Garcellano’s “The Philippines As Yugoslavia Revisited” wields academic freedom as a tool to crystallize the best aspects of so-called competing paradigms. But this is less an affirmation of the “marketplace of ideas,” a faux heterodoxy that has no other function but to fragment and marginalize in the name of pluralism than Garcellano’s thoughtful engagement with dialectical thought and totality.
Neoliberal ideology marks the class struggle as a thing of the past. We are in the era of post-politics, as it were. No more class struggle, no more revolution, there is nothing to redistribute at a time when productivity is at its highest in the whole history of capitalism. Yet class struggle is raging in the peripheries and semi-colonies. That people are massively incarcerated, abused, brutalized by the police, rendered homeless with no access to health care and proper nutrition is also a sign of class struggle, especially considering how Occupy America’s one percent thrives precisely because of all that human misery.
Rebyu ni ROLAND B. TOLENTINO Bulatlat.com Edel Garcellano, Sons of Naujan (Manila: Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press, 2015), 420 pp. Ayon sa Internet sources, ang munisipyo ng Naujan sa paanan ng dating bulkan na Mount Naujan ay ang pinakamalaking bayan sa Mindoro Oriental na binubuo ng 70 baranggay, at may Naujan Lake National Park,…