POLITICAL economy is a subject matter I found myself familiarizing with in the course of my integration into the anti-dictatorship struggle in the 1970s. I didn’t know the topic from Adam, so to speak, but I had successfully organized KAMAO (for Katipunan ng mgaMakabayangObrero), a union of employees of the Makabayan Publishing Corp. at the heart of a business empire, the J. Amado Araneta enterprises, that until then had maintained its rabid anti-trade unionist stance. That activity instantly threw me into skirmishes with the 300-strong Araneta Center security guards, beefed up still by large contingents of Quezon City policemen. Those encounters sort of gave me the credentials for larger tasks in the struggle called the national democratic revolution (NDR), which I so gullibly swallowed like any youth activist at the time, hardly bothering to know what it was all about; I had this naivete to believe it was going to bring about the liberation of the working class.