On a recent trip to the Philippines, facilitated by old friends yet shadowed by crises stretching from Gaza to the US to Sudan and everywhere in between and beyond, I gave some talks at various venues. I had no idea what to expect from my audiences so I designed interventions that would perhaps appeal to wider publics, while remaining embedded in my many years of research and thinking about China, history, politics, and the world.
My first talk, facetiously entitled “Why Mao? Why now?,” was fashioned out of a short piece I wrote some years ago about pedagogy; I was scheduled to deliver it in the North at the Alfredo Tadiar Library. Established a few years ago by my friend Neferti in her father’s home town and in remembrance of his giant judicial legacy, the library is a bootstraps affair: run by a small paid staff and a host of volunteers on a miniscule budget, it has become a space of gathering, reading, conversation, and cultural-intellectual exchange in an area apparently not known for widely fostering such activity.
The library is housed in Neferti’s childhood home and its modest physical space is densely packed with meaning. Down a small side street off the bustling main plaza, you turn into a courtyard whose wall mural was painted in vibrant colors by a Houston-based Filipino-American artist known as Kill Joy working with northern Luzon artists; it depicts everyday folks engaging in everyday labor in joyful, purposeful community. Stepping just inside the building, one finds a small shop, with locally-sourced crafts and a small selection of culturally and politically important books from around the world for sale at favorable prices. One can stop and linger here, in the cool of a lightly air-conditioned space to acclimate from the humid heat outdoors. There was a temporary coffee concession selling deliciously fragrant brews run by a husband-wife team of bean roasters who are passionate about their craft and their community; this concession will soon be replaced, perhaps by a local baker of northern-inspired sweets. Farther in, there is the main room of the library: a few tables now occupied by young people working on a collaborative project are interspersed among several shelving stacks of books, most volumes donated by their authors (several of mine are there) brought suitcase by suitcase from abroad by Neferti and friends. (This reminds me of the Kidlat Tahimik theory of filmmaking for the third world: a “cups of gas” process rather than a “tanks of gas” type of production). All the volumes are catalogued by those volunteers who are simultaneously learning library practices as they run the place. Today, in preparation for my talk, the space is full of folding chairs.
In the very back, there is one more distinct area: a gallery, which, at the time of my visit, was exhibiting a photography project of and by local fishermen, whose everyday labors and environments came to life in the candid portraits and composed shots of boats, sand, shore, nets, fish, light, sky, and work. This project will soon travel into the fishermen’s own communities for exhibition and discussion.
The space fills up with friends of the library, kith and kin of Neferti, and a number of activists and academics from a wide geographical area. Eventually around 50 people are crammed into the room. My talk is informal and I meander through Mao as a revolutionary, a theorist, a Marxist in the violent imperialist twentieth-century world. I think aloud about why he was effective in his time and why something of his methods and thinking might be relevant still in today’s world of critical politics and social movements, even while contemporary China has long since dispensed with its Maoist past and most of his theory. We dwell on “speaking bitterness” campaigns – or, how early 1950s narratives of suffering created communities of social transformation before they hardened into performatively scripted rote forms – and on the problems of revolutionary necessity, Party discipline, and the scourge of bureaucracy as the death of revolution.
The Q&A is when I learn from the audience about why Mao and why now, for them, in the Philippines: what it has meant to read and act and think with Mao’s theory and practice over long years of revolutionary struggle against multiple authoritarian and imperialist regimes. “On Protracted War” emerges as a key text. A young woman stands up to declaim, in a tumbled self-conscious hybrid of English and Filipino (maybe Ilocano?), about how activists have mobilized Mao in their pursuit of political and cultural revolution; how Mao is not dead theory to them, but live praxis. She is passionate, articulate, and forceful. She is teaching all of us about why Mao still signifies now. I’m grateful for her instruction and learn as much as I can from what I understand her to be saying.
After the talk, I sign the books I had brought in my suitcase, meet a slew of young people intent on learning and practicing and thinking about struggle and revolutionary cultural-political forms, and I’m humbled by their earnest belief – even today – that a different world is possible. If they were in charge, perhaps it would be so.
Some days later, I am in Manila at The University of the Philippines Center for International Studies (UPCIS) for two talks organized by Ramon Guillermo and Sarah Raymundo. First up is a morning panel on Palestine, convened with Neferti & Jon, our talks interspersed with video clips of Fidel, Hugo, and other Latin Americans repeatedly and in different eras berating world leaders at the United Nations and elsewhere for their supine acceptance of the decades-long sacrifice of Palestinians on the altar of fealty to Israel. In the Manila audience are Palestinians, Filipino activists, the Venezuelan ambassador, all told around 90 concerned people. There is none of the security apparatus that surrounds such events on US campuses these days, although the threat of state violence in the Philippines is never far away. None of us speaking is a specialist on Palestine, yet all three of us long have been active in our universities and other academic settings on behalf of Palestinian liberation and more recently anti-genocide protest.
Jon begins with some thoughts on Palestine and value forms (how many Palestinians are worth how many Israelis for example). He draws on his recently published exchange with Ali Musleh, in which the two dialogue about the total permeation of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians into the media ecology of thought, feeling, and affect the world over. In the intensification of what Jon calls the “semiowar” over meaning and information, none of us can be mere spectators. We all are complicit. How to navigate our complicity, to recognize and act on the fact that genocide (over there) implicates all of us (over here) becomes the challenge and the gauntlet. Genocide is financialized – no matter how it ends up, someone stands to make billions – and we are all thus enveloped into the computational warfare, since each of us lives in the mediated world and our data provides financial opportunities for the mega tech oligarchs. The complexity of his thinking is hard to convey, but it is stunning and he leaves us with a sense of foreboding: if we don’t grasp the contours of the semiowar and its computational weaponry, we will become mere fodder in its accelerated process.
Neferti does not lighten the mood. Drawing on her recent work on remaindered lives, she sketches in elemental ways how some bodies, some lives, are rendered unvaluable, unvalued, devalued in the course of contemporary warfare, whether economic or military or cultural. That Palestine is the site where this has become so incontrovertibly visible is both a function of the exceptional status that Palestinian lives have always had – exceptional insofar as they have never registered quite as human as Israeli lives – and of the normalization of this exception in the mechanisms of global capitalist accumulation and valuation. In a conversational style that is saturated with rage and erudition, Neferti also traces out how the devalued lives long embodied in Filipino labor have been harnessed to the devaluation of Palestinians in Israel, as Palestinian labor has been suffocated, bombed and destroyed while Filipino (and other Southeast Asian) labor has been imported to take their place. The Philippines is not an “elsewhere;” it is right in the middle of the genocidal process.
They are a tough act to follow.
I speak pointedly and briefly to the university activisms in the US long before and since October 2023, to the encampments and their violent suppression, to the “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom in the United States, and to the huge uphill challenges that face us now in the second coming of our fascist front. I speak as an engaged academic, an anti-Zionist Jew, and an activist on my campus at New York University– all those roles so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled. My words resonate with Jon’s and Neferti’s: now is the time for solidarity and unity against genocide and repression; anything less than that is complicity.
The talks are received enthusiastically. There is a brief intense group of questions focusing on what we can do now. We have no definitive answers. Several of the Palestinians approach me, and one is so overcome with emotion because, as he informs me, I am the first Jew he has ever met who has publicly identified with the Palestinian struggle. I point to Jon as another and mention that so many pro-Palestinian allies in the States and Europe are in fact anti-Zionist Jews. We take a picture and then we eat the lunch provided by the organizers. We talk of our different life trajectories and our common goals. He introduces me to his mother, who was in attendance and also overcome with emotion. We laugh and we cry together. We affirm our common humanity. It is so far from enough, yet such simple steps remain impossible in many venues, including at my NYU campus in New York where hostility and vindictive institutional and intellectual retribution are what is on offer for those of us who engage in anti-genocide speech and activism.
My afternoon talk at the University is devoted to China. With an audience of 60-70 people, I speak on history, narrative, and revolutionary possibility in China’s 20th century. This is adapted from a presentation I had prepared on my China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020). I begin with the early twentieth-century feminist He-Yin Zhen and her re-narration of Chinese history through the lens of perdurable patriarchy; I continue through the 20th century, from literary and historical narration to revolutionary activism and back again. Along the way I linger on Ding Ling and her “Thoughts on March 8th,” the piece that critically evaluated the possibility of female revolutionary subjectivity and that, in turn, was criticized by the Party for being too factionalist. I say something like, “Ding Ling was criticized and then sanctioned; she was sent down to live among and be re-educated by peasants.” I move on, through the revolutionary years to the denouement, which soon becomes the reversal and the repudiation of struggle in the name of class harmony, patriarchy, privatization, vast accumulations of individual wealth, national modernization, and global extraction.
The questions posed are respectful and curious: what accounts for “China’s rise,” how does China’s contemporary situation impact the Philippines today, why is the revolution’s history so completely erased in favor of nationalist developmentalism… And then one of the conveners of the event asks a question from her perspective as a long-time member of the opposition in the Philippines, an activist almost since the cradle. She asks: in my characterization of Ding Ling, I indicate that she was “sanctioned” by being sent down to the countryside. This, my friend says, is a peculiar way to think the question. When she was coming up in activism, it was a quest and a privilege to be “sent down;” one eagerly awaited one’s turn to be educated by peasants and the masses. Being sent down was a culminating prize of political education. Why, then, do I use the word “sanction?”
The question is provocative. It indicates precisely the fault-line between being a mere academic and being an activist. That faulty line of mine suddenly opens a gulf between my sanctimonious language of revolutionary discipline and her passionate revolutionary experience. It makes me rethink my articulations of the relation between intellectuals and education by the masses in the midst of revolutionary activism. It turns out that for me, this time in the Philippines has become a vital space where I can be challenged to learn again – is it too late? – how to do politics in the real time of struggle, how to move from the safe space of texts to the actual place of concrete action. Filipino Maoists have taught me, at this time in our attempts to advocate for the security of life and justice for Palestinians and others, why Mao and why now.
Rebecca E. Karl is professor of History at New York University