Category: Columns

An appeal for sobriety and prudence

he defense for Lisandro Claudio, PhD is an opportunistic reaction to a petition signed by 467 academics, artists and activists. The petition rightly argues that an academic who is engaged in tagging activist organizations as communist fronts is doing something unbecoming. It correctly articulates the global and local contexts in which such disposition is lamentable at the very least.

How I survived anti-Left academics and became an activist

I was prepared to be disappointed with NatDem politics but instead, I became more immersed in their mass campaigns. I was overwhelmed with several political realizations: Here was a movement making democracy work through collective leadership, here was a political force whose strength is linked to the empowerment of its members in the grassroots, here was history claiming the present to build a new future.

Persistent disasters

It is not by accident or a matter of racial superiority that rich countries have the technologies for disaster preparedness and management such as early warning signs, sturdy infrastructures. The resources at their disposal are proof of unequal development of nations as a direct result of imperialist plunder of resources and exploitation of cheap labor in the Global South by the Global North’s oligarchy. Imperialist plunder accounts for the stark differences in welfare, well-being and chances of survival people in this political-economic and spatial divide under global capitalism.

How redbaiting triggers the killing of activists in the Philippines

No one has stopped them from lampooning the CPP in local and international platforms. But they turned their valid right to criticize into a cheap redbaiting ploy to attack activists. It is therefore not a surprise to learn that the state has used their work to develop a propaganda material and even legal evidence to persecute militant activists while praising the politics of the moderates.