Chapter 2

Metropolitan Manila, City and Crisis

Evolution and Consolidation

Evolution: Manila, Colonial Citadel, Anno

1571-1898

Manila’s career as predominant centre of the urban

hierarchy began with the Spanish conquest of the
Philippines some 400 years ago. Since then the
capital has maintained its primate position. Manila’s
predominance, function and size developed from its
position at the apogee of three sets of hierarchically
organised activities: commerce, political
administration and religion. This situation evolved as
a result of Manila’s role in linking super-ordinate
international organisations - world markets, the
colonial system and the Catholic Church - to matching
internal ones. Within the archipelago, these
organisations and activities were extended outward
(geo-graphically) and downward (organisationally)
from the city rather than vice versa.1
During the early chapter of colonial sattelisation
(1565-1813), these vertical and horizontal linkages

1
 Developing Dystopia

were to a large extent confined to Manila and its

surrounding environs. Overall, the archipelago=s
integration into the world economy was Aslow,
uneven, protracted and non-cumulative.@
After initial colonial forays in the 1560s, Manila
became the remotest outpost of Spain=s Latin
American empire, administered via Mexico and
marginally linked to Europe through the trans-Pacific
galleon trade. While the islands offered few
incentives for intensive exploitation of local
resources,2 Manila was, however, well-situated to
serve Spain in her bid for an Asian trading empire in
the first half of the 17th century. In the intervening
two centuries, Manila functioned as transhipment port
and entrepot in the lucrative China-Acapulco trade in
which Chinese silk and luxury goods brought in by
junks changed hands with Mexican silver bullion and
Peruvian gold.3 The profitability of this highly
speculative enterprise brought untold fortunes to its
principal protagonists - overseas Spaniards in Manila
and Mexico, and religious corporations 4 - and
underwrote the capricious consumption of the
colonial elite, as well as the construction of much of
Manila=s impressive urban infrastructure.
The galleon trade provided the initial stimulus
for the early expansion of the colonial city, carving
the occupational and ethnic outlines of the urban
class hierarchy. By 1650, Manila and its arrabales 5
had grown into an area with a population of
approximately 42,000: 7,350 Spaniards in
Intramuros, the fortified central portion of the city
otherwise known as the Walled City; a thriving

2
City and Crisis

Chinese community of 15,000 in the Parian, outside

the walls; and 20,000 native Filipinos in suburban
settlements.6
While the trade delivered certain economic
dividends and tangible prosperity to the capital, the
mercantilist bent of colonial policy in force sealed the
fate of the larger colonial economy to inertia and
chronic fiscal deficits. As early as 1586, the licentiate
of the Audencia (court) of Manila complained of
Spanish coins streaming out into China. Chinese
fabrics were re-exported to Mexico in large quantities,
he said, in a way that was pricing out home products
and throttling the Spanish colony and finances at
large. The external compulsion of the exchange
economy and the centrifugal forces it generated
militated against the development of domestic
industries and markets, and aborted the prospects for
local capital accumulation. 7
Moreover, the magnetism of quick returns from
the trade dissuaded the Spaniards from productive
investments, who therefore neglected to develop the
agricultural potential of the colony. 8 That chronic
insolvency of the colonial administration up to mid-
18th century were tided over through annual
subsidies or situados from Mexico9 and coercive
extractions from the local population, testified to the
limited fiscal revenues derived from the trade.
However, official lethargy vis-a-vis the colony=s
internal economy implied by no means administrative
indifference. While the mercantilism of that period
dictated in large part the overriding predisposition to
trade, the extraction of tribute and corvee labour and

3
 Developing Dystopia

the proselytising tradition of Spanish colonial rule

required the systematic extension of administrative
control and political and ecclesiastical power. This
required the super-imposition of coercive feudal
institutions unto the communal and Aproto-feudal@ 10
subsistence economies of pre-conquest native
society.
The combined forms of reduccion, or forced
resettlements, encomienda-system, tribute, polos y
servicios or labour pools, bandalas or forced purchase
of agricultural products, the co-optation and
assimilation of village chiefs and clan-leaders into the
colonial apparatus,11 and the concept of private
property - all gradually undermined the autonomy of
indigenous societies and facilitated both their
integration and the process of colonial surplus
extraction. The key thrust of coercive resource
mobilisation during the early colonial phase was to
shore up the operational costs of the Manila-based
bureaucracy and religious hierarchy, their local
counterparts and the capital=s growing urban
population. The onerous burden that this modus
operandi levied on the rural producers triggered off
sporadic peasant revolts.
Colonial institutions of private property had still
more lethal and enduring impact on native society
and formed the lynchpin of massive usurpation of
communal peasant lands. The land issue stood at the
epicentre of rural social unrest during the entire span
of colonial rule. Spanish governor generals gave land
grants to Spaniards and the native principales (the
emerging indigenous elite recruited from the ranks of

4
City and Crisis

chieftains or datus) which often included communal

lands. By mid-17th century mortgages became more
common and foreclosures brought about more land
transfers and sales. For instance, land-holdings in the
jurisdiction of Tondo in the colonial capital were
divided into large estates owned by individual
Spaniards and religious corporations, crown land and
medium-size land-holdings of principales, and small-
peasant lands.
By the 18th century, the religious orders
evolved into the biggest landowners around Manila.
The rise of large estates or haciendas was stimulated
by the increasing demand for provisions as a result of
the city=s expanding population. Conversely, the
enlargement of hacienda land hastened the
dissolution of native communal lands. In 1723, a
report by a Royal land commissioner revealed that
most of the towns around Manila no longer had
communal land-holdings. Wholesale land-grabbing
sparked widespread protests which culminated in the
landmark agrarian revolt of 1745. Much of the anti-
clerical theme of the nationalist movement that
would eventually lead to the Philippine Revolution of
1896 can be traced to the 1745 revolt against the
religious estates around Manila and its surrounding
provinces.12
Emulsifying from the vortex of changes
generated by Spanish feudalism and mercantilism,
were urban and rural class hierarchies with distinctive
ethnic features: a three-tiered rural hierarchy
consisting of Spanish priest, principalia or native
Acaciques@ and peasant masses juxtaposed to an

5
 Developing Dystopia

urban five-layered pyramid of Spaniards, Chinese

mestizo landowners, native principales, Chinese
artisans and merchants and the natives. These ethnic
and class divisions persisted well into the beginning
of the 19th century, with the Spanish clergy
constituting the leading instrument of power and
vehicle of exploitation.13
Towards the end of the 18th century, a dramatic
shift in the hitherto mercantilist and isolationist
orientation of colonial rule unfolded. Under the
governorship of Don Jose Basco y Vargas (1776-1787)
and with Madrid=s imprimatur, a series of economic
reforms were unleashed to encourage direct and
systematic exploitation of the productive potentials of
the vast rural hinterland. State monopolies and
licenses were created and granted for the mono-
cultivation of various agricultural products (e.g.
cotton, indigo, coffee, cinnamon, pepper, tobacco and
sugar)14 in an effort to beef up the colonial
exchequer, which up until then had been plagued by
chronic deficits and dependence on Royal annuities.
Thus alongside the rice and corn-growing
haciendas devoted to food crops for domestic
consumption, a thriving export-crop sector emerged,
precipitating a modicum of industrial growth in Manila
and its periphery, and increasingly rivetted the rural
economy to the money economy of the urban
centres. Regional specialisation in export-agriculture
further spurred the expansion and improvement of
public works, inter-island shipping and
communication systems to facilitate the transport
and marketing of export crops.

6
City and Crisis

In 1789, Manila was opened to Asian shipping,

previously the exclusive turf of Chinese merchants,
but now even sanctioning European and American
vessels. In 1809, the first English commercial house
was established in Manila. 15 The revenues generated
by exports fuelled the importation of more foreign
goods for domestic consumption and further
development of the urban cash economy. 16 Following
in the backwater of this radical trend were the
rudimentary beginnings of rural and urban labour
proletarization.
Finally, the last nail on the coffin of waning
Spanish mercantilism was struck when the galleon
trade officially ended in 1813. The opening of
Manila=s ports to world trade the following year
heralded the advent of laissez faire in the colony;
which, on the one hand, signified the progressive
debacle of Spanish mercantile colonialism and the
rising clout of British and North American industrial
capitalism.
As an off-shoot to attendant commercial
liberalisation, a network of British and American
commercial houses mushroomed in Manila, supplying
needy credit to Filipino and Chinese mestizo
landowners and cultivators involved in the
agricultural and industrial export production boom. As
the scramble to gain control over land escalated
(insofar as the profitability of export commodity
production amplified the value of land as production
factor), so did the concentration of landownership in
the hands of still fewer individuals, as well as the
number of sharecroppers and landless agricultural

7
 Developing Dystopia

labourers, multiply.17
The activities of foreign traders broke the
commercial monopoly of the Spanish merchants and
enhanced Chinese control of the retail trade plus the
Chinese mestizo=s role in agricultural and industrial
development. While the Spaniards remained at the
political helm throughout the 1800s, they were
virtually transformed into economic strawmen by the
onslaught of Anglo-Chinese capital and
entrepreneurship. The archipelago was at this point
completely linked to the capitalist world market by
Britain. It became in effect, Aan Anglo-Chinese colony
flying the Spanish flag.@18
Manila stood at the crossroads of radical 19th
century economic transformation. The metropolis
began to function as the principal link between
market demand for raw materials in the more
developed and industrialising countries and the agro-
commodity producing regions of the archipelago.
Concomitantly, Manila became the hub through which
the colonial population gained access to goods
manufactured abroad. Across the city=s docks flowed
prodigious quantities of sugar, copra and coconut oil;
much of the world=s best cordage fibre, and billions
of Philippine cigars and handicraft products.19
Post-mercantilist and free-trade urban scenario
portrayed even more the accentuation of the colonial
capital=s centralising role as the axis of
communications, inter-regional, inter-island and
international maritime trade, financial, industrial
activities, over and above its traditional function as
fulcrum of administrative and ecclesiastical power.

8
City and Crisis

These added retouches were to complete the outlines

of Manila=s future growth as metropolitan mammoth.

Consolidation: Manila under US

Colonialism, “the dependency die is
cast”
US annexation of the Islands in 1898 and more
than forty years of colonial stewardship (1900-1941)
shifted the embryotic process of dependency from
the previous era to high gear. The infantile linkages
and mechanisms - e.g. primary commodity
production and trade, which initially provided the
beachhead for global capitalist integration of the
Philippines in the late mercantilist era - were
perfected and consolidated by the new colonial
masters, whose practices stemmed from the logic of
monopoly capitalist accumulation.
From this point on, the internal organisation of
production and the structures of class domination
became, to paraphrase Walton and Portes (1981),
Adirectly moulded by core capital ... investments
from abroad .. Were to permit routine extraction of
surplus value via international trade, unequal
exchange and fiscal indebtedness.@20 US core capital
imposed upon the archipelago the standard
silhouette of dependency, consigning its economy to
the classic role of raw material resource base and
market for manufactured capital and intermediate
goods.

9
 Developing Dystopia

During the period under review, the core-

periphery linkages fashioned by US colonialism
became so strongly welded indeed that the Philippine
economy responded with almost ventriloquist
precision to the conjunctural fluctuations of the North
American core economy. Internally, these ebb and
flow movements were matched inter-regionally and
inter-sectorally. The urban extension of this maxim is
lucidly furnished by the example of metropolitan
Manila=s development, as it expanded under US
colonial auspices in the interwar years.21

Consolidating the “Captive” Economy

At the threshold of Independence in 1945,

American High Commisioner Mcnutt, in a candid
confession before a US Congressional committee,
captured in a nut-shell the essence of Philippine
economic dependency sculptured by almost half a
century of colonial rule:22
AWhen we say trade in the Philippines, you
mean the national economy. It is a trading economy.
And I might and should say here and now that the US
managed it that way. We are responsible for the sole
dependence of the Philippines on the American
market. Our businessmen and our statesmen in the
past years allowed the Philippines to become
complete economic dependents of the US to a greater
degree than any single state of the Union is
economically dependent to the rest of the US.@

10
City and Crisis

Indeed, commerce and trade were at the apex of

the North American colonial agenda at the turn of the
century, which involved the annexation of the
Philippines in 1898, along with other leading sugar-
cane producers at the time - Cuba, Puerto Rico and
Hawaii. A significant rationale to the colonial
adventure was to circumvent US protectionist policies
toward sugar cane imports which American sugar
beet producers had frantically lobbied for. With
political sleight of hand, this hostility was
conveniently contained when the US enacted the
Payne-Aldrich Act of 1909 and the Underwood Simons
Act for years later, forging in effect US-Philippine
commercial relations approximating reciprocal free
trade.23
Although reciprocal free trade imposed quotas
on Philippine goods, it did guarantee Philippine
export production of primary tropical commodities
(e.g. hemp, sugar, cigar, copra and embroidery) a
sure market in the US. In the opposite direction,
manufactured goods from the core flowed to satisfy
domestic consumption in the periphery. Privileges
accorded to US imports practically flushed out foreign
competition from the Philippine import market,
eventually exacerbating total local dependence on
American goods. What seemed at first sight to be a
relation of Acomparative advantage@ became a
textbook case of Acomparative disadvantage,@ and
the repercussions of these trading relations on the
Philippine economy were debilitating.
In general, after Philippine products were
accorded duty free entry in 1909, the booms and

11
 Developing Dystopia

busts of the colonial economy tended with regularity

to synchronise with those of the US.24 With the free
trade in full swing, unrestricted capital mobility, high
profitability rates and greater demand for raw
materials in the industrial core economies, foreign
investments, particularly US, inundated the
agricultural export commodity sector and related
industries. The seizure of strategic sectors and
industries by core capital proceeded full steam
ahead. In 1932, and estimated 50% of capital
investments in the Philippines exclusive of real estate
and farmlands were of US origins; 33% of sugar
milling capacity was likewise American; US and
foreign capital controlled all coconut oil and
desiccated coconut processing industries and heavily
invested in the Manila import-export trade, in inter-
island and Philippine-West Coast steamship lines and
in Philippine railway bonds.25 US share of the total
value of Philippine trade soared considerably from
11% in 1900, 65% in 1920 eight years following the
elimination of quantitative restrictions, and 72% in
1937.
Free trade equated not only to Philippine
dependency to the American market, but to what
historian Norman Owen labelled Acolonial drain,@ a
drain on the country=s natural resources without
corresponding improvements in the balance of
payments. AIn each decade from 1901-1910 to 1931-
1940, the proportion of Philippine imports to exports
declined and over the full forty years roughly 10% of
total export earnings remained, or were sent abroad,
and thus were unavailable either for consumption or

12
City and Crisis

investments by the Filipinos.@ 26

Unequal exchange relations and the colonial
fetishism for primary commodity export trade and
production fertilised the soil of sectoral and social
Adisarticulation,@ a carry-over process which has
developed unabated ever since and formed the bases
of the post-colonial structural crisis. Reciprocal trade
thus produced a classic commodities export or
dependent economy in which the lion=s share of
capital generated by export production or invested
directly by foreign sources was captured by
something other than new or expanding industries
with above average productivity and above average
probability of stimulating growth in other sectors.
Capital generated by commodity export booms
tended as such toward export commodities
production and processing and speculation than
manufacturing. Moreover, many manufacturing
industries were heavily dependent on imported inputs
from the US.27
In the countryside, extensive regional crop
specialisation 28 and commercialisation of the
agricultural sector brought about by the export
booms accelerated the process of land concentration
in the hands of the rural oligarches and Acaciques,@
the liquidation of small peasant land holdings and
reversion to tenancy, and rural proletarisation. The
fortunes derived by the rural magnates from their
involvement in the export economy and their
ideological and political intimacies with the
occupation forces as junior managers in the colonial
bureaucracy, elevated this class of big landlords and

13
 Developing Dystopia

compradores to economic and political pre-eminence,

a position they would continue to enjoy even after
formal US withdrawal from the Philippines. Well-
ensconced in the state bureaucracy after de-
colonisation, they would play the role of social base in
the US chartered transcript of economic dependence.

City and Cycles

Integration and dependency to the US core

economy were articulated among others in the
peculiar development of town and country. The
cyclical and episodic nature of core-periphery
capitalism rippled out inter-regionally and inter-
sectorally. Metropolitan Manila=s development under
US colonialism spectacularly and in sundry ways
conveyed the conjunctural twists and turns of
dependency.
Manila served as a central cog in the
coordination of vertical and horizontal linkages in
production, consumption, and most importantly, in
exchange. The basic fixtures and infrastructures for
the execution of this pivotal role were already well in
place at the turn of the century, and the imposition of
American control did little to alter them. Manila=s
early primacy and urbanisation in the pre-war years
had been a by-product of its enlarges role in handling
the export-import linkages between the archipelago
and the world economy; in distributing grain to food
deficit provinces; in national public administration

14
City and Crisis

and as prime locus for specialised professional

services and major business and financial institutions;
and in organising much of the secondary processing
of export commodities.
In varying degree, these activities brought
income to the city from elsewhere and through the
multiplier effect, created opportunities for those who
provided goods and services primarily to the
metropolitan population. 29 Quadrupling to more than
900,000 (1900-41) and rising from 2.9% of the
enumerated national population in 1903 to more than
5.1% in 1939, an increase fuelled by a 33.4% net-
immigration rate, Manila=s long-term population
growth illustrates the centripetal pull exerted by
metropolitan economy.30
The vulnerability of Manila=s economy and
occupational/employment structure (in the upper
circuit or formal sector) to conjunctural shifts may, at
the risk of oversimplification, be demonstrated
according to the following Aflow-chart.@31
Essentially, an increase in prosperity of core
industrial economies (the US in particular) triggered a
surge in demand for tropical products, which in turn
resulted in the rise of the volume of Philippine
commodity exports, and also a rise in export-related
employment in commerce, transportation,
warehousing, stevedoring and secondary
manufacturing industries disproportionately
concentrated in the capital and adjacent provinces. A
surge in export demand also led to the growth of
import volume, wholesaling and retailing handled in
the city. Public employment trends reflected the

15
 Developing Dystopia

same cycles because government revenues rose and

fell with the collection of taxes, wharfage fees and
import duties, which were then ultimately tied to the
fortunes of the export economy. Insofar as extensive
regional cash crop specialisation depended on the
development of transportation and marketing
structures, the twentieth century expansion of the rail
service and automotive roads ensured Manila=s
direct market dominance over other regions. The
growth in the volume of agricultural exports that
came in part as a result of regional crop
specialisation produced in turn commercial,
transportation and cargo-handling employment in
Manila.
The indisputable position of Manila over other
regions the nerve centre of the import-export nexus
is captured in the statistics: Manila handled 80-85%
of all reported exports in the 1917-19 boom period up
from a more usual 65-75% during the preceding
decade. Although dwindling to 33-48% of total
reported value by outflow by the 1930s. Manila=s
aggregate share of the export trade was still
substantial. By contrast, the city=s ethnically discrete
commercial communities (dominated by the Chinese)
retained as a group a near monopoly of the handling
of import goods and also of wholesaling and
distributing. Reported imports which landed at Manila
regularly exceeded 85% of the national total.32
Spatial over-concentration of commercial,
financial and industrial capital in the metropolis
coupled with the increasing Filipinisation and
expansion of the bureaucracy and public sector were

16
City and Crisis

reproduced in the formal urban labour market and

occupational structure, instructively revealed in the
1939 census figures on national and metropolitan
employment.33 For example, the city=s brewery
workers and printers represented more than three-
fourth of national employment in their trade, and
Manila had almost half of the national share of labour
employed in the shoe and cinelas (slippers)
industries. Among the export industries, cigar
manufacture and coconut oil pressing were highly
over-concentrated in the city. Manufacturing and
mechanical, professional and commercial pursuits
stand out for their high degree of agglomeration and
magnitude.
The growth of the city tended to be both
seasonal 34 and episodic, where the major episodes
tended to mimic the fluctuating external demand for
Philippine exports. Presumably, urbanisation was
further spurred by a rapidly escalating nominal wage
differential which saw urban wages rise with the
severe inflation that characterised the booms, while
rural wages stagnated. During the peak years of
1916-1917, inflation of food and housing costs
superseded increases in income. Consequently,
workers in the modern private sector frequently
struck to secure cost-of-living raises. The number of
workers striking during 1918 was exceeded only once
during the 1910s and 1920s. The same wartime
boom also magnified the difference between urban
and rural wages. Agricultural wages stagnated, and
thus nominal rural wages declined in relation to those
received by regularly employed urban industrial and

17
 Developing Dystopia

commercial workers. Rural wages remained less than

half of urban wages through at least the mid-20s.35
Despite the high cost of living in the city, the
widening wage disparities between Manila and the
rural areas coupled with the urban employment
boom, generated a surge of urban in-migration.
However, contractions in the export market, like in
1919-20 translated ferociously into massive
retrenchments of urban labour in the tobacco,
coconut oil milling and railroad sectors.36

City, Crisis and Class

What changes visited upon the occupational and

ethnic configuration of the urban class hierarchy of
Manila under the American colonial regime? Notable
among these changes were: the removal of the
Spanish bureaucratic class; the rapid expansion of
educational opportunity; the increasing technical
requirements and bureaucratisation in modern
sector; the considerable mobility into and within the
ranks of the middle class; and marked changes in the
ethnic division of labour as Filipinos displaced either
the Chinese or Westerners within selected niches of
the occupational structure. Although these
modifications were cumulative, rates of mobility were
highly dependent upon specific components of the
economy, consumer expenditures, government
revenues and labour demand in particular fields - all
of which were contingent on external demand for

18
City and Crisis

export commodities and to US policy to indigenise

and expand the colonial bureaucracy.37
Together with the American and foreign
capitalists and colonial administrators, the native big
landlord and comprador elite, the standard bearers of
the export economy, were snugly nestled at the apex
of the urban hierarchy. During the early years of the
20th century, these classes resided in the provinces,
but eventually a few of the most wealthy landlords
acquired homes in Manila. The trend towards
permanent or seasonal residence in the capital was
strengthened by several factors: by the locus of
political power there, outright election of the
members of the elite to the Philippine Assembly
(since 1907); concentration of higher educational
institutions and modern appurtenances of
cosmopolitan life.38
Within the parameters of the expanding
bureaucracy and commerce, an intermediate crust
developed - the urban middle class. Enlargement of
middle class white collar employment in both public
and private sectors is notably registered in aggregate
terms as professional services and teaching
categories, public service and clerical occupations
ballooned from 7,7% of metropolitan labour in 1903
to 18% in 1939. In contrast to significant rates of
career mobility within middle class ranks, urban
proletarian careers, specially in the manufacture and
mechanical categories, suffered immobility and
hardly grew during the same period. Indeed, wage
labour in the modern sector was most vulnerable to
the erratic nature of the export-dependent urban

19
 Developing Dystopia

economy.
Imbalances between wage labour demand and
supply - a result of the low rate of modern job
creation and the heavy rural-urban migration of
increasingly marginalised peasants and rural
labourers - perpetuated chronic labour surplus in the
metropolis. While some manual workers found stable
employment in modern firms, a great many did not
qualify nor were lucky enough to penetrate the
modern economy. Instead, they made their careers
as individual workers or part of the family-scale
enterprises in handicraft production, petty commerce,
traditional transportation, or small-scale service
activities in what is commonly dubbed as the informal
sector or Alower circuit,@ of the urban economy.
A third category was composed of workers who
seesawed between, on the one hand, intermittent
employment in construction, stevedoring and casual
labouring in modern firms, and extended
unemployment, on the other. Labour operated thus in
an increasingly fragmented market, traversing
invariably between its Aupper@ (formal) and
Alower@ (informal) circuits.39
By the end of the 1920s, gross incompatibilities
between rates of population growth and economic
opportunities in the metropolis had already reached
critical levels. In 1929, after seven years of export-led
prosperity, the Bureau of Labour estimated that rural-
urban migration had produced a Afloating labour
population (of 15,000) which cannot be absorbed by
the existing industries@ of the city. By 1940, alarmed
authorities believed that Aan increasing number of

20
City and Crisis

unemployed were drifting into the city@ at a time

when an estimated 35,000 adult residents already
were out of work.40
Escorting this anomalous relation were social
and ecological disarticulations which would become
mainstay features of the urban landscape throughout
the 20th century.: inter-class and inter-household
variances in income and expenditure, in individual
and collective consumption patterns. These patterns
graphically articulated in among others the
proliferation of informal shelter construction in the
squatter and slum settlements at the margins of the
metropolis - an exigent strategy employed by the
urban poor to cope with their limited access to formal
job, land and consumer markets, and the inflationary
rise in urban cost of living.
A public welfare survey among 3,600 families in
Tondo (Manila=s most densely populated working
class district) in the early 1920s disclosed that more
than 50% Alive in overcrowded quarters and
unsanitary surroundings,@ and that about A34% of
the children die before they reach school age.@41

Class Conflict, Collective Movements and

Collective Consumption42

Attempts wage labour quarters to correct social

Adisarticulations@ spawned by structural
dependency were facilitated by evolving working
class social organisations. Early proletarian class

21
 Developing Dystopia

solidarity was expressed in the proto-typical mutual

aid societies that proliferated under limited official
tolerance at the outset of US colonial rule. Mutual aid
societies, with goals and activities centring around
the collection of funds that would be held available
for contribution to affiliates, were the most common
type of workers= association. Their emergence was a
step in the diversification of Aassociational@ life
beyond kinship and extended support networks in
early 20th century Manila.
Later, these societies evolved into or were
superseded by trade unions skilled in the use of the
strike. By 1931, twenty four years after the official
recognition of trade union activities, radical labour
organisations had emerged, most among upper
circuit wage workers.
Innovations in worker=s collective organisations
turned widespread and scattered discontent among
urban proletarians into coherent collective action, the
frequency and magnitude of which reached
unprecedented heights. Major outbursts of collective
militance appeared to coincide well with the
conjunctural swings of the export dependent urban
economy and its attendant inflationary repercussions
on labour=s living costs and downward pressures on
wages.
Several classic cases point at such a
relationship. Strikes involving 1,000 or more workers
were unusual before World War I. After 1920, they
became increasingly common. Such strikes first broke
out in the cigar industry. When the industry was
revived after the crash of 1921, it was done by filling

22
City and Crisis

the niche for the cheapest cigars in the American

market. That fact together with the long decline in
overseas sales which followed led to reduced levels of
employment and considerable pressure on
management to depress wages. The result was
predictable: the walk-out of more than 5,000 tobacco
workers in March 1921 finally came when wages were
cut in response to the abrupt deflation and temporary
collapse of American demand for Philippine cigars.
This massive outpouring of militance among one
of the largest and most unionised labour sectors
portended larger struggles to come, one which
eventually culminated in the Great Cigar Strike of
1934. The strike began in mid-August with a
triggering incident at the Alhambra Cigar factory in
Tondo. It snowballed immediately into a social
phenomenon of considerable momentum, involving
perhaps 1,500 tobacco workers and the near
complete shut-down of 19 (of 29) cigar and cigarette
manufacturing firms for six weeks. The strike was
remarkable for its magnitude (more than 400,000
worker days lost), militancy, breath of participation
and for the issues publicly raised by various groups of
strikers. The magnitude of strikes increased over time
until the enactment of compulsory arbitration in
1936.
Coercive rule interfused, however, with
concessionary urban reforms designed to break the
momentum of surging proletarian and community
struggles and contain social turbulence in the inter-
war years. New directions toward more socialised
urban planning and management were introduced by

23
 Developing Dystopia

the colonial state. While early policies were confined

to massive slum/squatter clearance and limited
relocation campaigns, enforced in the pretext of
public health and safety, a flurry of experimental
labour tenement and land expatriation programs for
the poor, unfolded.
Piercing the slum skyline of Tondo, eleven
storey labour tenement buildings were unveiled by
the local government in 1938 in Barrio Vitas to cater
to labour=s demands for decent and affordable
modern urban housing. Meanwhile, by virtue of the
Homesite Act of 1936, city authorities were mandated
to expatriate lay as well as ecclesiastical urban
estates to be eventually subdivided into home lots or
small farms for the poor. Public housing agencies and
development corporations, like the People=s
Homesite Corporation (PHC) and the National Housing
Commission (NHC), were created to implement and
oversee urban shelter and development
commitments. However, the socially remunerative
promises evoked by these early programs were to
remain a pipe dream for the poor as low income
tenant families were gradually booted out by market
forces in favour of an urban middle class clientele.43

Notes

24
1
.Doeppers, 1984: 8.

2
.From the point of view of Spanish mercantilism, thriving essentially on the overseas trade in specie and luxury
commodities, disincentives to direct productive investments and exploitation may have been highlighted by among others
the archipelago=s remoteness for bulk trade; production of neither pepper nor spices; and the relatively sparse labour
resources for mines and plantations. See McCoy, 1982: 6.

.Fast & Richardson, 1983: 3.

4
.Religious orders participated in the trade as holders of bolletas (tickets issued per decree to members of the Spanish
community in Manila and represented an allotment of lading space on each galleon, serving as export licence) and as
suppliers of credit to merchants through the Obras Pias, which were religious foundations deriving their funds from bequests
of the wealthy. One-third of total Obras Pias funds were loaned out to support the Manila-Acapulco trade and another third to
serve as banks and marine insurance for the galloen trade. Caoili, 1988: 35-36.

5
.Suburbs outside the city walls, known as the districts of e.g. Ermita and Malate south of the Pasig River, and Sta. Cruz,
Tondo and Sampaloc north of the river traversing Manila. See Constantino, 1975: 58.

6
.Caoili, op cit: 24.

7
.Magallona in Feudalism and Capitalism, 1982: 20.

8
.Constantino a, op cit: 56-57.

9
.ibid: 56.

10
. In the most advanced societies, the beginnings of a division of labour had been established, but bondage took forms
different from the classical slave or serf types, which Constantino loosely labelled Aproto-feudal.@ With the exception of
Mindanao, where an Asiatic feudal mode had already emerged, the kaleidoscope of co-existing pre-conquest modes at
different nodes of development were characteristically rather subsistence economies than rigidly class-stratified and surplus
expropriative forms. In effect, Spanish colonialism accelerated the process of feudalisation. Ibid: 40-41; Ofreneo, 1981: 3.

11
.Reduccion involved the forced concentration of the dispersed and scattered native communities into larger and compact
ones, a practice perfected by the Spaniards in their Latin American crusades to expedite political, administrative and
conversion work by the Catholic clergy. The native population was then incorporated into large territorial jurisdictions, lorded
over by encomenderos (Spanish military crusaders and religious orders) who were sanctioned by the Royal Crown to collect
tribute. In the localities, village chieftains were recruited into the ranks of the bureaucracy as tribute collectors and junior
administrators and enjoyed certain privileges. From these colonial subalterns, were bred an intermediary class of native
landowning Acaciques@ - Aprincipalia.@ The tribute, polos y servicios and bandalas were used by the colonial government to
exploit the countryside to support the bureaucracy and religious orders based in Manila, leaving little surplus in the
hinterlands for any viable development. The polos required all male citizens except chieftains and their eldest sons between
16-60 to render services for 40 days, reduced to 15 days after 1884, every year in colonial public works projects and
shipbuilding. Tribute was levied on all natives from 19-60 years of age, save for the Spanish officialdom and the principalia,
from the early conquest period to 1884. While the bandala were annual quotas assigned to each province for the compulsary
sale of products to the government. Constantino, ibi: 50-53; Caoili, op cit: 29-30.

12
.Caoili, ibid: 31-32. Another historian acknowledges the accelerating trend of de jure land concentration and
monopolisation, and the attendant institutionalisation of tenancy spearheaded by the religious orders and native principalia
classes during the 17th century. He noted that by the end of Spanish occupation, the friars were in possession of more than
185,000 hectares or about 1/5 of total land under cultivation. Of this figure, around 11,000 hectares were in the vicinity of
Manila. Constantino, ibid: 64.

13
.ibid: 64-65.

14
.Fast & Richardson, op cit: 6-11; Ofreneo, op cit: 7.

15
.Caoili, op cit: 38-39.

16
.Ofreneo, op cit: 7.

17
.Caoili, op cit: 41; see also Wolters, 1984: 12.
18
.Constantino, op cit: 114-15.

19
.Doeppers, op cit: 4.

20
.Walton & Portes, 1981.

21
.This section benefited handsomely from Doepper=s seminal study of metropolitan Manila under US colonialism (1900-41).
Taking its cue heavily from his work, this section represents to a large extent a condensed summary of his most salient
findings and conclusions. Particularly, the correlations he made between the nature and pace of metropolitan development in
conjunction with colonial economy=s dependency on external demand; between the vicissitudes of economic dependency
and the political practice of colonial administration and occupational/ethnic divisions and structure of urban labour; impact of
conjunctural cycles in American economy on urban employment generation and demographic shifts. See Doeppers, op cit.

22
.Caoili, op cit: 58.

23
.On August 5 1909, the US Congress promulgated the Payne-Aldrich Act removing tariffs on the products of both countries,
but regulating the amount of Philippine exports that could enter the US. By 1913, all quantitative restrictions were eliminated
through the Underwood-Simons Act. See Ofreneo, op cit:15; Canlas, 1988: 8-9; Francisco & Fast, 1985: 211-18.

24
.Doeppers notes however a divergence in the anomalous boom in Philippine exports during the Great Depression (1933-
34), which was due to the protected market for sugar in the US and the all out attempt by individual sugar growers and
millers to increase their respective shares of the soon to be imposed export quotas. The export collapse at the end of 1934
was due to the American imposition of just such a quota on Philippine sugar entering without duty. Doeppers illustrates the
co-extensive fluctuations of the peripheral colonial export economy and core GNP in Fig. 4. Doeppers, op cit: 37.

25
.Doeppers, ibid: 9.

26
.Owen, quoted in Canlas, op cit: 9.

27
.Doeppers, op cit: 17-19; The author notes for instance that in the late 1910, the US provided 70% of Philippine textile
imports. Regarding the concept of sectoral and social disarticulation we borrow from Garramon & de Hanvry in Walton &
Portes (1981). In nucio, the two terms imply respectively the absence or diminutive linkages between economic sectors and
the lack of objective connections between profits and wages/between production and consumption.

28
.Between 1902 and 1939, the area devoted to export crops expanded from 469,353 to 1.6 million hectares, or more than
three times the original land area. Se Ofreneo, op cit: 16.

29
.Doeppers, op cit: 32.

30
.Ibid: 4-5; Caoili, op cit: 70-71.

31
.Doeppers, ibid: 10-37. (The analytical concepts of upper and lower circuit have been used by Santos (1979) according to
Doeppers, as alternative categories to dualistic descriptions of peripheral urban economies. They are loosely synonymous to
the more conventional concepts of formal resp. informal sectors, but unlike the latter imply a functionally overlapping
relation. Though these terms are a bit diffuse, they are broadly used here to describe fully commodified versus partially/non-
commodified urban labour/employment Amarkets@ or circuits. Ibid: 85-87)

32
.After 1919 Manila lost a sizeable proportion of the growing national export trade to principal secondary ports as a result of
changes in the commodity mix of export demand in the intervening decades. Ibid: 17.

33
.Table 1 on metropolitan employment as a percentage of the national total in 1939 was based on Doeppers calculations
from data given in the 1939 national census survey. His notations on Manila=s absolute employment and index of
concentration are deliberately excluded. Ibid: 33.

34
.Doeppers noted the existence of circular migration patterns which tended to magnify the cyclical aspect of urban growth.
There was at least some seasonal movement of labour to and fro the city, since the peak demand for labour in construction
and cargo-handling here was during January to mid-May dry season - the nadir point of the year for agricultural labour in the
nearby unirrigated rice-growing areas of the Central Plains. Ibid: 38.

35
.Ibid: 39-41.

36
.Ibid: 41-43.
37
.Ibid: 51.

38
.Ibid: 56-57.

39
.Ibid: 3-4. See Table 4: 53 for comparative data on metropolitan occupational structure.

40
.Ibid: 113.

41
.Villegas, op cit: 26.

42
.This section has drawn heavily from Doeppers unless otherwise indicated, op cit: 117-138.

43
.As far as the labour tenement project is concerned, close to 40% of the tenants belonged in fact to the middle class white
collar category, suggesting that the relatively low-budget rents required were still way beyond the reach of labour. Moreover,
applicants without regular jobs were formally excluded. A parallel development was observed in relation to the Homesite Act
acquisitions and land expatriation program. Angeles, E, Public Policy and the Philippine Housing Market, PIDS, 1985: 47-49.