Reflection on Alain Badiou and the Christians for National Liberation

Emancipatory Faith:

Reflection on Alain Badiou and the Christians for National Liberation

REGLETTOALDRICHD.IMBONG JERRYD.IMBONG

Abstract

Although Badiouian political thought maintains an obvious distance from theology, theisms, and all forms of transcendental conceptualizations of human liberation, it does allow the most universal form of democratic mass participation, including by Christian believers. This crossover, far from being a domination of either politics or religion, is possible because of their common affirmation of and fidelity to an Event. This paper aims to show the crossover between the radical politics of Alain Badiou and the revolutionary potential of the Christian religion proposed by a revolutionary organization. It further clarifies that radical politics, which seemingly veers towards atheism, and religion can be united to a common conception of

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture XXI.1 (2017): 51-76.

democracy and emancipation. Drawing from this crossover, this paper criticizes the current notions of democracy espoused and preached under the current system, and presents a more genuine notion of the same.

The discussion hinges on the more than four decades of ardent revolutionary struggle of the Christians for National Liberation (CNL), a revolutionary Christian mass organization in the Philippines.

Keywords Emancipation politics, Christians for National Liberation, Event, subject, fidelity, National Democratic Revolution

The Militant as a Faithful Subject

rucial to Alain Badiou’s idea of a politics of emancipation, as well as in other truth-procedures (in science, art and love), is the category of the Subject and the corresponding idea of Fidelity borne of the happening of an Event. What this suggests first of all is the non-existence of a subject prior to the Event. No pre-determined community nor class supports a liberating political procedure. Badiou explains that the subject is not a substance.¹ The subject

1 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York:

Continuum, 2005), 291.

C

comes to be as it pursues and inscribes, within a particular world, the consequences of an Event. The subject’s being is both the living trace of the vanished Event, and the support for the Truth the Event opened up during its violent rupture with the previous structure. The subject is dependent on the Event and continues to be so for as long as fidelity to the Event is courageously pursued. Consequently, a betrayal² of the said Event constitutes the disintegration or vanishing of the subject.

An Event is a happening, wholly removed from the logic and structure of a given world. Badiou describes it as

“something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable . . . [and] indicates that . . . a possibility exists that has been ignored.”³ The Event, as a suspension of the normal and accepted routines or systems (in science, art, politics, or love), “interrupts the law, the structure of the situation.”⁴ The Event is a moment that both defies given normality and stability—since all events are abnormal, and that there are no natural or neutral

2 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2012), 78.

3 Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Massachusetts:

Polity Press, 2013), 19.

4 Alain Badiou, “Affirmative Dialectics: From Logic to Anthropology,” The International Journal of Badiou Studies 2, no.1 (2013), 3, accessed March 8, 2016, http://badioustudiesorg.ipower.com/ cgi-bin/ ojs-2.3.6/index.php/ijbs/article/

view/34/pdf.

events⁵—and serves as a harbinger of a possibility not anymore in the order of the Old but that of the New. In this case, an Event is singular in that its happening is not a structured effect of a world’s logic nor a consequence of the law but a random emergence of a new possibility immanent in the world. It has to be restated that the new possibility is not transcendent. This is different from what is commonly presented by theology or religion. The new possibility is concretely inscribed in a situation, in a social setting for example, so that the promise of liberation is not according to the usual religious or salvific connotation but instead refers to a material process of a collective making history.

Badiou likes to refer to some historical moments as events, and among them are the Paris Commune and the May 1968 of France. The latter has a personal value to Badiou as that Event not only offered a new and radical possibility for France, but also served as a new turning point in his orientation, radicalizing his thought, consequently laying down an ontology solidly grounded on mathematics that would later become the strong foundation for his version of a politics of emancipation. The former is, for Badiou, an important Event likewise as it launched the procedure that radically politicized subjects, making the concept of a collective emancipatory politics that effectively

5 Badiou, Being and Event, 175 and 178.

opposes capitalo-parliamentarianism⁶ not only real but above all necessary. The Commune,⁷ as an Event, was pregnant

6 This is the union of (capitalist) market and the parliament. Badiou explains that capitalism has forged a solid union with the parliament. On the one hand, there is the Western-style parliament that preaches a democracy

“reduced to its entirely corrupt representative and electoral form.” The ambiguity of the term democracy proves that it can be used against the demos (the common people, the masses, the farmers, the workers, etc.) in favor of the ruling elite. On the other hand, the bourgeoisies keep on defending a freedom that is merely understood as “the freedom to trade and consume.” Ibid., xii.

7 The Paris Commune, just like any other historical Event, can elicit different and at times conflicting views. It carries with it both achievements and shortcomings that can help guide future political movements. Even at its incipient stage, it served as an important guide to subsequent proletarian theorizing and struggle. Learning from the failures of the Commune, Karl Marx cautioned in “The Civil War in France” that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 584. This theory was incorporated later in the 1872 preface to the corrected The Communist Manifesto. We can appreciate the value of Marx’s caution in light of Vladimir Lenin’s evaluation of the Commune. In

“State and Revolution,” the Russian revolutionary pointed out that “it is this important correction that has been distorted by the opportunists . . . . Here it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar ‘interpretation’ of Marx’s famous statement just quoted is that Marx here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power.” In V.I.

Lenin: Collected Works 25, trans. and ed. Stepan Apresyan and Jim Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 419. In theory, the Paris Commune had much to contribute to the succeeding political movements. Badiou discusses the significance of the Commune, and even the Communist Hypothesis in general, using the analogy of a mathematician’s pursuit of a specific hypothesis.

He is alluding to “Fermat’s theorem.” Badiou explains: “Countless attempts were made to do this, from Fermat, who formulated the hypothesis (and claimed to have proved it, but that need not concern us here), to Wiles, the English mathematician, who really did prove it a few years ago. Many of those attempts became the starting point of mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself . . . . The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.” The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and

with and gave birth to new events. With Marx, Badiou proclaims that “working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.”⁸ The Paris Commune exemplified the notion of an Event in two senses. The first is the sense of embodying and successfully articulating the meaning of proletarian struggle, of overthrowing and seizing from the bourgeoisies political power. It was a radical politics that subverted bourgeois economics and politics in favor of a more egalitarian and democratic socio-economic arrangement. The second is the sense of surfacing a trans-historical truth, inspiring similar revolutions in different epochs, and which were successful revolutions.⁹ Badiou shares with Marx the conviction that

“[i]f the commune should be destroyed, the struggle would only be postponed. The principles of the Commune are eternal and indestructible; they will present themselves again and again until the working class is liberated.”¹⁰

Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2010), 6-7. Slavoj Zizek has a similar treatment of the matter and explains that “at its most radical, theory is the theory of failed practice . . . . Such an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-slick accommodation to ‘new circumstances’.” In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 3.

8 Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 169.

9 Of course, anti-communist discourses will always discredit the successes of the socialist revolutions, describing socialist projects, in Russia and China for example, as total failures. For an extensive defense on the subject matter, particularly on what the term “failure” really means, see The Communist Hypothesis.

10 Ibid., 198.

For the Event not to dissipate into a myriad of flowing images, thus losing the rare chance of constructing the New, it has to be affirmed. The act of affirmation demands an intervention from subjects who are determined to seize the New the Event is pregnant with.¹¹ In politics, this refers to a collective subject, so organized and resolved to construct the immanent consequences of the Event. The subject is the essential element of a politics of emancipation, as implied by the twofold senses of Event explained above. All attempts at emancipating humanity, no matter how ripe the objective conditions are, and be they against the shackles of feudal or capitalist bondage, require a subjective element, a precarious collective that supports and faithfully embodies the effects of the Event.¹²

The interventionist bent of Badiou's politics of emancipation highlights the necessity of an organized collective that incorporates into the world the consequences of the Event.¹³ Indeed, it can be said that the subject is the mediation between the trans-historical truth the Event instantiated and the historical intervention that inscribes

11 Badiou defines intervention as “any procedure by which a multiple is recognized as an Event.” Being and Event, 202.

12 Faithful support is synonymous with Fidelity, which Badiou elaborates as

“the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation . . . of an evental multiple. In sum, a fidelity is the apparatus that separates out, within the set of presented multiples, those which depend upon an Event. To be faithful is to gather and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance.” Being and Event, 232.

13 Ibid., 393.

within the world the procedure of the truth. In the level of politics, the subject is the organized collective process constructing within a particular region the universal and egalitarian consequences of an Event. In the modern world exclusively dominated by the logic of capital, this politics is an emancipation of the elements unaccounted for by the said capital—in the Philippines, these elements are basically the workers and peasants, but also the majority of the petty and national bourgeoisies.¹⁴ We may fairly apply Badiou's term, the inexistent, to the unaccounted elements within a

14 Amado Guerrero explains that the crisis of the current semi-colonial and semi-feudal system creates a unique social stratification represented by the existence of specific classes. As a semi-feudal society, he explains that the peasants predominate its population. He notes, “The peasantry is distinguished from all other classes by the fact that all its members cultivate the land. It is the main force of the national economy. It is 75 per cent of the entire Philippine population.” He also explains that the workers (also termed as proletariat) refer “principally to the industrial workers and secondarily to other wage-earners. It is a class that is dispossessed of any means of production and has to sell its labor power to the capitalist owners of the means of production.

It is exploited by being forced to create surplus value while receiving in return a measly subsistence wage, far smaller than that surplus value which capitalist employers appropriate.” According to Guerrero, the workers comprise 15% of the population. The 9% of the population is comprised by the petty and national bourgeoisie, constituting 7% and 2% of the population, respectively.

The national bourgeoisie is “the middle stratum between the comprador big bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. It is composed of businessmen in town and country who are interested in ‘nationalist industrialization’ . . . . It is oppressed to a great extent by imperialism which has its own direct investments in a big and strategic way, dumps its manufactures locally and manipulates the basic policies of the reactionary government . . . .” The petty bourgeoisie on the other hand “includes the vast majority of the intelligentsia like teachers, student youth, low-income professionals, office clerks and lower government officials . . . .” Philippine Society and Revolution (Manila: Aklat ng Bayan, 2006), 136-7, 140 and 145.

situation.¹⁵ If this politics is conditioned by an Event, an Event, then, is “what makes possible the restitution of the inexistent.”¹⁶ A radical change happens when the inexistent of the world start to exist in that same world, and with maximum intensity.¹⁷ In a more concrete and specific example, this change entails genuine land reform and its consequent national industrialization, implementation of livable wages and non-contractual jobs, genuine democratization of social and political spaces, accessible and quality social services, and healthy and mutually beneficial foreign relations. This is properly the condition for the coming of existence of the (presently) inexistent.

In the personal level, the subject is divided. This follows the basic Hegelian concept of the subject that is both an alienation and a scission: the former being the becoming- other of the subject, and the latter being the subject as a unity of opposites.¹⁸ Badiou recognizes the subject as being placed in opposition to the world s/he is constantly engaging and consciously changing. This world, above all, is not an abstract world but the bourgeois world, which, today,

15 This is truer in the case of the peasants and workers whose lives and voices are rendered insignificant in the formulation of economic and political policies in the face of brilliantly formulated neoliberal policies.

16 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York:

Verso, 2012), 56.

17Ibid.

18Alain Badiou, Theory of a Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York:

Continuum, 2009), 4.

is under the hegemonic rule of U.S. Imperialism.¹⁹ Hence, the subject is in constant struggle with the bourgeois world, so as not to be corrupted by bourgeois decadent culture and

19 Monopoly capitalism, or the last stage of capitalism, is also termed by Lenin as Imperialism. He described its five fundamental features, namely: 1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this “finance capital” of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of international monopoly capitalist combines, which share the world among themselves; and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. (Guerrero, 66) In the case of the Philippines, monopoly capitalism is reflected through U.S.

Imperialism. This started when the Philippines was ceded to the U.S. by Spain through the Treaty of Paris. After that, U.S. Imperialism “was able to hold the Philippines under its direct colonial rule” and it “took a firm hold of the material base of Philippine society.” Ibid., 67. In relation to the U.S.’ seizure of the Philippine economic base, it also “took a firm hold of the superstructure . . . .” Ibid. This includes the field of education. For a detailed critique of the colonial education during the American Occupation, see Renato Constantino, The Miseducation of the Filipino, http://www.scribd.com/

doc/32721186. See also Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 309.

From the declaration of the “bogus” independence in 1945 up to the present, U.S. Imperialism is in full control of the Philippines not any more as its colony, but as its neocolony (or semi-colony). See Amado Guerrero Philippine Society and Revolution, 63-64. The ballooning number of foreign investments in the Philippines, including BPOs and mining industries, is a concrete manifestation of one of imperialism’s characteristics: export of capital.

This is consistent with capitalism’s drive for higher profits as Philippines sadly is exploited for cheap labor. Boykoff of CNN describes the Philippines as “an affordable place to do business. An entry-level call center employee can make about $470 a month, which is a good salary for the Philippines but far less than their counterparts are paid in the U.S. or Europe. See Pamela Boykoff,

“Ringing in the Changes: The Philippines’ Call Center Boom,” CNN, April 30, 2012, http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/asia/philippines-call- centers/index.html.

thus remain in fidelity to the Event. Badiou explains that

“[t]he true contrary of the proletariat is not the bourgeoisie.

It is the bourgeois world, imperialist society, of which the proletariat, let this be noted, is a notorious element, as the principal productive force and as the antagonistic political pole.”²⁰ After all, the proletariat have no illusion to change the heart of the bourgeoisie, but the heart of the bourgeois world: the capitalist economic structure.

The Christians for National Liberation: History, Orientation, and Political Work

In the early 1960s up to the late 1980s, opportunities for political engagement opened up from within the Catholic Church. On December 8, 1965, the Second Vatican Council concluded with a “strong legitimation for religious concerns with social issues.”²¹ The Council instituted radical reforms in the Church and fuelled the conviction that “there is no salvation history genuinely separated from world history” and that human history “is, at the same time, God's liberating history with humanity and for humanity.”²² A few years later, in 1971, liberation theology

20 Badiou, op. cit., 7.

21 John J. Carroll, S.J., “Philippine NGOs Confront Urban Poverty,” in Organizing for Democracy: Non-Governmental Organizations, Civil Society, and the Philippine State, eds. G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 114.

22 Lode Wostyn, Doing Ecclesiology: Church and Mission Today (Quezon City:

Claretian Publications, 1990), 53-54.

emerged in Latin America and rapidly gained adherents around the world. Catholics, both clerics and laity, began to actively participate in the struggle for social transformation, thus averting what Cardinal Kasper describes as the

“danger of making the Church bourgeois . . . the church primarily of the rich, the powerful, and the socially acceptable.”²³ Their social involvement and activism further intensified due to worsening poverty and inequality in their respective countries—what Gustavo Gutierrez would later call the “eruption of the poor” prompted them to struggle alongside the poor and the oppressed for social justice and liberation. By joining the ranks of the poor in their struggle for land and just wages, these church people put into practice liberation theology’s ecclesiology: “a new way of being church.”²⁴ They interpreted the Christian faith from the vantage point of the poor. In this way, as Phillip Ablett put it, the institutional Church was transformed into “a terrain rather than simply a target of revolutionary political struggle.”²⁵

23 Walter Cardinal Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, trans. William Madges (Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 2015), 192.

24 Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church, trans. John Diercksmeir (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 128.

25 Phillip Ablett, “Beyond Church and Party: Christians for National Liberation in the Philippines,” (unpublished dissertation, La Trobe University, 2001), 1.

The response of the local church in the Philippines to the challenges of Vatican II was immediate in the form of several initiatives: “a month-long Priests’ Institute for Social Action conducted in Hong Kong by Fr. Walter Hogan, S.J. in 1965 and attended by a bishop and about thirty priests . . . ; the establishment by the Philippine Catholic bishops, in 1966, of a National Secretariat for Social Action (NASSA) headed by the dynamic Bishop Julio Labayen and with a full-time secretariat; and the National Catholic Rural Congress of 1967, which focused attention on the plight of the rural sector.”²⁶

It was during this great historical epoch that the Christians for National Liberation (CNL) was born. The CNL was founded on February 17, 1972 in a worship room of the Sampaloc University Center in downtown Manila.

According to an unpublished manuscript provided by a CNL member entitled “History of the CNL,” seventy-two church people came together to organize themselves as

“Christians and Revolutionaries.” The group articulated the founding of CNL in the following words: “This is a point of arrival and departure for us. It ends our separate search for service to the people and starts our organized struggle along the narrow path to national liberation and democracy.”

26 Carroll, 114-15.

Jose Maria Sison, the founding Chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines, describes the strategic role the CNL played within the church:

The CNL departed from the conservative tradition and position of the institutional church and hierarchy. It called for the church of the people, especially for the poor, deprived, and oppressed. It propagated conscientization and preferential option for the poor. The lower clergy joined the CNL and consciously distanced themselves from the mindset and actuations of an institutional church that owns substantial land and stocks in major corporations, and that provides services mainly to the exploiting classes.

In the shift from the Spanish to the US colonial period, the Catholic Church retained their property rights and gained capital for corporate investments from the sale of friar estates which came under the US-instituted land reform program.²⁷

When Martial Law was declared by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972, the members of the CNL had to adopt

27 Jose Maria Sison, “The New Democratic Revolution through Protracted People's War” (lecture, Forum for Liberation Theology, Centre for Liberation Theologies, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, May 15, 2014), http://josemariasison.org/the-new- democratic-revolution-through-protracted-peoples-war/.

tactics appropriate to the new situation while holding firm to its commitment to the national democratic cause. A number of priest-members went underground, some were arrested by the military, while a few joined the armed struggle in the countryside. In the urban areas, CNL set up programs that provided the masses with basic social services, supported them in their struggles or helped in organizing them; in other words, CNL members gave moral, technical, material, financial, and, above all, cadre support to the masses and the growing revolutionary movement in various places in the country.

Many religious priests embraced and devoted their lives to the advancement of the revolutionary cause of the national democratic revolution. Fr. Rustico Tan, Fr. Luis Jalandoni, and Fr. Santiago Salas, to name a few prominent CNL members, left their “‘safe’ environs and immersed themselves in another Filipino reality. They were subsequently conscienticized and empowered.”²⁸ They persevered in the fight and struggle in solidarity with the peasants and the workers. Their advocacies ranged from demands for national independence and democratic rights to the solution of the land problem, the empowerment of the workers and peasants, and just wages. By disengaging from “serving the interests of the powerful and instead tak[ing] the side of

28 Anne Harris, “The Theology of Struggle: Recognizing its Place in Recent Philippine History,” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 87.

those who are relatively powerless,”²⁹ the CNL members opted for the poor.

The CNL Constitution identifies two challenges that confront Christians in the Philippines: the challenge of

“revolution” and the challenge of “faith.” The challenge of revolution prepares Christians to struggle against the forces of national and class oppression and exploitation through a protracted people’s war for the attainment of national democracy with a socialist perspective. The challenge of faith exhorts Christians to “incarnate” their faith by actively supporting the national democratic revolution. By actively participating in the people’s war and defending the rights of the poor against the forces of oppression, CNL members were able to concretize the two greatest commandments: to love God and to love one’s neighbor.

The members of CNL are not limited to Catholic clergy and laity. The group consists of broad masses of Christians including members of the Philippine Independent Church and various Protestant denominations. They have been supportive of the new democratic revolution through a protracted people’s war, as well as the legal and peaceful democratic mass movement, and the campaign for a just and lasting peace. Their social and political involvement can be labeled as “the ingenious and ongoing creation of a group of

29 Marvin L. Krier Mich, The Challenges and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching (Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 2012), 10.

church-people negotiating and re-envisaging the dialectics of church and party to confront the socio-political crises afflicting their people.”³⁰

For more than forty years, CNL has been steadfast in its task of building the broadest united front. It showed unwavering commitment in its revolutionary task to overthrow the oppressive semi-colonial and semi-feudal system and pave the way for a truly free, democratic, and prosperous Philippine society. Jose Maria Sison highlights the important role of Christians in the revolution. He said that the new democratic revolution “cannot be won without the participation and support of the Christians.”³¹

The CNL and Badiou's Politics of Emancipation

Three significant points of intersection, among several others, may be noted from the overlap between the CNL’s national democratic principles and Badiou’s emancipatory politics, to wit: 1) the evental rupture; 2) the political organization of the collective; and, 3) the construction of the New. It is important to underline that CNL’s practice of a politicized religion never hindered it from becoming a strategic ally with those engaged in a secular or non-theistic politics of emancipation. This crossover between religion and the politics of emancipation is aptly described by Ablett

30 Ablett, 9.

31 Sison, ibid.

as “a transgression of boundaries and an identification of causes.”³²

The CNL believes that the Philippine state is semi- colonial and semi-feudal—a state of affairs they further believe is perpetrated U.S. Imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. Essentially, the CNL is against all forms of foreign domination and local class oppression. It is in this regard that the CNL is billed as responding to the call to resume the unfinished revolution of Andres Bonifacio, a movement that was anti-colonial and democratic in nature but whose victory was thwarted by the reinforcing interests of bourgeois ilustrado opportunism and imperialist hegemony.

The 1896 Revolution of Bonifacio was an Event. It was an Event that affirmed the New: nationhood. As an Event, it was supported by the collective subjectivity of the Katipuneros who valiantly battled against Spanish colonial forces. And similar to the Paris Commune, the Bonifacio revolt gave birth to several events. Worthy of note are the decades after 1913, when the U.S. colonial rule was rocked by progressive and nationalist sentiments³³ that ultimately culminated in the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s to

32 Ablett, 5.

33 See Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited 1 (Quezon City:

The Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1975), 348-89.

1980s, the period when the CNL was founded.³⁴ It can also be argued that the First Quarter Storm of the 1970s was an Event. These various events paved the way for the re- articulation of the national democratic political line.

There is a need for a continuing fidelity to these events.

The New has not been fully installed; the old structures are still extant—supported by the lingering bourgeois opportunism and imperial hegemony. Foreign domination continues to shape economic policies that are antithetical to the development of a local and nationalized industry.

Furthermore, the bureaucracy is still an exclusive contesting site among the landed and big bourgeois elites. Thus, the democratic interests of the majority of the Filipinos, the peasantry and the workers, as well as professionals and small businesses, remain undermined. Democracy is but an illusion popularized by the ruling elites and their apologists.

Their version of democracy is one which is a sham representative government legitimized by an elite-dominated electoral process. In the case of dissent, the right to speak is granted for as long as the language used is the dominant (yet oppressive) language. Any form of expression which transgresses the dominant language is branded as

34 Aside from the CNL, one radical movement of the youth, the Kabataang Makabayan (KM), was also born in this turbulent decade of the 1960s.

Founded by nationalist and progressive youth on November 30, 1964, coincident to Andres Bonifacio’s 101st birth anniversary, the KM was resolved to continue the unfinished revolution of Bonifacio. From a Badiouian perspective, the KM was faithful to the consequences of the 1896 Event.

uncivilized, barbaric, or hooliganism. Demands for changes are recognized for as long as these proceed within the parliamentarian or electoral processes that, under a semi- colonial and semi-feudal system, have long been pre- determined to reinforce the ruling interests. And development is granted by foreign masters for as long as the framework strictly mirrors the neoliberal logic of exclusion and greed.

The politics of emancipation is radical in its very character. It is a process that works within a situation but not within the State. This implies that liberation arises immanently in a situation; it is not something that is infused into a situation from a transcendent source. The latter is more akin to the theological or religious conceptualization of salvation. The CNL firmly believes that the worldly emancipation of humanity is the foundation of salvation history. The politics of emancipation, moreover, works outside of the State machinery. It is not a process that makes use of the appurtenances of the very system it seeks to change. It is not from the inside but from outside of the structure that the effects of the Event can proceed. Badiou wrote, “[W]e will have to create something that will be face to face with the State—not inside the State, but face to face with it.”³⁵ The working out of emancipatory politics outside the State is also consistent with the CNL’s assessment that

35 Badiou, “Affirmative Dialectics: From Logic to Anthropology,” 9.

the State in the country is no more than the machinery of the landed elite and the bourgeois classes; hence, the process of liberation has to be carried out outside the State. Indeed, the politics of emancipation forcefully breaks away from the logic and law of the State and “prescribes a measure to the measurelessness of the State through the suddenly emergent materiality of a universalizable collective.”³⁶

The politics of emancipation creates a collective body composed primarily of the inexistent since an Event is the coming forth of the inexistent. The collective inclusively allows the democratic participation of the peasants, workers, petty and middle bourgeoisies since this brand of politics does not privilege the members of the privileged class. The evolution of the collective subject into an organized political body is what Badiou calls the uprising of the inexistent.³⁷ This is reflected in the disposition of the CNL to forge a broad unity of progressive and positive forces determined to end centuries of imperial and feudal bondage. This coalition of forces is at once a universal collective as it advances the democratic demands of the majority of the population who are currently marginalized by the minority who impose an oligarchic and particularistic system of political rule. Its universality is further embodied in the indifference of the collective to religious (or irreligious) differences. The

36 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verson, 2005), 146-47.

37 Badiou, The Rebirth of History, 56.

statement of a CNL member who is a nun is revealing in this regard. Ablett shared that the Sister he interviewed reacted strongly against the charge that CNL worked hand in hand with communist atheists. She remarked: “I don’t bother too much about whether their ideology is Godless or not. After all, Christians work with lots of people, whether in Europe or here or any place . . . on Earth . . . who don’t believe in a God and who are not Communists. So why are they so hung up about the Godlessness of Communism or the atheism of Marxists?”³⁸

The collective engendered by the politics of emancipation is, finally, a collective propelled by the imperative to “keep going,” i.e. to be always faithful to the Event, and to never betray it. As the Paris Commune served as a harbinger for the new society in France, so does the national democratic movement, with the CNL as the revolutionary organization for Christians, serve as the herald of the New in the Philippines. The CNL has always been vocal about their perspective and alternative to the present national situation:

socialism. This is the New they have been striving to replace the old and reactionary structure with.

Throughout history, what seemed impossible always started as a hypothesis or as an Idea. In confrontation with the old oppressive structures, the Idea develops into the real, and goes by different names in various epochs. The Idea,

38 Ablett, 3.

according to Badiou, “was Republican for decades, ‘naively’

communist in the nineteenth century, and state communist in the twentieth century.” He continues: the Idea should be provisionally named as “dialectically communist in the twenty-first century. Its true name will arrive at the margins of the rebirth of History.”³⁹ The collective task therefore is to live with and be faithful to the Idea.

Bibliography

Ablett, Phillip. “Beyond Church and Party: Christians for National Liberation in the Philippines.” Unpublished dissertation, La Trobe University, 2001.

Badiou, Alain. “Affirmative Dialectics: From Logic to Anthropology.”

The International Journal of Badiou Studies 2, no. 1 (2013): 1-13.

Accessed March 8, 2016. http://badioustudiesorg.ipower.com/

cgi-bin/ojs-2.3.6/ index.php/ijbs/article/view/34/pdf.

———. Philosophy and the Event. Translated by Louise Burchill.

Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013.

———. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2012.

———. The Rebirth of History. Translated by Gregory Elliot. New York: Verso, 2012.

39 Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 63.

———. The Communist Hypothesis. Translated by David Macey and Steve Corcoran. New York: Verso, 2010.

———. Theory of a Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. New York:

Continuum, 2009.

———. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York:

Continuum, 2005.

———. Metapolitics. Translated by Jason Barker. New York: Verso, 2005.

Boff, Leonardo. Church, Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church. Translated by John Diercksmeir. New York:

Crossroad, 1992.

Boykoff, Pamela. “Ringing in the Changes: The Philippines’ Call Center Boom.” CNN. Published April 30, 2012.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/asia/philippines- call-centers/index.html.

Carroll, John J., S.J. “Philippine NGOs Confront Urban Poverty,” in Organizing for Democracy: Non-Governmental Organizations, Civil Society, and the Philippine State, eds. G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998):

113-37.

Constantino, Renato. “The Miseducation of the Filipino.” Weekly Graphic, June 8, 1966. Accessed April 15, 2016.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/32721186/Renato-Constantino- The-Miseducation-of-the-Filipino.

———.The Philippines: A Past Revisited 1. Quezon City: The Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1975.

Guerrero, Amado. Philippine Society and Revolution. Philippines: Aklat ng Bayan, 2006.

Harris, Anne. “The Theology of Struggle: Recognizing its Place in Recent Philippine History.” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 83-107.

Kasper, Walter Cardinal. Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life. Translated by William Madges. Quezon City:

Claretian Publications, 2015.

Lenin, Vladimir. “State and Revolution.” In V.I. Lenin: Collected Works 25. Translated and edited by Stepan Apresyan and Jim Riordan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974.

Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Mich, Marvin L. Krier. The Challenges and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching. Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 2012.

Sison, Jose Maria. “The New Democratic Revolution through Protracted People's War.” Lecture at the Forum for Liberation Theology Centre for Liberation Theologies, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, May 15, 2014. Accessed May 2, 2016 http://josemariasison.org/the-new- democratic-revolution-through-protracted-peoples-war/.

Wostyn, Lode. Doing Ecclesiology: Church and Mission Today. Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1990.

Zizek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. New York: Verso, 2008.

Authors

Regletto Aldrich Imbong is an assistant professor of philosophy of the University of the Philippines-Cebu. He is an active member of the Philosophical Association of the Philippines (PAP) and the Philosophical Association of the Visayas and Mindanao (PHAVISMINDA). He finished his AB and MA in Philosophy at the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, and is currently finishing

his PhD in Philosophy in the same University, under the Commission on Higher Education’s Faculty Development Program. He is a volunteer of the Cebu Archdiocesan Commission on Social Advocacies (COSA), providing support to the marginalized sectors of society especially in their struggles and advocacies. He is also a part of the secretariat of the Cebu Ecumenical Solidarity for Peace, an ecumenical group that supports the current peace negotiations between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

<rdimbong@up.edu.ph>

Jerry D. Imbong is a full-time faculty member of Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Intramuros, Manila where he teaches Social Science and Political Science subjects. He finished his Master’s in Philosophical Research at De La Salle University, Manila. At present, he is finishing his PhD in Philosophy in the same University and is planning to write a dissertation on Lumad struggle in Mindanao. He has presented research papers at the Philosophical Association of the Philippines (PAP) and Pambansang Samahan ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino (PSSP), of which he is an active member. He is also actively involved in various church-based organizations like the Church People - Workers Solidarity (CWS) and the Philippine Ecumenical Peace Platform (PEPP), a broad alliance of Christian churches that pushes for the resumption of the peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). <badok93@yahoo.com>