In Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, the peasant appears twice dead. First in life, as property; then in death, as inventory lingering in the bureaucratic ledgers of the empire. Pavel Chichikov, Gogol’s wandering con man, traverses provincial Russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs still counted in the census so he can accumulate fictive wealth from human absence. The grotesque brilliance of the novel lies not merely in the absurdity of the scheme, but in Gogol’s revelation that serfdom corrupts everyone. The peasant suffers most brutally, but landlords, bureaucrats, merchants, and respectable society itself become spiritually deformed by a social order that converts human beings into abstraction. Gogol was not a revolutionary prophet. Yet history would eventually sweep away the old landed order through the Russian Revolution of 1917, as if the moral rot he diagnosed had become historically unbearable.

I carried Gogol with me to Negros.

Not literally, of course. One does not bring Russian novels to fact-finding missions in a countryside thick with military checkpoints, grief, and the scorching heat that clings to the sugar fields. But Dead Souls returned to me in Toboso as we listened to the initial accounts surrounding the massacre of the Negros 19. Their names had already begun entering the cold grammar of state security discourse even before families could fully mourn them. “Encounter.” “Armed rebels.” “Recovered firearms.” The dead transformed almost instantly into administrative objects, into a narrative assembled in advance by counterinsurgency.

But the farmers and residents knew the dead otherwise. They knew who laughed most easily, who planted monggo beans, who worried over school expenses, who hummed songs while walking, who sang softly while planting, who fetched water before dawn. They remembered those whom the fact-finding mission confirmed as civilians—Alyssa Alano, Errol Wendel, Maureen Santuyo, RJ Ledesma, Kai Sorem, and Lyle Prijoles—not as names suspended in the cold grammar of casualty reports, but as lives once woven into the ordinary intimacies of community, into fields, unfinished conversations, and futures interrupted. While the state speaks in categories, the masses remember persons.

The grammar of counterinsurgency

This is the peculiar violence of counterinsurgency in the Philippines. One is stripped first of political humanity before one is stripped of life itself. The communist and the criminal, the organizer and the addict, the activist and the terrorist collapse into a single disposable category. Dehumanization prepares the conditions for killing while simultaneously anesthetizing the public imagination against outrage. Language itself becomes corrupted. The horrific casualness of terms like “corned beef” to refer to mangled bodies reveals not only cruelty but habituation to cruelty. A society learns to joke in the dialect of counterinsurgency.

Gogol understood this. The dead soul is not only the dead peasant. It is also the living conscience that gradually loses its capacity to recognize another human being.

Negros has long been treated as the dark unconscious of the Philippine social order. The island of sugar and massacres: Escalante, Sagay, the Fausto family of Himamaylan, Kabankalan, Guihulngan, and Toboso. They recur not because history repeats itself mechanically but because the agrarian question remains unresolved. Landlessness persists beside concentrated wealth. Hunger persists beside export agriculture. And whenever peasants attempt to organize themselves into a historical force capable of confronting this arrangement, they encounter not merely landlords but the full architecture of counterinsurgency.

Closure of peace

The tragedy deepened after the Duterte government unilaterally scuttled the peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines in 2017. The peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines had opened difficult but meaningful possibilities. No one serious about social transformation romanticizes negotiations. They are contradictory, frustrating, and difficult. Yet peace talks offered something rare in Philippine political life: an acknowledgment that the roots of armed conflict were social and historical, not merely criminal.

One historical possibility was foreclosed and another violently consolidated. In place of negotiations came the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, the reinforcement of the so-called whole-of-nation approach, Executive Order No. 32, intensified militarization, Operation Sauron, and an atmosphere in which legal democratic dissent itself became suspect. Once more, counterinsurgency is presented as the state’s preferred alternative to peace talks. And its casualties spread outward: peasants, labor organizers, activists, development workers, teachers, lawyers, indigenous leaders, revolutionaries, families. The countryside felt this immediately.

It is impossible for me to think about this history abstractly.

Kerima Tariman comes to me whenever I return to Negros. Her laughter arrives first, before memory catches up with death. She too was killed on the island, under the same machinery of anti-communist violence that continues to haunt Negros with terrible consistency. The same 79th Infantry Battalion implicated in the killing of the Negros 19 was also involved in the death of a revolutionary whose friendship carried the warmth and ferocity reserved for those who understand commitment not merely as ideology, but as companionship forged under pressure. Soon after came Ericson Acosta, whose remains we retrieved after his killing by the military in Kabankalan. The retrieval of a friend’s body alters something fundamental in one’s relationship to history. Politics ceases to be an argument about abstractions. One carries death physically: through mud and rain, exhaustion and paperwork, signatures and waiting, and finally through the unbearable intimacy of identification.

Yet the dead do not disappear. This is perhaps what frightened ruling classes historically about communists, peasant movements, and national liberation struggles. The dead continue organizing the living. Memory itself becomes insurgent.

Acceptable limits of dissent

The ruling order understands this well, which is why anti-communism does not move only through bullets. It travels through discourse, institutions, funding structures, and the respectable language of “democratic management”. Violence in the countryside is often accompanied by another labor elsewhere: the narrowing of political imagination.

The NGO world frequently emerges here as a contradictory terrain. Many inside it are sincere, exhausted, and deeply committed to the poor; some are dear friends. Yet structures possess their own gravity. What begins as solidarity may gradually become administration. Political struggle becomes project-based, measured in donor cycles, policy outputs, stakeholder consultations, and carefully calibrated forms of dissent. Revolution becomes too impolite a word. Liberation yields to resilience; structural transformation to capacity-building; imperialism to governance deficits.

None of this renders reform meaningless. Reforms matter because suffering is immediate. But there are moments in Negros when one senses the limits of managerial compassion. One cannot sit with peasants shaped by generations of landlessness, listen to mothers narrate massacre, watch children learn the ordinary disciplines of fear, and still believe history may be resolved through technical adjustment alone. The countryside strips language of comfort. It asks harder questions. Not whether reform matters, but whether reform becomes the horizon beyond which justice itself is no longer permitted to travel.

Counterinsurgency by military means seeks to eliminate revolutionary movements physically. Counterinsurgency by reformist means seeks to discipline the very horizon of emancipation—teaching society to fear revolution more than the conditions that produce it.

The living refusal

Gogol’s Chichikov accumulated wealth through dead peasants listed in imperial ledgers. Our contemporary order does not trade in dead serfs, yet there are moments in Negros when one feels surrounded by another species of dead souls: farmers rendered socially disposable by landlessness and militarization; activists transformed into targets through red-tagging; ordinary citizens taught to fear organizers more than structural injustice; intellectuals who, from above, speak endlessly of democracy while remaining silent about class war.

But there is another side to Negros that state discourse cannot fully comprehend.

During the mission, amid testimonies and mourning, people received us warmly and trusted us with their stories—their struggles both mundane and tragic, the painstaking calculations of survival, the ways they coax plants to live through unforgiving conditions and make sure children remain safe long before they can be vaccinated. We listened to accounts of loss and endurance, of interrupted harvests and unfinished conversations, of lives lived under the shadow of militarization yet never fully surrendered to it.

The living struggle of farmers in the Philippines persists precisely because peasants are not dead souls. They continue planting, grieving, organizing, loving, and risking despite conditions designed to exhaust historical hope.

This is why the peasantry remains dangerous.

Not because peasants are inherently violent, as anti-communist fantasy imagines, but because their collective existence continually exposes the unfinished business of Philippine history. The agrarian question remains like a wound the nation refuses to treat except through militarization. Every massacre becomes both revelation and warning: revelation of structural violence, warning against resistance.

And still resistance continues.

When the dead refuse disappearance

Solidarity begins where the ruling order fails to dictate the terms of human worth. It is the refusal to surrender to an arrangement of power that decides whose life matters, whose death counts, whose grief deserves language, and whose suffering must disappear into statistics, suspicion, or silence. In places such as Toboso, remembrance itself becomes an act of political fidelity.

This was evident in the life and death of Roger Fabillar, known to many simply as Jhong, a man in his late-thirties remembered not first through the abstractions of conflict, but through the intimacies of everyday life. In Toboso, he was beloved as a childhood playmate, a familiar presence in the ordinary geography of the barrio. People sought his counsel: how to process documents for land claims, how to confront everyday grievances with restraint, patience, and collective resolve. He inhabited that narrow and demanding space where political commitment and everyday care become indistinguishable.

When Ka Roger died, hundreds of Toboso residents rode their motorcycles beneath the torrid sun to accompany him in death as they had trusted him in life. They came despite the atmosphere of fear, despite surveillance, despite the risks that often shadow public mourning in militarized communities. Dust gathered on their clothes, heat pressed against their skin, but attendance itself became testimony. To pay tribute was to insist that memory belongs  to those who endure and not to those who govern by force.

A mother who had lost her son once put it this way, without theatricality nor bitterness: Here, there are two laws—the law of the army and the law of the digbay (digmang bayan)—the people’s war. Ka Roger, to many among the poorest who struggle and fight, belonged to the latter moral world: not terrorism as named by the state, but an undertaking of the oppressed toward liberation, a difficult and dangerous labor endowed with dignity. Leadership in such a struggle was not privilege but burden, and yet a prestigious one—earned through trust, sacrifice, and steadfastness. Perhaps this is why his funeral drew so many: because for those who came, mourning Ka Roger was inseparable from honoring what he had represented—a promise, however tenuous, that justice may yet belong to those history has most often abandoned.

Perhaps this is where Gogol finally becomes insufficient for us. His satire diagnosed decay brilliantly, but he could not fully imagine the revolutionary energies gathering beneath the old order. The Philippine countryside today likewise contains forces larger than the narratives imposed upon it by counterinsurgency. Beneath the discourse of national security lies a simpler and more enduring conflict: those who labor for the land and those who monopolize it; those who dream of liberation and those who mistake order for peace. 

In Negros, the dead remain close to the living. But unlike Gogol’s dead souls trapped in bureaucratic limbo, our dead insist on movement. They accompany fact-finding missions, wake us in the middle of the night, return in songs and stories, and demand from the living not pity but historical courage. Something spectral still moves through the countryside —not fear alone, nor merely grief, but unfinished history itself, returning insistently through every massacre, every harvest, every struggle that refuses disappearance.

The question is whether Philippine society still possesses enough moral life to hear them.

Sarah Raymundo serves on the National Executive Board of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) and as President of the Philippines-Bolivarian Venezuela Friendship Association. 

This post was first published on the Philippines-based platform Bulatlat.