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Title: The Anarchists
Date: 2016
Source: Chapter 10 (pages 285–332), Cuevas-Hewitt, M. (2016). *Re-imagined communities: the radical imagination from Philippine independence to the postcolonial present*. Doctoral Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy, The University of Western Australia. [[https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/re-imagined-communities-the-radical-imagination-from-philippine-i]]
Notes: Names of persons and groups marked by an asterisk (*) denotes a change of name to protect the privacy and annonymity.
Authors: Loma Cuevas-Hewitt
Topics: history, Philippines
Published: 2021-05-03 07:36:39Z

Anarchism’s history ‘has been that of a suppressed alternative... forced to subsist in

the shadows of Marxism’ (May 1994, p. 44). This was true up until the Crisis of the Left;

that point at which communist movements found the tide turning against them. This

then opened a space for a revivification of anarchist projects worldwide. As anarchist

anthropologist David Graeber (2004b, p. 330) observed,

[a]narchist or anarchist-inspired movements are growing everywhere; anarchist

principles — autonomy, voluntary association, self-organisation, mutual aid,

direct democracy — have become the basis for organising within the

[Alternative] Globalisation Movement and beyond, taking the place that

Marxism had in the social movements of the Sixties.

Although writing from North America, Graeber’s assertions are not inapplicable to the

Philippines, where, in the Eighties and Nineties, many defectors from the Maoist

insurgency found that their critiques of the CPP-NPA strongly resonated with

anarchism. Since that time, a succession of young Filipin@ activists, wishing to keep

their distance from Maoism’s legacy, have likewise gravitated in an anarchist direction.

Replied one Filipina anarcha-feminist under the sobriquet of ‘Ingrata’ (cited in

Dapithapon 2013, p. 72), when asked in an interview about what anarchism meant to

her personally:

There is no other socio-political theory that I know of that has given equal

weight to the problems of class inequalities, racism, sexism, homophobia and

every form of domination which enslaves humanity than anarchism. It is so

vibrant that the cycle of practice, criticism, validation and innovation does not

cease... Being an anarchist is an ongoing struggle for a society where all

deterrents to genuine human freedom and aspirations like hierarchies,

authority, discrimination are eliminated. But the bonus is you get to live it now!

Referred to herein are four of contemporary anarchism’s core features: its

intersectionality; its opposition to all hierarchies; its commitment to open-ended

process; and its alignment of means and ends, encapsulated in the notion of ‘living it

now.’ As a way of acquainting the uninitiated with anarchism, beyond caricatures of

bomb-throwing nihilists,[1] I will expand on each of these features in respective order.

[1] It should be acknowledged that such caricatures are not without basis, since some anarchists did

partake in bombings and assassinations (then known as ‘propaganda of the deed’) for a brief period in

the 1890s and early 1900s. Graeber (2013, p. 191) claims, however, that anarchism was also ‘the first

modern political movement to (gradually) realize that, as a political strategy, terrorism, even when it is

not directed at innocents, doesn’t work.’ As such, anarchists have overwhelming eschewed violent

methods for the better part of a century now.

Firstly, with respect to intersectionality, contemporary anarchism has mostly

dispensed with the kind of Oppression Olympics practiced by the Maoists (whereby

national and class-based oppressions are ranked as more pressing than sexism,

homophobia, environmental destruction, and so on), as well as by the so-called ‘class

war’ anarchists of old. From its roots in working-class struggles, anarchism has since

expanded into ‘a vast umbrella movement, importantly radicalized by feminists,

ecologists, gays and lesbians’ (Kinna 2005, p. 4). As a feminist, Ingrata would have

found that the anarchist movement was generally more receptive to gender issues

than the traditional Left, which may have been what first drew her in.

Second is anarchism’s opposition to all forms of hierarchy. In fact, the very word

‘anarchism’ derives from the Greek for ‘without rulers’ (Graeber 2004a, p. 3). From its

beginnings as a movement opposed to the twin hierarchies of government over the

governed, and capitalists over workers, it has since gone on to counter the hierarchies

of humankind over nature, man over woman, straight over gay, and cis-gendered over

transgendered, among others. While relevant to the previous point about

intersectionality, what I wish to highlight here is the key cleavage between Marxists

and anarchists over the question of power. The former, in their efforts to seize state

power, have usually only sought to substitute ‘new and better hierarchies for old ones’

(May 1994, p. 51). Hence Marx’s (1875) now-infamous proposal for a ‘dictatorship of

the proletariat,’ in which the desire to overthrow a tyrant equates with the desire to

occupy the tyrant’s place. Anarchists, in contrast — in their opposition to state

sovereignty, as well as to forms of authority that, like patriarchy, are diffused

throughout society — aim at ‘getting rid of hierarchic thinking and action altogether’

(May 1994, p. 51).

The third feature to consider is the anarchist commitment to an ongoing process of

experimentation and innovation, the counterpart to which is an opposition to linear,

teleological time. Clearly parting ways with Marxist teleology, the seminal anarchist

agitator, Emma Goldman (1969, p. 63), emphasised as much when writing:

Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized

through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly

creating new conditions. The methods of anarchism therefore do not comprise

an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must

grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual

and temperamental requirements of the individual... Anarchism does not stand

for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt,

in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth.

This leads on to the final feature of contemporary anarchism to be discussed for now:

the emphasis it places on aligning means with ends. This can be understood against

the Marxist habit of putting hierarchical means at the service of anti-hierarchical ends.

The building of a new society, so the argument goes, must wait until *after* the

revolution; what is important for now is to resist the present order. To the idea of

• negating in order to create*, anarchists pose the inverse alternative of *creating in order*
• to negate*. Traditionally, this was termed ‘building the new within the shell of the old’

(Barclay 1982, p. 143), but is known today by the succincter phrase of ‘prefigurative

politics’ (Gordon 2008, pp. 34–38). ‘[O]ne cannot create freedom through authoritarian

means,’ explains Graeber (2004a, p. 7); ‘as much as possible, one must oneself, in

one’s relations with one’s friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.’

By ‘living it now,’ as Ingrata put it — or, by ‘acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber

2009, p. 203) — one subverts the old while simultaneously prefiguring the new. In

practice, this translates into radically-democratic organising practices and a profusion

of counter-institutions.

In contrast to the traditional Left, in which the institution of the political party

predominates, I encountered in Manila’s anarchist milieu an array of countercultural

forms: anarcho-punk collectives, eco-anarchist collectives, a local chapter of ‘Food Not

Bombs’ (see McHenry et al. 2014), alternative media collectives, self-publishing

initiatives, diverse artistic projects, a grassroots think-tank, a cooperative bookstore,

and a community library (or ‘infoshop’ in anarchist parlance). All aspire to ‘cementing

people’s self reliance and developing grassroots networks... based on horizontal, non-

hierarchical co-operation with no need for any government, political parties, NGOs,

[or] businesses (Anonymous 2013, pp. 3–4).

With the stage now set, I will, in the next part of this chapter, trace the ecotone

between Red and Black; the transition in Philippine radical politics, that is, from

revolutionary nationalism to anarchism. In so doing, I will rely more on oral history

interviews than on written texts, since much of what follows is hitherto unwritten

history. I then turn, in the second part, to the notion of the ‘archipelagic

confederation’ (Umali 2006) — a *community-of-communities* that a section of Filipin@

anarchists is proposing in place of the Philippine nation-state. While contemporary

feminists and environmentalists meld their critiques of nationalism with their critiques

of androcentrism and anthropocentrism respectively, the contribution that anarchists

make to the new cosmopolitan zeitgeist is to throw into the mix their uncompromising

anti-statism. This is crucial for the very reason that, if one is to re-imagine community

beyond the nation-state, one must take issue with both the nationalism and the

statism inherent in that conjunction.

Red to Black

Making contact with the anarchists in Manila was not as straightforward for me as it

was with the environmentalists. Meeting the latter had been made a breeze by the

FAEJI solidarity tour, but getting in with the anarchists took some groundwork. My first

port of call was the now-defunct Manila Indymedia website — part of a global network

of ‘independent media centres’ first sparked out of the Battle of Seattle in 1999, each

functioning as an open publishing platform for the sharing of news, views, events,

photos, and so on. While in the first seven years of its life, the Indymedia network

served as a crucial tool for activists worldwide, it has since been eclipsed by the rise of

social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

At the time of my fieldwork in Manila, however, Indymedia was still very much in use

by local activists. I regularly trawled the newswire for local happenings, taking

particular interest in the stories and reports posted by anarchist groups. I posted

comments in response, introducing myself and my research and inquiring whether or

not it would be possible to meet. I was ignored for several months, but did not take it

personally. Security was (and remains) a real concern for Filipin@ activists, given the

prevalence of political violence in the country. Eventually convinced of the sincerity of

my intentions, Leon — the young Waraynon anarchist introduced in Chapter 7 — got in

touch with me out of the blue to suggest a meeting at UP Diliman.

When the day arrived, Leon showed up over an hour late, bespectacled and short of

breath after having ridden to campus on his bicycle. My impression was of a perceptive

and good-humoured character, and what I imagined would be a short chat over lunch

morphed into a lively, drawn-out drinking session that lasted until well past nightfall.

Our setting was a grungy student bar named Sarah’s, located in Krus na Ligas — a well-

established squatter community across the road from the university. Against the din of

the rain and traffic, our meandering conversation covered ample ground: the state of

the Philippine Left, recent intellectual movements in the Philippines, anarchistic

cultures in the archipelago prior to the Spanish invasion, anarchist theory, French

poststructuralism, the Alternative Globalisation Movement, Leon’s time as a migrant

worker in Japan, my time as a migrant rights organiser in Australia, and so forth.

I also learnt of Leon’s diverse involvements in alternative media, including in zine[2] and

documentary film-making collectives, pirate radio, and the aforementioned Manila

Indymedia. To my surprise, I found out that Perth Indymedia activists back home had

played a pivotal role in helping their Manila counterparts get their own site off the

ground in the early 2000s, providing them with technical support, server space, and

the like, until they had sufficient resources and know-how to run it themselves. Not

only was it a happy coincidence for me, given my Perth-Manila connections, but also a

salient example of the kind of translocal collaboration I have been discussing in this

thesis. International networking aside, Manila Indymedia also made sure to network

locally, becoming, upon its formation, one of a couple of dozen member collectives of

the Metro Manila Anarchist Confederation* (MMAC).

[2] Zines (their name abbreviated from ‘magazine’) are self-published booklets reproduced via

photocopier in a do-it-yourself (DIY), and often anti-capitalist, spirit. Their place in alternative culture

was set in train by the anarcho-punk scene of the 1970s (Duncombe 1997).

Leon’s political activism was not always as colourful. In a past life, he was a militant

with the Young Socialist League* (YSL), which he was recruited to in the late Nineties

during a campaign against fee hikes at his *alma mater*. Now inexistent, the YSL was the

youth and students wing of the Alliance for Workers’ Solidarity* (AWS) — an RJ, and

more specifically, Trotskyist, organisation formed out of the great schism of the early

Nineties. Even though the RA-RJ split had taken place before his time, the antagonisms

of the older political generation still defined the environment in which he operated. He

was taught to scorn the RAs for their authoritarianism, but grew tired of the

authoritarianism within his own organisation as well. For this reason, he began

gravitating in an anarchist direction, gradually dropping his YSL commitments in the

early 2000s before making a decisive switch to the MMAC. As Leon recounted:

If we wanted to organize our own local struggles at that time, they would

always say, “Oh, coordinate it with the national committee of the student

sector.” We always had to ask permission; that’s how it works. So yeah,

eventually I got pissed off with this kind of authoritarian tradition, and I saw a

different mode of expressing politics in the [Metro Manila Anarchist

Confederation]... They’re very dynamic; they don’t need to have a party.

Leon’s turn from Marxism to anarchism also involved an embrace of the anational

attitudes to which contemporary anarchism is predisposed. He even declared in one of

our interviews that ‘there is no such thing as “The Philippines,”’ or at least no

primordial national community that pre-existed its forcible creation under the Spanish.

This is only the fast-forwarded version of the Red-Black transition in Philippine radical

politics. To give a fuller account, I will rewind to the political tensions of the Eighties

and early Nineties, and play it through again at regular speed.

The older generation

As already recounted, the dissolution of the CPP in 1993 precipitated a flowering of

feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism in the Philippines, all of which had been

held in check by the Maoists’ hegemony over the Left. Every innovation at this time

was informed, in part, by diagnoses of what went wrong with the Party. The RJs who

found solace in non-Maoist forms of Marxism pinned the blame on Mao’s and Sison’s

distortions of the supposed essence of the Marxist project (MRRC 1993; Nemenzo

1994). Meanwhile, born-again Social Democrats affirmed the ‘parliamentary road’

(Ciria-Cruz 1992) against what they saw as the excesses of revolutionary violence. Both

tendencies, however, remained invested in the nation-state paradigm. My contention

is that those who effected a more fundamental break were not those who quarrelled

over the correctness of one Marxist theorist or another, or who argued for a reformist

rather than revolutionary approach, but those who called into question the very logic

of sovereignty within which all were complicit.

The journal *Kasarinlan* was the forum for many of these debates, both in the lead-up

to and in the wake of the CPP’s collapse. It was within its pages that an article entitled

‘Re-imagining Philippine revolution’ (Serrano 1994) appeared, perturbing many at the

time. Its author, Isagani Serrano, was very much in the minority amongst his fellow CPP

defectors for his divergent, anti-statist perspective. He critiqued his former party for

being ‘statist through and through,’ challenging, in particular, its tendency ‘to reduce

revolution to the capture of state power’ (Serrano 1994, pp. 80–81). When an RJ

acquaintance commented to me quite seriously one evening, ‘I just hope I’ll still be

alive on the day of the victory,’ he was referring to revolution in this same sense — a

cataclysmic seizure of power so as to bring about an ideal society from the top down.

In contrast, Serrano (1994, p. 81) stressed the need for a social, rather than merely

political, revolution. Where the ‘political revolution’ effects a simple change of

management within the state apparatus, the ‘social revolution’ erodes the state by

‘dispersing power across the social spectrum’ (Serrano 1994, p. 81). Elsewhere, he

explained that a ‘community can come to power without actually taking power. Slowly

you pulverize centralized power by breaking it up and taking control’ (Serrano cited in

Broad & Cavanagh 1993, p. 149).

Serrano re-imagined revolution as a process rather than an event; more an

• undercutting* than an overthrowing. This is the precise approach taken by present-day

anarchists in their building of counter-institutions and their efforts to cooperativise all

that capitalists would wish privatised and that statists would wish nationalised. Said

Leon, for one, ‘I consider revolution as an everyday struggle — the revolution of

everyday life.’ Although Serrano never professed an affinity for anarchism, his

anarchistic intuitions were palpable.

Serrano was in fact advocating for Popular Democracy, as distinct from the National

Democracy of the Maoists. From this perspective, the true locus of democracy lies, not

in the state, but in civil society (Serrano 1994, p. 75). The ‘Pop Dems’ (as adherents of

this approach were known) began coalescing in the wake of the People Power

Revolution of 1986, when widespread disillusionment with the CPP-NPA first set in. A

tension soon emerged, however, between those Pop Dems who still saw a role for the

state, even if a very minimal one, and those who wanted to do away with it altogether.

While the former current has since been absorbed into electoral formations, the latter

persists in community empowerment initiatives, whether driven by NGOs, POs, or

explicitly anarchist outfits (Törnquist 2002, pp. 48–55).

One NGO inspired by the anti-statist strain of Popular Democracy is the Philippine

Institute for Popular Education* (PIPE), active throughout the country but based in

Manila. Through the FAEJI solidarity tour, I was able to meet one PIPE educator,

formerly an NPA guerrilla, whom I shall call Edwin. In a fascinating talk, Edwin

reflected on how he and his NPA comrades did little to empower the people in whose

interests they were supposedly operating. On the contrary, they actively contributed

to their disempowerment by positioning themselves as leaders and the masses as

mere followers. On this topic, it would be worth citing Edwin at considerable length:

When I was with the Maoist movement... I realized most people would come to

me as the fountainhead of knowledge in the *barangay*, because I represent the

revolution. So if a couple has a domestic spat, they come to me to settle this

problem — and I was twenty-three years old and single! Given that particular

context I was in, I would say... “All these problems between husbands and

wives are the problems of colonialism and imperialism,” because I had nothing

else to say... [Another] part of our work at the time was going to the small

landlord in each town... and asking them to lower the interest rate of the loans

that the farmers made, or increasing the farmers’ share of the harvest...

Because we were armed, because we were guerrillas, the landlords would be

shaking in fear, because in the rural areas, they wouldn’t have any recourse to

military intervention. We were in power in the area... “Can you increase the

peasants’ share of the crop?” and he would say, “sure, sure.” He’d be really

shaking with fear. And then one of the guys who was in a key position in the

movement at the time wondered about something very crucial. He said “We

are not doing revolutionary work with the peasants... We are doing something

for them, but they are not doing it for themselves... Do we call this

revolutionary work? Why don’t we try asking them to do it?... to talk to the

landlord about changing the sharing patterns?” If only the guerrillas do it,

things can change, but if the people do it, you get different results... Left groups

would talk about empowering people. I keep wondering how that

empowerment happens, or if it’s really happening... Sometime in the late

Eighties, I became an NGO worker. That whole thing I experienced in the NPA

was foremost in my mind whenever I’d do NGO work... I was always asking

myself... “Is it perpetuating dependence?” It’s entirely possible that some sort

of dependency has shifted from one entity to you, as an NGO worker.

At this point, Edwin offered a word of caution for us, as young diasporans getting

involved in Philippine affairs:

I noticed many Fil-Americans who come over... would naturally say, “in the

States, things don’t happen that way. Why don’t you do it this way?” And that

usually produces two kinds of reactions: One is resentment, right? But the

majority reaction is “Oh yeah, he’s right. Why don’t we do it his way?... Things

are better there. They do things better in the States. Ah, I wish we could do

that here.” So what I’m saying is when people have recommendations for how

things should get done — and I’m sure a lot of goodwill is inherent in the

recommendations — one has to be conscious of how it impacts on people’s

consciousness, given the context of dependence... What does [FAEJI] bring into

the community?... Projects and programs and material things? That’s all good,

but try to do something else too — a notion of dialogue, so that you don’t tell

people what to do, but actually try to listen.

Edwin then related this to his own work as a popular educator with PIPE:

It’s a good thing to present an alternative to the current state of affairs, but it’s

also a good thing to help people articulate their discourse on a particular issue.

And then we might help people re-tell the story... Discourses are not static...

People would say: “Ah, mayor so-and-so is a good person... He may be stealing

from the coffers, but he sends my kids to college.” But if there’s less corruption,

it might be possible they could send more kids to college. If we could help

people find such fissures and cracks in their discourses, then I think that’s a

good thing we can do for people... Our community programs in [PIPE] are

basically of an education type, but aside from the usual notion of education,

what we do is try to help people articulate such discourses so that they

themselves could re-tell their discourses in a new way — hopefully. And this is

basically cultural work... cultural-political work. Identifying strong points in

their culture and helping them to find the cracks, so that when they

try to fill them in, the whole discourse changes towards something more

progressive.

Intrigued, I asked Edwin during question time about how he arrived at his ideas. Were

they solely a product of his experiences, or were there certain theorists that influenced

him as well?

In 1986, we were still good Maoists, loyal Maoists at that time... but we were

already reading [Paulo] Freire. And the senior cadres were discrediting us for

reading Freire... I think after three years, they got tired of us... They simply

severed us and that was the end. After that, some of us started discovering

[György] Lukács and [Antonio] Gramsci... [and the] postmodernist writers. And

then the senior cadres were branding us as anarchist, but we didn’t even know

what anarchism was... So we started reading up on anarchy and anarchism and

realised: “Yeah, we’re anarchists! They’re right!”

Anarchism was fitting, given Edwin’s already-cogent critiques of hierarchical power

relations. His intuitions were echoed by Roberto Garcia (2001, p. 94), another former

NPA soldier who developed anarchistic leanings:

The [National Democratic] revolution thrives in its critique of iniquity and the

hierarchical distribution of wealth, power, and decision-making in society. But

the movement itself is patently hierarchical. The whole party structure is

vertically organized and all major decisions are done at the top.

From the *de facto* or accidental anarchism of former Maoists, I will turn next to the

adoption of anarchism proper amongst the younger generation.

The younger generation

Owing to the enmities of the older generation, and the fluctuating realignments

resulting therefrom, the Nineties were a bewildering time to be young and radical in

the Philippines. ‘The political Left at that time had these factions,’ recalled Leon. ‘Every

year, there’s like splits going on... Because of this, we got frustrated with how the

authoritarian leftist tradition was affecting us.’ No sooner did Leon find his place in the

YSL, a group formed out of the RA-RJ splits, than it was torn apart by a split of its own,

with a quarter of its members bolting *en masse*. The dissidents’ point of contention

was that the YSL’s parent organisation, the AWS, should transform itself into a fully-

fledged, Bolshevik-style party; one that would aim at the kind of hegemony over the

Left that the CPP enjoyed in the Seventies and early Eighties. The loyalists, meanwhile,

felt that the group should remain a ‘pre-party formation,’ and that, as Leon narrated it,

a new party ‘should not be formed until we reconsolidate our forces.’ Those who

defected did eventually establish a new revolutionary party, the <em>Partido para sa

Rebolusyong Sosyalista</em>*[3] (PRS), only to see it disappear just a few years later. While

some in this milieu let their disillusionment get the better of them, others grew eager

for an alternative outside the political culture in which they had been raised. A handful

of them found just such an alternative in anarchism, becoming key players in the

formation of the MMAC at the turn of the millennium.

[3] This translates as: ‘Party for Socialist Revolution.’

According to Leon, the rationale behind the MMAC’s founding was as follows: ‘Why

not just build a network of individuals and collectives who will work together through

action, rather than thinking of building a party?’ This was in the wake of the Battle of

Seattle, which demonstrated to the world the power of anarchistic, network-based

forms of organisation.[4] A co-founder of the MMAC whom I corresponded with by e-

mail cited Seattle as a ‘major inspiration.’ He was inspired, too, by the anarchist

federations already in existence in the Philippines: the Davao Anarchist Resistance

Movement in Mindanao and the Far South Resistance Movement in southern Luzon.

The achievement of the MMAC was to bring together diverse, anarchist-inspired

collectives from across Metro Manila — students, punks, adventurers, zinesters,

anarcho-vegans, alternative globalisation activists, and so on — into a common arena

for collaboration.

[4] Contrary to popular misconceptions, anarchism is not opposed to organisation and order in general,

only to forms of organisation premised on coercive, centralised authority (Heckert 2013, p. 513).

Anarchists stand instead for voluntary, decentralised, and self-regulating relationships between equals,

which they believe constitute a much more ordered way of life — hence the slogan ‘Anarchy is order;

government is civil war,’ attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (cited in Kinna 2005, p. 5).

Leon was still with the YSL when the MMAC came into being, but the more estranged

he grew from his own organisation, the more he contemplated as a viable option for

himself the trail from Red to Black blazed by his former comrades (notwithstanding

their detour through the failed PRS). In time, as touched on earlier, Leon came to

reject the RJs’ self-designation as the ‘Democratic Left’ and their description of their

RA rivals as the ‘Authoritarian Left,’ concluding that both were just authoritarian as

each other. The MMAC appealed for the reason that it took traditional leftists to task

for reproducing the hierarchies of wider society within their own organisations. Leon

was surprised to find informal hierarchies at work within the MMAC as well, but

figured that at least there was a general commitment to mitigate them.

What also drew Leon into the anarchist fold was its culture of conviviality and

creativity, so different to the humourless militancy he was used to:

I was inspired by [the MMAC’s] work, you know? Way back in 1999, before the

Battle of Seattle broke out, they already had their own community space where

different youth, people from different communities, used to converge... They

had these once-a-week skill-sharings — from Food Not Bombs to making zines,

anything DIY. So I was observing their activities and I was kind of “Wow.” That

was it; I decided to join them.

For Leon, the anarchist ethos of ‘living it now’ was an antidote to the life-denying

values demanded by the traditional Left — discipline, sacrifice, and the idea that ‘one

has to be sad in order to be militant’ (Foucault 1972, p. xiii). Leon had sacrificed a lot

for the YSL, dropping out of university in order to become a full-time organiser. Upon

joining the MMAC, however, he decided to resume his studies, this time in art rather

than advertising. Once there was no longer any leftist bureaucracy in the equation,

Leon felt free to pursue more life-affirming endeavours in his activism and studies

alike.

Organising without leaders

One major reason for Leon’s turn to anarchism has yet to be discussed; namely, the

dashed hopes following the 2001 uprising that swept then-president Joseph Estrada

from office. Commonly known as ‘EDSA II,’ the follow-up to the first EDSA revolution of

1986, this episode was a turning point in Philippine radical politics — not for its

apparent success, but for its failures. The events of 2001 revealed to Leon, and many

others like him, the ideological bankruptcy of the traditional Left, making anarchism a

compelling alternative. To tell this story, I will begin in the most unlikely of places:

Leon’s surprising connection to renowned historian Benedict Anderson, who, although

most well-known for his writings on Indonesia, has also developed a significant body of

work on the Philippines.[5] Odd though it may seem at present, all will make sense in

good time.

[5] Anderson turned to the Philippines after being banned from Indonesia by the Suharto dictatorship.

Part of the appeal was the impending dissolution of the Philippines’ own dictatorship in the mid-

Eighties. He recalled that at this time ‘many of my best students at Cornell University were deciding to

work on the Philippines, for political as well as scholarly reasons. I more or less tagged along behind

them’ (Anderson 2003, p. viii). In an e-mail to one of his former students, Patricio Abinales, now a noted

scholar in his own right, Anderson gave a further reason for his interest in the Philippines: ‘I think that

living in America, and having long experienced... the katarantaduhan [‘nonsense’ in Tagalog slang] of

Washington in other places, made me think I should really study the American colony’ (Anderson cited

in Abinales 2003, p. xxvi).

It was over beers at Sarah’s that Benedict Anderson first came up as a topic of

conversation. Leon had yet to get his hands on a copy of Anderson’s latest book, *Under three flags* (2007), but I had just finished reading it myself and imagined it would be of

great interest to him. I summarised it for Leon as a study of the rich exchange that took

place in 1890s Spain between three sets of people: European anarchists, Cuban

émigrés fighting for Cuban independence, and Filipin@ émigrés fighting for Philippine

independence (or at least for greater autonomy). The treatise concludes with a curious

postscript hinting at parallels between the ‘early globalization’ of the 1890s and the

‘late globalization’ of the current era (Anderson 2007, pp. 3, 234). In it, Anderson

(2007, p. 234) writes:

In January 2004, I was invited to give a preliminary lecture on some of the

themes of this book by the famously radical-nationalist University of the

Philippines, where the influence of (Ilocano) José Maria Sison’s Maoist “new”

Communist Party, founded at the end of 1968, remains quite strong. Arriving

much too early, I filled in time at an open-air campus coffee-stall. A youngster

came by to hand out leaflets to the customers, all of whom casually scrunched

them up and threw them away once he had left. I was about to do the same

when my eye caught the title of the one-page text. “Organize Without

Leaders!” The content proved to be an attack on the hierarchies of the country — boss-ridden party-political, corporate capitalist, and also Maoist Communist –

in the name of “horizontal” organized solidarity. The leaflet was unsigned, but a

website was appended for further enquiries. This was a serendipity too good to

keep to myself. I read it out loud to my audience, and was surprised that almost

everyone seemed taken aback. But when I had finished speaking, many hurried

up to ask for copies... I feel certain that Isabelo[6] would have been enchanted

by the leaflet and rushed to his laptop to explore the website

*manila.indymedia.org*. He would have found that this website is linked to

dozens of others of similar stripe around the world. Late Globalization?

[6] Anderson is referring here to Isabelo de los Reyes — the Philippines’ first self-declared anarchist.

Arrested by Spanish authorities in 1896 for his involvement in the Philippine Revolution, he was sent to

prison in faraway Barcelona, largely in order to isolate him from fellow Filipin@s over whom he held

considerable sway. Not to be isolated from radicals of other nationalities, his Catalan anarchist inmates

so impressed him that, before long, he himself took on an anarchist identity. For de los Reyes (cited in

Anderson 2007, p. 201), anarchism was about ‘the abolition of boundaries; that is, *love* without any

boundaries, whether geographic or of class distinction... with all of us associating together without any

need of fraudulent taxes or ordinances which trap the unfortunate but leave the real criminals

untouched’ [italics mine]. Returning to Manila, de los Reyes brought with him the first anarchist texts to

reach the Philippines and quickly resumed his militant organising, albeit this time against the new

American regime (Anderson 2007, p. 7).

Leon could hardly believe it when I relayed this story to him, since the ‘youngster’ with

the leaflets was none other than Leon himself. I was surprised by the coincidence of it

all, and Leon by the fact that Anderson had seen fit to refer to their mundane (though

at once momentous) encounter in his work. Manila Indymedia was only

six months old at that point, so Leon and his comrades were still working hard to

inspire popular participation in the newswire. What better occasion to spread the

word, they figured, than a Benedict Anderson lecture on anarchism and

anticolonialism? Funnily enough, Leon had no idea who the foreigner at the coffee

shop actually was — ‘I saw an old, fat, white guy sitting there,’ he recalled; ‘I didn’t

think he would be care, but I gave him a flyer anyway, just to piss him off’ — until

around an hour later when he saw the same man appear at the front of the lecture hall

to speak.

The relevance here is that the Indymedia flyer in question was adapted from a

statement first distributed by anarchists during the 2001 uprising against Estrada.

Likewise bearing the title of *Organize Without Leaders!*, it recommended that people

ignore the various political parties that were attempting to capitalise on the

movement, and self-organise instead. While the RAs and RJs dreamt about coming to

power, President Estrada’s more conservative opponents simply wanted him replaced

by another member of the political-economic elite. For the anarchists, in contrast, the

issue was not who was in power, but power itself. They maintained that if the

problems afflicting Philippine society stem from an anti-democratic, hierarchy-ridden

political culture, then solutions must take radically-democratic, non-hierarchical forms — hence their proposal for an archipelagic confederation, which emerged directly out

of the post-Estrada context. For this to make any sense, it will be necessary to examine

EDSA II and its aftermath in greater detail.

As in the first EDSA revolution of 1986, millions of Filipin@s again took to Manila’s

Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in 2001 to demand the resignation of a president whose

rule they no longer found tolerable (see Image 17). Estrada was a charismatic former

movie star who came to power in a landslide election victory just two and a half years

prior. Before long, he revealed himself to be a walking contradiction: a populist

plutocrat who, despite his pro-poor rhetoric, siphoned from the public purse

somewhere in the range of 63–71 million US dollars (Burton 2001, p. 16; Larmer &

Meyer 2001, p. 10). On top of this, he was a chronic gambler and notorious womaniser

who boasted of mistresses and illegitimate children (Spaeth 2001, p. 22). His dubious

moral character made it easy for Manila’s business elites, who had long despised the

president for his anti-elitist posturing and economic mismanagement, to enlist the

Catholic Church in their calls for Estrada to step down. The Left joined in too, once the

extent of Estrada’s graft and corruption came to light. The opposition was hence

composed of seemingly incommensurable forces: ‘both management and organized

labor; the Right and the Left’ (Bello 2001, p. 4).

The movement reached flashpoint in early 2001, such that it began to feel like the

sequel to 1986. Estrada remained defiant, insisting he had the backing of the country’s

poor, but when his cabinet defected and the military withdrew support for his regime,

he had little choice but to resign. Estrada’s departure on January 20, 2001, provoked

spontaneous dancing in the streets, but what came next inspired far less celebration.

In line with constitutional writ, power was handed to the vice-president: US-educated

economist, Gloria Arroyo. The constitution turned out to be a convenient alibi for

corporate elites, since, of all the options put forward by the broad-based opposition, it

was Arroyo whom they felt would best serve their interests (Burton 2001).

Already in late 2000, leftists were fearing that ‘it is the faction of Vice President Gloria

Macapagal Arroyo that is pushing the situation in their favour... She can never be part

of the solution as she is in fact equally a part of the problem... [given her record as] a

staunch promoter of the neo-liberal agenda of global capital’ (PARE! Unity Assembly

2000, pp. 1–2). This prognosis proved correct, with Arroyo faithfully serving the

capitalist establishment over her nine-year tenure as president. Her economic policies

and repression of the Left even earnt her comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, with

commentators dubbing her the ‘Iron Lady of Asia’ (Cabacungan, Andrade & Morelos

2011, p. 1). It later came to light that Arroyo was scarcely less corrupt than her

predecessor, having been arrested twice since departing the presidency for electoral

fraud and theft of public funds (Ranoco 2012).

Owing to the dashed hopes of one uprising after another, there is now widespread talk

amongst progressives of a veritable ‘EDSA fatigue’: a disillusionment with the

timeworn revolutionary exercises that merely result in a change of management within

the same structure of power. One acquaintance at UP Diliman captured the mood

when he sighed: ‘We made a revolution, and look what happened: all we got was

Gloria!’ During my fieldwork, several leftist groups were pushing for a new EDSA-style

revolution against Arroyo, but even their own members at times seemed cynical about

the prospect. Dalisay, for instance, lamented to me one rainy afternoon over coffee

that rallies demanding Arroyo’s ouster were dwindling in numbers and lacked a certain

fire. ‘The EDSA strategy isn’t resonating anymore,’ she said. ‘Our rallies feel too much

like a routine.’ I was later reminded of this when encountering Juris’s (2008) argument

that the more that protest events become habituated, the less effective (and affective)

they become.

Like EDSA I, EDSA II ‘resulted in the consolidation rather than the weakening of the

elite’s hold on Philippine politics, governance, and society’ (Akbayan 2005, p. 1) (see

Image 18). Some RJ groups did modify their strategies after the failings of EDSA II,

although not in any fundamental way. Rather than reflect on the limitations of state-

centric, sovereignty-bound politics, the one major lesson that RJs seemed to draw

from the experience was that any future post-revolutionary government would have to

annul the existing constitution and draft its own — this, in order to prevent a simple

transfer of power to the vice president, as with what happened with Arroyo. It was

thus that LNM proposed that in the event of a future presidential ouster, a Transitional

Revolutionary Government (TRG) be installed — in effect, a temporary dictatorship with

the paradoxical aim of bringing about greater democracy. One LNM member group

explained that the proposal for a TRG

is meant to emphasize that the current crisis is a systemic crisis that cannot be

resolved within the confines of the current political system... The biggest

argument for extra-constitutional means is the set of radical reforms that we

want. These reforms cannot be delivered under the constitutional order. The

elite in political institutions cannot be expected to put a check on, much less

lessen, their political power and prerogatives (Akbayan 2005, pp. 1, 4).

This scheme could be read, in part, as an effort to atone for the embarrassment of the

RJ Left’s tactical alliance with the Right during EDSA II. There was also the

embarrassment of the anti-Estrada movement’s well-to-do composition. As Walden

Bello (2001, p. 1) observed, ‘the mass base of this transfer of political power was the

middle class. The lower classes largely sat it out.’

This class fault-line was brought into stark relief by a dramatic backlash of the poor,

triggered by Estrada’s arrest in April 2001 on charges of plunder. Although life had

changed very little for the millions of impoverished Filipin@s who voted for Estrada,

many remained loyal to him for the seeming reason that most other politicians failed

to grant them even a modicum of dignity as he did. Land reform, squatters’ rights,

redistribution of wealth, and other important issues for the poor were neglected

during Estrada’s term, but he did present the illusion that they were being addressed

(Severino 2001, p. 4).

With their champion behind bars, hundreds of thousands of rural and urban poor

descended on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue to stage an uprising of their own: EDSA III

(see Image 19). ‘It appeared to be a mirror image of the anti-Estrada protests, with the

same location for the stage, political banners hanging from the overpass, and even the

same songs,’ wrote Howie Severino (2001, p. 2). The key difference was that there

were ‘no college students or office workers in evidence. This was the so-called masa

[masses]’ (Severino 2001, p. 3). Deeming EDSA II to have been a protest of the rich,

those in attendance sought, not solely to defend Estrada, but also to decry their

marginalisation in a devastatingly unequal society.

No leftist group participated in EDSA III in an official capacity, though many individual

leftists, their curiosity whetted, did head down to watch the surprising turn of events

unfold. There, they witnessed the poor self-organising without them, thereby coming

to an awareness of the rift between the Left and the very people in whose interests it

supposedly operated.

I cannot say what effect EDSA III had on the RAs, since I had very little to do with them

in Manila, but as far as the RJs were concerned, many whom I spoke to felt greatly

humbled by it. EDSA III was swiftly crushed by the new Arroyo regime, but it continues

to serve as a reference point for leftists seeking to lessen the gulf between themselves

and the poor. Edgar and Jorge, for example, now renounce their earlier complicity in

EDSA II, claiming EDSA III to have been the only true uprising of the oppressed. Dalisay

also shared with me that, in light of the events of April 2001, the so-called ‘spontaneity

of the masses’ is now embraced within LNM. This is to say that, rather than the

downtrodden always having to follow the Left’s lead, there is a novel recognition that

it should sometimes happen the other way around.

Leon was still with the RJ Left in early 2001, but when its inadequacies were laid bare

by the upheavals of January and April, he became convinced that the way forward was

with the anarchists. ‘EDSA II,’ remarked Leon,

was actually terrible, you know, because it was an uprising of the middle class

and upper class opposition, so there was no significant change... What

happened to the Left movement is they just followed the political elites... And

then what happened was now; this is the future of those political dealings and

all that. This is what they asked for. From then on, I got involved in the

[MMAC].

The *Organize Without Leaders!* document that anarchists circulated during EDSA II was

a breath of fresh air for Leon, which was why he thought to adapt it for Manila

Indymedia’s purposes a few years later. As mentioned, many of the ideas it contained

were inspired by the Battle of Seattle on the other side of the Pacific, but it also took

on its own unique flavour in light of local political circumstances.

The anarchist critique of the Philippine revolutionary tradition, ‘highly influenced by

red bureaucracy’ (Umali 2006, p. 2), gained significant traction after 2001, when even

the Rejectionists, who had been considered the benign alternative to the Reaffirmists,

were discredited in the eyes of many. Anarchist writer, Bas Umali (2006, p. 1) ventured

that the RJs ‘offer no substantial difference [to the RAs], for they all adhere to the

state and capturing political power.’ It was on this basis that Umali (2006) formulated

his vision of a stateless alternative: the archipelagic confederation.

Archipelagic confederationalism

Given that a majority of Filipin@ activists from across the political spectrum have long

deemed the nation-state as incontrovertible, Umali’s re-imagining of the Philippine

Archipelago along non-nationalist and non-statist lines could be seen as something of a

game-changer. In his own words, the archipelagic confederation would be an

‘alternative anarchist political structure... that connects and interlinks politically and

economically every community in the archipelago... not in a hierarchical or top-down

orientation, but rather... [on the basis of] mutual cooperation, complementarity and

solidarity’ (Umali 2006, pp. 1, 9). Here, a spatial imaginary born of the Philippines’

unique, island-studded geography becomes the locally-specific vehicle for an old

anarchist idea: a ‘federation of free communities’ (Rocker cited in Davis 2014, p. 224)

autonomous from sovereign authority.

My first exposure to archipelagic confederationalism was in conversation with Leon in

2008. Leon, in turn, first learnt of the concept at an anarchist festival two years prior,

where Umali and his fellow delegates from the Anarchist Initiative for Direct

Democracy (AIDD) — a grassroots think-tank comprised of a small but energetic cadre

of dissident intellectuals — delivered a landmark seminar on the political crisis in the

Philippines following EDSA II. Their argument, recounted Leon,

was that *Laban ng Masa* adheres to the idea of top-down politics. Although

they try to look like they want to make some kind of significant change in

Philippine politics... it’s just about reform. They want to reform the electoral

system through the TRG... They don’t actually believe in grassroots organizing.

They don’t have such a thing, where you have organized political power from

the communities... We believe that the communities, like the slum areas, like

the urban poor communities, have their own way of fulfilling their needs, so we

thought we could build our collective power without depending on a

Transitional Revolutionary Government. So when AIDD brought this critique

and suggested the archipelagic confederation, we thought that “Yeah, it could

be possible”; that we start organizing from below, build up the power from

below, and then eventually disregard the government and the state, you know?

You have your own autonomous assemblies... popular assemblies, instead of a

national government.

The RJs, in drafting the TRG programme, had tried to make amends for their missteps

during EDSA II, but anarchists were unimpressed. While TRG exponents believed

themselves to stand for ‘systemic change and not the mere changing of the

government’ (Akbayan 2005, p. 5), Leon was one with the AIDD when countering that

there can be no systemic change if politics continues to be restricted within the nation-

state apparatus. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘the root cause of the problem is authority itself –

and hierarchy. Even though you have this revolutionary government run by whatever

leftist factions, if hierarchy and authority is present, you don’t resolve anything.’

After several return visits to Manila’s anarchist community during the write-up of this

thesis, I saw that support for the prospective archipelagic confederation continues

strong. Moral support has also come from afar, with Gabriel Kuhn (2010, p. 15), a

writer-activist from Austria who visited Manila in 2006, positing that the Philippines

could play a vital role in bringing much-needed Third World perspectives to the global

anarchist movement: ‘Recent essays published by Bas Umali,’ he said, ‘are just one

proof of this.’

Of course, Umali has not escaped reproach. His critics have come from the Right and

Left and even from within the anarchist milieu itself. As Danny, a scholar-activist with

the AIDD and masters student in philosophy, explained to me in an interview:

I think Bas... he’s trying to stake a claim on how we can localize anarchism, and

as such, I think it’s a good effort... It’s another flower — let it bloom. But a few

anarchist groups took offense in the sense that... the paper was trying to say

that “this is Filipino anarchism,” when I guess what Bas was really trying to say

was “this is a form of anarchism we should think about,” and at that level, I

share that with him... The response was “Why are you trying to organize us?.”..

Many of these anarchist groups fear large formations, and obviously, that

paper was in favour of a network of free communities, which is a large

formation. And, you know, I’ve never had a problem with that, but many of

them do... They feel that it’s a small step towards the loss of their autonomy.

The way I felt was “You know, if you don’t like it, it’s not something we’re

forcing on you.” In fact, the only thing we’re forcing is “Let’s talk about this, and

hopefully something comes out of it... something that’s both yours and ours.”

Such dissension could be taken as testament to the anarchist movement’s vibrancy.

Unlike in the traditional Left, no anarchist would ever expect another to toe a

particular line, since the idea of a formal leadership structure enforcing official tenets

is anathema for anarchists in the first place. Instead, ideas are produced, circulated,

and contested in a much more open and flexible way.

Gordon (2008, p. 6) asserts that the anarchist movement is ‘a setting in which high-

quality political thinking — indeed political *theorising* — take place’ [italics in original]. At

the same time, though, he emphasises that ‘anarchist literature is not supposed to

look like academic political theory. Much of it appears in self-published, photocopied

and pirated booklets and zines’ (Gordon 2008, p. 9). This was the case with Umali’s

piece on archipelagic confederationalism, which was self-published on an anarchist

website.

Although much of anarchist theory bypasses academia, it should not be seen as any

less important. In fact, it fills a conspicuous gap in the Philippine intellectual landscape,

with ‘embedded intellectuals’ (Bratich 2007) in the academe still very much beholden

to nation-state precepts. ‘Here at the university,’ said Leon during one of our meetings

at UP Diliman, ‘they always propagate the idea of nationalism, without even thinking

that nationalism kills other people.’ The work of critically re-examining the

inheritances of the national liberation era is therefore being left to non-academic

intellectuals like Umali — a *de facto* postcolonial scholar in a country that, as noted in

Chapter 2, is curiously lacking in postcolonial studies.

Returning momentarily to Benedict Anderson’s *Under three flags* (2007), a line of

affinity was drawn in that book between the contemporaneous anticolonial

intellectuals José Rizal and José Martí, who agitated against Spain from the Philippines

and Cuba respectively. Today, similar lines of affinity can be drawn between

postcolonial intellectuals in the same two countries. I was surprised to discover, for

instance, the resonances between Bas Umali’s archipelagic imaginary and that of

Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996). For the latter, the Caribbean is a ‘meta-

archipelago’: a space of immense ‘sociocultural fluidity’ with ‘neither a boundary nor a

center’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996, pp. 3–4). Intruigingly, Benítez-Rojo (1996, p. 4) points to

the archipelagic isomorphism between the Aegean Islands (the ancient Greek name for

which was *Archipelagos*, this being the very origin of ‘archipelago’ in modern English),

the Caribbean, and the ‘great Malay archipelago’ (inclusive of present-day Philippines,

Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia and Singapore).

As with ideas emanating from the West Indies, Umali (2006) re-imagines the Philippine

Archipelago, if not the wider East Indies, as a centreless mesh of cultures and

communities, held back by being held too tightly together by nationalist and statist

impositions. Taking the trope of the archipelago as my starting point, I will, in the

following sections on xenophilia and translocalism, build on Umali’s work by further

relating it to a range of kindred thinkers, mostly anarchist, who are concerned likewise

with re-inventing community beyond the nation-state.

Xenophilia

Xenophilia as a nascent or renascent political value can be understood against the

homophilic impositions it seeks to undo. In the pre-colonial era, the diverse peoples

inhabiting the islands of present-day Philippines submitted to no overarching state nor

conformed to any monolithic, archipelago-wide identity. Only with colonialism were

diverse communities forcibly integrated under a single apparatus of rule (Dagami 2010,

pp. 20–21; Gasera Collective 2010, p. 1). The invention of a homophilic national identity

went hand-in-hand with this process. Although political power has shifted over the

years from Spain to the United States to the Philippine elite, nationalist and statist

logics have remained constant throughout — not only on the part of rulers, but also on

the part of those, like the CPP-NPA, seeking to take their place.

Umali (2006) concedes the importance of nationalism in the Philippine Revolution of

the 1890s, but maintains that to subscribe to nationalism today is to do violence to

alterity and perpetuate the colonial mindset, even in spite of anticolonial intentions. A

similar sentiment comes through in a poem entitled ‘Naming archipelagos,’ in which

Catherine Candano (2007, p. 9) laments the lingering impact of colonialism on the

cultural diversity of the Philippines. With the Spanish invasion came the ‘erosion of the

countless names for surface soils... each granule sinking into sea-bed, and then reborn,

thrust forth — *eto* [this], an island itself...’ The archipelago, in effect, was reduced to a

single island. What was and remains a multiplicity became discursively naturalised as a

unitary community, with one people and one history. For RJ scholar, Marie Guillermo

(2000), the search for a ‘national bond among diverse communities’ is still ongoing.

Recently, postcolonial theorist Antonis Balasopolous (2008, p. 9) coined the term

‘nesology’ to refer to the ‘discursive production of insularity’ — its prefix deriving from

nesos, the Ancient Greek for ‘island.’ The ‘bounded morphological schema of the

island’ (Balasopoulos 2008, p. 13) becomes the analogue and archetype for the range

of entities customarily seen as discrete and self-contained: the individual, the

academic discipline, and the nation-state amongst them. Breaking from such

anachronisms, Umali’s (2006, p. 2) recasting of the Philippines along archipelagic

rather than nesological lines was a key manoeuvre:

Myriad historical accounts indicate that the bodies of water surrounding

different islands connected rather than separated them from each other, and

that economic, social and political activities of the inhabitants were developed

due to the interconnectedness of their immediate environment... [T]he rich

natural endowments of the archipelago allow diverse cultures to flourish and

develop in heterogeneous ways, yet [remain] connected by mutual

cooperation.

Of note is that the sea is not seen as a barrier, but as a connective tissue crossed by

perpetual flows. Just as Hau’ofa (2008, p. 31) wrote with respect to the South Pacific,

Umali (2006) regards the Philippine Archipelago less as a collection of isolated patches

of land than an interconnected ‘sea of islands,’ each inseparable from the fluid

relationships between them. For Benítez-Rojo (1996, p. 2) too, the Caribbean is

composed, not of stable islands, but of ‘unstable condensations, turbulences,

whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers,

flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and

pools, uncertain voyages’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996, pp. 2).

In each of these cases, attention shifts from hermetic island space towards the

• relational* space of the sea. This is apt considering that ethno-linguistic groups in the

Philippines do not map with particular islands, but with particular maritime regions.

For example, the Cebuan@ language is endemic, not just to the island of Cebu, but

also to the eastern portion of Negros and the western portion of Leyte, both of which

face Cebu. Likewise, Waray-Waray is spoken on the island of Samar as well as in

eastern Leyte which faces Samar. Indeed, *no culture is an island*.

Crucially, the same sea by which languages and cultures disseminate also acts as a

medium for cross-fertilisation across difference. The embrace of difference — in a

word, xenophilia — figures at the heart of archipelagic confederationalism. In contrast

to the nationalist imperative of subordinating diverse communities to a homophilic

unity, the archipelagic confederation would ‘accommodate highly diverse interests,

views, conceptions and identities in a horizontal manner,’ both within and between

localities (Gasera Collective 2010, p. 3). Given that, according to Umali (2006, pp. 7–8),

revolutionary nationalist formations are incapable of attending to the diversity of

peoples and places in the Philippine Archipelago, the solution is for each local

community to govern itself, connected to others in horizontal fashion but free from an

overarching sovereign.

Leon explained it as follows: ‘The progressive movement in the Philippines... is very

much preoccupied with the idea of national liberation. And, for me, I think this is

fascism in the making, because they’re building a nation and a state which is nothing

but a replication, a mirroring of what the imperialists did to them. They’re actually

proto-fascists because they want the idea of nationalism injected into the people, the

archipelagic formation of the Philippines... They want to inject the idea of one whole

something, which basically, for me is — well, it’s kind of irrelevant because, I mean, we

have forty languages, we have different cultures, diverse from one another. And if you

impose nationalism in these very diverse communities, you would kill the diversity and,

worse, you would create some kind of regional conflict or ethnic conflict...

‘If we consider the idea of power from below, organizing without leaders, this is very

much practical in the Philippines because we’re very diverse. So the question of

national identity is not that important anymore. What’s important is how you would

enable solidarity with other cultural groups, with other ethnicities, with other people,

which I think goes way beyond national identity. You become multiple in a sense, you

know? You’re not just you — me as a Waraynon, for example — but you can also be

something else, somebody else, when you have this interaction with other people,

other cultures, and other backgrounds. And from here, evolution is very much present.

You evolve, you learn. The intellectual capacity of these cultures... [becomes]

healthier, because of this idea of diversity... The people are diverse, the cultures are

diverse, and I guess if people from below would organize their own communities, from

there, they could organize a kind of confederation’

‘So we can build solidarity without necessarily being “one” or homogenous?’ I asked.

‘Yes, exactly. It’s not necessary actually... If you talk with others who have a different

background than yours, it doesn’t mean they should be the same as you.’

Having repeatedly heard such sentiments expressed to me in the field, I found I lacked

a word that could adequately encapsulate them. That was before I hit upon

‘xenophilia,’ which seemed an ideal fit. In the excerpt above, Leon was advocating for

• intra-xenophilia* in particular; that is, for an embrace of the Philippines’ cultural and

ethnic diversity, which homophilic notions of Filipin@ness usually paper over.

What, though, of *inter-xenophilia*?; of forms of collectivity inclusive of Filipin@s and

non-Filipin@s alike? Not until Leon spent four years in Japan as a migrant worker did

he learn of this second sense of togetherness-in-difference. It should firstly be noted,

though, that his departure from the Philippines was not an entirely voluntary one.

Shaken by the assassination of one of his comrades just a hundred metres away from

where he was standing, he felt it would be best to lay low for a while overseas. His

trauma notwithstanding, he discovered in Japan a ‘solidarity of multitudes that

transcends nationality’ (Gonzaga 2009, p. 11):

It was really kind of a paradigm-shift actually... I felt the real experience of

being a migrant... moving from one place to another, most especially to a place

where the culture is totally different from yours, and how you are able to adapt

and learn from this, and create something new out of it... We were raised to

embrace nationalism, but I was able to broaden my mind and then accept

cultures other than mine, or beyond my own identity, and it made me

something else. I became different... I don’t think very exclusively now; I think

inclusively... Some anarchist groups in the Philippines, they would say “I’m

against nationalism” and all that, but actually, they still have this nationalist

attitude... You can get very exclusive, you know? And you actually dispel other

individuals and people who would have a possible interaction with you... I was

able to hook up with other cultures, like Sri Lankan and Brazilian communities

in Japan, so the idea of nationalism just suddenly dissolved, you know, talking

with other cultures, with other people... You forget the idea of being a Filipino;

you feel like you have this “multi-belongingness” [laughs].

What stands out here is that Leon speaks, not merely of interacting across difference,

but of interactions that themselves *give rise to difference*. In loving the Other, we

become something other than what we were. To love, therefore, is to become.

319Beyond the embrace of ethnic and cultural diversity, an expanded xenophilia would be

equally as receptive to different genders, sexualities, bodily abilities, and even political

viewpoints. It is pertinent to raise this in relation to anarchism, since, as Gordon (2008,

p. 5) writes, ‘diversity is by itself today a core anarchist value, making the movement’s

goals very open-ended. Diversity leaves little place for notions of revolutionary closure

or for detailed blueprints and designs for a free society.’ This can be contrasted with

the intolerance of divergence often present in traditional leftist institutions. As

Graeber (2004b, p. 329) observes, Marxist and revolutionary nationalist parties tend to

‘organise around some master theoretician, who offers a comprehensive analysis of

the world situation and, often, of human history as a whole. From this one official

truth, an official path of action is prescribed. Anarchist groups, on the other hand,

accept

the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain

shared commitments and understandings... [E]veryone agrees from the start on

certain broad principles of unity and purposes for being in the group; but

beyond that they also accept as a matter of course that no one is ever going to

convert another person completely to their point of view, and probably

shouldn’t try; and that therefore discussion should focus on concrete questions

of action, and coming up with a plan that everyone can live with and no one

feels is a fundamental violation of their principles... Just because theories are

incommensurable in certain respects does not mean they cannot [co-]exist or

even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that individuals have unique

and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot become friends,

or lovers, or work on common projects (Graeber 2004a, pp. 8–9).

The anarchists’ valorisation of difference extends to the rainbow alliances that they

frequently involve themselves in, as well as to the future society they wish to create.

Generally speaking, their goal is not to convert the masses of non-believers to

320anarchism as a prerequisite for a better society, but only to encourage communities to

self-organise in ways they see fit — hence the archipelagic confederation. Community

for contemporary anarchists is not a homophilic unity, but a xenophilic multiplicity.

Translocalism

Accompanying the rise of xenophilic values in Philippine anarchism is a translocalist

spatial imaginary, which the trope of the archipelago likewise embodies. Anarchist

translocalisms function in resistance, not solely to the insularity of the nation, but also

to the hierarchy of the state. As raised earlier, contemporary anarchism’s contribution

is to combine cosmopolitan critiques of nationalism with anarchist critiques of statism,

thereby addressing both halves of the nation-state form.

‘The hierarchical nature of the state,’ said Umali (2006, p. 6) ‘inevitably creates

a bureaucracy that concentrates governance and decision-making in a few

representatives, akin to the institutional arrangement of the red bureaucracy.’ The

CPP, to which Umali was referring, is infamously hierarchical, as became clear to me

when, atop an archival copy of one of Sison’s (writing as Liwanag 1992b, p. 1) papers, I

noticed the following edict: ‘This is an internal party document. No Party cadre

receiving a copy can reproduce it without authorization from a higher organ.’ I took it

as a small, though nonetheless indicative, instance of the kind of centralism being

increasingly shunned by the younger generation.

Against the CPP’s legacy, Umali (2006, p. 8) calls for a renewed radical politics that

would allow for ‘active, creative, imaginative and dynamic participation.’ In the

archipelagic confederation, collectives of ‘peasants, fishers, women, youth, indigenous

people, vendors, tricycle drivers, jeepney[7] drivers, homeless, gays, neighborhood

associations, religious groups and other formations’ (Umali 2006, p. 8) would self-

organise at the local level, converging in popular assemblies that would be

horizontally-networked to other such assemblies elsewhere. From Umali’s perspective,

when local communities are able to manage their own affairs, as well as coordinate

between themselves translocally, the need for an overarching sovereign becomes

superfluous.

Without wishing to deny its novelty, Umali’s re-imagining of social space along

archipelagic lines did not take place in a vacuum, since translocalist tendencies have

been present in anarchism more or less from the beginning. The pioneering anarchists,

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, for example,

stressed the idea of federalism, designed to facilitate relations between

increasingly larger and more widespread groups of people. The initial building

blocks of the federalist plan are the local, “face to face” groups, either

neighbours or persons with common occupational interests — in any case they

have a common mutual interest in working with each other for one or more

ends... In order to facilitate these ends they “federate” with other similar

groups to form a regional federation and in turn regional federations join with

others to form yet a broader federation. In each case the power invested in the

organised group decreases as one ascends the different levels (Barclay 1982, p.

16).[8]

[7] A form of public transport unique to the Philippines, originally made from decommissioned US army

jeeps.

[8] In the liberal-democratic tradition, by contrast, power *increases* as one ascends.

322That a similarly translocalist imaginary persists in contemporary anarchism is

discernible in the following passage from Graeber (2004a, p. 40):

[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state... [T]hey

would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks,

projects, on every conceivable scale, over-lapping and intersecting... Some

would be quite local, others global... [S]ince anarchists are not actually trying to

seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing

the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm... but

will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on

a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of

organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently-existing forms of power

seem stupid and beside the point.

Anarchists in the Philippines, as much as those in the US with whom Graeber is most

familiar, are challenging the notion that communities or societies should look like

nation-states — ‘one people, speaking a common language, living within a bounded

territory, acknowledging a common set of legal principles’ (Graeber 2004a, pp. 40–41) — and asserting the possibility of other, less confining forms of collectivity.

On top of translocalisms internal to nation-states are those that traverse national

borders. ‘Transnational connections are important for anarchism,’ writes Kuhn (2010,

p. 13); ‘After all, a key notion of anarchism is its opposition to the nation-state.

Solidarity across borders and the desire to eventually eradicate these borders are

inherent in the anarchist idea.’

Umali’s (2006) insights centred on maritime flows within the Philippine Archipelago,

but history is also replete with flows linking the archipelago to its outside. James

Warren (1981; 2002), for one, has consistently highlighted the historical interlinkages

cutting across the broader Southeast Asian region. The Sulu Sultanate, for instance — at

its peak in the late eighteenth century — brought parts of the Philippine and Indonesian

archipelagos into a single regional polity centred on the Sulu Sea (Warren 1981).

Philippine peoples also maintained trading ties with maritime communities in China

and Indochina. Leon, being well aware of this history, commented in an interview:

It’s really interesting because before Spanish colonization came to the

Philippines’ shores, there was no Philippines, but... there was already

civilization going on. There was already a kind of globalized network at that

time between different cultures... various regions in the Southeast Asian Rim.

Acknowledging that the Philippines has long been a ‘crossroads of cultural traffic’

(Hogan 2006, p. 129) is one way of repudiating the perceived naturalness of the

Philippine national community. Aside from the long-distance dealings of rulers and

merchants, however, the seas were also plied by rebels and subversives. It was this

aspect of maritime history that Filipino anarchist Jong Pairez (2012, pp. 1, 3) drew

inspiration from in his proposal for an online journal of Asian anarchism:

Polynesia and Madagascar, regardless of its opposite-end locations on the map,

culturally share its language and habits with people from Southeast Asia; it’s

the ocean that... provided the link... Metaphorically, I describe the journal as a

*balangay* or pre-historic wooden boat of maritime Southeast Asia that

transported subversive ideals... ceaselessly escaping the claws of governments,

state and authority... By communicating our local struggles, I believe a

contemporary grassroots brand of anarchism will emerge from the land of our

ancestors who brought down the Khmer empire, the Majapahit, and the

maritime empire of the Sri-vijaya... The journal at the moment is just an idea...

[H]opefully, with the help of our comrades in Indonesia who already have

experience in producing local anti-authoritarian publications like Apokalips and

*Jurnal Kontinum*, we could actualize the remaking of balangay and sail it again

into the vast oceans of Malacca, Celebes Sea, South China Sea, Pacific Ocean,

and to the corners of Indian Ocean and beyond.

The proposed journal has yet to eventuate, but the proposal itself nonetheless serves

as a valuable text in its own right. What interests me is not the historical factuality or

otherwise of Pairez’s claims, but the way he weaves the raw material of history into a

subversive, future-oriented narrative. Although encouraged by the pre-colonial past,

his aim is not to retrieve a lost golden age, so much as to re-remember history in ways

productive of alternative futures. As Ella Shohat (cited in Hall 1995, p. 251) maintains,

the recuperation of the past need not equate with essentialist romanticism in all cases;

sometimes, what is restored is multiplicity, not a ‘static fetishized phase to be literally

reproduced.’ In Pairez’s (2012) case — as well as in Umali’s (2006) — pre-colonial

cosmopolitanism is recalled only so as to enrich the radical possibilities of present-day

cosmopolitanism. This helps to rob prevailing power arrangements of their air of

inevitability, and renew confidence that things could again be otherwise.

A concrete example of anarchist translocalism is offered by the *ad hoc*, Asia-Pacific-

wide network that formed in opposition to the G8[9] summit held in Toyako, Japan in

July 2008. The idea for the network first emerged at *Transmission Asia-Pacific*,

described on its website as a ‘5-day camp for web developers and video activists about

developing online video distribution for social justice, the environment and media

democracy’ (Transmission 2008, p. 1). The camp took place in the highlands of West

Java in May 2008, with local Indonesian activists joined by delegations from the

Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, India, Australia, and

elsewhere.

[9] The G8 or ‘Group of Eight’ is a forum for cooperation between eight of the world’s largest economies:

Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the US, and the European Union. Since the

advent of the Alternative Globalisation Movement, it has been targeted by activists as one

manifestation of the supranational power structure underpinning and promoting global capitalism. Since

the Crash of 2008, the G8 has been trumped in importance by the G20, which, in addition to G8

members, includes major developing world players such as Brazil, China, and India.

Among the participants was Leon, who informed me that following a presentation by

Japanese activists organising against the Toyako summit, the campers collectively

resolved to expand their scope beyond online video distribution to also mount

coordinated anti-G8 demonstrations across the region. That the project took on a

translocal flavour was owing, not solely to the participants’ anarchist sensibilities, but

also to their modest financial means: ‘Because most of the Southeast Asian nations are

poor, we cannot go to Japan to protest,’ explained Leon, ‘so what happened is we

decided to just have our own local actions in our respective localities during the actual

G8 summit.’

No prescriptions were issued; the idea was rather that each local group would decide

for itself what its own particular action would look like. At the time of my fieldwork,

the Manila event was still at the brainstorming stage: ‘We’re thinking of throwing a

party as a way of protesting, rather than the grim-and-determined form of protest

with just all these angry people; we’re thinking of music, to just clog the whole traffic

system with people dancing,’ mused Leon. What ended up happening, though, was

quite the opposite: a *silent* vigil outside the Japanese embassy. Local actions elsewhere

ranged from festive to militant, their differences in no way compromising their

translocal solidarity.

With the kind of translocal networks and nonsovereign globalities being enacted by

anarchists in the Asia-Pacific and beyond, the world itself becomes something of an

archipelago — or better yet, an *anarchipelago*. All the better to challenge the new

nesology in our midst: the island-continent of supranational sovereignty.

Green-Black solidarity

Having riffed on the radical implications of archipelagic confederationalism, I will

change tack now to highlight its affinities with bioregionalism, the vision of community

outlined in the preceding chapter.

As a first indication of the commonalities, one Filipin@ anarchist group proclaimed: ‘As

anarchists, we are radical ecologists... Human beings are just part of the infinitely

diverse global ecosystem; we are not above it’ (Gasera Collective 2010, pp. 3). Here,

the anarchist critique of social hierarchy is extended to the hierarchy of human beings

over nature. At the time of my fieldwork, rumour had it that a clandestine band of eco-

anarchists were carrying out a campaign of strategic property destruction in northern

Luzon, sabotaging bulldozers and logging trucks in order to prevent the even greater

destruction that would have been wreaked on the region’s rainforests and social

fabric. As much as I was tempted to pursue this lead, I had already committed to

Metropolitan Manila as a fieldsite. My exploration of the Green-Black relationship was,

as a result, largely confined to coffee shop conversations, inquiring into

environmentalists’ perceptions of anarchists, and vice versa.

With respect to the former, Pedro described his organisation’s stance as follows:

The [GFM] in political terms... might be called “semi-anarchist” in the sense

that we share with the anarchists a basic distrust for centralized power... Much

of the Left (communism and socialism), well, they talk of “democratic

centralism,” so in that sense they’re very power-oriented, very center-oriented.

They talk of “centralized planning.” So we are very distrustful when you

concentrate power in a few hands... We believe more in the diffusion of power,

which probably makes us kind of anarchist... but we also, we can accept some

kind of a hierarchy, but not too much.

From the other side of the Green-Black relationship, Leon expressed similarly amicable

sentiments towards his environmentalist allies:

I believe the [GFM], in some way or another, I believe they’re sympathetic to

the anarchist movement... They don’t have a problem with us, with the

[MMAC]. They actually keep in contact with us, and they’re very kind... unlike

with our former leftist friends, when it comes to protest actions in the streets,

when we started to march, all of us wearing black, they started to quell us

down. They want to keep us separated from their group. Well, this is how we

experienced it with our former friends in the Left. They’re very hostile to us.

Listening back to the recording, I noticed that as Leon was speaking these words,

Procul Harum’s ‘A whiter shade of pale’ was playing over the cafe’s stereo. What came

through in the interview was a greener shade of black, which complemented the

blacker shade of green brought to light by Pedro. The trends I was picking up on could

not have been put more tersely than when the Gasera Collective (2010, p. 4) in Manila

declared ‘*Green and Black as the new Red*’ [italics mine].

Green and Black each demonstrate a favourable view of difference. No longer the

limitation that past activists often deemed it to be, contemporary anarchists and

bioregionalists tend to maintain that diversity (whether cultural, political, biological, or

otherwise) is essential to the vitality and health of a given community, and that to

deny it is to thwart life itself.

Furthermore, both anarchists and bioregionalists imagine a future in which large-scale

social aggregates presided over by a sovereign — not least of all, the imagined

community of the nation-state — are broken up into smaller, self-governed polities,

each at once more democratic and ecologically-sound by virtue of being predicated on

local specificities. It does not follow, however, that each locality must languish in

isolation, since what most activists in the anarchist and bioregionalist camps seek is to

replace the Westphalian ideal of a community of nation-states with a new kind of

world community: ‘a million villages,’ as Bill Mollison (1988, p. ix) likes to put it. A

horizontal network of villages, balancing local autonomy and translocal solidarity

without contradiction, would arguably make redundant national and supranational

sovereignty alike.

Bioregionalism’s emphasis on decentralisation — that is, on democratic decision-

making at the local level, particularly as concerns natural resources — is such that one

author even asserts that it is, in fact, a form of anarchism (Eckersley 1992). Conversely,

anarchism may itself be considered a form of environmentalism, as seems to be

suggested by Goldman (1963, p. 50):

Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not

healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society.

It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually

bear healthy fruit.

For Peter Kropotkin (cited in Kinna 2005, p. 8), anarchism similarly promised, against

the ‘artificial’ order of the state, ‘the blossoming of the most beautiful passions.’

Perhaps the recurring use of ecological metaphors by seminal anarchist thinkers is not

simply poetic fancy, but a reflection of a generative, earthbound ontology shared by

Black and Green alike.

Conclusion

To conclude, I will revisit a point first made in the prologue to this chapter; namely,

that the anarchists’ key contribution to today’s cosmopolitan radicalism is their

resolutely anti-statist perspective. I argued that this is vital for the precise reason that

any project aiming to free social relations from the nation-state cannot rely on a

critique of nationalism alone, but must also take aim at the nation-state’s in-built

statism. While some political actors aspire to nations not premised on the state,[10] and

others to states not premised on a single nation,[11] contemporary anarchists aspire to

communities resembling neither nations *nor* states.

[10] Early German anarchist, Gustav Landauer, for instance, wanted each ethnos to govern itself

horizontally, sans an overarching sovereign. As Landauer (cited in Gordon 2008, p. 27) himself phrased

it, ‘I do not proceed in the slightest against the fine fact of the nation... but against the mixing up of the

nation and the state.’ Isabelo de los Reyes of the Philippines was another nineteenth-century anarchist

to espouse a peculiarly anti-statist nationalism. By and large, nationalist sympathies have since been

dropped from anarchism, with contemporary anarchists like Richard Day (2005, p. 178) now given to

celebrating emergent forms of community that, by way of what he calls ‘affinity-based relationships,’

embrace the different and the non-self-similar.

[11] President Evo Morales, for one, has re-christened his country the *Plurinational* State of Bolivia (see

Gustafson 2009).

None of this can be understood without reference to the recent past. The twentieth

century saw one revolutionary movement after another (whether communist,

nationalist, or a mix of both) seize the reins of the state, only for each ostensible

victory to be revealed in the end as a failure — at least in certain respects, since the

dictators who assumed power would disagree. Despite Fanon’s forewarnings — ‘[W]e

must find something different... let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states,

institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her’ (Fanon 1961, pp 251,

254) — the postcolonial regimes that came to power throughout Africa and Asia in the

Sixties and Seventies became barely distinguishable in their tyranny from the departed

colonial masters. A change of heads had occurred, but the institutional body of the

state stayed intact.

Gandhi (1998, pp. 120–121) claims that Fanon’s writings ‘are almost prophetic in their

predictions’ about what would happen should anticolonialists continue along the trail

first blazed by imperialists, but seemingly forgets that Fanon would have had, as a

reference point, the nineteenth-century independence movements in Latin America. In

regressing into statism-as-usual once securing self-rule, a precedent was set. Before

Fanon, too, was the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, who, in 1872, led a breakaway

faction from Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association over the issue of the

state. While Marx believed the state could serve liberatory ends, Bakunin (cited in

Barclay 1982) maintained that Marx’s so-called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would

be ‘nothing else but despotic rule over the toiling masses by a new, numerically-small

aristocracy.’ This was the original Red-Black split, of which today’s trends are

recapitulations. If there is now a twenty-first century sequel, it is because Bakunin and

Fanon were proved right about state-centric revolutionary strategies, thereby

prompting new explorations into what it might mean to ‘change the world without

taking power’ (Holloway 2005). I have offered a glimpse into one such exploration in

the Philippines — a unique case, though very much in line with anarchistic resurgences

everywhere.

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