[M]ore than a thousand men could not share exactly the same thoughts without some machiavellian leadership […] the International has spread its black wings to cast its nefarious shadow over the most remote lands.
Rafael Izquierdo y Gutiérrez, Governor-General of the Philippines on the 1872 Cavite mutiny
During the moment of the great degeneration and Reformation of Western Christianity, it became fashionable to distinguish between the “Church Visible” and the “Church Invisible.” Clearly, as one would see, there exists the great Papacy and its Papists, the cathedrals and churches, the bishops and their apostolic succession. Yet God was not with them. The Elect can recognize another across institutions, sovereigns, and confessions as members of the true church, a church invisible, whose members work towards the realization of the true Church and of true salvation, restored from the distortions of heresies.
It may be passe to speak of communism as being akin to religion, for the doctrine of communism is not technically a doctrine of faith. Communism is, first and foremost, a doctrine of experience and a doctrine of self-abolition. There is a reason, after all, that Marx refused to describe in detail how higher-stage communism ought to look like, for its emergence and efflorescence emerges in the inverse of the current society—through its abolition. It is in the smothering of who we are as commodified, gendered, propertied, dominated beings that it becomes possible to even begin to conceive of what we could be without reference to such impositions by bourgeois society. It is through that doctrine of the abolition of the current state of things—the self-abolition of the proletarianized—that the organs of communism cohere.
Agtipon, to cohere, to aggregate, magtipon, to gather—such are the tasks of revolutionaries today. A katipunan is an organization, a coming together, a party. The Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (hereafter the big-K Katipunan), did not fall from the sky. Even before its coherence and founding, its members were Elect that could identify one another as belonging to the party invisible. Eventually, the Elect cohered as the Katipunan and interrogated other Elect through three key questions:
- ¿Ano ang kalagayan nitong Katagalugan ng unang panahun?
- ¿Ano ang kalagayan sa ngayon?
- ¿Ano ang magiging kalagayan sa darating na panahun?
What was, what is, what could be. Revolutionary theory, as the self-theorization of the alienated of the current society searching for their own subjectivity forms the basis of the tipon, and upon that basis can be verbalized as agtipon, from merely gather to to gather. Mayhaps in the future, this could become a gathering, or a katipunan.
“It is right to rebel,” says Chairman Mao. Governor-General Izquierdo, upon crushing the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, remarked that the First International must have “spread its black wings to cast its nefarious shadow over the most remote lands.” Yet no such grand conspiracy by a world-spanning Party of Anarchy was ever necessary for rebellion to occur. Revolutionary theory forms from experience: what was, what is, what could be. Rebellion gives this form. From the Cavite Mutiny, the road led to the martyrdom of GomBurZa, which in turn led to the martyrdom of José Rizal, to the rebellion of the Katipunan, the rebellion of the rump First Republic after Emilio Aguinaldo’s surrender, to the peasant rebellions of the American period up to the Sakdalistas, then to the Huk rebellion, to the Maoist rebellion against the Marcos dictatorship to today—it is right to rebel, and it is right to reflect on the rebellion, and it is right to rebel against the Part(ies) Visible.
With the collapse and decoherence of the Party of Anarchy, of Socialism, of Communism, it becomes necessary to once again to gather—Agtipon—the Elect of the Party Invisible, who exist everywhere across the Parties Visible, tendencies, borders, and associations.
Agtipon is an organ, one among others, constituted for a specific purpose: to gather.