Preliminary notes on corruption and the peripheral-capitalist State
Metro Manila is drowning in shit and leptospirosis. Recent news, not at all old, believe it or not.
Introduction
In the recent weeks following sensational media stories and exposé of rampant corruption in flood control infrastructure financing, we have seen the same political spectacles we have become so familiarized to—and so desensitized by—in the last couple of decades. Every single time a scandalous outbreak of suspicious-enough misallocation—or outright disappearance into thin air—of public funds makes it to the news, barely catching the ears of the masses so beaten by the physical and mental toll of every-day work, the same sequence of events play out in the same exact order: an authoritative body calls for an investigation into the matter; the body (usually the Congress), headed by eager career-politicians trying to make a name, calls for a hearing to evaluate persons of interest—insisting all the while on the due process in the midst of growing mass unrest; politicians perform for the cameras, employing useless interrogation and irrelevant questioning to probe into the lives of said persons of interest in near-atomic detail, yet still with nothing to show for it; more and more names are revealed to the public—the investigating body of authority of course chooses to ignore these names as personally convenient (surprise: they too are complicit in the scandal); no order of summons. Days, weeks pass, the spectacle grows. The media earns by sensationalism, building up to a climax of nothing. The masses finally surrender and get tired of the whole act, choosing to go on with their monotonous working, tax-paying lives. This is the norm, anyway. Politicians are corrupt, forks belong in the kitchen, the sky is blue… what ever else?
But why is the sky blue? We have figured out a scientific explanation for that. Why do forks belong in the kitchen? We have a sociological explanation for that. Why, then, are politicians corrupt? Do we have any other explanation beyond the commonly accepted idea that politicians are just naturally, genetically greedy out of the womb? An explanation perhaps beyond the ever-vague blanket of “culture”?
As a matter of fact, we do.
Corruption, plainly speaking, is the privatization of public power to facilitate personalistic gains. The most common form of corruption involves the appropriation of the social wealth for private interests. To better understand corruption, therefore, we must understand the nature of public power in Philippine society, concentrated and embodied in the Philippine State.
Throughout this article I will argue that corruption is a latent mode of accumulation in the capitalist State apparatus; monopoly capitalism and premature integration into the ever-shifting structures of the global economy determine the forms and functions of corruption in the Philippines, effectively making the State a collective capitalist, or State-capitalist. I will demonstrate how corruption has two primary functions in the Philippine context; (1) as a permanent and recurring mechanism of primitive accumulation, and (2) as a function of intra-capitalist competition. I will elaborate on the significance of infrastructure development for the peripheral State. Finally, I argue that there is no other way out but relentless working-class struggle against the capitalists, inside and outside the comprador peripheral State.
My hope with this essay is not to provide an answer to everything about the problem of corruption but to initiate a broader discussion within the workers’ movement—those who are robbed the most of their labor, strength, creativity, and dignity by this rotting capitalist system—and its orbiters, or those who sympathize with our ends. The reader then may treat this essay as a rough collection of preliminary notes on corruption and the nature of the peripheral-capitalist State, to be used for better theoretical and practical elaborations hereafter.
Class Nature of the State
In Marxist theory, the State is a historically contingent social organ embodying and concentrating within itself the aggregate of authority in society as a whole, exercised by means of a monopoly on violence with origins in economic domination. More aptly, the State is primarily understood to be a class organized to suppress another class. Therefore in capitalist society the State is specifically a capitalist State.
The class nature of the Philippine State as a distinctly capitalist State is not necessarily determined or refuted by the level of industrial development of the Philippines as a whole, but by the functions it takes up in the general administration of capitalist society.
The foundational role and primary function of the State is the protection and maintenance of profit-maximizing property relations (capitalist private property). This manifests not only in the mandates of the 1987 Constitution but also in the State’s mediating role in property disputes and counter-insurgency campaigns. Its armed organs, the PNP (Philippine National Police) and the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines), serve and protect the landed and propertied capitalists in a gradating manner; the PNP serves as the armed protector and enforcer of internal capitalist order and norms, primarily in the cities (e.g., evicting informal settlers for private commercial development, breaking labor strikes, harassment or outright extrajudicial murder of suspected drug addicts), whereas the AFP serves as the defender of the general (i.e., national) interests of the entire Philippine bourgeoisie from external and internal threats, such as in the South China Sea–West Philippine Sea debacle and in the counter-insurgency campaigns in the countryside. The carceral judiciary arm of the Philippine State on the other hand imposes decades-long sentences to senior citizens for stealing fruit and bread, and house-arrest for big-time plunderers, typically politicians and their cronies, of our taxes.
Embedded in a developing, underindustrialized capitalist country, itself situated within the periphery of the imperialist world-system, the Philippine State takes on a comprador (syn., “peripheral”) character with inherent structural weaknesses that engender its inner life and culture as an organ of class rule. Owing to its structural weaknesses as a peripheral-capitalist state, the Philippine State is less a coherent Weberian-bureaucratic organ of streamlined state management functions than a consortium of competing bourgeois factions (political dynasties, comprador and landlord-capitalists, oligarchs of key industries, trade union bureaucrats, corporate lobbying groups, &c.) each vying for political power. Fully integrated into the world-capitalist system, the Philippine State is a particularly important capitalist organ due to its labor-export policy readily providing a supply of easily exploitable and remarkably compliant workers overseas. The peripheral character of the capitalist State is owed to its compliance and premature integration into the imperialist world-system and its consequent underdevelopment.
Since the Philippines remains a service economy, with its services sector employing over 60% of the total labor force (as of August 2025), its industrial development perpetually arrested, where manufacturing and industry employ ~18% (same figure as agriculture) of the total labor-force, the most lucrative industries for capital investment and accumulation are in the services, including the facilitation of foreign trade via exportation and importation. The underindustrialization of the Philippine economy, caused by premature integration into the world market and its global supply chains—with international capital’s global structural adjustments, intersecting with a rapidly-declining agricultural sector, and finally amplified by the sluggish generation of stable, regular, decent-paying jobs in the services sector—gives way to alternative modes of accumulation. One such alternative mode is Statecraft.
Corruption as Primitive Accumulation
There are very limited opportunities and avenues to relieve the natural pressure to accumulate and facilitate capital investment for the Filipino bourgeoisie. The peripheral-capitalist State, having a privileged position in society and acting as a junior partner of foreign capital in the imperialist world-system, fills this void instead and becomes a private business ran by rent-seeking oligarchs representing domestic capital and comprador elites intimately tied to import-export finance representing foreign capital to relieve the pressure of capital accumulation. Because of this unique role of the State, political power becomes, in a rather straightforward manner, economic power. Corruption then becomes a latent mode of primitive accumulation for the capitalist State.
The State facilitates primitive accumulation in a permanent and recurring manner. Its organs are crucial for the dispossession and active proletarianization of the huge mass of country peasants in direct aid of the landed capitalists. Since the cities are underindustrialized, proletarianized country peasants who have migrated to the urban areas are unable to be absorbed effectively, which invariably creates a pauperized class perpetually stuck in the liminality of proletarianization. They become the urban poor of our cities.
Hence the State function of primitive accumulation manifests in two deeply interconnected ways: (1) the active dispossession and proletarianization of the peasantry, and (2) the plunder of social wealth through the State apparatus.
Corruption is not, however, unique to weak peripheral States; it also occurs in the stronger core States. Since these stronger States typically have a greater stake in legitimacy as liberal democratic States and usually have more developed national economies, they can afford to tolerate the friction of regulatory state functions and legitimize this latent mode of accumulation by legalistic means, such as legal lobbying (literal bribery of lawmakers), effectively converting the privatized, criminalized form of raw, naked corruption into an official public power as a legal State function. Weaker peripheral States cannot afford the same privileges and as such corruption manifests as naked, raw, only barely-covered plunder of the social wealth (e.g., the national budget) or the bypassing of legal regulations (e.g., by patronage networks).
Another way that the peripheral (or “comprador”) character of the State manifests through corruption is in the latter’s function as a lubricating oil for the overall efficiency of the global plundering machine. Corruption is able to by-pass regulatory laws such as labor laws and quality assurance (treated as “friction” in the system) to more efficiently facilitate transfer of capital between States in the core and in the peripheries. This is a key character of the mobility of capital itself.
Infrastructure in the Peripheries
Pulled from Bulatlat’s facebook page; photo by Noel Celis of Greenpeace.
For developing countries in the periphery, infrastructure is perhaps the principal concern and priority of national development. Infrastructure serves as the base of all economic operations and activity, acting as the “skeleton” of the entire political, social, and economic body of the country.
For an underindustrialized economy such as the Philippines’, infrastructure is ever-necessary to support and facilitate economic activity in other sectors such as the services. Underindustrialization provides a multiplier effect onto the prioritization of infrastructure development, which then creates a new lucrative avenue by which the pressure to accumulate and reinvest capital can be facilitated.
Another way that the capitalist State facilitates, mediates, and converts economic power into political power and vice versa in infrastructure development is through Public-Private Partnership programs (PPP/P3s). The State, in its partnership with private firms and corporations, takes on an instructive role in organizing and actively involving the business sector in policymaking. This makes involved corporations effectively political entities with a direct hand in the exercise of State-power. The State in this way facilitates the institutionalization of oligarch-, crony-, and private corporate-powers.
In an ideal scenario, infrastructure projects would bear material fruit in the form of bridges, paved roads, schools, hospitals, mass transportation, and flood control; contractors, capitalist financiers, and the State can then extract profit by percentages and dues every time these infrastructures are used, or otherwise profit more indirectly but holistically by facilitating faster and more efficient transportation of goods and services, providing more jobs and opportunities, and increasing disaster resilience overall. However this doesn’t seem to be the case for the reasons stated above. The comprador capitalist class is fundamentally a myopic class: albeit less profitable in the long-run and actively erosive to its political legitimacy, the direct plunder of social wealth is the more profitable mode of accumulation in the short-term. This short-term vision of capital accumulation, what we might aptly call hoarding, is compelled by the general class instinct that the economy is always bound to collapse soon enough. Moreover, what would be the next-best-thing, a national industrial policy, is absent, and hence the accumulated ill-gotten wealth of these politicians and cronies almost never circulate back into the economy via productive investment into heavy industries[1]. If everything can collapse in a sneeze, why bother with long-term investments? We then get a sense of this vicious, self-fulfilling prophesiac closed feedback loop that only makes things increasingly dire at every turn.
Okay. What is the fix?
Various solutions have been put forward by different political actors, groups, and parties, but all continue to orbit the idea that the State is simply an empty neutral vessel that can be instrumentalized by whichever group for whatever agenda. I have shown that this is in reality a utopia. If corruption is a latent mode of accumulation in the capitalist State, this has its roots in the fact that the State is itself a common apparatus of the capitalist class in managing its own affairs. The solution to corruption lies not in who is in power, or in the intentions and promises of a ruling administration, but in the very nature of capitalist society, organized for profiteering and accumulation, in which the State is embedded.
Does liberal reform then have a sufficient solution to the problem of corruption? If we see the capitalist system itself as an untouchable, unchangeable, irreplaceable system, then the answer is a resounding no. Reform—even revolution!—through liberal democracy is a dead-end; we are here in the first place because of the liberal-democratic revolution of EDSA-1986. The State is itself structured to loot and deluding oneself that voting every now and then magically fixes the issue of corruption is nothing but that—plain delusion; for so long as the logic of accumulation, itself the content of corruption, dominates society, plunder of the Filipino working class remains the ruling philosophy of the State, no matter who the masses vote for to exploit them and steal from them for the next six years to come. Liberal reformism tells us that corruption is the rot of a few bad apples; we reply that the entire barrel is rotten.
Is it then a nationalist movement that is necessary to develop our sovereign industry and break away from the imperialist world-system? But since imperialism is a world-system, this does not actually address anything, as the same dynamics and relations of exploitation persist even if in a different country. This “solution” is caught in an endless loop of nationalist, protectionist revolts, falling in the same myopic logic of development as the plundering capitalists, without accounting for the global imperialist dynamic at play which we remain embedded and deeply integrated in, whether industrialized, agrarian, or service-oriented. The core-periphery dynamic of the imperialist world-system, ergo of world-capitalism itself, remains intact. The workers remain toiling like zombies for their bosses in the workplace and in the State. The system is still built on theft, only in this case with more patriotic thieves plundering the patriotic workers.
The politico who signs the contract, whoever he is and whatever his political affiliation may be, and the contractor who can show nothing for the millions and billions he has amassed for his projects, these are only two heads of the same many-headed Hydra that is the capitalist State. We have no illusions of it being otherwise.
Conclusions for an anti-corrupt, anti-capitalist worker: Class struggle!
Corruption is not only a natural mode of accumulation but in the case of peripheral-capitalist States becomes essential in the maintenance and development of the capitalist system. The disease, therefore, is capitalism itself. Any kind of anti-corruption campaign which does not acknowledge this basic objective fact is nothing but pure unbridled fantasy of a world that will never come: a capitalism which serves the people. This serves no other end but the State function of confusing the working masses towards dead-end policies and political programs.
We are left with one honest solution, if we are truly serious in ending corruption, as a class: to struggle against the capitalist thieves and capitalism itself. We the workers are accountable only to ourselves! Enough with left-capitalist delusions of a revolutionary capital. We must see clearly the present situation for what it is: not a failure of government and democracy but a critical historical lesson in the class nature of the capitalist State.
The workers must see clearly that only they have the power to put an end to all of this. Hence, the demand of the labor movement must be towards an uncompromising independence of the working class from the capitalists in the workplace, factories, the State, from both the liberal and nationalist middle-forces who seek only to appropriate workers’ power for their own ends, ultimately ending still in the plunder of the working class under “better-governing” or “patriotic” thieving rulers.
Towards an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist workers’ movement: Round up the capitalist plunderers! Smash the capitalist State! For a workers’ dictatorship against the capitalist thieves!
heisse, walang bathala o manunubos
Notes
Figures on labor-force and sectoral employment are pulled from Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA); while acknowledged as a generally inaccurate source of data, I use it here as a rough approximation and not as strict reflection of real employment conditions.
Sections on infrastructure and the capitalist State are heavily inspired by Davide of @criticofpolecon on Substack (many thanks to a comrade for suggesting this series) — https://criticofpolecon.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-capitalism-and
[1] See: Yuen Yuen Ang’s Gilded Age Thesis (many thanks to another comrade for finally giving a name to this intuition [+ writing advice, xD]) — Yuen Yuen Ang (2020) “China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption.”