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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Within the currently intensified labour flows from developing societies to highly industrialized areas, the Philippines has been the largest supplier of government-sponsored contract workers. Overseas contract employment was institutionalized by the Philippine government in 1972 to tackle the problems of unemployment and foreign debt. The remittances from migrant workers have become a major source of foreign currency for the national economy, which led the then president Aquino to call overseas workers "national heroes." In this light, building upon Louise Amoore's conceptualization of globalization as sets of globalizing social practices, my essay will investigate the concrete, contingen, t and situated practices of global labour migration. By so doing this analysis will stress that these migrant workers are not passive recipients of Philippine state policies but are agential political subjects. It will argue that the structured social practices of global labour migrants not only participate in and depend on, but also contest and negotiate, the (re)constitution of capitalist relations of production and social reproduction within the neo-liberal restructuring of global order. The objective of my essay is to contribute towards both the illustration of global politics as social relations produced by various actors in multiple spheres and emergent crucial efforts to pursue the possibilities for an emancipatory project and political resistance.
Resume
Dans le con texte des flux de travailleurs--flux actuellement intensifies--allant des societes en developpement vers des zones hautement industrialisees, les Philippines a ete le plus grand pourvoyeur de travailleurs-sous-contrat parraines par un gouvernement. L'emploi a l'etranger sous contrat a ete institutionnalise par le gouvernement philippin en 1972 comme mesure pour regler les problemes du chomage et de la dette exterieure. Les envois de fonds des travailleurs expatries sont devenus une source importante de devise etrangere pour l'economie nationale, ce qui avait amene la Presidente Aquino, presidente a l'epoque, a qualifier les ouvriers expatries de "heros nationaux". Darts cette optique, et en elaborant sur le modole de Louise Amoore qui a conceptualise la globalisation comme etant des ensembles de pratiques sociales globalisantes, mon essai examinera les pratiques concretes, contingentes et localisees de la migration globale de travailleurs. Ce faisant, cette analyse soulignera le fait que ces travailleurs migrants ne sont pas les beneficiaires passifs de la politique de l'etat philippin, mais sont en fait des acteurs politiques. Elle soutiendra que les pratiques sociales structurees des travailleurs immigrants a l'echelle globale, non seulement participent a, et dependent de, la reconstitution des rapports de production capitalistes et de reproduction sociale dans la restructuration neolibdrale de l'ordre mondial, mais qu'elles remettent en question et negocient ces memes rapports. L'objectif de mon essai est, d'une part, de concourir a illustrer la politique globale en tant que relations sociales produites par divers acteurs dans des spheres multiples, et de l'autre, de contribuer aux efforts decisifs emergents pour examiner les possibilites d'un projet emancipateur et une resistance politique.
... what we call globalisation is best understood as representative of sets of complex and often contradictory globalising social practices. --Louise Amoore (1)
The rapidly deepening penetration of liberal market discipline into political, social, and cultural realms has become fundamentally and contradictorily associated with the reconfigurations of the global division of labour as well as with the intensification of exploitation, alienation, and commodification of human beings and nature. Within such a context, usually labelled as "globalization," the literature that attempts to conceptualize social and political relations on the global scale has been voluminous in the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE). Yet, largely due to these disciplines' preoccupation with the emergence of the modern nation-state and to the rise of the bourgeoisie as a dominant social class through the consolidation of capitalist economy, IR and IPE scholars predominantly tend to focus on elite forms of transnational, state, or corporate agents with direct, top-down decision making and thus distance global politics from contextualized experiences. (2) In this respect, the objective of this essay is not to depict international relations "from the bottom up" by advocating the ambiguous notion of "global civil society," (3) but rather to unpack the linkages between global politics and individuals' everyday spaces by deeming global politics to be "social relations produced by a broad array of actors in multiple spheres." (4) To do so it will investigate the concrete, contingent, and situated practices of global labour migration and eventually contribute towards emergent crucial efforts to pursue the possibilities for an emancipatory project and political resistance. (5) In particular, building upon Louise Amoore's conceptualization ofglobalization as sets of globalizing social practices, this essay will explore: how and with what consequences are migrant workers, as active participants, contradictorily/paradoxically complicit and yet opposing to the neo-liberal restructuring of global order?
International labour migration is not a historical novelty, but its unprecedented magnitude and wide geographic dispersion, together with its potential as a force for social transformations in both the societies of origin and those of destination, has led Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller to predict that the closing years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first will be "an age of migration." (6) Within the currently intensified transfers of migrant labourers from developing societies to highly industrialized areas, the Philippines is the largest supplier of government-sponsored contract labour with over seven hundred thousand workers "deployed" annually to over 160 countries and territories. (7) Whereas in the early 1970s Philippine migrant labourers were overwhelmingly male and worked in the oil-producing states in the Middle East, their contemporary patterns highly consist of female workers who are mainly destined to other Asian countries. Labour migration in the form of overseas contract work was institutionalized by the Philippine government in 1972 as a stop-gap measure to tackle the persistent problem of unemployment and the lack of foreign exchange. (8) The remittances from overseas contract workers have become a major source of foreign currency for the national economy. (9) Based upon a specifically economic calculus and an unquestioned belief in the national development potential of this income stream, the then president of the Philippines, Cory Aquino, called overseas workers "national heroes." (10) In this light, this analysis will stress that these migrant workers are not passive recipients of the Philippine state policies that facilitate overseas employment but are agential political subjects, by arguing that the structured social practices of global labour migrants not only participate in and depend on, but also contest and negotiate, the reconfigurations of labourcapital relations in the (re)constitution of capitalist relations of production and social reproduction within the neo-liberal restructuring of global order.
To systematize this analysis, the section that follows will assess existing approaches to international labour migration, especially paying attention to perhaps the most influential leftist tradition of thought in IR and IPE, neo-Gramscian perspectives that have radically addressed the problem of power dynamics among social forces within capitalist modes of production and enhanced an understanding of the agency/structure relation in the historical transformations of world order. In the next section, the elitist bias of the neo-Gramscian approach will be problematized through perspective of globalization-as-practice, while drawing on emergent literature on...
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