THE DIALECTICS OF NOSTALGIA

By Mauro Gia Samonte

It needed my lament on the impunity of Henry Sy in cutting pines in his expansion of SM in Baguio City to shake me into realizing that even such abstracts as emotions and sentimentalism are inescapably subject to the workings of dialectics.

            Henry Sy’s apologist Benigno’s pining for the days of direct American  occupation of the country to which he had credited the development of Baguio into the summer capital of the Philippines smacks of what I derided as imperialist nostalgia. In a period when US imperialism is headed for total collapse, harking back on the glory of American rule in the country truly amounts to nothing but gentle whispers of what-might-have-beens.

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            But raging at Benigno’s slight of the Filipino people whom he blames for having, in his words, actually created the monster that is Henry Sy, I found myself indulging in my own sentimentalizing.

            Those were the days when as a not-too-young youth past his mid-twenties, I rode the romance of the First Quarter Storm, joining teach-ins, discussion groups, rallies and demonstrations, glorying in the Philippine revolution together with KM, SDK, MAKIBAKA and every other group in the Movement for a Democratic Philippines, getting completely seized with the vivifying elan of “serving the people”, until finally resolving to embrace the revolutionary option in transforming Philippine society, I took the frontline in organizing the Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero (KAMAO) sa Makabayang Publishing Corporation, the first-ever labor union successfully organized in the Amado Araneta empire. If there were other options to take, those were not for me to find out  at the time. The imperatives of the relations of production in Marxist dogma kept me toeing the line of class struggle: strike was the only way to resolve the conflict between the Makabayan management and workers. And strike the union did summer of 1971.

            We measured up one-to-one with the 300-strong Araneta Center security guards, beefed up even by elements from the Quezon City Police – a lopsided confrontation, going by the ratios of positional warfare.

            Still we dared fight. And fought well. Against sticks of guards and policemen, we struck back with placards and dos-por-dos. Against the onrush of strike-breaking company trucks, we set up barricades of our bare bodies. Against the threat of guns, we countered with actual shots from our sumpaks. We had the slums folks in the vicinity shielding us from pursuing security guards each time we fired shots.

            For at least a week, we succeeded in preventing the passage of vehicles in the Araneta Center, causing sympathizing youth activists to proclaim it the Araneta Commune. And we did think we knew how the Communards of Paris felt when they made their own communizing of the city in 1871.

            But precisely because we were more ferocious than the Araneta Center defenders, we were slapped an injunction for violence by the court, which did the whole trick of breaking the strike. Against the court order, we could only sit by watching helplessly, while men and machine went past the company gates unperturbed.

            Oh, yes, those were the days my friend, we’d thought would never end, but they did end, just a few days before two grenades blasted the Liberal Party rally in August 1971.

            The irreconcilability of class struggle found itself subsumed to the conciliation by the National Labor Relations Commission which after two years or so ruled that Makabayan Publishing Corporation was guilty of unfair labor practice, for which the union deserved indemnities.

            Too bad that the ruling could no longer be served when it came out. The Makabayan Publishing Corporation had been dissolved; nobody, nothing to accept it.

            On the site where once the company stood had risen the first-ever mall that signaled the beginnings of a giant chain of malls called SM City.

            But SM City had not risen on the ashes of the legally failed KAMAO strike. Rather it rose on the enlightenment that workers cannot achieve their liberation within the confines of factory walls. They have to crash those walls and join up with those struggling to set up a truly just and humane society.

            So SM apologists, be not proud of your imperialist nostalgia. Nostalgia is not your exclusive domain. I, too, and others like me, can pine for our own goodie ole days. And it is a pining that is fire. It consumes the soul. Makes the spirit surge and ache for fights unwon to be fought again.

            That’s revolutionary nostalgia, I had embodied it in a song.

            Listen.

REACH FOR THE APEX OF PROLETARIAN SERVICE

Reach for the apex of great proletarian service
Rise up in arms and ever without fear struggle
Hold high the rights and liberties of oppressed classes
Capitalists hold down in deep graves of injustice
There’s nothing whatsoever that the people have got
If they’ve got neither you nor me
A dedicated, faithful, steeped in struggle, fighting, serving
New People’s Army

Imperialism, bring it down
Feudalism, bring it down
Bureaucrat capitalism and all that impede socialism
Bring them down!

My life gladly I’d sacrifice
On altar of the people’s war
If victory indeed is prize
Then death to me is Heaven’s wise

Reach for the optimum of proletarian service
Hold on to arms and with resolve swear to defend
The gains the people won in so dear their struggle
Let no exploiters by their greed take ‘way again
The aim of social growth and final class liberation
Pushed on and on until
Reached is the peak of socialism
Communism
Our most cherished dream

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