The Left in the Philippines

I want to thank Nimalka Fernando, the IMADR staff, and other Sri Lankan friends for making it possible for me to finally do what I've always wanted to do, visit south Asia. Entering south Asia through Sri Lanka makes sense for a Southeast Asian like me not just because it is closest in terms of distance, in terms of temperature and vegetation, but also in terms of size and cultural approachability. My Indian friends understand this last point because I've explained why I have never gone to India in terms of my sense of dread, of uncertainty in confronting such a culturally complex society.

Being in Sri Lanka, however, makes my work today more complex. In the last few years, one of my main advocacies has been for progressives to form political parties and brave the uncertainties and ideological dangers of being in government. I cannot say this to Sri Lankan comrades, however, because they have extensive and long experience in doing precisely this. As a result, I have had to redefine my task this afternoon as finding points of convergence between our inexperience in forming electoral political parties in Southeast Asia and the rich lessons from the complex experience of the Left in Sri Lanka and actually other countries in south Asia.

Before doing this, let me take a stab at relating my comments to the theme of this conference, "human security". Taking the term beyond its conventional usage in relation to militaries and war towards the economic realm as Vinod Raina has done is conceptually easier than taking it to the realm of politics. One easy way of establishing the connection is to say that it is in politics, in the state where decisions on war and peace and on the distribution of economic goods are made. We might then pose our 'expanded security' goal as that of how do we increase the possibility of having governments which are more likely to choose peace over war, economic 'security' for the many over the economic so-called rights of the few.

Another possibility is to redefine democracy from the vantage point of security. The easiest connection is with civil and political rights, for people to feel secure in their homes, in their organizations, in their assemblies, in public discourse - to feel secure that they can exercise these rights without government sanction. Yet another angle is for people to be confident (feel secure) that laws will be implemented fairly. Taking 'security' beyond this stretches its meaning close to breaking. We could say, in a democracy people are secure in feeling that they can participate in politics to some, measurable effect; that we have organizations that we are confident are ours. But I feel that this use of the concept of security is forced.

I am sympathetic to our "interrogating" our ruling groups' manipulation of the term "natural security" as justifications for making war, for counterinsurgency. I am not so sure about the potential use of the concept of "human security" to apply to the range of things we do to organize our people, to lead them in our struggles for our rights. I am more comfortable, for example, with the idea that we should promote insecurity, we should work to make our ruling groups insecure - about attacking our organizations, violating our rights, and ultimately about their hold on government power.

Civil Society and Political Parties

This is a good place to now turn to the first subject of my presentation, the ongoing debate on the establishment of electoral parties by social movement and other civil society groups. In my country, the Philippines, there are two parts of this debate. One, with armed groups, is on the efficacy of open, electoral, parliamentary struggle. Another is with some NGO leaders who insist that civil society groups should not 'enter' the state by participating in building political parties, should instead remain as "watchdogs" of the state.

The contemporary Philippine progressive movement traces back to the "re-founding" of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968, and the dynamic student movement that preceded it. The CPP has not been the only progressive force around. But throughout most of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the CPP was a hegemonic force on the Left. By the early 1980s the CPP had become so strong that it forced all other progressive groups including anti-communist groups to relate their ideological and organizational life to the CPP, to measure themselves by the standards set by the CPP.

Born at the height of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China in the second half of the 1960s, the CPP's analysis of Philippine society , its program for a "national democratic revolution" and its strategy and tactics were classic Maoist. Debates on CPP founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison's framework for analyzing Philippine society continue to this day. In party history, the most important debates, however, were over the CPP's strategy and tactics. It was the party leadership's failure to adjust its strategy and tactics that led to its decline and split in the 1990s.

CPP strategy emphasized rural over urban, armed over unarmed, clandestine over open organizing. It was this strategy that enabled the party to, not just survive, but actually benefit from the conditions of martial law and dictatorship from 1972 onwards. It was so successful that even areas of work that it de-emphasized developed forcefully. Open, unarmed, urban mass movements under the leadership of party cadre rapidly built up in the first half of the 1980s. During this time, key party leaders pushed for a reevaluation of party strategy to take advantage of the decline in the dictatorship's repressive capabilities, the explosion of mass movements especially after the murder of opposition leader 'Ninoy' Aquino in 1983, and the restoration of constitutional democracy after the fall of Marcos.

Instead, the party leadership chose to boycott the February 1986 'snap election' for president which became the pivotal struggle which led directly to the downfall of Marcos. In the famous 'EDSA revolution' which followed the election, the CPP and its followers were on the sidelines. An internal CPP critique said it best: "...when the aroused and militant masses moved spontaneously but resolutely to oust the hated regime last February 22-25, the Party and its forces were not there to lead them. In large measure, the Party and its forces were on the sidelines, unable to lead or influence the hundreds of thousands of people who moved with amazing speed and decisiveness to overthrow the regime". (Rocamora:1994, p.69)

As it turned out, this 'tactical error' led to a strategic decline of the CPP. In 1986, it provoked a veritable avalanche of polemics within the party and outside that examined many different aspects of party life. What did not get carefully enough examined are the ramifications of being "unable to lead or influence" the people. The problem is not just what happened at EDSA in February but the way the party abandoned hundreds of thousands of people it "aroused, mobilized and organized" into political action because it later decided that their particular political action did not after all fit the party's strategic framework.

Issues related to political leadership will always be debated because social conditions are constantly changing. On the part of those who would presume to lead, there are matters of choice. Leading means being some distance from the people you want to lead. How far ahead is the first choice. Marxist Leninists attach names to these distances, short ones are "reformist", farther distances "revolutionary". We used to get all worked up over the finer details of the difference. At this time what is important for me is what kind of 'social costs' we ask the people we lead to bear. The more "revolutionary", the greater the social cost. If there is consultation about "costs", "how much" is a matter of negotiation.

The problem is that the more "revolutionary" the goal, the greater the need for being underground, the more difficult "negotiation" is. When you are engaged in armed struggle, there is a premium on discipline. When bullets are flying, you do not consult. But it is precisely under these conditions that you ask the greatest sacrifice. Being underground means extremely difficult living conditions, risking capture, being jailed and possibly tortured. Guerrillas are asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. The communities where guerrillas operate also pay the cost of military operations and the disruption of carefully worked out strategies for survival.

Armed struggle generates a terrible strain on the social fabric of communities where guerrillas operate. When guerrillas begin their work, everything is kept quiet and discreet. When the community is won over to the struggle, the existence of the party and its mass organizations moves more and more into the open. Maintaining strict military security then becomes the responsibility of the whole community. In effect, the community becomes militarized. Family, economic and other social relations outside the community become more and more difficult. Contact with relatives in the military have to be cut off.

The strain of maintaining tight military security often results in members of the community being punished for breaking security rules. I remember a very sad episode in a documentary about the New People's Army (NPA) where a 17 year old boy was executed for talking to an uncle who happened to be a military man. It was not made clear in the movie whether he had actually become a spy for his uncle. The military, in fact, often tried to infiltrate spies into the party. How much damage information collected by these spies actually had would be difficult to estimate. What is clear is that the paranoia generated by so-called "deep penetration agents" (DPA) resulted in massive damage to the party.

In 1985, after a series of setbacks in party work in the southern island of Mindanao that the leadership could not explain, a campaign to root out the presumptive explanation, DPA, was launched. Party and mass organization members and allies of the party were hauled into makeshift camps for interrogation that quickly slid into torture. When it was over, as many as 900 people had been executed or died during torture. Because the party never recognized this "campaign" for what it was, an abomination, it was repeated three years later in a different part of the country. Less than a hundred people were killed at this time, but because the killing fields were closer to Manila, the political impact was greater.

In its aftermath, the party leadership summed up the experience as an outbreak of "insanity" in party ranks. The damage to the party and its public image was incalculable. Comradeship in a party engaged in armed struggle demands that you trust your comrade with your life. Because what should have been a discreet counter-intelligence operation was turned into an anti-DPA mass campaign, party members were obliged to mistrust each other and the people they worked with. Because the killings became widely known, an implicit social compact with the people that the party would only use violence judiciously was broken.

The CPP reached its highest point of development in 1986 and 1987, precisely at the transition from dictatorship to elite democracy. It declined slowly thereafter then went into a steep dive starting in 1990 and culminating in the split of 1993 and 1994. In 1986, the party had 35,000 members and some 25,000 guerrillas. Today, the mainstream CPP faction is estimated to have 7,000 to 8,000 guerrillas. Smaller breakaway groups may have a total of 1,000 combatants. There are certainly other factors that explain the decline of the party starting in the second half of the 1980s. The two factors I chose to explore here are very important but not the only explanations. I chose them less to explain the past than to locate the present - to place what I and the people I work with have chosen as key lessons from our common past.

From Development to Governance

The decline of the CPP in the latter half of the 1980s was also marked by the rapid growth of the NGO movement. The tens of thousands of young people politicized during the last few years of the Marcos dictatorship could not be incorporated into the national democratic movement (ND). The CPP, at this time, was in the throes of profound disorientation. With the support of the Cory Aquino government which took over from Marcos, many new NGOs were established, soaking up all this youthful energy. NGOs also provided a way for party members who left the CPP to continue to do progressive work. Non-party political formations, what we call "political blocs", provided more comprehensive ideological frameworks.

At this time, these NGOs mainly engaged in development work. The preferred framework, emphasizing "people empowerment", was distinctly political. Forming people's organizations, as cooperatives or sectoral organizations (peasant, labor, urban poor, indigenous people, women) would invariably be the first step. In the Philippines, we never refer to NGOs on their own, always as "PO-NGO". The range of experience with development work is enormous, from simple subsistence projects, to commercial production, to micro credit, to export trade. Peoples lives have certainly been improved. But the enormity of problems of poverty in the country and the difficulty of sustaining development projects in the face of government indifference and often obstruction, generated a lot of frustration.

The PO-NGO movement naturally moved into governance and democratization work. This process was facilitated by a number of developments. The most important was the passage of the Local Government Code in 1991. The transfer of power and significant fiscal capacity to local governments fed into PO-NGO preference for grassroots work. It helped that the LGC provided specifically for PO-NGO representation in local special bodies including powerful bids and contracts committees. International agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) also moved into governance work at this time, providing funds and new ideas for PO-NGO work.

One of the more advanced governance and development projects by civil society in the Philippines is given the playful name, BATMAN. BATMAN is a governance and development project of Philippine NGOs and peoples organizations. It assists in training officials at the lowest level of administration, the barangay. It also facilitates participatory development planning and budgeting. The project's formal name is Barangay-Bayan Governance Consortium (BBGC), but it is more known by its informal name BATMAN, an acronym taken from its first product, the Barangay Management Training Manual.

The barangay is the lowest unit of governance in the Philippines. It is also the newest. It is here in rural villages and urban poor communities which comprise the majority of the 42,000 barangays that the greatest possibilities for citizen action to deepen democracy in the Philippines can be found. Dominance of elite groups and the centralization of politics and administration have, for most of the past century, meant that town centers (bayan) and cities have been the locus of political life. Barangays, the sites of most of the natural (face-to-face) communities left in the country, have largely been bypassed. Relations between town-and-city-center-elites and barangay inhabitants (barangay-bayan) have mainly been mediated by clans and families. The absence of administrative units at the level of the barangay was an expression of these political conditions.

These social and institutional arrangements generated a political culture anchored on exchanges of 'private' instead of 'public' goods as the characteristic "currency" of political relationships. Politicians provide jobs, money for a variety of consumption needs to individuals and their relatives who return the favor in terms of personal support for an individual politician and his clan. Many of the ills of Philippine politics - nepotism, corruption, violence, lack of transparency, government inefficiency, can be traced to this essential element in Philippine political culture.

The creation of barangay government units under the 1991 Local Government Code (LGC) created, for the first time in Philippine history, the possibility of lowering the center of gravity of Philippine politics from the town and city centers where elites dominate to the level of the barangay. The LGC provides for a salaried barangay captain and barangay council, an allotment from internal revenue funds, some taxation and ordinance making powers, and authority to borrow. Quite simply, it is now possible to do something at the level of the barangay. Enough to generate barangay level politics instead of barangay politics being only an adjunct of town politics.

The LGC also provides for barangay assemblies with limited legislative powers where all barangay residents can participate, the only form of direct democracy available in the existing political system. Barangay governments are obliged to formulate barangay development plans through the creation of a barangay development council with provisions for NGO and peoples organization participation. These institutional arrangements open up the possibility of a broadly participatory political process.

Once barangay processes have advanced to a stage where development plans have been formulated and political leaders have been established in barangay government, relations with town-level politicians and officials can take on the elements of negotiation between the politician and the barangay community and its leaders. One should not expect that the personal nexus of Philippine politics will be immediately removed, but the introduction of another mode of relations with municipal elites should, over time, erode personalism and move local politics from exchanges of private goods to exchanges of public goods.

These possibilities can only be actualized in practice. People have to become aware of the full range of possibilities open to them. This is where BATMAN comes in. BATMAN's goal is to set into motion a series of political activities at the barangay level that:

• will enable elected barangay officials to maximise the possibilities under the LGC to provide economic and political services to barangay inhabitants;
• will maximize economic gains for local inhabitants;
• will strengthen local communities and increase their capability to negotiate their economic and political relations with the larger society

BATMAN began in late 1996 when seven NGOs put together a course on COMET (Course on Management and Electoral Training) in response to a demand from cooperative and people's organization leaders who wanted to run in the May 1997 barangay elections. A Barangay Administration Training Manual (BATMAN) was simultaneously developed to serve the needs of those who would win. As it turned out, many more progressive people won in the barangay elections than those who were trained in COMET. We also realized that the training needs of barangay governance required more than one training course. BATMAN thus became expanded into a larger and longer term program, BATMAN FOREVER.

With an expanded program, first priority was to expand the number of trainers. After a slow start, a series of Barangay Governance Trainers Training (BGTT) were organized. By mid-1999, nine BGTTs had been organized graduating 356 participants from 26 provinces and five highly urbanized cities. Four more were held in the second half of 1999. Based primarily on their reentry or action plans prepared towards the end of the BGTTs, participants have conducted Basic Orientation on Barangay Governance (BOBG) seminars or to initiate participatory barangay development planning and budgeting in 654 barangays located in 126 municipalities and component cities in 34 provinces and in 9 highly urbanized cities.

From the original seven NGO members, the consortium has expanded to 35 NGOs, most of the members being local NGOs. Another 15 NGOs have started working with the consortium and have "observer" status. Many of the staff of NGO members of the consortium and PO members are active in organizing Akbayan (Citizens Action Party). The party is one of the main instruments generating a "multiplier effect" for BATMAN. Akbayan members in municipal governments have been instrumental in getting municipal government's to finance BATMAN training. Another instrument for "multiplying" BATMAN is the participation of barangay captains trained in BATMAN who persuade other barangay captains through the Association of Barangay Captains (ABCs) to enlist their barangays in BATMAN.

Because the Philippine NGO and P0 movement began during the period of the Marcos dictatorship, it has a strong anti-government bias. This bias extended to local governments. It has only been in the last five or so years that this bias has begun to be replaced by a cautious optimism about the progressive potential of local governance work. The impact on local governments has, by and large been positive. In turn, the impact on development work, the main area of NGO work has also been positive. BATMAN illustrates how this process has worked.

One aspect of BATMAN that has received a lot of attention is its work in assisting barangay officials and POs undertake participatory barangay development planning and budgeting. BATMAN NGOs start by putting barangay officials and POs together. The first activity is poverty mapping, identifying the poor in the barangay, and analyzing why they are poor. This exercise limits the infrastructure project orientation of most development planning in the Philippines whatever the administrative level. After identifying projects ranging from water systems to providing childcare, the barangay budget is then made based on the development plan.

Because the barangay budget is almost always inadequate, the development plan includes a strategy for accessing additional plans. BATMAN assists the process with a pilot project to provide a seed fund of P100,000 (US$2500) which can be accessed by the barangay only if they manage to generate funds from other sources. BATMAN also assists by organizing "pledging sessions" where higher level government officials and ODA and other foreign funding agencies are brought together to listen to barangay officials make a pitch for financial support for their projects.

The development generated by this BATMAN inspired process is still very limited compared to the extent of poverty in the Philippines. BATMAN is expanding at a very rapid pace but it cannot possibly cover the country's 42,000 barangays. What it is doing is providing an example of an alternative development model where local government units prodded by activist citizens working with civil society can generate a virtuous circle linking democracy and development. Political reform pushed by other processes can greatly expand the impact of this synergy.

Akbayan (Citizens Action Party)

From active involvement with local governments to electoral work was a short step. PO-NGO staff easily saw who among local government officials were corrupt or inept and who were innovative and reform oriented, and who therefore they should support in the next election. The next steps were more difficult. Starting in 1987, PO-NGO electoral initiatives coordinated at the national level were abject failures. One of the lessons drawn from these experiences is that it does not make sense for PO-NGO initiatives to only support established national politicians. They have to build their own political parties and establish electoral bases at the local level. This is where Akbayan (Citizens Action Party) comes in.

So I do not get accused of favoritism, I want to make it clear that I am in fact playing favorites in focusing on Akbayan. I am in the national leadership of Akbayan so it should be clear that it is my favorite progressive organization. The very nature of Akbayan, however, among others its being a multi-tendency, non-ideological organization, is a good antidote for the poison of sectarianism. We have also made it a point to ban people without a sense of humor from the party. It is difficult to be sectarian when the favorite form of communication within the party is heckling.

Akbayan started out at a series of meetings of leaders of four political blocs in April 1996. Building on the success of progressive participation in the May 1995 local elections, the group formulated a concept paper which was discussed widely in a series of consultations throughout the country. We invested the resources necessary for these extensive consultations because we wanted to break a standard pattern of the Philippine Left, parties and other organizations being started by a small group of intellectuals in Manila. With the consultations, we not only benefited from a wide range of ideas and experiences, we also started the party with a lot of stakeholders throughout the country.

The most important elements of the Akbayan concept include:

1. Akbayan's goal is the mobilization of people around a program of radical democracy. As a progressive organization, our program is anchored on the economic and political empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised majority through redistributive and entitlement programs. We also believe
   that democracy - constitutional government, a Bill of Rights limiting the power of the state, the rule of law - is essential to the well being of modern societies.
2. Akbayan participates in elections to win. This may seem self-evident. From past experience in the Philippines, this point is in fact crucial because progressive participation in elections tended to be mainly for propaganda purposes. Since the CPP strategy for achieving state power was armed struggle and the CPP saw elections as "meaningless ruling class exercises", they mainly used election campaigns to popularize certain issues. This then is a crucial point of departure for Akbayan, that
   elections would be Akbayan's main strategy for accumulating state power.
3. Akbayan emphasizes participation in local elections, again in contrast to past Left experience which focused intervention at the national level. This is both a matter of principle and practical politics. We participate in elections initially at the local government level where we have the resources to win and only slowly build up to the national level. Given people's alienation from a political system dominated by upper class groups, restoring a sense of effective participation - the essence of radical democracy - can be best done at local government levels.
4. Unity is built around a progressive political project, not a specific ideology. Groups and individuals following different ideologies are welcome in Akbayan. There are practical reasons for this choice. At a time of rapid change and ideological crisis, of splits and bitter ideological struggle in the Left worldwide, we did not want to bring these tensions into the party. In addition, because Left groups in the Philippines remained small, electoral impact required working together. The Akbayan political project is a "work in progress". We see it as being constantly in a process of
   shaping based on conditions outside and the democratic process within the party.
5. Akbayan can remain a progressive political party only if it continues to be accountable to a dynamic and assertive mass movement. While asserting a leadership role on matters of government policy, Akbayan will defend and promote the autonomy of organizations in civil society. Akbayan leadership will be a matter of political persuasion, not organizational fiat.

Since its founding Congress in January 1998, Akbayan has taken small but solid steps towards its long term establishment. We are not in a hurry. Life is hard enough as it is without having to run at a forced pace. Our target is to win a few more seats in every election we participate in. In 1998, we won one seat and got cheated out of another. It is not much given that the Lower House alone has 250 seats. If we can win three seats in the next election, we will be happy. More importantly, we need to at least triple the 10 town mayorships we won in 1998.

Discourse Solidarity

What part of the Philippine experience is relevant to other Asian progressive movements? Only as much as you want to appropriate. We are now past those days when the Left operated on the basis of models of revolutionary practice imported from a socialist motherland. The only safe conclusion is that whatever you want to appropriate, you need to go beyond the generalizations that intellectuals like me are fond of making. We consider it part of our internationalist responsibility to facilitate exchanges of experience. We do not assume that this traffic has to be one way.

Of necessity, new organizational forms to fit the new political circumstances will have to be learned. Given the enormity of the political tasks, there will be a temptation to use democratic centralist organizational forms. Voluntary organizations can choose to be run in whatever way they prefer. More tightly run organizations can do more than loose formations. But when you are trying to put many other people into political motion, or if you are running a government, it is very tempting to think that the efficiency of a tightly run organization can be extended to a whole society.

The experience of the Left in the Philippines provides good examples of the dangers of this way of thinking. The CPP got "separated" from the people in 1986 because what the party wanted the people to do - guerrilla warfare in the countryside - was at considerable distance from what the people wanted to do - vote in an election and continue urban mass actions. The cost of this kind of "separation" was borne at this time by the party. In situations where the party controls the state such as Tienanmen Square in 1989, the cost is paid in blood by the people.

I believe that events in the last decade or so of the 20th century have destroyed much of the theoretical base of the Left. Under conditions of theoretical disorientation, with so much of our theoretical legacy wiped out by history, we have to start with real people and their struggles, their attempts to make sense of their confusing social and political reality, their often stumbling struggle to devise new progressive strategy and tactics under very difficult conditions.

This admonition does not mean that I want us to go into battle without any theoretical weapons. I remain a Marxist. I believe that Marxism continues to be a useful theoretical tool for understanding capitalism. I believe that understanding capitalism remains the primary task of progressives because for all of its still unmatched capacity to generate economic growth, capitalism also retains its prodigious appetite for victims. Marxist economic analysis will not enable us to understand the victims of sexism and patriarchy, of ecological destruction, so we have to incorporate feminist theory, ecological analysis, and the less theoretically atavistic segments of post modernism.

This is not an occasion for a detailed review of the theoretical legacy of the Left. I picked out a set of interrelated ideas not just because I believe they are crucial for understanding the collapse of "actually existing socialism" - of the USSR and the Eastern European socialist states - but also because they are relevant to new forms of progressive action that we in the Philippines are experimenting with. These ideas - dictatorship of the proletariat, vanguard party, one-party state, mass organizations as 'transmission belts' from the party to the people - are all related to issues of democracy.

The socialist states in Europe collapsed because of mass movements which fought against their dictatorial governments. No amount of "false consciousness" theorizing can hide this embarrassment. It is not just governments or states that collapsed. It is a particular way of looking at states and governments, and their relationship with their citizens that collapsed. If you posit socialist states as "dictatorships of the proletariat", then it follows that the party of the proletariat would be the one and only ruling party. If you do not put limits on the power of the socialist state, and there are no other centers of autonomous political power allowed, then it follows that mass organizations are only instruments of the state.

These ideas are at the core of the theoretical foundations of the Stalinist state. While variations were devised in other countries in later times, what Stalin set up in the USSR was the characteristic state form of socialism. Does a socialist economy require this kind of state? The forced pace of capital accumulation under Stalin led to forms of exploitation of workers found only in earlier stages of capitalism. Does socialist accumulation require forced labor camps? The death of millions of people? Does it matter whether they were deliberately killed or died as a result of decisions made by an omnipotent state?

The will to power grows out of our rage at the powerlessness of our people, the abundance of power of our enemies. Organizing poor peasants to fight despotic landlords, workers against management goons are the early sources of progressives' will to power. Problems arise only after we have begun to accumulate power. Dilemmas are particularly intense in those movements which are engaged in armed struggle. It is one thing using (fire) power against our enemies. What limits do we place on our power over party members, members of mass organizations, allies? After we seize state power, over our citizens?

This is not idle theoretical musing. Millions of people have lived and died serving these ideas. Political parties have been founded, grown large and powerful, seized state power, grown fat and flabby, in the end, were thrown out of power by their own people because they were not able to learn new ideas. In the end, this is the most important demand on us by our past.

As I said on the last page of my book on the split in the CPP, "...I want to be able to love my own movement, to believe that we can do more than admit that we made "errors", as if our mistakes were merely technical problems. I want us to change, and to honor the memory of the fallen by listening to, knowing, and making room inside our organizations for the living. I want us to respect our people - with their differences and desire, their stubborn opinions, their fears, their courage, their intelligence".

When I have tried to answer these questions I ask in this presentation for my own movement, I have looked not at ideological propositions writ large, but at what my answer would mean for specific individuals, for Raffy or Anna or Risa. The problems of poverty that we face in our countries provide enough reason for a lifetime political commitment for each of us. But what we do in fighting for the future cannot be too distant from that future. If we are forced to distort our lives and our relationships during the period of struggle, if we do not allow ourselves to laugh and to have fun at this time of struggle, how can we build societies where we can enjoy ourselves together with our people?