Sugar Planter-State Relations and Labour Processes in Colonial Philippine Haciendas

Abstract

Disputes the prevailing view that the coercive power of the colonial state facilitated planter control of labor & the introduction of wage-labor relations in the sugar haciendas of Negros Island, the Philippines, in the late nineteenth century. Evidence is presented showing that sharecropping was the predominant mechanism for the generation & extraction of surplus, & that the supposed planter-state alliance was nonexistent during this period. Sugarcane tenancy was the specific outcome of incomplete planter class hegemony. It is also argued that planter strategies & labor processes entailed oppositional relationships that revolved around the dual axes of colonialism & capitalism, & that political economy & culture were dialectically intertwined in those relationships. The complex set of events that transpired in the early twentieth century under the aegis of US colonialism eventuated in the transition to the wage-labor form, in its deproletarianized variant, in Negros. However, from the outset, hacienda production relations were embedded in capitalist contradictions, but their changing morphology was contingent on the interplay of multiple determinations.