10/03/2023
From: Paloma Polo. What social conditions give rise to political change? This question propelled my immersion in the revolutionary movement in the Philippines, the oldest and most consolidated struggle for democratic sociopolitical transformation in the world. The work, coexistence, and filmic inquiry I undertook in a guerrilla front were the culmination of three years of research and reflection as I engaged in the political struggles of this country. For the last five decades, the initiatives directed by communist communities in the Philippines have been neglected, censored, and often violently repressed due to their willfulness to implement alternate sociopolitical and cultural modes of existence and their struggle to protect their ancestral lands. These communities are well established in the poorer and more remote parts of the country, where they actively strive for emancipation, the common good, and democratic transformation. The bonds I forged within these communities and my subsequent commitment and solidarity with their struggle facilitated my later integration in a guerrilla unit. An exceptional—almost miraculous—opportunity allowed me to film in a guerrilla front for several weeks. Going underground means observing strict security protocols, as the persecution and surveillance of government intelligence agencies is everywhere. Upon arrival, it felt bizarre to be at the camp where I had been assigned. But this feeling did not result from entering a new social constellation. I didn’t feel like I had been introduced to an unknown universe of relations and that was precisely what felt uncanny: that the unknown could become so familiar, so homely. In revolutionary daily life, relationships take on a much more humane dimension. Social bonds and codes are positively densified as certain ontological complicity brings comrades together.
Building the revolution in the Philippines means, above all, growing in common, individually, and singularly. The revolution advances to the extent that revolutionaries cultivate themselves and flourish, managing to effectively transform a common world. The work of the members of the NPA (New People’s Army), the armed branch of the Communist Party, is founded on three main pillars—arousing, organizing, and mobilizing the people—which eventually lead to people building up their organs of self-governance (“base building”), the implementation of agricultural revolution (to different degrees, depending upon the region), and armed struggle. Daily life in the camp is organized around educational and pedagogical projects, which are reinforced by the collective assessments that take place after every activity. The range of tasks is broad, but the vertebral part of the educational project is the psychological, emotional, social, and political maturing of each person. This process is called “remolding” and consists of shedding off bourgeois and capitalist forms of socialization and worldly conceptions.
Destruction, exploitation, repression, and inequality mark the history and the nature of the Philippine nation. The ongoing Philippine struggle adheres to the communist tradition and is rooted in the revolutionary liberation movements that have combatted the colonial yoke for centuries. A strenuous revolutionary force emerges from the poorest communities, which are willfully fighting to eradicate the ills that, from the revolution’s perspective, continue to ravage the country: a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society plagued with capitalist bureaucrats and relegated to deindustrialization that forces the country to consume imported merchandise and to continuously exploit cheap labor, while the plunder of natural resources orchestrated by international corporations in alliance with the government is rampant. The intense militarization and state repression render the Red zones almost inaccessible. Fifty years of revolutionary struggle at a distance from the state have nonetheless brought about the optimal conditions to critically reflect and act upon the issue of sociopolitical organization, the main question that any victorious revolution has to confront once it takes overpower. There are entire regions and provinces administered by the People’s Government. Large swathes of remote rural regions have become a sort laboratory of life. The NPA members that are featured in my film are not only guerrilla fighters—they are industrious and active builders of a different world, born out of cooperative work. Their task is mainly pedagogical, but they also serve entire communities as doctors, teachers, researchers, artists, mediators, administrators, farmers... This transformative process, gradually and existentially modeled as it surmounts setbacks and obstacles, is in itself a revolutionary success, it has brought forth sociopolitical change. But this only exists and can only be thought if it is always in the making. https://vimeo.com/354203983
