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 were to a large extent confined to Manila and its

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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 corporations4 - 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 arrabales5 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 Chinese community of 15,000 in the Parian, outside the walls;

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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 the proselytising tradition of Spanish colonial rule required the systematic extension of administrative

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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

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.

3

?.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.

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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.

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.

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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 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

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.

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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 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

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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

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.

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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.

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

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

15.Caoili, op cit: 38-39.

16.Ofreneo, op cit: 7.

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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 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.

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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. 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

17.Caoili, op cit: 41; see also Wolters, 1984: 12.

18.Constantino, op cit: 114-15.

19.Doeppers, op cit: 4.

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Developing Dystopia

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.

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

20.Walton & Portes, 1981.

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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.@

Indeed, commerce and trade were at the apex of

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.

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Developing Dystopia

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

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.

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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 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

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Developing Dystopia

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 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.

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.

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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 specialisation28 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 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.

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.

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Developing Dystopia

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 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

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.

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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

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)

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Developing Dystopia

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 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

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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 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 seasonal34 and episodic, where the major episodes tended to mimic the fluctuating external demand for

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.

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Developing Dystopia

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 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

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.

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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 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

36.Ibid: 41-43.

37.Ibid: 51.

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Developing Dystopia

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 economy.

Imbalances between wage labour demand and supply - a result of the low rate of modern job

38.Ibid: 56-57.

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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

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

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Developing Dystopia

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

40.Ibid: 113.

41.Villegas, op cit: 26.

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City and Crisis

Attempts wage labour quarters to correct social Adisarticulations@ spawned by structural dependency were facilitated by evolving working class social organisations. Early proletarian class 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

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

27

Developing Dystopia

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 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

28

City and Crisis

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 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

29

Developing Dystopia

Notes

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.

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