historian. wordsmith. wanderer.
Regions are not stable historical phenomena. They are, to draw upon a metaphor from Southeast Asian Studies, expanding and contracting mandalas. The alteration is not fundamentally their geographical scope but their social significance; it is their very existence that waxes...
The unreal spectacle has nothing to do with the passing of a slight, hunched-over elderly woman and everything to do with the royal institution that encrusted her and the monarchic principle she embodied.
The election of Marcos is a milestone in a global process. He represents the naked rule of reaction, promising dictatorship and drawing in his wake fascists and political scum.
On the first Monday in May each year a spectacle of excess is staged in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – the Met Gala. The red carpet rolls out for the billionaires and their hangers-on, the...
The political machinations of Ferdinand Marcos, who unleashed ex-Huk gangsters and military repression in his quest to be elected president in 1965, transformed Central Luzon into a war zone for the next decade.
An essay on historical methodology and revolutionary politics, in response to the arguments of impressionism, empiricism, and pragmatism. How do we study history? How can we understand the martial law regime of Marcos, or the barricades of the Diliman Commune,...
On Saturday, May 1 1971, police and military forces in the Philippines, who had been deployed on the roof of Congress buidling as snipers armed with machine guns, opened fire on four thousand protesting workers and students. They mercilessly strafed...
Jose Ma. Sison, founder and ideological leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines, developed his fundamental political ideas -- the program of Stalinism -- during his years as a graduate student at the University of the Philippines. His class...
I demonstrate that a growing radicalization among youth put great pressure on the party which had supported Marcos for president in 1965 and was looking to retain ties with him. Contrary to popular conception, Jose Ma. Sison, a leading member...
The anniversary of the Commune is thus necessarily less an occasion for celebration and nostalgia, and far more urgently an opportunity to assess the lessons and legacy of the experience, which prove to be of immediate relevance today.
1969 opened with an explosion of student strikes in Manila, a bellwether of the brief, heady epoch of storm and dictatorship that followed.
In the final analysis, Marasigan’s argument amounts to the claim that Joseph Stalin was right, and the CPP is correct in continuing his political legacy.
The foundational text of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), written by Jose Ma. Sison, Philippine Society and Revolution, was first published in serialized form in campus newspapers in the latter half of 1970.
An eruption of protests and violence — molotov cocktails and gunfire — in the streets of Manila, launched the heady, charged days of January to March 1970.
The Kabataang Makabayan (KM) was founded as a reformist youth organization to carry out pressure politics in the interests of the national bourgeoisie. Immense social struggles would, in less than six years, thrust this small group to the center of...
An odd, unpleasant photograph was taken forty-five years ago today. Imelda Marcos, the conjugal head of a two year old military dictatorship, intimately greeted the aged Chairman Mao who openly ogled the straightcut neckline of her terno.
The ruling opposition was thus mobilized for a particular reason — to have their hands upon the reins of the inevitable dictatorship. The working class and exploited masses of the Philippines were mobilized for very different reasons: price hikes, runaway...
The famed 1971 seizure of the UP Diliman campus and the formation of the ‘Diliman Commune’ was part of a coordinated campaign of barricades erected by the KM and SDK throughout Manila and beyond.
Among the criticisms which I raised regarding Ileto's account was the deeply problematic character of the class categories he employed.
An examination of the origins of my scholarship revisiting Reynaldo Ileto's classic 1979 work, Pasyon and Revolution.
My cobbled-together English translation of the epigraph to the first chapter of Edgardo M. Reyes’ Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, is a deliberately rough translation, the scaffolding for a later, and more polished, work.
