The Revolution As Dinner Party: The Strengths and Limitations of "Legalizing" Peoples Resistance

According to rural peoples’ organizations, the Philippines has been facing an agricultural crisis exacerbated by the state’s failure to implement agrarian reform and effectively industrialize its agriculture so that the country can attain food security. Landlessness, rural poverty, and agricultural underdevelopment are thus primary conditions defining the common Filipino peasant. In the Philippines, there is no active land reform program since the Aquino administration’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) [1980s], which was extended but finally expired in 2014. The failures and toothlessness of the state’s land reform program have been cited by progressive farmers organizations as the main impetus for today’s militant land struggle. Historians and social scientists from the 1960s onwards have made similar observations. This militant land struggle today has its many expressions including parliamentary movements, mass movements, collective land cultivation campaigns (takeovers), and armed rural resistance. The state’s response to this “unrest” tends to summarily lump all expressions of land struggle waged by the peasantry into “terrorism.” Indeed, the state has responded with the violence of counterinsurgency instead of meaningful agrarian reform. With this development, human rights organizations along with activist formations have initiated active and visible support through campaigns and “proto-legal” maneuvers, in an attempt to present clear arguments about the justness of peasant resistance. In this paper, I hope to apply Gramsci’s conceptualization of civil society in analyzing the developments in the Philippines’ recent history of land struggle in the proto-legal field and its strengths and limitations in shaping public opinion, informing bourgeois policy development, and influencing the possibility of pursuing the resumption of peace talks between the Philippine state and the National Democratic Front (the armed resistance's political representation).