An Anarchy Of Families

Winner of the Philippine National Book Award, this pioneering volume reveals how the power of the country's family-based oligarchy both derives from and contributes to a weak Philippine state. From provincial warlords to modern managers, prominent Filipino leaders have fused family, politics, and business to compromise public institutions and amass private wealth--a historic pattern that persists to the present day. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families explores the pervasive influence of the modern dynasties that have led the Philippines during the past century. Exemplified by the Osmeñas and Lopezes, elite Filipino families have formed a powerful oligarchy--controlling capital, dominating national politics, and often owning the media. Beyond Manila, strong men such as Ramon Durano, Ali Dimaporo, and Justiniano Montano have used "guns, goons, and gold" to accumulate wealth and power in far-flung islands and provinces. In a new preface for this revised edition, the editor shows how this pattern of oligarchic control has continued into the twenty-first century, despite dramatic socio-economic change that has supplanted the classic "three g's" of Philippine politics with the contemporary "four c's"--continuity, Chinese, criminality, and celebrity.

The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism. Anarchist ideas are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions and the solutions anarchists offer so remote, that all too often people find it hard to take anarchism seriously. This classic text is an attempt to bridge the gap between the present reality and anarchist aspirations, “between what is and what, according to the anarchists, might be.” Through a wide-ranging analysis—drawing on examples from education, urban planning, welfare, housing, the environment, the workplace, and the family, to name but a few—Colin Ward demonstrates that the roots of anarchist practice are not so alien or quixotic as they might at first seem but lie precisely in the ways that people have always tended to organize themselves when left alone to do so. The result is both an accessible introduction for those new to anarchism and pause for thought for those who are too quick to dismiss it. For more than thirty years, in over thirty books, Colin Ward patiently explained anarchist solutions to everything from vandalism to climate change—and celebrated unofficial uses of the landscape as commons, from holiday camps to squatter communities. Ward was an anarchist journalist and editor for almost sixty years, most famously editing the journal Anarchy. He was also a columnist for New Statesman, New Society, Freedom, and Town and Country Planning.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title "State-of-the-art yet accessible analyses that significantly expand understanding of the role of anarchism in Latin America. . . . Will long be a standard text that provides [an] important reference for scholars and students of labor and social movement history."--Choice "A vivid picture of the transnational nature of the anarcho-syndicalist/anarchist movement."--Anarcho-Syndicalist Review "A pioneering collection of essays on the world of anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and libertarian thinkers in Latin America."--Barry Carr, coeditor of The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire "An important contribution to a recent trend which sees anarchism not as derived from a European center but as a genuine Latin American phenomenon."--Bert Altena, coeditor of Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies "Thoughtful, well-researched, and well-written. As a collection, this goes a long way to furthering our understanding not just of anarchism in Latin America, but of anarchism more generally."--Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion. In this groundbreaking collection of essays, anarchism in Latin America becomes much more than a prelude to populist and socialist movements. The contributors illustrate a much more vast, differentiated, and active anarchist presence in the region that evolved on simultaneous--transnational, national, regional, and local--fronts. Representing a new wave of transnational scholarship, these essays examine urban and rural movements, indigenous resistance, race, gender, sexuality, and social and educational experimentation. They offer a variety of perspectives on anarchism’s role in shaping ideas about nationalism, identity, organized labor, and counterculture across a wide swath of Latin America.

The legacy of anarchist ideas in the Philippines was first brought to the attention of a global audience by Benedict Anderson's book Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. Activist-author Bas Umali proves with stunning evidence that these ideas are still alive in a country that he would like to see replaced by an "archepelagic confederation." Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance: Anarchism in the Philippines is the first-ever book specifically about anarchism in the Philippines. Pangayaw refers to indigenous ways of maritime warfare. Bas Umali expertly ties traditional forms of communal life in the archipelago that makes up the Philippine state together with modern-day expressions of antiauthoritarian politics. Umali's essays are deliciously provocative, not just for apologists of the current system, but also for radicals in the Global North who often forget that their political models do not necessarily fit the realities of postcolonial countries. In weaving together independent research and experiences from grassroots organizing, Umali sketches a way for resistance in the Global South that does not rely on Marxist determinism and Maoist people's armies but the self-empowerment of the masses. His book addresses the crucial questions of liberation: who are the agents and what are the means? More than a sterile case study, Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance is the start of a new paradigm and a must-read for those interested in decolonization, anarchism, and social movements of the Global South.

Intelligent, subversive writing and art with an anti-authoritarian perspective

Osvaldo Bayer's study of working-class retribution, set between 1919 and 1936, chronicles hair-raising robberies, bombings, and tit-for-tat murders conducted by Argentina's working men. Intense repression of labor organizations, newspapers, and meeting places by authorities set off a wave of illegal acts meant to secure funds and settle scores. Escaping similar repression at home, future Spanish Civil War hero Buenaventura Durruti joins the cast on a spree of robberies, ending in a narrow escape back to Europe. Osvaldo Bayer is an anarchist pacifist, author, and screenwriter living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the author of Rebellion in Patagonia (forthcoming from AK Press).

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies

Robert Kaplan, bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts, offers up scrupulous, far-ranging insights on the world to come in a spirited, rousing, and provocative book that has earned a place at the top of the reading lists of the world's policy makers. The end of the Cold War has not ushered in the global peace and prosperity that many had anticipated. Volatile new democracies in Eastern Europe, fierce tribalism in Africa, civil war and ethnic violence in the Near East, and widespread famine and disease—not to mention the brutal rift developing as wealthy nations reap the benefits of seemingly boundless technology while other parts of the world slide into chaos—are among the issues Kaplan identifies as the most important for charting the future of geopolitics. Historical antecedents in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and in the legacies of statesmen such as Henry Kissinger contribute to this bracingly prophetic framework for addressing the new global reality. Bold, erudite, and profoundly important, The Coming Anarchy is a compelling must-read by one of today's most penetrating writers and provocative minds.