Itinuturo ng katwiran na wala tayong iba pang maaantay kundi lalo’t lalong kahirapan, lalo’t lalong kataksilan, lalo’t lalong kaalipustaan, at lalo’t lalong kaalipinan.

Itinuturo ng katwiran na huwag nating sayangin ang panahon sa pag-asa sa ipinangakong kaginhawahan na hindi darating at hindi mangyayari.

Itinuturo ng katwiran na tayo’y umasa sa ating sarili at huwag antayin sa iba ang ating kabuhayan.

Itinuturo ng katwiran na tayo’y magkaisang-loob, magkaisang-isip at akala, at tayo’y magkalakas na maihanap ng lunas ang naghaharing kasamaan sa ating Bayan.

Panahon na ngayong dapat na lumitaw ang liwanag ng katotohanan.

Panahon nang dapat nating ipakilala na tayo’y may sariling pagdaramdam, may puri, may hiya at pagdadamayan.

Ngayon, panahon nang dapat simulan ang pagsisiwalat ng mga mahal at dakilang aral na magwawasak sa masinsing tabing na bumubulag sa ating kaisipan. Panahon na ngayong dapat makilala ng mga Tagalog ang pinagmulan ng kanilang mga kahirapan. Araw na itong dapat kilalanin na sa bawat hakbang natin ay tumutuntong tayo at nabibingit sa malalim na hukay ng kamatayan na sa atin ay inuumang ng mga kaaway.

Kaya, O mga kababayan! Ating idilat ang nabulag na kaisipan, at kusang igugol sa kagalingan ang ating lakas sa tunay at lubos na pag-asa na magtagumpay sa minimithing kaginhawahan ng bayang tinubuan.

Andres Bonifacio,
Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog*

* Bonifacio uses the word Tagalog to mean all the people living in the Philippine islands.

Note: Today we commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Filipino revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio who led the armed struggle against Spanish colonialism in 1896. This is the complete version of Bonifacio’s poem published in Kalayaan, the publication of the anti-colonial movement Katipunan, under the nom de guerre Agapito Bagumbayan. A popular version of the poem is the song of the same title which was given melody by Luis Jarque, a political detainee under the Marcos dictatorship.

Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa

Ni Andres Bonifacio

1
Aling pag-ibig pa ang hihigit kaya
Sa pagkadalisay at pagkadakila
Gaya ng pag-ibig sa tinub’ang lupa?
Aling pag-ibig pa? Wala na nga, wala.

2
Ulit-ulitin mang basahin ng isip
At isa-isahing talastasing pilit
Ang salita’t buhay na limbag at titik
Ng sangkatauhan ito’y namamasid.
3
Banal na Pag-ibig! Pag ikaw ang nukal
Sa tapat na puso ng sino’t alinman,
Imbi’t taong-gubat, maralita’t mangmang,
Nagiging dakila at iginagalang.
4
Pagpupuring lubos ang palaging hangad
Sa bayan ng taong may dangal na ingat;
Umawit, tumula, kumatha’t sumulat,
Kalakhan din niya’y isinisiwalat.
5
Walang mahalagang hindi inihandog
Ng may pusong mahal sa Bayang nagkupkop:
Dugo, yaman, dunong, katiisa’t pagod,
Buhay ma’y abuting magkalagot-lagot.
6
Bakit? Alin ito na sakdal nang laki
Na hinahandugan ng buong pagkasi?
Na sa lalong mahal nakapangyayari
At ginugugulan ng buhay na iwi?
7
Ay! Ito’y ang Inang Bayang tinubuan,
Siya’y ina’t tangi na kinamulatan
Ng kawili-wiling liwanag ng araw
Na nagbigay-init sa lunong katawan.
8
Sa kaniya’y utang ang unang pagtanggap
Ng simoy ng hanging nagbibigay-lunas
Sa inis na puso na sisinghap-singhap
Sa balong malalim ng siphayo’t hirap.
9
Kalakip din nito’y pag-ibig sa Bayan
Ang lahat ng lalong sa gunita’y mahal
Mula sa masaya’t gasong kasanggulan
Hanggang sa katawa’y mapasalibingan.
10
Ang nangakaraang panahon ng aliw,
Ang inaasahang araw na darating
Ng pagkatimawa ng mga alipin,
Liban pa sa Bayan saan tatanghalin?
11
At ang balang kahoy at ang balang sanga
Ng parang n’ya’t gubat na kaaya-aya,
Sukat ang makita’t sasaalaala
Ang ina’t ang giliw, lumipas na saya.
12
Tubig n’yang malinaw na anaki’y bubog,
Bukal sa batisang nagkalat sa bundok,
Malambot na huni ng matuling agos,
Na nakaaaliw sa pusong may lungkot.
13
Sa aba ng abang mawalay sa Bayan!
Gunita ma’y laging sakbibi ng lumbay,
Walang alaala’t inaasam-asam
Kundi ang makita’y lupang tinubuan.
14
Pati ng magdusa’t sampung kamatayan
Wari ay masarap kung dahil sa Bayan
At lalong maghirap, O! himalang bagay,
Lalong pag-irog pa ang sa kanya’y alay.
15
Kung ang Bayang ito’y nasasapanganib
At siya ay dapat na ipagtangkilik,
Ang anak, asawa, magulang, kapatid
Isang tawag niya’y tatalikdang pilit.
16
Dapwat kung ang bayan ng Katagalugan
Ay nilapastangan at niyuyurakan
Katuwiran, puri niya’t kamahalan
Ng sama ng lilong taga-ibang bayan.
17
Di gaano kaya ang paghihinagpis
Ng pusong Tagalog sa puring nilait?
Aling kalooban na lalong tahimik
Ang di pupukawin sa paghihimagsik?
18
Saan magbubuhat ang paghinay-hinay
Sa paghihiganti’t gumugol ng buhay
Kung wala ding iba na kasasadlakan
Kundi ang lugami sa kaalipinan?
19
Kung ang pagkabaon n’ya’t pagkabusabos
Sa lusak ng saya’t tunay na pag-ayop,
Supil ng panghampas, tanikalang gapos
At luha na lamang ang pinaaagos?
20
Sa kaniyang anyo’y sino ang tutunghay
Na di aakayin sa gawang magdamdam?
Pusong naglilipak sa pagkasukaban
Ang hindi gumugol ng dugo at buhay.
21
Mangyayari kaya na ito’y masulyap
Ng mga Tagalog at hindi lumingap
Sa naghihingalong Inang nasa yapak
Na kasuklam-suklam sa Kastilang hamak?
22
Nasaan ang dangal ng mga Tagalog?
Nasaan ang dugong dapat na ibuhos?
Baya’y inaapi, bakit di kumilos
At natitilihang ito’y mapanuod?
23
Hayo na nga kayo, kayong nangabuhay
Sa pag-asang lubos na kaginhawahan
At walang tinamo kundi kapaitan
Hayo na’t ibigin ang naabang Bayan.
24
Kayong natuy’an na sa kapapasakit
Ng dakilang hangad sa batis ng dibdib,
Muling pabalungi’t tunay na pag-ibig
Kusang ibulalas sa Bayang piniit.
25
Kayong nalagasan ng bunga’t bulaklak,
Kahoy nyaring buhay na nilanta’t sukat
Ng bala-balaki’t makapal na hirap,
Muling manariwa’t sa Baya’y lumiyag.
26
Kayong mga pusong kusang napapagal
Ng daya at bagsik ng ganid na asal,
Ngayon ay magbango’t Bayan ay itanghal
Agawin sa kuko ng mga sukaban.
27
Kayong mga dukhang walang tanging lasap
Kundi ang mabuhay sa dalita’t hirap,
Ampunin ang Bayan kung nasa ay lunas
Pagkat ang ginhawa niya ay sa lahat.
28
Ipaghandog-handog ang buong pag-ibig,
At hanggang may dugo’y ubusang itigis
Kung sa pagtatanggol, buhay ay mapatid
Ito’y kapalaran at tunay na langit.

The English translation of My Father’s Notebook is the only book by Kader Abdolah that I’ve read. The novel is also my first and only encounter with the exiled Iranian writer who now lives in the Netherlands. But the issues Abdolah’s book highlight on life in Iran under the Shah, the heroic struggles of the leftist resistance movement, and the eventual ascendancy of the Islamist mullahs in the power struggle following the revolution of 1979, are all relevant and makes My Father’s Notebook a rewarding read.

The history of Iran, like the history of all hitherto human societies, is a history of the struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited, the dominator and the dominated. Nowhere is this as clear as in that brief period called the 20^th Century when Iran fell in the hands of successive authoritarian regimes – from the British colonizing power to the two Shahs and eventually the Islamist dictatorship. My Father’s Notebook is an attempt at coming to terms with this history.

The narrator Ishmael shifts between an account of a life of melancholia and nostalgia in the Netherlands and memories of his own life and that of his deaf-mute father, Aga Akbar, back in Iran. Ishmael makes use of his father’s indecipherable notebook, which is written in cuneiform, in retracing the past. Being deaf-mute, Aga Akbar developed his own unique system of writing from the ancient cuneiform of the first king of Persia carved on the cave walls of Saffron Mountain which he first visited with his uncle as a child.

Ishmael thus grapples with the recollections of a deaf-mute father who he assisted as personal guide and translator since his childhood – but he never completely understood. His accounts of his father’s notes give the reader a peek of life in the Iranian countryside. Aga Akbar is the illegitimate son of a noble. He serves as a guide to archaeologists visiting the caves of Saffron Mountain for the cuneiforms. He trains to become a carpet mender and becomes the most renowned of menders in his province.

Aga Akbar personally encounters the first Shah, who rides into his village to personally oversee the building of train tracks through the countryside, and for which Aga Akbar and his entire village volunteered. He marries the strong-willed countrywoman Tina, sires 4 children, and eventually moves from the village by Saffron Mountain to the city where his handicrafts skills are rendered useless as he becomes absorbed into factory work. Aga Akbar’s life story eventually intertwines with that of the younger narrator.

Ishmael goes on to study at the University of Tehran but subsequently dropout to pursue full time work as a professional leftwing revolutionary. His party agitates against the Shah, organize a clandestine movement, and wage a guerrilla war with the Cuban Revolution as their model. Of course, they were eventually outmaneuvered by the Imams. But more than the standard academic postcolonial valorization of exile, My Father’s Notebook gives us a glimpse into the lost promise held by the possibility of a genuine revolution in Iran.

This is the tragedy of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After the mobilization of masses of Iranians toppled the authoritarian regime of the Shah, the Islamists led by Khomeini outmaneuvered other democratic, secular, leftwing forces and seized power. The mullahs initiated a counter-revolution that pushed the country in a regressive direction, back towards the restoration of a feudal theocratic rule of which the only thing new is it’s being propped up by the worst modern instruments of state repression.

The outcome of the Iranian struggle thus presents a strong warning about what a defeat for revolutionary left forces could mean. As in Germany and Spain in the 1930s or Chile in the 1970s, where the fascists won the hearts and minds of the petty bourgeois, the Islamists of Iran were able to win over large sections of the rising urban masses and a feudal landlord class that feared the prospects of genuine social revolution and the consequential redistribution of their rural estates.

The novel ends with the escape of one of Ishmael’s comrades from the Imam’s jails, an escape that symbolizes the militancy and indomitable spirit of the Iranian people. The spirit of resistance is still in the air in Iran even under the most repressive conditions, as the frequent outbreak of youth and workers protests in recent years have shown. It is the specter of this rising up of the Iranian people, and not US and Israeli war of aggression against Iranian sovereignty that spells the hope for real liberation of the people of Iran.

For every person missing at the roll-call, ten would be shot.

Transport

The corporal saluted smartly and replied ‘Wieviel Stück’ The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty ‘pieces’ and that all was in order.

Good wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom.

The doors had been closed at once, but the trains did not move until evening. We had learnt of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it at least implied some place on this earth.

Arrival

They did not interrogate everybody, only a few: ‘How old? Healthy or ill?’ And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply.

We had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

Survival

To old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationalist. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos.

On the back of my feet I already have those numb sores that will not heal. I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already my own body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others grey. When we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each other.

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months this way.

Primo Levi,
Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity

Last September 21, the nation commemorated the 42^nd anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law. President Benigno Simeon ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III once again spoke in memory of his father who died standing up against the dictatorship.

Yet the irony is not lost on many who see BS Aquino’s recent machinations as reminiscent not of his father and anti-dictatorship figure Ninoy Aquino but of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Shattering whatever remaining illusions that BS Aquino is anything like his father, he now pushes for the amendment of the 1987 Constitution to get himself one more term. He thus exposes himself to be just as power-hungry as Marcos.

But even before, the Aquino regime’s predisposition towards concentrating power in its own hands can already be seen in the usurpation of billions of public funds through the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP).

The normalization of DAP-like practices in the 2015 budget is now sought in spite of the Supreme Court’s declaring unconstitutional of DAP or the anomalous diversion of funds intended for various programs and agencies to those favored by the Aquino regime.

In fact, it is precisely the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against DAP that BS Aquino cites as one of the reasons for pushing for charter change.

Just like Marcos, Aquino fervently wishes to have a compliant judiciary that yields to his every whim. Indeed, he seeks nothing less than to have all branches of government follow his every bidding without any opposition.

No different from the deposed dictator, he styles himself as a messiah who is the only one capable of leading the nation.

If Marcos had his ‘New Society’ that supposedly brought discipline and prosperity for all Filipinos, Aquino now has his very own ‘Straight Path’ against corruption and poverty.

Marcos’ pompous avowals of purifying the country are promptly matched by Aquino’s own self-righteous rhetoric of change and reforms. But of course, these are never directed towards themselves and their allies.

Birds of the same feather, both Marcos and BS Aquino present their perpetuation in power as marks of selflessness.

Like Marcos, Aquino also dresses up the dismal state of the Philippine economy by conjuring the illusion of economic growth.

Marcos silenced the press and used the state-owned media to trumpet his supposed successes. Today, Aquino spends millions for a well-oiled public relations effort to paint a rosy picture of the country under his reign.

But like in the past, the intensifying socio-economic crisis can no longer be disguised through superficial mass media glosses.

First as Tragedy

It is often repeated by Marcos loyalists, in the vain hope that a lie said repeatedly begins take on the aura of truth, that the Martial Law period was a Golden Age in Philippine history: ‘Everyone was disciplined, goods cheap, and life generally easier.’

And yet this illusion of prosperity was true only for Marcos and his cronies who took over the major industries in the country, took big kickbacks from massive infrastructure projects, and pocketed millions of dollars borrowed from foreign banks.

There was only steadily rising prices and unemployment for the rest of the people while in the countryside peasants remained landless suffering from high land rent, low wages in spite of Marcos so-called ‘land reform’ and ‘green revolution.’

Marcos excessive foreign borrowing led the country’s debt to balloon to $26 billion from a mere $2 billion at the start of his term. And up until now, we are still paying for the loans borrowed from the Marcos era.

Behind the Marcos dictatorial regime is the support of the United States which hoped to ensure that its political and economic interests in the Philippines were protected at the point of the gun.

Marcos coddled large US military bases in Subic and Clark, a feat that Aquino now seeks to surpass by promising his US masters the transformation of the entire archipelago as one big base through the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

This system of ‘crony capitalism’ was propped up by the consolidation of all government power in the executive and the military, the elimination of all opposition parties, the gagging of the press, and the establishment of a reign of terror.

Under Marcos, the language of freedom and democracy, parliamentary niceties and legalities which cloaked ruling class interests was replaced by the outright depriving of civil liberties and abuse of human rights.

By sending over 70,000 political opponents to prison, torturing over 10,000, and murdering more than 3,000, not to mention the undocumented cases, Marcos stood as one of the biggest tragedies that befell the Filipino people.

Second as Farce

This tragedy continues to unfold under subsequent regimes of Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and finally BS Aquino.

The Marcoses themselves are back in power, with the late dictator’s son occupying a seat in Senate and eyeing the presidency in the next elections.

The 1986 EDSA people’s uprising may have toppled the old dictator. But the socio-economic order that only benefits the foreign monopoly capitalists and their local partners of big comprador-landlords remained in place.

Marcos was gone, but the same pre-industrial and agricultural economy that was kept backward so as to remain dependent on foreign capital, loans, and manufactured goods persisted beyond his rule.

On the other hand, the US and other foreign powers continued to be guaranteed by succeeding administrations of a steady source of natural resources to plunder and cheap labor to exploit.

It is thus the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system itself that is the problem and until we change it we will keep on perpetuating many more Marcoses and Aquinos in power.

Much of the same evils under Marcos from poverty, joblessness, hunger, and human rights violations persist today but only under a democratic veneer where we get to choose who oppresses us every 3 years.

With BS Aquino’s term nearing its end, he is now frantically conjuring another farce. Fearing the specter of ending up behind bars on corruption charges like his predecessor Arroyo, he is cooking up the appearance of mass support for an extension of his rule.

The choice of whether a dictatorial regime or a democratic farce is in place has largely depended in the past on which scheme will suffice to prop up the interests of the ruling classes and their foreign masters in a given period.

However, the strength of the people’s struggles for their rights and interests can also be a factor in tipping the scales towards genuine freedom and democracy. We have to take the power back. It’s time to change the system.

I wrote this for the Philippine Online Chronicles.

Malalaking kilos-protesta at demonstrasyon sa pangunguna ng Kabataang Makabayan (KM) at ibang mga pambansa-demokratikong organisasyon ng kabataan at estudyante ang sumalubong sa unang tatlong buwan ng taong 1970. Umalingawngaw ang mga sigaw ng “Makibaka, Huwag Matakot” at “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta.” Napuno ang mga lansangan ng mga istrimer at plakard ng “Imperyalismo, Pyudalismo, Burukata Kapitalismo Ibagsak!” Linggo-linggo, mahigit 50,000 hanggang 100,000 ang pumuno sa mga plaza ng kamaynilaan at nagmartsa sa mga lansangan patungong Malakanyang at US Embassy. Ito ang First Quarter Storm (FQS), isang makasaysayang pagbangon ng iba’t ibang sektor ng lipunan na naghahangad ng radikal na pagbabagong panlipunan. Apatnapu’t limang taon ang nakalipas matapos pumutok ang FQS, nananatili itong makabuluhan at puno ng mga aral sa kasalukuyan para sa pagsusulong ng pambansa-demokratikong pakikibaka na may sosyalistang perspektiba. Nagsimula ang FQS sa isang mapayapang demonstrasyon ng libu-libong mag-aaral, maralitang kabataan, manggagawa at magbubukid sa harap ng Kongreso kung saan nagtatalumpati si dating pangulong Ferdinand Marcos noong Enero 26, 1970. Dahas ang naging tugon ng rehimeng US-Marcos. Ngunit sa kabila ng panunupil ng estado, dumagsa sa Malakanyang noong Enero 30, 1970 ang libu-libong tao upang kondenahin ang mga pasistang patakaran, maka-Amerikano, at kontra-mamamayang programa ng gobyernong Marcos. Kumuha pa ng isang firetruck ang mga kabataang kasali sa protesta at ibinangga sa gate ng Malakanyang para buksan ito. Hindi dito natapos ang pagbuhos ng galit ng mamamayan. Nasundan ito ng malalaki at sunud-sunod na mga kilos-protesta hanggang Marso. Naglunsad din ng maraming mga pagkilos ang mga kabataan sa mga kabisera at mayor na lungsod ng iba’t ibang probinsya. Ang FQS ang rurok ng pagpupukaw, pag-oorganisa at pagpapakilos mula pa nang itinatag ang KM noong 1964. Pinalaganap nito sa buong bansa ang pambansa demokratikong pagsusuri sa aping kalagayan ng sambayanang Pilipino at ang pangangailangan ng rebolusyonaryong pagbabago. Naiugat ang mga suliranin ng mamamayang Pilipino sa tatlong salot ng paghari ng imperyalismong Estados Unidos sa bansa, pyudal na pagsasamantala ng panginuong maylupa sa uring magsasaka, at ang burukrata kapitalistang paggamit ng gobyerno bilang negosyo. Mainit ang naging pagtanggap ng mamamayansa mga protesta. Sumigla ang kilusan ng paglubog ng mga kabataan at estudyante sa mga manggagawa at magbubukid sa mga piketlayn, pagawaan, maralitang komunidad at sa kanayunan. Ang mga kondisyon para sa makasaysayang daluyong na ito ay ipinundar ng isang dekada ng walang pagod na pagpakilos, pagorganisa, at pagpataas ng kamulatan kamalayan ng kabataan at mamamayan ng mga grupong pambansa-demokratiko. Nagluwal ang FQS ng libu-libong kadre’t masang aktibista na naging muog ng kilusang rebolusyonaryo na pinamunuan ng Partido Komunista Pilipinas sa pambansang saklaw, ang muog na namuno sa paglaban at kalauna’y pagpapatalsik sa pasistang diktadurang US-Marcos. Apat na dekada ang nakalipas, patuloy na lumulubha ang kalagayan ng sambayanang Pilipino dahil sa kawalan ng trabaho, lupa, edukasyon, karaptang sibil, at serbisyo sosyal. Nananatiling mala-kolonyal at mala-pyudal ang lipunang Pilipino. Tumtindi ang pagsasamantala at pang-aapi habang lumalala ang krisis ng pandaigdigang sistemang kapitalista at ng lokal na kaayusang kontrolado ng dayuhang kapital, walang sariling industriya at atrasado ang ekonomya. Sa ganitong kalagayan, nagbibigay inspirasyon ang FQS upang labanan ang rehimeng US-Aquino at tuluyang gapiin ang bulok na sistemang mala-kolonyal at mala-pyudal na pinagsisilbihan nito. Mabuhay ang mapangahas at mapanlabang diwa ng FQS ng 1970!

Ginugunita ngayon taon ang ika-116 anibersaryo ng pagsiklab ng Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano, isang marahas na gerang agresyon ng Estados Unidos upang sakupin ang Pilipinas. Ang Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano ang simula ng isang-siglong paghahari ng kapangyarihang US sa ating bansa.

Tinataya ng mga historyador na umabot sa 1.5 milyong Pilipino ang namatay sa digmaang ito. Sa Luzon lamang ay umabot ng 600,000 ang patay na Pilipino, ayon sa konserbatibong pagtaya ng peryodikong The New York Times. Sa kabilang panig, 4,234 sundalong Amerikano nalipol sa labanan.

Ngunit wala na masyadong nakakaalam sa kasaysayang ito lalo na sa mga kabataan ng kasalukuyang henerasyon. Tila nabaon na lamang sa limot ang pagdurusa ng sambayanang Pilipino sa kamay ng mapang-abuso at mapanlinlang na imperyalistang US.

Sa harap ng patuloy na panghihimasok ng Estados Unidos sa ating bansa, mahalagang sariwain ang mga tunay na pangyayari sa Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano at basagin ang ilusyon ng pagkakaibigan ng dalawang bansa.

Matagal nang pinagtakpan ng mga Amerikano ang malagim na kasaysayan ng Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano, at kakambal nito ang magiting na paglaban ng mga makabayang Pilipino.

Sa halip ay pinapalaganap ang larawan ng mga Amerikano bilang tagapagligtas at nagbigay ng demokrasya at kalayaan sa mga Pilipino. Kahit pa man sa panahon ng direktang kolonyal na paghahari ng US ay pinapalaganap na ang kasinungalingang ito.

Gamit ang kolonyal na pampublikong edukasyon at dominanteng midya, ibinura ng mga kolonyalistang Amerikano ang kolektibong alaala ng mga Pilipino sa trahedyang ito.

Umpisa ng gerang agresyon ng US

Abot tanaw na sana ang tagumpay ng rebolusyong Pilipino laban sa kolonyal na paghahari ng mga Espanyol nang dumating ang bagong mananakop na mga Amerikano at inagaw ang tagumpay na ito.

Nagsimula ang gerang agresyon ng US sa Pilipinas ng sorpresang sinalakay ng mga tropang Amerikano ang mga rebolusyonaryong Pilipino sa Sta. Mesa, Manila noong Pebrero 4, 1899.

Pero bago pa man nagsimula ang digmaang ito, natakda na ang mga kondisyon para sa direktang pagsalakay ng mga Amerikano. Isa na dito ang “mock battle” sa Maynila ng US at Espanya noong Agosto 1898.

Sumunod naman ang pagpirma ng Treaty of Paris na diumanoy nagbibigay ng kapuluang Pilipinas sa US sa halagang 20 milyon dolyares at ang pagdeklara ng “benevolent assimilation” ni US Pangulo McKinley noong Disyembre 1898.

Nagtagal ng ilang taon ang magiting na paglaban ng mamamayang Pilipino laban sa US. Umabot ng 126,000 tropang Amerikano ang ipinadala ng Estados Unidos upang makibahagi sa gerang agresyon sa Pilipinas.

Ngunit sa kabila ng brutalidad ng mga sundalong Amerikano at superyor na mga sandata nito, hindi mabilis na nagapi ang malawak at magiting na paglaban ng mamamayang Pilipino laban sa gerang agresyon ng imperyalismong US.

Idineklarang tapos na ang digmaan ni US Pangulo Theodore Roosevelt nang madakip ang liderato ng Unang Republiko ng Pilipinas sa pamumuno ni Emilio Aguinaldo noong Hulyo 4, 1902. Ngunit nagpatuloy ang pakikibaka ng mga Pilipino sa iba’t ibang panig ng bansa, at lalo na ng mga Moro sa Mindanao, hanggang sa taong 1916.

Mga pag-abuso ng mga tropang Amerikano

Ginamit ng mga pwersang US ang iilan sa mga pinakamarahas at di-makataong mga taktika na target hindi lamang ang mga mandigirmang Pilipino kundi mismo ang mga ordinaryong sibilyan.

Isa sa mga pinakatampok na paglabag ng mga sundalong Amerikano sa karapatang pantao ang tintawag na “hamletting,” ang pwersahang rekonsentrasyon ng mga sibilyan patungo sa mga kampo militar ng Amerikano.

Ang mga espasyo sa labas ng mga hamlet ay itinuring na “free-fire zone” kung saan sinumang makita ay maaaring barilin ng mga Amerikano. Isiniksik ang libu-libong mamamayan sa mga kampong ito upang matanggalan ng baseng suporta ang mga lumalabang Pilipino.

Notoryus ang mga Amerikano sa sistematikong paggamit ng iba’t ibang anyo ng pagtotortyur sa mga nabihag na Pilipino. Isa na dito ang tinatawag na “water cure”: ginagapos ang biktima at binubuhosan ng tubig ang kanyang bunganga habang may nakaupo na tao sa kanyang tiyan upang hindi siya malunod.

Nariyan din ang patakarang pagsunog ng mga baryo at bayang pinaghihinalaang nagbibigay ng suporta sa mga mandirigmang Pilipino. Laganap ang pagpapatupad ng mga Amerikano sa karumal-dumal na patakarang ito sa buong Kabisayaan, sa Batangas, Laguna, at Bikol sa Luzon, at ilang bahagi ng Mindanao.

Isa sa mga pinakatampok na ehemplo ng pagmasaker noong Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano ang pag-utos ni US Heneral Jacob Smith na “huwag hayaang may lumilipad pang kahit isang ibon sa kalawakan” at “patayin ang lahat ng batang may edad sampu pataas” sa isla ng Samar.

Ginawa ito bilang pagganti sa tagumpay ng mga rebolusyonaryong Pilipino laban sa mga sundalong Amerikano na nakahimpil sa bayan ng Balangiga, Samar kung saan 48 sa 74 kataong tropa ang kanilang nalipol.

Nariyan din ang pagsunog ng malawak na bahagi ng isla ng Panay na nailathala sa pahayagang Boston Herald noong Agosto 25, 1902:

“Nagmartsa ang 13^th Regulars mula sa Iloilo sa timog patungong Capiz sa Hilaga ng Panay, sa atas na sunugin ang lahat ng bayan na lumalaban. Nagresulta ito ng paghawan ng lugar na may lawak na 60 milya mula sa isang dulo tungo sa ikalawang dulo.”

Dagdag pa sa listahan ng mga krimen ng mga Amerikano ang pananakop nito sa mga Moro sa Mindanao: ang pagmasaker ng 900 Tausog, kabilang ang mga babae at bata, sa tatlong-araw na pagsalakay sa Bud Dajo, Jolo noong Marso 5-7, 1906.

Nariyan din ang masaker sa Bud Bagsok, Jolo noong Hulyo 11, 1913 kung saan umabot sa 2,000 Moro ang namatay kasama ang 196 kababaihan at 340 bata.

Patuloy na dominasyon ng US

Ang pagsakripisyo ng buhay sa madugong operasyon sa Mamasapano, ang paggamit ng mga tropang SAF bilang pambala lamang para sa “War on Terror” ng US, ay isa lamang sa pinakamalinaw na tanda ng patuloy na panghihimasok ng US .

Nagpapakita rin ito ng larawan ng rehimeng Aquino bilang isa sa mga pinakamasugid na tuta ng Estados Unidos. Buhay na buhay ang ang dominasyon ng Estados Unidos sa aspetong politika, ekonomya, kultura, militar, at relasyong panlabas ng Pilipinas.

Malaking hamon ang pagmulat ng mga kabataan at mamamayang Pilipino sa tunay na kasaysayan ng Digmaang Pilipino-Amerikano. Mahalaga itong kontribusyon sa pakikibaka para sa tunay na kalayaan at soberanya sa ating bansa.

Note: I wrote this article for The Philippine Online Chronicles.

Mahigit 40,000 katao ang nag-bakwit sa kanilang mga tahanan dahil sa patuloy na opensibang militar laban sa rebeldeng grupong Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) sa Maguindanao na sinimulan ng gobyernong Aquino noong huling linggo ng Pebrero. Lagpas sa isandaang libong sibilyan na ang apektado sa opensibang ng gobyerno laban sa BIFF. Maraming bahay at sakahan ang nasira sa walang pagtatanging pagbobomba ng mga sibilyang komunidad.

Ngunit kung tutuusin, isa lamang “cover-up” ang opensibang ito na may layong ilihis ang atensyon ng publiko palayo sa kriminal na pananagutan ng gubyernong Aquino at ng Estados Unidos sa madugong operasyon sa Mamasapano. Sinasamantala ng mga tagapagtanggol ni Aquino ang malaking pinsalang idinulot ng mga mandirigmang Moro laban sa Special Action Force (SAF) ng Philippine National Police (PNP) sa Mamasapano upang ibaling ang galit sa kapalpakan ni Aquino tungo sa mamamayang Moro.

Ang panibagong opensiba sa Maguindanao ay bahagi rin ng “War on Terror” ng US kung saan binabasagang mga terrorista ang mga Morong lumalaban sa mapanupil na estado. Ginagamit nila ang multo ng terrorismo upang ipangatwiran ang walang katapusang digmaan.

Ngunit ang panibagong opensiba ay lalo lamang hihimok sa mga mamamayang Moro na lumaban upang isulong ang kanilang karapatan para sa tunay na kalayaan.

Paglaban sa kolonyalismong Espanyol at US

Hindi na bago para sa mamamayang Moro ang lumaban upang ipagtanggol ang kalayaan ng kanilang lupang tinubuan, ang Bangsamoro. Sumasaklaw ang pakikibaka nila ng apat na siglo mula pa sa pagsakop ng Espanya sa Pilipinas noong ika-16 siglo hanggang sa kasalukuyan.

Bago pa man dumating ang mga kolonyalistang Espanyol ay umiral na ang mga Sultanatong Moro sa hangganan ng Mindanao, Sulu, at Palawan. Ang Sultanato ng Sulu, Maguindanao, at Buayan ang kumakatawan sa pinakamaunlad na sistemang panlipunan sa kapuluan sa panahong ito. Dahil dito, hindi nagawang sakupin ang mga Moro ng mga Espanyol sa kabila ng sunud-sunod na pag-atake ng mga kolonyalista.

Mabangis din ang paglaban ng mga Moro sa mga kampanyang militar na inilunsad ng imperyalistang Amerikano sa mga taong 1901 hanggang 1916. Kung kaya’t kinailangan ang mas malakas na pwersa ng US na gumamit ng marahas at di-makataong taktika upang masakop ang mga mamamayang Moro sa Mindanao. Dagdag pa rito ang pagsuhol sa kanilang mga lider at pagsira ng kanilang tradisyunal na mga institusyon.

Inimbento ng mga Amerikano noong 1911 ang pistolang kalibre .45 dahil sa kanilang pangangailangan ng mas malakas na armas na panagupa sa mga Moro. Tinatalian kasi ng mga mandirigmang Moro ang kanilang katawan upang pigilin ang pagdurugo kapag tinatamaan ng bala ng kaaway kaya hindi sila napababagsak ng mas mababang kalibreng armas na gamit ng mga tropang Amerikano noon.

Ang pagmasaker ng 900 Tausog, kabilang ang mga babae at bata, sa Bud Dajo, Jolo noong Marso 5-7, 1906 at ang masaker sa Bud Bagsok, Jolo noong Hulyo, 1913 kung saan 2,000 Moro ang namatay kasama ang 196 kababaihan at 340 bata ay dalawa lamang sa mga pinakamalupit na krimen ng US laban sa mga Moro at Pilipino.

Bangsamoro sa ilalim ng Republika ng Pilipinas

Mula sa isang tuwirang kolonya ng Estados Unidos, ginawang malakolonya ng US ang Pilipinas noong 1946. Sa kabila ng balat-kayong kalayaan ay nagpatuloy ang di-tuwirang kontrol ng US sa ekonomya, pulitika, at kultura ng bansa. Ang dikta ng US ang siyang nagtitiyak sa mga patakaran ng gobyerno. Sa gayon, ang mga suliranin ng Bangsamoro ay mauugat sa pagnanasa ng US na maangkin ang yamang mineral at lakas-paggawa ng Mindanao.

Hindi natapos ang panunupil at pambubusabos sa mga mamamayang Moro sa pagkatatag ng Republika ng Pilipinas. Sa pagtaguyod ng interes ng US, hinayaan ng gobyernong agawin ng mga dayuhang korporasyon, malakihang minahan, at plantasyon ang mga lupaing ninuno ng mga Moro. Itinulak din nito ang pagtaboy ng mga komunidad ng mga Moro para sa mga magsasakang galing sa Luzon at Visayas na inilisan ng gobyerno papuntang Mindanao.

Patuloy ang pagbibiktima sa mamamayang Moro sa sistematikong diskriminasyon at pang-aapi, malaganap na pang-aabuso, at pagmasaker sa kamay ng mga pwersa ng estado. Isa na dito ang Jabidah Massacre kung saan 64 kabataang Moro ang pinadala ni Marcos noong 1969 sa isang ambisyosong misyon sa Sabah, Malaysia, ang tinaguriang Oplan Merdeka, na nauwi sa kanilang karumaldumal na pagpatay.

Ang lahat ng ito ay nagtulak sa paglunsad ng armadong pakikibaka sa pangunguna ng Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) simula noong 1970s, ng Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) simula noong 1980s, at ng Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) nitong nakaraang iilang taon.

Patay-sindi ang mga usapang pangkapayapaan sa pagitan ng gobyerno at mga rebeldeng Moro mula sa kasunduan sa MNLF na pinatibay noong dekada nobenta hanggang sa kasalukuyang pagsisikap ng MILF para sa isang Bangsamoro Basic Law. Palagi itong inaabutan nang panibagong opensiba ng gobyerno katulad ng mabangis na “All Out War” ni Estrada laban sa mga kampo ng MILF noong taong 2000. Layon lang kasi ng gobyerno na pasukuin ang mga Moro. Hindi tunay na nais ng gubyerno na ibigay ang karapatan sa pagpapasya-sa-sarili at lalong hindi masosolusyunan sa kasalukuyang sistema ang ugat ng kahirapan at kawalang kaunlaran sa Mindanao.

Sa dakong huli, makakamit lamang ang tunay na kapayapaan at kasarinlan ng Bangsamoro sa pagwasak ng kaayusang malakolonyal na siyang ugat ng pang-aapi at pagsasamantala ng mamamayang Moro. Nagpapatuloy ang pakikibaka ng mamamayang Moro para sa karapatan sa pagpapasya-sa-sarili at para sa tunay na kapayapaan at pambansang kalayaan.

Mao Tse-tung, May 1939
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume II
Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1967

The May 4th Movement twenty years ago marked a new stage in China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism. The cultural reform movement which grew out of the May 4th Movement was only one of the manifestations of this revolution. With the growth and development of new social forces in that period, a powerful camp made its appearance in the bourgeois democratic revolution, a camp consisting of the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie. Around the time of the May 4th Movement, hundreds of thousands of students courageously took their place in the van. In these respects the May 4th Movement went a step beyond the Revolution of 1911.

If we trace China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution back to its formative period, we see that it has passed through a number of stages in its development: the Opium War, the War of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894,[1] the Reform Movement of 1898,[2] the Yi Ho Tuan Movement,[3] the Revolution of 1911, the May 4th Movement, the Northern Expedition, and the War of the Agrarian Revolution. The present War of Resistance Against Japan is yet another stage, and is the greatest, most vigorous and most dynamic stage of all. The bourgeois-democratic revolution can be considered accomplished only when the forces of foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism have basically been overthrown and an independent democratic state has been established. From the Opium War onwards each stage in the development of the revolution has had its own distinguishing characteristics. But the most important feature differentiating them is whether they came before or after the emergence of the Communist Party. However, taken as a whole, all the stages bear the character of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The aim of this democratic revolution is to establish a social system hitherto unknown in Chinese history, namely, a democratic social system having a feudal society (during the last hundred years a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society) as its precursor and a socialist society as its successor. If anyone asks why a Communist should strive to bring into being first a bourgeois-democratic society and then a socialist society, our answer is: we are following the inevitable course of history.

China’s democratic revolution depends on definite social forces for its accomplishment. These social forces are the working class, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the progressive section of the bourgeoisie, that is, the revolutionary workers, peasants, soldiers, students and intellectuals, and businessmen, with the workers and peasants as the basic revolutionary forces and the workers as the class which leads the revolution. It is impossible to accomplish the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic revolution without these basic revolutionary forces and without the leadership of the working class. Today, the principal enemies of the revolution are the Japanese imperialists and the Chinese traitors, and the fundamental policy in the revolution is the policy of the Anti-Japanese National United Front, consisting of all workers, peasants, soldiers, students and intellectuals, and businessmen who are against Japanese aggression. Final victory in the War of Resistance will be won when this united front is greatly consolidated and developed.

In the Chinese democratic revolutionary movement, it was the intellectuals who were the first to awaken. This was clearly demonstrated both in the Revolution of 1911 and in the May 4th Movement, and in the days of the May 4th Movement the intellectuals were more numerous and more politically conscious than in the days of the Revolution of 1911. But the intellectuals will accomplish nothing if they fail to integrate themselves with the workers and peasants. In the final analysis, the dividing line between revolutionary intellectuals and non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary intellectuals is whether or not they are willing to integrate themselves with the workers and peasants and actually do so. Ultimately it is this alone, and not professions of faith in the Three People’s Principles or in Marxism, that distinguishes one from the other. A true revolutionary must be one who is willing to integrate himself with the workers and peasants and actually does so.

It is now twenty years since the May 4th Movement and almost two years since the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war. The young people and the cultural circles of the whole country bear a heavy responsibility in the democratic revolution and the War of Resistance. I hope they will understand the character and the motive forces of the Chinese revolution, make their work serve the workers and peasants, go into their midst and become propagandists and organizers among them. Victory will be ours when the entire people arises against Japan. Young people of the whole country, bestir yourselves!

Notes

[1] The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 was started by Japanese imperialism for the purpose of invading Korea and China. Many Chinese soldiers and some patriotic generals put up a heroic fight. But China suffered defeat because of the corruption of the Ching government and its failure to prepare resistance. In 1895 the Ching government concluded the shameful Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan.    [p. 237]

[2] For the Reform Movement of 1898 see “On Protracted War“, Note 8, p. of this volume.    [p. 237]

[3] The Yi Ho Tuan Movement was the anti-imperialist armed struggle which took place in northern China in 1900. The broad masses of peasants, handicraftsmen and other people took part in this movement. Getting in touch with one another through religious and other channels, they organized themselves on the basis of secret societies and waged a heroic struggle against the joint forces of aggression of the eight imperialist powers — the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Italy and Austria. The movement was put down with indescribable savagery after the joint forces of aggression occupied Tientsin and Peking.    [p. 237]

By Thomas Van Beersum, Pinoy Weekly

Who does this Alex de Jong think he is? Either he has not studied the Philippine revolution, or he has deliberately distorted facts to fit his own warped sectarian view. Inhis article, published by Jacobin Magazine, he tries to paint a picture of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as “orthodox Stalinist monsters marching towards irrelevance”. He echoes the same malicious allegations which the reactionary Philippine state has been spouting for the last 46 years.

In reality, the Philippine revolutionary forces are strong and vibrant. Having outgrown without their former “left” and right opportunist elements, they continue to make headway in advancing towards the seizure of state power. This is a result of the Second Great Rectification Movement that criticized and repudiated the handful of opportunist elements that had degenerated under various bourgeois influences, including neoliberalism, revisionism and Trotskyism.

The CPP continues to build organs of political power among millions of workers and peasants in thousands of Philippine villages, in accordance with the strategic line ofProtracted People’s War. The general line of People’s Democratic Revolution with a socialist perspective has generated a strong party of the revolutionary proletariat with 200,000 members, the New People’s Army with 10,000 full-time red fighters, tens of thousands of people’s militia, hundreds of thousands of men and women in self-defense units, and millions of people in the 18 organizations of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.

Yet de Jong has the audacity to proclaim “the end” of a rich and dynamic national liberation movement shaking a base of imperialism in Southeast Asia, despite the fact that his own organization pales in comparison to the organizational strength and capacity of the organizers of the Philippine national democratic movement active in his own country, the Netherlands.

De Jong tries to make it appear as if the only reasons the CPP play a leading role in the Philippine struggle are simply because of the worsening conditions in the country and because of the armed struggle’s “romantic” appeal. This is an insult to the proletarian intellect of the millions of supporters of the national democratic revolution in the Philippines, who are rooted among the most oppressed and exploited sections of the people.

This is a ridiculous paternalistic presumption from someone whose “left” chauvinist group believes that the “international communist revolution” has to be politically led by and oriented towards the Fourth International, the “strategic censor” based in Paris, France.

As a way to “prove” that the CPP is “being worn down by the passage of history”, de Jong exaggerates the size and significance of the CPP-splinters even as he decries their self-destructive status and course. These grouplets, whose legitimacy in the eyes of the international progressive community is becoming smaller day by day, are running out of their “revolutionary prestige” and hence need to use people like de Jong to make unfounded boisterous claims about them.

The question of primary importance for the revolutionary movement in the Philippines is still: Who are our enemies, and who are our friends? And let’s be clear, the “broad” and “ideologically heterogeneous” left composed of CPP-rejects are no alternative for the CPP, and they should in no way be conceived of as ‘friends of the people’.

Sneaky tricks

Many of the claims de Jong makes about the CPP are contradictory and reveal his shallow understanding of facts on the ground.

The national democratic (ND) line is, according to him, “strangely out of time”, but he also acknowledges that the national democrats remain by far the strongest current on the Philippine left.

De Jong accuses the CPP of branding everyone who does not follow a Maoist line as an “enemy of the revolution”, but at the same time he also accuses the CPP of violating revolutionary principles by engaging in united fronts and alliances, and decries the fact that the mass movement’s membership is based on a national democratic line rather than a strict ideologically socialist or communist one.

Furthermore, he also admits that the CPP ideology remains the dominant tendency and that alternative interpretations of socialism are almost nowhere to be found. If that is the case, how can he also claim that few people in the (ND) mass movement discuss socialism or Marxism?

Even when he slanders the CPP, de Jong feels the need to also praise their undeniable achievements. He even has to admit that the communists and NDs by far are the most relevant, that they are able to reach out to and organize millions of Filipinos around their political line, that they retain strong civilian support, that their means and infrastructure overshadow those of the other left groups, and that their ideology remains very influential even among the mainstream.

To show his thorough disdain for the revolutionary forces in the Philippines, his article could actually put them in danger. De Jong shows no respect for the distinction between the legal national democratic mass organizations and the different underground revolutionary groups. Due to the anti-communist political climate pushed by the reactionary state, when someone is branded as a communist it creates the ground for them to get abducted and/or killed. De Jong “outs” several organizations as being fronts for the CPP, and he even goes as far as naming a left-wing personality who is out in the open as being the rumored new chief of the Party. This “red-baiting” technique is frequently made use of by the Philippine military and its “left” lackeys.

Rectification

De Jong’s claim that the CPP- and ND-aligned left are equal in size to the other left groups put together is laughable and unsupported. But before countering that claim, we should examine how the split between the CPP and the grouplets originated. To do this, we must look back at the Second Great Rectification Movement which launched in 1992.

The Second Great Rectification Movement was a huge ideological and educational initiative inside the CPP that criticized and repudiated the subjectivist line that the Philippines was no longer semi-colonial and semi-feudal and that the line of Protracted People’s War was wrong, as well as the “left” opportunism and right opportunist lines which arose from such subjectivism.

The left opportunist line had variations. The CPP leadership of Rodolfo Salas put forward the “strategic counter-offensive” line of leaping over from the strategic defensive to strategic counter-offensive without developing the strategic defensive and strategic stalemate stages fully. (For those less familiar with military-political strategy, I suggest reading On Protracted War by Mao Zedong.)

But the main target of the Second Great Rectification Movement was the worst case of self-destructive left opportunism, which at the time was prevalent especially in Mindanao. Several high-level cadres of the party there tried to improve and adopt a line that tried to deviate from the strategic line of Protracted People’s War. They wanted to ‘finish the fight quickly’ using adventurist methods.

Their idea was to use urban insurrection by the spontaneous masses as the leading, politico-military force, while depreciating the people’s army as a mere military force to be reorganized into concentrated companies. This would have been a detrimental strategy for the seizure of political power in a country like the Philippines. They neglected mass work and isolated themselves from the masses. Because of this erroneous line, the Party, the peoples’ army and the revolutionary machinery became particularly vulnerable to tactical attacks by enemy forces.

The militarist line was easily overcome by the enemy. But instead of criticizing themselves, they blamed their failures on “deep penetrating agents” or “DPAs”. The wrong line ignited a hysteria in the organization that they would call “Kampanyang Ahos”, a campaign that resulted in the torture and killing of hundreds of party members, activists and allies without due process.

Kampanyang Ahos was not a “bloody purge”; it was a gigantic anti-communist and anti-people crime, not just a tactical error and not even merely an ideological-political-organizational matter internal to the Party. At the time of the campaign, the founding chairperson of the CPP, Jose Maria Sison (“Joma”), was in maximum security prison and held no official position in the Party. Still, he was one of the first people who called for an investigation into the “Ahos” campaign. In Joma’s book, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View, he already exposed and condemned the crime back in 1988.

The Second Great Rectification Movement caused a split within the national democratic movement. Those who reaffirmed the Maoist line became known as the Reaffirmists (RAs), and those following a different line who were either expelled or bolted out of the party themselves were known as the Rejectionists (RJs).

(For those interested in the theoretical contributions, the significance and necessity of the rectification movement, I advise everyone to at least read its basic documents:Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors, General Review of Important Events and Decisions from 1980 to 1991, and Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism.)

The grouplets

Let’s take a look at this “heterogeneous left” that de Jong is so supportive of. What has really become of these anti-CPP grouplets? Let’s go through the most relevant ones (relevant for this article, that is) one by one.

Akbayan

Each president in the Philippines has effectively utilized (or perhaps, neutralized) “its own” left. These “left” groups portray themselves through their “critical” aesthetic on the outside, but in essence they serve only as an extension of the power of the reactionary ruling classes.

The most successful at gaining high positions in the reactionary government usually evanesce as retired successful crooks after their presidential patrons step down from power. Examples are the Popular Democrats (PopDems) Horacio Morales Jr. as secretary of the ironically named Department of Agrarian Reform and Edicio De La Torre as Tesda director under the Estrada regime; Mike Defensor of Sanlakas who became the close political advisor to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and the social-democratic Akbayan cronies who became the backbone of current president Aquino’s own criminal administration.

De Jong’s own organization maintains close links with Akbayan up to this day; perhaps this is why he downplays Aquino’s human rights violations (which according to him apparently only continue under a “decreased” level during his presidency).

Akbayan or “Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party” was an active participant in international social-democratic alliances such as the “Socialist International” and the “Progressive Alliance”. These international affiliations were at the time centered around the imperialist politics of the “left-wing” war parties such as the PvdA in the Netherlands and the Labour Party in the UK.

Many Akbayan leaders have enjoyed opportunistic and anti-communist political careers. Joel Rocamora, Walden Bello, Etta Rosales and Ricardo Reyes were all leaders of Siglaya, a coalition of former national democrats linked to the Fourth International. Part of Siglaya joined with the social-democrats headed by Ronald Llamas (who is now the presidential political affairs advisor of Aquino) to form Akbayan, the “progressive” anti-CPP attack dog of the Aquino regime. Through Akbayan, those who previously called themselves liberal communists only to become Trotskyites have been able to get high positions in Aquino’s cabinet.

Etta Rosales, former Akbayan president, was the chief of the Human Rights Commission under Aquino until she retired last May. Aside from being active in other schemes, she engaged in whitewashing the human rights violations by reactionary military and police officers. Previous to that, she collaborated with US lawyer Robert Swift inremoving thousands of human rights claimants from the list of those who initiated and won the human rights case against Marcos in the US.

Joel Rocamora, former Akbayan president and ideologue, being so against poverty, has been enriching himself further as head of the National Anti-Poverty Commission under Aquino. When Rocamora was still a co-director of the Transnational Institute (TNI), he submitted falsified reports on progressive ND-allied groups to funding agencies in Europe to expose the “Stalinist CPP fronts” the agencies had been supporting.

Ricardo Reyes, who was one of the leaders of Akbayan before he had a falling out withred-baiter Walden Bello, ordered the so-called Mindanao Caretaker Committee to carry out the Kampanyang Ahos witch-hunt, resulting in the arrest of 1500 party members and allies and in the torture and execution of more than 300 party members and allies.

Former Akbayan leader Nathan Quimpo also actively led and participated in the torture and murder acts of Kampanyang Ahos. To distract from this grievous crime, Ricardo Reyes and Nathan Quimpo became prominent in exaggerating and denouncing the Salas central leadership of the CPP for their boycott policy in the rigged 1986 snap presidential elections. When he was in The Netherlands as a political refugee, Quimpo was one of the witnesses in the case against Joma, and made a sworn statement for the Dutch state against the latter.

The right opportunist line in the CPP already arose (almost at the same time as the left opportunist line) in 1981 and became fully articulated in 1982. Its basic line was to take out the working class leadership in the united front and in effect yield leadership to the liberal bourgeoisie supposedly in order to attract more people.

The right opportunists were small and weak before the fall of Marcos, but after his fall, the so-called Popular Democrats arose to promote the line of capitulation and seeking jobs in the reactionary government. Their line was reinforced by former left opportunists like Reyes and Quimpo who had swung to the right. It was further reinforced by real DPAs like Joel Rocamora who engaged in wrecking operations in conjunction with Trotskyites from the Paris-based Fourth International.

Even when these politicians ascended to power with Aquino, you saw them splitting over attempts to bolster their own individual power. Akbayan has been splitting again with Reyes and then with Bello, who recently gave up the Philippine House of Representatives membership in congress as Akbayan, criticizing its collaboration with Aquino… after almost 5 years of his own blatant collaboration. Something about rats abandoning a sinking ship.

RPM-P/RPA-ABB

Sanlakas was a party-list group (an electoral formation in the Philippines) set up by  Filemon “Popoy” Lagman in 1993. It was based on an ultra-left commandist, workerist line (inspired by Ernest Mandel) that gave no decisive value to the worker-peasant alliance and was based on the pernicious assumption that waging revolution is simply a matter of a workers’ uprising in the cities.

Although Lagman (who instigated the “June Breakthrough” and “Operation Missing Link” paranoia campaigns in Southern Tagalog) had his own rascality when it came to killing people without evidence, his insurrectionist opportunism should be seen as distinct from the opportunism in Mindanao.

The death squad group centered around Arturo Tabara (who led the biggest breakaway with arms from the CPP in Negros) eventually became part of Lagman’s group. But after some time this alliance went down, they became enemies, and Tabara became part of the launching of the Revolutionary Workers Party-Philippines (RPM-P).

Lagman also had a breakup with Nilo Dela Cruz of the armed Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB) over the bribe money from the Amari Real Estate Company in 1998-99. The Lagman-ABB group was bribed to push the eviction of the poor inhabitants of Freedom Island in Manila to make way for a casino. 80 million pesos was left in the bank. Lagman and Dela Cruz fought over the money, eventually the son-in-law of Dela Cruz (who was under the command of Lagman) was able to get the money, and in the end Lagman had to pay with his life.

One year after Tabara leading his RPA (Revolutionary Proletarian Army) into the RPM-P, the metro Manila-based ABB led by Nilo Dela Cruz joined this new party. The ABB was the name of the Manila-Rizal Armed City Partisans under the CPP and NPA during the Martial Law years until early 1990s. It was named after trade union leader Alex Boncayao, after he was martyred by the fascists during martial law. After the Popoy Lagman clique usurped command over it and used it for criminal activities, it was condemned by the CPP and even by the Boncayao family in 1992-1993.

The RPM-P/RPA-ABB became active in killing legal personalities of the left movement, such as Bayan Muna leader Romeo Sanchez, and the group has openly admitted to having coordinated with the Philippine Army’s 61st Infantry Battallion in attacking an NPA camp in Negros. It has also been implicated in the killing of Romeo Capalla, a civilian and brother of Archbishop Fernando Capalla.

The RPM-P/RPA-ABB has received millions of pesos from the Philippine government, due to its “peace” deal. Progressive human rights group Karapatan has covered the extent of the human rights abuses of the RPM-P (harassment, murder, arson, rape).

In Negros Occidental, the RPA became the hacienda guards of reactionary big landlordEduardo Cojuangco and received payments as an anti-NPA and anti-CPP paramilitary adjunct force of the reactionary armed forces under the Estrada, Arroyo and Aquino regimes.

Arturo Tabara was even one of the special guests of Philippine National Police Director-General Hermogenes Ebdane at the 12th founding anniversary of the National Capital Regional Police Office. Another special guest there was Romulo Kintanar, another CPP-reject and active “Ahos” participant, who served as a “resource person” of the Department of National Defense and the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Kintanar was also the designated project officer in an assassination plot (in collaboration with the Estrada government) against Joma in The Netherlands in 2000.

When ABB tried to expand and organize its own units in the cities of Negros and Panay Islands, it caused resentment from RPA over turf and loot from robbery and extortion. The RPA split with ABB and RPA itself split into different factions. The Tabara-Paduano faction of the RPM-P has been effectively disarmed in 2013 due to a peace deal with the government and is now the Kapatiran para sa Progresong Panlipunan (Brotherhood for Social Progress – KPP). Paduano represents the party-list “Abang Linkod” in the reactionary Congress.

The ABB is now a handful of elements based in Muntinglupa, Rizal, engaged in criminal activities (such as killing for hire) and espionage work for the reactionary armed forces. It practically does not exist anymore. The size of the gang fluctuates between 10 and 20. Their value as intelligence assets has dwindled. The ABB is now headed by a son of Nilo Dela Cruz (who had a split with his father over money matters), who seems to be more aggressive than the father in conducting criminal activities and attacking the NPA.

RPM-M/RPA

Ike de los Reyes was with the RPA but in 2002 formally split with them over differences on the RPM-P’s peace pact with the government and other organizational and ideological matters. His new party which was based in central Mindanao became known as the Revolutionary Workers Party of Mindanao (RPM-M). The RPM-M renamed its armed group the Revolutionary Peoples’ Army, to distinguish it from the RPM-P’s Revolutionary Proletarian Army.

At the beginning, what became the RPM-M was able to usurp command over one of the platoon remnants of the NPA in Cotabato, but this platoon has now disintegrated. For some time, they were together with Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao who is now identified with Aquino. The RPM-M has been pretending to have an active army to negotiate with the reactionary government in order to get payments from them as an anti-NPA organization. It signed a formal ceasefire with the government in 2005, and shifted its focus to doing ‘peace and development work’. Its support base is marginal.

The RPM-M is a regular and active member of the Fourth International since 2003. The inactive website of the RPM-M is hosted by the Dutch ‘Grenzeloos’ (Borderless), de Jong’s group.

PMP

Lagman had a break over strategy with Sanlakas and its yellow workers’ union BMP, and initiated the Filipino Workers’ Party (PMP) in 1999. This was done together with several other small remnants from the CPP. In 2002, several factions merged with the PMP, such as the Democratic Proletarian Party (PPD) of Manjette Lopez (who took over the leadership of the PMP after Lagman’s death) and the Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP) of Sonny Melencio. After some time this party practically disintegrated because the factions could not come to agreement on many issues, and while remaining under the PMP banner for some time, the groups used their respective names in issuing statements and have kept their respective alignments with international Trotskyite formations.

MLPP-RHB

The few personalities identified with the Marxist Leninist Party of the Philippines (MLPP) supported the rectification movement at first, but questioned it later. This group was founded in 1998. The MLPP formed the Revolutionary People’s Army (Rebolusyonaryong Hukbo ng Bayan, RHB), a tiny armed extortionist group with only a handful of members operating in small parts of Bataan and Zambales in Central Luzon.

PLM

In 1998, Lagman’s “theoretician” Sonny Melencio started the Socialist League which later became the Socialist Party of Labor. In 2005 a coalition of CPP-splinters called Laban ng Masa (Struggle of the Masses) was founded and Melencio became its chief spokesperson, but due to big ideological differences between the different RJ groups it went down again. Melencio was also reportedly taking many unilateral initiatives not backed by the other organizations.

In 2009, Melencio started the Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Laboring Masses, PLM), the political party still linked to Sanlakas Party-list. Sanlakas dwindled and the PLM has not done any better in electoral politics. This group is linked to the Australian Trotskyite formation “Democratic Socialist Perspective” and is able to hold a rally of 100 to 200 every now and then in Manila.

Conclusion

All those splinters or grouplets that persisted in committing “left” and right opportunist errors have only splintered further and become nil or close to nil. There are many individuals and groups, but none of them seem to have a mass base (except for the Akbayan cronies who enjoy a sizeable petty-bourgeois following due to their blatant puppetry).

These groups have become either the backbone and whitewashers of the reactionary state, criminal syndicates and bodyguards for the big landlords, or small fragmented groups whose main focus still is to echo the black propaganda of the police and military elements against the communist movement.

If the Rejectionists had their way, for sure it would’ve been the end of the CPP.

Not the war, but left opportunism is over

After the Second Great Rectification Movement, the CPP, the protracted people’s war, and all legal patriotic and progressive forces have been rejuvenated, have accumulated strength and are again advancing towards strategic stalement against the US-led reactionary state.

So why does Alex de Jong insist that the war is over? There is not a single piece of evidence in his article which proves this. The main thrust of the article is ill-wished and unsupported. De Jong thinks that he and some fragmented groups are acting in a different way but in fact they are doing the work of the ruling system.

If the war is over, then who are the victors? Why is he saying this and what are the political implications? To say that the war is over, isn’t that endorsing the winners and praising the pseudo-left who have for a long time already exposed themselves as servants of the ruling classes?

Our solidarity should lie with our comrades from the Philippines and India, who at this point pioneer the World Socialist Revolution. Not with the eclectic “left-wing” lackeys of comprador reactionaries and its “progressive” armchair supporters in the West.

Long live the revolution in the Philippines!

I was able to watch the film Chakravyuh, but minus the subtitles. Without the dialogue, I did not understand the minute details and nuances. But the scenes and the action were enough to give you an idea of what it is all about in general. I have to give the people behind the film the credit for the attempt at portraying one of the most important revolutionary movements in the world today, the Indian Maoists. More popularly known by the name Naxalites from the town Naxalbari in West Bengal where the first Maoist-inspired peasant revolt flared up in1967, they have been declared by the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the single most serious internal threat to national security.

Applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the concrete conditions of the Indian social condition, they contend that the Indian people has no choice but to wage a new democratic revolution with the strategic line of protracted people’s war. This is in response to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Indian society, which is ruled over by several imperialist powers through the conduit of the big comprador, landlord and bureaucrat capitalist classes. Because the ruling 1 percent use repressive violence to preserve their wealth and power, the masses must wield revolutionary violence against them.

There are over 30 groups that have been waging people’s war in various parts of India. In 2004, two of the largest Maoist groups, the Maoist Communist Centre of India and the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) [People’s War Group] merged to become the CPI (Maoist). They are said to be active in over 200 districts in ten states of India. Called the “red corridor,” this region in the east of India with significant Maoist presence includes parts of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

Unlike most other stories where the socio-historical element simply occupies the backdrop to the main family drama, romance, or personal vendetta, in Chakravyuh social reality is directly intertwined to the focal narrative of its protagonists.

In broad strokes, the plot centers on the friendship of Adil and Kabir. Adil is a police officer assigned to an outlying province where the Maoists are active. He launches search and destroy operations against the revolutionaries but ends up getting ambushed and almost dead. Then Kabir comes and promises to help Adil by infiltrating the Maoists for intelligence. He gets the trust and confidence of the revolutionaries, but just as he was already succeeding, reaching the top hierarchy of the movement, he gets a change of heart.

The brutality of the Indian state against the peasants and avidasis, who are forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for large-scale mines and export processing zones of foreign corporations, leads him to decide to fully embrace the revolution. The film concludes with a dramatic confrontation between Adil and Kabir and ends with a note on the continuing armed struggle of the Indian Maoists.

The usual melodrama, as expressed in the typical Cain versus Abel best friend fights best friend plot, in this mainstream Indian film is expected. But the twist in Chakravyuh is its providing the perfect example of class love trumping over personal friendship for in the end Kabir chose to serve the masses rather than be subservient to a friend who is a tool of the class enemies.

But despite the stark presentation of Indian realities, from the viciousness of the fighting, the plight of the adivasis and the rural poor, the doing of government officials and the police forces of the bidding of big business, and so on, there are significant misconceptions of the internal dynamics and organizational principles of the Indian Maoists that seriously hamper the film’s realism.

We see this in the way, for example, the Naxalites immediately recruited Kabir to their group, without adequate background check. This disregards the discipline of revolutionary groups that throughout history have been particularly strict about letting in undesirable elements. But strictly following real life would have made the film’s story in its present form simply untenable. A more realistic version would have been to make Kabir a radical from the very beginning. Then again, that would pose the problem of why would a revolutionary cooperate with the police chief, even if he were his childhood best friend?

Anyhow, it is interesting to note how reactionary governments have always used this method of infiltration to try to sow confusion and defeat revolutionaries. One amusing case for example is that of Roman Malinkovsky who joined Lenin’s inner circle and represented the Bolsheviks in the Duma while at the same time receiving pay checks from the Czar as a government spy.

Another problem in the film is its sensational depiction of revolutionary violence. An informer captured by the guerrillas has his ear cut off before being chopped off with an axe. A Maoist official who is caught pilfering the movement’s finances is executed by firing squad using excessive rounds of AK-47 fire. Excesses are bound to happen in any revolutionary mass movement whose constituents have been the victims of centuries of accumulated structural violence. But revolutionaries are also bound by rules of conduct in their waging of armed struggle, and this is expressed in the following of the rules of war and international humanitarian law and respect for human rights.

This is a given in a just war waged for the oppressed and downtrodden masses as is reflected in Mao’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention which govern the bearing of revolutionary soldiers. The Three Main Rules of Discipline are as follows: “(1) Obey orders in all your actions.(2) Don’t take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses. (3) Turn in everything captured.” The Eight Points for Attention are as follows: “(1) Speak politely. (2) Pay fairly for what you buy. (3) Return everything you borrow. (4) Pay for anything you damage. (5) Don’t hit or swear at people. (6) Don’t damage crops. (7) Don’t take liberties with women. (8) Don’t ill-treat captives.”

One more amusing part appears near the end when police suddenly appeared in a village where Juhi and her comrades were hiding. When the police started to take the children hostage, Juhi surrendered herself to them in exchange for the children’s freedom. Even more comical is Kabir’s reaction when he learned of Juhi’s arrest, running madly across forests from the village to the police station and single-handedly killing the police guards and freeing her. What is so ludicrous in these scenes is the individualist solution shown by revolutionaries steeled in the guerrilla struggle. Mao’s injunction against unnecessary sacrifices, exhortation for militant collective solution to people’s problems, and the strategy of letting a stronger enemy force punch into thin air (retreating as the enemy advances and harassing them when they rest) are forgotten.

Nevertheless, all in all, Chakravyuh is a very good film. I wonder why Filipino mainstream or indie film makers can’t produce something similar with the Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary armed struggle as the primary context? While there are Filipino films that touch on the matter, they either focus on legal mass struggles (Sister Stella L), human rights abuses (Orapronobis, Dukot), or the Martial Law experience (Dekada 70, Ka Oryang, Sigwa). Being a Bollywood film, Chakravyuh has the added come on of having all those singing and dancing. It’s refreshing to see a Maoist propaganda team, complete with a hammer and sickle flag, going among the masses and explaining the revolution to them with all the festive dancing and singing.

Chakravyuh also refers to a defensive military formation in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Shaped like a blooming lotus when viewed from the air, the formation aims to lure attackers into penetrating inside where they find it difficult to break out. Like the military formation from which the film is named after, this is a conflict that no social force in India can escape. Despite the film creator’s limited knowledge of the Maoist movement and need to play along with mainstream sensibilities hampering the film’s realism, it ultimately succeeds in portraying the glaring injustices and inequality of Indian society that necessitates the waging of armed revolution.

Nagpapaabot ang Anakbayan ng taos pusong pakikiramay sa pamilya, mga kaibigan, at mga kasama ni Wendell Mollenido Gumban na nagbuwis ng buhay sa isang engkwentro sa mga element ng 66th Infantry Battalion ng Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) sa Barangay Andap, New Bataan, Compostela Valley noong Hulyo 23, 2016.

Nagdadalamhati ang mga manggagawa, magsasaka, lumad at lahat ng masang anakpawis na kanyang pinaglingkuran sa kanyang maagang pagpanaw sa murang edad ng 30. Marapat na bigyan ng pinakamataas na parangal at pagbubunyi ang kanyang makabuluhan na buhay bilang iskolar ng bayan, propagandista, at pulang mandirigma ng Bagong Hukbong Bayan (BHB).

The Binanog dance performed during the 2016 Tumanduk nga Mangunguma nga Nagapangapin sa Duta kag Kabuhi (TUMANDUK) Assembly held in Tapaz, Capiz earlier this year. Photo credits: TUMANDUK.

In his first State of the Nation Address last July 25, President Rodrigo Duterte urged indigenous peoples to make use of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) to protect their rights and welfare. “Government has given you the legal tool to improve yourself financially, economically and socially. Make use of your ancestral domain. Do not let it remain idle,” he said.

But indigenous groups have a less favorable view of the IPRA; they say it has been used as an instrument to railroad big projects that encroach on indigenous lands rather than to empower indigenous peoples to defend their communities.

According to the Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas, the certificates of ancestral domain title issued under the law have facilitated the transfer of ownership and exploitation of ancestral lands under compromised indigenous leaders. This is clearly demonstrated in the way the Tumandok people of Panay, also known as the Panay-Bukidnon, will be displaced from their homes and farmlands to make way for the construction of the Jalaur Mega Dam in Calinog, Iloilo.

Last July 16-18, I joined an international solidarity mission to look into the proposed dam. The mission delegates represented 26 organizations from five countries—Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Philippines and South Korea.

According to Berna Castor of the group Tumanduk nga Mangunguma nga Nagapangapin sa Duta kag Kabuhi (or Tumanduk), the IPRA has been used to facilitate the approval of the dam by “tribal elders” organized by authorities for the singular purpose of legitimizing the project. She said the elders who had expressed their approval were not chosen by the community, and mostly comprised those whose lives and livelihood are not directly affected by the project.

The tribespeople who spoke during our delegation’s uphill trek to the communities along the Jalaur River in Calinog talked about the destruction of not only their homes but also their livelihood and cultural heritage.

In fact, at least 6 Tumandok burial grounds and sacred sites along the Jalaur River will be desecrated with the building of the dam, according to a research study presented during the ISM by University of the Philippines Visayas graduates Mar Anthony Balani and Jude Mangilog.

Delegates of the International Solidarity Mission fording the Jalaur River.

Tumanduk maintains that the “consultative assemblies” organized by the NCIP presented only the advantages of building the dam and masked the negative impacts. It says the affected communities were promised incentives in exchange for support, and those who oppose the project were harassed by state forces.

The group adds that the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) has not informed those affected of the environmental hazards posed by the dam, such as the existence of the active Panay fault a mere 11 kilometers away from the dam site and the Mines and Geosciences Bureau report on the high risk of landslides in the area.

The proponents hold that the Jalaur Mega Dam, also known as the Jalaur River Multipurpose Project Phase 2 (JRMP II), will provide irrigation to agricultural lands, augment potable water supply, and deliver electricity to the province of Iloilo.

Remmy Celeste of the Calinog Indigenous People’s Organization, a government-accredited and sponsored group, told the mission delegates during our courtesy call on Calinog Mayor Alex Centena that “little sacrifices” are acceptable in exchange for development.

“Without the dam, nothing will happen to us. Yes, some will sacrifice. Some properties will be damaged and inundated,” Celeste said in Filipino, adding that these “sacrifices” will be more than offset by the livelihood projects, scholarships, and roads that the dam will bring.

A priority project of the Aquino administration, the P11.212-billion JRMP II is mainly funded by an P8.94-billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of Korea with counterpart funding from the Philippine government.

The very idea that marginalized communities can be entitled to public assistance and social services only if they agree to the project is in itself questionable. And yet the official state discourse continues to paint those who resist the project as opponents of development.

The Tumandok mapping the destruction and displacement that the dam construction will cause. Photo credits: Jalaur River for the People Movement.

“The life of the indigenous peoples has remained the same. Will we not give them the opportunity to improve their lives?” said Iloilo Gov. Arthur Defensor Sr. during our dialogue at the Provincial Capitol.

But improvement from whose perspective? In limiting the issue to the conflict between those who support and those who oppose “progress,” the official narrative has sidelined dissenting voices and alternate visions of development.

Tumandok Nestor Castor asserts that development for his people means the improvement of agricultural practices, raising the productivity of their land, and the provision of social services like health and education.

“You see we are here upland but only the lowlands will benefit from the water that flows through the dam. But the proponents do not see the destruction it will cause, they only see their own gain,” he said in his native tongue.

Dr. Ernesto Hofileña, an agriculturist from Iloilo, has also outlined practical alternatives to JRMP-II: “The average annual output of the Jalaur River is 1,197,504,000 cubic meters. If we can save this using a series of small dams, reservoirs, and deep lateral canals crisscrossing the farmlands across the Iloilo plain, we won’t need a high dam with a storage capacity of less than a billion.”

This demonstrates that development is possible without displacing the Tumandok. It is thus imperative for the Duterte administration to review JRMP II and all other “development” projects that encroach on indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands.

Part of the Tumandok oral tradition narrates their belief of the known world divided among the kingdoms of their epic heroes. The kingdom of Datu Humadapnon is in the sky, that of Datu Labawdunggon in the mountains, that of Datu Paiburong in the lowlands, that of Datu Paubaya in the seas, and that of Datu Sagnay-Lunok underground.

Children playing along the river banks of Jalaur in Barangay Agcalaga, Calinog. 

Alas, the realms of Paiburong and the other datus have been successively taken from them, and what remains today is the mountain realm of Labawdunggon’s kin. And even these remaining ancestral lands of the Tumandok, along with their collective identity rooted in the native soil, are threatened with destruction.

“The dam will kill our people. Not only will we lose our homes and livelihood. The dam will force us to scatter across the plains. Our culture will disappear with the dissolution of our communities,” Tumanduk leader Roy Giganto said in Kinaray’a.

This is the reason for the unshakable commitment shown by the Tumandok men and women we spoke with in defending their land, livelihood, and cultural heritage.

Speaking in his native language, Nestor Castor said: This land has been ours way before the coming of the Spanish colonizers. We will not allow outsiders to drive us away so that they will become the natives and we will become the outsiders.

Note: This commentary was originally published by the Philippine Daily Inquirer on September 7, 2016. The version posted here includes portions that were not in the version submitted to the paper’s editors due to space constraints.

International Solidarity Mission delegates listen to testimonies by Tumandok men and women in Barangay Agcalaga, Calinog. Photo Credits: Jalaur River for the People Movement.

[This commentary was originally published by the Philippine Daily Inquirer on October 5, 2016.]

Of late, members of the younger generation, commonly referred to as “millennials,” have been the target of condemnation by some sectors for their supposed clueless acceptance of deceptive accounts of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship.

But blaming millennials obscures the role played by an ineffectual oligarchic democracy and its dismal failure to effectively prosecute the Marcoses and their cronies for plunder and human rights abuse. The persistence of foreign domination, landlord and elite rule, and bureaucratic corruption after the fall of the dictatorship have made it easier for the Marcoses to misleadingly claim that life was better under martial law.

Indeed, President Duterte’s promise to bury the dictator’s remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani is only the culmination of the long passage toward the political rehabilitation of the Marcos family.

Apart from school textbooks and curriculums that whitewash the abuses of the martial law regime, the continued enforcement of Marcos-era education policies also plays a role in the erasure of collective memory.

With Batas Pambansa 232 (or the Education Act of 1982), Marcos decreed the deregulation of the education system by allowing private schools to set tuition and other school fees. This resulted in the jacking up of the cost of education, with tuition soaring from P700-P2,600 a semester in 1982 to P1,200-P7,000 in 1987, according to a 1987 study of tuition levels of selected tertiary schools in Metro Manila. Fast-forward to three decades later, and the cost of tuition has spiraled by 5,000–7,000 percent, with the continued deregulation of the education system.

When Benigno Aquino III became president in 2010, the annual tuition was P30,000-P60,000. That amount had risen to P40,000-P80,000 by the time he left office last June, according to a study by the office of Kabataan Party-list Rep. Sarah Elago. Many have been deprived access to education, with only 14 in every 100 Grade 1 pupils making it to graduate school.

Meanwhile, Marcos’ 1972 Presidential Decree №6-A created the task force for an educational development plan aimed at realigning the education system toward supplying semiskilled labor for transnational corporations. This neocolonial orientation continues today, with the K-to-12 program focusing on technical-vocational courses and the “internationalization” of higher education that reduces the teaching of history and the humanities in favor of “globally competitive” programs.

All these form part of the neoliberal policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund-World Bank that transformed the public obligation of the state to provide social services like education into another opportunity for profit-making.

The gearing of education to supplying a cheap labor force and increasing profit margins has resulted in attacks on academic freedom, critical thinking, and the gutting of historical awareness among the youth. Many millennials have been left with no compass to navigate through history and its enduring legacy on the present.

Educating millennials on martial law thus means correcting insidious historical revisionism in schools as well as asserting education’s role in nation-building, as opposed to its current role as a commercial and neocolonial apparatus.

Last Sept. 21, students across the country walked out of their classes to join street protests timed with the 44th anniversary of the declaration of martial law. The young protesters called on President Duterte to make education free at all levels, put an end to extrajudicial killings, release all political prisoners, and stop the planned burial of the dictator’s remains in the heroes’ cemetery.

With his first 100 days in office over, it’s time Mr. Duterte heeded these demands and made good on his promise of change by finally breaking away from the neoliberal policies that have strengthened the oligarchic stranglehold on the country.

Despite several reservations—especially, my lack of blind faith in Mao’s China—I sympathize with the Maoists. They present themselves as revolutionary socialists, in opposition to the Soviet Union’s revisionism and the new bureaucracy created by the Trotskyists; I share their rejection of these approaches.  I am not so naive as to believe that they will bring about the revolution in the near future, and I find the “triumphalism” displayed by some of them puerile. But whereas  the entirety of  the  traditional Left accept s the system, defining themselves as a force for renewal or the respectful opposition,  the Maoists embody a genuinely  radical  form of  contestation.

Simone de Beavoir,
All Said and Done

Maoism is not as cool in the West nowadays as it was when Mao Zedong was still alive. The People’s Republic of China has turned capitalist with Mao’s death and lost much of its thunder as a friend of the oppressed and exploited. Today, Maoism seems to be alive and kicking as a real threat to the powers that be only in the weakest links of the imperialist chain, like in India, Nepal, and the Philippines.

Back in the 1960s, French intellectuals fell in love with Mao.[i] Thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and even Julia Kristeva were swept in a global wave of upheavals by youth, students, workers, peasants, and other Wretched of the Earth sparked by the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and pledged their allegiance to Maoism in various ways.

This is the story of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

Although Wolin is thoroughly against Marx, Lenin, and Mao, the book nonetheless gives a comprehensive account of the strengths and  problems of the French Maoists. The book also attempts to show the various forms of involvement and engagement by important French thinkers with Maoism.

Wolin’s narrative is clearly one of sin and redemption. It is about how these intellectual’s overcame their infatuation with Mao. Marxism, party politics, and the dictatorship of the proletariat are after all, for him, the embodiment of pure evil. But setting aside such a questionable agenda, the book also offers glimpses, tidbits, and anecdotes about this brief Maoist chapter in French intellectual history.

Sartre’s Maoist Commitment

Jean-Paul Sartre is popular as an existentialist philosopher and writer. His novels and polemical tracts are known to tackle the dilemmas of individual choice, freedom, and existence amidst the perceived absurdity of life and all its sufferings and predicaments.

But Sartre is also known as an advocate of social engagement among writers, as he wrote in the rambling prose of What is Literature. In this respect, he is renowned as an active supporter of varied causes such as the Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Sartre even wrote the Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he endorsed revolutionary violence as liberating in the face of the objective violence of the ruling system. All this as Sartre avoids any deeper commitment to organizations or parties that espouse these ideas.

What is not very well-known is Sartre’s dabbling with French Maoist militants. Sartre joined them in their protest actions, assumed the titular editorship of several of their newspapers, and publicly gave away copies of these banned Maoist papers on busy Paris boulevards.

With this dalliance with the youthful Maoist radicals, Sartre stood against the idea of the progressive intellectual as existing apart and above the masses and instead asserted that s/he should live among them, learn from them, and fight alongside them in their struggles.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir defying a government ban by illegally distributing La Cause du Peupl e in the spring of 1970. Photo: Gilles Peress. Source: Magnum Photo.

Foucault’s Revolutionary Zeal

Still another French thinker whose Maoist entanglement is not as renowned as his other achievements is Michel Foucault – more popular for making postmodernist micropolitics of everyday life fashionable as opposed to the supposedly “dogmatic” Marxist revolutionary orthodoxy.

For a time, Foucault joined the prisoner advocacy network GIP or the Groupe d’Information surles Prisons. The GIP functioned as a support group for detained Maoists, many of whom were leading hunger strikes in prisons all over France.

Foucault became deeply involved with Maoists who provided guidance for the direction, the meeting places, and the mimeograph machines for the pamphlets of the GIP. It was in the GIP that he adopted the Maoist method of work of social investigation to gather information on French prison conditions.

In this framework, it is not enough to conduct academic book-study, to confine oneself with “textuality.” More important is the act of actually immersing oneself among the masses and learning directly from them through social practice.

It was during this time that Foucault developed a powerful critique of the justice and prison system. In a celebrated debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued that it is “an idea invented and put into practice in different societies as an instrument of a particular political or economic power.”

It is clear that we live under a dictatorial class regime, under a class power that imposes itself with violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional… [When the proletariat triumphs] it will exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody over the class it has supplanted.

But Foucault’s petty bourgeois class origins also brought with him impetuous anarchist tendencies. While agreeing with the fact that the existing court system manifests the interests of the ruling classes, Foucault also opposed the creation of people’s courts on the basis of proletarian class interests.

Thus, even as Foucault called for the destruction of the bourgeois judicio-legal system for its bourgeois class biases, he also contested the idea of establishing a new proletarian legality that for him would only exercise formal restrictions on spontaneous popular will.

Foucault’s celebration of violent excess did have a good insurrectionist edge to it as this absorbed him in a series of pitched battles with the riot police in student barricades at the Vincennes: “Daily protests and riots regularly interrupted classes and the administrative functions of the university.”

Sartre and Foucault protesting the treatment of Arab immigrants at the Goutte d’Or quarter in Paris, November 1971. Photo: Gérard Ai mé. Source: Magnum Photo.

The Curious Case of Tel Quel

A more curious case of sinophilia involved the cultural journal, Tel Quel. Representing itself as the avante garde of the French intellectual scene, Tel Quel is prominent for championing first the Noveau Roman of Alain Robe-Grillet and subsequently the Formal Structuralism of Roland Barthes as well as the obtuse Deconstructionism of Derrida.

However, it was also this aspiration to be always at the forefront of the latest intellectual chic that led it to a more political direction when its editors sensed the militant wind blowing towards the direction of the May 1968 uprising. To capitalize in the rising political consciousness and indications of an approaching upheaval, Tel Quel ironically aligned itself with the PCF.

This would prove a big blunder as the bourgeoisified PCF would be at the tail of the rising youth and peoples movements of the 1960s rather than at its head. It was thus that Tel Quel finally settled into its bizarre “Chinese” mode.

This curiousity can be discerned, for instance, in the way Tel Quel contributor and eventual Post-Structuralist Superstar Julia Kristeva claimed that the foot binding of Chinese women was a manifestation of their power rather than of extreme feudal oppression!

Ultimately, this mania for the Cultural Revolution by the Tel Quel editors seemed more superficial rather than touching the essence of socialist revolution and construction in Mao’s China.

Althusser and Badiou

Another strange case is Louis Althusser’s having been inspired by Maoism. While he is an avowed Marxist, his formal membership in the Soviet-backed French Communist Party or the PCF prevented him from expressing this influence openly.

This is true especially after the Sino-Soviet split wherein the Chinese Maoists rebuked the “modern revisionism”[ii] of the former Soviet Union.

Althusser was able to get around this bind by contributing an anonymous essay to an ENS student publication special issue on the Cultural Revolution. His 1962 essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” meanwhile set out to tackle Mao’s treatise “On Contradiction” without Mao’s name ever appearing anywhere in the article.

This way, Althusser engaged with Mao without running afoul PCF officials. Nevertheless, this still represented a compromise with the blatant opportunism of the PCF and its Soviet masters. It is this conciliatory attitude that led many of Althusser’s students, who unable to clearly demarcate between modern revisionism and revolutionary thought, to break away from the Marxism altogether.

But one of Althusser’s students, unlike his erstwhile colleagues, unequivocally took up Maoism. Alain Badiou was one of the founders of the Union des Communistes Francais Marx-Leninistes or the UCF-ML, which criticized the other Maoist groups’ loss of ideological anchor and slide into micropolitics.

End of the Maoist Episode

Many of the intellectuals who became infatuated with the Maoist fad in the 1960s would eventually fall out of love as new fads became the sensation.

The youthful French Maoists suffered from weaknesses, thus the debacle of their almost missing the May 1968 uprising (because of the initially incorrect sectarian line that it cannot be supported because of its student rather than working class leadership). [iii]

Meanwhile the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent capitalist restoration in the People’s Republic of China as well as the continued degeneration of the Eastern European Soviet revisionists led many petty bourgeois intellectuals astray from the path of revolutionary change.

A defeatist outlook thus clouded the abundant optimism of the 1960s. Postmodernism became the new “IN” as many of these very same intellectuals who embraced Mao now castigated class analysis, the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Marxism as oppressive, totalitarian, and evil.

Ironically, many of those who took up the banner of Maoism misrepresented the Cultural Revolution as a revolt against the party, taking it as a cue to discard collective endeavors challenging the entire rotten ruling order in exchange for a politics of identity and everyday life.

The call to replace the system with socialism leading into communism is devalued to a mere championing of alternative lifestyles. Issues of homosexual and women oppression are isolated from the larger context of their emergence in a class society.

This one-sided relegation of politics to the microscopic level at the expense of a larger view – as particularly apparent in Foucault and his ilk – soon enough fell into the pessimistic conclusion on the absence of any real alternative to the world capitalist system.

But the promise of the May 68 uprising is still there waiting to be unlocked. Its failure to culminate into a full blown social revolution, rather than a manifestation of the impregnability the dominant social order, is simply a function of the absence of a genuine revolutionary vanguard.

What is to be done, as Badiou’s UCF-ML would postulate but subsequently failed to put into practice, is “to form a party for the sake of making the revolution, in order that it is not only the weather that is stormy, but us.”

As global capitalism drowns in ever-worsening crisis, this conclusion is as true today as it was in the 1960s.

[This commentary was originally published by the Philippine Daily Inquirer on March 9, 2017. The NFFM report can be read in full at http://ctuhr.org/hti-nffm-finalreport.]

More than a month after the tragic fire that engulfed the House Technology Industries (HTI) plant in the Cavite Export Processing Zone (CEPZ), facts about what rights advocates fear to be “the worst workplace tragedy in history” remain shrouded in secrecy. When the fire broke out at the factory at 6 p.m. on Feb. 1, videos, photos, and accounts of the fire quickly went viral. But these now seem to have been largely removed from the public eye.

Even as the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza), the local government of Cavite, and the Bureau of Fire Protection admit the absence of a comprehensive investigation, claims that workers were trapped inside the burning factory have been quickly dismissed.

But testimonies from workers gathered during a national fact-finding mission (NFFM) conducted by the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) and other people’s organizations last Feb. 2-5 paint a different picture. Exactly 1,328 HTI workers remain unaccounted for, according to the NFFM report presented in Congress last Feb. 21. If true, then this could be a workplace tragedy far worse than the Kentex slipper factory fire on May 13, 2015, in which 72 workers died.

Respondents of the NFFM say hundreds were working at the second and third floors when the fire began. More women were at quality control in the third floor but only 25 of the publicized list of 126 injured employees in hospitals were women. One worker narrated seeing a couple heading toward a bathroom crying and embracing each other. “When I was already out of the building, I did not see anyone passing through the fire exit, but many women, including a pregnant one, jumped off the windows from the second and third floors,” he said.

Witnesses said only the HTI main building’s regular entrance served as the main passage for workers escaping the fire. They said it was too narrow for the crowd of workers desperately rushing out, adding that many fire exits were locked.

All indications appear to point toward a corporate public relations whitewash of the facts of the fire. “The unusual silence of the workers and community residents about a fire of such magnitude that raged for 48 hours is alarming,” the NFFM said on the evasiveness of respondents. From the start, the media were barred by the HTI management, Peza, and the local government from entering the CEPZ. Journalists were allowed to join an inspection of the wreckage last Feb. 4 but were also told to remain in their vehicles.

The Duterte administration has been uncharacteristically silent on the issue. Is it because an expansion of the number of special economic zones (SEZs) in the country is part of its 10-point economic agenda?

We have been made to believe that workers in SEZs enjoy better working conditions. In truth, SEZs have been established as enclaves to host transnational corporations investing in the semiprocessing of products for export in exchange for incentives like tax exemptions, minimal state regulation, and a steady supply of cheap and docile contractual labor. Workers in SEZs suffer from neoliberal schemes that keep wages low, impose contractualization, attack workers’ right to organize, and undermine safe working conditions.

Where have 1,328 HTI contractual workers gone? This question offers faint echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Cien Años de Soledad,” in which he wrote of the infamous massacre of striking banana plantation workers by the Colombian Army in 1928. Like the rejected bananas of the US-owned United Fruit Company, the dead workers were packed inside a train and thrown into the sea. The massacre’s lone survivor in the novel was able to escape, only to find out that all talk of the dead workers has been dismissed as tall tales and rumors.

“There must have been three thousand of them,” he murmured. “What?” “The dead,” he clarified. “There haven’t been any dead here,” she said.

Despite several reservations—especially, my lack of blind faith in Mao’s China—I sympathize with the Maoists. They present themselves as revolutionary socialists, in opposition to the Soviet Union’s revisionism and the new bureaucracy created by the Trotskyists; I share their rejection of these approaches.  I am not so naive as to believe that they will bring about the revolution in the near future, and I find the “triumphalism” displayed by some of them puerile. But whereas  the entirety of  the  traditional Left accept s the system, defining themselves as a force for renewal or the respectful opposition,  the Maoists embody a genuinely  radical  form of  contestation.

Simone de Beavoir,
All Said and Done

Maoism is not as cool in the West nowadays as it was when Mao Zedong was still alive. The People’s Republic of China has turned capitalist with Mao’s death and lost much of its thunder as a friend of the oppressed and exploited. Today, Maoism seems to be alive and kicking as a real threat to the powers that be only in the weakest links of the imperialist chain, like in India, Nepal, and the Philippines.

Back in the 1960s, French intellectuals fell in love with Mao.[i] Thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and even Julia Kristeva were swept in a global wave of upheavals by youth, students, workers, peasants, and other Wretched of the Earth sparked by the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and pledged their allegiance to Maoism in various ways.

This is the story of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

Although Wolin is thoroughly against Marx, Lenin, and Mao, the book nonetheless gives a comprehensive account of the strengths and  problems of the French Maoists. The book also attempts to show the various forms of involvement and engagement by important French thinkers with Maoism.

Wolin’s narrative is clearly one of sin and redemption. It is about how these intellectual’s overcame their infatuation with Mao. Marxism, party politics, and the dictatorship of the proletariat are after all, for him, the embodiment of pure evil. But setting aside such a questionable agenda, the book also offers glimpses, tidbits, and anecdotes about this brief Maoist chapter in French intellectual history.

Sartre’s Maoist Commitment

Jean-Paul Sartre is popular as an existentialist philosopher and writer. His novels and polemical tracts are known to tackle the dilemmas of individual choice, freedom, and existence amidst the perceived absurdity of life and all its sufferings and predicaments.

But Sartre is also known as an advocate of social engagement among writers, as he wrote in the rambling prose of What is Literature. In this respect, he is renowned as an active supporter of varied causes such as the Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Sartre even wrote the Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he endorsed revolutionary violence as liberating in the face of the objective violence of the ruling system. All this as Sartre avoids any deeper commitment to organizations or parties that espouse these ideas.

What is not very well-known is Sartre’s dabbling with French Maoist militants. Sartre joined them in their protest actions, assumed the titular editorship of several of their newspapers, and publicly gave away copies of these banned Maoist papers on busy Paris boulevards.

With this dalliance with the youthful Maoist radicals, Sartre stood against the idea of the progressive intellectual as existing apart and above the masses and instead asserted that s/he should live among them, learn from them, and fight alongside them in their struggles.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir defying a government ban by illegally distributing La Cause du Peupl e in the spring of 1970. Photo: Gilles Peress. Source: Magnum Photo.

Foucault’s Revolutionary Zeal

Still another French thinker whose Maoist entanglement is not as renowned as his other achievements is Michel Foucault – more popular for making postmodernist micropolitics of everyday life fashionable as opposed to the supposedly “dogmatic” Marxist revolutionary orthodoxy.

For a time, Foucault joined the prisoner advocacy network GIP or the Groupe d’Information surles Prisons. The GIP functioned as a support group for detained Maoists, many of whom were leading hunger strikes in prisons all over France.

Foucault became deeply involved with Maoists who provided guidance for the direction, the meeting places, and the mimeograph machines for the pamphlets of the GIP. It was in the GIP that he adopted the Maoist method of work of social investigation to gather information on French prison conditions.

In this framework, it is not enough to conduct academic book-study, to confine oneself with “textuality.” More important is the act of actually immersing oneself among the masses and learning directly from them through social practice.

It was during this time that Foucault developed a powerful critique of the justice and prison system. In a celebrated debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued that it is “an idea invented and put into practice in different societies as an instrument of a particular political or economic power.”

It is clear that we live under a dictatorial class regime, under a class power that imposes itself with violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional… [When the proletariat triumphs] it will exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody over the class it has supplanted.

But Foucault’s petty bourgeois class origins also brought with him impetuous anarchist tendencies. While agreeing with the fact that the existing court system manifests the interests of the ruling classes, Foucault also opposed the creation of people’s courts on the basis of proletarian class interests.

Thus, even as Foucault called for the destruction of the bourgeois judicio-legal system for its bourgeois class biases, he also contested the idea of establishing a new proletarian legality that for him would only exercise formal restrictions on spontaneous popular will.

Foucault’s celebration of violent excess did have a good insurrectionist edge to it as this absorbed him in a series of pitched battles with the riot police in student barricades at the Vincennes: “Daily protests and riots regularly interrupted classes and the administrative functions of the university.”

Sartre and Foucault protesting the treatment of Arab immigrants at the Goutte d’Or quarter in Paris, November 1971. Photo: Gérard Ai mé. Source: Magnum Photo.

The Curious Case of Tel Quel

A more curious case of sinophilia involved the cultural journal, Tel Quel. Representing itself as the avante garde of the French intellectual scene, Tel Quel is prominent for championing first the Noveau Roman of Alain Robe-Grillet and subsequently the Formal Structuralism of Roland Barthes as well as the obtuse Deconstructionism of Derrida.

However, it was also this aspiration to be always at the forefront of the latest intellectual chic that led it to a more political direction when its editors sensed the militant wind blowing towards the direction of the May 1968 uprising. To capitalize in the rising political consciousness and indications of an approaching upheaval, Tel Quel ironically aligned itself with the PCF.

This would prove a big blunder as the bourgeoisified PCF would be at the tail of the rising youth and peoples movements of the 1960s rather than at its head. It was thus that Tel Quel finally settled into its bizarre “Chinese” mode.

This curiousity can be discerned, for instance, in the way Tel Quel contributor and eventual Post-Structuralist Superstar Julia Kristeva claimed that the foot binding of Chinese women was a manifestation of their power rather than of extreme feudal oppression!

Ultimately, this mania for the Cultural Revolution by the Tel Quel editors seemed more superficial rather than touching the essence of socialist revolution and construction in Mao’s China.

Althusser and Badiou

Another strange case is Louis Althusser’s having been inspired by Maoism. While he is an avowed Marxist, his formal membership in the Soviet-backed French Communist Party or the PCF prevented him from expressing this influence openly.

This is true especially after the Sino-Soviet split wherein the Chinese Maoists rebuked the “modern revisionism”[ii] of the former Soviet Union.

Althusser was able to get around this bind by contributing an anonymous essay to an ENS student publication special issue on the Cultural Revolution. His 1962 essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” meanwhile set out to tackle Mao’s treatise “On Contradiction” without Mao’s name ever appearing anywhere in the article.

This way, Althusser engaged with Mao without running afoul PCF officials. Nevertheless, this still represented a compromise with the blatant opportunism of the PCF and its Soviet masters. It is this conciliatory attitude that led many of Althusser’s students, who unable to clearly demarcate between modern revisionism and revolutionary thought, to break away from the Marxism altogether.

But one of Althusser’s students, unlike his erstwhile colleagues, unequivocally took up Maoism. Alain Badiou was one of the founders of the Union des Communistes Francais Marx-Leninistes or the UCF-ML, which criticized the other Maoist groups’ loss of ideological anchor and slide into micropolitics.

End of the Maoist Episode

Many of the intellectuals who became infatuated with the Maoist fad in the 1960s would eventually fall out of love as new fads became the sensation.

The youthful French Maoists suffered from weaknesses, thus the debacle of their almost missing the May 1968 uprising (because of the initially incorrect sectarian line that it cannot be supported because of its student rather than working class leadership). [iii]

Meanwhile the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent capitalist restoration in the People’s Republic of China as well as the continued degeneration of the Eastern European Soviet revisionists led many petty bourgeois intellectuals astray from the path of revolutionary change.

A defeatist outlook thus clouded the abundant optimism of the 1960s. Postmodernism became the new “IN” as many of these very same intellectuals who embraced Mao now castigated class analysis, the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Marxism as oppressive, totalitarian, and evil.

Ironically, many of those who took up the banner of Maoism misrepresented the Cultural Revolution as a revolt against the party, taking it as a cue to discard collective endeavors challenging the entire rotten ruling order in exchange for a politics of identity and everyday life.

The call to replace the system with socialism leading into communism is devalued to a mere championing of alternative lifestyles. Issues of homosexual and women oppression are isolated from the larger context of their emergence in a class society.

This one-sided relegation of politics to the microscopic level at the expense of a larger view – as particularly apparent in Foucault and his ilk – soon enough fell into the pessimistic conclusion on the absence of any real alternative to the world capitalist system.

But the promise of the May 68 uprising is still there waiting to be unlocked. Its failure to culminate into a full blown social revolution, rather than a manifestation of the impregnability the dominant social order, is simply a function of the absence of a genuine revolutionary vanguard.

What is to be done, as Badiou’s UCF-ML would postulate but subsequently failed to put into practice, is “to form a party for the sake of making the revolution, in order that it is not only the weather that is stormy, but us.”

As global capitalism drowns in ever-worsening crisis, this conclusion is as true today as it was in the 1960s.