COMPELLING VISIONS OF JUST PEACE: THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVE OF HUMAN DIGNITY IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
By Julieta de Lima
Interim Chairperson, Negotiating Panel of the National Democratic
Front of the Philippines
February 18, 2021
I am honored to speak at the 9th Ecumenical Church Leaders’ Summit on
Peace February 18-19, 2021 commemorating 500 Years of Christianity in
the Philippines and celebrating God’s gift of human dignity on the
subject of Compelling Visions of Just Peace: The Ethical Imperative of
Human Dignity in Social Transformation.
The 9th Ecumenical Church Leaders’ Summit on Peace is a chance once
again to express our unity amidst our diversity as the 500 years of
Christianity in our country is being commemorated.
In the spirit of Pope Francis, let us seek unity in diversity in
dealing with issues that beset society such as when he pontificated:
"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ,
all of us, not just Catholics. ...Even the atheists. Everyone!" on
careerism, on judging homosexuals, on consumerism, on the environment,
on marriage, remarriage and divorce and most importantly, on the
option for the poor (Evangelii Gaudium) as he strives to make the
Church relevant to the lives of the people.
Oppression and exploitation are a systematic violation of human
dignity. It is in this regard that I wish to discuss human dignity as
the core of the revolutionary process of transforming the oppressive
and exploitative society we have in the Philippines towards a life of
dignity for the Filipino people.
I share your vision of a just and enduring peace for the Philippines,
which means peace beyond the silence of guns to the active presence of
justice, right relationships with others and the rest of creation. It
is tangible and manifested through food on the table, decent jobs and
wages, clothing, shelter, education and access to the basic needs. To
me this means Man proposes and God disposes, with the masses not only
voicing the will of God but realizing it on earth. We make the plan
but it is up to the masses, the people, to make this successful. In
other words, our prayers are not enough, these must be substantiated
by human effort.
Let me present to you the just demands and just aspirations of the
people that have inspired the rise of the armed revolutionary movement
in the Philippines. I shall also refer to the willingness of the same
movement to negotiate a just peace, so brutally frustrated by the
all-out war policy and termination of the peace negotiations by the
Duterte regime.
These aspirations and demands are precisely among the objectives of
the Program for a People’s Democratic Revolutioni as well as the
12-Point Program of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines,
which you may find at <https://liberation.ndfp.org/our-program/>
In both documents are the most important objectives of the national
democratic revolution in the Philippines, which are to achieve full
national independence and people’s democracy. The old democratic
revolution of 1896 was anticolonial and led by the liberal bourgeoisie
and was aimed at building a bourgeois democratic republic.
It was preceded by the secularization movement of the clergy in the
Philippines led by Monsignor Pedro Pelaez, ecclesiastical governor of
the Church and continued by native (Filipino) priests, the most famous
of whom were the martyred priests Fathers Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos
and Jacinto Zamora. Their martyrdom, their Christian sacrifice,
inspired the national consciousness and coherence of the Filipino
people as single nation of diverse ethno-linguistic communities. It is
a historical fact that Spanish colonialism brought Christianity to the
Philippines. But it is also a historical fact that the Filipino people
have adopted it as a redemptive and liberating moral force in the same
manner as one type of society after another has adopted science and
technology as a progressive factor in advancing civilization.
Today’s new democratic revolution is led by the working class and is
aimed at proceeding to the socialist revolution in consonance with the
era of modern imperialism and the world proletarian revolution. The
revolutionary leadership of the working class and its vanguard party
ensures that the new democratic revolution has a socialist
perspective, takes a socialist direction and is the preparation for
the socialist revolution.
With the peasantry as the main force of the revolution, it is certain
that the main content of the democratic revolution is fulfilled with
the satisfaction of the peasant demand for agrarian revolution through
free land distribution. And the line is set for agricultural
cooperation and mechanization when the stage of socialism is reached.
It is necessary for us to study the different classes in Philippine
society in order to know who are the motive forces and friends and who
in varying degrees are the enemies of the revolution.
The motive forces of the revolution are the working class, the
peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie. The
enemies of the revolution are the imperialists and their domestic
collaborators: the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and
the bureaucrat capitalists. They are the forces of counterrevolution
that wish to perpetuate the semifeudal ruling system of oppression and
exploitation.
The comprador big bourgeoisie are the chief financial and trading
agents of the US and other imperialist countries. The landlord class
perpetuates private ownership of lands and subjects the peasants and
farm workers to feudal and semifeudal conditions of exploitation and
oppression.
The bureaucrat capitalists are the political agents of the big
compradors and landlords but they have become a distinct class by
accumulating power and wealth by using their governmental authority.
They have gained notoriety as political dynasties wanting to
perpetuate themselves in power in order to accumulate private capital
and land.
The big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists are
considered the class enemies because they exploit the people,
especially the workers and peasants, and they use the semicolonial
state to oppress the people and keep them within the bounds of the
ruling system through violence and deception.
Within the framework of the broad united front policy and tactics, the
CPP refers to these enemy classes as the reactionary classes in order
to focus the term “enemy” on the most reactionary clique that is in
power. The sharpening of the term is meant to take advantage of the
splits among the reactionaries and narrow the target of the revolution
to the ruling reactionary clique as the enemy in a given period.
As I explained above, the motive forces and the friends of the
revolution are the following: a. the working class as the leading
class from the new democratic stage to the socialist stage of the
Philippine revolution, b. the peasantry (essentially the poor and
middle peasants and the seasonal farm workers) as the main force or
democratic majority of the people and c. the middle social strata of
the urban petty bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie.
Their needs and demands are expressed in the program of people’s
democratic revolution (PPDR). And they participate in the revolution
in order to realize this program. Their participation in the
revolution spells the growth and advance of the revolution towards
victory.
Why are the workers called the leading class of the revolution? The
working class is the leading class of the revolution because it is the
most advanced productive and political force among the various classes
in Philippine society and in the world. It is the class that can
sustain and further develop an industrialized economy even without the
bourgeoisie. It is indispensable in the development of an
industrialized socialist economy.
It is the class that is capable of leading the toiling masses to
overthrow the state power of the bourgeoisie and replace it with the
state power of the proletariat and fulfil the historic mission of
socialist revolution and construction. The working class has the most
developed theory for revolutionary change and the accumulated practice
of leading successful socialist revolutions, despite the subsequent
revisionist betrayal and capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union
and then in China. The theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
encompasses philosophy, political economy and social science.
The working class has created the Communist Party as the vanguard
party to focus on revolutionary theory and practice on the basis of
the revolutionary mass movement. The Communist Party is the instrument
of the working class for leading the revolution from the people’s
democratic stage to the socialist stage of the revolution.
The peasant class (mainly the poor and middle peasants and traditional
seasonal farm workers) is still the most numerous class in the
Philippines and comprise the democratic majority of the people. The
satisfaction of their demand for land through agrarian revolution is
the main content of the revolution.
The protracted people’s war in the new democratic revolution is
possible in the Philippines because the peasant class has provided the
people’s army with the social and physical terrain, the widest sphere
of maneuver for the people’s war against the enemy that is superior in
terms of military personnel, equipment and training before the
people’s army gains the upper-hand by capturing the weapons from the
enemy.
The actual social investigation and class analysis done by the CPP
belies the claim of the enemy that the Philippines is already a
newly-industrialized country, even without having the capability to
produce industrial capital goods. The trick of the enemy is to claim
that out of the 45 million labor force or manpower in the Philippines
58 per cent are workers in the service sector and 19.1 per cent are
workers in the industry sector. Thus, the working class is now
supposedly 77.1 per cent, while the peasantry has dwindled to 19.1 per
cent without the need of genuine land reform and national
industrialization. Most of the so-called service workers are
oddjobbers and are the off-shoot of the semifeudal economy and not the
consequence of industrial capitalism.
The CPP is the principal instrument of the working class for leading
the national democratic revolution and, subsequently, the socialist
revolution. To be able to take this role, the CPP has to build itself
as an ideological, political and organizational instrument of the
working class. It has to realize the class leadership of the working
class in the entire revolutionary movement of the people.
As the ideological instrument of the working class, the CPP is guided
by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and has applied this theory on the history,
circumstances and revolutionary practice of the proletariat and
people.
As political instrument, it has formulated the general line of
people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war and
with a socialist perspective and has done the political work to build
itself, the people’s army, the revolutionary mass organizations, the
united front and the revolutionary organs of democratic power.
As the organizational instrument, it has built itself under the
principle of democratic centralism in order to make collective
decisions from the grassroots to higher levels of representation on
the basis of democracy.
The CPP established the New People’s Army (NPA) to defend, advance and
serve the people’s interests. In upholding human dignity in the
Christian and Marxist sense as well as in accordance with the
international covenants on human rights and humanitarian conduct in
war, the CPP sees to it that as an imperative every fighter abides by
the simply-worded three main rules of discipline and the eight points
of attention to wit:
Obey orders in all your actions.
Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.
Turn in everything captured;
Speak politely,
Pay fairly for what you buy,
Return everything you borrow.
Pay for anything you damage
Do not damage crops,
Do not take liberties with women,
Do not ill-treat captives.
The NPA is the Party’s principal mass organization. It is not only a
fighting force. It conducts propaganda work for party building, it
carries out the agrarian revolution in the countryside, builds and
protects rural bases and the people’s government.
In contrast, we do not experience the reactionary armed forces of the
oppressive classes observing such a code of conduct. What we observe
daily is the abuse of authority and the lack of concern for the
welfare of the masses on the part of the armed forces as instrument of
the bourgeoisie for protecting their interests as exploiting classes.
The CPP also established and built the National Democratic Front,
which seeks to develop and coordinate all progressive classes, sectors
and forces in the Filipino people’s struggle to end the rule of US
imperialism and its local allies of big landlords and compradors, and
attain national and social liberation. The earliest of its current 18
organizations is the Christians for National Liberation, which
preceded the NDFP by two years. Its formation was inspired by the
anticolonial priests Gomez, Burgos and Zamora martyred in the old
democratic revolution as well as by Camilo Torres and liberation
theology.
Your concept paper states: “The unpeace in our country has violated,
defaced and deformed human dignity in our country and is a constant
occurrence.” We must understand that imperialist powers and the local
exploiting classes have built an economic system that grabs most of
the social wealth creating by the toiling masses of workers and
peasants and have developed a system of organized violence to enforce
exploitative and oppressive laws and to suppress any critique or
movement that is construed as a threat to the fundamentals of the
ruling system.
In representation of the revolutionary forces the National Democratic
Front has agreed with the Government of the Republic of the
Philippines to engage in peace negotiations in order to address the
roots of the armed conflict with mutual agreements on social, economic
and political reforms in accordance with The Hague Joint Declaration.
It is not entirely impossible to agree on these reforms, which are of
a bourgeois-democratic character and which have been carried out in a
number of East Asian countries, such as in post-fascist Japan and the
so-called newly-industrialized countries since the 1970s.
This is the reason why revolutionary and progressive organizations
like PEPP persist in campaigning for the resumption of the peace
negotiations under all circumstances. They remain optimistic that
their efforts would alleviate the dire situation of the masses even
under the worst of circumstances.
As you have noted, communities, both in urban and rural areas, live in
fear of constant threat – threat from an unseen virus, threat from
increasing poverty, threat from arbitrary use of power from those who
have sworn to protect them – and other forms of violence from the
virus of tyranny.
Because of the violent resistance of the Duterte regime to basic
social, economic and political reforms and Duterte’s termination of
the peace negotiations, it becomes ethically and morally imperative
for the Filipino people to participate and advance the protracted
people’s war in pursuit of national and social liberation. It is also
for this reason that a people’s armed force is both an ethical and
moral imperative for the people to mobilize and defend themselves.
Inaction on their part is to allow unpeace to reign in our country. It
means allowing a tyrannical, treasonous and corrupt government to
trample on the rights and interests and, therefore, the dignity of the
people, especially the toiling masses.
The Duterte government unilaterally terminated the peace negotiations
with the NDFP when it issued Proclamation 360 in November 2017 and
designated the CPP and NPA as terrorist organizations under
Proclamation 374 of December 2017. It has since launched an all-out
war against the NDF, the New People’s Army, the Communist Party of the
Philippines and organizations it accuses as “front organizations”. The
breakdown of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations has also led to unbridled
‘red-tagging’ of government critics, and church people and churches
were not exempted from this practice by the National Task Force to End
Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).
Not satisfied with all the repressive measures it had already taken,
the Duterte regime took advantage of the lockdown necessitated by the
spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to impose further suffering on the
people through racketeering and profiteering on the procurement and
purchase of medicine, medical equipment, protective, etc and
appropriating donations medical aid from governmental and private
charitable institutions to line their pockets.
As we celebrate 500 years of Christianity in the country, let us
strive ever harder to uphold human dignity and as your concept paper
states, put this “at the center of our nation’s life in order for us
to get in the right track for our collective journey towards peace”.
Let us strengthen our struggle for peace by striving to oust the
tyrant and disable the instruments that victimize the people. We can
then hope that upon the tyrant’s ouster or stepping down, a new
administration that is patriotic, democratic-minded and concerned with
the rights and welfare of the people can arise and is willing to
resume the peace negotiations with the NDFP.
At the same time, we do not foreclose the possibility that Duterte is
struck by lightning like Saul on his way to Damascus and agrees to
resume peace negotiations because of the miraculous combination of
prayers for and advocacy of peace by the people and the irresistible
demands of the rapidly worsening crisis of the ruling system.
Thank you.
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