Did EDSA have a point?

Every year, Filipinos commemorate the four-day bloodless revolution that overthrew the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos. The EDSA Revolution remains etched in public consciousness. But its legacy is heavily disputed. Collective public remembering is always a complicated business, especially when this process is guided by official nationalism. Now that a “People Power President” occupies Malacañang, the mythology of EDSA intersects more with government rhetoric. State allies peddle a version of the EDSA Revolution based on simple binaries like good/evil, black/white, People Power/Martial Law, obscuring the grey areas that any honest observer of history must assess. In this story, Marcos is the ultimate evil, while Cory represents good. These crass oversimplifications obscure more sordid aspects of recent history such as Cory’s poor human rights or agrarian reform record. Perhaps in response to these binaries, middle-class observers glorify the order of the Marcos years. Everything was clean, people were disciplined, and at the helm was a firm leader with modernist aspirations - never mind that he was a crook. Certainly the Philippines remains poor and the same political elite dominate government institutions - a situation that lends itself to widespread disillusionment that induces nostalgia for an imagined past. And yet, despite this disillusionment with the present “EDSA system”, Filipinos overwhelmingly voted for Noynoy Aquino. PNoy, of course, represents the “success” of EDSA and the re-democratization process that followed in its wake. So despite anecdotal cynicism, 2010 brought us electoral hope. A tension? Oh yes. A contradiction? Possibly. See what I mean when I say collective remembering is a complicated business? We in the pretentious academe use a pretentious term to understand the pretentious phenomenon that is the grey area: subject-position. Put simply, this means that an experience changes depending on who’s looking. And surely there were/are subject positions that allow one to remember Marcos more kindly. For the straight-laced middle class Filipino who enjoyed his/her 9 to 5 and aspired for nothing more for him/herself or the country, martial law might have been okay. But how about the sakadas in the sugar plantations of Negros who were systematically targeted by the Marcos military and its crony allies? How about ethnic minorities who were massacred in places like Mindanao? And how about the activists who helped defend them? They were jailed, tortured, and salvaged. Surely, many people could live normal lives during martial law. But, for the dreamer who sought a better world, the Philippines was a dangerous place. Is it not arrogant to dismiss the suffering of many simply because the squares enjoyed cleaner streets? Freedom protects the totality of the human being; order just makes things easier for those who are comfortable to begin with. Besides, this order was illusory anyway. By the late 80s, social tensions were at a fever pitch, and the Philippines was literally on the brink of civil war, with the communist New People’s Army (NPA) troop count peaking at 20,000 regulars. In my conversations with former Communist Party Chairman and NPA Commander-in-Chief Rodolfo “Kumander Bilog” Salas, he narrates how, at around 1985, they felt ready to launch a major offensive to grab state power in 1987 (the initial target was Baguio because it only has four entrances and the president would visit it every summer). Why would so many Filipinos risk their lives to topple a regime if everything was fine and dandy? This is not to dismiss EDSA critics who point to the failures of the post-EDSA state. It is true, for instance, that activists and ordinary citizens died because of Cory Aquino’s counterinsurgency campaigns. These campaigns, which involved the mobilization of violent untrained vigilantes in what Aquino termed an extension of “people power,” led to the deaths of over 1,000 Filipinos in six years. This is stunning given that state terrorism during the 21-year Marcos regime killed roughly 3,000 people (see Alfred McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire). It is also true that People Power allowed the old oligarchy to return to positions of power. In the first post-EDSA congressional election in 1987, 130 of the 200 elected representatives hailed from established political families. EDSA, as political scientist Benedict Anderson notes, paved the way for the return of “cacique democracy.” We are formally democratic, but oligarchs dominate this democracy through guns, goons, and gold. So if, in many ways, we are still mired in the same problems, what was the point of the EDSA revolution? Again, this is a matter of subject positions and frames of reference. If one examines simply electoral politics (i.e. who gets elected and who doesn’t), there is a case to be made for EDSA being a mere restoration of the old political order. But as my colleague Rommel Curaming and I argue, the “restorationist” critique of EDSA fails to see broader cultural and social changes that occurred as a result of People Power. For one, the revolution proved that civil society, mobilized for a common end, can create major changes. This “demonstrative” effect of people power revolutions emboldens societies (look at how people power spread from Tunisia to Egypt). The government itself may not have changed much, but look at how many NGOs and people’s organizations mushroomed after EDSA. Citizen participation in public governance was not possible under Marcos; politics was run exclusively by Marcos cronies and the military. Now people at the margins of society can push the state to facilitate change, and institutions are susceptible to public pressure. Criticize Cory Aquino and other post-EDSA presidents all you want, but all of them – even Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – at least listened to civil society at one point during their presidencies. Take the extension bill for the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) or CARPER for example. The bill, although imperfect, passed by virtue of a strong grassroots campaign that even a congress infested with landlords could not ignore. Would this initiative have been possible under Marcos? Of course not; he ruled by decree. There were no democratic avenues before EDSA; there was just a dictator. Before we start waxing nostalgic over Marcos years, therefore, we should take a good hard look at the benefits of liberty. Liberty is not an abstract concept; it is the precondition for active citizenship and vibrant public life. The People Power revolution, without a doubt, facilitated a partial return to liberty. For all my reservations about the mythology that accompanies the EDSA Revolution, I am still proud to live in a society that reaps its benefits. Because of this, it is incumbent upon us to celebrate the many people who fought for that liberty and the revolution that they won. Beyond being a matter of patriotism, it is quite simply a matter of historical honesty. Leloy Claudio is a PhD Candidate at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne. He is the national chairperson of Akbayan Youth. For an extended version of the argument presented here, see link.