Philippines: Fan the flames of resistance in the countryside
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following editorial from Ang Bayan (The People), the official publication of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
The chief imperialist predator Donald Trump is set to arrive in the country next month. With blood stained sharp claws and outstretched wings, he brings Pax Silica to fully seize the country’s land and wealth in the interest of American capitalists. Bringing oppressive schemes, he is certain to be met by the Filipino people with vigorous protest.
In various parts of the country, most especially in the vast countryside, resistance breaks out amid the worsening oppression of the broad masses of the people. Their suffering, hardship, hunger and plummeting living standards intensify as a result of the Marcos regime’s programs and policies that favor the interests of the ruling class and big foreign capitalists.
“Economic and security hub” in Tarlac, railways under the Luzon Economic Corridor, mining operations from Nueva Vizcaya, Mindoro, Romblon, Samar, to Caraga and Saranggani, “solar farm” in Nueva Ecija, airport in Bukidnon, “bamboo plantation” in Lanao. There is a push to accelerate, increase and expand logging, mining, plantations, tourism and energy projects, and infrastructure that grab hundreds of thousands of hectares and drive out tens of thousands of farmers and indigenous peoples from their land, and fisherfolk from their fishing grounds.
This worsens the widespread problem of peasant landlessness. The reactionary government’s four decades of land reform is a fraud. Seven out of 10 tillers still do not own land. This is most glaring in rice fields, sugarcane lands and vast haciendas and plantations, where the worst forms of feudal and semifeudal exploitation prevail. Day-long, back-breaking toil brings no promise of a better life amid high production and living costs, and losses due to low-balling and price manipulation of agricultural products. Farmers are drowning in debt to usurers and banks that exploit their desperate situation.
Intense militarization and fascist repression by military and police forces magnify these suffering. Where logging, mining, plantations or other land-grabbing enterprises encroach, there repression is most brutal. Martial law under the framework of “counter-insurgency” is imposed on barangays in the form of limiting people’s movements, including prohibiting peasant masses from working their fields, even during planting or harvest season.
Widespread fear comes with the approaching Super El Niño, which will devastate agriculture, cause further losses to peasant masses, and bring severe hunger in the countryside. The people’s anger rages amid the Marcos regime’s meaningless measures in the face of the impending disaster.
Frequent military exercises of the US and AFP also bring fear in the countryside. Beyond disrupting the livelihoods of peasant masses and fisherfolk, they also endanger their lives and destroy the environment that sustains them.
The widespread suffering in the countryside is the suffering of the entire nation. Peasant masses make up the majority of the Filipino people. They are the biggest productive force in the country. They are entire families who till the land, generating wealth, despite many of them being “invisible” in the reactionary state’s statistics.
The widespread conversion of agricultural lands destroys food production, deepening import dependence, causing the prices of rice, vegetables and other food products to further rise. The cost of living in the country relentlessly rises, while wages and incomes of the majority of the people remain low.
The severe situation in the countryside reflects the persistent crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal system. There is no genuine land reform and national industrialization. Agricultural production remains backward, productive jobs are severely lacking, especially amid mass displacements. More and more peasants become landless, and become farmworkers or semiproletarians in the countryside. To survive, they settle for seasonal work tied to agricultural production and commerce.
The deepening crisis and sharpening contradictions of the international monopoly-capitalist system further worsen the social and economic crisis in the country. The crisis in the countryside is particularly severe, driven by the push of American and transnational corporations to monopolize the plunder of the country’s natural resources, and pull down the prices of export products.
Driven by the aspiration for genuine land reform, enshrined in the program of the Party and of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the peasant masses have embarked on the struggle for national-democratic social change. Along this path, they unite to advance their immediate demands: for lowering of land rent in the form of changing the share in harvest and costs in favor of the peasants, wage increases for farmworkers and agricultural workers, elimination of usury and giving fair farmgate prices.
The anti-feudal struggles of peasant masses are linked with the struggle of the entire people to defend land rights against intensifying land-grabbing and plunder of the country’s wealth and patrimony. Thus, people in both cities and rural areas must unite. The countryside is virtually blanketed in tinder. The sparks of resistance will surely ignite a great fire of resistance.
Workers, semiworkers, young students, and other sectors in urban areas are challenged to head to the countryside and join hands with peasant masses in the struggle to advance their land rights, fight exploitation and defend the country’s patrimony.
All democratic classes and sectors are called to join the New People’s Army and take part in the peasant war, which is a major component of the people’s war. In the countryside, the NPA is continuously strengthening itself by tirelessly deepening and expanding its ties with the peasant masses. In the face of intensifying oppression, the NPA is determined to advance the armed struggle to support the struggles of peasant masses and the whole people.