Portside

Willie Matos, who worked his entire adult life for Puerto Rican liberation and freedom for working class people everywhere, passed away on October 14.

An early version of these remarks was delivered as part of the “Palestine as a Craft Question” panel at the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) Fest in Minneapolis, on October 27th, 2023.

The book, and lectures that comprise it, give a powerful impression of an activist and thinker engaged with challenging and wide-ranging issues such as the continent’s history, slavery, independence, and projects of radical socialist development.

We need new ideas, new creativity, and new language that is equal to the challenges before us.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight.

To ignore race, C.L.R. James often said, in many contexts and many ways, was a disaster in any social understanding; only the ignoring of class would be worse. Or to put it in his own words: The race question is subsidiary to the class question, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental, is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

Unlike Spanish evangelism, US colonial machinery was geared to using the Philippines for thorough exploitation of the newly acquired territory, envisaging the eventual expansion of multinational corporations and ultimate global hegemony. This brief historical outline provides a background for global context and working class analysis of the Philippines and Filipino mass movements.