This is cool stuff. It delves into their organizational structure, tactics, including many interviews with members. They seem to pretty good at that they're doing.
Why is there always such a discrepancy between Third/Second World Maoists and First World Maoists? So many Maoist parties in the West are just cults and weirdos.
Next part of the documentary will be released next Thursday.
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Then why are they losing?
I assume because they are outnumbered and outgunned. It depends on how the masses will react to Duerte's fascism.
Maoism is supposed to be a work around to being outnumbered and outgunned, if you're a Maoist that's literally not an excuse.
muhtealrial konditions
Why don't you make some valid criticism of their praxis then? What do they do wrong?
That's a really stupid line of reasoning.
Maoism is fucking retarded. "Hey poor indigenous people, how can we help you help us become your overlords?"
The only reason the Zapatistas have worked is that they abandoned their ideological trappings and embraced the local cultures without shoving Marxist crap down their throats.
Why?
Yeah I support Maoists in the 3rd World 100 percent but western Maoists are just edgy lifestyle Communists.
I actually remember talking to a guy from the LLCO online who said their organization "works with" the NPA and the Naxals. This was two-ish years ago so I apologize if my facts are kind of hazy. I was sure he was lying since I don't understand how a group as dedicated as this would be taking cues from a white guy in Denver.
Everytime
It's true tho. The way the NPA makes it money to fund its campaigns is through extracting taxes from the propertied classes. They can't collectivize the people they tax because then they'd have no income to fund their campaign. Whenever anyone talks negatively about the NPA in the Philippines this is the first thing that they talk about.
He's wrong about communism, and he's wrong about the corrupt politicians part. Every politician in the Philippines is corrupt, every landowner and capitalist is corrupt; there's no such thing as a 'good' capitalist, and most of the members of propertied classes inherited their fortune from their parents, they didn't 'earn' anything.
There is literally nothing wrong with that though. What other option do they have?
The FARC did this in Colombia as well
the FARC aren't a model to follow
There's your problem.
Any group that shows the faces of their alleged cadres in countries which are known to kill leftist activists are obvious frauds.
Because Maoism was never intended for the First World to begin with.
This is Zig Forums tier bullshit
Because that means they become dependent upon the institution of private property and exploitation. They cannot collectivize - threaten the institutions of the ruling class - because to do so would undermine the material foundation of their politics.
The truth of politics is that people ultimately act in social interest based around a specific organization of economy. When people don't see a direct way to realize their own social interest, the movement becomes dominated by bourgeois moralism and bourgeois interests, which is what I've seen so far in left-wing nationalist and democratic movements such as the Philippine Maoist movement. If the direction of organization doesn't lead to a change in the organization of economy, that movement will be bound to interests of the ruling class.
Don't look at the Philippine Left as some sort of alternative to the contemporary malaise that infects the Western Left. The Philippine Left has all the same problems as the rest of the Left around the world; it's just the Philippine Left is larger and more violent.
Neozapatismo has some elements of Marx in it. See: big daddy Marcos
They can't effectively collectivism anyway given how marginal they are; taxing petty bourgeoisie and landowners is a temporary measure (whether because they'll grow in power and no longer need to rely on it or because they'll lose their war). It's like saying Stalin shouldn't have robbed banks to finance revolutionary activities because those banks would be abolished under socialism.
First of all, the NPA itself is small, but the Philippine Left is not, so the marginality of the NPA is not an excuse. What I'm saying is that their marginality is a result of their practice; it directly lags them due to the fact that any politics based not on social interest but on morality is doomed to lack a revolutionary push. What I'm saying is that the social edifice, the material foundation, of the guerrilla movement creates a fetter on the potential of revolutionary struggle. What is required is a platform based on a set of practice that not only views itself as having the goal of overthrowing capital but sets into place the proper social institutions that will set socialism in place come the revolution.
The reliance on revolutionary taxes means placing the backbone of the revolutionary movement on the whims of the propertied classes who pay such taxes, which ends up stifling the potential of collectivization, the cornerstone of socialist transformation, and means relying on the social interests of property over the social interests of community.
And my point about violence wasn't that violence is bad per se in some moral sense, but that political violence isn't, so to speak, more inherently more authenticly "Left". Any revolutionary struggle against capitalism come a certain point will have to be violent. This does not mean that any act of violence against the system is inherently authentically revolutionary. Just like all potential resistances to capitalism, violence against the system can be subsumed and ultimately controlled by capital, if it doesn't have the material foundation for social transformation. The fact that there are guerrillas in the mountains doesn't make the Philippine Left "more revolutionary". To illustrate using an analogy, an anarchist throwing rocks at cops isn't more authentically revolutionary as opposed to any other form of political action just due to its implicitly violent nature. While we must accept and even embrace the use of political violence - terror - when the time comes for it, romanticizing terror will only undermine our politics by creating illusions about proper practice.
Different guy, but those are some hot takes. No revolutionary movement has ever managed to collectivize during their struggle for power, that's absurd. Neither the Bolsheviks nor Mao did so. The productive base for socialism as an economic system is impossible to maintain when you are a marginalized fraction in the jungle and the mountains. We can only talk about such measures once sizeable pieces of the productive forces have actually been seized. I also don't care about the "Philippinian left" (whatever that means), I care about the NPA.
If you think they are not building dual power, you are also wrong. Watch the video.
My point isn't that they aren't collectivizing now, but that the social base for their movement stifles the potential to do so. To reiterate, relying on revolutionary taxes means relying on the social interests of property over the social interests of community. And the only way to have a proper revolutionary movement is to base it on the social interests of community.
They still rely on the community for their manpower and support base, the money they get from "taxing" propertied classes is just to supplement the money they need to fund their political and military activities. If this is the standard for a "proper revolution" then idk if any revolution has been proper, every one i can think of has relied on the expropriation of property to some extent. Its just that the NPA hasn't established firm enough control over most the areas which it is active to actually seize assets more totally and execute something like land reform so they instead use taxes which they can quickly and regularly collect without having to maintain more conventional control of an area.
They arent losing though, they have seen a significant increase in membership since Duterte took office and seem to maintain a decent casualty ratio. His type of dictatorial and violent rule is also exactly what empowers movements like the NPA.
Economy is the ultimate determinant of politics, and where you get the means to facilitate your politics, in this case money, can have an immense influence. The fact that they obtain the majority of their funds through taxing the propertied classes who have chosen to pay them means they are materially tied towards the institution of private appropriation, and cannot construct in practice a position that seeks the abolishment of that institution
And the class composition, the basis for their community, are predominantly peasants - a class that defined by its own inconsistency, and lead predominantly by landlords and other petty-bourgeois elements such as the student-intelligentsia.
And not only is the argument that they aren't intending to institution a transformation of agrarian social relations right now flies in the face of what they have written on the topic:
Not only is the NDFP arguing that the NPA needs to at the present moment construct a cooperative economy, they claim it is already doing so. But why are we not hearing this beyond the realm of propaganda. Because they are incapable of doing so.
The people they are taxing are essentially being extorted, its not like they are kissing up to the petite bourgeois and landlords they are essentially forcing them at gunpoint to give them money. They are currently reliant on taxing these people for part of their funds but this doesn't mean they can never abolish these institution when they actually have the power to do so. We arent hearing this beyond propaganda because as I said they dont have the actual power to initiate and maintain the presence needed to implement land reform in most of the regions they are active. Also it is likely that land reform has been implemented in various areas under strong NPA control and it just isnt being reported and published by news media. Revolutionary taxes are also usually directed at businesses and politicians not landlords. So them implementing land reform is in no way stopped by their reliance on revolutionary tax because they dont even seem to tax landlords to any significant extent.
According to the NPA, the taxes are legitimate taxes performed by legitimate state actors, not extortion, and if you argued to them that what they are doing is extortion, they would have you shot. So the way they frame revolutionary taxes is precisely, as you said (not my words), "kissing up to the petite bourgeois". Because their movement is dependent upon the petty-bourgeoisie.
What you just said is untrue because the lines between landlord and capitalist in the Philippines have blurred together given the transformative growth of bourgeois social relations in the Philippine countryside. To say that the Philippines is "semi-feudal" is also to say that it is "semi-capitalist". It would be accurate to call them landlord-capitalists given how the landlords have been thoroughly bourgeoisified. And arguing that the NPA doesn't tax landlords just proves my point. If they refuse to "extort" (your word) the landlords this means they're unwilling to perform a violent act against an essentially propertied class.
And the reason why there isn't any media presence around NPA cooperatives is because there aren't any cooperatives. The NPA reminds me of the Makhnovichna in that they had "collectivized" certain areas, but all that we know of these "communes" is the vague cultural sense of community, and not a fundamental rupture in existing production relations. Sure they have associations of people with a strong sense of community, but that isn't communism.
Part 2: youtube.com
There some north korean advisors in the NPA.
Yes and what means do those legitimate state actors use to get those companies to pay? The threat of violence ie newsinfo.inquirer.net
Just because they dont extort landlords doesnt mean they refuse to extort them or are unwilling to preform a violent act against them, The likely reason they dont extort landlords is because things like mining companies make a larger income to tax than landlords. And even if they did extort them you would then say they therefore cannot change social relations because they are now reliant on the landlords. In this case what are they supposed to do? Just immediately drop that form of funding completely and instead tax the people they are trying to win over. With this logic the Soviets nor the communist Chinese should have been able to abolish capitalist institutions since to some extent both were reliant on support and taxes from the petty bourgeoisie.