In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Allan E.S. Lumba. Lumba is currently an assistant professor of history at Concordia University in unceded Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montréal. His book is Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines. A free digital version of the book can be found here.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Allan E.S. Lumba: Monetary Authorities sheds light on how racial capitalism and U.S. colonialism in the first decades of the twentieth century would profoundly shape the destiny of the Philippines. I argue that U.S. imperial and colonial monetary and banking systems normalized racial and class hierarchies, enforced capitalist exploitation, and countered people-led movements for decolonization. I look at how and why economic policymakers justified imperial sovereignty by claiming that Filipinos did not possess the racial capacities to properly manage large scale capital. The monetary system was used to directly and indirectly police the economic activities of colonized subjects and suppress radical and revolutionary organizing. I also track how some Filipino leaders and experts, pursued a reactionary strategy of what I call “conditional decolonization,” which pushed for a national independence that maintained the country’s dependency on U.S. racial capitalism and militarized empire.
Through my book, I hope BAR readers will not only learn more about the Philippines and U.S. empire, but perhaps find resonance with other histories of decolonization and counter-decolonization and recognize connections with other places and peoples impoverished by global racial capitalism. Specifically, I hope my book helps readers see that contemporary global money relations are not only shaped by economic or class inequality but are also fundamentally structured by (and continues to reproduce) racial and colonial violence.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Abstractly, I am really hoping this book is of some use to organizers who have been thinking more materially and more internationally about the violence of money. I think it is easy to see money as a tool of the oppressor, but I also want organizers to see money relations as a terrain of struggle, ground where it doesn’t always go the way of the oppressor, where it can end up working against what was intended. I am hoping organizers think about how much anxiety and nervousness there is when policymakers make and maintain monetary systems, how much insecurity there is in something that seems so quotidian and normal.
More concretely I hope this book resonates with organizers in the Philippines and the diaspora concerned with two interconnected crises. The first crisis of the Philippines is its historic impoverishment. It is considered a chronically poor country. It is an indebted country. It is existentially dependent on foreign currency and capital. To make money, one must leave the Philippines as an overseas foreign worker. Daily life value is calculated by converting local currency in some other foreign currency, usually the U.S. dollar value. The impoverishment of the Philippines makes it less of a powerful voice especially regarding solutions to climate catastrophe. Despite being regularly inundated by super-typhoons that destroy lives and infrastructure, that causes ever more climate refugees, the impoverishment of the Philippines makes it underequipped to protect itself in any sustainable way. The second crisis concerns ongoing human rights violations, particularly how the Philippine state continues to mete out maiming, torture, and death to those it deems radical. My book tries to speak to the longer history of anti-radicalism in the Philippines, illuminating how monetary policies were attempts to fund and normalize these militarized forms of violence within “civil society.”
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
The objective of unlearning, I believe, was always the objective of my book. Rather than have a didactic text that presents information, I wanted readers to historically reframe contemporary conditions of violence and injustice. More acutely, I want readers to unlearn normative assumptions about decolonization and capitalism. On one hand, I hope readers unlearn the notion that decolonization was a past event that was successfully completed. This is especially true for places in the Global South, like the Philippines. I want to trouble the notion that nominal sovereignty for a nation is equivalent to true liberation. On the other hand, I also want readers to unlearn the assumption that decolonization is now merely an epistemological problem or an issue of individual consciousness. Decolonization, as I argue in the book, cannot occur as long as the world remains under an imperial and racial capitalist global system. Decolonization is concerned with an ongoing material problem, not one that can be solved merely through adjusting political categories or through merely transforming modes of knowledge production or the individual production of subjectivity. The book is not arguing that these problems are not interwoven with material relations, but rather, it is arguing that absolute decolonization entails creating a world without capitalism and imperialism. And that, monetary systems—especially under the U.S. dollar—have historically been invested in securitizing and reproducing racial capitalist and imperial relations.
This is especially apparent when thinking about how Philippine regimes since nominal independence have continued to maintain their “sovereignty” mainly by opening up the country (and now its globalized diasporic labor) to foreign capital and to U.S. imperial military forces. Geopolitically, the Philippines has never broken with its inheritance as the United States’ “little brown brother,” hardly ever challenging the white supremacist international order that has continued to shape the planet despite the supposedly egalitarian United Nations era. This is because Philippine national leaders have consistently collaborated with local capitalists, utilizing the rhetoric of what I call “conditional decolonization” to suppress and exploit any possibility of people-led revolution.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
I am greatly indebted to the Black radical tradition, for attracting me to history, and to enabling me to find ways of analyzing historical and contemporary material conditions. I go back often to writers like Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, and Stuart Hall. Also, I often return to the words of leaders that came out of the Third World anti-colonial movements like Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Stephen Biko. More recently, I’ve been greatly inspired by contemporary Indigenous feminist thinkers like Leanne Simpson, Jodi Byrd, Audra Simpson and the work of feminist and queer theory scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Mel Chen, and Lisa Lowe.
One thing I’ve been very interested in is trying to think with others more about the Philippine radical tradition before the 1960s, to reconsider the writings of someone like Jose Rizal, but to also engage more deeply with the writings of lesser known historical figures (in the Philippines and elsewhere) like Crisanto Evangelista, Pedro Santos, and Carlos Bulosan. For me, I see myself indebted to, and contributing to, much of the intellectual groundwork of radical thinkers like E. San Juan, Walden Bello, Carol Hau, Vicente Rafael, and Neferti Tadiar.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
I have learned a lot from Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). It’s a book I’ve been going back to a lot over the last couple years, especially when rethinking the history of U.S. capitalism through the lens of anti-Indigenous settler colonialism. I find Karuka’s analysis of railroad colonialism, counter-sovereignty, corporate personhood, and the counter-revolution of property especially helpful in better understanding white supremacist continental imperialism. In particular, it’s been giving me new insights into how and why there is such an intensified drive toward fascism in the United States all in the name of defending individual liberty from social movements seeking transformative justice.
A book that came out this year that has really opened up new intellectual horizons for me is Moon-Ho Jung’s Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (University of California Press, 2022). The book has been really generative, pushing me to rethink the historical entanglements between transpacific anticolonialism and global anarchism. I was really drawn to how the book illuminates how early twentieth century desires for national sovereignty and worker autonomy gave rise to unanticipated solidarities, tying together the fates of anti-colonial nationalists in Asia, migrant workers in North America and Hawai’i, and internationalist revolutionaries.
That these kinds of books can be published despite the intense hegemonic rise of reactionary politics (and publics), has really motivated me in pursuit of my next scholarly goal: writing a history of the Philippine radical tradition, and situating this tradition within an internationalist movement against capitalism, colonialism, fascism, and white supremacy.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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