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. 259 10 T H E P H I L I P P I N E S : S T U D E N T S , A C T I V I S T S , A N D C O M M U N I S T S I N M O V E M E N T P O L I T I C S patricio n. abinales C om pa r a t i v e ly s p e a k i ng , P h i l i p p i n e s t u de n t ac t i vi s m exhibits features comparable to that of Thailand. Like their Thai counterparts, Filipino activists have seen the struggles for student rights and welfare or campus democratization as battles not simply for the benefit of the student masses. They have also regarded these struggles as components of a quest for radical democracy or as part of a project to propel one to national office. This outlook has strong historical foundations : student leaders from all shades of the political spectrum regard themselves as legatees of antistate movements whose roots go back to the 1860s, when young Filipinos demanded reforms from the Spanish colonial regime.1 Student activism—particularly when it made an impact—was something that cannot be segregated from the larger narrative of stateversus -opposition relations. This is not to say that there were no school protests in pursuit of strictly student concerns. There were indeed student strikes over school-specific grievances, but the more historically decisive mass actions were protests over national issues (Santiago 1972).2 This chapter looks at the two conjunctures in postwar Philippine history when student protest reached high numbers and spread across the nation, only to taper off just as it reached its zenith. The first was during the so-called First Quarter Storm (FQS) of the 1970s and the second between 1977 and 1980, when a state-mandated increase in tuition fees led to massive boycotts. In both events, front organizations of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) rallied students toward the party’s national democratic revolution. But once the protests peaked, tensions began to develop within these organizations and between them and 260 . P A T R I C I O N . A B I N A L E S their student masses. The cracks precipitated fierce debates among cadres over what to do with the student movement, and these only hastened the movement’s decline. These surges and their subsequent recession were outcomes of the fraught relationship between the student movement and the CPP . Given the ability of students to easily understand radical ideology when compared to other social groups’ ability, they were easiest to recruit into the party, particularly in a time of profound political crisis. The CPP , however, could never trust students completely.They may have been accomplished pedagogues, talented ideologues, and fiery militants, but students were also petit bourgeois—the class that is remarkable for its opportunism and individualistic ambition and lacking the hardy commitment and toughness that the proletariat and the peasantry are known to possess (Sison 1995). The party’s suspicions led it to demand that students shed their petit-bourgeois provenance and become true revolutionaries by abandoning their main arena of struggle—academe—and be one with the masses as guerrillas or full-time labor organizers. In short, to prove her commitment to communism, a student must cease to be a student. The inspiration for this message was clearly Mao’s invocation to learn from the masses, a theme of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that the fledgling CPP took to heart along with everything else that the great helmsman articulated. And it was not only Filipino students who were exhorted to stop thinking and acting like petit bourgeois; in countries such as South Korea, students also were called upon to become proletarian by leaving the schools and becoming factory workers, to live the life of proletarians in order to understand completely what capitalist /imperialist exploitation meant and why the industrial working class must lead the revolution.3 But to do so also requires either giving lesser priority to the struggles inside the school, or, where campus issues were salient, mobilizing students strategically around them, regardless of whether the issues could be resolved or not.4 Moreover, treating academia as a training ground for the urban underground and/or the guerrilla zones meant ignoring its principal function as...

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