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.