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.