*start of message* tried to stay silent all throughout september and sum
all things that this accursed month of stressful hell broke loose come
october. failed, obviously. terribly failed. i am sober and i prophesy
strikes that hopefully would not end as only good starts of sparks that
exist for a nanosecond then later cease to be. speaking of such, two
strikes of matches after the cut
1) a draft abstract for the boni 150 conference of [contend] this coming thursday. paper tentatively titled "Bonifacio and General China: Power, Liberation and ‘Terrorism’ in Orchid"; and 2) "The Fight for Education: Global Upheavals as Rehearsals," the uncut version of "The Fight for Education as Dress Rehearsal" which was published way back 2011 in UP Forum. the latter a lengthy celebration, the former a brief sigh of critique. i share these things in anticipation of the aforesaid vision of strikes. *end of message*
Abstract
In the comic book Orchid, written by Tom Morello and
illustrated by Scott Hepburn, General China’s mask became an icon like
Bonifacio’s image—that become powerful enough to bestow magical powers to
whoever possesses it. The qualified and deserving (though not necessarily
prepared) ‘saint’ to wear the mask is Orchid. This paper will attempt to
investigate the struggle and development of the titular character from a
16-year old prostitute to the oppressed's hero / liberator and the oppressor's
villain / terrorist through the use of a relic, in the same way as we may
derive wisdom and power from the Supremo.
Functioning as keeper of General China's legacy /
ideology, the mask becomes a symbol, just like Bonifacio; and trying it on and
reading through it is dangerous, even deadly. Hailing from the millenarian
movement tradition, the superstitious “shadow rebels” led by Orchid as the new
General China went against the science and technology of the ruling class,
ending in a utopia with no leaders, thus mirroring the hopes of the Occupy
movements which have been criticized for lacking leadership and programme; and
for having neither structure nor strategy to achieve whatever the change the
99% wanted—tendencies which manifest in Orchid.
The comic book was published during the peak of the
Occupy protests, wherein another mask—the guy fawkes mask—became an icon of
defiance. Set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic world “when the seas rose,
genetics codes were smashed,” Orchid
serves as a critique of the so-called “climate change” at first glance; but
Morello, former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, neither ended nor wallowed
in environmental / eco-critical analysis, focused on what really caused
environmental destruction: class conflict.
***
The Fight for
Education: Global Upheavals as Rehearsals
In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
novel Petals of Blood, Munira, the
teacher in a ramshackle school in the likewise downtrodden, pastoral village of Ilmorog, realized that he “would have to face the drought as a challenge”
and he “would not be able to teach under these conditions where theory seems a
mockery of reality.” The “drought,” whether taken figuratively or literally, is
a result of the adherence of the local bureaucrat puppets to their imperialist
masters leading to state abandonment of the people by depriving them of
education and other basic social services, to give way to neoliberal interests.
The Philippines and the
rest of the world, however, began facing this drought with a raised fist, as we
have seen as theatre, had we attended or witnessed rallies, or as films, had we
observed massive protests through new (or even old) media. As observed in
recent nationwide strikes last September, students, teachers, administrators
and employees joined hands in mass demonstrations against budget cuts and for
greater state subsidy. These mass protests exposed “the naked contradictions of
capitalism” and showed “the continuing resistance of the people against a dying
system,” according to the Director of the Student Housing and UP Sociology
Professor Gerry Lanuza.
The global actions of
young people tells us that “the global dominance of neoliberal thinking result
to social spending cutbacks and other anti-people impacts” and “the protests
are proof of the vital and growing opposition of peoples around the world,
especially the youth, to neoliberal policies,” according to Kabataan Partylist
Representative Raymond Palatino. “Our fight for education” then, as UP
Sociology Professor Sarah Raymundo puts it, is “an anti-imperialist fight, a
political fight that weaves into the worldwide demand for a system that will
respond to human needs to replace the current one that is ruled by the logic of
profit accumulation.”
Described by Raymundo as
a system that “demands unnecessary suffering from the laboring people” and “allows
for looters and murderers to lead nation-states,” global capitalism provokes
revolt—as seen, not just in mass actions for free education, but in
demonstrations with a broad range of demands such as the popular international
Occupy protests.
The Theatre Production
“All modern revolt,” as
Robert Brustein’s The Theatre of Revolt
quotes Albert Camus’s The Rebel, is
“born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with unjust and incomprehensible
condition.” Such is the case with a system that prioritizes profit over people,
corporate greed over social services. Thus Munira’s realization of the
necessity to go beyond the classroom setting paints a picture, not just of
education crisis, but, more importantly, its roots in the global capitalist
system espousing “oppressive acts” that, as Paulo Freire depicts in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “prevent
people from being human.” Acts depriving anyone of any constitutionally-guaranteed
rights (such as that of education), are then oppressive—a violation of the “dehumanized”
people struggling for “rehumanization,” as these acts later become reactionary, to suppress
and to counter the people’s actions to struggle.
In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal said that the objective is
to change the passive spectators (the people) “into subjects, into actors,
transformers of dramatic action.” Boal’s views is in line with Freire who
criticized the “oppressor consciousness” that reduces everything to “objects of
its domination,” and thus treats the oppressed as “things,” rather than
empowering them as subjects, This advancement of people from the passive to the
active is what Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt
(translated as “distancing” or “alienation” or “estrangement” or
“defamilarization” effect) or V-effect is all about, as it subverts the idea of
catharsis in theatre—where the spectators become mere objects by totally
empathizing and identifying with the subjects, i.e. actors, to the point of
losing themselves in emotional trance, which is often the case in both the
subject and the object.
“A representation that
alienates,” Brecht declares, “is one which allows us to recognize the subject,
but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” Such estrangement makes the
critical observer conscious, instead of being drawn and drowned into the
illusion of the narrative. In line with this is Freire’s claim that “education
suffers from narration sickness,” manifested as teachers, deliberately or
otherwise, preach absolute, static reality, thus the emphasis on memorization,
rather than critical analysis. Such is also the case of the bourgeois theatre
that, according to Brecht, “emphasize the timelessness of its objects.” In the
classroom setting, Freire showed the object-subject dichotomy with the “banking
definition of education” where the students (depositories) become “mere
objects” while the teachers (depositors) become the “Subjects of the learning
process.”
The banking definition,
in today’s context, may be taken to another layer of interpretation by
associating it with the neoliberal policies—encouraging deregulation,
privatization and liberalization—imposed by the so-called 1% to the 99%, where
the former, in Freire’s words, “halt by any method (including violence) any
action” that “could awaken” the latter “to the need for unity.” Despite the
oppressors’ reactionary tendencies, as portrayed in the Occupy protests, and other
international struggles, not just for free education, but for liberation, the
oppressed 99% are finding ways to organize themselves and to set the stage for
the upcoming acts.
Casting Call: Role of the Youth
Though we may consider
them as independent performances in their own respect, mass demonstrations are
“rehearsals for revolution,” as John Berger’s The Nature of Mass Demonstrations asserts. These, however, are “not
strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness.”
Prior a rehearsal that shall later culminate into the grand theatrical
performance are open calls for auditions where roles are cast and/or tasks are
assigned, in accordance with the in/capacity and preferences of those who
responded to the call to act.
Likewise, affected
sectors that respond to the call to forge unities to foster the struggle for
free education are convened into an organization. According to Freire, concepts
such as organization, unity and struggle are labelled dangerous by oppressors
since “their realization is necessary to actions of liberation.” These
“dangerous” concepts are employed in collective action. Mass actions asserting
for greater state subsidy, in Raymundo’s words, help “build organizational
cohesiveness.” She adds that protest actions create “a stronger sense of
purpose and belonging,” while strengthening “an organization’s capacity for
systematic organizing in the sense that mass protests are venues for people to
facilitate other people’s enlightenment and a sense of being organized.”
However, in a
conservative country such as ours, the youth are often dissuaded by various
factors in assuming a daring role—whether in thespian or mass organizations—and
among those factors are right inside our homes. In an open letter, Lanuza
encouraged the parents to allow their children to be part of a national
performance, i.e. the September 23 strike of the KILOS NA! multisectoral
alliance against budget cuts: “They (students) cannot be a “genuine” iskolar ng
bayan if they will not go through this “baptism of fire.” In social scientific
parlance, these great protestivals are opportunities for political
socialization. They are being initiated into the role that they will have to
actively assume later on in their life: active citizens of Philippine society.”
Vencer Crisostomo, the
spokesperson of the alliance and national chairperson of youth group Anakbayan,
said that various sectors advocating free education help each other within KILOS
NA! The participation or roles are chosen “based on their respective strengths
and weaknesses.” He illustrated by saying that “the youths, as the largest
sector inside any school, provide the ‘muscle’ for any rally or protest action”
and “‘push the envelope’ in terms of the daringness and militancy,” while the teachers
and employees provide a “democratic space” for dialogue with university administrations
and even government officials and “a wealth of experience” as among their ranks
are many former youth activists.
Other roles the youth
sector play, as Palatino enumerated, are: 1.) sharing budget information and
other updates from the legislative department; 2) tacticizing on how to
successfully mount (our) campaigns; and 3.) building alliances, conducting
joint activities and actions. He said that the youth formed this unity with
other sectors because “the neoliberal agenda as reflected in the budget is not
limited to the education sector” and that Kabataan Partylist builds unities
with “Philippine Association of State Universities and Colleges (PASUC), the
national association of SUC presidents, to promote an awareness and education
campaign about the relevance of state investments to higher education and in
particular, the contribution of SUCs in fulfilling the national development
agenda” in order to “have more persuasive power when dealing with DBM and
Congress.” He added that Kabataan Partylist actively intervened all throughout
the budget deliberations and “proposed the realignment of state expenditures
from unproductive expenses (like cash transfers, bloated foreign debts, redundant
intelligence funds) to social services, especially basic and higher education.”
As thespian organizations
coordinate with different formations to help them stage a play, sectors build
unities within and among themselves to campaign for democratic rights. With
regard to the integration of the youth with other concerned sectors, Crisostomo
said, “Government employees, migrants, women, and the urban poor provide us
students with a wider perspective on the effects of the budget cuts.” Organized
multisectoral protest actions coupled with congressional lobbying alone shows
that coordinated campaigns for greater state subsidy encompass the concerns and
reflect the interests of various affected sectors—such unity manifests as well
in the international level.
Monologues and
Dialogues
In contrast to the unity
forged via dialogues, i.e. two-way inter-sectoral communication within the 99%,
the negotiations with the 1% seems like a monologue—leaving the 99% no other
option than taking it to the streets, among other means.
Going against the
majority of YES votes to pass the the 2012 General Appropriations Act on third
and final reading in the House of Representatives, Palatino voted NO and, in
his privilege speech, said that the budget will “disempower the grassroots
since it subscribes to a discredited development program.” He added, that the
youth and other sectors “pushed for crucial amendments but it appears that the
eclipse of reason still defines this so-called people’s budget” and “rallied to
register the amendments they want to be reflected in this budget.” He slammed the
House that “merely nods to the command of the Executive, instead of exercising
its constitutional duty to genuinely advance the rights and welfare of the
people” and said that “what is given is ‘loose change’ to barely meet what our
basic social services truly need to properly function.”
The authorities turning a
deaf ear, even to demands of representatives of marginalized sectors such as
the youth, results to public outrage—the education sector then is left with no
choice but to resort to the intensification of the parliament of the streets,
as it appears that the supposed dialogue with fellow lawmakers turn out to be a
monologue. With “the limitation of lobbying in convincing lawmakers with vested
interests, rallies ‘persuade’ politicians” through “‘public pressure’ that
shows (politicians) the extent of public opinion regarding the issue, and the
potential loss of electoral support should they act/decide contrary to our
interests.” (Crisostomo 2011) The public already expressed disapproval through
various means including placards that read NO TO BUDGET CUTS TO SOCIAL
SERVICES. According to Palatino, his NO vote to the 2012 budget is “a NO vote
to government neglect of basic social services and the utter absence of
substantial change.”
“To protest is to scream,
NO! As John Holoway puts it, “Faced with the mutilation of human lives by
capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a
scream of refusal: NO.” The people finally said, NO!” (Lanuza 2011) This NO was
echoed by different peoples across the globe from different sectors in
different forms of protest. Thus, as Lanuza puts it, an attack “in all fronts
the assault of neoliberal monopoly capitalism within the educational field: in
the everyday classroom setting, in the struggle for the welfare of the academic
and nonacademic personnel, in the revision of curriculum, institution of new
courses, and in other countless sites.”
Vaudeville of Protests
According to Crisostomo,
among the creative forms of protests he has seen are “‘flash mobs’, or surprise
synchronized dances in public places, graffiti murals on walls and roads, mass
‘planking’, or laying down face-first on highly visible or symbolic locations
such as the middle of roads, street plays, and concerts.”
Planking is one of the
most utilized spectacles. The September 23 planking at Mendiola was dubbed as the
largest planking protest in the world. Other spectacles seen in the UP system with
the street as the stage are: 1.) the budget CUTtoure fashion—UP Diliman
community had their shirts cut (and designed by clothing technology students)
before modelling; 2.) the pose to oppose budget cut campaign—UPLB constituents
put slogans on their profile photos in social networking sites; 3.) the blackboard
campaign—UP Visayas students write their calls on the blackboard, have their
photos taken with the call, and have this photo posted online; 4.) the huni ni
oble—UP Mindanao community hum the “UP Naming Mahal;” 5.) the
human chain—UP baguio constituents link arms and shared solidarity
messages; and 6.) the freeze mob—where participants “suddenly froze in the
middle of a busy school lobby or corridor, arousing the curiosity of passersby,”
thereby inviting the spectators to be actors themselves by joining protests. In
the virtual stage of social networking sites, personal accounts of those involved
in the struggle for free education changed their surnames to “opposes budget
cuts.” Social media are also means serving as venues to disseminate publicity
materials and information regarding upcoming activities for particular
campaigns.
However, despite these
‘creative’ means, “rallies and other forms of protest actions,” according to
Crisostomo, “comprise the main form of lobbying and campaigning for greater
state subsidy to education.” Relating this to global phenomena, Lanuza said
that mass protests embody the “people’s utopian longing for a society freed
from the exploitative mantle of neoliberal capitalism that consigns 2.5 billion
people or 40% of the world population to subhuman living by earning less than 2
dollars per day while 10% of the richest people controls 54% of the world
capital.”
In the privilege speech The Right to Strike Palatino said, “Domestically
and globally, budget cuts, price hikes, continuous rights violations and social
strife continue to inspire countless young people to rely on the collective
wisdom and power of the oppressed to build a better and more humane,
progressive society.” He furthered, “Youths all over the world are up in arms.
Youth and student riots in London, Chile, Spain, Madagascar, Columbia, Germany, Malaysia and elsewhere in the world are testament to how
volatile the present global economic crisis is. Youths 17-25 years old are jobless,
students are protesting.”
If all the world’s a
stage and all men and women are merely players, going by Shakespeare, then
consider the fight for education, being a global phenomenon, a theatrical
performance of universities, colleges, and other concerned formations in the
global scale—that is but an act within a larger theatrical performance, which
is yet to be seen. Going by Alan Moore’s rendition in the comic book V for Vendetta, “All the world’s a stage
and the rest is vaudeville.” Vaudeville, said to be derived from the expression
voix de ville (voice of the city),
are, in essence, variety shows—which may, for the purposes of this discussion,
refer to the variety of forms of registering protest. But still, these
theatricals are mere front acts before the main performance. Among the icons of
worldwide dissent, not just against deprivation of education and basic social
services, but against corporate greed, is the Guy Fawkes mask from the aforementioned
comic book.
In an interview with The Guardian, Moore said that the mask—worn by thousands of
demonstrators especially in Occupy protests, turning the “protests into
performances,” is “very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama.” He
added that protest marches can be “very demanding, very gruelling” and “quite
dismal” but are “things that have to be done.” Moore struggled to find the last V word to use as a
title for the comic book’s closing chapter, according to The Guardian. Having used “Victims, Vaudeville and Vengeance; the
Villain, the Voice, the Vanishing; even Vicissitude and Verwirrung (the German word for confusion)” he settled for Vox Populi. “Voice of the people” Moore said, “And I think that if the mask stands for
anything, in the current context, that is what it stands for. This is the people. That mysterious
entity that is evoked so often – this is the people.” For the sake of making
more people critical observers, if not actors themselves (spect-actors as Boal
termed), rather than passive spectators, there is the need for V-effect in the
Brechtian sense in every performance, which in this case, are protest actions
for asserting the right to education.
“The street
demonstrator’s performance,” Brecht said pertaining to an eyewitness telling
other people how a traffic accident took place, “is essentially repetitive. The
event has taken place; what you are seeing now is a repeat. If the scene in the
theatre follows the street scene in this respect, then the theatre will stop
pretending not to be theatre, just as the street-corner demonstration admits it
is a demonstration (and does not pretend to be an actual event).” Speeches in
rallies, the aforementioned creative forms of protest, and other demonstrations
that we may qualify as performances, then, are also mere
repetitions—recollections of the oppression communicated with other people. Mass
demonstrations are perhaps repeated as preparations for the grand performance.
“Rehearsals of revolutionary awareness” indeed, as Berger postulates, where “the
delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long” and “their
quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions,
vary considerably.” As Brecht further asserts, the street demonstrators (i.e.
actors and protesters as far as theatre and rallies are concerned, respectively)
are not fascinated with creation or invocation of pure emotions as his or her
interests rather lie on social intervention—and a collective intervention of
the oppressed 99% escalates as we speak.
Upheavals as
rehearsals
People’s consciousness of
how governments’ crosscutting measures on social services prove to be “a
consequence of the crisis of global capitalism” is a “significant theoretical
point that once grasped and acted upon creates a strong sense of international
solidarity.” The slogan “we are the 99%,” according to Raymundo, articulates
“society’s polarization on account of a moribund economic system” that only benefits
1%, i.e. the ruling minority, thus the global phenomena of international protests
remind us the class struggle’s societal role as engine of history. (Raymundo
2011)
“The oppressed,” Freire
said, “must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a
contrary conviction can begin to grow within them,” thus the significance of being
witnesses to successful spectacles, such as massive rallies or creative protest
actions or—even so-called “tactical offensives,” had participants or actors
been resolved that armed revolutions are necessary. Brecht reminded, however,
that performances should not completely drown the spectators into a cathartic,
emotional trance. As Boal suggests, “Brecht wants the theatrical spectacle to
be the beginning of action: the equilibrium should be sought by transforming
society.”
Being a repeated performance,
if not a mere rehearsal to the grand performance, a demonstration must indeed estrange
through the V-effect by maintaining enough distance of the public spectacle to
reality as a means of giving room to critical observation. Like theatrical plays,
mass demonstrations are, as Berger described, “a created event which
arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its
artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.”
“We have equated politics
with what is possible, not with what is impossible,” said Lanuza. “In the
post-modern age when a lot of people and intellectuals no longer believe in
universality, of shared common humanity and utopian aspiration, the successful
protest actions of various sectors of Philippine society” for some people “is
an enigma.” But for Lanuza, it is never an enigma because capitalism itself “breeds
its own grave-diggers.” He added that people, becoming “dystopians,” imagine
the possibility of ending the world “through a gigantic meteorite hitting the
earth or a big tsunami covering the entire planet or even people dying from the
effects of global warming,” but not the possibility of ending neoliberal global
capitalism through collective resistance. In a speech at the Occupy protests, Slavoj
Zizek said that almost everything is possible in technology and in sexuality as
one “can travel to the moon” or “can become immortal by biogenetics” or “you
can have sex with animals,” but in society and economy, if one wants “to raise
taxes by little bit for the rich” wants “more money for health care,” it is
impossible. He said, “There’s something wrong in the world, where you are
promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare.”
Through social movements,
according to Lanuza, the people realize that they do not need to concede with
this “rootless logic of capitalist commodification” that subjects “all social
life” to the market’s “abstract requirements” and that “neoliberalism, as
parasitic upon the illusion of our own powerlessness and its own global
irresistibility, has precluded any utopian imagination beyond the omnipotence
of the market,” thus protest movements are “necessarily utopian.” Quoting
Ernest Bloch, Lanuza said that utopianism was not “something like nonsense or absolute
fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be
there if we could only do something for it.” Such is the “power of protest and
social movements” that “electrify society and raise the consciousness of the
people” to win their rights through unity.
Lanuza added that people
who protest and denounce capitalist violence are called “dreamers” and quoted
Zizek: “The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the
way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is
tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing
how the system is destroying itself.” But
the people, Lanuza concluded, are “once again awakening from their deep
slumber” as “neoliberal restructuring of education is a nightmare.” Palatino
added that “students are worried over the creeping invasion of corporate
interests in schools,” which “addressed the market needs and foreign economies
instead of the actual needs of the local economy and the communities they are
supposedly serving” and suggested “to counter this neoliberal attack” by
forming a “broad unity of various people’s organizations and force the
government to fulfill its mandate of providing adequate funds for social
services.”
Our free education
campaign, according to Crisostomo, is similar with those of other countries’ in
respect to the analysis of ‘commercialization’ of education. Concerned sectors “recognize that the budget
cuts are not simply some policy error by the government, but rather a trend to
make education less accessible, and in general, make it serve corporate needs.”
He furthered that the “scope and magnitude” protests for free education
worldwide are inspiring. “For example, while we have managed campus strikes of
a maximum of four days, the ‘student strike’ in Chile encompasses hundreds of universities and high
schools, and has been going on for several months now. The U.K protests,
meanwhile, have hundreds of thousands in participants. Just recently, they have
been holding their campus walkouts simultaneously with workers’ rallies. And in
the U.S, ‘Occupy’ protesters are now gathering in campuses after being
repeatedly dispersed by the police.”
Using Freire’s terms, the
oppressors condemn “the violence of a strike by workers,” and “call upon the
state in the same breath to use violence in putting down a strike.” This
violence may be in the form of an actual dispersal, or perhaps an agitation of
a riot, but such may also be in the form of verbal ridicule, like the
Malacanang’s snide remarks that “students shall focus on their studies” and the
President’s comparison of the anti-imperialist
youth group League of Filipino Students to a dictatorship. Palatino, in his
speech The Right to Strike, sad that unlike some assemblies ending up as
riots in other countries, we have our youth activists, with their sense of the
discipline and organization, to thank for as they took a stand that anarchy is
not the solution to the education crisis. “Mass demonstrations should be
distinguished from riots or revolutionary uprisings although, under certain (now
rare) circumstances, they may develop into either of the latter.” (Berger 1968)
Comparing a riot and a
revolutionary uprising, Berger said the aim of the former is immediate—
“seizing of food, the
release of prisoners, the destruction of property”, while that of the latter is
“long-term comprehensive”—culminating “in the taking over of State power,” but
that of a demonstration is rather “symbolic”—demonstrating “a force that is
scarcely used.” As the mass reproduction and utilization of Guy Fawkes masks
mentioned earlier is a rendition, if not mere repetition, of an act that has
not actually happened in reality other than that of fictional dystopia of V for Vendetta, a mass demonstration, in
Berger’s terms, is an enactment of the capturing of a city—something
symbolical, not actual and this symbolism is “for the benefit of the participants,”
who become “positively aware of how they belong to a social class.”
Brecht’s concept of “epic
theatre” insists on a sort of metatheatre that shall make the spectator aware
that the play is indeed just a play, as subversion of ordinary theatre’s
“engendering of illusion.” Applying this concept to mass demonstrations, it is
a practice, for instance, in snake rallies (ones that symbolically capture both
the streets and the buildings as the protesting contingent marches around the
large area of a particular institutions, e.g. universities) to shout chants
that “breaks the fourth wall” to address the audience directly and encourage
them to join the ranks of the rehearsing actors and be involved in the collective
action of the education movement. “Protest movements also belie the fetishized neoliberal
political myth that individuals, not collective movements, are the heroes that
can change the world. Today more than ever we have to realize that what we are
fighting against is a system, not just aggregation of individualized greed.”
(Lanuza 2011)
Curtain Call to an Impending Doom
“Protests,” Lanuza said,
“are proving to be very effective in wringing decisive concessions from the
neoliberal state.” According to Berger, “Theoretically demonstrations are meant
to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an
appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a
conscience which is very unlikely to exist.” A rally is indeed an amateur theatrical
play thus a rehearsal, since, had the state been “open to democratic influence,
the demonstration will hardly be necessary,” otherwise, “it is unlikely to be
influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat” unless the
rally in consideration is “in support of an already established alternative
State authority,” then “may be immediately effective.” (Berger 1968)
Since mass
demonstrations, as Berger said, appeal “to the democratic conscience of the
State” that is “very unlikely to exist” and “provoke violence upon itself” its
“historical role” then is merely to “show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality
of the existing State authority.” Rallies “express political ambitions before
the political means necessary to realise them have been created” and “predict
the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that
realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve them,” which leads Berger to
conclude that “the question which revolutionaries must decide in any given
historical situation is whether or not further symbolic rehearsals are
necessary. The next stage is training in tactics and strategy for the
performance itself.”
With the mass
demonstrations as manifestations of the “symptoms of the deepening crisis of
global monopoly capitalism,”
Lanuza suggests intensification of the struggle by “exposing the inefficiency
of the market and the way the “invisible hand” that is supposed to guide the
market has been from the beginning the hands of the wealthy and powerful.” Comparing
the struggle for education in other countries and in the Philippines, Crisostomo said that the calls of some countries
are “essentially calls for reform in the education system. They are calls, or
pleas, to the government. They have no answers to the question ‘What Happens
Next?’ when the government rejects their calls,” while that of the “Philippine
education movement clearly views the problems of the education sector as
closely linked with the problems of Philippine society in general. Thus, we
always strive to raise the level of discourse in campuses from that of budget
cuts to social change.” The education crises then and the global economic
crises are interweaved, thus discourse as regards what needs to be done after
rehearsals of revolutionary awareness, i.e. mass demonstrations, as posed by
Berger, requires praxis. Praxis can only be achieved through theory and
practice, or, in Freire’s terms, reflection and action, Mass
demonstrations fall under the latter, while the former lies in further critical
analyses of society through theorizing and problematizing through discourse,
which in turn, has to be later tested through practice, and be analyzed again
through theories and so on.
Thus, rallies and the
campaigns that propelled them need to be tested against theories and vice
versa. In relation to this dialectical relationship, Lanuza added that through
these mass upheavals, we are witnessing the resurgence of “dead” ideologies thus
it is high time to seek the guidance of “old masters” and “lost causes,” despite
the notion that scholarly analyses on the global crisis (such as Harvey’s,
Callinicos’s, Meiksins’s, Wood’s, and Arrighi’s), which are inspired by Lenin’s
theory of imperialism, are considered outmoded. These critical analyses,
according to Lanuza, are as valid as before. Quoting Jean Paul Sartre, he said,
“Far from being exhausted Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy;
it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our
time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances
which engendered it. Our thoughts, whatever they may be, can be formed only
upon this humus; they must be contained within the framework which it furnishes
for them or be lost in the void or retrogress.”
Lanuza challenged “those
who say that these words are belied by the historical failure of massive
utopian uprisings,” and, quoting the aforementioned French philosopher, said
that “there is no need to readapt a living philosophy to the course of the
world; it adapts itself by means of thousands of new efforts, thousands of
particular pursuits, for the philosophy is one with the movement of society.”
As far as the education movement, with the basic sectors, and international
struggles for liberation that comprise the 99% are concerned, with this concern
manifested through these intensified rehearsals to perfect the upcoming
performance, it appears that the theatrical production is about to end
simultaneously with the doom of the 1%. A dreamt classless society is yet to be
seen. This, however, remains to be fully realized and only history can absolve
whether another production is being orchestrated, and which productions endure and
perform until the curtain call.
No comments:
Post a Comment