Philippines: Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, On the detention of Dutch activist Thomas van Beersum

Free Thomas Van Beersum Now!

From Bayan.ph:

We strongly denounce the detention of Dutch activist Thomas van Beersum by the Bureau of Immigration. Thomas was prevented from boarding his flight this morning and is being held by Immigration officials at the NAIA. Thomas was already leaving the Philippines and we see no reason to detain him. This is plain harassment in light of the many threats issued by the BI against Thomas during the past two weeks. It is ridiculous that a person already set to leave the country will be detained only to be eventually deported. However, this is not the first time this has happened as other foreign activists have also been held before by Immigration officials only to be deported and then blacklisted.

Immigration officials have also told media that van Beersum is “overstaying” in the Philippines. If true, then he should just have been made to pay the corresponding fine instead of being detained. The whole thing is just political harassment and is meant to send a message to other foreign activists showing solidarity with the Philippines.

Full article: On the detention of Dutch activist Thomas van Beersum

This shows to the world the repressive conditions in the Philippines in their true light: what freedom of speech is taken for granted in the Netherlands is denied in the Philippines. The convenient appeals to nationalism on the part of the Government and State in the Philippines would make sense if they were consistent – but “foreigners” who go to the Philippines for the sex trade (that is rape for money), or who go there as part of mercenary imperialist armies, or who go there to exploit illegally the environment and natural resources of the Philippines, do not meet the same fate. Against the false nationalism of the Comprador slaves of imperialism, Thomas van Beersum stands as an example of proletarian internationalism – more Filipino than the politicians, cops, judges, and enemies of the people who serve imperialism in the Philippines will ever be.

Related articles

• Dutch who made SONA cop cry to be deported (rappler.com)
• Dutch activist detained by immigration officials (bulatlat.com)
• Philippine Government Free Thomas Van Beersum Now ! (democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com)
• In Praise of Thomas Van Beersum’s Internationalism (karlomongaya.wordpress.com)

Full pamphlet: El Líder de la desesperación – Juan Antonio Corretjer

We are making available in Spanish, the text of the political summation by Juan Antonio Corretjer of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader and revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos. We hope to be able to translate this text sooner or later, but in the meantime, Spanish readers can take advantage of this.  Please click here to view: El Líder de la desesperación – Juan Antonio Corretjer (The Leader of Desperation)

Clemente Soto Velez, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Pedro Albizu Campos, at the time when Corretjer was a leader in the Nationalist Party.

This document – published in the early 1970s (a few years after Albizu’s death), as a result of a series of lectures Corretjer gave on the topic, is still one of the best communist summations of Albizu, as well as being a communist critique of the limitations of the Nationalist perspective for the liberation of Puerto Rico. Juan Antonio Corretjer was uniquely placed to make this critique: he was for many years the Secretary General of the Nationalist Party, and his organic break with the Nationalists happened as he served a 10 year jail sentence as part of his work in that position. Thus, he had been second only to Albizu in being instrumental in developing that Party from a debate club for middle class nationalists, into one of the defining political organizations of the middle of the 20th century Puerto Rico, and the initiator in the 20th century of the Puerto Rican revolutionary movement.

Corretjer does a masterful synthesis of both the need for revolution (as expressed by the Nationalist Party) and the need for this revolution to be proletarian in nature (as advocated by Puerto Rican communists). His correct analysis of the class basis – petty bourgeois and bourgeois – of the Nationalist Party as part of its ultimate failure – which titles the text, referring to the desperation of the middle and upper class nationalists – still remains a powerful deviation in the context of the Puerto Rican revolutionary movement, even among forces that were led by Corretjer and his followers. (A good criticism of this failure of line, from a 1982 document by the Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadores, translated from Spanish, is available here: The Attack on Muñiz Air Base: On the Question of Armed Struggle in Puerto Rico).  As analysis, this text is a foundational basis for the communist criticism of Puerto Rican Nationalism, and thus essential reading for North American Maoists and communists, for whom the struggle for the liberation of Puerto Rico – as one of the few remaining open colonies in the world – should be a central component of their struggle against imperialism in general, and US imperialism in the specific – and who contains among its ranks some of the most advanced elements of the diaspora and Puerto Rican heritage proletariat in the United States.

Corretjer’s closing argument, which we translate here, holds true today, as it did then:

“Albizu remains a great teacher as he, by his actions as well a omissions, laid out the basis of the revolutionary path for Puerto Rico. We should look at his experience in the direction of  where he pointed, and at the same time, rectify the errors of the reformist, counter-revolutionary, and anti-proletarian “workers movement” in Puerto Rico; substituting Albizu’s revolutionary nationalist ideas for the communist ideas of [Irish revoltionary James] Connolly and of [Russian revolutionary V.I.] Lenin. In doing so, we shall organize the forces of the liberation movement not from outside of the proletariat, but from inside the proletariat itself.”

Corretjer in full uniform giving a speech, a few years after writing this text.

On Cultural Nationalism

Portrait of Hernan Cortes

Science is a never ending quest for knowledge it is knowledge gained by systematic study.  In Marxism the central case of study is made between the oppressor and oppressed, that is the dialectic of the class struggle. In the context of the United States the revolutionaries are correct to view the proletariat of the oppressed nationalities as the vanguard or at least an indispensable component of a future revolutionary movement in any future challenge to bourgeois power. Within these oppressed nations there lies antagonistic contradictions between the oppressor Anglo-American bourgeoisie that manifest themselves at times through spontaneous uprisings(The Harlem Rebellion, The Watts Rebellion, and recently the uprising in Brooklyn). However, there are also contradictions between the different classes within the oppressed nations themselves.

Certain cultural nationalists be they Chicano(or Nican Tlaca as some refer to themselves), Indigenous or Black tend to refute the dialectic of the class struggle as “eurocentric” and “incapable” of being applied to the conditions of the Black, Chicano/Nican Tlaca or Indigenous peoples in the United States. The reasoning being that Marx, Engels and Lenin were born in Europe and were speaking of European conditions not the conditions of the “Third World” so to say, that is the non-white peoples of the rest of the planet, that they did not sufficiently consider the conditions or study societies that existed in other parts of the world. However, if one were to buy this argument how is it then that these “eurocentric” theories first found themselves in nations that were on the periphery of the “advanced nations”? That is to say Russia, China, Vietnam, Albania as well as being practiced in the Philippines, India, Peru etc. would not logic deduce that such a theory that is steeped in European prejudices have most of it’s followers be from Europe? Since this is where it is only applicable? Even the imperialist American Army believes that Mao’s theory on People’s War is invaluable and it is studied at West Point to this day.  In dealing with the dismissal of Lenin as white by certain cultural nationalists, James and Grace Lee Boggs  wrote that: