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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Loving Political Agitators By Antonio C. Abaya Written June 19, 2006 For the Standard Today, June 20 issue Should we love � or at least respect � political agitators? An article in the � where else? � Philippine Daily Inquirer (June 13) says we should. Written by one Peter Jaynul V. Uckung, identified as a senior history researcher at the National Historical Institute, the article begins as follows: �The next time a group of demonstrators block traffic, don�t swear, don�t honk, just think: A traffic jam is a small price to pay when protesters hit the road for they force the government to do something good for the people. �Filipinos may do well to respect the angry crowd of demonstrators, or listen to the impassioned appeals of union leaders for they tell us truths we cannot seek for ourselves. History speaks of the power of political agitation.� But Uckung does not specify, agitation for what? Instead, he follows the thread of self-selected historical events in the Philippines, starting with the execution in 1872 by the Spaniards of three indio or native-born priests, Frs. Gomez, Burgos and Zamora, through the propaganda movement in Europe led by the Indios Bravos such as Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar etc., the call of �the masses� for revolution, the various peasant revolts during the American era, the birth of the labor movement in the 1920s, the founding of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas in 1932, the radicalization of the students in the 1960s (by Joma Sison�s Communist Party of the Philippines, though Uckung does not mention authorship), up to the present. And therein lies his ideological bias, conveniently hidden from and undecipherable to the ideologically naive reader, including the capitalist owners of the Inquirer. And he concludes, ominously: �Guided and goaded forward by political agitators, protest movements, when ignored by the government, do not fade away. They retreat to gain momentum, threatening to engulf everything in the forward rush to cleanse an unresponsive government. It is called revolution.� The idea that historical events, such as political agitations and revolutions, are reactions to existing conditions, and that the clash between opposites results in �something good for the people,� is the popularization of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis mantra of classical Marxism, which even non-Marxist social scientists have long accepted. It is the philosophical underpinning of dialectical materialism, the theory of social-economic-political organization that guarantees to true believers � apparently including Uckung � the allegedly inevitable triumph of Communism. According to this theory, human society, because of inevitable class conflicts between landowners and tenants, has evolved from feudalism, where economic and political power was/is based on ownership of land, to capitalism, where power is transferred to the owners of financial and/or industrial capital. The Ayala family would be the classic example of this transition, but so is the Prieto family, the capitalist owners of the Inquirer. Because of exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, the workers will rise up in revolt against their exploiters and usher in the next and higher phase of human society, socialism. To accelerate this historically inevitable transition needs the intervention of a small group of professional revolutionaries, the Communist Party and its cadres of political agitators-propagandists (agit-prop), according to Lenin. Hence, the term Marxist-Leninists for those who believe in and work for this transition, though some capitalist owners of Manila newspapers would not recognize them even if their staff wore Lenin and Mao masks during their story conferences. Under socialism (the Soviet or Maoist type, not the western European variety), the Communist Party would enjoy monopoly of power under a �dictatorship of the proletariat� that will cleanse society of all reactionaries, capitalist-roaders and other exploiters of the working class, in preparation for the coming triumph of Communism, the perfect state and perfect society, where no one will ever exploit another, and every one will waltz happily ever after into the sunset. When Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in the 1840s, they were convinced that �the spectre of Communism� was already hovering over Europe because of appalling living and working conditions for workers and their families brought about by the unregulated excesses of the Industrial Revolution. As the most highly developed capitalist countries then, Germany and England were expected to be the first staging ground for the coming socialist revolution. Instead, that socialist revolution took place only in feudal, pre-capitalist societies such as Russia (1917), Mongolia (1921), China (1949), and Cuba (1959). Not a single capitalist country has morphed into Soviet- or Maoist-type socialism, much less into Communism. (Scandinavian socialism is not regarded as true socialism since it is merely �utopian�, not �scientific,� because it does not call for armed revolution and does not grant a monopoly of power to the Communist Party.). But A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Communism, which was the title of a booklet that I wrote in 1985 � four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the Soviet Union imploded � predicting that Communism would collapse, as in fact it did, from the accumulated weight of its failures. True believers like Nelia Sancho and the late Jesus Lava, however, were not dismayed. They were convinced, as no doubt today�s communists still are, that the victory of Communism was inevitable, they said to media, �even if it takes hundreds of years.� (�Even if it takes hundreds of years?� What a splendid opportunity for some truth-in-advertising. �Comrades,� Jose Maria Stalin can rally his troops, �let us be prepared to sacrifice your lives [but not mine] as we assault the gates of Malacanang for the sake of our beloved proletariat, so that our great great great great great great great (etc through 20 generations) grandchildren can finally live in the perfect society that is Communism by the year 2506. Or thereabouts.� By which time, the Philippine population, growing at an ideal rate of one percent a year, compounded annually, will have reached about 3.5 billion, give or take a few hundred million. Do the calculations yourself, if you don�t believe me.) Yes, to get back to Uckung�s article, we should respect political agitators, but only if they are agitating for a more perfect Jeffersonian democracy, of which there are many working models, not if they are agitating for a Theoretical Ideal that does not exist in reality and never did, which is what Communism is. Not all political agitators are created equal. The Prietos should understand that and stop allowing their newspaper to be used as a propaganda tool by the communist movement. (The Inquirer�s poster boy in its Sunday supplement of June 18 is Teddy Casino of Bayan Muna, who is given a full-color two-page blow-job without mentioning anything about his abiding beliefs in Communism. This kind of subtle but insidious propaganda would not be allowed in Malaysia or Singapore or Indonesia or Thailand or Taiwan or South Korea. Onli in da istupid Pilipins.) Edsa I People Power in 1986 was a glorious example of political agitation towards a more perfect Jeffersonian democracy. That it did not result in that development was not the fault of the middle class that started it and fleshed it out, nor even of President Aquino who was its saintly figurehead. But I would fault the political lieutenants who hovered around her, that they did not know how to wage a bourgeois revolution when the moral power to do so was in their hands. Edsa II in 2001 was a phony People Power exercise, concocted by military and political conspirators and choreographed to look like it was a re-incarnation of Edsa I, when it was really nothing but a trapo power grab in which even the Supreme Court got its fingers unwittingly dirtied with the slime of trapo politics. In its present state of spiraling dysfunction, the Philippines could stand some more political agitation, but it should be, ultimately, towards a more perfect Jeffersonian democracy, not towards a Theoretical Ideal that does not exist in reality, whose 74-year path in history is littered with the detritus of its failures and the mountains of corpses that those failures caused. The middle class instinctively understands this distinction, even if middle-class protest groups like Bukluran and the Black and White Movement apparently do not. That the bulk of the middle class have stayed away from their protest actions may be explained by the prominent presence of trapos and communist militants in those protest actions, whom most of the middle class have rightly learned to distrust and detest. And there is no need to apologize for being selective in one�s choice of political agitation. After all, when student political agitators massed in their hundreds of thousands on Tienanmen Square in Beijing in June 1989, demanding more political freedoms, the armored personnel carriers of the People�s Liberation Army swept them off the square, machine guns blazing. A monumental massacre applauded by only a handful around the world, among them Joma Sison of the CPP and Crispin Beltran of the KMU. Sison and Beltran were in effect saying: Do not do unto Us what We will do unto You once we are in Power. Should we really respect this kind of political agitators? Aware that political agitation, even when leaderless and unorganized, �did something good for the people� by collapsing communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chinese Communist Party bans members of the Falun Gong meditation cult (est. membership: 100 million) from meeting in groups of more than five, in public or in private. Denied the right of peaceable assembly, they are also being kidnapped, tortured and their healthy organs (members do not smoke or drink) harvested for sale in the black market, according to a recent (June 12) article written by Edward McMilllan-Scott, member and vice-president of the European Parliament, after a recent visit in Beijing. Should we really respect political agitators who are self-described ideological offspring of the Chinese Communist Party? ***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org. Current articles also in tonyabaya.multiply.com and the tapatt.yahoogroups.com OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |