A Dark Page In The Past

BIMBO CABIDOG

Ferdinand Marcos on his second term as president with the so-called Rolex generals getting the final details of how to execute Oplan Sagittarius, the plot to impose martial law and put the entire country under one man rule.

When Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared Martial Law in September 21, 1972 were the communists about to seize power? This was what he made as reason, but history would belie it. There was no imminent danger to the nation from the left, or real threat of oligarchs trampling upon traditional democratic institutions and taking over the country, as he harped on.

Now, looking back, it is very clear that Martial Law was not a recourse to save the country from communism. It was neither, as Marcos would idealized it, a “revolution from the center” to stop the powerful economic and political cliques of the right from doing harm.

The draconian measure was simply a palace coup to extend his rule beyond the term provided by the 1935 Constitution. It was a move to centralize power under one man. What a tragic fate it spelled for the people.

The enactment of Proclamation 1081, suspending normal governmental institutions and suppressing political rights, cast a pall of gloom over the entire nation. The archipelago fell into an eerie silence. No newspapers showed on the streets. Radio and TV broadcasts went off the air. The citizenry talked in hushed tones. Everyone waited with bated breath for what was going to happen.

Over the week, bits of news slowly trickled building a hazy picture of the situation. Folks began to know that Senator Ninoy Aquino, Senator Jose W. Diokno and other major personalities in the political opposition were captured and detained. Down the line, activists and alleged subversives were rounded up and brought to stockades or tortured in unknown “safe houses.”

Both chambers of Congress were shut down. Political parties were not allowed to exist anymore. Organizations especially those that proliferated in the climate of dissent following the tumultuous First Quarter Storm in 1970 were disbanded. Even campus associations including student councils were suppressed. There was only one way to override the edict: go underground.

Considered a bastion of freedom, the Fourth State was shuttered. TV and radio stations were seized. Printing presses and editorial offices were padlocked. The widely read Manila Times newspaper and the favored maverick weekly mag Philippine Free Press, so with others in the liberal print media, disappeared from the stands. Through duress and actual force, Marcos gagged expression.

In the ensuing state of repressions, little dreams of young people like me would be dashed. Because of my prior engagement in university politics, and involvement in off-campus youth organizing and protests, I earned the honor of landing in the Military Intelligence Group’s blacklist. Before long, state agents were already after my skin. Less than a year after the declaration of martial law, I would be welcomed to one of Marcos’s detention cells.

Since then, life took a shaky turn. One door shut. In it my poor father saw the prospect of a bright future, the only one he could offer to me. It flew in an instant. Another door swung open and sucked me in. There I found myself in uncharted and turbulent waters. I floundered and tossed in stormy straits. Sailing was rough all the time. And I didn’t know which shores to head.

Was martial law worth the agony, sacrifices and deaths inflicted on the nation? Marcos wielded the powers it gave to be a dictator of unequalled rapacity in the country’s history. He fleeced the public coffers and carted billions of dollars to foreign shores to hide in private accounts. But not only did he plunder, he murdered. And the list of those who succumbed in that night is very long. What did the citizenry gain? Did the country end up any better, any safer?

It ended up much worse. Three years before Marcos’s ouster, the country’s Gross Domestic Product started on a steady trend of negative growth. The economic decline sent banks into holidays and subsequent closures. Investments took flight. As markets crashed, the financial system nose-dived. The government tail-spun towards bankruptcy it had to beg for loan from Singapore.

The pretext for the declaration of Martial Law was the specter of communism swallowing the whole country. The Utopian vision of a classless and stateless society should of course be a dangerous proposition only to the capitalist ruling classes. The spook about totalitarian rule, supposedly accompanying it, was merely a Cold War myth. Nonetheless, forty four years since, the Communist Party of the Philippines, along with its armed wing the New People’s Army, has not even hurdled yet the first stage of armed struggle to capture political power. It still languishes in what it calls the strategic defensive phase. So what danger did it pose in 1972?

Where was the fearful challenge to the country during Marcos’s ascension to authoritarian rule? It wriggled at the embryonic stage of revolution, a ragtag idealistic band of recruits from the academe merging with remnants of Lava-Taruc’s Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB). Debacles after debacles in the war front saw it conducting a guerrilla warfare of running without hitting, until the top leadership was snared by the enemy and locked in Marcos’s jails.

There was no subversion on a general scale that was about to topple democracy Philippine-style. The actual subversion was that of Marcos’s palace coup striking down the liberal-democratic government that existed under the 1935 Constitution. The communists were not poised to take over. He was. With martial law, he arrogated to himself the powers of the three equal counterbalancing branches of state.

Marcos lied to the nation. In the guise of quelling rebellion, he perpetuated himself in power. And under cover of monumental deceptions he suppressed civil liberties, trumped democratic processes, cancelled voting, and warped governance. He jailed, tortured and murdered detractors. He amassed wealth while the country turned into a basket case. For fourteen years he succeeded with lies.

But not for long could the dictator cheat history. On February 25, 1986 he was ousted by a popular upheaval that saw millions of unarmed citizenry match up to his tanks and cannons. A pundit once said: “Those who sow the seeds of deception will reap the whirlwind of the people’s fury.” Marcos literally finally did.

With his ignominious flight on that fateful night of February, as the masses he had oppressed for years surged at the gates of the palace, went a dark page in the nation’s history. But now, thirty years after the fall, his family members are hell-bent in burying him – or what passes off as him, at the Libingan Ng Mga Bayani, and the new government has given permit. Subtly, the vestiges of the past taking heart from the generation that did not directly experience want to revise history.

Now, the government of Rodrigo Duterte is killing its own people waging a misguided war against drug. There isn’t even a semblance of due process, as in the time of Marcos, when supposed narco elements are shot dead and tagged user, pusher or dealer. The police do not care to investigate, for it also is involved in the mass slaughter under the contrived alibi that arrested suspects fought. The skies on human rights are once again dimming.

I have added four decades to that time when I was barely a young man taking the cudgels of a fight for freedom, as many other young men like me did. I am again having that chilly feel of de javu as a climate of undeclared martial law, forgoing with the rule of law, and rabid persecution of those who dare to disagree or criticize the leadership blanket the land. Is the nation turning another leaf, much similar to that page of past that shifted 44 years ago today?

A Warmer World, An Altered Human Mind

BIMBO CABIDOG

In a lyrical short story first published in Esquire magazine, August 1936, the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro were immortalized by Nobel Prize author Ernest Hemmingway. As it stands today, the beautiful wintry scene at the zenith of the highest mountain in Africa may not last anymore.

Mt. Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano located in Tanzania. Enchanting artists and plain visitors of yore, its pristine white cap now melts when it shouldn’t. The scene of breath-taking allure painted by the great novelist Hemmingway in the canvass of his prose is on the way to vanishing. This is due to the hotter than usual climate across the Dark Continent.

With such trend continuing everywhere, what will the world be in 2040 or 2050? It is an issue as RAGING as the Muslim jihad phenomenon in the capitals of the west. It conjures a scenario where no other than mankind may have suicide-bombed itself.

In March 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a Fifth Assessment Report detailing the broader impacts of an increasingly warmer earth on water resource, food production, and other natural and human social systems. The report also indicated the world’s vulnerability in different areas, regions and key risks over the future.

The scientific community has long held that the entire food chain can be decimated to a vast extent, and the human species itself endangered, if temperature rise will go on. Global warming poses a more serious threat to civilization than Islamic extremism. Climate terror is upon mankind.

For those in Africa, a hotter world was a matter of grave concern as early as ten years ago. In 2006, governmental and civil society leaders here held a summit attended by then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. The assembly intended to discuss and come up with a response action plan to the heat that was wreaking havoc on the region.

A warmer clime automatically triggers the spread of diseases and makes the natural food supply more precarious. In Kenya, one province was severely hit by flooding due to altered weather. In some places like Turkana, sun blasted plains threatened to extinguish an extraordinary culture.

That was several years before Supertyphoon Yolanda lashed. On November 08, 2013 the world came to great shock and grief when the tropical cyclone described as the strongest storm on record hit Eastern Samar and Northeastern Leyte, Philippines. Around 8,000 inhabitants at once perished in the city of Tacloban and the towns of Guiuan, Palo and Tanauan.

The catastrophe was brought by combined maximum sustained winds of 285 kilometers per hour and 15-foot waves surging inland from the sea. Almost everyone agreed that this was what climate change is already all about. The ferocious winds and crushing waves of Yolanda couldn’t have happened if not for the despoliation of weather systems by rising global temperature.

Over the last 100 years, the earth has warmed by about .6 degree centigrade. But crossing to the third millennium, deep concern has begun to be expressed by various circles including the scientific community on the unabated trend of global temperature rise especially among the developed countries.

If the heat yet climbs up by three degrees and because of the melting polar ice caps sea levels rise by 7 meters, where will humans go? Oceans invading higher elevations can easily displace 100 million people all over the globe.

Meanwhile, on the remaining dry land, already degraded environments will scorch, water bodies will disappear, and vegetation will become thinner and thinner. All over Asia and Africa, this has already manifested in lakes drying up and expanses of cropland being claimed by desertification.

With estuary, coastal area and lowland flooding on the one hand, and high aridity on the other, most species including Homo sapiens could already go the way of the dinosaur.

Of course a lot of people know it. The apocalyptic effects of global warming are not an imaginary ghost story by the old folks to scare the young into behaving and bundling themselves in a corner. The futuristic scenario is for real. The world of man will crash, if temperature rise is not halted. The latter part of the present century alone may well see the prophetic end of days.

How will societies deal with the threat? There are two ways. One is knowing how and preparing to adapt. Human populations and settlements will have to drastically alter patterns in the advent of unbearably hotter environs paired by vast areas under water. Living then will not be what it used to be. With substantial amenities absent, things may beat back to the Stone Age.

What are examples to prepare for? Housing and food procurement will border on frontier extremes. Scarcities will be the norm dramatically impacting on lifestyles. Climate events beyond control will shrink families and communities and exact a huge psychological toll. Quality of life can recede to the hunting-gathering stage.

How to cope up or survive under these conditions will be more central than how to earn a living.

But before we get there, we are presented a wiser second way to deal with the nightmare. This is to prevent it from happening. Respond to global warming now, not later. Cool down the heater. Stop doing what you used to do.

What exactly has to be stopped? It is the furnace from churning more heat. The furnace is the deposit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap radiation from the sun. They are the carbon emissions from industrial and biological waste. They should subside or stop.

Reducing or stopping outright carbon emissions is of course easier said than done. That will take uprooting of most of the ways civilization has been going on for the past three centuries. Salient among this is the reshaping of culture and reconfiguring of human-social needs after the industrial revolution. Social modernization, driven by runaway industrial production and highly consumptive lifestyle, would give rise to the use of energy and resources at unprecedented levels.

As culture turns more and more to artificial means of satisfaction, burning in all spheres of human activity would increase thousand-fold especially with the extraction of oil from the bowels of the earth. With this, prodigious volumes of byproduct in harmful gases would be spewed out. In the case of carbons, they would remain suspended in air and trap solar heat. 

Confronted by overheating machinr and human activity, cultures must start to veer away from modes of living dependent on huge consumption of energy. Industry for one may have to slow down. Demanding lifestyles, such as having a car and motoring to places may have to be forgone. Eating hamburger in fast-food stands that take supply of raw material at the expense of decimating natural ecosystems may have to exit.

The climate time bomb is on. The world is a boiling magma of energy turning every facet of human life from ceaseless industrial production to culture characterized by highly artificial urban living. As this hot core of need and satisfaction churns the goods and services the present historical social development requires, the earth nears explosion.

Energy generation and consumption must wind down. It may have to address already just what man directly needs, not what a whole gamut of activity at putting up the industrial economic base and the social superstructures needs. This entails a sort of back-to-nature reprogramming, living simply, and going by the basics.

Human life needs a reboot. Old habituated practices have to be kicked out. The usual behaviors, attitudes and tendencies that demand so much especially in destroying the natural biophysical environment have to be discarded. Aims and aspirations and even rationale for living must be changed. The concept and conduct of being human themselves have to take some paradigm shift.

How deep should change get? It may have to turn man back to the mode of living in the period of Adam and Eve, before the fall. This means living in harmony with nature, on what nature provides. It doesn’t dare alter the vast array of creation and its internal laws of motion – the interaction of elements therein and growth, which the limited human mind neither engineered nor significantly knew.

The world is what it is today, in great peril and racing towards self-destruct, because of the altered mind of man which kept on changing it, not for better, but for worse. The answer to global warming and the need to deflect its apocalyptic outcome may be what Paul in Roman 12:2 said: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” 

It is when the wave is high that you can surf

BIMBO CABIDOG

Years ago, I came across this quote on a poster: “As long as you keep sailing, there are horizons to explore.”

Since then the words would come back to me every time my life hits a snag and it seems that I could not go anywhere anymore.

Are you facing overwhelming odds right now? Look at the bright side. It is only when the wave is high that you can surf.

Once I lay on a hospital bed, crushed and broken. I was just lucky enough to have my limbs intact. But I was near death, or may have only come back from it. Blood pressure was zero from a whole night of hemorrhaging, hemoglobin count two. Breathing won’t proceed lying on my back. Skin was ashen, lips violet. Only one fly needed to sign my death sentence.

From the bottom of a smoky pit, I kicked back gasping. Feeling the doctor’s hand busying around me, I inhaled the revitalizing air, and gradually began to breathe normally.

The surge of revival made me defy the deadly searing pain that shot through almost every nerve of my body. But full consciousness brought in a prospect much paler than death. It seemed life had perfectly exploded, and everything ahead was only one big problem.

Well, it was 38 years ago, and I’m still here to occasionally remember the episode. I sailed through. Since then, I have kept on arriving at one horizon after another.

There is really no such instance when there is nowhere else to go. But I suppose that is how some people feel at some messy juncture in their lives. 

The road has come to a dead end. Nothing anymore lies ahead. Not true! At any impasse, a way to keep going on always presents itself. The only problem is if we don’t see it, or simply refuse to look at it.

It doesn’t mean that if you can no longer think of anything, there is nothing more to think of. The possible has no limit. Only the thought of it has. This is not science or logic. It is just that only the impossible is impossible. It is just that beyond knowledge is yet the realm of belief, and belief’s range is infinite.

I have never gotten to plan life able to rule out the uncertain, the unexpected outcomes. I have always been lousy at leading a systematic existence. It did not help that I was once an academic derelict, thinking he knows better than the teachers. In a period of repressions, darkness and seeming hopelessness, I dropped in and out of school.

But what you’re going to be, and where you’re going to be, will surely come no matter how faltering and unsure you are.

A college instructor once assigned me to write a career plan. I ended up writing why I did not need or want a career. That came out to be prophetic. I would lead a life of not treading the required or prescribed path, not avoiding to go where angels fear to tread, not living by the book. I wandered and meandered out of the way, that is: finishing school, getting a job, raising a family, acquiring conveniences that money can buy.

I may have been joking. But fate took me seriously. It would award me with a ceaseless string of debacles, frustrated ambitions and setbacks. Sometimes I just thought I was simply born a loser. Sometimes the setbacks got to the point where there seemed to be no more tomorrow. But who cares? I have grown to be inured with stumbling and falling.

When you are down, the law of gravity doesn’t say that you are going to stay there forever. The instinct is always to rise. There is an inner force that makes you spring back. The next turn is definitely not to die, unless as they say, it is already your turn. You may not want to live anymore, but you cannot afford to live dead.

Consequences of a particular fall can be worse than the worst. But Murphy’s Law has only temporary application. Even in the direst of times, things can already start to assume a sunny aspect. Thank that the chance given you is the last. The torment is over. Thank that the door has been shut. You no longer have to enter it. And who knows what’s inside?

Any auspicious outcome, any deliverance from the valley of the shadow of death, doesn’t even need a reason to happen. It happens on account of you.

Feeling like you’re leading a messy and chaotic life? Don’t dive into a quicksand worrying. Don’t impetuously throw your life away, because nothing good seems to be going anymore. There’s another way of looking at it, waiting to be worn like a new pair of glasses. You are experiencing the rough edge because it is passing away. Remember, all things must pass.

Every experience is worth it: the happy and sad, the sound and the sordid, the easy and the hard, the blissful and the sorrowful, the pleasant and the painful, the elating and the humiliating. You can’t add to or deduct from any of them by shirking in front of each one’s time. Look them in the eye. Accept what has come, and even give thanks.

The mind always questions. It questions what it doesn’t like, what it hates, what hurts. Why is this happening to me? What have I done? It presumes that these things should not have happened at all, or they happened because somebody has done something wrong.

Take it from higher intelligence. You are having them, because you have the light. The light that is in you is the same light that shines on everything, carves every experience, brings every piece of beauty or ugliness before you.

In the end, every rise or fall is just how we see it. The passage of an adversity can never be more devastating than the thought that says it is. When you meet what appears like Mr. Misfortune, don’t tarry longer than the time you need to greet him. Look him eye to eye and bid him your friendly goodbye.

The seas are not always calm. They are neither always rough. Sail on and set your sights to the exploration of new horizons. Mind you, there comes the radiance of the high wave beckoning for an adventurous and fulfilling surf. 

Ending Poverty (Seventh and Last of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

The agenda for social reform and restructuring

Would the masses be poor if they could help it? Would they prefer to be poor, if they can have a better life? Things boil down to freedom. What the poor ultimately don’t have is not money, but power. They do not have that power to choose and shape their destiny, the way it should be.

The motivation behind the nature, structure and direction of the political-economy of a particular society is certainly of the classes that dominate it. They are the ones that own and control the means of production, appropriate the fruits of collective labor, and divide wealth. Ownership, control and appropriation of the products of human-social labor have always been strong motive forces of history. They determine the prerogatives society as a whole carries out. It is unthinkable and unbelievable for the ruling classes to organize and marshal a system that goes against their fundamental interests.

So why is the economy stunted? Why is it continually failing to scale up? Another question may answer them: Which class decides what it produces, places commodities in markets, or does not mind producing at all? The interests and priorities of this class are the reason why. The nation does not change the feudal system in order to unleash unprecedented production in the countryside, and does not move towards full-blown economic modernization by industrializing, because these are not to this class’s best interest and highest benefit.

In Philippine society, its personas are the big landlord, commercial and banking tycoon, financial oligarch, top-level government bureaucrat, and rich clan member wearing political coats. Over the past century, genuine progress has not dawned on the country, because of their stranglehold on the means of economic satisfaction of the vast masses. With the political and state structures they hoisted, the economic policies they foisted, and the roadmaps of skewed development they have imposed aggressively over the rest of the populace, they prevented and suppressed the nascent forces of society’s genuine development. These forces constitute the marginalized classes at the lower tiers of the social pyramid.

Ever increasing national wealth did not go to the improvement of the lives of the people. Under the unsullied reign of the powerful and wealthy elite, society has not attained real and equitable development. Instead, it continued to be stuck in the doldrums of repetitive economic debacles and injustice to the working masses. It continued to be weighed down by pre-industrial levels of productivity and rural stagnation. It went on to be chronically wrecked by astronomic external debt servicing.

The native political-economic oligarchies with their powerful foreign patrons have deflected the nation’s course from genuine agrarian emancipation, the liberation of the forces reeling under feudal rule, and the release of the people’s vast potentials for industrial development, towards the mere partitioning and parasitic sucking of its economic lifeblood through highly exploitative plantation agriculture, comprador monopolization, and predatory financial regimes by banks for the enrichment and maintenance in power of a few.  

The long freeze in rural emaciation and backwardness, and holding at the jump-off towards industrial pole vaulting, stunted the economy even as the population flung into runaway growth. These scenes at the macro translated into surreal deprivations and untold ill-being of millions of people in local and specific communities. Moreover, they weakened them enough to prevent them from emerging out of the cocoon of exploitation and oppression, into a new economic day.

The country must do away with these constricting realities and free its vast citizenry to soar the heights of development. State structures must be overhauled, along with the predatory regimes of finance, production and markets that have battened on the blood and flesh of the masses and road-blocked the course of their socio-economic advance.

First is reforming government policies and budgets to manage optimally and efficiently the public resources. The large chunks of money must now be decisively shifted away from projects that mean little to the people’s real welfare and advancement, but deliver largesse to politicians, bureaucrats and conniving contractors. Spending for large-scale engineering and massive infrastructure must be balanced with the need to deploy almost an equal amount of resources to the promotion of enterprise at the grassroots or enterprise-livelihood, the enhancement of agro-ecological environments, the improvement of rural production systems, and the capability building of local folks to set in motion and accelerate their communities’ sustainable development.

What these ultimately boil down to is for the people to be in the strategic position to chart their own future and realize outcomes with their intrinsic resources and potentials, in their own terms. The restructuring or reorganization of power relations in such a way that the people will finally be able to tread the path of their genuine progress, fulfill aspirations that are primarily their own, employ labor most productively to their greatest enjoyment, enlarge social equity, and carve novel markets of goods and services, to lay the groundwork for the rise of a modern industrial society – such is only for them to implant and nurture into growth.

The good news is the seed has always been available.

Why hasn’t indigence been licked despite the pouring of billions of pesos by the government into the vaunted war against poverty? It cannot be simply done leaving untouched the structures and edicts that perpetuate strangulating exploitation, economic stagnation, and social inequity. Unless they are dealt with by deep-going reforms, the curse of poverty can stay for the rest of the century.

Is there a political-economic order that can at last resolve age-old ills? There is. On what force does this depend? It depends on the active and consciousness-directed historical force of the vast majority. It must in fact rely on the unity and collective action of the masses.

To end poverty for all times, the people must advance their own Political-Economic Restructuring and Reform Agenda. And they must advance this, not waiting for the time when they have finally got the power to smash the old apparatuses of state and replace them with a new one. They must advance it, utilizing all the spaces and power immediately within grasp, building up from their own existing horizons of capability the force to destroy the old system and superstructures. The time for the dismantling is not at some far stage of struggle ahead. The time is now.

Local pill for global ill

Poverty is real globally. But it impacts locally. As concrete ill-being, it is specific and multidimensional. Thus, encounter with it is not anywhere but where the poor live.

The global ill can only be cured by the local pill. Nobody knows what it is truly about, how it feels, and where it hits, but the poor themselves. Doesn’t this place them in the best position to minister the cure? It is their ail. It is also their weal. They alone, in the final analysis, can draw what goals to aspire. And they alone can go to the extent of actually accomplishing them.

Who else but those who suffer will resolutely want to find out what can be done and shall be done with their suffering? Appropriate action cannot be charted appropriately in the boardrooms of the well-off, insulated from what is going on. It can only be done in the villages, hovels and households of the folks who reside in them experiencing the problem everyday of their lives and the urgency of solution. These are the single biggest reason why the war should proceed to the logical end.

A bad condition of existence will not be eradicated by the ones who profit from it. Equality cannot be eliminated by those who live by the unequal ways of society. Good change cannot be advanced by those who hold power and wealth by taking advantage of the status quo.

Hence, victory will only be clinched by the battles that the poor themselves wage. They cannot ask for it from above. They must make it happen. In summary, how?

One is by uniting and organizing themselves to wage battles in the political front. Their big numbers can score victories, whether in putting their real representatives in power, or by effecting policy reforms through pressure. They can demand the enactment of a law, or the proper dispensation of justice. Or they can remove a corrupt and unresponsive elected official.  They can gradually shift the political order towards their incremental democratic empowerment.

The way to the restructured and reformed state is the rise of an advanced section among the masses to undertake general awareness-raising, unification of their ranks, and direction and management of concerted action to confront the powers-that-be and demand answers.

Second is by self-help initiative, the consciously directed application of their labor to change the circumstances of their lives. Labor, according to Adam Smith, creates the wealth of nations. Almost everything on earth yields to human hands as they magically turn idle resource into value. Labor itself can be wielded by the slaves of toil and oppression as weapon for their liberation.

Ending Poverty (Sixth of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Dynamics of economic modernization or industrialization

The other pivotal development is industrialization, the ultimate solution that will seal the history of poverty and spur off unprecedented development. What does it mean?

Industrialization is the modernization of social production characterized by the predominant use of machines and the organization of labor forces in a workplace. It is an epoch that saw the rise in human productivity and output never seen in the historical development of society. It is a time when the capacity of labor has magnified several fold with technological innovation and the introduction of machinery.

Only genuine industrialization for such a Third World country as the Philippines can increase production exponentially and generate the kind of prosperity that will improve the lives of the masses on a general scale. Only such a development can make it possible to raise incomes above deprivation levels, raise standards of living, and establish a reliable domestic market.

That full-fledged industrialization will spur off progress by leaps and bounds stands to reason and experience. Productivity will be at never attained heights before, and because of this, economic growth will proceed on a speed never hitherto experienced. Jobs will multiply. Outputs and levels of money will break records.

The sheer force and magnitude of progress absent the equitable distribution of wealth yet can already severe the chain of poverty. Indeed, the country’s transformation into a modern industrial economy can result in bailing masses of the people out of chronic hunger, dire impoverishment, helplessness, and stagnation.

What is the configuration of the new development? First, to fully and genuinely industrialize, there must be capital goods production. The capital goods industry includes such commodities needed in production itself as steel, machinery, power, power generation capacity, energy, communication infrastructure components, electronic raw materials, construction materials, engineering equipment, and inputs to manufacturing. The CGI supplies the requirements of industry itself.

Department I or the capital goods industry cannot be done away with. It plays a strategic role and is indispensable in industrialization.

Liberating the countryside

How will the country go into industrialization? What historical factors must be realized before this can actually proceed.

First is the emancipation of rural folks and their resources from the slaveries of the past. The nation must now be unstuck from feudal stagnation. It must be able to free the forces of production in the countryside for rapid growth. The individual lot tillers and farm workers excruciating under age-old production systems and the counterproductive domination of landlords must find release to shape a new economic destiny.

It may only be done by an agrarian reform that corrects the historical injustice of having land owned. Because of this, the actual workers or tillers of the land lose a means of production. The landlords who now have control over it subject them to choking squeeze. They attune it to large-scale cash crop production. By doing so, the peasants are left with nothing to eat, except what they can buy with their starvation income. The landlords further intensify production to squeeze more money, but give the peasants so little from the yield to live on. The feudal order strangles the forces of production and stifles overall economic growth. It has to be dismantled.

Land should be returned to the ones who work on it. There and then only can they regain control over the means of production and attune it to their best interest. If they think farm diversification is better than the old monopoly plantation, their will be done. As opposed to the previous order, their decision on what to do with the land will now be followed to their greater benefit. Only then can productivity and production pick up, and rural prosperity fueled by unprecedented agricultural progress become a concrete reality.

Rural prosperity is the main lever to catapult industrialization. It will provide the surpluses needed to create savings in huge amounts. The savings can then constitute the financial resource to convert into capital for strategic nascent industries. Land and human resource present the biggest largely untapped potentials that lay in the countryside for genuine industrialization. The only requirement is for them to be released from the stranglehold of the outmoded production system whose place should already be in the past.

With rural prosperity, the country is able to create the size of market viable for industry. The maximum employment of workforces by a highly progressive agricultural sector, accompanied by a steep rise in incomes, can result in a dramatic increase of purchasing power in the countryside. That increase further expands in the generation of new jobs or livelihoods, out of agriculture allied industries, or downstream processing industries that add value to farm products. The segment of the population now lifted up from the poverty threshold by prosperity in the countryside is quite a bankable domestic market for a thriving industrialization.

It might be necessary to remind again. The historical condition that can spur all these is only the liberation of the countryside from landlord rule.

Ending Poverty (Fifth of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Enterprise by the poor, business at the grassroots

Stop-gap measures of the government will never be able to bail out the poor. Neither will the mantra of inclusive growth, which is just charity by another name. The millions of Filipinos who wallow in misery can only start leaving the poverty threshold by setting in motion two pivotal developments:

1.    Taking up enterprise that will create wealth in their hands and propel local economic growth
2.   Setting the country in the direction of genuine Industrialization.

Under the macro-economic order that perpetuates the root cause of their social status, the poor cannot hope for deliverance. Their only recourse is to embark on an economic revolution that will terminate the vicious cycle of underdevelopment and the indigence of the masses. Such is the real war against poverty. How is it going to be waged?

The poor have one inherent power in their possession that has made the world what it is now. It is the power to create the wealth of nations, according to the father of economics Adam Smith. When they are relegated to the state of idleness in the ranks of the industrial reserve army, and have no employment to secure a means of living, they can wield it all the more. They can use it no longer to make the rich richer, but to make their lives better. This is by getting out of the predatory regime of creating wealth for a few, while depriving themselves and their families the enjoyment of life.

That power is labor. And the revolution is enterprise at the grassroots, or enterprise of the poor.

A simple paradigm shift makes it happen. The workers, the possessors of labor power, transform their social and economic character from wage-earner or industrial labor reserve under the employ of the capitalists into self-employed producers of value and creators of wealth. They apply labor to the production of goods and services by them, and for their primary benefit. They do so as entrepreneur.

Instead of looking for job, or lining up in the long queue of applicants for it, only to end up waiting much longer for news if he got hired or not, the industrial labor reserve may take the path of self-help initiative. Or the company to offer it might take another generation to materialize and finally pop up the wished-for opportunity. Wait no more. Pull the opportunity, make things happen. In short, the industrial reserve, the job seeker, employs himself by creating his own job.

Self-employment upends the old social order that dictates the industrial labor reserve can only live if he/she works, but he/she can only work if it produces profit for the capitalists. Now, the worker no longer sells his labor power in the modern industrial slave market, he overturns the economic dictum by working for his own profit (economic gain) in order to live. The new condition happens when the worker assumes the role of worker-entrepreneur.

Allow this essay some minting of words: labor entrepreneurship. This is when a worker gets into business, instead of hiring off for wage-labor. It means the worker, as industrial labor reserve, instead of seeking job embarks on an enterprise. He puts up and operates business.

The pivot may be a small matter at first sight or on the surface. But it represents a big leap in the usual order of things. First, the move offers an immediate solution to poverty, which is taking an age to crystallize. It doesn’t wait for the macro economy to generate jobs. Experience shows that the wait could be interminably and agonizingly prolonged. Even then, finally having a job still doesn’t necessarily mean ending poverty.

Second, labor entrepreneurship offers the prospect of pulling the community up from the doldrums of economic inactivity to the dynamics of production and market expansion. Enterprise increases the community’s output. But besides upping productivity, it employs idle workforce, puts money in their pockets, and therefore builds a robust market. Hence, it becomes an engine of local economic growth.

Finally, there is the social justice angle. Labor entrepreneurship paves the way to equitable wealth distribution. The wealth creators enjoy the whole fruit of their labor by first of all getting most of the wealth they create. Because of the new scheme of things also, the gains of progress stay in the locality to fuel sustainable development.

The new economic paradigm distinguishes itself most clearly by the fact that the underlying factor of development is no longer the financial wealth of the rich at the top, but the forces and resources of the local folks below. The principal determinant of whether or not the lives of the people will improve is no longer the institutional arrangements that shape the bigger economy at large, but the proactive decision and collective action of the very ones themselves who need their lives to become better.

With the poor taking the road of self-help initiative onward to enterprise, ending poverty doesn’t bank anymore on the false hope that the rich embracing the myth of inclusive growth will come down to the rescue. It banks on the result from doing something about their lot themselves. The resolution of the war against poverty doesn’t wait and wait and just wait for some rich guy to dare to spend millions of his wealth on business to provide jobs for poor folks. That is tough luck, and never happens.

Job creation has been touted as the means to solve poverty. But what does this entail? It entails the decision of a capitalist or group of capitalists to put up business by probably building a factory that will employ many people. That decision ponders two essential things: how much money to invest, and whether the business is worth it. Of course, the would-be proprietors are not going to decide on these things on the basis of whether or not the company they will be building will provide jobs to the poor. They are going to decide on the basis of whether or not the millions of pesos or dollars they will be pouring in will generate equally millions of pesos or dollars in profit.

In short, it is a decision that is not dictated by pity for some people who are in misery. It is dictated by pragmatism, that is: the certainty of getting profit, with minimal risk of losing. The jobless can spend ages waiting for the decision. Sans the assurance of hefty profit, it will never come. Yet oftentimes, making profit also simply means making folks perennially poor. 

Such is what the formula of job creation in solving poverty is all about. It is a prescription that twiddles the fate of the masses on the vagaries of the market and the uncertainties of business. The poor have waited for it to throw in the net of redemption. But it doesn’t happen simply because they need redemption. It happens, because the rich need to get richer.

The people and they alone can make their liberation from poverty happen. They are the principal forces to make such change. Only they have the best reason and the most enduring strength to bring it to the finish, having virtually nothing to lose, and everything to gain. And it calls on them just to take the initiative of helping themselves, acquire skills, pool the resources lying around – many of which idle, deploy them into the arena of their economic war by turning them into capital, turning capital into goods or services, and the latter into incomes.

Enterprise in the community, enterprise of the poor, and enterprise for development as engine of economic growth – such is the sure-fire weapon at winning the war against poverty.

Ending Poverty (Fourth of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Product and manifestation of the failure of the economy to grow

Mass poverty is by and large an ill of developing countries. The biggest number of people victimized by extreme deprivations is from them, as shown by the Human Development Report (First of Series).

The fact that about four billion folks living only on $2 and below a day come from the Third World shows that the general problem of underdevelopment has got to do with poverty on a very wide scale.  It is the offshoot of the failure of national economies to grow.

The Philippines belongs to the underdeveloped or Third World countries. More than half the people here rate themselves poor. The country’s per capita GDP (gross domestic product) is one of the lowest in the world. Agriculture, which continues to be the basis of its economic viability, is stuck up in an age-old mode of production characterized by backward underproductive tillage, and single planting of low-value crops for export.

Eastern Visayas is one of the country’s poorest regions. Poverty incidence here has been officially recorded at 48.5 percent. But with how its economy has been performing, the data may still be understated. Below is a case in point.

In 2008, the Eastern Visayas had a Gross Regional Domestic Product of P28,997,747,000. Its annual per capita income was P7,020. This means each person in the region had only a theoretical income of P585 per month or P20 per day. The term theoretical is used, because such is if the output is distributed evenly on the whole population. Of course, it is not.

The impoverishment of a large number of the population constrains economic growth. It emaciates labor power, preventing it from creating greater wealth. Marginalized workers are condemned to a fate of expending energy in labor without proper replenishment, because they barely have food on the table, or sometimes forgo with it at all.

The situation either discourages workforces from engaging in production or constricts productivity. Misery demoralizes labor. The inability of a worker’s earning to support even his/her bare existence discourages work, because what labor offers is only slow death.

Meanwhile, because labor gets only a tiny share of the value it produces, the capacity of the working class and the rest at the lower strata of society to purchase the goods and services in the market is diminished. Demand tends to fall short of supply. Industries pile up commodities that are not bought and become moribund surpluses.

Progress is thrown back by failing markets, and neither does it happen at all with sluggish markets, for there is no reason or motivation to produce goods in high quantities if they cannot be sold.

But large production and economies of scale is what drives spiraling economic growth. They not only fuel material prosperity by increasing the social output, they employ the vast reserves of industrial labor and put money in their pockets. In the final analysis, by increasing the purchasing power of the general populace, they buy themselves the products that they send to the market.

Nothing of these happens when millions of people agonize below the poverty line. With very little to satisfy their basic needs, they also have very little energy and motivation to intensify labor and boost production. The condition turns the cycle of poverty and underdevelopment.

On the one hand, underdevelopment causes poverty and folks hardly subsisting. The economy fails to grow. Agriculture stagnates. Industry could not take off. More than half of the population depends on farming to live. But even the farmers who produce food have no food security. The result is the impoverishment of huge segments of the population.

On the other hand, poverty perpetuates underdevelopment. The penury of the masses discourages increased large-scale production, or modern industrial production, because the population doesn’t have the capacity to buy its output. Mass indigence therefore itself stymies progress.  

Import-dependent export-oriented economy

With a sluggish domestic market, manufacturing naturally depends on export. But in producing for export, it competes against an advantage exclusive to the developed countries where it destines its products: industrial might. Besides the built-in competitive disadvantage, it often has to deal with onerous terms, vagaries of the market, and price uncertainties. It only hopes to offset these by one factor: lower priced commodity made possible by cheapened labor power.

Export-oriented manufacturing can only succeed by perpetuating poverty. This is by paying the lowest minimum wage for labor.

Dependence on foreign market is inherent in continuously underdeveloped societies. The reason is that the domestic market cannot yet fully support manufacturing.  Thus, the tendency not to produce what the people need, but what other countries need. Export-oriented production is indeed ironical for a country with a high number of people unable to meet their basic needs?

Because of the virtual absence of industrialization, the country must get so many of the goods it needs from outside. It must import not only consumer goods, but inputs to the making of such products as pins, clothing, milk, chicken, household appliances, personal gadgetry, etc.

Here is where the bind comes in. Imports need international currency. And foreign exchange may only be provided either by overseas Filipino labor or foreign trade. Exporting goods again cannot be avoided, because of another imperative: getting dollars to buy imports.

Such a mode of existence ends up reproducing underdevelopment and the inter-generational cycle of poverty. For the country to develop, it must embark on full industrialization. But this cannot proceed purely reliant and attuned to foreign markets. Industrialization can only take off on the assurance of a robust domestic market.

Import-dependence in goods and export-reliance in production constitute a sure-fire formula for perpetuating the country’s Third World status. This is one big reason why the curse of mass poverty with all the ills it spawns stays.

Ending Poverty (Third of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

The poor at revolution, the moral dimension

Injustice makes poverty a moral and political issue. As such, poverty stops being a mere fact of life. It stops being a neutral reality, but a condition of existence to fight against.

Because of its exposure as an evil, poverty graduates from being just a matter for a bothered conscience to respond, and for the kind soul to engage in charity. It becomes a cause for social critique and pursuit of political action.

The case does not just appeal for one’s sense of compassion anymore, and sharing of blessings with the least of his brethren. It does not merely call for inclusiveness of society. It demands redress and radical structural change.

Further analysis of the issue bares the unjust system that nails millions of people on or below the income threshold, thereby introducing the necessity of strife to dismantle it. Forging a higher consciousness, it mobilizes forces to engage in fundamental change.

The other face to poverty is deprivations – the denial of the satisfaction of needs like food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc. Deprivations create ill-being. But more than that, they deny freedom. They curtail choices in life. 

To millions of people, it could be the choice not to go hungry. They don’t have that anymore several times a year, for their economic status rules out getting food.

When the poor have become conscious of the denial of their freedom, poverty is seen as oppression. In itself, there may be nothing wrong with a low wage. But when the lowly paid ones realize it as a curtailment of their right, it becomes a revolutionary cause. Earning above the poverty threshold means being freed from an oppressive social-economic relationship.

The question of freedom touches off strong feelings. Poverty morally urges to take sides: whether for change or the status quo, equity or oppression. It creates a gap, and the gap becomes a fault line with the potential to trigger cataclysmic social upheavals.

Well, it historically did. Philippine society has convulsed with violent unrest over the past century. The immediate root of such was the inability of the people to live by their means anymore, under the prevailing political and economic regimes. The eruption of the peasant insurrection in Central Luzon in late 1940s and the 50s was one.

The same tremors would continue until now in the internecine and prolonged conflicts that divided the country over the years. On the other hand, the state would chronically inflame them with the response of virulent suppression, unable to end the cause and reconcile social contradictions.

Throughout the 20th century, rural poverty exacerbated by intensifying feudal oppression ignited pockets of rebellions against landlord rule. These later merged into one national struggle with the aim of overhauling the old social order.

The Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB), under the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas led by Jesus Lava and Luis Taruc, poised at the verge of taking the reins of government in Manila and sweeping the whole country in a revolutionary storm. But effective counterrevolutionary tactics, complemented by big blunders of the movement, foiled the challenge.

The specter of people’s war would later resurrect with the fusion of armed HMB remnants and intellectuals from universities in the national capital, which founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. The leadership of the merger swore to rectify errors, rebuild revolutionary strength, and ramp up anew a nationwide insurgency. Fueled by continuing mass poverty, this would spill into decades of protracted warfare.

The gas that would feed all the political conflagrations was the denial of the right of the masses of the people to greater choices in life. The fiercest military campaign waged by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to quell the leftist insurgency in the 1970s and 80s diminished such choices and fanned conflict all the more.

During his dictatorship, when the country fell under the darkest repression and the economy was run to the ground by unbridled plunder, poverty worsened. A new sector rose defined by historical struggle. This was the urban poor, matching with its own determination to fight for liberation, the organized farming folks in the countryside.

During the hour of fiercest political repression in the early stage of martial law, the urban poor spilled out of Tondo to stage a daring march to Malacanang in defense of their threatened communities and means of living. Their mass action broke the climate of fear. The poor had nothing to lose but their abject lot.

Marcos was toppled by a short uprising in February 1986 that gathered millions of people at a main thoroughfare dividing the two camps of Aguinaldo and Crame, bringing to a standstill the dictator’s military machine. Soon after President Cory Aquino assumed office, she declared war against poverty. The enunciation of the war against poverty was a wise political stroke to address continuing polarization and conflict even after Marcos has been removed.

Folks die of hunger without raising a finger against the powers-that-be. Why do they fight then? It is because they now see the ill-being as the denial of their right to life. Poverty has crystallized as a case of grave injustice. It has assumed a moral dimension. 

Ending Poverty (Second of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Inequality masking the true face of inequity

The definition of poverty, as an income on or below which a family can no longer meet the bare minimum requirements to exist, presents a complementary realization: the capitalist system may actually have no solution to it. This is because the iron law of wages that governs the principal economic relationship of classes in society tends to keep income at the lower strata to the lowest.

The case is mostly true to countries in the southern hemisphere which have been kept perennially underdeveloped by colonial exploitation. While rich economies, like those of the United States and Europe, pay workers ten or more times the wages of their counterparts in the global south, they are able to do so only because of the sacrifice of the intensely exploited peasant and working classes here.

The global sway of the highly advanced capitalist societies, especially in the west, would stunt growth and keep incomes of billions of people marginalized under the pre-industrial, debt-ridden and underproductive economies that they foist on these societies and dominate.

In most times, the minimum wage here never rises above the poverty level. Yet, this is only for firms that care to observe the minimum wage law, as the case in the Philippines is. A majority of companies consisting mostly of small-scale manufacturing and commercial outfits pays workers even way below the mandated wage.

What does the historical reality show? Indeed, poverty is a condition fostered by the prevailing social and economic system. It is due to an order that denies the working masses the power to decide what’s good for them. It owes to the predatory regimes of labor imposed by the economically dominant classes of society.

Earnings will always be unequal, apologists of the system defend. It is inevitable, because people themselves by nature are unequal. The rich folks naturally get rewarded for extraordinary talent, diligence, hard work, and acumen. So, they earn more money than the average rest.

The argument however falls short of explaining why some of them garner inordinately more money in this life than the majority of the masses could ever earn in several lifetimes.  

The highest level of excellence or the hardest humanly possible labor still cannot account for some folks getting into the club of the richest – the one percent who owns more than half of the globe’s wealth, while most of everyone else wallows in penury they starve at certain times of the year.

The justification for so much wealth at the other pool actually does not stop at extolling the virtues of its appropriators. Apologists go further to blaming the poor themselves for being poor. They blame them for being inept, lazy, vice-prone, and not doing any better. “That, gentlemen, is why the unfortunate assholes never earn more than they pee,” they would opine.

All men are created equal, they admit. But the problem with being poor is in the poor themselves. They cannot hope to be rewarded with equality, for not being equal to the economic challenge, for not doing more to earn more, and seeking to be the best to best the competition. Instead, they are prone to staying just what they are, not improving, uncommitted and indolent.

So, the fact that folks are just not equal in talent, intellect and effort is the reason why one class of people is extremely wealthy, and another extremely poor. Is that truly the case?

To the peasants in the granaries of Luzon whose life since they grew taller than the grass has never left the back-breaking toil on the land, to the sacadas in the sugar haciendas of Negros whose interminable and agonizing labor on the vast farms still is not enough to ease the pain of failing to give a family a decent life, and to the work slaves in factories and sweatshops, the said fact doesn’t hold water. They know who are the lazybones.

But who says anyway that inequality is the problem? It is not. The problem is the evil wherein the poor do not get what they earn, while their slave masters get what they don’t earn. And the latter simply get it from them who actually earned what was unfairly cut. That is not inequality. That is inequity.

The poor did not become poor, because they are lazy and inept, or don’t know better. They are so, because they are exploited and denied enjoyment of the wealth they create by labor. They are paid in fixed wages that is not enough to live on, but by law is enough to own their labor power. Then their labor is spent to create wealth that they never get to hold. Such appropriated wealth would later be used against them as a kind of power to squeeze them tighter.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of their exploiters makes them forever poor. Because of the circumstance, they can only live if they work, but they can only work if their work brings profit to the appropriators of wealth. Such a rule of capitalist society bonds them to low-wage labor. 

What does the system tell? Raking wealth by a tiny few at the expense of the multitude is not just pure and simple inequality. It is inequity. It is injustice.

Still, many poor are poor because they cannot even work at all. They are irregularly employed or perennially unemployed. They are not absorbed by industry, do not enter into wage-work relationships, and therefore stay with the ranks of the vast industrial reserve army. Their idle state is used to keep wages down by keeping labor supply up and labor competition high.

Wage-labor propelled industrial production. Industrial production and, in its wake, the accumulation of wealth never hitherto witnessed brought unprecedented social progress. But at the back of progress, the concentration of gigantic wealth in a few would be the source of hardships of billions. It is this basic social condition that would perpetuate the cycle of poverty from generation to generation.

Intergenerational poverty is the product and manifestation of the victimization of man by man, one class by another. 

Accounts in every clime tell that the poor are the kind of hard-working folks that society cannot do without: farmers, wage-earners, and work-slaves in sweatshops and plantations. They continue to be poor, not because they are laggards and prone to sloth, but because the regime of production designed to amass wealth by a few deny them of advancement, much less of earning sufficiently. 

They are denied from getting the just fruits of their labor. The injustice strangulates the chances of their redemption from want, economic advancement, and social empowerment.