Revolutionary situation nears

If the communist guerrillas are back in business, it’s not because the revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong are enjoying a resurgence. It’s simply because, if we must use leftist parlance, something approaching a "revolutionary situation" now exists in the Philippines. If not a revolutionary situation, then a steeply worsening peace and order situation where mass poverty – shameful and execrable – gets worse with every passing day. What is worrying, what is a blot on the national conscience, is that the elite hardly cares. Even the middle-class Filipino has his head stuck in the sand. And thinks of escaping abroad.

Almost all professional survey organizations have plotted poverty at between 60 to 70 percent of the Philippines’ 82 million population. Unemployment has long been double digit, 13-14 percent, underemployment at 25-30 percent. If our fragile economy remains above the water, it’s because Filipinos employed overseas send anywhere from $6 to $7 billion home annually. Then there is a brisk underground economy. This economy is not registered in the official records at all but it keeps millions of Filipinos alive. Illegal mining, illegal trade, illegal merchandising and marketing, smuggling, narcotics, and all that.

Still and all, it’s a race against the clock.

The big ogre is what they call the demographic "time bomb". However resourceful the Filipino might be, however patient and resigned to the fates, he cannot escape this bomb. It tells him the Pinoy is growing and multiplying out of proportion. The Filipino family just loves to procreate. Families of six to seven, even eight to ten children, are common. That would be all right except that the nation’s food supply and provisions have long been at a standstill – and that’s where the hunger starts. And if this hunger is not checked in time, starvation begins.

Economists will tell you that for the nation to progress, annual GDP (Gross Domestic Product) will have to move up to at least seven percent per year. GDP in 2002 rose to 4.5 percent. Official expectations are that in the years ahead, GDP could hit five percent and beyond. Already this is cause for Malacañang rejoining. The nation, it is claimed, is well on the road to sustainable progress, if not prosperity.

This is crap. Hardly anybody believes this anymore.

If indeed there is substantial progress, the nation should feel it and sense it. There should be many more jobs and there are none. There should be much more food on the table and there ain’t. There should be more earnings, more family income and there are none. There should be more schoolhouses, more classrooms. The opposite is true. The squatter areas should start to diminish. Instead, they proliferate. There should be less crime, specially petty crimes due to poverty. Our jails are chockful, can hardly contain the hundreds, even thousands over the country booked and imprisoned daily for ordinary misdemeanor.

Just walk around Metro Manila. Avoid the plush neighborhoods, districts, the shopping malls. Meander into the poor areas where the houses suddenly droop to squat and squalid barong-barongs and the stench offends you. Thousands mill into narrow streets. Here the nation grinds to a standstill. The adults are supposed to be working but they are not. They are perched atop stools and benches, drinking, talking, laughing, carousing, bare above the waist. Children, toddlers, babies are everywhere, dressed as squatters are dressed in dilapidated clothes, pinched, scrawny but merrily chasing each other as children everywhere in the world are wont to do.

These were the children of Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables as they are ours today. There was a lot of freedom, yes. But as Hugo masterfully depicted, it was the freedom to starve, the freedom to live under bridges, the freedom to get sick, the freedom to feebly protest and squawk, the freedom to live with sewer rats, the freedom to languish and die. These are the freedoms the bulk of Filipinos enjoy today.

I was quite taken aback when I saw and heard Gen. Victor Corpuz, head of military intelligence, declare in a TV talk show two nights ago that Filipinos were enjoying democracy, and had a lot of freedoms. What democracy? What freedoms? Yes, we have elections. Yes, we have freedom of the press, assembly, the freedom to shout our misery from the rooftops. But what kind of democracy is that? What kind of freedom is that? Like the United Nations General Assembly, it is the freedom of the poor nations to mount the podium and screech before the rich and the powerful push their heads into the water.

But back to the CPP-NPA (Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army). We have argued time without number in this space that communist revolutions have no currency anymore. The end of the Cold War in 1989-91 tore the intestines out of communist insurgencies virtually all over the world. The communist ideology, bulwarked into totalitarian or authoritarian governments fomenting class war, cannot feed the citizenry. Capitalism, supposedly moderate and given a human face, not only can feed hundreds of millions but educate them, give them access to knowledge and technology, widen their horizons, transport them to the ease and comforts of the middle class.

That is China today. Communism has officially been tossed to the scrap heap. Capitalism rides herd. The biggest middle class in the world – more than 200 million people – is the Chinese middle class. You won’t believe it but the Chinese rich today can afford to purchase stretch limousines, not to mention Mercedeses, BMWs, Buicks and Cadillacs. They live in California-style bungalows, have learned to ski in exclusive mountain resorts, dress well, eat very well, are now hardly removed from the life-style of the Boston Brahmins.

But even as we say the communist ideology is now a dead duck, revolutionary consciousness is beginning to seethe in the Philippines. There is nothing surprising in this.

The ancient Greek and modern philosophers had always maintained that poverty and oppression bred social unrest and social unrest bred rebellion and revolution. Just so many days ago, I asked a well-known economist how long the Philippines could last under the grinding weight of escalating poverty. His reply was possibly until the 2004 elections are over. The deluge could begin shortly after. Unless the economic situation is reversed, he said, the nation "will certainly crack up in less than four years".

My economist-friend knew whereof he spoke.

Way back in the early 70s, he was guest speaker of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of the Philippines (FOCAP). That was 30 years ago. He told me that early that arable lands were starting to get congested because of rapid population increase. Our population then was just about 37 million. Student and worker demonstrations were quiescent. There was no such thing as civil society. The term barong-barong was current usage. And it was only later that the artist Malang depicted them in his paintings – rickety houses cheek by jowl held up it seemed only by Scotch tape and by the ingenuity of the poor.

"Watch it," the economist told me. "Once all arable lands in Luzon and the Visayas are tilled but still unable to sustain a growing population, there will be more and more migrations to Mindanao. Once even Mindanao becomes dense with human habitation, Christians settling by the doves and acquiring land and driving the Moro into the hinterland, then the Philippines could be in for a social explosion."

He was right, uncanningly right.

Mindanao today is beset with all the evil in the land. This sprawling island coupled to Sulu and Palawan is now a gun barrel pointed at the central government in Manila. Poverty is at its worst in Mindanao, social unrest, crime and violence. Nobody is really in control of or dominates Mindanao. The military isn’t, although it claims to be. The Christians aren’t, although they are in the majority. The Muslim rebels refuse to disappear and they to hold a live grenade to the temple of Philippine society.

And up north, in Luzon and the Visayas, the situation is made worse by the presence of about 10-12,000 communist NPA guerrillas. If they should formally link up with the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), and the situation after the 2004 elections doesn’t get any better, both have a broad-gauge weapon that can wreak havoc on whatever peace still remains.

And so while a "communist insurgency" might not have any meaning anymore, the ideologues of violence now talk about a broad-based revolution or civil war. I had earlier brought up the concept of Freedom Force. This would have been a non-violent force standing between a communist revolution and a seizure of power by the military. But such a force presupposes the existence and support of a civil society up in idealistic arms, breathing verbal fire, and treading ground with raised fists and a threatening bellow.

Alas, civil society is asleep today.