Why Hasn't People Power Greatly Benefited The People Themselves?

 

BIMBO CABIDOG

The world heaped praises on the Filipinos for a four-day revolt that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos on February 25, 1986. He ruled them for 14 years as a ruthless dictator. But in an uprising dubbed Edsa Revolution, millions of civilians took to the streets to defy and end his authoritarian regime.

The letters EDSA stand for the Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue, a 12-lane thoroughfare that girds Metro Manila and at a certain point wedges between the country’s central military and police headquarters, Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame.

On February 22, 1986 citizens started massing along the camps initially to shield from the wrath of Marcos a group of junior military officers who plotted a mutiny but were at once pre-emptively foiled by loyal security forces. They holed up at the National Defense offices to escape retaliation.

The few civilian numbers at the start swelled into millions, and the gathering rapidly evolved into full-blown urban insurrection. Then the tide suddenly turned. As the throng at Edsa obstinately held on, the Armed Forces disintegrated from massive defections to the rebel side. On the evening of February 25, Marcos fled Malacanang via an American rescue that flew the strongman all the way to Hawaii.

What gained the adulation of the international community for the four–day epic was not so much the drama and astonishing audacity displayed by millions of ordinary citizens who faced barehanded a formidable rule with awesome military firepower, but that it succeeded with no bloodshed.

The victory of the mass action came from its moral high ground. From this source of strength, leaders would coin the phrase People Power.  The vaunted miracle at Edsa, hailed by citizens of other countries around the world, was the dynamo that generated historical change. It was people power.

The “peaceful revolution” itself revolutionized democratic practice, not only in the country, but in many parts of the globe. Direct mass action overruled electoral exercise in changing a repressive political order. Following Edsa, people power would become very popular worldwide and actually be resorted to in struggles for social liberation among climes reeling under totalitarian regimes.

But aside from the ouster of discredited regimes, the powerful political dynamo has generated no other historical change for the greater benefit of the people. It has not gone into changing their lives for the better. It has repetitively failed to turn towards effecting real social transformation.

Decades after the Edsa Revolution, most Filipinos continue to be marginalized under the political order misconceived even by the educated as democracy, but actually the rule of a few. The dismantling of Marcos’s one-man rule did not change the dispensation wherein the elite lord over social wealth and wield economic power, which enable them to dominate elections and ultimately government.

The so-called “restoration of democracy” in 1986 would mean only the replacement of the Marcos dictatorship by the reign of political dynasties later that monopolized government authority and deny the people the power to collectively chart their future. These dynastic groups would busy themselves only with building and consolidating each family's fiefdom or sphere of political-economic domination instead of governing well.

People power may have won in driving Marcos out of office, but the people still lost genuine empowerment.  They had no meaningful role in governance, and their supposed democratic exercise boiled down to shading names of candidates on the ballot. And that singular act, they would yet sell to politicians. 

Under the setup, the masses continued to languish in acute poverty, lack access to social services, confront perennial unemployment, or work for dismally low wages. The dynamo of historical change must yet be harnessed to bail them from ills rooted in the main problem of socio-political injustice.

This was the one expectation that the Edsa Revolution could not meet. This is because they are realities that ultimately have to be dealt with locally and specifically and by the people’s genuine empowerment.

Profound change in the conditions and situations of existence of the vast majority can only happen if the people go further than the spontaneous mobilization and action that occurred at Edsa. They must be able to wage strategic, deep-going and long-term struggles collectively and in organized fashion.

People power can be truly for the people if it serves their interest of realizing structural change in society. It must therefore evolve into people’s empowerment. This means that they see their lot down to its roots, process information from higher awareness, organize, and take consciously directed action. 

To create the kind of history wherein society has truly been transformed and the lives of the masses have immensely improved the people must learn to wield people power, not just for the good anyone else, but for their greater benefit.