In El Filibusterismo (1891),² the protagonist is reminiscent of Ravachol, the French anarchist known for avenging oppressed workers by bombing targets of the authorities.

Rizal symbolically equated this with the desperation of the Filipino people and their desire to liberate themselves from colonialism.

Under Three Flags El Filibusterismo ²

But anarchist theory and praxis never did proliferate in that period as a legitimate revolutionary alternative to colonialism in the Philippines.

In Japan, anarchism had sown its seeds during the Meiji and Taishō periods, when Japanese anarchists became instrumental in struggles against the war and the emperor, as well as in building militant unions.

There were some such developments in the Philippines, but obviously there is a contextual difference between the Japanese and the Filipino experience.

So there is a history of anti-authoritarian struggle in the Philippines, but it is weak.

Some pacified Filipino natives, especially the discontented principalia (noble) class, were imagining a nation-state independent from their colonizers, but many indigenous brothers and sisters were fighting to defend their egalitarian ways of living in the mountains and other parts of the archipelago.

Quasi-religious insurrections in Philippine history can be linked to antiauthoritarian struggles due to their desire of preserving autonomy.

principalia

Bas: José Rizal’s novel depicts the oppressive character of colonialism and suggests a solution to get rid of it.

Where did he get the idea from that the entire colonial elite could be exterminated by igniting the nitroglycerine hidden in a lamp?

Rizal’s long stay in Europe had made him aware of the anarchists’ “propaganda by the deed.” At the same time, his campaign for education as one of the key components of the freedom struggle is similar to Ferrer and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism.

Bas

In 1901, Isabelo de los Reyes returned home from a Montjuic prison cell in Spain to face the new enemy that disembarked from the modern warships in Manila Bay.

De los Reyes’s frame of struggle was far different from the nationalists we know today as heroes.

Firstly, his object of criticism was imperialism.

He organized workers and the urban poor in Manila and attacked American corporations.

He practiced what he had learned from anarchist cellmates like Ramon Sempau.

The Unión Obrera Democrática (UOD), which he cofounded, was the first workers’ union in the archipelago.

Direct actions through creative picket lines and strikes launched by workers and communities, particularly in Manila’s Tondo district, rocked the colonial government, its corporate partners, and the local elite.

It seems that in quite a lot of your work you try to relate anarchist ideas to traditional ways of social organizing on the Philippine islands.

manila

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