Walden Bello’s new cudgel is to credit ousted President Estrada for being able “to organize the people along class lines into a powerful mass movement,” something supposedly the Left has failed to do “for decades.” Aside from a gross misrepresentation of the so-called Edsa 3, this is a cavalier dismissal of the colossal efforts and significant achievements of the Left in organizing in the countryside and cities of the archipelago.
By LUIS SANVICTORES
In the article “May
1st Riot: Birth of Peronism, RP Style?” (Philippine Daily
Inquirer, May 7), University of the Philippines professor Walden Bello
starts off by touting his noisy (a term he casts at others) little group in
order to lay his credentials for his crusade, now a decade and a half long, of
attacking the Left movement.
His new cudgel is to credit
ousted President Estrada for being able “to organize the people along class
lines into a powerful mass movement,” something supposedly the Left has failed
to do “for decades.” Aside from a gross misrepresentation of the so-called
Edsa 3, this is a cavalier dismissal of the colossal efforts and significant
achievements of the Left in organizing in the countryside and cities of the
archipelago, starting from well-nigh scratch, despite military and ideological
encirclement and suppression, and after overcoming major errors in line and
leadership.
Ever since his embarrassment
in purveying the US State Department document that the US would hold on to
Marcos when it was actually already abandoning him, Bello has been calling for a
“new paradigm.” After Corazon Aquino’s ascension and in the heyday of
Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and all that, he cried down with the Communist Party
of the Philippines, Marxism, the national democratic revolution and, most of
all, Jose Maria Sison -- and all power to Cory. Before the Asian financial
crisis, he bandied about that Japan had far outstripped the US in the
Philippines and Southeast Asia, and that what the Philippines needed was more
imperialism, not less, for its development. Then with globalization getting a
bad time, he became its “rational” critic.
He has been demanding “a
sea change in strategy, methods of organizing,” etc. and for jettisoning the
Left movement for a decade and a half now, or about half the time the Left has
been organizing, but all he has come up with up to now is his noisy little group
with its real and imagined sentiments. The Left, meanwhile, has managed to
regroup, correct its errors and advance.
No doubt Bello wields a
facile pen and has come up with a catchy phrase in “Peronism RP Style,”
which goes to show that he gained erudition from his Princeton political
sociology courses, but despite his paradigmatic ambitions his faddish analyses
in the end seem more akin to cosmopolitan journalism.
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