Alienation, they say, can be traced to the industrial revolution when craftsmen were forced to become factory workers.  They simply could not compete either by way of volume or quality against the factory.  And so they had to give in to the new world order.  In their workshops, they owned the means of production; in the factories, they didn’t.  In their workshops, they were the masters; they made and sold products.  In the factories, they were little more than slaves; they sold their labour power for products owned by the company and driven by capital.  In their workshops, they were involved in all stages of a product’s creation; they were like artists infusing each product with their creativity.  In the factories, the manufacturing process was fragmented into distinct stages, each requiring one worker to a series of repetitive actions.  There is no creativity there. 

A factory worker doesn’t look at a factory product and say, “It was I who made that.”  The worker becomes part of the machine and is just as expendable as any spare part.  A factory worker cannot take a factory product and say, “This is mine and I will sell it.”  It is not his.  It is owned by the factory.  Alienation is the phenomenon in which a worker becomes divorced from his labour and the work of his hands, an abomination that is so far removed from our natural ability to, like God, admire our work and say, “It is good.”

I think, however, that the feeling of alienation resulting from this divorce between a labourer and his labour does not depend on the method of manufacturing per se.  For example, Japanese management styles (at least in the middle of the 20^th century) were very effective in keeping workers happy.  The workers, despite working under Western-style factories, did not feel alienated.  This was because the Japanese management system was designed to effectively allow the Japanese worker to identify with the factory.  Workers were “employed for life,” subjected to a corporate culture that developed company loyalty—singing pro-company songs in the morning, attending company parties, being exposed to all sorts of propaganda about the goodness of the company, the progress of the company, the superiority of the company over its rivals.  The worker, in identifying with the company, allows his subjectivity to be diffused into this collective identity, this community bound by the common goal of increased production and profit. 

This is propaganda at it’s best.  After all, the workers do not, in supposedly sharing in the company’s dreams, actually get shares in the company’s profit.  But it is exactly the genius of “motivational activities” that allows the worker to identify with the company while all the company needs to do is maintain an appearance of identifying with the workers.  The Japanese were pretty good at it, and so their workers were blinded and unable to see the reality of their alienation.  Ignorance is bliss.   But this is one way in which alienation is countered—if I am made to believe that I am an integral part of the company (not just an expendable worker but a consciousness among a community of subjectivities united as one identity, one community) then I can be made to believe that I made the company’s products, I own the company as the company owns me, and I share the company’s success.

This success of corporate management in imposing this process of identification is apparent when managers announce the status of the company to their workers.  When the company experiences success, the workers rejoice, they feel “good”—even though their salaries don’t really change.  And so they work harder to maintain this good feeling of success and are even prepared to make sacrifices for the company (forced overtime, delayed salary raise, etc.) if the company experiences difficulty because they see the company’s success or failure as their own.

In the past, people thought of alienation as something that only plagued the workers.  Most of us have gotten over this naiveté.  It has become obvious that professionals, though exploited in different terms, are likewise vulnerable to alienation.

The modern office is not that different, after all, from a factory.  Writers who learned so much about their craft in college end up doing dull, generic reports and letters.  Like the factory worker, they can find themselves drained of any capacity for creativity as they are driven by demands of efficiency to use word processors to cut and paste generic texts from one document to another.

I am reminded of Bubbles Guerrero who said one evening while photocopying hundreds of materials way into the wee hours of dawn (8 hours of overtime):  “I can’t believe I studied twelve units of Philosophy in college for this.”

In truth, many young professionals entering junior corporate positions are experiencing this alienation, leading to a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “quarter-life crisis,” a time when the promises of youth are broken in the face of alienating professional reality.  

Not all yuppies suffer from this, of course.  Some companies, especially multi-national companies, are particularly good at making junior employees feel good.  These employees are given all sorts of bonuses and incentives and indoctrinated into company values of loyalty and honour.  These things encourage identification with the company.  Like the Japanese workers of half a century ago, modern yuppies can feel just as happy—and be just as blind to the alienating circumstances of their professional labour.  Call centre employees in the Philippines, for example, can become ecstatic over freebies and bonuses, they feel lucky for belonging with the company as opposed to working for some pathetic organization where workers are unappreciated and underpaid (like, say, a Philippine government agency)—all the while ignoring the fact that their foreign counterparts are earning several times as much. 

This feeling of superiority that leads individuals to read other people’s lives and beliefs as somehow wrong or inferior while failing to realize the contradictions in our own lives—contradictions that upon realization could lead either to suicide or revolt—is a result “ideology” as formulated by Louis Althusser.  Ideology is what keeps us happy, what allows us the privilege of bliss in ignorance of the things that ideology allows us not to see.  The ideology of social mobility, for example, that has driven millions of Filipino youth to study in order to achieve personal success is a type of ideology propagated by the State and by the educational ideological state apparatus.  This ideology, by pointing to the educational system as the official means toward personal progress, allows the State to shift the blame from itself (for its corruption and inefficiency) to the people themselves.  In fact, the educational system itself is the means in which the ruling class keeps class boundaries and counters the social mobility it is supposed to produce.  For example, students in public schools (where poor people go) are blamed for not reading when their libraries have no books, for not being smart enough when their teachers are overworked and underpaid, and for not passing entrance exams to prestigious universities when the difference between the quality of education in public schools and private schools (where the children of the middle-class and the elite go) is so vast.

Poor children are allowed by the state to go through the school experience so that in the end, when they end up in some dead-end job, they can be made to believe that their failure in life is nobody else’s fault but their own—a belief that is essential in an ideal worker who is submissive and obedient because he knows his “natural” place.  But how can it be their fault when they never had a chance from the very beginning?  Their poverty forced them to avail themselves of poor-quality education—education for the poor—which in turn determined that they would remain poor and deserve to be so.

Not all poor children fail.  Some are able to rise despite the fact that the game is rigged.  These are the people who become the poster boys and girls for the ideology that education must lead to success.  I was once (and still is?) such a poster boy.

This, then, is the role of ideology.  Ideology is the comfortable cage that blinds us from seeing that we are in fact imprisoned.  The full force of alienation occurs when ideology, for some reason, crumbles.  We are either forced to suffer the alienation or forced to find release by seeking escape.

In my previous post, I sounded as if, just because of the fact that I had decided to pursue an academic career, I have somehow escaped alienation.  Because I no longer needed to cut and paste texts onto generic documents but was now in an environment where I could read what I wanted and write what I wanted, I made the silly assumption that I have now “awakened from my torpor” and am now "resurrected."  This is wrong.   At the end of the day, I know that I’ll be working in institutions where dissent is expressed not in order to inspire radical change but in order to be contained.  And who is to say, even if one were to be inspired to revolution, that the acts and institutions of revolution are themselves free from subtler but no less dark machinations of ideology?

Ideology is inescapable.  I merely transfered myself to another part of the cage.  I laugh at myself and my previous entry.

Still, I go on.  I go on believing that, despite the realization that there is no way out of the cage, there must still be avenues for redemption.

Before I proceed to engage you, let me express disagreement with some of the points you raised in your blog (bopis.dekarabaw.com) on november 2.

1. you claim I “throw around the weight of my choice”?  now where did you get that?  I was always talking about MY choice, not yours.  I don’t seem to remember telling you what to do with your life.  I was merely expressing why I cannot “choose the nation.”  And this is because the nation is a bloodsucking whore.  At least, the way I see it.  I’m not forcing you to justify anything.  That I am spitting at your goddess is an unfortunate consequence of my perception, but if you insist on worshipping her, then by all means do so.  I’m not stopping you.  I recognize the fact that you see her in a different light and are not about to see her differently.  Your choice.  I neither need nor wish to hear your justification for it.  I merely wanted to give you MY justification foe not choosing the nation.
2. you compare me to a lover threatening suicide. You ask me, “why not just leave” if I’m so sick of the nation.  To this I must reply:  Have you been listening to me?  Haven’t I told you that that is exactly what I plan to do, one way or another, before 2005 is up?

Now, on to engaging your point.  If I were to sum up your response to my question (“why should I choose the nation?”), it seems to all boil down to one word: DEBT.  Utang na loob.  The farmers and the fishermen contributed to this system of labor value extraction and taxation that has allowed me to get a college education from the premiere state university.  I have a debt to them.

I will not debate the reality of this debt.  But excuse me for debating you on the point of to whom I owe it.  you say that because the farmers and the fishermen bled for me that I owe it to the nation?  You seem to be confusing the farmers and the fishermen for this idolatrous construct you call a nation.  You speak as if there is a natural and moral social contract between me and the farmers because the nation took from them to give to you and me?

Let me tell you something, if the farmers and fishermen had their way, they would spend the true value of their labors on themselves and their children, not on a nation that channels the value of their labor through a system of taxation supporting a university which is a breeding ground of human resources for the state’s repressive and ideological state apparatuses that perpetuate this system of slavery.  Why should I revere this “nation” because of what you and I have become?

You and I are products of a system designed to perpetuate itself and to contain dissent.  It’s a mad cycle.  We were in college when we heard of Philippine Studies graduates ending up as bank tellers. We were in college listening to “radical” nationalist professors spewing forth the gospel of nationalism because for some reason or another they themselves can’t make the ultimate sacrifice of joining the revolution, of dying for the “farmers and fishermen.”  Instead they live through the delusion that their saliva will spur the nation’s youth into action, into living the dream they cannot live.  And so they spent time with us kids who would one day end up as bank tellers and corporate employees—or university instructors preaching the same message.  Like the phenomenon of the six previous versions of Neo in “The Matrix,”  all our avenues for revolution have been illusion, a way of containing the true potential of radical dissent.  The EDSA revolutions are one.  The “revolution of the mind” in universities is another.  In the meantime, generations of farmers and fishermen have been bleeding and dying for us with only some vague idea that this is the right way to go because we must all make sacrifices for

“The Nation,” thus preserving this construct founded on illusionary unity.

Here is how I view this Whore:  She is an imposter.

In 1896, we broke with Mother Spain to affirm our new bond with Mother Filipinas.  This is because as Procopio Bonifacio had rationalized, Mother Spain was a traitor, was in fact an imposter.   The peasants revolted to bring to life our “true Mother,” but before the birth of Mother Filipinas could be completed, ilustrados like you and me corrupted her.  Aguinaldo took over the reigns, formed a republican government, and banished the Katipunan and its egalitarian ideals to the periphery.  The Katipunan, along with our True Mother, was buried alive.  In her place, we have erected the Republic of the Philippines, the Nation.  This Nations is the one that has now taken over the slavemaster’s whip once wielded by “mother Spain.”  This nation is now the one responsible for the virtual slavery of “the people,” a system perpetuated through the power of capital, with the backing of foreign powers, and through the creation of human resources like you and me through state-sponsored education.  “The people,” for now,  are still under the illusion that they and the nation are one.  This illusion is encouraged by the nation.  And we lap it up, thinking we do this for “the people.”

The Nation and The People are not one.  If you want me to define my loyalties, then I say that I want to be for The People.  My only problem is I don’t know where to start.  These two constructs may not be one, but decades of bureaucratic and ideological machinations have wound them up pretty close.  Moreover, I as an entity am just as problematic.  My urban poor background has allowed the Nation to feed me bourgeois desires through the media and other ideological apparatuses that preach that the power to “make it” is in our hands—the same apparatuses that displayed my picture and broadcast my story when Nathan the squatter boy ended up being valedictorian of his class and delivering the speech preaching “the gospel of solidarity.”  Well, that was naïve and that was five years ago.  Now I preach the gospel of chaos, of disjunction.  I don’t know where to start, but I do know that we have to do something “different,” something that would break the chain, something the system can’t predict—all so that a new social consciousness can be created to bring down the tyranny of the Nation.  Or perhaps it is not a matter of creating the new but of unearthing the buried.  Somewhere out there is the true Mother for whom our ancestors died in 1896.

Thanks to your referring to this issue of debt, I now know that I cannot totally forsake our people.  I belong to them, not to the nation.  One way or another, I must find a way to pierce the illusion of nationhood that has enslaved them and me and find my part in this narrative.  I’m afraid many things in my past has severely limited me in the kind of roles I can play. 

You ask, “sino ka ba?  Ano bang K mo?”  Well I say, I am a human being, with the spark of the divine, made in the image of God, with the right to dream, the right to redemption.  The same can be said of the people.  But it cannot be said of the mechanical construct that is The Nation.  It is nothing but an idol, a false god.

You say this is all about choice.  Remember, though, that right after graduation I was looking for avenues to serve The Nation.  I tried.  But the last four years has revealed her true form to me.  I cannot choose her.  She merely wants to chew up my life an spit out the bones, the way she has devoured the lives of countless men and women who have gone before us.

And please, much as I respect the girl whose life you use to juxtapose against mine, i can trade anecdotes with you all day and it won't resolve anything.  i, for one, know a doctor who like me lived a life of poverty.  he studied medicine at the university philippines and learned all about nationalism.  he learned it so well that he stayed in the philippines when 70% of all his batchmates already went abroad.  he found passion in teaching at the university to "give back" to this nation.  one year, he was awarded the honor "Best Teacher" in UP Manila.  two years later,  he even resigned from two consultancy jobs so he could concentrate on his passion.  too bad, that was the year the university decided not to renew his contract in line with the university's new policies.  after all the sweat, blood, and tears--the man was jobless, just another life spit out by the system.  will you also ask him if he has "K"?

Death to the imposter, death to the whore.  Long live our true Mother, the Spirit of 1896.