Revisions for my Rebel Peripheries zine is coming to a close. My draft is quite mature already. Projected publish date is likely May 1. Let me know if you still want to read and provide comments! Below is an outline that I provide in the introduction.
To build up to this thesis of mamundok-in-place, I first start with a discussion of the anarchy of the peripheries, a condition by which State power cannot cohere and territorialize in the internal peripheries of a country. I touch here on the question of why Marxist guerrillas, rather than anarchists, are often found in anarchic peripheries. These anarchic peripheries act as refugia for political projects. Then I move to the second section on desertion and marronage which sees peoples and rebels move to peripheries out of the politics of escape and how this can transform into the politics of rebellion, as with the case of the maroons. I also discuss the notions of dragons and hydras in terms of organizational form as developed by Russell Maroon Shoatz. In the third section, I situate concepts of the politics of escape and the politics of rebellion in the Philippines with concepts such as remontar and mamundok. It is in this tradition that I contextualize the New Peoples Army and the communist insurgency. I move on to the fourth section to return to Shoatz’s dragon and hydra analogies to apply these to the Philippine experience. This is necessary to make an anarchist appraisal of the second communist insurgency which feeds onto a broader political project of appraising Maoism and its use of rebel peripheries. I extend this discussion of Maoism in the fifth section to critique the Marxist project using Shoatz’s analysis. Through this, I develop a notion of “post-Maoism” that learns from the mistakes and defeats in the Marxist and Maoist projects. I return to rebel peripheries in the sixth section in order to problematize rebel peripheries in the context of the revolutionary and insurrectionary project. Rebel peripheries are ultimately projects that suffer from problems of isolation and marginalization. This isolation clashes with the revolutionary project of wanting the whole world. In the seventh section and building upon these problems in the previous section, I unpack rebel peripheries to make sense of what aspects of rebel peripheries are pertinent for anarchists and revolutionaries today. It is here that we can begin to see the contours for the development of autonomous projects in the Twenty-First Century that learns from the deficiencies of rebel peripheries while also affirming the politics of care that the Black radical tradition affirms. It is here that mamundok-in-place begins to make sense. In the penultimate section, I return again to the Philippines and the rebel peripheries of the Maoists to make sense of what is being subverted. The contours of mamundok-in-place are outlined in precisely what is not being subverted and what could be subverted in its place: organized abandonment and proletarianization. In the final section, I further sketch the contours of what mamundok-in-place could be, understanding that lines of desertion are found everywhere and that the insurrectionary project can find its reality when we see the whole world is our mountain.