THE BASIC PROBLEMS OF FILIPINO PEOPLE

U.S. IMPERIALISM

• Is the final stage of capitalism that means the extension of the class oppression and exploitation. There are five basic features namely : 1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;2)the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of international monopoly capitalist combines which share the world among themselves; and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. U.S.  imperialism took a firm hold of the superstructure correspondent to its control of the material mode of production in Philippine society.

BOGUS INDEPENDENCE AND THE UNEQUAL TREATIES
  

• Philippine Constitution came into full operation without any expressed prohibition against imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. On the very day that this bogus independence was granted, the puppet president signed the U.S.-R.P.  Treaty of General Relations which recognized the perpetuation of U.S. property rights and the U.S. military bases in the Philippines. Until today, there is a set of unequal treaties and arrangements reflecting the undiminished control of the Philippines by U.S. imperialism. These are the shackles on the nation which are known as “special relations.” Let us make a review of them.

1. 1947- The U.S.-R.P. Military Bases Agreement. Under this agreement, U.S. imperialism retains its control over the entire Philippine territory. 
2. 1947- The U.S.-R.P. Military Assistance Pact. This unequal treaty further ensures U.S. imperialist control over the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
3. 1951- Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement. Under this agreement, the U.S. government makes the pretext of extending economic and technical programs of assistance to the  Philippine puppet government.
4. 1951- The U.S.-R.P. Mutual Defense Pact. This unequal treaty allows the United States to use its aggressor troops to interfere in the internal affairs of the Philippines under the pretext of securing “peace” and “mutual security.”
5. 1954 -The Laurel-Langley Agreement (Revised Bell Trade Act) this reflects the economic vassalage of the Philippines to U.S. imperialism.
6. 1954- The Manila Pact. This treaty created in Manila the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) for the “regional defense” of Southeast Asia. It includes two puppet governments of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia: namely, the Philippines and Thailand.
7. The Agricultural Commodities Agreements. These are governed by U.S. Public Law 480, otherwise known as Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act. Through these agreements, the United States disposes of its surplus agricultural products by dumping them on the Philippines.
8.  Agreements Pertaining to Culture and Education. U.S. governmental agencies like the A.I.D., the U.S. Educational Board, the Peace Corps and foundations like Asia Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation have a decisive say in the cultural and educational system. 

US MONOPOLY CONTROL OF THE PHILIPPINES

• In an uneven and spasmodic way, U.S. surplus capital has been invested in the Philippine economy. At present the U.S. monopolies and their local subsidiaries own or control such businesses involving petroleum,14 tire and rubber, drugs, fertilizers, chemicals, mining, heavy equipment, marketing, transport facilities and others. The majority of the biggest corporations in the Philippines today are American. They control at least 50 per cent of the total business assets in the country. The U.S. imperialists own the largest commercial banks, insurance companies and other financing institutions. They therefore control the Philippine banking system. They grab the domestic savings of the people and utilize these to support U.S. enterprises here.

THE SCHEME TO PROLONG U.S. DOMINATION

• In the last 10 years, the crisis in the Philippine economy has rapidly worsened. This has been the result of the vicious maneuvers of U.S. imperialism to shift the burden of its economic crisis at home to its colonies and semi-colonies and also to prepare for the termination of the Laurel-Langley Agreement and the Parity Amendment. The scheme of U.S. imperialism is to put the Philippines into such a desperate financial situation as to ensure the prolongation of imperialist privileges. At the same time, all-out military and police preparations and actual operations are conducted to counteract the revolutionary mass movement inflamed by the economic crisis. Counterrevolutionary reformist campaigns are also waged to sow confusion in the ranks of the revolutionary masses.  

FEUDALISM  

• Feudalism is a mode of production in which the principal forces of production are the peasants and the land which they till and the relations of production are basically characterized by landlord oppression and exploitation of the peasantry. The most immediate manifestation of feudalism is the possession of vast areas of cultivable land by a few landlords who themselves do not till the land and who compel a big number of tenants to do the tilling. It was not the Spanish colonialists who first laid the foundation of feudalism in the country. The sultanates of Mindanao, especially those of Sulu and Maguindanao, preceded the Spanish conquistadores by at least a century in doing so. These were the first to create a feudal mode of production producing an agricultural surplus to support a landed nobility of considerable membership, fighters, religious teachers and traders. Later on, the feudal society became further consolidated by its determined resistance to Spanish colonialism.

The Hacienda System

• In the period of direct and indirect U.S. imperialist rule, there has been a long list of sham land reform measures. These include laws involving land titles, disposition of public lands, resettlement, “expropriation” of large estates, “fair” crop distribution credit and “anti-usury” and “just wage” for farm workers.
• Resettlement and Landgrabbing. The earliest law pertaining to land that the U.S. imperialists adoped in the Philippines was the Land Registration Act of 1905 which took the pretext of facilitating the issuance of land titles. The act recognized only three titles to properties that could be registered under it; i.e., the Informacion Possesseria, registration under the Spanish Mortgage Law and imperfect title or possession since 1894. To the U.S. imperialists the main purpose of the act was to determine the limits of private lands and to classify those beyond them as public lands under their arbitrary disposition and control. The Cadastral Act of 1907 was passed to carry out further the U.S. imperialist seizure of land and not to rectify previous errors in land titles. Until now, cadastral surveys are being used as a major device for landgrabbing.
•  Land Retention Limits and Bogus Expropriation. In all laws of expropriation that they have passed, the reactionaries invariably require “due process” (i.e., bureaucratic run-around and expensive litigation that the poor peasants cannot afford) and “just compensation” (i.e., high prices for barren lands that landlords are willing to part with). Only for token purposes have some lands been actually bought by the reactionary government from the landlords. The higher the price of the land paid to the landlord, the higher is the redistribution price for the peasants. Thus, only landlords and big bureaucrats have been able to acquire expropriated lands or these remain under state administration indefinitely.But the most striking development in the land situation since the enactment of the Agricultural Land Reform Code has been the rapid conversion of rice and corn lands into sugar lands and the considerable increase of large-scale capitalist farming and farm-mechanization. Peasants have been driven out of their farms by bulldozers, guns and court orders.

The Magnitude of the Land Problem 25

•      The Extent of Feudal and Semi feudal Exploitation. 

The peasantry has become more impoverished during the last seven decades of both direct and indirect U.S. imperialist rule in the Philippines. The reactionary government admits that the rate of tenancy increased from 18 per cent in 1903 to 22 per cent in 1918, to 35 per cent in 1933, to 37.4 per cent in 1948 and then to 48 per cent in 1956 and to 50 per cent in 1961. According to the 1960 agricultural census, 63 per cent of rice cultivators are share-croppers, tilling an average of 2.6 hectares each. In 1963, eight million of the 27 million Filipino people were sharecroppers. All these figures coming from the statistical agencies of the reactionary government require verification through actual rural surveys. But they indicate the extreme plight of the great majority  of the Filipino peasantry.  Feudal and semifeudal exploitation in such land-scarce areas as Ilocos  Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, the mountain provinces, Cebu and Eastern Samar is even worse than, say, in certain areas of Central Luzon where the armed peasant movement has to a certain degree seized democratic gains. The land-scarce areas are generally the source of farm workers for haciendas in other areas and of settlers in the frontier areas of the last seven decades.In Mindanao, the land- starved Visayans and Ilocanos are also found in great numbers as homesteaders and tenants. 

•       Basic Forms of Exploitation in the Countryside  

The basic forms of landlord exploitation in the countryside today include the exaction of high land rent from the poor peasants and semi-owner peasants and the imposition of the extremest wage slavery on farm workers. Aggravating these basic forms of exploitation are the practice of usury, price manipulation, menial service and tribute-making.

1)Land Rent, Usury and Other Feudal Evils. Land rent to the landlord is still as high as 80, 70, 60 and 50 per cent of the crop, although it is commonly said by the less knowledgeable that the “50-50” sharecropping arrangement is the prevalent system of rent payment all over the country.

Usury is a major feudal device that many landlords use to increase their crop share and also to acquire more lands. They may agree to any sharecropping arrangement but in lending money to the tenants either for the cultivation of the land or for the upkeep of the tenant’s family, an interest rate ranging from 100 per cent in three months to 50 per cent per month is demanded.

2) Wage Slavery on Farms. Because farm workers generally come from land-scarce and one-crop areas, they are even more exploited than the poor peasants who can still subsist on the land that they tenant. Farm workers are a great part of the relative surplus of manpower in the countryside. The hacienderos and labor contractors recognize their desperate economic condition. On this basis, both the hacienderos and the labor contractors engage in the worst exploitative relations despite the fact that agricultural production for export is extremely profitable for the hacienderos. 

The Political Power of the Landlord Class 

• The landlord class will never surrender its ownership of vast lands voluntarily. Neither will it allow exploitative relations in the countryside to cease. It will always make use of its political power to serve its interests. The landlord class has its direct representatives at every level of the reactionary government from the barrio level to the national. The landlords themselves are officials of the reactionary government. Their power extends into every agency of the reactionary government, especially the coercive apparatuses of the state. Being the big and widespread financiers of electoral campaigns, they are found in decisive positions in all the reactionary political parties.
• The landlord class has various types of organizations which it can directly and indirectly use to look after its interests in every possible way within the present system. It has the millers’ and producers’ associations and the chambers of commerce. It has the so-called civic and charitable organizations which are used to publicize its “thoughtfulness” and “kindheartedness” and to conceal the ruthlessness and violence of its rule. It puts up fake cooperatives to manipulate the various strata of the peasantry. It has the banks serving as the centers of landlord-comprador alliances.  Among all types of organizations, the Catholic Church serves as the oldest and most reliable defender of the landlord class. It has been the most decisive and most virulent factor in the development and preservation of feudalism for over four centuries. This Church is itself a big landlord, enjoying undiminished the feudal privileges that it enjoyed in the Spanish colonial system. It is a parasitic institution enjoying the material support of the landlord class. It is an ideological and political weapon, using all kinds of tactics to advocate the “sacredness” of the right of landlords to keep their property. Even its bishops and priests and the landlords’ children in sectarian schools have joined in the fun of reform-ism only to proscribe violently those who advocate agrarian revolution and to prescribe to the oppressed peasant masses.

Lastly, the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), the Presidential Arm on Community Development (PACD), the Free Farmers’ Federation (FFF), the Federated Movement for Social Justice and Reform (FMSJR), Malayang Samahang Magsasaka (Lava faction), Kaisahang Magsasaka (Kasaka). They share the counterrevolutionary objective  of swindling the poor peasants and farm workers into believing that they can rise up from their oppression and exploitation by trusting the “land reform” program of the reactionary comprador- landlord state. They hope vainly to draw away the poor peasants and farm workers from the agrarian revolution for which the Communist Party of the Philippines is indefatigably and courageously fighting.