CSEAS TALK on OCTOBER 24, 2024
I will be giving a talk at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies on October 24, 13:30 Japan Time. The format is hybrid, so hopefully some of you all can tune-in for those who can’t make it in person. This is the link to the event: https://kyoto.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/event/20241024/
And here’s the summary:
Title: Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City
Speaker: Allan Edward Lumba (CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar / Assistant Professor, Concordia University)
Abstract: Nationalist Artist of the Philippines Nick Joaquin once wrote, “The site of Manila was reclaimed from the sea—and the sea is still trying to get it back.” Three decades later, Manila is sinking at an alarming rate. This process, in which land vertically moves downward, is called subsidence. Subsidence is an increasingly dangerous threat to coastal cities around the planet and a particular threat to one of the densest populated areas in the world, metro Manila. Yet, the problem of subsidence is not simply the abstract threat of rising sea levels due to planetary warming. Instead, an often-occluded problem is the neoliberal corporatization of water management combined with the intensification and proliferation of extractive industries. As more of the traditional waterways have been diverted from Manila for commercial use, the city’s rapidly increasing population of migrants from elsewhere have turned to extracting more groundwater, decreasing the stability of the land beneath the city and causing the city itself to sink and crumble under its own weight. This talk situates the recent threat of subsidence within a longer history of racial and colonial capitalism in and around Manila. It will especially focus on a broader overview of political ecological and infrastructural conditions from the nineteenth century into the present, while simultaneously tracing social movements that have surfaced in relation to struggles over water and land in Manila’s edges.
Autumn in Kyoto!
For the next three months, beginning September, I will be in Kyoto as a visiting research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University. I am super excited for the opportunity to dedicate myself to the rich archives at the libraries here, as well as pick the brains of some very serious scholars of Southeast Asia. Additionally, I have a few articles I really want to finish (who am I kidding, start!) and the time and space here will contribute to that greatly. I’m also over the moon that my family will be here with me and all the grand adventures we will have in the mundane, the uncanny, and the sublime. I’ll be updating with a melange of thoughts here and perhaps bricolage a few of them for later writings. Here’s a video I just took this morning from our place in a more sleepy part of the city by the mountains.
Monetary Authorities Reviewed in Journal of Asian Studies and Labor: Studies in Working Class History
Some very generous reviews with Monetary Authorities in two different journals. All my gratitude to these esteemed scholars for their patience and genuine engagement with my work.
Rebecca Tinio McKenna review in Labor: Studies in Working Class History. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10949103
“Lumba's framing of the colonial Philippines as a long history of decolonization is novel and foregrounds the anxieties and tensions that beset the Spanish and US colonial government. Economic experts fretted over the instabilities triggered by the circulation of forces perceived as foreign to the colony or beyond their control whether in the form of the Mexican coin (in the Spanish colonial period), embodied by Chinese workers and capital, or expressed in workers’ intractability. Economic experts idealized sovereign markets yet also claimed the right to structure markets in ways that advantaged colonialists and preserved the racial and class status quo. Lumba's decolonization framework also helps him avoid an essentializing parable of imperial aggressors versus champions of national independence. Lumba is attentive to the capitalist ordering of the world that Filipino nationalists embraced or, in some instances, may have accepted pragmatically.”
Allison Truitt in Journal of Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-10872730
“Lumba does a masterful job in creating a counterdiscourse to capitalism by demonstrating how the decisions over currency and banking were not rational but steeped in racial anxieties. In building this argument, Lumba is resolute in unearthing the substrata of racial capitalism—the fears of the alien Chinese, the disdain for Natives, the primacy of colonial metropole where white Americans resided. We also see the fraught relationship with the Filipino elite, who were drawn into the system as clerks and bureaucrats and whose own decision-making eventually ensured the triumph of “conditional decolonization,” or the political sovereignty of a Filipino monetary authority, rather than unconditional decolonization that might have liberated Filipino national subjects from the structures and strictures of capitalism. This story of monetary authority, Lumba concludes, is essential for understanding why many people in Philippines and the diaspora still hold “aspirations of capitalist security and the violent fantasy of state sovereignty” (154). Lumba reveals how conventional discourses of macroeconomics served as a form of monetary authority to intervene in the Philippines and so perpetuate the US empire.”
Monetary Authorities reviewed in Diplomatic History
Monetary Authorities was recently reviewed by (the great) Yoshiko Nagano in Diplomatic History. [Diplomatic History, dhad047, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad047]
Dr. Nagano has been the foremost expert on monetary and banking history in the American colonial Philippines, and I’m truly honored she would take time to thoughtfully read and review my book. Her book State and Finance in the Philippines (and her numerous articles) has been truly pathbreaking and was especially fruitful in generating horizons for my own approach to analyzing economic archives.
Monetary Authorities reviewed in American Quarterly
Monetary Authorities was recently part of a long review in American Quarterly by Leanne P. Day “Transpacific Radical Solidarities: Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism.” [American Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 2, June 2023, pp. 405-418]
Other books reviewed include Archipelago of Resettlement, Menace to Empire, and Settler Garrison. It was a very generous and granular review of Monetary Authorities. Honored to be mentioned and connected to such groundbreaking books!
Monetary Authorities reviewed in Pacific Affairs
A succinct review of Monetary Authorities by Ateneo’s Katherine G. Lacson in Pacific Affairs. The questions about “unconditional decolonization” have me thinking some more about future research.
https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/monetary-authorities-capitalism-and-decolonization-in-the-american-colonial-philippines-by-allan-e-s-lumba/
Black Agenda Report Book Forum: Monetary Authorities Featured
Excited that Monetary Authorities was featured in Black Agenda Report’s Book Forum. I have so much respect for Black Agenda Report and its radical critiques of global politics. I also got to share a little about other authors and thinkers that have shaped me and my thinking.
You can check the link here: https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-allan-es-lumbas-book-monetary-authorities
Toynbee Prize Foundation Review
Monetary Authorities was recently reviewed by Jaimie Martin, and I, in turn reviewed, Martin’s The Meddlers. It was a cool experience, and there are so many resonances in the historical questions we are both exploring about tensions and entanglements between capitalism, imperialisms, and the possibilities (or impossibilities) of sovereignty.
https://toynbeeprize.org/posts/side-by-side-allan-lumbas-monetary-authorities-and-jamie-martins-the-meddlers-reviewed/
Monetary Authorities was recently featured in podcast, Critical Literary Consumption
I recently discussed my book Monetary Authorities on Critical Literary Consumption. It was a very generative, and more personal conversation with Anna Nguyen. The podcast tends to explore questions about writing form, reading practices, and theoretical approaches, so it made me think about my scholarship more reflexively. I also ended up sharing some of my other thoughts about field formations and counter-formations, the path I took to get to academia and what are my commitments while in this realm. Overall, it’s a more personal conversation, and I really got to hand it to Anna for being a wonderful host. Definitely check out some of the other interviews, which is with a lot of creative writers and radical scholars. You can listen to the episode here: link.
Thomas Sankara on Debt and Decolonization (1987)
A powerful and convincing speech, in plain language, on the mulltiple mechanisms of capitalist power (and knowledge) that produced necolonialisms throughout “postcolonial” Africa.
Courses scheduled for Fall 2023 and Winter 2024
I’ll be teaching some courses for AY 2023-2024
Fall 23 "American Capitalism: A Global History" and "U.S. Foreign Relations, 1945 to Present"
Winter 24 "History of Southeast Asia," and seminar "History of Asian America."
For more information please see: https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/history/programs/undergraduate/courses.html
Monetary Authorities was featured in podcast, Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast
I recently discussed my book Monetary Authorities on Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast. It was a great opportunity to delve deeper into themes of racial capitalism, decolonization, and imperial militarism, especially in light of the recent intensification of U.S. presence in and access to Philippine military bases. Jessica Levy, the host and editor, did a great job I believe in making my rambling a more succinct experience. I really appreciate the engaging questions and helpful framing of the main arguments and relevance of my book. You can hear it on apple podcasts, spotify, and directly from the Who Makes Cents website: link.
Fantasy Reductions: A response to Lisandro Claudio’s review of Monetary Authorities in Philippine Studies.
The December 2022 Vol. 70, no. 4 issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints contained a review of my book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American colonial Philippines. The review was written by Lisandro Claudio. The review was written in bad faith, shot through with, in some instances, deliberate misreadings, and in other instances, complete fabrications. Claudio frequently argues that I make claims that I never do. In the following I will highlight some of the more egregious instances which reveal Claudio’s desire to reduce my book to an enemy of good scholarship: as either a flimsy strawman or a dangerous bogeyman.
In one instance there is the fabricated argument that I demand that taxation be abolished.[i] Here he uses an example from Monetary Authorities chapter one (Philippine wartime taxation) and another example from chapter two (U.S. colonial seigniorage). The quote he uses in the example on seigniorage is incorrectly written (he writes “decolonization” when it should be “counter-decolonization”). Perhaps this typo by Claudio could have led to a misinterpretation, but in any case, Claudio uses these two examples to argue that I collapse “nuances” since they both refer to state techniques of capital accumulation. Here is Claudio’s argument about my supposed comparison between wartime taxation and colonial seigniorage.
Should Lumba dismiss both episodes as comparable cases of violent “capital accumulation” (i.e., making money)? Aguinaldo’s raising of taxes entailed a flowing of capital into a fledgling state that was combatting imperialism, while American tinkering with seigniorage generated money to build a colonial state that had restricted its own spending power through the gold standard. These nuances are not just important policy distinctions but moral ones as well. Because he condemns everything that happens within capitalism, Lumba has no compunction about deploying rightwing, libertarian rhetoric to discredit any form of “capital accumulation.” Aguinaldo’s tax regime, as a result, is just one of “the coercive techniques of expropriating wealth from the population under [the revolutionaries’] control” (32). Does Lumba advocate abolishing taxation?[ii]
I don’t directly compare these two episodes, but in Claudio’s mind I do. In fact, if anyone is guilty of collapsing “nuances” to make an argument, as he claims I do, it is clear from this instance, it is him. I agree, however, that they are connected by the concept of “taxation.” Seigniorage for instance can be considered a kind of “tax” imposed on a population for the “cost” of minting a currency they are legally required to use. In the history I trace, the U.S. uses the profits from this “tax” of seigniorage to offset costs of maintaining colonial occupation, especially through aiding the needs of military logistics and bolster the colonial civil government.
Again, I do not ever make a direct comparison between these two examples. Nor do I collapse “nuances” to make an argument about “abolishing taxation.” But instead, I explore these historical episodes (and other episodes as well) to show the actual gradations in modern state techniques of expropriation and its relation to capital accumulation. One episode demonstrates a kind of conditional decolonization (Philippine wartime taxes) and the other episode demonstrates a kind of counter-decolonization (U.S. seigniorage). Furthermore, even if these two states are ideologically different (one anti-imperial and the other imperial, a distinction my book is clear about sharpening), my book demonstrates there is a tendency for modern state formations to adhere to certain isomorphic structures under capitalism. Since most of my book examines the relation between state formation and capital accumulation (mainly the colonial state accumulation), I’m not sure why the multiple dimensions I focus on (be they taxation, or seigniorage, or savings banks, or speculative loans, etc.) should be considered dubious or somehow lacking nuance or complexity.
As for why I spend time on Aguinaldo’s taxation, it is because I am interested in how taxation, in this moment of attempted decolonization, might have inherited logics from the Spanish colonial state, and thus reproduced class and racial hierarchies. I explore how taxation—not in the abstract—but in the actual attempts to collect or to evade it during wartime, created instabilities within the revolutionary movement for decolonization and emboldened counter-revolutionary practices. In fact, as I state in the book, the ones who benefited the most or at least attempted to, were Filipino capitalists or landowners. And I’m not the only one who thought this way. In the late 19th century, propagandists like Gregorio Sancianco warned about how and why taxation reified colonial, class, and racial hierarchies. Apolinario Mabini also warned other leaders in the Malolos Government about the political risks of how wartime taxation would be interpreted by those of lower social rank. But my chapter is not interpreted by Claudio as a critique of how relations of power messily unfolded during the late nineteenth century, but instead seen as a simple manifesto for abolishing taxes. Claudio thus fantasizes an argument I never make, which to him, proves that I am “deploying rightwing, libertarian rhetoric,” and at the same time remain “sympathetic” to “communist armies.”
After mentioning my sympathies to “communist armies,” Claudio uses this moment in the review to launch into a tangential reference that supposedly exposes the contradictions in my thinking. Claudio references the “Vietminh” and what he alleges was their exploitative taxation policies.
Even communist armies (to which, as we shall see below, Lumba is sympathetic) such as the Vietminh taxed and, even worse, expropriated land from poor farmers to support their war effort.[iii]
The Viet Minh were an anticolonial coalition that warred against the French Indochina state from the 1940s to the mid-1950s. I do not ever mention the Viet Minh in my book. Yet there is this fantasy conjured that I would defend the Viet Minh if I did mention them in my book. Why he wants to compare a completely different political organization from a completely different geography and time period to the subject of my chapter on taxation (the late 19th century in the Philippines) remains a mystery to me. Perhaps it is to implant suspicion in the reader, like a bad rerun of a Cold War era scholarship, that I am some sort of communist sympathizer.
After this allegation of collapsing nuances for ideological purposes, Claudio then claims my scholarship is negligent, which leads to “factual error.”
One may reject all of capitalism, but that should not entail a refusal to assess its subtleties. A major consequence of such negligence is factual error. In chapter 2 Lumba accepts the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source and notes that “higher prices” often “accompanied gold- based currency.” As a result, “the prices for the necessities of life” would increase, and “wages would have to correspondingly be raised” (54). Lumba then proceeds to expose the racism implicit in the view that colonials should not be exposed to price inflation caused by the gold standard.[iv]
Again, I do not ever claim to accept “the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source.” Indeed, the section from which he lifts his quotes from is drawn from interviews of American and European businessmen conducted by the Philippine Commission during the Philippine American War. In this section I examine how and why the words and opinions from white businessmen would be treated by Charles Conant as reliable data as he designed the colonial monetary system.
The following paragraphs is the section from my book that Claudio lifts lines from, which supposedly prove that I accept “the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source.”
American entrepreneur John T. Mcleod argued that the Native would never be able to afford any of the higher prices that usually accompanied gold-based currency. Unlike individuals in modern industrial societies who understood how to properly save and invest money, the Native would simply “gamble it away.” Yet, even if the Native did in fact manage to not waste money through gambling, the Native’s way of life did not necessitate consuming higher priced modern commodities that a gold-based market would bring. Asked by the commission whether Natives, once on gold, would consume higher priced commodities produced in the United States such as manufactured clothes, Barnes dismissively answered: “the native does not use a great deal of clothing.”'' For both Mcleod and Barnes, therefore, the savage Native—one who wasted money and had primitive consumption needs—was incapable of the more modern desires that naturally accompanied gold currency.
Perhaps the most prudent rationale for anti-gold arguments, however, especially for American and European capitalists and entrepreneurs, had to do with the effect of gold currency on wages. If the prices for the necessities of life were to increase, wages would have to correspondingly be raised. Increased wages would cause a problem for American capitalists eager to profit from the colonial occupation of the Philippines. Another concern was that Natives could demand more value for their work and thus challenge the authority of their white employers and by extension the authority of the colonizer.[v]
This section illustrates how those on the ground believed markets based on a gold backed currency worked and how it could potentially hurt their bottom line in the colony. After all, from their perspectives, the gold standard only existed in modern industrial markets, where prices for goods appeared higher than the ones in the colonies. I do not understand how showing what the American and European business community thought about the gold standard could be considered a “factual error.” If anything, these paragraphs illustrate the alibis that capitalists conjured, not necessarily that they were correct in their logic. Instead this passage revealed their anti-gold logic and how they articulated it. The point is that their bottom-line interests were to suppress wages and keep exploitation going, which they argued could not continue under the gold-standard.
If we are to believe Claudio, I not only accept the premise of the gold standard automatically creating higher prices (as if prices and wages are inherently determined by monetary laws and are not instead overdetermined by capitalist intentions for profit), then I also accept that Filipinos simply “gamble away” their wages or could never develop more “modern desires” for consumable goods. The point of the paragraph is not to argue that these business owners in the colony actually knew what they were talking about, but rather that their opinions on the matter were elevated in the minds of the colonial state. In this way, it’s only through colonial occupation that obviously “economically illiterate” foreigners were transformed into sudden experts.
Claudio then goes on another tangent to describe the ideal “laws” and logic of a gold standard system. I’m not sure who he is arguing with at this point. Perhaps it is the economic experts of the early 1900s, but it’s certainly not me. In fact, if one considers Claudio’s terminology of “inflationary bias” and “deflationary bias,” he is literally describing how a gold standard should ideally operate if left in a vacuum. In reality, the justification for monetary standards (including the gold standard) is to create a stable value of currency. There is not supposed to be an inflationary or deflationary bias in standards, and instead these were what people at the time debated (1870s – 1910s). These debates would even lay at the basis of several social movements. Indeed, much of contemporary histories of money are less concerned about how the gold standard would have worked in ideal conditions and instead focus on how and why it would become naturalized as the most stable standard (especially in relation to a bimetallic system).
This supposed stability of the gold standard espoused by experts is especially strange to many historians, since what was considered a gold standard system oftentimes wasn’t an orthodox one. For instance, Yoshiko Nagano in her book State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898 – 1941 demonstrates that the American colonial Philippines was only briefly on a gold standard, and in fact became a de-facto dollar standard, especially after the collapse of the international gold-standard after WWI. That the gold standard would appear stable during the conquest of new colonialisms, expanding of imperialisms, and an intensification of settler colonialisms, is no coincidence. Gold standard empires primarily achieved “stability” through the dispossession and extraction of colonial mines, the increased militarization of international asymmetrical trade, the manipulation of colonial debts and laws (for instance in British India or Dutch Java), and of course collaborating with the banking and capitalist classes. These movements by capitalist empires is what I allude to throughout my book as the global conditions of what is happening in the Philippine colony. There is nothing “natural” about monetary standards being deflationary or inflationary. Prices are determined through a panoply of forces, not merely the logic of economic law.
What is striking about Claudio’s tangential rant, therefore, is it seems to want to determine which monetary policy that worked more efficiently in the colony (hard or fiat currency as he talks about in the review). Indeed, my refusal to choose which colonial policy would ideally be best for the colonized is what frustrates him. As he writes about my analysis of colonial policy:
While he acknowledges that wages were down during this period (144), he makes no attempt to assess which monetary standard would have best addressed this problem. (It would have been a fiat currency.)[vi]
I don’t find this speculation on which colonial policy would have worked best very useful in understanding how histories of power unfolded at the time. Instead, my book tracks how monetary policy congealed colonial relations of power, maintaining a racial and imperial hierarchy between colony and metropole. Oftentimes monetary policy occluded the violence that the currency system benefited from. One point I make in the book, is the role of militarized occupation. Indeed, it was the military occupation during the long Philippine American War (or the first decade and half of occupation that military cash) that kept the colonial monetary system afloat. Cash for militarized violence in turn motored the “civil” colonial government and economy of the Philippines.
In addition to fabrications and misreadings, Claudio makes hyperbolic claims about my book’s thesis. He alleges that my book contains dangerous ideas, ideas that would cause “generations of suffering Filipinos” perish. As he states:
Here I must admit my biases. As a liberal social-democrat, I believe in finding ways to make capitalism fairer in the short run. After all, generations of suffering Filipinos will be dead when/if the country achieves Lumba’s unconditional decolonization.[vii]
How does my book seem to turn a blind eye to the “generations of suffering Filipinos,” and how is my book seemingly responsible for this mass future death? For Claudio it is my conception of “unconditional decolonization,” something he equates to communism. Again, I do not ever make this equivalence, and indeed, much of what I look at as eruptions of what could be considered desires for “unconditional decolonization” have historiographically been categorized as reactionary rebellions, such as millenarian groups or even the Sakdalistas. Despite this, Claudio cites the book’s conclusion as proof of my dangerous thinking.
In my conclusion I contrast two irreconcilable viewpoints on money in the immediate years after Philippine national independence. One is from the first central bank head Miguel Cuaderno and the other is Luis Taruc, a leader in the Huk rebellion. As Claudio states:
Unconditional decolonization, however, is a high bar, and Taruc’s Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas—a sectarian party that sought “guidance” from Stalinist American and Russian operatives—hardly clears that bar. There is also nary a mention of how communists like Taruc envisioned the organization of money at this period. Was it the fiat currency of the pre-1922 Soviet Union? Or was it the effective gold standard implemented by the Gosbank (the Soviet central bank) afterward (a deflationary policy similar to Cuaderno’s approach)? Lumba is no doubt attracted to the revolutionary sentiment informing Taruc’s words. But while fighting words may hint at a different world, that world is built by plans.[viii]
Again, Claudio alleges something I never claim: stating that I am advocating for a decolonization modeled on a soviet style state, or as he writes, a decolonization which “sought ‘guidance’ from Stalinist American and Russian operatives.” This is an argument that is not in my book but conjured by Claudio, and one that is meant to impress upon the reader of the review, that I possess some kind of communist agenda in my writing. Perhaps by mentioning Stalin, it is to invoke in the minds of the reader a commonly thought historical villain, or perhaps to imply that Taruc was simply a puppet of foreign communists. In any of these cases the mention of Stalin is meant to undercut my examination of Taruc’s words, and by extension one of my main frameworks of historical analysis. Here Claudio is correct that I am more interested in examining the words than the policy of Taruc. I find the words expressed by Taruc generative in illustrating that desires for unconditional decolonization continued even after nominal Philippine independence had been achieved. Here is the Taruc quote I briefly examine in the conclusion:
The Filipino moves about in an American-made world. . . . The value of his peso depends entirely on the value of the American dollar. The very home he lives in (if he lives in the city) is virtually American-made: the corrugated iron roof, the nails in the walls, the electric light bulbs, the electric wiring and switches, the kitchen utensils, the plates and spoons, his toothbrush, the bed clothes, the ring with which he weds his wife. And finally, of American make, are the guns, the tanks, the planes, the artillery, the vehicles, and even the uni- forms of the troops that have been used to shoot down the Filipino people who would like to see a Filipino-made future for their children.[ix]
These words are from Taruc’s memoir Born of the People, which is thought to be mainly written by William Pomeroy. Taruc, later on in life, would renounce most of his communist thinking. For me, however, the words articulated in Taruc’s memoir, is not one from the viewpoint of a policymaker or even a “perfect” revolutionary, but rather Taruc’s quote articulated the possible suspicions of capitalist money (figured in the U.S. dollar) shared by those rebelling in the late 1940s through early 1950s. There was a suspicion that adopting “modernization” through the U.S. dollar (commodities, militarized security) eventually reproduced colonial dependency and colonial violence. They saw their desire for land reform under the newly independent nation-state as being blocked by dependency upon U.S. imperial power. I am not the first to point out this suspicion that independence instead brought upon “neocolonial” dependence for the Philippines. Taruc’s words, therefore, appeared to give voice to those who questioned how and why, despite achieving national independence, all of their things, their entire world, seemed to be dominated by American money. Those who joined the Huk rebellion, therefore, seemed to seek a different world from one impressed upon them. They refused a world that would be dependent upon and overdetermined by the U.S. dollar. By joining in a regional rebellion centered on food and land, they refused to follow the imperial logic laid out by capitalist empires in the Bretton Woods and GATT era.
As one of my mentors has said about radicals and revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century, they might not have had the right answers, but they did ask the right questions. I am therefore interested in Taruc’s words not because I hope to romanticize him as some sort of hero, but rather his words offer an entry-point to critique power. Taruc’s memoir, after all, had an international reach, a reach that resonated with others who were critical of global racial capitalism and U.S. empire. The foreword was written by Paul Robeson. And one of the blurbs for several first editions were written by W. E. B. Du Bois. Taruc, whether one agrees with him or not, was thus a figure for the possibility of another world emerging at the time: internationalist notions of anti-imperial solidarity connecting Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Taruc’s memoir gestured not only to national independence (or even a communist revolution) but rather to a world indebted to past anticolonial and antislavery rebellions and marronage, what Cedric Robinson has called “the Black Radical Tradition.”
This is all to say, Claudio’s undercutting of Taruc’s words was an attempt to undercut the very concept of unconditional decolonization. The focus of my book, however, is to illustrate how conditional decolonization could only emerge as a reaction to both formal colonialism and the threat of something else that continues to haunt all nation-states under capitalism, what I call unconditional decolonization. It is clear that I hope to denaturalize how power and hierarchy are normalized, and seek, through history, to examine how power and hierarchy operate over time. This is where Claudio and I obviously have incompatible notions of how to critically analyze history. I am not interested in creating studies about comparative policy, but rather, I am interested in tracking the dominant, residual, and emergent histories of decolonization in the Philippines.[x]
History to me is not foreclosed, there are many residual histories that had not yet been realized, and many yet to be. Many historical episodes of the past that could be rehearsals for future movements. I do not think historians should be content to justify the present through the past, but rather to illustrate how the dominance of the present came to be. And as I observe, the present of an independent Philippine nation-state was formed through a panoply of conscious suppression of what could have been: it was only through the suppression or domestication of a possible unconditional decolonization. Other scholars have of course read against the grain of Philippine history. I am indebted to their approach to texts, close reading the archives to better understand the residual possibilities of another possible world that fell away due to dominant forces in history, or to track the opening for new emergent worlds to come.[xi]
With my book I had intended for the relational concepts of “conditional decolonization,” “unconditional decolonization,” and “counter-decolonization,” to help better think through the Philippine past and pending. To me this is a serious and collaborate endeavor, one that is about inviting others to think alongside with. It is not a frivolous practice. Yet, Claudio at the end of his review implies that I take this all very lightly, that my scholarship is mere performance. He writes that my goal:
is ostensibly to provide a genealogy of racial capitalism in the Philippines, which necessitates, to borrow from contemporary slang, “dunking on” the language of imperialist and racist capitalists. In this regard Lumba’s work is a success. It is a clear-sighted, archivally rich, and erudite account of how imperial logic defined the birth of modern economic thinking in the Philippines and the US.
Yet we must hold Lumba to a higher bar. A predominantly linguistic approach does not suffice when studying the material phenomenon of capitalism, whose power to order everyday lives transcends the discursive. In the world of capital, it is necessary to study not just the discourse of economics, but also the economics itself. [x]
Here my book is backhandedly complimented as “a clear-sighted, archivally rich, and erudite account of how imperial logic defined the birth of modern economic thinking in the Philippines and the US.”[xii] But as I demonstrate, economic thinking was part and partial to the spectacular and structural violence enacted upon those colonized in the archipelago. It wasn’t simply that colonial officials held racist thoughts (they certainly did), but race (especially their investment in white supremacy) justified, legitimized, guided, and even inspired capital accumulation through colonial dispossession. To me, the “linguistic” archives—to which I assume he means the plans and policies that I analyze and that were created by monetary authorities—were not separate from the material world. Monetary policy not only recorded the world, but they simultaneously, to paraphrase Claudio, helped build the colonial world that monetary authorities wished to see. Here I am not introducing some radically new methodology to Philippine and Southeast Asian studies. I am, after all, indebted to others before me who studied the structures and superstructures of capitalism and colonialism in Southeast Asia.[xiii]
Why this historical approach doesn’t fit Claudio’s definition of the “material” (his emphasis) I don’t know. At the same time, I don’t really care to know. What it boils down to is this: I analyze capitalism as a historical process, something that emerges and is reproduced out of the material world. Capitalism is not some default state of the world that we just simply have to live under, accept, and tinker with. In other words, to think about capitalism as having a history—a history that we have all been forced to share in the present—simultaneously raises the possibility that capitalism doesn’t have to be our only shared future. Indeed, other futures may appear, other horizons of how to collectively live.
In this review, my book is treated like a fantasy. Claudio fantasizes about what my book should be, and since the book fails this fantasy, he fantasizes about what my book supposedly claims and reduces the complexity of my book to a strawman to attack, or a dangerous bogeyman that demands policing. Claudio admonishes my book as not being up to the proper standards, and perhaps even lowering the standards of Philippine studies specifically and historical scholarship, generally.
I must be held to a “higher bar,” Claudio writes. The sporting analogy of having my book needing to clear a “higher bar” reveals several aspects of Claudio’s approach to radical scholarship. First, it implies that the standards of peer review and any other scholarly feedback and editing were lowered because of my radical critique of racial capitalism. Deploying “anti-woke” parlance, Claudio claims that by critiquing the history of colonial and racial capitalism in the Philippines I am simply “‘dunking on’ the language of imperialist and racist capitalists.” A critique of racial capitalism, in other words, is not a difficult or rigorous form of scholarship, and one that is merely performative, without actual scholarly substance. At the same time, Claudio’s use of a sporting analogy also treats radical scholarship more generally like some competition, a sporting event where one performs a debate against defenseless actors of the past to try and shame those with power in the present. To me, however, my book is not a competition, game, or performance. It’s an invitation to seriously reckon with the past so as to genuinely seek justice and build good relations with others in the present.
With this response, I want to be clear: I’m not playing.
Notes:
[i] Claudio, “Review of Monetary Authorities,” 603
[ii] Claudio, 603
[iii] Claudio, 603
[iv] Claudio, 603
[v] Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 54
[vi] Claudio, 604.
[vii] Claudio, 602
[viii] Claudio, 605
[ix] Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 147.
[x] Claudio, 605
[xi] Here I am indebted to Lisa Lowe’s argument about possible histories in The Intimacy of Four Continents, which is an extension of Raymond Williams’ formulation.
[xii] I am thinking particularly of the works by Carol Hau, Vince Rafael, and Neferti Tadiar.
[xiii] Claudio, 605
[xiv] My methodological approach to archives is indebted to the methodological approaches of Ben Anderson, James Siegel, Vicente Rafael, Laurie Sears, Carol Hau, Pheng Cheah, Neferti Tadiar, etc.
New Directions in Political History
I was invited by the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era to take part in a dialogue on “New Directions in Political History,” specifically for the GAPE. In my contributed essays, I urge political historians to engage frameworks of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and affect to better rethink the horizons of U.S. political issues, past and pending. The abstract and link for the special issue for the roundtable is below:
This roundtable takes up old themes and new perspectives in the field of political history. Scholars engage with six questions across three main categories: the scope of the field, current debates, and teaching. The first two questions ask how we should think about political power and the boundaries of what constitute political history. The section on current debates interrogates the relationship between governing and social movements during the GAPE, and how to situate the political violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot in historical perspective. The final section on teaching takes up two very different challenges. One question is a perennial concern about connecting with students in the classroom about political history. The other dilemma is how to respond to the growing cascade of censorship laws passed by state legislatures that prohibit the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.”
Did you know that Monetary Authorities is open access?
Get a digital version for free here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58913
For May Day, some old and rough writings about Crisanto Evangelista
The following is an excerpt of some writings I’ve done thinking about Crisanto Evangelista, one of the founders of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), the first formal Philippine Communist Party. I’ve presented this work in various places at least since 2015, and as a consequence, parts have ended up in various published pieces, most notably Monetary Authorities and my essay in the Histories of Racial Capitalism anthology. Since the footnotes didn’t transfer at all, I’ve listed the texts that were referenced at the end of the excerpt.
On Revolutionary Decolonization
Before exploring Filipino Marxism and its relation to struggles for decolonization, I want to emphasize that Filipino radicals under U.S. colonial rule had to reckon with the afterlives of the 1896 Revolution. Beginning with the 1521 colonial encounter, what is now known as the Philippine archipelago had been under Spanish imperial rule. Although Spanish rule had been threatened by a multitude of local uprisings and revolts (usually labeled as mutinies) it would not be until 1896 that a sustained Revolution would erupt. Filipino Revolutionary thought and energies were greatly influenced by anarchist and socialist thought circulating around the globe, in particular during the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, counter-revolutionary forces would quickly take positions of power within the movement, with many elites grabbing leadership positions to establish the first modern republic in Asia. The Republic would soon be dismantled through U.S. military force during the Philippine American War, replaced by the American colonial state. Revolutionaries and subversives were quickly outlawed by the American colonial state, with many driven to exile or imprisoned. During the 1910s, however, there was an intensified uptick in radical organizing, particularly in the increasingly urban areas of the colony. By the time news hit of the 1917 Russian Revolution, organic intellectuals in the Philippines would begin to theorize, and concretely organize around, Marxist conceptions. One of the primary Filipino Marxist intellectuals, if not the most important Filipino Marxist intellectual before WWII, was Crisanto Evangelista.
Crisanto Evangelista was born in 1888 into a peasant family. His father fought and died in the 1896 Revolution. Too young to join in the Philippine American War, at the age of ten he would become a printer apprentice, eventually teaching himself how to read and write. Throughout the 1910s Evangelista would attempt to work with establishment parties like the Nacionalista Party. Evangelista was even appointed as the representative of Filipino workers in the first Independence Mission to Washington in 1919. Eventually Evangelista would turn his back on the Nacionalista Party and embrace Marxism.
In the early 1920s Filipino Marxists began to actively build relations with peasant organizations, whose memberships were increasing rapidly. For instance, agriculturally based unions, such as the Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (National Association of Peasants in the Philippines), steadily gained numbers throughout the immediate post-WWI years. Evangelista, would emphasize organizing bonds between urban factory workers and peasants. By the mid-1920s Evangelista was avowedly a communist, having established communication with the Comintern, and working transnationally with other communist leaders, like Harrison George of the Communist Party USA and Tan Malaka, the famous Indonesian born transnational communist. Evangelista would hold prominent positions in the Partido Obrero, one of the first Marxist organizations in the Philippines. He would also be one of the five representatives of the executive committee of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a subdivision of the Red International of Labor Unions.
Crisanto Evangelista in the Pan Pacific Monthly, June, 1929
In 1927 Evangelista, along with other organizers, would seek to re-orient the Partido Obrero toward a Marxist-Leninist organization. This transformation would be marked by a new name, which honored the 1896 Revolution, yet simultaneously emphasized its analysis of proletarianization. The new name was Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis sa Pilipinas (or the KAP) its English translation at the time, was the Proletarian Labor Congress. At the time of its founding KAP membership was estimated to be about 33,000. At its height it would swell to almost 100,000 official members. After a few years Evangelista again would again make plans to re-orient radical organizations in the Philippines, pushing to change the name from the KAP to overtly embrace the label of Communist, and solidify the ties between Philippine revolutionary organizations and a broader internationalism committed to the overthrow of both imperialism and capitalism.
The KAP would go on to produce a series of publications in vernacular presses, preparing members and the broader public for the transformation. Calling for a formation of a “mass political party,” the KAP would publish the first Tagalog translations of the Communist Party and republish famous Soviet pieces like “the ABC of Communism.” Eventually during the convention of August 26, 1930, the new party was formed as the Partido Komunista sa Pilipinas (PKP), to coincide with the 34 Anniversary of the Cry of Balintawak, the moment the Philippine Revolution officially kicked off in an organized uprising in Manila, the tearing of cedulas—the colonial identification papers used for taxation of native subjects. The PKP would make public its formation on November 7th, 1930, to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The crowd of about 6,000 in the Tondo district of Manila declared the formation of PKP through chants of “Down with Imperialism!” “Down with Capitalism!” “Long Live the Communist Party!”
Here we see the attempt by Filipino communists to draw upon two seemingly estranged or unconnected Revolutions—the 1896 Philippine Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Moreover, it established their commitment to communism—not anarchism or socialism—as the primarily political program to which would accomplish their primary objectives of: on one hand, the end of imperialism, and on the other hand the end of capitalism. To Filipino communists, therefore, these twin objectives were inextricable. We can see this theorization especially in Evangelista’s approach to organizing and recruitment.
By the time Evangelista was appointed as the PKP’s first General Secretary, Evangelista led a humble life, residing in a small home with his wife and five children. Frequently he was described as someone with a frail stature, oftentimes coughing as a result of malnutrition and near-chronic sickness. This was most likely due to the rate in which Evangelista was incarcerated for his political organizing, in an out of prison multiple times through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was nevertheless an inspiring speaker, less an imposing voice, but rather a patient, effective, and authoritative educator.
In 1930, Evangelista was described by American writer Agnes Smedley as one of “the strangest and most interesting characters in Asia.” Smedley would go on to state that he was “perhaps the only Filipino Marxist theoretician” who was able to “accumulate and read hundreds of works on the social sciences” and “possess the only Marxian-Leninist library in the Philippines.” Smedley would go on to describe one particular scene which illustrates the difficult and complex work of radical organizers within colonial conditions.
He was teaching the fisherman the causes of the revolutions against Spain, of the workers and peasants who fought in the revolution—and of the compromise signed between the American military invaders and the Filipino leaders—a document of the betrayal of the revolution. He taught them of the workers’ movement in various European countries and in Soviet Russia, and of the theories of socialism. Through his Tagalog language came such words as “Karl Marx,” “Lenin,” “surplus value,” in English. For three hours he taught, earnestly and without any demonstrativeness, and the only movement in the audience was when some man would arise from the hard earth to rest his legs for a moment.
Evangelista, even in this moment in which he was attempting to recruit fisherman, a kind of worker that was far from a Marxist notion of “proletarian,” Evangelista was grappling and engaging with if and how Marxian-Leninist concepts would work in colonial conditions—conditions that for many orthodox Marxists was a backwards political and economic condition. After all, so this logic goes, colonies and colonized peoples were historically underdeveloped by colonizers for imperial purposes, and thus modern conditions had to be created in order to produce a communist revolution. Until then, the best that could happen was a national revolution, like what happened in the Philippines.
What I want to emphasize from such a short and small observation is that Evangelista both incorporates traditional Marxist notions like “surplus value” but also brings it into conversation with the Philippine Revolution, a revolution that he correctly points out, was driven, not for strictly nationalist purposes, but driven by and through the revolutionary energies of workers and peasants, the very peoples that had been exploited for their “surplus value.” In this, I believe, Evangelista is attempting to articulate a consistency in this longer struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism in the Philippines, from the sixteenth century to this particular moment of capitalist crisis between the two World Wars.
By the time Smedley had visited the Philippines, Evangelista had already been imprisoned multiple times by the American colonial government. The PKP would not even see two years of existence before it was outlawed by the Philippine Supreme Court in October 1932. Evangelista would be either repeatedly imprisoned or harassed for the rest of the decade. In 1942 he would be executed as a political prisoner by a different colonial power, the Japanese, during World War II. As a result of this, not much of Evangelista’s theoretical thoughts exist in the historical record after the establishment of the PKP. Still, if we are to look at his writings from the late 1920s, just before the KAP turned into the PKP and right after his increased exchanges with the COMPUSA and the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, we see this intensified move toward not only a nationalist communism, but a more internationalist form of revolutionary decolonization.
In a short 1928 book written in Tagalog, Evangelista would focus on the extremely popular rhetoric of the Nacionalista Party, the dominant mainstream political party of the Philippines. In particular Evangelista wanted to underline the limits of nationalist notions of decolonization, particularly conservative decolonization which emphasized national control of capitalism and increased autonomy of established Filipino political leaders. Titled, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo-Radikalismo or Protectionist Nationalism vs. Radical Internationalism, Crisanto Evangelista attempted to pull back the curtains from the “narrow, conservative, and reactionary nationalism,” of Filipino statesmen and protectionists, urging readers to look beyond these “narrow horizons” of political sovereignty and economic development.
Evangelista’s analysis emphasizes what he saw as two fundamentally antagonistic kinds of political economic futures. On one hand, there was the future proposed by Filipino protectionists, who argued for a Philippine economy shielded from foreign competition. In this scenario Philippine industry and markets would be protected—artificially by the state—from the natural laws of a global capitalist market, a market that was already historically rigged in favor of more advanced industrial and imperial economies. Under this protection, the Philippine economy would diversify and mature. For Evangelista, however, protectionism was simply an accommodation of the exploitative system of capitalism, albeit with a local twist, in which already wealthy Filipinos would be protected by the state from wealthier capitalists from abroad. On the other hand, Evangelista envisioned a future of radical internationalism, dictated by the desires and needs of workers. In this future, workers would pursue a radical solidarity that combined both anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism to struggle toward a world unfettered by the artificial and violent constraints of imperialism and capitalism.
In the first section, Evangelista tackled the economic aspect of nationalist protectionism, asserting that protectionism not only bred racial chauvinism, but dangerously created an unproductive trade policy of isolationism. These conditions—chauvinism and isolationism—would lead to Filipinos being shunned by other nations, seriously wounding international trade. This would then create a chain reaction in which demands for Philippine commodities would fall, leading to immense drops in commodity prices and wages, and eventually mass unemployment. Filipino workers, desperate for work and wages would flee the Philippines in even greater numbers, to other territories that were still under what he argued was under the “grasp of imperialism, like Hawaii” or Mindanao, which Evangelista argued was ironically under the control of “Foreign Investment.”
For Evangelista, the very notion of “protectionism” was suspect. Although proponents of protectionism argued that it would lead to national vitality and a proliferation of native entrepreneurs and small businesses, he warned that it would simply intensify the drive toward local monopolies. “First, it [small businesses] will be swallowed by large investors; and second, the small investor will fight or think of killing those they are chasing or those that are equal in stature in “the name of free competition.” That is what is called the “free competion” of capitalism. That is the law that capitalism follows. That is the anarchy and antagonism [anarquia y antagonismo] of the system of capitalist production [sistema de produccion capitalista].”
Thus, rather than an orderly world of economic growth and national progress, protectionism would instead lead to a world of intensified exploitation, disorder, and violence. However, because the state would exclude foreign capitalists from the economy, the source of antagonism would not be an imperialist power, but instead from within, an antagonism within and between native Filipinos.
In the second half of the book Evangelista switched to the political aspects of protectionism. He specifically focused on the question of American colonialism, the unjust historical condition that protectionism was supposed to resolve. Here Evangelista challenged the protectionist nationalist position on colonialism, arguing that it was not necessarily the presence of the foreign that was the enemy. “The American people are not our enemy,” he asserted. Instead, the enemy was “the imperialistic world consisting of American, English, Japanese, French, Dutch, Spanish, and others.”
Thus, instead of the narrow horizons of what Benedict Anderson would call “official nationalism,” Evangelista argued for a broader global approach. One therefore had to see true freedom as a radical overturning of the entire world, not simply the achievement of national sovereignty. For Evangelista “the independence of the Filipino people is dependent on the problem and the fate of the other colonies and semi-colonies.” Put differently, rather than focusing on the antagonism between colony and metropole, one had to see the central antagonism between colonies and the imperial world system. For Evangelista the struggle for Philippine independence had to be connected to the larger struggle of international anti-colonialisms, in concert with other colonized workers. As he stated: “If we are freed, it would change the shape of colonialism in the world,” leading to what Evangelista envisioned as “an outbreak of fire that would burn and smolder inside the people of Taiwan and Korea to fight against Japan; the Indonesian against the Netherlands; in Indo-China against France and Portugal; the Indians, the Malaysians and other English colonies against England.”
Under Evangelista’s formulation, Filipino anti-colonialism must fundamentally be “internationalist,” to “make friends and join in the international workers’ movement.” In this political and ethical formulation of friendship, simulaneously within and beyond the nation, “the enemy of our people…is not only national but worldwide.” In this “international movement against international imperialism” he argued that not only must Filipinos “unite with the Indonesian, Malay, Korean, Taiwanese, Indians, Chinese and other similar young colonies,” but Filipinos must “join, befriend, and collaborate with workers in the capitalist countries and the imperialist order by forming a single column, through cooperation and simultaneous resistance to weaken World Imperialism.”
References
Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2011); William J. Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration, and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992); and Jim Richardson, Komunista: The Genesis of the Communist Party, 1902 – 1935 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 2011).
Crisanto Evangelista, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo Radikalismo, (Manila: Katipunan ng Anak-pawis sa Pilipinas (KAP), 1929); Agnes Smedley, “Philippine Sketches” in The New Masses, June 1931.
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