never odd or even

Unus instar omnium, “one like all,” might be the Liga’s device, but that is as far as Rizal seems to have gone, and it was not very far. Agriculture and commerce were to be encouraged and developed—but for whose benefit? Significantly enough, the Liga’s funds were to be lent to any member who needed capital; shops, warehouses and commercial establishments were to be opened where members might buy goods at a discount. At most the Liga was a national co-operative association. Nor did the Katipunan, as far as the evidence shows, go much farther; its peasants and workers might have had ideas of their own, but there is nothing in Bonifacio’s “Decalogue” or in Jacinto’s “Kartilla” that hints at the expropriation and distribution among the workers of the great landed estates, at the seizure of mines, banks, corporations and other private enterprises, at the equalisation of wealth or even of opportunity, or even at the organisation of labor unions to protect the workers from sweatshop wages and hours. When Jacinto wrote of “the equality of all men,” he meant only that “the origin of all is the same” and no race was superior to another. The “Kartilla” was a collection of moral rules and exhortations of which Rizal, or for that matter Archbishop Nozaleda himself, would have approved.

The truth of the matter is that neither Rizal nor Bonifacio was fighting a class war; it is to be doubted that they had even heard of it; the Philippine Revolution was “French” not “Russian;” it was the political expression of a nation and not of a class. For all that it must also be granted that Bonifacio made his Revolution with peasants and workers while Rizal sought his Nation through the “unity and prosperity” of the middle class.