E. SAN JUAN JR
Interrogating the Postcolonial Alibi: A Testimony from the Filipino Diaspora It is important for us to identify the new victims and the new victimisers in the neocolonial era--for we do not live in a postcolonial era as the postmodernists claim. We must struggle together both locally and globally. The local struggle must be combined with global or international struggle and solidarity. We must fight on all fronts....We must carry on a continuous resistance, a continuous dissidence, which will forge the way to a better future for
all the peoples of the world.
Nawal El Saadawi
The masses are the torch-bearers of culture; they are the source of culture and, at the same time, the one entity truly capable of preserving and creating it—of making history.
Amilcar Cabral
From 1996 to 1998, we celebrated in the Philippines and here in the United States the one-hundred year anniversary of the Philippine revolution against Spain. December 10, 1998, marked the centennial of the Treaty of Paris marking the end of the Spanish-American War, an event which ushered in the carnage of the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1903 — the “first Vietnam”, one historian believes — and beyond, as well as the colonial domination of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico. The latter two events still haunt us not just with spectres but with the lived experience of pain, denials, and ordeals of servitude. We can never completely “postalise” these Nachtraglich repercussions because to do so would just confirm the reality — Puerto Rico is recognised by the world as a US colony, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba (like North Korea and other so-called “rogue” states) will not go away like a bad dream, even though Washington hopes they will fade away like the Sandinistas, Maurice Bishop’s “New Jewel Movement”, the FMLN of El Salvador, Kim Il Sung, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevarra, and others who have now dissolved into the posthistorical folds of the “New World Order”. Unfortunately, the Pinochets of this world are still around — and their victims will not allow them their solipsistic retirement.
Postcolonial theory warns us not to engage in the “politics of blame” and praise. Indeed, can I, as a subaltern, neocolonial intellectual, speak and discriminate as to who is guilty and who is innocent? Complexity and various rhetorical and ethical refinements will be sacrificed. Given the hybridity, mixing, creolisation, syncretism, in-betweenness and just the sheer all- encompassing ambivalence and heterogeneity of relations between the postcolonised and the ex-colonisers, I would in fact be guilty of some cardinal
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sins: totalisation, imposition of metanarratives, universalisation, and so forth. Despite the heterogeneous locus of enunciation, I would plead guilty to reiterating a commonplace generalisation here: the Spanish American War established the geopolitical place of the United States as an imperial power whose apogee after World War II, in the pax Americana of the Cold War, persists though in attenuated form, enabling the rise of neocolonial states like the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and others in Africa and Latin America. The postcolonial position of genuine sovereignty for many peoples is still germinal, the embryo of wish-fulfillment.
Let me post a few reminders. After the end of Francis Fukuyama’s history, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Chiapas revolt in Mexico, and Japan’s recession, the “Asian Tigers” — in particular South Korea and Thailand — collapsed, and Indonesia soon unravelled. Just a few weeks ago, Brazil was saved by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Spasmodic ups and downs in the stock markets, currency devaluations and capital flight from the peripheral “emerging market” economies plague the globalised “free market” despite “structural adjustment programs” imposed by the World Bank (WB)/International Monetary (IMF) Fund. Loan defaults, production cutbacks, mass layoffs, and bankruptcies are rocking the whole planet. A new world depression (read: crisis of transnational capital) seems brewing. Globalisation is on the rampage — what else is new?
Last November, an international conference on “Alternatives to Globalisation” was held in the Philippines with delegates from thirty-one countries. What is meant by globalisation? In brief, it is the neoliberal ideology of the free market, the capitalist market of exchange values, as the only way to economic growth and social progress everywhere. It is the general offensive of monopoly capital (transnational corporations or TNCs) to maximise the extraction of profit and accelerate capital accumulation everywhere, particularly through the use of modern technology (such as robotics and information technology), and, more importantly, through the political dicta of liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation mediated through the triad multilateral institutions: the IMF/WB, and World Trade Organisation. Supposed to refurbish the old nostrum of “modernisation”, globalisation enables rapid economic restructuring, centralisation of capital, takeover and control of production resources in undeveloped societies and weak nation-states by TNCs based in the industrialised metropoles (Europe, Japan, North America). The conference ended with a resolution which reads in part:
Globalisation has worsened the effects of the destructive paradigm of “growth and development”. Instead of economic prosperity and social stability that it promised for all nations, globalisation has brought about economic turmoil, political and social tension, and widespread devastation to the world’s people and resources.... The gap between the rich and poor
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in all nations, industrial and non-industrial alike, and between the rich and poor countries is widening rather than narrowing....
Everywhere globalisation is eroding the gains of social movements in all aspects (political, social and cultural). There is a general regression of democracy, as economic impositions by states entail increasing human rights violations, not only of economic, social and cultural rights, but of political and civil rights as well. In the third world, as the majority of the people are marginalised economically, they are also disempowered politically. (Cyberdyaryo, 12 November 1998)
No doubt, from the postcolonial orthodoxy deriving its imprimatur from the “Holy Trinity” of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, that resolution will be dismissed as “old hat” radicalism vitiated with tired Marxist cliches and reductionist excesses. But surely, the owl of Minerva has not flown yet over postcolonial theory’s territory to bring this tiding of disaster and awaken the acolytes and epigones from premature dogmatic slumber. While global unemployment has gone beyond 40 percent and 90 percent of the world’s inhabitants suffer from poverty, do we still dare not whisper the tabooed words “finance capital”? For Fredric Jameson (1998), this new stage of capitalism characterised by speculation in the money market, monetary equivalence superimposed on land values, space, and so on — in brief, in the intensification of the forces of reification — have generated precisely those tell-tale affects of contingency, indeterminacy, ambivalence, borderline crossings, displacements, dislocations, transcultural negotiations, and diasporic exchanges whose fragments are being continually plotted by postcolonial theory. Such theory turns out to be a shamanistic reading of symptoms. Indeed, the repertoire of postcolonial tropes condense with uncanny prescience the full measure of globalised financial transactions — except that the practitioners of this rhetorical strategy or language-game pride themselves in disavowing any knowledge of the material/historical determinants of their performance. The warning one should heed then is: You might ignore globalised finance capital, but it will surely not ignore you.
One more reminder not as recent as the unconscionable “killing fields” of Kosovo and East Timor but equally heuristic and instructive. Retaliating for the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the United States government unleashed a barrage of deadly Tomahawk missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan, two of the rogue states declared to be harboring terrorists, aka Islamic fundamentalists, hostile to the United States and its Western allies. This, in a time of the “New World Order”, when (according to Fukuyama) history ended with the demise of the Soviet Union and the worldwide triumph of liberal capitalism. But are we not in a postality epoch where colonialism and capitalism have both been superseded, where universalising paradigms and metanarratives have gone the way of dinosaurs?
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Heterodox Scruples
By all indications, postcolonial orthodoxy expressed in the writings of Bhabha, Spivak, and their epigones, would register protest against a revanchist US imperialism. At the same time it would condemn the totalising philosophy of Osama bin Laden and the Manichaean strategy of those fundamentalistic nationalists who reject the hybrid and heterogeneous reality of societies victimised by transnational corporations. Lest I be accused of caricaturing postcolonial critics, I refer my readers to the thorough and judicious appraisal of this newly institutionalised discourse by Arif Dirlik in his somewhat neglected book The Postcolonial Aura. Dirlik points out the mystification of the relations of culture and power when postcolonial critics concentrate on Eurocentric ideology and foundationalism as their main target. The now scriptural text The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al) privileges the hermeneutics of colonial discourse as a desideratum of the new academic discipline. The aura of the “interstitial” and hybrid preempts any original indigenous resistance, discursive or otherwise, from the subaltern natives (Schulze-Engler). Among other scholars cited by Dirlik, O’Hanlon and Washbrook bewail the conservative and authoritarian nature of the solutions offered by postcolonial theory to the problems of the contemporary world: “methodological individualism, the depoliticising insulation of social from material domains, a view of social relations that is in practice extremely voluntaristic, the refusal of any kind of programmatic politics” (66). From another stance, Aijaz Ahmad considers the doctrine of the postcolonial transhistoricity of colonialism as an ideological alibi to expunge “determinate histories” and determinate structures of power, releasing them from accountability. One German scholar, noting how the postcolonial proliferation of differences inaugurates new hegemonies, recently asked: “Where is the protest against SAP (Structural Adjustment Programs) universalism?” (Stummer).
I suspect that this has been said before in other ways — think of the expanding archive of postcolonial theory/postcolonial discourse, from Said’s classic Orientalism to Spivak and Bhabha’s voluminous essays to the ripostes such as Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory, Arif Dirlik’s The Postcolonial Aura, and provocative essays by Ann McClintock and Ella Shohat, in particular — a veritable academic industry. In the last two years, aside from my work, three books have come out that inventory the postcolonial archive in a thorough if somewhat tautologous manner: Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (1997), Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (1998). Institutionalisation, together with the canonisation of the “Holy Trinity” (Said, Spivak and Bhabha), have generated the routine repertoire of rituals, cliches, formulae, platitudes, mixed with “received” commonsense rehashed in the doxology of Establishment poststructuralism and pragmatic metaphysics.
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Common among these three books is the positive appraisal of the ideology of difference. Recognition of Otherness, decolonising the ethnocentric gaze, radical indeterminacy immanent in hybridity, diaspora, heterogeneity, exile, displacement, dislocation, borderline crossing, and so on, constitute the recurrent themes, motifs, and archetypal topoi of postcolonial discourse. There are of course the classics: Said’s Orientalism, Fanon’s Black Face/White Masks, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and (as the contrapuntal voice, Ahmad’sIn Theory), together with the key texts of Salman Rushdie, Wilson Harris, Jean Rhys, and a few Africans. Leela Gandhi eulogises the “analytic versatility and theoretical resilience” of the postcolonial practitioners. Ania Loomba’s substantial survey provides ample archival background, with a show of painstaking evenhandedness toward adversaries of postcolonial orthodoxy. However, like Gandhi, she subscribes to the general condemnation of Marxism as guilty of economism, totalising, humanism, teleology, the neglect of gender, sexuality, racial and ethnic differences, and other minor crimes. Unlike Gandhi, however, Loomba is not sanguine about globalisation. She concurs with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s aim of “provincialising Europe” (255), but her own endorsement of “empirical specificity” returns us back to the slogan of localism and particularism that she herself finds fault with. Shades of melancholy irony in a peculiarly imploding Leibnizian conceit.
A nuanced dialogue between Marxism and post-structuralism recommended by Loomba seems to be attempted by Bart Moore-Gilbert in his detailed inventory of the writings of Said, Spivak and Bhabha. However, his concluding judgment that there is a fit between postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism (for example, the affinities between Bhabha and Wilson Harris’ ideas) and that we need to apply Spivak’s nostrum of “strategic essentialism” (202), with qualifications, are anticlimactically disappointing. With some reservations, Moore-Gilbert also supports Laclau-Mouffe’s strategy of multiple positioning or “equivalential articulation” (199). He commends Ranajit Guha’s liberal pluralism:
...it seems to me that a choice between the predominant paradigms, or an attempted synthesis of them, is perhaps equally unnecessary if one applies an historical and differential perspective to the question of the heterogeneity of the “postcolonial”.... Because postcolonial histories, and their presents, are so varied, no one definition of the “postcolonial” can claim to be correct, at the expense of all the others, and consequently a variety of interrelated models of identity, positionality and cultural/ critical practice are both possible and necessary. (203)
Not to worry; we are all open-minded, cosmopolitan and catholic in taste. This is obviously a species of pragmatic agnosticism, at best an old-fashioned eclecticism that exudes the aura of the dilettantish gentlemen of letters whiling away time in the English countryside. Moore-Gilbert tries to be tactful, lucid,
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and impartial — at the cost of tolerating the differential politics of globalised transnational corporations to ride roughshod over millions in the so-called postcolonial or neocolonised South. In our three authors, as well as in postcolonial mimicry in general, a crippling category mistake is made by confusing culture with ideology, thus forfeiting any attempt to do what Ella Shohat calls for: to interrogate the concept of the “post-colonial” and contextualise it historically, geopolitically and culturally (111). Or else, there is only the ideology of the enemy to be exorcised or stigmatised as reductive, deterministic, essentialist, and so on.
The paralysis and inconsequentiality of postcolonial theory and criticism on the face of globalised capitalism are patently clear not to warrant rehearsing the objections of Ahmad, Dirlik, and others. This is not just because this genre is devoted to specialised studies on widow-burning or British colonisation of the Indian subcontinent, Australia, Canada and South Africa. The explanation is more than theoretical or discursive. Robert Young, the editor of the new magazine, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, put his finger on its symptomatology: “The rise of postcolonial studies coincided with the end of Marxism as the defining political, cultural and economic objective of much of the third world” (8–9). This diagnosis is more wishful thinking than a factual statement. To be sure, the “third world” as a homogenised entity never claimed to elevate Marxism as its all-encompassing objective; no one does this, anyway. Another agenda lurks in the background.
Postcolonialism seems to require a postMarxism as “supplement”, a prophylactic clearing of the ground. What is meant by postMarxism or the “end of Marxism” is really the reconfiguration of the international class struggle between the imperial metropoles and the revolting masses of the periphery. It signifies the end of the bourgeois national project initiated by the Bandung Conference led by Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno (Ahmad 1995). This project of postcolonial states modernising on the basis of anticommunism and pragmatic philosophy, reliance on Soviet military support and cynical playing of the “American card”, collapsed with the bankruptcy of most neocolonial regimes that succumbed to WB/IMF “structural adjustment programs” and conditionalities. The killing of Salvador Allende in 1974 signalled the close of an epoch in which “national liberation” struggles, inspired with ideals learned from the Marxist tradition, led the anticolonial processes that led to the victories of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Amilcar Cabral, and the Sandinistas, notwithstanding the reversals and setbacks witnessed afterwards. With the neoconservative reaction encapsulated by the programs of Thatcher and Reagan, we witness the emergence of poststructuralism and various postmodernist trends with their reformist and anti-revolutionary program (Lazarus). In this context, postcolonial theory with its nominalist/relativist orientation appears to be invariably parasitic on the larger cultural terrain of comparative, interdisciplinary, and area studies
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in the Western academy.
In brief, without too much sociological analysis of the position of diasporic
intellectuals in the universities of North America and Europe, one can say that postcolonial discourse and theory accompanies the restoration of the periphery of postcolonial societies to a comprador role — for those that have evolved to a more competitive stage of capitalist development. The new “third world” to which postcolonialism resonates designates those countries that have gained sufficient industrial modernisation; this includes the big countries of Latin America, East Asia (China, South Korea, Taiwan), Eastern Europe, and the former USSR. A new fourth world has appeared comprised of most countries in Africa and the Arab world, including many that have not embarked on any sustained program of industrialisation: sub-Saharan Africa, the West Indies, Central America, Bangladesh, and Indonesia (Amin 1994). Most of these remain neocolonised by transnational corporations and the consortia of finance capital under the WB/IMF aegis. Postcolonial legitimacy stems from this new form of national differentiation in the world system of globalised capital.
Alternative Routes
Postcolonial normativity inheres in its claim to discover complexity and difference hitherto submerged by totalising axioms. The principle of uneven and combined development, as adumbrated by Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and others in the socialist tradition, renders all the rhetoric of ambivalence, syncretism, and hybridity redundant. But this principle has been ignored or neglected because a linear teleological narrative of social evolution has been ascribed to classical Marxism, conflating it with ideas of unidirectional progress and developmentalism from Jean Bodin to W.W. Rostow and the gurus of modernisation theory (Patterson). I want to elaborate on this distortion of Marx’s position because it functions as the crucial basis for arguing the alternative rationality of unpredictable social change offered by postcolonial theory. The metaphysical idealism underlying postcolonial dogma, its hostility to historical materialism (the dialectical theory of comprehensive social transformation), and its complicity with the “New World Order” managed by transnational capital can be made transparent by juxtaposing it with Marx’s thesis of uneven and unsynchronised process of development in specific social formations.
In essence, the most blatant flaw of postcolonial orthodoxy (I use the rubric to designate the practice of Establishment postcolonialism employing a poststructuralist organon) lies in its refusal to grasp the category of capitalist modernities in all its global ramifications, both the regulated and the disarticulated aspects. A mechanistic formula is substituted for a dialectical analytic of historical motion. Consequently, in the process of a wide-ranging critique of the Enlightenment ideals by postcolonial critics, the antithesis of capitalism — proletarian revolution and the socialist principles first expounded by Marx and Engels — is dissolved in the logic of the global system of capital
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without further discrimination. The obsession to do away with totality, foundations, universals, and systemic analysis leads to a mechanical reification of ideas and terminology, as well as the bracketing of the experiences they refer to, culminating in a general relativism, skepticism, and nominalism—even nihilism — that undercuts the postcolonial claim to truth, plausibility, or moral high ground (see Habermas, Dews, Callinicos).
A typical exercise in repudiating a historical materialist approach can be seen in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s objection to the institutional history in which Europe operates as “the sovereign theoretical subject”. Modernity — “the meta- narrative of the nation state” — is understood as European imperialism in collusion with third-world nationalisms. What is at stake is the question of a history of India written from the subaltern (peasantry) point of view. Chakrabarty calls for “radical critique and transcendence of liberalism (that is, of the bureaucratic construction of citizenship, modern state, and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced)” (386), a call that he believes finds resonance in Marx, poststructuralism, and feminist philosophy. While he seeks to provincialise Europe by demonstrating the limits of Enlightenment rationalism (its coercive violence suppressed the heterogeneity of other cultures and civilisations), he also rejects cultural relativism and nativist histories.
Chakbrabarty’s obsession is to unmask, demystify, or deconstruct the themes of citizenship and the modern state as though they were permanent, transhistorical, and ubiquitous. In the end, Chakrabarty negotiates for a compromise which he labels a “politics of despair”: “I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity”. His intent is to unfold a radically heterogeneous world “where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates” (388). Not to worry. The dreams of repressed subalternity in India and elsewhere await a Foucauldian genealogical excavation that the group of elite academics like Ranajit Guha, Partha Chaterjee, Gyan Prakash, including the arch- postcolonialist Gayatri Spivak, have already begun. On the other hand, the status quo of existing property relations and asymmetries of actual power relations (articulating class, gender, locality, religion) in India remain untouched.
Central to the postcolonial malaise is the belief that history or historical narratives of colonised peoples by Europeans have been permanently damaged, hence they are useless for recovering native or indigenous originality. Eurocentric knowledge (whether expressed by Cecil Rhodes or Joseph Conrad, by Black Elk or Fray Bartolome de las Casas) can never disclose the truth about the colonised. Following Lyotard, only local narratives can have validity from
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now on. Unless postcolonial historians naively believe they can return to a past where local narratives of tribal groups ran parallel and never intersected, the notions of locality and place are unintelligible outside of a wider global space from which they can be identified. What is missing in the critique of Eurocentric history is a dialectical comprehension of such relations — the relation between Europe and its Others — that precisely constitute the problem of one-sidedness, falsity, distortion, and all the evils that postcolonials discern in modernity (including Marxism as a peculiarly European invention). Parallel or coeval modernities need to be theorised within a differentiated, not centralised, ontology of determinate and concrete social formations if we do not want to relapse into essentialising metaphysics.
In 1878, Marx wrote a letter to a Russian journal that complained of a certain tendency that mistakenly elevated his hypothesis about capitalist development in Western Europe to a “suprahistorical theory”. He wanted to correct the misapplication to Russia of his notion of the transition from feudalism to capitalism given in Capital: the emergence of capitalism premised on the expropriation of the agricultural producers can occur only when empirical preconditions exist. Russia will tend to become capitalist only if it has transformed the bulk of the peasantry into proletarians. Marx explains that this did not happen in Roman times when the means of production of the plebians or free peasants were expropriated; they became “not wage workers but an idle mob more abject than those who were called ‘poor whites’ in the southern United States”; after this appeared not a capitalist but a slave mode of production. Marx objects to his critic’s attempt to generalise the hypothetical conclusion of his empirical inquiry:
[My critic] absolutely insists on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive ultimately at this economic formation that ensures, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (It does me both too much honor and too much discredit.) [Here follows the instance of the Roman plebians.] Thus events that are strikingly analogous, but taking place in different historical milieu, lead to totally disparate results. By studying each of these developments separately, and then comparing them, one can easily discover the key to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there with the master key of a historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being suprahistorical (“Pathways” 109–10).
Now, it is clear that events cannot be judged in themselves apart from the historical milieu, and that there is no “master key” to unlocking all phenomena — which is not to say that one does not need some schematic framework or
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methodological guidelines for gathering data, testing and evaluating them through some principle of falsifiability or verification, and finally formulating general, albeit tentative, observations. I think Marx was not disclaiming the validity of the notion of primitive accumulation he outlined, nor the scheme of historical development enunciated in the “preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). The fundamental insight on the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, manifest in class struggles and in the global phenomenon of uneven development, has served as a fertile problematique or framework of inquiry — paradigm, if you like — in which to raise questions and clarify problems of social change and historical trajectories.
Heterodox Modernities
It was the return of a serious concern with non-European routes to modernity in the sixties (such as the so-called Asiatic mode of production and the Russian commune) that spurred discussions over dependency, uneven development and underdevelopment, world systems theory, the specificity and complexity of “third world” societies, and African socialism. The theoretical liabilities of Orientalism incurred by the Asiatic mode has been spelled out by Bryan Turner:
its theoretical function was not to analyse Asiatic society but to explain the rise of capitalism in Europe within a comparative framework. Hence Asiatic society was defined as a series of gaps — the missing middle class, the absent city, the absence of private property, the lack of bourgeois institutions — which thereby accounted for the dynamism of Europe. (36)
Nonetheless, the notion functioned as a heuristic tool that Marx deployed to eliminate any teleological determinism or evolutionary monism in his speculative instruments of historical investigation.
On the pivotal significance of these socioeconomic formations, Eric Hobsbawm calls attention to its implicit thesis of human individualisation through the historical process, via exchange conceived in terms of reciprocal interactions. It is in the course of demarcating the precapitalist Formen — before full-fledged commodity production set in — that Marx revealed his commitment to an emancipatory, if utopian, vision. Whether in ancient Greek and Roman, Asiatic, or Germanic versions, these tribal communities contrasted favorably with the bourgeois epoch because “man always appears ... as the aim of production, not production as the human goal...”. Marx continues: “In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc. of individuals, produced in universal exchange?” In effect, the totality of human development, “the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions” and human powers signifies a “situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality” (Formations 84–85). Informed by
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this synthesising impulse in which dealienation of labor becomes the aim of revolutionary praxis, Marx’s method of historical specification does not degenerate into the disintegrating, anomic reflex that vitiates postcolonial discourse. Marx’s empathetic understanding and interpretation of the past in their uniqueness, which postcolonial hermeneutics inflates into an axiom of incommensurability, does not preclude a synoptic, all-encompassing apprehension; in fact, it presupposes that stagnant and paralysing continuum that, as Walter Benjamin puts it, must be blasted apart to release the forces of change.
It is in this context that Marx seized the moment of “the break-up of the old village communes” in India by British imperialism as a disastrous event pregnant with its contrary. It is progressive in the sense that it releases or unfolds human potential. On the other hand, Marx believed (in a letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881) that if the Russian village commune (mir) was left free to pursue its “spontaneous development”, then it can be the point of departure for “social regeneration in Russia”. This shows that Marx, far from being a unilinear determinist, posited the dialectical-materialist view that the peasantry can acquire a communist consciousness, depending on which aspects (the collectivist or privative) of the mir would be enhanced by a changing historical environment (Levine 175). This anticipates what Mao, Cabral, and others have recognised in appraising the conjuncture of forces in any contested situation, namely, “the sovereignty of the human factor in revolutionary warfare” (Eqbal Ahmad 147).
George Lichtheim reflects that Marx’s ideas on the various forms of social metabolism which are crystallised in different stages of society illustrates the modes in which humans individualise themselves through the historical process of “evolving various forms of communal and private property, i.e., various ways of organising his social intercourse with nature and the — natural or artificial — preconditions of work.... The forcible disruption of the Indian or Chinese village community by European capital completes the process by rendering it truly global” (85). In any case, a revolutionary Marxist position does not prescribe a causal monism nor a freewheeling causal pluralism. Gregor McLennan has summed up succinctly the dialectical imperative of the Marxist approach : “Structural principles must be complemented by, or even include, notions of individual action, natural causes, and ‘accidental circumstances’.... Nevertheless, material and social relations can be long-term, effective real structures that set firm limits to the nature and degree of practical effect that accident and even agency have” (234). In other words, Marxism views the world not as a closed totality but an “open, structured whole, with irreducible differences” (Haug 16) comprehended dialectically, mindful of the play of contradictions.
I have dwelt at length on this topic because of the postcolonial critic’s
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insistence that the method of historical materialism is fatally compromised by its Enlightenment provenance. If Marx is a Eurocentric apologist for the “civilising mission” of imperialism, then we should have nothing to do with his indictment of capitalism and advocacy of socialist revolution. It might be instructive to note that the charge of Eurocentrism levelled against Marx does not permit a nuanced and rigorous appraisal of his critique of bourgeois philosophy; the polemic of Eurocentrism does not distinguish the nature of capitalist modernity as a specific epochal form, one which is constituted by the complex, uneven relation between coloniser and colonised. Capitalism disappears when all of modernity, both positive and negative elements, become ascribed to a geopolitical region (the metropole vis-à-vis the periphery) that cannot be divorced from the world- system of which it is an integral part.
Samir Amin has perspicaciously described the historical genealogy of Eurocentrism in the drive of capital to subordinate everything to exchange value, to accumulation, hence the need for standardisation. But this drive to uniformity also precipitates its opposite, unequal accumulation or impoverishment of the masses. For Amin, the most explosive contradiction generated by transnational capital inheres in the centres/peripheries polarisation and its corollary, the “imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion” (Eurocentrism 141). Postcolonial affirmation of cultural difference, or the interstitial and syncretic byproducts of the centre/periphery dynamic, evades a critique of economism and reproduces itself as an inverted Eurocentrism that cannot resolve the crisis of inequality. A genuine universalism cannot emerge from incommensurable and provincialised cultures, no matter how valorised as singular or cosmopolitan; the impasse can be broken only by a national popular-democratic breakthrough instanced by national liberation struggles.
Toward Historical Regrounding
We are inhabiting today a “new world order” in which, to quote Ellen Meiksins Wood (1998), capitalism has universalised itself, subjugating everyone to the logic of capital accumulation. Can assertions of particularities and singularities suffice to offset, sidetrack or neutralise the totalising logic of commodification? Can a rejection of the Enlightenment paradigm of rational autonomous monads, the “Leibnizian conceit” (Harvey), free the subaltern from colonial tutelage? Given the fact that, as Saskia Sassen acutely grasped, the global cities like New York and London are “the spaces of postcolonialism and indeed contain conditions for the formation of a postcolonialist discourse” (361), how can this discourse take into account the uneven, disarticulated, and unsynchronised alignment of forces in the neocolonised, still colonised (for example, Puerto Rico, Hawaii), and recolonised geopolitical South?
It is not exorbitant to state that today all social relations and practices, as well as the process of social transformation, labor under the imperatives of accumulation, competition, commodification and profit-maximisation.
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Postcolonial paradigms of hybridity and ambivalence are unable to offer frames of intelligibility that can analyse and critique the internal contradictions embedded in the neoliberal reality and ideology of the “free market”. Driven by a pragmatic empiricism, postcolonialism cannot offer a frame of intelligibility for a “cognitive mapping” of all those historical trends that marked the breakdown of developmentalism, modernisation theory, and other theoretical solutions to the crisis of monopoly capital since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 up to the scrapping of the Breton Woods agreement and a unitary monetary system. As many have noted, postcolonialism, its logic and rhetoric, coincides suspiciously with the anarchic “free market” and the vicissitudes of finance capital on a global scale. Bound by its problematic, the postcolonial critic cannot even entertain the crucial question that Amin poses: “how can we develop the productive forces without letting commodity relations gain ground?” (Amin 1977, 101).
There have been many explanations for this inadequacy and limitation. Amin (1998) locates it in postcolonialism’s rejection of modernity, the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation and convivial democracy. The excesses of instrumental reason are ascribed to the teleology of progress instead of the logic of capitalism and its presuppositions (private property, entrepreneurship, wage labor, technological improvement, laws of the market). The conflation of the ideals of enlightenment with the telos of utilitarian capitalism and its encapsulation in the historiographic fortunes of modernity has led to a skeptical, nominalist conception of subjectivity and agency. Disavowing modernity and the principle of collective human agency — humans make their own history under determinate historical conditions, postcolonialism submits to the neoliberal bourgeois cosmos of fragmentation, individualist warfare, free- playing decentred monads, and a regime of indeterminacy and contingency. This ironic turn damages postcolonialism’s claim to liberate humans from determinisms and essentialisms of all kinds.
I think the fundamental error may be traced to two sources whose historical matrix I have alluded to earlier. We have, first, the inability to conceptualise mediation or connections in a dialectical manner, substituting instead a seriality of differences whose equivalence or solidarity remains unpredictable; and second, entailed by the first premise, the incapacity to conceive of the conjunctural moment of society as inscribed in the uneven or unequal development of the world-system. Uneven development involves the inescapable polarisation of the world into peripheral and central economies, tied with the intrinsic contradiction between labor and capital and the international division of labor whose boundaries were laid by the history of European colonialism and later by finance or monopoly capital. Why theorise mediation and uneven development in a precise historicised fashion? Because our intent is to “master” and so escape the “nightmare of history and to win a measure of
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control over the supposedly blind and natural ‘laws’ of socioeconomic fatality”. As Fredric Jameson suggests, historical reconstruction, “the positing of global characterisations and hypotheses, the abstraction from the ‘blooming, buzzing’ confusion of immediacy, was always a radical intervention in the here-and-now and the promise of resistance to its blind fatalities” (35).
From a historical-materialist perspective, the dynamic process of social reality cannot be grasped without comprehending the connections and the concrete internal relations that constitute the totality of its objective determinations. Several levels of abstraction have to be clarified among which is the relation between the knowing subject and the surrounding world (both nature and the built environment) knowledge of which is desired. Truth in this tradition comes from human practice, the intermediary between consciousness and its object; and it is human labor (knowing and making as a theorised synthesis) that unites theory and practice. As Lenin puts it, everything is mediated and connected by transitions that unite opposites, “transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property, into every other” so that “the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal” (132). The reciprocal interaction of various levels of formal abstractions has been elaborated by Bertell Ollman under the categories of “metamorphosis” and contradictions. These levels of abstract mediation, however, need to be transcoded into their concrete manifestation without necessarily succumbing to the one-sided immediacy of empiricism or pragmatism. Otherwise, what Fabian (1983) calls the allochronic orientation of Eurocentric thought with its taxonomic, non-coeval representation of Others would continue to prevail.
What is required next is to confront the second-order mediations which are historically specific and transcendable, namely, the market, money, private property, the transformation and subordination of use-value to exchange value — in short, the sources of alienation and perversion of what Meszaros calls “productive self-mediation” of individuals in social life. Alienation on the level of national struggle can only be resolved in the colonised people’s conquest of full sovereignty, “the socialisation of the principal means of production” (13) and reproduction in a socialist transformation. Indeed, it is this historical phenomena of alienation and reification that poststructuralist thought hypostatises into the nihilism of modernity, converting mediation (transition) into serial negation and occluding its prefigurative, transformative phase or aspect. Contradiction, sublation, and overdetermination do not figure as meaningful concepts in postcolonial theorising.
Without a concept of totality, however, the notion of mediation remains vacuous and useless. All determination is mediation, Roy Bhaskar reminds us in his magisterial study Dialectic (1993). Totality in its historical concreteness becomes accessible to us in the concept of uneven development, and its corollary ideas of overdetermination (or, in Samir Amin’s thought,
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“underdetermination”), combined development in the coexistence of various modes of production in a specific social formation, or in another framework, Wallerstein’s world-system mapping of periphery and core societies. We have come to accept as a commonplace the differential rhythm of development of societies, the uneven pace due to presence or absence of cumulative growth in the use of production techniques, labor organisation, and so on, as reflected in Marx’s inquiry into Russia and Asia as mentioned earlier. It is indeed difficult to explain how the old imperial polities of Britain and France were superseded by Germany and the United States, and how West Germany and Japan have occupied dominance today.
Exemplum from the Boondocks
Uneven development results from the peculiar combination of many factors which have marked societies as peripheral or central (Novack; Lowy). In many societies shaped by colonial conquest and imperial domination, uneven and combined development is discernible in the co-presence of a modern sector (usually foreign dominated or managed by the state) and a traditional sector characterised by precapitalist modes of production and ruled by a merchant capitalist and feudal/tributary ruling classes. In these peripheral formations, we find a lack of cumulative growth, backward agriculture limited by the lack of an internal market, with the accumulated money capital diverted from whatever industrial enterprises there are into speculative activities in real estate, usury, and hoarding (Mandel 1983). This unsynchronised and asymmetrical formation, with variations throughout the postcolonial geography of post-World War II ex- colonised countries, serves as the ideal habitat for “magic realism” and wild absurdist fantasies (Borges, Cortazar), as well as all those cultural expressions and practices described as hybrid, creolised, syncretic, ambivalent, multiplicitous, and so on, which postcolonial theory and criticism have labored so hard to fetishise and reify as permanent, ever-recurring, and ineluctable qualities (San Juan 1998).
Prior to the disruption of the postcolonial impasse and in order to situate postcolonial difference in the Philippine context — a classic example of uneven non-synchronic formation where contradictory modes of production and life- forms coexist, I would like at this point to concretise the crisis of bourgeois metaphysics and its political implications in contemporary Filipino expression.
In general, imperialism and the anarchy of the “free market” engender incongruities, non-synchronies, the Other inscribed in liminal and interstitial space. Capital accumulation is the matrix of unequal power (Hymer; Harvey) between metropolis and colonies. The historical reality of uneven cultural development in a US colonial and, later, neocolonial society like the Philippines is evident in the visible Americanisation of schooling, mass media, literature in English, and diverse channels of mass communication (advertisements, TV and films, etc.). In my previous work (The Philippine Temptation, History and
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Form, and other books), I have described the domination of US symbolic capital on literary and critical discourse since the annullment of the Spanish language and the indigenous vernaculars as viable media of expression in the public sphere at the start of US colonisation in 1898. The ascendancy of the hegemonic discourse of liberal utilitarianism expressed in English prevailed throughout the period of formal independence and the Cold War until the martial law period (1972–1986) when an authoritarian order reinforced semi-feudal and tributary norms. Meanwhile, Philipino (now “Filipino”) has become a genuine lingua franca with the popularity of local films and television serials, aided by the prohibitive costs of imported Western cultural fare. Backwardness now helps hi- tech corporate business. Since the seventies, globalisation has concentrated on the exploitation of local tastes and idioms for niche marketing while the impact of the Filipino diaspora in the huge flow of remittances from OCWs (Overseas Contract Workers) has accentuated the discrepancy between metropolitan wealth and neocolonial poverty, with the consumerist habitus made egregiously flagrant in the conspicuous consumption of domestic helpers returning from the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and other places with balikbayan boxes. Unbeknownst to observers of this postmodern “cargo cult”, coffins of these dead workers (one of them martyred in Singapore, Flor Contemplacion, achieved the status of national saint) arrive in Manila at the rate of five or six a day without too much fanfare.
In addition to the rampant pillage of the national treasury by corrupt Filipino compradors, bureaucrat-capitalists and landlords, the plunder of the economy by transnational companies has been worsened by the “structural conditionalities” imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Disaggregation of the economy has registered in the disintegration of ordinary Filipino lives due to forced migration because of lack of employment, recruiting appeals of governments and business agencies, and the dissolution of the national homeland as psychic and physical anchorage with the triumph of commodity- fetishism. I want to illustrate the phenomena of postcolonial hybridity as a symptom of uneven capitalist incursions in a story by Fanny Garcia (1994), “Arriverderci”, written in 1982 at the height of the Marcos-induced export of Filipina bodies to relieve widespread immiseration and curb mounting resistance.
Symptomatic of a disaggregated and uneven socioeconomic formation are the narratives spun around the trauma of dislocation undergone by over 7 million OCWs, mostly women. This unprecedented haemorrhage of labor- power, the massive export of educated women whose skills have been downgraded to quasi-slavish domestic help, issues from a diseased body politic. The marks of the disease are the impoverishment of 75% of the population, widespread corruption by the minuscule oligarchy, criminality, military/police atrocities, and the intensifying insurgency of peasants, women, workers, and
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indigenous communities. The network of the patriarchal family and semifeudal civil society unravels when women from all sectors (except the very rich) alienate their “free labor” in the world market. While the prime commodity remains labor-power (singularly measured here in both time and space especially for lived-in help), OCWs find themselves frozen in a tributary status between serfhood and colonising petty bourgeois households. Except for the carceral condition of “hospitality” women in Japan and elsewhere overseen by gangsters, most Filipinas function as indentured servants akin to those in colonial settler societies in seventeenth-century Virginia, Australia, Jamaica, and elsewhere. But unlike those societies, the Middle East, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and other receiving countries operate as part of the transnationalised political economy of global capitalism. These indentured cohorts are witness to the dismemberment of the emergent Filipino nation and the scattering of its traumatised elements to state-governed territories around the planet.
Garcia’s ascetic representation of this highly gendered diaspora yields a diagnostic illustration of postcolonial schizophrenia. In the opening scene, Garcia describes Filipina domestics in Rome, Italy, enjoying a weekend break in an excursion outside the city. One of these domestics, Nelly, meets a non- descript compatriot, Vicky (Vicenta), who slowly confides to Nelly her incredible experience of physical hardship, loneliness, and frustrated ambitions, including her background in her hometown, San Isidro. Vicky also reveals her fear that her employer might rape her, motivating her to inquire about the possibility of moving in with Nelly whose own crowded apartment cannot accommodate Vicky. Spatial confinement resembles incarceration for those who refuse the oppression of live-in contracts, the latter dramatised in Vicky’s earlier experience.
After trust has been established between them, Nelly learns that Vicky has concealed the truth of her dire situation from her relatives back home. Like others, Vicky has invented a fantasy life to make her folks happy. After a short lapse of time, Nelly and her companions read a newspaper account of Vicky’s suicide — according to her employer, she leaped from the fifth floor of the apartment due to a broken heart caused by her sweetheart, a Filipino seaman, who was marrying another woman. Nelly of course knows the real reason: Vicky was forced to kill herself to save her honor, to refuse bodily invasion by the Italian master. Nelly and her friends contribute to send Vicky’s body back to the Philippines. When asked how she would explain her death to the next-of-kin, everyone agrees that they could not tell the truth. Nelly resolves their predicament:
“Ganito na lang”, sabi ni Nelly, “nabangga ang kotseng sinasakyan n’ya”.
Sumang-ayon ang lahat.
Pumunta sa kusina si Nelly. Hawak ang bolpen at nakatitig sa blangkong
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putting papel na nakapatong sa mesa, naisip ni Nelly, dapat din niyang tandaan: sa San Isidro, si Vicenta at Vicky ay si Bising (1994, 334–35). [“Let’s do it this way”, Nelly said”, she died when the car she was in crashed”.
Everyone agreed.
Nelly entered the kitchen. Holding a ballpoint pen and staring at the
blank piece of paper on the table, Nelly thought that she should also
remember: in San Isidro, Vicenta and Vicky were also Bising.]
In the triple personas of Vicky held in the mind of Nelly, we witness the literal and figurative diaspora of the Filipino nation in which the manifold layers of experience occurring at different localities and temporalities are reconciled not in the corpse but in the act of gendered solidarity and national empathy. Without the practices of communication and cooperation among the Filipina workers, the life of the individual OCW is suspended in thrall, a helpless fragment in the nexus of commodity circulation.
What I want to highlight, however, is the historicising power of this narrative. Marx once said that capitalism conquers space with time. The urgent question is: can its victims fight back via a counterhegemonic strategy of spatial politics? Here the time of the nationalising imagination overcomes displacement by global capital. Fantasy becomes complicit with truth when Nelly and her friends agree to shelter Vicky’s family from the terror of patriarchal violence located in European terrain. We see that the routine life of the Filipino community is defined by bureaucratised space that seems to replicate the schedule back home; but the chronological itinerary is deceptive because while this passage lures us into a calm compromise with what exists, the plot of attempted rape and Vicky’s suicide transpires behind the semblance of the normal and the ordinary:
...Ang buhay nila sa Italia ay isang relo — hindi nagbabago ng anyo, ng direksiyon, ng mga numero.
Kung Linggo ng umaga, nagtitipon-tipin sa loob ng Vaticano, doon sa pagitan ng malalaking haliging bato ng colonnade....
Ang Papa’y lilitaw mula sa isang mataas na bintana ng isang gusali, at sa harap ng mikropono’y magsasalita’t magdadasal, at matapos ang kanyang basbas, sila’y magkakanya-kanyang grupo sa paglisan. Karaniwa’y sa mga parke ang tuloy. Sa damuhan, sa ilalim ng mga puno, ilalabas ang mga baon. May paikot-ikot sa mga grupo, nagtitinda ng pansit na lemon ang pampaasim, litsong kawali na may ketsup, at iba pa. Umpisa na ng piknik. Magkakasama ang mga Ilokano, ang mga Batanggenyo, at iba pang hatiang batay sa wika o lugar. O kaya’y ang mga propesyonal at di- propesyonal. Matapos ang kainan, palilipasin ang oras sa pamamagitan ng kuwentuhan o kaya’y pagpapaunlak sa isang nagpapasugal. Malakas ang tayaan. Mga bandang alas-tres o alas-kuwatro ng hapon, kanya-kanyang
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alis na ang mga pangkat. Pupunta sa mga simbahang pinagmimisahan ng mga paring Pinoy na iskolar ng kani-kanilang order. Sa Ingles at Pilipino ang misa, mga awit at sermon. Punong-puno ang simbahan, pulos Pilipino, maliban sa isa o dalawa o tatlong Puti na maaring kaibigan, nobio, asawa o kabit ng ilang kababayan.
Matapos ang misa, muling maghihiwalay ang mga pangkat-pangkat. May pupunta muli sa mga parke, may magdidisco, may magsisine. Halos hatinggabi na kung maghiwa-hiwalay patungo sa kanya-kanyang tinutuluyan.... (329–30)
[Their lives in Italy resembled a clock — never changing in shape, direction or numbers.
On Sunday mornings they would gather inside the Vatican, there between the huge rocky pillars of the colonnade...
The Pope would appear at a window of the tall building, and would pray and speak in front of a microphone, and after his benediction, they would all join their groups upon leaving. Usually they head for the parks. On the grass, under the trees, they will spread their packs. Some will circle around selling noodles with lemon slices, roast pork with catsup, and other viands. The picnic begins. Ilocanos congregate among themselves, so do those from Batangas, and others gather together according to language or region. Or they socialise according to profession or lack of it. After eating, they will pass the time telling stories or gambling. Betting proceeds vigorously. Toward three or four in the afternoon, the cohorts begin their departure. They head toward the churches where Filipino priests, scholars of their orders, hold mass in English or in Filipino, together with songs and sermon. The churches overflow, all Filipinos, except for one, two or three whites, who may be friends, sweethearts, wives, or partners. After the mass, the groups will again separate. Some will return to the parks, others will go to discos or moviehouses, until around midnight they will go their separate individual ways to wherever they are staying.]
This surface regularity conceals fissures and discontinuities that will only disclose themselves when the death of Vicky shatters the peace and complicates the pathos of indentured domesticity.
The most telling symptom of uneven development caused by the new international division of labor is the schizoid nature of Filipina response to serf- like confinement. This response has been celebrated by postcolonial critics as the exemplary act of “sly civility”, a tactic of outwitting the enemy by mimicry and ambivalent acts. We read a tabulation of this tactic in Garcia’s description of Nelly’s plans to tour Europe by touching base with friends and acquaintances throughout the continent, an escape from the pressure of responsibility for Vicky or accountability to anyone. Here is the cartography of Nelly’s “imagined community” which generates the deterritorialised citizen of global capital. The
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space of recreation may relieve the pressure of alienated time, but it cannot ultimately resolve the dilemma of diaspora. Asked by her friends what’s going on between her and Vicky, Nelly simply smiles and shrugs her shoulders:
Mas mahalaga sa kanya ang mga tanong ng sarili. Pulos Roma na lamang ba? Aling sulok at kanto pa ng Roma ang hindi niya natatapakan? Pulos pagkakatulong na lamang ba? Hindi siya nagpunta sa Europa upang paganapin lamang ang sarili sa mga istorya ng pagliliwali kung Linggo, na kabisadong-kabisado na niya ang simula’t dulo. Hindi siya nangibang bansa upang makinig lamang sa mga usapang nakaangkla sa mga “nanay”, ‘tatay”, “anak”, mga gawaing-bahay, hinaing at problema. Hindi upang sundan ang buhay at kasaysayan ng isang Vicenta.
Ipinasya niyang umpisahan na ang paglilibot sa Europa. May sapat na siyang naiipon para sa ibang bansa. Bibili siya ng Eurail pass, mas mura sa tren. Unahin kaya muna niya ang France, West Germany at Netherlands? May mga kaibigan siya doon. Nasa Paris si Orly, may kuwartong inuupahan. Nagpunta ito sa Paris bilang iskolar, artist-observer sa loob ng tatlong buwan, ngunit tulad niya, hindi na ito bumalik sa Pilipinas. Ngayo’y nabubuhay ito sa pamamagitan ng pagpipinta at pagiging potograpo. Sa Frankfurt, makikituloy siya kay Nora at sa Alemang napangasawa nito, dating penpal. Nasa Amsterdam si Angie, kahera sa department store, at ka-live-in ang isang Dutch. Sapat na marahil ang isang buwang paglalakbay. Saka naman iplano ang mga ibang bansa. Sinulatan niya ang tatlong kaibigan (333).
[More valuable for her are the questions addressed to herself. Am I to be confined to Rome alone? What corner and crossroad of Rome has she not covered already? Am I to be tied to domestic work? She didn’t travel to Europe in order to let herself play a role in the stories of killing time on Sundays, whose beginning and end she knew thoroughly. She didn’t go abroad only to listen to talk anchored to “mother”, “father”, “child”, domestic chores, grumblings and problems. Nor to pursue the life and history of a certain Vicenta.
She decided to start her travels around Europe. She already has enough savings for the trip to other countries. She’ll buy a Eurail pass, it’s cheaper by train. Should she begin with France, West Germany, and the Netherlands? She has friends there. Orly is in Paris, with a rented room. He went to Paris as a scholar, artist-observer, for three months, but like her he never returned to the Philippines. Now he’s supporting himself by painting and photography. In Frankfurt she’ll stay with Nora and her German husband, her former penpal. Angie is in Amsterdam, a cashier at a department store, with a live-in Dutch partner. Perhaps a month’s journey will be enough. She’ll plan visiting other lands later. She wrote her three friends.]
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In the above passage, we discern the contradictions immanent in Filipina agency as she negotiates her position in the locus between wage-labor under serf-like conditions and the mobility promised by the “free market” of late capitalist Europe. This situation may provide us the source of scaling the postcolonial dilemma suffered by Filipinas, conceiving scale as (in Neil Smith’s definition) “the geographical resolution of contradictory processes of competition and co-operation” (1993, 99). But the chance for an escape to resolve the contradictions is foiled for the moment when Nelly and her friends learn of Vicky’s death. Contrary to postcolonial alibis concerning decentered subject-positions, Garcia’s narrative posits an interrogation of presumed agency: is the charm of adventure enough to heal the trauma of dislocation and obviate the terror of rape? Are the opportunities of consuming images and experiences offered by the wages of indentured labor enough to compensate for the nullity of citizenship and the loss of intimacy and the support of family and community? Is this postcolonial interstitiality the new name of servitude under the aegis of consumerist transnationalism where physical motion transcending fixed locality becomes a surrogate for the achievement of dignity and freedom?
What is clear is the dialectical unity of opposites embedded in the geopolitical predicament of OCWs captured in Garcia’s narrative (for a hermeneutics of OCW stories, see San Juan 1998b ). The Filipino diaspora here is defined by the Filipinas’ social interaction and its specific differentiated geography, an interaction characterised by family/kinship linkages as well as solidarity based on recursive acts of mutual aid and struggle for survival. The political struggle over the production of scale in global capitalism is translated here in Nelly’s mapping of her coordinates as she plans her tour of Europe, a translation of abstract space into places indexed by Filipino friends and acquaintances. This is not postcolonial ambivalence or hybridity because it is centered on the organic bonds of experience with oppressed compatriots; Nelly’s affiliation with Vicky is tied to a web of shared stories of intimacy, dehumanisation and vulnerability. The Eurocentric fabrication of Otherness is qualified if not neutralised by Nelly’s collectively assigned task of communication with Vicky’s family, a task that prefigures and recuperates even if only in symbolic terms the interrupted struggle for national autonomy and sovereignty on the face of disintegration by transnational corporate aggression.
Postcolonial disjunctures are reproduced by acts of revolt and sustained resistance. Such acts constitute a bad example for metropolitan citizen subjects of industrialised democracies. Racism still prevents them from uniting with their victims. While it would be exorbitant to claim that global capitalism has been dealt a blow by Filipina agencies of coping and life-maintenance, I would suggest here that this mode of representation, which I would categorise as a type of allegorical realism common to progressive Filipino writers and artists, enables us to grasp the totalising virtue of Filipino nationalism as it inhabits
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diasporic subjects. Perhaps this virtue manifests itself only as a potential reservoir of energies that can be mobilised in crisis situations; still, the cultural and ideological resistance of neocolonised Filipinos overseas testify to its immanent presence in what Lenin called “the weak links” of the imperialist chain around the planet, not only in the peripheral dependencies but also in the margins now transposed to the centers of empire.
Beyond Postcolonial Alibis
In my view, this historical conjuncture of uneven and combined development can only be grasped by a dialectical assessment of imperialism such as those propounded by Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, and others in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. It was Lenin who remedied the classical limitation of the Second International and the social democratic parties by integrating in his idea of world revolution the revolt of the industrial working class in Europe with the mass uprisings of small colonised nations, as well as peasant revolts against landowners. Lenin’s post-1914 writings — the Hegel Notebooks, the article “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-determination”, and so on — theorised how the “particular” of national liberation movements can, under certain conditions, become the road to the universal of socialism. In this discourse, mediation assumes the form of contradiction between oppressed peoples in the colonies and oppressor nations. As Kevin Anderson argues, “Lenin’s theory of imperialism has become dialectical in the sense of pointing not only to the economic side of imperialism but also to a new revolutionary subject arising from within global imperialism: national liberation movements” (1995, 142). Unless we can improve on Lenin’s theory of national liberation with its processual or dialectical materialist method, we will only be indulging in postcolonial verbal magic and vertiginous tropology that mimics Bhabha, Appadurai, and their epigones.
It would be pedagogically catalysing here to invoke the figure of Amilcar Cabral in order to illustrate a Marxist-Leninist reading of the cultural problematique in a “third world” site like the Philippines. Notwithstanding the resurgence of armed anti-imperialist insurgency in “third world” neocolonies like Colombia, the Philippines, Mexico (Chiapas), the moment of Cabral might be deemed irretrievably remote now from our present disputes. However, the formerly subjugated peoples of colour grudgingly acknowledged by Western humanism (following Kant’s axiom of rational autonomy and Adam Smith’s notion of the “free market”) cannot be simply pacified by reforming capitalism’s international division of labor. The postcolonial cult of the Leibnizian conceit (Harvey), in which alterity and marginality automatically acquire subversive entitlement, has carried out the containment of Marxist ideas and ideals of national liberation by an aestheticising manoeuver analogous to what Neil Larsen discerned in cultural studies: “a subtle transfer of emancipatory aims from the process of objective social transformation go the properly ‘cultural’
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task of intervention in the ‘subject’-forming play of discourse(s)” (Reading 201). But as long as capitalism produces uneven and polarising trends in all social formations, there will always exist residual and emergent agencies challenging the reign of “the law of value” and postmodern barbarism (Amin, 1998).
We cannot of course return wholesale to the classic period of national liberation struggles indexed by the names of Nkrumah, Cabral, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevarra, Fanon, and others. My purpose in bringing up Cabral is simply to refute the argument that historical materialist thinking is useless in grasping the complexity of colonialism and its aftermath. Would shifting our emphasis then on studying the subaltern mind remedy the inadequacies and limitations of postcolonial theory? I might interpolate here the view of two Australian scholars, Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, who believe that the limits of the postcolonial/diasporic trajectory can be made up by the voices of the indigenous and the subaltern within the context of the “relativisation of all discursive self/ other positionings within the Anglophone cultural studies community” (386). This intervention in the site of textual-discursive representation is salutary, but the problem of articulating a counter-hegemonic strategy focusing on the “weak links” (where the IMF/World Bank’s “structural conditionalities” continue to wreak havoc) remains on the agenda.
It might not be excessive to situate postcolonialism as a symptomatic recuperation of finance capital, at best the imaginary resolution of contradictions between exploited South and exploiting North, within the altered geopolitical alignments of the world-system.
Within its epochal time-period, the “third world” was a viable conceptualisation of the nationalist bourgeois struggles that led to the independence of India, Ghana, the Philippines, Egypt, Indonesia and other nation-states after World War II. The classic postcolonial states created the Bandung coalition of non-aligned states which gave a semblance of unity to the “third world”. However, United States hegemony during the Cold War continued until the challenge in Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere. The last expression of “third world” solidarity, the demand for a “New International Economic Order” staged in the United Nations, came in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973; but the OPEC nations, with their political liabilities, could not lead the “third world” of poor, dependent nations against US hegemony. Notwithstanding the debacle in Vietnam and the series of armed interventions in the Caribbean and elsewhere, US world supremacy was maintained throughout the late seventies and eighties by economic-cum-military force. This mode of winning consent from the “third world” used monetarist policies that caused lower export earnings and high interest rates, reducing these polities to dependencies of the IMF/WB and foreign financial consortia. The defeat of the “third world” bloc in 1982 allowed the US-led Western bloc to exploit
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“international civil society” into a campaign against global Keynesianism. From 1984 to the nineties, however, global Reagonomics, the instability of the financial markets, the fall of the dollar, worsening US deficit, and so forth, posed serious problems to the US maintenance of hegemony over the Western bloc. Despite the success, and somewhat precipitous collapse, of the Asian Newly-Industrialising Countries, the “third world” as an independent actor, with its own singular interests and aspirations, has virtually disappeared from the world scene. What compensates for this disappearance is postcolonial theory and criticism whose provenance owes much to finance capital than is heretofore acknowledged or understood, a disappearance masked by the carnivalesque regime of simulacra and simulations that, despite its current hegemony, fails to repress, I daresay, the labor of the “old mole” burrowing underground. Wherever neocolonialism (Woddis) prevails, the ideal and practice of national liberation will continue to thrive.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?” Late Imperial Culture. Ed. Roman de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1995, pp.11-32.
———. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
Ahmad, Eqbal. “Revolutionary Warfare and Counterinsurgency”. National Liberation. Ed. Norman Miller and Roderick Aya. New York: The Free
Press, 1971, pp. 137-213.
Amin, Samir. Imperialism and Unequal Development. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1977.
———. Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989.
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