By Joey Sarte Salceda
Chair, Institute of Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies, Inc.
(A reflection by the author of his time as labor organizer in the 1980s, the People Power Revolution, its mixed results, and the way forward)
In August 1983, Ninoy Aquino was shot dead on the tarmac of Manila International Airport. I was a young man then. Like many Filipinos of my generation, that gunshot did something peculiar to us: it made us believe that we had a compelling individual duty to work for the country.
I joined the Federation of Free Workers, where I helped organize labor unions. I did what amounted to forensic accounting: going through the books of companies to prove to the courts and the labor arbitration panels that they could afford to pay their workers more. I was also a college instructor at San Pablo College, where I helped organize the student council.
This was my introduction to what political theorists call civic democracy. One must participate in democratic processes every step of the way: in labor negotiations, in school governance, in the tedious committee work. I was also learning something about economics: You need to grow the economy so that there are as many jobs as possible. But growth alone is insufficient. You need institutions—labor unions, a credible Department of Labor, impartial courts—to keep those jobs and wages just and fair. Without institutions, growth is just a bigger pie being eaten by the same few people.
I came to think of this as the theory of countervailing forces. Enterprise unleashes immense creativity. Free markets, at their best, generate more prosperity than any central planner could dream of allocating. But enterprise is also motivated, at bottom, by self-interest, and self-
interest, left entirely to its own devices, eventually becomes indistinguishable from greed. So, you need something to push back.
The Inevitability of EDSA
In hindsight, EDSA was inevitable. Consider the famous exchange between Lee Kuan Yew and Ferdinand Marcos. In a private meeting in Brunei in 1984, Lee pressed Marcos on the succession question: who would lead the Philippines if something happened to him? Lee was
blunt. He told Marcos that his preferred successor, Prime Minister Cesar Virata, was a nonstarter (“a first-class administrator but not a political leader.”)
Marcos fell silent, then admitted that succession was the nub of the problem. As Lee rose to leave, Marcos said, cryptically: “You are a true friend.” Lee later wrote that he did not understand what Marcos meant. It was, he said, a strange meeting. That unanswered question—who comes next?—was a ticking bomb. Sooner or later, neither the Filipino people, nor our allies, nor the upper echelons of the military, nor the Church, nor the business community would have allowed the country to sleepwalk into a bitter succession crisis. Something had to give, and it did, on a highway in Quezon City.
One must also acknowledge, in fairness, that Marcos Sr. was in some respects unlucky. His first term from 1965 to 1969 produced GDP growth averaging 6.8 percent annually, among the strongest first-term economic performances in Philippine presidential history. Had the global commodity crisis of the early 1980s not landed at the same moment as his deepening political rot, the regime might have limped on longer.
Marcos would die just three years after being ousted, which means that if events had broken differently, he might well have been president for life—and that life would not have extended very far beyond 1986 in any case. But the commodity crash and the political crisis arrived
together, and the combination was more than any President’s cunning could survive.
Triumphs and travails
For better or for worse, we are now shaped by how EDSA shaped us. And the triumphs should not be waved away. Since 1986, there have been no successful coups. Every president—whether an Aquino, a Ramos, an Estrada, an Arroyo, a Duterte, or a Marcos—has had to win at
the ballot box. The Armed Forces of the Philippines, for all the occasional restlessness in its ranks, has remained committed to constitutional processes. In a region where generals have routinely rewritten constitutions at gunpoint, this is worth more than we sometimes admit.
The legacy of EDSA is that the people always get a say. But the fears and paranoias of EDSA persist, and they have hardened into rigidities that now cost us dearly. We have no nuclear power, because Marcos built a nuclear plant and therefore nuclear energy must be suspect. We have an enduring constitution that almost no one is allowed to touch, even though both sides of the political spectrum now recognize the deep structural flaws of our unitary presidential system.
The mere mention of charter change triggers the old EDSA alarm bells, as though any revision of the 1987 Constitution were a secret plot to restore authoritarian rule. Foreign direct investment remains hobbled by restrictions that treat every outside investor as a potential colonizer. You still need a Filipino sponsor—a ninong, as we say—to get in. None of these rigidities have changed in nearly four decades.
EDSA may also have encouraged a kind of magical thinking about democracy itself: the comforting but mistaken belief that a democratic process will, by its own internal logic, solve our economic problems. It is worth remembering that most of the Tiger economies—South Korea under Park Chung-Hee, Taiwan under the KMT, Hong Kong under colonial administration, even Malaysia under Mahathir’s dominant-party system—achieved their economic transformations under autocratic or semi-autocratic rule. Singapore is arguably the only one that can claim to have been a democracy throughout its ascent, and even that claim requires a generous definition of the word.
Inversion
Milton Friedman argued, in Capitalism and Freedom, that economic freedom is a necessary precondition for political freedom. Prosperity creates the conditions in which democracy can take root. The usual trajectory, in this telling, runs from growth to liberalization to democracy. The Philippines went the other way around. It was an economic contraction—the catastrophic collapse of commodity prices and a debt crunch—that compelled us toward democracy.
This inversion has consequences that we are still living with. We are now in a strange place. Pure laissez-faire capitalism has been discredited everywhere, not just here. Every serious economy in the world now recognizes the need for robust and correct state industrial policy. But those countries could do it by decree. We have to do it within the bounds and workings of a democracy that is, by design, fractious, slow, and suspicious of concentrated power. This means that our industrial policy will proceed by nudges rather than big strokes, by incentives rather than commands. It is slower. It is messier.
Moving Forward
How, then, do we move forward? I think the spirit of EDSA, properly understood, is this: democracy is a contested space in which we still need to find ways to prosper. It is not a guarantee of prosperity. It is merely the arena in which prosperity must be fought for, argued over, and built. The good news is that EDSA sentimentalism alone is no longer enough to win elections. Even Fidel Ramos, who was Cory Aquino’s anointed candidate, understood this. He did not run the country on the memory of the revolution. He ran on the promise of capable, pragmatic governance (Philippines 2000, liberalization, power sector reform).
That is the mature reading of EDSA, and I think more Filipinos are arriving at it. We are no longer content to celebrate the revolution as though celebrating it were itself a form of governance. We want results. We want jobs and lower prices. We want to know why Vietnam, which was poorer than us in 1986, now exports more manufactured goods in a month than we do in a quarter.
These are healthy questions, and the fact that we can ask them—publicly, openly, rambunctiously—is itself the enduring gift of EDSA. That President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., got elected President with the largest mandate post-EDSA, and is now in staunch defense of the Constitutional processes it birthed, shows that history is capable of poetic syntheses.