ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND THE PHILIPPINE SOCIAL FORMATION

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12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the“national-popular” and socialistrevolution in the Philippines

Epifanio San Juan Jr

Though in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bour-geoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, ofcourse, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. . . . The workingmenhave no country. We cannot take from them what they have no [sic] got. Sincethe proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be theleading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is so far itselfnational, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Gramsci has been pronounced “dead” so many times that one suspects theannouncement to be unwittingly premature and question-begging (Day 2005).Of all the Western Marxists, Gramsci is exceptional in being the subject of animmensely burgeoning archive of scholarly studies and the object of furiousworldwide political debates (Rosengarten 1994). Except for the somewhatopportunist inflection of “subaltern” by Derrideans/Foucaultians and the trendyfashion of reinterpreting “hegemony” as pluralist consensus, Gramsci’s thoughtseems useless for postmodernists, including establishment postcolonialists.Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School successfully popularized Gramsci as aninnovative cultural theorist and founded the academic discipline of mainstreamCultural Studies. It was Gramsci’s resurrection in advanced capitalist forma-tions, the birth of what David Harris (1992) calls “gramscianism.” This followedthe Eurocommunist view of Gramsci’s “revolution against Capital” – to quotehis famous article of 1917 – in which the Italian road to socialism (classlesssociety, socialization of crucial productive means) would be won not throughrevolutionary violence but through cultural reform – through education andmoral/ethical persuasion. Communist parties will thus gain hegemony, that is,domination by consent, peacefully or legally.

Communism will win without replacing the prevailing “common sense.” Pre-sented as ideals to be aspired for, and naturalized as “common sense,” the beliefsystem of bourgeois society does not require armies or police; only a finelytuned art, schools and mass media, ideological apparatuses that would do the job(Finnochiaro 1995). From this prophylactic stance of postcolonial scholastics,

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Gramsci is seen as a precocious neoliberal avant la lettre, committed to “rationalpersuasion,” political realism, methodological fallibilism, liberal democracy,and pluralism. Something is surely wrong with this picture.

Clearly, history – or, better yet, neoliberal metaphysics exacted a vengeanceon Gramsci’s historicist “good sense.” While reborn as a theoretician of thesuperstructures, civil society, rule by consent, and non-economistic “openMarxism,” Gramsci became irrelevant to socialist revolutions as they wereoccurring in the “Third World.” He had nothing to say to peoples strugglingagainst finance–capitalist imperialism, old-style colonialism that ruled by bruteforce, or neocolonial rule masquerading as latter-day “civilizing mission,”humanitarian intervention. For postcolonial studies, in particular, the obsessionwith Eurocentrism (the fallacious subsumption of capitalism into an abstractWestern modernity) in the case of Edward Said, as Neil Lazarus (2002; see alsoSan Juan Jr 2007a) has shown, led soon to the speechless subalterns of GayatriSpivak and the sly mimics of Homi Bhabha. Meanwhile, the logocentricdiscourse of poststructuralism wrought its dire effects on the critique of thenation/nationalism launched by Bhabha and the Australian “high priests” of thediscipline after the collapse of “actually existing socialism.” With nations andnation-states abolished or rendered defunct by the “New World Order” and laterby triumphalist globalization, we are on the way to the heady disjunctures ofArjun Appadurai and the nomadic multitudes of Hardt and Negri’s Empire.Until September 11, 2001 exploded over this academic scenario and overtookour missionary enlighteners who had attended Gramsci’s redundant burials.

We owe it to Benita Parry’s appraisal of the historical-political contextssurrounding the disciplinary formation of postcolonial studies that we can nowbegin to appreciate Gramsci’s relevance to “Third World” social transformations.Parry’s argument on the centrality of Marxist principles (internationalism, perman-ent revolution) in liberation theory actualized in anticolonial revolutions, is salutary.The erasure of socialism and an anticapitalist modernity in postcolonial discoursecoincides with the refusal of a national-democratic stage in anticolonial revolutionsled by a historic bloc of anticapitalist forces. What kind of nation-state do postcolo-nialists have in mind? Certainly not the Italian nation of 1861 that witnessed thecolonization/annexation of the South through the subjugation of the insurgentpeasant masses, and produced the “Southern Question” that Gramsci considereddecisive in carrying out a socialist revolution in the twentieth century (Verdicchio1997). Postcolonialists erase the ugly fact of neocolonized nation-states (thePhilippines, Haiti, Colombia, etc.) resistant to their fantasy of a world-system ofhybrid social formations equal in power and wealth, all inhabited by transnationalconsumer-citizens.

Postcolonial obfuscations

The asymmetry of uneven and combined development distinguishes the structure ofnation-states born in the shadow of finance–capitalist imperialism. Archaic, feudal,and modern sectors coexist in these societies. The Althusserian idiom of Bhabha

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is revealing when he problematizes the “ambivalent temporalities of the nationspace.” For Bhabha, nationalism is fascism tout court. Ultimately, the culprit is“that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one –” and so,Marxist theories of culture and community defined as holistic, expressive socialtotalities should be repudiated. Unity, solidarity, the multitude envisaged byGramsci as “national-popular” collective will (Jessop 1982) are all anathema,contaminated by bourgeois universalism and other archaic irrationalities.

For her part, Spivak rejects anticolonial revolutions as hopelessly controlledand manipulated by a native bourgeoisie. The colonized subaltern is made notonly speechless but immune to experience. Parry’s comment applies a Gramscianoptic to this fantasized self-erasure:

It dismisses the experiential transformation of the “subalterns” through theirparticipation, and disregards situations where an organic relationship wasforged between masses and leaders sharing the same class interests andrevolutionary goals – there is after all no essential and invariable correlationbetween objective class position and ideological belief or political stance.

(2002: 144)

In short, history as a dialectic of subject–object is denied by postcolonialists forwhom pacified subalterns are speechless or tricky ventriloquists (for Gramsci’sconcept of subaltern, see Green 2002).

With the formalization of canonical postcolonial studies as an academicdiscipline, a reconciliatory attitude seems to have emerged. Stuart Hall’s inflectionof this fetishism of ambivalence or difference is only symptomatic: anti-imperialistopposition, for Hall, must be conceived in terms of “transculturation” or culturaltranslation “destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever” (1996:247). This postcolonialist bias against binarism, telos and hierarchy, as we haveseen, returns us to the question of agency and the role of the subaltern in arevolutionary disruption of the colonial predicament. But, as Parry notes, thisimpulse to find a middle ground between domination and oppression, to describecolonialism as “generically ambivalent,” the site of dialogue and cultural assimila-tion, is both historically mendacious and “morally vacant” (2002: 144). This appliesto the tendentious genealogy of nation/nationalism offered by Ashcroft et al. (1998;see my critique in San Juan 2001). In effect, the nation (and its attendant set ofbeliefs called “nationalism”) is a foul ideological invention, a dangerous myth ofexclusivism, homogeneity, and naturalness. It refuses internal heterogeneities anddifferences. It informs the violence of the nation-state (such as the Stalinist SovietUnion, as well as European imperialism as “an extension of the ideology of a‘national’ formation”) against those who are different, thus making the cause ofnational liberation for oppressed colonies suspect if not hopelessly tainted.

Postcolonialists cannot face the truth of sustained colonial legacies and theirinsidious resonance in everyday lives. As to the notion of the “subaltern,”Ashcroft et al. (1998) cannot but invoke Gramsci’s terminology but not the polit-ical project that motivates it. They elide the whole issue of hegemony (consent

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armored by coercion) and replace Gramsci’s framework with the entirely dis-parate paradigm of the Indian historians’ Subaltern Studies Group (with whichSpivak is affiliated). This group’s primary preoccupation is the criticism of elitesand elite culture in India whose anti-British nationalism worsened the oppressionof the landless peasantry. Consequently, they criticize Marxist class analysiswhich to them ignores the “politics of the people,” and by implication Gramsci’snotion of the popular as a transcendence of economic–corporatist position, and anational-popular culture as a crystallization of the diverse interests/sectors consti-tuting the nation (SCW: 203–212). Their concern with power and authority, withgovernability (a variant of Foucault’s governmentality), displaces the question ofsovereignty vis-à-vis the occupying colonial power. While Gramsci envisionedthe “national-popular” as a process of lay intellectuals expanding and elaboratinga secular “humanism” attuned to the grassroots, for the Subaltern Studies Group,an implacable fissure exists between the nation represented by the native elite andthe people, specifically the peasantry. Gramsci is accused of essentialism, thoughit is unclear how the Indian historians can be credible when they themselves pos-tulate a rigid distinction between the elite and the subaltern, subject-positionswhich are constituted by converging and diverging lines of differences. Again,difference becomes fetishized or reified when Spivak claims to establish afixed incommensurability between elite and subaltern, even canceling the at leastrelational category of dominant/subordinate groups in structural-functionalistsociology. Since the categories of nation and class are rejected, subalternitybecomes mystified or trivialized as all or any kind of subordination removed fromany revolutionary socialist telos.

The habitual imposition of a monolithic grid of difference in postcolonialmethodology sets it apart from a historical-materialist analysis such as thatsubtending Gramsci’s “Notes on Italian History” (1934–1935) in the PrisonNotebooks. It accords with a nihilistic and even cynical skepticism toward anyemancipatory project of overthrowing capitalist social relations of production.For those desiring to change the impoverished and exploited condition of what isnow called the global “South,” it is better to forego Establishment postcolonialstudies and go straight to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (see the lucid expositionof Bellamy and Schechter in Gramsci and the Italian State). The twin issues ofthe peasantry and national sovereignty constitute the blind spot that defines thelimit of postcolonial critique.

In quest of Gramsci

“A new way of being Gramscian” – to quote Pasolini’s (1982) slogan – is toapply Gramsci’s dialectical–materialist (not homological) approach to the taskof popular democratic mobilization against finance capital in specific nationalsettings. I am not interested in deriving axiomatic truths or formulas fromGramsci’s texts. Nor am I interested in ascertaining which text represents the“real” Gramsci among the multiple Gramscis now available (Holub 1992),including the “rightist” Gramsci quoted by neoconservatives. My task here is

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circumscribed: to see how we can deploy or adapt certain modes of analysisinitiated first in Gramsci’s historical studies. I would locate Gramsci’s useful-ness today in the application of precisely the speculative tools he devised earlierin his vocation as a radical activist. One key concept is the “national-popular”and its resonance with the conceptual archive of alliances, anti-corporativism,blocs, ensembles, etc. Following the nuanced approach of Nicola Short (2007)and Stephen Gill (2003c) to the historical-materially structured nature of inter-national production in the context of antagonistic core-periphery relations, Iwould argue that Gramsci’s dialectical analysis of class-realignments, especiallythe stratified divisions of epochal and conjunctural sequences, would prove mostuseful in elucidating what is involved in the theory of combined and unevendevelopment first formulated by Lenin and Trotsky and explored by activistsin the Marxist tradition. Gramsci is, as Boothman (1995: liii) aptly puts it,“the theorist of the historical bloc” engaged in a concrete analysis of relations/articulations of social forces in a given country at specific conjunctures orperiods for the purpose of calibrating at which exact point human agency canproduce the most decisive transformative effects.

The “Southern Question” epitomized for Gramsci the problem of uneven,disarticulated, non-synchronous development carried out by the bourgeois liberalstate. Before Gramsci became a socialist, around 1913, he was a Sardiniannationalist, alienated as he was by the industrial North’s subjugation of thepredominantly rural South. Even when Gramsci became an active socialist intenton constructing a proletarian-led state within the fabric of civil society, he neverstopped insisting on the need to concentrate on the specificity of the Italian situ-ation, its “particular, national characteristics,” compelling the party to assume “aspecific function, a particular responsibility in Italian life” (LP: 4). The premisehere is the forced unification of Italy by the northern bourgeoisie’s subjugation ofthe southern peasantry and the unresolved issue of landed property. What thisimplies is an active program to counter the transformist politics of the liberal statewhich maintained the fragmented social reality of Italy characterized by diver-gent regional traditions, polarized classes and economic disparities. The materialinequalities were reflected, and in turn sustained by, the ideological/culturalincompatibilities between a popular culture of the quasi-feudal, rural areas andthe elite culture of the caste of cosmopolitan intellectuals. To mobilize themasses, a whole program of education and organization of the entire populacewas needed, a pedagogical mobilization led by a political party of the proletariatand its organic intellectuals. New values and ideals were needed to generate acritical consciousness – “unitary” and “coherent” thinking, as he put it – ofthe social situation, together with the ethico-moral imperative for organizedcollective action.

Gramsci had in mind a national-democratic liberation project based on theprotagonism or participatory mobilization of the people that would constitute theemergent nation. What was needed is a mass movement to emancipate the prole-tariat, together with the peasantry, and the establishment of a communist society,the precondition for the full liberation of the individual. This fundamental



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Marxist belief Gramsci enunciated in his articles of 1914 and 1916, “An Activeand Functional Neutrality,” and “Socialism and Culture.” It was specifically inthe 1917 article “The Revolution against Capital” that Gramsci expressed for thefirst time his distinctive Marxist conviction that without organized political willand social consciousness of the people, even the most favorable objective con-ditions of crisis will not lead to revolutionary change. Economic statistics do notmechanically determine politics; it was necessary for people “to understand . . .and to assess them, and to control them with their will, until this collective willbecomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself ”(LP: 40). In colonial and peripheral societies, historically sedimented divisions ofclass, race, religion, nationality, and so on present more formidable obstacles tomass mobilization. The appeal of national self-determination in such colonialformations as India in the 1920s and 1930s led Gramsci to conceptualize the“national-popular” movement as a powerful agent of revolutionary change(Bocock 1986). The centrality of organic intellectuals and the pedagogical strat-egy of mobilizing the masses is immediately relevant to peripheral societies (suchas the Philippines) where bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions support andare reproduced by patronage, clientelist politics, reinforced by police–militarycoercion and para-military gangsterism and warlordism, all beholden to thedictates of US finance capital.

We owe it to Forgacs’ review of its historical context that Gramsci’s conceptof the “national-popular” has been foregrounded into a site of controversy andrevaluation. While textually faithful in his reconstruction of its genealogy,Forgacs’ renovation is qualified by the British/European political and ideologicalmilieu of the 1980s – the rise of neoconservatism in the UK, North America andthe industrialized nation-states. Like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (againstthe background of the Althusser/Poulantzas/Foucault orbit of dissonance),Forgacs’ chief concern lies in using Gramsci’s idea to transcend economisticMarxism and assert that there is no necessary correlation or link between classand ideology. Forgacs is correct in appraising Gramsci’s concept as integral,fusing the political and cultural, but at the expense of the economic – a termmisconstrued as a separate, independent sphere usually isolated to the “base” inthe misleading couplet “base–superstructure.”

Removing “national- popular” from the underlying historically specific relationsof production in any given society, Forgacs concludes that the notion “recognizesthe specificity of national conditions and traditions” in which multi-sectoral andcross-cultural struggles are strategically linked together to promote commoninterests (1993: 219; compare Hall 1981).

In effect, Forgacs has re-inscribed Gramsci’s idea in the process of “passiverevolution,” or transformism, at the same time as he marginalizes the role of thestate. By detaching the “national-popular” from its Gramscian framework ofsocialist transformation, its link with the abolition of private property and classinequality, in short, an expansive proletarian hegemony, Forgacs confuseshimself and others in wondering how a class alliance can contain a collectivewill, and how such an alliance can become reorganized by bourgeois hegemony.

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This is due to the mistake of using the term “alliance” for a populist, sponta-neous trend that has no will, no purposive direction. Once a collective will isdefined as non-class (in the functionalist sense) since it has transcended narrowcorporatist class interests, then it is impossible to fashion a collective willlacking goals that are defined as simultaneously national and popular. Nationand people (both the discourses and institutional practices associated with theseterms) are class-stratified and acquire coherence by articulation into a hegemo-nized nation-people. Hegemony is not only ethico-political but also economic,given “its basis in the decisive function exercised by the leading group in thedecisive core of economic activity” (Boothman 1995: li). Why this is so fromGramsci’s perspective, can be explained by his own singular understanding of“collective will.”

Beyond idealist hermeneutics

Two earlier texts may illuminate the political condition of possibility for thetheory of the “national-popular” will. The first is the 1916 article “Socialism andCulture.” Here Gramsci defines culture as a creation of humans as products ofhistory, not natural evolution. Culture is:

The organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’spersonality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we cancome to understand our value and place within history, our proper functionin life, our rights and duties.

(Gramsci [1916])

This inventory and ordering of the layers/aspects of one’s self becomes thestaging-ground of class consciousness. Change occurs gradually, through “intelli-gent reflection” of a few, then of a whole class. Revolutionary change comes aboutthrough critical reflection and enlargement of one’s awareness via solidarity orcollective mobilization of the people constituted as nationwide directing agency(Jones 2006).

The formation of a socialist collective will thus results from “a critique ofcapitalist civilization.” Gramsci emphasizes the growth of a collective willthrough critique, through the discovery of the self (ultimately social) as aninventory of traces inscribed by history. Gramsci focuses on the objective orgoal pursued through discipline and order:

Discovery of the self as it measures itself against others, as it differentiatesitself from others and, having once created an objective for itself, comes tojudge facts and events not only for what they signify in themselves, butalso according to whether or not they bring that objective nearer. To knowoneself means to be master of oneself, . . . to emerge from chaos andbecome an agent of order. . . . And one cannot achieve this withoutknowing others, . . . the succession of efforts they have made to be what



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they are, to create the civilization they have created, and which we areseeking to replace with our own.

(Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 348–349)

The labor of acquiring self-knowledge is key to grasping the nation/people as asite of constituting oneself as an agent of change. The dialectical interface ofnation/people found in self-understanding – a form of cognitive appropriation ofthe world – leads to the integral state, thus abolishing the liberal distinctionbetween civil society and state: “State = political society + civil society, in otherwords hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (SPN: 263; Williams1980). Learning has an ultimate emancipatory drive (LP: 11–12). It epitomizesthe “catharsis” bridging economics and politics (ideology). Space limitationsprevent my elaborating on this “catharsis,” the cognitive praxis enacted bythe national-popular subject; as a corrective to the sanitized interpretation ofGramsci (e.g. Germino 1990; see Gedo 1993; Haug 2000; Thomas 2007).

The second text for elucidation is the 1917 article, “The Revolution againstCapital.” Here Gramsci spells out the versatile diagnostic power of historicalmaterialism, “the real, undying Marxist thought” purged of positivist, naturalistincrustations. This Marxism upholds, as the most important factor in history “notcrude, economic facts but rather men themselves, and the societies they create, asthey learn to live with one another and understand one another; as, out of thesecontacts (civilization), they forge a social, collective will.” This collective willunderstands and controls facts, becoming “the driving force of the economy, theforce which shapes reality itself, so that objective reality becomes a living,breathing force, like a current of molten lava, which can be channeled whereverand however the will directs” (LP: 40). Knowledge, will, and practice/action allcoalesce in the collective transformation of social life in a determinate historicalmilieu.

Beyond being a united front tactic, the project of a national-popular ensembleis the project of a mass-based proletarian party constructing hegemony – moral-intellectual leadership – as it confronts “the problems of national life.”Gramsci’s collective will arising from historically determined “popular forces”is premised on “the great mass of peasant farmers” bursting “into political life”(SPN: 132). This event will materialize through a Jacobinist strategy: when theworking class overcomes its “narrow economic–corporative” outlook andincorporates the interests of the peasantry and urban artisans into its ownprogram and praxis. In the “Notes on the Southern Problem,” Gramsci predi-cates the capacity of the proletariat to govern as a class on its success in shed-ding “every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice or incrustation”(1995: 27). While this may be described as an educative, universalizing andexpansive alliance, the strategy does not abandon class – does not break theconnection between ideology and class, as Forgacs et al. (1985) insist. Rather,the class ideology used to dominate the peasantry and other intermediate strata isthoroughly analyzed (as witness Gramsci’s meticulous anatomy of traditional,petty-bourgeois intellectuals, their ethos and worldviews). Gramsci thus asserts

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that aside from getting rid of inherited prejudices and sectarian egoism, theyhave to take one more step forward: they have to think like workers who aremembers of a class that aims to lead peasants and middle classes into a collect-ive project of releasing human potential for the benefit of all; “members of aclass which can win and build socialism only if it is helped and followed by thelarge majority of these social strata” (LP: 28) – the majority – whose subsump-tion by bourgeois leadership serves as the chief obstacle to socialist reconstruc-tion. This process of a generating directed consensus through organicintellectuals who will synthesize the cultural traditions of the whole people is aprocess not only of education but of organization for class war. Proletarianagency is thus universalizing and sublating at the same time. This entails theimperative of further elucidating the purpose of a national-popular alliance andthe goal of constructing a national-popular will.

Again, Gramsci directs our attention to the shifting balance (equilibrium/disequilibrium) of political forces. Given the situation of the South as “a socialdisintegration,” and the peasants’ inability “to give a centralized expression totheir aspirations and needs,” Gramsci notes, the landlords and their intellectu-als (Croce, for example) dominate the political and ideological field. Likewise,the proletariat as a class “lacks in organizing elements,” just as it lacks its ownstratum of intellectuals with a left tendency “oriented toward the revolutionaryproletariat.” With the mediation of intellectuals as organizers, the proletarianparty will facilitate the alliance between peasant masses and the workersprepared to “destroy the Southern agrarian bloc.” The party needs to organizethe masses of poor peasants “into autonomous and independent formations”free from the stranglehold of the “intellectual bloc that is the flexible but veryresistant armature of the agrarian bloc” (1995: 47). Thus the people, not thebourgeoisie nor the Church and its cosmopolitan intelligentsia, will proceed toconstitute the nation by releasing the productive forces needed for a morehumane civilizational project, a new social order.

While the educational–pedagogical task seems a prerequisite, Gramsci doesnot envision an ideological-moral reform as an end in itself, a continuous “warof position” regardless of changed circumstances. Nor does it have anything todo with the numerical weaknesses of the proletariat nor of the fascist monopolyof military reserves and logistics. Rather, the problem Gramsci faced then washistorically dictated by the deleterious moral-intellectual leadership of the fascistbloc enabled by the continuing political and economic subordination of thepeasantry and the failure of the workers and their party in mobilizing them. ForGramsci, one of the ways (specific to Italy but not to all social formations) inbuilding a counter-hegemonic bloc is the cultivation of organic intellectuals thatcan help shape a genuinely democratic national unity (the Italian nation as alegal, formal entity had no real cultural unity rooted in the people’s lives) on thebasis of a unified struggle with the popular forces (peasantry, middle elements).

Before applying Gramsci’s theory of the national-popular strategy to the Philip-pines as a model neocolonial formation, I want to summarize its fundamentalelements:



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1 A national life and field of action is needed for the proletariat to settle firstwith its bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels stipulated in the Manifesto, and asynthesizing historical program based on commonalty of experiences willbe used to unify, activate and lead the majority of the population.

2 For socialist revolutionaries to defeat the capitalist bloc and its feudal or semi-feudal supports, the party of the proletariat needs to move beyond sectarian-ism, that is, beyond corporatist/syndicalist tendencies and win the consent ofthe peasantry and middle elements by including their interests/demands in acommon program/platform of action through concessions/compromiseswithout abandoning their humanist, secular principles and the goal of aclassless society.

3 To build such an alliance or historic bloc of subaltern masses under theleadership of the party of the working class, organic intellectuals are neededfor organizing the nation-people, and to supervise the inculcation of discip-line in thinking and action; these tasks aim to generate a collective willinformed by a knowledge of the totality of social relations that is itscondition of effectivity.

4 The field of political mobilization involves civil society and the state institu-tions, without any predetermined approach (as always, an orchestration offrontal assault in a war of maneuver needs to be synchronized with political-legal actions in a war of position); the tactics of mass actions will depend onthe concrete situation and the alignment and balance of political forces inany specific conjuncture. Consent is always armatured with the legitimacyof coercion.

5 The national-popular has a socialist orientation based on internationalistsolidarity, geared to utilizing the scientific and progressive achievements ofall of humanity to improve the material and spiritual well-being of allcommunities and national formations.

Historical triangulation

I will now summarize briefly the political history of the Philippines and sketch themost crucial problems of neocolonial development in the epoch of globalizedcapitalism and the US-led “war on terror” gripping the whole planet. This exerciseis intended simply to illustrate the usefulness of Gramsci’s thesis on the imperativeof a “national-popular” will applied to a colonial/neocolonial formation. While Italyand the Philippines belong to sharply disparate temporal and spatial regions andscales, with incommensurable singularities, one can discern rough similarities. Theprincipal difference, of course, is that the Philippines was colonized by theocraticfeudal Spain for 300 years and by the industrialized capitalist United States fornearly a century. US colonial rule preserved the feudal infrastructure, heightenedethnic divisions (principally between Christian and Muslim), and deepened classinequality by supporting a comprador-merchant class and an army of bureaucraticintelligentsia. After forcibly subjugating the revolutionary forces of the first Philip-pine Republic, it used a transformist “passive revolution” to win the subaltern

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intelligentsia and thus incorporate the peasantry into a colonial order and eventuallya neocolonial setup. It suppressed the birth of a Filipino national-popular will.

The parameters of revolutionary socialist change in the Philippines areclearly drawn by the legacy of its colonial history, first by Spain and then by theUnited States. This resulted in the continuing fragmentation of the country interms of class, language, and religion with deadly consequences (instanced bythe undefeatable Moro separatist struggle). Spain used the Philippines primarilyas a trading post for the galleon trade with China, using natural and humanresources it found, until primitive mercantilism took over in the nineteenthcentury. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philip-pines as a result of tribal conflicts which the Spanish civil authority resolvedmainly by force and partly by concessions to the local chieftains. Unable tooccupy the Muslim territories with its limited resources and personnel, theSpanish colonial administration used this conflict to heighten insecurity andlegitimize their authority. They relied mainly on the friars of the religious ordersto extract tribute from the Christianized inhabitants who were reduced toserfhood or abject slavery.

In time the encomienda system generated a stratum of Spanish landlords who,together with the Catholic Church, maintained a tributary system in which only afew selected natives functioned as petty administrators and bureaucrats. SoSpanish hegemony was tenuous, obtained mainly through the disciplinary regimeof religious practices and institutions. When the children of Chinese and Filipinocreoles or mestizos succeeded in acquiring formal education in schools adminis-tered by the religious orders, and also in Europe, they absorbed liberal ideas thatformed the basis for the nationalist movement which began in the 1870s andripened in the 1898 revolution. But this consciousness of Filipino nationality wasconfined mainly to the artisans and professions led by the ilustrado gentry class.It was not shared by the peasantry who were mobilized in terms of kinship ortraditional loyalty to their village elders; or in terms of affiliation with millenary,chiliastic sects. In time, because of the organizing efforts of the Propagandists(reformist intellectuals, ilustrados, from the classes of rich farmers, artisans andpetty traders) with their ideals of enlightenment rationalism and autonomy, andthe recruitment of the petty landlords–merchants, a hegemonic social bloc ofanticolonialists emerged: the Malolos Republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo.This signaled the emergence of a Filipino national-popular intelligence andcommunal-oriented sensibility.

A sense of Filipino nationhood founded by the cosmopolitanized petty bour-geoisie with allies in the merchant and small landlord class was aborted when theUnited States suppressed the young Republic in the 1899–1903 Filipino–AmericanWar. The formal republican institutions built on the ruins of Spanish theocracycollapsed when the ilustrado leadership surrendered to the US colonial authority.While the Spaniards used violence armored by Christian evangelization, the UnitedStates occupied the islands with brutal force armored by diplomatic propaganda,the promise of “Benevolent Assimilation” and eventual independence. Usingscorched earth tactics, torture and mass imprisonment, the US killed 1.4 million



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Filipinos, 10 percent of the population. Unable to defeat the Moros (FilipinoMuslims) despite a series of massacres, the US deployed a combination of diplo-matic chicanery, subterfuge and “bribery” to pacify them. Up to the present, USSpecial Forces are still battling the Moros (Muslims living in the Philippines) in theform of the “Abu Sayyaf” terrorist bandit group, a proxy for the massive and moreformidable Moro insurgency forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)and disaffected sections of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (San Juan2007a) who refused to cooperate with the current US-subservient administration.

One can summarize the 50 years of direct US colonial rule as an illustration ofhegemony won initially through military power and stabilized through the twinmethods of bureaucratic coercion and cooptation. When the Philippines wasgranted formal-nominal independence in 1946, the US had set in place anAmericanized privileged minority, an oligarchy of landlords, bureaucrat-capitalists,and compradors that would fulfill US economic needs and global foreign policy.Consensus on elite democracy and the formal trappings of representative govern-ment was obtained through decades of violence, cooptation, moral persuasion, anda whole range of pedagogical–disciplinary methods, with the active collaboration ofthe religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant). Hence the Philippinestoday is a nation of impoverished peasants and workers, with less than 1 percent of90 million people comprising the middle class and landlord-comprador elite(Lichauco 2005). It is basically agricultural and dependent on foreign investments(lately, on remittance of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW)), devoid of the fullexercise of its sovereignty (the US has veto power over its military and foreignpolicy). Its political system is characterized by the presence of formalistic liberal-democratic institutions administered by a tiny group of oligarchic families,reinforced by the Church, and a vast military–police apparatus chiefly dependent onUS aid (economic, military, political) rationalized by the US-led “war on terror”(on US support of “low-intensity conflict” see Agee 2003). There is as yet nonational-popular will exercising genuine independence, only a subalternized elitewhose ascendancy and survival depend on direct or mediated (via WorldBank–IMF–WTO) US military and political patronage.

The Southern Question in the Philippines

Gramsci of course did not directly engage with the process of Westerncolonization of a “Third World” country. However, even though there areconsiderable differences, one can consider the Philippines as analogous to theItalian “southern region” vis-à-vis the US industrial metropolis. The currentmetaphorical use of “North” (industrialized nations; center) and “South”(underdeveloped regions; periphery) in international relations is clearlyindebted to Gramsci’s geographical–economic polarity. To be sure, Gramsci’scategorization of the North–South binary is less economic than sociopoliticaland cultural, in contrast to the orthodox Marxist definition of a nation histori-cally predicated on the existence of a market and a commodity exchangesystem.

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Contrary to orthodox Marxism (Rosenthal and Yudin 1967: 304), whichconsidered the capitalist national market as the basis for nationhood, the sense ofa Filipino nation was born in armed struggle against Spanish theocratic rule andlater against US military aggression. No full-blown commodity market existed ina feudal-theocratic mercantilist order. However, the emergent national identitywas cancelled outright when Filipinos were excluded in the 1898 Treaty of Paris(Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to cede the islands to the US for 20 milliondollars). Laws were immediately promulgated to criminalize anticolonial dissent:the 1901 Sedition Law and 1902 Brigandage Act punished anyone advocatingseparation from the US. The 1903 Reconcentration Act relocated entire ruralcommunities into towns to deny refuge to rebels; the Flag Law, which prohibiteddisplays of the revolutionary flag of the Filipino Republic, was enacted in 1907,the same year when the last revolutionary Filipino general, Macario Sakay, washanged in public. Nationalist discourse and symbols were proscribed, thusdestroying the material practices sustaining the collective spirit of resistance andwill to independence. This period of pacification (1898–1935) involved a variableif shrewd application of force and consent, violence and persuasion, guided over-all by a transformist, “passive revolution” strategy administered by the localoligarchy and its bureaucrats tutored by American overseers.

US colonialism thus applied “transformism” by supplementing coercive tacticswith a long-range strategy of ethnocentric, opportunistic extraction of consent fromthe new subjects (Pomeroy 1970). After Filipino guerilla resistance waned in thefirst decade of the twentieth century, the US established the Philippine Assembly asan auxiliary law-making body under the US-dominated Philippine Commissionappointed by the US President to manage the colony. It was one way of implement-ing the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the natives proclaimed by PresidentWilliam McKinley in the midst of the violent pacification of the islands under theaegis of the white-supremacist slogan of “Manifest Destiny.” This Assembly servedto co-opt the native elite (elected by at most 3 percent of the population) and defusethe popular agitation for “immediate independence,” a submerged, repressedtendency in the majority of colonial subjects.

A neocolony was born from the destruction of the insurgent nation and thesystematic deepening of divisions among the people (Schirmer 1987). Theprincipal instruments for winning consent were the school system of universalpublic education and the enforcement of English as the official medium ofinstruction, government communication, and mass media. Among progressiveintellectuals, Renato Constantino (1978; see also Martin 2001) was the first tostress the crucial role of the pedagogical apparatus and the modes of theproduction and transmission of knowledge, specifically through the Englishlanguage, in enforcing the allegiance/conformity of the majority of citizenswhose national imaginary has thus been captured and detained. Americaniza-tion of the Filipino through education and cultural domination may be viewedas a kind of “passive revolution” aimed chiefly to defuse nationalist impulsesin the peasantry and working class, and re-channel the energies of the middlestrata of intellectuals–professionals to serve the interests of US policy in Asia



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especially in a time when Japan was rising as an imperial power and revolu-tionary ferment in China and other countries was dangerously looming in thehorizon. Future independence was promised to pacify the nationalist intellec-tuals while recruitment to the Hawaii plantations gave temporary relief tounmitigated misery in the countryside.

In the process of revolutionizing the political and cultural institutions “fromabove,” the US colonial regime also cultivated its own intelligentsia. Politicsimitated the prevailing patronage system binding landlord and tenant. Filipinoilustrados serving the defeated Republic – the educated gentry – were enticed tojoin the colonial administration as teachers, policemen, clerks, and technicalhelp in the bureaucracy; as judges and municipal legislators. One example of atraditional intellectual who participated in this negotiated compromise wasTrinidad Pardo de Tavera. In 1901, Tavera wrote to General Arthur MacArthur,the chief administrator of the military occupation:

After peace is established, all our efforts will be directed to Americanizingourselves, to cause a knowledge of the English language to be extended andgeneralized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency the Americanspirit may take possession of us, and that we may so adopt its principles, itspolitical customs, and its peculiar civilization that our redemption may becomplete and radical.

(Quoted in Constantino 1978: 67)

This stratum of neocolonized intellectuals cemented the tie between theoligarchic elite and the colonial rulers, performing a necessary role in disinte-grating the popular memory of past revolutionary struggle and alienating thiselite from the everyday lives of the masses.

When the Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935, the Filipinointellectuals who came from the peasantry and working class gathered aroundthe US-sponsored President Manuel Quezon and his program of “socialjustice.” This populist rhetoric re-channeled nationalist impulses toward legalameliorative schemes won as concessions from Washington. The social bloc oflandlords–bureaucrats–compradors funded cultural programs with a sentimentalpatronizing attitude toward the native or aboriginal populace. While writers inthe vernacular gravitated toward more activist left-leaning circles on the fringesof the Communist Party of the Philippines (formed in August 1930), the writersusing English remained “cosmopolitan,” as can be gleaned from this reflectionof a progressive-minded critic, Salvador P. Lopez (written during the Japaneseoccupation circa 1942–1944):

For culture is fluid, volatile, impossible to confine in an air-tight compart-ment; and nothing is truer than that real culture is universal, the exclusiveproperty of no particular nation but of all nations that have intelligence toharness it to their own uses.

(1945: 61)

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Cosmopolitanism Filipino-style lurked astutely behind this left-wing nationalistfigure who eloquently voiced proletarian sentiments in the 1930s and 1940sagainst European fascism and Japanese militarism.

Uneven and combined development

Unlike Italy, then, the Philippines were distinguished as an undeveloped rural-agricultural economy without any heavy industry, under US ideological-moralcontrol and political “tutelage.” Utilitarian and pragmatic norms permeatedthe social habitus of the middle strata. This hegemony flourished due to theacquiescence of the oligarchic bloc of landlords, comprador merchants, andbureaucratic intelligentsia, complemented by overt and covert tactics of violenceand bribery unleashed on the unruly sections of landless peasants, workers, andartisans. Challenged by numerous peasant insurrections and workers’ strikes, UShegemony continues as a compromise setup enforced by juridical-police meansof untenable legitimacy.

Filipino cacique/elite democracy is built on the parasitic dependency of thelocal clients on US military, economic and political assistance. The Philippinesis a polity formally identified as “national” (since the Philippines is recognizedby the United Nations as a “nation-state”) without genuine sovereignty, butonly “popular” on the basis of periodic elections. This is concealed by JohnGershman who, in a historical survey of the country, describes the Marcos dicta-torship as a hybrid of personalistic caudillo rule, aided by technocrats andregional alliances of governors, without any mention of US dependency of thewhole structure validated by bilateral treaties and secret stipulations (1993: 162).

From 1899 up to 1946, the US utilized the Philippines as a source of cheap rawmaterials and labor (the colony began earlier to supply the Hawaii plantations withcontract workers), as well as a military-naval outpost. The semi-feudal system ofland tenure, especially in the sugar plantations, maintained landlord/rentier powerthat shared governance with the comprador merchants in the cities. Clientelismand patronage regulated class friction. More impoverished than before, the peasantmasses staged regular revolts culminating in the numerous peasant uprisings in the1920s, the Sakdal uprising of the 1930s and the Communist-led Hukbahalap rebel-lion of the 1940s. The Moros for the most part followed their tribal chieftains whowere allowed limited local power by the central government. After World War II,the neocolonial government re-located landless peasants, former Huk partisans, tothe southern island of Mindanao, temporarily relieving population pressure andunemployment in the North. The question of land and the demands of the peas-antry eluded the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines because, in aone-sided manner, they gave priority to the issue of formal independence, thussubordinating them to elite politicians like Quezon and abandoning the peasantryto the military, church and landlord private armies. Based on the small urbanindustries (printing, cigar-making, etc.), Crisanto Evangelista and other tradeunionists set up the party with 6,000 members, a few from the peasant sector.Impatient, they tried to skip the necessary stage of winning hegemony in civil



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society, opting mainly for confrontational tactics within a narrow geopoliticalarena. Within less than one year, however, the leaders were in jail and the partycriminalized and substantially dismantled.

James Allen, a leading Communist Party USA functionary, visited thePhilippines in 1936–1938 and helped amalgamate the urban-based CommunistParty with the peasant-based Socialist Party led by Pedro Abad Santos. In hismemoirs, Allen criticizes the limitations of the Filipino Marxists, influenced byanarchist and syndicalist notions absorbed from Spanish progressive intellectu-als rather than from “liberal and radical ideas emanating from the United States”(1993: 27) – for example, the Popular Front perspective. Allen describes thepeasant leaders Juan Feleo, Mateo del Castillo, and Pedro Abad Santos who, incontrast to the Communist Party leaders, emphasized the need for unifying thepeasant and proletarian movements. Even though they were not familiar with thedebates among Western Marxists, at least they paid attention to the “Southern[peasant] Question.” With the merger in 1938 of the communists and socialistsinto one Communist Party, the theme of national independence was eclipsed bya “democratic front policy” to oppose the victory of fascism in Europe andJapan. The mediation of Allen and other patronizing mentors displaced the“national-popular” agenda with an internationalist one, thus legitimizing thecontinuing authority of the US-patronized cacique, Quezon, who had terrorizedthe party and persecuted its officials, and only grudgingly tolerated their 1938convention. Proletarian and socialist principles were displaced by the virtues ofentrepreneurial individualism and US-style pluralism, ironically conveyed by atrusted “tutor”/adviser from the US Communist Party.

From a Gramscian point of view, a shift of party policy from the national to theinternational (in Gramsci’s specific case, this was brought about by the need toconfront the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s) sacrifices the interests of the party’smass base. It subordinates the party to the oligarchy whose defense of elite/caciquedemocracy would conceal their subservience to US authority. The outcome in thePhilippines was disastrous. When the US forces returned in 1945, the axiomatics ofUS imperialism, which disappeared in the struggle against Japanese occupation, hadto be re-learned after the arrest and killing of anti-Japanese Huk (Filipino commu-nist-led) guerillas. A similar situation occurred 30 or so years later when formerleftists made a fetish of “civil society” as an entity separate from the state, followingUS Cold War strategy against the Soviet state. Filipino postmarxists (now flunkeysof the Establishment or ideologues of globalization) glamorized a hypothetical“democratic space” and electoral democracy without any substantive land reformor even token social-democratic improvements during Corazon Aquino’s presi-dency. Meanwhile, Aquino and her successors welcomed US advisers to superviseterrorist and fascist measures against the left, up to inviting US Special Forces tohelp wipe out Moro dissidents. This policy of systematic terror against leftists,nationalists, and indigenous advocates continues under de facto president GloriaMacapagal Arroyo, with over 1,000 extra-judicial killings (also designated byhuman rights monitors as “summary executions”) and enforced disappearancessince 2001.

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Again, Gramsci’s lesson here is clear: replacing the need for an anti-imperialist“national-popular” bloc fighting for genuine national sovereignty, and thedemocratization of social property to abolish class privileges, means abandoningthe entire socialist project. It is a formula for defeat.

During the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), the revolutionary project ofbuilding socialism through a worker–peasant alliance took the form of a unitedfront – the National Democratic Front (NDF) agenda initiated by a party estab-lished under “Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tsetung Thought.” Established in April1973, the NDF sought to fight Marcos’s authoritarian-martial rule through thetransitory alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and thenational bourgeoisie in a national-democratic revolution – a people’s war gearedto forming a democratic coalition government (on the postwar elite, see Agoncilloand Guerrero 1970: 670–671). According to the 1985 draft program, the NDF

Provides a framework and channel for the unity and coordination of allgroups and individuals adhering to, and advancing, the general line of fight-ing for national liberation and genuine democracy. It wages armed struggle –specifically a people’s war – as the principal form of struggle at this stage ofthe Philippine revolution; but it also recognizes the importance of otherforms of struggle, and in fact combines and coordinates the armed strugglewith all types of clandestine and open, non-legal and legal struggles.

(National Democratic Front Secretariat 1985: 5)

In later elaborations of this program, one finds the “armed struggle” accentuatedas the primary form of struggle nationwide, taking pride of place over all theother forms. The first item in the 12-point general program reads: “Unite theFilipino people to overthrow the tyrannical rule of US imperialism and the localreactionaries.”

Clearly, the NDF may have sidetracked, at certain conjunctures, the primacyof the armed struggle in favor of peace negotiations with the government begin-ning with the Hague Joint Declaration of 1992 (NDFP 2006). Combined witharmed political mobilization, I see these negotiations as an astute move of theNDFP to build public consensus on the most crucial issues of land reform, socialjustice, and sovereignty. This is an opportunity denied to it except in theliberated zones where the New People’s Army (NPA) exercises precariousascendancy. However, the NPA cannot win consent in the domain of civilsociety (including the economic sphere) unless its program is translated intocommunity-wide practicable agendas. But the drive for winning consent(through a wise strategic balancing of frontal assault and positional warfare)seems premised on a mechanical reading of the prevailing social productionrelations (not just the economic base, in the conventional sense). For example,there is a recurrent stress on the developing crisis as engendering the imminentcollapse of the regime. Conversely, there is a belief that a spontaneous outburstof mass action may precipitate revolutionary victory, ahead of any nationwideacceptance of the legitimacy of the NPA as the liberating people’s army.



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Whereas Gramsci proposed that what is decisive is moral-intellectual leadershipof the historic bloc of social forces subtending the people’s army, a leadershipwhich does not passively anticipate crisis breakthroughs but in fact prepares theground for such direct confrontations. In addition, the forces of the ruling blocneed to be sufficiently demoralized, disaggregated, and decapitated of itsintellectual-moral leadership before proletarian hegemony can be assured.

Toward clarifying the problem of transition

The problem of the national-democratic transition to socialism in the Philippineshas been surrounded with the endless and often futile debate on the mode ofproduction, in particular, whether feudalism or capitalist social relations obtain.Numerous volumes have appeared contradicting Sison and De Lima’s (1998)thesis of the Philippines as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal formation. Forexample, Ben Reid (2000) argues that the Philippines is now overdetermined byrent capitalism which is more vulnerable to urban insurrections, therefore apeasant-based insurgency is no longer valid or tenable as a revolutionary strat-egy. This kind of empiricist-positivist thinking is what Gramsci warns us toreject when he states: “it is not the economic structure which directly determinesthe political action, but it is the interpretation of it and of the so-called lawswhich rule its development” (quoted in Bobbio 1979: 33). And for Gramsci,such laws in Marxism are tendential laws that are historical, not methodological,because they always beget unpredictable countervailing forces. “Economiccontradiction becomes a political contradiction” and economic law passes intopolitical strategy (Bensaid 2002, 283).

Statistics proving uneven and combined development in neocolonial formationslike the Philippines can be interpreted to serve either progressive or reactionarypurposes; they cannot by themselves propose a revolutionary strategy. A leader-ship formation is needed. Gramsci writes that the mythical “Modern Prince” (van-guard political party) is a creator or initiator, basing itself “on effective reality”which is not something static or immobile, but rather “a relation of forces incontinuous motion and shift of equilibrium.” Hence, normative ethical judgmentand realistic critical analysis fuse in political action: “What ‘ought to be’ is there-fore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality,it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics”(SPN: 171). The ascendancy of the national-popular will as the sign of accom-plished hegemony does not hinge on the resolution of the feudal-or-capitalistdebate but on the meticulous analysis of the balance of political forces, that is, ontheorizing the alignment and conflict of social blocs on the terrain of a specifichistorical formation.

The Philippines is indeed a complex test case for any revolutionary socialistpolitics removed from its European provenance. In such a highly differentiatedpolitical economy with divisions and fragmentation on every level, what isimperative is precisely an inventory of social-political forces. For there to be arevolutionary change there has to be a national-popular movement in which

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masses will be “led to think coherently and in a unitary manner an existingreality” (Fontana 1993: 45). This critical and coherent practice of understandingis expansive, moving beyond sectarian, corporatist or parochial views.Gramsci’s strategy of striving for a national-popular bloc is premised on thenotion of catharsis, the dialectic of the war of position and the war of maneuver,neither one nor the other but always contingent on the highly mutable balance ofpolitical forces:

The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from thepurely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, thatis the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the mindsof men. This also means the passage from “objective” to “subjective” andfrom “necessity” to “freedom.”

(SPN: 366)

In short, proletarian class ideology becomes universalized; it becomes thenation-people’s “common sense,” pervading everyday life. All these have beenprefigured in the emphasis Gramsci laid on the need for self-inventory, ordergained from self-discipline, knowledge of social relations, and collective will inthe essays I have cited earlier.

Failure to heed this dialectical analysis of the ever-shifting equilibrium ofpolitical forces, which is essentially a symptom of positivistic or dogmatic think-ing, has led to catastrophes in the past. Most notable is the prediction by theleadership of the Huks in the 1950s that the neocolonial regime would collapsebecause of the sharpened crisis of international capitalism (Dalisay 1999: 116).This error stems from ignoring the form of the state being challenged and theexisting balance of political forces, allowing the supposed transnationalization ofproduction and finance to dictate the terms of the national-democratic struggle. Itis the current malady afflicting anti-globalization “leftists” who consider thebattle against the IMF/World Bank/WTO as more important than fighting theruthless fascist acts of the US–Arroyo regime. The other lesson in ignoringthe problematic of achieving hegemony via a national-popular bloc may be foundin the CPP/NDF’s boycott of the “snap elections” of February 1986, a mistakedue (to quote the official explanation) to the mechanical analysis in terms of classstandpoint and subjective intentions, without taking into account “the objectivepositioning of each of the political forces in motion and in interaction withothers” (Schirmer and Shalom 1987: 384). But that self-criticism does notmention at all where and how the protagonism of the masses will intervene in theconjuncture.

With the demise of the Soviet system and the proliferation of Western-fundedNGOs (Non-governmental organizations) in the civil society of “Third World”countries, Gramsci was discovered as a quotable sage. In the Philippines, the“new social movements” opted for US-promoted electoral democracy instead ofsocialism or national independence. In this milieu, Gramsci’s notion of engagingthe state from bases within civil society was refunctioned to resolve the crisis of



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left-oriented political forces. It was purged of its historically realist theorems(see Jaluague 1993). The Filipino “civil-society” advocates were dutifully silentabout US imperial plunder of the Philippines and the utter subservience of itsrapacious local agents to the Washington Consensus. Thus Gramsci is instru-mentalized to deflect attention away from the lack of national sovereignty, thefragmentation and anomic decay of society, and the unprecedented impoverish-ment of the masses – a majority of Filipinos subsist on $2 a day – and theendemic unemployment, which explains why eight out of ten households arestricken with hunger (Lichauco 2005; Oliveros 2008), and why between nineand ten million Filipinos are exploited migrant workers in over 200 countriesaround the world. This use of Gramsci was surely an exercise in tendentiousextrapolation at the tail of the Cold War when neoliberal themes/sloganspurveyed via privately funded NGOs led by managerial technocrats flourished.Gramsci’s hegemony was equated with radical democracy, all struggle beingreduced to the ideological realm (Wood 1986). In fact, the call for hegemony(construed as electoral supremacy) eclipsed and erased the call for revolution,for people’s war. This is of course a prelude to the trendy, chic sectors of theanti-globalization movement embodied in the World Social Forum and itseclectic, opportunist accommodationism.

Imperial terror contra revolution

Immediately after September 11, 2001, the Philippines was declared the “secondbattlefront” after Afghanistan in the “war on terror” (Tuazon 2002). In October,Secretary of State Colin Powell classified the CPP and the New People’s Armyas “terrorist” organizations, clearly revealing the normative unilateral criterionof “terrorist” as any group or individual that opposes US imperial policies andits effects. President Bush dispatched thousands of US Special Forces andMarines to pursue members of the Moro guerilla contingent called “AbuSayyaf,” actually a kidnap-for-ransom gang, alleged to be Al Qaeda followers.The informed public in the Philippines already knows that this group was set upby government military/police, local politicians and businessmen to split up theMoro revolutionary camp and also channel ransom money into their privatebank-accounts (Vitug and Gloria 2000; International Peace Mission 2002).Notwithstanding this truth, the Bush regime utilized the brutal 1899–1903 colo-nial pacification of the islands to justify sending US troops to the Philippines asan example of the US spreading democracy and freedom to benighted lands athorrendous costs for both Americans and Filipinos (Katz 2004; Kolko 1976).

There is no doubt that US policies of hegemony succeeded in making thePhilippines one of the first genuine neocolonies on the planet. Concluding hishistory of Philippines in the twentieth century, Renato Constantino states thatafter the 1946 grant of formal independence, “the culture, the institutions, thesciences and the arts that evolved only served to confirm in the minds of orthodoxFilipinos the need for some form of dependence on the United States” (1975:393–394). Lichauco contends that “the contradiction between colonialism and

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nationalism remains the principal contradiction of Philippine society” (2004; seealso CENPEG 2005; Bauzon 1991).

Consequently, parasitic on US support, the Filipino ruling bloc has neverreally won hegemony over the nation-people. Like the previous administrationsfrom day one of the Republic up to the present, the Filipino elite has neverenjoyed the full and total consent of the governed, as witness the uninterruptedpeasant rebellions in the first 50 years of the last century, as well as the periodiceruptions of Moro antigovernment resistance. Even after the end of Marcos’s“constitutional dictatorship,” the military and police apparatus of the neocolonialstate continues to be fully deployed both against the communist guerillas andthe Moro insurgents – the Moros in fact receiving worldwide recognition of itslegitimacy by the Organization of Islamic Conference. Class war persists in bothits positional and confrontational dimensions, across ethnic, sexual, and regionalheterogeneities (Eadie 2005).

Despite their unflagging struggle against fascist violence in defense ofpeople’s rights and welfare, the NDF, CPP and NPA are branded as terrorists byall those who succeeded Marcos. At present, the Arroyo regime has beenaccused of unprecedented and massive extra-judicial killings and abductions ofover 1,000 citizens, priests, lawyers, journalists, human-rights advocates, laborunion leaders, women, and activists from “civil society.” Amnesty International,the UN Special Rapporteurs, World Council of Churches, Human Rights Watch,and others have all agreed that Arroyo’s government, in particular the US-funded and supervised Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Police,are all guilty or complicit with those crimes. In March 2007 at The Hague,Netherlands, the Permanent People’s Tribunal held a trial of the US–Arroyoregime and found it guilty of “crimes against humanity,” a judgment conveyedto the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the International Court ofJustice (San Juan 2007b). It would be logical to conclude then that followingGramsci, the war of maneuver, frontal assault, may be considered appropriate(as it was in Russia in 1917), especially if the state (military-police power) waseverything and civil society “primordial and gelatinous” (SPN: 238). But is thatthe case in the Philippines today where, behind the army and bureaucracy, thetrenches and fortifications of civil society – church, media, schools, etc. – havealready been taken over by the national-popular bloc, the alliance of workersand peasants? If so, then the revolution has won. If not, we need to go back tothe mass grass-roots organizations and reassess our frameworks, paradigms,conceptual tools, and experiences.

We may sharpen our inquiry further. While the situation may be crisis-riddenand Arroyo deprived of majority support in “civil society,” has the working classparty achieved hegemony in that realm? Apart from the current logistical weak-ness and decreased size of the NPA (the Moro insurgents, though massive andwell-equipped, appear to be plagued with leadership problems), the CPP andother left-leaning or socialist-oriented groups have not yet fully attained“national-popular” stature. That is, their leaders and intellectuals have not yetachieved that “organic cohesion in which feeling–passion becomes understanding



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and thence knowledge,” precisely that moment when they can be said to berepresentative insofar as a “shared life” exists “which alone is a social force . . .the ‘historical bloc’” (SPN: 418). We do not yet have proletarian-oriented“common sense” operating in everyday social life. In other words, the historicalbloc of national-popular forces has not been realized as yet, despite the utterlycorrupt, mendacious and criminal actions of the illegitimate president. The neo-colonial state survives by virtue of superior military-police organization (thoughrent by factional in-fighting, as attested to by several mutinies in the last decade,which persist up to now), the inadequacy of its challengers, and sheer psycho-cultural inertia. Above all, the neocolonial state is able to function with asemblance of normality (though quotidian life is replete with emergency episodesand punctual ruptures) because of unremitting US support. Aside from USmilitary-political aid, the elite is able to survive because of the $12–14 billionannual remittance of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers), enough to pay thegrowing foreign debt and fund the irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy andmilitary-police apparatus.

Globalizing the nation?

Viewed from the neo-Gramscian perspective of international political economists(Gill 2003c; Bieler and Morton 2003), we need to take account of the current worldorder, the appearance of trends such as “the new constitutionalism” and “discipli-nary neoliberalism.” Future research should take into account the “recomposition ofstate-civil society relations” that generate new structures of exploitation, forms ofclass-consciousness, modes of resistance and class struggle (Bieler and Morton2003). World-systems analysis has to be supplemented by a historical-materialistcritique of mutable forms of political subjectivities generated by new innovativeforms of commodification and marketization of both private and public spheres, aswell as the corresponding changes in the planet’s bio-eco system (Gill 2003c).

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony operating through the historic bloc of thenational/popular conceptualizes the idea of socialist revolution as a transformationin the relation of political forces. Protracted people’s war, if it is not just a carry-over slogan from the Chinese experience, needs to be judged as a tactic, not along-range strategy of political struggle where the land problem coexists withinthe question of neocolonial dependency. “People’s war” also needs to concede ifnot incorporate the more urgent demand for Moro self-determination within itsparameters. Within the dual perspective that Gramsci applies to the revolutionaryprocess, the military moment of a relation of forces – the moment of maneuver orfrontal assault – must be located within the unity of the whole formation and thecomplex relation of the elements within it. Gramsci warns us that it is foolish to befixated by a military model since politics must have priority over its militaryaspect: “only politics creates the possibility for maneuver and movement” (SPN:232; Sassoon 1980).

Notwithstanding the primacy of class struggle in historical materialism, thepeople-nation (mainly in the “Third World”/global South) remains the pivotal

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agency for a strategy against finance–capital imperialism. The people (prefiguredby the revolutionary worker–peasant alliance) and the emergent nation endowedwith critical universality (Lowy 1998) remains the dual thematic and narrativevectors of any socialist praxis in neocolonized formations. In the case of thePhilippines, as long as the peasantry, rural middle stratum, and indigenouscommunities remain the base of landlord–comprador power, and therefore ofbourgeois (US and local capitalist–bureaucrats) control, the insurgency in thecountryside will always be an irrepressible part of the “civil society + political-ideological domain” (the integral state) which is the paramount terrain of thenational-democratic struggle (Q2 §6: 763–764). Again, we need to be remindedthat civil society includes the economic sphere lest everything be reduced to thecultural or ideological realm. The immiserated countryside and its urban exten-sions continue to serve as the reservoir for the thousands of migrant contractworkers who now remit billions of their earnings, enough to pay the country’shuge foreign debt to the World Bank and financial consortiums. And as long asthe Philippines is a deformed or inchoate “nation-state,” without real sovereignty,the nationalist project – global decolonization as “the most significant correlate ofUS hegemony” (Arrighi 1993) remains pivotal and decisive in socialist trans-formation. Without the Filipino nation-people, there is no agency to carry out thesocialist revolution in a neocolonial location. Without the national-popular, therecan be no historical specificity to analyze, no particularity to authenticate theuniversal drive of global socialist transformation of the global capitalist system.By grasping the full implications of Gramsci’s “national-popular” as applied tothe historicized formation of a neocolony like the Philippines, by exploring itsheuristic and explanatory value for socialist goals, we may be able to find toexplore the most fruitful way of being Gramscian in this new millennium ofimperial terror and impending planetary ecological disasters.



Documents

ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND THE PHILIPPINE SOCIAL FORMATION