On Jonathan Okamura’s “The Global Filipino Diaspora as Imagined Community”

Global Diasporas, Imagined Communities

In his essay, Jonathan Okamura[1] argues that the global Filipino diaspora constitutes the kind of “imagined community” that Benedict Anderson once famously conceptualized. That is, Filipinos all over the world actively imagine themselve to be part of a similar, united experience, “aware of one another’s presence”, and sharing the same sense of “culture, national identiy, custom and tradition”.

Okamura begins by discussing the notion of diaspora, and how, while not a new notion, the diaspora (which continues to resist complete assimilation into the host country, and retain strong, often sentimental links with their homelands) have challenged traditional models of community (or enclave, usually bounded in space and ontological coherence). The Fordist platitude of “time is money” is, as Okamura points out, interpellated by the mechanisms of the processes of globalization that define contemporary society. With the increasing ubiquity of affordable telecommunications and information networks, along with the expontentially developing sophistication of their conduits and technological grids, time, in the late capitalist sense, has been deprioritized, and has more or less found itself into a snug industrial efficacy. Today, “space is money” is more apt, as the shrinking of the world renders urgent the need for more efficiency, more power, and more usefulness within each singular embeddedness. It is at these interstices (which Okamura relates to the notion of “borderland”) that the notion of diaspora becomes a component of social understanding that is pregnant with possibility. The plasticity of the diaspora — that is, their malleability, part of which Anderson refers to as “style” of imagining — becomes more than just a consequence of the contexts and conditions of contemporary mobility; it also becomes an empowering tool of identity politics against repressive essentialism and reductionist insularism.

To support his thesis, Okamura outlines the various ways that the Filipino diaspora, through the various conduits of transnationalism/globalization, actively imagines itself.

First there is the very real, material reality of dislocation and deracination, and the notion of “returning” to the Philippines. Here, Okamura discusses the notion of pilgrimage, and how the (oft-ceremonious) encounters of and between “balikbayans” (“returnee to the nation”) in both public (airports, festivals) and private (barrio/hometown news) spaces help reinforce the diaspora’s imaginings. This relationship is further expanded to non-members, who, once exposed to the variety of exotic locales, tales of newly-acquired wealth, and elevated social statures of the balikbayans, “start to consider going overseas themselves”. It might be important here to bring up Oscar Campomanes’s notion of the “reverse telos”[2], a unique concept amongst Filipino literature in Asian-American studies. While most other Asian-American narratives (say, Japanese or Korean) find their formal conclusions (the “telos”) within the United States, Filipino American narratives, often driven by the spectral phantasm of the homeland, seek a “reverse telos”, a “going back” to the Philippines. The balikbayan, then, can be thought of as more than just an illustration of the powerful longing for a homeland that continues despite the globalization-induced necessitations of outbound mobility; we can argue here that one of the most powerful bonds of the diasporic imagination is the persistence of returning as as a kind of redemptive force (however futile or fictive that redemption may actually be) — not necessarily a shallow vindication, but as an understanding of the consequence of dislocation, and of the emotional tethering to a particular space in the world that one calls “home”.

The capital that these migrants accumulate and send home — their Philippine-bound remittances, the materiel occupying the balikbayan box freight, etc.  — constitute Okamura’s second consideration. Here, consumer items and money, and the ways that these things are transferred, became universal tokens that Filipinos abroad imagine themselves to send, in an effort to actively participate in the lives of their families and loved ones back home. New telecommunication technologies have made it more affordable, as well as easier than ever, for members of the diaspora and their Philippine-based kinship networks to remain in constant contact, despite the distinct geographical distance, and subtle emotional and cultural changes inherent in being and living abroad. The ever-increasing accomodations on the part of corporations, towards a specified market segment (in this case, Filipinos in America) evinces not just the existence of this population, but the viability and potency of such a population.

The third consideration is the role of the Philippine state in the mitigation of this unprecedented historical phenomenon of bodily movement. Since the floodgates were first opened by the Marcos regime (initially as a temporary, stop-gap measure to quell local unrest caused by rapidly-rising unemployment rates) in the 1970’s, subsequent presidents and their administrations would take even greater and farther-reaching steps in bureaucratically stream-lining the exportation of their new “national resource”. Alongside informal institutions encouraging work abroad, the government has helped to facilitate migration by instigating labor agencies and programmes to expand the contract labor force, maintaining legal and civil rights to Filipinos abroad (even extending them to those who have gained new citizenships), as well as official gestures of acknowledgment, such as referring to these migrants as being the “new heroes” of the Philippine state, declaring national holidays in their honor, etc.

Historical Slippages: The Role of the State

There are several things to consider when reading Okamura’s paper. Firstly, the problem with the diaspora as an imagined community is that, unlike the traditional nation-state, the diasporic population often fails to constitute a viable body politic;  more than just difficulty in imagining itself as possessing real political power, the Filipino diaspora also has a historical susceptibility to marginalization, either in the home country or the adopted one. This sense of liminality often creates dangerous slippages. The Flor Contemplacion episode is one such instance. Here, the Philippines’s attempts to secure mercy on one of its citizens (a domestic helper), accused of murder and sentenced to death, in Singapore in the mid-1990’s offers the grossest example of the discrepancy between the home country’s ability to extend ancillary support to its migrant population(s) and the material reality of dislocation that puts the OFW subject beyond the tentacles of the State. Similarly, the reports of employer abuse, sexual harassment, and discrimination puts the OFW in a curious, and dangerous, position — one in which the State is both responsible and helpless.

There is also a problem with the nature of the state’s role and complicity in this facilitation. As the state needs an influx of liquid foreign currency reserves to keep the economy afloat (and to stabilize the value of the historically susceptible Philippine peso), the Filipino diaspora’s continued remittances should, in theory, be helpful to any development economic programme the state might employ; in reality, these remittances are in themselves the development programme, as well as helping to sustain a dangerous economic trap, susceptible to corruption and graft while the Philippine economy continues to teeter on collapse. In order to guarantee the maintenance of this system, the state uses the mythologizing of Philippine foreign workers a strategem for pacifying (by deception) latent civil unrest all the while dampening the state’s responsibility to publicly address the social inequities that breed migration in the first place.

As David Lloyd once pointed out[3], in reference to 19th-century Irish displacement to the United States, mass immigration is a material consequence of the failure of the (post)colonial state. Though Okamura might not necessarily agree with this entirely, I interpret this to mean that the efficacy of a state’s ability to maintain its own citizenry (which Okamura conditions as a “right” to work/live in one’s home country) within its own boundaries is a measuring tool for questioning the state’s very constitution, and indeed, its legitimacy.

Ethnicity, Race, and the Limitations of Diaspora Blocs

Additionally Okamura is not attentive to the role of colonialism in the persistence of migration. More than merely the introduction of particular flows of people — in this case, from the colonies to the metropole — the role of colonialism is also most evident within the mindset of the populations that tend to opt for migration as a way out of their institutionally-ordained poverty. Okamura, unfortunately, is not sensitive to the impact of American colonialism when he remarks that the “historical particularities” of the American occupation did not explain why Filipinos continued to migrate en masse to the United States specifically, long after their sovereignty was declared. As has been argued elsewhere, the benevolent assimilation tactics employed by the American colonial administration had a more profound effect on the colonial Filipino psyche than the Spanish stratagem of containment (focusing on keeping Filipino subjects ignorant). As B. A. Roley points out[4], the consequence of the American colonial project is the discrepancy between the American and Filipino imaginings of their relationship; that is, the latter continues to believe that across an ocean there exists a country that cares for them out of some historical fraternal bond (the “little brown brothers” rhetoric of American pro-colonial propaganda is apropos here). Additionally, the mythos of America as the pinnacle of accomplishment within the global capitalist rubric (the mostly fictional “American Dream”) that was propagated in the Cold War — of which the Philippines would serve as a proxy-war fulcrum in the Pacific region — continues to haunt many.

Largely because it is a sensitive issue for me (as it is part of my background), I am also pushing forth more interrogations about the role of race — not just in the encounters of the diaspora with other societies, but with the diaspora within itself. Though, like many Asian societies, the Philippine juridical structure is heavily engineered around blood relations (oft-used in ethnocentric agendas), nonetheless the impact of the Spanish/American colonial projects as well as miscegenation as a consequence of  migrant “contact” with host country populations has radically transformed the nature of Philippine populations. Unlike, say, the Chinese diasporas around the world, which prioritizes to retention of its relative homogeneity, the Philippine diasporas are relatively open and willing to allow outside cultures, peoples, and traditions mold in with their own. What is missing from Okamura’s analysis is exactly what constitutes membership of this diaspora, and how this dynamic concept is itself challenged and reshaped and reconstituted by various forces. How does the diaspora continue to imagine itself given the historical hybridization and “open-ness” on the part of Filipinos regarding their culture? The danger of accepting the notion of a “global Filipino diaspora” (in the singular) is that it presupposes a monolithic, static, stable notion of “Filipino” identity to begin with.

How does one confront the ethnolinguistic, racial, and religious cleavages that are themselves real, viable sociopolitical issues in the Philippines? Ilocanos in Hawai’i, the various Aeta and Igorot enclaves in New Jersey and in cities in Central Europe, and other “factions” whose presence seem to bleed outside the parameters of a singular “Global Filipino” diasporice identity. A personal example of this would be my own experiences with a Filipino student group as an undergraduate. Despite attempts to diversify its membership, the student group was entirely composed of what F. N. Zialcita would refer to as the “lowland, Hispanized, Christian” Filipino[5] — the ones historically most shaped by colonial forces. When an outreach was attempted to the Muslim Filipino students at our university, the offers of membership and camaraderie were rejected, on the basis of fundamental cultural dissimilarity. The Muslim students did not want to participate in an advocacy group run by students whose heritage came from a country known to marginalize its Muslim members; nor did they want to appear connected to an identity politics group based on ethnicity alone: they didn’t want to join in a fraternity of people constantly asking themselves “Who or what is the Filipino?”. They knew who they were and what their place in the world was. Many of them were members of other groups, including the Muslim Students Association and various groups campaigning for various publicly Islam-oriented causes (Palestinian liberation, for instance).

There is also the historical discrepancy of different societies that Filipinos go to, and surely this must challenge the notion of a singular global diaspora. For instance, how does a Filipino in the Middle East imagine themselves — their bodies, the way they are materially tethered to their part of the Earth — alongside the imaginings of Filipinos in Nigeria, the Caribbean, Germany, or New Zealand? Though they all indeed participate in the act of imagining, how, broadly speaking, are these imaginings enforced, shaped, or directed by their present contexts? Additionally how do permanent immigrants of such countries– those who married spouses from abroad, or were otherwise independent of the state administration’s programmes of migrant facilitation — imagine themselves vis-a-vis overseas contract workers, whose very presence abroad is temporary?

Though we can not fault Okamura completely (the paper was clearly written in the early 1990’s), it is nonetheless curious for its lack of any nuanced recognition of the impact that gender has in the development of the Filipino diaspora. Much has since been written to address the issue regarding the “feminization” of labor. Besides the Flor Contemplacion episode, whose hype amplified her almost to a suffering “inangbayan” archetype, numerous other female workers, many of them domestic help, have come forward to newspapers and popular chroniclers with their own tales of despair and oppression. The Philippine media industry milks these narratives in many popular films and television operas. Academics have also been particularly aware of the nature of gender in Philippine migration. Rolando Tolentino[6], for instance, refers to the “vaginal economy” of the Philippines , in which the Philippines is not only feminized due to the labor capital it is notorious for exporting — generally non-professional, traditionally female jobs, such as domestic care, hospitality and entertainment, etc. — but also for its position in the world economy as a “receptacle” for the “penetration” of Western capitalist initiatives (the kind of neo-liberal agenda embodied in the IMF/World Bank institutions). Additionally, one anthropologist has argued that social capital circulating throughout the world — based on structural racism, transnational gossip, circulating “common knowledge” discourse, etc. — is a powerful determinant in the nature of labor available to migrants of different countries[7]. In her study of migrant, female labor in Mediterranean societies, she found that due to the social capital of women from Eastern European countries such as Romania and Russia as being “beautiful” and “sexy”, migrants from these countries often found sexy dancing, “companionship” and prostitution as the job sectors available to them; Filipinas were not known for these same qualities, as their social capital rested on their quality as housemaids, domestic help, etc., and were, respectively, mainly found in these provinces of employment. As time goes on, the literature addressing gender and its implications in the Filipino migrant system is growing closer and closer to comprehensiveness.

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[1] Okamura, Jonathan Y. “The Global Filipino Diaspora as an Imagined Community”. Accessed here: http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/CMTS/MonoPaper3-6.html

[2] Campomanes, Oscar. “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile”from the Lim & Ling-edited collection, “Reading the Literatures of Asian America”, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992.

[3] From David Lloyd’s “The Recovery of Kitsch”. Accessible here: http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/zrecu2.html

[4] From Brian A. Roley’s short story, “Unacknowledged”, included in “Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience”, W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.

[5] Zialcita, Fernando N.  “Authentic, Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity”. Manila: Ateneo University Press, 2005.

[6] Tolentino, Rolando. “Vaginal Economy of Images: Philippine Cinema and Globalization in the Post-Marcos Post-Brocka Era”. (unpublished manuscript)

[7] Anna M. Agathangelou’s “‘Sexing’ Globalization in International Relations: Migrant Sex and Domestic Workers in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey”, from the Chowdhry & Nair-edited volume “Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class”, Routledge Press, 2002.

The Multicultural State and Its Discontents

This post is a response to Dr. F.P.A. Demeterio III’s “Ang Balangkas ng Multikulturalismo at Ang Pagbubuo ng Bansang Pilipino”. The paper interrogates various contexts of “multiculturalism” and looks at the multicultural conditions of Philippine society that are inhibitive or encouraging of a Filipino country (bansa). Though I think most of his arguments are fundamentally right – that is, there remains an indivisible kernel of experiential truth to be derived – I nonetheless have a few main topics of discussion – not fully fleshed out arguments, per se, but merely nodal points to suggest further lines of inquiry.

Firstly, the notion of a coherent Canadian “model” of multiculturalism is a bit essentialist. It is important to note that the supposed (anti-assimilative) successes of the Canadian project of multiculturalism have not necessarily translated into an efficacious, stream-lined, stable multicultural state. Francophone Canada, located within the province of Quebec, has tried for many years to gain independence from the rest of the country. Inuit and other First Nations tribes have not had comparatively equal, available resources from the government. On the other hand, the United States, which has prided itself on a  unique “melting pot” multiculturalism (the national motto is, after all, “e pluribus unum” or, “out of many, one”), has often had to deal with fractured social networks: the prevalence of many ethnic enclaves, institutional discrimination, difficulty in assimilation, etc. The author also neglected to mention the strong sense of geographic regionalism (the Pacific Northwest, the American South, etc) in the United States, which, while varied and distinct, nonetheless simultaneously coexist.

Additionally, the discussion of the “gessellschaft” is somewhat of a mis-reading, and not necessarily positioned as “public domain” (redeploying E. San Juan, Jr.’s slightly incorrect translation of the word in a Marxist context), but a “civil society”, one that is mobilized entirely within the primary centralized bureaucratic infrastructure. Though many have argued that the patrimonial nature of gemeinschaft is less turbulent, Marx himself argued that the gessellschaft, which creates social cleavages along class, race, etc., is necessary in order to create massive, wide-ranging productive forces.

On a side note, the glorification of either model has to take into account the historical particularities of its content. The Malaysian project of monocultural coherence based on ethno-nationalism will naturally have some difficulties in appropriating the American melting-pot stratagem because the former clearly privileges an “indigenous” population whose nation is characterized as an ancient domain, while the latter’s structure is a blend of various remnants due to immigration and its heritage as a European settler colony. The Philippines, which has had no history of mass immigration to the country, by both coincidence (logistic difficulties attendant to its geographic location and archipelagic character) and design (the structures in place by both the Spanish and American colonial administrations), with the exception of the Chinese. The Philippines, unlike Malaysia, is closer, at the very least, to a fairly indigenized, homogeneous society (in the sense that there is a more coherent set of criteria upon which one “imagines” the Philippine nation, in the Benedict Anderson sense).

Towards a People: A Response to the Issue of Individual Subjectivity and the Collective in Brocka’s Cinema

“In short, if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet… the people are missing.” - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2

When watching Lino Brocka’s cinema, it is expected that the endings of his films will inevitably be tragic, as both men and women struggle to overcome the trauma of the “violent banal” – the day-to-day struggles of living in an impoverished society: cynical political attitudes, hypersexuality, etc. After all, his cinema is what Deleuze refers to as the cinema of “crisis”, of “raw drive” and “social violence”. What do these terms mean, and how do they relate to understanding the ways in which Brocka’s cinema is politicized? Or, in other words, how does Brocka’s cinema present certain politically motivated schemas in ways that operate outside the normal ideas of filmic narrative?
The “trance” or “crisis” of Brocka’s cinema develops out of its subversion of conditioned expectations regarding the functionality of narrative. Simply, the methods of resolving plight and depravity don’t seem to be adequately presented within the narrative. One must therefore consider that Brocka’s cinema demonstrates the impossibility of the narrativized social contradictions to be solved at the formal level (the narrative itself). With this assumption, one might understand that a response cannot be presented within the narrative form that aligns itself with the conditioned expectations of the viewer: that is, for Brocka’s cinema, an “adequate response” is not organically produced within the narrative or the narrative forms – for real subversion to be presented, the narrative itself must counteract the audience’s conditioned expectations, they must be left feeling as if the narrative was inadequate.
In both Orapronobis and Maynila Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, for instance, the individual protagonists try their best to seek empowerment through their own personal mechanisms: priesthood, construction work, brothel work, etc. Both protagonists also exhibit a kind of complacency – in this sense defined as an active disconnection with progressive movements that only serves to reinforce the status quo – as both Julio and Jimmy are both “neutral”, apolitical figures[1]. However, this sense of complacency eventually gives rise to some kind of climactic failure – the death of a loved one, for instance – that inevitably chases the protagonist into an understanding of the dynamics of the collective. In Orapronobis, the death of Jimmy’s son acts at the catalyst for his eventual rejoining (or, at least, the viewed possibility of a rejoining) of an underground resistance group. In Maynila, Julio’s murder of Ah Tek provokes the redemption of a violent mob, a collective that visually and metaphorically evokes Julio’s social isolation and impossibility of alleviating social conditions through such methods (as well as contrasting to the other sites of possible community and collective formations: the construction site, the brothel, the political street demonstration, etc.).
Brocka, however, plays with this issue as well. In one scene, Julio and Ligaya spend time together in a movie theatre, watching a filmic adaptation of perhaps the most salient narrative of individual subjectivity and absolution – the story of Jesus Christ – before leaving the public, spectatorial space (the theatre) in favor of a more intimate, private space (the bedroom). If we read Deleuze’s comment on the nature of the “private element” as the site for burgeoning forms of (social) consciousness, how do we interpret the self-reflexivity of this scene? Do we read this movement as a moment of contradistinction in terms of the limitations of the public sphere? Or is Brocka suggesting that the ways in which the collective is manifested are rooted in a complex historiography? Perhaps. More importantly, Brocka suggests, in this scene, that Julio’s decision to leave the theatre symbolizes the way in which he is sacrificing the collective viewing of an individual’s movement (and sacrifice) in order to pursue the development of his own subjectivity. Julio’s departure separates him from the collective (dare I say, suggests him as a celluloid Christ figure in his own right?) and forces the audience to come to terms with their own group anatomy and the susceptibility of their collective body to dissection and compartmentalization: upon the film’s conclusion the audience themselves will scatter into other spaces, other rooms to, presumably, embark on their own quests, their own directions, their own searches for the development of their subjectivities.
What might be important to understand is that the failure of the individual’s quest only serves to expose the skeletal structure of power-relationships that underpin much of these social conditions – globalisation, neo-colonialism, government corruption, etc – and the limitations in which to handle or make sense out of these historical indices. The exposure of these limits and the structure itself shifts the viewer’s reading from the trajectory of the narrative to the elements that bleed through – and in the case of Brocka’s cinema, that the conditioned expectations of individual subjectivty (rooted firmly in the case of narrative[2]) as the source of resolution are ultimately destined to failure within the narrative.
But how is the collective analyzed as well? For Brocka, the collective represents a dynamic of action that leads to resolving some of these problematics. Individual subjectivity is associated with prefigurations, planning, scheming, and dreaming. The last part makes sense within the context of the aforementioned films, especially in the sense that what is being “dreamt” about is not necessarily imagined, but memories, the feeling of loss, of nostalgia. However, the nostalgic elements of either films only present complacency. Perhaps this is another way that the individual in Brocka’s cinema cannot possibly be a catalyst for reform – Julio is too preoccupied with restoring, rather than adjusting, or even accounting for the chance of progressive change.
The people are missing, but I prefer to think of them in Deleuze words – they are “not yet”. All peoples missing are peoples becoming. Brocka’s people are missing because they are becoming – they are difficult to track because they exist in a liminal state of identity. They are not individuals anymore (they always once were) but are not quite a collective as well. Brocka’s narrative examines at what cannot be done, (at the level of form, the narrative cannot provide the answers, because individuals cannot) but also provides moments of possibility of that which can be done (outside the narrative, the collective). Both of the Brocka films mentioned end differently – one succumbing to the fate of individual subjectivity, and the other rising with the collective – but argue for the same overarching sense of community-building.

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[1] Although defined as such, I shy away from the connotation of “satisfaction” in terms of understanding “complacency”. I think that although both protagonists seem “satisfied” with the “way things are”, I want to instead emphasize the ways in which they are seemingly outside the regular discourse of politics and activism. The reasons for their “outsideness” or “neutrality” are both different. Julio’s “neutrality” is presented as symptomatic of his provincial naivete, while Jimmy, a more problematic figure, embodies post-People Power embittered cynicism – the result of failure for massive social change following the exile of Marcos and the ascendancy of his rival, Corazon Aquino.

[2] I’m considering a number of assumptions, including David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson’s definition of “Classical Hollywood Cinema” and Emmanuel Reyes’ discussion of form in Filipino film. Although I recognize the latter’s claims regarding the ways that form in Filipino film subverts many of the elements of the “Classic Hollywood Cinema”, including the emphasis on isolated elements and events (scene-oriented) instead of the propulsion of narrative and a holistic storyline (plot). I’m using filmic narrative here to include a specific historical-cultural element. Rather than defining Lino Brocka’s cinema as a rearticulation of certain forms of Filipino cinema (which I do believe is the case), I am trying to suggest the ways in which it acts against the standard of international, mainstream filmmaking – in this case, the ubiquitity of the “Classic Hollywood Cinema” and how this is figured in the imagination of the Western film audience.

Note: a torrent link for “Manila in the Claws of Neon” is available here.

adventures in development economics

I am taking this class on development economics this term. It’s an introductory grad class, so there’s a variety of different approaches and theories. Thankfully, the professor’s tried to keep the mathematical modeling low (which Krugman might find both deplorable and understandable). The professor likes to liven things up and provides a lot of thought experiments for us to work on, yet these are almost always vague, too broad, and loan themselves too easily to sweeping generalizations that end up as far away from the course texts as you can imagine. His most recent one – in which we have to “stake a claim” on the current debates about the viability of socialist models vis-à-vis capitalism in light of the global financial crisis – was infuriating as much as it was “fun” to discuss. They’re not meant to be particularly sophisticated, just some ideas thrown out there to see what’ll happen. Some stuff I threw out:

The nature of “crisis” intrigues me, mainly because crisis is part and parcel of the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism as a mode of production. If we think of capitalism as a machine, as Steven Shaviro invites us to do, then the current financial crisis is an episode of “clogging”, in which several key parts of its mechanization have stalled (and been stalled). Crisis ends up a necessary component of capitalism – in order to regenerate and reinvent itself due to abundancy, over-accumulation, and overproduction. This particular crisis is more or less the same as all other crises before, just on a much more massive scale: the lines of easy-access credit that have helped to lubricate the aggravated contradictions of the system have shrunk, and the fantasia of wealth/prosperity/equitable distribution of income that such credit kept buoyant has collapsed, laying bare what Baudrillard referred to as “the desert of The Real” (a modeling for this over-accumulation/overproduction problematic). As Shaviro points out, crisis functions as “the mechanism that transforms the abundance which capitalism produces into the condition of scarcity and deprivation which is necessary to its continued functioning.” Because capitalism is dependent on inequity (fundamentally speaking), but at the same time demands rampant growth, crisis is both an inevitable consequence and built-in safeguard to ensure the continuing (re)production of capital.

We can relate this particular supposition to the massive government support of the private sector as of late. It might be prudent here to refer to a joke referenced by Angela Merkel (a child of the GDR) to her cabinet: “What’s the difference between Communism and Capitalism? Answer: The Communists nationalised all the companies first — and then ruined them.”

Unironic meeting of two (fellow travelers?) heads of state -- both from nations formerly known as communist

Her reference here to lemon socialism – in which governments briefly suspend their usually aggressive capitalist ventures in order to keep afloat various sectors crucial to capitalism’s stranglehold (for the benefit of a few at the expense of the majority) – is telling. As all current attempts at nationalisation are meant to keep those banks from becoming insolvent, the government has no interest whatsoever in altering its primary mode of production. The unwavering optimism in Obama’s financial team (which seeks to replace Bushist neo-liberalism with slightly more humane Clintonian neo-liberalism) is indicative of this; the whole purpose of government intervention as of late is not to try and “correct” the systemic flaws that produce these crises, but to try to unclog and restart the system to get back to “business as usual”. As Shaviro additionally argues, consumers are thus trapped within two vectors of capitalist agenda: the best they can hope for under “irrationally exuberant” times (i.e. non-recession capitalism) is for a trickle-down effect (in which they would be “splashed” upon by the wealth of the privileged few), while times of recession and panic only lend themselves to sympathy – restoring the system (at the expense of all) because we all “share the pain” of the decaying financial sector.

Where is this all going? Well, what is particularly crucial for us to understand then is that due to the political-economy insidiousness, times of crisis themselves are rarely –if ever– the times for social upheaval in capitalist West. This is where Marx and the kernel of revolutionary possibility become problematic. The reality is that crisis is so damaging, so stressful, that revolution becomes stunted, as people retool their efforts to focus primarily on their struggle to survive. Further complications include the historical legacy of 20th century communism’s breakdown – what Fukiyama refers to as “the end of history”, or what Badiou refers to as the “obscure disaster” – that has left many (particularly the Western political left) disillusioned with socialism’s potential as alternative to capitalism (this is not mine entirely, but one of Lévy’s primary suppositions from his latest book). Large economies of scale, in which massive financial institutions – investment banks, for instance – crucial to engineering capitalism’s incessant drive and growth, have momentarily glitched, and all the recent focus to “save the economy” consist of, more-or-less, prime pumping this particular sector with cash. Given this context, it seems here that the shift to socialism is the least likely development to arise from the current financial crisis.

Perhaps then we can use this information to think more about the Philippines. As past experiments in socialism in underdeveloped countries — with projects ranging from the Yugoslavian workers’ councils (Horvat’s autogestive “radničko samoupravljanje” syndicalism) to Tanzania’s Ujamaa communitarianism, Vietnam’s thời bao cấp subsidy-based transition “phase” (abandoned in favour of Đổi mới free-market based economic reform policies) to Maoist China’s “Great Leap Forward” industrialization plan – have clearly shown, major infrastructural and cultural changes that must be in place in order to facilitate socialism have faced significant challenges. As Marx argues in his theory of productive forces (from The German Ideology), the emergence of a “bürgerliche gesellschaft” (a civil society) from bourgeois society can only be perpetuated through the conduit of larger, abstract prisms of human organization (e.g. nationalism), but these cannot be sustained in the relative absence of material conditions of productive forces. This is more or less part of Marx’s treatise on how to “deal” with the problem of socialist societies equally distributing the wealth (of, say, a nation) in lieu of capitalism (which, as Marx fairly points out, at least has a way of extracting abundant wealth – via the industrial revolution). The problem is that societies that have put forth productive forces before ideological ones have all been severely underdeveloped*. When Marx was working on his major treatises, the United States and England were by then technically advanced, and their political-economies had achieved a high degree of efficiency and sophistication. A country such as the Philippines is still primarily agrarian, and its agricultural sector, due chiefly to uneven land distribution rights (legislative attempts crippled by the vested interests of landed aristocratic families, remnants of a feudal, colonial hacienda system) have created an uneven, inefficient agricultural sector. The disinterest of landlords to invest more into capital-intensive technologies for the purposes of higher yield is problematic. Of course, why should they? Neoliberals would argue that overabundance deflates the market, and labor-intensive operations keep people poor, but at least employed**. Mobilizing such a largely-agrarian population has proven especially tough for socialist experiments in developing countries***.

The possibily for social change (the Issue, so to speak) is therefore not to make the switch to socialism by completely abandoning capitalism (which the Maoist NPA’s low-intensity warfare in the Philippine northern hinterland is supposed to do), since that would be tantamount to initial, prolonged disaster, but instead to utilize capitalism’s productive capacity in favour of socialist values. Since socialist values has, at its root, some form in Philippine indigenous thought****, it would not be too far fetched to imagine the congruence of political and cultural spheres of mobilization in order to generate long-term economic viability. For practical intents, we could argue here that the crisis could give the Philippines some benefits: to restructure debt payments, encourage OFW remittances into entrepreneur activities, the slow dampening of free trade policies with a corresponding increase in fair trade ones (despite the risk of loss due to comparative advantage), and favouring the stronger growth of domestic markets. Of course, a corresponding need for stronger, less corrupt government (a lifetime’s work just for analysis), a strong civic society, better education and health systems, and a host of other social problems are both concurrent issues that need their own attention and formal resolution.

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*We can talk endlessly about the relative “failure” of the Great Leap Forward, though perhaps the discussion of the relative “success” of comrade Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (具有中国特色的社会主) would be a lot less limited. Comrade Wang Yu’s article, “Our Way: Building Socialism With Chinese Characteristics”, takes staunch defense of the necessity of China to be less “hard-line” in its ideology in order to prioritize the development of its socialist society. After The Great Leap Forward failed to propel China into the vanguard of developed countries, Zu writes that

production stagnated for a long time. There was little improvement in people’s quality of life, and China’s gap with developed economies widened further. All of this made Chinese Communists ask themselves time and again the following questions: Where on earth was the superiority of socialism? Was socialism rich or poor? What is revolution and what was its purpose? The theory of building socialism with Chinese characteristics, which took the development of the productive forces as its fundamental task, came into being amid and as a result of these reflections and reviews.

**Though it’d be easy to lay blame on the culture components that give rise to these grotesqueries — post-colonial industrial insecurity, debt reciprocation institutions such as “utang na loob” which encourage feudal tenancy, nepotism, and so forth –  we could say that this fundamental assumption of the prevailing economic order is where neo-liberalism’s fantasy of a “perfect market” with synchronous flows of supply/demand and “rational” economic consumer behavior fails. There is absolutely no such thing as a “perfect market” without “irrational” (i.e. human) behavior. The trick is to make things socially “work out” for the benefit of a political-economic society. After years of trying to destroy the “guanxi” networks under Mao, for instance, the Chinese have come to realize that these informal institutions often do help in generating their own checks-and-balances within the capitalist system, encouraging relatively efficient growth (as long as you can keep them marginally restrained, of course).

***The Khmer Rouge’s aggressively ideological political programme (based on moving back to more communitarian, “primitive” modes of productive force that harkened back to ancient Angkor civilization) ended up completely failing, with millions dying in slave work/collective farms in the Cambodian hinterland.

**** I am referring here to the notions of “pakikipagkapwa” and “pakikisama” as “core” social institution principles (encouraging SIR), traced back far enough through historical trajectory, due to the communitarian notions of pre-Hispanic Philippine civilization (societies which Marx valorized for being communist in spirit, but ineffective and ultimately disastrous due to their lack of sophisticated productive force and inability to produce abundance).