Pilipinas (History of The Philippines) Written Jointly With Gregorio Zaide. Masses in 1956

THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES

About the Author:

 Teodoro Agoncillo
 Born on November 9, 1912 in Lemery, Batangas, a Tagalog Province Southeast
of Manila
 Obtained Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from University of the Philippines in
1934.
 He began writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s , his earliest publications
were Tagalog Poems
 It was only in 1941 when he published a historical work, Ang Kasaysayan ng
Pilipinas (History of the Philippines) written jointly with Gregorio Zaide.
 By 1950s he decided upon a career as Historian, he published Revolt of the
Masses in 1956.
 Agoncillo was the first academic historian to analyze the Revolution in terms of
the contradiction between different classes in Philippine Society

About the Book:

 Revolt of the Masses
 One of the most influential books on Philippine History
 The book was written in 1947 as the author’s winning entry in a National
Bonifacio Biography Contest held in 1948.
 Explained what made the “masses” revolutionary
 The book became a guiding light and inspiration for the period of student
activitism and social unrest in the 1960’s and the early 1970’s.
 Agoncillo’s text contains an implicit theory to explain the revolutionary
ferment, but his perspective was contradictory.
 In Agoncillo’s historical imagination “the masses” (like the people) is reified as
“someone” with a definite form with set of specific patterns, motivations,
behavior, agency, and peculiar psychology.
Contents of the Book:

 In this historic action in Agoncillo’s narrative, the masses were led by the
proletarian Andres Bonifacio.
 Agoncillo defined the Katipunan as a “proletarian movement” and a
“distinctively plebian”
 In Agoncillo’s portrait, Bonifacio was “always calm and composed” and he
possessed the “will power” or determination as well as the “personality” that
made the Katipunan a “militant entity”
 Agoncillo wrote that the Katipunan fighters “were not only lacking in arms and
ammunition but were also poorly trained and deficient in military leadership.”
 In the end, the revolution needed someone with “bravery and brilliant military
leadership” in the person of ambiguously classed Aguinaldo.
 “It was not until Emilio Aguinaldo entered the scene that they found a leader
who could give battle to the Spaniards on something like equal terms.”
 “Aguinaldo became the undisputed military leader of the revolution.” And he
met “the enemy’s offensive in a series of battles that would determine the
future of the revolt of the masses.”
 In CHAPTER ONE of the book, readers are told, “the broad masses groaned and
grew numb under the spell of poverty and profound ignorance”. It also
describes the Spanish colonial as “ignorant and stupid”
 In CHAPTER THREE, the attribution of ignorance is embellished as narrow-
mindedness that resulted in seeming courage and hope.
 In CHAPTER SEVEN, “BETRAYAL”, Agoncillo offered a further contrasting
characterization of the “middle class” and the masses. The “mass of the
people” were the “victims of subtle or overt exploitation”
 In the 1980’s, Agoncillo described the Filipinos during the Spanish epoch in
general as “ignorant and generally prevented from being educated until the
second half of the nineteenth century.”
 In CHAPTER TEN, “the masses, led by their leaders, hurled themselves against
the oppressors with a ferocity and tenacity that surprised the hitherto cocky
Spaniards. This attack happened as the masses had been goaded to fury and
desperate action and were thirsting for vengeance.”
 In CHAPTER ELEVEN, it was said that “the strength and determination of the
masses were especially manifest in the case of religious fanatics”
 These descriptions indicate that Agoncillo saw the masses as taking up
collective political action because of their ignorance, irrationality, fanaticism,
resignation and determination causing them to hurl themselves against the
enemy as though their bodies were weapons.
 In explaining how Spanish authorities found out about the underground
movement, Agoncillo found it expedient to blame the “common people”.
 The revolution was an act of vengeance, propelled by emotions gone berserk,
the masses gave vent to anger through the unhindered release of brute
strength.
 Amid the troubles in Cavite described in CHAPTER THIRTEEN, Bonifacio was
said to have known, “to his bitter disappointed, that the mind of the masses
was being poisoned to make him ridiculous and in other ways deprive him of
respect.
 In that same paragraph, Agoncillo underscored that Bonifacio was “an easy
victim of their credulity.” Amid their credulity, they wallowed in jealousies and
suspicions as to end up turning their backs treacherously against the
revolutionary leader.
 Agoncillo’s recourse to “venom” and “venomous” implied that the masses
were like snake in the grass.
 He said that the masses are dangerous and cannot be trusted for they
betrayed the revolution –the masses betrayed Bonifacio.
 Agoncillo’s narrative concomitantly suggested that, apart from Bonifacio
himself, the masses were responsible for Bonifacio’s death because of their
disloyalty, unfaithfulness, vengefulness and gullibility.
 In FINAL SUMMARY CHAPTER, Agoncillo underscored once more the ignorncae
and irrationality of the masses, they were “confused, hopeless, abused”; the
Spanish Friars held the “unlettered commoners” “obedient and ignorant and
superstitious.” Fanatical, excitable, unreflective and hasty, the Katipunan
fighters started with the “emotive cry of freedom, followed with the instinctive
resort to physical force to realize the primitive urge to be free.” There fight for
freedom was not the fruit of intellect, but merely the outcome of primitive
impulse.
 Moreover their grievances were “fundamentally economic in character” rather
political. In essence, the revolution was a mammoth emotional outburst, and,
in that sense, it was doomed to fail, but not before the Spaniards got punished,
they who were the other “ignorant” party in this drama.
 On the final page, when Agoncillo recounted his encounter as a young
historian with an “old man who in his younger years had fought the
Spaniards,” the final description of the masses appeared positive: the old man
“spoke of the men, crude in their learning yet pure and undaunted in their
aims, who left family and home to pursue the illusive ideal of freedom, not for
themselves but for the coming generations who were their fear and faith and
hope.”
 Agoncillo finally restrained himself from using “ignorant”; instead, the masses
were “crude in their learning,” but they were to be admired because their
“aims” were “pure and undaunted,” granting the masses a nobility not found
among the “middle class.”
 It is ironical that The Revolt of the Masses denigrated the masses and yet
played a strategic role in edifying Bonifacio and glorifying the revolutionary
character of the masses. Sensing that the masses constituted political energy
and potential, many readers ignored, minimized, or bypassed the problematic
technique of Agoncillo’s personification of the masses and his attribution to
them of negative characteristics—making it possible later on to equate
cognitively the two abstract concepts of the nation and the masses.
Conclusion:
 This study has examined Agoncillo’s text to reveal an implicit theory on what made
“the masses” revolutionary.
 The book explains the explosion in the masses’ participation in the Katipunan as due
to the reading of Bonifacio’s texts that appeared in the single issue of Kalayaan, the
periodical of the Katipunan, those texts putatively connecting to the masses’
experiences and feelings of injustice and bondage. In this singular instance, the
masses were presumed to be literate and thoughtful.
 Bonifacio’s campaign materials, as it were, made him most effective in political
mobilization.
 Bonifacio was seen as a great organizer, although Agoncillo also referred to him as one
of and with the masses, as a merciless demagogue, fanatical, of one-track mind, and
stubbornly determined. These qualities supposedly connected him to the masses,
whom in Agoncillo’s predominant portrait were not literate but ignorant and
therefore behaved in irrational, emotional, unreflective, impulsive, gullible, reckless,
illogical, fanatical, vengeful, obstinate, and treacherous ways. Thus, the masses were
revolutionary but not in a revolutionary way because they were driven primarily by
passion rather than political thought.
 These contradictory traits became pronounced in Agoncillo’s literary approach to
historiography. Although this approach needs further study, particularly by students
of literary criticism, we can say that Agoncillo’s fusion of literature and history
resulted in a rhetorical strategy in which “the masses” did not only stand for a
sociological category but were also and more importantly ascribed a specific set of
traits that rendered them as a character in the narrative, largely static but behaving
predictably to move the plot forward to its tragic ending.
 Bracketing aside Aguinaldo, who was the military leader the Katipunan was said to
have needed from the start, we can say that Bonifacio and “the masses” are the two
main protagonists in the tragedy that is The Revolt of the Masses. Their actions
unfolded in a historical narrative with a deep literary structure, amid the comingling of
empirical historical data with rhetorical devices that could not be footnoted.
 When Bonifacio made his alleged mistakes in Cavite, the ignorance of the masses,
which purportedly explained their behavior, doomed the Katipunan’s founder. Victims
of colonialism, the masses victimized and devoured their own leader, thus confirming
their fearsomeness, as the so-called middle class and Agoncillo himself had
postulated.
 The masses needed a new leader who ostensibly would not be one of them,
Aguinaldo, the “true liberator” who moved the nation closer to its dream of selfhood.
 Based on an incoherent character study that was not recognized and therefore not
reconciled, Agoncillo’s perspective on what made the masses revolutionary was highly
contradictory, positing literacy in explaining the impact of Bonifacio’s texts, but
otherwise depicting the masses throughout the book as ignorant.
 In the latter case, he was writing based on what he himself referred to as
“conditioning factors,” pre critical aspects of his worldview that remained tacit and
unquestioned.
 As a literary strategy, the book’s politically charged abstraction of the masses lent it
an almost ineluctable force, its mesmeric effect obscuring the concomitant reification
and vilification of the masses. As a category, “the masses” became indelibly associated
with the Philippine Revolution and thus celebrated as the “genuine” agents of history,
the revolution thus becoming unthinkable without the masses that Agoncillo’s
contradictory and disparaging characterizations of the masses were imperceptible to
most readers meant that the latter were likely to have partaken of the same
“conditioning factors” in which Agoncillo was immersed.
 For this reason, just as the writing of a text that became a classic occurred in a specific
historical context, the reading of such a text that led to it being hailed a classic also
transpired in a given historical context.
 The success of The Revolt of the Masses as a work of history was not so much about
the masses as it was about the intellectual elite. Embodying the split subject, these
members of the intelligentsia were uncomfortable with and even questioned the role
of the rich in the nation’s history, the social class to which many of them belonged,
but at the same time were unable to divest themselves of the presumptive elements,
the mindset and prerogatives of their class. Their sentiments were for the poor and
downtroddenbut they could not transcend the privileges and social dominance of
their class and their putative superiority over those who knew nothing about what
they knew. Agoncillo was their prophet, and The Revolt of the Masses became a
sacred text.

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THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES

About the Author:

About the Book:

Contents of the Book:

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