Saturday, July 07, 2007 Carvajal: Modernizing to live, not to kill By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
IT was really only at last Thursday’s ceremonies conferring on Mrs. Armi Lopez Garcia the position of Honorary Consul of the Russian Federation in Cebu that I noticed that Russia has also a red, white and blue flag like the Philippines. But, of course, I told myself, the red flag with the hammer and sickle is gone because Russia is no longer a communist state but a democratic republic also like the Philippines.
Yes, communism has come and gone in Russia and we could learn some very crucial lessons here. As exemplified by Russia, communism had its roots in a feudal countryside and a laissez-faire capitalist industrial sector. In this set-up, dirt poor farmers who get a pittance from their landlords run to the cities in search of better opportunities. Instead they become dirt poor industrial workers, given a pittance by their capitalist employers.
It is not quite as stark as that anymore in the Philippines but the picture remains pretty much the same. The local communists, therefore, are right in calling our setup semi-feudal and semi-colonial, meaning that the local elite simply replaced the colonial landlords and industrialists with the system producing unacceptable levels of poverty in the countryside and in the cities.
Hence, to beat communism we need to do nothing more than take out poverty in the countryside and in urban slums, communism’s breeding grounds. Communism’s demise and capitalism’s resurgence in Russia tell us further that we do not even need to change the system anymore. We just need to mitigate its rigors by beating it at its own game. Capitalism has shown a lot of resiliency, the reason why it is surviving while communism is not.
We live in a global village. Job-hunting has gone global and many Filipinos, in fact, work better-paying jobs abroad. Modern communications technology also allows locals to work for companies abroad without leaving home. We can, therefore, fight poverty over the long term by modernizing education so Filipinos can compete with workers of other countries for better-paying jobs at home and abroad.
To defeat communism, we do not need to modernize our military, our killing skills. What we need is subsidize and modernize some more our educational system, our life-giving skills. More and better classrooms, more and better teachers and more relevant skills are needed in a much more imperative way than better guns, ships and planes for the military.
More and more jobs will be available in a fast growing global village which will be out of reach for the un-educated or ill-educated Filipino of which we have simply too many. Modernizing education has to clearly take the cake. We must modernize to give life and not take it.
