I have now posted the English translation of the novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente under the documents tab on this website.
The translation was published a year after the Tagalog translation. It was again printed by Isabelo de los Reyes in Manila. The printing of the English version is of much poorer quality. The translator is invisible, as is so often the case.
I am still hard at work on my thesis. I have been collecting relevant primary source materials during my research, many of which I have scanned as Adobe PDF files. I intend to begin making some of these materials available here.
The first item which I am posting is a Novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Originally written by Gregorio Aglipay in Spanish, this text was translated into Tagalog by Juan N. Evangelista and published in 1925 in Manila by Isabelo de los Reyes.
The text is fascinating. It walks through, in the nine days of a novena, a series of scientific, critical, and rational ideas; it instructs the participant in ideas of evolution and natural selection and a historical-critical approach to the Bible and theology.
You can access the entire text from the Documents tab of this website.
This fascinating political cartoon comes from El Debate, a Spanish language news daily during the American colonial period in the Philippines. Tan Malaka, Indonesian communist and cosmopolitan provocateur, was in the Philippines and the colonial administration was threatening him with a lengthy prison sentence. A number of prominent Filipinos came to defense.
Notice the towering figures of Rizal and Plaridel [Marcelo H. Del Pilar] and the approach of the guardia civil. The guardia civil was the loathed tool of repression under the Spanish occupation; here they represent the Philippine constabulary, the likewise loathed tool of repression under the American occupation.
I believe that, in life, Rizal was four feet, eleven inches tall. Here he towers over everyone, much as his statue towers today over every town plaza from the top of a pedestal.
David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
David Marr’s
Marr is intent on avoiding what he terms the “teleological trap,” examining history in the light of later events and then ferreting out the causes to these events and thereby inadvertently robbing history of the sense of the possible. This, he claims, is but a short step from “crude deterministic expostulation.” (xxv) To this end, Marr has written a dense and remarkably well-documented account of the various forces and events that created the stage upon which it was possible for the August Revolution to occur.
I was put off, however, by the claim on which Marr grounds his anti-teleological agendum: “the only truth in history is that there are no historical truths, only an infinite number of experiences.” This felt strangely disingenuous one page after Marr spoke of the need to ‘routinely exclude’ the ‘deliberate mystification of the past’ that occurred under the ‘Communist Party imprimatur’ (xxiv). Here then was an account of the past that was ‘inaccurate’ because it failed to reflect ‘historical truth.’ Further, while I share Marr’s concern with a reductionist teleology historically retrojected as causal narrative, not all narratives of possibility are equally worthy of recounting. Granted there is not an historical telos to be expostulated; there are, however, actor-intentioned historical tele, whose viability are mediated by concrete historical circumstances. Not all possibilities are created equal and the historian’s concern should be to move from historically determined causes - determined in the etymological sense of ‘limited’ or ‘bounded’ - to their necessary effects.
Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, (London: Penguin, 1987).
[This is a somewhat imitative, tongue-in-cheek review of Max Havelaar which I originally addressed to fellow seminar participants upon our completion of Multatuli’s work.]
Max Havelaar is an angry bitter indictment of the colonial project in toto and not, as has been claimed, a reformist depiction of the evils of misguided colonial officials. Lies and tomfoolery!
The book is deliberately nested in the writings of Droogstoppel, then Stern, then Scarfman and finally Havelaar. The tone of the work is bitingly sardonic. The colonial project, from its capitalist origins – here the merchant ‘Change – to its representative officials – from Verbrugge to Slymering – to its deliberate manipulation of existing elite exploitation, stands up to savage indictment. Havelaar is well-intentioned, yes, but utterly ineffectual.
Is the reader truly left with the hope that William the Third will respond any differently than Slymering? The ethical indictment of the text, like Havelaar’s letter, is reinforced by the silence with which those in power greet it.
Further, are we truly to believe all of the ideas of that ‘half-baked dreamer’ Havelaar? Havelaar, like Droogstoppel or Slymering, is a character type rather than the protagonist with whom we are to identify. He represents the idealist, to their capitalist and colonial official. Witness, Multatuli urges, the ineffectuality of even the best intentioned. If a Havelaar cannot save the colonial venture, no one can.
Reynaldo Ileto. “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History.” In Reynaldo Ileto. Filipinos and their Revolution: event, discourse and historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.
I am working on my thesis; it is a critical re-examination of Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution. Looking through my old notes, I found the following ideas. My critique is now much more sharply focused than these criticisms were.
This work left me feeling unsettled and critical.
A sentence in Ileto’s concluding paragraph clarified for me the unease that I had felt throughout the article: “These leaders [Lantayug, et. al.] have, until recently at least, always belonged to the ‘dark underside’ of the struggle for independence dominated by such ilustrado notables as Quezon, Roxas and Osmena.” It seems clear to me that the division between an ilustrado led resistance and a ‘dark underside’ is a false dichotomy.
There are a multitude of underside resistances, many of them with a very different self-concept from the one put forward by Ileto. It would appear that in a attempting to ‘retrieve’ history from below, Ileto has manufactured a monolith: a Filipino ‘underclass’ that conceives of power and loób in terms that sound remarkably like those used by Benedict Anderson in his “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”
Where in this underside would Ileto fit the Union Obrera Democratica, the first Filipino labor movement, which was forming at this time, was composed entirely of working class Filipinos and whose perceptions were sharply different from that of Ileto’s underclass? Where to put Isabelo de los Reyes’ and Gregorio Aglipay’s Iglesia Filipina Independiente? Do Macario Sakay and the Republika ng Katagalugan really fit Ileto’s description?
It would involve an extensive investigation of sources, but it seems likely that Ileto’s ‘underside to Philippine history’ was actually a minority of lower class resistance movements.
Continue reading ‘Notes on Ileto’s “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History”’
“Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam.” In Hans Antlov and Stein Tonnesson, eds. Asian Forms of the Nation. London: Curzon Press, 1996, 67-91.
For the imagining of a geographic unit to be possible as the collective imagining of ‘nation,’ more was involved than the demarcations of cartographers - the demarcations had to be experienced as the local, lived reality of boundedness. Here the practical project of enforcing borders was much more important than their inscription.
Thongchai’s account tells of a move from relatively permeable borders to more impermeable ones. Yet, it would seem, from the perspective of European capital that this was hardly the case. Capital migrated more fluidly when the porous indigenous inter-Southeast Asian trade was supplanted by the protectionist mandalas of competing European capital-polities.
For the purely insular Philippines the externality of demarcated boundaries feels alien – we do not experience the friction of external abutting. It is inclusion – the quintessential problem of the imagined community - that is the cartographic shift. Mapping in the Philippines served the interests of colonial commerce, the extension of peninsular polity, and, I believe, the proselytic pretensions of the religious orders; it did not redefine some geographic khetdaen/hangganan. These would almost always have been inscribed by the natural topography of cordillera and Pacific.
Nationalist historiographies have anachronistically retrojected the contemporary spatial fixity on to the past. This contemporary fixity is in truth the product of a lengthy historical evolution and of inter-‘wolf’ negotiation. Yet is Thongchai’s conclusion that the nation emerged from the ‘creative transculturation between the west and the indigenous’ and not “anti-colonial heroism as conventional history usually suggests” (91) justified?
Thongchai has stacked the deck in his favor by using the very loaded term ‘heroism.’ Replace it with resistance, however, and his conclusion is a bit more questionable. Is not anti-colonial resistance in truth an apex of ‘creative transcultural activity,’ rather than its supposed aporia? Surely ‘creative transcultural’ resistance is as vital as the collaborative elite redrawing of the map?
Steve Heder, Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model: Imitation and Independence, 1930-1975 (Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 2004)
Steve Heder, in his work Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model, presents a history of the close ties between Cambodian and Vietnamese Communism. He argues, in contrast to the prevalent view that Cambodian Communism was led by French-educated intellectuals, that the primary influence on Cambodian Communism was Vietnamese Communism. Under the leadership of Salot Sar (Pol Pot) and Nuon Chea, Cambodian Communists implemented a program of people’s war directly learned from the Vietnamese. This imitation and implementation of Vietnamese Communist tactics often took place in opposition to the express dictates of the Viet Nam Worker’s Party (VWP). The VWP, to maintain “supply lines and sanctuaries” (5) in Cambodia via agreements with Cambodian political and military leaders Sihanouk and Lon Nol, argued that Cambodia represented an extremely ‘backward’ mode of production, one not ready for the tactics of people’s war being implemented in Vietnam. In opposition to these Vietnamese dictates, Salot Sar and Nuon Chea sought to implement the model of people’s war learned from
Heder’s account of Cambodian Communism from 1930-1975 was intriguing and in many ways convincing.
I was troubled, however, by two aspects of this work: the use of the term ‘Marxism-Leninism’ without any clarification as to its content, and the embarrassing misrepresentation of Lenin’s ideas.
Continue reading ‘Heder’s Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model: a review’
When I first read, several years ago,
Continue reading ‘Notes on Anderson’s “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”’
[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.
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
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