On January 26, 1970, history was made on P. Burgos Drive in Manila. The unrelenting chant of 50,000 students roared amid the barricade shields and truncheon-swinging police forces, as flames engulfed Ferdinand Marcos’s effigy at the center. Now under a different figurehead, the same chants occupy the streets more than half a century after the First Quarter Storm (FQS).
A series of anti-poor economic policies and repressive laws precipitated the FQS. The string of demonstrations in 1970 was the culmination of an already agitated student movement in the 60s. During this decade, works by the likes of Renato Constantino and Jose Maria Sison penetrated the academe and transformed the psyche of Filipino students. Constantino’s analyses valued ‘historical objectivity’ where viewpoints from the marginalized were taken into account.
In The Miseducation of the Filipino, Constantino exposed the American-made educational system’s elitist and colonial orientation which merely reinforced order where the poor are left behind. Constantino’s idea put into question how education in the classroom championed individualism and only geared students to be just cogs of the market machine. Such an act of scrutiny inspired the youth, both inside and outside the university, to be more critical of what is considered normal for so long.
Like Constantino, Sison’s writings elevated discourses on national consciousness, especially one that takes into account the wide disparity in social classes. His essays in Struggle for National Democracy outlined the ideas and perspective of the national democratic movement, highlighting the primary goal of breaking free from the control of the United States.
Sison further detailed the analysis of the country’s condition in Philippine Society and Revolution. Groundbreaking at its core, the book became the foundation of the national democratic movement. It was the first to forward the analysis underpinning the country’s state of penury: that the Philippines is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Sison characterized the Philippine society as triangular, where the rich 1 percent at the top exploited the labor of the poorer 99 percent. Freeing the oppressed majority will not be through political reformism, but through a revolution that would invert the triangular society.
Alongside this militant revolution, there must also be a change in culture. Adopting Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution in China, the left forwarded a nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented culture. Part of the efforts in the cultural revolution is indigenizing concepts, such as Virgilio Enriquez’s Sikolohiyang Pilipino, which counteracted the negative western orientation of Philippine culture. Instead of the impressionistic perception of our psychology, the discipline redefined the collective experience of Filipino values and realities. Gone were the distorted foreign perspectives of Philippine history as it reinterpreted the colonial experience that has maligned and stunted the development of indigenous thought.
It's been 52 years since the demonstrations of 1970, and more since the seminal works of Filipino thinkers were published, however, our country has still not escaped the plight of poverty nor corruption. The same social ills during Marcos’s regime continue to hound us now—the poor still get left behind, especially during this pandemic, the military and police continue to act with impunity.
That social conditions remain the same even after Marcos only shows the necessity of sharpening and putting into practice the theories from the FQS. But because these ideas, when applied in the real world, challenge the status quo, the state intensifies its crackdown on these thoughts and the activists who advocate them. The abrogation of the UP-DND Accord, the purging of certain books from libraries, and the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Law all lead to diminishing the space for critical thought to prosper.
Pushing back against the state’s efforts to limit critical thinking would demand not just preserving the classic ideas of Marx, Constantino, or Sison, but sharpening these bodies of thought according to the present conditions, and translating them into praxis. Or better yet, build on the theories of those who came before us and spur a whole new revolution in thought.
The struggle for cultural revolution remains undeterred by academic repression and the government’s Marcosian tactics in education. Albeit brief, the FQS continues to spread the flame of radical ideas and scientific inquiry in pursuing genuine social change. These demonstrations were a testament to the strong knowledge base cultivated beyond the academe. If anything, the FQS proved the liberating power behind radical works and theories. Without them, the youth would not have marched as an organized student movement—leading to the fall of the Marcoses.
While the full realization of our national identity has yet taken shape, the prospects of cultural revolution and genuine educational reform are catalyzed by the very nature of revolutionary thought: change and progress. ●
