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| Reference Material |
| AVERTING A BLOODY REVOLUTION:
Analysis and Program Reflections by Sixto K. Roxas November 10, 2005 The Depth Of Our Current Crisis The Philippines is facing its worst crisis since the founding of the Republic. It is part of the gravity of that crisis that very few, least of all our political leaders, are aware of the depth of it. A great majority of our people still believe that somehow or other, the elections of 2004 will offer fresh hope that the continuous slide of our society and increasing misery of our people will be turned around. That hope is certain to be betrayed. At which point the only recourse will be overt revolution. Forces are already forming for that explosion. Soon or late that explosion will come. The root cause is the failure of both republican and authoritarian forms of governance, over the 58 year history of this Republic, to deliver to the people a development that is sustained and sustainable, equitable and satisfying for the great majority. A comparison of the basic long term trends in the country with the year-to-year movements of the indicators of economic performance defines the gravity of the present crisis. The persistent growth in population, and the on-again-off-again fluctuations in the indicators of aggregate demand for and supply of requisite goods and services, the resulting uninterrupted deterioration in the internal and external purchasing power of the peso, the persistent and uninterrupted growth in our country�s debt to foreign countries and international institutions, the growth in the numbers of families living below the poverty line, the increasing out-migration of our labor force and the accompanying increase in the country�s dependence on the remittances of earnings of our people doing assorted menial tasks in foreign countries � all these are symptoms of a deepening malady. The growing disenchantment of the population with the processes of our so-called democratic system, with the results of the electoral process and the erosion of confidence that the electoral process is effective in giving us leaders that can satisfy the rising expectations of our growing population are already evident in two popular uprisings that have deposed two presidents, and a third that has given us a short glimpse of the horrors that can result from an uprising by the suffering urban poor. The End of the Road for Palliatives In the past the effects of the repeated failures of development policy were alleviated by extraneous factors that provided safety valves salving the growing misery with hopes of change from election to election and preventing the discontent from becoming intolerable and leading to out and out revolution: The existence of a land frontier up to the mid 1950s made it possible for families unable to find livelihood opportunities from the cash economy to set up subsistence villages in new areas. When the land frontier was closed, the slow growth in productive employment was eased by government pump priming projects financed out of additional taxes on imports and on corporate business or from increases in government debt from local and foreign creditors. Natural resource based export industries � both the expansion of traditional primary exports, and new exports such as bananas and marine products, picked up the slack from the tapering off of earnings from logs (as the country�s forests dwindled) and from minerals as the reserves of developed mines pushed the margin of extraction to economically sub-marginal deposits. These safety valves have reached the limits of their serviceability. The exploitation of natural resources and the reliance on monocrop plantation agriculture in the face of growing landlessness of the population and the lack of industrialization to provide alternative non farm livelihood for the labor force have reached the limits of their capacities to sustain the continuous growth of population. Over exploitation of timber and mineral resources are already causing ecological disasters. Giving up on the prospects of fulfilling their desire for a better life in their respective communities, families have resorted to migration. First from their rural villages and small towns to the big cities. The cities are now in crisis as well unable to match the immigration with sufficient growth of livelihood, and raise enough revenues to provide housing, utilities, health and other social services. Finding city life in the country intolerable, massive emigration to other countries have become another outlet. Over 3,000 Filipinos now leave the country daily to seek opportunities abroad! Absent a solid industrial base that limits the capacity of our local economy to produce goods and services competitively either for local consumption or for export the country�s capacity to supply the population with goods from either domestic agricultural or industrial production or from imports, and services from essential utilities has become severely limited. The capacity of the national government to give a superficial impression of economic prosperity through pump priming has reached the limits because of the size of the domestic and foreign debt and the growth in the debt service as a percentage of the national budget. Revenue from additional taxes is rendered doubtful because of the failure of the asset and income base for taxes to grow precisely because of the failure of the whole development strategy to create wealth and income sources for the population. These constraints will limit the ability of the national government to continue on the development path it has pursued since 1986. If the elections push through, it is not likely that they will result in a regime that will pursue any radical change in approach to development. They will offer no hope therefore of turning around the continued deterioration and immiseration of the greater mass of the Filipino population. When this happens, after 12 elections, an 18 year dictatorship, it is likely that the people will lose hope that this political system can offer them a change in their life conditions. They will be open to alternatives � even radical alternatives. The Alternative Strategy There is no alternative but to institute immediately the development strategy that has been found to work in other countries � a formula defined by two imperatives: genuine agrarian reform and industrialization, the formula that developed the countries of Europe and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Taiwan, South Korea, China in the second half of the previous century. It is a strategy already embodied in our 1987 Constitution but honored by our government more in the breach than in the observance since its passage. What has been lacking is what the country lost with the passing of the previous generation, an ideology that pursues national development and industrialization with a passion. We shall label that ideology �nationalism,� but it is a nationalism that is quite different from the nationalism of the 19th century that pushed the imperialism that made the Philippines a colony of the United States , and that brought the world to two global wars. It is the ingredient that historians such as Gerschenkron have said has been essential to all national developments throughout history, the element needed to �break through the barriers of stagnation in a backward country�� Our government�s faith in the profit motive and the market has failed us. We have ignored the lesson of historical experience that �� to ignite the imaginations of men, and to place their energies in the service of economic development, a stronger medicine is needed than the promise of better allocation of resources or even of the lower price of bread. break through the barriers of stagnation in a backward country�� It is the utter absence of this ideology, this ingredient that has featured in all development in history, that has prevented our country from rising out of the bog in which we seem to have gotten stuck for the past forty years. The organizers of the Kilusang Makabansang Ekonomiya together with organizations of peasants, labor, students, business, religious, academe have organized a movement called Peoples� Action for Nationalist Governance to advocate a new nationalist ideology. The Peoples� Action For Nationalist Governance 1. The Setting � The year 2004 a) This is presidential election year, and discussions of candidates and party slates and platforms fill the media in print and air waves. This is the eleventh such election in the 58-year history of the Philippine Republic. b) Ten past elections elected as many presidents and two bloodless revolutions � demonstrations of Peoples� Power � replaced two. But through it all the promised improvements in the conditions of the greater majority of the Filipino people have failed to materialize. Ten elections and two revolutions have raised and betrayed promised prosperity for all. c) Peoples� Power I of 1986 that overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos reinstated a democratic republic and embodied a vision of a truly sovereign nation in the Constitution of 1987 in which was laid out the course for the development of a just economic order effectively controlled by Filipinos for the benefit of the majority of Filipinos. But over the years the leadership the electoral process has put at the helm has systematically deviated from that course and violated both the vision and the letter of that organic act. d) The profile of the new leadership that aspires to lead the country in the eleventh electoral process offers no promise of any deviation from the path that the government has followed since 1987. e) The basic position of The Peoples�Action for Nationalist Governance is that the electoral process itself is flawed as an instrument for selecting a leadership that will change the ruling order responsible for the continued immiseration of our people. f) It has organized a movement to seek an alternative course for the abolition of the ruling order in favor of one that will achieve a genuine, sustainable development for the good of the entire Filipino nation and not just that of an elite minority and its retainers. g) The Movement is radical in the full sense of: i) Viewing the current condition of the Filipino people and the path on which it seems launched as being intolerable and the ruling economic, political and social order as being fundamentally responsible for that condition and the historical course on which Filipino society is launched. It thus says no to the ruling order and no to any reformist program that does not seek its complete overthrow; ii) Having a vision of an alternative economic, political, social and spiritual order that ensures a better life for the majority of the Filipino people, more suited to the geographical, historical and cultural circumstances and characteristics of the Filipino nation and its island habitat; and iii) Harboring the faith and confidence that such a vision is attainable, and possessing the commitment and determination to organize itself to achieve the transformation that will replace the ruling order with a new, just and human alternative. h) The 30th of this month of January 2004 will mark the Thirty-Fourth anniversary of the protest of the nation�s youth against the regime of then President Ferdinand Marcos that ended in violent reprisals from the government�s troops, and left martyrs to the cause of freedom. i) The Peoples� Action Movement views this occasion as an opportunity to raise the battlecry for mass action by the people to seek through peaceful means the total transformation of the existing economic, political, and social order and the establishment of a system of governance that will honor and satisfy the demands of the majority of Filipinos for a better life for themselves and their children and a sustainable path of evolution and development for the Filipinos and the Philippines. 2. What�s To Be Done? a) The Movement�s Program � its diagnosis of the present condition of the Filipino, its critique of the ruling order, its vision of the alternative, its plan of action � must be fully articulated in appropriate documents and embodied in a passionate Manifesto. b) This Manifesto must be launched in a public demonstration and fully propagated at all levels of society and throughout the country. c) The Movement�s Program must be translated into the specifics that demonstrate what each sector of society, at each level of community in the nation, now disadvantaged by the present ruling order, will gain from the realization of the new order established by the program. Those sectors must be mobilized then to throw their support behind the program. d) The program design will mobilize all levels of communities, all sectors of society within each community -- farmers, fisherfolk, artisans, small and medium traders and manufacturers, market vendors, landless peasants, professionals, service providers, civil servants, educators, students, women, youth, religious leaders and their lay constituents � in village, towns and cities � by demonstrating to each how much better they will fare under the new order than under the present ruling system. Their awareness will be awakened and their perceptions sharpened in workshops and discussion groups. e) The churches and schools will be mobilized to conduct these workshops and raise the levels of consciousness and awareness of every age-group and occupational sector of the population at all levels of the community. f) The protocol for organizing at all levels will embody the approach found effective in other similar movements, the triple process of SEE, THINK, ACT, or OBSERVE, ANALYZE, ORGANIZE at each level of community organization and in each sector. g) Each step in the process will be served by suitable protocols: for factual observation, for analytical diagnostics and for strategy, tactics and operational techniques of organizing. Appropriate programs for training of trainers and of leaders and facilitators will be designed and instituted through the channels most effective in each group and locality. h) The unit organization will start with �Consciousness Circles� that eventually combine and become formalized into groups of individuals or families in �Action Clusters� and grow into �Basic Ecclesial Communities� following an evolutionary process in stages along a maturation trajectory. 3. Resource-Mobilization Plan and Logistics or �Where do we begin?� a) Severe limitations in starting capital require great ingenuity and resourcefulness in mobilizing resources to seed the movement. Start-up capital will cover four items: i) The design and preparation of the entire program (including the protocols for the triple process of OBSERVE (Participatory Action Research), ANALYZE, ORGANIZE), the writing of the Manifesto, and their documentation. ii) Publication of the Manifesto � full page ads, printing of copies, translation into dialects. iii) January 30 Launching Rally iv) Training of core group of trainers and facilitators. b) If these first four items are covered and prove successful, then the follow-up, echo rallies in various communities and sectoral organizations, subsequent training sessions, organization of �Consciousness Circles� should become self-financed from a combination of volunteered services, contributed facilities by schools, religious orders, civic organizations, local NGOs in various communities and sectoral groups, and converted private individuals. |