Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your organizing?

I’m someone with the spurious nom de guerre, “Simoun Magsalin.” I do a lot of writing on political theory, mostly on anarchism and abolition. On the organizing side, I’ve worked with comrades on abolitionist projects, mostly educational. I’m also a librarian on The Anarchist Library, the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library, as well as an administrator on the Marxist Internet Archive for the Philippine socialism section and the Tagalog section. Most of my organizing now involves engaging with the broader left milieu in the Philippines to get them to adopt positions that are abolitionist, libertarian, prefigurative, and degrowth.

Your projects—abolitionist projects, chatting with non-anarchists about anarchism, maintaining digital archives—all seem to have the common thread of centering accessibility. Can you speak to your experiences with this?

Accessibility is an interesting theme for you to notice in my work! My first foray into anarchism was making Philippine anarchist texts available on The Anarchist Library alongside many other texts. Some of the comrades I met later mentioned they read so-and-so on The Anarchist Library, often texts that have been made accessible because of my own actions. On the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library, the platform has allowed anarchist literature in Burmese, Thai, and Tieng Viet to be more accessible to the whole world. It is on the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library that the first anarchist texts in Tieng Viet were published publicly. Similarly on the Marxist Internet Archive, making available socialist text and radical literature from the Philippines has made some obscure literature more accessible to new audiences. For example, the debate within the Communist Party of the Philippines in the 2009–2010 election where rank-and-file cadre defied and critiqued the Party leadership for opportunism is now made accessible to a new generation of Filipinos who matured after the 2010 elections. A bit of what I’m doing now is making abolition and degrowth more accessible to the Philippine left. Accessibility remains one of the biggest issues in the Philippine left, where most of what is accessible is from a narrow tendency. Accessibility, then, is making this knowledge the birthright of all.

What (if any) are your critical theory influences? What motivates you to organize?

Two key currents are highly influential for me, one is the communization current, and the other is the Black radical tradition. For communization, what has always been key for me is the concept of the self-abolition of the proletariat. Actually, one of my initiatives was to track down obscure pamphlets about proletarian self-abolition in French to translate to English, making accessible these currents to new audiences. Even if I am not Black myself, I do have a heavy intellectual debt to the Black radical tradition. Black abolitionism and Black anarchic radicalism have been strong influences and I have tried to bring it in dialogue with communization, which is largely White. I then try to bring both in dialogue with Philippine history and the Philippine radical tradition.

I, like many other anarchists, don’t want to turn everyone in the world to anarchism—we just want people to act for themselves. Proletarian self-activity is the first step to self-emancipation and self-abolition. What motivates me to organize is to see people acting for themselves. The point of an organizer is not to direct the struggle like a movie director or musical conductor. The point of an organizer is to catch up to the people already doing self-activity and then adding what you know into their repertoire.

What is it like doing anarchist organizing work in the Global South, and where you live, what is the anarchist scene like?

It is a bit difficult to be in the “boondocks” of the global anarchist scene. Unfortunately, the established anarchist scene in the Philippines is dominated by personalities who are transphobic or otherwise cliquish. Still, there’s still many others out there outside our affinity group that are implicitly abolitionist or anarchistic, so that’s where our people are at. As I am not an evangelist, I’m hardly interested in conversion and evangelization into the anarchist creed. I’m more interested in adding abolitionist, libertarian, prefigurative, and degrowth ideas to the repertoire of existing tendencies. And indeed, this is what I am doing with the socialist scene. Most of the Philippine left isn’t explicitly “socialist” but rather “National Democratic,” meaning they follow the ideology of the Communist Party of the Philippines. For those outside National Democracy, there’s a lot of common ground for agreement that we can build off for discussing abolition, libertarian municipalism, prefiguration, and degrowth. For much of us, the anarchist scene is the friends we build along the way.

Anything else you want to share?

Yes actually, I’m pretty excited to share an essay coming out in May 2025 entitled Rebel Peripheries that brings anarchism and Black radical concepts like marronage in dialogue with Philippine history and the rebel praxis of the ongoing second communist insurgency. It’s a work of political theory that I have been developing for a year now and I am proud of it for containing a lot of original thinking. The Philippines has an equivalent of marronage that the Spanish colonizers called “remontar,” and I think this concept speaks a lot to how the inhabitants of the so-called Philippines openly deserted the colony for the freedom the mountains give them. I connect this to how “mamundok” is understood in the Philippines today as an euphemism for joining the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Through this, I bring these concepts in dialogue with anarchism to develop an insurrectionary project of “mamundok-in-place” that looks for the lines of desertion all around us. I hope people like it!