Philippines- Roots of rebellion

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On Jan. 31, 1984, some six months after the assassination of Benigno Aquino, half a million people once again demonstrated in Manila for an end to the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. This massive show of resistance to the regime came days after a largely successful boycott of a government-staged referendum on a procedure for choosing Marcos' successor. In the wake of the Aquino murder and the continued repression of the regime, the boycott expressed the broadly felt sentiment that anything short of a thorough purge of the regime would be simply "too little, too late." But the stubborn resistance of the old order has made clear that such a project cannot be accomplished peacefully.

Widespread discontent, anger, and unrest have been building up for at least a decade, since the declaration of martial law in September 1972. The worsening economic conditions in the wake of the generalized capitalist recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s have quickened the pace of the buildup. But it took the assassination of Aquino-the most popular bourgeois oppositionist to Marcos— to bring millions into the streets. This mass rejection of the present regime has forced sectors of the Philippine and U.S. ruling classes to begin moving toward an "orderly transition" from the rule of Ferdinand Marcos.

For the U.S., the maintenance of a neocolonial government in the Philippines is vital. Far more important to Washington than its substantial economic interests there-between $1.5 and $3 billion, over half of all U.S. investment in eastern Asia-are its strategic interests. From the Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base, U.S. imperialism prowls the Indian and western Pacific oceans as the policeman of counterrevolution. The U.S. recently agreed to pay $900 million in rent for the continued use of the bases. As the springboard for projecting its military power into the Persian Gulf and the Indochinese peninsula, the U.S. cannot afford to allow even a mildly nationalist regime in Manila to question the existence of the bases.

Until the murder of Aquino, Marcos seemed-like Somoza or the shah before him-to be the United States' best option for safeguarding these interests. But the surge of unrest, coupled with the worsening economic situation, has shaken this belief. And by the same token, the scope of the U.S. interests in the Philippines poses sharply the threat of open military intervention should the dictatorship be toppled by the mass upsurge.

The economic roots of the crisis The repressive and corrupt nature of the Marcos dictatorship is well known, not least of all to the Filipino people. Yet martial law itself was insufficient to generate the existing level of opposition to the regime. Its roots lie deeper.

The expansion of capitalism into the Philippine countryside uprooted millions of peasants, eight million of whom have crowded into the shantytowns surrounding Manila. The urban work force expanded from roughly 15% of the population in 1968 to about 37% today. The economy was able to absorb many of these former peasants through the expansion of export-oriented light industry financed by U.S. and Japanese capital. Even now, U.S. firms control 30% of foreign exports.

The worldwide recession and the resulting protectionism over the past half-decade have curbed the world market for Philippine exports and restricted the importation of raw and semifinished

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Stati: Paul Colvin, Larry Cooperman, Robin David, May May Gong, Gonzalez, Hayden Perry, Linda Ray, Marion Syrek, Sylvia Weinstein Published monthly by the Socialist Action Publishing Association, 3435 Army St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110. Phone: (415) 821-0458. Subscriptions: U.S.: $6.00 for 12 issues; outside U.S.: $20.00. April 1 5-26 Editor: Alan Benjamin Associate Editors: Mark Harris March 1984 1 SociAlisE ACTiON