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 III
Colonial Rule and Arrested Development
When the first colonizers came to this archipelago that they would later call the Philippine Islands (the Philippines), only a little less than five hundred years ago, some of our forebears (the local inhabitants of the archipelago) lived basically within a primitive social formation but with many areas already in an incipient agricultural mode, and a few areas having crafts and trading in secondary positions of importance. But for more than 900 years prior they had already been trading with neighbouring countries – indicating therefore a lot of prosperity and a large production surplus.[1]
A thousand years of constant trading with neighbouring peoples is no small matter by any standards anywhere! It is no small matter as it means that they were producing and had lots to share with others elsewhere.
The Ownership Question
But more significantly, the people of the Philippines were quite sophisticated in their moral understanding of property ownership, which is the essential core of the relation between poverty and wealth. For instance, they did not only have one but two distinct terms for owning anything as “ours”. One could use the term amin, meaning “exclusively ours”, and refer, for example, to village lands as collectively belonging to a given village to the exclusion of others; or one could use the term atin, meaning “ours” in an inclusive sense, comprehending literally everyone, both within and without that particular village or barangay.
Thus some lands were amin (“ours” exclusively) because we applied our exclusive labor for the productivity of those lands, while rivers and forests were atin (ours inclusively) because they were just “there” as nature’s gift to all for the enjoyment of all.
The people of the Philippines, like most other peoples on earth, knew the important implications of the patent truth that the human being is, quite inescapably, “a land animal”: without land the human being simply cannot live.
They sensed that appropriation by some individuals of the land on which and from which all must live inevitably condemned the non-owning producers of wealth to deprivation.
Can we think on this for just a little bit?
While the many non-owning producers worked and tilled the land, a few non-producing owners, should such a class come into existence, would be pampered in luxury at the expense of the non-owning producers who would be denied the right to either a part or the whole of their own produce by the non-producing owners. A few could lord it over the many. The non-owning producers would be denied in whole or in part the fruits of their own labor. This would result in injustice not just on an individual but on a social scale, which is what is meant by social injustice — the necessary result of an unjust social concept.
There would be, as what actually developed in the Philippines and in many countries of South America, a plutocracy and an oligarchy. True democracy on a social scale would be impossible – unless or until a just notion of ownership were restored.
To be repetitive about this, let’s get it clear: the non-producing owner would be able to appropriate the produce of other persons’ labor for merely giving them permission to work the land – the land which no one had made, which was simply “there” as a free gift of nature. In the end the non-producing owners (or landlords) would own the labor power on the land. And of course, ownership of that on which and from which all people must live would be little different from owning the people themselves.[2]
Who can assail the justice and soundness of this pre-colonial concept of ownership? Well, the colonizers did.
Changing the Concept and Establishing the “Oligarchy”
With the occupation of the Philippines by Westerners (Spaniards), a significant change in the idea of land ownership was introduced among the various barangays (village communities) of the archipelago. Heads of barangays were encouraged to individually own what traditionally were regarded as communal lands (amin not akin) of the whole barangay and to lay de facto claims to the lands of those indebted to him. For the first time ever people could and would now appropriate for themselves as their exclusive property the lands that had hitherto honestly in their mind and in actual practice truly belonged to all.
This process of individual appropriation of land accelerated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
At Last, a Propertied Class Emerges
In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the propertied class (the principalia) started moving towards center stage, quite fortunately, with an emerging nationalist consciousness. What is meant by this?
“The ilustrados,” as the members of the new propertied class were known felt different from the Spanish colonizer. The ilustrado members came in varying degrees of skin color: the Spanish Filipino (born in the Philippines), the Spanish mestizo, the Chinese mestizo, and the Indio barangay chief.
The Spain-born Spanish (peninsulares) considered them socially inferior and discriminated against them and looked down upon them as mere “islanders” or insulares.
Moreover, the ilustrados were clearly mere beneficiaries of the tenancy system which, in the first place, the Spanish colonizers had fostered with the introduction of the Roman law philosophy of property in the Philippines.
But as a class, these ilustrados were able to create a wide web of family alliances connected by ties of marriage, business and common interests. With some wealth, they could even acquire formal education up to the university level and travelled as far as Europe.
Most important of all, the ilustrados had the loyalty of their share tenants who, because of their “submerged subculture” and their failure to crystallize their own class interests, identified these interests with their masters, the landlord ilustrados.
Given all these factors at play, a nationalist consciousness had to emerge, and it did – a consciousness that the ilustrado class was different and must be recognized and no longer be regarded as inferior. They must take hold of political power or at least have some share in it. The movement led by the ilustrado class, clearly nationalist, had at last become a historical necessity.
The events consequent to this movement are now immortalized in Philippine history books: the Gomburza martyrdom, the Propaganda movement, the emergence of the Katipunan, the Rizal martyrdom, the revolution, the first Philippine republic at Kawit, and the illegal sale of the Philippines by the Spaniards to the Americans. What do we mean by this?
Well, it’s ownership again: the Philippines was supposedly “owned” by Spain. The owners wanted to sell because the Filipinos were in revolt. There was a “buyer” – the USA, which needed to “own” the archipelago for their own purposes or justify their intention of forcible occupation. And so, voila – the sale was done: the 1898 Treaty of Paris. America buys the Philippines and the Filipino people at two dollars per head grossly ignoring the very public fact that the Filipinos themselves had already rid the country of Spain and had now established their own independent Republic – legitimately claiming ownership of their own country.
McKinley’s Dream – a Philippine Nightmare
Yes, no sooner had the ilustrado-led nationalists put an end to Spanish colonialism than they found themselves fighting another enemy, whom they thought at first to be a friend – the U.S. of A.
In defence of the American republic turning imperialist, turn-of-the-century US Senator Beveridge explained: “We are a conquering race…We must obey our blood and occupy new markets, and if necessary, new lands. American factories are making more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us. The trade of the world must and shall be ours.”
The senator was quite perceptive. He found in the essence of American capitalist economy a persistent urge to expand, to dominate, and of course to defend the political order that its expanding economy created. Yes, this was all about ownership on another level. The American capitalists knew that their capital must go to where it makes the largest profits; it must expand, or go under.
But how would one or could one justify the country grab? Only with the help of religio-cultural gobbledegook. The moment of truth came to the Chief Executive at the White House. In his own words later, President McKinley described that moment to a delegation of Methodist dignitaries:
“I thought, first, that we would take only Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also.. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way… I don’t know how but it came… that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the Chief Engineer of the War Department (our map maker) and told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are [pointing at map], and there they will stay while I am President.”
This weird process of Christianizing a predominantly Catholic country and educating a nation whose universities were older than Harvard resulted in a holocaust. Said one Republican Congressman in 1902 quite proudly after a visit to the Philippines: “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and whenever and wherever they could get hold of a Filipino, they killed him.” Ownership was basically about this: “to have” and “to hold”. Once you got it, you better defend it. Or you will surely lose it. This whole business had to turn quite violent, and, indeed, it did.
Those more skilled in the art of body-counting said that the U.S. sent 126,468 soldiers to fight the nationalist Filipinos in 2,811 battles, spent $500-million to kill roughly 600,000 Filipinos (one-sixth then total population of Luzon at that time) – and put themselves in a better position to uplift and civilize and Christianize the Filipino Catholics.
By 1913, with the Philippines now again a conquered land, the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act was passed by the United States, establishing Free Trade and Product Specialization between the U.S. and its new colony – and thus effectively making of the Philippines a source of raw materials at cheap prices and a dumping ground for finished products at higher prices.
Original forests occupied 70% of this country’s land area around 1900, when we first came under the USA. Then the US colonial government started classifying trees as agricultural export crops! Because of that policy, by 1946 when they formally left, only 30% of forests were left. And we were still very much at the logging madness, in admiration of our former colonizers, till very recently.
Okay, that’s about the economy and politics. What about culture? To reinforce the colonial economy, a colonial education would now also be established.
Reinforcing a Colonial Mentality
The basic objective of the educational system was to persuade the Filipinos that good things are American things; good literature is American English literature, good music is American music, good custom is American custom, etc. The colonial teachers certainly did not come to the Philippines to learn but to teach, and may have sincerely thought that they were doing the Filipinos a great favor by moulding them as closely as possible to the American image.
Thus, in Philippine schools, “A” was for apples although apples do not grow in the Philippines. “C” was neither for coconut nor even for the native root crop camote, but for the imported cherries. If the pupils, however, flunked in class, the American teacher would say, “Better go home and plant camote.” Filipinos were taught to dream of a white Christmas when all the Christmases they had known were brown. They were taught to brush their teeth, but curiously enough not to make toothbrush. In short, they were taught to despise themselves as they were and the things they would always have, like coconuts and camotes, and long for things they would never have; or simply try to become what they were not – brown Americans.
With the incredible success of this Americanizing type of education, and when the structures of political and military domination had been near-thoroughly Filipinized, the U.S. passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act – to grant “independence” to its erstwhile colony. In the prefatory note to his version of the “Independence” bill, however, Senator Tydings was dreadfully frank as to his aims: “to keep the Philippines economically while letting them govern themselves politically.” (Go to Part IV)
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[1] See Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Flipinas as annotated by Jose P. Rizal
[2] ((This is the meaning of what is called the unjust appropriation of what was intended for all. Nature’s bounty belongs to all. In the old times they used to identify capital, labor and land (the commons or nature’s bounty) as factors of production – a distinction blurred by decades of justifying the new industrial system which could have been a producer of goods for the prosperity of all and not just for a few.
But this is getting ahead of the story – showing that not only in agriculture but also in industry and other sectors of the economy, if the commons are unfairly appropriated, equality becomes impossible.
The latest area we will not get in to now is intellectual property. It is the locus of the most important decisions in information policy – the legal form of the information age. The value protected by Intellectual Property in the world economy is in the staggering trillions of dollars – and still growing. It is the key to the distribution of wealth and power and access in the globalized information society – and there, arbitrary private appropriation of the commons is at its worst. ))