an arbitrary moment of stock-taking. Have I grown? Am I a better person or just an older one?
have I demanded of myself an inescapably ethical approach to the quotidian?
have I let the interstices of each day adumbrate the hazily perceived possibilities of unalienated humanity?
do I proleptically embody our collective redemption?
to take stock is to arm oneself for the future.
They had a world-weary cosmopolitan feeling to them, those haphazardly stacked books in an out of the way corner of Cervantes Trading Supply store. There was no arrangement to their display, no semblance of order. They lay in piles on two small tables past the stationery shelves near the back wall of the store. You had to know where to look to find them. But there, hidden beneath old editions of People magazine were books, evocative in their careless juxtaposition. Fear of Flying, Erica Jong, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler, Hollywood Wives - this cheap and tattered paperback dreck from innumerable publishing houses concealed an occasional gem.
Outside the streets of Paniqui thrummed to the excited traffic of tricycles and owner jeeps. Elderly women hawked bibingka on cunningly woven round trays of rattan, their wizened lips drawn around the lit ends of hand-rolled tabako cigarillos. But in my dusty corner of Cervantes I wondered at the peripheral peregrinations of these books. How had they arrived on this little table whose 4×4 surface was the only source of books in our entire town? Where had they come from?
And I did find gems. Archaeology of the Bronze Age in the Upper Levant. Biology and the Evolution of Language. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Each book received a small Cervantes price sticker: 100 pesos, 20 pesos, 5 pesos.
I was never certain when a new shipment of books would arrive. I checked the table weekly. It was, in someways, the highlight of my week.
I once found a pristine first edition of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea in a perfect dust jacket lodged between James Michener and an obsolete self-help book. How did such a thing happen? I think my hands may have trembled as I handed thirty pesos to the cashier in payment.
Clearly the books on the table at Cervantes had travelled.
We ate daing na bangus and laing na hipon - shrimp with taro root leaves - this evening. Laing and daing, the children laughed. Blanche and the children were still eating as I began to read to them. This evening we were reading from the third chapter of Madeleine L’Engle’s magnificent A Wrinkle in Time. And there it was, at the bottom of page 45 - the stamp from The American School of Kinshasa Library in Zaire.
Here was a book which had made its circuitous way around the globe, shunted from periphery to periphery, always on the outskirts, on the margins of a dynamic, driven and rather small world. You could only buy a book like this from the small table which stands in a neglected corner of Cervantes.
[Section V. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]
In turning to the Philippines, we see that the semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode of production, promulgated by Mao and modified by Aidit, was adopted by Joma Sison because of its similarity to familiar nationalist rhetoric and its political efficacy for undermining the current leadership of the Communist Party. When Joma Sison arrived in Indonesia in 1962, the anti-imperialist account of Indonesian society and its forced semi-feudal structure would have deeply resonated with Sison’s understanding of Philippine society which he had gained from Recto. Sison, prior to any encounter with Marxism, let alone a Marxist analysis of Philippine society, was already convinced that Philippine society was feudal and that this was somehow the fault of imperialism.
Aidit’s Indonesian Society and the Indonesian Revolution with its familiar rhetoric would have immediately appealed to Sison. It would have provided a point of contact between Joma Sison’s nationalist upbringing and his emergent Communism. Sison’s early work with Kabataang Makabayan seems directly derivative of his encounter with Aidit’s work; he insisted that the semi-feudal, semi-colonial character of the Philippines necessitated a militant united front organization against imperialism. In keeping with Aidit he did not advocate armed struggle, although unlike Aidit he did not explicitly eschew it.
Driven out of power and then underground by the PKP leadership in 1968, Joma Sison turned from Aidit’s version of the semi-feudal, semi-colonial idea to Mao’s. This idea was crystallized in Philippine Society and Revolution, which Sison wrote under the nom-de-guerre of Amado Guerrero. Sison now argued that the Philippines’ status as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society necessitated a protracted people’s war waged from the countryside. This idea was the founding principle of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Drawing from Aidit, Sison rewrote Philippine history with an eye to a particular tactical end. Where Aidit aimed to shift the blame for the Madiun affair away from Sukarno leaving Hatta as the sole guilty party, Joma Sison wished to present a history of the uninterrupted struggles of the Filipino people against imperialism hindered only by the disingenuous and cowardly leadership of the PKP. The Filipino people must complete their unfinished revolution, he argued, by allying with the newly formed Communist Party of the Philippines and its ‘invincible’ strategy of protracted people’s war.
[Section IV. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]
“There is no such thing as abstract truth. Truth is always concrete.” – Lenin.
Robert Brenner in an article in The New Palgrave Marxian Economics defined feudalism using three main ‘complementary’ and ‘integrally related’ conceptions: feudalism as a legal relationship between vassals and overlord in a fiefdom, as a form of political domination characterized by geographic fragmentation, divided political authority and a prominent role given to privately contracted military, and as a socio-economic organization in which the peasantry are in full possession of their necessary means of subsistence and in which surplus is exploited by landlords through the use of extra-economic coercion.[1] This definition, in my opinion, closely reflects Marx’s own writings on feudalism. Feudalism, for Marx, was a political, legal and economic social formation which characterized medieval European societies. This statement is borne out by a close reading of Marx’s writings on a materialist conception of history, in particular the lengthy section on pre-capitalist economic formations in his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, commonly known as Grundrisse.[2]
In Communist analyses of modes of production during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods, these more nuanced and historically grounded accounts of feudalism were supplanted by a highly rigid, schematic reading of history as a succession of five modes of production. This version of ‘Marxist thought’ was largely based upon a sentence and a half in Marx’s acontextually famous Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Marx wrote, “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.”[3] These prefatory remarks to a work on monetary circulation, intended to outline Marx’s findings on the Hegelian philosophy of law,[4] were strait-jacketed by Stalinist analysis into a universal, unilinear sequence of modes of production, although the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was replaced with the ‘primitive’ or ‘communal’ mode of production.
The notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production,’ which is one of the most cheerily ignored concepts in Marx’s writings, points to the hermeneutical imposition of reading this passage as an account of a unilinear sequence of modes of production. For Marx, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was a system of despotic government characterized by a tributary system of surplus exploitation. He wrote occasionally of it as the ‘Asian’ or ‘oriental’ alternative – not precedent – to European feudalism, one which directly encountered capitalism through European imperialism. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, a Marxist historian of ancient Greece, writes “The existence of an ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ mode of production seems to me a useless and even misleading conception, evolved by Marx on the basis of what can now be seen as a seriously defective knowledge of the Oriental world (though based on the best sources available in his day), and far too imprecise to be of any value in historical or sociological analysis.”[5] In the above quotation from the Preface to A Contribution to a Critique, Marx clearly did not intend the Asiatic to precede Ancient and Feudal modes of production. In order for this passage to function as the foundation for a universal sequence of modes of production, it was necessary to supplant the Asiatic with the ‘primitive’ mode of production in Stalinist discourse.
This is of more than theoretical significance. In the three cases that we will briefly examine – China, Indonesia, and the Philippines – to determine the historical trajectory of a society’s modes of production was considered the central task for determining the contemporary mode of production and by derivation the necessary revolutionary tactics for the successful seizure of power. The revolutionary tactics chosen by the Communist Party were supposed to be dictated by the mode of production that was dominant in the country at the time. In truth, I will argue, quite the opposite occurred. The revolutionary tactics chosen by the Chinese, Indonesian and Philippine communist parties dictated their theoretical interpretation of the dominant mode of production. The ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode of production’ was invented to serve pragmatic political ends, i.e., to justify previously chosen revolutionary tactics.
Continue reading ‘IV. ‘Semi-feudal, semi-colonial’ in regional Communist discourse’
[Section III. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]
By the mid-1950s the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, known by its Tagalog name Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), had entered a period of stagnation and dissolution. The rebellion of the PKP’s guerrilla army, Hukbo Mapagpalaya ng Bayan[1] (HMB), had been successfully suppressed by the Magsaysay administration through the combined use of the tactics of psychological warfare and a limited program of land reform for surrendering ‘Huks.’[2] In 1957, having already shifted tactics from guerrilla warfare to legal struggle, the leadership of the PKP announced the ‘single-file’ policy. All cadres were only to have contact with one other party member and directives were to be disseminated orally in a ‘single-file.’ The networks and organizing groups of the PKP, in essence, self-dissolved.[3] A few guerrilla units were preserved as bodyguards and security for those engaged in the legal struggle. Among the preserved units was Kumander Dante’s central Luzon command that would be the founding unit of the New People’s Army (NPA) under Joma Sison’s CPP.
The Philippine Communist Party was thus a nearly defunct organization when the simultaneous waves of bourgeois nationalist politics and student rebellion broke across Philippine society in the late 1950s.
The emergent nationalist political movement was led by Claro M. Recto. A senator from the Nacionalista party, Recto was an electrifying speaker, whose powerful and courageous rhetoric moved a generation of student radicals, among them Jose Maria Sison. Recto denounced what he termed ‘US economic imperialism’ and the local political ‘puppetry’ that was subservient to the demands of foreign capital. A series of unequal trade agreements, such as the Bell Trade Act (1946) and the Laurel Langley Agreement (1955), Recto argued, demonstrated that “it is the declared policy of the state to perpetually chain itself to an agricultural economy, making us, Filipinos, mere suppliers and providers of raw materials and consumers of foreign manufactured goods.”[4] This chaining to an agricultural economy perpetuated a system of Philippine ‘feudalism.’ The only solution to the problem of Philippine feudalism, perpetuated by US imperialist capital and its local ‘puppets,’ was a system of tariffs against imported manufactured goods and the subsidizing of local industrialization. In 1957, Recto broke with the Nacionalista party to found his own political organization. He ran for President but lost to Vice President Carlos Garcia. Recto died at the age of 70 in 1960, revered by radical movements of all stripes.
Continue reading ‘III. Jose Maria Sison and the founding of the CPP’
[Section II. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]
While perhaps a less than aurally felicitous choice, the metaphor of nodality can be employed with pertinence to this endeavor. A necessary first step toward the writing of a comprehensive history of the Communist Party of the Philippines is a reconstruction of crucial and problematic moments, nodes, in the historiography of the Communist Party of the Philippines. These moments are connected together by a very thin thread of narrative – knotty protuberances strung along a loosely chronological quipu. To shift the methodological metaphor to a biological one, the nodes under examination are the articulated joints of contingency upon which the developing history of the Communist Party flexed and hinged. Or finally, these moments are points of efflorescence from which a variety of conflicting accounts have budded and unfurled their heliotropic tendrils.
Whatever the somewhat pretentious metaphorical value of nodes – whether conceived of as knots, joints, or buds –my aim is to write an initial account which will be deliberately ‘lumpy.’ Not all of the history of the Philippine Communist Party will merit equal attention, nor will all of our nodal points be given equal weight.
Schematically the history the Communist Party of the Philippines can be broken down into the following nodes: a. Joma Sison, the founding of the Communist Party, and the recurrent Indonesia connection, b. the intellectual genealogy of a concept – ‘semifeudal, semicolonial’ as a mode of production, c. the seminal text – Philippine Society and Revolution, d. the impetus for growth – the First Quarter Storm, Plaza Miranda, and the declaration of Martial Law, e. the question of localization in both indoctrination and revision, f. the persistent question of participation, g. the question of Aquino and the rhetorical shift from administration to regime, h. mass murder in Mindanao, and i. reaffirmation and rejection (RA/RJ) – the splits of the early 1990s. A recreation of these nodes will allow for the fruitful examination of the various historical explanations for the RA/RJ splits of the 1990s, the assessment of the usefulness of these explanations, and the adumbration of a coherent solution that takes account of the conflicting narratives of existing historiography.
This paper will explore the first three nodes outlined above, namely Jose Maria Sison and the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the genealogy of the idea of a ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial mode’ of production in regional discourse, and its incorporation in the seminal text of the CPP, Philippine Society and Revolution.
[Section I. of a larger piece:
Modes of Production and Tactics of Resistance:
The Historiography of the Founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)]
The existing secondary literature on the history of the Communist Party of the Philippines is stunningly paltry. This historiographic deficiency stands in stark contrast to the rather daunting abundance of available primary source material. From pamphlets and fliers to circulars, memoranda and polemical tracts to pedagogical material and underground journals, the internal documentation of the Communist Party of the Philippines is diverse, wide-ranging and voluminous.
Records have been kept obsessively by nearly all Communist cadres and written down in a number of languages. The linguistic wealth of materials records a history of debate and regional autonomy published in English, Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan, Pangasinan, Kapampangan, Hiligaynon, Waray, and Zambal. The literature of the Communist Party in any language other than English has yet to be used in any broad historical account.
A prime example of this overlooked abundance of information is the Philippine Radical Papers Archive.[1] This archive contains the papers – letters, news clippings, journals, and fliers – secretly collected over a period of nearly thirty years by the University of the Philippines main library. This archive has seen little use since its opening to historical scholarship. It is cited with frequency in bibliographies but it has never actually merited a footnote.
Another abundant source of untapped information for the writing of a history of the Communist Party of the Philippines is the oral accounts of cadres who joined the Party from the 1960’s onward, the vast majority of whom are still alive. Thousands of party members are not only available to be interviewed but actually eager to share their experiences and perspectives on the successes and failures of the Communist Party. For the past decade, most interviewees have no longer even requested anonymity. Outside of a handful of interviews conducted in English with the top leaders of the Communist Party, no attempt has been made to study the oral history of this period. The divergence between the potentially abundant primary material and the paltry secondary accounts of this period is again striking.
What few attempts have been made to examine the history of the Communist Party of the Philippines in this period have been marked by the uncritical repetition of unsubstantiated claims from previous material, the failure to take international communist trends into account, a nearly complete ignorance of Marxist and Communist theory, and a seemingly complacent acceptance of gaping lacunae in the historical narrative of the Party. The existing secondary literature is fraught with gaps, loose ends and at times embarrassingly obvious contradictions.
This sharply critical survey can be restated positively: the history of Philippine communism has yet to be written and the primary source material for its writing is abundant and accessible.
Continue reading ‘I. Historiography of the Communist Party of the Philippines’
My daily reading is extremely wide ranging - from science, history and politics to theology, poetry and children’s literature. I frequently post quotations and selections from my daily readings, often without commentary, in the hope that others may be inspired to read the volume from which the selection was taken.
What follows may also be regarded as part of a prolegomenous outwork to a future commentary on Hugh MacDiarmid.
God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him. The phrase “being ultimately concerned” points to a tension in human experience.
On the one hand, it is impossible to be concerned about something which cannot be encountered concretely, be it in the realm of reality or in the realm of the imagination. Universals can become matters of ultimate concern only through their power of representing concrete experiences. The more concrete a thing is, the more possible concern about it. The completely concrete being, the individual person, is the object of the most radical concern - the concern of love.
On the other hand, ultimate concern must transcend every preliminary finite and concrete concern. It must transcend the whole realm of finitude in order to be the answer to the question implied in finitude. But in transcending the finite the religious concern loses the concreteness of a being-to-being relationship. It tends to become not only absolute but also abstract, provoking reactions from the concrete element.
This is the inescapable inner tension in the idea of God. The conflict between the concreteness and the ultimacy of the religious concern is actual wherever God is experienced and this experience is expressed from primitive prayer to the most elaborate theological system.
It is the key to understanding the dynamics of the history of religion.
from The Essential Tillich: an anthology of the writings of Paul Tillich.
Ed., F. Church. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
(Separated into paragraphs for ease of reading).
James Siegel. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
I fear that I am predisposed to dislike a work that opens by acknowledging its indebtedness to Jacques Derrida, who “shows the impossibility of our disciplines [viz. anthropology and history], precisely their lack of foundation. To continue after him means to accept this impossibility.” (x) The post-structuralist deconstructionist rupture of signifier and signified – the impossibility of history - entails my immediate alienation. More on this in a bit.
I will limit myself - a solipsistically imposed aporia (sorry, I couldn’t resist) - to a few comments and questions that arose from my reading.
From this perspective a post-structuralist work can be simultaneously insightful and utter nonsense – like Douglas Adams’ deity it vanishes in a puff of logic.
Here we are. The long journey of forty-six days is ended and we are anchored in Manila Bay, two and a half miles from the shore. At this distance the city is only a shining white line between the blue water and the bluer sky. hot? You never imagined the real meaning of that word, and yet the thermometer marks only ninety-nine; the moist atmosphere makes it seem many degrees higher. Thin clothing and excitement are helping us to bear the heat for there is a sense of exhilaration in the thought that we are at last in Oriental America.
These are the opening lines of the volume of colonial memoirs that I am now reading through. The reflections are those of Edith Moses on her arrival in the Philippines on June 3, 1900. Her husband, Bernard Moses, served as Secretary of Public Instruction on the Philippine Commission from 1901 to 1908. He subsequently returned to teaching at Berkeley where Moses Hall was posthumously named in his honor.
Edith Moses’ memoirs were published as Unofficial Letters of An Official’s Wife by D. Appleton and Company in 1908. The book is a blend of exoticism and racism and clearly captures the perceptions and attitudes of a high ranking and well educated US colonial official.
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos by Eric J. Chaisson
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
My System: 21st Century Edition by Aron Nimzowitsch
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky
