Photographs are not windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence – often spurious, always incomplete – in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.

How? By statements about what is in the world, what we should look at. Photographs tell us how things ought to look, what their subjects should reveal about themselves.

Photographs taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely fail to make visible the markers of status. We associate this with posing. The process itself took time: one couldn’t take photographs on the run. With posing, whether in a studio or portrait or in pictures of people taken on  the sites of work and recreation, there can be a conscious construction of what is seemly, appropriate, attractive. The way most old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this cannot only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. Modern taste judges the way workers in the old photographs of building sites and factories were stiffly posed to be a kind of lie – concealing, for instance, the reality of their physical exertion. We prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking shots in which people are caught in a movement – that is what looks truthful (if not always beautiful) to us. We feel more comfortable with what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the realities of control (self-control, control by others), of power – revelations we now judge, oddly enough, to be “artificial.”

Susan Sontag,
“One Hundred Years of Italian Photography”

Unlike most films that we usually see, Claire’s Knee shuns the standard plot-based, fast-paced, action-packed, or suspense-filled formula popularized by Hollywood.

There’s not much of plot in Claire’s Knee. It opens with the French diplomat Jerome spending his holidays in his ancestral home located beside some lake in France after many years spent abroad.

The diplomat is getting married soon and is there to find buyers for his property. He goes around by pumpboat, like Zizek in the Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, and accidentally meets his former lover Aurora while cruising in his boat.

Aurora, a literary writer, would talk Jerome into becoming a gineau subject for a story that she is unable to finish. She introduces Jerome to the family hosting her stay in the area. This is how he meets the teenager Laura, who flirts with him, and her older sister Claire with whom he falls head over heels for.

“Every woman has her most vulnerable point. For some, it’s the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. For Claire, in that position, in that light, it was her knee,” said Jerome.

He eventually gets to touch it, thus fulfilling his fetishist desire. But just that. Nothing else seems to happen. The film would end with Jerome leaving the country for his marriage without initiating any other serious attempt to prey on any of the two girls.

None of the usual slapstick from Hollywood romantic comedies on one hand or the dreary soap operatic melodrama on the other hand. Claire’s Knee instead focuses on the characters, their attitudes and views on love, friendship, and relationships as shown in the dialogue and their gestures.

We liked the microscopic emphasis on the way the characters act – their look in the eye, the touch on the shoulders, their facial expressions, how they played with their hair – as they interact with each other.

I am personally fond of Aurora’s conversations with Jerome, which makes for an incisive commentary on the relationship between authorship and fictionality, of how writers fashion their fiction out of seemingly shallow events from everyday life.

Ultimately, the scenario envisioned by Aurora in line with her unfinshed story’s plot, that of Jerome playing around with the young girls before his marriage, would fail to materialize.

Susan Sontag once observed that “the reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attention-grabbing, have produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.”

Claire’s Knee’s subtle contradictions, its slower pace and many pauses, and its deceptive simplicity makes it a film that deserves our full attention and reflection.

If Tolstoy took as the model for his attack the old aristocratic classes in the person of the judge Ivan Ilych, Fuentes’ Artemio Cruz personifies the big bourgeois comprador class as situated in the Mexican social condition.

Through Tolstoy, said Lenin, “the Russian working class will learn to know its enemies better.” In the same way, Artemio Cruz invites the same denunciation of the Mexican elites by exposing the duplicity of the institutions which props up their rule.

That is “the inner falsity” of “the church, the law courts, militarism, ‘lawful’ wedlock, bourgeois science,” as Lenin would put it apropos Tolstoy works.

Fuentes’ narrative follows a fragmented and non-linear route with its non-chronological flashbacks of the past and frequent forays into the present streams of consciousness of Artemio Cruz who, dying in his hospital bed, attempts to declare his final testament to his heirs.

The cynical old man views his immediate family and colleagues with toxic suspicion, assuming correctly that they were only after his inheritance.

But the motley group around Cruz’s deathbed has no reason to relish the company of the dying man though, which only left bitter memories to his estranged wife and children in his single-minded drive for wealth and power.

We are brought back immediately after the Mexican Revolution at the outset of the 20^th Century. What began as a genuine social revolution later on failed to institute radical changes in the face of the wavering character of its bourgeois leadership.

In the internecine struggle for power, the more progressive-minded generals Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata were outmaneuvered by the conservative forces within the revolution that would eschew the aims of instituting genuine land reform and shunning of foreign domination.

Cruz, as an officer under one of the revolutionary armies, personified the deterioration of this national democratic revolution of the old-type into the mere transfer of power and reconcentration of wealth from one faction of the Mexican landed elites into another.

We are shown how Cruz began to accumulate his wealth by marrying the daughter of a dying despotic landlord immediately after the war. He subsequently uses his newfound wealth for forays into politics and the setting up of his own newspaper and various other businesses.

The revolutionary degenerates into the role of the intermediary who facilitates their exploitation of his country’s markets, natural resources, and cheap labor by foreign monopoly capitalists in exchange for a small portion of their superprofits.

It is in this way that he gained access to all the pleasures the world can offer. It is also in this way that Cruz ironically became a broken man. Drunk on his wealth and power, he was consumed by his bitterness and resentments and never found peace with himself and his past.

In the end, The Death of Artemio Cruz also serves as a reminder of how otherwise well-intentioned revolutionary endeavors go astray if they are not anchored on the correct emancipatory standpoint, viewpoint, and method.

Like the old ilustrado-led 1896 Philippine revolution against Spanish colonialism, the Mexican revolution was hijacked by a leadership that was all too ready to sacrifice the aspirations of the toiling masses for their own prosperity under the auspices of U.S. imperialism.

• On Anxiety by Renata Salecl
• Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism by V.I. Lenin
• One Dimensional Woman by Nina Powers
• Wages, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
• Mula Tore Hanggang Palengke: Neoliberal Education in the Philippines
• The Foundations of Leninism: Lectures Delivered at the Sverdlov University by J.V. Stalin
• My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah
• Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21^st Century by Giovanni Arrighi
• Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
• Was Mao Really a Monster: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story
• The Secret History of Modernism by C.K. Stead
• How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930-1975 by Ben Kiernan
• Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
• Muog: Ang Naratibo ng Kanayunan sa sa Matagalang Digmang Bayan sa Pilipinas
• Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia
• How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart

The list does not include the ones I’ve marked for rereading. And of course, the books that I’d eventually read within the year would inevitably not be limited to the ones listed here.

Reading. Photo taken by Sheila.

The year 2011 saw a decline in the number of books that I read. The year would therefore not amount as much as the previous years when judged according to the books I read. From some 77 books in 2010, the number of books I finished reading from the first to the last page dropped to 46 in 2011.

My exit from the academe last April and entry into social movement organizing saw an end to the doggish pursuit of the pleasures of the written text and paved the way for the beginning for a more fruitful reading (and more importantly, the collective writing) of the world itself as the text.

Nevertheless, here’s a brief record of some of the more memorable books that I read from the past year:

• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: a book that I pay homage to at least once a year, this is one of the most incisive, forceful and well-written manifestoes ever. Its analysis of the world capitalist system remains true as ever.
• How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard: the title speaks for itself. It took away that little tinge of guilt I feel everytime I put off reading some novel or too. A very amusing read.
• Agaw-dilim Agaw-liwanag by Lualhati Milan-Abreu: a heart-rending autobiographical account of the author’s traversing of the less-travelled path in the underground revolutionary movement from the late 60s to the early 90s.
• Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said: this lengthy tome analyzes how seemingly innocent novels, such as those by Jane Austen, among others, are in fact complicit in the imperialist project.
• Pereira Declares: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi: a story of an indifferent intellectual’s awakening to the need for resistance against fascist oppression set in Portugal.
• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello: six characters barge in the theater and demand the director to give them storylines, making for a commentary on authorship and the boundaries between fiction and reality.
• Token Professionals and Master Critics: Critique of Orthodoxy in Literary Studies by James Sosnoski: a very scholarly critique of the academe which reinforced my decision against following the academic career path.
• Wandering Star by JMG Le Clezio: a sympathetic account of Jews in Israel who survived the Holocaust side by side with the Palestinians who have been dispossessed of their land from the subsequent Zionist colonization of Palestine.
• The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier: a poetic novelization of the Haitian people’s long history of struggle against colonial tyranny.The
• The River Between by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: to collaborate with the white colonizers or to stick dogmatically with tribal traditions? These are the two main African response to colonialism problematized in this powerful novel.
• The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes: surreal and poetic, the many dissonant voices of this heavily textured novel delves into the insanity and decay at the micro level of the characters’ individual lives brought about by the brutal Salazarist Portuguese regime and its colonial enterprise in Mozambique.
• The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy by Minqi Li: on China’s role in exacerbating the presently unfolding crisis of global capitalism, why revolution is imminent, and why it must ultimately succeed if the destruction of the entire human civilization is to be avoided.
• The First International and After: Political Writings 3 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: interesting account of the theoretical and practical problems faced by Marx and Engels as they organized the First International. Acidic rebuttals against the anarchist tendency, as then represented by Bakunin and his ilk.
• Grendel by John Gardner: far from setting Grendel up as the victim turned villain because we don’t know his side of the story, this charming little novel examines how Grendel may have viewed his existence and justified his monstrosity.
• The Kill by Emile Zola: classic attack on the rottenness and corruption of capitalist society and the decadence of the ascendant bourgeois class set in 19th century Paris.
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk: the melancholic superfluous man returns as the disillusioned radical who, getting caught in the social maelstrom of contemporary Turkey, predictably ends up in the most miserable and pathetic situation.
• Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy by Kim Moody: a detailed examination of the global neoliberal offensive of capital in the 80s and 90s and the response of organized labor.
• Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa: a humorous glimpse of life in the Peruvian countrysides at the height of the Shining Path movement’s revolutionary war, but from a reactionary point of view. This book should be banned.
• Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Material by Reza Negarestani: a few inspired passages in a sea of a most convoluted and ultimately pointless text. This is not recommended either.
• The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes: recounts the sad, sad life of a Mexican comprador who remembers his macho exploits and corrupt dealings as he lies in his hospital deathbed.

The United States has the world’s biggest economy, strongest military and the most influential culture. It’s the only power with a global project defended and supported by more aircraft carriers, Fortune 500 companies and most successful media-tainment conglomerates than any other. But America’s post-cold war optimism, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has given way to pessimism, forecasting a declining power and more crucially, the end of an American era. The rise of new divisional and global powers, coupled with Washington’s recent war fiascos and financial crisis have worsened the outlook for America’s future.

Marwan Bishara,
Decline of the American empire

Notorious as the “The Butcher,” Palparan has been charged with the kidnapping and serious illegal detention of University of the Philippines student activists Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeno.

Palparan is also infamous for the rise of cases of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and other human rights abuses in every province where he was assigned under the regime of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Human rights groups have documented at least 1,206 extrajudicial killings, 206 enforced disappearances, and 2,059 illegal arrests and detention under the past administration.

Palparan has gone into hiding after an arrest warrant was filed against him and his failed attempt to escape the country to Singapore. Join the efforts to put this human rights violator to justice by reposting this poster online in your blogs,  tumblers, and facebook walls.

Various international agreements entered into by the Philippines, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, state that the state has a responsibility to guarantee the people’s right to education.

Our 1987 Constitution itself explicitly provides for government to “protect and promote the right of all citizens to quality education at all levels” and “take appropriate steps to make such education accessible to all.”[3] The constitution also states that “the highest budgetary priority” shall be assigned to education.[4]

Reactionary or liberatory

Education is given a high value in the country because it is perceived by the masses as a stepping stone out of poverty, it is imagined by the middle classes as a way to climb to a higher social status, and is used by the ruling classes to reinforce their influence over the populace.

Education, more importantly, is of great importance for nation-building because it can mold the consciousness of the youth and the people and direct them towards particular purposes. Education, in this sense, can be either reactionary or liberatory.[5]

It is reactionary if it functions to defend an exploitative and oppressive social order by “prevent[ing] the people from gaining critical awareness, from ‘reading’ critically their reality.”[6] Education can be liberating if it seeks the opposite and works for social transformation.[7]

The Philippine educational system has been plagued by a severe and chronic crisis that leaves it incapable of pushing for national progress. It has instead been molded “according to the interests of those who have power”[8] and has reinforced worsening social inequality.

Rather than being treated as an investment with a crucial role in nation-building, education has become perpetually hostage to grave shortages, wrong priorities, and the demands of foreign powers. Instead of being conferred to the people as a basic right, it has become a privilege for a few.

A colonial education

The sorry state of affairs of Philippine education can be traced back to the country’s colonial period when the educational system was designed to mold loyal colonial subjects who valued the interests of their foreign masters above their own needs and aspirations.

This was clearly the case under 300 years of Spanish colonial rule when all the schools were under the control and the direction of the Catholic Church. After all, “the most effective means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds.”[9]

The arrival of the Americans did little to change this. Having waged a genocidal war that murdered over a million Filipinos in order to subdue the Filipino revolutionaries, the new colonizers realized the need for establishing a public school system in order to make the new regime acceptable.

Filipinos were forced to speak in the colonizers’ tongue. They sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” They were told that the colonizers came to liberate them and teach them democracy. They were inculcated with the new rulers’ consumerist values. They were transformed into “little brown Americans.”

Schools like the University of the Philippines and the Philippine Normal University were established to produce a new generation of Filipino clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, teachers, and other professionals who are trained in the ways of the colonizers and beholden to foreign interests.

Ultimately, education was fashioned to suit the colonial project of making the country dependent on the U.S. economically, politically, and culturally even after it was “granted” freedom.

Under a neocolonial state

The formal declaration of independence finally came on 1946, but the policies of the new government would remain bound to U.S. designs through various unequal treaties and agreements. Philippine education became and continues to be a testament of this new neocolonial status.

Fashioned to serve the aims of foreign powers and the demands of the international market, the Philippine educational system became a regular testing ground for World Bank and International Monetary Fund prescriptions and impositions.[10]

This assumed a more brazen form under President Ferdinand Marcos who would subsequently assume dictatorial powers. His regime would reconfigure the educational system to focus on technical and vocational training “to provide the manpower required by foreign investors and their local partners.”[11]

The Marcos-era Education Act of 1982 allowed unregulated tuition increases while his regime’s New Elementary School Curriculum (NESC) of 1983 used World Bank funded textbooks. Marcos revised foreign borrowing rules “for a more extensive funding of educational projects from foreign and external sources.”[12]

The removal of the dictatorship from power did not bode any change for the prevailing orientation of Philippine education. The new president would promise the U.S. government to pay the $26 billion debt accumulated under Marcos never mind that much of it went to the dictator and his cronies’ pockets.[13]

Cory Aquino remained subservient to the dictates of foreign banks and powers, which would attain larger roles in crafting the country’s educational policies. Her regime’s New Secondary Education Curriculum of 1989, for instance, would simply serve as the high school version of Marcos’ NESC.

Philippines 2000 and beyond

The same pattern would continue under Fidel Ramos whose Education 2000 program would direct the reduction of government funding for state universities and colleges (SUCs) in order to make way for higher allocations for foreign debt servicing.

The short-lived Estrada regime would meanwhile form the Philippine Commission on Educational Reform (PCER) which recommended that the “use of large allocations of the government budget for public higher education is perceived to be inefficient and inequitable.”[14]

Some of the proposals of the study, in the main, included the raising of tuition to “realistic levels,” the use of SUCs’ idle assets for commercial purposes, and intensified fund-raising from the private sector.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Long Term Higher Education Development Plan (LTHEDP) would put this direction to its logical conclusion by directing:

• The decrease of SUCs by 20 percent,
• Transforming 20 percent of SUCs into semi-corporatized entities,
• Making 20 percent self-sufficient by selling intellectual products and grants,
• Requiring 50 percent of SUCs to engage in active income generating projects,
• Having 70 percent of SUCs charge tuition comparable to private universities, and
• Involving 60 percent of SUCs into collaborations with big business.

In order to produce a “globally competitive” labor force, the Arroyo government also introduced the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank-recommended “Millennium Curriculum” which emphasized English, Math and Science at the expense of history, humanities and social sciences.

The same perverted logic would form the core of the education policies of the Aquino regime. His Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016 would aim to “Harness private-sector resources in the delivery and monitoring of, social marketing and advocacy for education, especially higher education.”

The implementation of K to 12 would meanwhile take-off where the “Millennium Curriculum” left by creating a new generation of cheap semi-skilled workers who are employable by transnational corporations or qualified for labor exports immediately after high school graduation.

Globally competitive

What has become clear after the end of every administration and the passing of each decade is the way the educational system has been structured to benefit the profit-oriented political and economic interests of foreign and local elites.

Under this setup, the “global competitive workforce” which the educational system seeks to mass produce becomes another fancy name for cheap and docile labor, a youth that can be easily disposed of in transnational corporations in the country or abroad.

Thus, Philippine education is directed towards whatever is the demand in the international market: it was engineering in the 1960s, medicine in the 1970s, computer science and information technology in the 1980s and 1990s, and nursing and caregiving courses in the first decade of the 21^st century.

What the government euphemistically terms “job-skills mismatch” is actually a result of its very own labor export policy and the lack of national industries that can essentially provide job opportunities at home. It is a symptom of an economy that has become overly dependent on foreign economies.

The predominance of the English language in the Philippines is closely linked to the country’s foreign-dominated economy. English, after all, is essential if one pursues a career in call centers or goes abroad. The use of the foreign language is therefore strongly campaigned by the present educational system.

The fining of students speaking in the native tongue in order to promote English has become a common practice in several schools. English is prescribed as the favored medium of instruction even if using native languages is more effective than the use of a foreign one.

Commercialization

One of the clearest manifestations of the Philippine educational system’s colonial orientation is the government’s abandonment of its financial responsibility for education to the public sector through drastic cuts for SUCs and the commercialization of various facets of public education.

This is in line with the dominant neoliberal dogma perpetuated by the U.S. and other world powers, which seeks to reduce government’s role in providing social services and regulating national economies in favor of the free reign of the market. Under the neoliberal doctrine, the only role for government in the economy is the facilitating of the smooth functioning of a market dominated by big business and foreign powers.

In the year 2010, the education budget comprised no more than 11.35 percent of the entire national budget from 30.78 percent at its peak in 1955. The P738 billion principal and interest debt payments in the 2012 budget is three-folds larger than the P224.9 billion education budget.

The results are predictable. Grave shortages of classrooms, desks, teachers, and textbooks persist in both primary and secondary levels while tertiary state school students and their families are increasingly bearing the burden of paying for the cost of education.

From 87.74 percent in 2000, the share of the government in the budget of SUC’s has steadily gone down to 65.58 percent in 2012, forcing school administrations to engage in various income generating projects. This is legitimized by the passage of the Higher Education Modernization Act of 1997 which

• authorizes the Boards of Regents of SUCs to fix tuition and other fee increases,
• directs SUCs to enter into joint ventures with private corporations, and
• mandates the privatization of services such as health, food, security, etc.

The University of the Philippines Visayas, for example, became the most expensive tertiary school in the whole Visayas with P1,000 per unit tuition. Only 13.225% of the student population availed of free tuition for the First Semester of this Academic Year while a combined 55.98% pay P600-P1,000 per unit tuition.

Deregulated private schooling

The situation is, of course, worse in private tertiary schools. After the Education Act of 1982 effectively gave these institutions free reign to increase tuition rates, a series of government guidelines only reinforced this setup where families are held hostage to yearly tuition and other fee hikes.

Under the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) Memorandum 13 Series of 1998, for instance, student consultations for fee increases practically amount to information dissemination by school administrations while miscellaneous fees are not covered under the memo.

Without regulation from government, the average tuition rates in private schools at the national level have increased from P257.41 per unit in 2001 to P501.22 per unit in 2010. Many private colleges and universities have been charging creative and even out-of-this world exorbitant fees such as follows:

• Land Infrastructure Maintenance and Development Fee (University of Cordilleras-Baguio)
• Installment Fee (University of the East)
• Power Charge Fee (Trinity University of Asia)
• Power Plant Development Fee (Miriam College)
• Spiritual Development Fee (St. Paul’s College)

Not surprisingly, private higher educational institutions have made it to the list of top 1,000 corporations in the country, including the Centro Escolar University, Far Eastern University, Manila Central University, Mapua Institute of Technology, and the University of the East.

The top 5 school earners in the country have earned P15.43 billion in gross revenues and P3.45 billion in net income in the past six years. But the experience of the past decades has proven the saying that “one must be willing to pay a high price to attain quality education” to be a fallacy.

The commercialization of tertiary education has not lead to an improvement in its quality. Data from CHEd itself admits that only 100 from among the 1,831 colleges and universities nationwide have adequate facilities. The performance in licensure exams also shows a low 34% average passing rate.

More importantly, because of the higher cost of education, many students at all levels are forced to stop schooling and forgo a brighter future. According to CHEd, for every 100 Grade 1 students only 23 enter college, while only 14 graduate. 

Instrument of reaction

In order for the educational system to reproduce the injustices of the present social order and reinforce the power of the dominant classes in society, education becomes an instrument of reaction. Opposition to the colonial and commercialized orientation of education is met with repression.

The existence of student councils and other kinds of student organizations are prohibited by many school administrations to let their students focus on their “studies.” Fraternities, sororities and especially activist groups are not recognized in many schools.

In other universities and colleges, student councils and other groups are co-opted to become mere satellite-belts that obey every whim of the school administration. Harsh school regulations are put in place to “discipline” students and organizations that are critical of school or government policies. Student publications are meanwhile expected to toe the line or are subjected to

• Harassment,
• Meddling of editorial policies,
• Censorship of editorial content,
• Withholding of publication funds,
• Padlocking of publication offices,
• Abolition of its very existence,
• Suspension and expulsion of student writers, or
• Filing of libel charges against them.

The College Editors Guild of the Philippines has documented 187 such cases of campus press freedom violations in the past year.[15]

Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transsexuals are widely discriminated against and victimized by school rules that repress their sexual orientation and identity – including the holding of “masculinity tests” for male school applicants, the prohibition of cross-dressing, etc.

Some schools are no different from prison houses with heavy police presence that aim to prevent critics of school policies from holding protests. Surveillance cameras are put in place to monitor and control the movement of their students. Student rallies are violently dispersed.

The state itself regularly intrudes in academic spaces with its iron hand through the direct and indirect presence of military forces in the campuses. Actual military detachments are even setup inside the premises of some school campuses, like in UP Mindanao.

Student Intelligence Networks are setup in campuses for the surveillance of student leaders and organizations that are vocal against school and government policies. Witch-hunting is rampant with progressives maliciously maligned as armed communist rebels and subversives.

Ruling classes and ruling ideas

This is, of course, not at all surprising for “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production…” and ultimately “the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”[16]

The interests of this ruling class – the maintenance of the social divide in its favor – are represented through various apparatuses like the educational system “as the common interest of all the members of society… the only rational, universally valid ones.”[17]

Education in this way becomes “the exercise of domination” that aims to indoctrinate its subjects “to adapt to the world of oppression.”[18] Social realities are obscured from the minds of the students. At the same time their capacity for critical thinking is blunted. They are forced to believe that learning is confined to the four walls of the classroom or the limits defined by authorities. Those who propose alternatives are suppressed in various ways.

It is in this way that the Philippine educational system has become colonial, commercialized, and repressive. It is designed to cater to the needs of foreign powers over our very own national development. It has become profit-oriented institutions that sell education as a commodity instead of providing it as a right. The students themselves become commodities that are disposed of according to the needs of the global market. Critical thinking and basic freedoms are curtailed to suppress opposition to this kind of setup.

Education reforms

What we need is a liberatory education that can serve the genuine aspirations of the people. At the very minimum, basic reforms can and must be instituted in the educational system:[19]

• The combined spending for education at all levels must be equal to 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product as mandated by the UNESCO,
• Universal basic education should be provided by doubling the number of the country’s high schools and making preschool free,
• Shortages in the school system should be addressed by rechannelling P115 billion to education from debt servicing, conditional cash transfers, and other questionable allocations,
• Strengthen the teaching of history, society, and culture and  promote the national and regional languages, and
• Explore alternative modes and methods of learning.

The Kabataan Partylist has a legislative agenda that aims to address the  longstanding  ills  of  the  Philippine  educational system while mobilizing the youth in the campuses and  the  streets  to  put  more  pressure  on  government vis-à-vis these issues. Some of our House Bills in Congress include:

• HB 4791: The Anti-No Permit, No Exam Bill, which seeks to end the no permit, no exam policy,
• HB 1962: 6% GDP for Education Bill, which mandates education spending equal to 6 percent of the GDP,
• HB 3708: Tuition Moratorium Bill, which seeks to stop all tuition increases in the next 3 years,
• HB 4287: Tuition Regulation Bill, which seeks to regulate tuition and other fee increases,
• HB 4332: Campus Press Freedom Bill, which seeks to defend campus press freedom, and
• HB 4842: Students Rights Bill, which seeks to institute a genuine Magna Carta of Students.

But piecemeal reforms are not enough. With society continued to be dominated by foreign powers and their local big landlord and comprador partners, Philippine education would remain a commercialized enterprise geared towards exporting cheap labor to the demands of the international market.

Change the system

The struggle for education reforms therefore goes side by side with the task of creating bigger social changes. It is anchored on the struggle to transform an unjust social system. In the long-run, we would like an educational system that is nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented.[20]

Education is nationalist if it is “based on the needs of the nation and the goals of the nation.”[21] As eloquently said by Renato Constantino:

The object is not merely to produce men and women who can read and write or who can add and subtract. The primary object is to produce a citizenry that appreciates and is conscious of its nationhood and has national goals for the betterment of the community.[22]

Education is scientific if it propagates scientific thinking against superstition and subjectivism, integrates theory and practice, facilitates the free exchange and sharing of critical discourses, and contributes to national industrialization and the revival of domestic industries.

Education is mass-oriented if it is valued as a universal right for all. This means free and accessible quality education for all. This also means an end to discrimination on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity, race, among others, and the promotion of a truly democratic culture.

History has proven that our collective action remains our most potent weapon for effecting change. Recent events from the Arab Spring, the European strikes, the campus shutdowns in Chile, to the now global Occupy movement are testaments to its continuing validity.

We can attain a more empowering education for the people only if we overhaul the rotten system and change society itself.

Notes

How much of the Philippines have you visited? Find out at Lakbayan!

Created by Eugene Villar.

By the Cagayan de Oro River in Tibasak, Brgy. Macasandig, Cagayan de Oro City.

“Mahadlok mi kung ulan kay mudako ang tubig.” There used to be some houses by the river shore where some men and women were busy washing their clothes.

Just a little further ahead is the covered court, lately swelling with crowds, pitched tents trucks and buses bearing relief goods and volunteers going to and fro.

The river widened four-fold, we were told by a little boy. as other children ran along around us, playing in the field by the road. All that’s left of their homes are ruble.

I arrived in Cagayan de Oro City with my mother last December 27 to lend a hand to the relief efforts for the victims of tropical storm Sendong.

My parents helped arranged the turning over of donations from Cebu City to the affected members of the Northern Mindanao media. We stayed in the Balay Mindanaw Peace Center headed by my ninong, Tito Kaloy Manlupig.

A boy draws his experience in an art therapy session with children affected by Sendong.

On the 28th, I tagged along with my ninang, Tita Bane Agbon, around various evacuation centers and communities devastated by Sendong. Tita Bane and the volunteers of the Kids for Peace Foundation were conducting their preliminary assessment of these areas.

We were trying to make sense of how kids make sense of the catastrophe. “Nabahaan pud mo?” “Unsa kadako inyo balay?” I was told these were common questions asked by the children.

The Kids for Peace is planning to hold for psycho-social therapy sessions with the children of these locations sometime in January.

Evacuees line up to get donations.

Those we spoke to described rampaging flood waters that hit them fast and hard with massive amounts of mud and debris.

The destruction was not immediately visible on the main road from the airport. It only became apparent when we proceeded to the areas along the river the next day.

People are busy brushing mud off furniture and appliances. Random items, from toothbrushes, bibles, to bed foams being dried, are found on the roof of various homes.

Balsa Mindanao volunteers distribute donations for the evacuees in Macasandig Elementary School.

Lines filled with clothes left to dry seem to be everywhere. Not a few are busy washing clothes of mud. Boots are in fashion.

In the Brgy Kauswagan Elementary School evacuation center, only 14 of the 34 families are left. The rest have returned to their communities.

But some return to the center after a day of cleaning up their houses. Others dreaded sleep. We were told that they were afraid of the voices asking to be saved that they imagined hearing.

It only took seconds for the water to rise. All were caught unprepared. Some did not have televisions or radios. They were not warned by local officials.

A 6 months old baby was placed inside a laundry basin to be saved.

Balsa Mindanao volunteers distribute donations for the evacuees in Macasandig Elementary School.

The next day fellow traveler Karlos Manlupig brought me along to the Balsa Mindanao relief drive by progressive groups where I also met some of my Mindanao-based colleagues in Kabataan Partylist.“Naa’y relief diha,” I heard someone ask as our van passed by. This was a common refrain in affected communities, I was told.

Some evacuees, however, share that more than charitable donations what they’re more concerned about is rebuilding their homes and means of livelihood.

Iponan Elementary School, Cagayan de Oro City.

Flood water level etched in class room black board.

We used to joke back in high school that there’s no classes whenever it rains because the blackboards are wet. Here, the blackboard literally marks how high the flood waters went:

There are children who were afraid to return to school because the textbooks assigned to them were all wet and muddied.

These kinds of disasters will further strain the already inadequate Aquino regime budget for education with more classroom, chair, desk, and textbook shortages.

In the first place, such wanton destruction could have been mitigated if not for the government’s coddling of large-scale mining and transnational plantations that replaced upland forests and lack of adequate disaster-preparedness measures and budget.

Damaged textbooks.

To state the obvious, social media accounts of the disaster, from photos to testimonies, remain largely confined to the middle and upper classes. The accounts by urban poor and working masses victimized by Sendong come from those with access to computers, Internet, and other new technologies.

So, as Spivak denies in her usual obscure manner, can the subaltern speak? These people would readily share their most harrowing experience if asked.

Fishermen cast their nets in the mouth of Cagayan de Oro River in the eve of the storm. Instead of fishes, it caught a lot of other unexpected things. It saved many lives.

“In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements, must see the bright future and must pluck up our courage.”

But if one looks at popular portrayals of the Filipino youth, it would seem that our concept of social involvement has been reduced to liking facebook causes or volunteering for some charity drive.

Nationalism itself has been diminished to being dutiful citizens, graduating on time and finding work in some call center, or sending remittances from abroad.

Collective politics, mass actions, and revolutionary causes, it is said, are already a thing of the past. But is this the only horizon for the contemporary youth?

Our nation’s own history shows how the younger generations of every epoch are confronted by two choices: either to side with the oppressors and exploiters or to struggle side by side with the toiling masses for social transformation.

Revolutionary Beginnings

It was the younger generations who formed the core of the Katipunan, the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of the late 19th Century. These patriotic youth led the liberation of the country from 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. The young revolutionary leaders of this period envisioned the establishment of a truly independent Filipino nation.

But the American colonizers came and stole the country’s independence after a genocidal war that the cost the lives of more than a million Filipinos. The colonizers installed local puppets from the ranks of ilustrado families whose sons and daughters would come to dominate the country’s political scene up to the present.

This did not prevent the rise of a new generation of young Filipinos, however, who would take up the struggle left by their forebears.

Young workers, peasants, and intellectuals would have a big role in the rise of the Philippine labor movement, the founding of the old Partido Komunista Pilipinas, and the revival of armed anti-colonial struggles against the American and Japanese occupations.

Indeed, many of those who became anti-Japanese guerrillas during the Second World War were mere teenagers when they took up arms.

A Gathering Storm

Defiant students clench their fist in the 1971 Diliman Commune.

Formal independence was finally declared on July 4, 1946. But the indirect control of the former colonizers over the country’s politics, economy, and culture persisted.

The American colonizers may have departed, but they left behind a whole generation of loyal puppets from the same haciendero classes to run the new republic. Various unequal agreements, the U.S. military bases, and an acquiescent government became the hallmarks of the country’s new semi-colonial status.

It did not take long for the youth of this period to begin questioning the prevailing social order that continued to concentrate the country’s wealth to the ruling elites and foreign powers while the masses remain mired in poverty.

A rejuvenated nationalism and a strong conviction to correct historical injustices pushed a generation to go beyond the confines of their classrooms and integrate with the peasant, workers, and urban poor communities in pursuit of genuine freedom and social justice.

As the whole world rose up in the 60s and 70s from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American and European anti-war movement, to the Third World national liberation struggles, the Filipino youth also led massive weekly protest actions that are now collectively famous as the First Quarter Storm of the 1970s.

These empowered youth pointed out the need for their sector to unite with the country’s exploited masses in struggle to root out the three basic problems afflicting the country:

• Imperialism that subordinated the country to the interests of foreign powers,
• Feudalism or the persistence of land monopoly amidst grave landlessness and rural poverty, and
• Bureaucrat Capitalism or the use of government as a business enterprise.

Going Underground

A company of New People's Army guerrillas in Eastern Visayas.

But President Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in the year 1972 to contain this unprecedented upsurge of the mass movement and ultimately protect the interests of his own clique and class.

Marcos had student councils and publications closed. He had both radical organizations and the traditional opposition parties suppressed and their known leaders, members, and supporters imprisoned, killed, and tortured.

Human rights organizations have recorded 70,000 political prisoners, 35,000 victims of torture, and 3,257 extrajudicial killings. [2] The cases of tens of thousands of other victims have not been fortunate enough to be documented.

This only stoked the fires of defiance all the more. All democratic spaces for resistance may have been curtailed but this only push thousands of youth of this time to go underground and join the armed struggle in the countryside. The tyranny of the Marcos dictatorship did not prevent these young revolutionaries from risking their lives for the Filipino people.

The reestablished Communist Party of the Philippines-led revolutionary movement emerged as the most dedicated, unswerving, and respected opposition to Marcos. It attracted some of the most talented and idealistic youth, who with their boundless energy, commitment, and creativity, became the core of a broad anti-dictatorship struggle.

The Radical Tide Ebbs

A portion of the mammoth EDSA 1 mobilization that toppled the Marcos dictatorship.

The fall of Marcos in 1986, however, signaled a shifting interest among the youth. Many who grew up under the dictatorship believed that Marcos is the root of all evil and his removal would already usher in genuine social change. With Marcos gone, many in the post-EDSA generations would thus become less inclined to be socially involved.

Grave errors and internal weaknesses in the revolutionary movement also led many activists to become disillusioned. Some would form NGOs that seek to institute minute changes within the system instead of endeavoring for far-reaching social change.

A whole generation was fed with the mistaken belief that the time of collective struggles is long past and a world centered entirely on the self and an ever expanding consumer culture has no alternative.

But the basic problems afflicting Philippine society did not go away with the deposed dictatorship. Peasants marching to Malacanang to demand genuine land reform would be shot by Cory Aquino’s soldiers in the infamous 1987 Mendiola Massacre.

Seven of ten farmers do not own their land. Poverty remains widespread as the price of basic commodities and unemployment continue to rise. Around 4.5 million workers are jobless [3] while 4,030 Filipinos go abroad to find work daily. [4]

Marcos left behind $26 billion of debt, a figure that has now ballooned to more than $100 billion after a few successive administrations. The economy remains backward agrarian, and dependent on foreign capital.

The social divide remains as deep as ever, with the 25 wealthiest Filipinos possessing a net worth equal to the combined earnings of the poorest 55.4 million, [5] and political repression continues to be used by those in power to promote and protect their interests.

Current Challenges

Jubilant crowds during the 2001 EDSA 2 popular uprising.

It is the force of persistent social realities that continue to inspire significant sections of today’s youth to reaffirm our commitment to serve the people.

Using new technologies alongside classical modes of political organizing and mobilization, youth activists were at the forefront of the popular uprising that removed Joseph Estrada from Malacanang in 2001.

However, because the same social order persisted despite the change of leadership, the next president only continued the rotten policies of the past administrations. Gloria Arroyo would even overtake the rapaciousness and brutality of the regime that it replaced.

Her regime would be hounded by mammoth corruption cases, electoral fraud, and human rights violations as epitomized by the brutal Ampatuan and Hacienda Luisita massacres. There are over 1,206 victims of extrajudicial killings under Arroyo. [6]

The Arroyo regime outraged the people, but the mechanical attempts at repeating the EDSA-formula failed to draw millions into the streets like in 1986 and 2001. Arroyo would stay in power until 2010 when another landlord would be elected into office.

Noynoy Aquino would handily win by playing with the people’s anti-Arroyo sentiments and getting the support of foreign powers and local elites.

Underneath Aquino’s flimsy anti-corruption and reformist rhetoric is the continuation of long-discredited policies from budget cuts for social services, disdain for genuine land reform, to subservience to foreign powers.

The most serious crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s is now wreaking havoc on the lives of millions worldwide. This global catastrophe will further worsen the domestic crisis in the Philippines.

Budget cuts on social services, pushing down of workers’ wages, massive unemployment, and rising costs of living in the US, Europe, and Japan is breaking the Hollywood-manufactured delusion that life is getting better under the present system.

These sorry conditions are once more reaffirming the truth that our collective action is our most potent weapon against social injustice and oppression.

Reaffirming the Struggle

Thousands join protest actions against Aquino's budget cuts for education and social services in recent months.

There are popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, massive anti-austerity strikes in Greece, Spain, and other parts of Europe, months-long campus shutdowns in Chile, and a now global Occupy movement.

The systemic nature of the problems facing the nation show that simply swapping leaders every few years cannot meet the genuine aspirations of the Filipino people. Without fundamental change in the system, there is no bright future for the youth of today.

We are hence confronted with the challenge to partake in the collective struggle to transform an unjust social order that benefits a few while reducing the majority to poverty. Only by winning the people’s national democratic struggle can we attain this.

The youth should stand with the Filipino people in asserting our national sovereignty against foreign control over our politics, economy, and culture. We should push for genuine land reform, national industrialization, and the democratic rights of peasants, workers, and all marginalized sectors of society.

The present generation must overcome the apathy, indifference, and individualism promoted by the dominant system to do this.

Being at the prime of our physical condition and possessing a strong sense of justice, boundless optimism, creativity, idealism, and openness to new and radical ideas, the youth are the most ready to serve the people and fight for a better world.

If we can prevail over our weaknesses and integrate ourselves with the toiling masses, then we can become a most vital force for social transformation.

Only with the participation of thousands of young men and women can the struggle for national liberation and genuine democracy achieve victory.

Notes

1. I presented different variations of this piece in the first-ever 26 November 2011 Panay and Guimaras State Universities and Colleges Student Summit, and other occasions. This discussion is indebted to the “State of the Youth” primer being prepared by the Kabataan Partylist National Office for much of its points.

2. Alfred McCoy, “Dark Legacy: Human Rights under Marcos Regime,” Hartford Web Publishing, 18 October 1999. Retrieved 15 March 2011 from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html

3. Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Matuwid na Landas ng Pakikibaka (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., July 2011), 6.

4. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration in Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Matuwid na Landas ng Pakikibaka (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., July 2011), 6.

5. Forbes Asia in Praymer sa Pambansang Kalagayan: Mga Pangakong Napako (Quezon City: IBON Foundation Inc., January 2011), 4.

6.2010 Year-End Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines (Quezon City: KARAPATAN Alliance for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2010), 16.

“You’re deceiving yourself! Even if you did believe in God, it would make no sense to believe alone. You’d have to believe in him the same way the poor do; you’d have to become one of them. It’s only by eating what they eat, living where they live, laughing at the same jokes, and getting angry whenever they do that you can believe in their God. If you’re leading an utterly different life, you can’t be worshiping the same God they are. God is fair enough to know it’s not a question of reason or logic but how you live your life.” (204)

Orhan Pamuk,
Snow

Lumping together the “nightmarish” experience under all victorious and defeated revolutionary movements from the “Stalinist” show trials to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Kampuchean “Killing Fields,” the people are admonished to just endure the exploitative and oppressive conditions of the present because any attempt to change will only lead to something worse.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes gives another variation to this old worn-out theme. While keeping the writing style light and filled with humorous anecdotes, making the novel a delightful read, Llosa ultimately tackles grave issues confronting Peruvian society at the height of the Shining Path’s guerilla war against the US-sponsored government in the late 1980s.

The disappearance of three militiamen in a remote rural outpost in the mountains of Peru is the starting point of the novel. Two civil guards, Captain Lituma and his adjutant Tomasito are sent to investigate. Were they murdered by the guerrillas? Have they gone to join them voluntarily? Or were they sacrificed to the mountain spirits by the superstitious locals?

We jump from story to story about the lives of the two investigators and the people around them, including that of Tomasito’s love affair with the prostitute Mercedes. But all of these serve as a mere plot device to allow Llosa to point his guns at the peasant-based Sendero Luminoso.

Narrated in a mocking tone, Llosa does not hide his disdain for the revolutionary movement. He writes how these revolutionary multitudes took two French tourists hostage, conducted trials with their people’s court in a rural village, and interrogated a “bourgeois” philanthropist before her execution.

Llosa’s impressionistic accounts of these tribunals paint the revolutionaries as a ruthless and dogmatic bunch only out to eliminate perceived enemies. He rips their violence out of its context as a logical response to the everyday violence inflicted upon these previously submissive masses by unjust social structures and its agents. Without any deeper look at the crimes wreaked by the old semi-feudal order on the people, the novel jumps directly into how the movement, bearing their rifles, waving their red flags, painting their slogans, and reciting their blood-curdling speeches, incited people to mindless violence:

They took turns and patiently explained the crimes, real and inferred, that these servants of a government drenched in blood, these accomplices of repression and torture, had committed against each and every one of them, and their children and their children’s children. They instructed them, they encouraged them to take part to speak without fear and reprisal, for the armed power of the people protected them.

This nameless and faceless mass that included men, women, and children alike, like the blob of science fiction thrillers, and now given the power to put things right after centuries of colonial and landlord oppression apparently embody Llosa’s worst nightmare.

Little by little, breaking out of their timidity and confusion, spurred on by their own fear, by the atmosphere of exaltation, and by darker motivation – old quarrels, buried resentments, silent envy, family hatreds – the townspeople began to speak… By midday, many Andamarcans had found the courage to walk to the middle of the square and present their complaints and recriminations and point the finger at bad neighbors, bad friends, bad kin.

Seizing power from the landlord and bourgeois classes that have concentrated economic wealth, political power, and military force in their hands and establishing a more humane and socially just dispensation sometimes necessitates the use of armed struggle on the part of the oppressed. For the majority whose very status as the oppressed forced was upon them through the violence of the oppressing classes, their use of revolutionary violence as an instrument forced upon them for their own liberation is justified.

As long ago pointed out by Mao, it is exactly the tyranny of the despotic landlords themselves who drove the peasants to violent revolts of the kind scorned by Llosa. It is in areas where the worst outrages were perpetrated that the most violent reprisals occurred.

The peasants are clear-sighted. Who is bad and who is not, who is the worst and who is not quite so vicious, who deserves severe punishment and who deserves to be let off lightly — the peasants keep clear accounts, and very seldom has the punishment exceeded the crime.

Without exerting such a force, the peasants cannot defeat the entrenched power of the landowning classes. The pursuit of fundamental social change cannot but take the form of an act of violence by which one class defeats another, how in this instance the peasantry defeats the feudal classes.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.

And it is precisely this insight that is lost on Llosa, which makes the thought of radical social upheaval a nightmare. And it is exactly his being a part of the ruling Peruvian elites that makes the idea of the redistribution of wealth and the peasants taking up arms to enforce this so repugnant.

This is also the explanation why the revolutionaries are perceived by Llosa and his lot as aliens: “They hear, but they don’t listen, and they don’t want to understand what you say to them… They’re from another planet.” It is the class divide that is speaking here, the unbridgeable gap between two irreconcilable interests that only shows how deeply ingrained the ruling ideology, the prevailing worldview of the ruling classes is in Llosa’s own consciousness and consequent construction of his novel.

Mao once observed in the Talks at Yenan Forum that different classes in different class societies always put the political criterion above artistic merit in judging literary and artistic works. His counsel for the oppressed classes to similarly criticize works on the basis of their attitude to the people and progressive or historical significance should prove to be instructive a propos Death in the Andes:

Some works which politically are downright reactionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more reactionary their content and the higher their artistic quality, the more poisonous they are to the people, and the more necessary it is to reject them.

In fact, it was more of a one-sided talk with me relegated to polite nods and one-syllable replies like “yes” and “okay.” But it was an interesting one. Perhaps noticing the pamphlets I kept in the envelope I was bearing, he launched into a discussion on the centrality of religion in social life.

He explained the distinction between the Adventist Church of which he was a partisan and the Roman Catholic Church of which I was baptized into as a child, claiming that his Church represented the authentic teachings of God.

The Church, he claimed, was tarnished by the impingement of Pagan beliefs and practices in its own doxa. While some of its traditions are correct, he said that its institutions and bureaucracy has deteriorated through the centuries. The Church’s repression of other spiritual denominations, he added, did not end with the Inquisition but continues up to this day where Catholic fundamentalists in other parts of the world are already imposing the celebration of Sabbath during Sundays instead of any other day by force.

But instead of crediting these instances to political expediency, class struggle, or the thirst for power, he said that it all boils down to religion and the Holy Bible.  It is not a matter of politics or, more importantly, economics, he said, but of spirituality. The economic crisis now rocking the entire world is just a shadow play of more profound forces. Religion, he said, is the key. It is the foundation upon which all human acts are founded on.

Not wanting to offend the old man, he was so soft-spoken his voice was barely audible and his arguments didn’t seem to reach the other passengers, I refrained from launching into my own take on the matter. All I would have said is that men cannot conjure visions of angels if they are not in a position to live – that is to be able to eat, drink, dress, and dwell – and to produce the means to satisfy these very needs and ultimately sustain human life.

As a philosopher once put it, “production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order.” In all societies in history, he adds, “the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.”

Consequently, he concludes that “the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.”

Christmas is just around the corner and its sad to know that there’d be less food on the table for everyone this holiday season.

The seemingly peaceful landscape framed by the bus window also masks deeper contradictions that are also alluded to in the novel, the ceaseless struggle between the peasants and the landlords – a struggle that all too easily slip into violence as exemplified by the case of the Hacienda Luisita Massacre of picketing farm workers in 2004.

This violence is given concrete form in the novel in the form of the brutal repression of the US-sponsored Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the antagonist of the Mirabal sisters: the Las Mariposas who sacrificed the comforts of their middle class upbringing and even their lives for national liberation and democracy.

In the Time of the Butterflies follows the lives of Dede, Maria Teresa, Minerva, and Patria as they grow up under the authoritarian regime. Like any other women, they also meet men, have amorous affairs, and start their own families. But their stories would also include participation in the underground resistance movement, getting imprisoned, and tortured.

One of the novel’s failures has to do with Alvarez’s framing of the Mirabal’s struggles and the Dominican people’s plight along the lines of simply attaining the formal freedoms of Western-style democracy. Consequently, this unstated assumption becomes the basis of the author’s own thinly-veiled judgment of the choices made by some of the characters in the novel. This becomes conspicuous in the way Minerva’s husband Manolo, who continued the guerrilla struggle in the mountains after the fall of Trujillo, is scorned as a “disgrace” and “too radical” while Maria Teresa’s husband Leandro who went down the hills to become “a big builder in the capital” is applauded for making the right decision. This is despite the lack of any fundamental change in the new regime in terms of giving land to the peasants, decent wages for workers, more opportunities for local small business as opposed to U.S. multinationals, and putting an end to human rights abuses and corruption.

As a whole, however, Alvarez’s fictionalized account of the lives of the four Mirabal sisters is still a rewarding one. Told from the vantage point of Dede, the one who survived the treacherous massacre of the butterflies, its account of everyday life under the Trujillo, the horrors that accompanied it, as well as the little and big acts of defiance by the people is an entrancing one. It is in honor of these courageous women that November 25, the day of the Mirabal’s murder, is observed as the “International Day Against Violence Against Women.”