Comments on the Manifesto Papers

Abstract

I wrote a piece for this panel that seems to diverge from the mood and tempo of the other essays. It is a piece that is more academic in orientation, and like many academic pieces, wants to complicate things by posing additional nuances and problems to a communist resurgence in the Philippines as compared to the more optimistic prognoses of the other essays. Moreover, I am, in the final analysis, just an armchair intellectual, and as such would not and do not have any claims at political prescription. Thus my comments on the other papers must be taken with a grain of salt. It is an academics reflection of and commentary on what are evidently political pieces. To assess the Manifesto, particularly in this century, may therefore also involve our reflecting on the experience of socialism, no matter how bureaucratized it was. To do this, however, also demands that we read about them.