Part 1

• Who Are “the Masses”? Bureaucrat Capitalism, the National Bourgeoisie, and the Politics of Corruption in Philippine Maoism Joseph Scalice Hong Kong Baptist University

  This paper uses the Philippine case to explore how the Maoist category of “bureaucrat capitalism” defined “the masses” in a way that explicitly included the national bourgeoisie. Emerging in the early 1960s as Mao Zedong denounced the Soviet leadership as “bureaucrat capitalists,” the term was repurposed in global Maoism to explain state repression and corruption without indicting capitalism itself. The problem was no longer a state structurally tied to class exploitation, but a betrayal of what should have been a progressive national coalition government under New Democracy.
  Focusing on Jose Maria Sison and the Communist Party of the Philippines, the paper examines how “bureaucrat capitalism” was elaborated in Philippine Society and Revolution as one of the three “historical evils.” In Sison’s usage, bureaucrat capitalists were corrupt officials acting as local managers of US monopolies — aberrations within an otherwise potentially progressive state. This allowed the CPP to condemn the Marcos regime’s corruption while preserving the theoretical possibility of a coalition government of workers, peasants, and national capitalists that would represent the “broad masses of the people.”
  The paper argues that “bureaucrat capitalism” functioned as a device for drawing the boundary of the masses: excluding a narrow stratum of corrupt officials and compradors while including the national bourgeoisie as part of a common people with shared national interests. The category narrowed the horizon of critique to corruption and foreign domination, recasting the state as a potentially neutral arbiter rather than an instrument of class rule. It thus illuminates how Philippine Maoism defined who the masses were, who spoke in their name, and what they were permitted to demand.

• Armed Citizenry in Indonesian and South Korean Political Thought and Praxis Iqra Anugrah University of Turin Windu Yusuf Leiden University

  Authoritarian turn in global capitalist development in the last decade has rendered the liberal form of domestic and international political economy dysfunctional, resulting in severe national democratic deficits and the breakdown of the liberal international order. In the face of neo-fascist desires and jingoistic imperialism, perhaps it is high time to revisit the idea of armed citizenry.

  Most recently repopularized by cultural theorist Frederic Jameson, armed citizenry refers to the idea of citizen armies as popular mass force and a dual power institution leading to radical democracy. Rooted in the experience of the Paris Commune, the echoes of armed citizenry can be found in other world-historical events.

  This talk is a preliminary study of armed citizenry in Southeast Asian political thought and praxis. The major starting point from this endeavor is Indonesia’s anti-colonial revolutionary experience: local social revolutions in Northern Central Java and East Sumatra during the Indonesian National Revolution as well as the writings and politics of two competing Marxist independence leaders, Tan Malaka and Amir Sjarifuddin, on armed struggle and people’s army. Then, as a strategy for further theorizing, it compares the Indonesian case with anti-dictatorship citizen militias during the commune-like 1980 Gwangju Uprising.

  This presentation attempts to make several interventions. First, it looks at the construction of revolutionary subjectivities in (inter-)Asian emancipatory politics. Second, it examines the arguments for armed citizenry as a form of self- defense against foreign aggression and tyrannical power in Indonesian and to a lesser extent South Korean political thought. Third, it puts the said notion of armed citizenry in conversation with similar concepts in a range of political traditions and practices. Finally, it ponders its possible relevance and limitations in the current context of contentious politics and disruptive tactics against democratic backsliding and neo-colonial occupation.

• In Whose Name? Constituent Power and Popular Sovereignty in Southeast Asian Constitutionalism John Raymond Jison University of the Philippines

  Who founds the political order in Southeast Asia, and does the founder’s authority survive the act of founding? This paper reads Southeast Asian constitutions as documents of political thought, examining how each text constructs the sovereign subject, defines the scope of popular political agency, and determines whether constituent power persists or is absorbed into constituted institutions. Constituent power—the authority of “the people” to create, amend, and reconstitute their political order—has generated extensive scholarship in Euro-Atlantic constitutional theory (Sieyès, Kalyvas, Negri), but it has not been systematically applied to Southeast Asian constitutional texts. This paper addresses that gap, treating these constitutions as original expressions of political thought shaped by anti-colonial republicanism, Islamic governance, Buddhist kingship, revolutionary socialism, and sultanistic authority. The paper advances three claims. First, “the people” is not a universal category waiting to be activated by constitutional design, but a political construction whose content varies radically across the region’s constitutional traditions. Second, the persistence question, what happens to constituent power after the founding, admits more than the binary of persistence versus exhaustion; Southeast Asian constitutions reveal additional structural possibilities including permanent delegation upward (the vanguard model), cyclical activation by extra-constitutional actors (the Thai model), and outright denial that the question arises (the sultanistic model). Third, the gap between declaratory sovereignty and institutional capacity is not a transitional deficiency but a structural feature of regional constitutionalism that performs its own ideological work. These claims challenge the assumptions of existing constituent power theory and point toward a more capacious comparative political thought of constitutionalism.

Part 2

• Who Are “the Masses”? Bureaucrat Capitalism, the National Bourgeoisie, and the Politics of Corruption in Philippine Maoism Joseph Scalice Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU)

  This paper uses the Philippine case to explore how the Maoist category of “bureaucrat capitalism” defined “the masses” in a way that explicitly included the national bourgeoisie. Emerging in the early 1960s as Mao Zedong denounced the Soviet leadership as “bureaucrat capitalists,” the term was repurposed in global Maoism to explain state repression and corruption without indicting capitalism itself. The problem was no longer a state structurally tied to class exploitation, but a betrayal of what should have been a progressive national coalition government under New Democracy.

  Focusing on Jose Maria Sison and the Communist Party of the Philippines, the paper examines how “bureaucrat capitalism” was elaborated in Philippine Society and Revolution as one of the three “historical evils.” In Sison’s usage, bureaucrat capitalists were corrupt officials acting as local managers of US monopolies — aberrations within an otherwise potentially progressive state. This allowed the CPP to condemn the Marcos regime’s corruption while preserving the theoretical possibility of a coalition government of workers, peasants, and national capitalists that would represent the “broad masses of the people.”

  The paper argues that “bureaucrat capitalism” functioned as a device for drawing the boundary of the masses: excluding a narrow stratum of corrupt officials and compradors while including the national bourgeoisie as part of a common people with shared national interests. The category narrowed the horizon of critique to corruption and foreign domination, recasting the state as a potentially neutral arbiter rather than an instrument of class rule. It thus illuminates how Philippine Maoism defined who the masses were, who spoke in their name, and what they were permitted to demand.

• From ‘Maubere’ to ‘Timorese’: Mass Politics, Ideological Shifts, and National Identity in Occupied Timor-Leste Nuno Canas Mendes University of Lisbon

  This paper proposes an analysis of the “Maubere people” as a mass movement within the context of the guerrilla resistance in Indonesian-occupied Timor-Leste. It seeks to examine the extent to which Mauberism functioned as a mobilizing and representative ideological framework, while simultaneously embodying elements of controversy, ambiguity, cohesion, and division. Particular attention is given to its role in incorporating and re-signifying a marginalized lumpen proletariat into a broader nationalist cause.

  The study traces the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the “Maubere people,” from its early connotations as a term of social and cultural marginalization to its politicization and strategic deployment by resistance leadership. By situating Mauberism within the dynamics of anti-colonial and anti-occupation struggle, the paper explores how it operated both as a strategy of inclusive mass mobilization and as a potentially exclusionary or ideologically charged construct.

  Furthermore, the paper investigates the eventual shift in terminology by Timorese leaders from the ideologically laden “Maubere people” to the more geographically grounded and ostensibly neutral designation of the “Timorese people.” It aims to understand the political, strategic, and symbolic motivations behind this transition, considering both internal dynamics of the Resistance movement and the changing international context. Ultimately, the paper contributes to broader debates on nationalist discourse, identity construction, and the instrumentalization of social categories in liberation movements.

• Markets for the Masses: Islamizing Ordoliberalism in 1990s Indonesia Windu Yusuf Leiden University

  Much of the scholarship on Islam in late New Order Indonesia explains the rise of the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) as both elite co-optation and affirmative action for the Muslim community (ummah). In the dominant interpretation, ICMI stands in direct opposition to the pluralist civil-society groups associated with the emerging pro-democracy movement of the 1990s. I argue that this opposition obscures a competition between two liberalisms. The paper examines a group of social-democratic intellectuals in the LP3ES-Prisma orbit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, working under state terror against Islamic politics, economic deregulation, and the growth of a Muslim professional middle class. A section of liberals and social democrats in that milieu sought to create a safe and respectable channel that could draw religious politics away from adversarial mass opposition and into a German ordoliberal-inflected market outlook. While ICMI was never monolithic, and more illiberal elements came to be more dominant over time, the paper examines how a liberal core consolidated and was sold to a wider public.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Amir Sjarifuddin
• Communist Party of the Philippines
• Gwangju Uprising
• Maoism
• Philippine left
• Sino-Soviet split
• Southeast Asia
• Tan Malaka
• Timor-Leste
• alternative development
• armed citizenry
• bureaucrat capitalism
• citizen militias
• communes
• comparative political thought
• constituent power
• constitutionalism
• mass mobilization
• nationalism
• people’s army
• political thought
• popular sovereignty
• regionalism