Urban restructuring in developing countries through “globalization of cities in the South” is the intermediate economic background of Marco Garrido’s (2019) more than a decade long ethnographical study of Manila communities made up of urban poor settlements and proximate middle-class gated subdivisions.
The built up of these two intersperse metropolitan communities started in 1960s but it was only beginning in the 1990s and towards the turn of the century that widespread middle class walled enclaves defined sharp spatial boundaries. To quote Garrido, “The interspersion of the urban poor and middle class in slums and enclaves drives boundary imposition with the housing divide becoming a salient class divide.” Decades of spatially bounded dynamic interactions between the two communities emerge a socio-economic relationship of a stigmatized poor and the siege mentality of the middle class.
Garrido’s social class rigors of analysis explain the ensuing politics of the two classes clarifying the electoral struggle of the middle class-led EDSA Dos overthrowing Estrada in January 2001 and the following backlash of the pro-Estrada urban poor contingent in the protest march of EDSA Tres in May 2001. The social class-based analysis partly explained how Macapagal-Arroyo survived the Hello-Garci scandal, and then the election of Noynoy Aquino as president in 2010. The analysis continue to explain into why Duterte won in 2016 garnering the electoral support from both classes. It was a protest against political dysfunction but with tangential reasons coming from their own differentiated social class circumstances. (Just to remind ourselves that the study covers only Metro Manila.)
What makes the social class analysis and politics in Metro Manila compelling is that Garrido’s study carefully constructed the theoretical basis of the class divide physically represented by imposed spatial boundaries and then reaffirmed by decades of social interactions of unequal relationships. Garrido let the stories of the citizens inside the two communities define their views and feelings, affirming the subtle or not impositions of the class division in between them.
This is by far the most systematic sociological analysis of current Philippine politics, and possibly applicable to other developing countries with large number of urban poor settlements amidst a moderately growing middle class such as Brazil. This is better than the patchwork and top-down analysis of systematic disinformation and miseducation of the less educated poor supposed to be without capabilities to discern, and the civil-society groups heroic but failed efforts to help and transform them. The failure of current political analysis to recognize two to three decades of social class division in the major urban city, their sentiments and politics, led only to inappropriate messages that further reaffirmed the unequal relationship. Let me quote Garrido’s critical analysis:
“It really is amazing. Manileños have such a highly refined nose for class—it steers a thousand daily interactions, which, in their aggregate, give the city its shape—and yet largely blind to the way social class shapes their politics. They reach instead for the usual rubrics: political dynasties, political bosses, patronage, palakasan, or plain old corruption. These frameworks are not so much irrelevant as insufficient particularly in Manila. Our picture of Philippine politics will never be complete without a sociological account of social class.”
The quote above for me is probably what makes up the conclusion of the wonderful book, no doubt a great contribution to Philippine studies and the “Global South” that scholars will have to deal with. As an economist, I have to get pass through what is now clearly understood social class dynamics and politics in current Metro Manila, thanks to Garrido. I have to reflect what had happened and what could happen on the basis of the continuing transformation of the economy towards bad or good outcomes.
Developing countries in the Global South that failed to fully industrialize and create corresponding urban industrial jobs depict an economic transformation from largely agricultural toward services, half of which are low-productivity, low-wage, and irregular or casual jobs. In comparison are successful industrial East-Asian economies that include China, currently in the process of completing their economy’s full transformation. Contrary to usual paeans paid to liberal market reforms, the state and political leadership in partnership with the private sector played a pivotal role in the successful economic transformation of China following the same successful East-Asian countries’ route.
Social class formations and their attendant politics are normal dynamics in a changing society and economy. What is crucial is a political leadership that forge a working coalition among different social class interests taking on the challenges and opportunities offered by the changing global economic and geopolitical environment. The associated goal of transformation is to lessen inequality by spreading out opportunities for social and economic mobility diffusing tension from social class conflict of interests.
Mr. Joselito T. Sescon is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of Ateneo de Manila University. “The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila” by Marco Garrido, Associate Professor, University of Chicago, is reprinted and available at the Ateneo de Manila University Press.