| Sumario: | Summing up the achievement of the generation of the 1896-1898 revolution, Apolinario Mabini appraised the organic basis of the Filipino nation as a popular-democratic project. All sovereignty belongs to the masses of workers-peasants, the victims of Spanish and U.S. colonialism. He articulated the historical consciousness of the oppressed and exploited as the foundation of the first Philippine Republic. Functioning as the first prime minister of the revolutionary government, and later as a deported insurrecto, Mabini crafted the juridical-moral basis of the resistance against U.S. aggression. He distinguished himself as the first public intellectual who exposed the hypocritical racist ideology of U.S. imperialism. In doing so, he forged the conscience of the Malayan race founded on a socialist-oriented ethical self-consciousness. In his memoir, Mabini mapped the trajectory of the Filipino struggle for self-determination from the time of the secularizing propagandistas, the Katipunan, and the urban cultural activists that inspired later independence movements. Analyzing his discourses, this article hopes to elucidate the process of how Mabini sought to indigenize and merge Enlightenment principles with the communal ethos of the natives struggling to overthrow the legacy of Spanish feudal savagery and the violence of U.S. barbarism. From this dialectic of contradictory forces, Mabini discovered the revolutionary subject, the agent of a national-popular insurgency sustained by martyrdom and visionary ideals. Although Mabini's life and deeds are still obscured, his ideas remain sedimented and cogent in current grassroots mobilizations against neocolonial servitude.
|
|---|