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.

Ending Poverty (First of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

So what is poverty?

Poverty is a global concern. In a summit of world leaders at the beginning of the new millennium, participants representing around 100 countries concurred on eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals. They ranked the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger No. 1.

Global poverty is depicted by a UN report on Human Development. It says:

1. Of the 4.6 billion people in the developing countries, around 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day, 2.8 billion on less than $2 a day
2. Nearly a billion lack access to improved water sources
3. About 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation
4. More than 850 million are illiterate, 543 million of them women.
5. Nearly 325 million boys and girls are out of school.
6. And 11 million children under age five die each year from preventable causes.

The figures manifest a multidimensional reality. It is ironic for a world witnessing tremendous progress to have masses of people trapped in acute deprivations. Earth’s population has now grown to 7 billion. There are around four billion folks suffering from such.

Poverty is officially defined as a threshold of income on which a family can no longer meet the minimum requirements of living. The income-based definition points to purchasing power or what kind and number of goods an amount of currency can buy.

A way of determining purchasing power is the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This is the basket of goods a referenced amount of currency, like PhP100, could get at a given year. So, what is important is not how much a person or family earns, but how much his earnings can buy.

Today, an income of two dollars or approximately PhP100 can only buy two kilos of rice. Would two kilos of rice feed a family of six for the whole day? What about the other ingredients of the food diet which a human being needs to reproduce life daily?

In the early 1970s, a person earning PhP200 a month (not a day) had already more than enough to provide a family, not only with food, but other basic needs. During that time, a ganta or an equivalent of two kilos of rice costs only around PhP1.50 to two pesos.

An essential point of consideration is that for an income threshold to define poverty, it must refer to CPI in real time.

Measuring poverty presumably makes it objective. This means, a person is poor, whether or not he rates himself poor. But even being objective may not equate to being accurate. Defining poverty as a threshold of income is put into question as formulas and factors for computing thresholds differ, depending on which perspective they come from. The government usually applies numeric indicators that bring down the statistical threshold.

Private research groups, such as the Ibon Facts and Figures and trade union labor centers, often contest the statistical definition of poverty presented by agencies like the National Statistics Office or the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). The difference between them, in numbers defining poverty, puts the incidence of poverty either up or down. It lessens or heightens the issue. As always, politics comes into play claiming viewing the reality from different sides.

So what actually is poverty? To answer this, it must be first acknowledged that statistics or figures do not offer an accurate definition. Poverty is not just about having only, or not having at all, a certain amount of income. It is an ill-being no number can justifiably express.

Poverty is not about what folks possess (or do not possess), but what they go through. It is not a so-what kind of social being, but a bad or painful experience of an unjust social reality.

To be poor, hence, is not just to be on or below a numeric threshold. It is to be condemned to a multidimensional ill that is by and large immeasurable as it is unquantifiable.

Science folks draw their meaning of poverty from observation at a cold distance. But true meaning can only be expressed by those who agonize in its hell. Most of the time, they have no words for it.

Organizing for Change - Last Part

 BIMBO CABIDOG

Reengineering communities for the people's empowerment

A thought that must be straightened out is the inversion of the phrase community organizing into organizing community.  Social workers in government and the private sector surely do not mean this. They do not mean to build yet another political-administrative structure other than the barangay that already exists. But the empty thought could dwell in the head for a long time, and encounter a lot of frustrations in practice, simply because the hired workers have never been up to organizing community.

Organizing new/alternative communities is a radical concept that can only be a product of revolutionary theory. It falls within the programme of replacing the old social order with a new social order, and of overhauling the old power structure, so that the ruled now becomes the ones who rule. That in essence is the mission that community organizing must ultimately accomplish.

Widely practiced among the development initiatives that proliferated after the Edsa 1986 uprising, community organizing would refer simply to convening assemblies of local folks and electing officers, such as members of the board of directors, Chairman, President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and so on down the line, i.e.: reposting merely the institutional arrangements prescribed by the prevailing power structure. 

It is formulaic organizing, adopting the templates for association provided by the old social order. The so-called organization hibernates after election. But the model of organizational dysfunction would be replicated in CO practice a thousand times all over the archipelago.

Community organizing is not a job for hire. It is a political task borne by the commitment to wage struggle for basic social change. The change is the liberation of the people from bondage to poverty, their long-held release from the trap of underdevelopment. Community organizing is not an 8:00-5:00 work affair, five days a week. It is a more than 24/7 full-time devotion to waging struggle and living with the masses.

Mere immersion in communities doesn’t even begin to define it. Social transformation is not guaranteed by some proselytized individuals getting out of the way to experience what the poor go through in their hovels and villages left behind by the times. CO is of course socially transformative. It is so, because it stems from an encounter with the reality of deprivation, powerlessness and struggle. Thus, it takes up the lot of the oppressed. This is not mere immersion, but being them itself.

Some mistakenly approach community organizing from the technical point of view. They think that knowing methods and processes can already carry it to success. Nope. They must take to heart its meaning. They have to absorb its historical context, the critique of the existing order or status quo from which it derives relevance, its place in change, and what it essentially is for.

In summary, the following points must be clear:

1.  Community organizing is about the people gaining power to transform the conditions and  situations of their existence by doing so themselves. It is not about herding them into meetings  and seminars and making them say what you want to hear. It is neither making them good  enough to follow set of instructions in conforming to requirements of getting aid from donors.
2. The people can only change society if they change themselves. They cannot hope to transform  the conditions in which they live, if they don’t discard the manner of thinking and attitudes  that have long kept them away from doing what is right. They sneer at attending meetings or  participating in training, because they won’t get money in it. But if they can’t even take that  risk of betting an hour or day to find out what course may help shape a better tomorrow, why  will those who have money to give take their risk on them either?
3. Development happens when folks learn to solve their problem by solving it themselves. The mistake of many interventions is to think for them and worse, do things for them. Their lack of advancement is not reversed by somebody taking it upon himself to wage their strife, because he is superior and better equipped. There are no heroes of their liberation other than they.
4. The people actually still have to meet such a creature called community organizer. They who comprise community organize themselves. That’s the whole truth. What the others can only do is facilitate their getting organized. What forces other than themselves can just do is help them access information or avail of technical support.
5. Community organizing is not just about uniting and coming together in meetings. It is about going into action, and deploying everyone in it. It is about doing, not just talking. The way a community has been structured before could not solve problems anymore, much more realize the fundamental aspirations of the people. Community organizing restructures it to enable them to do what they haven’t been able to do so for a very long time. It doesn’t bury itself in winding analysis and theoretical deepening. It advances a bias towards action.

The ruling elite love to organize themselves into talking shops – parliaments, councils, board meetings, leaders or experts' conferences, leaving the dirty job and the sweating to the working bodies below. For that they already amass all the wealth the latter create. For that they already hold sway over men, money over will, matter over mind.

But the truth is they have nothing to grasp, except the obedience of the people, and their acceptance of a supposedly higher authority over them.

The masses are not talkers. They are workers, producing the things that society needs, and creating the wealth the ruling classes that dominate the political economy accumulate. They join up not to talk and discuss endlessly, but to get into action.

But what they have in their minds and in their hands is a power no might by any human being can surpass. The only thing that is lacking is to get themselves organized for their own empowerment, for their own supreme good.

Organizing for Change - Last Part

 BIMBO CABIDOG

Reengineering communities for the people's empowerment

A thought that must be straightened out is the inversion of the phrase community organizing into organizing community.  Social workers in government and the private sector surely do not mean this. They do not mean to build yet another political-administrative structure other than the barangay that already exists. But the empty thought could dwell in the head for a long time, and encounter a lot of frustrations in practice, simply because the hired workers have never been up to organizing community.

Organizing new/alternative communities is a radical concept that can only be a product of revolutionary theory. It falls within the programme of replacing the old social order with a new social order, and of overhauling the old power structure, so that the ruled now becomes the ones who rule. That in essence is the mission that community organizing must ultimately accomplish.

Widely practiced among the development initiatives that proliferated after the Edsa 1986 uprising, community organizing would refer simply to convening assemblies of local folks and electing officers, such as members of the board of directors, Chairman, President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and so on down the line, i.e.: reposting merely the institutional arrangements prescribed by the prevailing power structure. 

It is formulaic organizing, adopting the templates for association provided by the old social order. The so-called organization hibernates after election. But the model of organizational dysfunction would be replicated in CO practice a thousand times all over the archipelago.

Community organizing is not a job for hire. It is a political task borne by the commitment to wage struggle for basic social change. The change is the liberation of the people from bondage to poverty, their long-held release from the trap of underdevelopment. Community organizing is not an 8:00-5:00 work affair, five days a week. It is a more than 24/7 full-time devotion to waging struggle and living with the masses.

Mere immersion in communities doesn’t even begin to define it. Social transformation is not guaranteed by some proselytized individuals getting out of the way to experience what the poor go through in their hovels and villages left behind by the times. CO is of course socially transformative. It is so, because it stems from an encounter with the reality of deprivation, powerlessness and struggle. Thus, it takes up the lot of the oppressed. This is not mere immersion, but being them itself.

Some mistakenly approach community organizing from the technical point of view. They think that knowing methods and processes can already carry it to success. Nope. They must take to heart its meaning. They have to absorb its historical context, the critique of the existing order or status quo from which it derives relevance, its place in change, and what it essentially is for.

In summary, the following points must be clear:

1.  Community organizing is about the people gaining power to transform the conditions and  situations of their existence by doing so themselves. It is not about herding them into meetings  and seminars and making them say what you want to hear. It is neither making them good  enough to follow set of instructions in conforming to requirements of getting aid from donors.
2. The people can only change society if they change themselves. They cannot hope to transform  the conditions in which they live, if they don’t discard the manner of thinking and attitudes  that have long kept them away from doing what is right. They sneer at attending meetings or  participating in training, because they won’t get money in it. But if they can’t even take that  risk of betting an hour or day to find out what course may help shape a better tomorrow, why  will those who have money to give take their risk on them either?
3. Development happens when folks learn to solve their problem by solving it themselves. The mistake of many interventions is to think for them and worse, do things for them. Their lack of advancement is not reversed by somebody taking it upon himself to wage their strife, because he is superior and better equipped. There are no heroes of their liberation other than they.
4. The people actually still have to meet such a creature called community organizer. They who comprise community organize themselves. That’s the whole truth. What the others can only do is facilitate their getting organized. What forces other than themselves can just do is help them access information or avail of technical support.
5. Community organizing is not just about uniting and coming together in meetings. It is about going into action, and deploying everyone in it. It is about doing, not just talking. The way a community has been structured before could not solve problems anymore, much more realize the fundamental aspirations of the people. Community organizing restructures it to enable them to do what they haven’t been able to do so for a very long time. It doesn’t bury itself in winding analysis and theoretical deepening. It advances a bias towards action.

The ruling elite love to organize themselves into talking shops – parliaments, councils, board meetings, leaders or experts' conferences, leaving the dirty job and the sweating to the working bodies below. For that they already amass all the wealth the latter create. For that they already hold sway over men, money over will, matter over mind.

But the truth is they have nothing to grasp, except the obedience of the people, and their acceptance of a supposedly higher authority over them.

The masses are not talkers. They are workers, producing the things that society needs, and creating the wealth the ruling classes that dominate the political economy accumulate. They join up not to talk and discuss endlessly, but to get into action.

But what they have in their minds and in their hands is a power no might by any human being can surpass. The only thing that is lacking is to get themselves organized for their own empowerment, for their own supreme good.

Organizing For Change - Part IV

BIMBO CABIDOG

Is community organizing still heard now?

The CO initials are probably familiar. But the CO referred here is not commanding officer, or carbon monoxide. It is community organizing.

The phrase has been a word of mouth among non-government organizations and even government line agencies in recent past. CO was particularly popular in the immediate post-Edsa revolution period of the late 80s and 1990s. Yet, though popular, community organizing would be misconceived.

In the heyday of its application – rightly or wrongly, the phrase Community Organizing was used to label almost every activity that had to do with gathering folks in the barangay. Some of the activities ironically were intended to use them for money-making or for preempting organizing by forces that indeed advance genuine social change.

The term CO means the building of the organ of empowerment by the people thereby making them capable of changing the situations and conditions of their existence. It is meant to unite the community for collective action under a different structure and mechanism than what used to be. In the fulfillment of objectives, it applies strategies and methods different from those of the mainstream or traditional institutions of society.

Such wasn’t the practice labelled/identified as CO that found its way into official governance. In many instances, certain CO practice bastardized the original concept. The bastardized version went against the true mission and goals of community organizing: to effect fundamental change in society.

Part of the distortion of its meaning was CO becoming Community Organizer, a job designation. This happened in the decade after the popular uprising at Edsa that ousted the Marcos regime.

Still fresh from the non-traditional and extra-constitutional means of changing a regime by people power, the country pivoted towards offering greater participation and wider institutional leverage in governance to the basic sectors as well as their non-state partners. Official development assistance from foreign donors awarded largess to organizations implementing development programs outside the government. An offshoot of this was the opening of the position of Community Organizer for hiring by NGOs receiving assistance, and even government line agency projects with foreign funding.

Is community organizing simply a job? The CO recruiters must have thought so. They offered it like a wanted labor ad, attracting applicants with high pay. But the drawback was the qualification: must be college graduate, pass exam and interview, and have at least two-year experience. Was CO already a course in college with a bachelor’s degree? Could work experience that may be said as CO be presented in Curriculum Vitae and validated, like a stint in a company from year blank to year blank?

The real political workers or activists who have done it may not have imagined how community organizing could be something they would apply for. You do it simply as a matter of course, or as the logical sequence of fighting for a cause. You do not do it to earn a living or blaze a career.

Organizing is the primary function of leadership. Leaders organize or have to organize to lead. That is how to bring their people to the port of destination. They do not apply for it. They make it their job. 

Supposedly to help the people, the system of hiring Community Organizers however fosters the same exclusionism against them who never have had the economic opportunity to better their lives. Only college grads with dependable experience and impressive CV may get it?

The irony is clear. It is like saying, only the degree holders can arouse and mobilize the masses for change, which of course they can’t, for their bachelor’s degrees had nothing to do with those tasks or such commitment.

On the other hand, the original ones didn’t need educational credentials, because they did not thought anyway of getting paid. They only thought of doing something they should do, even if nobody offers a salary. They just wanted to be counted in the fight to end oppression and champion their kind’s liberation. They weren’t there for the opportunity to have a high-paying job.

Ironically, the hiring would often be under programs that consequently prolong the masses’ agonizing poverty and its root problem of underdevelopment. The newly hired workers inculcate mindsets and practices that perpetuate powerlessness, debt bondage, and aid dependence.

They themselves provided the best example. Their role and function in the aspiration of the people for a better life must show to be indispensable. Otherwise, why hire and pay for them? But no matter how important, their role and function still depend on aid. Without it, those are not going to happen at all. Wasn’t this Exhibit A for gross dependence and powerlessness?

These are the conditions that the original community organizers fought against. But they are what the hired CO workers help perpetuate with the implementation of programs, projects and initiatives that confine or direct the people to growth formulas dependent on external assistance. 

The Epic of Filipino Nation Building

BIMBO CABIDOG

The unfinished revolution then and now

Be careful of what you say, for it can be turned against you. In times of danger, nothing puts things better than this rule of thumb.

But even silence can have something to say. Quiet can be disquieting.

In the quiet of a land smothered by tyranny, at the waning years of the Spanish era, something was building. Dr. Jose Rizal, the renowned Malayan patriot who fought with his pen for an oppressed people, was deported by the Spanish colonial authorities. His works were censored. On July 7, 1892 six colleagues of his convened a secret council.

Andres Bonifacio, Deodato Arellano, Valentin Diaz, Teodoro Plata, Ladislao Diwa and Jose Dizon met at No. 72 Azcarraga St. in the Spanish governorate capital of Manila, Las Islas de Filipinas. The six were members of the La Liga Filipina, an organization Rizal founded to seek for liberal and progressive reforms within the Spanish colonial framework. Faced by intensifying repression and the futility of reformism, the men agreed to form a revolutionary society.

The clandestine meeting gave birth to the Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan. The concept of country has long lain in the minds of the people in the various provinces experiencing the same dark force. Finally, the historic day did not end without founding the revolution to terminate foreign rule and hoist the flag of national independence through armed struggle.  

The Katipunan, as the revolutionary society was popularly known, exemplified brotherhood with three defining objectives: a political, moral, and civic. It advanced freedom from colonial bondage, which has to be fought with arms. But the fraternity also coded the personal duty to help the poor and oppressed, as well as propagate good manners, hygiene, and morality.

From founding, recruitment went full blast over the months ahead through a triangle method of networking that avoided detection by the rulers. Affiliation with the secret society spread like wild fire. The spark on that day of the KKK’s founding quickly turned into a Luzon-wide conflagration. Political awakening rode on a highroad. The archipelago went into a flux. The people rose.

Draftees to the Katipunan went through a Mason-like initiation rite. The new recruit is ushered to a cubicle surrounded by nationalistic signs and symbols. He is seated at a dimly-lit table in front of a cabinet with black drapery. On the table rests a long knife, a revolver and a questionnaire that must be answered for approval of members.

The questions were: What was the condition of the Philippines in the early times? What is the condition today? What will be the condition in the future?

The future would come so soon. On August 19, 1896 the Spanish authorities found out the secret anti-colonial organization. The discovery gave impetus to insurrectionary action. Four years after the KKK’s founding, Philippine Revolution erupted.

At a large assembly in Balintawak, Caloocan the leaders of Katipunan put up a revolutionary government named "Haring Bayang Katagalugan." Thereupon, it declared armed revolution throughout the archipelago. Supreme head Bonifacio ordered an assault on the city of Manila.

The first military action flopped. But the surrounding parts revolted. Armed uprisings flared up in eight provinces of Central Luzon. They then engulfed areas of Southern Tagalog, such as Cavite. The revolutionaries gradually liberated towns in the first wave of attacks during the early months.

The new republic was now in full course. In November 1897, the revolutionary movement established the Republic of Biak-na-Bato. It promulgated a constitution.

Thus, the Filipino nation state came into being, nurtured by unwavering courage in the struggle for freedom, and nourished by the blood of heroes. For 350 years, the country languished under foreign oppression. Now, its brave fighters would no longer stop at anything other than national liberation.

But imperialist intervention didn’t let the strife taste complete victory. Just as the revolutionary struggle was sweeping the provinces and surging towards the ultimate crown, the capture of the capital of Manila, the North American nation which was by then already a neo-colonial power inserted itself. American naval operators plucked the defunct general, Emilio Aguinaldo, from exile in Hong Kong, and propped him up to take over again the revolution’s leadership.

General Aguinaldo had earlier signed the Pact of Biak na Bato, which surrendered the revolution to the Spaniards for $600,000. Thereafter, he and his cohorts took $400,000 of the money into exile. He then isolated his persona from the revolutionary movement, which however did not heed the treacherous agreement of surrender, but continued to conduct warfare against the colonial rulers.

Under the auspices of the US high command in Asia, Aguinaldo maneuvered to take control of the revolutionary forces in 1898. The forgiving leaders easily trusted him and yielded. But through him, the Americans halted the Filipino divisions advancing around the fringes of the capital.

The new foreign invaders conducted a mock battle to capture the seat of power. They later effected the surrender of the Spanish government sealed by the Treaty of Paris, which handed the Philippine Islands to the Americans for $20 million.

The epic of Filipino nation building would wind yet to another saga. The Americans dug in, while the revolutionary forces were being grounded around Manila by the US-Aguinaldo ruse. They were told to stay put for further developments. The development came out to be the arrival of hundreds of fresh troop reinforcements to the small American military contingent biding time in the conquered capital.

Shots by the American sentry at the San Juan bridge access, killing two Filipino officers, ignited the Philippine-American war. The US infantry regiments began to blast away with their much superior weaponry and training to push back the native freedom fighters, which retreated to the nearby provinces and further to the remote mountain interiors and hinterlands of the country.

The US imperialists have made good the McKinley dream of assimilating the country purportedly to teach Filipinos self-government. American officialdom used the lie that the natives were still a bunch of savages, to justify occupation. The seemingly altruistic purpose of teaching them self-government was of course nothing but rhetorical sugar-coating of what was pure and simple naked aggression.

The Filipino revolutionaries were already well enlightened of the liberal and democratic ideals that fueled the French revolution and other nationalist risings in Europe. What the natives learned from the new colonizers was not democracy as stated, but betrayal accompanied by the cruel whiplash of counterrevolution. The unfortunate turn of events lead to the US imperialists’ brutal pacification campaign towards the turn of the century. The unleashed might of that military push netted the slaughter of 600,000 Filipinos.

Nation-statehood for the Filipinos would be postponed for another 50 years of neo-colonial domination. But although the revolutionary mainstream was dissipated, the undercurrents of struggle persisted. They made their way into the scattered millennarian revolts that erupted throughout the American colonial occupation. They took the likes of the movements led by Gregorio Aglipay, Teodoro Asedillo, Macario Sakay, Papa Faustino Ablen of the Pulajenes, and all the other local revolutionists that strung up the threads of the struggle for freedom and independence through their own peculiar religious couching of the mission.

There are those who avow that the country is not really independent until now, that the grant of Independence by the Americans in July 1946 was a mere farce, for they continued thereafter to hold sway over the country and dictate on its successive governments. But whatever is its current status, the building of the Filipino nation never really ceased. It is an epic that continues until now to sail uncharted waters, like the Greek epics depicted by Homer.

Many refreshing and invigorating revolutionary streams will yet flow from the headwaters of that historic moment, when the nation was conceived in secrecy at a house in Azcarraga, Tondo and six brave men dared to remove their colonial blindfolds, recast their citizenship, wage struggle, and carry it to the logical end.

Sometimes, pioneers of something new have to keep quiet to start its noise. The KKK lit the fireworks of anti-colonial struggle that way. Nation is not usually born from the labor of multitudes. It may take only the sperm of a liberating idea from somebody or a tiny group of men and women to fertilize epic sagas. 

Organizing For Change - Part III

BIMBO CABIDOG

Empowerment For Whom

An organization is a social instrument of empowerment. It is a system, mode or manner of relationship between individuals uniting to become a collective. By becoming a collective, thinking and acting together, they acquire a power that can never be acquired separately as individuals.

The question from beginning to end of any effort to form an organization is: for whose benefit is the empowerment going to be? The answer seems obvious: for the empowered.

Nope, it doesn’t automatically follow. In fact, there are cases in which the opposite happens. The organization serves purposes that run counter to the interest of the members it is supposed to empower.

Imagine a guy possessed by bad spirits, as some characters in the Bible are told to have been. The spirits give him powers that no ordinary mortal has. He becomes extraordinarily strong, moves objects other guys cannot, and suspends himself in mid-air in a horizontal position. But every time he does these things, he harms himself. He uses the powers to only destroy his own body and soul.

The spirits dictate upon him things to do that runs counter to his own good or even his self-preservation. And while he possesses extraordinary power, he could not resist doing self-destructive things using the power. He is trapped in a state of inner chaos and conflict with his own self. Some people call it dementia.

The analogy is true to a lot of folks today. Being part of an organization has thrown them into a quandary, a situation of constantly being at loggerheads with a power that works against their own good. And that power is in their hands. But they use it in obedience to a spirit whose interest is so much different than theirs.  

Isn’t that organization the prevailing social order under which, and for which, they live now? Isn’t it the political and cultural superstructures and attached institutions down the line that stamp the people in perennial hardship? They have been given the power to vote for instance. But they really just vote for the ones anointed by political dynasties to work against their basic interests.

The system games them to pick no other than the pseudo leaders that sell public service down the drain. Their vote becomes a convenient tool in leveraging power by a few. It puts officials in powerful positions only to siphon public money into private pockets, and foster arrangements for the protection of their vested interests.

Unless the nature, structure and core values of an organization is changed or tailored to the purpose of real development for the numerous members, sometimes it only empowers them to do things that trash their very welfare, and derail their genuine advancement.

So what should an organization that is really for its members be? It must be one that not only empowers them, but empowers them to champion their wellbeing. It should be an organization that is not a robot or piece of manipulated machinery, but a collective of advanced thought mindful of where everyone should be heading. 

It should therefore be an organization in which direction is set by the bulk of the members who are conscious of the problem and know what to aspire for.

In a business company, purposes diverge. On the one hand, the proprietors or owners want to make profit. It is their single overriding purpose of doing business. On the other, the workers or employees want to have a means of living. They have it through wage-labor. More often than not the two collide.

Sometimes the proprietors lower wages or do not increase them even when the economic times already call for it, in order to sustain high profit or what they consider as the level of profit that make the business still viable.

The workers of course demand living wage in the form of higher pay for work. They are precisely there to earn a living, not to die day by day spending energy without commensurate replenishment and the satisfaction of their family’s basic needs. 

But when the capitalists think that they will no longer be making big profit, they close the company and the whole business organization disintegrates.

The case of the company that closes, because it can no longer meet the objective of making big profit, shows one basic lack of the right kind of organization the people should have. That lack is a strong gravitational center, that is: shared vision, values and goals.

The proprietors of the business did not share the goal of its members to have a means of earning. They were only leveraging the means of earning for the overriding goal of profit. So when they decided to shut down, there was nothing in the decision that cares about the workers losing their jobs.

Treat strategy and system second and third. First should be shared vision, values and goals. Without them, nothing holds the collective for the long haul. There’s no reason at all for people to bind themselves in an organization, in the first place.

Individuals depart from their separate ways and unite to achieve goals no one can ever achieve alone. With a common purpose their different directions converge, divergent minds meet. The bad spirits of purposes running in opposite ways are driven out. The good spirits of common vision, values and goals take over and pull everyone and everything together.

Members of an organization did not just happen to be in the same place at the same time. They were guided there by the same identification of needs, constraints, and appropriate course of action. That is why they came together agreeing to work with each other. 

By coming together and agreeing to work with each other, they gained the power not only of numbers, but of a sort of whole that would be more than the sum of its parts. The whole is the organization, the exponentially magnified capacity of the individual acting alone.

In that magnified capacity, relationship is cemented by roles being defined and assigned, tasks being divided, functions and responsibility being designated, and authority delineated. This is how the good spirits take over the whole body and power works for the benefit of all. (Next and last part is Community Organizing.)

Ten Days That Shook The Nation

BIMBO CABIDOG

I have always believed that the main root of the force that makes people subservient to a dictator is in their mind. For eleven years of Marcos’s dictatorial rule, the people obeyed fear. Then all of a sudden the same fear no longer mattered.

His face in the last photos at the China Airlines plane en route to Manila showed that former senator and martial law detainee Ninoy Aquino had it. Premonition of a dire event wrought his demeanor. The brave mien and the wry smile, presumably to hide fear, revealed it all the more.

No normal human being is exempt from fear. But like many of his countrymen, who defied and fought the brutal reign of Ferdinand Marcos, Ninoy Aquino subdued it. There is a time when courage saves a life. In that fateful time of his return, not yielding to fear ended his.

Thirty three years ago today, Ninoy alyas Marcial Bonifacio calmly followed the military contingent that came on board his plane to fetch him. Had he given in to fear, there could have been a struggle, the coterie of media folks around him could have ganged up and wrestled him out of hold, and maybe, just maybe, the military men could not have simply taken him to his rendezvous with death.

But Ninoy ordered fear to get thee behind. The members of the international media who accompanied him on the ill-fated journey were prevented by the soldiers from trailing. Down the side stairs of the airport tube, at the last steps to the tarmac’s floor, the man was shot.

The last shots of that homecoming came from a camera in a window. One captured Ninoy sprawled face down on a pool of his own blood. Another sequence-shot caught him being lifted up to the van by troopers.

Fear has been conquered. The ruthless and treacherous murder at the tarmac shocked the nation. Over the next ten days, it would shake the pillars of strength of the Marcos dictatorship.

Most in the revolutionary movement never gave much to Ninoy, before that fateful homecoming. We knew, yes, he suffered the worst acts of cruelty under Marcos’s apparatus of repression. He spent years of hard incarceration in the strongman’s detention camps, and one time agonized through months of solitary confinement stripped down to bare physical essence. Then, he was tried in a zarzuela and finally sentenced to death by musketry by a kangaroo court. 

Still, we held our reservations.

At last, after seven years of toughing it off in the toughest conditions of a garrison state, the need for a heart bypass procedure whisked Ninoy to self-exile in America. Even in that state of peace and security, harsh fate never let up on him. Then time to go home.

Ignoring the dire warnings of Imelda Marcos, the ironclad better half of the conjugal dictatorship, he beat back to homeland cutting three years of sojourn on foreign soil. The trip turned out to be fatal. An obstinate bullet, as the world already knows, stopped him.

Until his date with martyrdom, Ninoy was only among many of us who suffered the same hard fate, some worse like his. Hundreds of us fell, hundreds vanished into the night. Those left to carry on did not give up the strife in the most daunting and harrowing passes, going to clandestine meetings in the shadows of slum dwellings, organizing and raising political consciousness up to the remotest interiors of the countryside.

But Ninoy? He still was doubted for his political persona, for tinges of power ambition, and for suspected connection with the US Central Intelligence Agency that orchestrated the deadly coups against President Sukarno in Indonesia, and Salvador Allende in Chile.

I conceded it to him. Ninoy was full of energy, magnetic and intense. In a dinner meeting with our student council at the mezzanine of a posh downtown hotel in Tacloban City, I asked him two questions. One was about Raul Manglapus, who reportedly led a squatter rally outside the extravagant wedding anniversary of media magnate Eugenio Lopez. The gist was that the squatters could not even help themselves to a viand of tuyo (dried fish), but the Lopez party was throwing expensive food  like it was running out of fashion. To exacerbate the insult, champagne flowed from a fountain.

To cap the story, I asked: Weren’t the two parties (at that time), the Liberal Party and Nationalista Party just the same kind of stuff, like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola?  He answered that NP Manglapus was sour graping, because he was not invited. He was just taking the urban poor for a ride. But when he was ushered inside, the demonstration stopped. Of course, he being an LP stalwart, Ninoy ticked in some confusing words about why the LP was different, and how it was pursuing principled politics.

I followed up. The news is that Marcos will declare martial law. If it is indeed declared what will you do? His answer was short as it was blunt: “I’ll go to the hills!” The meeting meandered up to late evening. Then he signed off to take some rest.

Our group sent Ninoy off at the DZR Airport at four in the morning. The place was still quite dark, but his private plane loomed large enough to be in quick sight. Another day for Ninoy, he was climbing the skies again for the next hop. As we bid him goodbye, we had the feeling that we were waving at the next president of the republic. A few months later, Marcos had him in jail.

More than a decade since that meeting, Ninoy's bravery at the Manila International Airport tarmac easily spilled to the rest of the nation. Right at that hour, some radio stations would no longer be deterred from covering the negative event and the succeeding events later.

On that day, I had just finished an advertising job contract. With the small fee, I hurried to Cubao to shop and buy new clothes. At past mealtime, I sensed something was amiss. Then I heard Ninoy has been shot.

I did not finish shopping anymore, but went home in record time. From one o’clock PM to twelve in the evening, my ears were glued to the radio for continuing account on Ninoy. 

Throughout the next days, tension hovered over the metropolis. The Luzon grid plunged into total blackout, fueling talk of revolution. Conversations even in our devil-may-care neighborhood did not leave the topic of the ex-senator’s murder.

A few days later, I was at Ninoy’s wake. The taxi I rode had a hard time squeezing into the jam of people and vehicles around the Sto. Domingo Church, that afternoon when my whole physical constitution brought me to have a look at an old acquaintance, and bid him my last farewell. The driver was telling me, as if to put one on Marcos, “The NPAs are here!” I smiled in silence glancing furtively if he was looking at me.

The queue going to Ninoy’s coffin inside the church was kilometric. By the time I caught up at the tail end, it already wound into a side street stretching down to Quezon Avenue. But I piled in patience to have my last glimpse. I said to myself: “Perhaps, if you were able to make good of your word, we may have met in the hills.”

The moment given for a glimpse and prayer was brief. But it was more than enough for the image inside the glass to be etched in my memory until now. He was not the debonair young senator anymore that I met in Tacloban, eleven years back. Gone was the burst of life, the overflowing energy and vitality. But in there lurked a different force. From the dead man riddled with bruises and a bullet hole, a current of electricity conducted, went through the air, and touched the gathered mass of watchers at the church.

Ninoy’s face shone despite the ugly marks. It was a portrait of long years of tortuous struggle. That struggle would purify the traditional political persona that darkened in him. Finally, martyrdom distilled pure sincerity from all the seeming pretensions. In that state, having given it all, he became a figure of overarching influence for someone definitely lifeless and speechless.

The stretch of ten days after Ninoy's death up to his internment became a study in mass consciousness raising and political education. Folks were talking, feeling having to to talk of topics that were once taboo. Monday morning quarterbacking rose in corner stores. Marcos was being analysed, from his Maharlika body to his lupus erythematusos, from his military strength to his Imelda weakness, from his Presidential Decrees or Palakol ng Demonyo to his presidential plunder, from his being Genuine Ilocano to his fake medals. As always, fear in the hearts of men headed for the exit.

Workers who did not go out to rally on the slogan, “Sahod Itaas, Presyo Ibaba!” piled out of their factories to join the call “Justice for Aquino, Justice for All!” Protests even in the rarefied corporate joints of Ayala Avenue were on a groundswell. Marches were breaking ground. Numbers in them were breaking records.

Suddenly, it became fashionable to tie a headband and join the demos. Paper waste and Yellow Pages were shredded and flushed out the windows of buildings to shower confetti as marchers, who were becoming a daily phenomenon, passed by. On a cue, cars would instantly blow their horns and a noise barrage would engulf the city.

All of the bravery was a product of the ten days that shook the nation into waking up from eleven years of slumber and masochism. From the day of the assassination to the day when Filipinos turned up in a mammoth crowd to send the martyr to his final resting place, the long lethargic political fault lines began moving and sending tremors and aftershocks. Although Ninoy died, his fight took a life of its own.

There is no mistaking the period of turmoil and alignment triggered by the assassination of August 21. It was a time of unease, but it was also a time of assurance of triumph. It was a time of anxiety, but it was also a time of anticipation of great things to happen. It was a time of anger, but it was also a time of telling everybody to be patient for the end of the dark force was near. And the great wonder about it was no one ever expected this to happen.