Sarah Raymundo is a full-time faculty at the University of the Philippines-Center for International Studies (UP-CIS Diliman). She is a member of the National Executive Board of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) and currently the External Vice Chair of the Philppine Anti-Impeiralist Studies (PAIS). She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements.
El Caracazo in 1989 and the current Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela show that resistance to imperialist plunder and mass immiseration and murder of the people through the IMF-WB and the whole neoliberal project is possible and the absolute right and duty of the people.
In the midst of a heightened climate of impunity, this current volume locates the place of the people’s war as a revolutionary process in which alternatives are approached in terms of tactical and strategic objectives. In doing so, resistance is foregrounded as both an actual reality and a goal of people’s war taking place in two different and parallel spheres, namely, organized and legal street protest and the underground revolutionary armed struggle.
Those activists taught us how to expand, how to imagine the world with compassion, a sense of mission and commitment, freely, creatively and scientifically. None of our goals end when our personal ambitions shatter. There is a bigger picture to this accord and even to the so-called student power that made it possible.
The immediate effect was to facilitate a conversation, if not an outright stand on imperialist wars waged by the U.S.
What do we do with this history? What must we do with our very own politicians – – Duterte and a consolidated Philippine senate and congress who have only looted us, shown us obscene disrespect, and barbarism? Their actions are akin to US-backed local operatives deployed to exact the most severe violence among the people– mass murder, corruption, hunger, and repression.
Without undergoing a revolutionary process, governments in neo-colonies like the Philippines cannot plan. This government will always have to wait for imperialist dictates through neoliberal structural adjustment of the economy and culture. This government has no sense of nation because to think of nation and national sovereignty is to be up against imperialism, which has been the source of political and economic power by rich and corrupt Filipino politicians.
Neoliberal ideology marks the class struggle as a thing of the past. We are in the era of post-politics, as it were. No more class struggle, no more revolution, there is nothing to redistribute at a time when productivity is at its highest in the whole history of capitalism. Yet class struggle is raging in the peripheries and semi-colonies. That people are massively incarcerated, abused, brutalized by the police, rendered homeless with no access to health care and proper nutrition is also a sign of class struggle, especially considering how Occupy America’s one percent thrives precisely because of all that human misery.
This is why it is important to equate “poor” with “vulnerable.” Why, the most oppressed and exploited are also the most organized and politicized. More than ever, it is crucial for the ruling elite and their imperialist masters to deny that landless peasants, wage workers, informal workers and the unemployed wield the power of conceptual thought within the context of a protracted people’s war for national liberation and socialism.
Peace talks comes primarily because in the country’s hinterlands, a people’s army, guided by a communist party, is building organs of democratic political power. And in various sites, the communist bid for land redistribution, national industrialization, and a participatory planned economy through socialism is paralleled by organized, institutionalized and legitimate endeavors pursuing the same vision. This is enough for a government that is provisionally hijacked by compradors and imperialists to talk peace and reforms.
The law is flagrantly used by judges, police and military to violate human rights. Organizations previously red tagged have endured painful outcomes such a the imprisonment, murder and massacre of their members. This is none other than full spectrum dominance.
One of the supreme ironies in the history of protest movements is the fact that Chile, a US laboratory for covert action and direct military aggression is also the place in which the slogan “¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!” (The people united will never be defeated) originates. It is chanted by peoples in protests and meetings which honor revolutionary international solidarity.