Let me express my solidarity with all the human rights organizations and advocates that have agreed to form KARAPATAN. I am happy as you are that you are holding the first national congress with the theme, “Develop our strength, consolidate our ranks, struggle for human rights towards the liberation of the entire people.”
The establishment of KARAPATAN is a highly significant event. It comes to further firm up the resolve of the human rights organizations and advocates to persevere in the struggle for national liberation and democracy and therefore to uphold, defend and promote human rights in opposition to foreign monopoly capitalism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism as well as their special agents who use the slogan of human rights to attack the national democratic movement.
So long as the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system persists, the toiling masses of workers and peasants and the middle social strata are exploited and oppressed. Their human rights—civil and political as well as economic, social and cultural—are unceasingly violated by the imperialists and the exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords.
There can be an effective advocacy and militant defense of human rights only by knowing who are the violators of human rights and who are the victims and by recognizing that the people themselves can fight for their human rights through the national democratic movement.
It is necessary to repudiate the handful of elements who pretend to be for human rights but who pose as neutral and are in fact hostile to the national democratic movement. They render a special service to the human rights violators and are therefore shunned by the victims.
A Comprehensive View of Human Rights
Let me try to present the comprehensive position of the national-democratic movement on the issue of human rights in terms of substantive scope and the levels of social reality. In the process, let me contrast this position with that of the imperialists and the local reactionaries.
The substantive scope of human rights covers not only civil and political rights but also the economic, social and cultural rights of the Filipino people. The people assert and fight for the full scope of human rights in their struggle for national and social liberation.
The national-democratic revolution is waged to overthrow the big comprador-landlord state, to liberate the people from oppression and exploitation and to establish the people’s democratic state. The constitution of this state carries provisions against imperialism and the local exploiting classes in order to lay the ground for the full realization of the people’s human rights in every sphere of social life.
To counter the revolution, the imperialists and the exploiting classes openly and viciously use the coercive apparatuses of the state to suppress the revolutionary forces and the people. The outcry rises against state terrorism. The main or sole tendency is to invoke the civil and political rights of the victims, as if these were the only human rights under attack.
There is oppression because it is a prerequisite and concomittant to exploitation. The imperialists and the local reactionaries violate the civil and political rights in order to preserve the system of exploitation. They want the daily violence of exploitation to persist under their state power. This exploitation extends to the violation of economic, social and cultural rights.
While playing a revolutionary role in the past, the bourgeoisie asserted the sovereignty of the people against the so-called divine right of the absolute monarchy and defined the relationship of the state and the citizenry. In the best of bourgeois democratic constitutions, the bill of rights lists the fundamental rights and freedoms of the citizenry.
But after seizing political power and making capitalism the dominant socioeconomic system in a number of countries, the big bourgeoisie has systematically misrepresented the bourgeois state as supraclass in order to conceal its oppressive class character and used the abstraction of individual rights in bourgeois constitutions in order to rationalize the privilege of certain individuals to exploit many other individuals.
The exploiters are a class that in fact controls the bourgeois state. It is simply untrue that all individuals in an exploitative society have equal rights, equal opportunities and equal protection of the law and that their only concern is either to harmonize their relations with the supraclass state or overthrow it when it becomes tyrannical and oppressive.
The provisions on human rights of the United Nations Charter (1945) and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) are in line with the traditional bourgeois concept of human rights mainly and essentially as civil and political rights. What is new about these UN instruments is the attempt to set an international standard on human rights and to suggest that the international law on human rights override domestic law.
However, there are enough provisions in these UN instruments to allow the contracting states under the principle of state sovereignty to handle all human rights cases within their national borders individually and exclusively and to restrict or even violate human rights by invoking national security, public order and the like. The imperialist states and their client-states in far greater number than revolutionary states have used the principle of state sovereignty to assert exclusive jurisdiction over human rights cases within their national borders.
With utter callousness, the United States and other capitalist powers have described the most brutal pro-imperialist regimes as democratic and belonging to the free world and have used the slogan of human rights to pursue anticommunist propaganda against anti-imperialist states or dignify pressures on other states to submit to the policies of foreign monopoly capitalism.
The United States has been the worst of human rights violators on an international scale since 1945. It is the only imperialist power that has used nuclear weapons to wipe out civilian populations in a few seconds. It has launched wars of aggression to kill millions of people as in Korea and Indochina and nearly 200,000 people in Iraq within one month. It has instigated and supported reactionary regimes to engage in the most barbaric acts, including massacres, torture, bombardments on civilian communities, and forced mass evacuation.
We should not forget the massacre of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 and so many other massacres perpetrated in Asia, Africa and Latin America by the imperialists and their reactionary agents. The Marcos regime dared to impose a fascist dictatorship on the Filipino people in 1972 only because the United States approved and supported it. The repression was done in the name of anticommunism and was intended to thwart the growing national democratic movement.
In Philippine history, the worst human rights violations have been committed by foreign oppressors. Spanish colonialism oppressed and exploited the Filipino people for more than three centuries. In frustrating and defeating the Philippine Republic from 1899 onward, the United States unleashed such barbarities as massacre, torture, food blockade, forced relocation, arson and artillery fire on millions of people and killed off ten percent of the population. During World War II, Japan and the United States in their interimperialist contest took turns in inflicting atrocities on the Filipino people.
As a result of the demand of the underdeveloped countries, the UN General Assembly passed not only the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights but also the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. The self-determination of the people is affirmed and so is the sovereign power of the contracting states, of whatever character, to be separately and solely responsible for the observance of human rights within their national jurisdiction.
In waging national democratic revolution, the people uphold the principle of their sovereignty and their human rights as individuals, in association, in patriotic and progressive classes and strata, and as a national community. They struggle to liberate themselves from foreign and domestic oppressors and exploiters in order to assert, defend and advance their human rights and establish the people’s democratic state under which they can truly enjoy the constitutional guarantees for their human rights.
To harmonize the relations of the state and the citizenry in the observance of human rights is necessary, when that state is truly an instrument of the citizenry who are liberated from imperialism and the exploiting classes and really provides the guarantees that no less itself or any other entity in society can violate the human rights of any citizen with impunity.
The current reactionary state in the Philippines is an instrument of oppression and exploitation, violating the guarantees of civil and political rights in the bill of rights of its own constitution as well as those in the UN instruments on human rights. In the Philippines today, there are five levels of social reality to take into account in dealing with the issue of human rights. The best way to grasp these levels is to grasp them as levels of social contradictions.
These are the contradiction between foreign monopoly capitalism and the Filipino people, that between the reactionary classes of big compradors and landlords on the one hand and the people, especially the workers and peasants, on the other hand, that between the state in the service of imperialism and the local exploiting classes on the one hand and the broad masses of the people, that between the few individuals who belong to the exploitative classes and that between the rational regard for human beings as individuals with basic human rights and the inhuman regard for them as a work force for exploitation.
Taking into account the aforesaid levels of social reality in opposition to their obfuscation by the imperialists and local exploiting classes does not mean laying aside or disregarding the human rights pertaining to human beings as differentiated from the beasts and as individuals with inalienable right to life, liberty and the security of person and with fundamental freedoms.
Such acts, as torture, rape, murder, cannibalism and the like are patently inhumane. Even one accused of having committed the most heinous crime is entitled to due process, deemed innocent until proven guilty in court, treated humanely and punished according to the gravity of the crime and in a manner that does not demean the system of justice. The punishment is meant to give justice to the victims and serve notice to all that no one can violate the human rights of another person or the people with impunity.
The revolutionaries do not sweepingly consider all members of the exploiting classes as criminals. Relatively only a few of them have criminal accountability and are subject to criminal prosecution before the people’s court. An entire exploiting class may be deprived of its means to oppress and exploit the people and certain rights of all members of the entire class may be restricted or dissolved. But they are not arbitrarily regarded and treated as criminals nor are they viewed as beasts. They are given the opportunity to remould themselves and to contribute to society what they can under basically human conditions.
The constitution of the people’s democratic state upholds the power of the proletariat and other working people and contains the crucial provisions against the imperialists and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords for the purpose of the all-round social revolution. Such provisions make the constitution radically different from the constitution of the current reactionary state. Consequently, the guarantees for the civil and political rights of the citizenry in the bill of rights come into a context of genuine independence, democracy, social justice and development.
In the Philippines today, there is a bitter contention, in fact a civil war, between the big comprador-landlord state and the people who are engaged in the national democratic revolution and are building the organs of political power. Between the two sides, there is a contention between the constitution of the big comprador-landlord state and the Guide for Establishing the People’s Government which upholds the people’s sovereignty, sets forth the liberation of the people from imperialism and the exploiting classes and guarantees the human rights of the people in every aspect of social life.
Experience in the Advocacy for Human Rights
In the advocacy for human rights, it is necessary to muster the forces that are engaged in the struggle for national liberation and democracy. These are the working class as the leading force, the basic alliance of the working class and peasantry as the main force, the aforementioned classes and the urban petty bourgeoisie as the basic progressive forces and all positive forces which include the national bourgeoisie.
The alliance of the patriotic and progressive forces can also take advantage of the contradictions among the reactionaries and avail of the less reactionary sections of the exploiting classes as temporary and unreliable allies directly or indirectly against the enemy (the most reactionary faction, which is most subservient to the imperialists). The point is to develop the broadest possible array of forces in order to isolate and destroy the power of the enemy that is unleashing the worst human rights violations on the people.
In the alliance for human rights along the national democratic line, the patriotic and progressive forces and elements involved may be motivated by various lines of thought and belief. The proletarian revolutionaries, the progressive liberals, religious believers and other people can find common ground in the national democratic movement and agree to defend and fight for human rights against the imperialist and the local exploiting classes. In this regard, there has been a rich experience since the early ’70s when upon the instigation of the United States the Marcos regime set out to impose the open rule of terror on the people.
There are the proletarian revolutionaries who have a clear class analysis of Philippine society, take the vantage point of the working class, and consider the national democratic and socialist stages of the Philippine revolution as stages in the advance of the the struggle for human rights. There are the bourgeois liberals who retain the revolutionary or progressive aspect of their political philosophy, share with the proletarian revolutionaries adherence to the people’s sovereignty and strive to put the bourgeois-democratic bill of rights and the current bourgeois international canon of human rights in the service of the national democratic movement. There are the religious believers who find their faith as being in consonance with the struggle for national and social liberation because this upholds the dignity and rights of human beings.
A broad alliance called the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties was formed in 1971 when the US-Marcos regime proclaimed the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and started to suppress the legal forces of the national democratic movement and all other opposition. The National Democratic Front was established in 1973 in order to preserve, consolidate and expand the forces of the national democratic movement underground after the US-Marcos regime proclaimed martial rule in 1972 and attempted to destroy completely all types of opposition.
Within the NDF, the Christians for National Liberation (CNL) took upon itself the task of creating a formation to defend human rights, seek the support of the church people and counter the reactionary support of the institutional church for the fascist dictatorship. The Task Force Detainees came into being in 1974, under the auspices of the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines.
Through all the years of the fascist dictatorial regime of the US-Marcos ruling clique, the forces of the national democratic movement struggled to uphold and defend human rights and suffered the main brunt of human rights violations. They ceaselessly offered alliance and cooperated directly and indirectly with all other antifascist forces, including the anti- Marcos sections of the exploiting classes. They excelled in waging armed revolution as well as in developing a broad united front and utilizing legal tactics against the fascist dictatorship.
From the late ’70s onward, funds in substantial amounts came from bourgeois and religious funding agencies based in Western Europe to support legal work in human rights. This work was helpful in the reemergence of the legal democratic movement against the regime. But with the foreign funds also came subtle anticommunist ideas and the floating notion that human rights work was merely a matter of civil and political rights and that democracy was merely a matter of restoring the pre-1972 bourgeois democratic institutions and processes.
Towards the middle of the ’80s, bureaucratism became conspicuous among the salaried and office-bound personnel in the human rights organizations and other foreign-funded NGOs. There developed a tendency to neglect painstaking mass work and to depend on funds from outside the mass movement in order to undertake sweeping propaganda and mass protest actions without solid organizing. The wave of mass discontent, arising from the acute economic and political crisis of the regime and from the Aquino assassination, was so strong in the 1983-86 period that mass protest actions could be undertaken even with limited work in political education and mass organizing.
From 1980 onward, the subjectivist notion had gained ground within the central leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines that the US-Marcos regime had so industrialized and urbanized the Philippines to the extent that it was no longer semifeudal. This erroneous notion became the common launching base for both “Left” and Right opportunism, both of which overrated the importance of urban work and depreciated the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside in protracted people’s war.
Both the Left opportunist lines of “strategic counteroffensive” (centrally generated) and the “Red Area-White Area” (whipped up in Mindanao) undermined and inflicted severe damage to the revolutionary movement in the entire ’80s. By pushing urban insurrectionism and premature regularization of the people’s army and drawing cadres away from mass work, these adventurist lines undermined the revolutionary advances achieved by the revolutionary cadres and fighters who carried out extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of widening and deepening mass base.
While “Left” opportunism was riding high in the revolutionary movement, Right opportunism lurked behind, proposing the “New Katipunan” as a device for liquidating the working class leadership in the revolution under the pretext of thereby attracting more mass support. The Right opportunists used foreign funds to favor the creation of “NGO” offices, the proliferation of alliances and campaign centers addressing the spontaneous masses. Like the “Left” opportunists, they had disdain for painstaking mass work and solid organizing.
The “Left” opportunists passed off modern revisionism as Marxism-Leninism and Soviet monopoly bureaucrat capitalism as socialism for the avowed purpose of courting the Soviet and pro-Soviet parties and governments for military and financial assistance. A revisionist concept of armed struggle, dependent on foreign assistance and impugning the principle of self-reliance, took hold among the putschists. The obfuscation of the longrunning antirevisionist position of the CPP, the silence on Dengist revisionism and the endorsement of Brezhnevite revisionism would ultimately lead to the acceptance of Gorbachovism and anticommunism among the opportunists in the latter part of the ’80s.
From the United States, some Filipino assets of US imperialism pushed the seemingly Leftist line of supporting the Philippine armed struggle but dropping the strategic line of protracted people’s war and seeking the support of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, they whipped up the blatantly Rightist line that the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship would spell democratization and that elite democracy could be transformed through reforms within the system by popular democracy. The exponents of “popular democracy” (bourgeois populism) emerged as an ideological parasite within the CPP as early as 1984 and subsequently tried to use the foreign-funded “NGOs and POs” against the national democratic movement.
After the complete frustration of their line of urban insurrectionism and militarism as early as 1984, the “Left” opportunists in Mindanao obscured their responsibility for their disastrous line and blamed “deep penetration agents” for their failure and launched the bloody witchhunt Kampanyang Ahos from 1985 to 1986. Then they swung towards the Right opportunist line by claiming that the strategic line of protracted people’s war was to blame for the 1986 boycott error, exaggerating this major tactical error as the biggest error in the entire history of the revolutionary movement and unabashedly calling for bourgeois reformism as the necessary prerequisite to their failed insurrectionism.
They conjoined with the long-standing Right opportunists and with the “Left” opportunists in other regions as well as with the pseudo-Left anticommunist groups in assailing the CPP as having isolated itself not only because of the boycott error but mainly because of the line of the national democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. As early as 1985, it was evident that the agents of US imperialism were instigating and manipulating the opportunists and pseudo-Left groups to discredit, undermine and derail the national-democratic movement.
Despite the disaster caused by the wrong line in Mindanao from 1984-1986, various forms of “Left” opportunism continued to run, cause damage and result sometimes in hysterical anti- informer campaigns in areas other than Mindanao. The Right opportunists used to their advantage the serious damage done by “Left” opportunism. They misrepresented the errors and damage made by the “Left” opportunists as those of Marxism- Leninism.
In 1989, the Right opportunists started to become arrogant and even the worst of the “Left” opportunists started to swing to the position of the Right opportunists. They began to flaunt the books of Gorbachov and Roy Medvedev as their guide and to spread these. They used the anticommunist line in the cold war that the proletarian revolutionary party and the national democratic revolution were outdated and hopeless because of “Stalinism” which they adopted as their favorite cussword.
They collaborated with the pseudo-Left anticommunist groups and the thinly disguised agents of imperialism and local reaction in trying to spread revisionism and liquidationism within the CPP. The urban-basing of the central organs of the CPP and even those of the NPA was also taking a toll in terms of ideological confusion and effective enemy operations. Cynicism, gangsterism and NGO corruption became visible problems.
The Rightist current ran strong in urban-based progressive organizations and offices. Political degeneration set in among certain elements and sections of the human rights organizations. They succumbed to the pressures of Western funding agencies that the revolutionary forces be depicted as equally responsible for human rights violations as the reactionary armed forces. However, they covered up the Kampanyang Ahos and other bloody witchhunts instigated by the failed putschists in their hysteria and attempt to blame deep penetration agents for the disastrous results of their wrong line.
They harped on the line that democratization and the decline of human rights violations were occurring under the reactionary regime, despite the escalation of the total war policy, which involved the killing of prominent progressive political leaders like Rolando Olalia and Lean Alejandro, labor leaders, human rights lawyers, youth activists, personnel of Partido ng Bayan and others in urban areas from 1986 to 1988 and the wider scale of gross human rights violations under Lambat Bitag I, II and III and other military campaigns of suppression in the countryside from 1986 to the present. Bureaucratism and corruption of a few through multiple compensation in several foreign-funded human rights organizations became more scandalous from year to year.
In 1991, the incorrigible opportunists were already outspokenly anti-Marxist, anticommunist and counterrevolutionary, were spreading pessimism and defeatism among people they came in contact with and were maneuvering to decapitate and disintegrate the CPP and the entire revolutionary movement of the people. They pointed to the fall of the anti-Stalin revisionist regimes as the fall of socialism and Stalinism and as the proof of the marginalization and futility of the anti-imperialist and class struggle for socialism.
Since 1988, the genuine proletarian revolutionaries have been cognizant of the need for a rectification campaign. The most tactful efforts were undertaken in this regard but proved to be ineffective in stemming the tide. It would only be in 1991 that the proletarian revolutionaries decided to launch the Second Great Rectification Movement with resolve and vigor, unprecedented since the First Great Rectification Movement that had led to the reestablishment of the CPP in 1968.
The counterrevolutionary opportunists who are now specialists of the reactionary regime in using the phraseology of the pseudo-Left and neocolonialism to attack the national democratic movement have a handful of cohorts who pretend to be still in the legal work for the protection of human rights. These are the shameless elements in PAHRA who are headed by Ramon Casiple and who are characterized by the following:
- They vociferously take an anticommunist line and a hostile position towards the forces of the national democratic movement.
- They adopt the “universality” (in fact the narrow mentality and interests of the big bourgeoisie) to attack the comprehensive position of the national democratic movement on human rights.
- They misrepresent themselves as “neutral” between the violators of human rights and the victims.
- They condone the Kampanyang Ahos and other barbaric acts and pass off as advocates of human rights the torturers and murderers who were responsible for these.
- They harp on the democratization of the Philippine ruling system and on the decline of human rights violations.
- They are office-bound, engage in bureaucratism and put themselves against the human rights workers in the field.
- They are corrupted by the funds which they get from foreign funding agencies through multiple compensation, top- heavy administrative spending and padding of accounts.
They are programmed to self-destruct because they cannot long pretend to be advocates of human rights while they attack the national democratic movement and use foreign funds to run their bureaucratic operations and pursue the anticommunist line of foreign funding agencies. They can try to sow intrigues among some victims of human rights violations up to a certain point in time in the past. But certainly they have cut themselves off from the new waves of victims of the counterrevolutionary state.
Further Strengthening Advocacy for Human Rights
The formation of KARAPATAN is the brilliant result of the rectification in the various human rights organizations and basic mass organizations. KARAPATAN repudiates and replaces PAHRA because the latter has fallen into the hands of a small clique of conspirators who have betrayed the advocacy of human rights and who are opposed to the line and forces of the national democratic movement.
Being the genuine alliance for the advocacy of human rights, KARAPATAN is certain to further strengthen itself by fighting for the full range of human rights (civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights) along the national democratic line and by engaging the participation and support of the broad masses of the people. KARAPATAN can only be as strong as it relies on its component organizations and the mass movement. Its representations and issuances can only be as forceful as it can arouse, organize and mobilize the people on human rights issues.
KARAPATAN is carrying a great amount of work in seeking justice for the victims of human rights violations. The US- Ramos regime knows no other way to deal with the crisis but to unleash gross human rights violations on a wide scale. There is more work ahead as the number of victims increase. The socioeconomic and political crisis is ever worsening and oppression and exploitation is ever intensifying.
The economic bankruptcy of the reactionary state is clearly manifested by the rapid sale of state assets, the mounting foreign and local public debt, the huge trade deficit, overdependence on speculative foreign capital, the rising level of taxation, the runaway inflation in basic commodities and so on. The imperialists are grabbing fast the superprofits and debt service and so are the big compradors their own profits, the landlords their rent and the high bureaucrats their payoffs.
The agrarian and semifeudal character of the Philippine economy continues to aggravate and deepen. There is massive unemployment in both urban and rural areas. The exploitation of the working people is intolerable and social unrest is widespread and acute. The promise of NIC-hood for the Philippines by the year 2000 is a flagrant lie. The US-Ramos regime is not at all engaged in any program of industrialization and is opposed to genuine and thoroughgoing land reform.
It is of crucial importance to recognize that the big comprador- landlord state remains oppressive, that the official terrorism made conspicuous by the US-Marcos regime has extended to the succeeding Aquino and Ramos regimes and that reactionary military politicians and politicians backed up by blocs of military officers and private armed groups are increasingly in control of the reactionary government and compete for political power and the accumulation of private wealth. These are manifestations of the further deepening of the crisis of the ruling system.
The periodic elections are merely moments of defining the reactionary factions which are at odds with each other. The internal contradictions among the reactionaries are likely to become more violent than now as the economic and political crisis worsens and the people raise the level of their armed resistance to a new and higher one.
But there are strong indications that Ramos wants to prolong himself in power beyond 1998, by amending the GRP constitution in favor of a parliamentary form of government. He has gained control over both houses of Congress and he is seeking extraordinary powers to reorganize the executive and judicial branches of the reactionary government. He is pushing the Anti-Terrorism Bill for the purpose of terrorizing the people as he tightens his autocratic hold on the reactionary government. His autocratic ambitions are exacerbating the political crisis of the system.
Exactly at the point that the negotiating panels of the GRP and NDFP entered the stage of formal peace negotiations last June 26 in Brussels, the Ramos regime suspended these negotiations. It did so after maliciously violating the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees in the outstanding case of Sotero Llamas. The regime has also recently “suspended” the effectivity of the JASIG.
Even as the Ramos regime appears to be set on terminating the peace negotiations, the Reciprocal Working Committee on Human Rights of the NDFP Negotiating Panel is working on the Draft of the Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. In the making of this draft, the basic rights and interests of the entire Filipino people, especially the toiling masses and the middle social strata, are taken into account along the national democratic line and in accordance with the Guide for Establishing the People’s Democratic Government. The available international instruments and standards on human rights and international humanitarian law are also used for critical study, reference and guidance.
The NDFP is asking all human rights and basic mass organizations to help in drafting the said agreement. Whether there will be further peace negotiations or not, the NDFP draft on human rights and international humanitarian law will set an important standard for the advocacy, active defense and observance of human rights.
The draft should uphold, defend and promote the basic human rights and freedoms of individuals and the patriotic and progressive forces of the people in the context of the people’s sovereignty and liberating the people from imperialism and the exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords in all fields of social life and endeavor. The NDFP is bound by the Guide for Establishing the People’s Democratic Government and its Part III on the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens.
Your human rights work is of crucial importance and is urgently needed. The imperialists and the local reactionaries are frenziedly engaged in human rights violations. The civil war is proceeding because the imperialists and reactionaries have no wish but to destroy the armed revolution one way or another and the people have no choice but to intensify their struggle and win the national democratic revolution in order to achieve a just and lasting peace.
I wish KARAPATAN the utmost success in performing its role of human rights advocacy in these trying times. I am confident that your achievements will be great as you are determined to stand up courageously and militantly for the victims of human rights and as you adhere resolutely to the national democratic line.
The traditional view of the Western bourgeoisie is that natural rights or human rights are essentially civil and political rights. It is insufficient to think of human rights only in these terms, although these are the rights most conspicuously violated by the reactionary state and are therefore the most vigorously invoked by the victims in a draconian situation. There is oppression because it is a prerequisite and concomitant to exploitation.
Even in the absence of armed revolution, when the peace and order of the imperialists and the reactionaries reigns, the daily violence of exploitation is at the core of seemingly unresisted [quiescent] violation of the people’s economic, social and cultural rights persist. The coercive apparatuses of the state continue to operate in the background and are ready to move to the foreground whenever the rulers deem it necessary.
Since the time that they started to define the natural rights of man in order to oppose the divine right of the absolute monarchy, the philosophers and publicists of the bourgeoisie have abstracted the individual and have glossed over the reality of classes and class struggle in defining civil and political rights.
Message to the Alliance for People’s Rights (KARAPATAN) Congress. ↩︎
