For May Day, some old and rough writings about Crisanto Evangelista

The following is an excerpt of some writings I’ve done thinking about Crisanto Evangelista, one of the founders of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), the first formal Philippine Communist Party. I’ve presented this work in various places at least since 2015, and as a consequence, parts have ended up in various published pieces, most notably Monetary Authorities and my essay in the Histories of Racial Capitalism anthology. Since the footnotes didn’t transfer at all, I’ve listed the texts that were referenced at the end of the excerpt.

On Revolutionary Decolonization

Before exploring Filipino Marxism and its relation to struggles for decolonization, I want to emphasize that Filipino radicals under U.S. colonial rule had to reckon with the afterlives of the 1896 Revolution. Beginning with the 1521 colonial encounter, what is now known as the Philippine archipelago had been under Spanish imperial rule. Although Spanish rule had been threatened by a multitude of local uprisings and revolts (usually labeled as mutinies) it would not be until 1896 that a sustained Revolution would erupt. Filipino Revolutionary thought and energies were greatly influenced by anarchist and socialist thought circulating around the globe, in particular during the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, counter-revolutionary forces would quickly take positions of power within the movement, with many elites grabbing leadership positions to establish the first modern republic in Asia. The Republic would soon be dismantled through U.S. military force during the Philippine American War, replaced by the American colonial state. Revolutionaries and subversives were quickly outlawed by the American colonial state, with many driven to exile or imprisoned. During the 1910s, however, there was an intensified uptick in radical organizing, particularly in the increasingly urban areas of the colony. By the time news hit of the 1917 Russian Revolution, organic intellectuals in the Philippines would begin to theorize, and concretely organize around, Marxist conceptions. One of the primary Filipino Marxist intellectuals, if not the most important Filipino Marxist intellectual before WWII, was Crisanto Evangelista.

Crisanto Evangelista was born in 1888 into a peasant family. His father fought and died in the 1896 Revolution. Too young to join in the Philippine American War, at the age of ten he would become a printer apprentice, eventually teaching himself how to read and write. Throughout the 1910s Evangelista would attempt to work with establishment parties like the Nacionalista Party. Evangelista was even appointed as the representative of Filipino workers in the first Independence Mission to Washington in 1919. Eventually Evangelista would turn his back on the Nacionalista Party and embrace Marxism.

In the early 1920s Filipino Marxists began to actively build relations with peasant organizations, whose memberships were increasing rapidly. For instance, agriculturally based unions, such as the Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (National Association of Peasants in the Philippines), steadily gained numbers throughout the immediate post-WWI years. Evangelista, would emphasize organizing bonds between urban factory workers and peasants. By the mid-1920s Evangelista was avowedly a communist, having established communication with the Comintern, and working transnationally with other communist leaders, like Harrison George of the Communist Party USA and Tan Malaka, the famous Indonesian born transnational communist. Evangelista would hold prominent positions in the Partido Obrero, one of the first Marxist organizations in the Philippines. He would also be one of the five representatives of the executive committee of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a subdivision of the Red International of Labor Unions.

Crisanto Evangelista in the Pan Pacific Monthly, June, 1929

In 1927 Evangelista, along with other organizers, would seek to re-orient the Partido Obrero toward a Marxist-Leninist organization. This transformation would be marked by a new name, which honored the 1896 Revolution, yet simultaneously emphasized its analysis of proletarianization. The new name was Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis sa Pilipinas (or the KAP) its English translation at the time, was the Proletarian Labor Congress. At the time of its founding KAP membership was estimated to be about 33,000. At its height it would swell to almost 100,000 official members. After a few years Evangelista again would again make plans to re-orient radical organizations in the Philippines, pushing to change the name from the KAP to overtly embrace the label of Communist, and solidify the ties between Philippine revolutionary organizations and a broader internationalism committed to the overthrow of both imperialism and capitalism. 

The KAP would go on to produce a series of publications in vernacular presses, preparing members and the broader public for the transformation. Calling for a formation of a “mass political party,” the KAP would publish the first Tagalog translations of the Communist Party and republish famous Soviet pieces like “the ABC of Communism.” Eventually during the convention of August 26, 1930, the new party was formed as the Partido Komunista sa Pilipinas (PKP), to coincide with the 34 Anniversary of the Cry of Balintawak, the moment the Philippine Revolution officially kicked off in an organized uprising in Manila, the tearing of cedulas—the colonial identification papers used for taxation of native subjects. The PKP would make public its formation on November 7th, 1930, to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The crowd of about 6,000 in the Tondo district of Manila declared the formation of PKP through chants of “Down with Imperialism!” “Down with Capitalism!” “Long Live the Communist Party!”

Here we see the attempt by Filipino communists to draw upon two seemingly estranged or unconnected Revolutions—the 1896 Philippine Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Moreover, it established their commitment to communism—not anarchism or socialism—as the primarily political program to which would accomplish their primary objectives of: on one hand, the end of imperialism, and on the other hand the end of capitalism. To Filipino communists, therefore, these twin objectives were inextricable. We can see this theorization especially in Evangelista’s approach to organizing and recruitment.

By the time Evangelista was appointed as the PKP’s first General Secretary, Evangelista led a humble life, residing in a small home with his wife and five children. Frequently he was described as someone with a frail stature, oftentimes coughing as a result of malnutrition and near-chronic sickness. This was most likely due to the rate in which Evangelista was incarcerated for his political organizing, in an out of prison multiple times through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was nevertheless an inspiring speaker, less an imposing voice, but rather a patient, effective, and authoritative educator. 

In 1930, Evangelista was described by American writer Agnes Smedley as one of “the strangest and most interesting characters in Asia.” Smedley would go on to state that he was “perhaps the only Filipino Marxist theoretician” who was able to “accumulate and read hundreds of works on the social sciences” and “possess the only Marxian-Leninist library in the Philippines.” Smedley would go on to describe one particular scene which illustrates the difficult and complex work of radical organizers within colonial conditions.

He was teaching the fisherman the causes of the revolutions against Spain, of the workers and peasants who fought in the revolution—and of the compromise signed between the American military invaders and the Filipino leaders—a document of the betrayal of the revolution. He taught them of the workers’ movement in various European countries and in Soviet Russia, and of the theories of socialism. Through his Tagalog language came such words as “Karl Marx,” “Lenin,” “surplus value,” in English. For three hours he taught, earnestly and without any demonstrativeness, and the only movement in the audience was when some man would arise from the hard earth to rest his legs for a moment.

Evangelista, even in this moment in which he was attempting to recruit fisherman, a kind of worker that was far from a Marxist notion of “proletarian,” Evangelista was grappling and engaging with if and how Marxian-Leninist concepts would work in colonial conditions—conditions that for many orthodox Marxists was a backwards political and economic condition. After all, so this logic goes, colonies and colonized peoples were historically underdeveloped by colonizers for imperial purposes, and thus modern conditions had to be created in order to produce a communist revolution. Until then, the best that could happen was a national revolution, like what happened in the Philippines.

What I want to emphasize from such a short and small observation is that Evangelista both incorporates traditional Marxist notions like “surplus value” but also brings it into conversation with the Philippine Revolution, a revolution that he correctly points out, was driven, not for strictly nationalist purposes, but driven by and through the revolutionary energies of workers and peasants, the very peoples that had been exploited for their “surplus value.” In this, I believe, Evangelista is attempting to articulate a consistency in this longer struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism in the Philippines, from the sixteenth century to this particular moment of capitalist crisis between the two World Wars.

By the time Smedley had visited the Philippines, Evangelista had already been imprisoned multiple times by the American colonial government. The PKP would not even see two years of existence before it was outlawed by the Philippine Supreme Court in October 1932. Evangelista would be either repeatedly imprisoned or harassed for the rest of the decade. In 1942 he would be executed as a political prisoner by a different colonial power, the Japanese, during World War II. As a result of this, not much of Evangelista’s theoretical thoughts exist in the historical record after the establishment of the PKP. Still, if we are to look at his writings from the late 1920s, just before the KAP turned into the PKP and right after his increased exchanges with the COMPUSA and the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, we see this intensified move toward not only a nationalist communism, but a more internationalist form of revolutionary decolonization.

In a short 1928 book written in Tagalog, Evangelista would focus on the extremely popular rhetoric of the Nacionalista Party, the dominant mainstream political party of the Philippines. In particular Evangelista wanted to underline the limits of nationalist notions of decolonization, particularly conservative decolonization which emphasized national control of capitalism and increased autonomy of established Filipino political leaders. Titled, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo-Radikalismo or Protectionist Nationalism vs. Radical Internationalism, Crisanto Evangelista attempted to pull back the curtains from the “narrow, conservative, and reactionary nationalism,” of Filipino statesmen and protectionists, urging readers to look beyond these “narrow horizons” of political sovereignty and economic development.  

Evangelista’s analysis emphasizes what he saw as two fundamentally antagonistic kinds of political economic futures. On one hand, there was the future proposed by Filipino protectionists, who argued for a Philippine economy shielded from foreign competition. In this scenario Philippine industry and markets would be protected—artificially by the state—from the natural laws of a global capitalist market, a market that was already historically rigged in favor of more advanced industrial and imperial economies. Under this protection, the Philippine economy would diversify and mature. For Evangelista, however, protectionism was simply an accommodation of the exploitative system of capitalism, albeit with a local twist, in which already wealthy Filipinos would be protected by the state from wealthier capitalists from abroad. On the other hand, Evangelista envisioned a future of radical internationalism, dictated by the desires and needs of workers. In this future, workers would pursue a radical solidarity that combined both anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism to struggle toward a world unfettered by the artificial and violent constraints of imperialism and capitalism. 

In the first section, Evangelista tackled the economic aspect of nationalist protectionism, asserting that protectionism not only bred racial chauvinism, but dangerously created an unproductive trade policy of isolationism. These conditions—chauvinism and isolationism—would lead to Filipinos being shunned by other nations, seriously wounding international trade. This would then create a chain reaction in which demands for Philippine commodities would fall, leading to immense drops in commodity prices and wages, and eventually mass unemployment. Filipino workers, desperate for work and wages would flee the Philippines in even greater numbers, to other territories that were still under what he argued was under the “grasp of imperialism, like Hawaii” or Mindanao, which Evangelista argued was ironically under the control of “Foreign Investment.”

For Evangelista, the very notion of “protectionism” was suspect. Although proponents of protectionism argued that it would lead to national vitality and a proliferation of native entrepreneurs and small businesses, he warned that it would simply intensify the drive toward local monopolies. “First, it [small businesses] will be swallowed by large investors; and second, the small investor will fight or think of killing those they are chasing or those that are equal in stature in “the name of free competition.” That is what is called the “free competion” of capitalism. That is the law that capitalism follows. That is the anarchy and antagonism [anarquia y antagonismo] of the system of capitalist production [sistema de produccion capitalista].”

Thus, rather than an orderly world of economic growth and national progress, protectionism would instead lead to a world of intensified exploitation, disorder, and violence. However, because the state would exclude foreign capitalists from the economy, the source of antagonism would not be an imperialist power, but instead from within, an antagonism within and between native Filipinos.

In the second half of the book Evangelista switched to the political aspects of protectionism. He specifically focused on the question of American colonialism, the unjust historical condition that protectionism was supposed to resolve. Here Evangelista challenged the protectionist nationalist position on colonialism, arguing that it was not necessarily the presence of the foreign that was the enemy. “The American people are not our enemy,” he asserted. Instead, the enemy was “the imperialistic world consisting of American, English, Japanese, French, Dutch, Spanish, and others.” 

Thus, instead of the narrow horizons of what Benedict Anderson would call “official nationalism,” Evangelista argued for a broader global approach. One therefore had to see true freedom as a radical overturning of the entire world, not simply the achievement of national sovereignty. For Evangelista “the independence of the Filipino people is dependent on the problem and the fate of the other colonies and semi-colonies.” Put differently, rather than focusing on the antagonism between colony and metropole, one had to see the central antagonism between colonies and the imperial world system. For Evangelista the struggle for Philippine independence had to be connected to the larger struggle of international anti-colonialisms, in concert with other colonized workers. As he stated:  “If we are freed, it would change the shape of colonialism in the world,” leading to what Evangelista envisioned as “an outbreak of fire that would burn and smolder inside the people of Taiwan and Korea to fight against Japan; the Indonesian against the Netherlands; in Indo-China against France and Portugal; the Indians, the Malaysians and other English colonies against England.”

Under Evangelista’s formulation, Filipino anti-colonialism must fundamentally be “internationalist,” to “make friends and join in the international workers’ movement.” In this political and ethical formulation of friendship, simulaneously within and beyond the nation, “the enemy of our people…is not only national but worldwide.” In this “international movement against international imperialism” he argued that not only must Filipinos “unite with the Indonesian, Malay, Korean, Taiwanese, Indians, Chinese and other similar young colonies,” but Filipinos must “join, befriend, and collaborate with workers in the capitalist countries and the imperialist order by forming a single column, through cooperation and simultaneous resistance to weaken World Imperialism.”

References

Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2011); William J. Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration, and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992); and Jim Richardson, Komunista: The Genesis of the Communist Party, 1902 – 1935 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 2011).

Crisanto Evangelista, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo Radikalismo, (Manila: Katipunan ng Anak-pawis sa Pilipinas (KAP), 1929); Agnes Smedley, “Philippine Sketches” in The New Masses, June 1931.