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.Can you tell us more about this?
Bas: In my view, since time immemorial, anarchism has been present in the archipelago; primitive communities from coastal to upland areas flourished and utilized autonomous and decentralized political patterns that facilitated the proliferation of highly diverse cultures and lifestyles.
Primitive social organizations evolved until social stratifications formed and became institutions. The archipelago has various tribes with their own self-identity, culture, and sociopolitical organization. Before authoritarianism infected the revolutionary movement of the archipelago, direct action was practiced.
One example is the “Cavite mutiny” of February 20, 1872, when seven Spanish officers were killed in a mutiny at the Cavite naval shipyard. As a consequence, the Spanish authorities ordered the arrest of creoles, mestizos, secular priests, merchants, lawyers, and even some members of the colonial administration. In order to instill fear in the minds of the people, a kangaroo trial was held, and three secular priests were garroted in front of 40,000 people. Six months later, 1,200 workers went on strike, setting the first record in the history of the archipelago. Many people were arrested, but the administration failed to identify a leader and eventually everyone was released. General Izquierdo apparently concluded that “the International has spread its black wings to cast its nefarious shadow over the most remote lands.”3
How did the traditional forms of social organization relate to the independence movement?
Bas: The Propaganda Movement was basically composed of the local educated elite.4 They adopted the so-called Enlightenment framework from Europe. Giant names in history like those of Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, Emilio Jacinto, Andrés Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, Apolinario Mabini, and Marcelo del Pilar were all committed to nationalism as the basis of uniting the oppressed people.5
The elite successfully created the idea of an abstract large-scale community integrating highly diverse cultures. The culmination of the agitation of the Propaganda Movement was the establishment of the Katipunan organization that later formed the first government in the archipelago patterned after the nationalist framework of the West.