In late September of this year, tens of thousands of Filipinos took to the streets following weeks of revelations that some of the country’s highest officials had been receiving millions of dollars’ worth of kickbacks from government contracts. Among them were around a thousand protesters, mostly youth from the urban poor, who insisted on marching to the presidential palace and subsequently engaged in some of the most confrontational acts of protest in recent Philippine history.
Herbert Docena is a researcher and educator helping to organize The Workers’ School, a new education initiative to help oppressed groups in the Philippines educate themselves and each other.
The young protesters attempted to set a ten-wheeler truck blocking their way ablaze, and lobbed Molotov cocktails at heavily armoured police. Even after police responded with live ammunition, they refused to back off. “F*ck the system!”, one of them was recorded on camera shouting. Others let out a different but complementary call: “Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!”
Government officials and many commentators quickly dismissed what happened as little more than a mindless riot — the work of unthinking or irrational “troublemakers” paid off by “malevolent forces” seeking to destabilize an otherwise stable government. Underlying these accusations was an unstated assumption: that nobody in the Philippines, least of all the children of the working poor, has any reason to want to “f*ck” the system. But only someone with no knowledge of the lived experience of the Filipino working class could fail to grasp why a segment of the youth have had it with “peaceful” protest.
Indeed, only the rich, confined as they are to their gilded penthouses or glass towers and utterly oblivious to the real state of the country, could fail to understand the logic behind that call for “revolution”. For the Philippines is a country riven by deep inequality and even deeper pain — pain that eventually rises to the surface in one form or another.
The Usual Suspects
To begin to understand why poor urban youth might refuse to restrict their protest to mere ritual or ceremony, it is necessary to understand what has been happening to them at the hands of the Philippine state in recent years. In so doing, we can also begin to draw a picture of contemporary Philippine society different from that internalized and propagated by the country’s elites.
Over the past several decades, young people from among the country’s oppressed and exploited classes have borne the brunt of direct and indirect violence perpetrated by the Philippine government and other state apparatuses such as the courts, the police, and the military. As others have pointed out, teens and young adults living in the Philippines’ sprawling slums and working-class districts have become the preferred punching bags — if not live shooting targets — of the country’s violent police force.
Unlike middle-class youth who live in gated subdivisions, exclusive condominiums, or other places cops cannot freely enter, these working-class youth are easier prey: they are always the first to be rounded up by the police during drug raids or other police operations. Their fathers being trash collectors or factory workers with few social ties, unlike the lawyers or white-collar professionals who have friends in high places, they are also always more vulnerable to being beaten up, tortured, or otherwise abused by the police when in custody.
By consolidating capitalism in the country and pursuing a neoliberal form of development, the Philippine state helped extract vast amounts of wealth from the country’s working poor.
Indeed, as some have rightly noted, poor urban youth constituted a large section of all those killed in the brutal “war on drugs” waged with impunity by the police under Rodrigo Duterte, the former Philippine President now held by the International Criminal Court in the Hague precisely for instigating this killing spree. Think of Kian delos Santos, the 17-year-old student from Caloocan, a well-known working-class district north of Manila, who was wrongly accused of being a drug runner and then fatally shot by cops who were subsequently convicted for killing him. He was just one of the many working-class minors from among the estimated 12,000 to 30,000 people murdered as part of Duterte’s ill-disguised war against the poor.
It should come as little surprise that some of these youths, after years and years of oppression, marginalization, and dehumanization, have abandoned previous inhibitions and are now in open revolt against a state that has never given them anything. More surprising is that it did not happen sooner.
Violence Comes in Many Forms
These direct forms of state violence are not the only factor brutalizing the children of the Filipino working poor, however. Consider Kian again. His mother, Lorenza, worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh during the last three years of Kian’s brief life. She is just one of the millions of working-class Filipinos wrenched out of the country by the state’s inability to create an economy capable of generating more domestic employment — and then pushed into Saudi by Arabia by that same state acting as a “labour-brokerage state”, actively promoting export labour to prop up the domestic economy.
In 2023, it was reported that 2.2 million Filipinos worked abroad as “Overseas Filipino Workers”, of whom around half were women employed as domestic workers like Lorenza. How many of those who took part in the “riots” or cheered on the “rioters” in September grew up like Kian — away from their mother for years, unable to be embraced by them when sick or to share their joy with them when happy?
Poverty, landlessness, lack of employment opportunities at home, and patriarchal norms that make women little more than the glorified slaves of their husbands, fathers, or brothers are all conditions that, in one way or another, push Filipino women to escape the country and work abroad. They are not “natural”. They must be maintained or recreated anew through deliberate actions by the state or those in power.
Since the 1970s, the Philippine state has done precisely that: by refusing to redistribute wealth away from the richest, by failing to counter landlord interests blocking land reform, by declining to go against business owners and neoliberal ideologues opposed to industrial policy, by repudiating moves aimed at eroding the power of the Church and other conservative, anti-feminist forces, and so on. Are all these actions, these steps taken or not taken, which result in so many children being separated from their mothers, not a form of violence against the children of the working poor?
Working Class under Attack
Consider, too, the sons and daughters of those who are not even granted the “privilege” of being exploited abroad: those who cannot afford the steep placement fees needed to work in other countries and therefore have no choice but to stay behind and work in the Philippines’ overcrowded cities as part of the urban proletariat or in the countryside as farmworkers or small tenant cultivators.
In recent decades, 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, urban and rural labour’s share of the total output vis-à-vis capital has actually declined, and real wages have largely failed to keep up with the rising cost of living and soaring social expectations. What remains of the ever-shrinking Filipino peasantry is under attack, as cheaper produce from abroad floods the domestic market even as the price of fertilizers and other inputs remain unaffordable.
As if that were not enough, corporations seeking outlets for speculation or areas for resource extraction have stepped up their efforts to grab as much land as possible, driving peasants away and forcing them to flee to the cities to join what Karl Marx called the “industrial reserve army of labour” or the swelling ranks of the unemployed or under-employed. Making things worse for so many working and poor Filipinos has been the utter insufficiency of the country’s so-called “social safety nets” meant to cushion the impact of their subjugation to the tender mercies of the market. Since the 2000s, access to social services has either been restricted or stigmatized through conditionalities or “targeting” systems that seek to distinguish between the so-called “deserving” and “undeserving poor”.
The Philippines is a country full of people who are hurting. When people are hurt, they react.
None of this happened spontaneously. Since the 1960s, the Philippine state has consistently mobilized its vast resources to engender and entrench a form of society and a kind of economy that intrinsically places the interest of big landowners and big capitalists over the interests of the working-class majority. Beginning in the 1980s, the state decided to embrace an even more vicious type of capitalist development that made it even easier for big corporations to grab vast tracts of land and resources from small peasants or indigenous peoples, pay workers far below the living wage, and avoid shouldering more of the burden for the upkeep of public hospitals, public schools, and other essential services. It also tolerated if not encouraged various forms of corruption and rent-seeking activities, enabling a vast web of political dynasties to use public funds to enrich themselves.
The Pain of Late Capitalism
By consolidating capitalism in the country and pursuing a neoliberal form of development, the Philippine state helped extract vast amounts of wealth from the country’s working poor. National GDP grew by over 1,000 percent over the past five decades, and the Philippine economy has now become the ninth largest in Asia and the thirty-second largest in the world, bigger than the economies of over 150 other countries.
But by helping to create and reinforce the conditions under which subordinated groups are driven to produce all this wealth, the state also caused much pain. The Filipino masses have gone through all sorts of complex emotions we do not normally think or talk about, because social policies or government action are typically discussed in quantitative terms — number of jobs destroyed, sum of wages not paid, total acreage of land grabbed, etc. — rather than in terms of pain felt.
Consider the agony of the small farmer on Sicogon Island who saw the small plot of land he was supposed to receive under the government’s land reform programme paved over to make way for a luxury resort. Think of the trauma of the mother who saw her shanty in the North Triangle of Quezon City bulldozed to make space for a shopping mall. Imagine the anguish of millions of workers who realize that their wages are insufficient to send their children to school, or the despair of the people in Bicol whose houses were swept away by floods that the government’s non-existent flood control projects failed to prevent.
Now consider the impact of all this pain on the children. Is it really any wonder that so many young, working-class Filipinos would want to “f*ck the system” and call for “revolution”? Those in power are mystified by the revolt, but perhaps the real mystery, looking at Philippine realities from the perspective of the working class, is why the revolt is not already much bigger. The puzzle for many commentators has been “Why can’t all these poor kids stay peaceful?”, but maybe the real puzzle, given everything they have been subjected to in recent decades, is how they could have remained peaceful all these years.
The Philippines is a country full of people who are hurting. When people are hurt, they react — sometimes they do so together. Sometimes they even manage to carry out an insurrection. That this has not happened yet in the Philippines, unlike in Bangladesh or Nepal, does not mean it never will.