Amado Guerrero
July 30, 1970

III. Feudalism

1. The Meaning of Feudalism

On reaching the stage of imperialism, capitalism as a world historical phenomenon has become moribund, parasitic and decadent. U.S. imperialism exports its surplus capital to its colonies and semicolonies not to raise the economy of these to the level of capitalist development but merely to extract superprofits by exploiting cheap local labor and drawing out cheap raw materials. Only to some very limited extent will U.S. enterprises be set up to process on the spot certain raw materials available locally. The extent and quality of U.S. monopoly capital injected into the Philippine economy since the beginning of the 20th century have merely caused the subordination of domestic feudalism to U.S. imperialism. It is in the nature of U.S. imperialism to cause uneven and spasmodic development, to maintain a few cities ruled by the comprador class and preserve a vast countryside ruled by the landlord class.

Feudalism still persists in the Philippines although U.S. imperialism has introduced a certain degree of capitalist development. U.S. monopoly capital has assimilated the seed of capitalism that is within the womb of domestic feudalism but at the same time it has prevented the full growth of this seed into a national capitalism. The persistence of feudalism and the growth of a limited degree of capitalism can be understood only by delving into history. Feudalism is a mode of production in which the principal forces of production are the peasants and the land which they till and the relations of production are basically characterized by landlord oppression and exploitation of the peasantry. The most immediate manifestation of feudalism is the possession of vast areas of cultivable land by a few landlords who themselves do not till the land and who compel a big number of tenants to do the tilling. Feudal relations between the parasitic landlord class and the productive peasantry essentially involve the extortion of exorbitant land rent in cash or kind from the latter by the former. Such basic relations leave the tenant-peasants impoverished as their share of the crop is just enough or even often inadequate for their subsistence. They are further subjected to such feudal practices as usury, compulsory menial service and various forms of tribute. The old landlord class which utilizes land rent essentially for its private pleasure and luxury is satisfied with the backward method of agriculture because it gets more than enough for its needs from the sheer exertion of physical labor with simple agricultural implements by a big mass of tenants. On the other hand, the tenant who has only his own assigned plot to till is further impoverished by the low level of technology.

It was not the Spanish colonialists who first laid the foundation of feudalism in the country. The sultanates of Mindanao, especially those of Sulu and Maguindanao, preceded the Spanish conquistadores by at least a century in doing so. These were the first to create a feudal mode of production producing an agricultural surplus to support a landed nobility of considerable membership, fighters, religious teachers and traders. The growth of feudalism under the Islamic faith was stimulated by the brisk trade that was centered in Sulu. Later on, the feudal society became further consolidated by its determined resistance to Spanish colonialism. Representing a form of social organization higher than that which obtained in other parts of the archipelago, the sultanates of Mindanao could more effectively resist the Spanish colonialists who did not represent any higher form of social organization and who were easily identified as an external enemy due to the long-standing conflict of Islam and Christianity then.

It was Spanish colonialism, however, which compelled the institution of feudalism on the widest scale in the archipelago. Under its administration, it developed the feudal mode of production to the fullest extent. In their rule of more than three centuries, the colonial authorities took two major steps to entrench feudalism in the Philippines. These were 1) the assignment of encomiendas as a royal grant, a reward for service or loyalty to the Spanish crown and 2) the compulsory cultivation of certain crops for export starting during the latter part of the 18th century.

The encomienda was a royal grant to religious orders, charitable institutions and individuals. It encompassed a large area and brought together several barangays into one economic and administrative unit. The chiefs of barangays were converted to become the chief running dogs in every locality in their capacity as tribute collectors, enforcers of corvee labor and principal devotees of the alien faith. The essential purpose of the encomienda, indeed was to facilitate the collection of tribute in cash or agricultural commodity, the enforcement of corvee labor and the indoctrination of the people in such a feudal ideology as Roman Catholicism. The colonialists used Christianity to foster docility and servility.

A surplus in agricultural production was created but only to support and feed the Spanish administrators, clergy, soldiery and the indigenous nobility. The tribute was collected as a means of supporting the foreign rulers, especially for providing them with food and luxuries. Corvee labor was employed to expand the agricultural fields, build government and church buildings and improve communications between the villages and the town settlement where the curate set up his quarters.

Within the encomienda, Spanish laws on private property in land began to be applied arbitrarily by both the clerical and lay encomenderos. Communalism was abolished in fully colonized areas. The Spanish encomenderos claimed vast tracts of land as their private property. The indigenous nobility was also allowed to lay private claims on agricultural lands and at the same time it was cajoled into making direct donations of land to the Catholic Church. In cases where the people resisted, the colonialists cruelly grabbed the lands from them by force of arms. All conquered lands were considered property of the royal crown, subject to arbitrary disposal by the colonial authorities. Corvee labor was used systematically to clear new lands or in cases where the people on their own volition would create new agricultural fields for their own needs, they would only be subsequently told that these did not belong to them but to the royal crown or to some encomendero who had gained title over these.

When the friars later advocated the abolition of the encomienda system, it was not really with the view of having feudal abuses eliminated. Their intention was mainly to demand the rigorous application of Spanish laws within a more orderly administrative system so that clerical and lay landlords would not collide with each other too often in their common landgrabbing activities. Friar criticism of the encomienda system merely led to the creation of provinces under the central administration of Manila. The encomienda system had already taken deep roots. The religious orders had already accumulated vast lands.

Spanish lay encomenderos chose either to stay in the archipelago to breed successive generations of insulares and mestizos or to sell out to merchants and other landlords, bring gold back to Spain and retain their status as peninsulares. The native landlords had their own stratum within the landowning class. Some of them became landlords only at the expense of their fellow indios who were dispossessed through sheer landgrabbing or who fell into bankruptcy through the due processes of feudalism. Chinese merchants who chose to stay in the country to conduct trade between the town center and the villages and between the provinces and Manila intermarried with the native women in order to be able to buy lands legally with the money that they earned from their trade and money-lending activities. This would explain why the family names of many landlords today still sound Chinese aside from sounding Spanish.

2. The Hacienda System

The Spanish colonialists decided to intensify feudal exploitation of the people when the galleon trade was already on the decline during the latter part of the 18th Century. The galleon trade had been the principal source of income for the central administration in Manila. With this source of income yielding less and less as a result of international developments caused primarily by the pressures of capitalism, the colonial authorities turned to large-scale cultivation of commercial crops for export. "Economie reforms" were adopted ostensibly to make the Philippines "self-sufficient", that is to say, allow the colonialists to have an alternative source of income.

The Economic Society of Friends of the Country was founded by the Spanish governor-general in 1871 to encourage the planting of certain commercial crops for export. The Royal Company of Spain was subsequently enfranchised to monopolize trade in these agricultural crops. The cultivation of tobacco, indigo, sugar, abaca and other crops was imposed. Spain was trying to adjust to the pressures of capitalism, especially British capitalism and French capitalism, during the late part of the 18th century and the early part of the l9th century. Before the formal opening of the ports of Manila to non-Spanish ships, these had already started to call on Manila during the latter part of the 18th century.

The large-scale cultivation of commercial crops started the hacienda system that still exists today. This resulted in the more vicious exploitation of the Filipino people. The colonial government dictated confiscatory prices for the commercial crops. Also, the people who planted these crops had to get their staple food, rice or corn, from other areas. Thus, specialization in agriculture was introduced and commodity production began to disturb the natural economy obtaining in a feudal society.

While the Spanish colonialists, particularly the friars, intensified their feudal exploitation of the people, 51 non-Spanish foreign shipping and commercial houses became established in Manila in the middle part of the l9th century. Twelve of these were American and non-Spanish European houses which virtually monopolized the import-export trade. These would subsequently open branches at different points in the archipelago such as Sual, Cebu, Zamboanga, Legaspi and Tacloban where ports were opened to foreign trade.

The financial operations of these foreign establishments strengthened the production of export crops. The total value of agricultural exports rose from P500,000 in 1810 to P108 million in 1870. This rose even more rapidly towards the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution of 1898. The cultivation of abaca and sugar was encouraged and these crops became the principal exports of the country. In the mid-19th century, the level of sugar production was 3,000 picu1s and four decades later it reached 2,000,000 piculs. American refineries (controlled by the mammoth American Sugar Refining Company) were specially interested in sugar so that in 1885, they were already getting two-thirds of this crop or 225,000 short tons. In 1898, the American consul in Manila could boast that the value of trade under his supervision equalled that of 21 competitors combined.

The acceleration of foreign trade in agricultural crops resulted in the acceleration of domestic trade. The local mercantile bourgeoisie emerged more significantly in domestic trade. Nevertheless, it found its economic opportunities limited to investing its profits in the acquisition of lands or in the leasing of friar estates. Part of its profits went into supporting more university students who studied locally or abroad. Thus, the mercantile bourgeoisie served as the social base of the native intelligentsia.

When the United States in its imperialist greed seized the Philippines for itself, it was very conscious of the necessity of retaining feudalism so as to provide itself continuously with such raw materials as sugar, hemp, coconut and other agricultural products. In using counterrevolutionary dual tactics to deceive the ilustrado leadership of the Philippine Revolution, it was aware of the landlord and mercantile character of the right wing of such a leadership and moved to assimilate its interests. It adopted the tactics to isolate the left wing represented by Mabini which was ideologically closer to the revolutionary peasant masses and which advocated the restitution to the people of the lands taken away from them by the Spanish colonial government and the friars.

U.S. imperialism, therefore, did not hesitate to guarantee in the Treaty of Paris of 1898 the property rights of the landlord class under the Spanish colonial regime and returned even to the most despotic Spanish ecclesiastical and lay landlords the lands that had been confiscated from them by the revolutionary masses. The continuance of feudal rights assured the U.S. colonial government of political support by the betrayers of the revolution and of continued supply of raw materials for U.S. industries. The Payne-Aldrich Act of 1909 admitted Philippine products, chiefly agricultural, duty-free into the United States. In 1910, the U.S. imperialists set up a sugar mill as a signal act for the type of investments they were most interested in making. In 1913, the Underwood Tariff Act removed all quota limitations on Philippine agricultural products exported to the United States. All these steps had the single effect of tying down the Philippines to a colonial and agrarian economy highly dependent on a few export crops. During the first three decades of U.S. imperialist rule, agricultural production for export was expanded more rapidly than ever before. By 1932, more than 99 per cent of sugar exports was going to the United States.

By conquering the Philippines, U.S. imperialism was able to create the conditions which it was less in a position to create through sheer commercial financing operations by its export-import and shipping firms under the Spanish colonial rule. It enhanced semifeudalism in the countryside by further encouraging capitalist farming, corporate ownership of land and merchant usury. It put up sugar mills, abaca mills and coconut mills under corporate ownership and around which the landlords were organized. Aside from these measures which were effected directly in the countryside, U.S. imperialism dumped finished products in order to tie down the economy to the production of a few export crops and to the commodity market.

The pattern of the economy and of agricultural production encouraged by U.S. imperialism during its direct colonial rule has remained basically unchanged. As of 1957, large-scale cultivation of export crops prevailed over about 20 per cent (1.5 million hectares) of the total agricultural land. Land devoted to food crops comprised about 80 percent (5.5 million hectares). As of 1970, despite conspicuous attempts in the sixties to expand it, large-scale cultivation of export crops prevailed over about 28 per cent (2.5 million hectares) of the total agricultural land. Land devoted to food crops comprised about 72 per cent (6.4 million hectares). Capitalist methods of exploitation are strikingly evident in lands where export crops are cultivated, except in some few areas where mechanization has been introduced by the landlords.

Not all bankrupt owner-peasants and tenant-peasants displaced from lands converted into capitalist farms can be accomodated as workers in the industrial areas or as regular farm workers. The enterprises set up by the U.S. monopolies and national capitalists are insufficient to absorb them. Because of extremely limited opportunities in industry and agriculture, there is excessive competition for a few industrial jobs which press down wage conditions as well as overcrowding on land.