The Gardener gave the following address at the July 1, 2014 Seminar Session
(8 a.m. to 12 noon) at the NCCP Building, Edsa, Quezon City
Brothers and Sisters in the National Council of Churches of Korea, and
Brothers and sisters all in the National Council of Churches of the Philippines:
PART II
Society’s Time and Space
What we are saying is that, concerned for the poor as we all must be, a study of poverty and prosperity cannot and should not be merely a study of individual persons who become rich or poor but, rather, a study of the society that enables them to be so.
Do you want to get a good picture of society? Go, study its historical changes through time (historical exploration), and analyse its cross-section or structure in that time stretch (structural analysis). This twin method enables us to view social reality from an angle that yields a more comprehensive picture of a given social situation.
When employing those two methods, the overall result is sometimes referred to as a society’s social mode or epoch, or, simply, its “totality,” or that society’s predominant mode of production.
We are saying that the way a given society materially reproduces itself, i.e.
- the way that society at a given time produces its means of material being (economics)
will certainly influence, or even determine
- the way the people of that society relate to each other (politics) as well as
- the way they think and dream and value things (culture).
For instance, a society that produces wealth on the basis of slave labor will be one whose politics is dominated by slave owners (naturally), complete with teachers, clergy and literature that justify the treatment of certain human beings as essentially inferior entities (absurd and incredible as this would sound in later times). We would call such a society a “slave society” because slaves are the predominant factor in the way that society is set up and prospers.
As we go down through history, we see that various societies have been distinguished from each other in their various epochs or modes by their qualitatively distinct principal characteristics.
Our first example of a “slave society” (because of its predominant mode of production), would be followed later in time, by what was called “a feudal society”, and, still later, by what was termed “a modern capitalist society”, or in another time by what may be viewed as clearly “a neo-colonial society”, or, lately, “a peripheralized or a globalized one” – etc. – all depending on the principal characteristics that objectively describe a particular economy and politics.
So, this manner of viewing social reality – combining historical exploration and structural analysis – was what 1960s Philippines popularly called the act of social analysis.
By such a method, what was not obvious before could become so suddenly patent. The study revealing that this country’s underdevelopment is the product of its prolonged foreign domination – the cumulative effect of centuries of foreign exploitation of the people and their national patrimony – is an instance.
In the light of that fact, merely blaming one administration after another for all our problems no longer makes full sense. I mean: mere change of personalities at the top could never do the trick because nothing less than structural change is needed.
It will also become obvious that the more critical problems of today are the results of designs that substantially continue, or have not yet been able to reverse, past historical colonial patterns. Many current economic development policies are but new expressions of the old colonial doctrines. These strategies keep countries like the Philippines dependent on a backward kind of agriculture and hold back our genuine development.
The economy can “grow,” sure, as grow it can and must, but in a most distorted way – as, for instance, consider the indubitable fact that current economic growth in our country is due mainly to the export of warm bodies as our Number One “industry” with all its socio-psychological-spiritual implications.
This active underdevelopment of the economy and severe social injustice cause the poverty keenly felt by the majority populace. Peasants, agricultural workers, rural landless, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, workers, urban poor, students and professionals, patriotic businessmen and small entrepreneurs – all alike are victims of social injustice and the loss of economic sovereignty. And they form the big majority of the total population.
Stages of Development and Civilization
Let us now make a very quick review, or, if you will, a long telescopic view of humanity’s common stages of development and civilization – commonly true in this country and in others though in varied particulars and details.
Let’s just remember this first: from the beginning of recorded human history, people have continuously transformed the world around them using the tools they have invented or discovered to make life better, easier, and more prosperous – or simply to survive. It was in this process that they established various forms of civilization or social formations each of which may be perceived as a different wave or stage of economic development.
It is not difficult to distinguish basic social formations or modes of production: the primitive, the agricultural and the industrial, which various peoples have established throughout history. Quickly, then, let’s review them:
The Primitive mode describes the food-gathering stage of economic development. What principally characterized this stage? Here people lived and worked without any tools or only with very “primitive” tools (“old stone” Paleolithic or “new stone” Neolithic) and an attitude of nearly one-on-one correspondence with the environment.
By reaching back to this mode, we are telescoping across more than a million years before the rise of agriculture ten thousand years ago. What we see is this “isang-kahig-isang-tuka [‘one day-one eat’]”food-gathering stage of humanity’s prolonged infancy in wealth creation. At that stage there was no wealth production – only survival. There was also very little need for either war or governance. For what was there to quarrel about or to rule over?
Is there still any instance of this million-year-old primitive mode? Incredibly up to recently, it was found in some parts of the Philippines, among certain indigenous groups – some of whose limited vocabulary, interestingly enough, had words for love but none for war. And, interestingly enough, neither did they have words for property. This was the case too then among some areas in the Amazonian jungles of South America, and the Upper Nile Valley in Africa.
Next, we go to
The Agricultural Mode. Now this is a different stage of development, a stage where people settled down and used tools to produce food, that is, they did not merely forage around to gather it. This first happened over ten thousand years ago. Here people consciously brought about changes in their environment. Down through the centuries, great civilizations were established on this mode of production.
Note that we use this term, “civilization,” strictly – referring to a new way of life associated with a particular system for wealth creation: agrarian (the First Wave), industrial (the Second Wave), and now knowledge-based, or informational waves of civilization (the Third Wave).
We are not talking here of the seven or eight major sub civilizations which may include the Western, the Confucian, the Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilizations ( a context used by the late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard in his “clash of civilizations”).
We refer, rather, to the great super civilizations into which all the others fit (the context popularized by author Alvin Toffler).
Of record, it would seem that the first to create civilized settlements were the Sumerians – the people of Sumer in what is now IRAQ.[1]
In the land of Sumer, as you may well recall from early school days, the rise of agriculture and the invention of irrigation evolved the existence of a central authority to coordinate and control the flow of water down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; to ensure that downstream fields could be watered as well as those further up; to devise a calendar and know when the spring floods might be expected; to undertake a division of labor so that some could specialize as farmers or as warriors, as priests or as tax gatherers – in other words to function as a complex society having a government in the delivery of basic services that could gather the necessary revenues, protect society from natural disaster, and from external attacks – in short, to install community security.
All this became possible because of humanity’s leap from a merely food-gathering stage to settled-down agriculture. Down the centuries and the millennia – that life in the agrarian mode remained the same.
In the agrarian mode, the relations vis-à-vis the production of wealth between the landowners and the non-owner producers ensured that wealth indeed could be produced but only for the benefit of an owning few who became the nobles, the rulers, the kings, the despots. How was this possible?
As we now telescope ten thousand years of this wave of civilization in its various forms, you should not be blamed if you find it monotonous – the monotonous story of the few and the many, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled leading some to claim that, in the end, all government is but a façade for oligarchy. We will go back to this because this is the root of it all – injustice in the ownership by a few regarding the commons or what should belong to all. To repeat: wealth could now be produced – but who would get to own it, and why?
Through all these periods, the basic means of subsistence and production of wealth was agriculture – with crafts and trading already in significant secondary positions. Then, after ten thousand years, humanity discovered a new way to meet material needs – the industrial route.
The Industrial Mode of Production is the stage where people discovered or invented machines to produce goods, including machines. We cannot deny that this leap in how humans produced wealth constituted real change. It is less than 300 years old, and is characterized by the ability to mass produce, to unlock the secrets of the material world, and even alter the face of Earth for better or for worse. With this mode we have to say that we were now dealing with a new wave of humanity’s social formation – which we have called “the Second Wave of Civilization.”
Although the agricultural civilization of the First Wave started wealth production, output was so low and food surpluses so small by later Second Wave standards that over 90% of all manpower was needed simply to work the land. (FYI: Today’s Philippines needs almost 60 %.)
Then came the industrial revolution that led to factory production. Before long, many different elements including mass production, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass politics and movements all linked together to form a truly new industrial system – the Second Wave civilization.
The Second Wave, as you all know, first swept across Western Europe and North America and is still spreading to other parts of the world as well – hundreds of years after it first spread around our planet.
It simply engulfed local agrarian-based civilizations wherever it spread – bringing urbanization, looser adherence to tradition and moral codes, and shattering many cultural patterTribal and territorial wars between different primitive and agricultural groups continued, as they had throughout previous millennia. But these were of limited importance now and often merely weakened both sides, making them easier prey for the overwhelming force of the industrial wave. (Go to Part III)
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[1][Ha, ha! So now, easy, America, on this nation. Don’t feel too superior or they might, again, teach you a very painful lesson]