing to see a Maoist propaganda team, complete with a hammer and sickle flag, going among the masses and explaining the revolution to them with all the festive dancing and singing.

Chakravyuh also refers to a defensive military formation in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Shaped like a blooming lotus when viewed from the air, the formation aims to lure attackers into penetrating inside where they find it difficult to break out. Like the military formation from which the film is named after, this is a conflict that no social force in India can escape. Despite the film creator’s limited knowledge of the Maoist movement and need to play along with mainstream sensibilities hampering the film’s realism, it ultimately succeeds in portraying the glaring injustices and inequality of Indian society that necessitates the waging of armed revolution.

Painting “The Dodo & Given”, by G. Edwards (1759)

Today is said to be the end of world according to some interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar. That we will be facing Armageddon today has become such a cliche that it now comes with a complete commercialized package from a Hollywood flick to various survivalist guidebooks. What form this end for humanity would take, be it in the apocalyptic sense of the New Testament or some transcendent New Age spiritual renewal, is anybody’s guess.

Nonetheless, this occasion should serve as the perfect time to reflect on another ending that also captured the imagination of many. Around 400 years ago, before the present brouhaha about Mayan prophecies of doom, the people of Europe precipitated the end of the world for the Dodo, that big, weighty, flightless bird of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The adage “dead as a Dodo” has also become a cliche. But it carries more weight than today’s sensationalized non-event.

Before the coming of the first human explorers in the sixteenth century, the Dodo lived a peaceful existence in Mauritius for centuries. Without any predators in the island, the Dodo did not develop fear nor did it need any form of self-defense. With powerful beaks that cracked open nuts for food, the Dodo sat on top of the island’s food chain.

This seemingly idle life came to an abrupt end with the arrival of wave upon wave of European Conquistadores as the newcomers hunted down the hapless, defenseless bird by the hundreds. They also brought along animals like rats, dogs, pigs, and monkeys that destroyed the environment, attacked the poor bird, stole their eggs, and competed for limited natural resources.

The Dodo became extinct less than a century after its “discovery” by the European colonizers. However, it also left an indelible mark on the European imagination. It is this tale of how the Dodo came to occupy such a prominent space in Western culture that takes up Clara Pinto-Correia’s attention in Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo.

Pinto-Correia begins the book by looking at the widespread fascination with strange creatures as found in the maps, myths, and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans up to literary works like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels, a fascination which set the stage for the attention that the Dodo would later on attract from its 16th Century Euroepan discoverers.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot on Mauritius. They called the fat clumsy bird that did not run away from men “Doudo,” which means crazy in the archaic Portuguese of the sixteenth century. The Dutch, when they arrived in the island, called it “Walckvogel” or disgusting bird because its flesh was tough when cooked and eaten.

Perhaps one of the events that secured the Dodo’s place in human history is its having been brought into the ports and royal courts of Europe before its extinction. This way, the Dodo became the topic of various 16th century paintings. It aroused the curiosity of Kings and Emperors, and its remains made their way in museums.

The Dodo later on became the center of debates by taxonomists and naturalists who argued about its classification and characteristics. Carolus Linnaeus gave the Dodo the scientific name of Didus ineptus, meaning “clumsy dodo.” The German Paul Heinrich Gerhard Moehring meanwhile gave it the name Raphus cucullatus, which meant “cuckoo-like bird with far rump.”

In the 19th Century, the Dodo also starred in the scholarly debates surrounding the notions of evolution and extinction. Of course by this time there was no Dodo left to be examined live. In the end, Pinto-Correia concludes that while the biological Dodo lived and died in Mauritius it is nonetheless “literally the most amazing bird ever to have been born in Europe.”

The Europeans were the dodo’s first known visitors. It was christened by Europeans. It was described in words and printed in woodcuts by Europeans. It was even brought live to Europe, so that more Europeans could see it and immortalize it in paintings. It was hunted and eaten by Europeans, and it was in Europe that its swift extinction first raised eyebrows.

Cultural critic Frederic Jameson once observed how today it is easier to imagine the end of the world through alien invasions and natural cataclysms than to envision the collapse of the dominant ruling system. The curious case of the Dodo can help us reflect on the untenability of the dominant social order which is based on insatiable consumption, plunder, and exploitation. The Dodo’s extinction was after all very much a result of colonial expansion and primitive accumulation that laid the foundation for the present world capitalist system.

Despite several reservations—especially, my lack of blind faith in Mao’s China—I sympathize with the Maoists. They present themselves as revolutionary socialists, in opposition to the Soviet Union’s revisionism and the new bureaucracy created by the Trotskyists; I share their rejection of these approaches.  I am not so naive as to believe that they will bring about the revolution in the near future, and I find the “triumphalism” displayed by some of them puerile. But whereas  the entirety of  the  traditional Left accept s the system, defining themselves as a force for renewal or the respectful opposition,  the Maoists embody a genuinely  radical  form of  contestation.

Simone de Beavoir,
All Said and Done

Maoism is not as cool in the West nowadays as it was when Mao Zedong was still alive. The People’s Republic of China has turned capitalist with Mao’s death and lost much of its thunder as a friend of the oppressed and exploited. Today, Maoism seems to be alive and kicking as a real threat to the powers that be only in the weakest links of the imperialist chain, like in India, Nepal, and the Philippines.

Back in the 1960s, French intellectuals fell in love with Mao.[i] Thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and even Julia Kristeva were swept in a global wave of upheavals by youth, students, workers, peasants, and other Wretched of the Earth sparked by the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and pledged their allegiance to Maoism in various ways.

This is the story of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

Although Wolin is thoroughly against Marx, Lenin, and Mao, the book nonetheless gives a comprehensive account of the strengths and  problems of the French Maoists. The book also attempts to show the various forms of involvement and engagement by important French thinkers with Maoism.

Wolin’s narrative is clearly one of sin and redemption. It is about how these intellectual’s overcame their infatuation with Mao. Marxism, party politics, and the dictatorship of the proletariat are after all, for him, the embodiment of pure evil. But setting aside such a questionable agenda, the book also offers glimpses, tidbits, and anecdotes about this brief Maoist chapter in French intellectual history.

Sartre’s Maoist Commitment

Jean-Paul Sartre is popular as an existentialist philosopher and writer. His novels and polemical tracts are known to tackle the dilemmas of individual choice, freedom, and existence amidst the perceived absurdity of life and all its sufferings and predicaments.

But Sartre is also known as an advocate of social engagement among writers, as he wrote in the rambling prose of What is Literature. In this respect, he is renowned as an active supporter of varied causes such as the Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Sartre even wrote the Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he endorsed revolutionary violence as liberating in the face of the objective violence of the ruling system. All this as Sartre avoids any deeper commitment to organizations or parties that espouse these ideas.

What is not very well-known is Sartre’s dabbling with French Maoist militants. Sartre joined them in their protest actions, assumed the titular editorship of several of their newspapers, and publicly gave away copies of these banned Maoist papers on busy Paris boulevards.

With this dalliance with the youthful Maoist radicals, Sartre stood against the idea of the progressive intellectual as existing apart and above the masses and instead asserted that s/he should live among them, learn from them, and fight alongside them in their struggles.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir defying a government ban by illegally distributing La Cause du Peupl e in the spring of 1970. Photo: Gilles Peress. Source: Magnum Photo.

Foucault’s Revolutionary Zeal

Still another French thinker whose Maoist entanglement is not as renowned as his other achievements is Michel Foucault – more popular for making postmodernist micropolitics of everyday life fashionable as opposed to the supposedly “dogmatic” Marxist revolutionary orthodoxy.

For a time, Foucault joined the prisoner advocacy network GIP or the Groupe d’Information surles Prisons. The GIP functioned as a support group for detained Maoists, many of whom were leading hunger strikes in prisons all over France.

Foucault became deeply involved with Maoists who provided guidance for the direction, the meeting places, and the mimeograph machines for the pamphlets of the GIP. It was in the GIP that he adopted the Maoist method of work of social investigation to gather information on French prison conditions.

In this framework, it is not enough to conduct academic book-study, to confine oneself with “textuality.” More important is the act of actually immersing oneself among the masses and learning directly from them through social practice.

It was during this time that Foucault developed a powerful critique of the justice and prison system. In a celebrated debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued that it is “an idea invented and put into practice in different societies as an instrument of a particular political or economic power.”

It is clear that we live under a dictatorial class regime, under a class power that imposes itself with violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional… [When the proletariat triumphs] it will exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody over the class it has supplanted.

But Foucault’s petty bourgeois class origins also brought with him impetuous anarchist tendencies. While agreeing with the fact that the existing court system manifests the interests of the ruling classes, Foucault also opposed the creation of people’s courts on the basis of proletarian class interests.

Thus, even as Foucault called for the destruction of the bourgeois judicio-legal system for its bourgeois class biases, he also contested the idea of establishing a new proletarian legality that for him would only exercise formal restrictions on spontaneous popular will.

Foucault’s celebration of violent excess did have a good insurrectionist edge to it as this absorbed him in a series of pitched battles with the riot police in student barricades at the Vincennes: “Daily protests and riots regularly interrupted classes and the administrative functions of the university.”

Sartre and Foucault protesting the treatment of Arab immigrants at the Goutte d’Or quarter in Paris, November 1971. Photo: Gérard Ai mé. Source: Magnum Photo.

The Curious Case of Tel Quel

A more curious case of sinophilia involved the cultural journal, Tel Quel. Representing itself as the avante garde of the French intellectual scene, Tel Quel is prominent for championing first the Noveau Roman of Alain Robe-Grillet and subsequently the Formal Structuralism of Roland Barthes as well as the obtuse Deconstructionism of Derrida.

However, it was also this aspiration to be always at the forefront of the latest intellectual chic that led it to a more political direction when its editors sensed the militant wind blowing towards the direction of the May 1968 uprising. To capitalize in the rising political consciousness and indications of an approaching upheaval, Tel Quel ironically aligned itself with the PCF.

This would prove a big blunder as the bourgeoisified PCF would be at the tail of the rising youth and peoples movements of the 1960s rather than at its head. It was thus that Tel Quel finally settled into its bizarre “Chinese” mode.

This curiousity can be discerned, for instance, in the way Tel Quel contributor and eventual Post-Structuralist Superstar Julia Kristeva claimed that the foot binding of Chinese women was a manifestation of their power rather than of extreme feudal oppression!

Ultimately, this mania for the Cultural Revolution by the Tel Quel editors seemed more superficial rather than touching the essence of socialist revolution and construction in Mao’s China.

Althusser and Badiou

Another strange case is Louis Althusser’s having been inspired by Maoism. While he is an avowed Marxist, his formal membership in the Soviet-backed French Communist Party or the PCF prevented him from expressing this influence openly.

This is true especially after the Sino-Soviet split wherein the Chinese Maoists rebuked the “modern revisionism”[ii] of the former Soviet Union.

Althusser was able to get around this bind by contributing an anonymous essay to an ENS student publication special issue on the Cultural Revolution. His 1962 essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” meanwhile set out to tackle Mao’s treatise “On Contradiction” without Mao’s name ever appearing anywhere in the article.

This way, Althusser engaged with Mao without running afoul PCF officials. Nevertheless, this still represented a compromise with the blatant opportunism of the PCF and its Soviet masters. It is this conciliatory attitude that led many of Althusser’s students, who unable to clearly demarcate between modern revisionism and revolutionary thought, to break away from the Marxism altogether.

But one of Althusser’s students, unlike his erstwhile colleagues, unequivocally took up Maoism. Alain Badiou was one of the founders of the Union des Communistes Francais Marx-Leninistes or the UCF-ML, which criticized the other Maoist groups’ loss of ideological anchor and slide into micropolitics.

End of the Maoist Episode

Many of the intellectuals who became infatuated with the Maoist fad in the 1960s would eventually fall out of love as new fads became the sensation.

The youthful French Maoists suffered from weaknesses, thus the debacle of their almost missing the May 1968 uprising (because of the initially incorrect sectarian line that it cannot be supported because of its student rather than working class leadership). [iii]

Meanwhile the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent capitalist restoration in the People’s Republic of China as well as the continued degeneration of the Eastern European Soviet revisionists led many petty bourgeois intellectuals astray from the path of revolutionary change.

A defeatist outlook thus clouded the abundant optimism of the 1960s. Postmodernism became the new “IN” as many of these very same intellectuals who embraced Mao now castigated class analysis, the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Marxism as oppressive, totalitarian, and evil.

Ironically, many of those who took up the banner of Maoism misrepresented the Cultural Revolution as a revolt against the party, taking it as a cue to discard collective endeavors challenging the entire rotten ruling order in exchange for a politics of identity and everyday life.

The call to replace the system with socialism leading into communism is devalued to a mere championing of alternative lifestyles. Issues of homosexual and women oppression are isolated from the larger context of their emergence in a class society.

This one-sided relegation of politics to the microscopic level at the expense of a larger view – as particularly apparent in Foucault and his ilk – soon enough fell into the pessimistic conclusion on the absence of any real alternative to the world capitalist system.

But the promise of the May 68 uprising is still there waiting to be unlocked. Its failure to culminate into a full blown social revolution, rather than a manifestation of the impregnability the dominant social order, is simply a function of the absence of a genuine revolutionary vanguard.

What is to be done, as Badiou’s UCF-ML would postulate but subsequently failed to put into practice, is “to form a party for the sake of making the revolution, in order that it is not only the weather that is stormy, but us.”

As global capitalism drowns in ever-worsening crisis, this conclusion is as true today as it was in the 1960s.

Žižek’s idealistic political philosophy that apparently endorses revolutionary terror stands side by side with a generous use of counterrevolutionary clichés when discussing actual revolutionary experiences or contemporary events.

A “radical” who chooses to close his eyes to prevailing social conditions is only delusional. A “radical” who proves incapable of arriving at the roots of the fundamental problem is a charlatan. But a “radical” who markets utopian fantasies and reactionary fallacies as revolutionary is a dangerous demagogue.[1] In the US-based online forum Kasama Project I was criticized for writing a supposedly “wooden critique” of Slavoj Žižek.[2] Singled out as an example of a captive of “theories of orthodoxy,” I was chastised for being blind to the “contribution of theory produced by people like Žižek.”[3] Apparently, some fellows in the Kasama Project took offense to my calling “comrade” Žižek an apologist of the ruling order.[4]

But is there anything wrong with criticizing this so-called “Academic Rock Star” for his whimsical pronouncements on the nature of the world capitalist system? Are assertions of the supposed “total failure” of 20^th Century revolutionary experiments now beyond reproach? Is this not the same kind of “unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking)” that Žižek himself complained about in reference to the liberal dread of the so-called “totalitarian threat”?[5]

In some of his works, Žižek – following Alain Badiou – has insisted on the “eternal” Idea of Communism, namely “strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people.”[6] Following his very own injunction for such a politics, should we not take Žižek to task for statements that promote wrong readings of the present conjuncture and misleading assessments of the great revolutionary upheavals of the past?

While it may indeed be more fruitful to read Žižek as a philosopher that can provide an unorthodox account of consciousness via a reworking of the notion of ideology through Lacanian psychoanalysis,[7] would it do to simply leave him to present himself as a worthy “radical” even as he rehashes some of the vilest anti-communist propaganda and propagate pessimism and defeatism?

One of the charges levelled against me in the Kasama Project is my clinging to Lenin’s theory of imperialism as opposed to Žižek’s own formulations. Changes in the way the globalized capitalist order is organized, particularly “the increasing integration and penentration [sic] of capitalism,”[8] has supposedly made Lenin’s prognosis of imperialism as the highest and last stage of capitalism obsolete.

At first glance, it would seem that I am indeed “uncritically upholding everything about the past,” dogmatically clinging to an outmoded conceptual framework that I use to bludgeon new thinking and more up to date analysis of the present situation, including Žižek’s. After all, the world capitalist system has passed through various changes since the death of Lenin.

Žižek’s Multinational Capitalism

In “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,”[9] Žižek presents the world capitalist system as having gone beyond imperialism with its opposition between imperialist countries on the one side and the subjugated colonies and semi-colonies on the other side.[10] For Žižek the entire world has become the colony of multinational corporations: “there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company.”[11] He makes this argument in order to provide the basis for his corollary point that “the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism.”[12]

While it is not directly stated in Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, the same premise informs his characterization of the slum dweller in the book as living in blank spots “from which the state has withdrawn its control.”[13] The rise of a global urban poor “excluded” from the so-called “normal functioning of capital” is presented as the consequence of the new dynamics of multinational capital.

Of course, this argument is offered as his own sequel to the old Western Marxist fixation with the search for the new revolutionary subject that will replace the working class after it supposedly failed to deliver the promised revolution envisioned by Marx. For Žižek, “the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises.”[14]

But in his 2009 response to the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2008, which continues today as “the worst economic depression since the Great Depression,”[15] Žižek reverts to the more “old-fashioned” idea of the US and European powers keeping developing countries “in a state of  postcolonial  dependence” through the International Monetary Fund-World Bank structural adjustments.[16]

For sure, he makes this contention in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce in order to make a case for the introduction of his own brand of “communist utopia” as an alternative to the subjugation of the underdeveloped countries in the world capitalist peripheries to the whims of “market fluctuations” as a result of their full integration into the global market.[17]

Is Imperialism Passé?

First, it is interesting to catch a glimpse of the same Žižek who declared “Whatever I say, you can make me say the opposite!”[18] in these passages where he tackles the nature of the capitalist order. Often fanciful, this is symptomatic of the way Žižek superimposes the imperatives of an eclectic metaphysical dialectic robed as “a blizzard of ideas” over an actual analysis of concretely existing conditions. It simply varies according to the “philosophical” provocation that Žižek wants to emphasize in a given text.

Nonetheless it is easy to see that it is not merely a case of Žižek simply blurting out “stupid shit” about the nature of contemporary capitalism “for shock value.” Žižek’s interview with Ahmed and Cutrone wherein he states that the whole world has become “colonies” of a multinational capital that is not anymore connected to any national base[19] simply rehashes the pronouncement he makes in his “primary texts.” I singled out this interview because Žižek’s views about the world surpassing the stage of imperialism are quite simply crystallized in a brutally intense fashion in this particular piece.

But is Lenin’s theory of imperialism really passé? Writing in Zurich in 1916, Lenin defined imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism, the highest and last stage of capitalism. In this era, monopolies have fully dominated the economy, politics, and the entire social field of the wealthiest capitalist nations. The crisis of overproduction in these imperialist centers has reached gargantuan proportions that it can only be alleviated through “the oppression and exploitation of other nations and peoples abroad through the export of surplus products and surplus capital.”[20] The nations and peoples of the world have become divided between a few imperialist powers on the one side and many colonies, semi-colonies, and dependent nations on the other side.

But the rise of imperialism, Lenin noted, is also the death knell of the world capitalist system which has already reached its moribund stage. By intensifying the basic contradictions of capitalism, imperialism ushers in a period of never-ending inter-imperialist rivalries, wars of national liberation, and revolutionary upheavals. It is, as Lenin declared, “the period of the eve of the socialist revolution.”[21]

There would be no big debate about the first two characteristics of imperialism outlined by Lenin about the domination of monopolies and the emergence of finance capital.[22] Are these observations not truer today than it was when Lenin was still alive? If anything the massive rise of an enormous speculative economy and the rapid development of information and communication technologies have only made these features of contemporary monopoly capital all the more intense.

The contentions would come with Lenin’s definition of the third, fourth, and fifth features of contemporary capitalism, namely the export of capital by the monopoly capitalist states to the backward nations, the economic division of the world by international monopolies, and the completion of the territorial division of the whole world by the imperialist powers.

Imperialist “Globalization”

As opposed to the abovementioned analysis, many trendy “radicals” agree with the popular concept of “globalization” as a supra-class and universal process of inevitable flattening of the world into a “global village” governed by a borderless and stateless global capitalist octopus through transnational corporations and multilateral agencies like the UN, IMF-WB, and WTO.[23] But is this really the case? Are we now really seeing the homogenization of the world capitalist system with its collection of a few monopoly capitalist powers and a far larger majority of dependencies and semi-colonies into a single seamless international capitalist mode of production operating at a truly global scale?

By the end of the 19^th century, free competition capitalism has transformed into monopoly capitalism. The economic division of the world was achieved mainly in the form of cartels, organizations, agreements, and partnerships of the most powerful monopolies. Direct colonial subjugation of the backward nations was the preferred mode of the territorial division of the world.

This arrangement was eventually replaced by the rise of the multinational corporation (MNC) as the new form by which the world is divided economically by the international monopolies after the Second World War. This came alongside the use of neo-colonialism as the imperialist response to the powerful national liberation movements that defeated old-style direct colonialism. Instead of directly subjugating them, the imperialist powers keep backward nations as semi-colonies that are indirectly dominated politically, economically, and culturally despite formal trappings of independence.[24]

The crisis of overproduction has constantly fired the struggle to re-divide the world among the imperialist powers as in the First World War and the Second World War in the first half of the 20^th Century and after this, the Cold War between US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. However, in the mid-1980s, the collapse of the revisionist states and the success of neo-colonialism in subverting many movements of national liberation led to a condition where the monopoly capitalists on a grand scale have united against the oppressed peoples and nations of the world.

This led directly to the present period of imperialist globalization[25] marked by the ascendancy of neoliberal market fundamentalism as the dominant economic paradigm. With the fall of the former Soviet Union, the US has emerged as the sole world superpower that functions in the main “to guarantee, with armed forces, the reproduction of the world capitalist system.”[26]

Nevertheless, the national character of monopoly corporations and banks persist as the imperialist powers continue to reinforce their own economic domination, compete with each other, and struggle to economically re-divide the world through the agency of these multinational firms. MNCs destroy the national industrial base of other countries, avail of cheap labor that can be relocated at the flick of the finger once wage levels increase, while keeping the knowhow and core processes of the latest high-technology advancements in their own home countries.[27]

The ravages of the Great Depression of the 1930s led to the rise of the welfare state as a means of containing the working classes in the metropolitan centers. Against this, the neoliberal doxa that rose to prominence in the mid-70s and 80s orders the reduction of the role of the government to that of the pure ground zero level of reproducing the conditions for the consolidation and expansion of private property, free markets, and free trade.[28] Social services like education and health are cut down while government interventions to increase wages or control prices in favour of the toiling majority are proscribed – all in accordance with the neoliberal tenet teaching that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions.[29]

But notwithstanding these neoliberal “reforms,” the nation-state continues to be central to the reproduction of capital. In fact, the states in the imperialist centers now encompass even wider tasks in the management of the economy for the interests of monopoly capital. The only place where this does not seem to hold true is in the backward nations wherein the “states were radically weakened and… were subdued to become more and more open, and almost without any state mediation”[30] as a result of rapacious neo-colonialism.

Far from simply disappearing, the monopoly capitalist state continues to play a decisive role in ensuring the steady flow of superprofits from the global peripheries to the metropolitan centers by repressing social movements, instituting programs favourable to the wealthy, reinforcing the military-industrial complex, and as we saw in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, “bailout” the monopolies from difficulties which they find unable to manage by themselves.[31]

The existence of the UN, IMF, WB, WTO, and so on does not at all mean the elimination of national loyalties or the end of monopoly rivalry between competing imperialist powers since these multilateral agencies are precisely controlled by the imperialist states according to their relative strengths and at the expense of the rest of the world.[32] These global institutions are the deadly weapons used by the imperialist powers to retain their domination wherein “the process of deepening international economic integration actually increases some aspects of fragmentation and inequality between nations.”[33]

Economic policies imposed on the backward nations as conditionalities for the renegotiation of loans and official aid “transforms countries into open economic territories and national economies into ‘reserves of cheap labor and resources.”[34] Far from homogenization, the main trend is towards the worsening of uneven development under the world capitalist system:

So far, without losing their national basing and instrumentation of their states, the monopolies have “globalized” most such aspects as finance capital, trade and the use of high-tech communications rather than productive capital. There is no such thing as the limitless internationalization of the capitalist mode of production as to dissolve the far more numerous semifeudal economies and the lesser number of dependent capitalist economies and the so-called newly-industrializing economies.[35]

Indeed, under a world capitalist system beset by an ever-worsening crisis of overproduction, the monopoly capitalists cannot expand their markets without “concurrently undermining or destroying the domestic productive base of developing countries, – i.e. through the disengagement of domestic production geared towards the internal market.”[36] As Panitch and Gindin points out, the imperialists have “used their advantages in new sectors of production, as well as in research and development, design, marketing, business services, and finance, to sustain their overall place in the global hierarchy”[37]:

Despite the enormous volume of manufacturing production taking place in [the “Third World”] by the first  decade of the twenty-first century , the advanced capitalist countries, with one-sixth  of the global population, still accounted for over 70 percent of world manufacturing production  by  value, and  over  60  percent  of  the  value  of manufactured  exports. Most MNC production and sales still took place in the developed world, which in 2007 was still the recipient of 70 percent of FDI.[38]

The export of surplus capital and the placing of the backward countries in the orbit of international capital, Lenin perceptively anticipated, do not improve their forces of production to the level of making them potential competitors. Foreign direct investments are at the outset predicated on the prevention of a backward country’s full development into a national capitalism. The export of capital is “utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalist…”[39]

“Ultra-Imperialism” Revisited

The concept of “globalization” as promoted by the imperialists, the multinational firms and banks, bourgeois academicians, and today’s trendy “radical” intellectuals is but a rehash of Karl Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism” which postulated “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals.”[40] In essence, this “ultra-imperialism” thesis glosses over the fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalism and misrepresents imperialism as a benevolent force that brings industrialization to the backward nations.

In fact, present-day imperialist globalization is characterized by the intensification of the same lust for domination that characterized the rudimentary monopolies and finance capital from the time of Lenin. Far from peacefully transforming the entire world into industrialized urban enclaves, imperialist globalization has only hastened the concentration of capital in a limited number of industrial capitalist cores while destroying the forces of production in the rest of the world in order to cope with the ever worsening crisis of overproduction.[41]

For sure, the astronomical expansion of the speculative economy, the enormous growth of the service sector, and rapid advancements in information technology has modified the way imperialism operates today. In fact, finance capital has reached an unprecedented level of concentration that is perhaps unimaginable during Lenin’s day. This has as its corollary the rise of a “casino economy” that is propelled by “the ups and downs of the speculative gambling in financial instruments, a sector of the economy that is no longer reflective of the real economy.”[42]

Yet a more meticulous investigation of present-day capitalism would show that changes in its particular forms and methods has not actually led to a transformation of its general content as imperialism, which essentially remain the same. We are still in the era of imperialism at the turn of the 21^st Century with the US remaining the most powerful military superpower and the main enemy of all the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world. The weakening of US power due to the sheer insolubility of the severe economic crisis suggests a turn towards a multipolar world and a resumption of more intense inter-imperialist rivalry.[43] But the imperialist system will not collapse by itself unless it is smashed to pieces by a victorious proletarian revolution.[44] As the Indian revolutionaries stress:

The worst impact of imperialist globalization is on the backward countries of the world thereby intensifying the contradiction between imperialism and the people of the backward nations and countries of the world. It is this contradiction that continues to be the principal contradiction in the world arena with the backward countries being the storm centres of the world revolution.[45]

In short, the Kautskyites work precisely to prevent such an upheaval from happening by peddling “a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism…”[46] By embracing this thesis of a transnational capitalist mode of production, a “global state,” or any such variant, they are floating the illusion of the impossibility of radical social change by the toiling masses in the backward nations. By accepting such a proposition, it is only a matter of time before overtures are made to the powers that be in the guise of fine-tuning strategy and tactics.

The experience of the Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary movement in the 1980s proves to be instructive here. A wavering in the analysis of the dynamics of imperialism led to some elements within the movement to imagine that the US-Marcos dictatorship has developed the Philippine forces of production to an extent that it has shed off its backward, foreign-dominated, agrarian and essentially semi-feudal character to become semi-capitalist or even industrial-capitalist already. Forgetting the fundamentally rapacious and parasitic character of the imperialist system, they fancied that foreign direct investments by monopoly capital in the country have led to the industrialization and the extensive urbanization of the country.[47]

This subjectivist misreading of the objective situation prevailing in the international and national field was used to push for “Left” opportunist lines of premature urban insurrectionism and military adventurism and Right opportunist lines of purely legal struggle and reformism as opposed to the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside wave upon wave in a protracted people’s war.[48] These grave errors led to serious setbacks and immense disorientations. It was only the launching of the Second Great Rectification Movement from 1992 to 1998 that thwarted the total disintegration of the revolutionary movement and its recent revitalization and resurgence.

Indeed, the objective appraisal of the imperialist system, of its fundamental contradictions and how it would continue to sink into even greater crisis and hence spark militant and revolutionary struggles on an ever wider scale is one of the bases for the confidence of the Philippine revolutionary in not only defeating the Oplan Bayanihan[49] counter-insurgency campaign of the US-Aquino regime but more importantly in advancing the people’s war to a new and higher phase from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate within the decade.[50]

Against Empty “Radical” Rhetoric

Indeed, it is of great importance for all partisans of radical social change the world over to stand for active ideological and political struggle against incorrect views and counter-revolutionary remarks. Avoiding this, as the great revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung saw, “stands for unprincipled peace” and only gives “rise to a decadent, philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration…”[51]

Žižek is exemplary of the currently fashionable petty bourgeois obsession with wishful thinking about “eternal communist Ideas,” “communist hypotheses,” and “communist desires” as one form of response to the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system. What we have in Žižek’s concept of revolution is the taking of categories from psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy followed by the superimposition of these eclectic notions on readings of concrete social conditions or phenomenon:

In place of the economic contradictions that force changes in capitalist relations of production, Žižek emphasizes an ideological impasse or double bind from which escape is only possible through a violent “passage à l’acte,” that is, a destructive or self-destructive outburst through which one attempts to break out of a restricted, unbearable situation.[52]

Following this logic, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is conceived as an eternal Idea that “survives its defeat in socio-historical reality” and “haunts the future generations” with the spectre of recurrence.[53] But what seems like a spirited defence of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is actually a bankrupt rehashing of the idealist notion of the material world and historical experiences simply as the concrete embodiment of an “absolute idea.”

On the other hand, Žižek also endorses the slander about Mao’s Great Leap Forward supposedly “causing the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries” in order to paint Maoist China as the realization of the “industrial production of corpses.”[54] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s biography of Mao which forms the basis of this fantastic account is, of course, a complete hoax refuted even by bourgeois scholars who are unsympathetic to Mao.[55]

To argue that it is not a matter of stand but of an “uncomfortable style of writing” is to forget about the dialectical relation between motive and effect. Claiming that his intentions are good but his mode of expressions leads to a bad turn out is to forget that the question of effect is in fact already a question of stand. As Mao points out: “A person who acts solely by motive and does not inquire what effect his action will have is like a doctor who merely writes prescriptions but does not care how many patients die of them.”[56]

We have already noted Žižek’s apologia for imperialism before.[57] We have also seen how he explicitly judges the socialist revolutions in Mao’s China and the former Soviet Union under Stalin as purely negative episodes: “The lessons are only negative: We learn what not to do.”[58] This goes to show that Žižek’s idealism in his theoretical edifice is complemented by an aversion for the revolutionary upheavals of the past Century and present-day revolutionary movements in more practical discourse.

Žižek’s idealistic political philosophy that apparently endorses revolutionary terror stands side by side with a generous use of counterrevolutionary clichés when discussing actual revolutionary experiences or contemporary events. In short, what we have in Žižek is the shunning of scientific analysis, of historical materialism, of social investigation and class analysis to uphold a nebulous but “hip” philosophizing that is presented as a “fresh,” “non-dogmatic,” and “creative” application of Marxism.

But if what we aim for is the overthrow of the present ruling order then what is needed is a real understanding of the historical circumstances and characteristics of the present juncture. What is needed are not “conceptions of justice and injustice held by an armchair philosopher” but “a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.”[59]

For this we need to grasp firmly Marx and Engel’s summation of the proletarian dialectical materialist vantage point, its extension to the study of society and history as historical materialism, and its application to the study of political economy. We need to identify the contours of imperialism as defined by V.I. Lenin and how its particular features continue or cease to operate into the present era.

Regardless of Žižek’s seemingly “revolutionary” phraseology that calls for a demystification of violence[60] and an open endorsement of “concrete terror,”[61] we must as Lenin warns remain wary: “judge people, not by the glittering uniforms they don or by high-sounding appellations they give themselves but by their actions and by what they actually advocate.”[62]

Nguyen Van Thieu had constructed himself a worthy Presidential Palace set in the middle of a great park in the center of Saigon, with a vast ballroom, a swimming pool, game salons, a cinema, and a complex of halls for appropriate occasions. His furnishing it with plush and rich textiles, marble, and rare woods, with polished and heavily carpeted interiors, with lacquer panels and overstuffed couches, created a mood he thought essential. His own office was a vast chamber with a throne-like chair behind a huge desk. His private apartment was installed around a lush garden set deep into the interior of this massive edifice. For all practical purposes, on the morning of April 30 the palace was the symbol of all that was left of the American effort that had begun twenty years earlier and consumed the lives and commitments, emotions and existences, of millions of people. South of Saigon, in the Mekong Delta, the remnants of the Republic of Vietnam’s armies were surrendering and disintegrating to local National Liberation Front units, sometimes several guerillas capturing hundreds of superbly equipped soldiers. At 10:15 [Duong Van] Minh broadcast a cease-fire to his own forces, urging them also to remain in their positions and asking the Communists to do the same until there was a discussion of the orderly transfer of power. It was a surrender, but scarcely an unconditional one which acknowledged the reality of the battlefield. Minh and his cabinet then repaired to Thieu’s palace and waited.

Thieu was in Taiwan; the Americans were on aircraft carriers heading toward the Philippines. As the first units of the People’s Army of Vietnam entered the city, they confronted sporadic shooting and wiped out a few pockets of resistance, and a team of three tanks went straight to the palace Thieu had built. By this time the entire nation knew the end was imminent. The radios had ceased to operate, and for several hours the city was suspended between the old order and the new. The tanks reached the place, which was undefended, and, after smashing through the huge iron grill protecting it, sped up the vast lawn to the broad stairs. A soldier with a Provisional Revolutionary Government flag ran to a balcony, euphorically waving it back and forth, and then raised it up a flagpole at about 11:30 AM. He and a comrade next searched the rooms and quickly found Minh and his cabinet seated around a table, silent. No one moved. One soldier stood guard while the other ran to find his officers. When a political cadre arrived, Minh declared, “We have been waiting for you so that we could turn over the government.” “You have nothing left to turn over,” he retorted, “You can only surrender unconditionally.” Minh immediately went to the radio station and did so.

The Vietnam War had ended.

Gabriel Kolko,
The Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience

Note: This is a talk I gave to campus journalists of the University of the Philippines system during a Conference of the UP Solidaridad in UP Visayas Miagao, Iloilo last May 16, 2013.

When Pixel Offensive posted a status update discouraging his readers from blaming the masses for disappointing election results, the Facebook meme page got some affirmations and violent reactions.

There are those who still blamed the ignorance of the masses, saying “most voters are stupid and they get stupid lawmakers and leaders.” Some called for the education of the masses. Others blamed the vote-buying and violence by those in power for making elections a mere illusion for the majority.

One of the more perceptive comments said that voting changes nothing: “People are not elected to political office to change things, they put there to keep things the way they are.”

This is an example of the power of social media or web 2.0 as it used to be known at the turn of the 21^st Century. Unlike web 1.0 of the 1990s which akin to TV, traditional print, and broadcast media consisted mainly of static Internet pages fed to its audience, social media enables users to generate content themselves.

Who among us here have Facebook accounts? Twitter? Uploaded YouTube videos? Edited Wikipedia entries or tinkered with Google Maps? You are not alone. It is not without reason that we have been called the digital generation.

We Filipinos are the biggest users of Twitter in August 2012. We also send an average of 1 billion text messages daily. Filipinos has the highest internet usage in Asia with the Internet World Statistics saying that 32.4% of the population having internet access.

Social media and imperialist globalization

We are all familiar with buzzwords such as “immaterial labor,” “information hi-way,” and “virtual economy” which make it seems that the success of dot com companies like Google and Facebook was simply a matter of taking advantage of the potentials of the World Wide Web. Innovative entrepreneurs simply have to cash in.

But in fact their success depended mainly on the existence of material infrastructures like research labs, physical servers, computer networks, and business process outsourcing sites and offices that any ordinary internet user cannot possibly possess.

Capitalism which began with free competition eventually led to the triumph of big enterprises over small ones, and hence the concentration of production in the hands of big monopolies in the advanced capitalist countries at the turn of the 20^th Century.

To avert crisis in their domestic economies with too many products that the majority of their own people cannot possibly consume, the industrial powers of Europe and North America completed the territorial division of the rest of the world among themselves. These countries became colonies and semi-colonies as the dumping ground of surplus capital and manufactured goods and a source of cheap labor and natural resources. This system of monopoly capitalism is what is classically defined as imperialism.

A socialist bloc led by China under Mao and Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin as well as widespread national liberation struggles in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria, and other parts of the world posed a powerful challenge to the exploitative and oppressive world imperialist regime.

But the complete restoration of capitalism in these countries in the late 1980s due to intense military pressure and economic sabotage from the capitalist powers as well as internal weaknesses led to the present juncture where imperialism has spread its tentacles in almost all corners of the world under the banner of “globalization.”

The rise of the use of social media can be contextualized in the rapid development of information and communication as a major component of “imperialist globalization.” The widespread dissemination of social media, mobile phones, and other information and communication technologies are promoted as part of this globalized system’s neoliberal drive for quicker profit and accumulation of capital through faster financial speculation and economic transactions.

It compliments the dynamic of concentrating of wealth in the hands of the multinational corporations and big bankers in the metropolitan centers. It serves as another means for the propagation of consumerist lifestyles, middle class aspirations, technological determinism, and unbridled individualism to the peoples of the world.

Potentials, limits, and dangers of social media

But like everything in this world, social media also had the unintended consequence of giving ordinary people a weapon to unmask the half truths and lies peddled by the ruling order and the mainstream corporate media to legitimate their rule. Social media has become a novel tool to expose social injustices, oppression, and exploitation, to mobilize for causes, and organize resistance.

Here in the Philippines we’ve all been acquainted with the way social activists have adeptly utilized social media to advance a diverse set of causes from the opposition to environmentally-destructive mining, the campaign to end violence against women, and demanding respect for human rights.

To highlight the abduction of activists by military forces, human rights advocates campaigned for Facebook users to remove their profile pictures during the International Day of the Disappeared last August 30, 2012. The massive actions against the cutbacks on the budget for state schools also popularized planking as a form of protest.

Meanwhile, social activists also coined and caused the term “noynoying,” which literally means do-nothing, to trend to expose the Aquino regime’s inaction on the people’s urgent demands from ending tuition increases, oil price hikes, among others. The combination of online outrage and on the ground protests also nailed the coffin on the draconian Cyber Crime Law.

But despite its potentials, social media is also fraught with limits that prevents freedom of expression advocates and social activists from relying solely or primarily on it for their work. The Global Voices Advocacy tracked 371 cases of threatened or arrested bloggers, including 3 in our country. Websites that are critical of ruling regimes are regularly blocked.

Online freedom of speech is suppressed once it becomes too threatening to those in power. Citizen media are monitored, intimidated, harassed, and put under arrest. Social media accounts are effective tools for electronic surveillance with its wealth of raw data about vocal critics of government policies and programs.

Mobile phones can pinpoint the locations of activists. The list of friends and photos uploaded on Facebook provide precise information on their networks. Tweets and status updates can provide the latest information on their whereabouts.

But more than this, the rise of social media has gravely affected the way we perceive the world and become socially aware and involved in politics. Instead of providing a locus for people’s empowerment it has for the most part become a “weapon of mass distraction.”

Rather than encouraging social involvement, it is capturing people’s energies and diverting it to mundane concerns from worshiping showbiz stars, criticizing another country, or promoting charity or some other “harmless” advocacies like tree plantings or coastal cleanups. And as the recently concluded elections show, this includes bashing scions of political dynasties that are seen as threats to the ruling party.

If in the past, we judge something as true if we see it with our own eyes today we only believe it if it can be searched in Google. The danger of relying on social media as our only window to the world is epitomized in an uncanny case involving Google maps:

As of late 2009, Google Maps users in China saw the area marked as part of Tibet; those in India still saw it designated as part of India. Google Maps applied the same treatment to disputed areas of the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, which have majority Muslim populations and have been claimed by Pakistan since the two nations were divided in 1947. [1]

2013 election circus and social media

The problem with what is now criticized as “clicktivism” or the relying on online petitions and Facebook causes to forward advocacies is hindered by two major factors.

First, traditional politicians simply hire public relations teams to handle their social media accounts rather than interacting their with their constituents. Second, limited internet penetration and access to hi-tech gadgets prevents advocates from reaching a large number of people with your message.

Those in power would rather saturate social media with their own message to drown out critics rather than addressing criticisms raised online:

Rather than responding to messages sent by activists and critics, they counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping that sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their contributions dominance or stickiness. [2]

The partial results of the 2013 mid-term elections highlight these limitations of social media as a tool for promoting changes in the real world in a glaring way. Despite efforts at maximizing social media for raising voters awareness and holding intelligent debates, the elections at all levels were still dominated by the same political dynasties who represent big business and landlord interests.

Those who featured well in alternative surveys and online discourse in social media like independent Senatorial candidate Teddy Casino and even traditional politicians like Dick Gordon and even Liberal Party lapdog Risa Hontiveros of Akbayan have all trailed in the actual results. Meanwhile, Nancy Binay who is a perennial target of bashing many social media users for her alleged lack of credentials as a senatorial candidate has ended with one of the highest number of votes.

Ultimately, old-school 3G technology that is, “guns, goons, and gold” still proves to be more decisive in winning elections than hi-tech social media. The entrenched patronage system, the monopoly of wealth and violence by the ruling elites, vote-buying, intimidation and harassment, as well as the use of government machinery by the ruling party were still the key to victory rather than the viral discourse in the virtual world.

For the majority of the people, elections as a “democratic exercise” of the right to vote the country’s leaders has been limited to choosing once every three years who from among the ruling elites will oppress them with anti-people laws, policies, and programs the rest of the years.

In this circus, even the party-list system which was supposed to be a concession by the ruling system to the marginalized sectors by giving them 20 percent of the seats in Congress is now used as a backdoor to Congress by political dynasties and big business.

For example, election watchdog Kontra Daya points out that the party-list  Aambis-Owa which claims to be for the farmers is represented by a Garin, a landed political clan in Iloilo. A Teacher is run by private school owners and Append by big micro-lending companies while Akbayan is led by cabinet-level government officials. Meanwhile genuine party-lists like Kabataan and Piston are threatened with disqualification by the Commission on Elections.

But what is worse is the possible use of hi-tech gimmickry for fraudulent schemes. There is widespread suspicion of the election results because of the total absence of transparency by the Comelec in the counting and canvassing of the automated election system.

From the very beginning, the system is owned, controlled, and managed by profit-driven foreign companies like Smartmatic while the source code was never opened for public review. We thus lack the ability to independently verify the software running the automated system.

These fears are now being compounded by the rampant glitches afflicting the automated system during the election day and after – from malfunctioning machines, corrupted compact flash cards, failed transmissions, and the delayed canvassing of results.

Three Years under the Noynoy Aquino regime

Officials of the ruling Liberal Party boast that the mid-term elections is a referendum on the administration of Noynoy Aquino. They boast that the economic growth, social reforms, poverty alleviation and anti-corruption crusade that led to the success of administration coalition candidates for local and national posts. It is a testament to the Filipino people’s satisfaction and confidence in the Aquino regime and its neoliberal policies and programs.

In the first place, economic growth for whom? The spokespersons of the president have been busy trumpeting the so-called 6.6% growth in the Gross Domestic Product in the last quarter of 2012. But they forget to add that 76% of this growth is actually in the hands of the 40 richest families in the country. It goes to the pockets of the Sys, Cojuangcos, Tans, Gokongweis, Ayalas, and so on.

On the other hand, 65 million Filipinos continue to live on less than $2 a day. The latest government statistics itself point out that 28% of the population live in extreme poverty. Ordinary families are burdened by soaring prices and rising joblessness. Workers suffer from low wages, contractualization and inhumane working conditions while 6 of 10 peasants are still landless, thus forcing them to enter into unjust and exploitative relations with despotic landlords.

The country remains dependent on foreign loans and foreign direct investments. Government economic policy is aimed mainly at enticing foreign big business to engage in business process outsourcing, large-scale mining, legal logging, and cash crop plantations in the country. Because of the intensifying rate of exploitation and plunder of the country’s natural resources and environment, the Filipino people have been at the receiving end of even more destructive natural calamities from Sendong to Pablo.

As a safety valve to an explosive domestic situation, the Aquino regime continues the labor export policy. It peddles the illusion of easy money being earned abroad even as more than 4,000 Filipinos join the 11 million Filipinos in other countries due to the lack of opportunities at home.

Three years under the Aquino regime has not made any difference for the majority of the country’s people. A different president is in power but the same policies are still in place. The same political dynasties that represent landed and big business interests are still in power.

Even the administration’s anti-corruption drive has been more concerned with targeting rivals of the ruling party. In fact, technical smuggling has increased under Aquino. According to the International Monetary Fund, the government revenues lost to smuggling has reached $19 billion a year as opposed to $6 billion under the Estrada and Arroyo regimes. The turning over of public assets to private investors, i.e. privatization, is called under the fancy name of “public-private partnership” or PPP.

While slashing the budget for education, health, and other social services, the Aquino regime has increased the allocation of Conditional Cash Transfer doleouts. The state abandonment of education has led to the increase of tuition and other fees in state colleges and universities.

Last February, a student from the University of the Philippines, the country’s national university, committed suicide because of her inability to pay tuition. The average price of education in UP is P1,000 per unit under the Socialized Tuition Financial Assistance Program.

On the other hand, 451 private schools are set to increase tuition with the opening of classes this June. The educational system continues to be deregulated under the Education Act of 1982 with annual tuition and other fee hikes posing added burdens to students and their parents every year. The effect is clear. Education has become so inaccessible that only 1 for every 10 Grade 1 students eventually graduate college.

But instead of solving this problem, the Aquino regime has pushed for the lengthening of basic education with two additional years under K-12 saying young Filipinos can immediately find jobs after high school instead of proceeding to college. The real purpose here is of course not improving the quality of education but creating more cheap semi-skilled labor.

The Aquino regime also brags about concluding a Peace Agreement with the main Moro secessionist group in Mindanao, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, by 2016. However, as long as the Moro people’s right to self-determination is not respected, as long as the Moro people remain marginalized, they will continue to fight. The unexpected armed expedition of the Sultanate of Sulu in Sabah is also reflective of the continuing volatile situation in Mindanao.

The peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines was recently scuttled by the Aquino because it wants to compel the Communist Party-led revolutionary movement to simply surrender without addressing its legitimate grievances that are rooted in social injustices and oppression. The government dreams of crushing the armed struggle by the end of its term in 2016 but the revolutionary movement has only grown even stronger and plans to reach strategic parity with the government’s armed force within the decade.

The Aquino regime therefore resorts to intensified repression. Under the Oplan Bayanihan counterinsurgency plan no distinctions are made between guerrillas under the CPP-led New People’s Army and civilian activists. Sugarcoated slogans like “winning the peace,” “people-centric approach,” and “respect for human rights” cannot hide the reality of a brutal war being waged all over the country.

Since the beginning of Aquino’s term in 2010, the human rights group Karapatan has documented 130 extrajudicial killings, 72 tortures, 14 enforced disappearances, 30, 260 forced evacuations, 27, 308 harassment, and 23,702 cases of the use of civilian buildings like schools, chapels, public markets, and barangay halls as military detachments.

Social media and social change

The problem goes beyond the incompetence or “noynoying” of the Aquino regime, the corruption of evil government bureaucrats and officials, or the so-called “ignorant voters.” Ultimately, all this reflective of the dominant social system in the country which concentrates all the wealth and power in the hands of the top 1% by oppressing and exploiting the bottom 99%.

Despite the diffusion of social media and cheap mobile technologies to a wider segment of the population, Philippine society remains semi-colonial and semi-feudal. Semi-colonial because the ruling classes are tied to imperialist interests, in this case the US, despite trappings of formal independence. Semi-feudal because of the persistence of the land monopoly and its being put under the orbit of the world capitalist system.

Only by putting collective action and solidarity back on the national agenda and by building a strong social movement that will encompass the 99% can we hope to overturn this system. Only by organizing and mobilizing the largest number of people can we hope to build a better future for the present and next generations to come.

The use of social media can compliment but not replace the hard work of organizing people face to face to fight for their rights and demand justice from those in power. It is not enough for us to simply blog, sign online petitions, or like Facebook causes. We have to go out and unite with the struggles of the peasants, workers, and other oppressed and marginalized sectors.

As the examples of “Textpower” in Edsa Dos that overthrew a corrupt President or the use of Twitter and Facebook in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements that drew attention to global inequality and ousted powerful dictators in the Middle East, the combination of online and offline activities, of virtual and real-world interventions, can be a potent weapon for change. In the end, it is people not Facebook that make revolutions. As a revolutionary leader and philosopher once said, “it is people, not things, that are decisive.”

Notes

1. Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 117.
2. Jodi Dean. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and Foreclosure of Politics,” in Cultural Politics, Volume 1 Issue 1 (2005), 53.

This is an essay I wrote for the Philippine Online Chronicles.

Street children are once again selling little Philippine flags in busy downtown streets. The relatively well-off families display flaglets in their homes and cars as proud proofs of patriotism.

It is the country’s independence day, the time of the year when the national symbol is in vogue.

Under the protection of the United States, General Emilio Aguinaldo declared Philippine independence from Spain on June 12, 1898.

This date has been commemorated annually since 1962, the year when President Diosdao Macapagal moved independence day to June 12 from July 4 which is the day the United States “granted” the country independence in 1946.

A Sterile Formalism

As in any other year, a civil-military parade will be staged in the national capital on the same date while various programs will be held by local governments and schools nationwide. And like the past two years, President Noynoy Aquino will give a national address.

But fewer and fewer people are paying attention to what is said on these occasions. And even less are buying the flaglets being hawked on the sidewalks. Exhortations made by politicians about loving the country have largely become empty rituals that have largely lost symbolic efficiency.

Nationalism has become equated with display the national flag, singing the national anthem, buying native delicacies, following traffic rules, throwing your trash on the garbage bin, joining some charity, or posting yellow twibbons on your Facebook profile picture.

In short, we see all too clearly what the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon decried in The Wretched of the Earth as “the imprisonment of national consciousness in sterile formalism.”

Does this mean the terminal decline of nationalism in the present generation? And are these perfunctory rituals the only remaining horizon of Filipino nationalism?

To answer these questions, we must distinguish between two different and conflicting strands of nationalism, between a nationalism that seeks liberation from an oppressive and exploitative system and an official nationalism that is used to legitimate the interests of the ruling classes.

From Ferdinand Marcos’ “Bagong Lipunan,” Fidel Ramos’ “Philippines 2000,” to Noynoy Aquino’s “Matuwid na Daan,” a state-sanctioned nationalism has been occasionally encouraged to promote the political fortunes of those in power.

What truly matters – the nation as “a historically constituted community of people” – is lost in this equation.

A Neo-Colonial Order

Unfortunately, this empty and artificial nationalism is the only kind recognized and tolerated by the ruling order because it is one way to veil the continuing ties that bind the country’s rulers to its former colonial masters. It is one way of hiding the country’s neo-colonial status.

For despite the formal independence, it remains politically, economically, and culturally dominated by foreign powers, particularly the United States. The official independence day, be it July 4 or June 12, thereby serves only to mark the transition from direct colonial rule to indirect neo-colonial rule.

The country’s economy remains backward and agrarian. The Philippines remains dependent on foreign loans direct capital investments that pushes the country into the direction of cheap labor export and extraction of natural resources while being swamped by foreign consumer products.

We do not have our own heavy industry and cannot produce for the daily necessities for the people. Even rice has to be smuggled. Even a tiny nail or needle is imported.

The ballooning foreign debt has sequestered much-needed funds for foreign banks. Loans are tied to the imposition of neoliberal programs that seek to abandon the government’s policy to provide for the educational, health, and other needs of the people in the pursuit of corporate profits.

This stranglehold over the economy is coupled with unequal agreements and treaties to ensure the government’s subservience to US geopolitical interests. Under the Visiting Forces Agreement, US troops and warships are conspicuously present in various parts of the country .

The Conditional Cash Transfer is a World Bank-dictated program. The government’s Oplan Bayanihan internal security plan is based on the US Counterinsurgency Guide.

And in the cultural sphere, Renato Constantino noted that “the westernization of the Filipino mind has dulled its perception of even the worst aspects of Western exploitation.” Many dream the “American dream” and believe that all US acts are done out of benevolence rather than out of self-interest.

This was accomplished through an educational system that breeds docility, individualism, and colonial mentality, as well as a mass entertainment industry that serves as a tranquilizer of unrest and propagator of unbridled consumerism.

A Love for the People

Genuine nationalism then is not a mere abstraction but is ultimately a love for the people that compose the nation. It means advocating the rights and welfare of the people, especially the toiling masses.

It means combating social injustices and pushing for radical changes in a system that has consigned the majority to the bottom of the social pyramid. And who exactly are these people?

They are the peasants who are already landless, hungry, and exploited not only by despotic hacienderos but by a bogus land reform law that only peddles to them the illusion of tilling their own land while actually consolidating landlord power.

They are the katutubo, tumandoks, or lumads who are displaced from their ancestral domains which are being land grabbed by big corporations and the national government to make way for environmentally-destructive large-scale mining, cash-crop plantations, legal logging, and big dams .

They are the workers who suffer from low wages , inhumane working conditions, contractualization, lack of job security, attacks on their right to organize and form unions, among others.

They are the urban poor who are dispossessed of the homes that are demolished in order to give way to the construction of highrise condominiums, shopping malls, and beautification projects that favor real estate developers at the expense of the people’s rights.

They are the women who “hold half the sky” yet are victimized by gender inequality, discrimination in the work place, rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking.

They are the small entrepreneurs and businessmen who are burdened by high taxes and utility costs and who cannot compete with the deluge of foreign multinational corporations in the country.

They are the youth who are deprived of their right to education and a bright future because of massive unemployment , incessant tuition and other fee hikes and insufficient state subsidy for education.

Under this setup, genuine nationalism means standing up for national sovereignty against foreign domination and for the democratic interests of the majority against the rule of an elite few.

We can gain inspiration from the social criticism of Jose Rizal and more importantly the 1896 revolution led by Andres Bonifacio against Spanish colonialism.

Rizal’s willingness to speak the truth and die for his country and Bonifacio’s daring to launch revolutionary struggle against the people’s oppressors are some of the greatest examples of nationalism.

Frantz Fanon once said that “the living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people.” In the final analysis, a true nationalist is one who is willing to serve the people and actually does so.

Vo Nguyen Giap, “Ang Digma ng Pagpapalaya 1945-1954”
Ang Sining Militar ng Digmang Bayan: Piling mga Akda ni Heneral Vo Nguyen Giap (2012)

Ang digma ng pagpapalaya ng mamamayang Byetnames ay isang makatarungang digma, naglalayon na mabawi ang kasarinlan at pagkakaisa ng bayan, mabigyan ng lupa ang ating mga magsasaka at garantiyahan sa kanila ang karapatan dito, at ipagtanggol ang mga tagumpay ng rebolusyong Agosto. Iyon ang dahilan kung bakit una sa lahat ito ay isang digmang bayan. Ang turuan, pakilusin, organisahin, at armasan ang buong sambayanan para makibahagi sila sa pagtatanggol ay isang napakahalagang usapin.

Ang kaaway ng bansang Byetnames ay ang agresibong imperyalismo na kailangang pabagsakin. Pero dahil sa matagal nang nakipagkaisa ang kaaway sa pyudal na mga panginoong maylupa, tiyak na hindi maihihiwalay ang pakikibakang anti-imperyalista mula sa antipyudal na pagkilos. Sa kabilang banda, sa isang atrasadong bayang kolonyal tulad ng sa atin kung saan ang mga magsasaka ang bumubuo sa mayorya ng populasyon, ang isang digmang bayan sa esensya, ay isang digmang magsasaka sa ilalim ng pamumuno ng uring manggagawa. Dahil sa katotohanang ito, ang isang pangkalahatang mobilisasyon ng buong mamamayan ay ang mismong mobilisasyon ng masa sa kanayunan. Ang suliranin sa lupa ay may mapagpasyang kahalagahan. Sa isang malalim na pagsusuri, ang digma ng pagpapalaya ng mamamayang Byetnames sa esensya, ay isang pambansa-demokratikong rebolusyong bayan na isinagawa sa ilalim ng sandatahang pwersa at mayroong dalawang pundamental na tungkulin: ang pagpapabagsak sa imperyalismo at ang paggapi sa pyudal na uring panginoong maylupa, kung saan ang anti-imperyalistang pakikibaka ang pangunahing tungkulin.

Isang atrasadong bayang kolonyal na kababangon pa lamang para iproklama ang kanyang kasarinlan at itatag ang kapangyarihang bayan, kamakailan lamang nagkaroon ang Byetnam ng isang sandatahang lakas; armado ang mga pwersang ito ng mahihinang armas at walang karanasan sa labanan. Ang kanyang kaaway, sa kabilang banda, ay isang imperyalistang kapangyarihan na nakapagpanatili ng may isang kalakihang potensyal sa ekonomya at sa militar kahit na sinakop kamakailan ng mga German at nakinabang, higit pa, sa aktibong suporta ng United States. Kitang-kita sa balanse ng pwersa ang ating mga kahinaan laban sa kapangyarihan ng kaaway. Kung gayon, ang digma ng pagpapalaya ng mamamayang Byetnames ay kinakailangang maging isang mahirap at matagalang digma upang matagumpay na malikha ang mga kalagayan para magwagi. Lahat ng kaisipang bunga ng pagkainip at paghahangad ng madaliang tagumpay ay malalaking kamalian lamang. Kailangang mahigpit na maunawaan ang estratehiya ng matagalang pagtatanggol, at pataasin ang kapasyahang umasa sa sarili upang mapanatili at unti-unting madagdagan ang ating mga pwersa habang inuuk-ok at papasulong na dinudurog iyong sa kaaway; kailangang magtipon ng libu-libong maliliit na tagumpay para maibaling ang mga ito sa isang malaking tagumpay, sa gayon unti-unting binabago ang balanse ng pwersa, itinatransporma ang ating mga kahinaan tungo sa kalakasan at tinatamo ang ultimong tagumpay.

Sa maaga pang yugto, naunawaan ng Partido ang mga kalikasan ng digmang ito: isang digmang bayan at isang matagalang digma, at sa pamamagitan ng pagsisimula sa mga batayang ito kaya nalutas ng Partido, sa buong panahon ng mga labanan at sa partikular na mahihirap na kalagayan, ang lahat ng usapin sa pagtatanggol. Ang matalinong pamumunong ito ng Partido ang naghatid sa atin sa tagumpay.

Ang ating estratehiya, katulad ng naidiin na, ay ang maglunsad ng matagalang pakikipaglaban. Kailangan sa isang digma na may ganitong pangkalahatang kalikasan ang ilang yugto; sa prinsipyo, nagsisimula sa isang yugto ng tunggalian, tumutungo ito sa isang panahon ng pagkakapatas bago umabot sa isang pangkalahatang kontra-opensiba. Sa totoo, ang pamamaraan kung paano ito isinasagawa ay maaaring maging higit na mapanlikha at higit na kumplikado, ayon sa partikular na mga kalagayang kinapapalooban ng magkabilang panig sa daloy ng mga operasyon. Tanging isang matagalang digma ang magpapahintulot sa atin na gamitin nang lubos ang ating mahahalagang bentaheng pampulitika, pangibabawan ang ating kakulangan sa materyal, at itransporma ang ating kahinaan tungo sa kalakasan. Ang mapanatili at mapalaki ang ating mga pwersa ay ang prinsipyong pinanghawakan natin, sapat na sa atin ang umatake kapag tiyak ang tagumpay, tumangging lumaban kapag malamang na magtamo ng mga pinsala o sumabak sa mga marisgong aksyon. Inilapat natin ang islogang: buuin ang ating lakas sa aktwal na daloy ng pakikipaglaban.

Kailangang ganap na iangkop ang mga anyo ng labanan, ibig sabihin, ang itaas nang lubos ang diwang palaban at sumalig sa kabayanihan ng ating mga tropa para mapangibabawan ang materyal na superyoridad ng kaaway. Sa pangunahin, laluna sa umpisa ng digmaan, kinailangang gamitin natin ang pakikidigmang gerilya. Sa teatro ng operasyong Byetnames, nagdulot ang pamamaraang ito ng malalaking tagumpay: maaaring gamitin ito sa mga kabundukan, gayundin sa wawa, maaaring ilunsad ito nang may mahusay o mahihinang kagamitan at kahit na walang armas, at sa huli ay nagawa nitong armasan ang ating sarili sa kapinsalaan ng kaaway. Saanman dumating ang Pwersa ng Ekspedisyon, lumalahok ang buong populasyon sa pakikipaglaban; ang bawat komuna ay may sariling kutang baryo, ang bawat distrito ay may kanya-kanyang tropang teritoryal na nakikipaglaban sa ilalim ng kumand ng mga sangay ng Partido sa lokalidad at ng gubyerno ng mamamayan, kakawing ng mga pwersang regular para pahinain at lipulin ang mga pwersa ng kaaway.

Buhat noon, sa pag-unlad ng ating mga pwersa, nagbago ang pakikidigmang gerilya tungo sa isang pakikidigmang makilos – isang anyo ng pakikidigmang makilos na matingkad na kinatatangian pa rin ng pakikidigmang gerilya – na pagkatapos ay magiging esensyal na anyo ng mga operasyon sa pangunahing larangan, ang hilagang larangan. Sa prosesong ito ng pag-unlad ng pakikidigmang gerilya at ng pagbibigay-diin sa pakikidigmang makilos, tuluy-tuloy na lumaki ang ating hukbong bayan at nilampasan ang yugto ng mga labanang kinapapalooban ng isang seksyon o kumpanya, tungo sa may kalakihang saklaw na mga kampanyang nilalahukan ng ilang dibisyon. Unti-unting umunlad ang mga kagamitan nito, pangunahin sa pamamagitan ng pag-agaw ng armas mula sa kaaway – ang kagamitang-militar ng mga imperyalistang French at Amerikano.

Mula sa punto de bistang militar, pinatunayan ng digma ng pagpapalaya ng mamamayang Byetnames na maaaring pagsanibin ng isang hukbong bayan na di sapat ang mga kagamitan, pero isang hukbo na nakikipaglaban para sa isang makatarungang adhikain, sa angkop na estratehiya at mga taktika, ang mga kalagayang kinakailangan para lupigin ang isang modernong hukbo ng agresibong imperyalismo.

Kaugnay ng pangangasiwa ng isang ekonomyang pandigma sa loob ng balangkas ng isang atrasadong bayang agrikultural na nagsusulong ng isang matagalang pagtatanggol tulad ng Byetnam, lumitaw ang usapin ng mga likurang linya sa anyo ng pagtatayo ng mga base ng pagtatanggol sa kanayunan. Ang pagtataas at pagtatanggol ng produksyon, at ang pagpapaunlad ng agrikultura ay mga usaping may malaking kahalagahan para tustusan ang larangan at para rin tuluy-tuloy na mapahusay ang kalagayan sa pamumuhay ng mamamayan. Hindi maisasantabi ang usapin ng pagmamanupaktura ng mga armas.

Sa pagtatayo ng mga base sa kanayunan at sa pagpapalakas ng mga likurang linya para bigyang-tulak ang pagtatanggol, gumampan ng isang mapagpasyang papel ang patakarang agraryo ng Partido. Dito nakasalalay ang antipyudal na tungkulin ng rebolusyon. Sa isang kolonya kung saan isang pambansang usapin ang mismong usaping magsasaka, mangyayari lamang ang konsolidasyon ng mga pwersa ng pagtatanggol sa pamamagitan ng paglutas sa suliraning agraryo.

Ibinagsak ng rebolusyong Agosto ang pyudal na estado. Ang pagpapababa ng upa sa lupa at tantos ng usura na isinabatas ng kapangyarihang bayan ay nagbigay sa mga magsasaka ng kanilang unang materyal na mga pakinabang. Kinumpiska at ipinamahagi ang mga lupang monopolyado ng mga imperyalista at taksil. Mas pantay-pantay na ipinamahagi ang mga lupang komunal at palayan. Mula 1953, dahil itinuturing na kailangang itaguyod ang pagpapatupad ng mga tungkuling antipyudal, pinagpasyahan ng Partido na kamtin ang repormang agraryo kahit na sa daloy ng digma ng pagtatanggol. Sa kabila ng mga pagkakamali na dumungis sa pagpapatupad nito, wastong linya ito na ginantimpalaan ng tagumpay; nagbunga ito ng tunay na materyal na mga pakinabang para sa mga magsasaka at nagbigay sa hukbo at sa mamamayan ng isang bagong simoy ng kasiglahan sa digma ng pagtatanggol.

Salamat sa makatarungang patakarang agraryong ito, umunlad sa pangkalahatan ang pamumuhay ng sambayanan, sa pinakamahihirap na kalagayan ng digma ng pagtatanggol, hindi lamang sa napakalawak na mga pinalayang purok ng Hilaga, kundi maging sa mga baseng gerilya sa Timog Byetnam.

Ang digma para sa pagpapalaya ng mamamayang Byetnames ay nagluwal sa kahalagahan ng pagtatayo ng mga base ng pagtatanggol sa kanayunan at ng mahigpit at di masisirang relasyon sa pagitan ng rebolusyong anti-imperyalista at ng rebolusyong antipyudal.

Mula sa punto de bistang pampulitika, ang usapin ng pagkakaisa sa hanay ng mamamayan at ang mobilisasyon ng lahat ng lakas sa digma ng pagtatanggol ay may pinakamalaking kahalagahan. Kaalinsabay, isang usapin din ito ng Pambansang Nagkakaisang Prente laban sa mga imperyalista at kanilang mga alipures, ang mga traydor na Byetnames.

Sa Byetnam, nakamit ng ating Partido ang isang malaking tagumpay sa patakaran nito ng pagtatatag ng isang Prente. Kasing-aga noong mahihirap na araw ng Ikalawang Digmaang Pandaigdig, binuo nito ang Liga para sa Kasarinlan ng Byetnam. Noon at sa unang mga taon ng digma ng pagtatanggol, ipinagpaliban nito ang paglalapat ng mga islogan nito hinggil sa rebolusyong agraryo, nilimitahan ang programa nito sa pagpapababa ng upa sa lupa at tantos ng interes na nagpahintulot sa atin na nyutralisahin ang bahagi ng uring panginoong maylupa at kabigin sa ating panig ang pinakamakabayan sa kanila.

Mula sa unang mga araw ng rebolusyong Agosto, nanyutralisa ng patakaran ng malapad na prente na pinagtibay ng Partido ang mabubuway na elemento sa hanay ng uring panginoong maylupa at nalimitahan ang mapanabotaheng mga pagkilos ng mga kapanalig ng Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang.

Pagkatapos noon, sa daloy ng pag-unlad ng digma ng pagtatanggol, nang naging isang kagyat na pangangailangan ang repormang agraryo, ibinuhos ng Partido ang sarili sa paggawa ng pagkakaiba sa loob mismo ng uring panginoong maylupa sa pamamagitan ng pagtatakda sa linyang pampulitika nito ng iba’t ibang pakikitungo sa bawat tipo ng panginoong maylupa ayon sa pampulitikang paninindigan nila hinggil sa prinsipyo ng pagbuwag sa sistema ng pyudal na pangangamkam ng lupa.

Ang patakaran ng pagkakaisa sa hanay ng mga nasyunalidad na pinagtibay ng Pambansang Nagkakaisang Prente ay nagkamit din ng malalaking tagumpay, at nagtamo ng magagandang resulta ang programa ng pagkakaisa sa iba’t ibang sirkulong pangrelihiyon.

Ang Pambansang Nagkakaisang Prente ay magiging isang napakalawak na asembleya ng lahat ng pwersang may kakayahang magkaisa, magnunyutralisa sa lahat ng maaaring manyutralisa, manghahati sa lahat ng maaaring hatiin upang maituon ang dulo ng sibat sa pangunahing kaaway ng rebolusyon, ang mananalakay na imperyalismo. Itatatag ito sa batayan ng isang alyansa sa pagitan ng manggagawa’t magsasaka at ipaiilalim sa pamumuno ng uring manggagawa. Sa Byetnam, ang usapin ng isang alyansa sa pagitan ng manggagawa’t magsasaka ay pinatibay ng isang maningning na kasaysayan at matatatag na tradisyon, tanging ang partido ng uring manggagawa ang pampulitikang partido na puspusang lumaban sa lahat ng kalagayan, para sa pambansang kasarinlan, at ang naunang nagsulong ng islogang “lupa para sa mga nagbubungkal” at matatag na nakibaka para sa katuparan nito. Gayunman, sa unang mga taon ng pagtatanggol, ilang pagmamaliit sa kahalagahan ng usaping magsasaka ang humadlang sa pagbibigay natin ng lahat ng pansing kinakailangan sa alyansang manggagawa’t magsasaka. Iwinasto na kalaunan ang kamaliang ito, laluna mula sa sandaling nagpasya ang Partido, sa pamamagitan ng pagpapatupad ng repormang agraryo, na gawing tunay na mga panginoon ng kanayunan ang mga magsasaka. Sa kasalukuyan, matapos ang tagumpay ng pagtatanggol at ng repormang agraryo, nang naibalik na ng Partido ang kasarinlan sa kalahati ng bayan at namahagi na ng lupa sa mga magsasaka, ang mga batayan ng alyansa ng manggagawa’t magsasaka ay patuloy na lalakas sa araw-araw.

Pinatutunayan ng digma ng pagpapalaya ng mamamayan ng Byetnam na sa harap ng isang makapangyarihan at malupit na kaaway, makakamit lamang ang tagumpay sa pamamagitan ng pagkakaisa ng buong sambayanan sa kandungan ng isang matatag at malapad na pambansang nagkakaisang prente na nakabatay sa alyansang manggagawa’t magsasaka.

We had absolutely no industry to speak of. We remained a completely agricultural economy, importing virtually all our requirements of finished goods, and paying for these with the export earnings of the agriculture crops which we were exporting to the United States.

We had no motor vehicle, fuel, and the industry that could keep an army mobile and moving, we had no munitions and weapons industry that could equip it with arms and the logistics it required, no pharmaceutical industry that could provide its sick and wounded with drugs and medicines, no textile industry that could clothe it, no electronics and telecommunication industry that could enable it to communicate; no food industry that could supply it with canned goods; no watch industry that would enable it to keep time. We certainly had neither chemical nor steel industry. We could not even produce our own bicycles, flashlights and batteries.

Alejandro Lichauco, “The IMF-World Bank Group: The International Economic Order and the Philippine Experience,” September 3, 1976