Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

372 SESSION VI
While in Indonesia, peasant groups have scarcely been
able to mobilize even for two days and a lot of political
options and social divergences have not met each other.
However, the Filipino politics of lip service in the form
of advanced legal technicalities, as we may see in the
“comprehensiveness” of the agrarian reform programs,
may be turned upside down by the unsurprisingly very
simple human condition that is the fulfilment of rights
to live in an adequate fashion.
Search for Justice
This observation on structural injustice presumes the present
Filipino and Indonesian societies inherit bondage of
the past entanglement with lopsided social structures
of land tenure systems, at the cost of the precarious
condition of the majority of each country’s population
in rural areas. I opt here for the opinion that one could
only find strong arguments for fighting for justice only
if s/he could see positive opportunities in the midst of
difficult surroundings, like what we see in the experience
of Nagasi peasant struggle.
In the one side, stressing classic stance in social justice
theory on “propertarianism”, the search for justice in both
countries remains highly-demanding despite increasing
pessimism for the globalized structure of imbalance of
power and resources sharing over developing nations
to the rest of changing world economy. What is
unacceptable in the search for justice, however, is not
inequality as such, but inequality combined with the
extreme destitution and misery of those who are worst
off. To date, recent studies indicate the Filipino poor
have been further divided for deeper impoverishment.
Worsened gradation of poverty shows they dramatically
separate the marginally poor (mahirap) from the
destitute (dukha). In Indonesia, while the governments
are still struggling to cope with the prolonged economic
crises, poor people in the countryside risk of being more
abandoned, as could be seen in the current widespread
phenomena of hunger (busung lapar) that the elite
mostly deny.
On the other side, efforts to resolve democratically
such conundrum of inequality remain harder human
undertaking, no less in the realm of agrarian reform,
as landed elite and land controller entrenched with
land rights retention in the Philippine case while
the Indonesian governments, allied with neo-liberal
economic proponents mostly among the elite business
sectors, remain stubborn from substantial pro-poor
reform. Recent world economic instability, as could be
seen in the increasing dependency on world oil price
and penetration of global profit-taking businesses into
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
the villages, has worsened the rural conditions. In
fact any local transformations have to consider global
changes. Elite in both countries, in this case, justified
their stance on the ground of political “egalitarianism”
to maintain public institutions for the sake of economic
growth and social order.
The convergence between both perspectives could be
pursued, therefore, as it offers fertile for fresh search of
better human condition, in what philosopher John Rawl
maintains that, to put it in simple way, first, “everybody
has the equal rights and freedom”, and second, in
dealing with social, economic inequality, “a) it should
be arranged that the biggest benefits be given to the
poorest, and b) it should be maintained to the public
a fairness in opening fair opportunities”. 22 In other
words, what is relevant in this reflection, “inequality is
anyway inevitable, however, we should not let anybody
to exploit it at the cost of the whole population”.
The problem is then how to implement such difficult
principle. Surely it is the main task of the public actors
as they are assigned to maintain “fair opportunities”
in a law governing the societies such the constitution,
basic political rights, control over executive power, and
so forth. The state actors are entrusted by the peoples
to do so. However, if this task is taken for granted by
the traditional state actors, this principle will never be
achieved, even otherwise. In the Philippines, the elites
control the governments, avoiding the rural poor from
intervening. In Indonesia, the governments remain
stubborn from poor people’s outcries. Hence Rawl’s
principle is actually not in the poor’s immediate reach.
However, because the principle is characteristically
imperative, it is basically then a condition to fulfil in
advance that the poor need a bridging link between the
government and the rural poor communities. The link
lies perhaps in the adequate representation of the rural
poor’s interests, socio-political goals to struggle that are
definitely hard to meet as well.
One should keep in mind that the opponents of
the rural poor in the struggle to fight for justice are
undeniably grotesque and unbeatable. In the Philippine
case, the peasant struggles with the government’s agrarian
reform programs have put forward stronger promises to
improve poor rural communities though the manoeuvre
of the elite against the peasants remains pitilessly craftier,
while in Indonesia pro-peasant meaningful changes are
still far away as the government tends to adopt pro-global
market approach. In Indonesia, the peasants’ interests
even still tend to be excluded from joining the civil society.
However, albeit very rare and harder option to take
as it costs lives, many peasants kept waging social