The Few Who Won: The History of the Russian Revolution(s) and its Strategic Relevance Today

A repost from Jacobin, written by Bhaskar Sunkara. The original article is here.

The Few Who Won

How should we understand the October Revolution and its tragic aftermath?

A devout Polish Catholic, Felix Dzerzhinsky was once asked why he was sure there was a God. “God is in the heart,” the teenager replied. “If I ever come to the conclusion that there is no God, I would put a bullet in my head.”

A few years later, he realized just how alone humanity was. But instead of a bullet, he found a new faith, vowing “to fight against evil to the last breath” as a revolutionary socialist. By age forty, he was clad in black leather, designing a bloody terror as head of the young Soviet Union’s secret police.
This story of zealotry fits with the popular image of Bolshevism — a conspiratorial sect, singular in purpose. By virtue of their ruthlessness, they would take advantage of 1917’s democratic upheavals, perverting the noble February Revolution into the bloody excesses of October. That Stalinism emerged from its womb is no surprise — the extremism of men like Dzerzhinsky, confident the utopia they were building was worth any cost, made it all but certain.

The narrative is neat, and seemingly vindicated by history. The system that emerged out of the October Revolution was a moral catastrophe. But more than that, it was a tragedy — and tragedies don’t need villains.

Take Dzerzhinsky’s socialism. It was rooted in the humanist idea that the “present hellish life with its wolfish exploitation, oppression, and violence” could give way to an order “based on harmony, a full life embracing society as a whole.” The future executioner suffered for his beliefs — eleven out of twenty years underground spent in prison or exile — “in the torments of loneliness, longing for the world and for life.”

Poor, tortured, imprisoned, and martyred, the revolutionaries of Russia seemed destined to meet the same fate as radicals elsewhere in Europe. Only they didn’t. After half decade in solitary confinement, enduring beatings that permanently disfigured his jaw, Dzerzhinsky’s last letter from prison was resolute: “At the moment I am dozing, like a bear in his winter den; all that remains is the thought that spring will come and I will cease to suck my paw and all the strength that still remains in my body and soul will manifest itself. Live I will.”

Here’s what happens when noble, determined people win — and find themselves in an unwinnable situation.


The Bolsheviks Before Bolshevism

In the Cold War, both sides painted Vladimir Lenin and his party as special — unique in their brutality or their model for revolution. But despite being an underground movement, it’s striking just how ordinary they were. Lenin saw himself as an orthodox Marxist, trying to adapt the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) plan to a largely rural and peasant country with a weak civil society and mass illiteracy.

The supposed proto-totalitarian smoking gun, Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, does have unusual elements. Lenin calls for professional organizers capable of eluding police and places special emphasis on the role of print propaganda, for instance. But it wasn’t a blueprint for a radically different party; rather, these were tactics needed for a movement barred from the legal organizing and parliamentary work pursued by its counterparts elsewhere. Once tsarism was overthrown, backward Russia and its small working class could develop along Western lines and push the struggle further.

Siding with Karl Kautsky, Lenin took aim at Eduard Bernstein and others on the SPD’s right wing for trying to change “a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms.” To be a revolutionary, for Lenin, meant smashing the capitalist state — it was a politics of rupture. But his project, unlike the “Blanquists” he also denounced, was about cohering a workers’ movement and placing it at the center of political struggle, not creating a hardened core of putschists. For Lenin the problem wasn’t that workers weren’t flocking to the vanguard party, but that socialists were underestimating workers. His goal, following the German example, was a merger of the two currents — a militant socialist workers’ movement.

Then perhaps if not by design, the Bolsheviks were forced by repression to adopt a military-like structure that they would take into power. This claim, too, is doubtful. Bolshevik organs even functioned with transparency and pluralism few organizations in much rosier conditions today can match.

Take the “economists,” the grouping Lenin criticized so thoroughly in What Is to Be Done? He thought that they, like every other faction, deserved “to demand the opportunity to express and advocate views.” Lenin was hardly a genial interlocutor — like Marx, he was a fan of personal invective. Still, the leader had to deal with not getting his way. Between 1912 and 1914, forty-seven of his articles were refused by Pravda, the “party paper.”

Dissent cut through Russian social democracy; no one’s marching orders were followed without debate. It wasn’t just Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Socialist Revolutionary (SR), but dozens of shades of opinions among the Bolsheviks themselves.

On important political issues, however, the main wings of Russian social democracy were close. When the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split in 1903, it was over small points of emphasis, not because of Lenin’s supposed call for a professional vanguard party. When the 1905 revolution arrived, all parts of the movement fought side by side. Most Mensheviks, like most Bolsheviks, opposed the Great War, a clarity matched by few socialists elsewhere in Europe. In the lead-up to February 1917, they differed on how to view the liberal bourgeoisie, but agreed that the immediate task of Russian social democracy was overthrowing autocracy, not socialist revolution. Only in this period did it become obvious what set the Bolsheviks apart.

Goodbye, Social Democracy

Lenin didn’t leave social democracy, it left him. When he first got news that the SPD had voted for war credits on August 4, 1914, he thought it was capitalist propaganda.

His faith was misplaced. Only fourteen of ninety-two German socialist deputies opposed the decision. Following parliamentary norms, they voted with the majority as a bloc. An antiwar politician, Hugo Haase, was made to read the party’s pro-war statement in the Reichstag. Socialists in the French Chamber of Deputies followed suit the same day.

Kautsky wasn’t a parliamentarian, but he was present at the debate. He suggested abstaining, but agreed that Germany was waging a defensive struggle against an eastern threat. Within a year, he changed his tune and vigorously denounced the SPD’s pro-war leadership and the German state, but the damage was done. The longstanding social-democratic idea, affirmed by the Second International in congress after congress, was that the growing power of the working class would maintain peace “by resolute intervention.” If war did come to pass, the parties would not only oppose it, they would use the “crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”

That was the theory — in reality, social democracy’s flagship not only voted for war, but promoted Burgfriedenspolitik, a policy of class peace to help it along. Sixteen million people died in the conflict.

For more than a century, the Leninist narrative was that Kautsky had been an ideal Marxist until almost the outbreak of World War I. It was his stance on war in 1914 and his opposition to the October Revolution in 1917 that transformed him from revered “Pope of Marxism” to a “great renegade.” In his 1939 obituary for the German socialist, Trotsky sounds like a scorned lover: “We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.”
Kautsky’s position on the war was indeed shocking. Within social democracy, a right-wing tendency had been growing among trade union leaders and parliamentarians who saw not just their own power, but that of the class they represented, as bound up more with the stability and prosperity of their respective nations than with vague notions of proletarian internationalism. But those were foes against whom Kautsky had waged intellectual and political battle for years.

“Modern society is ripe for revolution; and the bourgeoisie is not in a position to survive any insurrection.” Such a revolution would be won by “a well-disciplined minority, energetic and conscious of the goal.” Sounds like Lenin, but that was actually Kautsky.

There was, however, a growing gap between Kautsky’s ideas and those of his Russian admirers. He had developed a conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that differed from Lenin and Trotsky’s. Kautsky might have used language similar to theirs in the 1880s, just a decade removed from the Paris Commune and with the SPD still underground. But his thought subsequently evolved. He believed workers would win power through free elections, extend political and civil liberties, and radically reform, not smash, the existing state.

Kautsky was skeptical that direct democracy could operate at scale. Though never equating nationalization with socialism, neither did he advocate a council-based “soviet democracy.” He saw overcoming capitalism as a struggle that required political democracy and a long battle for popular support. Well before publishing The Road to Power and other late works praised by the Bolsheviks, he had developed ideas distinct from both social democracy’s reformist right and its revolutionary left.

But Lenin still looked to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the great revolutions of 1848 and 1789. This was the spirit that spawned the communist movement.

To the Finland Station

The 1905 revolution showed Lenin to be in step with his era. The “great dress rehearsal” came close to toppling tsarism and gave birth to the soviet.

Russia at that time was already pulsing with change. Rapid economic growth and social advance had taken place in the empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Industrial production doubled in the 1890s alone. Horses and carts and dusty tracks began to give way to vast railroads and, for a time, Russia even led the world in oil production.

But development was highly uneven. St Petersburg’s modern factories told little of life in an empire where, even in its European regions, only one in nine people lived in cities. Whatever Russia’s progress in absolute terms, it was falling ever further behind Western Europe.

In the countryside, agricultural development advanced at an even more glacial pace, failing to keep up with huge population growth. Land-hungry peasants pushed westward from their traditional communes into the steppes. Rural poverty was still endemic. With economic stagnation in the countryside and growing but patchy capitalist industry in a few cities, generalized scarcity went along with a small but highly politicized working class.

January 1905 caught the Bolsheviks by surprise. The timing and shape of the revolt was not what they expected. In October, St Petersburg workers established an organ to coordinate their actions. Factory delegates formed a soviet (council) in the city. The body soon became a kind of workers’ parliament, with representation from a range of trade unions and committees. It was essentially a functioning local government.

Trotsky, not Lenin, shined brightest in 1905. Neither Menshevik nor Bolshevik, but respected in both camps, he immediately grasped the revolution’s significance. Within the St Petersburg Soviet’s brief life, the twenty-six year old delegate emerged as an unparalleled orator and thinker. By the end of November, he was even elected its chair.

The situation by that point was untenable. As feared, Nicholas soon crushed the revolution and reneged on concessions promised to liberal forces. By April 1906, 14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned.

But the revolutionaries now had a taste of real power. The transformation of Russian social democracy was stunning. Immediately before the 1905 revolution, the Bolsheviks had just 8,400 members. By the following spring, they could count 34,000 among them. The Mensheviks also drew thousands to their ranks.

The revolutionary movement finally had something Lenin had been aspiring to for years — a mass base of workers. Attempts to mend the divide between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would fail, but all had a sense that they were in a new era and that the tsar would soon fall.

But none came as close as Trotsky to guessing what would happen next. Grasping 1905’s implications, Trotsky refined a novel theory of “permanent revolution.” Marxists had traditionally thought that revolution would happen in stages. The first of these would be “bourgeois-democratic”: economically, this stage would pave the way for peasant land reform and further urban industrialization; politically, it would create a capitalist republic with freedom of speech and assembly. That would then allow social democrats to patiently organize for a second, socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed on this — they just argued over the role liberal capitalists would play. Mensheviks thought they would be at the heart of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, while Lenin thought workers could reconcile their interests with those of peasants and drive the process themselves.

Trotsky foresaw a different scenario. Instead of a bourgeois democratic revolution, the peasants would defeat the gentry in the countryside and the workers would conquer capitalists in the city. This “proletarian-socialist” revolution would merge democratic and socialist tasks into one. In underdeveloped Russia, however, this would create a situation of flux, with exploiting classes defeated but no material basis for large-scale socialist construction. As a result, the sequence would have to be “furthered by an international revolutionary process.”
1917 saw Trotsky’s vision vindicated — but with one key exception: the international revolution didn’t come.

The Two Revolutions

Two years into the great war, three million Russians were dead, the empire’s economy was in ruins, yet the army pushed ahead with futile new offensives. In February 1917, the stalemate was broken from within.

As in 1905, St Petersburg (now Petrograd) and its working class led the upsurge. On International Women’s Day, February 23, women textile workers began a strike which spread across the city. By day’s end, 90,000 workers were involved; by the next day, 200,000. A similar situation developed in Moscow, where workers protested against skyrocketing inflation and bread shortages. Nicholas II refused concessions until he was forced to abdicate on March 1. The Romanov dynasty that had endured for three centuries was swept away in a week.

Its fall was almost universally celebrated. What to do next was less clear. The Bolsheviks’ doctrinal dispute with the Mensheviks over how to relate to the liberal bourgeoisie would prove important here. Though the Bolsheviks agreed that the time wasn’t ripe for socialism, they wanted workers and peasants to take power and carry out the revolution’s democratic tasks. But most workers were instead drawn to the Menshevik call to simply revive the soviets; these would assert the interests of the oppressed, but not capture state power themselves.

Liberals established a Provisional Committee to fill the void, but it had little social base. On March 1, the day of the tsar’s flight, soviet and liberal leaders came to an agreement: a new Provisional Government would form and agree to a wide range of reforms. Russia would have full civil liberties, with political prisoners released and the police and state apparatus transformed.

Important questions about the war, land reform, and elections remained unresolved, but the February Revolution was among the most sweeping the world had ever seen.

But a tense situation of “dual power” quickly emerged. Sovereign authority could now be claimed by the worker and soldier soviets and by the Provisional Government. Moderate socialists struggled to bridge the gap, believing they had to keep the “progressive bourgeoisie” within the February consensus.

They were right. Materially, Russia wasn’t ripe for socialism. But those finally released from tyranny weren’t going to wait patiently for Marxist schema to mature. Freed from generations of oppression, workers seized factories and peasants divided up estates. Popular committees sprang up across the country: rank-and-file soldier committees resisted their officers and peasant organizations oversaw unsanctioned land expropriations. Authority in all its forms was questioned: the aristocracy was gone, but for a supposed “bourgeois revolution,” the bourgeoisie was reeling.

Radicals didn’t drive the change, though they benefited from it. In February, there were 24,000 Bolsheviks; within months they became a mass organization ten times that size.

For now, however, the democratically elected soviets were still dominated by Menshevik and SR forces. And meanwhile, the dynamic between those bodies and the Provisional Government was frustrated by the latter’s lack of legitimacy. It’s not hard to understand why — Prince Georgy Lvov, a link to the old regime, was the nominal head of state and the Kadets and Octobrists that ran the government were terrified by the revolution that brought them to power. Liberals could pass decrees and try to restore order and continue the war effort, but their wishes simply weren’t carried out.
On March 1, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies published its famous Order Number One. It declared that military orders from the Provisional Government were to be carried out “except those which run counter to the orders and decrees issued by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” With Order Number One, the soviet demanded a key component of sovereignty, yet refused to actually make itself the functioning authority in the country.

Moderate socialists still looked to the Provisional Government, which had been reconstituted to include more left-wing forces, including Alexander Kerensky, himself an SR. The hope was that this alliance would calm the country and create an environment in which socialists could press democratic demands and find a route to end the war. For now the fighting would continue, but was to be strictly “defensive and without annexations.”

The Bolsheviks themselves were split on how to relate to the government. Returning from Siberian exile in March, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin saw the new republic as one that would stand for years, if not decades, and oriented the Bolsheviks along that time horizon.

Lenin, still in exile, was shocked by his party’s complacency. The day after his arrival at Finland Station he presented his April Theses, where he reaffirmed an uncompromising antiwar posture and essentially embraced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Like Trotsky, Lenin thought that rather than let the revolution consolidate into a parliamentary republic, socialists should instead push it forward and build “a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.” This wasn’t empty rhetoric: the soviets already had more popular legitimacy than the Provisional Government.

Against the tamer position of Kamenev and Stalin, Lenin said “No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear.” The die was cast — there would be another revolution in 1917.

Trotsky was also in exile when the February Revolution broke out, rousing the “workers and peasants of the Bronx” an ocean away. After a perilous return home, conditions were set for him and his followers to eventually join the Bolsheviks and play a pivotal role in the events to come.

The reception to Lenin’s April Theses among many Bolsheviks was frosty at first, but it found some popular support. Lenin also had an ally in the young Nikolai Bukharin, then on the left of the party. Lenin’s return and radical line elevated his stature.

The party was still split in this period: there were those like Lenin and Bukharin who looked to insurrection and those with a more moderate perspective — like Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Viktor Nogin (who had long wanted to reunite with the Mensheviks), and Gregory Zinoviev. The latter wanted to replace the Provisional Government, but only with a broad coalition of socialist parties.
Lenin also didn’t want a premature uprising that would leave the Bolsheviks isolated and unable to last in power like the Communards of Paris. As late as June, he would stress that: “Even in the soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority . . . the majority of the masses are wavering but still believe the SRs and Mensheviks.”

But the party’s radical appeals were taking hold — tens of thousands of workers and soldiers joined. Some, inspired by slogans like “All Power to the Soviets,” launched spontaneous armed demonstrations in Petrograd against the Provisional Government in July. A crackdown followed — Trotsky was imprisoned for a time, Lenin fled, publications were banned, and the death penalty was reintroduced for soldiers. With the blessing of the Menshevik-SR majority, Kerensky’s Provisional Government claimed more power for itself.

During his two months hiding in Finland, Lenin finished The State and Revolution. His argument with reformists was premised on a simple point: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Like Marx and Engels, he saw the state as a tool of class oppression. A tiny minority used it to rule over a great majority. The state was, unsurprisingly, bloody and repressive. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat and its allies, by contrast, it would be the great majority repressing a tiny minority. There would be some violence, then, but by comparison it would be minimal.

“We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes, “we do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.” But as socialism triumphed, the need for a repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution as a false flag — a libertarian socialist document from the father of socialist authoritarianism. But it seems to have been a genuine indicator of his political worldview. It was the simplicity with which Lenin made his case that prefigured the problems Bolshevism would face once in power.

In August, it was the Right’s turn at revolt. General Kornilov, sensing the instability of the Provisional Government, tried to restore order by way of a coup. With no one else to call on for help, Kerensky appealed to the Petrograd Soviet. It easily beat back Kornilov, with the Bolsheviks playing a decisive role. The party’s prestige was at a high and Kerensky was forced to release its captured leaders. In late September, Trotsky once again became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, now under the control of a Bolshevik majority. What was recently a small, radical party could now claim popular legitimacy. The stage was set for the October Revolution.

Yet before it could transpire, the Mensheviks and SRs had one last chance. The mood in the country had swung even further left. It was clear the Provisional Government had no independent means of defense in a country that now had six hundred radicalized soviets. Among the Mensheviks, steadily hemorrhaging support to the Bolsheviks, a left wing under Julius Martov was gaining strength. Martov was resolutely antiwar and in favor of more sweeping reforms than the Provisional Government could offer. His position was nearly indistinguishable from that of the moderate Bolsheviks.

The Mensheviks and SRs could have stepped in and taken power as part of a broad front of socialist parties to create a constituent assembly and a framework for reforms. The Bolsheviks could have formed a loyal opposition to such a government, or even directly joined it, as Kamenev and Zinoviev wanted. It was a moot point — the Mensheviks and SRs clung to the sinking Provisional Government, and even if they hadn’t, the parties were divided on the war. Lenin and Trotsky’s insurrection seemed like the only way.

With the Petrograd Soviet now under their control, Lenin finally convinced the Bolshevik Central Committee of that course. The “single greatest event in human history,” as socialists called it for decades, was anticlimactic. On October 24, Bolshevik units quickly occupied rail stations, telephone exchanges, and the state bank. The following day Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested the cabinet ministers. One-sixth of the world had been conquered in the name of the proletariat with barely a drop of blood spilled.

Did Lenin lead a coup? Though certainly not as spontaneous as the February Revolution, October represented a genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers, allied with elements of the peasantry. After the Kornilov coup, the Bolsheviks could claim a mandate for such an action. Their support was bolstered by a straightforward call for “peace, land, and bread.” The Mensheviks demanded patience from the long-suffering masses; the Bolsheviks made concrete promises. Making those desires a reality would be another matter, but the Bolsheviks were the force most militantly trying to fulfill the February Revolution’s frustrated goals.

In the first months after October, the character of the regime was not yet clear. The Bolsheviks didn’t initially seek a one-party state — circumstances, as well as their decisions, conspired to create one. Immediately after the revolution, it fell to the Second Congress of Soviets to ratify the transfer of power from the Provisional Government. From 318 soviets, 649 delegates were elected to the body. Reflecting a dramatic shift in mood, 390 of them were Bolshevik and 100 Left SRs (those Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the October rising).

Now transformed into a small minority, the Right SRs and Mensheviks attacked the Bolshevik action. Even Martov denounced the “coup d’état,” but also put forth a resolution calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the motion and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would have created the broad socialist government that many had sought in September — only now, in a more radical context, it would be pressured into taking principled positions on the war and land reform.

But as in September, the Right SRs and the Menshevik majority refused to go along. They walked out of the Congress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks. Martov still wanted a compromise — negotiations for the creation of a coalition socialist government. But now, just two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall, the Bolshevik mood hardened. “The rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!”

Here is Trotsky epitomized — grand, rhetorically masterful, but tragically overconfident in the ordination of history. The delegates didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They erupted into applause. Martov began to leave with the other left-Mensheviks. A young Bolshevik confronted him on the way out, upset that a great champion of the working class would abandon its revolution. Martov stopped before the exit and turned to him: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”

Almost exactly twenty years to the day, that worker, Ivan Akulov, was killed in a Stalinist purge.

The Workers’ State

“We will now build the socialist order.” Lenin’s words just after the revolution suggested a radical course, but the Bolsheviks moved cautiously. Though they had popular support in a few major cities, they knew it would be a struggle to assert authority in a massive, mostly rural and peasant country.
They tried to make good on their program, however. Against the old elites’ resistance, worker control over production was expanded. Homosexuality was decriminalized, women won divorce and reproductive rights. Land rights were expanded to peasants, antisemitism was combatted, and steps were made toward self-determination in the former empire Lenin called “a prison house of nations.”
In industry, Lenin’s vision of worker control wasn’t syndicalist (“the ridiculous transfer of the railways to the railwaymen, or the tanneries to the tanners”); in the long run, he looked to more coordinated class-wide methods of ownership. In the short term, he said, “the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible,” and argued instead for worker oversight of management, alongside the nationalization of key sectors. That wasn’t the limit of his horizons, of course. Lenin was impressed with the wartime economy in capitalist states. If planning in the service of chaos was already a reality, why shouldn’t planning in the service of human need — under the watch of democratic soviets — be possible?

The push for more extensive nationalizations came from the grassroots. A contradictory late November order gave factory committees a legal mandate to interfere in production and distribution, while still asserting management’s right to manage. Not surprisingly, it fueled disorder and further hampered production. Many workers took to taking over factories on their own accord. Often, these were honest attempts to restore production after capitalist sabotage or flight; at other times, workers responded to chaos by hoarding supplies and protecting their own interests.

Within months the Bolsheviks would have to clamp down on such actions — the immediate task was restoring basic productivity and order. It’s clear that the government intended to maintain a mixed economy at least until its rescue by revolutions elsewhere in Europe.

But the confusion of these months was helped along by the fact that Bolsheviks never clearly delineated between the overlapping jurisdictions of factory committees and trade unions and a sprawling complex of soviets, not to mention the central state. They had vacillated on these questions for tactical reasons in the pursuit of power. Centralization and the blurring of party and state were simple, pragmatic ways to resolve the dilemmas.

On the question of the war, the Bolsheviks also saw their hopes complicated. The situation was urgent. Though fighting was subsiding, between the February and October Revolutions one hundred thousand died on the Eastern Front. The Bolsheviks made a call to all governments for a “just and democratic peace.” If they refused, Lenin was confident that “the workers of these countries will understand the duty which now rests upon them of saving mankind from the horrors of war.”

The decree was ignored by the Entente powers and, for the moment, so was the call for revolution. Negotiations with the Central Powers began. Against Lenin’s advice, the Bolshevik Central Committee turned down an initial peace offer. “Left Communists” led by Bukharin wanted to continue the war and fan the flames of revolt in their enemies’ homes. It was a grave miscalculation. Taking advantage of strife within the young socialist state, the Germans and Austrians advanced, seizing a huge swathe of land from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s painful concessions followed, cutting the Soviet state from key agricultural and industrial heartlands and putting it in a weaker position to deal with growing civil unrest.

Attempts to undermine the Bolshevik government started from the day it took power in Petrograd. The White movement was an unholy alliance spanning the political spectrum — from right-Mensheviks and SRs to the liberal Kadet party to extreme nationalists and monarchists. Thirteen thousand American troops along with British, Canadian, French, Greek, Italian, and Japanese forces joined to aid a brutal domestic opposition. Against remarkable odds, the Bolsheviks oversaw the creation of a Red Army and triumphed in a five-year conflict that claimed nine million lives.

As Trotsky, that great army’s organizer, put it, “Having mounted the saddle, the rider is obliged to guide the horse — at the risk of breaking his neck.” The Bolshevik government rode on. Their argument for doing so was at first less about the immediate prospects for socialism within Russia and more in terms of a “holding action.” The survival of the first workers’ state would be a boon to the revolutionary movements that would take power in more advanced countries. These states would then come to the Bolsheviks’ rescue and help rebuild the country as part of a broader proletarian confederation.

It wasn’t as fantastical as it sounds today: this was an era of upheaval. Not long after October, German communists launched an ill-fated series of revolts trying to follow the Russian example. Newly liberated Finland saw its democratically elected socialist government dislodged in a bloody civil war. In 1919, a Hungarian Soviet Republic briefly took power. Two red years of factory occupations and mass strikes shook Italy. Even Ireland boasted soviets for a time.

Though the Bolsheviks still hoped for a breakthrough through the newly formed Communist International, it was becoming clear that no salvation from abroad was on its way. Lenin’s party had made a justified gamble to protect and extend the February Revolution’s gains and help end not just one grisly war, but all future ones as well. That gamble failed. And now with the only apparent alternatives to their leadership being a right-wing military dictatorship or even a form of Judeocidal fascism, they pressed on. Faced with an impossible dilemma, what the Bolsheviks had to do to survive would only exacerbate the party’s worst tendencies.

Terrorism and Communism

The moment called for hardened men like Dzerzhinsky. His newly formed Cheka would collect information from across the empire and act on it immediately. Interrogations were quick, and those who failed to dispel suspicion were stood up against a wall and shot. With Lenin’s blessing, the Cheka grew two hundred thousand strong and led a Red Terror in which as many were killed.
Were such terrible acts necessary to win history’s most destructive civil war? Maybe, but the methods in which they were conducted certainly were not. There were no external controls on the Cheka’s arrests and executions — the example of Dzerzhinsky’s disciplined leadership would never be enough to curb excesses. Collective punishment, state terror, and intimidation — all these were initially exceptional measures that became norms when social conflict reemerged during Stalin’s reign.

Though one can overstate the comparison, Abraham Lincoln’s US Civil War government declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, detained thousands, and used military tribunals, among other extra-constitutional measures. But these were recognized as temporary deviations necessary for the restoration of normal republican government, which was restored before long.

The Bolsheviks didn’t delineate their state of exception clearly enough, blurring together actions taken out of necessity and those performed out of virtue. There was no clear bedrock of rights and protections that Soviet citizens could claim once the emergency of war subsided. Open debate within the newly formed Communist Party would continue for some time, including factions pushing for democracy and worker power. But the broader political culture of engagement and contestation — sustained by a network of parties and newspapers — that had survived underground for long decades under tsarism would never reemerge.

A central problem was the lack of clear agreement on what the dictatorship of the proletariat should look like. Like other wings of social democracy, the Bolsheviks focused on seizing power, not exercising it. Aside from vague sketches, they hadn’t thought much about politics after revolution. With the exploiting classes gone, would the proletariat need a socialist theory of jurisprudence or institutional checks on power? Caught in an unprecedented situation, they made it up as they went along.

From War Communism to the NEP

Moves toward “war communism” were spurred more by practical necessity than ideological zeal. Years of revolution and unrelenting war had disrupted agricultural production. Peasants had little incentive to direct what was still produced to the cities — there was a shortage of consumer goods and grain prices continued to decline in relation to those goods. A black market naturally developed, a market the tsarist state and Provisional Government both sought to combat.

The Bolsheviks continued that course, but even more ruthlessly — applying their class analysis to the countryside, which they saw as divided between poor peasants, middle peasants, and wealthy kulaks. They hoped to maintain support by focusing their actions on the latter, but divisions on the ground were less clear, and the presence of armed requisition squads searching for hoarders only served as a further disincentive to production. Despite the banning of private trade and energetic repression, it was largely thanks to the black market that Russian cities survived the Civil War.

The Bolshevik industrial policy also shifted in this period. The government nationalized the entire economy, instituted rationing, and imposed strict labor discipline. Not even the moderate visions of worker control survived the return to one-man management. No capitalist sabotage was necessary — shortages of parts and raw materials slowed production to a crawl. Highly ideological initiatives, like the attempt to construct moneyless budgets, coexisted with the reality of wholesale economic regression. By 1921, Russian industry was less than one-third its prewar size.

The Soviet state’s political base was decimated, too. Some industrial workers died in the Civil War, while others left starving cities and tried their chances in the countryside.

With the dream of German revolution buried for now, the issues were now practical ones: how to restore and expand Russian industry, and how to revive the worker- peasant alliance that sparked the revolution.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a step in this direction. The state still controlled the commanding heights of the economy — large industries, banking, and foreign trade — but markets were legalized elsewhere. A tax on food producers replaced counterproductive forced requisitions, with peasants free to dispose of their goods how they wished once the tax was paid. Though the partnership would have to be skewed — peasant surplus was needed to restore and expand industry — the hope was to replace the direct coercion of war communism with accumulation through gradual, unequal exchange. Rather than forced collectivization, many NEP supporters looked to the voluntary creation of agricultural cooperatives that, in time, would outcompete what they saw as needlessly inefficient traditional peasant production.

Politically, the NEP was a period of hardening, not liberalization. Party leaders feared that the peasantry’s newfound economic power might morph into a political opposition. Not only opposition parties, but even internal Bolshevik factions were banned in 1921. There would still be debate within the party, but the Bolsheviks made clear that they would not step away from power. For the moment, the arts and intellectual life flowered undisturbed. But the one-party state was an easy trap to fall into: with the Civil War, foreign intervention, blockade, and plots against the leadership, who could deny that Russia was under siege? Then, with the war over, the task of reconstruction required reliable men of action. One such man, Stalin, rose to general secretary in 1922.

Lenin was wary of what he saw. But though he decried the party-state elite’s abuses and excesses, he failed to see that democratic reform, however risky, was the only possible counterbalance to that power. Approaching death, he warned specifically about Stalin, encouraging the party congress to remove him, but his wishes went unfulfilled. Once Lenin was gone, Stalin used his post to scatter the supporters of his rival Trotsky within the party. Still, Stalin was not yet in control.

Debate within the party soon crystalized between three main camps: the left opposition of Trotsky, Stalin’s current, and those around Bukharin, who now found himself on the party’s right.

Trotsky pushed for party democracy and other anti-bureaucratic measures, faster industrialization and collectivization at home, and aggressive revolutionary exhortations abroad. Bukharin was more cautious, seeking to continue slowly “riding into socialism on a peasant nag,” with some adjustments. Stalin vacillated between the two positions, displaying a political savvy few knew the Georgian possessed.

Trotsky saw the real danger not in Stalin’s bureaucratic centrism, but in the risk that Bukharin’s program would accidently bring about the restoration of capitalism. Bukharin, too, took far too long to see Stalin as a threat. Yet even had they united, Stalin might have been destined to win: he applauded the party men Trotsky criticized.

Meanwhile, Trotsky’s call for industrial rejuvenation hardly won him goodwill among the peasant majority outside the party. And without the support of the bureaucracy or the peasantry — and with the old Bolshevik workers dead or exhausted — on what social basis could Trotsky hope to win? Confidence in the dialectic of history wasn’t enough.

Trotsky was removed from power in late 1927 and sent into exile shortly after. Until his murder thirteen years later, he remained Stalinism’s greatest critic. Yet he couldn’t admit that any part of the system he so despised had its genesis in the early repression that he himself had helped engineer.

Stalin and His Children

Despite the political turmoil in Russia, the NEP was working. By 1926, Soviet industry had surpassed prewar levels — a remarkable turnaround from just five years prior. What to do with this new wealth was hotly debated: agricultural improvements and light industry or heavy industry? These choices weren’t just technical. For a party that grounded its legitimacy in an industrial proletariat, continuing along the NEP route had profound political implications.

With the left opposition eliminated and his erstwhile ally Bukharin marginalized, Stalin was free to answer these questions as he saw fit. He was growing frustrated with the NEP. Industrial investment increased, yet grain prices were kept low. Peasants, naturally, clung to their stock. Periodic crises of this kind occurred throughout the 1920s, as industrial and agricultural prices fell out of sync.

In the past, these problems had been alleviated through price adjustments and other policy changes.
This time, however, Stalin made no such adjustment. Instead he sent police to commandeer legally produced and traded grain. Local officials who followed existing laws were dismissed. A new period of coercion against every layer of the peasantry was born. Stalin wanted a “revolution from above.” The first show trials took place, the first five-year plan was introduced, which called for the tripling of industrial output and investment.

 And then, without warning, millions were forcefully collectivized into farms. Planners thought this would permanently solve food supply issues. It had the opposite effect — production fell dramatically and scapegoats had to be found. Collective punishment returned, not just against supposedly wealthy kulaks, but now also against “ideological kulaks,” that is, those who opposed the policy. At least six million perished in famine, and millions more would spend their lives in a vast network of forced-labor camps.

Many, of course, resisted the new serfdom. Stalin’s own wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932 to protest the new course. But there was no serious challenge to the dictator. Within a decade, a once-vibrant, fractious party became a monolithic sect.

Yet if we can close our eyes to the cost, the five-year plan was a success. The Soviet Union made an incredible advance — largely in spite of forced collectivization, rather than because of it. State planning led to a rapid rise in GDP, capital accumulation, and consumption. Foreign observers downplayed reports of mass famine and celebrated the achievement. (Not just the Daily Worker, but also liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Nation.) As the fascist threat grew, so did Communist prestige. But this economic breakthrough was accompanied by new political terror. A campaign of mass murder began in 1936, with thousands purged from the Communist Party, including lifelong Bolsheviks. Many of them were imprisoned as counterrevolutionaries, forced to confess to elaborate plots, and then executed. More than half a million were killed.

Stalin had used a food shortage to transform the Soviet Union from a slowly rebounding authoritarian state to a horrific totalitarian regime unlike any the world had ever seen.

Dzerzhinsky, who died of a heart attack in 1926, supposedly anguished over every execution order he signed. He was replaced by men with no such compunction.

Stalin’s Soviet Union did win a great war against a far greater evil. Yet for every action the leader took to defeat fascism, he took another to undermine the antifascist struggle —supporting the disastrous Third Period policy, purging the Red Army of capable officers, ignoring news of imminent Nazi invasion. The victorious regime was deeply conservative, pursuing great power policies on a scale even the tsars couldn’t have imagined, along with episodes of mass ethnic cleansing and even its share of antisemitism. Under Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement, too, became a tool of Russian national interests rather than one of working-class emancipation.

Once Stalin was gone, the Soviet system morphed into something profoundly different. His command economy remained, but the bureaucrats who now ruled remained haunted by the totalitarian terror that had cut through their own ranks. The new order was grey and repressive, but capable for a while of delivering peace and stability. Yet the ruling elite had no interest in building a free civil society from which socialist democracy might have sprung. Attempts to renovate the system only undermined the coercion that held it together. Its collapse gave way to an even more predatory order.
For a century, socialists have looked back at the October Revolution — sometimes with rose-colored glasses, sometimes to play at simplistic counterfactuals. But sometimes for good reason. Exploitation and inequality are still alive and well amid plenty. Even knowing how their story ended, we can learn from those who dared to fight for something better.

Yet both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and an easy leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The Bolsheviks, having seen over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval, can be forgiven. We can also forgive them because they were first.

What is less forgivable is that a model built from errors and excesses, forged in the worst of conditions, came to dominate a left living in an unrecognizable world.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/the-few-who-won

The Making of Global Capitalism: Current Thoughts for the Philippine Left

In 2012, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin published The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. The subject matter of MGC is Capitalism itself -- how it works, the institutions that run it, the crisis it spawns -- and the state that holds it all together, the United States.

It is a mammoth of a book, the life's work of two scholar-activists who have devoted their entire lives to the socialist cause. It is a must read if one has to be up to date on the subject. (And In a Left community that hardly updates its dogmatic understanding of things, it's even more relevant.)

In the Philippines, probably much of the Left's understanding of the workings of Capitalism is tied to the single most dominant paradigm still plying its trade in the country, the paradigm of Imperialism.

According to this understanding, the current capitalist stage is one characterized by an American state in a crisis of overproduction which drives it to look for "semi-colonies" where it could export goods and capital to, to make up for the saturation of its markets at home. The paradigm also points to a logical conclusion of imperialist wars, as many different capitalist/imperialist powers supposedly battle it out for global dominance.

Much of this is outdated. A key point Panitch and Gindin make is that the American economy is far from saturated. American consumer spending is unparalleled in the world (and is in fact a key growth driver for the global economy for having a population with a very high purchasing power, and which is a recipient of much of the world's exports).

On the other hand, it is equally counterproductive (if not dangerous), to still be fixated to a pre-World War II view of the world in the face of one glaring reality -- global capitalism at present is in fact upheld by all the major industrialized nations, and to make capitalism work they all look to a singular leader -- America. The most developed nations' leadership has in fact been institutionalized through the formation of the G7/G8 -- one of whose primary tasks is to ensure harmony in the global financial system.

Global finance

This latter cooperation for the sake of the financial system is inseparable from global capitalism, especially because the system is under constant threat -- not from overproduction but from financial crises.

According to the authors:

"The unresolved dilemma for all capitalist states today is how to both stimulate the economy and regulate financial markets so as to limit increasingly dangerous volatility without undermining the ability of finance to play its esential role in global capitalism."

Put another way, capitalism's central contradiction is that to keep on stimulating the economy, it allows for the activities of finance which eventually threatens the system itself by eroding regimes of value. Financial crises cannot be predicted. We do not know when the next Dotcom Bubble or the next Subprime Mortgage Lending Crisis will occur, and there is only so much that regulators can do to keep profit-seekers from unwittingly conjuring the next crash. (In many cases, the policies that once checked finance have themselves been removed to accommodate more profit-making.)

So finance is integral to -- and inseparable from -- the working of Capitalism. It oils up the wheels and sprockets of global economic activity. But its bullish activity breeds financial crisis. In a financial crisis, assets – bonds, stocks, currencies -- dramatically lose their value. This eventually results in a widespread slowdown in economic activity.

The coordination of policies especially among the most advanced capitalist states is thus important in managing global finance, and in containing crisis when it does eventually arise. Policies relating to capital risks, reserves, lending ratios (the Basel accords), financial liberalization, and liquidity during periods of crisis all have to be coordinated.

Perhaps part of what this means for us in the Left is to endeavor to have a very deep understanding of the financial/capital markets, to be able to show just how irrational the entire system is. Just as the Left periodically tracks statistics relating to poverty and wages, so should it record movements in local interest rates (from the Bangko Sentral) and hot money flowing in from abroad (a.k.a. "portfolio investments").

At present, global capitalism is a creation of a global capitalist class led first and foremost by one state, the United States of America. Its current agenda is to promote capitalist production in the entire globe; exploit or/and develop new markets; and maintain international regimes of value especially in times when the financial system makes a mess of itself. The global Capitalist system is run by the Federal Reserve, the de facto central bank of the world. Together with the US Treasury, it conducts US monetary policy which is the global basis for short-term economic policy everywhere else.

Philippine setting

Another danger of looking at capitalism from an overproduction/market saturation perspective is that the Left would cling to the hope that some final rupture will eventually occur that will finally end the rule of global capital. It is very unlikely that that will happen. As Panitch and Gindin showed, one remarkable phenomenon that occurred during the last crisis, in '07-'08, was how quickly the governments of the G20 lined up in support of the United States in helping avert further potential economic loss.

But what insights can MGC offer the Philippine Left in relation to its own local situation, and in the context of Philippine political realities, for example the current Menace in Malacanang?

Perhaps we will need to understand how Philippine economy is currently integrated to the international capitalist system, especially to international finance. From the perspective of global Capital, the Philippines is basically a low-income nation that offers cheap, English-speaking labor whose economy is ultimately propped up by a long-standing labor export policy. It should hardly be an inviting site for hot money/portfolio investments, although this is something that the Left should probably guard against.

But perhaps one of the things that need to be pointed out is that Philippine economic development is not materializing not because there are international Capitalist forces preventing it from doing so. In fact, it could instead probably be sufficiently argued that it is in the interest of global capital to see the local economy grow, so that it becomes a broader market for higher-end exports. Rather, economic underdevelopment will have to be blamed on the local class interests that no longer care about such worthless cases as national economic development. Economic development necessitates land reform, something never palatable to the local (landed) ruling elites.

But at the same time, it will be in the top interest of global capitalist elites to not rock the local class alignments in the Philippines that in the end are their own caretakers for their own economic interests in the country. It is in this context that for as long as Rodrigo Duterte is a faithful steward of global Capital in the Philippines, he can count on continuing his activities, including killing citizens, with impunity. All the Western powers will eventually turn a blind eye -- except for the occasional token condemnation.

In the final analysis, Third World governments are really nothing more than the local stewards of global Capital. As such, they have only one role: to ensure that the system of private property, financial liberalization and regimes of Value are protected. All other tasks, such as the niceties of human rights and "good governance" are a mere bonus -- and are in any case done not for their own sake, but in aid of the smooth running of the international system as a whole. Marcos was, after all, a son of a bitch. but he was "[their] son of a bitch."

Panitch and Gindin mention that it is the contradictions that emerge within, rather than between, states during times of severe economic crisis that show the openings for political action. Whether one of the future political battles will get to tackle the unmaking of the irrationalities of capitalism in this part of the world is one local democratic socialists should decide. xxx

BAKIT KAILANGAN NG BAYAN ANG LABAN NG MASA: Speech at the First General Assembly (Bello)

Mga kasama, invited guests, dear friends:

When I invited a Dean at a prominent university to this assembly he said that he remembered the first Laban ng Masa as the biggest alliance of progressive forces that had come together since the 1986 People Power Revolution. Many of you here today were part of that first Laban ng Masa. [The Chairman of that First Laban ng Masa is here today, Ka Dodong Nemenzo, the person who is most associated with the socialist tradition in our country. Let us give Ka Dodong a big hand. He will be giving us a message later this morning.]

 

Naririto ngayong ang Pangulo ng unang Laban ng Masa, si Ka Dodong Nemenzo, isang taong kilala ng lahat bilang primerong tagataguyod ng tradisyon sosyalista sa ating bansa. Bigyan natin si Ka Dodong ng isang masigabong pagbabati. Magbibigay siya ng isang mensahe sa atin mamaya ng kaunti.

 

[In our decision to found the second Laban ng Masa, we confront conditions that may be different from the circumstances of 2005 and 2006, but we face them in the same way, as progressives who seek to change the social structure that condemns millions of our compatriots to poverty, inequality, and powerlessness.]

 

Noong nagdesisyon tayo na itayo ulit ang Laban ng Masa, alam natin na iba ang mga kondisyon na hinaharap ng bansa ngayon sa mga kondisyon na umiiral noong 2005 at 2006. Ngunit hinaharap natin ang mga bagong kondisyon na hawak ang parehong pananaw--ibig sabihin, bilang mga progesibong nagtatankang palitan ang isang rehimeng sosyal na nagkokondena ng milyung-milyun ng ating mga kapwa Pilipino sa kahirapan, sa di-pagkapantaypantay, at sa kawalan ng kapangyarihan.

 

Today, our country is ruled by a man whose brainchild, the so-called War of Drugs, has taken over 13,000 lives in less than a year and a half. Placed in a Southeast Asian context, the number of those killed makes the Duterte’s war against the poor the third most deadly in the region’s recent history, after the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975-78,, which took some 3-4 million lives, and the massacre of Communists and Communist sympathizers in Indonesia in 1965, whose victims ranged from 500,000 to 2 million.

 

[If you remember, Duterte said in October of 2016, when the number of those slain was “just” around 3000, that 20,000 to 30,000 more Filipinos might need to be murdered for his campaign to meet its objectives. Many people then said he was joking or he was engaging in hyperbole. A year later, no one is laughing any more.]

 

Naala siguro niyo, sinabi ni Duterte noong Oktubre nang 2016, noong mga tres mil pa lang ang napaslang niya, na baka kailangan pa raw mamatay ang 20 hanggang 30 mil na Pilipino bago makamit ng War on Drugs ang layunin niya. Maraming nagsabi noon na nagbibiro lang siya or gumagawa raw siya ng hyperbole. Matapos ang isang taon, wala nang tumatawa.

 

President Duterte is what I call a fascist. But he is a fascist original. The usual textbook model of how fascism comes about is that of “creeping fascism,” like that of Marcos, where the first phase is marked by violations of political and civil rights, followed by the grab for absolute power, then by massive, indiscriminate repression. Duterte’s brand of fascism is what we might call “blitzkrieg fascism,” wherein the order is reversed: first indiscriminate murder in the form of thousands of extra-judicial executions of poor people, then with all sectors thoroughly intimidated, followed by the grab for absolute power and the abolition of democratic institution and political and civil rights.

 

There may be differences among us as to whether we should call the current regime fascist, authoritarian, or de facto dictatorial rule, but there can be no doubt that the direction is towards the consolidation of absolute power, whether this comes in the form of martial law, the de facto subjugation of all the other branches of government to the president, a so-called revolutionary government, or charter change along the lines of “federalism.”

 

Siguro may mga pagkakaiba ng opinyon ang ilan sa atin tungkol as katangian ng rehimeng Duterte—pasista ba ito, o awtoryanismo, o isang de paktong diktadura? Pero walang duda na ang takbo ng pamahalaan ay patungong konsolidasyon ng kapangyarihang total sa pamamagita ng iba-ibang anyo, sa porma man ng martial law o sa de paktong pagsisira ng mga ibang sangay ng gobyerno o sa porma ng tintatawag na rebolusyonaryong gobyerno o sa pagpapalit ng saligang batas sa sistemang pederalista daw.

 

The only response that we can make to this swift movement towards absolute rule is resistance. However, it cannot be resistance in the name of restoring what I have called the EDSA system of elite democracy, for one of the chief reasons why Duterte is in power is because of the failure of that 30-year-old system to deliver on its promise of bringing about genuine democracy and the redistribution of wealth. Instead, what it gave us was a system dominated by traditional political elites, the continuing concentration of economic power in an oligarchy, and neoliberal economic policies that have resulted in some 25 per cent of our population living in poverty and in a gini coefficient of 50, which represents the worst inequality ever in the distribution of wealth and income in our history.

 

[We cannot go back to the past.]

 

Hindi tayong maaring bumalik sa nakaraan.

 

Despite his populist rhetoric, Dutere has, in fact, shown that he belongs to the past. He has shown his true colors when it comes to economic reform. Instead of outlawing contractualization, he has made it legal. He has made no effort to promote agrarian reform. He has not given coconut farmers the coco levy funds, as he promised during the campaign. He allowed the big mining lobby to oust Gina Lopez when a phone call to his allies in the Commission on Appointments could have save her. He has become the BFF of big capitalists like Ramon Ang and Manny Pangilinan. Nearly a year after he assumed office, nearly all fractions of the ruling class stand solidly behind him, and he stands solidly behind them. The only difference of substance from past regimes is that his main base within the elite are the warlords and clans that control local politics throughout the country.

 

[We are at the moment at a dangerous juncture. ]

 

Ang bayan ngayon ay nasa isang puntong mapanganib.

 

The popularity and credibility of the administration have declined. The vast majority of the people do not believe the police’s explanation that most of those killed in the anti-drug war resisted arrest. The killing of teenagers Kian de los Santos, Reynado de Guzman, and Carl Angelo Arnaiz brought many people to their senses. Trust in the police, the main agency of the war on drugs, is lower than its already low level before Duterte. It is surely a sign of changing times when Duterte’s allies in the Senate are angry that they were not signatories of a resolution condemning the killing of young people by the police, undoubtedly because these opportunists feel the wind is shifting.

 

[With distrust and disappointment building, Duterte has seen a drop of 18 percentage points in his net satisfaction rating. The public mood is changing. Fearful of losing his momentum, Duterte may panic and move forward quickly to dictatorial rule.]

 

Pataas ang bilang ng mga walang tiwala kay Duterte o mga nabigo yung mga pagasa nila sa kanya. Napapakita ito sa pagbagsak na labing walong porsyento sa tinatawag na net satisfaction rating niya. Nagpapalit ang ihip ng hangin. Nababagabag sa pagkawala ng momentum, baka masindak si Duterte at sumulong na mabilis upang magtayo ng diktadura.

 

The country today is looking for a force that will rescue it from the mess it is in. People will not, however, trust those who say they are against dictatorship but have until very recently been part of the regime they are now denouncing. It is certainly positive that these forces have ceased being part of a bloody regime, but for them to claim leadership of the resistance is not something the people will buy. You cannot fool the people.

 

Neither will our people at this point accept an alternative that looks back to the past, to forces associated with the elite democracy and neoliberal politics that destroyed the promise of the EDSA People Power Revolution. Yellow has become a term of contempt among our people, because it has come to represent a system that is democratic in rhetoric but oligarchic in substance.

 

The people will only trust those forces who are neither compromised with the present nor the past. The people will only trust those who have condemned the anti-people policies of this administration from the very beginning and have been consistent in their opposition. The people will only trust people like you who are assembled here today--people untainted by opportunism or association with a discredited past and a menacing present.

 

Ang mamamayan ay magtitiwala lang sa mga puwersang hindi nasangkot sa kasalukuyang or nakaraang rehimen. And bayan ay magtitiwala lang sa mga puwersang nagkondena na sa mga laban sa bayan na mga polisiya ng administrasyon noong pasimula pa lang niya at pirme sa kanilang oposisyon. Ang bayan ay magtitiwala lang sa mga taong kagaya niyo na nagpupulong ngayon ditto, mga taong di markado ng oportunismo o ng pagkakasangkot sa nakaraang bulok at sa kasalukuyang mapanganib.

 

The need for a genuine and credible opposition to authoritarian rule is one reason we have come together in Laban ng Masa. But there is another reason. That other reason is that we offer the only alternative that our people can take to break from the repression, poverty, and inequality that engulf them. That alternative is system change. This is change oriented in a socialist direction.

 

When we say we are socialist, we do not mean we champion the centralized bureaucratic systems that collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe in 1989. Those regimes that disfigured the vision of socialism deserved to be banished to the dust bin of history, and the authoritarian left movements that continue to adhere to their failed ideology are doomed to permanent marginalization.

 

Socialism for us means a system of genuine, participatory democracy dedicated to transforming the economic order in order to eliminate inequality among social groups.

 

Para sa atin, ang ibig sabihin ng sosyalismo ay isan tunay na demokrasya kung saan nakikilahok ang lahat sa pagdedesisyon, isang system na magwawakas as kasulukuyang rehimeng na nakabase sa di-pagkapantaypantay ng mga mamamayan.

 

When we say socialism, we mean a post-capitalist system where the means of production are owned and controlled by the majority for the welfare and interests of the majority.

 

We mean a system that recognizes that it is labor that creates wealth and promotes the self-organization of workers to determine the ways in which the wealth they create is used, whether for consumption, investment, or enabling democratic government.

 

We mean a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, with the emphasis on by the people, that is, direct, participatory democracy.

 

Ang ibig natin sabihin ay isang gobyerno ng bayan, para sa bayan, at sa pamamagita ng bayan, na ang diin as nasa pamamagita na bayan—ibig sabihin, sa pamamagita ng isang demokrasya kung saan lumalahok ang lahat sa paggagawa ng mga desisyon, hindi yung nagpapanggap na kintawan nila ngunit sa katotohanan ay naghahari sa kanila.

We mean a system of governance that will abolish inequalities based on class, race, ethnicity, and gender--one that will bring about real, substantive equality, not just formal equality before the law.

 

We mean a state that will safeguard our national sovereignty and fight imperialism in whatever shape it takes, whether this be US militarism or Chinese hegemony.

 

We mean a government that will provide the full range of social services for its citizens, from a guaranteed basic income to job security to all forms of social security.

 

Ang ibig natin sabihin ay isang gobyerno na magbibigay ng lahat ng serbisyo sosyal sa mga mamamayan, mula sa garantisadong sahod na basiko para sa lahat hanggang seguridad ng trabaho at lahat na klase na seguridad sosyal.

 

We mean a system of governance that will safeguard the environment and work with other governments to protect the planet and the country from global climate change.

 

We mean a state that recognizes the right of self-determination for all oppressed minority peoples.

We mean an economic and social system that will give ownership and control of the land to the people and communities that till the soil through thorough and comprehensive agrarian reform.

 

Ang ibig natin sabihin ay isang sistemang ekonomiko at sosyal na magbibigay ng karapatan at kontrol sa lupa sa mga tao at komunidad na nagtratrabaho sa lupa sa pamamagita ng isang ganap at komprehensibong reporma sa lupa.

 

These are our demands. These are the Filipino people’s demands. These are the demands of 99 per cent of people throughout the globe.

 

Ito ang mga ating pinaglalaban. Ito ang mga pangangailangan ng Bayan Pilpino. Ito ang mga pangangailangan na ipinaglalaban ng siyamnaput siyam na porsyento ng buong mundo.

 

Let me end by saying that we as a nation are at a crossroads. There are essentially three paths before us.

 

The Duterte regime and its fanatic supporters are herding us towards the dark destination of open dictatorship and fascist rule, to a frightening repeat of Marcos’ “New Society.”

 

Then there are those who speak the language of democracy but look back with nostalgia to the system of oligarchic rule masked by formal democracy that reigned for 30 miserable years.

 

Then there is us, ordinary citizens who look toward and are fighting for a future of participatory democracy and economic and social equality. It is such a vision that Proverbs 29:18 meant when it said, ““Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

 

Laban ng Masa affirms that a future of democratic equality that goes beyond capitalism is possible and worth fighting for.

 

There is no guarantee that our vision will win, but we cannot win without putting all our sweat and, need be, our blood into making this future that we desire a reality.

 

Idinidiin natin sa Laban ng Masa na isang sistema na demokratikong pagkapantaypantay na lalagpas at papalit sa kapitalismo ay maaaring malikha ng kolektibong trabaho natin. Walang garantiya na magtatagumpay tayo. Ngunit hindi tayo magtatagumpay kung hindi tayo magbubuhos nang todo todo ng atin pawis a, kung kailangan, ating dugo upang maging tunay ang ating mga pangarap.

 

Mabuhay ang Laban ng Masa! Mabuhay ang sosyalismo!

 

The original post is here https://web.facebook.com/notes/laban-ng-masa/bakit-kailangan-ng-bayan-ang-laban-ng-masa-speech-at-the-first-general-assembly-/520941431600336/ 

Laban ng Masa to oppose Duterte's 'sins of commission, omission'

Note: Some parts of the Philippine non-ND Left (i.e., the Philippine Left not allied with the Communist Party that hews to a "national democratic" line, hence "ND"), are reviving a coalition that first emerged during the anti Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo campaign (see Philippines: Left unity challenges Arroyo regime).

Laban ng Masa chair Walden Bello says President Rodrigo Duterte is not a true socialist: 'He said something in order to win an election, but has not moved one iota towards real transformation'   

MANILA, Philippines – A new progressive opposition coalition called "Laban ng Masa" is calling for the end of elite democracy and authoritarianism under President Rodrigo Duterte.

The coalition is chaired by ex-legislator Walden Bello, who said they are aiming for a “clear vision and program against elite democracy and pursue a system marked by real participatory democracy and real economic equality.”

“It’s not just an opposition group. It’s also a coalition formed for what is needed in the Philippines, which is system change,” said Bello in a press conference on Friday, October 27.

The coalition is against Duterte's bloody drug war, which has led to thousands of drug suspects dead.

Laban ng Masa is also criticizing the President for failing to fulfill his promise to eliminate contractualization, return the coco levy fund to farmers, pursue agrarian reform, stop protecting the interest of miners, and address corruption.

Bello said they are also “worried" that Duterte is “destabilizing different institutions” by promoting the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno and threatening Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales as she investigates the alleged unexplained wealth of the President and his family. (READ: Duterte to Morales, Sereno: Let's resign, let AFP probe us)

“So we have a whole range of issues – both sins of commission like EJKs and sins of omission, like the lack and absence of social reform. So Laban ng Masa is, in fact, united around both opposition to the government’s sins of commission and also very critical of its sins of omission, or lack of social reform,” said Bello.

He clarified, however, that Laban ng Masa is not calling for Duterte’s ouster. He doubts any group at this point is out to overthrow the government, despite suspicions by the President and his allies.

“Laban ng Masa is not engaged in any ouster campaign, is not engaged in destabilization plots. And that whatever happens to President Duterte, it is the Filipino people who will decide that,” said Bello. (READ: Bello to Duterte: 'Reverse course' or Filipinos may 'throw you out’)

The coalition was formed on September 21 during the 45th anniversary of the Martial Law declaration. Laban ng Masa will be having its first general assembly on October 29 at the University of the Philippines Bahay ng Alumni.

Duterte a 'false socialist'

On Friday, Bello and Laban ng Masa national coordinator Rasti Delizo said Duterte merely used the promise of socialism to win the 2016 polls. (READ: Rodrigo Duterte: A fascist original)

“Nung sinabi ni President Duterte na socialist siya, ang daming nag-clap kasi ang sense nila (When President Duterte said he was a socialist, many clapped because their sense) is that socialism is good – it is needed for a chance for transformation. The problem is that Duterte is a false socialist,” said Bello.

“He said something in order to win an election, but has not moved one iota towards real transformation,” he added.

Delizo also took a swipe at Duterte’s war against drugs.

“A true socialist does not kill millions of poor people – in this case, it's thousands, but these are mainly poor people. A real socialist will clearly uphold the interest and the welfare of the working class,” said Delizo.

“Thirdly, a real socialist will not connive with US imperialist interests. A socialist will always take the side of all the oppressed, the exploited working class masses in their social majority, in their millions,” he added.

Distancing from Makabayan, Tindig Pilipinas

Laban ng Masa distanced itself from the House Makabayan bloc and Tindig Pilipinas, the opposition coalition that counts among its members politicians part of the once-ruling Liberal Party.

"We know there are groups saying they are the main opposition, but how can that happen when only yesterday, you were part of the government?" Bello asked in Filipino.

The Makabayan bloc was allied with Duterte’s Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan until they bolted the alliance on September 14.

"There are also those saying they are progressive, but they are associated with the former administration that did nothing in terms of promoting equality and real democracy,” said Bello.

In 2015, Bello resigned as Akbayan representative due to Aquino’s failure to address corruption and bring about social reform, and the ex-president’s insistence that he had a limited role as commander-in-chief in the botched Mamasapano operation. – Rappler.com 

 

https://www.rappler.com/nation/186576-laban-ng-masa-duterte-sins-commission-ommission 

Duterte net satisfaction drops significantly in September 2017

The fifth quarterly satisfaction rating from SWS is out here.

Results:

• National net satisfaction drops from +66 in previous quarter to +48.

• National gross satisfaction with Duterte is at 67%, while dissatisfaction is at 19%.

• Drop steepest in the Class E of the population at only +35 net satisfaction from a previous +67.

• One in every four members of respondents in Class E now dissatisfied with Duterte.

• Gross satisfaction with Duterte rises in Class ABC -- the only class group where gross satisfaction rose up.

• Net satisfaction with Duterte lower than P-Noy's for the same period, but higher than Erap's.

Rebyu: Humanidad – Bagong album ni Dong Abay/DAMO

Paano nga ba maging tao? O kaya, paano ba maging tao sa kasalukuyang lipunang mayroon tayo ngayon?

Sa Humanidad, ang bagong album ni Dong Abay kasama ang kanyang bagong banda, ang Dong Abay Music Organization (DAMO), may tugon sa tanong na ito. Pag-asa ang hatid ng bagong album ni Dong. Ipinapakita nito kung paano magpunyagi bilang tao sa gita ng isang lipunang maraming pagkukulang.

Napuna kaagad ng mga nagbalita sa Humanidad, na inilabas nitong Oktubre, na ito ang unang album ni Dong matapos ang mahigit 10 taon. Ang hindi nila nababanggit, mahigit edad-45 na ang makatang mang-aawit – at ito na ang kanyang pampitong album mula ng mailabas ng Yano ang kanilang unang casette tape.

Ito'y mahigit dalawang dekada ng pagtugtog – mahigit dalawang dekada ng rock and roll ng rock star na naghatid na sa atin ng mga kantang “Esem,” “Senti,” at “Banal na Aso, Santong Kabayo.”
Ang Humanidad ay binubuo ng 14 na bagong awitin na ang sabi ni Dong ay sinulat niya sa iba't ibang panahon sa kanyang buhay. Ang lahat ng kanta at musika ay naka-credit kay Dong Abay (may tatlong kantang ang lyrics ay hinalaw/hiniram sa ibang may-akda), na mahusay at sama-samang nilapatan ng instrumento ng iba pang miyembro.

Ang DAMO ay binubuo nina Dong, Kakoy Legaspi (gitara), Simon Tan (base) at Abe Billano (drums) (ang tatlong kabanda ni Dong ay lahat nagmula sa bandang Pedicab). May halo man sigurong patawa ang acronym, isa itong lehitimong organisasyon na mayroong pormal na structure. May banda, may manager at may mga crew. Tumayong producers mismo ang apat na miyembro kasama ang manager nilang si Elwyn Zalamea.

Mga awit

Muli pa, pinakita ni Dong ang kanyang komitment sa mga komentaryong panlipunan. Karamihan ng mga kanta ay ito ang tema. At muli rin, ang mga ito'y hindi komentaryong basta-basta. Sa pambungad na awitin pa lang, bakas na ang talas sa mga linyang tulad ng:

 Anong Demokrasya
 Nagpapatawa ka ba?
 Ang sistema ng gobyerno
 Ay oligarkiya! (“Oligarkiya”).

Ngunit sa mga tagasunod ng musikang rock, marahil ang unang mapapansin sa unang kanta pa lang ng album ay ang pagsasakatuparan ng pag-iisang himig ng gitara ni Kakoy Legaspi at ng musika ni Dong.

Mula sa mala-punk na tipa ng "Oligarkiya" hanggang sa mga ad lib sa mga kanta, masasabing sa wakas ay nahanap na ni Dong ang gusto niyang timpla ng gitara na marahil ay panandaliang nawala sa ibang album niya.

Panlipunan at pulitikal rin ang tema ng mga kantang “Porky,” “Karera ng mga Daga” at “Trade Mark.” Marahil pinaka-testamento ang mala-epikong kantang "Trade Mark" sa kung paano nagkasundo-sundo ang banda at ginamit ang talento ng bawat isa para makagawa ng isang mahusay na areglo. Sapagkat ambisyoso ang awitin -- layunin nitong sa anim na taludtod ay maikwento ang buong kasaysayan ng Pilipinas, mula sa pre-Hispanic period hanggang sa pananakop ng mga Amerikano at pagpapakilala ng mga burgis na konsepto tulad ng "liberal democracy"! Sa bawat period, iba-ibang atake ng instrumento sa parehong basic melody ang ginamit.

Sa totoo lang, sa mga kanta pa lamang na nabanggit ay sulit na ang P300 na materyal na halaga ng album. Ngunit patikim pa lamang ito (at may mga kantang hindi mababanggit sa rebyung ito, bilang konsiderasyon sa haba). Maliban sa social commentary, nagbigay ng mga mataimtim na mga awit tungkol sa pagpapatuloy ng buhay si Dong – mga awit na pwedeng awitin habang naglalakbay sa isang mundong marahil ay hindi naman talaga natin kontrolado bilang mga tao.

Ang kantang “Dakilang Araw” ay awit ng paghingi ng gabay at basbas mula sa mga dakilang espirito sa masalimuot na paglalakbay sa daigdig. Ang Dakilang Araw – na nakatato sa kanang dibdib ni Dong – ay hinalaw niya sa Tibetan Buddhist (Shambhala) na konsepto ng Great Eastern Sun:

 Dakilang Araw ng Silangan patnubayan mga paa
 Sabayan sa paghakbang saan man mapunta
 Akayin ang mga kamay
 Sana'y laging maging gabay
 Habang aking nilalakbay
 Ang takbo ng buhay
 Ito ang takbo ng buhay ko
 Sa takbo ng buhay
 Samahan mo dalisay na espirito

Sa awiting ito, at sa halos lahat ng kasama sa album, kapansin-pansin din ang isang bagong elemento sa mga kanta ni Dong – marahil sa unang pagkakataon, sumasagot ng back-up vocals ang tatlong iba pang miyembro sa maraming kanta, na nagbibigay ng karagdagang dimension na magandang pakinggan.

Ngunit sa kabilang banda, masalimuot man ang daigdig, lahat naman ng mangyayari at nangyayari dito ay matagal nang batid. May ordinariness ang mga bagay. Sa Track 3 ng Humanidad ay ang kantang “Vulgares,” na isinalin ni Dong mula sa isang tulang Espanyol:

 Ordinaryong pakiramdam
 sa ordinaryong mukha
 ng ordinaryong tao
 Andun pa rin ang mga kalyeng luma
 may lumang lungkot...
 Andun pa rin ang mga kaluluwang luma pa rin!
 Lahat ng batid:
 batid na lumbay
 batid na galak
 At ang pangangailangang maging buhay
 batid na ang buhay
 walang iba kundi ang mabuhay!

Pag-asa

Ngunit pinakamahalaga siguro ang mensahe ng pag-asa sa bagong album ni Dong Abay. O, sa kanta niya mismo, ang pag-asa sa gitna ng kawalang pag-asa. Ito ang pangunahing mensahe ng unang kantang nai-release (“carrier single” ayon sa tradisyunal na kapitalistang marketing), ang “Positibo.”
Magsisimula ang "Positibo" – na unang pinatugtog sa Jam 88.3 bago ang album launch – sa mga linyang:

 Sawang sawa na akong magtanim ng galit
 Kaya magtatanim na lang ako ng pag-ibig
 Luhang luha na ako sa iyong sinapit
 Kaya pasasayahin ko ang iyong daigdig

bago ang panawagan at pang-uudyok na Korong:

 May pag-asa! May pag-asa pa!
 May pag-asa pa sa kawalang-pag asa!

Mapapansin na Pag-asa, kung ganon, ang temang tumatahi sa karamihan ng awitin sa album. (Ginawan rin ng kanta ni Dong ang tulang Bahaghari” ni Jose F. Lacaba na ang mensahe ay: “May bahaghari pagkatapos ng unos.”) At sa kanyang pagluha ay dito rin makikita kung anong klaseng puso mayroon si Dong para sa Pilipinas. Nang tanungin si Dong sa isang interview bago ang album launch tungkol sa “Positibo,” kinuwento niyang sinulat niya ito dahil may mga fans na paminsan-minsan ay nagtatanong sa kanya ng, “Sir Dong, may pag-asa pa ba ang Pilipinas?”

Ani Dong, sagot niya lamang ay, ang koda na ginamit ni Gat Andres Bonifacio sa Katipunan ay “May pagasa.” Hindi niya naman aniya sinabing walang pag-asa.

Ngunit ang pag-asang ito, marahil, ay hindi pag-asang simple, o kaya nama'y walang basehan. Si Bonifacio, halimbawa, ay kumilos nat akibaka. At sa personal na lebel naman, wala na sigurong mas may karapatan pang magsabi na may pag-asa kung hindi si Dong mismo – na nilabanan ang sarili niyang yugto ng depression ng ilang taon – upang pagkatapos ay muling umawit.

Ang album bilang protesta

Katulad ng pulitika, ang mga kanta ni Dong Abay ay hindi naman talaga para sa lahat, kung iisipin. Mayroon lang itong sesentrohan na audience. Ngunit sabi nga ni Joey Ayala kamakailan, may tamang balanseng tinatantiya ang mga alagad ng sining, sa isang dako sa pagpapakilala sa mga bago/radikal ngunit posibleng hindi mabentang ideya, at sa kabilang dako sa mga luma nang tema na patok naman sa masa – kahit pa ang mga lumang kantang ito ay sila rin naman ang gumawa.

Lalo na pagdating halimbawa sa mga awiting medyo pulitikal, maaaring sabihing mangangalahati agad ang makakatanggap. Mas may puwang ang mga kantang puno na social commentary noong kasagsagan ng rock music. Tila ba nagbago na rin ang panahon. Kaya pagkalipas ng tatlong buwan matapos mailabas ang Humanidad, hindi natin inaasahan na ang mga nagpapatugtog ng mga awitin ni Dong ay kasing-dami na ng airplay ng mga bata ng mainstream recording industry (read: ang Capitalist Culture Machine na ang pangunahing layunin lamang ay gumawa ng pera – hindi mass enlightenment o kahit sana mass respect man lang).

Na naglalabas pa rin si Dong ng album na puno ng mga kantang hitik ay isa nang malaking pagtutol sa kasalukuyang kalakaran ng “kultura” sa bansa. Matagal nang sinasabi ni Dong na mahalaga sa kanya na mabigyan ng kalayaang isulat ang mga nais niyang isulat ng walang nagdidikta.

Paminsan-minsan, mistulang mag-isa lamang si Dong sa laban. Kahit ngayon, may mga nakabinbing tanong: Magtatagal kaya ang DAMO, ang bagong banda? Maaaring oo, maaaring hindi. Ngunit sa ngayon, sa mas malawak na pagtingin, isang tagumpay niya at ng kanyang grupo (hindi lang ng banda mismo kundi kasama ang mga manager, crew at iba pang tumatao dito) ang pagkakalabas sa Humanidad. 

Ito'y mga awit na dapat marinig – na magpapalaya sa mga makikinig. Na maghihikayat sana sa bawat isa na tukuyin man lang kung ano ang mali. At na magpatuloy sa buhay ng mayroong dangal at layunin. xxx

REPOST: PATUNGONG KRISIS NA ANG REHIMENG DUTERTE

Ni Walden Bello*

Rappler, Oct 3, 2017

Dahil sa pagkabahala sa papalakas na oposisyon sa kanyang gobyerno, maaari itong magkamali sa pagtaya sa sitwasyon at ideklara ang batas military; mapapabagal nito ang pagdausdos sa mas malala pang krisis ngunit baka nga mas mapabilis pa, di man madalian ngunit sa di-malayong hinaharap.
Hindi dapat ipagkamali na padausdos na si Rodrigo Duterte, ngunit ang prosesong ito ay makakalikha ng isang mapanganib na panahon sa bansa, dahil maaaring ang hakbang ng presidente ay matindi tulad ng batas militar upang mapigilan ang krisis.

Ano ang nabago nitong nakaraang mga linggo? Ito ay may kaugnayan sa tinatawag nating “moral momentum,” gaya sa basketball. Ito ay isang kondisyon na hindi nakikita ngunit nararamdaman. Noong nagsimula ang administrasyon niya, may moral momentum si Duterte na naibigay ng kanyang nakuhang 40 porsyento na boto noong Mayo 9, 2016. Dahil dito nalagay siya sa opensiba nitong unang taon niya, at ito ay ginamit niya upang lapastanganin ang karapatang pantao at mga ligal na proseso sa aspeto ng gyera laban sa droga, at gawing sunud-sunuran lang ang Konggreso, habang isinantabi ang Korte Supremo, at pinatahimik, tinakot ang pamunuan ng Simbahang Katolika.

Ang momentum ding ito ang nagbigay sa kanya nang tila matibay na depensa kaya’t nagawa ng kapulisan ang mga pagpatay, tinatakan bilang di-tao ang mga drug addict, nagawang katawa-tawa lamang ang isyu ng rape, at naipakulong si Senador Leila de Lima sa pamamagitan ng inimbentong kaso ngunit sa totoo, ito’y personal na paghihiganti. Parang walang maaaring makagalaw sa kanya at ang kapangyarihang ito na ipinamalas sa mga taga-sunod niya lalo na sa social media ay nagpatapang sa marami na manakot, mandahas, magbanta sa facebook, tulad nang naranasan ng mga mamamahayag na tulad ni Raissa Robles at Maria Ressa. Ginamit din nila ang banta ng rape bilang anyo ng pananakot at pandarahas sa social media kay Senador Risa Hontiveros.

Ngunit katangian din ng moral momentum na madali itong mawala o maglaho dahil sa kombinasyon ng iba’t ibang pangyayari at elemento o salik. Maaaring malakas ito ngayon ngunit bukas ay nakalutang na uli ang sitwasyon.

Ang Pagkawala ng Moral Momentum

Maaaring pagtalunan pa kung kalian nawala ang moral momentum ni Duterte, ngunit sa pagtingin ko ang dahilan nito ay siya ring dahilan ng paghina ng kapangyarihan ng mga ambisyosong awtoritaryan sa kasaysayan: ang pagmamalabis. Ang pagtingin na walang hangganan ang maaaring gawin ng isang nasa kapangyarihan na nakita sa mga pangyayari nitong Agosto at Setyembre ang simula nang pagbagsak ni Duterte.

 Nariyan ang balitang 81 katao ang pinatay sa loob lamang ng apat na araw ng operasyon ng mga pulis noong kalagitnaan ng Agosto, sinundan nang nakababahala pang pagkamatay ng mga kabataang sina Kian delos Santos, Reynaldo de Guzman, at Carl Angelo Arnaiz; at ang pagdukot at pagpatay kay Kian ay natala sa CCTV. Ang pagkagulat ay naging pagkagalit, kahit na sa hanay ng mga taga-suporta ni Duterte; ang kasiyahan ay naging pagkalito, at nakita ito sa malaking pagbaba ng bilang ng mga facebook posts na nagtatanggol sa rehimen.

Sinundan ito ng eskandalo tungkol sa shabu na nagkakahalagang P6.4 bilyon na kinasangkutan ng anak ni Duterte na si Paolo; tahimik ang presidente tungkol sa isyung ito. Pagkatapos nito ay binigyan ng Konggreso ng P1000 badyet ang Komisyon sa Karapatang Pantano para sa taong 2018, at kamakailan, binantaan ni Duterte na papaimbestigahan ang opisina ng Ombudsman bilang ganti sa desisyon nitong imbestigahan ang yaman ng presidente.

Kung dati’y paghanga ang nakukuha ng presidente, ang ipinakita ng mga pangyayaring ito ay ang paggamit ng kapangyarihan ng presidente, ang kanyang pagtingin na siya ay di sakop ng batas, at maaarin gawin lahat ng gusto. Nabawasan ang mga pumapalakpak, at ang natira ay ang mga die-hard na lang na natutuwa sa kanyang mga drama, tulad nang paghamon kay SC Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno at Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales na magbitiw sa puwesto kasabay niya.

Kakaunti ang ‘Sundalo’ sa Larangan

Matalas na pulitiko si Duterte kaya’t hindi maaaring hindi siya nag-aalala sa mga mobilisasyon noong Setyembre 21; sa katunayan, upang mapahina ang magiging epekto nito, idineklara niya itong “araw ng protesta”. Hindi lamang ang libu-libong kataong pumuno sa Mendiola, Luneta at lugar ng Komisyon sa Karapatang Pantao ang nakabahala kay Duterte, kundi ang maliit na bilang na namobilisa sa rali mula sa hanay ng kanyang mga taga-suporta sa kabila nang ibinuhos na pera rito. Marami sa kanila ang mga empleyado ng gobyerno na mula sa Caloocan at San Jose del Monte, na dinala pa ng mga bus mula sa kanilang mga lugar.

Ayon sa mga surbey, nananatiling popular si Duterte, ngunit hindi ibig sabihin na gusto pa rin ng mga taong ibigay ang kanilang katapatan sa kanya, mas lalo pang hindi na handa ang mga taong ipagtanggol siya. Maaaring matapang at palaban ang kanyang mga taga-suporta sa facebook, ngunit hindi sila mga aktibista ng lansangan. Mga cyberwarriors ito, at nakakapagtago sa fasebook, ngunit hini alam ang isisigaw at gagawin sa mga rali.

Ayon kay Dr. Herbert Docena ng Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, may implikasyon ang di-pagiging aktibista ng mga taga-suporta ni Duterte: “Ano ang sinasabi nito sa atin? Kung ihahambing sa kanyang mga idolo (Mussolini at Hitler), mahinang klaseng manggagaya lamang si Duterte. Pumopostura siyang pasista, ngunit hindi naman kayang maging mahusay na pasista. Positibo ito para sa malalalimang pag-oorganisa. Ipinakita kahapon ng rali hindi lang kung gaano kalakas ang pagtutol at maaari pang lumakas, nakita rin kung gaano kahina si Duterte at humihina ang suporta sa kanya. Umaasa ang kanyang rehimen sa pwersa o pamimilit at hindi sa aktibong suporta ng mga tao; magaling siyang magpapatay ngunit hindi ang magbigay ng inspirasyon para mapakilos ang mga tao’t ipagtanggolg siya. Hindi na ito kwestiyon ng kung babagsak ba ang kanyang rehimen, kundi kalian—at ano ang papalit.”

Nagigising si Duterte sa katotohanang hindi permanente ang popularidad, at kung walang base sa mga masa, maaari niyang haraping ang mga kilusang tulad ng mga naging protesta sa EDSA at nagpabagsak sa ibang predisente. Itinutulak ni Kalihim ng Cabinet, Jun Evasco, ang Kilusang Pagbabago, isang pormasyon ng mga masa na may katangiang pasista, ngunit maliit ang nakuhang suporta ng inisyatiba sa Presidente, pati sa aspetong pondo, at ang mga alyadong pulitiko tulad ng pamilyang Pimentel at Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez ay nag-aalala na baka palitan ng KP ang namumunong partido, PDP-Laban. Maaaring huli na sa puntong ito ang pagpapasigla sa KP.

Batas Militar bilang Hakbangin

Sa paglakas ng pagtutol na nakita noong mga rali ng Setyembre 21, maaaring mabilisin ni Duterte ang pagdeklara sa batas military sa buong bansa upang isulong ang kanyang agenda bilang isang awtoritaryan. Kahit pa makuha niya ang suporta ng Konggreso at ng Korte Suprema, magkakaroon ng reserbasyon ang mga matataas na opisyal ng militar dahil wala silang sapat na rekurso lalo na mga tao para sa isang pambansang batas militar. Alam din ng mga heneral na ang tiyakk na paraan para magkaroon nang pagtutol sa hanay ng mga junior na sundalo ay makita na ang kanilang mga pinuno ay kakutsaba ni Duterte para gawing personal na instrument ang AFP.

Ngunit dahil sa palakas ng opisisyon, maaaring magkamali ang pagtaya ni Duterte sa sitwasyon at magdeklara nga ng batas militar upang panandaliang pabagalin ang pabulusok sa krisis, ngunit ang magiging resulta ay pagpapabilis pa nang pagbagsak niya.

Ang Pitong Representasyon ng Kasamaan

Nagbabago ang sitwasyon sa pulitika, maaaring maging mabilis ito or mas bumagal, may urong-sulong sa mga kondisyon, ngunit ang mas tiyak ay pababa ang direksyon ni Duterte.

Isang indikasyon na nagbabago ang ihip ng hangin ay ang aksyon ng pitong Senador na taga-sunod ni Duterte. Nagtataka ang ilan kung bakit galit ang pito—Sotto, Gordon, Villar, Pacquiao, Pimentel, Zubiri—nang hindi isinama ang kanilang mga pirma sa resolusyon ng Senado na kumokondena sa pagpatay ng mga menor de edad sa ilalim ng gyera sa droga ni Duterte. Bakit may “privilege speech” pa si Sotto tungkol sa isang blog kung saan tinawag siya at mga nasabing senador na mga aso ng Malacanang? Simple lang. Naamoy na nila, dahil sa pagiging oportunista, kung saan umiihip ang hangin; na nalalantad na ang kahinaan ng padron nila, at panahon na para sabihing distansya, amigo.
Huli na. Nakatatak na sa inyo ang tattoo ni Duterte, at tulad ng tattoo ng triad, di ito nabubura.#

*National Chairman ng Laban ng Masa

The original Facebook post is here https://web.facebook.com/walden.bello/posts/10155252284049332