7.

1 PEASANT REVOLT AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY

● During the 1970s, there was a sustained attempt to understand peasant
revolutions-provoked, in part, by the wars of Southeast Asia and a flurry of
challenging, wide-ranging books on peasants, rural change, and revolution.
Scholars achieved partial success in specifying the conditions that generate
peasant unrest and in explaining the emergence of revolutionary
organizations. Because revolutionary activity by peasants remains rare,
however, James Scott and others have recently drawn our attention to the
everyday forms of peasant political action.³ These analysts have made great
strides in documenting the myriad and mundane forms of struggle in the
countryside that remain short of armed confrontation. Despite their rarity in the
1980s, several ongoing, rural-based Third
● El Salvador-World revolutionary movements come to mind. Much of the
research for this paper was conducted in the Philippines during the academic
year 1986-87, and was supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Social
Science Research Council and a Faculty Grant from Horace H. Rackham
Graduate School of the University of Michigan
● The Peasants Revolt, also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion, was the first major
popular uprising in English history, taking place in 1381. The implementation
of the unpopular poll tax in 1380 was the primary reason, bringing to a head
economic discontent that had been rising since the middle of the century.
● During the American colonial period in the Philippines in the first part of the
20th century, communism emerged. Labor unions and peasant communities
were the origins of communist movements.The communist movement has
enjoyed moments of popularity and influence in Philippine politics, most
notably during World War II and the Martial Law Era
● A longstanding thesis on the Chinese revolution is that the peasants
embraced the Communist movement because the brutalization by the
invading Japanese Army aroused the village people, making it possible for the
Communist Party to organize them and to appeal to their nationalist
aspirations.
● A theoretical exploration of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war in the
T'aihang Mountain-North China Plain revolutionary base suggests different
reasons.
● The peasants there embraced the Communist movement mainly because the
Communist Party 8th Route Army helped them regain their basic rights to
subsistence in their struggles with landlords and local governments before the
Japanese invasion
● The armies of the Japanese and the Kuomintang exerted tremendous
pressures on the peasant movements in the base area, and there was a
negative correlation between the presence of these intruding forces and the
emergence of a viable Communist political order.
● The revolutionary army won the War of Resistance and the War of Liberation
largely by averting and ameliorating the burdens the peasants were
encountering.
● In all of the revolutionary processes, the peasants placed greater value on the
performance of the party in enhancing their livelihood than on the nationalist
propaganda of the revolutionary movement.
 PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE PEASANT REVOLT AND
THE COMUNIST PARTY

Jose Maria C. Sison

- He is the founder of the Communist Party and On the 75th birthday of Mao Zedong,
the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the Communist Party of the
Philippines (CPP) was re-established on December 26, 1968.
James Scott
-The Moral Economy of the Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Ana
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976);
Samuel Popkin
-The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979);
Jeffery Paige
-Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the
Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975);
Joel S. Migdal
- Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures Toward Political and Social Change
in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974);
Jeffrey Race
-War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972);
Theda Skocpol
-States and Social Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).