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Title: Anarchipelago Kollective Author: Anarchipelago Kollective Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: Philippines, autonomist
Anarchipelago Kollective is a group of multi-tendency leftists working
in struggle against authoritarianism.
Our story is that of unbelonging — though our origins are from the
island nation-state known today as the Philippines, we are also moving
through diaspora and displacement, through the white supremacist matrix
of the United States, the rigid binaries of gender and sexuality, the
space in between here and there. We have also come together out of
shared frustration and disillusionment towards the hegemonic groups of
the Philippine left.
We reject both liberalism and conservative nationalism as ideologies
invested in the preservation of the state. The existence of both the
state and capitalism rely on the worldwide exploitation, subordination,
and policing of darker, struggling communities — communities that we are
from, and that we are a part of. Therefore, we are both anti-state and
anti- capitalist.
Our struggle is the global struggle for dignity and life of all
oppressed peoples. Because many of us do exist at the intersections of
these identities — brown, queer, femme, chronically ill/disabled — we
engage in horizontal, collective decision-making and transparent
communication around needs and capacity, rather than reliance upon
strict hierarchy and leadership.
Before his presidency, Duterte as Mayor of Davao was linked to the Davao
Death Squad vigilante group which executed more than 1,000 people over a
decade. Despite this, the major parties of the Philippine left heralded
Duterte as a pro-people, anti-imperialist, unorthodox candidate for the
presidency. [1]
Over 13,000 people — including women and children — have already been
killed since the beginning of Duterte’s drug war, mostly in the poorest
urban areas of the Philippines. There is no indication that the killings
will slow or cease under this regime.
While in office, Duterte has unapologetically and repeatedly threatened
to declare Martial Law [2] (which has already become a reality in
Marawi, motivated by Islamophobia), candidly compared himself to Hitler
in his promise to slaughter millions [3] of drug addicts, and joked
about how he should have been the first to violate a victim of gang
rape.[4] Duterte arranged for the reburial of Ferdinand Marcos in the
Libingan Ng Mga Bayani (Heroes Cemetery), while his presidential
campaign was funded and strongly supported by [5] the Marcos heirs Imee
Marcos and Bongbong Marcos. Duterte also engaged in character
assassination against those who have attempted to hold him accountable,
including the now-imprisoned Senator Leila De Lima,[6] who led the
charge in investigating Duterte’s record of human rights violations.Yet
the major leftist blocs have been reluctant to declare their opposition
to the Duterte administration. Instead, they have become entangled in an
endless tug-of-war that they refer to as “peace talks”.[7] One day, the
claim is made that Duterte is a socialist willing to work for the good
of the people:[8] “Duterte’s show of readiness to continue cooperation
and friendship with the national democratic movement is the basis of
possibilities for a fruitful alliance with his government.” The next
day, Duterte himself is calling for leftists to be captured and
killed.[9]
The inflexibility of these top-down organizations has discouraged
members within their ranks from speaking outright against Duterte. At
the same time, their hostility towards autonomous leftist movements in
the Philippines has manifested in the silencing of those with more vocal
critique of the Duterte administration [10] and the posturing that the
party members are the only ‘true’ revolutionaries [11] organizing the
masses.
Ultimately, the ambivalence of the leftist vanguard parties towards
Duterte — and the reluctance to retract their leadership from Duterte’s
cabinet — has neutralized the possibility of building a broader
resistance against his administration.
To be clear: we reject Duterte’s authoritarian rule because we do not
believe in negotiating with fascists.
You cannot claim to be “pro-people” while motivating and perpetuating
violence with a politic of ruthless machismo. You cannot hide behind the
rhetoric of anti-imperialism while entertaining and colluding with
western forces [12] to maintain their investments in Philippine land,
resources, and labor.
Duterte’s apologists call for us to consider that he is a “flawed” human
being, that he is “not to blame” for the rising casualties in the drug
war.[13] But we understand what flaws look like. Wielding state violence
— consistently and unapologetically — is not a flaw. Death squads and
blood spilled nightly on the streets are not flaws. A strongman’s iron
fist is not a flaw: it is a weapon.
And so we do not mistake strong men for saviors. A nationalist,
socialist “revolution” that systematically commits genocide against the
poor, that is fueled by patriarchy and misogyny, that is homophobic,
that is ruthlessly militaristic, that insults Western powers to our face
but continues to make deals with them behind our back, is no revolution
at all.
Oppression
Las Filipinas — the imperialist project that began in 1521 with Spanish
colonization still exists to this day: a de facto colorist caste system,
the rule of billionaire haciendero oligarchs. More than five hundred
years of plunder and conquest. Generational trauma. Grueling poverty.
Violence. Violent repression. The legacy of empire. The Philippines is a
neo-colony of the United States and continues to be exploited for
military purposes, natural resources, and a market for U.S.
transnational corporations.
The drug war in the Philippines is situated within this context.
For the United States, the Philippines has never been more than a
strategic pawn in a global chess game. Duterte calls former President
Obama the “son of a whore”, invoking the ongoing police terror in the
United States to deflect criticism from himself. But the applause for
his anti-imperialist statements cannot drown out his hypocrisy. As if a
hierarchy of colorism and anti-Blackness do not exist in the
Philippines. As if the vigilantism that he openly encourages is not its
own form of terror against the Filipino people.
What is currently taking place in the Philippines cannot be
decontextualized from hundreds of years of Spanish and U.S. imperialism.
The fate of the Philippines is also interdependent on the liberation of
all colonized peoples, especially Black and indigenous peoples in the
U.S. and other western states. Imperialism is an extension of western
empire, an appendage reaching outwards from the belly of the beast.
As autonomist leftists, we are working to deconstruct the matrices of
violence that crush all people living in the margins. We draw parallels
between the imprisonment and modern enslavement of Black and Brown
peoples in the U.S. with the present reign of terror in the Philippines
that has claimed more than thirteen thousand lives in the past year
alone. Both states have used the veil of a “war on drugs” to legitimize
the imprisonment and assassination of marginalized peoples. We are
abolitionists in our rejection of the carceral state and its militarized
prison industrial complex — both in the U.S. and the Philippines. There
is no justice to be found in cages or in summary execution.
We honor the legacy of and the ongoing struggles for self-determination
led by Black and indigenous peoples, the internationalist work of the
Third World Liberation Front, and the almost 600 year-long fight of the
Philippine archipelago against each wave of colonizers. We seek to
identify and solidify the connections between each of these resistance
movements.
We strive to dismantle capitalism, classism, white supremacy,
anti-blackness, patriarchy, heterosexism, imperialism, ableism, and
other violent hierarchies of oppression — not by climbing to the top,
but by bringing the top down.
We understand the vast and encompassing nature of our struggle, but we
do not accept that things are ‘just the way they are’. We do not have
all of the answers, but we refuse to be sold the lie that our saviors
are those who emerge victorious in a game of survival of the fittest.
We fight for the possibility of our own and each other’s existence as
dark, femme, queer, sick/disabled, and poor: through collective care,
mutual material aid, resource-building, skill-sharing, and self-defense.
We seek a world not limited to what we can see before us — a world
beyond colonial occupation, imperialist exploitation, enforced binaries,
and the violence of white supremacist ideology.
We do not pretend to claim ownership for the revolution. We are not the
leaders of the people, we are the people.
So, we ask you: How might we envision a world where we are all allowed
to live, where the most powerful do not dictate the fate of those they
trample on their way to the top? How are we already moving towards and
building that world?
[1] Welcome President Duterte, Arrest Aquino! Embrace the People’s
Agenda for Real Change!
[2] Rodrigo Duterte’s Most Contentious Quotations
[3] Duterte donor Imee Marcos not in his SOCE
[4] A Philippine senator defies her president — from behind bars
[5] On the Communist Party of the Philippines’ support for fascistic
President Duterte
[6] Alliance and struggle under the Duterte regime
[7] Duterte to CPP: No more talk, let us fight
[8] A Filipino ‘subversive’ in America runs into ‘leftist’ censors
[9]
[10] Philippines’ Duterte on Trump’s White House invitation: ‘I’m tied
up’
[11] Duterte not to blame for rising drug slays: Bayan
[12] —
[13] —