Amado Guerrero

July 30, 1970

3. The Peasantry

The peasantry is distinguished from all other classes by the fact that all its members cultivate the land. It is the main force of the national economy. It is 75 per cent of the entire Philippine population. It has three strata; namely, the rich peasants, the middle peasants and the poor peasants.

a. The Rich Peasants

The rich peasants are otherwise called the rural bourgeoisie and comprise about five per cent of the rural population. They as a rule own the land that they till and have surplus land besides. Otherwise, they own only part of the land and rent the remainder or they do not own the land at all but rent a sizable amount of land. By tilling the land themselves and by exploiting others on the surplus portion of the land that they either own or rent, they derive a surplus in grain or in cash above their yearly expenses.

Although they themselves work, they engage in exploitation either by hiring farm labor or letting part of their land to poor peasants. They have more and better farm implements and also more work animals. They have more capital to improve their crops with fertilizers and pesticides and also their fields with irrigation facilities. Aside from hiring farm labor or collecting land rent, they engage in such other forms of exploitation as usury, renting out work animals and farm implements, running a local store and the like. They represent semifeudalism in the barrios and are susceptible to echoing the views of the small landlords or the small merchants.

Rich peasants attain the status of landlords when they begin to depend wholly or mainly on their income from hiring the labor power of others, retaining tenants, engaging in usury, renting out work animals and farm implements or serving as overseers or administrators of landed estates or communal lands. When reaction is on the rise in particular areas, a handful of rich peasants also take to the style of local tyrants and become rabid running dogs of despotic landlords. The landlord class always tries to make use of rich peasants as instruments for turning the "barrio councils" as well as organizing armed gangs against the revolutionary peasants. Our policy is to frustrate the landlords' efforts and win at least the neutrality of the rich peasants in the revolution.

It must be recognized as a general rule that the rich-peasant form of production is useful for a definite period. A premature policy of liquidating it should be strictly avoided. The rich peasants can be of help to the anti-imperialist struggle of the peasant masses and they can remain neutral in the agrarian revolution against the landlords. Rich peasants should not be indiscriminately treated as landlords or as filthy rich. On the other hand, a general policy should be adopted to encourage them to make grain or cash contributions to the revolution. At the same time, definite steps must be taken to replace their political dominance in the barrio with that of the proletariat through the Party, the semiproletariat, and the leading activists from the middle peasants. Steps must also be taken to guard against the possibility that they turn against the revolution. However, the opportunism of the rich peasants in the face of the enemy should not be regarded automatically as treason. Those who have willfully done serious damage or incurred blood debts against the revolutionary masses must be dealt with on a case-to-case basis.

b. The Middle Peasants

The middle peasants may be called the rural petty bourgeoisie and they comprise about fifteen to twenty per cent of the rural population. They as a rule own land that more or less allows them to be self-sufficient. Otherwise, they own only part of the land and rent the remainder or they do not own land at all and rent all of it. But in any case, they rely mainly on their own labor to earn an income that allows them to be self-sufficient. They may occasionally practice exploitation but it is only to a small extent and is not their regular or main source of income. They have adequate farm implements, cash for agricultural expenses and at least one work animal. Because of their characteristic self-sufficiency, the middle peasants do not have to sell their labor power. Some members of their families may have certain special skills but they will earn the extra money only to be able to improve their homes or to send someone to school.

There are three levels of the middle peasants. Those who belong to the upper level have a little more than enough land or make a harvest or get a share of the harvest a little more than sufficient for their families. They aspire to the status of the rich peasants and they therefore tend to take the political attitude of the latter. Those who belong to the middle level of the middle peasants have just enough land or earn just enough to make them self-sufficient. They strive to earn a little more in an attempt to attain the status of the upper-middle peasants and to keep themselves from falling into indebtedness. They get indebted sometimes but they manage to stay on an even keel. They tend to follow the opinion of the upper-middle peasants and rich peasants in placid times. But they easily follow the opinion of the lower-middle peasants and poor peasants in an increasingly difficult situation or when the tide of the revolutionary movement is high. Those who belong to the lower level of the middle peasants are ever troubled by the inadequacy and poor quality of their land, their shortage of cash and increasing pile of debts. The usurers are knocking at their doors to declare them in default of their mortgage and inform them of their new status as poor peasants.

The middle peasants live austerely to make both ends meet. But their lives are often upset by a poor harvest or by a serious illness in the family. As the crisis in Philippine society is rapidly worsening, however, the whole lot of the upper, middle and lower-middle peasants are going down rapidly into bankruptcy. They are being mercilessly pressed down by the rising costs of agricultural production and prices of basic commodities.

The middle peasants are willing to join the anti-imperialist struggle and the agrarian revolution because of their immediate oppressed and exploited condition. It is of great importance to conduct revolutionary propaganda among them. Their positive or negative attitude is one of the factors determining victory or defeat not only in the countryside but in the whole country. Their enthusiastic support is especially needed in carrying out the agrarian revolution and we must remember that after the agrarian revolution, the middle peasants become the majority of the rural population. The middle peasants welcome and can accept agricultural cooperation and socialism. They are, therefore, a reliable ally of the proletariat and an important motive force of the Philippine Revolution.

c. The Poor Peasants

Together with the farm workers, the poor peasants are about 75 to 80 per cent of the rural population. Together with the semi-owner peasants, the poor peasants are included in the category of semiproletariat. They as a rule own no land and serve as tenants of feudal lords. Some of them may own a piece of land but this is utterly negligible as they depend for their livelihood mainly on their tenant status. They own a few odd farm implements and many of them merely borrow or rent work animals. The main form of exploitation suffered by the poor peasants is the regular payment of land rent that is equivalent to half their harvest or even more. It is this peasant stratum that is most subjected to usury and other forms of feudal abuses. In many cases, they are cheated by the landlords in the accounting of agricultural expenses. The poor peasants more than any other peasant stratum have to supplement their meager crop share by planting side crops, raising poultry or pigs, fishing, handicrafts, peddling, or selling their labor power as construction workers or seasonal farm workers. The poor peasants are often obliged to sell their labor power for a definite and considerable period of time unlike the middle peasants who sell their labor power only occasionally or partly. The poor peasants generally have insufficient funds for both their subsistence and agricultural expenses. They often seek the help of relatives and friends or use their crop to guarantee debts from the landlords and money lenders.

The poor peasants and the overwhelming majority of semi-owner peasants constitute the biggest motive force of the Philippine Revolution. The land problem is their essential problem. It is, therefore, the main problem of the people's democratic revolution. In the process of making the revolutionary solution to this problem, the most gigantic force in Philippine society is aroused and mobilized to smash not only the landlords but also the imperialists, the comprador big bourgeoisie and the bureaucrat capitalists. All of them have long conspired to keep the peasantry in bondage. All "land reform" laws passed by these counterrevolutionaries have been calculated to entrench the exploiters of the peasant masses in this semicolonial and semifeudal society.

The peasantry, i.e., the poor and middle peasants, is the natural and most reliable ally of the proletariat and it is the main force of the Philippine Revolution. Only under the leadership of the proletariat can the peasantry achieve liberation from its oppressors and only by forging the firmest alliance with it can the proletariat lead the Philippine Revolution to victory. Powerful armed contingents can be drawn in large numbers by the revolutionary party of the proletariat only from the ranks of the peasantry. The people's democratic revolution is essentially a peasant war because its main political force is the peasantry, its main problem is the land problem and its main source of Red fighters is the peasantry.

With the support of the peasantry, the revolutionary party of the proletariat and the people's army can take full advantage of the uneven development of Philippine society. The countryside where the peasantry toils can be turned into a vast ocean to drown the enemies of the Philippine Revolution. It is here where the revolutionary forces first defeat the counterrevolutionaries before the final seizure of power in the cities. The countryside offers the widest area possible for maneuver for the revolutionaries because the counterrevolutionaries have no choice but to concentrate their forces for the defense of their urban centers of economic and political power and also for guarding their main lines of communication and transport. Furthermore, as the revolutionary movement intensifies, factions within the counterrevolutionary ranks struggle more bitterly and more violently, thus forcing whichever faction is in power to retain its crack forces in the city or in reserve camps to defend itself from coup d'etats.

The proletariat should pursue a revolutionary anti-feudal united front in order to mobilize to the fullest possible extent the revolutionary forces in the countryside. It should unite with the poor peasants, lower-middle peasants and farm workers as its most reliable allies. These in turn can win over the entire middle peasantry to neutralize the rich peasants and isolate the landlord class and other local tyrants.

4. The Proletariat

The proletariat refers principally to the industrial workers and secondarily to other wage-earners. It is a class that is dispossessed of any means of production and has to sell its labor power to the capitalist owners of the means of production. It is exploited by being forced to create surplus value while receiving in return a measly subsistence wage, far smaller than that surplus value which its capitalist employers appropriate.

Because of the semicolonial and semifeudal nature of Philippine society today, the Filipino industrial proletariat is small in size in comparison with the peasantry. It includes about 15 per cent of the total manpower in the country. It ranges in number from 1.8 million to 2.0 million.

The industrial workers are in land, water and rail transport; mines and quarries; logging areas and lumber yards; sugar, coconut and abaca-stripping mills; public utility plants; food processing; beverage plants and breweries; tannery and shoe manufacturing; textile factories; printing presses; merchandising firms; chemical and drug factories; soap and cosmetic factories; oil refineries; flour mills; cement plants; pulp and paper manufacturing; scrap metal and steel processing plants; and several other enterprises and industrial lines. The most strategic and the biggest enterprises are owned and controlled by U.S. monopoly firms. Otherwise, they are owned by the local big bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie, with the latter playing a secondary role in the economy as a whole.

The industrial workers are extremely oppressed and exploited by U.S. imperialism, local capitalism and feudalism. The so-called Magna Carta of Labor has not really been of help to them. It has been a mere concessionary and deceptive scrap of paper issued by the counterrevolutionaries after the brutal suppression of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Congress of Labor Organizations. The workers receive low wages which are further cut down by continuous inflation and are deprived in practice of such minimum rights as unionization, job security, compensation for death and injury, overtime pay, maternity and sick leave with pay, regular medical and dental care, retirement pension and the like. The army, police, courts and prisons are ruthlessly poised and used against them whenever they rise up to assert their rights. The excessive number of unemployed and underemployed due to the general backwardness of the economy is always used by the exploiters to threaten or cause dismissals and replacements and to press down wage and living conditions of workers.

Before the reactionary employers give any concession, they subject the workers to the most vicious deception and, when this proves futile, the brutal force of the counterrevolutionary state. The officials of the reactionary government are given retainers' fees, bribes and other special privileges to suppress the workers' strikes. Labor dealers also come into the bargain to mislead the workers either by making a straight sellout or by limiting the economic struggle to merely getting the watered-down terms of a "collective bargaining agreement" and preventing the workers from raising their class consciousness. The exploiters make concessions to a certain segment of workers only when there is no way out in the face of a powerful workers' unity. But they never stop seeking ways of taking back what they have conceded and of intensifying the exploitation of the proletariat and other working people.

In addition to the industrial workers, there are the farm workers mainly in large sugar, coconut, fiber-growing, citrus, pineapple, banana and vegetable farms. They work the longest hours, receive the lowest wages and suffer the worst conditions. They are exploited by the imperialists, landlords, labor contractors and usurers. Like the industrial workers, the farm workers are wage-earners, and own no means of production. They are the rural proletariat.

The industrial proletariat is the most advanced force of production in the country today. It is internationally associated with the most advanced force of production in the imperialist countries and the world in general. It is associated with the most advanced form of economy, socialism. In the whole history of mankind, the proletariat has emerged as the most advanced force of production by creating the modern means of large-scale production. On the basis of its economic status and political experience, the proletariat has become the most advanced political force internationally and nationally. This truth has become unmistakably clear in the era of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is marching toward worldwide victory.

The Filipino proletariat is not only a basic motive force of the Philippine Revolution but it is also the leading force. It is the standard-bearer of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, the proletarian revolutionary ideology that guides the people's democratic revolution now and the socialist revolution subsequently. Among the toiling masses, the proletariat has the Communist Party of the Philippines to represent its class leadership. It is the class that can have a comprehensive grasp of materialist philosophy, dialectical and historical materialism, political economy, social science, people's war, party-building and the great proletarian cultural revolution.

The workers are today the most concentrated class in Philippine society; in big numbers, they work together daily. They have a strong sense of organization and discipline. They can use their strikes to temper their class leadership and prepare themselves for the seizure of political power in concert with the peasantry and other exploited sections of the people. By waging general strikes in coordination with the people's army, they can paralyze or overthrow their class enemies.

Owning no private means of production and being subjected to the most brutal oppression and exploitation, they are always willing to exercise their class leadership and strike down the oppressors and exploiters of the Filipino people.

Being young in comparison with the proletariat of the imperialist countries, the Filipino proletariat has natural ties with the peasantry which are close and strong. Most Filipino workers come from peasant families. They can make full use of their home barrios and blood relations at various points of the whole country to launch people's war. At present, there is an increasing number of workers going to the countryside to conjoin with the peasantry in the revolutionary armed struggle. The workers in such enterprises as those found in the countryside, mines and quarries, transport lines, logging and lumbering, plantations, cement plants and others are tightly bound up with the peasant masses and are easily drawn to the revolutionary cause.

The Filipino proletariat has a splendid record of revolutionary struggle. Though still unconscious of their revolutionary ideology, Marxism, the Filipino workers led by Andres Bonifacio initiated and participated vigorously in the old national-democratic revolution. In the course of the Filipino-American War, the printing workers of the official newspaper of the revolutionary government established the first union. After the defeat of the Aguinaldo government by U.S. imperialism, they fearlessly continued to establish trade unions despite the brutal attacks launched by the imperialists and their local lackeys to suppress them.

Unable to stop them, the U.S. imperialists attempted to split the ranks of the proletariat by propagating locally the reactionary trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) and, after the triumph of the October Revolution, by promoting anti-Bolshevik hysteria. Despite the combined use of force and deception, the Communist Party of the Philippines was established in 1930, marking the formal beginning of the integration of the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Philippine Revolution. Since then, U.S. imperialism and its local lackeys have become even fiercer in attacking the revolutionary workers and in using all kinds of subterfuge to attack them and also to make use of internal weaknesses of the Party.

Only a few months after its establishment, the Party was brutally attacked by the U.S. imperialists with the use of the Quezon puppet clique and the puppet constabulary. In the period of 1935 to 1941, political representatives of the bourgeoisie led by Vicente Lava crept into the Party to lay the foundation of the counterrevolutionary revisionist line of the Lavas and Tarucs. This line became more distinct in 1938 when the Communist Party and the Socialist Party merged wholesale.

During the war of anti-Japanese resistance, the proletariat and the Communist Party of the Philippines achieved considerable strength by leading the peasantry in revolutionary armed struggle. But upon the return of the U.S. imperialists in 1945, counterrevolutionary revisionist agents of the bourgeoisie, the Lavas and Tarucs, maneuvered the Party into taking the erroneous path of parliamentary struggle and allowed U.S. imperialism and feudalism to reclaim the areas where the workers and peasants had made substantial democratic gains.

Despite the veiled opposition of the Lavas and Tarucs, the armed struggle was resumed upon the insistence of the revolutionary masses. Under the guise of trying to achieve a rapid military victory in two years' time, the counterrevolutionary agents of the bourgeoisie led by Jose Lava within the Party abandoned the principle of building the people's fighting strength step by step within a protracted period of time and thereby sabotaged the revolution in concert with the U.S. imperialists, the comprador big bourgeoisie, the landlord class and the bureaucrat capitalists, who launched vicious campaigns of "encirclement and suppression" against the people and the Party. In 1951, the puppet state destroyed the biggest and strongest trade union movement, the Congress of Labor Organizations, by committing all kinds of terrorist abuses against its officers and rank-and-file. Only after destroying this democratic organization did the reactionaries put out the so-called Magna Carta of Labor to allow its agents to mislead those who could be misled among the workers.

After suffering disastrous military defeats, the counterrevolutionary agents of the bourgeoisie within the Party, the Lavas and Tarucs, took a series of steps towards surrender. Luis Taruc surrendered in 1954 and Jesus Lava did the same in 1964. The revolutionary mass movement became sabotaged because of the long period during which the counterrevolutionary revisionist line of the Lavas and Tarucs prevailed within the old Communist Party. The old Communist Party did not only fail to seize power but it also failed to preserve itself for further waging revolutionary armed struggle.

The proletariat has been preyed upon by reactionary union bosses and other sorts of swindlers. The U.S. labor attach�, CIA, AID, representatives of the AFL-CIO, ICFTU and ILO, U.S. foundations (Asia, Rockefeller, Ford and the like), the Asian Labor Education Center, Institute of Social Order, Philippine Trade Union Center, Federation of Free Workers, Philippine Transport and General Workers Organization and so many reactionary outfits31 have for quite a long time tried to mislead the proletariat. Yet the crooks trained, fielded and subsidized by these anti-communist and anti-proletarian entities hardly control ten per cent of the Filipino working class in all their fake trade unions. It is obvious that the workers can be organized and mobilized only under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought and under the practical leadership of the proletarian revolutionary party, the Communist Party of the Philippines.

The Semiproletariat

A high rate of unemployment is a basic characteristic of a semi-colonial and semifeudal country. With a population of 37 million, the Philippines has a reserve army of labor that is three million unemployed and seven million underemployed. The reactionary government mendaciously conceals this fact by releasing false figures concerning the state of unemployment. Artificially, it considers the millions of people who belong to the semiproletariat as fully employed.

The huge multitude of poor and semi-owner peasants who belong to the semiproletariat has been presented. Aside from this, there are still other sections of the semiproletariat which comprise a sizable part of the population. The most numerous of these are poor fishermen on the sea coasts and lake shores. The rest of the semiproletarians are found mostly in towns and urban areas.

The semiproletarians suffer from dispossession, undercompensation, irregularity and insufficiency of income and insecurity. There are those who have only their simple implements like the small handicraftsmen, carpenters and masons, small photographers, ambulant repairmen and poor fishermen. There are those who have only a small amount of funds to carry on their lives as peddlers and small stallkeepers. There are those who have nothing at all but their labor power to sell like provincial dock porters, market cargadores, shop assistants, apprentices in sweatshops, pedicab drivers, some jeepney drivers, house servants, restaurant helpers and the like. These are people who cannot be accommodated as regular wage-earners in industrial enterprises nor as regular tenants in the countryside because of the semicolonial and semifeudal conditions.

These semiproletarians are a motive force of the people's democratic revolution. They can be formed into local associations although they are not as concentrated as the industrial proletariat. They are eager to fight the national and class enemies of the Filipino people.

The Lumpen Proletariat

On the basis of the high degree of unemployment in both city and countryside, the ranks of the lumpen proletariat keep on increasing. This stratum is composed of the dregs of Philippine society. It has emerged as a result of forced idleness. It is composed of thieves, robbers, gangsters, beggars, pimps and prostitutes, fakirs, vagrants and all other elements who resort to anti-social acts to make a living. They appear conspicuously in city slums. Many of them come from the provinces to look for jobs that are not available in the city. They are organized into such gangs as the OXO, Sigue-Sigue, Bahala Na and the like.

They often act as strikebreakers, disrupters of democratic actions, informers or goons for hire. Many of them go to the countryside to engage in banditry, extortion, cattlerustling, piracy and the like. Most of those being recruited by the reactionary armed forces into the "Monkees," BSDU's and other killer groups come from the lumpen proletariat. Lately, the reactionary government has adopted the malicious practice of sending into the ranks of demonstrators combined forces of secret agents and hired lumpen proletarians to attack petty-bourgeois establishments and to disrupt and prevent demonstrations from reaching the vicinity of Malacanang Palace and the U.S. embassy.

The lumpen proletarians are an extremely unstable lot. They are easily bought off by the enemy and are given to senseless destruction. But some of them can be remolded. Their courage in combat and their hatred of the puppet state and exploitation can be put in the service of the revolutionary struggle provided safeguards are taken. When they join the revolution, they become the source of roving rebel and anarchist ideology. The Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique and the Monkees-Diwa gang typify the unremolded lumpen proletarians who try to misrepresent the people's army.

__________________________

31 Even such a trade union outfit as the National Association of Trade Unions previously reputed to be progressive has long suffered the corruption and anti-communist misdirection of Philippine Society and Revolution 157 the labor aristocrat Ignacio F. Lacsina, its president. Lacsina has been discovered as an infiltrator and saboteur of the revolutionary mass movement in all years that he pretended to veer away from his past connections with C.I.A. Jesuit �labor organizer,� Fr. Hogan; the late puppet chieftain Magsaysay; and the Philippine Trade Union Council (PTUC).

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