Communist Revival Worries the Philippines

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

GTONGANON RANGE, the Philippines — Christopher Suazo was in the jungle, wearing torn jogging pants and cradling an M-1 rifle. At 18, he had managed only three years of schooling when he joined the Communist Party last fall. Like many others, Mr. Suazo was motivated by a perceived injustice. His father and uncle, both farmers, were gunned down last March, he said, by the hired hands of a town mayor whom the military protects.

The Communist rebellion in the Philippines began 35 years ago. It foundered but has regained strength and, according to military estimates, now counts 10,000 fighters in its armed wing, the New People's Army.

<snip>

In their foggy camp high in the mountains of Compostela Valley Province, the Communists go about their business: training cadres in military tactics and martial arts, organizing the residents below, helping peasants on their farms and studying what they call the "evils of U.S. imperialism."

"The U.S. is a brutal enemy," a guerrilla leader known as Richard told a dozen rebels during a class about the invasion of Iraq. "It will not hesitate to use or kill its own people."

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/international/asia/04FILI.html

[lcordero]

1. their govt made their bed

[IndianaGreen]

10. and one cannot trust the bourgeois parties, including liberals

to solve the problems of the country, whether it is in the Philippines, Colombia, or even the United States.

What is the theory of the Permanent Revolution?

The national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries entered into the scene of history too late, when the world had already been divided up between a few imperialist powers. It was not able to play any progressive role and was born completely subordinated to its former colonial masters. The weak and degenerate bourgeoisie in Asia, Latin America and Africa is too dependent on foreign capital and imperialism, to carry society forward. It is tied with a thousand threads, not only to foreign capital, but with the class of landowners, with which it forms a reactionary bloc that represents a bulwark against progress. Whatever differences may exist between these elements are insignificant in comparison with the fear that unites them against the masses. Only the proletariat, allied with the poor peasants and urban poor, can solve the problems of society by taking power into its own hands, expropriating the imperialists and the bourgeoisie, and beginning the task of transforming society on socialist lines.

By setting itself at the head of the nation, leading the oppressed layers of society (urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie), the proletariat could take power and then carry through the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution (mainly the land reform and the unification and liberation of the country from foreign domination). However, once having come to power, the proletariat would not stop there but would start to implement socialist measures of expropriation of the capitalists. And as these tasks cannot be solved in one country alone, especially not in a backward country, this would be the beginning of the world revolution. Thus the revolution is "permanent" in two senses: because it starts with the bourgeois tasks and continues with the socialist ones, and because it starts in one country and continues at an international level.

The theory of the permanent revolution was the most complete answer to the reformist and class collaborationist position of the right wing of the Russian workers' movement, the Mensheviks. The two stage theory was developed by the Mensheviks as their perspective for the Russian revolution. It basically states that, since the tasks of the revolution are those of the national democratic bourgeois revolution, the leadership of the revolution must be taken by the national democratic bourgeoisie. For his part, Lenin agreed with Trotsky that the Russian Liberals could not carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and that this task could only be carried out by the proletariat in alliance with the poor peasantry. Following in the footsteps of Marx, who had described the bourgeois "democratic party" as "far more dangerous to the workers than the previous liberals", Lenin explained that the Russian bourgeoisie, far from being an ally of the workers, would inevitably side with the counter-revolution.

http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/permanent_revolution.html

"Side with the counter-revolution," doesn't that sound like the attacks by the DLC and some top Democrats on those that demonstrated against the war in Iraq and against globalism?

[Dirk39]

11. Hey comrade!

"THE POOR

Vogelfrei, "bird free," is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second place, it was "freed" from the means of production, separated from the soil, with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being "free as birds," for being immune to the discipline of the factory and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how, when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen of socialist realism.

The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation), once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person, the hunger of the multitude-all forms of the poor have become productive. And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and freedom. The poor is the condition of every production.

The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968 and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct, banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain. What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline of liberation, he interpreted the "modern times" of poverty, but at the same time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a liberated productivity.
(...)
There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi. Consider his work. To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused every instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption. Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis's situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control-because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."
Toni Negri, Michael Hardt: Empire.

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[La_Serpiente]

2. wow

there is a Muslim seperatist group and a Communist group. On top of that, the US has a very bad reputation in Phillipines AND there are already US troops there. I hope we don't have a repeat of post-Spanish American war Phillpines.

Looking at the failures of this foreign policy team in Central America (most of the foreign policy teams in the Bush II administration are from the Reagan/Bush I era), this is going to look very ugly.

[birthcontrol]

3. is NPA prochoice?

Is the NPA pro-choice? pro-abortion like China? which Island are they on? near the islamic faction or somwhere else?

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

4. What doe the National Pigeon Association have to do with

pro choice?

What does any of what you are talking about have to do with the topic?

[shawn703]

5. So would these be "terrorists" or "Freedom Fighters"? n/t

[annak110]

6. Communist forces in the Philippines helped the U.S. defeat

Japanese forces there in WWII, then the U.S. sent troops in to kill those forces.
These people must have begun rebuilding at about the time Ferdinand Marcose was appointed dictator, 1965, and no wonder!

[loudnclear]

7. After a re-read of the Communist Manifesto, it's a wonder this isn't

happening in many more places, especially in light of the US invasion of Iraq and the Corporcrat-neocon takeover of our government and democracy.

[IndianaGreen]

9. It is happening in many more places.

Bush has shown capitalism and imperialism in all of its ugly decadent glory. Bush has been the greatest booster of Marxism-Leninism the world has ever known. People even want to know about Trotsky.

Who better speaks for the poor and the peasants of the Philippines? President Arroyo? No, way! She is as authoritarian as Marcos, and she came to power via a coup. The Catholic Church? The Church is aligned with the wealthy families, using the Gospel to preach the riches in the next life in order to keep the faithful in line.

[IndianaGreen]

8. Communist revival worries the 200 families that own the Philippines

The ruling class relies on the other two legs of the Filipino Axis of Evil: the military, and the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church of the Philippines, led by Cardinal Jaime Sin, is one of the most reactionary institutions in the world.