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POPULAR SUPPORT FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT CPP-NPA: EXPERIENCES IN A HACIENDA IN NEGROS OCCIDENTAL, 1978-1995 Rosanne Rutten INTRODUCTION Why did peasants and rural workers support the revolutionary movement CPPNPA (Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army, henceforth called NPA)? The question is hardly trivial: without the support of more than a million people in Philippine villages and towns who supplied manpower, food, cash, and intelligence, the NPA would never have developed by the mid-1980s into a powerful challenger to the state. This sizable popular support for the NPA was one sign of a "revolutionary situation" in the Philippines, a situation that, as Tilly says, is characterized by the appearance of contenders with exclusive claims to state power, the "commitment to these claims by a significant segment of the citizenry," and the "incapacity or unwillingness of rulers" to suppress these contenders.1 Here I deal with the second aspect, that of popular commitment, and seek to explain the rise (and decline) of support for the NPA among hacienda-worker families in Negros Occidental, one of the provinces where the NPA gained considerable influence and support.2 1 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), p. 10. 2 Research was financed through a grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. While in the Philippines in January-November 1992,1was affiliated with the Institute of Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University. An earlier version of this paper was written while I was a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Studies of Social Change (CSSC), New School for Social Research, New York, in 1993-94. I wish to thank Charles Tilly and the members of his Proseminar on Political Mobilization and Conflict at the CSSC for their comments and for the opportunity to develop my argument in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere. Thanks are also due to Patricio Abinales, Rod Aya, Ben Kerkvliet, Vina Lanzona, Kim Scipes, John Wiersma, and Frank de Zwart for critical comments and suggestions. Support for the Revolutionary Movement CPP-NPA III A common view has it that Philippine rural poor were pushed into the arms of the NPA because they were "desperate and outraged"3 at increasing poverty, repression, and the lack of legal means to seek redress of grievances; and that their outrage was channeled by the NPA. Porter, for instance, cites "disaffection from the government arising from a number of sources: the inequalities of the existing landowning system, the process of landgrabbing by wealthy and politically influential figures, the insensitivity of the Marcos regime to the interests of poor farmers, the arbitrary and repressive local political and administrative structure, and the abuses of the military."4 Such explanations list "invidious conditions of state and society" that supposedly cause people to join or support a revolutionary movement, but give little evidence that such aggregate conditions actually motivate or constrain them to do so.5 To find out what leads people to support the NPA,we need to focus on the level at which people interact, trace the microprocesses that produce this support, and start by analyzing the sequence of key interactions in which people actually decide to contribute to the NPA. Simply stated, most contributions to the NPA are solicited and provided in interactions between mobilizers and villagers. Taking these interactions as a starting point, we can then consider whether and how specific "invidious conditions" motivate people to provide these concrete contributions, what other considerations are at work, and how people's motives for support may change over time. At this level of personal interaction we can also explore how people's involvement in social networks of community, family, peers, and activists, and their connections to larger social environments, influence their mobilization and commitment. Two considerations inform this perspective. First, we should avoid looking around for "big" causes (forinstance, a wide gap between rich and poor, or a deep socioeconomic crisis) to explain a "big" change (massive support for a revolutionary movement) but consider, instead, the accumulationof microprocesses out of which a specific large change is built.6 Second, we need to acknowledge that revolutionary activists may have considerable influence on why, how, and when villagers support a revolutionary movement. Like most party-led and rural-based revolutionary movements this century, the NPA gains rural support through the mobilizing work of activists, who combine ideological work, organization, and coercion in an effort to reshape communities into support bases for the NPA. The initiatives come primarily from mobilizers...

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