Why the Phillipine left actively participates in “self-kettling”—an anarchist analysis and response

~ Simoun Magsalin~

Every year, the left in the Philippines marches on Commonwealth Avenue in anticipation of the President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA). Supposedly, our ultimate destination is the Batasang Pambansa, the venerable campus of the House of Representatives, where both houses of congress, elected officials of the executive branch, bureaucrats, businessmen, oligarchs, and dynasts all sit to listen to the President of the Philippines drone on about this and that state policy.

One might imagine that the cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), or any of the many other underground and armed parties (both communist and Islamist), would salivate at the thought of sabotaging the SONA, thus dealing a crippling blow to the Philippine ruling class. But the security of the ruling class is actually one of the most coherent aspects of the Philippine state. Thus such an act is nigh impossible under the current balance of power.

Instead, the Philippines’ left —social democratic, national democratic, reaffirmist, rejectionist, etc.— marches on Commonwealth until they reach a police barricade, at which point they then march in place, wave red flags, listen to speakers, and watch cultural performances.

From the contingent I was in, I watched as the leaders of the mobilisation talk to the police and shake their hands, likely in making some kind of agreement to keep the peace. We then marched until we reached the police barricade, effectively kettling ourselves into the delimited spaces outlined by the police.

I am no stranger to marches in the Phillipines, and in every march I’ve been to or seen the left actively chooses to self-kettle, even on May Day, International Women’s Day, independence day, etc. For those who don’t know, kettling is a police tactic to delimit and control the size and movement of protesters, usually with lines of armed cops with riot shields, and occasionally with barricades.

Generally, kettling allows the state to render protests and mobilisations functionally harmless and insignificant to state power. By “self-kettle”, I mean that organisers work with the police to delimit their own mobilisation, thus functionally making these mobilisations nothing but worthless rituals.

So why does the Philippine left do this? Do they simply not know better? Doubtful. It is no secret that the various left forces are pretty much obsessed with their own marginalisation and stagnation. It is clear when one reads the texts and documents of the Philippine left that they read and engage in constant dialogue with the theories of various left groups all across the world. This means that they are fully aware of creative ways of organising, protesting, and mobilising. Thus ignorance is clearly not the explanation.

Rather, there are ideological and structural forces at play that compel the Philippine left to self-kettle.

In terms of ideology, there is, of course, the ongoing Third Rectification Movement within the reaffirmist left and national democracy. This rectification movement doubles down on the CPP’s invariant (Maoist) theses developed in the 60s and 70s and then reaffirmed (hence “reaffirmist”) in the Second Great Rectification in the 90s. This Third Rectification Movement considers many ideas outside the ambit of national democracy and Maoism as “revisionist” and to be dismissed and “rectified.” But this cannot be the whole story. While the reaffimist left and national democracy remain the biggest blocs in the Philippine left (other than Kilusan, a reaffirmist group that split from them a few decades ago), they are not the entirety of the Philippine left.

Rather, the ideological force at play in self-kettling is that the left is accepting its role as “izquierda permitida” or “permitted left”—an idea developed in Latin America. In this sense, the left accepts and collaborates in their own policing to permit their existence.

Why does the left do this? For the materialists among you (whether marxist or anarchist), you may know that materiality precedes ideology, that material conditions inform ideological positions. This begs the question: What are the structural factors that compel the Philippine left to accept—or be forced to accept—their role as the permitted left?

This “crisis of revolutionary leadership” led many in the working class and petty bourgeoisie to follow the leadership of Cory Aquino and the liberal bourgeoisie, which then worked with putschists in the military to overthrow the dictatorship in the 1986 People Power Revolution and usher in the “EDSA Republic” (called so because the revolution took place on the avenue known as EDSA). This left the CPP outside the newly emerging “EDSA consensus,” preventing them from having a stake in post-dictatorship statecraft.

The boycott mistake and numerous other issues (like bloody purges) in the CPP led to the splintering of the Marxist movement during the Second Great Rectification—also called as the reaffirmist–rejectionist schism. While the CPP and their allies were able to regroup, they never reached the same heights of mobilisation as during the dictatorship. Meanwhile, the schismatic factions failed to regroup into a coherent bloc (they were only united by their rejectionism), leading them to splinter and splinter again, sometimes even merging and reforming, until the form we see today.

Thus the weakness of today is at least in part rooted in this fractured and fragmentary condition. The Philippine left simply does not have the organisational power and resources to mobilise anything else other than what the state permits. One imagines senior cadres waiting endlessly to accrue more resources before they can try anything riskier. Rather than a judgemental assessment, this is really just localised example of the general condition of the left all around the world since the fall of the USSR, which I term as the post-communist condition, which caused a rightward shift in all national left milieus. Thus the structural legacies of post-communism and historical weakness results in a balance of power that does not permit the Philippine left to do anything other than permitted protests.

There is another structural and material factor in play, the theory of which I am still working on. Briefly, there is a problem of why the Philippines has not seen a mass-based urban insurrection since EDSA Dos and EDSA Tres in 2001, even while the whole world has undergone several phases of urban insurrections: the Arab Spring, Yellow Vests, George Floyd uprisings, insurrections in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia etc. The Philippines seems immune to urban insurrections since 2001.

One explanation I have suggested is that the CPP and their armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), are at inadvertent fault. According to former cadres and fighters, there is a heavy pressure within the CPP for young cadres to the move to the countryside and join the NPA. Effectively, this divests the cities of the most militant activists. This happened before: fighters with the Huk rebellion (the first communist insurgency in the 40s to 50s) were enticed to leave the urban movement to settle the frontier of Cotabato, tying them to the battle against the state on the island of Mindanao.

In both cases, the effect is the same, namely to divest militancy from the core territories. The permitted left thus cannot use force against the state with the CPP funnelling militants to the countryside to wage people’s war. With the “most advanced” sections of the working class absconding to the boondocks, the state consolidates its power in the cities and core territories. While state power draws back from the peripheries, it renews its control over the core structures the permitted left.

Is there any way out? The anarchist, of course, answers that the solution would be to break out of the permitted left and become the “izquierda radical”—the radical left. Words are wind, so to speak, but this break requires the kind of revolutionary or insurrectionary infrastructure to defend and support the breaking of kettles towards a disruption of social order, thus opening the possibility of anarchy and the communisation of social life. Such a break requires self-directed militancy to break with the self-kettling leadership. It would require a kind of proletarian agency and autonomy that builds towards the self-abolition of our class. As always, the insurrection is social, not military.

To think of “proletarian fronts” against “bourgeois fronts”—as the CPP does—is to think of the proletariat in bourgeois terms, rather than its own terms as a class of alienated people who no longer want and can no longer be as commodified beings. To be proletarianised is not—as the CPP thinks—to accept the program of communism or Maoism, but rather to exist as a negation of humanity, as a being alienated from their humanity. Thus the negation of this negation is itself the social force of the insurrection. Increasingly, this is not merely the spectacular violence of an insurrectionary attack, but the construction of communities of care—an “insurrectionary mutual aid” as some had suggested—that mitigates proletarianisation and alienation (as these cannot be ultimately overcome without the final abolition of capitalism), building the kind of safety networks that can defend and support those who do break out of the permitted left or break with those who abscond to the hills.

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Thanks to dyownie at mstdn.social for asking the question that prompted this article