Chapter 6 examines the dramatic escalation of protest activity after the assassination. I show how the melodramatic mass-action strategies of the movement hinged on stoking the class hostilities of the popular classes—and, crucially, transforming mass anger into a politically viable expression of resistance. I examine the activism of New Cinema filmmaker Lino Brocka and present a close reading of Bayan ko: Kapit sa patalim (My country: Seize the blade, 1985), his homage to the new politics. As a bellwether of the 1986 popular revolt, this national allegory offers valuable insights into the often-overlooked role of the popular forces in the unfolding of people power.
Contrary to the dominant interpretation of the 1986 revolt as a middle-class phenomenon, people power was in fact the culmination of the long popular struggle against the regime. Various grassroots struggles from the earliest days of martial law created both a melodramatic imaginary and an infrastructure of resistance that allowed millions of disempowered Filipinos to stage an awesome public drama bearing the full force of twenty-one years of resistance against a repressive and corrupt regime. The mobilizing efforts of an alternative press and the New Cinema were crucial supports in this drama. But at bottom it was the overwhelming presence of the popular classes and their melodramatic performances of their democratic aspirations that were on display. It was, in short, the force of national allegory that toppled the dictator.
Chapter 1
THE FIRST QUARTER STORM
When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines on September 21, 1972, the country was on the cusp of a revolutionary upheaval. The economy was in crisis, exacerbating class divisions in a nation where 50 percent of the national wealth was concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of the population.1 On the political front, the nation was still reeling from the staggering violence and fraud that attended the November 1969 elections, which saw Marcos reelected to an unprecedented second term. Meanwhile, a “special relationship” with the United States guaranteed Philippine support for America’s war in Vietnam and the country’s wholesale capitulation to the International Monetary Fund’s oppressive demands for drastic cuts in social expenditures. Against this dire political and economic backdrop, waves of strikes and demonstrations swept the nation’s capital, escalating to dramatically violent confrontations between the military and dissident groups during the first three months of 1970. Collectively dubbed the First Quarter Storm, these public dramatizations of urban unrest closely followed the steady advance of an underground guerrilla insurgency movement in the countryside. These two fronts of militant dissident action—one highly visible, the other covert—were mutually reinforcing features of an ascendant cult of revolutionism that Marcos ostensibly aimed to defuse by declaring martial law.
In his martial law declaration, Marcos alleged that “lawless elements” presented a “clear, present and grave” danger to the republic, threatening to undermine the government with acts of “rebellion and armed insurrection.” The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its military arm, the New People’s Army (NPA), were specifically targeted as the principal instigators of the conflict. In the face of the enemy’s “well-trained, well-armed, highly indoctrinated and greatly expanded revolutionary force,” martial law was deemed a necessary corrective to the nation’s “state of political, social, psychological and economic instability.”2
Even as he condemned the upsurge of radical militant action in the nation as the immediate justification for establishing authoritarian rule, Marcos was deeply enamored of the cult of revolutionism generated by this militancy. Shortly before assuming his dictatorship, Marcos would write, “We live in a revolutionary era. It is an era of swift, violent and often disruptive change, and rather than lament this vainly, we have to decide whether we are the masters or victims of change.”3 The statement, issued in his 1971 political tract “Today’s Revolution: Democracy,” demonstrates Marcos’s readiness to appropriate the revolutionary feeling buoying his critics.4 As the New York Times reported in March 1970, the word revolution was becoming a byword for an ever-widening spectrum of oppositional groups in the country, including “workers, peasants, middle-class intellectuals, clergy, moderate students as well as radical revolutionary students.”5 “Today’s Revolution” paradoxically parrots the broad-based opposition’s calls for social reforms, even trying to outdo the populist bent of the opposition’s reformist agenda by demanding nothing less than radical social transformation.
In the Philippines, Marcos writes, “revolution is inevitable.”6 This inevitability is subtended by the utter failure of social reform in the face of a debased democracy. Marcos is quick to enumerate the symptomatic features of such a democracy: the unchecked political and economic power of the oligarchy, the sensational practices of the media, the rampant corruption in the public and private sectors, and the existence of private armies and political warlords.7 Reflecting a fundamentally flawed social contract, the nation’s flailing democracy demands that society itself must be radically transformed. Otherwise, Marcos argues, those to whom reforms are a necessity “have no other recourse but violent revolution.”8
For Marcos, what the nation needed was a democratic revolution: “The process we need—and want—is thus a revolution by democratic means, the only method of cleansing society and rescuing it from its ills.”9 What would make such social cleansing “democratic” was that the martial law declaration that occasioned it was perfectly legal, based on a constitutional provision guaranteeing the executive’s special powers under times of war. Marcos coined the phrase “constitutional authoritarianism” to describe his new dictatorial powers, which he claimed to be using in radical ways.10 By turns a reactionary and revolutionary concept, constitutional authoritarianism promised to create a working fit between two otherwise contradictory systems—dictatorial rule and democracy—with an eye to generating a more perfect society and, consequently, a purer social contract. But for this social experiment to be legitimate, at least on paper, the onus lay on Marcos to prove that the nation was in fact in a state of war, so much so that martial law had become a necessary and exigent measure.
The spectacular nature of the First Quarter Storm, aided in large part by sensational media coverage of the demonstrations, ironically worked to strengthen Marcos’s position regarding martial law. This was indeed significant because the president and the oligarchy-controlled media had been at loggerheads, at least since Marcos’s much-disputed reelection in 1969. In the months following his reelection, the media launched a de facto anti-Marcos campaign, feeding the public with a daily diet of anti-Marcos announcements from both the political right and left. Both ends of the political spectrum had charged the newly incumbent president with “seeking to perpetuate his power” and failing to “curb corruption, the private armies of warlord-politicians, and an obstructive Congress.”11 During the fateful First Quarter Storm, oligarchs hostile to Marcos (most notably the Lopez family, who owned and controlled the powerful ABS-CBN television network and the national daily Manila Chronicle) used their vast media holdings to publicize the demonstrations, thus inadvertently aiding the leftist dissidents in their efforts to bring down the government through violent confrontation.
Marcos was quick to transform what would ordinarily amount to a political deficit into a golden opportunity. The First Quarter Storm, which had taken him by surprise in 1970, had taught him the invaluable lesson that the revolution was fundamentally governed by the dynamics of spectacle. But while his opponents labored to spectacularize national discontent in the hopes of discrediting his administration, Marcos, in an act of classic one-upmanship, would translate these spectacles of social disorder into a public drama justifying authoritarian social control. To fully understand this critical shift in the revolutionary momentum of the nation on the eve of martial law, we need to revisit the public drama that was the First Quarter