Abe, absolutely

CLASS WAR is not only imminent but imperative in the coming Angeles City mayoralty contest. If, indeed, it has not started yet.  

Partido Abe Kapampangan endorses Alex Cauguiran.

Screamed our banner story of Sept. 18, reporting of the assembly of some “500 card-bearing party leaders representing the city’s 33 barangays” held Sept. 13 in Balibago that elected the party’s new set of officers and declared its president, Cauguiran, as party standard bearer in the Angeles City mayoralty race next year.

Even as Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan was re-elected party chairman, he was most obviously absent in the assembly.

Partido Abe Kapampangan selects Bryan-Edu tandem.

Headlined our online page on Sept. 23, reporting of “another” assembly held Sept. 20 of “about 800 delegates” where they selected Vice Mayor Nepomuceno and councilor Pamintuan as official candidates for mayor and vice mayor respectively in elections next year.

Ubiquitous, monopolizing even, was the elder Pamintuan’s presence in the latter assembly.

What gives? Same party. Distinct candidates.

Pamintuan makes all the difference.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. So, it has been clichéd. 

But as much as so metaphored, houses don’t make political parties. Hence, even when fissured or factionalized parties still stand, albeit tottering to the slightest wind. In the process developing wings – as in LP-Kalaw Wing versus LP-Salonga Wing, and NP-Roy Wing in some distant past; like the LP-Atienza-Defensor Wing and LP-Drilon-Pangilinan Wing of the PGMA era.

So, takes the same route Partido Abe Kapampangan now, with PAK-Cauguiran Wing and PAK-Pamintuan Wing, as deduced Ashley Manabat in our online story’s very lead paragraph?

No. A farce Partido Abe Kapampangan makes of its very self, if it does so.

Abe – comrade, in Capampangan – makes both the party framework and the ground upon which the party is founded. On an even loftier plane, Abe is the very soul that animates the party.

Thus, cleaving the party to two factions – if only for fairness and equity to Cauguiran and to Pamintuan – is not Solomonic, but rather moronic. As this snuffs out the very essence of its life.  

There can only be one, as there is but one, Partido Abe Kapampangan.  

It is that “multisector grassroots mass organization” founded on the ideals – members committed themselves to – “..iisang uri ng pinanggalingan na dapat mabigyan ng puwang at pagkakataon ang kinatawan ng ordinaryong tao at wakasan na, kahit pansamantala kung hindi man panghabang panahon, ang paghawak sa panunungkulan na lagi na lamang sa mayayaman at malalaking politiko.” Long and winding articulation concluding no blunter than: From the masses, by the masses, for the masses. The ruling elite be damned!

The two-wing contradiction that has seemingly befallen Partido Abe Kapampangan is neither dialectical nor diametrical, as one unrepentant Marxist contextualizes it. In fact, it is not even a contradiction but a perversion.  Of the ideals that make the party’s raison d'être.

To declare as standard bearer of Partido Abe Kapampangan the very dynast of the “mayayaman at malalaking pulitiko,” precisely against whom the party was founded, is not just an insult to the party members but an abomination of everything that the party stands and lives for.

Here is a case when principles – reduced to principals – are debased to prejudices. Of the plutocratic fallacy of governance as sole domain of the propertied, the have-nots as mere subjects. 

Here is an instance when comradeship is subjugated to exigency, and subordinated to expediency. When the interest of the party is subsumed to those of the self.  

Thereof, a class war, in all its classicism, with all its romanticism, is an imperative for the Partido Abe Kapampangan.

First from within – to cleanse it from the bourgeois decadence that has most manifestly infected its body parts.

Then to the age-old struggle of “the history of all hitherto existing society…”

On one hand: the landed gentry, the feudal lords, the political dynasties and their lackeys embodied as the immovable object -- preserving the status quo, keeping their socio-economic and political stranglehold of the city.

On the other: Partido Abe Kapampangan of the working classes, the barrio folk, the intelligentsia, the greater mass of Angeles society -- banded as the irresistible force to crush bourgeois domination.

Only one forged in the anti-dictatorship struggle, conscienticized in the grassroots pedagogy on the imperative of the rebellion of the poor towards their ultimate liberation, steeped in dialectics, possessed of rhetorical skills can embody Partido Abe Kapampangan. One with proven leadership and managerial capabilities on the side.

We don’t have to look far to find him: As he is us, so we are him.