Fictionalizing Error in Edberto Villegas’s Barikada

Barikada (2013), written by the late political scientist, writer, and consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) Edberto Villegas (1940–2020), is a novel that presents a counterfactual portrayal of an urban insurrection, waged by city-based national democratic (NatDem) revolutionaries who deviated from the Maoist rural-oriented protracted guerrilla warfare sanctioned by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). This essay reads this NatDem fiction in relation to the debates about revolutionary strategy that surfaced during the movement’s crises-ridden years, and were taken up during the Second Great Rectification Movement. I undertake a detailed examination of the novel’s reworking and invocation of the movement’s complex history of crises and rectification, and reflect upon how its counterfactual representation of urban insurrection does not simply function to criticize the actual insurrectionist tendencies that emerged in the movement in the post-EDSA years, but more broadly, lays bare the figurative force of fiction in generating insights about the ever-present possibility of committing errors in the revolutionary struggle