A New Leftist Agenda

JoeAm

April 2

Analysis and opinion.

By JoeAm

By my definition, a leftist is a liberal with a pro-worker agenda. A liberal is a person who tilts in favor of government helping citizens to realize their potential rather than leaving this to the haphazard and self-dealing private sector.

In the Philippines, leftists are 1950s holdovers, unable to adapt to changing Philippine conditions. They see US imperialism as a boogie man rather than point to the real bad guys, China, communism, socialism, and corruption. They work in opposition to the democratic system, without influence, rather than within it to better shape national policies.

My New Leftist Agenda postulates that they should stop wasting their efforts and nationalistic capital by marching and slogan spouting. They should recast both their goals and methods.

Here are a few policy decisions that would do this:

Stop fighting democracy and capitalism and work within these government and economic models to apply their strengths: fairness and wealth-generation.
Separate from the New Peoples Army (NPA) and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Fighting the system is both bloody and counter-productive. Become legitimate. And peaceful. But powerful.
Separate from China, the thief in Philippine seas. Communism is not a realistic model of government and America's assorted global engagements in warfare are not a reasonable basis for coddling up to China. China is not an ally and cannot be under their ambitions to grab Philippine territory.
Recognize that socialism is a failed and inefficient system of wealth distribution. It creates totalitarian leaders and a listless labor force. Administer capitalism better. Acknowledge that cooperatives are unable to feed and operate a large modern nation.
Recruit youth and employees as the voter base that will build within-government strength and the ability to recast government programs to favor workers.
Use two essential metrics to measure success: number of employed adults and Gross National Income (GNI) per worker. The first quantifies the worker base, the second reports how well the nation's generated wealth gets distributed to the base of workers. Other metrics can shed light on the process, but those two are the policy drivers.
Move away from cash grants as a populist way to paste over failed efforts to generate well-paying jobs and replace them with . . . yes, well-paying jobs.

I am struck by the huge wealth gap in the Philippines. A large and growing segment of the population works on a Western economic plateau where cars cost 3 million pesos and two bedroom condominiums cost 20 million pesos. Meanwhile provincial workers, farm workers, fisherfolk, and transportation workers struggle to eat and get their kids schooled. And OFWs are a main export.

Corruption, entitlement, and impunity characterize the way that Western economic plateau is supported by transferring money from the poor to the rich. Completely backward. These essential barriers to efficiency and fairness have to be recast as the nation-destroying forces that they are. Unpatriotic, corrupt self-dealers need to have their wealth taken back by the nation as they are sent off to jail.

The Philippines is a big-boy nation. It has a strong economic base built on consumer services, transportation, and fishing and farming. But the manufacturing core is weak. Manufacturing is a job multiplier, spawning equipment producers, packaging, shipment, wholesale, and retail components. So building more manufacturing capacity is a no-brainer policy decision.

These themes illustrate that the leftist agenda ought not be an extremist agenda, but a sensible agenda. Pursued aggressively within the existing democratic and capitalist models. There is really nothing to fight other than those holding the Philippines back. There is everything to build.

If we consider the two metrics of employed adults and GNI per worker, and consider that the leftist agenda OUGHT to be to drive both indexes upward, then we can see that capitalism and the profits generated are a FRIEND of leftists. The enemy is bad allotment of that produced wealth. This can be a subject for future debate: how to better distribute wealth without undermining the incentives that generate that wealth.

The new New Leftist Agenda outlined here brings the pro-worker effort out of the contrarian, inefficient, and nonsensical slogan-spouting extremist wasteland and moves it into the mainstream where it can build a better and richer Philippines for working Filipinos. It takes a simple change in mindset to do this.

And a lot of determined work.

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Link to Philippine Statistics Authority

Link to Table A, Key Employment Indicators

Cover Photo from Philstar article about Filipinos building military ships