Department of Rhetoric
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2670
In Formal Economies: Of Filipinos and Pirates in the New World Order
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which the phenomena of informal economies in the Philippines – from markets of pirated products to underground networks of trade and labor – are necessary consequences of, rather than perversions within, capitalistic hyper-development in the postcolonial Global South. Drawing examples from recent sociological studies on informal economies, as well as governmental documents on informal markets in the Philippines, I wish to examine how the problem of piracy emerges out of the aggressive economic infrastructural plans of ÒmodernizingÓ the Philippines. I do this by articulating the relationship between three thematic topics. First, I examine the rhetoric of economic development as one that involves the delimitation of time, that is, of presupposing and projecting a singular time defined by transnational capital under which the ÒbackwardnessÓ of local underdevelopment is subsumed toward the ÒprogressiveÓ futurity of global modernity. Secondly, this subsumption of different temporalities into the teleological time of capital leads to the second problem of space: how to organize the various material contradictions that come out of this temporal contraction. Thirdly, I analyze how informal economies and the phenomena of Filipino piracy become not only necessary outcomes of these temporal and spatial problems, but indeed are structural ÒanswersÓ that the Philippine nation-state at once seeks to vitiate and profit. The elaboration of this tripartite schema will argue that Philippine piracy cannot be fully understood unless it is situated within governmental efforts to transform the Philippine national economy into a viable competitor in the world market; or to put it another way, Philippine informal economies are consequences of being ÒinÓ the formal relations of global capitalism. By proposing this theoretical structure in understanding piracy in a postcolonial state like the Philippines, I wish to broach further questions of new media, technology, and their embeddedness in the international division of labor of the New World Order.