Amado Guerrero

July 30, 1970

5. The Political Power of the Landlord Class

The landlord class will never surrender its ownership of vast lands voluntarily. Neither will it allow exploitative relations in the countryside to cease. It will always make use of its political power to serve its interests. At the first sign of resistance by the peasants to its authority, it never hesitates to use armed force to quell them. Woe unto the fool who relies exclusively on the Office of the Agrarian Counsel and the Court of Agrarian Relations! In all "land reform" laws adopted by the reactionary government, the landlord class has never failed to put provisions that benefit itself and worsen the plight of the peasantry. The army, police, courts and prisons are at its service. It has put up for its immediate purposes private armies not only for carrying out factional strife within the class but also for attacking the growing revolutionary mass movement. Warlordism in the provinces has steadily risen.

The landlord class has its direct representatives at every level of the reactionary government from the barrio level to the national. The landlords themselves are officials of the reactionary government. Their power extends into every agency of the reactionary government, especially the coercive apparatuses of the state. Being the big and widespread financiers of electoral campaigns, they are found in decisive positions in all the reactionary political parties.

Every time the reactionary government speaks of increasing agricultural productivity or of making export incentives, it merely wants to bring the benefits to the landlord class. So long as the landlords continue to own large estates and so long as they continue to control the relations of production in the countryside, all the improved roads, bridges, ports, irrigation systems, river control systems and even the agricultural extension services that the reactionary government may build with onerous foreign loans and high taxes can only redound to the benefit of the landlord class and the big comprador bourgeoisie.

The landlord class has various types of organizations which it can directly and indirectly use to look after its interests in every possible way within the present system. It has the millers' and producers' associations and the chambers of commerce. It has the so-called civic and charitable organizations which are used to publicize its "thoughtfulness" and "kindheartedness" and to conceal the ruthlessness and violence of its rule. It puts up fake cooperatives to manipulate the various strata of the peasantry. It has the banks serving as the centers of landlord-comprador alliances.

Among all types of organizations, the Catholic Church serves as the oldest and most reliable defender of the landlord class. It has been the most decisive and most virulent factor in the development and preservation of feudalism for over four centuries. This Church is itself a big landlord, enjoying undiminished the feudal privileges that it enjoyed in the Spanish colonial system. It is a parasitic institution enjoying the material support of the landlord class. It is an ideological and political weapon, using all kinds of tactics to advocate the "sacredness" of the right of landlords to keep their property. It has put up a big number of lay organizations dedicated to the preservation of landlordism and yet pretending to work for land reform. Even its bishops and priests and the landlords' children in sectarian schools have joined in the fun of reformism only to proscribe violently those who advocate agrarian revolution and to prescribe to the oppressed peasant masses the old recipe of faith and confidence in the reactionary government and in the landlord class.

In the countryside today, there is quite a number of peasant associations, farm workers' unions, "rural development" agencies and "cooperative" projects which are reformist and counterrevolutionary. These are organized either by the U.S. counterinsurgency agencies, bureaucrat capitalists, religious organizations, counterrevolutionary revisionist renegades, plain crooks or the landlords themselves directly. To mention a few, these are the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), the Presidential Arm on Community Development (PACD), the Free Farmers' Federation (FFF), the Federated Movement for Social Justice and Reform (FMSJR), Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (Lava faction), Kaisahang Magsasaka (Kasaka) and the like. They share the counterrevolutionary objective of swindling the poor peasants and farm workers into believing that they can rise up from their oppression and exploitation by trusting the "land reform" program of the reactionary comprador- landlord state. They hope vainly to draw away the poor peasants and farm workers from the agrarian revolution for which the Communist Party of the Philippines is indefatigably and courageously fighting.

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