How the Philippines’ Near Revolution Became a Neocolonial Nightmare

In the grand narratives penned by Anglo-American bourgeois historiography for the “glorious achievements” of imperialist powers, the Philippines is often deliberately overlooked, relegated to the most inconspicuous corners.

This neglect is no accident but a deliberate erasure.

The history of struggle in the Philippine archipelago reveals the brutal essence of the Western colonial system---from Spanish feudal oppression to the masquerade of American “benevolent assimilation.” It is a must-read textbook.

The Filipino people have never ceased their resistance, composing a revolution that remains unfinished. This history is a precious legacy of struggle for the peoples of the Third World Countries, with indispensable significance for understanding the tragic present in Southeast Asia.

This article begins by puncturing the reactionary historical narrative of the Philippines in the 20th century, recounting the revolutionary history before the 20th century, then dissecting how the current American neocolonialism developed, enumerating its despicable tactics, and examining how the Philippines plunged headlong into the abyss of neocolonialism.

Part One: The Revolutionary Narrative Sliced by Reactionary Scholarship

From 1565 to 1898, Spanish colonizers ruled the Philippines for over three centuries, thoroughly feudalizing and subordinating its social and economic structures.

As representatives of early colonialism, the Spanish colonial authorities were incompetent in governance and never willing to attempt effective strategies, everywhere displaying the short-sighted greed of feudal landlords and semi-feudalized bourgeoisie.

Their typical method of exploitation was to impose forced labor and heavy taxes on the indigenous population for ruthless extraction, then continuously ship the wealth back to the metropole, leaving behind a land of devastation.

Faced with the Spaniards’ brutal plunder, the Filipinos confronted a crisis of national extinction and genocide.

By the 1880s-1890s, Philippine society was deeply mired in class contradictions. A broad coalition of the oppressed had formed, composed of the toiling masses: smallholders, semi-servile tenants (or bonded tenants), sharecroppers, landless agricultural laborers, the urban proletariat, and lower-level functionaries. The oppressed did not submit but resisted in ways with Filipino characteristics.

For a long time, the imperialist bourgeois academic system has deliberately concealed these preparations for resistance and attempts at rebellion, remaining silent on how Filipinos spontaneously conducted revolutionary preparations at the middle and lower levels, nor is there any meaningful discussion of how this consensus for resistance was forged. Still less is there any rigorous observation of the internal structures or ideological underpinnings of these early organizations.

Imperial scholarship refuses to recognize the lineage of organized resistance in the Philippines. Instead, it decontextualizes events like peasant uprisings, presenting them as sporadic and unconnected, discussing only the writings and actions of elite individuals, thereby establishing a mainstream narrative that the reformist movements and revolutionary activities in the Philippines were entirely controlled and led by a highly Westernized elite stratum.

According to this view, during the revolution, the primary mode of mobilization was elite kinship, supplemented by a pervasive cultural deference among the poor rooted in the concept of ‘repaying debts of gratitude’.

This hypocritical, crude bourgeois historical perspective dominated Philippine historical scholarship in the 20th century, in reality waving the flag for the current colonial rule.

This elite-centric narrative was, in part, dismantled by the research of Filipino historian Reynaldo Ileto. In his 1979 work, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840—1910, he argued that under Spanish colonialism, a religious epic known as the Pasyon was covertly imbued with revolutionary significance by the broad Catholic peasantry.

This epic, recounting Christ’s suffering, resistance against tyranny, and ultimate resurrection, evolved in folk singing into an allegory for the Filipino nation: Christ’s agony symbolized the suffering of the Filipino people, the oppression of the Roman Empire corresponded to Spanish colonial rule, and the final resurrection and light embodied the people’s hope for an independent nation free of oppression and with equality for all.

Reynaldo Ileto argued that this imported colonial religious culture was transformed locally and then combined with indigenous mental strength, laying a broad mass foundation for the middle and lower-level revolution. With this as the axis, he refuted the then-mainstream reactionary narrative.

In the chapter “Light and Brotherhood,” he cites an example: the Cofradía de San José (Confraternity of Saint Joseph), a religious group founded in Tayabas Province by the peasant leader Apolinario de la Cruz, known as “Hermano Pule.”

When Spanish religious groups refused to recognize the brotherhood’s legitimacy, de la Cruz banned non-indigenous Filipinos from joining in 1841. The authorities were shocked, viewing it as Filipinos usurping religious leadership, and sent troops to suppress the brotherhood’s gatherings.

The brotherhood’s activities in fact turned into a rebellious uprising, with members clashing with soldiers on the slopes of Mount San Cristobal for ten days. Approximately 300 to 500 members were killed, and another 300 to 400 were captured.

Reynaldo Ileto wrote: “The 1841 event that ended in bloody uprising was not a blind reaction to the oppressive forces of colonial society; rather, it was a conscious action taken by participants after reflecting on certain mystical phenomena and omens, realizing the possibilities of existence… Thus, the connections between the turmoils could be established.”

While Ileto’s work may lack a rigorous class analysis---often conflating the heterogeneous oppressed classes under the general rubric of ‘the masses’---and while he may have misdiagnosed the revolution’s primary catalysts, nor did he ever explicitly frame his writing as a polemic against the established order;

Nevertheless, his research decisively subverted the traditional, reactionary historiography. He demonstrated to the Philippines, his own homeland, that revolutionary activity was not merely a series of disparate, isolated incidents, but an interconnected struggle.

In the next section, we will remedy some of Ileto’s deficiencies, discuss the factors forcing the revolution to start, and then recount the history of the Philippine Revolution from the founding of the Katipunan organization in 1892 to the execution of Bonifacio in 1897.

Part Two: The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Spanish Revolution

At the end of the 19th century, the decaying and incompetent Spanish Empire was no longer able to maintain its colonial system.

The revolution originated from the drastic changes in the colonial economy and political life. The population surge from 1790 to 1870 placed immense pressure on Philippine resources.

Numerous studies claim that between 1870 and 1900, “the archipelago suffered an unprecedented crisis of high mortality shocks.”

Under the impact of capitalist waves, commodity production penetrated every corner of Philippine life, and wage labor relations and export production (especially sugar, Manila hemp, and tobacco) thoroughly transformed every region of the archipelago.

As economic environments changed and labor demands shifted, population mobility surged dramatically. The great development of steamships and railways accelerated this mobility. Large-scale population movements in turn fueled the spread of infectious diseases---smallpox, beriberi, malaria, and cholera devastated the indigenous population, while rinderpest wiped out entire generations of livestock.

In this highly mobile and uncertain new world, the commonsense spatiotemporal concepts by which Filipino masses, especially peasants, measured life inevitably shrank. While capitalism destroyed the subsistence economy, it also made rural populations extremely vulnerable to world market fluctuations, forcing them into a highly mobile new life---no longer rooted in any specific land or home.

This crisis compelled many radicalized segments of the populace to transcend the archaic response of social banditry---itself a traditional reaction to a decaying social order---and to embrace the radical anti-colonial politics embodied by the Katipunan

At the same time, a new generation of intellectuals was active, with a group known as the “Ilustrados” (Enlightenment elites) emerging in politics. Most came from wealthy families, had studied in Europe, and were deeply influenced by Western liberalism thought.

The most representative figure was José Rizal. Similar to China’s reformist modernizers, he sought to expose the darkness of colonial rule through literary creation to awaken national consciousness among the people. He founded non-violent reform societies, petitioning the Spanish colonial authorities for political reforms, hoping the metropole would grant the Philippines equal status.

However, the colonial authorities responded to his peaceful appeals with force. Rizal was executed by the Spanish colonial government, and his sacrifice marked the total failure of the reformist path.

Unlike in China and Japan at the time, these “Ilustrados” had no emperor to champion, and the Spanish authorities’ bribery was extremely inefficient, causing a large number of intellectuals to turn to radical political agitation and propaganda.

The execution and the intellectuals’ shift ignited strong anger and anti-colonial sentiment among the Filipino people, who profoundly realized that in the face of fully armed imperialism, moderate activities could not achieve national liberation.

In 1892, Andres Bonifacio, himself an urban worker, founded the revolutionary organization Katipunan. He developed strength among workers, peasants, and urban poor, and attempted to unite with the landlord class to fight the colonizers together.

Bonifacio was an autodidact, a pursuit he tenaciously maintained despite his crushing circumstances. He could read Spanish. He had read Rizal, Victor Hugo, and Eugene Sue, studied Lives of the Presidents of the United States, and books on the French Revolution. He translated Rizal’s poem Mi Último Adiós (My Last Farewell), written on the eve of Rizal’s execution by the Spanish in December 1896, into Tagalog, gaining a large following.

He harbored no illusions about the colonizers; This lived experience of immiseration, compounded by the brutal failure of reformism---crystallized in the execution of its proponents---forged his conviction that the shackles of oppression could only be broken through the people’s armed struggle.

In August 1896, Bonifacio and his supporters convened at Balintawak. In a founding act of revolutionary defiance, they tore up their cédulas---the community tax certificates that symbolized their colonial subjugation and tax servitude.

This act, immortalized as the ‘Cry of Balintawak,’ ignited the people’s revolution.

The revolution developed rapidly, and the landlord class and conservatives discovered speculative opportunities; they superficially responded to the revolutionary call and joined the struggle. This led to fissures within the revolution emerging even as the war against Spanish colonizers advanced triumphantly.

The right-wing landlord bourgeois leader, the great landlord Emilio Aguinaldo, betrayed the revolution, establishing a provisional government whose charter completely ignored the Katipunan’s revolutionary program and openly opposed its demands, isolating the revolutionary forces.

In February 1897, the Katipunan’s struggle situation deteriorated sharply, forcing it to retreat to northern Luzon. In the following three months, the landlord conservatives announced the dissolution of the Katipunan, arrested and executed the revolutionary leader Bonifacio. Seven months later, the conservative government led by Aguinaldo surrendered to the Spanish colonizers, calling on revolutionary masses to abandon armed struggle and completely degenerating into capitulators.

The Spanish colonial authorities treated the capitulators leniently, far from being prosecuted for their ‘revolutionary crimes,’ the capitulators were merely required to disband their armies. Worse still, they were paid hundreds of thousands of pesos---a reward for their treachery---and then actively enlisted to implement domestic counter-revolutionary ‘reforms’ on the new regime’s behalf.

The colonial authorities’ sole condition was that Aguinaldo exile himself abroad, but this was more like protection from the colonizers, laying the groundwork for his later submission to the new colonizers.

The revolution centered on Bonifacio and the Katipunan failed under the strangulation of internal and external enemies, with the remaining resisters retreating to guerrilla and underground struggles.

During this period, the middle and lower-level revolutionary mobilization in the Philippines showed distinctive characteristics: pre-modern colonial religious content was autonomously transformed, by the lower classes, into the core for initially coalescing revolutionary forces. This creative transformation embodied the Filipinos’ consciousness and autonomy in struggle.

Revolutionaries including Bonifacio harnessed the revolutionary core to drive the religious shell, successfully using religious content to mobilize the masses without being bound by religion, pioneering in Southeast Asia the task of transforming pre-modern colonial religion into a revolutionary tool.

This experience in handling the relationship between religion and revolution is relatively rare in Asia; now unearthed through Ileto’s voice, it holds significance.

Part Three: The “Liberation” and Colonial Remaking by the New American Colonizers

As economic globalization and disputes between the old and new continents intensified, contradictions among colonial powers grew fiercer, leading to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. As a Spanish colony, Filipino revolutionaries seized the opportunity to reignite the flames of struggle under the new situation.

The United States swiftly intervened, attempting to control and usurp the revolutionary gains the Philippines might achieve. U.S. Navy Asiatic Squadron commander Admiral George Dewey contacted the consul and exiled conservative elements, particularly Aguinaldo, promising at least recognition of Philippine independence under U.S. naval protection, claiming it as the “most solemn assurance” that would be “unfailingly fulfilled.”

Aguinaldo, already disgruntled by the paltry sum paid by the Spanish authorities (for his exile), eagerly returned from Hong Kong. He arrived ready to leverage his primary assets: U.S. imperial backing, the endorsement of the landed elite (hacenderos), and the political prestige he had gained from his past opportunism in the struggle to wage political struggle against the revolutionaries, usurping revolutionary leadership and leading the war against Spain.

In the months following his return, the newborn Philippine revolutionary army captured almost all Spanish-controlled areas in the territory, with Manila completely surrounded by 12,000 Philippine troops, and the revolution nearly victorious.

However, the United States soon tore off its mask of pretense. The Philippine Declaration of Independence in June 1898 was not recognized by the U.S. During the Battle of Manila, U.S. forces openly demanded that Philippine revolutionaries not participate, expelling them from strategic points near the capital and threatening attack if Philippine troops entered Manila.

At this moment, the revolutionaries awoke to the fact that the U.S. was not an ally but a new enemy more cunning than Spain. Relations between the two sides continued to deteriorate. In December 1898, the U.S. completely disregarded Filipino people’s opinions and signed the Treaty of Paris with Spain, announcing the armistice between the U.S. and Spain, “purchasing” Philippine sovereignty for $20 million, stealing the revolutionary fruits for itself and utterly abandoning the revolutionary forces.

The revolution swiftly turned into a new anti-colonial war against U.S. annexation. However, under the pincer attack of imperialism and landlord capitulationists, the revolution was quickly suppressed.

On March 21, 1901, U.S. forces occupied the entire Philippines, Aguinaldo was captured, and afterward, representing the capitulationists, he persuaded the remaining armed forces to cease struggle, and the revolution was declared failed.

After the blood and sovereignty of the Philippines were transferred between U.S. and Spanish colonial forces, some people mistakenly believed the U.S. was a liberator. However, the U.S. persecution of revolutionaries and purge of Spanish remnants caused at least 200,000 civilians to die from violence, famine, and disease, exposing the essence of this racist, colonialist, and imperialist war of conquest.

Once rule stabilized, the U.S. began the process of “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines, whose essence was comprehensive economic control and political puppetization.

Without consulting any relevant parties, the U.S, having acquired the new colony, passed unequal laws like the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, implementing extreme trade protectionism, forcing goods entering the U.S. to pay exorbitant tariffs while U.S. goods flooded into the colony tax-free.

This destroyed the Philippine native industrial base, forcing the Philippine economy into a monocultural structure providing tropical crops (like sugar and hemp) for the U.S. market. The Philippines fell from a grain exporter to an importer, with its economic lifeline firmly gripped by U.S. capital, making industrial development impossible.

Politically, the U.S. employed the “divide and rule” poison, propping up and buying off native elites mainly consisting of landlords and comprador merchants. These elites, to safeguard their interests, willingly acted as proxies for U.S. colonizers, assisting in suppressing people’s resistance.

Ideologically, the U.S. carefully shaped and beautified figures like José Rizal, who had reformist tendencies and sacrificed in the anti-Spanish struggle, to mask its own colonial essence; while belittling and marginalizing Bonifacio and others who persisted in middle and lower-level armed revolution, fracturing the complete spirit of the Philippine Revolution.

This series of operations made it difficult for the Philippines to organize a complete, mobilizing national culture in the 20th century. Next, they would face the brutal crushing by the Japanese Empire.

Part Four: The Rapid Plunge into Neocolonialism

In the early stages of the Pacific War, U.S forces in the Philippines faced the Japanese invasion, abandoning part of their troops to surrender before irresponsibly handing over power and land to Japanese aggressors.

Politicians cultivated during U.S. rule, such as Interior Secretary Laurel and aforementioned the great capitulator Aguinaldo, all defected to Japanese fascism during this period, helping it establish a reign of terror.

During the Japanese occupation, for every Japanese attacked by anti-colonialists, the Japanese would retaliate by killing ten Filipinos. In just the two years of rule from 1943-1945, Filipino war dead and massacred may have exceeded 1.1 million.

In such a brutal situation, the old Communist Party of the Philippines organized the “People’s Anti-Japanese Army” in central Luzon, and the Marxist left-wing movement began to surface from underground---perhaps we will have the opportunity to discuss this in detail later.

After the victory in the anti-fascist war, the U.S. restored control over the Philippines.

In 1946, under pressure from the international community and Filipinos, the U.S. “granted” independence to the Philippines, but this was merely a transition from colonialism to neocolonialism.

Through the Bell Trade Act and the Military Bases Agreement, the U.S. ensured its economic privileges and military presence in the Philippines, making the “independent” Philippines still a vassal politically, economically, and militarily. U.S.-backed compradors continued to rule the country, safeguarding imperialist interests, while the broad masses of workers and peasants struggled in poverty and exploitation.

And the U.S. government’s control over the Philippine regime and its tactics to deceive the Filipino people became ever more diverse and adept.

This practice of harboring right-wing proxies remained standard U.S. operating procedure long after the Philippines’ sham independence. Case in point: Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator who ruled from 1965 to 1986. Just as he was about to be toppled by the People Power Revolution, the U.S. airlifted him and his family to a secure exile in Hawaii, where he was free to enjoy the beach.

The U.S. also successfully pushed regimes with tendencies to cooperate with the left toward right-wing conservatism. After Marcos was overthrown, the president who took power was Corazon Aquino; to maintain her regime, she once maintained good relations with left-wing organizations like KMU.

But the U.S. government adopted a “low-intensity conflict” strategy, funding militias or other folk right-wing armed groups to target left-wing activists; from the late 1980s to early 1990s, hundreds of workers suffered attacks each year as a result.

During the period when Corazon Aquino’s regime maintained good relations with the left, the U.S. at least acquiesced to six coup attempts by conservative military elements, using threats to pressure the Aquino regime.

At the same time, using U.S.-controlled international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, it lured Aquino to compromise with aid. “By the late 1980s, the Philippines was locked into a state of structural dependency on U.S. ‘aid.’ The profound irony was that this ‘aid’ was never a gift; it was merely a fraction of the surplus value generated by Filipino labor---wealth that was siphoned from the Philippines only to be repatriated as ‘assistance.’ Its primary function was purely ideological: to burnish America’s self-appointed image as the nation’s ‘savior.

In September 1990, the lease on U.S. military bases in the Philippines expired. Against the backdrop of the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, stable U.S.-China relations, and tensions in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. advanced by retreating, temporarily withdrawing large numbers of troops from the Philippines, once again constructing a hypocritical good image, only to redeploy forces in 1999 under the banner of “visits.”

These events had an extremely detrimental impact on the anti-U.S. mobilization of the left-wing movement, deceiving large numbers of masses without clear political positions, making the U.S. image mild and ambiguous.

Conclusion

One indisputable fact is that today’s Filipino people are struggling on the line between life and death; As the quintessential neocolony, its plight remains ignored by any Western white leftists.

Rosa Luxemburg’s words must be repeated: “We stand today before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture; or, the victory of socialism.”

Philippines is the answer. Without a victorious Marxist revolution, there is no possibility of completely escaping imperialist control---herein lies the very legitimacy for the entire struggle of the international leftists. It is the ultimate program demanded by the Third World Countries.