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.