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Contemporary Global Capitalism and the Challenge of the Filipino Diaspora

Journal: Global Society

Manuscript ID: CGSJ-2010-0029.R1

Manuscript Type: Original Article

Keywords: neocolonialism, globalization, diaspora, finance-capital, imperialism

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Contemporary Global Capitalism and the Challenge of the Filipino Diaspora

By E. San Juan, Jr

Fellow, W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

They kept saying I was a hero…a symbol of the Philippines. To this day I keep

wondering what it is I have become….

—Angelo de la Cruz, kidnapped Filipino worker in Iraq

The Philippine nation-state often gets world attention only when calamities—such as the

recent typhoon Ondoy’s unprecedented flooding of metropolitan Manila, with thousands of

homes destroyed and several hundreds killed, due to government neglect; or the nearly 100,000

refugees created by the Arroyo regime’s indiscriminate bombing campaign against the separatist

Moro Islamic Liberation Front—hit the headlines. The Maguindanao massacre of 57 unarmed

civilians by a local warlord is the latest calamity (Conde 2009). Meanwhile, news about the

plight of twenty Filipina domestics abused as sex slaves in Saudi Arabia (Ellao 2009), or the

brutalization of several hundred Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) detained in Middle-Eastern

jails, hardly merit notice. Meanwhile, the recently elected president Benigno Aquino III

confronts the long neglected plight of about 100 cases of Filipino migrant workers on death row

in the Middle East, 50% of the cases involving OFWs arrested in China (Migrante-Middle East

2010). Despite propaganda about concern for OFWs, the previous Arroyo regime miserably

failed to translate the $17.3 billion 2009 remittance –one-tenth of the country’s gross domestic

product—into self-sustaining well-paid jobs due to flagrant corruption and sheer neglect

(Jimenez 2010). OFW remittance last year represented 15 times more than new foreign direct

investments, a symptom of the addictive dependency of the Philippine economy on the global

capitalist system’s iniquitous division of social labor and the distribution of its value/products.

A review of the political economy of the Philippines might shed light on this facet of the

global predicament of 200 million people (according to UN estimates) migrating for work

outside their impoverished native lands, “spurring heated debates over national identity and

border security, and generating suspicion, fear and hatred of the ‘other’ “ (Bencivenni 2008, 1).

Deleted: ¶

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This phenomenon concretely demonstrates what Samir Amin calls “polarization on a world-

scale, … the most violent permanent manifestation of the capital-labour contradiction in the

history of the expansion of capitalism” (2003, 25)

Three thousand four hundred Filipinos leave daily for work abroad, over a million a year,

to join the nearly ten million Filipinos (out of 90 million) already out of the Philippines, scattered

in more than 197 countries. It is the largest postmodern diaspora of migrant labor next to

Mexico, the highest exporter of labor in Southeast Asia relative to population size. 75% of

migrants are women, mainly domestics and semi-skilled contract workers, seeking decent

livelihoods, for their family’s survival (Pagaduan 2006). Two thirds of the population live on less

than $2 a day (The Economist 2009, 107). Over four million more leave, without proper/legal

travel and work permits, for unknown destinations. About 3-5 coffins arrive at the Manila

International Airport every day--not as famous as Flor Contemplacion, Maricris Sioson, and

other victims of neoliberal policies. According to Connie Bragas-Regalado, chair of Migrante

International, at least fifteen “mysterious deaths” of these government “milking cows” (her term

for OFWs) remain unsolved since 2002, with more harrowing anecdotes brewing in the wake of

the U.S.-led war of “shock and awe” against anyone challenging its global supremacy. This

relentless marketing of Filipino labor is an unprecedented phenomenon, rivaled only by the trade

of African slaves and Asian indentured servants in the previous centuries. How did Filipinas/os

come to find themselves suddenly burdened with this collective misfortune, forced into the

traffic of selling their bodies, nay, their selfhoods?

Public records show that OFWs contribute more than enough to relieve the government

of the onerous foreign debt payments to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF)

and financial consortiums. In 1998 alone, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas,

755,000 Filipinos found work abroad, sending home a total of P7.5 billion; in the last three years,

their annual remittance averaged $5 billion (Tujan 2007). Throughout the 1990s, they remitted

over 5 percent of the national GNP, not counting the billions of pesos collected by the Philippine

government in exorbitant taxes and processing fees. In 2004, OFWs sent $8.5 billion, a sum

equal to half of the country’s national budget. In 2006, the OFW remittance was five times more

than foreign direct investment, 22 times higher than the total Overseas Development Aid, and

over more than half of the gross international reserves (De Lara 2008). In 2007, they sent $14.45

billion and $15.65 in 2008. For this they have been celebrated as “modern day heroes” by every

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president since the export of “warm bodies” was institutionalized as an official government

policy.

OFW earnings suffice to keep the Philippine economy afloat and support the luxury and

privileges of less than 1 percent of the people, the Filipino oligarchy. They heighten household

consumerism, disintegrate families, and subsidize the wasteful spending of the corrupt

patrimonial elite. They are not invested in industrial or agricultural development (IBON 2008).

Clearly the Philippine bureaucracy has earned the distinction of being the most migrant- and

remittance-dependent ruling apparatus in the world, by virtue of denying its citizens the right to

decent employment at home. OFW remittances thus help reproduce a system of class inequality,

sexism, racism, and national chauvinism across the international hierarchy of core and peripheral

nation-states.

Historical Orientation

After three hundred years of Spanish colonialism, the Filipino people mounted a

revolution for national independence in 1898 and established the first constitutional Republic in

Asia. But the United States destroyed this autonomous republic in the Filipino-American War of

1899-1913, with 1.4 million Filipinos killed and the islands annexed as a US territorial

possession up to 1946, when nominal independence was granted (Miller 1982). The US conquest

perpetuated the feudal landlord system by co-opting the propertied elite that, together with

comprador/middlemen traders and new cadres of well-tutored intelligentsia, served as the

colonial, and later neocolonial, administrators (Constantino 1978). The Philippines offered

abundant natural and human resources, together with what US policy-makers originally desired:

strategic military bases for trade with China and a geopolitical outpost in the Asian-Pacific

region. By 1946, thoroughly devastated by World War II, the Philippines emerged as a reliable

U.S. dependency, with its political, economic and military institutions controlled directly or

indirectly by Washington. Up to today, the Philippine army operates as an appendage of the

Pentagon, its logistics and war-games supervised by Washington via numerous treaties and

executive agreements, as witnessed by ongoing joint U.S.-Philippines “Balikatan” war exercises,

legitimized by the anomalouos Visiting Forces Agreement (Diokno 1980; IBON 2005; CENPEG

2009). Despite official denials, the US exercises hegemonic sway over a neocolonial formation

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so thoroughly Americanized that many Filipinos today believe that moving to the U.S. metropole

is the true fulfillment of their hopes and dreams.

The U.S. nation-state after September 11, 2001 remains alive and well. US imperialism

today might not have formal colonies in the old European sense of territorial possessions (Pease

2000), but (as Eric Hobsbawm [1994] recently pointed out), nation-based finance-capital

practiced “the collective egoism of wealth” that coalesced vestiges of “national self-

determination” with the new politics of ethnic identity that characterized the transition from the

“Age of Catastrophe” (from World War I to World War II) to the “crisis decades” of the Cold

War and beyond. Even the cosmopolitan electicism of Saskia Sassen (2008) which extolled

cyberspace as “a more concrete space for social struggles than that of the national formal

political system” (2008, 90), could not explain the sudden disappearance of the once legendary

Sub-Comandante Marcos’ Zapatistas from the transnational arena, nor the place-based national-

liberation movements (the Maoists in Nepal, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution; Evo

Morales and indigenism in Latin America; the New People’s Army and the Moro struggles in the

Philippines, etc.). So much for the anathematization of national-liberation struggles in a time

when NATO and US military continue to inflict genocidal havoc in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,

Yemen, Palestine, and other countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

With the Cold War unfolding in IndoChina, and the worsening of economic stagnation

and lower rate of accumulation in the core capitalist countries by the seventies, the Marcos

dictatorship worsened the country’s underdevelopment. Structural problems, such as

unemployment, inflation, chronic balance of payments deficits, onerous foreign debt, and

widenening social inequality are symptoms of the persisting US stranglehold. For over half a

century, the US established the legal and political framework that transformed the country into a

raw-material exporting economy and a market for consumer goods, with a semi-feudal land

system and a bureaucrat-comprador-landlord governing bloc subservient to U.S. dictates

(Villegas 1983; Bauzon 1991; Pomeroy 1992). The import-substitution scheme briefly tried in

the fifties and sixties quickly gave way to an export-oriented development plan at the behest of

the WB/IMF. In the latter 70s, IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs to promote “free-

market capitalism” (such as tourism, export-oriented light industries in Export Processing Zones,

currency devaluation, etc.) imposed by the latter agencies and the state’s local technocrats

plunged the country into a profound crisis (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, esp. Chs. 7-8; Klein

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1999). Because of the severe deterioration in the lives of the majority and serious foreign-debt

problems, Marcos initiated the “warm body export”—the Labor Export Policy (LEP)—with

Presidential Decree 442 in 1974, followed by the establishment of the Philippines Overseas

Employment Administration (POEA) in 1983 and the mandatory sending of remittances through

the Philippine banking system—a stop-gap remedy for a world-systemic crisis of profit/capital

accumulation.

For the last four decades, the Philippines has been plagued by accelerated

impoverishment as a result of the decline in wages, severe chronic unemployment, rising cost of

living, inflation, and huge cutbacks in social services. Neoliberal policies known (“the

“Washington Consensus”) maintained the cycle of crisis and systemic underdevelopment, rooted

in the iniquitous class structure and the historical legacy of political, economic and military

dependence on the U.S. These provide the framework for the increased foreign penetration and

control over the national economy, the unremitting dependence on raw material exports and

(since 1970s) of human resources (Fast 1973; IPE 2006), coupled with the deteriorating

manufacturing and agricultural sectors caused by ruinous trade and investment policies. “Free

market” development schemes packaged with “trickle-down” reformist gimmicks implemented

by successive regimes after Marcos have precipitated mass hunger (Lichauco 2005). As Pauline

Eadie (2005) has cogently demonstrated, the role of the Philippine state in perpetuating poverty

and aggravating the exploitation of Filipino citizens cannot be discounted, no matter how weak

or “failed” in its function as a mediator/receiver of supposedly neutral global market

compulsion.

By 2007, there were 9.2 million Filipino workers scattered in 197 countries, over 9% of

of the total labor force. Permanent OFWs are concentrated in North America and Australia,

while those with work contracts or undocumented are dispersed in West Asia (Middle East),

Europe, East and South Asia, and as sea-based workers (roughly 250,000). The situation of

Filipino migrant workers in the United States has been adequately explored in various studies

(San Juan 1998, 2009; Espiritu 2003). Grace Chang (2000) has investigated the plight of

Filipina caregivers, nurses, and nannies in North America. A recent write-up on the horrendous

condition of smuggled Filipino caregivers in Los Angeles, California, may illustrate one form of

modern slavery (Alimurung 2009). Why do Filipinas easily succumb to labor traffickers? About

700,000 men, women and children are being trafficked to the U.S., but OFWs are quite unique in

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that the Filipino’s deeply colonized mentality/psyche privileges America as “the dream

destination,” an intoxicating way out of poverty.

Most OFWs today (46.8%) are service workers: household or domestic helpers, maids or

cleaners in commercial establishments, cooks, waiters, bartenders, caregivers and caretakers

(IBON 2008). Although most are professionals with college degrees, teachers, midwives, social

workers, etc., they are generally underpaid by the standards of their host countries—a

sociopolitical, not purely economic, outcome of core-periphery inequity. OFWs work in the most

adverse conditions, with none or limited labor protections and social services otherwise accorded

to nationals. Whether legal or undocumented, OFWs experience racism, discrimination,

xenophobic exclusion, criminalization; many are brutalized in isolated households and in the

“entertainment” industry (Komite 1980). They are deprived of food and humane lodging,

harassed, beaten, raped, and killed (Bultron 2007; Taguba 2002). Meanwhile, the families left

behind suffer from stresses and tensions in households lacking parental guidance; often,

marriages break up, leaving derelict children vulnerable to the exigencies of a competitive,

individualist-oriented environment (Arellano-Carandang et al 2007). These are all symptoms of

the logic of class and national inequality operating in a hierarchical world-system, not objective,

neutral effects of a temporary dis-equilibrium of the free market due to illegitimate political and

social interference.

Victimization of Filipinos (via insults, beating, starvation, rape, quarantine, murder) by

employers from Europe to the Middle East to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan have been

documented in detail since the seventies when the export of “warm bodies” started. The fates of

Flor Contemplacion, Sarah Balabagan, Maricris Sioson, and others—several hundred OFWs

languish today in jails in the Middle East, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc.--have become public scandals

and occasions for venting mass indignation. But the Philippine government officials either refuse

to do anything substantial, or deliberately ignore the reports, dismissing them as untypical or

trivial. Consequently, on April 8, 2009, the UN Committee for the Ratification of the Migrants

Convention deleted the Philippines from the list of model states complying with the UN

Convention mandating countries to protect the rights of their migrant citizens.

Agony of Deracination

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Amid the tide of barbarization attendant on the putative benefits of flexible, neoliberal

capitalism, we have witnessed a paradigm-shift among scholars of the emergent Filipino

diaspora. Critical intelligence has been hijacked to serve vulgar apologetics: for example, the

employment of Filipina women as domestics or nannies to care for children, old people, the

chronically infirm or disabled, and so on, has been lauded as altruistic care, embellished with a

philanthropic facade. With most female domestics coming from impoverished, formerly

colonized societies, it is clear that the traditional structure of global inequality among nation-

states operates as a crucial determining factor. One can no longer deny that the buying and

selling of “third world” bodies is a legacy of the unjust and unequal division of international

labor in both productive and reproductive spheres (Petras 2007).. This “global care chain”

(household work managed as a profit-making industry) has been described by, among others,

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochshild (2006). But their picture is vitiated by a telling

omission: the status/rank of the Philippines as a neocolonial dependency, without the capability

to enforce its sovereignty right and safeguard the welfare of OFWs.

The stark disparity is sharply delineated by Bridget Anderson in her penetrating critique,

Doing the Dirty Work? Opposing scholars who streamline if not euphemistically glamorize the

job of caring, Anderson exposes how domestics from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other

subaltern nations function as “legal slaves.” Anderson shows how this came about through the

economic conquest of third-world societies by the profit-driven industrialized North. This has

given the middle class of the First World “materialistic forms of power over them” (2000, 149).

She deploys Orlando Patterson’s conceptual distinction between the pre-modern personalistic

idiom of power and the materialistic idiom of power under capitalism. She defines the

employer/domestic relation as a master/slave relation. The employer exercises both forms of

power: “the materialistic because of the massive discrepancy in access to all kinds of material

resources between the receiving state and the countries of origin of migrants; the personalistic

because the worker is located in the employer’s home—and often dependent on her not just for

her salary but for her food, water, accommodation and access to the basic amenities of life. The

employer uses both these idioms of power, and both idioms are given to employers and

reinforced by the state” (2000, 6). Viewed systemically, the global capitalist structure enables

the exploitation of poor countries by the rich ones, and the exploitation of the citizens of poor

countries by citizens of the global North (either male or female) through immigration

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legislation, even criminalizing migrants who assert their human rights. Earlier, institutionally

imposed norms of race, nationality, and gender served to naturalize the migrant worker’s

subjugation. But in the new field of globalized capital, the lack of citizenship rights and the

status of subordinated or inferiorized nationality/ethnicity both contribute to worsening the

degradation of third-world workers.

But there is something more pernicious that eludes the orthodox scholastic. What

Anderson argues is that domestic work commodifies not only labor power---in classic political

economy, labor power serves as the commodity that produces surplus-value (profit) not returned

to or shared with the workers--but, more significantly, the personhood of the domestic.

Indentured or commodified personhood is the key to understanding what globalization is really

all about. Consequently, what needs to be factored in is not only an analysis of the labor-capital

relation, but also the savage asymmetry of nation-states, of polities that hire these poor women

and the polities that collude in this postmodern slave-trade. Economics signifies nothing without

the global sociopolitical fabric in which it is historically woven (Munck 2002). Brutalized

migrant labor throughout the world thrives on the sharpening inequality of nation-states,

particularly the intense impoverishment of “third world” societies in Africa, Latin America, and

Asia ravaged by the “shock doctrine” of “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007).

Race, national and class forces operate together in determining the exchange-value (the

price) of migrant labor. The reproduction of a homogeneous race (in Europe, North America,

Japan) integral to the perpetuation of the unjust social order is connected with the historical

development of nation-states, whether as imagined or as geopolitically defined loci. Historically,

membership in the community was determined by race in its various modalities, a

circumscription that is constantly being negotiated. It is in this racialized setting that European

women’s positioning as citizen acquires crucial significance. This is the site where third-world

domestics play a major role, as Anderson acutely underscores: “The fact that they are migrants is

important: in order to participate like men women must have workers who will provide the same

flexibility as wives, in particular working long hours and combining caring and domestic chores”

(2000, 190). This is the nexus where we discern that care as labor is the domestic’s assignment,

whereas the experience of care as emotion is the employer’s privilege. The distinction is

fundamental and necessary in elucidating the axis of social reproduction rooted in socially

productive practices. Such a vital distinction speaks volumes about migrant domestic labor/care

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as the key sociopolitical factor that sustains the existing oppressive international division of

labor. This crucial distinction undermines all claims that globalized capitalism has brought, and

is bringing, freedom, prosperity, and egalitarian democracy to everyone.

The political economy of globalized migrant labor involves the dialectics of production

and reproduction. Following an empiricist line of inquiry, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas examines the

racial and class dimensions of OFWs in what she quaintly terms “the international transfer of

caretaking” in Rome and Los Angeles (2005, 113). While she calls attention to the gendered

system of transnational capitalism, she downplays the racialist component and scarcely deals

with subordination by nationality. This is because Parrenas construes “class” in a deterministic,

economistic fashion. Her focus on the “patriarchal nuclear household” displaces any criticism of

colonial/imperial extraction of surplus value from enslaved/neocolonized reproductive labor.

Indeed, the fact of the caretakers’ national origin is erased, thus evading the issue of national

oppression (for an eclectic view ignoring U.S. imperial reach, see Santos 2009). The slavish

condition of indentured reproductive labor scrutinized by Anderson is not given proper weight.

We need to examine how the dynamics of capital accumulation hinges on, and subtends, the

sustained reproduction of iniquitous social relations and exploitative inter-state relations. Unlike

academic experts, Anderson foregrounds social reproduction at the center of her inquiry,

allowing her to demonstrate how gender, race, and nation are tightly interwoven into the

mistress/domestic class relationship. In effect, the Filipina domestic is what enables

European/North American bourgeois society and, by extension, the relatively prosperous

societies of the Middle East and Asia, to reproduce themselves within their nation-state domains

and thus sustain capital accumulation with its horrendous consequences.

In Quest of Filipino Agency

Postmodernist scholars posit the demise of the nation as an unquestioned assumption,

almost a doctrinal point of departure for speculations on the nature of the globalization process

(Sassen 1996). Are concepts such as the nation-state and its exclusive territoriality, sovereignty,

nationality, and their referents obsolete? Whatever the rumors about the demise of the nation-

state in the wake of September 11, 2001, agencies that assume its healthy existence are busy: not

only the members of the United Nations, but also the metropolitan powers of the global North,

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with the United States as its military spearhead, have all reaffirmed their civilizing nationalism—

disguised as humanitarian intervention--with a vengeance.

In this epoch of preemptive counter-terrorism, the local and the global find a meeting

ground in the transactions among nation-states and diverse nationalities while the sharing of

hegemony is negotiated among the metropolitan powers. Their instrumentalities—the World

Trade Organization, NATO, IMF/WB, and assorted financial consortia—are all exerting

pressures on poor underdeveloped nations. They actualize the “collective imperialism” of the

global North (Amin 2003; Martin and Schumann 1996; Engel 2003). Citizenship cards,

passports, customs gatekeepers, and border patrols are still powerful regulatory agencies. Given

the power of the nation-states of the U.S., Japan, UK, France, Germany, among others, to dictate

the terms of migrant hiring, and the administered circulation of wages, passports, rent, and other

instrumentalities, the Philippines cannot rescue millions of its own citizens from being

maltreated, persecuted, harassed, beaten up, raped, jailed, and murdered (Africa 2009). Violence

enacted by the rich nation-states and their citizens hiring OFWs prevail as the chief control

mechanism in regulating the labor-market, the flows of bodies, money, goods, and so on.

My interest here is historically focused: to inquire into how the specific geopolitical

contingencies of the Filipino diaspora-in-the-making can problematize this axiomatic of multiple

identity-creation in the context of “third world” principles of national emancipation, given the

persistent neocolonial, not postcolonial, predicament of the Philippines today (San Juan 1996;

2006). Suffice it here to spell out the parameters of this transmigrancy, an evolving transit

narrative of neocolonials: the profound impoverishment of millions of Filipino peasants and

workers, the extremely class-fissured social order managed by local compradors, landlords, and

bureaucrat-capitalists who foster systematic emigration to relieve unemployment and defuse

mass unrest, combined with the hyped-up attractions of Hong Kong and other newly

industrializing countries, and so on. The convergence of complex global factors, both internal

and external, residual and emergent, has been carefully examined by numerous studies

sponsored by IBON, GABRIELA, Center for People’s Empowerment and Governance

(CENPEG), and others. We may cite, in particular, the studies on the devalorization of women’s

labor in global cities, the shrinking status of sovereignty for peripheral nation-states, and the new

saliency of human rights in a feminist analytic of the “New World Order” (Pineda-Ofreneo and

Ofreneo 1995; Yukawa 1996; Chang 2000). In addition to the unrelenting pillage of the public

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treasury by the irredeemably corrupt oligarchy with its retinue of hirelings and clientele, the

plunder of the economy by transnational capital has been worsened by the “structural

conditionalities” imposed by the WB/IMF (Villegas 1983; De Dios and Rocamora 1992; Quintos

2002).

Disaggregation of the economy has registered in the disintegration of ordinary Filipino

lives (preponderant in rural areas and urban slums) due to forced migration because of lack of

employment, recruiting appeals of governments and business agencies, and the dissolution of the

homeland as psychic and physical anchorage in the vortex of the rapid depredation of finance

capital. In general, imperialism and the anarchy of the “free market” engender incongruities,

nonsynchronies, and shifting subject-positions of the non-Western “Other” inscribed in the

liminal space of subjugated territory. Capital accumulation is the matrix of unequal power

(Hymer 1975, Harvey 1996; Yates 2003) between metropolis and colonies. The time of alienated

daily labor has so far annihilated the spaces of the body, home, community, and nation for

OFWs. The expenditure of a whole nation-people’s labor-power now confounds the narrative of

individual progress in which the logic of capital and its metaphysics of rationality have been

entrenched since the days of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Gatherings and Dispersals

In the 1980s and 1990s, diaspora studies emerged as a revision of the traditional

sociological approach to international migration and the national process of modernization

(Cohen 2008). Because of globalizing changes in the modes of transport and communications

(electronic mail, satellite TV, Internet), diaspora communities appear to be able to sustain their

own distinctive identities, life-styles, and economic ties to their homelands. Accordingly, the

static territorial nationalisms of the past are deemed to have given way to a series of shifting or

contested boundaries, engendering notions of transnational networks, “imagined communities,”

“global ethnospaces,” “preimmigration crucibles,” etc. (Marshall 1998, 159). These notions

emphasize the complexity, fluidity, and diversity of migrant identities and experiences,

foregrounding personal narratives and the popular culture of diasporic communities rather than

structural, unidirectional economic and political influences.

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The term “diaspora” usually designates “a minority ethnic group of migrant origin which

maintains sentimental or material links with its land of origin” (Esman1996, 316). Either because

of social exclusion, internal cohesion, and other geopolitical factors, these communities are never

assimilated into the host society; but they develop in time an idiosyncratic consciousness that

carries out a collective sharing of space with others, purged of any exclusivist ethos or

proprietary design. These communities might embody a peculiar sensibility and enact a

compassionate agenda for the whole species that thrives on cultural difference (Keith and Pile

1993; Clifford 1997). Unlike peoples who have been conquered, annexed, enslaved, or coerced

in some other way, diasporas are voluntary movements of people from place to place, although

such migrations also betray symptoms of compulsion if analyzed within a global political

economy of labor and interstate political rivalries. Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) suggests that

labor migrants (like OFWs) can challenge transnational corporations by overloading the system

with “free movement,” at the same time that they try to retain for themselves more of the surplus

value they produce. But are such movements really free? And if they function as a reserve army

of cheap labor wholly dependent on the unpredictable fortunes of business, isn’t the expectation

of their rebelliousness exorbitant? Like ethnicity, diaspora fashioned by determinate historical

causes has tended to take on “the ‘natural’ appearance of an autonomous force, a ‘principle’

capable of determining the course of social action” (Comaroff 1992). Like racism and

nationalism, diaspora presents multiform physiognomies open to various interpretations and

articulations.

One sociologist argues that OFWs are revolutionizing Filipino society, pushing the

political system “toward greater democracy, greater transparency and governance” (David 2006),

a foolish judgment given the corruption and inequities attendant on this labor-export program

acknowledged by everyone. Lacking any dialectical critique of the dynamics of colonialism and

imperialism that connect the Philippines and its people with the United States and the rest of the

world, mainstream academic inquiries into the phenomenon of recent Filipino immigration and

dislocation are all scholastic games, at best disingenuous exercises in Eurocentric/white-

supremacist apologetics. This is because they rely on concepts and methodologies that conceal

unequal power relations—that is, relations of subordination and domination, racial exclusion,

marginalization, sexism, gender inferiorization, as well as national subalternity, and other forms

of discrimination. What I want to stress is the centrality of waged/commodified labor assessed

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and valued within the global political economy of commodity exchange (Garnham 1999). In the

field of current globalization studies, the Global North-Global South duality has not extinguished

the crucial theoretical role the concept of the nation/nationality plays, in particular the

asymmetries of nation-states and the varying role the state plays in regulating the economy and

planning/implementing social policies within specific territories (Nixon 1997; Sader 2010).

Has the world really become a home for OFWs, for indigenes who inhabit a group of

7,100 islands, “one of the world’s most strategically important land masses” (Demko 1992)?

Globalization has indeed facilitated the mobility of goods, services, information, ideas, and of

course peoples. It has proceeded to the extent that in our reconfigured landscapes, now grasped as

liminal or interstitial, old boundaries have shifted and borders disappeared. Everyone has

allegedly become transculturized due to Americanization or Disneyfication in actuality or in

cyberspace. Representations of transnationals or transmigrants materialize as mutations of

expatriates, refugees, exiles, or nomadic travelers (such as Filipino “TNTs,” fugitive

undocumented Filipinos). Given these transformations, the reality and idea of the nation and of

national sovereignty have become contentious topics of debate and speculation (Ebert and

Zavarzadeh 2008). They constitute a theoretical force-field comprised of notions of identity and

their attendant politics of difference, normative rules of citizenship, nationality, cosmopolitanism,

belonging, human rights, and so on. It is in this context of globalization, where ethnic conflicts and

the universal commodification of human bodies co-exist in a compressed time-space of

postmodernity, that we can examine the genealogy and physiognomy of this process called the

Filipino diaspora, the lived collective experience of OFWs.

Encountering OFW Singularities

At the beginning of this millennium, OFWs have become the newest diasporic

community in the whole world. They endure poorly paid employment under substandard

conditions, with few or null rights, in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, North America, and

elsewhere. It might be noted here that historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a

homeland but also by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and

memories of the homeland. The Filipino diaspora, however, is different. Since the homeland has

long been conquered and occupied by Western powers (Spain, United States) and remains

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colonized despite formal or nominal independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully

defined nation but with regions, localities, and communities of languages and traditions.

Perceived as untutored, recalcitrant strangers, they are lumped with familiar aliens: Chinese,

Mexicans, Japanese, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Newspaper reports have cited the Philippines

as the next target of the US government’s global “crusade” against terrorism—tutelage by

coercion. Where is the sovereign nation alluded to in passports, contracts, and other

identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation or nationality, given the

insidious impact of US disciplinary forces and now, on top of the persistent neocolonizing

pressure, the usurping force of quantifying capital and its reductive cash-nexus ?

According to orthodox immigration theory, “push” and “pull” factors combine to explain

the phenomenon of overseas contract workers. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic

formulation? Poverty and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to seek work abroad,

sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to their families. Occasional visits and

other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. Alienation and isolation, brutal

and racist treatment, and other dehumanized and degrading conditions prevent their permanent

settlement in the “receiving” countries, except where they have been given legal access to

obtaining citizenship status. If the return is postponed, are modes of adaptation and temporary

domicile in non-native grounds the viable alternatives for these expatriates, quasi-refugees and

reluctant exiled sojourners?

The reality of “foreignness,” of “otherness,” seems ineluctable. Alienation, insulting

treatment, and racist violence prevent their permanent resettlement in the “receiving societies,”

due to implicit genetic or procedural norms of acquiring citizenship. Or to a traditional ethos of

purist self-privileging. OFWs are thus suspended in transit, in the process of traversing the

distance between coordinates of their journeys. Because the putative “Filipino” nation is in the

process of formation in the neocolony and abroad, OFWs have been considered transnationals or

transmigrants—a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic or under

interrogation, whereby the “trans” prefix becomes chimerical. This diaspora then faces the

perennial hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via racial profiling, and physical

attacks. Can Filipino migrant labor mount a collective resistance against globalized exploitation

and racialized ostracism? In what way can this hypothetical diaspora serve as a paradigm for

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analyzing and critically unsettling the corporate-led international division of labor and the

consolidation of reified ethnic categories as the decline of hegemonic bourgeois rule unfolds?

At this juncture, I offer the following propositions for further reflection and elaboration.

My paramount thesis on the phenomenon of the Filipino dismemberment is this: Given that the

Philippine habitat/dwelling-place has never cohered as a genuinely independent nation—national

autonomy continues to escape the Filipino people subjected to a repressive tutelage—Filipinos

are dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns, or provincial regions first, and

loosely from an inchoate, even “refeudalized,” polity. This dispersal is primarily due to

economic coercion and disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of comprador-

bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism articulated with tributary institutions and practices.

The network of patriarchal clans/dynasties in a partly nationalized space unravels when women

from all sectors (peasantry, ethnic or indigenous groups, proletariat) alienate their “free labor” in

the world market. They are inserted into a quasi-feudal terrain within global capitalism. While

the prime commodity remains labor-power (singularly measured here in both time and space

especially for lived-in help), OFWs find themselves frozen in a precarious, vulnerable status

between serfhood and colonizing pettybourgeois households, or incarcerated as slaves in Japan,

Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. These indentured cohorts are thus witnesses to the unimpeded

dismemberment of the inchoate Filipino nation and the scattering of its traumatized fragments to

various state-governed policed territories around the planet.

From a postmodern perspective, migration is sometimes seen as an event-sequence

offering the space of freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of adventure in

libidinal games of resistance, sojourns sweetened by illusions of transcendence. For OFWs, this

ludic notion is inappropriate. For the origin to which the OFW returns is not properly a nation-

state but a barangay (neighborhood), a quasi-primordial community, kinship network, or even a

ritual family/clan. Meanwhile, civic solidarities are gradually displacing the old ones. In this

context, the Philippine state-machinery (both sending and receiving states benefit from the

brokerage transaction) actually operates as a corrupt exploiter, not representative of the masses, a

comprador agent of transnational corporations and Western imperial powers, enabling the

infliction not simply of feminicide but genocide. The Philippine ideological state-apparatus in

effect functions as an accomplice of the U.S. prison-industrial complex with its multinational

accessories and connections.

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What are the myths enabling a cathexis of the homeland as collective memory and

project? They derive from assorted childhood reminiscences and folklore together with

customary practices surrounding municipal and religious celebrations; at best, there may be signs

of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and latter-day

celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes (the boxing champion Pacquiao), charismatic TV

personalities, and so on. Indigenous food, dances, and music can be acquired as commodities

(epitomized by the ubiquitous “balikbayan” [returnee] boxes) whose presence temporarily heals

the trauma of removal; family reunification can resolve the psychic damage of loss of status for

those enduring lives of “quiet desperation.” In short, rootedness in autochthonous habitat does

not exert a commanding sway; it is experienced only as a nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language,

religion, kinship, the sacramental resonance of neighborhood rituals, and common experiences in

school or workplace function invariably as the organic bonds of community. Such

psychodynamic cluster of affects demarcates the boundaries of the imagination but also release

energies that mutate into actions serving ultimately national-popular emancipatory projects.

Alienation in the host country is what unites OFWs, a shared history of colonial and

racial subordination, marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through heterogeneous

forms of covert resistance and open rebellion. This is what may replace the nonexistent

nation/homeland, absent the political self-determination of the Filipino masses. In the 1930s, the

expatriate activist-writer Carlos Bulosan (1995) once observed that “it is a crime to be a Filipino

in America.” Years of union struggle, united-front agitation, educational campaigns, and

political organ

izing in interethnic and interracial coalitions have blurred if not complicated that stigma.

Accomplishments in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s have provided nourishment for

communal pride. And, on the other side, impulses of “assimilationism” via the “model minority”

umbrella have aroused a passion for eclectic multiculturalism divorced from any urge to

disinvest in the “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 1998). However, compared to the

Japanese or Asian Indians , Filipino Americans as a whole have not “made it”; the exceptions

prove the rule. Andrew Cunanan (the serial killer who slew the famous Versace) is the specter

that continues to haunt “melting pot” Filipino Americanists who continue to blabber about the

“forgotten Filipino” in the hope of being awarded a share of the now disappeared welfare-state

pie. Dispossession of sovereignty leads to moral and ethical shipwreck, with the natives drifting

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rudderless, some fortuitously marooned in islands across the three continents. Via strategies of

communal preservation and versatile tactics of defining the locality of the community through

negotiations and shifting compromises, diasporic subjects might defer their return—unless and

until there is a Filipino nation that they can identify with. This will continue in places where

there is no hope of permanent resettlement as citizens or bona fide residents (as in Japan, Hong

Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere) and a permanent danger of arrest, detention, and

deportation--the disavowed terror of globalization.

In general, OFWs will not return permanently (except perhaps for burial) to the site of

misery and oppression—to poverty, exploitation, humiliated status, despair, hunger, and lack of a

future with dignity. Of course, some are forcibly returned: damaged, deported, or dead. OFWs

would rather move their kin and parents to their place of employment, preferably in countries

where family reunification is allowed, as in the United States, Canada, and so on. Or even in

places of suffering and humiliation, provided there is some hope or illusion of relief and eventual

prosperity. Utopian longings can mislead but also reconfigure and redirect wayward travels

sojourns, and adventures—historical moments connecting specific trends and actualizing the

concrete dynamic totality of a world freed from inherited necessity (Ilyenkov 1977).

Filipino nationalism blossomed in the late 1960s and 1970s, but suffered attenuation

when it was rechanelled to support the populist elitism of Aquino and Ramos, the lumpen

populism of Estrada, and the thoroughly corrupt Arroyo regime. With the re-appointment of the

Arroyo-holdover Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo and do-nothing bureaucrats in the

Philippines Overseas Employment Administration, President Aquino III signaled its

determination to uphold the free-market neoliberal status quo the keystone of which is this

unconscionable labor-export policy (Migrante International 2009). The precarious balance of

class forces at this conjuncture is subject to shifts in political mobilization and calculation, hence

the intervention of Filipino agencies with emancipatory goals and socialist principles is crucial

and strategically necessary. Especially after September 11, 2001, and the Arroyo sycophancy to

the Bush regime, the Philippines (considered by the US government as the enclave/haven of

homegrown “terrorists” like the Abu Sayyaf) may soon be transformed into the next fertile

“killing field” after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Recently, a coalition of migrant workers and

professionals called Migrante International together with other sectors organized rallies in

Manila and other cities to protest government neglect of OFWs. (Makilan 2007; Elllao 2009; De

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Jsus and Hongo 2009; Olea 2009). This front mobilized millions in the Middle East, Hong Kong,

Japan, New Zealand, Australia and cities in Europe and North America. Millions denounced U.S.

diplomatic and military interventions (covert action, low-intensity warfare, and its attendant

atrocities of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances of ordinary citizens) against the

Filipino people’s struggle for self-determination and social justice—a united-front praxis

distinguishing the cumulative strategy of winning hegemony via the praxis of historic blocs.

Identity Matters

In this time of emergency, the Filipino collective identity is going through ordeals,

undergoing the vicissitudes of political metamorphosis and elaboration. The Filipino diasporic

consciousness is without doubt an odd species, a singular genre: it is not obsessed with a

physical return to roots or to land where common sacrifices (to echo Ernest Renan) are

remembered and celebrated. It is gradually being tied more to a symbolic homeland indexed by

kinship or sutured to organic mores and communal practices that it tries to transplant abroad in

diverse localities. In a moment of Babylonian captivity, as it were, dwelling in “Egypt” or its

postmodern surrogates, building public spheres of solidarity to sustain identities outside the

national time/space “in order to live inside, with a difference” may be the most viable route (or

root) of Filipinos in motion—the collectivity in transit, although this is, given the possibility of

differences becoming contradictions, subject to the revolutionary transformations enveloping the

Philippine countryside and cities. It is susceptible also to other radical changes in the geopolitical

rivalry of capitalist interests based on nation-states. But it is not an open-ended “plural vision”

characterized by arbitrary border-crossings, ludic alterities, and contingencies. There is indeed

deferral, postponement, or waiting. Meanwhile, history moves on in the battlefields of Luzon,

Visayas, and Mindanao where a people’s war (with its Moro component) rooted in a durable

insurrectionary tradition rages on. This drama of a national-democratic revolution will not allow

the Filipino diaspora and its progeny to slumber in the consumerist paradises of Los Angeles,

New York, London, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, or Sidney. It will certainly

disturb the peace of those benefiting from the labor and sacrifices of OFWs who experience the

repetition-compulsion of uneven development and suffer the recursive traumas of displacement,

marginalization, and dispossession.

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Caught in the cross-currents of global upheavals, one can only conclude with a very

provisional and indeed temporizing epilogue to a narrative still unfolding. Filipinos in the United

States and elsewhere, mis-recognized by a hegemonic Western dispensation, are neither

“Oriental” nor “Hispanic,” despite their looks and names; they are nascent citizens of a country

in quest of genuine self-determination. They might be syncretic or cyborg subjects with suspect

loyalties. They cannot be called ambivalent “transnationals” or flexible trans-status agents

because of racialized, ascribed markers (physical appearance, accent, peculiar non-white

folkways, and other group idiosyncracies) that are needed to sustain and reproduce white

supremacy in historically racialized polities. Anderson (2000) has cogently demonstrated how

the international labor market consistently racializes the selling of Filipina selfhood; thus, not

only gender and class but, more decisively, national identities articulated with immigrant status,

denigrated culture, and so on, are reproduced through the combined exploitation and oppression

taking place in the employer’s household. Slavery has become re-domesticated in the age of

reconfigured laissez-faire corporate schemes—the vampires of the despotic past continue to

haunt the cyber-domain of finance capital and its brutalizing hallucinations.

The trajectory of the Filipino diaspora remains unpredictable. Ultimately, the rebirth of

Filipino agency in the era of global capitalism depends not only on the vicissitudes of social

transformation in the US but, in a dialectical sense, on the fate of the struggle for autonomy and

popular-democratic sovereignty in the Philippines. We find autonomous zones in Manila and in

the provinces where balikbayans (returnees) still practice, though with increasing trepidation

sometimes interrupted by fits of amnesia, the speech-acts and durable performances of

pakikibaka (common struggle), pakikiramay (collective sharing), and pakikipagkapwa-tao

(reciprocal esteem). Left untranslated, those phrases from the philosophical vernacular address a

gradually vanishing audience. Indeed, the register of this discourse itself may just be a wayward

apostrophe to a vanished dream world—a liberated homeland, a phantasmagoric refuge—

evoking the utopias and archaic golden ages of prehistoric myths. Wherever it is, however, this

locus of memories, hopes, and dreams will surely be inhabited by a new collectivity as befits a

new objective reality to which Susan Buck-Morss, in her elegiac paean to the catastrophe that

overtook mass utopia, alludes. She envisions a future distinguished by “the geographical mixing

of people and things, global webs that disseminate meanings, electronic prostheses of the human

body, new arrangements of the human sensorium. Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of

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bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s

scenario, ‘as radical as reality itself’ ” (Buck-Morrs 2000, 278; Fischer 1996).

Homelessness and uprooting characterize the fate of millions today—political refugees,

displaced persons, emigres and exiles, stateless nationalities, homeless and vagrant humans

everywhere. Solidarity acquires a new temper. In the postmodern transnational restructuring of

the globe after the demise of the socialist experiments in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, the

Philippines has been compelled to experience a late-capitalist diaspora of its inhabitants.

Diasporic labor exchange, a novel sociopolitical category (preponderantly female) transported to

the markets of various nation-states, in particular the Middle East, is the new arena of hegemonic

contestation. Drawn from petty-bourgeois, peasant, and proletarian roots, OFWs are leveled by

their conditions of work (de Guzman 1993). Unilaterally enforced labor contracts partial to the

employer—the matrix of this inferiorized alterity--defines the identity of Filipino subalterns vis-

a-vis the master-citizens. They are the proles and plebeians of the global cities.

Meanwhile, the urban centers of the global North, also cognized as the putative space of

flows (of bodies, commodities, money, intellectual property, and so on), prohibits these

subalterns from carving a locale for their sociality. For these deracinated populations, their

nationality signifies their subalternity within the existing interstate hierarchy of nation-states

(emasculated but not yet fungible nor defunct) while money (yen, petrodollars) permits them the

prestige of cosmopolitan status. This auratic profile is reinforced by the whole ideological

apparatus of consumerism, the ironically betrayed promise of enjoying appearances or

semblances (Haug 1986). The commodity’s promise of future bliss never materializes, remaining

forever suspended in giant billboard advertisements, in TV and cinema screens, in fantasies, in

the passage of “balikbayan” boxes. For foreign observers, the almost but not yet globalized city

of MetroManila exudes an illusion of consumerist affluence, sporting the postcolonial mirage of

hybrid spectacles in megamalls and carceral Disneylands amid the ruin of fragmented families in

squalid quarters, swamped with petty crimes, drugs, prostitution, and other degrading symptoms

of anomie. OFWs congregating in the malls, public squares, and railroad stations, may be the

most intriguing parodic spectacle of this new millennium prefigured by Guy Debord’s (1983)

“society of the spectacle.” In their alienation and deprivation, Filipina "slaves" of uneven

combined development may constitute the negativity of the Other, the alterity of the permanent

crisis of transnational capital. This position does not translate into the role of an international

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proletarian vanguard, but simply intimates a potentially destabilizing force—OFWs act as

dangerous alien bacilli, eliciting fear and ressentiment-- situated at the core of the precarious

racist order. They also sometimes march under left-wing anti-imperialist slogans and socialist

platforms. If the Other (of color) speaks, will the disguised slave-owner/ “master” from the

global North listen?

Extrapolating Agendas

What needs urgent critical attention today is the racial politics of the transnational blocs

to which we have been utterly blind, obsessed as we have been with “classism.” This approach

construes “class” in deterministic fashion, congeals it as an attitudinal modality replete with the

nuances of patron-client interaction, with amor propio, and so on (on gender struggles, see

Eviota 1992; Aguilar 2000). Filipinos have been victims of EuroAmerican racializing ideology

and politics, but characteristically we ignore it and speak of our racism toward Moros, Igorots,

Lumads, etc. Race and ethnicity have occupied center-stage in the politics of nationalist

struggles in this postCold War era. OFWs need to inform themselves of the complex workings

of racism and chauvinism subsumed in the paternalistic Establishment pluralism of the

industrialized states. On this hinges the crucial issue of national autonomy, pivoting around the

question of whether a dependent formation like the Philippines can uncouple or delink from the

predatory world-system in order to pursue a different, uniquely Filipino kind of non-competitive

sustainable growth and a radically liberatory kind of national project. Perhaps the trigger for a

new mass mobilization can be the awareness of racial politics (articulated with nationality) as a

way of restaging the national-democratic struggle in the new framework of neoliberal market

discourse--unless there emerges in the global North a powerful socialist/communist challenge to

the corporate elite. The prospect of radical social change remains uncharted, criss-crossed with

detours, beguiling traps, and blind alleys where signs of the future are perpetually spawned.

. Since my primary intent here is to offer heuristic propositions on the nature of the

Filipino diasporic subject and its capacity for transformative agency, I will hazard to conclude

with large generalizations and hypotheses.

By virtue of its insertion into transitional conjunctures—from Spanish feudal-mercantilist

colonialism to U.S. monopoly-capitalist domination—the Filipino diasporic subject is essentially

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a historic bloc of diverse forces. Inscribed within the socio-historical context sketched broadly

earlier, this bloc/subject is necessarily contradictory, a product of uneven and combined

development. Its trajectory may be inferred from the layered dimension of its historic rootedness

in a semi-feudal, comprador-sponsored, bureaucratic formation and its exposure to the dictates of

the neoliberal market. Such dictates, as we’ve noted earlier, ushered this neocolonized subject-

bloc to situations of indentured servitude, serfhood, or virtual slavery, as witnessed by Sarah

Balabagan’s ordeal, Flor Contemplacion’s hanging, and the fate of “entertainers” owned by

criminal syndicates such as the Japanese Yakuzas (Beltran And Rodriguez 1996; Torrevillas

1996). One may speculate that this collective subject manifests a constructive negativity as it

struggles to free itself from quasi-feudal bondage and from slave-like confinement. Given the

uneven, disaggregated process of diasporic mutations suffered by OFWs--a removal first from a

semi-feudal, tributary formation to a capitalist regime that commodifies their personhoods—the

struggle of this bloc (OFWs and their allies) will have to undergo a popular-democratic phase of

renewal: regaining migrant-workers’ liberties as persons with natural rights (as defined by the

UN Charter, UN Convention on Migrants, etc.). After all, their cause is fundamental: to regain

their right of livelihood expropriated by a minority privileged elite. But this stage coalesces with

the struggle to assert the right to collective self-determination and representation, either as a

national/popular bloc or political community defined by common principles and goals (San Juan

2007; 2009). This assertion is the struggle for popular-democratic hegemony in the Philippines

and in places wherever OFWs may be found or discovered.

Uneven and combined development distinguishes this struggle. This has been

foreshadowed by Karl Marx’s multilinear social dialectic that has been distorted by bourgeois

and orthodox into a dogmatic economic determinism, as recently argued by Kevin Anderson

(2010). The essentially contested concept of globalization, and its corollary notions of

postcolonial transnationalism, civic cosmopolitanism, Eurocentric hybridity, and kindred

scholastic bromides cannot expunge the realities of class and third-world origin from local and

cross-border conflicts (Callinicos 2003; Dirlik 2007). It is in the context of this ideological

debate that I have framed my speculative reflections here on the adaptive and creative nature of

Filipino nationalism, a political force whose dynamic élan is responsive to the changing

alignment of political and social forces in the Philippines and around the world where about 10

million OFWs are scattered and mobilizing every day.

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Amid the sharpening rivalry among capitalist states/blocs and the upsurge of anti-

immigrant racism and neofascist populisms in Europe, North America, and newly industrialized

regions, one may discern two contradictory impulses are unified in the Filipino nationalist

project of countering imperial hegemony: the separatist one of national independence, and the

integrationist one of unity with universal secular progress/world socialist revolution (see

Genovese 1972). This process of engagement would be historically contingent on the fluctuating

crisis of global capitalism. Essentially, Filipino dislocation on both levels—as a people colonized

by US imperial power, and as a quasi-nation subordinated to global capital, in the process of

uneven development (Mandel 1983)—constitutes the horizon of its project of affirming its

identity as a historic bloc of multisectoral progressive forces. This bloc will play its role as a

revolutionary protagonist in the political terrain of a united front against disciplinary

neoliberalism (Gill 2009), in an era when US hegemony (political + military) is yielding to a

multipolar global arrangement. Filipino nationalism thereby acquires critical universality as part

of a universal anti-capitalist trend with a long internationalist record of struggle (Lowy 1998).

Perhaps the Filipino people, claiming their sovereign right to a historically specific position in

the civilizational arena, would then become equal, active participants in a worldwide coalition of

forces against monopoly finance capital and its local agents, be they labor recruiters,

neocolonized bureaucratic states, financial consortiums, or transnational institutions like the

IMF/WB, WTO, or even a supra-national entity like the UN controlled by wealthy industrialized

elites. Only in this process of active solidarity with other subordinated or excluded peoples will

OFWs, given their creative integrity and commitment to self-determination, be able to transcend

their deterritorialized fate in a truly borderless world without classes, races, or nationalities. We

envisage germinating from the combined ideas and practices of OFW struggles an alternative,

feasible world without the blight of class exploitation and gendered racialized oppression—the

concrete totality of an emancipated, commonly shared planet satisfying human needs and wants.

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