People s Power in the Philippines

People's Power in the Philippines Anjan Ghosh BOTH GPD (EPW, February 22 and March 1) and Subrata Sen (Letter to Editor, EPW, April 12) have vainly tried to square events in the Philippines to an orthodox Marxist theory of revolution and hence misconstrue its significance. History on the other hand has a strange irreverence for orthodoxies and every revolutionary situation calls for a creative adaptation of theory to political practice, inflexibilities of theory impoverishes and immobilises mass action in the hour of crisis leading to the tailing of history, not I he making of it. The political revolution which followed in the wake of the February 7 elections in Philippines exemplifies a situation of how people make history. That is why GPD's dismissive remarks about 'people's power' (EPW, March 1) are so utterly misplaced, as is Sen's invocation of "an authentic Leninist vanguard party" (EPW, April 12). in their comments on events in the Philippines both GPL) and Sen display a disregard for the concrete historical conditions in which people have to act, to uphold their hidebound theories.