Growing guerrilla movement fueled by peasant desperation to demonstrate real capabilities for operating independently. It is nearly impos sible to bring in arms in large quantities from outside (from a friendly country or market). The NPA has to find its weapons in the country itself, by capturing
Since the assassination last August of the opposition leader Benigno Aquino, the Marcos regime in the Philippines has been going through a prolonged period of open political crisis.
The world press's attention has been focused mainly on the extraordinary wave of mass mobilizations that has dominated the political life of the country for six months now. In Manila above all, but also in the provinces, demonstrations have followed mass rallies without letup.
On January 31, 1984, there were again a million and a half people in the streets of the capital demanding the resignation of President Marcos.
These urban mass mobilizations, entry of the middle classes and an important part of the business community into active opposition, have involved all sections of society and pointed up the isolation of the regime. The government is able to remain in power only because of the backing of the army, the support of the United States and the division of the opposition forces (1).
Even if the media are not so interested in it, the worsening of the social and economic situation in the countryside is also a major factor in the development of the national crisis in the Philippines. given impetus to peasant mobilizations and offer fertile soil for the communist guerrilla movement.
which have been facilitated by the
These problems have them from the enemy or buying them from corrupt officers in the government
Linguistically divided, the majority of the Philippines' 53 million inhabitants are peasants, and there is a considerable range of differences in the agrarian structures. These conditions make it difficult to achieve a rapid unification of the peasant
All this has obviously worked to slow down the spread of the NPA. On the other hand, the policy of the martial law regime, the constant widening of the market economy, and the increasing integration of the country into the world economy in the 1970s have strongly promoted the geographic spread and conver gence of the democratic and social struggles. Many mass organizations have been formed, and the guerrillas have been able to take advantage of the new situation.
By the start of the 1980s, the NPA's main "fronts" were no longer concentrated, as they had been in the initial phase, on the northern island of Luzon alone. It had established a front in the Davao zone
LING DUING
SUSTALE VIC MASOONE
DR. BOBBY dela PAZ on the southern island of Mindanao and on the island of Samar (in the middle of the archipelago, to the east of the Visaya island group), as well as in the Cagayan Valley in the northeast of Luzon.
More generally, the conditions seem to
SICCI € MILITARY TERRORIE have been assembled today for the communist movement to reinforce its work in the countryside on a national scale, on political and military levels, as well as in struggles for immediate demands, in both semi-legal and clandestine forms.
For the first time, the activity of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) extends to the bulk of the country. It in fact goes far beyond the guerrilla zones where the NPA, its "armed
25,000 demonstrate in Manila against President Marcos (DR) Paul PETITJEAN
The New People's Army, known by the initials of its English name, was founded in 1969. For several years, its forces remained quite small. But in the mid-1970s it began both to consolidate its strength on the local level and to spread. This twofold process made it into one of the most dynamic guerrilla movements in the world, after the one in El Salvador, although the extension of the Philippine movement has been relatively slow and the level of its operations remains generally modest. (2)
The mountainous terrain of the country has made it easier to establish small International Viewpoint 26 March 1984 guerrilla nucleuses. But the fact that the
Philippines is an island archipelago including more than 7,000 large and small
For a general analysis of the crisis of the
Marcos regime, see Paul Petitjean,
Dictatorship in
Movement," IV. No 38, Octo
The NPA sometimes conducts large oper marshalling hundreds of guerrillas.
generally remain units in the villages or the forests.
"liberated zones," the NPA has gions and partially controls some areas with a
According to a recent article in the CPP's
Ang Bayan, the NPA has 45 guerrilla fronts covering areas
It extends to
"white" rural zones - that is, those congovernment army - and
This article also claims that the NPA has 20,000
100 in 1968-69, grew to 2,000 in 1972, rose to this figure again in 1976 after a decline, and tosouth of the archipelago have the benefit of an board motor boats, in particular with Sabah in the Indonesian archipelago.
rillas are much better armed than the communtheir struggle affects only
-ULLCD.
southern part of the country.
indirectly to some extent from the traffic run
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The situation that prevails today on the island of Negros illustrates both the new possibilities open to the revolutionary movement and the complexity of the problems that have still to be solved
On the island of Negros in the western Visayas, sugar is king. Since the nineteenth century, sugar cane has dominated its entire economy. The archipelago's first big export crop, sugar cane growing, was given its initial impetus by Anglo-American commercial capital while the country was still a Spanish colony.
From the outset, this industry was oriented toward international markets, and it was granted special access to the American market by the Laurel-Langley Treaty when the Philippines became independent in 1946. (At the end of the nineteenth century, the US took over the Philippines from Spain and ruled it as a colony for about fifty years.) But in 1974, the Laurel-Langley Treaty ran out, and the Philippine sugar industry had to face competition from other producing countries and sugar substitutes. Crisis of the sugar industry
The shift in 1974 opened up a deep crisis, although it was momentarily concealed by a considerable but temporary rise in sugar prices on the world market. A long time before, Hawaii, followed by Australia and other producing countries, had mechanized their plantations. But in the Philippines, the bulk of the crop was still brought in by wage workers (on Negros) or by share croppers (Luzon).
Assured of a stable market in the US, the Philippine "sugar barons" were content to go on superexploiting their workers and did not try to modernize. Most of them seem to have been counting on a renewal of the special agreement with Washington and were taken by surprise by the expiration of the Laurel-Langley
The crisis of the sugar industry in the Philippines was compounded by a political crisis. The Negros "sugar barons" belonged to the traditional bourgeoisie and were not represented in the new coterie around President Marcos.
Taking advantage of the powers derived from the establishment of martial law in 1972, Marcos gained a monopoly in sugar trading. For this purpose, he set up government banks and agencies and put one of his intimates, Roberto S. Benedicto, the new sugar czar, at the head of them.
The sugar industry in the Philippines has remained one of the most backward in the world. Systematic efforts mechanize, based on Australian methods, only a few years ago. preparations were made for this. ever, the mechanization of all operations (cultivation, weed removal, care of the the plants, cutting, collecting, etc.) should lead to a drastic reduction in the labor force employed - by 60 to
"This is a tragic situation," a trade-union activist explained to me in 1983: "The island and its people depend entirely on the sugar crop. The government has provided no plan for agricultural or industrial reconversion. There is simply nothing else for the laid-off workers to do. Unemployment is already rampant in the rest of the country. And in any case the plantation workers have had no training to enable them to adjust to another trade. In many cases, their parents lived on the plantations before them. It is the only world they know."
The island of Negros has an old tradition of mass struggle that goes back to the revolution of 1896, the uprising against Spanish colonial rule. But the communist guerrilla movement took root on the island only recently. Still relatively weak, it has operated mainly in the mountainous areas, where the slopes are worked by share croppers or small farm-
Agricultural workers unions have organized the plantations on the island's western plain. The most dynamic of them, the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), was founded in 19,71, a year before the institution of martial
This union now has a long experience of economic struggles and has managed to establish itself on a significant number of plantations on Negros (as well as in the center of the island of Luzon). But it faces great difficulties in its organizing work. One reason for this, of course, is the repression. forms of exploitation and dependency to which the workers are subjected also pose
Full-time workers live on the planta-
The houses they live in belong to the landowners. They are often obliged to buy their supplies at the plantation store, if only because transportation to the market is too expensive. They are in debt, often deeply. They are paid by the day or on a quota rate. In the off season, they depend on rice distributed to them landowner, whom they reimburse out of their wages when they go back to work.
But the plantation owner may refuse to give rice to a union activist. It is very difficult for workers to leave a plantation if they are too badly treated because they are often in debt to the owner. Moreover, the other plantation owners in the area would probably refuse to hire them (since the bosses stick together), and then these workers would have no other alternative but to go join the ranks of the urban poor in the shantytowns.
more, the full-time workers are traditionally only a minority of the workforce, by comparison with temporary workers and migrant seasonal work-
The sacadas, the cane cutters, generally come from the neighboring island of
They are organized into "gangs" by the recruiting agents. They are paid miserably but they are also trapped by the spiral of debt.
Thus these workers form a poverty-stricken rural subproletariat, and they have been the first to pay the price for mechanization. employed for a season is already much lower than in the past. This has a direct effect also on wives and children. Because the plantation owners often introduce mechanization in stages, starting first with those tasks traditionally done by women and children - planting, of fertilizer and pesticides,
The NFSW is trying to get the social
"On paper, the Philippines has the best social legislation in Asia. The problem is that the laws are rarely enforced. today (early 1983) is 14 pesos a day, plus cost-of-living allowances, making a of about 20 pesos. The real average wage is 10 to 12 pesos a day. What is more various methods are used to try to get members of the workers' families to contribute unpaid labor, in particular through the Pakiao system."
The Pakiao system is a cruel form of piece work often applied on many plantations. The workers are paid according to the area covered, per hectare of cane cut for example. The rate is so low that they are obliged to get their whole families to help them so that the family can collectively earn a little money.
"There are cases where the daily wage of an individual member of the team is as low as one or two pesos," that is about 12 cents. Thus, a family of eight might earn a dollar a day. Growing tensions tension is obvious today on Plantation workers who lost their jobs killed a particularly inhumane manager out of desperation. The landowners are worried about the safety of their agents if they fire workers on too
For some years army outrages have been increasing. And summary "liquidations" are stimulating the growth of a human rights movement. Big mass mobilizations have developed around social and political demands (such as the boycott of faked elections). In December 1983, 90,000 people demonstrated in the city of Bacolod.
Living conditions vary considerably from plantation to plantation. owners are more humane than others, especially those who live on their planta. tion and not in town. Some managers are also better than others. measures that makes the biggest difference in the living conditions from plantation to plantation involves subsistence farming by the workers. On one plantation that I visited, for example, the owner let the workers grow for their own use or sale vegetables, maize and rice along
See Alfred W. McCoy, "In Extreme UncSugar Industry." Political Economy of Philippine Commodities, Third World Studies Program, University of the
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
the bank of a stream. This was vital for the families concerned. They could eat what they grew. You cannot live on sugar cane!
It is an ingrained experience in agricultural workers that sugar means hunger. (5) The commercial crops are no use to those who grow them. So, agricultural workers retain the mentality, the aspirations of small peasants. They dream of getting a bit of land on which they can grow things for themselves, for their families.
This factor explains the ambivalence of the program and struggles developed by the NFSW. The union fights to win a measure of control by the workers over the plantations. It defends the legal rights of agricultural workers in the courts. It organizes strikes to get these rights respected, as it did in the La Carlota district in 1982, for example, to force the owners to pay the workers the annual bonus to which they are legally entitled. (It was a very big strike but the workers were unable to win their demand. Because of the sugar industry, the relationship of forces is unfavorable to the workers.)
But since 1973, the NFSW has also included agrarian reform in its program -distribution of a part of the plantation land to the workers so that they can grow on it what they need. It has supported large actions where workers have planted food crops on unused land in the face of fierce opposition from the owners. Today, the NFSW explains that this is one of the few means available for dealing with the social crisis opened up by the mechanization of production, that to take advantage of the resulting increase in productivity to give the workers left wholly or partly unemployed some of the plantation lands.
This paradoxical situation — agricultural workers aspiring to a peasant life that neither they nor their parents have ever known - illustrates a fundamental feature of the social crisis gripping the Philippines. Everywhere production for the market, national or international, is tending to replace, or at least dominate subsistence farming.
### MULTARY
*SES
THE PAILS!
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
This is an inevitable effect of modernization in a capitalist country. new commercial crop is introduced, it offers the small producers an attractive income, which induces them to modify their farming decisions - to "modernize." In other cases, the landowners impose such changes on share croppers by threatening to deny them the right to cultivate
But very often, once the cultivation of a crop becomes wide spread, the real income of the small producers falls below what it was before. With the money that they get, they can no longer buy the equivalent of what they themselves and for barter under submarket prices fall with the increase in
Because the prices of the fertilizers and pesticides essential for the new crop go up. Because the land gets exhausted. And because the small producers are too dependent on the merchants and therefore are subjected to an unequal rate of exchange. Poor peasants ruined
Big producers can make substantial profits owing to the size of their farms, their ability to get information about the evolution of the market, and the quality small producers can themselves left in a desperate situation, getting less than a subsistence income.
This is what happened in fact in the coconut industry in the Philippines. This is a very important sector, since coconut products are one of the country's primary
There are a few big coconut plantations. A lot of producers are small
Others are share croppers or agricultural workers. For a period when coconut products were selling well on the world market, in particular coconut oil, the commercial growing of coconut trees
Then an overproduction of vegetable oils appeared. The price collapsed. But in order to compensate for the drop in prices and raise productivity, it was necessary to invest capital (better seed stock,
Anti-US imperialism demonstration (DR)
REAGA
KEEP YOUR
ARMY
• TO YOURSEY
fertilizer, etc.). The small producers did not have it. In particular, if they had any surplus, they could not wait eight years to get their money back, since this is the time it takes for a coconut tree to begin
What is more, as in the sugar industry, the Marcos regime's policy was not to aid the mass of producers by subsidies but to government monopoly in the sugar trade, a governmental monopoly in fact by - the minister of defense, Enrile, and the businessman Cojuanco.
Marcos even managed to finance the creation of this new economic empire by taxes levied on the producers them-
Mass demonstrations in protest developed in the coconut producing regions, which in some cases were suppres sed bloodily by the army.
What keeps small producers (either small holders or share croppers) tied to a commercial crop when the money they get for it is so little is that it is very difficult to extricate yourseif from the trading circuits once you have gotten into them and when the entire regional economy has started to be transformed).
Very often the small producers are in debt to the land owners or the merchant who provides their basic necessities. So, they borrow on their future crops and cannot break the cycle of production without the agreement of their creditors.
In this way, they are obliged to keep on buying and therefore selling, even though, because of their debts, almost never see the money their crops bring in. Lifetime indebtedness, passed on from generation to generation, is not
Producing for the market then becomes the precondition for keeping up some small subsistence farming, enables the producers to survive because of their very small monetary income. They have to continue growing this commercial crop, not to earn a living but to hold onto the land on which their houses stand and where they can raise a few chickens and a pig, when they can plant vegetables and fruit trees. (6)
You can see the same conditions in other sectors. An example is a village in the north of Luzon, lying among dry
The two main crops here are mountain rice, grown without irrigation,
The first is for family consumption, the second is for sale. local farmer, I added up what each crop cost to produce (fertilizer, etc.) and what they brought in (the sale price of the tobacco and the savings made by growing rice, comparing the production cost
It turned out that the farmer worked
In a good year, he got the equivalent of about 8 dollars for a month's work, in a bad year, nothing.
This experience coincides with that of the sugar workers in Brazil. See Linhart, Le sucre et la faim, Editions de Minuit, Paris. 6. See Ribogerto Tiglao. "The Political Economy of the Philippine Coconut Industry," in the Third World Studies Program, Op. Cit.
19
"Last year, when I sold my tobacco crop, paying my debts and my land rent, I had enought left to buy a pair of underpants," he remarked bitterly. he has to continue to produce tinue to live in the village, to get fruit from the trees, to survive.
Thus, the market economy subordinates subsistence agriculture. the social relations and the living conditions of the villagers. It tends to integrate the local economy more and more into the national and international capitalist economy. It draws the country into an irreversible process of modernization, a modernization that very often leads to the absolute impoverishment of large sections of the population and an exodus from the rural areas, which, in turn, because of the lack of sufficient jobs in the and in industry, generates vast
In this way, the extension of the market economy generally accelerates the concentration of land ownership in fewer and fewer hands and the growth of social divisions within the peasantry. the most advantageous positions take advantage of the widening of the market to increase their profits and acquire more land. The rest, the majority, are crushed under the burden of debt.
Moreover, in countries dominated by imperialism, the market economy is not incompatible with the maintenance of backward and complex social structures. It is not necessarily in the interests of seize the lands of peasants unable to repay their debts.
The government assures its control over the profits more through the mechanisms of trading than of production. And the same holds true for the multihitch the small and middle producers to their chariots rather than transform them directly into agricultural workers.
The way in which the policy of the food and agricultural companies has evolved is clear in the Philippines. banana industry on the southern island of Mindanao is a good example. the 1960s that the commercial growing of bananas became widespread on Mindanao, with production oriented to the Japanese
The bulk of the industry is in the hands of three big American transnational food and agricultural companies - Castle "Stanfilco"; Del Monte, under the name of "Philpak"; and United Brands (formerly the United Fruit Corporation) under the name "Tadeco."
Only the last of these three has set up a plantation employing agricultural workers. Stanfilco signed contracts with 377 small producers. And Philpak signed contracts with middle producers, with cap-
Through tight control of the trading circuits and by contracts with the producers, the big companies have in fact gained a grip on the production process right down to the last detail, without however becoming the owners of the lands concerned. They can impose the forms of cultivation that suit them and sell the agricultural products to anyone they please.
The producers, especially the small ones, have been robbed of their power of choice. On the other hand, the big company does not have to assume a series of costs (land tax, hiring temporary workers,
This burden is left on the legal "owners" of the plots of land. still better from the big companies' point of view, the small producers will get their families to work for nothing and the capfarmers will superexploit their All this goes to swell the profits of the multinationals.
By controlling both the prerequisites for production and the outlets for the products, the food and agricultural companies can keep the producer-owners on a tight leash. This has the additional advantage of standing in the way of the small producers developing a common limited demands or revolutionary aspira-
It reduces them in practice to a quasi-proletarian status but keeps them attached to legal ownership of the land.
Almost all sectors of agriculture in the Philippines have now been hit by economic or social crisis. (7) This is what is enabling both the communist guerrillas and the CPP's underground structures in the "white" zones to expand to new territory and wider social layers.
However, in order to achieve this growth, the Communist Party had to substantially its initial orientations, which were too militarist. the formation of the NPA in 1969, the CPP tried to establish a "Yenan" (8) in the Cagayan valley region (in the northeast of the island of Luzon). But by 1971, government troops had been concentrated there to nip in the bud this first attempt at establishing a guerrilla focus. For the NPA, the experience was a very bitter and costly one.
In an article looking back, Liberation, the underground organ of the CPP-led Democratic National Front, described the lessons of this experience as follows:
"The region became a land of torment and misery as the government's encirclement and suppression campaigns forcibly relocated and hamletted thousands of peasants in the manner of 'depriving the fish (NPA) of its water (the people)?
"The systematic and sustained repression campaign continued under martial
For the next four years, the NPA suffered tremendous losses due to massive enemy operations which were compounded by big errors in policy committed by some leading cadres in the region. These cadres' reliance solely on physical terrain in an effort to preserve the guerrilla army from the encirclement and suppression campaign had spawned passive and also limited NPA areas of operation to already depopulated forested areas.
"In 1977, the NPA launched a rectification campaign. New priorities and new tactics enabled the Red fighters to break out of enemy encirclement and expand into virgin territories. In this way, the guerrilla army was able to preserve its diminished forces and increase manifold. From the forested areas of Sierra Madre, it reached the populated plains of Cagayan Valley and the neighboring Apayao."
Thus, since the first stages the conception of the guerrilla war has been modified. It has developed from a technical one of seeking protection government armies solely in the terrain to a more political one where the guerrillas protect themselves by building a base among the masses.
This reorientation of the NPA fits in also with a whole series of adjustments in the CPP's perspectives for work. adjustments have been made successively since the mid-1970s. They have involved mass work; work in the cities; the attempt to gain a more working-class social base; reevaluating the role of semilegal activity, and even intervening in elections; the party's agrarian program; and alli-
While making all these adjustments, the CPP has sought to strengthen its focus on the armed struggle.
The acceleration of the social crisis in the countryside and the cities, together with the political crisis of the regime that opened up after the assassination of Aquino, are posing many of these problems again, but on an unprecedented
The CPP is trying to respond to these developments by combining reinforcement of the NPA in the guerrilla zones with centralizing a vast nonviolent movement for democratic rights and immediate demands in the "white" areas.
However, it is far from easy to coordinate mass struggles in areas where military battles are being waged and in areas where the struggle is nonviolent and to coordinate highly diverse political and social movements. It is very tricky to try to build at the same time underground revolutionary structures and broad legal or semilegal mass organizations. Nor is it simple to set immediate common objectives for this entire movement beyond just the overthrow of Marcos.
The practice of the CPP and the NPA will probably continue to evolve under the impact of the present mobilizations.•
This article does not deal with the ricegrowing industry. For the overall picture, see Walden Bello, David Kinley and Elaine Elinson, Development Debacle, the World Bank and the Philippines, IFDP and PSN, USA, 1982.
Yenan was the sanctuary, the liberated zone, where the Chinese Communist Party took refuge after the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution in 1927 and after Chang Kai-shek started extermination operations against the
Army. At the end of the Long March (1935), the Chinese Communist Party established itself in Yenan, in the northwestern part of the country.
Liberation, Vol. XI, No 6, September 1983, p. 17. This evolution of the Communist Party indicates What differentiates it from the Communist Party of Thailand. this regard, see the article on the crisis of the Thai CP in this issue of IV.
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
In 1982, the Fourth Congress of the CPT met finally after long being postponed. Far from resolving the contradictions and reestablishing a semblance of unity in the party, it opened up a new period of crisis, marked by mass defections and a member of the Political Bureau surrendering to the government.
The crisis of the CP and the left
The years 1973-1978 were a time of testing for the CPT. It got a historic opportunity to put down roots and to lead a revolutionary movement on the national scale, to overcome its political marginality and the limitations of its geographical and social base.
For the Thai left, the last ten years will be remembered as a decade of dashed hopes.
From 1973 to 1978, the revolutionary forces in the King lom of Thailand experienced a rapid growth.
was given impetus by an unprecedented wave of social struggles, as well as by the defeat dealt to the American imperialists in Indochina. (1)
With the radicalization of new strata, followed by a rapid expansion of the guerrilla zones, the