Sad day for the Philippine Left, but tomorrow is another day and the future open-ended

A sad, sad day for the Philippine left! Waking up on a gloomy autumn day in this part of the world, then watching and reading news and comments about a scuffle of two progressive groups who could've been allies....

I condemn in the strongest possible terms the attempt to physically harm my teacher, AKBAYAN Representative Walden Bello, by protesting youth/students of Anakbayan. The incident conjures up the horrible images of the Communist Party-led left's past, and I'm afraid to say, its present and future. Arguing verbally and in writing, yes! But physical harm is morally intolerable in a civilized society. Those students, especially the adult who attempted to slap Professor Bello, should be subjected to disciplinary action in their/his school(s) and should spend some time in jail. Knowing the sympathetic Professor Bello, however, those youth/students are most likely forgiven.

And this reminds me of an old essay I wrote in 2004 — "The Nightmare of the Philippine Left: The History of All Dead Generations — uploaded in several sites then in the Philippines and abroad, a nightmare that I would've wanted to forget. I believe that the Philippine left has to realize that at this crisis moment — of both the ruling class/system and the revolutionary movement — the choice is, as the great Rosa Luxemburg has put it: "socialism or barbarism"! 

It is heartbreaking to agree with Marx's analysis on the historical process and more painful to come to a realization that the same applies to the position of the Philippine left movement at this point in time in the ongoing struggle for social change: 

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. 

Tomorrow is another day, indeed. Nevertheless, the future is open-ended.