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Theories of Peasant Revolution: A Critique and Contribution from the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Gary Hawes
Gary Hawes
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

This article examines three models—moral economy, rational choice, and class structure—that have been applied to rebellions and revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia. All three are found lacking in various ways and unable to provide convincing explanations for the growth and continuing strength of the contemporary revolutionary movement in the Philippines. The Aquino government is challenged by a movement that has a mass base of roughly ten million and fields a fighting force of twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand men and women. It is active in virtually every province and city of the nation. Based on the present case study, suggestions are made both for ways in which the insights of extant theories can be synthesized and ways in which these theories must be revised if they are to be made more generally applicable to today's revolutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , January 1990 , pp. 261 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1990

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References

1 Scott, James, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Popkin, Samuel, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Paige, Jeffery, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Migdal, Joel S., Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures Toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Race, Jeffrey, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Scott (fn. 1), 194. McClintock's study of the Sendero Luminoso (fn. 3) is an example of a test of Scott's theory of peasant rebellion when applied to a contemporary revolution.

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25 Scott (fn. 1), 195.

26 This argument is based in large part on the detailed empirical evidence presented in papers from a conference on “Processes of Agrarian Change in Southeast Asia,” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, December 14–20,1983; published as Hart, Gillian et al. , eds., Agrarian Transformations: Local Processes and the State in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

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29 In a personal interview in July 1988, Jaime Tadeo, Chairman of the K.MP (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, or Philippine Peasant Alliance) stated that the Alliance's members had occupied a total of nearly 70,000 hectares through land invasions, and that nearly 50,000 hectares had been made productive.

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31 Quoted in Edward P. Reed, “Agrarian Reform and Rural Reconstruction: A Seminar Report” (Silang, Cavite, Philippines: International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 1980), 20.

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33 Such statements were repeatedly made by Philippine government officials in interviews I conducted during 1980 in the course of research on plantation agriculture.

34 Central Bank of the Philippines, Annual Report, Statistical Bulletin, 1979 (Table V.10) and 1984 (Table 6.10).

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39 A barrio is the nation's smallest administrative unit. It is roughly equivalent to a village, but ranges in form from a cluster of rural households surrounded by agricultural land to a small political unit in a larger urban area.

The figures are from an Armed Forces of the Philippines document which was classified secret, but was widely distributed in Manila by mid-1987. The estimates are likely to be on the low side. Every city and town in the country was listed, along with the corresponding barrios believed to be “influenced, infiltrated, or threatened.” When asked to compare the government's list with the actual situation in one province, activists there pronounced the list to be the result of extremely poor intelligence.

40 Dante, “Rethinking Philippine Society and Revolution,” Ang Katipunan, January-February, 1988, p. 7 (reprinted from Diliman Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, 1987).

41 For example, participants at a four-day leadership training course for the leaders of village youth organizations in one of the southern Luzon provinces were all out-of-school youths who were learning organizational and public-speaking skills. The teachers were NDF cadres, one a high school graduate from a middle peasant family, the other a college graduate who grew up in the city and whose family was a member of the bourgeoisie.

42 What follows is based on in-depth interviews I conducted with farmers and NDF cadres during March 1987. The Bikol region is composed of the provinces of Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes, all in the southernmost portion of Luzon Island.

43 Interviews conducted in the province of Negros Occidental during September 1980, and followed up in 1987.

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50 This statement may appear to be an unsubstantiated, antimilitary allegation; yet credible military and police connections have been established by witnesses or by the National Bureau of Investigation in recent cases, such as the assassination of labor leader and chairman of the Partido ng Bayan, Rolando Olalia; the two ambushes of the president of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Nemesio Prudente; and the assassination of the human rights lawyer from Cebu City, Alfonso Surigao.

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