Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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to their parents and teachers. They defied existing laws in order to create new ones while setting aside existing family ties to go underground and there forge new kinship bonds.
Indeed, this book shows how the revolution radically reshaped the fundamental features of middle class family life. The wall between the personal and the political, so characteristic of bourgeois culture, is completely, sometimes disastrously, demolished. Romance flowers while attending discussion groups and rallies. It intensifies amid the violence of fighting in the field, and is then cut short by news of the other’s death, or endangered by the strategic needs of the Party. (In the case of Emilie Quimpo, who joins not the Communist Party but something equally totalitarian, the Opus Dei, the effects of a disrupted life requiring displacement and disconnection from friends and family are functionally similar.)
Indeed, any semblance of domestic life proves impossible given the imperative to live underground. The revolutionary movement becomes exactly that: a life defined not by stability and routine but by constant movement from one safehouse to another, or from one prison to another. Itineraries become indefinite, arrivals deferred, meetings subject to detour and the constant possibility of ambush. Subversion entails leading a subterranean life, whether in Manila, Cebu, Davao, Paris or Utrecht. In this context, all identities melt into air, becoming flexible and disposable. Joining the insurgency means adopting new names and masking one’s own. Escaping the forces of the state requires constant disguise and deception. Forced into exile, one is constrained to ask for political asylum and take on a new citizenship, becoming foreign to one’s self even as one waits to return to a country and a family that will never be the same. Most painful of all, as in the cases of Jun and Jan Quimpo, one can die mysteriously or disappear altogether, giving up one’s identity and any hope of being identified, leaving behind a barely identifiable corpse, or worse, no body at all, and therefore, no legacy.
A mother is inexplicably killed in an accident, traumatizing the daughter who witnessed the scene, and a father dies deeply saddened by and unreconciled to the political paths taken by his sons. And the sons, seeking to overcome the world of their father, find themselves contesting the wishes of the Father of the party himself who comes to identify the fate of the revolution with the reaffirmation of what he takes to be an absolute, inflexible political line. Such a double defiance is bound to exact a high price, including alienation from the family and excommunication from the party.
Life in the revolution as revealed in this book consists of many things and many acts: mobilization, protest, debate, struggle, captivity, torture, killing, escape, exile, and so forth. It is not, however, a life of remembering and mourning. This is perhaps what sets communism, as it is driven by revolution, apart from nationalism. The nation, as Benedict Anderson has taught us, is an “imagined community.” Imagination is built on the inclusion of others within a bounded territory, including the dead, who are commemorated by the living as part of the same national “family.” By contrast, communism is not wedded to one place but from the start seeks to root itself like its enemy, capitalism, in every place. It is thus inherently cosmopolitan, bearing an internationalist vocation that urges the transcendence of national identities and the crossing of national boundaries for the sake of creating transnational proletarian solidarities.
Nationalism in contrast tends to suppress class conflict in favor of cross-class alliances. Where communism sees the working class as the main agents of historical transformation, nationalism, despite its republican rhetoric, invariably sets the bourgeoisie as the natural leaders of the people (see the Malolos and all postwar Republics). Nationalism, especially in a colonial context, seeks sovereignty from a foreign power within a delimited territory, a market economy directed by the national bourgeoisie, and a stable class hierarchy led by elites acting as representatives of the people (see Rizal, Quezon, Recto, Marcos, Aquino, . . . Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo). Unlike nationalism, communism confronts capitalism in its global form of imperialism, in the hope of establishing a classless society that would lead to the withering away of the state. It has no time to mourn because that would require restoring the class and national particularity of the living who remember the dead. It would, in other words, mean allowing nationalist sentiments to rule over communist revolutionary resolve. “Workers of the world” would have to yield to “workers of the Philippines,” the “Internationale” to “Lupang Hinirang” rather than the other way around.
Compared to nationalism, there is thus something wildly impossible and highly improbable about “communism.” It is worth noting the origins of that word in the Latin communis, to come or be bound together, to hold something in common, which we can gloss as: to be by being with others. It was commonly used to refer to the pre-Marxist revolutionary movements and secret societies in France in the 1830s. Marx himself was notoriously elusive in his attempts to define what might constitute a communist society (see especially The German Ideology). For Marx, communism was not simply a political movement but also the social conditions that such a movement would ideally yield. In such a society, human association would be predicated on overcoming the very source of alienation: the necessity to labor itself. Surpassing both capitalism and socialism, a communist society would be one where freedom and justice were perfectly aligned, thanks to the abolition of all forms of human and natural exploitation. It would put an end to the division of labor and the invidiousness and inequalities such a division implied. As a radically egalitarian society, communism, should it ever exist, would foster unconditional hospitality and friendship for one another. It is not for nothing that communists refer to each other wishfully and without irony as kasama or comrade.
Nationalism has periodically sought to appropriate communism’s utopian vision only to turn away from its more radical demands. It is as if there is something about communism—its appeal for revolution as a way of life, for the destruction of private property, for the abolition of the state, and for the radical leveling of class, gender, ethnic and racial inequalities—that proves impossible, if not profoundly threatening to the constitution of the nation-state. The means for achieving communist sociality—revolution—is historically what links nationalism and communism in the Philippines. But it is also what separates the two.
As the Quimpos tell it, revolution requires a kind of dedication that calls for sacrificing everything to a single cause. It tends to subordinate all other forms of human relationships to a particular “Line of March,” reducing the world into stark categories of friends or enemies (as “revisionists,” “puppets,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and so forth). In the name of liberation, revolution ironically creates new forms of oppression as it seeks to transform everything into an instrument for the realization of its goal. While nationalism seeks to dominate revolutionary power, communism is inextricably bound to it. For nationalism, revolution is a means to an end and therefore a transitory condition. For communism, revolution is a permanent possibility, the exception that is also the norm. In revolution, nationalism and communism come together only to split apart, forming alliances founded on mutual suspicion, crass calculation, and potential enmity.
Memoirs such as Subversive Lives implicitly apprehend this fact without, however, fully comprehending it. Reading the lives of the Quimpos, one senses the deconstructive power of revolution at work, unhinging much of what we, during these unrevolutionary times, take for granted, such as the categories of national identity, private property, social hierarchy and political order. It is a power that the PKP-HMB and the CPP-NPA-NDF also sensed and sought to wield. But like the Philippine state, they too have always failed to tame its uncanny force, much less render a “correct” interpretation of its meanings and demands.
This is perhaps why communism with a small “c” cannot be monumentalized because, like revolution, it cannot really be buried. Every time it is declared dead and laid to rest, its specter returns to confront the vampire-like (as Marx described it) workings of global capitalism and the awful catastrophes these spawn. It still haunts contemporary articulations of Filipino nationalism in the latter’s attempts to counter the alienating effects of globalization, especially in its most pervasive form: the overseas contract worker.
Proof of this spectral presence are memoirs such as Subversive Lives that bring forth something of the revolution when it was still revolutionary, that is, still a movement, and thus still the living possibility of enacting the exorbitant promise of communism. It is, of course, a promise that is