Dictatorship of the Proletarian Pilipinos

The institution I chose is the student Pilipino community (Pil-community) at the University of California, Berkeley. The Pil-community at Berkeley is a microcosm of Pilipino students who are unified under their shared culture and ethnicity. I believe the Pil-community at Cal would fall under a cultural and political category given that the Pil-community is first and foremost Pilipino and that in itself stands as a political statement. I chose this institution because I find myself caught in this complicated web of social rules that I am expected to follow, being one of the Pil-community leaders as a board member of one of the Pilipino organizations (Pil-org). One major social rule that the Pil-community follows is that if you are Pilipino you are automatically part of the Pil-community, and there is an unspoken expectation that since you are Pilipino you must be "active" in the community; meaning, you should be associating closely with the rest of the Pil-community or you may be considered an outcast.

The Pil-community is comprised of eight Pilipino student organizations each fulfilling a different niche, which enhances the little world that these Pilipino students create for themselves on the Cal campus. Marx would note how each organization "specializes" in different things but he would be pleased to know that the more dominant Pil-orgs are the politically active Pil-orgs, which fight for the injustices of Pilipinos and Pilipino-Americans. There are three Pil-orgs that may be seen as the "bourgeois" organizations since three of them are the pre-professional organizations (pre-pros); one specializing in law and business, another with a healthcare focus, and lastly one with an engineering/science concentration. All of the pre-pros foster career preparation into these capitalist positions. Sometimes these bourgeois-like organizations are seen in a negative light since members from these organizations are seen as being self-interested in their careers instead of being politically active for the Pil-community. Marx would also detect a certain amount of exploitation being made by some of the larger Pil-orgs over the smaller ones since they possess the resources that the smaller ones lack.