The Usual Suspects

Over the past few decades, young people from the country’s working classes have borne the brunt of various forms of violence that the Philippine state has inflicted upon them, directly or indirectly. Teenagers and young adults who live in the country’s sprawling slums have become the favorite punching bags — or even live shooting targets — of the police.

Young people from affluent families live in gated neighborhoods, exclusive condominiums, or other places that cops cannot freely enter. Working-class youth, in contrast, are easier prey: they are always the first to be rounded up during drug raids or other police operations, and with few friends in high places, they are more likely to be tortured or otherwise abused when in custody.

Youth from the urban poor constituted a large number of all those killed in the brutal “war of drugs” that police officers waged with impunity under the rule of Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte, the former Philippine president, is now awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court for instigating this killing spree, which may have claimed as many as 30,000 victims.

Take the example of Kian delos Santos, a seventeen-year-old student from Caloocan, a working-class district north of Manila. He was wrongly accused of being a drug runner and fatally shot by cops who were subsequently convicted of murder. The only thing that was unusual about the case was the fact that it resulted in criminal charges for the killers.

Indirect Violence

It is not merely direct forms of state violence that have been brutalizing the children of the working poor in the Philippines. Consider Kian delos Santos again. Kian’s mother, Lorenza, worked as a domestic helper in Saudi Arabia during the last three years of his brief life.

She is just one of the millions of working-class Filipinos who have been torn out of the country by the state’s inability to create an economy capable of generating employment for them at home. The same state pushes them into countries like Saudi Arabia, acting as a “labor brokerage state” that is deliberately promoting the export of labor to prop up the domestic economy.

In 2023, 2.2 million Filipinos worked abroad as “overseas Filipino workers,” more than half of them women who were employed as domestic workers like Lorenza. How many of those who took part in the “riots” last month (or who cheered on the “rioters”) grew up in similar circumstances as Kian — separated from their mother for years, unable to embrace them when they are sick or share their joy with them when they are happy?

Poverty, landlessness, lack of employment opportunities at home, and the perpetuation of patriarchal norms that reduce women to the status of glorified slaves for their husbands, fathers, or brothers: these are the conditions that push so many to want to escape from the Philippines by working abroad. These conditions are not natural — they have to be constantly maintained or recreated anew through deliberate actions by those in power.

For decades, the Philippine state has refused to redistribute wealth away from the country’s richest people. It has failed to counter the landlord interests that block land reform or the business owners and neoliberal ideologues opposed to industrial policy. There has been no effective action to erode the power of the Catholic Church and other conservative, anti-feminist forces.

Under Attack

Consider too the sons and daughters of those who do not even receive the “privilege” of being exploited abroad: those who cannot afford the steep placement fees necessary to work in other countries, and who therefore have no choice but to stay behind in the country’s overcrowded cities as part of the urban proletariat or in the countryside as farmworkers or tenant cultivators.

These sections of the working poor in the Philippines have been losing ground, just like their counterparts in many other countries around the world. Despite tremendous increases in productivity, the share of total output accruing to urban and rural labor alike has been declining, as real wages fail to keep up with the rising cost of living and soaring social expectations.

What remains of the shrinking peasantry is under attack, with cheaper produce from abroad flooding the local market while fertilizers and other inputs become unaffordable. Meanwhile, corporations seeking outlets for speculation or areas for resource extraction have stepped up their efforts to grab as much land as possible, forcing peasants to flee to the cities to join the reserve army of labor.

To make matters worse, the “social safety nets” that are supposed to provide some protection for the urban and rural poor are totally inadequate. Since the 2000s, access to social services has been limited or made more stigmatizing through conditions or targeting systems that aim to distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.

None of this happened spontaneously. The Philippine state and the social elites that dominate it, pushed and enabled by other, more powerful states, made a series of deliberate choices that created or reinforced these conditions. While there may have been some countercurrents at work along the way, the overall record is clear.

The state has consistently chosen to mobilize its vast powers and resources to favor the interests of big landowners and capitalists over those of the working-class majority. It has also tolerated or encouraged various forms of corruption and rent-seeking, enabling political dynasties to use public funds to enrich themselves.

Collective Traumas

The Philippine state has thus enabled capital to extract vast amounts of wealth from the labor of the country’s working poor. The country’s real gross domestic product grew by over 1,000 percent over the past five decades. The Philippine economy has now become Asia’s ninth largest.

During this period, tens of millions of people must have experienced all sorts of complex emotions that we don’t normally talk about, because we typically discuss government policies in quantitative terms — in terms of jobs destroyed, wages unpaid, land grabbed, and so on — rather than in terms of the hurt inflicted.

Consider, for example, the agony of the small farmer in Sicogon Island who saw the small plot of land she was supposed to receive under the government’s land reform program paved over for a luxury tourist resort. Or think of the trauma of the mother who saw her shanty in the North Triangle district of Quezon City bulldozed for a shopping mall.

The question that the authorities should be asking is not “Why are they rioting?” but “Why aren’t more of them rioting?” Like so many other late-developing capitalist societies in the South today, the Philippines is a country full of people who are hurting. When people are hurting, they react.

Sometimes they do so together, and sometimes they even manage to carry out an insurrection. The fact that this hasn’t happened yet on a larger and more sustained scale in the Philippines, unlike countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal in recent years, does not mean that it never will.