The statue of Andres Bonifacio showed him to be barefooted, garbed in rolled up trousers, a simple cotton shirt and who wielded a bolo. A character portrayal of a common laborer or a farm worker during the Spanish colonial period.
But, is there any truth to this?
Andres Bonifacio's social background was described as thus; that his father was a tailor, and a petty Spanish offical. A teniente mayor in Tondo. While his mother was a Spanish-Tagala mestiza who was from a family of modest means, and was employed at a cigarette factory.
Which made Bonifacio's family neither of the the peasant stock nor of the common laborer that did manual labor during that time. Its safe to assume then that Andres Bonifacio's background was of the middle class, perhaps lower middle class, rather than one of the urban poor living in a "shack" as erroneously described by some websites. Their home was the typical wood, bamboo and nipa structure of ordinary Tagalogs.
Andres Bonifacio was not illiterate because he had primary education in Spanish ABCs, first by the Catholic priests for religious rituals, and later, by Guillermo Osmena, (a Cebuano). Bonifacio being fluent in Spanish, translated Rizal's Mi Ultimo Adios to Tagalog. As written he was also an avid reader owning a small library of books.
When Andres Bonifacio was orphaned he was forced to dropped out of school and work for a living to support his siblings. So he became a small time entrepreneur, or in today's parlance, a street vendor, selling paper fans and wooden canes he made with the help of his younger brothers and sisters.
Later on and because he was literate, he was employed as a company storekeeper by Fleming and Company; a business that dealt in articles of trade, such as tar and rattan. He rose to become an agent of that firm in time. For better compensation he moved to another business firm, Fressel and Company, as its clerk and agent.
According to the marxist perspective, as the middle class and the entrepreneurs gradually become destitute, ultimately, because it will not be able to compete with large capitalists and new methods of large scale production. The proletariat then will come out from all social classes of the population. But this is the result of Modern Industry because the proletariat is the end product of the very contradiction found in capitalism:
"Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes are decaying and being ruined in the face of large scale industry; the proletariat is its most characteristic product. The intermediate strata, the small industrial, the small merchant, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to safeguard their existence from ruin as intermediate strata. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative." (Communist Manifesto 1848, translated from German by H. Draper)
So how was Bonifacio's milieu related to the Industrial Age when the Philippines was not industrial but agricultural?
Was Bonifacio really about the violent overthrowing of the social strata of inequality, and thereby, creating a social movement; rather than merely reacting to the results of its current colonialism?
Why was Bonifacio shown in a sculpture that of a common laborer when he was not of that social class? Why was he not portrayed accurately as that of the lower middle class?
Sources:
A. Borrero, Kalayaan Vol 3, 3-1998
Wikipedia, Bonifacio
The World of 1898:Spanish-American War, Hispanic Division, Library of Congress
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, edited by F. Bender
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